The reception given to The New Army: blacklisted by anti-militarists

When it was published, The New Army was met with a rather hostile reception. The Right criticised it for its pacifism and the Left for its militarism. To those who, like Maurice Barrès, thought that proletarians were essentially rootless, which would prevent them from being true citizens in the ancient sense, Jaurès describes a rooting that is not physical but cultural, a rooting not in the soil but in the fatherland as a project. To Barrès, who wrote in Les Déracinés (The Uprooted), ‘That the poor should have a sense of their powerlessness is a primary condition for social peace’, Jaurès replied that the country was rich with the strength of the proletariat; thus, his book met no success from the right wing.

On the left, in a context of social unrest (revolt of the Languedoc winegrowers in 1907, strikes in Draveil and Villeneuve-Saint-Georges in 1908) put down by the army, Guesdists and trade unionists had more than mere reservations about the book. La Bataille syndicaliste, the daily newspaper printed by the C.G.T. (General Confederation of Labour), under the pen of Francis Deleisi, observed that Jean Jaurès’s project ran against the deep feelings of the proletariat, which was anti-militarist. It condemned ‘militarism in schools’ and considered that the so-called people’s army, supervised by professional officers, constituted ‘the most ingenious system for the military subjugation of one class to another’. In the eyes of the Guesdists and the anarcho-syndicalists of the C.G.T., Jean Jaurès was working in the interests of the war ministry and the bourgeoisie.

The harshest criticism came from Germany. The social democrat intellectual Max Schippel derided The New Army: ‘You can’t put a cannon in every old gunner’s bed and give every old sea dog a little warship to float around in his bathtubFootnote ⁴ …’ The harshest criticism nevertheless came from Rosa Luxemburg in the Leipziger Volkzeitung dated 9 June 1911. Her first judgement was an extreme oversimplification. ‘This book’, she wrote, ‘is not an investigation of the objective conditions of modern militarism and its relationship to capitalist development, but only a penetrating discussion of the repugnant ideas and prejudices of French patriotism and its warmongering appetites’.

Rosa Luxemburg criticised Jean Jaurès for ‘introducing militarism into the whole of social life[…] It would be like a red thread running through all the institutions and even the party life of the socialist proletariat’. She rejected the involvement of the proletariat in military preparation, whether by sponsoring military gymnastics clubs, shooting clubs, practising open-air exercises or manoeuvres, or workers’ associations providing financial aid for the sons of trade unionists, mutualists and co-operators to train to become officers. Her condemnation was categorical and without appeal.

Luxemburg also accused Jean Jaurès of ‘chauvinist and petty-bourgeois politics’ arguing that, in his project, he armed only the soldiers of eastern France and not the entire army:

Rosa Luxemburg rejected any distinction between offensive and defensive warfare. Recourse to arbitration to settle conflicts seemed to her to be futile, and the ultimate recourse to popular insurrection envisaged by Jean Jaurès if a government did not want to accept arbitration was proof that war and peace were not questions of law but of force. Her conclusion is an unqualified condemnation of Jean Jaurès’ approach: ‘To give in to the illusion that legal formulae can in any way prevail over the interests and power of capitalism is the most harmful policy that the proletariat can pursue’.

The conflict that broke out in 1914 led to a completely different view of Jean Jaurès’s book. In the 1915 edition of The New Army, the preface (which is anonymous but known to have been written by Lévy-Bruhl) sets the tone:

Is the image of Jaurès as a ‘hero killed before the armies faced off’, as Anna de Noailles wrote, combined with that of a strategist? This image, shrouded in a sort of sanctity, has long prevailed in the socialist imagination. Next, we take the work as our starting point in an attempt to identify its ‘elements of pure socialism’.

Elements of ‘pure socialism’ in Jaurès: is the ‘prolétariat’s involvement’ what makes the army new?

Our aim here is to identify the passages in Jaurès that undoubtedly establish him as a socialist thinker. It would be futile and incorrect to deny that The New Army has a strong socialist identity: we can even assert that in this book, Jaurès carries on a dialogue with Marx and seeks to characterise ‘his’ socialism in opposition to that of Marx’s Capital. It is even tempting to read The New Army as a metaphor of the socialist society advocated by Jaurès, and the recent publication of an issue of Cahiers Jaurès on the work gives great emphasis to this perspective (Buffotot, Reference Buffotot2013). The excerpts cited below are a good example of this. Ignoring or neglecting this dimension would be just as misleading as limiting our interpretation of the work to this dimension alone. In the following section, our reading of the work will move away from this single interpretation. For the time being, we will highlight the passages in The New Army that underline the author’s ‘socialist’ intent.

For Jean Jaurès, the working class ‘has nothing really to gain by putting its claims into brutal forms. It is under no figure of savagery that proletarian civilisation ought to appear before the world’ (p. 448) and he serenely envisages a natural transition from capitalism to socialism.

