The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 by Barbara W. Tuchman
Jaurès’ campaign was not merely Socialist oratory. As in Les Preuves in the Dreyfus Affair, he set about demonstrating the practicability of his case, studying and working out, over a period of three years, the means of reorganizing the military establishment. He embodied the results in a bill submitted to the Chamber in November, 1910, and in a book of seven hundred pages, l’Armée Nouvelle, published in 1911. Preaching his cause tirelessly in the Chamber, in l’Humanité, the Socialist paper of which he was founder and director, in meetings and lectures, he was thunderously abused as a “traitor,” pro-German and “pacifist” by the cohorts of the Right, particularly by the vituperative Action Française.
The Balkans, where the interests of Russia and Austria clashed, was, as everyone knew, the hot-box of Europe. When in October, 1912, the Balkan League of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro, encouraged by Russia, declared war on Turkey, it seemed the awful moment had come. In Belgrade, Trotsky watched the 18th Serbian Infantry marching off to war in uniforms of the new khaki color. They wore bark sandals and a sprig of green in their caps, which gave them a look of “men doomed for sacrifice.” Nothing so brought home to him the meaning of war as those sprigs of green and bark sandals. “A sense of the tragedy of history took possession of me, a feeling of impotence before fate, of compassion for the human locust.”
To demonstrate the unity of the workers of the world against war, the Bureau in Brussels convened an emergency Congress to meet in Basle on the Swiss border between France and Germany on November 24 and 25. Five hundred and fifty-five delegates hastened to Basle from twenty-three countries. A manifesto drawn up in advance by the Bureau was voted unanimously, proclaiming “readiness for any sacrifice” against war, without specifying what. Addresses by Keir Hardie, Adler, Vander-velde and all Socialism’s most inspiring orators culminated in a speech by Jaurès, tacitly acknowledged by now the most influential figure of the movement. Bebel, though present, was in decline and making what proved to be his last international appearance.
Jaurès spoke from the pulpit of the Cathedral, given over to the Congress by the ecclesiastical authorities despite bourgeois fears of “dangerous” consequences. The sound of the church bells, he said, reminded him of the motto of Schiller’s “Song of the Bells”; Vivos voco, mortuos plango, fulgura frango (I summon the living, I mourn the dead, I break the furnaces). Leaning forward urgently, he spoke to the upturned faces: “I call on the living that they may defend themselves from the monster who appears on the horizon. I weep for the countless dead now rotting in the East. I will break the thunderbolts of war which menace from the skies.”
As it happened, these particular thunderbolts were broken by capitalist statesmen who summoned a Conference in London in December, 1912, which limited and, when reconvened in the following May, settled the war before it could expand into conflict between Russia and Austria.
In March, 1913, in a measure directly contrary to Jaurès’ campaign, France acted to enlarge her Army by restoring the period of military service from two years to three. Jaurès threw all his energies into battle against it and in favor of the nation-in-arms. For the next six months the Three-Year Law was the dominant fact of French life. Enactment became the rallying cry of nationalism and resistance to it the symbol of the Left. Jaurès denounced the measure in the Chamber as “a crime against the Republic” and drew a crowd of 150,000 to an open-air protest meeting. Leadership of the opposition marked him as the outstanding spokesman for peace. As such he was made the object of further attack as a pacifist and pro-German. After seven weeks of furious debate, the Law was enacted on August 7. Persisting, as he had done through six years of embittered struggle after Rennes until Dreyfus and Picquart were reinstated, Jaurès now led the movement for repeal.
Bebel died that year at seventy-three. In a procession lasting three days, workers and Socialists from many countries filed past the coffin surrounded by hundreds of wreaths and bunches of red flowers. Leadership of the party went to his chosen successor, Hugo Haase, a lawyer and deputy from Königsburg. In August, 1913, in the presence of Andrew Carnegie, and representatives of forty-two states affiliated with the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the Peace Palace was opened at The Hague in what The Times called “the happiest circumstances.” A survey of French student life in 1913 remarked that the word “War” had a fascination which “the eternal warrior instinct in the heart of man keeps reviving.”
