Georges Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence (1908) gave him a reputation as a thinker who romanticized the proletariat’s revolutionary violence. Yet before his embrace of revolutionary syndicalism in 1903, he articulated a theory of the socialist movement which held that violent crowds threatened the possibility for socialist progress. Like many leftist intellectuals concerned with improving workers’ lives, Sorel studied the crowd to understand the dangers and benefits of different kinds of working-class street action. By attending to his neglected account of the crowd in the 1890s, we gain new insights into the cultural contexts that foster the emergence of subservient working-class crowd movements. We can also better understand the environments that encourage workers’ autonomous street politics. This article analyzes Sorel’s anxieties about crowds to explore the conditions under which beneficial forms of working-class street action can emerge.
Witnessing the rise of the mass press in fin de siècle France, Sorel worried about workers’ subsumption into bourgeois press culture. He thought journalist agitators were bourgeois Jacobins who disseminated stories of heroic, destructive conquest to foment working-class crowds prone to hysterical overexcitement. These stories played a central role in making crowds suggestible, such that they blindly followed a leader’s commands. Sorel believed that crowds’ danger lay in their Caesarist character: they would acclaim a military adventurer as a latter-day Caesar and serve as his instruments of terror in a coup d’état. In brief, he held that a militarist press was pervasive in France and fashioned Caesarist crowds. His theory of the crowd was different from better-known accounts.
In the late nineteenth century, crowd psychologists described crowds as inherently irrational, susceptible to unconscious suggestion, and driven by bloodlust.Footnote 1 In the twentieth century, historians and sociologists challenged this negative view by demonstrating that many crowds in history drew on discursive contexts, such as oral folk traditions, and followed rational patterns of action.Footnote 2 While Sorel engaged with the field of crowd psychology in the 1890s, he advanced a unique perspective by focusing on the media discourses that motivated crowd action. But, unlike later twentieth-century scholars, he thought the webs of meaning that influenced crowds were not independent of the prevailing bourgeois culture. Sorel offers us a new vision of crowds because he neither dismissed them as inherently irrational nor praised them as agents of generative, rational protest. Instead, he specified discursive–organizational conditions under which working-class street action became irrational and a vehicle for violent Caesarism.
Sorel’s reflections on the Dreyfus affair led him to elucidate the relationship between crowds and Caesarism. The affair centered on the French general staff and the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus. In 1894, a military court convicted Dreyfus of treason for spying on behalf of Germany. It subsequently came to light that the general staff had forged documents to convict him. When the affair climaxed in 1898, the public was divided between nationalists who supported the army and Dreyfusards who demanded a retrial. Jules Guesde’s Parti ouvrier français (POF) announced its neutrality on the trial, effectively aligning it with the anti-Dreyfusards. As passions exploded over the affair, Paris witnessed “the rise in the power of crowds … the street completed the public space that the press constituted.”Footnote 3 Sorel developed his account of Caesarism in light of the mass boulevard press that emerged in the 1890s and contributed to crowds’ paroxysms during the affair.Footnote 4
To him, the affair showed Caesarism to be a form of mass democracy in which bourgeois, demagogic journalists adopted Jacobinism’s militarist political organization and rhetoric to transform workers into manipulable crowds.Footnote 5 Nationalism and Guesdism, he claimed, were revolutionary movements that manifested a Jacobin Caesarism which participated in boulevard press culture: run by journalistic general staffs, these movements wielded centralized mass presses to distribute vulgar legends of conquest against alleged national enemies during elections.Footnote 6 Influenced by his study of the Salpêtrière school of hypnosis in France, Sorel argued that inundation with these legends led workers to enter a state of hysteria and compulsively fixate their attention on leaders as Caesar savior figures. This hysterical state made workers in crowds suggestible and prone to following manipulative leaders into coups. Unlike Karl Marx, Sorel did not view Caesarism as a weak politics that would disappear with the Second Empire once citizens recognized their material oppression under Napoleon III.Footnote 7 Instead, the bourgeoisie’s Jacobinism and use of a mass militarist press to beguile workers made Caesarism an enduring threat in the Third Republic.
In viewing press-constructed crowds as vehicles of Caesarism, Sorel operated on the terrain established by the independent, non-party-aligned socialists Gustave Rouanet and Eugène Fournière rather than the crowd psychologists. These figures were editors of the Revue socialiste and vocal Dreyfusards.Footnote 8 By examining Sorel’s theory of the crowd and his intellectual proximity to these figures, this article provides a new perspective on his thought.Footnote 9 I argue that Sorel’s theory of the crowd was a unique contribution to the independent challenge to Guesdism. Scholars have stressed that independent socialists opposed Guesdism because it espoused a dogmatic Marxism that generated authoritarian party discipline.Footnote 10 They have also shown that the independents championed a present-minded socialism which held that workers developed a new morality and culture in everyday experiences in cooperative associations.Footnote 11 The independents consequently opposed the POF’s revolutionary millenarianism.Footnote 12 My centering of Sorel’s worries about crowds shifts the perspective on the problem with Guesdism, while offering new insights into a present-minded socialism’s cultural environment and street actions.
I show that Sorel thought that the sources of socialist authoritarianism in Guesdism went beyond dogmatic Marxism: they also lay in a Jacobin militarist party and press culture that fashioned Caesarist crowds.Footnote 13 My account further demonstrates that he saw crowds as conduits of millenarianism: they constructed an idealized revolutionary future on the basis of propaganda legends and sought to violently accelerate into this future. For Sorel, workers needed to inhabit a media and cultural environment fundamentally different from that of Guesdism to become a democratically self-governing, present-minded proletarian subject. He thought the bourses du travail, which were federations of trade unions emerging in the 1890s, created this alternative media and cultural setting.
These institutions developed a socialist culture of attentive reflection in contrast to Guesdism’s culture of hysterical overexcitement and blind obedience. In the bourses, unionists established a practically oriented union press, studied their local economic context, and engaged in democratic deliberation.Footnote 14 These unionists’ attentiveness to present possibilities for economic self-government inoculated them from the crowd’s pathologies.Footnote 15 Their socialist culture ultimately engendered a form of street action different from that of crowds. Sorel emphasized the significance of the nonviolent Dreyfusard street marches conducted by the Allemanist bourse unionists.Footnote 16 These marches embodied reflective, present-minded socialist action: they activated other citizens’ rational faculties by concentrating attention on the Caesarist threat and its democratic socialist alternatives. Through the marches, unionists exercised independent influence in parliamentary democracy and promoted socialist progress: they helped form a republican–socialist coalition and inspired socialist representation committed to facilitating union self-government. Sorel initially viewed the new cabinet of 1899 in this light.
