Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/53

 Rh way I help to ruin the prestige of middle-class culture, a prestige which up to now has been opposed to the complete development of the principle of the "class war."

In the last chapter of my book, I have said that art is an anticipation of the kind of work that ought to be carried on in a highly productive state of society. It seems that this observation has been very much misunderstood by some of my critics, who have been under the impression that I wished to propose as the socialist solution—an aesthetic education of the proletariat under the tutelage of modern artists. This would have been a singular paradox on my part, for the art that we possess to-day is a residue left to us by an aristocratic society, a residue which has, moreover, been greatly corrupted by the middle class. According to the most enlightened minds, it is greatly to be desired that contemporary art could renew itself by a more intimate contact with craftsmen; academic art has used up the greatest geniuses without succeeding in producing anything which equals what has been given us by generations of craftsmen. I had in view something altogether different from such an imitation when I spoke of an anticipation. I wished to show how one found in art (practised by its best representatives, and, above all, in its best periods) analogies which make it easier for us to understand what the qualities of the workers of the future would be. Moreover, so little did I think of asking the École des Beaux-Arts to provide a teaching suitable to the proletariat, that I based the morale of the producers not on an aesthetic education transmitted by the middle class, but on the feelings developed by the struggles of the workers against their masters.

These observations lead us to recognise the enormous difference which exists between the new school and the anarchism which flourished twenty years ago in Paris. The middle class itself had much less admiration for its