Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/54

 40 literary men and its artists than the anarchists of that time felt for them; their enthusiasm for the celebrities of a day often surpassed that felt by disciples for the greatest masters of the past. We need not then be astonished that by a kind of compensation the novelists and the poets thus adulated have shown a sympathy for the anarchists which has often astonished people who do not know what a force vanity is in the artistic world.

Intellectually, then, this kind of anarchism was entirely middle class, and the Guesdistes attacked it for this reason. They said that their adversaries, while proclaiming themselves the irreconcilable enemies of the past, were themselves the servile pupils of this cursed past; they observed, moreover, that the most eloquent dissertations on revolt could produce nothing, and that literature cannot change the course of history. The anarchists replied by showing that their adversaries had entered on a road which could not lead to the revolution they announced; by taking part in political debates, Socialists, they said, will become merely reformers of a more or less radical type, and will lose the sense of their revolutionary formulas. Experience has quickly shown that the anarchists were right in this view, and that in entering into middle-class institutions, revolutionaries have been transformed by adopting the spirit of these institutions. All the deputies agree that there is very little difference between a middle-class representative and a representative of the proletariat.

Many anarchists, tired at last of continually reading the same grandiloquent maledictions hurled at the capitalist system, set themselves to find a way which would lead them to acts which were really revolutionary. They became members of syndicates which, thanks to violent strikes, realised, to a certain extent, the social war they had so often heard spoken of. Historians will one