Even in the class struggle, in the eyes of Jean Jaurès, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat walk on the same path. He criticised Marx for having emphasised only the darker sides of the bourgeoisie, concerned only with increasing its profits and extending its empire. Jaurès reproaches Marx for having ignored ‘the part of human good faith, the sincerity of moral and social enthusiasm’ (p. 457) which the bourgeoisie has shown at certain times. Indeed:

The very victory of the bourgeoisie overflows and surpasses it. Its ideas and events give society an impetus which goes far beyond purely bourgeois interests. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie is not uniform; it is ‘anarchic and diffuse’ (p. 473) and, in the diversity of its elements, there are always those who are more in harmony with the new forces and sensitive to an expansion towards social justice. Thanks to its capacity to adapt, the bourgeoisie can permit broad evolutions without irremediable ruptures. In fact, the bourgeois class and the working class serve each other and collaborate in the preparation of a higher order. The bourgeoisie has taught the working people political action on a grand scale, the conquest of central power, and the control of the state. It has also taught the working people that they must first rely on themselves. ‘The critique of the bourgeoisie has helped give form to scientific socialism. It forced the proletariat to free itself from idyllic socialism, to understand that a new society could only be constituted by great inner efforts by the exploited class’ (p. 507).

Jaurès thus shows his gratitude towards the bourgeoisie, which was able to recognise its proletarian brothers and to be a driver of progress. For Jaurès, who was an expert classicist (he wrote his secondary PhD thesis in Latin), the way in which the bourgeoisie articulates itself with the proletariat rather than opposing it seems to stem from the perception of ‘bourgeois Athens’, and references to political organisation from Ancient Greece to the French Revolution. ‘In Germany as in France [in the nineteenth century], the relationship to the Roman world initiated a reflection on the state, whether it was the Republic or the Empire. Through the Greek polis, the question of political action and its place in society is raised’ (Vidal-Naquet, Reference Vidal-Naquet1990, 161–210). This bourgeois Athens represents a living democracy, whose trade and luxury contributed to progress, as opposed to Sparta, which, during the Revolution, was admired by the Montagnards, the most radical political group. The aligned interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and the recognition of the latter’s role in progress, can thus be seen as an echo of the way in which the representation of the ancient polis was constructed around the French Revolution, and in the years that followed. This particular perspective developed by Jaurès seems to be anchored in a certain reading of history, reflecting nineteenth century historiography.

Reciprocally, the working class brings to the bourgeoisie the spur of its demands, necessary for the movement and progress of industry. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat share the same culture and their thinking influences the others. The two antagonistic classes have a reciprocal interest in each having the greatest intellectual strength and reaching a higher solidarity where virtues will be the common good.

From this basis, and despite a widening of the class struggle towards ‘an absolute and aggressive internationalism, towards a class-based politics which is both universal and unyielding’ (p. 510), ‘It is still possible that great transformations may be effected without any breach of continuity; we may yet have internal revolutions which will crush nothing and dislocate nothing’ (p. 511). And Jean Jaurès states that: ‘A new economic balance of power is preparing, through a long series of passionate conflicts, which will get rid of capitalist and bourgeois privileges, but which will not shatter either the living forces of what we now call bourgeoisie, or the independence and individuality of different nations’ (p. 511), with the democratically constituted state playing the role of arbiter in class conflicts.

Jean Jaurès reckoned that nationality and democracy were inseparable. In defending the independence of democratic nations, the proletariat defends its own freedom of action and its chances for the future. It is certainly necessary to push for the evolution of social justice, in universal peace and through the concerted effort of the workers of all countries, ‘but Democracy and Nation are, after all, the essential and fundamental conditions of any further and higher creation’ (p. 545).

In these passages, Jaurès’s socialism is affirmed both as an ideal and, in economic terms, as a form of smooth transition (not violent as in Marx) from a capitalist society to the kind of stationary state of peace and universal harmony that would be socialism. The common reading of The New Army sees this dimension alone. Yet in our view, analysing the book only in this historically situated perspective (that of the pre-1914 march towards socialism) and interpreting The New Army as merely a search for the conditions of the transition from the capitalist system to socialism – as a sort of revisited ‘Marxist’ theory of the movement and transition to socialism – is too narrow. This reduces the work to a mere historical curiosity, whereas it has an undeniable universal dimension, to the extent that its translation into English in 1916 was even paradoxically used by British liberals to justify their support for conscription army and mandatory military service (Jousse, Reference Jousse2013).

As we will see, however, the work has in fact a more general scope that prevents it from being confined as an outdated episode in the history of socialist thought. This universalism of thought is served in a very original way by a discourse on the economics of war prevention.

The principle of prevention economics in the New Army

Prevention is defined as ‘any act intended to avoid expected phenomena’. Since the seminal paper by Ehrlich and Becker (Reference Ehrlich and Becker1972), economists have tended to distinguish between two kinds of prevention: self-protection and self-insurance. In this context, prevention can be defined as all actions carried out with the aim of preparing for or preventing the occurrence of certain risks, but also of minimising the negative consequences of their occurrence. The objectives of prevention can therefore be either to reduce the occurrence of a risk or to adapt behaviour should the risk occur (Kenkel, Reference Kenkel2000).