Working-class strength continued to grow. Union membership in Germany and Great Britain each reached three million by 1914 and one million in France. The Socialists of Denmark were the largest single party; in Italy Socialists increased their seats in parliament from 32 to 52 in the election of 1913; in France from 76 to 103 in the election of April, 1914. Belgian Socialists, besides electing 30 deputies and seven senators, held 500 municipal council seats. Long frustrated by the stubborn resistance of the ruling class to equal suffrage, they felt themselves strong enough at last to enforce their demand by a general strike. Against impatient radicals who wanted immediate action, Vandervelde and his associates insisted on long and careful preparation; even so, although 400,000 workers joined the strike and stayed out for two weeks, they could not prevail and the strike failed.
The Tenth Congress of the Second International was scheduled for August, 1914, in Vienna, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the First International and the twenty-fifth of the Second. Faith in its purpose and its goal were high. In May a Franco-German Committee of Socialist deputies, including Jaurès and Hugo Haase, met at Basle to discuss measures for rapprochement between their countries. Their intention was good but its limit was talk. In England Keir Hardie in the midst of a speech to a conference of the ILP in April turned suddenly to face rows of children from Socialist Sunday Schools, seated behind the platform. Speaking directly to them, he pictured the loveliness of the world of nature and of the world of man as it could become. He spoke of how unnecessary were war and poverty and how he had tried to pass on to them a better world and how, although he and his associates had failed, they, the children, could yet succeed. “If these were my last words I would say them to you: Live for that better day.”
At the end of June, news that Serbian patriots had assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, in an obscure town in the annexed territory of Bosnia, provided a sensation of the kind to which Europe was accustomed. It passed without causing undue public alarm. Then suddenly, a month later, on July 24, with terrible impact, came the announcement that Austria had delivered an ultimatum to Serbia of such “brutality,” in the words of Vorwärts, the German Socialist paper, that “it can be interpreted only as a deliberate attempt to provoke war.” Full-scale crisis opened beneath Europe’s feet. Would it be another like Agadir and the Balkan War, hot with challenge and maneuver but finally fended off? People waited in desperate hope. “We relied on Jaurès,” wrote Stefan Zweig long afterwards, to organize the Socialists to stop the war.
Socialist leaders consulted. To wait to make a demonstration at Vienna a month hence might be too late. A readiness, a sense of gathering belligerence, could be felt in the atmosphere. The Bureau of Brussels summoned an emergency meeting of leading members for July 29. Jaurès, Hugo Haase, Rosa Luxemburg, Adler, Vandervelde, Keir Hardie and representatives of the Italian, Swiss, Danish, Dutch, Czech and Hungarian parties and of the several Russian factions, about twenty in all, assembled with a “sense of hopelessness and frustration.” What could they do? How could they make the will of the working class felt? What indeed was that will? No one asked that question for none doubted that it was for peace, but one answer had already been given two days earlier in Brussels at a congress of trade unions attended by Léon Jouhaux, head of the CGT, and Carl Legien, the German trade-union chief. Jouhaux tried anxiously to find out what the German unions would do. The French, said Jouhaux, would call a strike if the Germans would, but Legien remained silent. In any case no plans had been prepared.
All we
On a rainy day in Brussels the Socialist leaders met in a small hall of the Maison du Peuple, the proud new building of the Belgian labour movement with its theatre, offices, committee rooms, café and shops of the cooperatives. As they met they learned that Austria had declared war on Serbia but that other nations were not yet engaged. The hope that somehow the workers would rise—the “somehow” to which they had clung for so long—was all that remained. Each delegate hoped his neighbor would bring news of some great spontaneous outbreak in his country expressing the workers’ No! Adler’s speech brought no hope of a rising in Austria. Haase, too restless to sit still, reported protests and mass meetings in Germany and assured his colleagues that “the Kaiser does not want war; not from love of humanity but from cowardice. He is afraid of the consequences.” Jaurès gave an impression of “one who, having lost all hope of a normal solution, relies on a miracle.” Hardie was certain that the British transport workers would call a strike but his confidence was assumed. A few weeks earlier he had written, “Only the binding together of the Trade Union and the Socialist movements will ever put the workers into a position of controlling Governments, thus bringing war to an end.” The one country where such binding had taken place was Germany. The delegates talked all day but the only decision reached was to advance the date and change the place of the Vienna Congress to August 9 in Paris, there to resume discussion.
