On 4 February 1918 Le Journal de Genève published under the title ‘The other danger’ an article the greater part of which I reproduce below.

‘The great revolutionary wave, which originated in the East, is spreading in Europe, is passing over the German plains and is already breaking against the rocks at the foot of the Alps. We must expect that our country will have to undergo a supreme test before having definitely won its right to exist in the new world to which the war will give birth. Our banal and vain quarrels between the French Swiss and the German Swiss are a turned page, a sad page to which we must not return. Another ditch has been dug that it will be more difficult to refill.

It is becoming more and more evident that an internationalist agitation, which is both planned and methodical, is spreading in our large towns. It seeks to incite, by violence, a revolution which, from Switzerland, would advance step by step to neighbouring countries.

… Before the war there was propagated a doctrine of Force in syndicalist circles which had an obvious affinity with that of the German imperialists. In his Reflections on Violence Georges Sorel preached this new gospel: “The role of violence”, he said, “appears to us as singularly great in history, provided that it is the brutal and direct expression of the class struggle.”