Applying prevention or insurance logic to war requires some adjustments. War has, in fact, significant specific features. We can measure its financial costs ex post, but it is not ‘insurable’ ex ante other than through a policy of prevention. In economic terms, war is a prime example of an uninsurable event and Jaurès defends the policy of self-protection as the only way to contain it effectively, as we will show with the formal model. Other contemporary approaches to war prevention, such as nuclear deterrence, international legal regimes, and decentralised civilian defence strategies, certainly stress the diversity of institutional mechanisms available today, but they operate with assumptions about state capacity, coordination, and enforcement that differ significantly from those animating Jaurès’s vision.

Starting from the founding model of the economics of prevention by Ehrlich and Becker (Reference Ehrlich and Becker1972), which analyses the interaction of preventive behaviour with existing insurance systems, these authors distinguish three ways of responding to the occurrence of a negative event (in the case of Jaurès, this negative event obviously refers to war): buying an insurance policy to receive income in case the negative event should occur; undertaking self-protection activities to reduce the probability of a negative event occurring, and finally, undertaking self-insurance activities to reduce the magnitude of losses in case a negative event occurs. Ehrlich and Becker (Reference Ehrlich and Becker1972) studied the choice between insurance and self-protection, on the one hand, and insurance and self-insurance, on the other. For Ehrlich and Becker, the more risk averse an individual is, the more he or she values each of the two instruments: insurance and self-insurance. These two instruments make it possible to limit financial risk by modifying the distribution of income; insurance and self-insurance are substitutes. Conversely, the relationship between insurance and self-protection seems more ambiguous. For Ehrlich and Becker, moral hazard arises only if the purchase of insurance reduces the demand for self-protection. If insurance premiums are fair and reflect the self-protection activities of individuals, then the individual or insured will continue to have an incentive to spend on self-protection, thereby lowering the price of insurance. In this case, there is no moral hazard. Insurance and self-protection activities are therefore complementary. In fact, this attitude towards self-protection will also depend on the price of preventive goods. If preventive measures are available at a lower cost, then partial insurance would be a possibility to reduce moral hazard. The partially insured individual will still have an incentive to invest in prevention.

This concept masterfully characterises the project laid out in The New Army: a (re)organisation of civil society in the sense of self-protection in order to avoid, or minimise the probability of the occurrence of war.

A simple strategic model for war prevention

The notion of probability attached to the occurrence of war, which, we will argue, is what Jaurès wanted to minimise, is not something that can be simply modelled exogenously: war is a strategic outcome. In order to be able to represent the occurrence of war, we build a two-player game where each player represents a country, and can simultaneously decide whether to attack or not. This approach to modelling conflict is well-established: see for example Schelling ([Reference Schelling1960] 1980), Boulding (Reference Boulding1962) and Boulding (Reference Boulding1978). We only consider a single period; while Axelrod (Reference Axelrod1984) looked at the emergence of cooperation out of repeated games, in the context of war this would require the assumption of very long-term decision and planning, which are not fully consistent with the observation of recurring wars. In many of these modelling approaches, pure strategies (i.e., deterministic optimal choices) are often considered, such as in Maoz (Reference Maoz1990) for example, leading to a variety of paradoxes. We focus on the potential for mixed strategies at the Nash equilibrium, which introduce randomness and will allow us to discuss such a notion as the probability of being attacked. Schelling addressed randomisation to some extent, through the notion of surprise (Schelling [Reference Schelling1960] 1980: 173–186); but we only consider it as an optimal strategic response.

More formally, we consider a strategic situation between two countriesFootnote ⁵ $i$ and $ - i$ , or 1 and 2. Both countries are assumed to know the other’s characteristics, but not whether they will go for war or not, since that decision is taken simultaneously. We reason in terms of the differential utility (or disutility) of war relative to uniform peace. The base-case outcome is therefore this no-war ‘ideal’ situation, of value 0. In the case where there is war, then there is a trade-off relative to that peace situation. We write the trade-offs for bilateral attack $ - {b_i}$ for country $i$ , or unilateral attack ${u_i}$ (if the other country is not waging war at the same time), or unilateral defence $ - {d_i}$ (if one is not waging war but the other is attacking). We assume that ${b_i} \gt {d_i}$ : bilateral war is always more destructive than letting the other country pillage or exploit one. Also, ${u_i} \gt 0$ , so that an undefended attack is a net positive for the attacker: the benefit of pillaging or exploiting the other country. The strategy followed by each country is written as ${S_i} \in \left\{ {W,P} \right\}$ (for war or peace). We write the payoff associated with a strategy ${{\rm{\Pi }}_i}\left( {{S_1},{S_2}} \right)$ as a game, between countries 1 and 2:

There are two pure strategies Nash equilibria in this game, where locally neither player would want to select another strategy: either country unilaterally attacks the other. In this symmetrical situation, without any coordinating mechanism, there is no way in which either country can be assured either equilibrium may be reached, however. Therefore, the only optimal approach that can be systematically followed, for both countries, is to play mixed strategies: randomise the choices optimally.