That evening a mass meeting was held in the Cirque Royale crowded by Belgian working people from all parts of the city and its suburbs. As the leaders mounted the platform Jaurès stood with his arm around Haase’s shoulders in a gesture which denied the enmity of Germany and France. When he spoke at the climax of the meeting his eloquence mounted until the hall shook with the force of it. He was “quivering, so intense was his emotion, his apprehension, his eagerness to avoid somehow the coming conflict.” When he had finished, the crowd, on waves of enthusiasm, poured into the streets to form a parade. Carrying white cards inscribed “Guerre à la guerre!” they alternately shouted the slogan and sang “The International” as they marched.
Next day, as the delegates departed, Jaurès, taking leave of Vander-velde, reassured him. “It will be like Agadir—ups and downs—but it is impossible that matters will not be settled. Come, I have a few hours before my train. Let’s go to the Museum and see the Flemish primitives.” But Vandervelde, who was leaving for London, could not go and never saw Jaurès again. On the train returning to Paris, exhausted from the strain, Jaurès fell asleep. A companion, Jean Longuet, looking at his “wonderful face,” was “suddenly overcome with a feeling … that he was dead. I froze with fright.” On arrival, however, Jaurès woke up and, still persisting, went to the Chamber to talk among the deputies and to the office of I’Humanité to write a column for the morning.
Angelica Balabanov and other delegates who left Brussels by another train were breakfasting in the station restaurant at Basle next morning when two comrades of the German Central Committee rushed by in obvious excitement. “There is no doubt about war now,” said one of the delegates who had just talked with the Germans outside. “They came here to put the money of the German party in safe-keeping.” In Berlin that day Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg assured the Prussian Ministry of State that there was “nothing particular to fear from the Social-Democratic party” and “there would be no talk of a general strike or of sabotage.”
In Paris on July 31, the day of Germany’s ultimatum to Russia and declaration of Kriegsgefahr, or preliminary mobilization, the public was tense with the knowledge that France stood on the edge of war. The Cabinet was in continuous session, the German Ambassador arrived and departed ominously from the Foreign Office, the life of the country was in suspense. Jaurès led a Socialist deputation to the office of the Premier, his former comrade, Viviani, and returned to organize party pressure in the Chamber. At 9 p.m. he left the office of I’Humanité, worn out from anxiety, to have dinner with a group of colleagues at the Café Croissant around the corner in the Rue Montmartre. As he sat eating and talking with his back to the open window, a young man who had been following him since the previous evening appeared in the street outside. Filled, as was later ascertained, with the demented zeal of the superpatriot, he pointed a pistol at the “pacifist” and “traitor” and fired twice. Jaurès slumped to one side and fell forward across the table. Five minutes later he was dead.
The news licked through Paris like a flame. Crowds gathered so quickly in the street outside the restaurant that it took the police fifteen minutes to open a passage for the ambulance. When the body was carried out a great silence fell. As the ambulance clanged away, escorted by policemen on bicycles, a sudden clamor arose, as if to deny the fact of death, “Jaurès! Jaurès! Vive Jaurès!” Elsewhere people were stupefied, numb with sorrow. Many wept in the streets. “My heart is breaking,” said Anatole France when he heard. Informed at its night session by a white-faced aide, the Cabinet was stunned and fearful. Visions rose of working-class riots and civil strife on the eve of war. The Premier issued a public appeal for unity and calm. Troops were alerted but next morning, in the national peril, there was only deep grief and deep quiet. At Carmaux the miners stopped work. “They have cut down a mighty oak,” said one. In Leipzig a Spanish Socialist student at the University wandered blindly through the streets for hours; “everything took on the color of blood.”
