Page:The International Socialist Review (1900-1918), Vol. 1, Issue 1.pdf/24

 imply militarism and chauvinism, seems to me more evidently economic at its root, while it does not like the French nationalism involve a medieval anti-semitism.

Nevertheless I would not leave the American comrades to suppose that French nationalism is at bottom anything but a mighty effort against socialism and the proletarian revolution. It is a movement which has succeeded in uniting all the forces of the large and the smaller bourgeois, the landed aristocracy and the army, with the braggart demagogues who deceive the unhappy, stupid and ferocious mob into the belief that the nationalist movement will bring remedies for their economic troubles.

Opposed to this nationalist party, the different factions of the bourgeois democracy cut a sorry figure. The republicans whom we call opportunists, and who represent bourgeois liberalism, have certainly passed over for the most part to the nationalist reaction, their chief, M. Meline, at their head. The radicals, who for a long time assumed the direction of the liberal element, and whose tendencies correspond exactly with those of the American Democrats and Populists, have offered a very ineffective resistance to the assault of the nationalists. It is moreover quite evident that demoralization and discouragement reign and will reign more and ever more in the radical camp. Nationalism is in great part, from the economic point of view, not only the party of the upper-class reactionary bourgeoisie, but also the party of the small bourgeoisie, of the little traders and of all that intermediate class from which radicalism formerly drew its strength. So today it finds itself deprived of the greater part of its little bourgeois following, while socialism is taking away daily what strength had remained to it among the workingmen.

Under these conditions the results of the municipal elections in Paris May 6th and 13th are not surprising. Nationalism such as we have described it is especially strong at Paris, where the reaction finds in the petty bourgeois demagogy the element required to enable it to present itself under a new mask. In the provinces socialism has only had to struggle against the bourgeois reaction properly so-called.

The Socialist party, perhaps for the first time, offered itself united, at least as far as voting is concerned, to the suffrages of the whole people. With some rare exceptions there was in each district of Paris only one Socialist candidate, and in each of the other cities of France only one Socialist ticket.

At Paris, among all the parties which struggled against nationalism, the Socialist was the only one which sustained no losses; on the contrary it increased the total of its votes. Of twenty outgoing Socialist municipal councilmen, sixteen were re-elected and four defeated. But on the other hand four seats were gained