We write the probability that country $i$ attacks as ${\pi _i}$ . At the Nash equilibrium for mixed strategies, a player’s probability of attack makes the other player indifferent, and this is sufficient to characterise the optimum of that equilibrium. Country 1’s expected gains if they do not attack is hence equal to their expected gain if they attack, when the other country is also acting optimally:

$$\matrix{ {{\mathbb E}\left[ {{{\rm{\Pi }}_1}\left( {W,{S_2}} \right)} \right]} \hfill & { = {\mathbb E}\left[ {{{\rm{\Pi }}_1}\left( {P,{S_2}} \right)} \right]} \hfill \cr { - {d_1}{\pi _2}} \hfill & { = {u_1}\left( {1 - {\pi _2}} \right) - {b_1}{\pi _2}.} \hfill \cr } $$

Solving, and noting that with our assumptions ${u_i} - {d_i} + {b_i} \gt {u_i}$ we obtain, replacing 1 with $i$ and 2 with $ - i$ since the problem is symmetrical:

$${\pi _{ - i}} = {{{u_i}} \over {{u_i} - {d_i} + {b_i}}},$$

and $1 \gt {\pi _{ - i}} \gt 0$ . The expression for the probability of entering war for a country is driven by the characteristics of the opposing country. In this framework, randomness emerges as a result of optimal behaviour. This Nash equilibrium shows that, with the parameters we selected, and in particular because bilateral war is very damaging, always attacking or never attacking is not an optimal strategy. The lower the gains obtained in unilaterally attacking another country (lower ${u_1}$ ), the less likely it is that other country will attack, since there is a lesser necessity for it to reduce Country 1’s utility in waging war. Also, the more one suffers in a bilateral war (larger ${b_1}$ ), the lower the probability of being attacked: this is because it makes waging war less attractive to Country 1, and as a result Country 2 has less of an incentive to attack it with a high probability as a deterrent. Finally, a greater resilience to suffering a unilateral attack (lower ${d_1}$ ) reduces the probability that the other country will attack, along the same underlying logic: it reduces Country 1’s utility gain in waging war and hence reduces Country 2’s need for pre-emptive striking.

In this minimal setup, we can now more precisely define the notions of self-insurance and self-protection we conjured up earlier. Self-insurance, reducing the severity of a loss, would correspond to reducing ${b_1}$ (we take the viewpoint of Country 1), that is the large amount of loss suffered in the case of bilateral war, conditioned upon the occurrence of that very negative event. Self-protection, on the other hand, corresponds to reducing the probability of being under attack, that is reducing ${\pi _2}$ . Paradoxically, if there was an insurance market so that ${b_1}$ could effectively be lowered, it would in fact also increase the probability of being attacked at the same time, as we indicated above. In this strategic context, it seems like self-insurance, even if it was possible, may not be a good choice because of the signal it sends to the other country: ‘I don’t mind being at war’.

We will next examine how Jaurès effectively proposes to reduce ${\pi _2}$ through his set of proposals, and how he measures the social and economic cost of implementing the measures in question. Indeed, Jaurès clearly conceives of prevention as self-protection: not by organising civilian defence, as Sharp (Reference Sharp1990) will later propose, but by the enrolment of young recruits and their continued training through exercises throughout their lives. It is, in his eyes, a credible dissuasive preventive threat to the external enemy. Conversely, the book does not place itself directly in a perspective of self-insurance, which appears particularly well-founded and lucid on the part of the author.

Jaurès’s ‘proletarian-soldier’ as self-protection against war

Jaurès drafted legislation to implement the principles of economics of war prevention which he advocates. ‘The Republic can, from this moment, call upon this comprehensive working-class thought if it wants to organise a truly defensive, popular and effective army’ (p. 572). Article 16 of the bill submitted by Jean Jaurès to the Assembly emphasises this army’s purely defensive nature and the necessity, in the event of conflict between nations, to resort to arbitration: ‘The Army thus constituted, has one single object, – to protect the independence and the soil of France against all aggression [emphasis added]. All war is criminal if it is not manifestly defensive; and it can be manifestly and certainly defensive only if our Government proposes to the foreign Government with which we are in dispute to settle that dispute by arbitration’ (pp. 684-5). Article 18 calls on all governments of countries represented at The Hague Court to negotiate an arbitration procedure.

The major figure in Jaurès refers to the ‘proletarian-soldier’, which hearkens back to the hoplite of ancient Athens and the ‘farmer-soldier’ of Year 2 of the French Revolutionary calendar. Jaurès was highly critical of how national defence was organised. Despite appearances, the army was not the nation’s army. The active army – with soldiers garrisoned for two years whereas four times less time would be enough to teach them what they must know – was unworthy of its name. It was run by a caste, cut off from the nation, and trapped in a routine. The reserve army, which should have been the real active army, did not enjoy the place it should have; its potential energy was left undeveloped. ‘Hence, military service, under the present system, provides a somewhat lazy education for the ‘Active Army’ and has a depressing and deadening influence on the reserves’, writes Jean Jaurès (pp. 48-9). Jaurès was opposed to a conception of the army in which the people would be on foot, and members of the higher classes would have sole access to the higher ranks.