The early Sorel’s analyses of the Third Republic’s mass democracy underscored the dangers that militarist party organization and press rhetoric pose to socialism.Footnote 17 The more the socialist movement organizes centralized propaganda premised on narratives of destructive conquest, the more workers become a manipulable crowd prone to Caesarism and incapable of self-government. The path to a democratic socialism of self-government, Sorel insisted, lies in establishing media and cultural settings, along with street actions, where workers substitute practices of directed attention for dreams of revolutionary conquest.Footnote 18
A mirror of militarist nationalism: the independents’ critique of Guesdism
In the 1890s, the independent socialists advanced a critique of Guesdism’s authoritarian character. They claimed that the rise of nationalism after the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War and during the Boulangist crisis of 1887–9 contributed to the development of an authoritarian relationship between leader and mass in the movement. This was because many demagogic, nationalist journalists who had supported General Ernest Boulanger’s movement against France’s parliamentary republic joined Guesdism after Boulangism’s collapse. These were the journalists and boulevard hawkers whose mass distribution of political newspapers, brochures, and placards generated the “war of paper” during Boulangism and the Dreyfus affair.Footnote 19 They gave the Parisian “street a function that it had not previously fulfilled” and became “the driving force of crowds.”Footnote 20 The independents believed that, by pushing militarist street literature of heroic conquest against the corrupt “Jewish” republic, these journalists transformed much of the Parisian public into suggestible Caesarist crowds. For them, since Guesde tolerated this Boulangist remnant’s entry into the POF, its propaganda had similar effects on workers in the movement.Footnote 21
The Boulangist campaign emerged due to the transformation of patriotic sentiments after the Franco-Prussian War. “The German annexation of Alsace–Lorraine,” Fournière explained in 1902, “was the cause of our patriotism’s evolution into nationalism.”Footnote 22 Public schools after 1871 spread “the vile lead of bellicose nationalism.”Footnote 23 For example, the minister of public education, Jules Ferry, required schools to distribute 20,000 copies of the Chants du soldat—virulent patriotic poems written by the nationalist leader, Paul Déroulède.Footnote 24 The Boulangist movement was the first political expression of this new nationalism. Bearing the slogan “Dissolution, revision, constituent assembly,” Boulangism aimed to revise the constitution to end parliamentarism and install Boulanger as a presidential dictator. A presidential dictator’s unitary executive power—in contrast to parliament’s indecisiveness—would make a successful revanchist war possible.
In an 1888 essay, Fournière highlighted how “the noisiest and most active group” in Boulangism “is recruited among the plunderers [écumeurs] of the press and the boulevard.”Footnote 25 These boulevard journalists “took advantage of the revival of warlike ideas” to “seduce the crowd with colored images … naive placards, silly songs, mystical adulations, and tales.”Footnote 26 By depicting Boulanger as a heroic warrior in caricatured placards, stories, and hymns, they prompted a general discontent with the present and evoked hope for redemption from France’s oppression. In Boulanger, the crowd saw a “heroic, Cornelian attitude and the aureole of the predestined [savior].”Footnote 27 Rouanet developed this account of Boulangist propaganda by tying it to crowd suggestion:
the irresistible suggestion that one exerts on crowds [occurs] through the incessant repetition of ideas … Boulanger’s popularity consisted in the profusion of images, portraits, photographs, engravings, spread everywhere, violently attracting attention, forcing the eyes to retain the idol’s features in all forms—portrait or caricature. Through the daily publication of thousands of newspaper articles, [the crowd was] delivered to a permanent suggestive action.Footnote 28
Boulangist mass propaganda thus disabled much of the Parisian public’s capacity to direct its attention elsewhere: it made the public obsessed with Boulanger as the général revanche who would restore national honor. The crowd’s obsessive state made it open to the “Boulangist suggestion [that a new regime could be] obtained through violent means.”Footnote 29
For the independents, nationalist press demagogy intensified during the Dreyfus affair, particularly in 1897–8. In the fall, investigative work by Dreyfus’s brother revealed that the primary piece of evidence used by the general staff to convict Dreyfus was a forgery. Calls for a revised trial from the vice president of the Senate and Dreyfusards ensued. Émile Zola’s publication of J’accuse in January 1898 was the most important: it castigated the general staff for its lies, President Félix Faure for supporting anti-Semitism, and the government for failing to pursue revision. These accusations generated a violent response from the nationalist press which “intoxicated public opinion” such that it “permanently refused to recognize the obvious.”Footnote 30 Boulevard journalists and their hawkers flooded the street with ever greater amounts of printed material to defend the general staff.Footnote 31 In this context, the independents argued that nationalist journalism manipulated the public to embrace a new Caesar: the chief of the general staff, Raoul de Boisdeffre.
First, they argued that the nationalist press overwhelmed the public with wild speculations about Dreyfus’s reasons for spying on behalf of Germany: the aim was to inflame Parisians’ feelings of hatred towards him and the Jews as “internal enemies.”Footnote 32 Second, they maintained that the press portrayed Boisdeffre and the general staff as wrongly persecuted outlaws fighting to save France from the Jewish threat. Rouanet stressed that “L’Écho de Paris, Le Gil Blas … La Patrie and La Presse … distort facts … duped by stories of bandits, [the reader embraces] nationalist opinions.”Footnote 33 These stories of heroic banditry constituted the “Caesarist demagogy” that led Parisians to fixate their attention on Boisdeffre as the figure who would ensure “national salvation.”Footnote 34 Much of the public consequently formed suggestible crowds prone to violence. These crowds manifested their violent tendencies in response to Zola’s J’accuse. Indeed, for the independents, the nationalist press caused crowds’ anti-Semitic rioting in Paris in the weeks and months after Zola’s intervention.Footnote 35 “Boulevard journalists,” Fournière warned, “swell crowds’ crazy panics and transform citizens into a herd of brutes rushing under the butcher’s knife.”Footnote 36 As one historian emphasizes, mass pamphlets’ “symbolic execution of the enemy” with headlines like “Down with the Jews!” encouraged physical violence.Footnote 37 Yet, if the independents worried about crowds following the general staff into a coup, they did not see the threat of Caesarism as confined to the nationalist right.
In their view, the migration of ex-Boulangist journalists to French socialism resulted in the spread of militarist press demagogy within the movement: in the 1890s “a mass of discontented people, who confused aimless agitation with fruitful action, demagoguery with democracy, adorned themselves with the socialist label without professing its doctrine … they were former Boulangists who had preserved Boulangism’s demagogic temperament. Socialism, for them, was an irrational opposition.”Footnote 38 These journalists joined either the Blanquist Comité central socialiste révolutionnaire (CCSR), led by Ernest Roche and Ernest Granger who had supported Boulanger, or the POF.Footnote 39 The anti-Semitic editor of L’Intransigeant, Henri Rochefort, epitomized this Boulangist remnant’s demagogic, anti-Semitic journalism.Footnote 40
The POF’s shift to a position of neutrality on the Dreyfus affair in 1898 facilitated the ex-Boulangists’ demagogy because it licensed their use of anti-Semitic stories of conquest in canvassing for the party.Footnote 41 During the 1900 Parisian municipal election, for example, Rouanet claimed that “the nationalist intrigue disorients Parisian socialists” because there are “certain individuals with shady designs [who] adapt their revolutionary rhetoric to nationalism’s demagogic declamation system.”Footnote 42 This was a reference to the Boulangist remnant inundating workers with stories that depicted Guesde as the new Caesar who would save France from Jewish capital. As a result, workers became obsessed and formed unthinking Caesarist crowds: “Guesde has within the worker groups ... people who obey him at his fingertips and passionate admirers who believe everything he tells them.”Footnote 43 A Guesdist coup was possible because workers “abdicated their thought before leaders hungry for dictatorship.”Footnote 44 For the independents, then, Guesdism contributed to the threat of Caesarist militarism gripping France in the 1890s.
