From France (From Our Correspondent)
Из Франции (от нашего корреспондента)
Date: 1913
Source: PSS vol 23
Translated by: AI (Claude)

Our newspaper has already told about the remarkable example of spinelessness displayed by Gustave Hervé. This glib journalist and agitator, a man without socialist schooling and without socialist education, crossed over into the workers' party (from professors) with all the habits and manners of a bourgeois intellectual. He began as an opportunist. Then he swung over to the "extreme left" and long preached semi-anarchist things, "frightening" the bourgeoisie with noisy cries in the antimilitarist spirit.

Recently he began to turn away from the anarchists and return to the party, to recognition of parliamentary struggle and educational-organizational work. But even here our glib little intellectual did not restrain himself and swung over again to the opportunists. As an impressionist, too susceptible to the impressions of the last minute and falling into spineless vacillations, he has been so "frightened" by the present reactionary wave of chauvinism, nationalism and imperialism in France that he set about preaching a return to the policy of the "bloc," that is, alliance with the bourgeois radicals. To save the republic in France, you see, a bloc with the radicals is necessary—otherwise in France the reactionaries will again restore the monarchy or empire!

Needless to say, except for the extreme opportunists, the French socialists ridicule the spineless Hervé and resolutely protest against the bloc. Recently one of the working party organs published in the south of France cited a series of opinions of prominent socialists against the bloc.

The socialists began and are conducting a campaign against the reaction—these prominent workers justly say—the socialists carried to the masses a protest against the law on the return to three-year military service (that is, on the return to a reactionary, barrack, decidedly undemocratic army). The socialists are realizing a proletarian bloc, that is, an alliance of socialist-workers with syndicalist-workers. Of the radicals and "radical-socialists" (a petty-bourgeois party resembling our Narodniks) only an insignificant share supports this truly democratic campaign of the socialists, and even then with vacillations.

What is the bloc for, then? Alliance with the vacillating will weaken the onslaught of the masses and strengthen vacillations! And from the support of radicals, insofar as they in this or that case speak out against reaction, the socialists have never refused.

Here you have Messrs. Charles Dumont, writes one socialist, and Alfred Massé, seasoned "radical-socialists," who defend the law on three-year service out of calculation for a ministerial post. Here you have the leader of the radicals, Clemenceau "himself," conducting a campaign for this law. Here you have another most prominent leader of the radicals, Léon Bourgeois, also speaking out for this law. Finally, in the military commission at the chamber of deputies this law was adopted by 17 votes against 4, belonging exclusively to socialists.

What kind of bloc with this shameless bourgeois party of radicals and "radical-socialists"? Only by agitating against it among the masses can the French socialists tear away all democratic elements from this party and thereby force a certain part of it to go left, toward democracy. Being entirely dependent on the masses in elections (for in France there exists, of course, universal suffrage and parliamentary government), many radicals will think very, very carefully before finally voting for a reactionary law, notoriously unpopular among the masses.

The only serious support for democracy and the republic in France (as everywhere) is the masses, the masses of workers, and after them the small peasants, and not the parliamentary dealers, mountebanks, careerists and adventurers of bourgeois parties, who today declare themselves "radical-socialists" in order tomorrow (for the sake of a ministerial post or for the sake of a profitable deal in the form of some concession or position in a syndicate of millionaires, etc.) to sell both democracy and the fatherland (as the French bourgeois sold France to Bismarck in 1871 out of fear of the uprising of Paris workers against wage slavery).

One can only warmly greet the French socialists fighting the idea of the bloc and expanding socialist work and agitation among the masses.

Written May 30 (June 12), 1913

Published June 5, 1913 in the newspaper "Pravda" No. 127. Signed: F.

Published according to the text of the newspaper