The roles must be reversed. The reserve was the army’s main force and should therefore become the real active army. The barracks should be a school to give the fresh recruit, in a few months, the necessary basic training. In the country itself, combat units should be organised, fully staffed companies which would be periodically called up for training. This is how Jean Jaurès wanted to promote the nation in arms. The stark contrast that Jaurès highlights between professional armies and proletarian armies goes back to the social organisation of Ancient Greece, and especially the opposition between Athens and Sparta.

The bill that Jaurès tabled in the Assembly is significant in this respect:

• ‘All able-bodied citizens from 20 to 45 are bound to help in national defence. From 20 to 34 they are in the first line, thence until 40, in the reserve; thence until 45, in the Territorial Army’, according to Article 1 (p. 675);

• ‘The recruiting is done by districts; the citizens are drafted into units corresponding to their district of domicile’, Article 3 states (pp. 675-6);

• Soldiers are to receive continuous training. Article 4: ‘The education of the army will be in three steps: (a) preparatory (boys and youths); (b) recruit school; and (c) periodical after-trainings’ (p. 676).

The notion of a non-professional army is based on weapons or combat techniques that exploit the lack of training of combatants. There is a parallel between the marching phalanx, in which men ‘just’ had to hold their spears and shields and march forward in tight formation (Hanson [Reference Hanson and Hanson1991] 1994), and men armed with rifles that only need to be pointed in the right direction. The transition to armies recruited from the broader population and armed with rifles began with the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century (Bois, Reference Bois1993), but it was not until the metal cartridge and pyroxylated gunpowder were introduced in the late nineteenth century that a final degree of technical complexity was removed from the handling of the weapon. From this point of view, Jaurès was writing at the exact time when, after a long period that had emphasised the soldier’s skills, it was his valour that once again took priority. Thus, to a certain extent, Jaurès’s position on the subject of a conscripted army, as opposed to a professional one, can be seen as stemming from a reference to the classical world, which contrasts Athenian flexibility with Spartan mechanics, and from the military technological environment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The education of children and teenagers, from 10 to 20 years old, was not to teach military movements and manoeuvres at an earlier age, but to give them what we would today call physical or sports education, to keep them in good shape. This physical education would be given by the officers of the units concerned, but teachers and doctors would also be called upon, as well as a Council of Military Development, whose members would be elected by universal suffrage and which would supervise the overall functioning of the units and would be involved in the promotion and posting of officers. The establishment of training for children and adolescents to prepare for military training may evoke Book II of Plato’s Republic, but it may also suggest Sparta, the model city for Plato. Jaurès was familiar with Plato’s texts, and also with the texts of Plutarch and Xenophon (who were more overtly hagiographic towards the Lacedaemonian city), which constitute the bulk of the tradition on Spartan education (Kennell, Reference Kennell, Grubbs and Parkin2013). The myth of the very demanding training of young Spartans, taken away from their mothers at the age of seven to learn the art of combat from their peers, is now considered historically inaccurate, but it was a topic of study in the early twentieth century (Jeanmaire, Reference Jeanmaire1913).

In Jaurès’s proposal, young men entering their twenty-first year would be called up for six months to a recruit school at the garrison centre nearest to their home, where they would learn military manoeuvres. The notion of specifically military training, over a short period of time, for twenty-year-olds is reminiscent of the ephebia, particularly in Athens. A specific age group being separated from the rest of the population for a given period corresponds to a form of rite of passage, well attested in Antiquity (Vidal-Naquet [Reference Vidal-Naquet1981] 2005: 151–207). Jaurès’s idea of the state providing for the physical education of children and adolescents, with a military aim, may therefore have been inspired by the historiography of his time about Sparta. Then, the evolution of this physical training into military training as the youngsters aged recalls the institution of ephebia in ancient Greece, also well-known to nineteenth century historiographers.

In the thirteen years of active service required of them, soldiers would be called up eight times for exercises and manoeuvres. These manoeuvres, depending on their nature, would last 10 or 20 days. Each soldier would have his military clothes at home. Armouries would be set up in the main towns of each canton and in the largest towns. In the départements of the East, each soldier would have his weapons at home. This would be a nation armed and in a state of continuous mobilisation, capable of bringing its defensive force to bear against any external threat. The policy of self-protection through the continuous training of citizens’ troops was, in Jaurès’s view, a credible defence against external invasion.

There is a notable difference between the proletarian-soldier as conceived by Jaurès and the citizen of the ancient polis. While in Roman as well as Greek antiquity, the relationship to land was essential, notably for citizenship (the metics, who were not citizens, did not have the right to own land, for example), we can wonder how these explicit or implicit references to this past can be articulated with the fact that the proletariat, almost by definition, does not own land. The way in which the Athenian polis was perceived may in fact have played a role in minimising this disconnection from the land. In Victor Duruy’s A History of Greece, first published in 1851 and reprinted for many years (Duruy, Reference Duruy1851), this link to the land was ignored and the focus was on trade, industry and banking, which were more indicative of development. As an admirer of Athens, Duruy contrasted it with Sparta, which was ‘barren’ (Vidal-Naquet, Reference Vidal-Naquet1990: 206–208). If we perceive the Athenian of the fifth century BCE as a poor craftsman or a sailor, without land holdings, then it becomes much easier to imagine a parallel with the contemporary world of the early 20th century, either consciously or unconsciously.

