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By Root 1177 0

Paris like a flame. Crowds gathered so quickly in the street outside the restaurant that it took the police fifteen minutes to open a passage for the ambulance. When the body was carried out a great silence fell. As the ambulance clanged away, escorted by policemen on bicycles, a sudden clamor arose, as if to deny the fact of death, “Jaurès! Jaurès! Vive Jaurès!” Elsewhere people were stupefied, numb with sorrow. Many wept in the streets. “My heart is breaking,” said Anatole France when he heard. Informed at its night session by a white-faced aide, the Cabinet was stunned and fearful. Visions rose of working-class riots and civil strife on the eve of war. The Premier issued a public appeal for unity and calm. Troops were alerted but next morning, in the national peril, there was only deep grief and deep quiet. At Carmaux the miners stopped work. “They have cut down a mighty oak,” said one. In Leipzig a Spanish Socialist student at the University wandered blindly through the streets for hours; “everything took on the color of blood.”

The news of Jaurès’ death appeared in the papers on Saturday, August 1. That afternoon Germany and France mobilized. Before evening, groups of reservists, carrying bundles and bouquets of flowers, were marching off to the railway stations as civilians waved and cheered. Enthusiasm and excitement were equal in every country. In Germany on August 3, Socialist deputies held a caucus to decide whether to vote for war credits. Only a few days ago Vorwärts had scorned the pretence of a defensive war. But now the Government talked of the Russian peril and French aggression. Bernstein, the reviser of Marx, assured them that the Government planned to build a “golden bridge” for the Socialists and as proof cited the fact that the Foreign Ministry had extended official condolences in the great loss they had suffered by the death of Jaurès. Of the total of 111 Socialist deputies, only 14, including Haase, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Franz Mehring, were opposed, but they obeyed the strict discipline of the majority. Next day the Social-Democrats voted unanimously with the rest of the Reichstag for war credits.

The Kaiser announced, “Henceforth I know no parties, I know only Germans.” In France M. Deschanel, President of the Chamber, delivering Jaurès’ eulogy before a standing assembly, said, “There are no more adversaries here, there are only Frenchmen.” No Socialist in either parliament disputed these statements of the primary loyalty. Léon Jouhaux, head of the CGT, declared, “In the name of the Syndicalist organizations, in the name of all the workers who have joined their regiments and those, including myself, who go tomorrow, I declare that we go to the field of battle willingly to repel the aggressor.” Before the month was out Vandervelde joined a wartime coalition Government in Belgium and Guesde a Government of “sacred union” in France. Guesde a minister! The tribal pull of patriotism could have had no stronger testimony.

In England where there was less sense of national danger than on the Continent, Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and a few Liberals spoke out against the decision to fight. Elsewhere there was no dissent, no strike, no protest, no hesitation to shoulder a rifle against fellow workers of another land. When the call came, the worker, whom Marx declared to have no Fatherland identified himself with country, not class. He turned out to be a member of the national family like anyone else. The force of his antagonism which was supposed to topple capitalism found a better target in the foreigner. The working class went to war willingly, even eagerly, like the middle class, like the upper class, like the species.

Jaurès was buried on August 4, the day the war became general. Overhead the bells he had invoked at Basle tolled for him and all the world, “I summon the living, I mourn the dead.”

Afterword

The four years that followed were, as Graham Wallas wrote, “four years of the most intense and heroic effort the human race has ever made.” When the effort was over, illusions