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From Syndicalism to Trotskyism – Writings of Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer. REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY, VOLUME 7, ISSUE 4, WINTER 2000–2001

Reviewed by VINCENT PRÉSUMEY

The journal Revolutionary History, Volume 7, Issue 4, has offered Anglophone readers an excellent selection of texts by Alfred Rosmer (1877–1964), a French international revolutionary, best-known outside France for his memoir, Moscou sous Lénine [Lenin’s Moscow]. Rosmer was also the author of a very fine, albeit unfinished, history of the French workers’ movement during the First World War,1 and of a complementary text to Leon Trotsky’s autobiography My Life, entitled The Planet Without a Visa. Rosmer was not a ‘theoretician’, and his temperament was unobtrusive and modest. Indifferent to honours or prestige, he was a foremost political thinker with a profound knowledge of the workers’ movement and the working class which he came from. He left several articles which are a precious set of contributions to the history and analysis of twentieth- century revolutionary struggles. Along with his work, one should note the presence at his side of Marguerite Rosmer, his partner and equal. As well as enabling us to find out about Rosmer, this issue of Revolutionary History will be valuable to every reader looking for some of the finest material produced by the French workers’ movement over the last hundred years. Additionally, it constitutes an excellent entry-point into the international history of the socialist revolution, of which Rosmer was, throughout his life, an active participant and, during the early 1920s, a leading figure in Moscow. In France itself, Rosmer is little known today, although it would be a mistake to think that this is because he was a marginal revolutionary. On the contrary, Rosmer was a product of one of the most deeply-rooted traditions of the French working class: the revolutionary syndicalism of the years before 1914. It was in this tradition that much of the activity of the most combative workers and trade-union delegates for decades can be located. Rosmer, like his friend Pierre Monatte (it was customary to refer to them as a pair, always as ‘Monatte and Rosmer’) learned about class action particularly during the CGT’s campaign to win the eight-hour working day on the general strike of 1 May 1906. Although it did not achieve this goal (finally conquered in 1919), the strike left a durable mark on social relations. The strikes of 1920, 1936,

1 Rosmer 1993.

Historical Materialism, volume 14:4 (273–277) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006 Also available online – www.brill.nl HIMA 14,4_f16_272-277I 11/9/06 3:45 PM Page 274

274 • Vincent Présumey

1947, 1953, 1968, 1995, 2003 and 2006 all owe some of their substance to the experiences of 1906. The ruling class has always detested this. One of its leading essayists, Alain Minc, in the newspaper Le Figaro, after December 1995, called it the ‘taste for throwing fits’. It is this circumstance that better accounts for Rosmer’s current anonymity. A fairly complete biography about Alfred Rosmer written by Christian Gras was published over thirty years ago.2 It should be read together with two other biographical works about him: one of them by the ‘spiritual father’ of revolutionary syndicalism, Fernand Pelloutier, which appeared around the same time as Gras’s,3 and the other, published recently, of Pierre Monatte by Colette Chambelland, of which an account will be found in the same issue of Revolutionary History.4 These three works are indispensable for any serious study of the French workers’ movement, and, of the three, it is the last (also the shortest) which best recaptures the warmth and quality of an activist world we have lost, that of the ‘passionate lovers of self-cultivation’ to use Pelloutier’s expression. Rosmer was of that world. His real name was Griot. He had a poor childhood in the USA and in France. His pseudonym was taken from an Ibsen character. His autodidactic temperament and his desire to become his own man are characteristic of his whole generation’s mentality, a very active generation heavily influenced by anarchism and devoted to the appropriation by workers of culture, both classical and modern. Rosmer was a connoisseur of the art of the 1900s, of the fauvism and of Pissarro. This dimension of his personality was not unique to him and constitutes a historically important trait. In the articles published by Revolutionary History it is only mentioned in the obituary by Roger Hagnauer at the start of the collection. A second key theme is, as I have already mentioned, the famous ‘revolutionary syndicalism’, a tradition in which the theories of Georges Sorel actually occupied only a very secondary place. For Rosmer, it was very clear: the trade unionism of the CGT, and the presence within it of an important group of activists seeking to ‘inform’, enlighten, educate, and instruct the working class, around the magazine La Vie Ouvrière5 founded by Pierre Monatte, were the means to help the proletariat to expropriate capital and destroy the state, in other words, the means to revolution. In moving from that brand of syndicalism to Bolshevism, Rosmer personally felt no discontinuity, though in this, it must be said, he was quite unusual. For Rosmer, the great discontinuity in his life, in history, in his thought, was August 1914. In his account of that period,6 he emphasises the fact that not only the parties of the Second International, but also almost all the revolutionary syndicalists and the anarchists, had rallied to the War and into a ‘holy alliance’ with the bourgeoisie. With

2 Gras 1971. 3 Julliard 1971. 4 Chambellard 1999. 5 This is still the subtitle of the CGT’s publication. 6 Cf. Footnote 1.