Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/145

 to sympathise with the extreme position held by Gustave Hervé. The revelations of the Dreyfus case, which had shown that the French army was led by a number of men really opposed to the Republic and ready to plot against her, and the discovery on the other hand that Radical ministries could use the army for the purpose of suppressing strikes, produced a profound disgust, which in Gustave Hervé led to a kind of anti-patriotism. He contended that all forms of patriotism were a delusion for the worker, who had no real fatherland as long as he was deprived of all those benefits which make their country dear to the privileged classes. He argued that the worker would be as well off under one anti-Socialist government as another, and would gain nothing by fighting to preserve the possessions of his present masters. He never really knows which is the aggressor in a war, and for him there is only one duty—to refuse to fight for the capitalist state at all, and to paralyze every war by a general strike and a revolutionary effort. This as we have seen was not Jaurès' point of view, though Hervé interested him, as did all original men, and with much of Hervé's destructive criticism he was in complete sympathy. But to him the nation was a reality of great significance. Moreover, Hervé's repudiation of every means of combating war and the spirit of war but by the one means of refusing to fight, was foreign to