Jean Longuet

Wellred

Core Argument

In his December 1919 article, Trotsky dissects a speech by French Socialist Deputy Jean Longuet, using it to condemn the degeneration of French socialism and parliamentary politics. Longuet’s address, ‘Against Imperialist Peace – For Revolutionary Russia!’, is characterised by constant attempts to find common ground with imperialist opponents. He invokes Renan, Lenin, and Wilson together, and couples the martyred Liebknecht with the traitor Vandervelde, whom he calls “our friend”. Longuet uses Liebknecht and Luxemburg’s corpses to fend off attacks while immediately praising Vandervelde. He refuses to answer whether Belgian Socialists voted for the Versailles Treaty. On the Saar, he complains the coal is poor quality and suggests taking better coal from the Ruhr. On Tunisia, he describes 45,000 colonial casualties as an “honourable sacrifice” that merits a grant of freedom as a tip. On Russia, he praises Clémenceau for denouncing Brest-Litovsk, endorses the Bullitt mission, and acknowledges the Soviet regime has mass support. Trotsky argues Longuet’s method is to kowtow to the Right, curtsy to the Left, and merge irreconcilable opposites. He concludes that Longuetism is a “protracted misunderstanding” and that the French proletariat must make a “definitive settlement” with it as a demand of political hygiene.

The text supplies biographical notes on figures of the French bourgeoisie and international politics. Barthou, a prominent French politician and premier, was assassinated in 1935 with King Alexander of Yugoslavia. Briand began as a left-wing labour agitator in the 1890s but later renegaded, becoming a political leader of French imperialism; by the mid-1920s he was a conservative leader of the ‘Left Bloc’. Millerand, a French president, started as a Socialist alongside Jaurès, joined a bourgeois government in 1899, sparking controversy in the Second International, and evolved into a leader of French reaction. Foch, marshal and Allied commander-in-chief in 1918, was a resolute partisan of military intervention in the Soviet Union. Gladstone, a left-wing English bourgeois leader, favoured peaceful assimilation of Ireland and repeatedly promised Home Rule to secure Irish Party support but never delivered. Campbell-Bannerman, Liberal prime minister (1905-08), supported Irish Home Rule, Boer autonomy, and curbing the House of Lords. The Marne and Somme were sites of massive World War I battles. Bullitt, an American attaché, was sent to Soviet Russia in 1919 to negotiate peace; the Allies dropped the matter after Kolchak’s offensive. Kühlmann and Czernin were the German and Austro-Hungarian foreign ministers at Brest-Litovsk. The armies of the National Convention repulsed foreign intervention and extended French republican influence.