There are very specific aspects in Jaurès’s recommendations that drive the way in which one anticipates the model parameters would be affected:

• Widespread combat ability, albeit not at an expert level, along with rapid mobilisation potential;

• Particular attachment to locality and land, reinforced by the fact that the military districts keep people from the same place together.

The territorial links in this New Army, combined with everyone’s ability to fight (especially with weapons at home) should be expected to reduce the negative impact of an enemy army attacking one’s country by surprise. The attackers would be hindered at every step, and have limited ability to extract resources from the country, hence a reduction in ${u_2}$ (the benefit of an unilateral war for the enemy), which contributes to reducing ${\pi _1}$ , in comparison with the current army.

The ‘proletarian-officer’ as an investment in human capital for greater national self-protection

The influence of the Dreyfus Affair on Jaurès’s thinking must be emphasised. For much of the 1890s, French public life was consumed by the Dreyfus Affair, which raised major concerns, particularly among republicans and the left, about the ethics of French military officers and their loyalty to the republic. Jaurès was, of course, an ardent Dreyfusard. The ‘radical’ cabinets of the early years of the 20th century were hostile to the military (as well as to the Catholic Church), largely because of its suspect behaviour during the Dreyfus Affair. The Affaire des fiches revealed that pro-Republican elements in the military were monitoring the political affiliations of officers, particularly their connections to anti-republican groups. It is important to remark that this political context makes it clear why Jaurès reached, beyond socialism, to all republicans who were scandalised to realise that despite the ‘rallying’ of Catholics to the Republic in 1892, the hard core of the military hierarchy remained faithful to the Ancien Régime. Actually, this piece of the contextual puzzle is central, given its argument that Jaurès favoured a democratic and meritocratic officer corps and that this measure was crucial for his efforts to minimise the chances that France might declare war on another country.

Let us now continue our reading of Jaurès’s work in terms of the economics of prevention. Jaures’s perspective on the French institutions of his time is that they lacked in their ability to create human capital. A major achievement of the Third Republic was the generalisation of primary education, and the subject of The New Army is the way in which the nation is going to offer free higher education to its cadres. Jaurès thus conceives and describes the institutions that will enable the formation of human capital on a national scale, with the aim of increasing productive efficiency, at the heart of an institutionalist approach to economics.

Jaurès attached great importance to the training of officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs). He wanted to take this training out of the special military schools and entrust it to the university, which would ensure a higher, more open-minded level and would break the army away from the caste to bring it into communion with the whole nation. Jaurès goes into great detail about the recruitment, training and promotion procedures for officers and non-commissioned officers. Let us simply remember that the officer corps are made up, on the one hand, of professional non-commissioned officers and officers and, on the other, of civilian non-commissioned officers and officers. Only the NCOs who were responsible for educating soldiers at the recruit school would be professional. One-third of the officers would be professionals and two-thirds would be civilians. Both would have the same prerogatives at the command level.

It is important for officers and non-commissioned officers to be recruited from all social backgrounds. It is necessary ‘that the elite officers can be recruited and are recruited… from the sons of the bourgeoisie, but also among the sons of the proletariat, and which keep the alive memory and the mark of their origins’ (p. 382). Jaurès dreams of a democratic mingling of all social elements in the military institution, beyond the fact that the working class would bear the burden of their education. Hence a vigorous appeal to workers’ organisations:

And Jean Jaurès insists. The idea may seem strange to involve proletarian organisations in the training of army cadres. But ‘it is through organisation that working-class strength asserts itself and prepares the new destiny; the only truly national army, the only true people’s army, is that which will be able to welcome these new social forces and adapt to them by appropriating them’ (p. 384).

Amazingly, we discovered that Jaurès addressed the question of a democratic army in his earlier writings on the French Revolution. Indeed, between 1900 and 1903, Jaurès published A Socialist History of the French Revolution (Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française). We have identified an unprecedented filiation between these two works. The following passage gives evidence that Jaurès prefigures his later military thinking, particularly on the social origin of officers (Jaurès [Reference Jaurès1904] 1927: 2: 207–208):

This social ‘intermingling’ proposed by Jaurès in the functioning of the New Army can also be put into perspective by noting its links to Greek antiquity through aspects that were well-known in the late 19th century. In 508 BCE, Cleisthenes introduced a large number of innovative political reforms, which laid the foundations for Athens’ democratic development in the following century. One of the most important aspects was the intermingling of all levels, with random groupings of elected officials from different social echelons having to work together to ensure the functioning of the city. Recent analyses of this modus operandi, and of its military, imperialist and economic effectiveness, show that the restructuring of the political system following Cleisthenes’ reforms was consubstantial with Athens’ economic and military success. It has been shown that it was precisely this intermingling that, by forcing decision-making to be decentralised and information to be shared, allowed for greater responsiveness and efficiency of the whole system (Ober, Reference Ober2008: 118–167). By breaking the traditional ties between members of the same tribe and introducing randomness in the attribution of responsibilities, Cleisthenes’ reforms forced Athenians to collaborate by sharing the private information available to each of them: ‘Athenian government can best be understood as a complex and effective machine designed […] to identify and collect relevant social and technical knowledge’ (Ober, Reference Ober2008: 133). The democratic intermingling of all social elements that Jaurès calls for thus seems to be directly inspired by the revolutionary reforms that Cleisthenes had enacted, which had somehow torn the citizens away from their autochthonic references, and to benefit from the same advantages, i.e., from the fact that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts thanks to the combination of diverse perspectives.

