Socialism developed late but rapidly in France. Jean Jaurès and the more orthodox Marxist, Jules Guesde, led the parliamentary party, which gained 103 deputies and 1 million votes in the elections of 1914. But they never shared power with the parties of the centre for two reasons: the Socialist Party adhered to the line laid down in the International Socialist Congress of 1904 by refusing to cooperate in government with bourgeois parties, and in any case it was excluded by all the anti-socialist groups, which could unite on this one common enmity. Besides the extreme left, the extreme right was also ranged against the Republic. From the debris of the Dreyfus case there had emerged a small group of writers led by Charles Maurras who formed the Comité de l’Action Française. Under the cloak of being a royalist movement, Maurras’s ideas were really typical of some aspects of later fascism; fanatically anti-democratic and anti-parliamentarian, he hated Protestants, Jews, Freemasons and naturalised French people. An aristocratic elite would rule the country and destroy the socialism of the masses. The Action Française movement could not really appeal to the masses with its openly elitist aims. Yet, it appealed to a great variety of supporters. Pius X saw in the movement an ally against the godless Republic; its hatreds attracted the support of the disgruntled, but it did not become a significant political movement before the war of 1914. The Action Française movement enjoyed notoriety through its daily paper of the same name, distributed by uniformed toughs, the so-called Camelots du roi; uninhibited by libel laws, the paper outdid the rest of the press in slander.
First Half of Twentieth Century and Europe Engulfed in Ambiguities
