socially conservative voters: the peasants who
owned their land, shopkeepers, craftsmen, civil
servants and pensioners with small savings.
Governments were formed around groups of the
centre, sometimes veering more to the ‘left’ and
sometimes to the ‘right’. But ‘left’ in the French
parliamentary sense did not mean socialism. Once
the predominant groupings of radical republicans
had succeeded in defeating the Church, their rad-
icalism was mild indeed. They stood for defend-
ing the interests of the peasant land proprietors,
the shopkeepers, the less well-off in society; their
socialism went no further than wishing to intro-
duce a graduated income tax. The radical repub-
licans were not, in fact, in the least bit radical but
were ‘firmly attached to the principle of private
property’ and rejected ‘the idea of initiating class
struggles among our citizens’. Their reforming
record down to 1914 was indeed meagre. Even
progressive income tax had to wait until 1917
before it became effective.
Socialism developed late but rapidly in France.
Jean Jaurès and the more orthodox Marxist, Jules
Guesde, led the parliamentary party, which gained
103 deputies and 1 million votes in the elections
of 1914. But they never shared power with the
parties of the centre for two reasons: the Socialist
Party adhered to the line laid down in the
International Socialist Congress of 1904 by refus-
ing to cooperate in government with bourgeois
parties, and in any case it was excluded by all the
anti-socialist groups, which could unite on this
one common enmity.
Besides the extreme left, the extreme right
was also ranged against the Republic. From the
debris of the Dreyfus case there had emerged a
small group of writers led by Charles Maurras
who formed the Comité de l’Action Française.
Under the cloak of being a royalist movement,
Maurras’s ideas were really typical of some aspects
of later fascism; fanatically anti-democratic and
anti-parliamentarian, he hated Protestants, Jews,
Freemasons and naturalised French people. An
aristocratic elite would rule the country and
destroy the socialism of the masses. The Action
Française movement could not really appeal to
the masses with its openly elitist aims. Yet, it
appealed to a great variety of supporters. Pius X
saw in the movement an ally against the godless
Republic; its hatreds attracted the support of the
disgruntled, but it did not become a significant
political movement before the war of 1914. The
Action Française movement enjoyed notoriety
through its daily paper of the same name, dis-
tributed by uniformed toughs, the so-called
Camelots du roi; uninhibited by libel laws, the
paper outdid the rest of the press in slander.
Far more significant than right extremists was
the revolutionary workers’ movement known as
syndicalism, which emerged during the early
years of the twentieth century. The factory worker
had become a significant and growing element
of society between 1880 and 1914. The trade
unions, or syndicats, really got under way in the
1890s. Unlike the parliamentary Socialists, the
syndicalists believed that the worker should have
no confidence in the parliamentary Republic,
which was permanently dominated ‘by the prop-
ertied’. The unions were brought together in the
Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). By
1906 the CGT firmly adhered to a programme of
direct action, of creating the new state not
through parliament but by action directly affect-
ing society; its ultimate weapon, its members
believed, would be the general strike. They
accepted violence also as a justifiable means to
bring about the ‘social revolution’. The attitude
of the CGT had much in common with the
British phase of revolutionary trade unionism
in the 1830s. Although most workers did not
join the syndicalist CGT – only some 7 per cent
in 1911 – nevertheless with 700,000 members
their impact was considerable; they organised
frequent violent strikes which were then ruthlessly
put down by the army. The syndicalists declared
they would not fight for the Republic and on
27 July 1914 demonstrated against war. Social-
ism, by being divided as a movement – for syn-
dicalists rejected any community of interest with
parliamentary Socialists – was much weakened
in France. The result was a deep alienation of a
large group of working men from the Third
Republic. The defence of the fatherland, the
almost unanimous patriotism in 1914 against the
common enemy, was to mask this alienation for
a time.
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HEREDITARY FOES AND UNCERTAIN ALLIES 25
