Le mouvement ouvrier pendant la premiere guerre mondiale

Alfred Rosmer, Le mouvement ouvrier pendant la premiere guerre mondiale. Editions d’Avron, 1993 (two volumes)

Alfred Rosmer was a leading figure on the left of the revolutionary syndicalist movement in France before World War 1.

At the start of the war, the majority leadership of that revolutionary syndicalist movement collapsed into support for the French imperialist government’s war effort as dramatically as the German Social Democracy famously collapsed. In fact, perhaps even more dramatically, since anti-militarist agitation had been one of the key themes of syndicalist militancy. The CGT (France’s trade-union confederation, then under revolutionary syndicalist leadership), operating in relatively democratic France, had been much more flamboyant in its anti-militarism and its revolutionism than the cautious German Social Democrats, who operated in a semi-dictatorship.

In fact, one of the CGT leadership’s main excuses for their rallying to the “union sacree” (sacred union) with the French bourgeoisie was their claim that they had pressed the German unions for joint action against the war, and found them unwilling. (Rosmer shows in detail how hollow that excuse was).
The CGT, like the majority of the French Socialist Party, then justified France’s war as one against “imperialism and militarism”, identifying “imperialism” and “militarism” as being uniquely or primarily German (in much the same way as some leftists today identify “imperialism” as being uniquely or primarily American).

Rosmer was one of the minority of revolutionary syndicalists who remained true to their principles. Over the war years, bit by bit, they regrouped and organised the internationalists – from the old syndicalist movement, and also from the old Socialist Party – and prepared the way for the creation of the French Communist Party after the war.

Rosmer also worked closely with Trotsky, who spent a part of the war in Paris, working on the Russian-language internationalist paper Nashe Slovo.

Rosmer was expelled from the Communist Party in 1924, as part of a purge of those in France who sympathised with Trotsky and the Left Opposition in Russia. In 1929-30 he worked with Trotsky (who was now in exile) on bringing together as much as possible of the diverse Oppositionist groups in France into a coherent Trotskyist organisation, the Communist League.

In his 40s by then, and a quiet, cultured man by temperament – the pre-1914 revolutionary syndicalists, despite their strident “workerism”, were also a notably literary, studious lot – Rosmer found other Communist League leaders such as Raymond Molinier too uncouth to work with. He stepped aside.

In the 1930s, he re-knit his friendship with Trotsky. The founding conference of the Fourth International was held in Rosmer’s home, and he worked with the Trotskyists to try to expose the Moscow Trials.

He published volume 1 of Le mouvement ouvrier pendant la premiere guerre mondiale (The workers’ movement during the first world war) in 1936. Trotsky received it with high praise. Rosmer had almost finished volume 2 in 1939; then the German army invaded France and burned all his drafts and notes.

In the 1950s, Rosmer returned to the task, finding to his surprise that sufficient sources still remained for him to construct an adequate history. He published volume 2 in 1959, just five years before he died, in 1964.

Rosmer’s book achieves its effect by the quiet, dispassionate, meticulous accumulation of facts and documents, with only the most minimal commentary, and very little reference to his own personal role in events.

He shows how dramatic the CGT’s political collapse at the start of war was, and helps us understand how it happened. With the CGT, it was not so much that a fat, cautious bureaucracy had developed which could not cope with the idea of sharp conflict with the government. The pro-war swing of the German trade union leaders – which probably gave the decisive push turning the majority of the German Social Democratic leadership pro-war – was in large part of that character. The CGT was a bit different.

Before 1914, the CGT had no large army of officials. You can see a photo of its headquarters, the Maison des Federations, on page 194 of Alain Rustenholz’s Paris Ouvrier (Parigramme, 2003): it is a small, shabby building, and yet the acquiring of it (with money from a rich sympathiser: the CGT itself was nowhere near having the funds) had caused a major row in the organisation. The leading figures lived mostly as journalists on the labour movement’s various newspapers and magazines.

Rosmer comments on the Federation of Teachers (which, along with the Federation of Metals, had an anti-war stance from the start, and, unlike the Metals, managed to keep its congresses and journals going throughout the war, without a break) that “then, the workers’ movement managed to do a lot with very little money”. The comment would hold to some extent for the CGT as a whole.

But, being syndicalist, the CGT lacked clear politics. It talked about the idea of a general strike to stop war, but when the war came and it was obviously unable to organise a general strike, did not know what to do. From that intellectual collapse came its political collapse.

In chapter 14 of volume 2, Rosmer discusses in some detail Lenin’s attitude to the war. The conventional account, shaped by Zinoviev’s selection of articles to reprint in the 1920s when he (Zinoviev) wanted to boost his stature as the “intransigent” close comrade of Lenin in the war years, is of a Lenin insistent on his formula of “revolutionary defeatism”, and utterly scornful of any anti-war socialist who rejected the formula.

Rosmer shows, quietly but meticulously, that it isn’t true. The building-up of an internationalist current in France required constant collaboration and debate with the semi-internationalists, and Lenin did not object. Moreover, there is good reason to suppose that those, like <a href=”http://www.workersliberty.org/node/4507″>Trotsky and Luxemburg, who objected to the “defeatist” formula at the time</a>, were right, and that Lenin redefined his “defeatism” to make it almost meaningless in the later years of the war.

That debate has been covered in detail in a <a href=”http://www.workersliberty.org/node/4507″>book by Hal Draper</a>, and was covered earlier by articles by Draper and by Brian Pearce. Rosmer’s chapter suggests to me that Rosmer was the original source for such writers as Draper and Pearce.