Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [279]
“Certainly Germany is a reactionary, feudal, police state, the worst governed country in Europe” except for Turkey and Russia, Bebel replied, “but we scarcely need anyone from the outside to tell us how dismal our conditions are.” Jaurès’ policy, he said, would corrupt the proletariat. The Dresden Resolution was the only safe guide. Shrilly Rosa Luxemburg denounced Jaurès as “der grosse Verderber” (the great corrupter). When he stood up to reply, asking who would translate for him, she answered, “I will, if you like, Citizen Jaurès.” Looking around with a broad smile Jaurès said, “You see, Citizens, even in battle there is collaboration.”
Refusing to give up the principle of class war, the majority voted for the Dresden Resolution against Jaurès, combining, as Vandervelde said, doctrinal enmity with personal sympathy. “We remembered the Dreyfus Affair” and the “magnificent ardor” of Jaurès’ great battle against the accumulated forces of reaction, but the majority could not nerve themselves to cut the umbilical cord to Marx. In a final effort to close the rifts of Revision, the Congress adopted a last resolution stating it to be “indispensable” to have only one Socialist party in each country henceforth. All who claimed the name of Socialist must work for unity in the interest of the working classes of the world, to whom they would be responsible for “the mortal consequences of a continuance of their divisions.”
A problem that had not yet been their main concern made a tentative appearance at Amsterdam. With the echo of the Russo-Japanese War in their ears, delegates discussed working-class responsibility to society in the event of another war and the feasibility of a general strike. German Marxist ardor cooled at the very word. To talk general strike was one thing; to get the unions to act on it quite another. So far as the German trade unions were concerned, the “political mass strike,” as they called it, was anathema. If the Fatherland were attacked, said Bebel, old as he was, he with every other Social-Democrat would shoulder a rifle and fight to defend his country. Looking very grave, Jaurès said to Vandervelde on their way out, “I think, my friend, I am going to apply myself to the study of military questions.”
On his return home, as a loyal Socialist in obedience to the Amsterdam decision, he moved back toward a rapprochement with Guesde, reuniting the two parties in the following year as the Socialist Party, French Section of the Workers’ International, commonly called, from its French initials, the SFIO. It declared itself to be “not a party of reform but a party of class struggle and revolution” and verbally repudiated collaboration. Although this was a defeat for his position, Jaurès did not make a fetish of words. He let doctrine follow action and could the more easily concede formula to Guesde since he himself was the real leader of the union. Cooperation for him was not an end in itself but an avenue of action.
For some it proved indeed the corrupter in a political sense. In 1906, the same year in which the ILP entered the House of Commons and John Burns the Cabinet, French Socialists polled 880,000 votes and won fifty-four seats in the Chamber. Briand, who had been active in the matter of disestablishing the religious schools, was offered the post of Minister of Education. He accepted and in the ensuing bitterness left the party. A few months later Viviani followed him into office as Minister of Labour. Together with Millerand, who now called himself an Independent Socialist, they held a succession of offices