The independents nevertheless believed that workers’ organization outside the POF served as bulwark against boulevard journalism and military adventurism. They saw the “Allemanists” as “leading the defense campaign against neo-Boulangism in 1898–99.”Footnote 45 These socialist unionists were helping to “cure Paris of plumes and shady adventurers.”Footnote 46 Like the independents, Sorel worried about press-constructed Caesarist crowds and the possibility of military dictatorship during the Dreyfus affair; he too praised the Allemanists’ vigorous opposition to the Caesarist threat. Yet, as a former civil engineer interested in scientific scholarship, Sorel developed a theory of the crowd via a different route than the independents. While his historical inquiry into Jacobinism in 1888–9 also spoke to the Boulangist moment, his subsequent intellectual engagement with experimental psychology led him to advance a novel view of crowd suggestion. This view would underpin his concern about the press’s influence on crowds during the affair.
Sorel’s theory of crowd suggestion
Sorel’s first public writings evinced a hostility to the French bourgeoisie for its embrace of the Jacobin revolutionary tradition and dictatorial tendencies.Footnote 47 In studies of the Jacobin army’s actions in southern France in 1792–3, Sorel highlighted Jacobinism’s militarist rhetoric. In these texts from 1888–9, he explored issues raised by Boulangism because he focused on nationalist, militarist legends’ influence on Jacobin soldiers. These historical investigations need to be read alongside Sorel’s writings on experimental psychology at the time. This is because he developed an account of Jacobin literature that he connected to the understanding of crowd suggestion which he gained from experimental psychology.
The psychologists Jean-Martin Charcot and Hippolyte Bernheim’s pioneering studies of hypnosis in the 1880s were touchstones of much analysis of mass democratic society in France and Italy at the fin de siècle. Many intellectuals concerned with the phenomenon of crowds in this period adopted a hypnotic paradigm to explain crowd behavior.Footnote 48 Crowd psychologists Gabriele Tarde, Scipio Sighele, Cesare Lombroso, and Gustave Le Bon all examined crowd movements from this perspective. These figures followed Bernheim’s Nancy school in viewing hypnotic suggestion as a universal phenomenon that did not require any specific mental preconditions: all individuals in society were necessarily hypnotized by prestigious leaders.Footnote 49 For them, crowd suggestion underpinned the acts of violent crime common in revolutions. In the early 1890s, Sorel read Charcot and other figures who broadly shared his Salpêtrière school’s approach, such as Pierre Janet and the German scientist Wilhelm Wundt.Footnote 50 This reading shaped his intervention into the debate on crowd suggestion and criminality: he endorsed the Salpêtrière school view of suggestion as a symptom of a hysterical mental state. Crowd suggestion was not a universal phenomenon but required certain mental preconditions. From 1893, Sorel brought his ideas about Jacobin literature into his account of hysteria and crowd suggestion.
The Boulangist moment was the backdrop for Sorel’s 1888–9 study of the Jacobin army and its “revolutionary literature,” which consisted of speeches, distributed printed material, and war songs.Footnote 51 He himself stressed this context: “these studies are not purely speculative” because “today there are people dishonest enough to deceive the ignorant masses and intoxicate them with a revolutionary epic!”Footnote 52 This was clearly a reference to the legend around Boulanger as a revolutionary figure who would inaugurate a new regime. Sorel also described the Jacobins as “electric patriot[s]” who propagated a bellicose nationalism akin to that of the Boulangists.Footnote 53 The Jacobin army’s revolutionary literature had two components. First, “epithets play a significant role in this low literature”: Jacobin officers’ speeches, for example, used “expressions such as slaves … vermin … [and] scoundrels” to describe France’s enemies and inflame soldiers’ hatred.Footnote 54 Second, this literature induced feelings of admiration. Jacobin officers “launched into a heroic genre” when describing their future deeds: “we will perish by doing our duty and our death will be glorious.”Footnote 55 This was a militarist, nationalist literature of conquest that made Jacobin soldiers admire the fallen as “heroes.”Footnote 56 For Sorel, this literature fostered hypnotic suggestion. Through “all the carmagnoles, paraphrases of the Marseillaise … [and] revolutionary literature … our fathers’ nervous systems were overexcited. The repetition of sonorous phrases, which required no effort of intelligence, caused a numbing of reason and hypnosis.”Footnote 57 At this stage, then, Sorel thought repeated regurgitation of legends of heroic, destructive conquest had something to do with hypnotic suggestion. Due to studies in experimental psychology between 1890 and 1895, he developed a view of suggestion which led him to explain Jacobin literature’s role in stimulating this phenomenon.
Sorel had read Wundt, Charcot, and Janet’s scientific works by 1892.Footnote 58 At the same time, he was studying Tarde, Sighele, and Lombroso’s analyses of the crowd. He took these thinkers as sharing the Nancy school’s perspective that the mass necessarily imitated prestigious leaders and stressed his disagreement with this approach. “Lombroso accepts too easily the conceptions of Sighele, who himself follows Tarde too much … Sighele admits with Tarde that people follow superior men. History denies this thesis.”Footnote 59 Sorel’s engagement with the Salpêtrière school led him to hold a more complex view of suggestion: “Charcot established a very important fact, demonstrating that ... magnetism [hypnotic suggestion] consists of an artificial nervousness with great affinities to hysteria.”Footnote 60 In a review of Janet’s État mental des hystériques (1892), Sorel discussed the significance of the Salpêtrière school’s studies.
Janet, he observed, gave “a definitive formula of hysteria as a form of mental disintegration characterized by the personality’s permanent and complete splitting.”Footnote 61 The hysteric experienced “an order of psychological phenomena independent of consciousness [where] images associate automatically.”Footnote 62 A particular kind of education brought about this division of the personality: “nervous training can modify the temperament and fix lower emotional movements … these movements bring about serious determinations under insignificant causes [by] recalling perceptions.”Footnote 63 Emotional experiences thus agitated the nerves and created a store of images in the unconscious memory. In turn, subsequent emotional disturbances would lead the unconscious to recall these images and disable one’s faculty for rational “personal perception.”Footnote 64 In Sorel’s eyes, Janet’s study of hysteria offered a better way to conceptualize suggestion than prevailing views: “it has often been imagined that the suggester only had to command to be obeyed … suggestion has been much abused; with Janet, we reason about it scientifically. For suggestion to be possible, it is necessary that the automatic association of psychological elements be preserved and the mental synthesis of phenomena be reduced.”Footnote 65 Against the crowd psychologists’ universalist conception of suggestion, Sorel followed Charcot and Janet: suggestion only worked on hysterics whose unconscious memory regularly recalled automatically associating images.Footnote 66 With this view in hand, Sorel argued Jacobin that militarist literature fostered crowd criminality and suggestion.
