Jules Guesde, ou: Le Marxisme orthodoxe (review)

"There is thus no possible conciliation between these two worlds [bourgeois and proletarian] and the parties that represent them. One must choose! One must take one's place in the ranks of one or the other army in the field." I could easily pass off this statement as coming from Lenin or Stalin. In reality it was written in 1901 by Jules Guesde, founder and leader of one of the first Marxist parties in Europe, the Parti Ouvrier (Worker Party) of France. Long relegated to a paragraph or two in the scholarly literature, Guesde and the Parti Ouvrier have now been taken up not only by a challenging book-length essay by Marc Angenot but also in excellent studies in English by Robert Stuart and Leslie Derfler. ¹

Why should a journal dedicated to Russian history give space to Jules Guesde? In the first place, Guesde is a figure in the history of Russian Social Democracy. A look at WorldCat will show the many pamphlets by "Ged" (the Russian transliteration is also a guide to correct pronunciation) that were translated into Russian. Guesde himself—tireless orator, intransigent defender of orthodoxy—was something of a role model for many Russian Social Democrats. In turn, the Parti Ouvrier paid attention to Russia, for example, conducting a major campaign in 1903 against the Franco-Russian alliance because of the Kishenev pogroms. ²

Besides these direct connections, these new studies of Guesde and the French Marxists are full of invaluable background material necessary for grasping the basic outlook of Russian socialists. But assimilating this background is not just a matter of adding information to what we already know about the Russians. The deeper challenge is to our very assumption that we have an accurate grasp of the outlook even of the Russian socialists.

From Socialist Realism to Where's Waldo

Marc Angenot, a professor in French literature and language at McGill University, comes to the subject less as a political historian than as an analyst of discourse. I use the word "discourse" with some trepidation, first because many will assume that a francophone writing about discourse will be a jargon-ridden horror. On the contrary, I find Angenot a joy to read, not only because of my fascination with the topic but because of his pellucid and engaging style. Furthermore, "discourse" is not used here to make overblown claims about what people can or cannot think but rather as a pointer to an empirical body of material: a given repertoire of arguments, authoritative assumptions, metaphors, genres, that together constitute a specific historical reality that evolves over time.

To locate and describe the discourse of the French Marxists, we have to look at a wide range of material—not just treatises by top leaders, but newspaper articles, speeches, pamphlets, and, when possible, non-verbal material such as the iconography of street demonstrations. Furthermore, the particular discourse of the French Marxists cannot be understood except as part of a much wider context. The essay under review is only one of a long series of books and essays by Angenot treating an imaginative variety of topics connected to radical discourse, mostly from 19th-century francophonie(France and Belgium). Thus Angenot places the Guesdists in the political context of the whole spectrum of the French left in the belle époque(late 19th century), in the polemical context of standard attacks on socialism, and in the historical context of the evolution of the various world-historical narratives put forward by socialists since the 1820s and 1830s. ³

Robert Stuart has much the same approach, although more intensively focused on the Guesdists. He states well some of the methodological maxims needed to analyze this sort of material (and rarely followed by historians of Russian Social Democracy). A particular polemic "must be situated in its discursive domain—with its place established in relation to the Guesdist's massive textual legacy and, more challengingly, in dialogical relation...