The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (52 page)

If governments did little to advance the cause of peace in the prewar years, for the peace movement one other great hope remained – the Second International, which was an organisation founded in 1889 to bring together the world’s workers and their socialist parties. (The First International founded by Marx himself in 1864 had fallen to pieces a dozen years later over doctrinal differences.) The Second International was truly international with member parties across Europe, and from Argentina, India and the United States, and it could surely only grow as industrialisation spread. It was united by a shared enemy in capitalism and by an ideology strongly influenced by Karl Marx, whose old collaborator Friedrich Engels had been present at its first congress and whose surviving daughter and two sons-in-law remained much involved in its development. Most importantly the Second International had the numbers; by the eve of the Great War, some twenty-five different parties were affiliated with it including the British Labour Party with forty-two Members of Parliament and the French Socialists with 103 seats and a fifth of all the votes cast in France. The most important party of all was the German SPD with its million and more members, a quarter of German votes, and, after the election of 1912, its 110 seats which made it the biggest single party in the Reichstag. If the workers of the world could unite – and they had no nation, Marx had famously said, but only the interests of their class – they had within their power the means to make war impossible. Capitalism exploited workers but it also needed them to keep the factories going, the railways running, and the ports working – and to fill up the ranks in their armies when they were mobilised. ‘Your dry powder? Your excellency!’ a militant French socialist
apostrophised the Kaiser. ‘Can’t you see that four million German workers have pissed in it!’
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(One of the reasons that the German War Ministry resisted increasing the size of the army for so long was its fear that recruits from the working classes would not fight loyally.) And when socialism had finally triumphed, there could be no more war at all. As Karl Liebknecht, one of the leading figures on the left of the German Social Democratic Party, said contemptuously to Suttner: ‘What you are trying to achieve, peace on earth,
we
will attain – I mean social democracy, which in truth is a great international peace league.’
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Suttner did not much care for socialists. Workers in her view needed the patronage of their betters if they were to become a useful part of society. ‘They must first’, she said, ‘overcome their coarseness.’
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In general relations between the largely middle-class peace movement and the socialists were difficult in the decades before 1914. The upper and middle classes were scared off by the revolutionary rhetoric and the socialists tended to regard liberals as the kindly face of capitalism, helping to mask its true nature from the workers. When it came to issues of peace, the socialists had little patience for issues dear to antiwar liberals such as arbitration and disarmament; what was more important was to overthrow capitalism, which was seen as the cause of war. Engels in 1887 had painted a grim picture of a future great war in Europe which would bring famine, death, sickness, and the collapse of economies and societies and finally of states. ‘Crowns will roll by dozens in the gutter and no one will be found to pick them up.’ It was impossible to predict where it would all end. ‘Only
one
result is absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the establishment of the conditions for the final victory of the working class.’
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Yet did European socialists really want victory at that price? Would it not be better both to work against war and use peaceful means to acquire power? The spread of the franchise and the improvement in the conditions of the working classes, especially in western Europe, seemed to promise another route using the ballot box, the law, and co-operation with other political parties where their interests overlapped rather than that of bloody revolution. The attempt to revise the Marxist orthodoxy which held that change occurred through the violent clash between one class and another caused painful and divisive debates within the European socialist parties, notably the German Social Democratic Party, and
was to shake the Second International as well. After many debates in which the works of the great socialist fathers Marx and Engels were ransacked for support by both sides, the German socialists voted to uphold revolutionary orthodoxy. The irony was that they were in practice becoming reformist, even respectable. The trade unions, whose membership was growing, were perfectly prepared to work with business to get benefits for their members and, at the local level, socialist members of such bodies as town councils co-operated with middle-class parties. At the national level, however, the socialists kept to the old stance of hostility, voting against the government on all occasions, and their deputies ostentatiously remained seated when the Reichstag gave its cheer for the Kaiser.
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The German socialist leadership feared, with good reason, that there were many in the government who would have liked any excuse to revive Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws. Nor did the Kaiser help matters by publicly reminding his soldiers that they might have to shoot their own brothers. The election of 1907, which was fought in an upsurge of nationalist feeling in the aftermath of Germany’s brutal repression of an uprising in its colony of Southwest Africa, shook the socialists. They were accused by the nationalist right of being unpatriotic and lost forty of their eighty-three seats in the Reichstag. This in turn strengthened the moderate wing of the party: a new SPD deputy, Gustav Noske, promised in his maiden speech in the Reichstag that he would repel foreign aggression ‘as implacably as any member of the bourgeoisie’.
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The party leadership also did its best to keep its own left wing under control, resisting all suggestions for general strikes or revolutionary activities.
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If the German government had been wiser and picked up on the many signals that the SPD was no longer a serious threat to the established order, it might well have brought the socialists into mainstream politics. Instead the government continued to treat the socialists with suspicion, doubting their loyalty. As a result the socialist leadership had little reason to abandon their lip service to Marxist orthodoxy, whatever they and their members were doing in practice.

The key person responsible for this mix of ideological conformity and timidity was a small, slim man, August Bebel. He was the SPD’s chief organiser, its main parliamentary spokesman and the man largely responsible for maintaining the adherence to Marxism. His parents
were working class, his father a non-commissioned officer in the old Prussian army and his mother a domestic servant. By the time he was thirteen he was an orphan and his remaining relatives apprenticed him to a carpenter. In the 1860s he was converted to Marxism and devoted the rest of his life to politics. He opposed both Germany’s war of unification against Austria in 1866 and its war against France in 1870 and was consequently convicted of treason. Although he used his time in prison to read widely and to write a tract on women’s rights, he always remained more comfortable with organising – at which he was a master – than theorising. He helped to found the Social Democratic Party in 1875 and built it into a large and well-disciplined organisation.

