I. Old ideas relative to the Revolution. – Change resulting from the war of 1870 and from the parliamentary regime.

II. Drumont's observations on the ferocity of the bourgeoisie. – The judicial Third Estate and the history of the law courts. – Capitalism against the cult of the State.

III. Attitude of the Dreyfusards. – Jaurès' judgements on the Revolution: his adoration of success and his hatred for the vanquished.

IV. Antimilitarism as proof of an abandonment of bourgeois traditions.

The ideas current among the general public on the subject of proletarian violence are not based on the observation of contemporary facts nor on a rational interpretation of the present syndicalist movement; they derive from an infinitely simpler mental process, a comparison of the present with the past; they are shaped by the memories that the word revolution evokes almost automatically. It is presumed that the syndicalists, merely because they call themselves revolutionaries, wish to reproduce the history of the revolutionaries of [17]93. The Blanquists, who look upon themselves as the legitimate owners of the terrorist tradition, consider that for this very reason they are called upon to direct the proletarian movement; they display much more condescension to the syndicalists than do the other parliamentary socialists; they are inclined to assert that the workers' organizations will come to understand in the end that they cannot do better than to put themselves under their tuition.