The crowd psychologists, such as Lombroso, maintained that crowds were populated by mentally abnormal, crime-prone individuals. Sorel thought there were few “born criminals” in crowds, while another class of criminals—criminaloids—were more important.Footnote 67 These “were very dangerous beings” whose propensity for “crime was prepared over a long time … and under the influence of strong and repeated excitations.”Footnote 68 Sorel highlighted examples of these excitations: “old popular songs maintain admiration for the bandit. The publicity given to crimes by the press has been reported as a stimulant [excitant] and this is true … in criminaloids’ eyes, he who fights against organized force is great and, if he dies with courage, he is a hero.”Footnote 69 Sorel was describing a Jacobin militarist literature here. The Carmagnole and Marseillaise, after all, were popular war songs. In his mind, repeated exposure to this literature caused degeneration into hysteria. “People of the criminal life,” he contended, “have a weak conscious understanding. Their associations of ideas are very limited. Their mental determinations are almost always linked to some dominating images”—images of past criminals’ heroic violence.Footnote 70 Criminaloids thus existed in a state of constant nervousness, which meant their unconscious memory would regularly overwhelm their rational faculties with such images given emotional agitation. In a review of Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules (1895), Sorel specified how the experience of being in a crowd triggered the unconscious.
Sorel read Le Bon as a follower of the Nancy school who failed to give an adequate account of suggestion.Footnote 71 He ignored the role of the crowd’s unconscious memory:
Le Bon rightly says, “the heterogeneous drowns in the homogeneous” [in crowds], but he does not give the cause. Emotions always associate with actions using the material of memories man possesses. The place of intelligence and voluntary attention is very weak here. The [crowd’s] choice between various actions depends on accidental circumstances … Le Bon observes that [a leader’s] “example plays an enormous role in crowd suggestion.” I believe this is explained by the fact that this action is closer to emotional expression than speech is.Footnote 72
Sorel’s point was that a leader’s emotional expression served as the “accidental circumstance” or trigger that shaped crowd behavior by causing the automatic recall of memories from the unconscious.Footnote 73 Leaders’ “invectives and cries” were expressions of emotion that produced this effect: they inflamed a crowd’s hatred towards an enemy deemed responsible for its oppression and called to mind memories associated with this emotion—namely memories of criminals’ heroic violence and suffering at the hands of despicable foes.Footnote 74 The recall of such violent images prompted crowd hysterics to experience emotional attacks and lose the ability to consciously direct their attention. They became engrossed with these images: the individual’s “mind” in the crowd “was closed to any image not closely linked to the obsession that dominates him.”Footnote 75 They embraced a leader’s suggestions for violence because, quite literally, they could not think of anything else.
Sorel’s engagement with the Salpêtrière school led him to hold a view of crowds similar to that of Rouanet and Fournière. Like them, he thought propaganda stories of heroic, destructive conquest disabled individuals’ capacity for voluntary attention such that they became obsessive and suggestible. Yet, due to his reading of Charcot’s school, he explained suggestion in a distinct way: it required a state of hysteria in which the unconscious emotional memory overpowered the faculty for rational, conscious thought. Sorel nonetheless stressed his closeness to the independents by praising Rouanet’s Les complicités du Panama in 1893.Footnote 76 At this stage, however, his theory of the crowd operated on an abstract plane. Although he emphasized a militarist press’s role in constructing suggestible crowds, he did not specify the political institutions that were its vehicles. As the Dreyfus affair intensified between 1897 and 1900, Sorel concretized his account of the crowd in analyses of the nationalist and Guesdist movements.
Sorel on crowds and Caesarism during the Dreyfus affair
In the fall of 1897, when Dreyfus’s brother publicized the general staff’s use of forged evidence in the trial, the Dreyfus affair became a national political crisis. The nationalist press’s condemnation of Zola’s J’accuse in January 1898 and his subsequent conviction for libel demonstrated France’s intense polarization over the trial. This polarization influenced the April–May national election.Footnote 77 While Guesde’s POF remained noncommittal on Dreyfus’s guilt during the election—with some notable candidates outright condemning him—this position effectively aligned the party with the anti-Dreyfusards.Footnote 78 In the tense atmosphere after the publication of J’accuse, riotous crowds became a regular sight on Paris’s streets. “The Affair,” one historian writes, “presented the people in the slumped and corruptible form of the crowd.”Footnote 79 These crowds were “small processions of several hundred” that “harassed people considered Jewish, smashed store windows and hurled abuse at their opponents.”Footnote 80 For Sorel, nationalism and Guesdism created these crowds.
Like the independent socialists, Sorel was concerned with how these revolutionary movements systematically organized and wielded a boulevard press, which had exploded onto the political scene with Boulangism, in their electoral agitation. These movements manifested Jacobin militarist organization and press rhetoric: journalistic general staffs used a centralized press apparatus to disseminate mass propaganda premised on legends of destructive conquest against national enemies. This fashioned hysterical, Caesarist crowds that leaders were likely to use as instruments of terror in reckless palace coups.Footnote 81 Sorel’s “independentist” perspective led him to again distinguish his views from those of Le Bon, whose contempt for parliamentary democracy had spurred support for anti-Dreyfusardism: he opposed Le Bon’s anti-Dreyfusard defense of Caesarist crowds’ altruistic, racial instincts advanced in the new Psychologie du socialisme (1898). Yet, while Sorel shared the independents’ general orientation, he made the original claim that propaganda legends led crowds to construct an idealized vision of the revolutionary future. This would prompt their murderous fervor in coups.
Much of Sorel’s writing on the affair appeared in Italian journals because he developed relationships and corresponded with Italian sociologists and socialists confronting Caesarist militarism in their own country with the premiership of the general Luigi Pelloux (1898–1900). He also likely felt that an Italian audience would be more receptive to his critique of Jacobin militarism than a French one. Sorel’s most important contacts in Italy were with Guglielmo Ferrero and Napoleone Colajanni, editor of the Rivista popolare, where he published.Footnote 82 Ferrero had initiated the debate on Jacobin Caesarism in important lectures in Milan in 1897.Footnote 83 Sorel thought that his account of Caesarist crowds advanced this debate.
Unsurprisingly, then, Sorel’s first discussion of Caesarism occurred in an 1897 review of Ferrero’s work. Ferrero was right to characterize “Caesarism” as the “true creation of the imaginative and sensual Latin race [which] … relies on the army … to maintain an oligarchy.”Footnote 84 In another review from this period, Sorel stressed that an “oligarchy” governed French democracy by creating “fictitious opinion ... [and] enticing men with the abuse of big words.”Footnote 85 This was an oligarchy of journalists whose agitational methods would lead to “the creation of new dynasties beginning with Caesarism.”Footnote 86 Caesarism thus involved journalists manipulating public opinion through grandstanding.Footnote 87 In his examinations of nationalism and Guesdism, Sorel brought these two understandings of Caesarism together: he clarified that Caesarist politics relied on the army not in a direct sense, but because bourgeois journalists embraced army-like structures and militarist imagery to seduce the public.
