Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/138

124 they are aware that on the day when they control the Government they will have need of an army; they will carry on foreign politics, and consequently they in their turn will have to praise the feeling of devotion to the fatherland.

Parliamentary Socialists perceive that antipatriotism is deeply rooted in the minds of Socialist workmen, and they make great efforts to reconcile the irreconcilable; they are anxious not to oppose too strongly ideas to which the proletariat has become attached, but at the same time they cannot abandon their cherished State, which promises them so many delights. They have stooped to the most comical oratorical acrobatics in order to get over the difficulty. For instance, after the sentence of the Court of Assizes of the Seine, condemning Hervé and the antimilitarists, the National Council of the Socialist party passed a resolution branding this "verdict, due to hatred and fear," declaring that a class justice could not "respect liberty of opinion," protesting against the employment of troops in strikes, and affirming "resolutely the necessity for action, and for an international understanding among the workers, for the suppression of war" (Socialiste, January 20, 1906). All this is very clever, but the fundamental question is avoided.

Thus it cannot any longer be contested that there is an absolute opposition between revolutionary Syndicalism and the State; this opposition takes in France the particularly harsh form of antipatriotism, because the politicians have devoted all their knowledge and ability to the task of spreading confusion in people's minds about the essence of Socialism. On the plane of patriotism there can be no compromises and half-way positions; it is therefore on this plane that the Syndicalists have been forced to take their stand when middle-class people of every description employed all their powers of seduction