Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [269]
His faith had the strength of an engine. “Do you know how to spot an article by Juarès?” asked Clemenceau. “Very simple; all the verbs are in the future tense.” Nevertheless, of all Socialists he was the most pragmatic, never a doctrinaire, always a man of action. He lived by doing, which meant advance and retreat, adaptation, give and take. A formal dogma that might have closed off some avenue of action was not possible for him. He was always the bridge, between men as between ideas. He was a working idealist.
Elected with him as Socialist deputies in 1893 were Alexandre Millerand, a hardheaded lawyer; René Viviani, renowned more for his moving oratory than for its content; and another lawyer, Aristide Briand, youngest of the group, the F. E. Smith of the Socialists, whose brains, ability and ambition were to prove stronger than his convictions. Briand “knows nothing and understands everything,” said Clemenceau, adding that if he were ever accused of stealing the towers of Notre Dame, he would choose Briand to defend him. The Socialist deputies in the parliament of 1893–98 made their ideas and aims and immediate demands known to the country. Among themselves they had managed to agree in 1896 on a minimum definition known as the St-Mandé Program, formulated by Millerand, which stated that “a Socialist is one who believes in the collective ownership of property.” It established as essential Socialist goals the nationalization of the means of production and exchange, one by one as each became ripe; the conquest of political control through universal suffrage; and international cohesion of the working class. In the Chamber they demanded as interim reforms the eight-hour day, the income and inheritance tax, old-age pensions, municipal reform, health and safety regulations in factories, mines and railroads. With Jaurès in the van, with Guesde in his piercing voice making the bourgeoisie tremble as he expounded the implacable march of Marxian history toward collapse, with the conservative defense led by de Mun, and with all the speeches reported in the papers, the debate developed into a great tournament of ideas which made Socialism from then on a main current of French life.
French trade unions, infused by the fierce Syndicalist rejection of political action, federated in the Confédération Générale du Travail in 1895 and kept aloof from Socialism. The antagonism reached a climax at the London Congress of the Second International in 1896, the most “tumultuous and chaotic” of all, when armed with mandates from the French unions the Anarchists (among them Jean Grave, representing the steelworkers of Amiens), made their last claim to membership in the Socialist family. The French factions split apart in frenzied antagonism over the issue, and when they caucused before the plenary session a “pandemonium of savage clamor” could be heard through the closed doors. After six days of strife during which the old quarrel between Marx and Bakunin was fought all over again, the Congress ended by excluding the Anarchists once and for all. A phase of Socialism had come to an end. Few doubted that new issues would not arise to divide the right and left wings of Socialism and keep open the schism between the Absolute and the Possible.
Before that expectation was fulfilled, Socialism in the United States took