The nationalist movement’s centralized, army-like character became apparent as the affair intensified in 1897–8 and different nationalist groupings overcame disagreements to establish a common front.Footnote 88 “The affair,” Sorel observed, “witnessed the formation of a nationalist party … a staff [un personale di uomini] was created which went to public meetings to agitate. Conservatives finally had at their disposal an army corps [un arma].”Footnote 89 For Sorel, the editors Henri Rochefort (L’Intransigeant), Édouard Drumont (La libre parole), and Ernest Judet (Le petit journal) constituted nationalism’s bourgeois general staff: “the masses follow journalists who convince them that they think for themselves. The opponents of revision in Dreyfus’s trial exploited this feeling … readers took the reasoning of Judet, Drumont, and Rochefort as gold from a cup.”Footnote 90 These journalists commanded a corps of agitators to disseminate “penny papers [of which] Le petit journal” was “the perfect example.”Footnote 91 The nationalist press’s centralization was evident in the fact that Rochefort’s editorial office was next door to that of the leading street hawker, Léon Hayard.Footnote 92
With mass pamphlets and newspapers, the nationalists bombarded Parisians with legends of destructive conquest that made many lose their ability to direct their attention elsewhere: they entered a state of hysterical obsession. Like the Jacobin army’s literature, this press identified national enemies and a national savior. France was witnessing “a renaissance of patriotic and epic legends … with epithets” presenting Jews as “brutes to be cut with a knife.”Footnote 93 In turn, the press depicted the army as bearing Jacobinism’s mantel and prepared to mete out violence against France’s Jewish enemy: the nationalists “live on traditions ... and illusions … whose source lies in the legends of the Revolution and heroic volunteers … [this was] radical patriotism’s historical foundation.”Footnote 94 Nourished by Jacobin chauvinism, the Parisian public “loved and admired the army.”Footnote 95 The problem with the nationalists’ “low literature … of cynical brutality” was that it “required no effort of intelligence” from readers.Footnote 96 Instead, it induced intense feelings of hatred and admiration and caused images of the army’s destructive conquest to become seared into Parisians’ memory. Much of the public thus degenerated into hysteria and fixated upon these images. Indeed, Sorel emphasized that the “epidemic … of [anti-Semitic] nationalism” appealed to “lunatics and epileptics.”Footnote 97 This public’s hysteria ultimately made it form suggestible crowds in the movement. The nationalist party “would not last long,” Sorel insisted, “without the powerful illusions that dominate crowds’ psychology and derive from the repetition of legends.”Footnote 98
The POF was also a movement with army-like structures. Since 1882, Guesde had insisted upon a centralized organization in the party and prohibited electoral candidates’ independent initiatives.Footnote 99 After ending his association with Guesdists at Le devenir social in 1897, Sorel condemned the POF’s militarized apparatus: “Guesde treats his followers as a Boisdeffre or any general might do … he only understands authoritarian government.”Footnote 100 Such authoritarianism manifested in opposition to discussion about party doctrine. For example, the party newspaper, Le Socialiste, was simply a conduit for Guesde’s vulgarizations of Marxism. As one historian notes, “Guesde remained resistant to an open newspaper” that voiced “varied republican and workerist sensibilities.”Footnote 101 In tune with this analysis, Sorel described Guesde and his confidants as a journalistic general staff. “Guesde and [Paul] Lafargue” were “journalists who claim to judge workers and to understand socialism.”Footnote 102 Like the leaders of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD), they constituted a “general staff.”Footnote 103
Guesde directed the POF press to imitate nationalism’s tactics around the 1898 election because he thought appealing to many workers’ nationalist sentiments was necessary for electoral success. Since “the masses have been lectured on the cult of the flag … and socialists are obliged to seek votes,” Sorel explained, “they mislead the people … and flatter the stupidities of Le petit journal’s readers.”Footnote 104 The Guesdists had “become patriots … authoritarian socialism necessarily leads to nationalism and militarism.”Footnote 105 While Sorel did not center the POF press’s anti-Semitism as the independents did, he argued that its mass street literature propagated legends of destructive conquest by portraying socialist revolution as the path to national regeneration.Footnote 106 The Guesdists’ Le Socialiste “reasoned like Judet [Le petit journal]” because it demonized a national enemy and apotheosized a national savior.Footnote 107 Guesdist propaganda consequently weakened workers’ capacity to control and direct their attention to objects of their choosing; it made them hysterically obsessive.
Ernest-Antoine Seillière’s book Littérature et morale dans le parti socialiste allemande (1898) led Sorel to focus on demonizing socialist propaganda. Although this book was nominally about the SPD, Sorel thought its examples of propaganda literature represented the “corruption disseminated by [socialist] politicians” generally.Footnote 108 Seillière had described a story published in the SPD’s illustrated Sunday magazine that followed the travails of an impoverished working-class woman, Bertha, who had to sell herself to a “charlatan doctor” in return for medicine for her terminally ill child.Footnote 109 For Sorel, the problem with this story was that it presented capitalists, whom the venal doctor embodied, in the same way as nationalist propaganda portrayed Jews: as “enemies living a bestial life” who deserved repression.Footnote 110 It sought to enrage workers and stir their desire to avenge Bertha, who had committed suicide when her child died. By creating a symbolic target for socialist hatred and conquest, demonizing stories like this one exemplified the Guesdists’ “idiotic” street literature.Footnote 111
Equally important, the POF press circulated pamphlets that depicted Guesde as a national savior who would lead a revolutionary war of conquest. Sorel pointed to a popular brochure in which “we learn that our soldiers have been Guesde’s constant preoccupation because he believes our country will play a great role in the next revolution and wants an invincible France … he dreams of carrying the revolutionary flag to neighboring countries as in 1794.”Footnote 112 In a published speech, Guesde also intimated that he would create “a true homeland after the social revolution.”Footnote 113 This mass propaganda led workers to see Guesde as an armed protector whose revolutionary conquest would liquidate capitalists at home and establish national unity. Since this propaganda induced intense feelings of hatred and admiration, it became imprinted on workers’ unconscious memory. This caused them to degenerate into hysteria and form suggestible crowds: Guesdists were “dominated ... by memories of 1793,” which meant they regularly recalled images of Guesde as a Jacobin conqueror and fixated upon him.Footnote 114
Nationalist and Guesdist crowds’ obsessive state led them to construct an idealized vision of the revolutionary future: the overthrow of the republic would proceed exactly as propaganda legends suggested. As Sorel explained, “in crowds we automatically try to repeat what we believe to have been good in the past.”Footnote 115 The emotional attacks induced by the recall of these legends untethered crowd members’ vision of the future from reality: “when emotion extinguishes individuals’ faculty of measurement … everything which smiles on their imagination is possible … social relations can become anything by the use of force.”Footnote 116 For Sorel, the Guesdist proletariat was not simply an inert mass that waited for capitalist crisis to produce revolution.Footnote 117 Instead, it was a hysterical mass that would seek to violently accelerate into a revolution which it imagined to mirror those of the past.Footnote 118 Against the Guesdists, he stressed that “we should never imagine the working class’s future from memories of old revolutions.”Footnote 119
