Suchergebnisse

On a previous occasion, I have argued that during the two decades preceding the First World War, the French Radical Party, under electoral pressure from the separate and then united Socialist parties of Jaurès and Guesde, began to look for a doctrine around which they could rally to defend their recently acquired hold on power against both the individualists to their right and the collectivists on their left. It was the six-month duration of Léon Bourgeois' purely Radical government of 1895–6 and hisLettres sur le Mouvement Socialof 1895, republished in 1896 as a book and entitledSolidarité, that marked the beginning of thebelle époqueof Radical-socialism and of the Third Republic. It was argued that during the next two decades, Bourgeois' doctrine of Solidarism became for platform, and to a lesser extent, practical political purposes, the official social philosophy of the régime, probably reaching its apotheosis at the time of the Paris World Exhibition of 1900. This pre-eminent position in the doctrinal firmament of France was not achieved without an intensive campaign through a variety of mainly educational pressure groups – to be anticipated in a lay "République des professeurs." It is the principal channels and people through which this indoctrination was propagated that will be our concern in the pages that follow. However, the activities of the "Universités Populaires", which were closely allied to the movements discussed here, have been passed over because they have formed the subject-matter of a separate study.

At the turn of the century, the authoritative political theorist Henri Michel had this to say of the characteristic approach in France to all problems, and in particular to political problems. "We are infatuated withisms, it is part of the national temperament. It is significant that a large number of our fellow-citizens like them so much, that every time they are presented with a new one, they greedily seize upon it, without asking themselves whether it can be accomodated alongside the one with which they were previously enamoured."; The accuracy of this observation has not substantially diminished over the last half-century, the parties left of centre being particularly addicted to doctrinaire formulations of their political philosophies and programmes and to the consequent verbal fetishism and pompous dogmatism. The rise of Socialism in the late nineteenth century overshadowed the contemporary crystallisation of Radical attitudes and aims into the doctrine of Solidarism. Solidarism, however, played a major part in galvanising and rallying the protagonists of state intervention and voluntary association; uniting them in the task of building, by a series of piecemeal reforms inspired by a simple principle and a multiplicity of imperative needs what has come to be known as the "Welfare State". Despite the doctrinal fragility of Solidarism, its practical programme was inspired by and was appropriate to the social and political needs of a society in transition from individualist and non-interventionist liberalism to associationist and statist socialism, just as liberal economism had secured the transition from corporativism and mercantilism to private enterprise, laisser faire and laisser passer. To-day it is Gaullism that dominates the political scene, but the tenacious Radical tradition of the Third and Fourth Republics may yet reassert itself, transforming in retrospect the tidal wave of to-day into a ripple, as it has so frequently done during the last eighty years of France's tormented history.

The survival of a concept is generally only secured at the price of an intellectual odyssey in the course of which it is transformed out of all recognition. The nineteenth century fortunes of the idea of solidarity exemplify this axiom only too strictly. It became the victim of a multiplicity of ingenious puns and metaphors as well as outright malicious distortions that rendered a simple, technical word, drawn from the sphere of jurisprudence, at once emotive and obscure, influential and diffuse. As the eminent and caustic critic of the twentieth century, Julien Benda, formulated this vital problem of the fate of concepts, "pour l'historien des idées des hommes, la réalité ce n'est point ce qu'ont été les idées dans l'esprit de ceux qui les ont inventées, mais ce qu'elles ont été dans l'esprit de ceux qui les ont trahies… car il est clair qu'une doctrine se propage d'autant plus largement qu'elle est apte à satisfaire un plus grand nombre de sentiments divers." This pessimistic view has been all too frequently verified in human history.