Contenu du sommaire : Le syndicalisme révolutionnaire

The Charter of Amiens is hundred years old. Traditionally considered as a manifesto of political neutrality, it affirms on the contrary, the vocation of syndicalism as a rival to the parties and as a means of describing for itself the outlines of the future society. Directed against the Guesdist tendency within socialism it was voted for jointly by the revolutionaries and the reformists. Despite appearances, it indicated a change in direction on the part of the leadership towards a more reformist strategy. More profoundly, it was the expression of the schizophrenic position of the working class: political inclusion within the republican pact combined with social exclusion. The CGT transformed this exclusion into deliberate secession.

The “charter of Amiens” is the foundation myth of French syndicalism. But does the sense that it has since come to have in the collective memory conform to the intentions of the authors for whom in October 1906 it was part of an “agenda” for a conference that was full of developments? This study seeks to explore the fascinating mutation of this agenda item into a “Charter” that was almost constitutive of the movement itself, specifically the progressive slippage of a document which sought perhaps above all to be a sketch of a society relevant to the syndicalist avant-garde into a document that did exclude the political parties. That this reduction should be the outcome of the battle against the communist takeover of the CGT should not be surprising. That it should be a convenient scapegoat for those who lamented the depressing state of the French left should likewise not surprise. But that the “Charter” today should receive unanimous interpretation from the distant inheritors of Bolshevism as well as from those who have succeeded in bringing about the “deconfessionalisation” of Christian syndicalism is one of the paradoxes of which the social history of ideas is more familiar than one might think.

Revolutionary syndicalism was a “new revolutionary idea” which, as theory, germinated amongst authors such as Lagardelle, Berth, Guieysse and in the reviews le Mouvement socialiste and Pages Libres. It was defined as a “revolutionary revisionism” based upon working class autonomy expressed through the syndicat. Sorel followed in the steps of this ‘new school' soon after. In contrast to the latter, Lagardelle and Berth subsequently moved towards a corporatism mixed with productivism.

Through his work Maxime Leroy outlined both a description and a theory of French syndicalism. Around 1900, this unusual legal expert became impassioned about the different forms of working class mobilisation. If La coutume ouvrière (1913) remains without doubt his most remarkable book, after the First World War he continued to reflect upon “the new techniques of syndicalism”. He thus affirmed a vision of politics that was sought to be first and foremost syndicalist in character.

Born from within the socialist party, Italian revolutionary syndicalism, with at its head various rootless intellectuals and activists, advanced an argument for working class autonomy against governmental liberalism and parliamentary socialism: this they attempted to do by leaving the party in 1907, in separating themselves from its intellectuals and through the creation of their own trade union base. Divided in their response to the First World War, after the war one strand formed a syndicalism receptive to the idea of the homeland, whilst another remained faithful to unconditional class struggle. Its bastions were situated in the countryside (Emilia, Puglia) rather than the industrial centres of the north.

In 1906 when the CGT endorsed the Charter of Amiens, it was the only self-proclaimed revolutionary syndicalist organization in Europe. By 1912 trade union or propaganda organizations in a dozen European countries, which drew inspiration from France, espoused the creed. They saw themselves not as uncritically importing a distinctive French model, but rather as members of an international family within which the French were the elder brothers. Despite the inspiration they drew from their Gallic brethren, national syndicalist organizations outside France appeared to have more in common with one another than any of them did with the CGT. Unlike the CGT, they were all minority movements within which reformist voices were relatively muted. Unlike the CGT, they were beleaguered by larger union opponents, but remained committed to maintaining their own revolutionary unions. Compounding these differences, they were all barred from the social-democratically dominated International Secretariat of National Trade Union Centres, to which the CGT belonged and to which its commitment grew just as its fellow revolutionary syndicalists increasingly pondered establishing their own international revolutionary alternative. Up to the outbreak of war in 1914, the CGT and the remaining national syndicalist organizations in Europe saw themselves as an international family, but were not able to act as one.

In this article, previously unpublished in French and which first appeared at the beginning of 1910 in the Italian review il Divenire sociale, Sorel vigorously attacked revolutionary intellectuals as the adversaries of working class autonomy. This was in the context of a polemic between Gustave Hervé, editor of la Guerre sociale and Georges Yvetot, editor of la Voix du peuple, the official organ of the CGT. Returning to the criticisms that his stance on the Ferrer affair had evoked, Sorel reaffirmed his hostility to any subordination of syndicalism to democratic objectives.

An intersected history of “experimental systems” in France and Germany, this article shows how the research programme of “physiological psychology” led by Wilhelm Wundt in the laboratory that he established in Leipzig in 1879 was received in France. A physiological psychology laboratory was created at the Sorbonne in 1889, intended to import German methods and instruments relevant to the measurement of speeds of reaction. The debate in France about the value of these “psychometric” experiments led Alfred Binet to abandon the use of the preferred instrument of Leipzig, the Hipp chronoscope, and to transform the sense of Wundt's experiments by making a systematic appeal to introspection. If Wundt ignored these experiments and criticised French experimental pathological and hypnotic psychology, his dissident pupils from the Wurzburg school referred to Binet. Thus, to the “transfer” which took place between Leipzig and Paris there occurred in a different way a “counter-transfer” between Paris and Wurzburg.