Bebel was part of the German delegation at the founding of the Second International and over the years the SPD became its most important member thanks to its size and discipline. The German prescription for the constituent members of the International was simple and rigid: they must keep the class struggle in mind at all times and there must be no compromise, no deals with bourgeois parties, no taking part in bourgeois governments or supporting bourgeois causes. At the 1904 congress in Amsterdam, Bebel condemned the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès for supporting the French republic during the Dreyfus affair: ‘Monarchy or republic – both are class states, both are a form of state to maintain the rule of the bourgeoisie, both are designed to protect the capitalist order of society.’ The Germans and their allies, who included the more doctrinaire French socialists, pushed through a resolution condemning any attempts to move away from the class struggle ‘in such a way that instead of conquering political power by defeating our opponents, a policy of coming to terms with the existing order is followed’. Jaurès, who believed passionately in socialist solidarity, accepted the resolution. Where others might have despaired or been bitter he simply set himself to work to bring together the different factions in both the French and the international socialist movement.
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It was typical of Jaurès that the cause was more important than himself and that he did not bear grudges. In his own life his friendships crossed ideological lines and in politics he was always ready to reach out to his opponents. ‘His human sympathy was so universal’, said Romain Rolland, ‘that he could be neither nihilistic or fanatical. Every act of intolerance repelled him.’
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Among the socialist leaders before 1914
Jaurès stands out for his common sense, his grasp of political realities, his willingness to work for compromises and his optimism. With an unshakeable trust in reason and the essential goodness of human nature, he believed until the day he died that the purpose of politics was to build a better world. Although he had studied Marx and the rest of the socialist canon thoroughly, his socialism was never doctrinaire. Unlike Marx he did not see history unfolding itself in an inevitable pattern through class struggle; for Jaurès there was always room for human initiative and idealism, always the possibility of different and more peaceful paths to the future. The world he wanted was one based on justice and freedom for all, and one that brought happiness. A goal of socialism, he once said, should be to allow the common people ‘to savor all the joys of life which are now reserved for the privileged’.
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Solid and broad-shouldered with an open, friendly face and beautiful deep-set blue eyes, Jaurès barrelled through his life with enormous energy. He was both a consummate politician and a thoughtful intellectual who could have been a great classical scholar. He was a clever, even brilliant man, but this did not make him arrogant or unkind. He married a dull woman who did not share his interests but he remained loyal to her. Although he had lost his own faith in God as a young man, he raised no objections when she gave their children a religious upbringing. He loved good food and wine but would frequently forget to eat when he was engaged in his other enthusiasm of good conversation. He did not care about wealth or status. His apartment in Paris was comfortable but shabby and his desk was made of boards set on trestles. He himself dressed in clothes which, said Ramsay MacDonald, who saw him at a socialist congress in 1907, looked as though they had been thrown on with a pitchfork. With a battered straw hat on his head, Jaurès strolled along completely unselfconsciously, said MacDonald, ‘like a youth upon a new world, or a strolling player who had mastered fate and discovered how to fill the moments with happy unconcern’.
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Jaurès was born in 1859 in Tarn, in the southern part of France, to a middle-class family but experienced what it was like to be close to poverty as his father moved restlessly from one unsuccessful pursuit to another. His mother, who seems to have been the strong one in the family, managed to send him to a local boarding school where he won more prizes than any other student ever had. His talent and
accomplishments took him to Paris for further schooling and ultimately to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, then as now the hothouse in which much of the elite of France is formed. Even at a relatively young age, Jaurès showed a strong concern for social issues and it was not surprising that he chose to go into politics. First elected to parliament in 1885, he was defeated in 1889 and spent the next four years teaching in Toulouse and serving on the municipal council, practical experience which was to give him a lasting appreciation of the importance of bread-and-butter issues to voters. He served as a member of the French parliament for thirty-five years and was head of the French Socialist Party for ten of those. He was a great speaker. Mopping his brow from the effort, he spoke with deep conviction, eloquence and emotion whether in parliament, socialist congresses, or the towns and villages of France as he criss-crossed the country. He found time as well to write copiously and he edited the new socialist paper
L’Humanité
from 1904 and wrote over 2,000 articles for it during the next ten years.

After his defeat in 1904 at the congress of the Second International Jaurès became increasingly concerned about the deterioration in the international situation and devoted much of his energies to the cause of peace. He had long supported arbitration and disarmament but he now studied war itself. Being Jaurès, he undertook a serious study, reading military theory and the history of war and working with a young French army captain, Henry Gérard. One night as the two men sat in a café in Paris, Jaurès described what a future war would be like: ‘the cannon-fire and the bombs; entire nations decimated; millions of soldiers strewn in mud and blood; millions of corpses …’ During a battle on the Western Front some years later, a friend asked Gérard why he was staring into space. ‘I feel as though all this is familiar to me,’ Gérard replied. ‘Jaurès prophesied this hell, this total annihilation.’
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Within France, Jaurès proposed transforming the French military from a professional force focussing on the offensive into a citizens’ militia such as the Swiss had where soldiers did six months of service and then came back for short spells of training. This new army would be used only to defend the country. That, he argued, was how the French Revolution had defeated the armies sent against it by its enemies – by arming the nation. Not surprisingly, his ideas were rejected by the political and military establishment although in retrospect his stress on the defensive made a lot of sense.
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