Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/207

 Rh perceive that the idea of the political strike (which he now, to a certain extent, accepts) is connected in the closest manner with this dictatorship of politicians which he fears. The men who had managed to organise the proletariat in the form of an army, ever ready to obey their orders, would be generals who would set up a state of siege in vanquished society; we should therefore have, on the day following the revolution, a dictatorship exercised by those politicians who in the society of to-day already form a compact group.

I have already recalled what Marx said about the people who reinstated the State by creating in contemporary society an embryo of the future society of masters. The history of the French Revolution shows us how these things happen. The revolutionaries made arrangements whereby their administrative staff was ready to take possession of authority immediately the old administration decamped, so that there was no break of continuity in the domination of a governing class. There are no bounds to Jaurès's admiration for these operations, which he describes in the course of his Histoire socialiste; he does not exactly understand their significance, but he guesses the analogy they bear to his own conceptions of social revolution. The flabbiness of the men of that time was so great that sometimes the substitution of the old by the new officials was accomplished under conditions bordering on farce; we always find a supernumerary state—an État postiche (artificial state), to use