The French Revolution Has Begun!¶
Core Argument¶
In this urgent polemic of June 1936, Trotsky argues that the wave of factory occupations then sweeping France is not a series of discrete craft strikes but the opening of a revolutionary crisis. He insists that revolutions do not announce themselves with fanfares; they begin precisely in such apparently chaotic, improvised mass movements. The core of his argument is that the strike wave has broken through the artificial boundaries of craft unionism, which the bureaucracy uses to isolate and control workers, and has instead become a class-wide mobilisation. The contagion spreading from factory to factory, reaching the most backward and oppressed layers, is the infallible mark of a tidal wave.
Trotsky’s key claim is that the movement’s very character—its spontaneity, its scope, its political impact—proves it is revolutionary. He contrasts this reality with the lies of the trade-union and parliamentary leaders. Léon Jouhaux and Léon Blum, he charges, are assuring the bourgeoisie that these are merely ‘craft strikes’ within the law, while the workers are seizing factories and transforming the entire political situation. He draws on the historical precedent of the French Revolution itself, quoting the apocryphal exchange between Louis XVI and his courtier: what the courtier called a ‘mutiny’ was in fact a revolution. Today, Blum and Jouhaux play the courtier’s role, telling the capitalists this is only a strike.
The polemic is directed against three targets simultaneously. First, the reformist leaders (Blum, Jouhaux, Cachin) who are trying to contain and extinguish the movement, adapting to it only to betray it. Second, the Stalinist leadership of the Communist Party (Thorez, Cachin), which has been caught unawares and is more concerned with its parliamentary blueprints than with leading the struggle. Third, the counter-revolutionary ‘200 families’ and their strategists, who are playing a calculated game of ‘losers win’, making tactical concessions now in order to crush the workers later with interest.
Trotsky’s theoretical framework is the Marxist understanding of revolution as a process of class self-mobilisation. The strike has created the first elements of a revolutionary leadership at factory level, but the mass still lacks a general staff. He argues that the coming second wave, born of disillusionment with the People’s Front, will be far more bitter and violent. The only adequate organisational form for this struggle is the soviet—workers’ deputies elected directly in the factories and industries. He concludes with a sharp challenge to those who have previously shouted ‘Soviets Everywhere!’: the time has come to pass from words to action.