While Sorel certainly worried that crowds would unthinkingly vote for nationalism and Guesdism, then, he also fundamentally emphasized their potential to facilitate the violent establishment of revolutionary dictatorship. In reviews of Le Bon’s Psychologie du socialisme, he made this clear: he endorsed Le Bon’s description of crowds as Caesarist, while rejecting Le Bon’s anti-Dreyfusard positive view of them. Sorel highlighted the “seriousness” of Le Bon’s “thesis that socialism and democracy are in danger of perishing because crowds are conservative and will follow the daring adventurer or obey the oligarchy who has the energy to command them.”Footnote 120 Yet he opposed Le Bon’s “praise of the masses” for “instinctively defending the country’s interests.”Footnote 121 Le Bon had characterized crowds as possessing instinctual “altruism” that made them only engage in “occasional ephemeral violence” and acclaim “the first Caesar who promised to restore what they had broken.”Footnote 122 Crowds’ embrace of restorative Caesar would “maintain a race’s collective interests.”Footnote 123 Sorel disagreed:
I cannot share Le Bon’s admiration for the masses’ instincts … they only know about social interests, the homeland, and politics from what the most vulgar agitators teach them … the mass is careless, boastful, and fierce … Le Bon believes that crowds will crush socialism and democracy because they support dictatorship … Recent events [the 1898 election] have shown that, for elected representatives, Truth, Justice, and Morality do not count for much … but are these not higher ideals than that of crowds “turning towards a Caesar’s plume?”Footnote 124
Le Bon thus ignored how vulgar journalist agitators influenced crowds’ instincts. The 1898 election had shown that nationalism and Guesdism’s boulevard journalism created “careless, boastful, and fierce” crowds which fixated upon a Caesar’s plume. Against Le Bon’s “ideal” of Caesarist crowds as altruistic forces, Sorel maintained they would be agents of Jacobin terror in a nationalist or Guesdist coup attempt. This perspective led him to warn in 1898 that “France was moving towards Caesarism.”Footnote 125
Nationalist and Guesdist leaders posed the threat of an amateurish palace coup rather than a Blanquist coup. While the socialist followers of Auguste Blanqui in nineteenth-century France had defended the need for a trained vanguard to confront the army on the barricades during coup attempts, a palace coup involved conspirators seizing government buildings at the time of political uncertainty. “I cannot see Guesde,” Sorel explained, “at the head of armed workers marching against the troops … he has always counted on political crises [and] seeks to exercise his party’s revolutionary action on an almost unarmed, Girondian government.”Footnote 126 While nationalist agitators were “reckless” and had “the idea of a coup,” they too were “pretenders [who] had no inclination for a serious fight.”Footnote 127 For Sorel, hysterical crowds were ill-suited to organized barricade combat. Instead, nationalist or Guesdist adventurers were more likely to take advantage of a government crisis to direct their “careless” crowds to violently occupy the Palais Bourbon. Even if a coup failed to bring regime change, Sorel thought it would involve murderous chaos and produce temporary Parisian dictatorship.Footnote 128
In the late 1890s, Sorel invested his hopes in the bourses du travail because he thought that these institutions were bringing into being a socialist culture different from that of Guesdism. This was a culture free of Jacobinism and all this entailed: militarist boulevard presses, Caesarist adventurism, and violent crowds. For Sorel, socialist education in the bourses developed workers’ rational faculties rather than inflaming their passions of hatred and admiration. In pushing this view, he showed his socialist colors. Unlike such liberals as Alfred Fouillée and Charles Renouvier, Sorel did not think that workers were destined for subordination to elites in the economy and democracy.Footnote 129 Instead, they could achieve self-government in the present through the right kind of media and educational institutions. Such self-government would involve workers’ exercise of independent influence over their local economies and parliament.
Sorel’s antidote to Caesarist crowds: socialist education in the bourses du travail
My analysis of Sorel’s anxieties about the crowd offers a new way to grasp his vision of the bourses’ educational tasks and, in turn, the conditions under which a present-minded, democratic socialism could emerge. Like the independent socialists, Sorel turned to unions and cooperatives as institutions that enabled workers to pursue the moral and cultural change required for socialism “in the near future.”Footnote 130 Education in the bourses, he believed, immunized workers from crowds’ hysteria and projection into an idealized revolutionary future.Footnote 131 This was because these institutions created a new media sphere that led workers to consciously direct their attention to practical and material matters vital to their economic emancipation: understanding production, improving their immediate surroundings, and forming cooperative relationships with their comrades. In short, bourse unionists developed a socialist culture of attentive reflection which was manifest in what Sorel labelled their democratic legal spirit: through inclusive, democratic discussion about their local economy, unionists established rules to govern their cooperative self-government in industry.Footnote 132
In the early 1890s, the bourses developed as an alternative to other unions—namely the unions de métiers, which were associations of workers within a profession, and the Fédération des syndicats, which was a federation of unions that attached itself to the POF. In 1892, twelve bourses emerged across France when local unions from across different professions established spaces for the study of a region’s economy. They created these spaces in two ways. First, the bourses conducted surveys of local production and consumption. In regular conferences, moreover, workers discussed how to manage production more cooperatively and scientifically. The bourses held courses in mathematics, physical sciences, and technology to enable workers to comprehend economic surveys and participate in the conferences.Footnote 133 They also encouraged workers to attend lectures at the universités populaires, established in 1899.Footnote 134 Second, each bourse founded a newspaper to report on survey results, conferences, and production issues. The federation established a newspaper, L’ouvrier des deux mondes, in 1897. These newspapers were radically different from nationalist and Guesdist outlets. As the leading bourse organizer Fernand Pelloutier wrote, “there is little taste for serious reading in France. The worker reads the patriotic, saber press. [With L’ouvrier des deux mondes] we introduced into the press an absolutely new journal … an economic information manual.”Footnote 135
Sorel was well aware of these developments and, between 1898 and 1902, repeatedly highlighted the bourses as places where workers pursued the practical study of their economic environment. “Anarchist unionists ... [in] the Bourses du travail,” he wrote in 1898, “study ... practical life.”Footnote 136 He recognized the bourses’ press as central to their endeavors. “I cannot recommend reading Le monde ouvrier enough,” he declared, because “it contains detailed studies on practical questions.”Footnote 137 Indeed, bourse unionists’ reading habits made them unique: “there are perhaps 20,000 anarchists in France … many enter unions … because of their love for education they differ greatly from socialists who barely read.”Footnote 138 In a crucial essay from 1900, Sorel specified how education in economic institutions like the bourses cultivated a socialist culture of attentive reflection.
