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mutiny in which he was successfully defended by Briand. Regarding the mystique of patrie as a Moloch sucking workers into its armored jaws where they shed each other’s blood, Hervé continued his campaign against army and country, undaunted by further trials and a term in jail. “We shall reply to the mobilization order by revolt!” he screamed. “Civil war is the only war that is not stupid.” At the French Socialist party Congress of 1906, in the midst of the first Moroccan crisis, and again at the Congress of 1907, he embodied these sentiments in a resolution. All the Syndicalist intellectuals, devotees of Sorel, Bergson and Nietzsche, rallied to his support. They were the cultists of the “myth” of the general strike, not the men who would be called upon to practice it, for these were not present. The CGT did not come to congresses of the SFIO, and in any case it designed the general strike for purposes of revolution, not prevention of war.

Representing the diehard Marxists, Guesde led the opposition to Hervé on the ground that since war was inherent in the capitalist system and the predecessor of its death-throes, it was futile, and for Socialists self-defeating, to prevent it.

Jaurès, as the party’s leading figure, had to guide the Congress to a position. With his faith that a good society was within man’s grasp, he saw war as the great wrecker; not the opportunity of the working class, but the enemy of the workingman. To prevent it was to become, in the years ahead, his primary aim. He had long maintained that the general strike, unless well organized both as to means and ends, was “revolutionary romanticism,” yet at the same time it was the only way the working class could make its power felt to prevent a threatened war. He was also inclined to support it because, in maintaining the precarious unity of the SFIO, it was important to make concessions to the Syndicalist-minded wing. No less a man of this world than Bebel, Jaurès remained also an idealist and dealt with the problem of the general strike by persuading himself that if war loomed, somehow the masses would be stirred by the necessary fervor to rise in spontaneous and effective protest without previous planning or organization. In this one area, a crucial one, Jaurès came closest to thinking “with his beard.” He agreed to a resolution less explicit than Hervé’s, but committing French Socialism to all forms of agitation against war, including parliamentary action, public meetings, popular protests, “even the general strike and insurrection.”

It was rhetoric, but Jaurès believed or persuaded himself that “ceaseless agitation” could make it come true. He did not content himself with hoping but practiced agitation at Socialist mass meetings and on speaking tours throughout France. From this time on, at Toulouse, Lille, Dijon, Nîmes, Bordeaux, Guise, Reims, Avignon, Toulon, Marseille, and of course Carmaux, “at every railroad station in France, it seemed, Jaurès descended from a train at one time or another, suitcase in hand, the great salesman of peace.” Abroad too, in London, in Brussels and other foreign capitals, his voice poured forth as if trying physically to lift his listeners to a fervor that could be translated into action if need arose. On one trip to England in company with Vandervelde they visited Hatfield, home of the Cecils, which Jaurès said interested him more than Oxford.

The problem of war, the effort to reconcile the trends between the extremes of Hervé and Noske dominated Socialism from now on. It came to a head at once at the next Congress, convened for the first time on German soil, in August, 1907. Although the working class of Berlin was a stronghold of Socialism, the party’s leaders did not venture to hold the Congress in the capital under the nose of the Kaiser. The site they chose was Stuttgart, capital of Württemberg in South Germany. Eight hundred and eighty-six delegates representing twenty-six nations or nationalities assembled in the largest auditorium of the city. Among them were Ramsay MacDonald from England, De Leon and Big Bill