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In one of its incarnations, the POF validated the accusation that Marxists are alien to nationhood, strangers to patriotism, mere “rootless cosmopolitans.”1 Certainly Parti Ouvrier texts offer few hints of that “enracinement”2 in landscape , kinship, and heritage so vital to national identity. The rhetoric of “blood and belonging” played virtually no role in the Guesdists’ discursive self-construction , in sharp contrast to the instinctive nationalism characteristic of their ideological interlocutors—all of whom, from socialist-nationalist competitors like Jaurès, through National Liberal opponents like Ferry, to national-socialist enemies like Barrès, rejoiced in their national “roots.” In the Parti Ouvrier’s most cosmopolitan persona, the movement derided the patrie as a false god invoked by charlatans like Jaurès, Ferry, and Barrès to mislead the masses. Rather than mindlessly worshipping that fake “homeland,” Guesdist obeyed The Communist Manifesto’s mandate, often underscored in Parti Ouvrier discourse , that “Communists . . . point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.”3 This injunction could be interpreted as repudiating nationhood, both as authentic historical experience and as valid political project, and was so interpreted when the Parti Ouvrier self-consciously embodied Marxism’s “universal, placeless, and especially nation-less”4 proletariat. Lafargue exemplified this ultracosmopolitanism when he quoted Renan’s sour observation that “where socialism appears, there patriotism vanishes”—an observation that the Guesdist leader gleefully accepted, not as the intended criticism, but as unintended praise.5 This anational, even antinational, sensibility recurred sporadically throughout the POF’s history, and was deeply grounded in the Guesdists’ passions and preoccupations. Prosopographically, their openness to the world mirrored that of their German-Jewish-English master.6 Long years of exile typified the life histories of the POF’s leadership—the catastrophic Communard experience having ensured that, like Marx himself, Guesde, Lafargue and many of their lieutenants had joined European socialism’s multitude of “uprooted.” Guesde himself retained strong Italian connections from his exile years, during which Milan had witnessed his abandonment of youthful anarchism for protoMarxist socialism, and his marriage to a beautiful and polyglot Milanese.7 For 9 C H A P T E R 1 “For Us the World!”: The Guesdists against the Nation his part, Lafargue exemplified nineteenth-century “multiculturalism” and “hybridity.” Of Cuban extraction, flaunting Negro, Jewish, and American Indian blood, living an exile’s life abroad in Spain and England, and married to a London-raised Jew (née Laura Marx), the Guesdist leader was often vilified as a foreigner . . . and rejoiced in the characterization.8 On one occasion, having been viciously attacked as alien, Lafargue, described in Le Socialiste’s account (almost certainly in his own words) as “priding himself on being international ,” simply shrugged with indifference.9 French, Cuban, Spanish, Carib, Jewish, Negro—none of these ethnic identities mattered. As far as he himself was concerned, Paul Lafargue was simply a socialist and, as such, a citizen of the world. Other militants proudly emphasized their own years of exile, asserting that the salutary experience had immunized them against nationalist contamination .10 Yet other Guesdists—like the multilingual Charles Bonnier, who had taught French in Oxford—even if spared Communard banishment, exploited their ramified international networks to enfold themselves in a supposedly seamless fabric of cosmopolitan communion. Nor were these instances of self-asserted cosmopolitanism individual eccentricities. The Parti Ouvrier as a whole was, in some ways, as cosmopolitan as its cadres. Its membership manifested the Party’s relaxed openness to ethnic “others”—most obviously in the Nord, the heartland of Guesdism, where Belgians played a starring role first in founding and then in sustaining the POF.11 Guesde’s enemies, indeed, indicted the deputy from Roubaix as representing only the city’s teeming naturalized immigrants!12 At the other end of the country , the Parti Ouvrier strove to recruit the Midi’s many Italian workers, if necessary by appealing to them in their own language. Commenting on the formation of a “section italienne du POF” in the Savoy, Le Socialiste happily concluded that this commingling of French and Italians conclusively demonstrated that “for socialism and for the Parti Ouvrier Français, there are no frontiers.”13 L’Egalité and Le Socialiste filled their columns with articles culled from the world’s Marxist press—not least with articles against nationalism—even, or even particularly, when drawn from German socialist journals. Clara Zetkin, for one, might well have been on Le Socialiste’s staff, given her prominence...

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