The news of Jaurès’ death appeared in the papers on Saturday, August 1. That afternoon Germany and France mobilized. Before evening, groups of reservists, carrying bundles and bouquets of flowers, were marching off to the railway stations as civilians waved and cheered. Enthusiasm and excitement were equal in every country. In Germany on August 3, Socialist deputies held a caucus to decide whether to vote for war credits. Only a few days ago Vorwärts had scorned the pretence of a defensive war. But now the Government talked of the Russian peril and French aggression. Bernstein, the reviser of Marx, assured them that the Government planned to build a “golden bridge” for the Socialists and as proof cited the fact that the Foreign Ministry had extended official condolences in the great loss they had suffered by the death of Jaurès. Of the total of 111 Socialist deputies, only 14, including Haase, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Franz Mehring, were opposed, but they obeyed the strict discipline of the majority. Next day the Social-Democrats voted unanimously with the rest of the Reichstag for war credits.
The Kaiser announced, “Henceforth I know no parties, I know only Germans.” In France M. Deschanel, President of the Chamber, delivering Jaurès’ eulogy before a standing assembly, said, “There are no more adversaries here, there are only Frenchmen.” No Socialist in either parliament disputed these statements of the primary loyalty. Léon Jouhaux, head of the CGT, declared, “In the name of the Syndicalist organizations, in the name of all the workers who have joined their regiments and those, including myself, who go tomorrow, I declare that we go to the field of battle willingly to repel the aggressor.” Before the month was out Vandervelde joined a wartime coalition Government in Belgium and Guesde a Government of “sacred union” in France. Guesde a minister! The tribal pull of patriotism could have had no stronger testimony.
In England where there was less sense of national danger than on the Continent, Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and a few Liberals spoke out against the decision to fight. Elsewhere there was no dissent, no strike, no protest, no hesitation to shoulder a rifle against fellow workers of another land. When the call came, the worker, whom Marx declared to have no
Jaurès was buried on August 4, the day the war became general. Overhead the bells he had invoked at Basle tolled for him and all the world, “I summon the living, I mourn the dead.”
Afterword
The four years that followed were, as Graham Wallas wrote, “four years of the most intense and heroic effort the human race has ever made.” When the effort was over, illusions and enthusiasms possible up to 1914 slowly sank beneath a sea of massive disillusionment. For the price it had paid, humanity’s major gain was a painful view of its own limitations.
The proud tower built up through the great age of European civilization was an edifice of grandeur and passion, of riches and beauty and dark cellars. Its inhabitants lived, as compared to a later time, with more self-reliance, more confidence, more hope; greater magnificence, extravagance and elegance; more careless ease, more gaiety, more pleasure in each other’s company and conversation, more injustice and hypocrisy, more misery and want, more sentiment including false sentiment, less sufferance of mediocrity, more dignity in work, more delight in nature, more zest. The Old World had much that has since been lost, whatever may have been gained. Looking back on it from 1915, Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian Socialist poet, dedicated his pages, “With emotion, to the man I used to be.”
References
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES
The Bibliography, arranged according to chapter, is confined (with one or two exceptions) to those sources cited in the Notes and is not intended to be either systematic or thorough. It is simply a list of what I used, often of what I stumbled on, weighted heavily toward primary personal accounts. It is noticeably light on secondary interpretative studies. When I needed their guidance I used those as nearly contemporary to their subjects as possible, not because they are better books than today’s but because they are closer in spirit to the society and the time of which I was writing. Modern scholarship, nevertheless, has given me a firm underpinning in many places, notably Halévy’s great and reliable encyclopedia of English affairs, Pinson’s and Kohn’s studies of Germany, Morison’s edition of Roosevelt’s letters and two superbly informative biographies of subjects who were at the heart and core of their age, Goldberg’s Jaurès and Mendelssohn’s Churchill. Each, while focusing on an individual, is a detailed history of his surrounding period, amply and carefully documented. In a narrower field Ginger’s Debs and in a still more restricted one Painter’s Proust achieve the same result.