Thus reorganised, by mobilising and amalgamating all the forces of the nation democratically, the army, ‘not for the benefit of a class or for the creation of a spirit of aggression’ (p. 201), will be able to respond to its ‘sublime object: for the preservation of national security and the free development of social justice’ (p. 273). In this way, Jean Jaurès positions the organisation of a New Army in the continuity of the French Revolution. He devotes a long chapter – the longest in the book – entitled ‘Militarism and DemocracyFootnote ⁶ ‘ to the establishment of a social republic, which would be an extension of a political republic, resulting not from a break with the past but from a natural evolution.

At the beginning of this chapter, Jaurès returns to the necessity for the proletariat to occupy positions in the hierarchy. The army has until now been merely an instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie, the instrument of internal repressions and external colonial adventures. The proletariat must become involved in its hierarchy to transform the military institution and make it truly the instrument of the whole nation. It can only do this from within, hence the need to occupy as much of the command as possible. ‘The proletarian and socialist spirit, with which the mass of artisans and peasants is inoculating the army’ (p. 444) means that this mass ‘would not be a tool fit for every design’ (p. 444). Therefore, the organised proletariat must provide as many new officers as possible for the New Army.

In our understanding, changing the way the officers’ corps is formed, Jaurès also changes their perspective on war. In the traditional army, and in particular with career officers, the notion of glory in combat would be of some existential importance. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, France had developed substantial armament driven at colonising weaker countries (Bernstein, Reference Bernstein1940: 128). In contrast, the officers formed from the proletariat are not likely to have a family history to represent, for example. One important consequence is that the officers in the New Army should be much less likely to be willing to march on another country in order to carry out their existential goal of being in combat. Hence, this new moral setup of the New Army’s command is expected to reduce ${u_1}$ , the gains in waging unilateral war, which again reduces ${\pi _2}$ in turn. The ‘proletarian and socialist’ spirit Jaurès refers to is therefore important in the construction of this New Army as an optimal war prevention organisation.

A theorist of the ‘social return’ of investment in human capital: handling the cost of war prevention

Referring to the model by Grossman (Reference Grossman1972) is useful to tackle the self-protection dimension of the preventive approach which runs through and characterises The New Army. Grossman introduces the concept of ‘health capital’ and shows that it differs from other forms of human capital. This model is based on the idea that a patient is born with a stock of health capital, which she manages until death. Investment in health can therefore be seen as a demand for prevention; such investment increases the amount of time in good health that the individual can devote to production and consumption activities, and compensates for the loss of health due to the depreciation of the stock of health capital with age. For Jaurès, military, athletic, and educational activities organised at all ages for those who can be mobilised (in schools, universities, and active or reserve armed forces) will maintain citizens’ strength and the dissuasive force of the citizens’ army. More generally, military training is presented as an investment by the nation in human capital.

If we define human capital as intangible capital embodied in physical persons, which can be increased by physical preparation, health care and training, a form of capital with a measurable return that may differ at the individual and at the aggregate levels, then this notion of human capital plays a central role in Jean Jaurès’s argument about the transformation of the army and the country. The idea is first presented in negative terms: if the reward for the training of officers were not sufficient, then many potential officer candidates would ‘turn away from a thankless career’ (p. 344). Jaurès demonstrates his elitism by explaining how the levelling down of the entrance examinations for officer training schools would be harmful because ‘the most capable would perhaps be repelled by a superiority which would never have the opportunity to assert itself authentically and which could neither show its measure nor find its reward. Only those for whom study is a fully disinterested and self-sufficient joy would continue with a strong mental effort of spirit…’ (p. 346). In contrast, we understand here that since education is costly, it must be sufficiently rewarded, otherwise the only people who study are those who do it for their enjoyment. More generally, Jaurès asks straightforwardly: ‘What is the use of the high education of the early years if it does not, all things being equal, provide a man with true superiority […]?’ (p. 375). Of course, there can be no question in the thinking of a socialist theorist of a selfish superiority, so the author endeavours to show that the formation of human capital benefits not only the individuals but also the proletariat, and of course the nation as a whole.

