A Letter to Our French Comrades¶
Core Argument¶
In this open letter of September 1919, Leon Trotsky addresses leading figures of the nascent French communist movement—Loriot, Rosmer, Monatte, and Péricat—as comrades bound by a common revolutionary banner. The core argument is that the Russian Soviet Republic, despite severe military pressure, is on the verge of decisive victory over the White counter-revolution, and that the French working class must now break decisively with all shades of reformism to fulfil its historic role in the world revolution.
Trotsky begins by reporting the military situation. The Red Army has destroyed Kolchak’s forces, advancing over a thousand kilometres from March to September and reclaiming the Urals with its industry and proletariat. This has freed reserves to throw against Denikin on the Southern Front, where an offensive has already pushed the enemy back a hundred kilometres. The Western Front, where Polish forces are making temporary gains, is described as of tertiary importance; once Denikin is settled, heavy reserves will be poured westward. Trotsky dismisses Churchill’s boast of fourteen states mobilised against Russia as “fourteen geographical titles and not fourteen armies,” arguing that neither Clemenceau nor Lloyd George can form effective detachments. The letter thus serves as a bulletin of revolutionary optimism, insisting that the Soviet republic is stronger than ever.
The polemical thrust is directed against the French socialist and trade-union leadership. Trotsky recalls how, during the war, the social-patriots Renaudel and Jouhaux peddled the illusion that an Allied victory would mean the triumph of democracy. Jean Longuet’s centrist group is denounced for trying to correct world history “by carrying out Renaudel’s policy with the addition of footnotes, reservations and ambiguities.” Trotsky argues that Longuet’s faction is actually more dangerous than open reactionaries, because it uses the “ritual and liturgy” of socialism and internationalism to cover its defence of the capitalist order. Merrheim’s defection is dismissed as unsurprising: he was never marching with the revolutionaries but “toddling behind.” The letter insists that in the era of social revolution, “it is better to have open enemies than dubious friends.”
The theoretical context is the Leninist rejection of bourgeois democracy as a fraud in the epoch of imperialist war and proletarian revolution. Trotsky contrasts the “conventional fake of democratic parliamentarism” with the Soviets, which he calls “a genuine democracy of the working class.” He claims that Soviet Russia has involved millions of workers and peasants in building a new life, and that Red Army commissars are simultaneously carriers of communist culture and builders of the new society in liberated areas. The economic crisis in food supply is blamed entirely on the war unleashed by British and French capital; once the enemies are finished off, all forces will be directed to economic construction.
The letter closes with a confident prediction: the deeper the triumph of militarism and social-treachery in bourgeois France, the more severe and decisive the coming proletarian uprising. Trotsky assures his French comrades that the cause of communism is in “honourable and firm hands” and ends with the cry: “Long live the world social revolution!”