In this essay, he contrasted economic education with a deficient approach that he thought existed in public schools and political campaigns. The latter involved “passing before pupils pictures of the idealized history of a few superior individuals.”Footnote 139 This education “furnishes our memory with images [such that] we can never take any action without memories immediately appearing and provoking a comparison.”Footnote 140 The nationalist and Guesdist presses’ stories of heroic conquerors “educated” workers in this manner. In contrast, institutions like the bourses
bring about a personal, active, and permanent experience which makes us understand the power we have over the world, indicates to us how we should modify human relations, and enables us to judge events that affect us … economic institutions clip the wings of idealism … the obstacles to be overcome lie not so much outside as inside ourselves: we have stiff necks and do not want to submit to reason.Footnote 141
By developing workers’ capacity to judge their economic environment, the bourses enabled them to confront internal psychological obstacles to practical economic action. The bourses therefore “clipped the wings of idealism” because they prevented workers from becoming engrossed with propaganda stories of destructive conquest and Caesar savior figures. Workers came to see these stories—and idealized visions of the revolutionary future constructed on their basis—as distractions from the practical matters essential for economic emancipation. Instead, they concentrated their attention on understanding production’s scientific technicalities so that they could improve its processes and establish cooperative relationships with each other. “We must continually appeal to ... the understanding,” Sorel emphasized, “to curb our visions and control the exercise of our faculties of invention.”Footnote 142
The bourse proletariat’s culture of attentive reflection generated a democratic legal spirit: “under the influence of practice (cooperation, mutuality), the legal spirit begins to take on considerable importance … we have gone from vague hypotheses to the reasoned elaboration of principles … [from] emotional darkness to the clarity of legal discussions.”Footnote 143 By “legal spirit,” Sorel meant how workers discussed and formulated rules to organize their economic life in a cooperative and scientific manner. At this time, he connected the positive side of democracy to local practices of discussion that fostered intellectual independence. He was clearest on this point in 1901: “in democracy, institutions must produce the liberty to think spontaneously … it is worth examining the means employed to defend this liberty … [such as] the federalist organization of education.”Footnote 144 Sorel had the bourses in mind here. As a result of its attentive “legal spirit,” the bourse proletariat held a particular view of the relationship between the present and socialist future.
If the Guesdist crowd sought to escape the present and violently accelerate into an idealized socialist future, the bourse unionists believed that the socialist future would emerge out of ordinary acts in the present. “Anarchists,” Sorel observed, “construct a personal conception of the future and carry out the individual acts that it entails … [they manifest] a practical spirit that gives well-determined meaning to what happens in the future.”Footnote 145 Thus, among the bourse proletariat, “socialism no longer exists in a symbolic future, but in the present: utopias are replaced with hypotheses capable of being acted upon in practice.”Footnote 146 These unionists continually modified their actions “with a view to self-government,” which meant they seized upon present opportunities to practice cooperative decision making in their local economic contexts.Footnote 147
The bourse proletariat’s attentive culture ultimately led it to shun the POF, its propaganda legends, and Caesarist crowds. As Sorel put it, “[French] worker associations seem, for some time now, to be emancipating themselves from Parisian trouble-making bands.”Footnote 148 If workers had previously been “led by socialist publicists and orators’ hot-blooded pronouncements,” unionists were “regaining their independence” through the “Bourses du travail.”Footnote 149 In his mind, the bourses’ culture had decisive political consequences during the Dreyfus affair. He specifically highlighted the political activism of the Allemanist group within the bourses. These largely Parisian unionists had taken up leading positions in the Parisian bourse and played an integral role in the national federation’s formation in the 1890s.Footnote 150 They practiced a type of street protest, Sorel argued, that combated the Caesarist threat and influenced parliamentary representatives to take measures to support their self-government in industry.
The Allemanists and Sorel’s vision of working-class street action
During the affair’s critical period between 1898 and 1900, independent and Dreyfusard socialists were anxious to distinguish between dangerous crowds and dignified, beneficial street movements. Rouanet, the professor Charles Andler, and the poet Charles Péguy, who had socialist sympathies at this time, all located a countermodel of street protest in the mass Dreyfusard demonstrations on 12 June and 19 November 1899.Footnote 151 The latter event involved 300,000 socialists and republicans who peacefully marched to the Place de la Nation to profess support for the democratic republic. These two demonstrations’ “courteous calm” differentiated them from the crowds dominating Paris’s streets.Footnote 152 Sorel also established a contrast between calm street protest and violent crowds, but he did not view the mass Dreyfusard demonstrations as representing the former.Footnote 153 He endorsed the Allemanist marches because only this kind of street movement manifested a socialist culture of attentive, present-minded action.
In his view, the Allemanists’ clear, hymn-like chanting activated other republican citizens’ rational faculties: it did so by concentrating their attention on the Caesarist threat gripping the republic and its democratic, socialist alternative. By gaining republican citizens’ support, Sorel thought the Allemanist marches were part of an anti-Caesarist political strategy: they deterred crowds’ rule over the street and prevented coups.Footnote 154 Equally important, they facilitated unionists’ independent influence over parliament: they contributed to the formation of a republican–socialist coalition and inspired a new kind of socialist representation committed to passing reforms beneficial to union self-government. For Sorel, the Allemanists inspired the independent socialist Alexandre Millerand, who entered the cabinet as minister of commerce in 1899, to bear their culture in his representative conduct.
In an 1899 essay, Sorel highlighted an Allemanist march that dissolved a Caesarist crowd and helped to thwart a coup: “in August, anarchists came to the Place de la République to prevent an anti-Semitic demonstration. The latter did not take place [because] about 2,000 people walked between the Place de la République and Place de la Nation … pronunciamentos [coups] are now possible … the current tranquility of the street is a great safeguard against militarist attacks.”Footnote 155 While Sorel did not specify here how the march dissolved the anti-Semitic crowd, Jean Allemane’s discussion of another march in Rennes suggests a method. “Our comrades in Rennes,” Allemane explained, “stood up to the terrorizing … militarist bands mobilized in view of Dreyfus’s upcoming trial. Thanks to our comrades’ energy, all the republican citizens of Rennes were soon on their feet, and, at the reactionaries’ first attacks, they rushed upon them and took away their clubs.”Footnote 156 The Allemanists’ street action disbanded the nationalist crowd, then, because it influenced onlookers to join their side. There was an initial confrontation, but the crowd gave up its willingness to fight in the face of the joint Allemanist–republican front. The August march that Sorel referenced likely proceeded in the same manner: it began with a smaller number of Allemanists and then expanded to 2,000 people as more republican citizens joined. This was what caused the nationalist crowd to shrink away.
The Allemanist marches brought republican citizens onto their side because they clearly communicated the nature of the Caesarist threat. As Allemane put it, “our protestors’ voices have produced an awakening in cities [by] tearing off the mask of anti-Semitism and revealing its lying face.”Footnote 157 The Allemanists’ speech distinguished their marches from Caesarist crowds. Nothing here was akin to the incendiary shrieking that adventurers used to make crowds recall propaganda images of destructive conquest, experience emotional delirium, and blindly imitate them. “Harangues,” Allemane stressed, “do little for the people’s education.”Footnote 158 In contrast, the Allemanist marches—as Péguy explained in a discussion of one—involved a “slow and sweeping singing, like a canticle.”Footnote 159 The Allemanists’ steady, clear, and calm speech thus prompted republican bystanders to voluntarily direct their attention to the Caesarist threat. As a result, these citizens rationally endorsed the need to form a front against it and emulated the Allemanists by joining them on the street. Since this was conscious and rational rather than blindly emotive emulation, it was not a case of hysterical suggestion.