From the individual point of view, in The New Army, Jaurès intends to establish a system of incentives to attract the nation’s elite to the army: ‘Advantages will be given to military students during their university years, their living expenses will thus be covered by the nation and the various groups that I have mentioned, and a promotion bonus will reward this first substantial effort sufficiently to ensure that an abundant elite will sign up for the various competitive entrance examinations for the military education section’ (p. 389). Contrary to the practices he had observedFootnote ⁷ , Jaurès pleads for continuous training: ‘at each fresh step in promotion, a fresh educational effort is demanded from the citizen thus promoted’ (p. 299). This is a decisive argument in favour of investing in human capital: ‘We do not want all the education, all the mental work of the officers, to take place only during these university years. We want their education to be personal, we want their learning to last as long as their careers, we want staggered courses and a virile habit of personal work to keep their minds sharp’ (p. 388). Jaurès thus describes the initial and continuous training of army officers as a form of investment. As for returns, Jaurès distinguishes between private returns (i.e., higher pay for the highest ranks), and the ‘social return’ (p. 384). This ‘social return’ comes not only from the fact that a national army made up of well-trained officers is more effective but also that this army, because it comes from the working classes, expresses both the genius and the vital energy of the proletariat. In Jaurès’s view, this combination is invincible. The result is a rise of ${b_2}$ in our model, the penalty to the attacker, resulting in falling probability of attacking the enemy, i.e., ${p_1}$ .

The idea that the nation should invest in the training of officers to benefit from a more effective army might appeal to the bourgeoisie calculating in economic terms, but in Jaurès’s time, the army was helping to put down a working-class movement. The socialist thinker therefore had to prove to the proletarians that the officers, in particular, could be loyal to them: ‘There is only one way of ensuring that the working classes shall have their own men in the army, unceasingly penetrated with working-class influence and spirit. They must themselves undertake, in fact, the burden and control of these young officers’ education’ (p. 383). Faced with a credible commitment problem, as North (Reference North1993) and Acemoglu (Reference Acemoglu2003) will call it later, Jaurès argues the solution is to create a new institutional organisation. He thus intends to reassure the proletarians about the loyalty of the army officers whose training they will have paid for. To do this, he clearly measures the social cost of officer training, which was no longer just the individual efforts mentioned in the previous quotations, but also all the costs of schooling and living expenses for the students. This investment is profitable both for the working class that has agreed to the expense – the return for its investment is a loyal army – and for the nation as a whole, which benefits not only from better-trained officers but also from the vital energy of the proletariat through these officers who will know how to mobilise their men at the moment of combat. Jaurès’s entire New Army is in fact a plea to show both his party and the nation that the social return on investment in the training of officers (and non-commissioned officers) is far greater than the individual return, which is already positive since those who can afford to make this investment are already doing so: by giving other social categories the means to become officers through training (i.e., through investment in their human capital), Jaurès is showing all stakeholders that they will gain something. As he intends to persuade all stakeholders to support his project, Jaurès adopts the language of enlightened self-interest, and to demonstrate the advantages of training more officers, he cites the individual and social return of such training. From this very special point of view, it is therefore unsurprising that he foreshadows the theory of human capital. This project of a New Army as an investment by the Nation as a whole and by the proletariat in particular is a public policy to respond to the demand of the whole Nation for prevention against war. The programme laid out in The New Army is, in fact, a public offer of self-protection against war.

Of course, the investment in human capital may be lost in case of war, and ${b_1}$ may thus rise: this tends to lower the probability of being attacked, ${p_2}$ . There are thus costs, gains, and losses that must be balanced. In the context of the model we developed earlier, the expected gain given a set of parameters can be calculated. The expected gain for Player 1, which at the optimum is the same whether they attack or not, is:

$${\mathbb E}\left[ {{{\rm{\Pi }}_1}} \right] = - {d_1}{\pi _2} = - {d_1}{{{u_1}} \over {{u_1} - {d_1} + {b_1}}}.$$

This value is negative: the fact that there may be war always makes things worse. However, the degree by which this expected payoff is negative is reduced by the various organisational strategies developed in The New Army, as we have discussed. Jaurès’s argument, hence, can be expressed as factoring in the strictly positive gain ${g_{{\rm{NA}}}} = {\mathbb E}\left[ {{\rm{\Pi }}_1^{{\rm{NA}}}} \right] - *\left[ {{{\rm{\Pi }}_1}} \right]$ , where ${\rm{NA}}$ signals the altered values due to The New Army’s recommendations. This difference can be written:

$${g_{{\rm{NA}}}} = d_1^{{\rm{NA}}}{{u_1^{{\rm{NA}}}} \over {u_1^{{\rm{NA}}} - d_1^{{\rm{NA}}} + {b_1}}} - {d_1}{{{u_1}} \over {{u_1} - {d_1} + {b_1}}} \gt 0.$$

Jaurès’s argument, from the standpoint of building a defensive army, is that ${g_{{\rm{NA}}}}$ is greater than the actual cost of training the soldiers and officers of the New Army. There is, in addition to that trade-off, the gain from being able to adopt a more pacifist stance, since the optimal probability of wanting to attack the other is also reduced.

The various ways in which Jaurès’s recommendations, in his analysis, contribute to reducing the occurrence of war through self-protection, are summarised in Table 1. The table shows Jaurès’s plans for the New Army, and their anticipated effects according to the formal model we have developed.

Table 1.

Summary of recommendations from The New Army and their effect on war risk