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Despite the globalization limned in the Communist Manifesto, nationhood has survived modernity. The century following Marx’s death may have witnessed Marxism’s transient ascendancy as socialism’s master discourse, but it also experienced the far more spectacular triumph of nationalism. Whether in Paris during the Dreyfus affair, in Vienna during August 1914, in Berlin during the Nazi ascendancy, or in Moscow during the “Great Patriotic War,” the question confronting Marxists became “who [is] the ‘we’ in the dominant political discourse, and who [is] the ‘other’ which defined that ‘we’”1 — “we workers” against capitalism, or the “we of our nation” against other nations? In this contest, national identity repeatedly “trumped”2 class consciousness . Workers fought workers, if separated by nationality; employees and employers united, if allied by nationalism. And, even before our recent “century of total war,” Marx and Engels had sometimes despaired at nationalism ’s class-divisive and class-collaborationist force, not least as manifest in France.3 Guesdists certainly had to contend with nationalism’s enduring vitality. And they, too, like Marx and Engels, lapsed into consequent confusion, and occasionally despaired. After all, floods of nationalist enthusiasm periodically swept away the rivulets of Marxist militancy that crept across the contours of the French political culture—Boulangism inundating proletarian constituencies during the 1880s, Henri Rochefort’s “national-socialist” Intransigeant far outselling Le Socialiste, and Pierre Biétry’s ultranationalist “Jaunes” overnight erecting a labor organization far grander than the Guesdists’ withered Fédération Nationale des Syndicats. Fin de siècle nationalists summoned workers to their cause, and French proletarians responded. “Our Brethren of Alsace-Lorraine”: The Parti Ouvrier and “Revanche” Lorraine, that mutilated member of the French body politic, illustrated this Guesdist agony in microcosm, and in extremity. Even the incendiary magic of 29 C H A P T E R 2 “Dupes of Patriotism”: Nationalism as Bourgeois Hegemony Guesde’s oratory fizzled when discharged in the mining villages and textile towns of the northeast, with their “proletariat that’s so numerous, so compact, so oppressed, yet so little imbued with the principles of modern scientific socialism.”4 Nationalist heckling repeatedly barred Guesdists from even being heard by the metalworkers of the Meurthe-et-Moselle, the textile operatives of the Vosges, or the miners of the Longwy Basin.5 It was only in 1899, for instance, that French Marxists finally established a POF branch in Lorraine’s capital, Nancy, expecting that this hard-won bridgehead would soon mobilize workers “until now diverted by nationalist and anti-Semitic tricksters.”6 Not so. Maurice Barrès’ “national socialists” easily prevailed against newly introduced Guesdism among Nancy’s metallurgists, mill workers, and glassblowers . From first to last, Lorraine’s proletarians mobilized against Germans, Jews, and immigrants, but not against capitalists.7 Why this Marxist fiasco in one of France’s most proletarian regions? Quite simply, it happened because Guesdists repudiated revanche—that dream of “revenge” for the annexations of 1871 that so empowered the belle epoque’s virulent nationalism, and that so saturated Lorraine’s heated political atmosphere.8 The Guesdists’ own understanding of “1871” produced a very different agenda, and one with little resonance in the borderland. “The only revenge that matters,” claimed the Parti Ouvrier, was “revenge for the Commune , for the thousands of workers massacred by the bourgeoisie.”9 Even more tellingly, the Parti Ouvrier detested the Alsatian “Protestaires” who doggedly defied their province’s annexation to the Reich.10 The Protestaires, after all, had voted unanimously for Bismarck’s antisocialist laws. From the Parti Ouvrier’s jaundiced perspective, those most infuriated by Germany’s annexations of 1871—Déroulède’s Ligue des Patriotes, Barrès’ national socialists , the pro-French recalcitrants within the lost provinces—were all “bourgeois nationalists,” antisocialist reactionaries, counterrevolutionaries. They, not imperial Germany, threatened aggression against both French and German socialists. All the same, Guesdists realized full well that their enemies’ cacophonous calls for “revenge” could drown out the “social question,” so that its answer would be deferred to the distant future when France was once again whole. “If,” the Parti Ouvrier worried, in order to organize themselves into a class party and pursue their liberation . . . which is that of all humanity, the proletariats of different countries have to await the return to the national cradle of all the lambs violently detached from the national flock, then the capitalist Minotaur will have many hundreds of years before him during which to levy his tribute of misery , tears, and blood from labor. That...

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