Page:William Z. Foster - The Revolutionary Crisis of 1918-1921 (1921).djvu/54

 waged strike after strike, most of them succssfulsuccessful [sic] and many of them spectacular enough to attract the attention of the whole world. The organization became very powerful—it was rightly said at the time that its 500,000 members were much more of a factor in the life of France, than were the 2,500,000 members of the German Socialist unions in the affairs of their country.

This era of militancy lasted practically up to the outbreak of the world war in 1914, when it ended with a crash. Almost overnight hundreds of the seemingly revolutionary leaders, especially the officials grouped around Leon Jouhaux, general secretary of the General Confederation of Labor (C. G. T.), became ultra-patriotic. Instead of countering the war declaration by calling a general strike, as the C. G. T. was pledged to do, they fell in line with the war plans of the ruling class, echoing all its chauvinistic slogans and using the labor movement chiefly as a means to inject the germs of war-hysteria in the minds of the workers. The supposedly revolutionary Syndicalists of France plunged into the war almost as unresistingly as the reformist Socialists of Germany.

Naturally the French ruling class appreciated this. They made much of their labor allies, even as the German exploiters had done theirs under similar circumstances. Jouhaux and the others were feted and dined and given high political preferment. Most of their time they spent hobnobbing with the capitalists and sleek bourgeois politicians, or running about the world on war business for the Government. Of course, they were spared the dangers and hardships of serving in the trenches. For their treason to the workers, the erstwhile despised C. G. T. leaders suddenly blossomed forth as "big" men of France. On the other hand, those militants who, like Pierre Monatte, still remained true to the old ideals of the C. G. T., were harried and persecuted. Most of them were rushed off to the firing line forthwith, even as their similars had been in Germany.