Sorel’s discussions of Dreyfusard street action suggest that he viewed the Allemanist marches in this light. “Dreyfusard campaigning,” like that of the marches, weakened rather than strengthened “the militarists.”Footnote 160 If initially “the extremists had moderates [i.e. republican bystanders] as their auxiliaries,” then Dreyfusard agitation exposed the militarists’ aims.Footnote 161 “The stone that now exists in the reactionary movement’s gears,” Sorel declared, “forces the blind to become aware of [accorgersi] its existence” and violent intentions.Footnote 162 Like Allemane, Sorel thought the Allemanist marches represented a working-class street action that rationally enlightened rather than emotionally stupefied participants and onlookers. He further claimed that these marches promoted democratic, socialist progress because their consciousness-raising effects helped to form a republican–socialist coalitional government. “Millerand’s entry into the ministry,” Sorel explained, “was the natural consequence of … rapprochements between democrats, socialists, and anarchists” in Dreyfusard agitation.Footnote 163
In Sorel’s telling, the Allemanist marches inspired Millerand to bear their socialist attitude in his conduct as minister. Millerand was, in fact, exceptionally attentive to workers’ local situations and their specific demands for state intervention.Footnote 164 Indeed, Sorel drew a distinction between “true [socialist] political action and politicians’ agitation” in light of the Allemanists’ influence on Millerand: “the former’s aim is to make public opinion favorable to workers’ demands. This is easier the more one abandons revolutionary, apocalyptic sermons … it is useful to have the proletariat’s authoritative representatives in the Chamber—men who know workers’ practical issues and can advance factual arguments. The socialist [parliamentary] group should be serious, instill respect, and include competent people.”Footnote 165
Just as the Allemanist marches activated republican citizens’ rational faculties, Millerand did so through his interventions in parliament and cabinet meetings: specifically, he directed his republican colleagues’ attention to the need to pass legislation that would facilitate workers’ organization and devolve regulatory power to unions. Workers were ultimately “happy to see Millerand in the Ministry” because he “fought against central powers” and supported their “federation [in] groups.”Footnote 166
This defense of Millerand was short-lived. By late 1901, Sorel no longer viewed Millerand as a new socialist representative. He changed his position in light of Millerand’s proposal to establish compulsory work councils, which the bourses rejected. The councils would inevitably fall under demagogues’ influence as they sought to dictate strike outcomes for political gain.Footnote 167 Sorel’s disillusionment, however, should not diminish the significance of his initial view. Between 1899 and 1901, he believed that the Allemanists and Millerand offered a way out of a political atmosphere asphyxiated by militarist journalism, Caesarist adventurism, and violent crowds.
Conclusion
This article has examined Sorel’s theory of the crowd in the 1890s and its influence on his early socialist vision. I have argued that his engagement with the Salpêtrière school of psychology and reflections on the Dreyfus affair led him to differentiate between subservient crowd movements and positive, autonomous working-class organization. He made this core distinction by associating each of these phenomena with unique media environments, which cultivated certain mental habits among workers, and different political forms of the socialist movement. In developing his argument against crowd-based socialism, Sorel contributed in an innovative way to the independent socialists’—Gustave Rouanet and Eugène Fournière’s—challenge to Guesdism and its political vehicle, the Parti ouvrier français.
Like these figures, Sorel was concerned with the emergence of a demagogic socialism in France that, instead of investing in workers’ self-governing capacities, transformed them into a manipulable mass. This type of socialism, he warned, would only advance bourgeois, Jacobin party leaders’ interest in consolidating power in their hands rather than workers’ economic emancipation. During the Dreyfus affair, Sorel came to think that Guesdism represented this socialism because Guesdists’ militarist press propaganda, borrowed from nationalism, fueled the rise of hysterical, suggestible crowds in the movement. This generated Guesdism’s authoritarian and Caesarist political form: dominated by propaganda images recalled by their subconscious memory, hysterical workers in crowds would experience emotional attacks, acclaim Guesde as a Caesar-like military savior, and obey his suggestions for coup terror. For Sorel, the symbolic representation that a Caesar figure offered workers was a harmful illusion: it came at the expense of their intellectual and political autonomy in democracy and, potentially, also their lives.
The bourses du travail, Sorel argued, established a very different kind of media environment. In contrast to the Guesdist press’s phantasmic, saber-rattling visions of revolution, the bourses’ press centered studies of local economies, union conference discussions, and technological developments in production. This media’s rigorous analyses of material reality and practical science led unionists to develop habits of attentive reflection, critical observation, and judgment. In Sorel’s view, these unionists’ intellectual and moral culture lay at the root of their socialism’s democratic form and present-minded, reformist agenda. A democratic, reformist orientation was evident not only in their local practices of deliberation to determine cooperative reforms to production, but also in their communicative, coalition-building street action. The Allemanist unionists’ disciplined marches in defense of the republic between 1898 and 1900, Sorel thought, embodied a new kind of socialist street politics far more amenable to progress toward workers’ economic self-government than crowd paroxysms.
This account of the early Sorel suggests productive new ways to read his Réflexions sur la violence. While he famously embraced revolutionary syndicalism and rejected unions’ interactions with parliamentary democracy in 1903, his opposition to a Jacobin socialism premised on the militarist conquest of state power and crowd terror remained unchanged.Footnote 168 If syndicalists’ violent strikes were not hysterical, hateful, and blindly obedient crowd movements, it is worth exploring their resonances with the Allemanist marches: we might consider how their strike violence activated nonaligned workers’ emotions in a manner conducive to a rational understanding of the value of socialist self-government.Footnote 169
Sorel’s analyses also offer insights into the pathologies of our digital, social-media-facilitated democracy. The attack on the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, for example, was a crowd movement driven by an alt-right media environment that manifested Make America Great Again’s authoritarian proclivities. What Sorel draws our attention to in this event—and others like it—is the connection between citizens’ exposure to repeated sloganeering in the media, crowds’ emotional identification with incendiary leaders, and their embrace of violence. From Sorel’s perspective, a media landscape, like that of the alt-right meme sphere, which inundates viewers with images glorifying a militarist attitude and political violence, empowers the subconscious emotional memory at the expense of rational, discriminating thought.Footnote 170 The inhabitant of this alt-right media space, a Sorelian account would suggest, is likely to uncritically identify with a rabble-rousing leader calling for violence because his subconscious memory makes him emotionally obsessed with cartoonish, meme-framed combat against political opponents.
From Sorel’s study of the bourses du travail, we can draw out the outlines of a different future for our digital democracy. His thinking suggests that unions can play a leading role in establishing a novel media environment distinct from one saturated with attention-grabbing meme imagery and vitriolic slogans. Unions, for example, could serve as sites for the emergence of worker-owned, nonprofit media platforms focused on thorough local and national economic reporting.Footnote 171 With Sorel, we might anticipate this media space to foster workers’ practices of directed attention, critical and informed discussion on union strategy, and tolerant disagreement. It could also encourage their democratic, coalition-building—rather than authoritarian—street action. At a time of union revival, then, Sorel points us toward a vision of unions as institutions that enable workers’ attentive participation and independent influence in democracy.
Acknowledgments
The research for this article was conducted during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Justitia Center for Advanced Studies, funded by the Alfons and Gertrud Kassel Foundation, Goethe University Frankfurt. I would like to thank the members of the Frankfurt Political Theory Colloquium for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article. I am also grateful to Maria Paola Ferretti, Cain Shelley, Alec Dinnin, Ed Baring, and anonymous reviewers for their detailed feedback and suggestions, which helped me improve the article. Hedwig Lieback’s spirited questions and critical counsel, finally, were indispensable to sharpening the argument.
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