The Communists and the Peasantry in France¶
Core Argument¶
In this polemical article from April 1922, Trotsky intervenes in the French Communist Party’s internal debate over the united front tactic, directly challenging Renaud Jean, a leading figure responsible for agrarian work. Jean had characterised the united front as a dangerous concession to conciliationism, arguing that France’s peculiar political conditions—debilitated by decades of universal suffrage and ideological confusion—demanded maximum irreconcilability from the Communist Party. Trotsky accepts Jean’s premise that French Communism must be the most irreconcilable, but turns it against him: French Communism is in fact the least irreconcilable, the most tolerant of bourgeois-democratic deviations. The party press tolerates sentimental humanism, pacifist twaddle, and the moralising gospel of the League of the Rights of Man, all of which blunts the proletariat’s revolutionary instinct and dissolves its will to action. Trotsky insists that such pacifism, far from being harmless, serves the bourgeois regime by providing a sterile outlet for hostility to militarism, preventing it from crystallising into revolutionary force. He draws on American examples—Bryan’s pacifist influence over farmers and Hillquit’s capitulation—to illustrate the social function of pacifism as a supplement to bourgeois rule.
The core of the dispute, however, concerns the peasantry. Jean objects that the united front platform—defence of the eight-hour day, opposition to wage taxes—contains nothing directly addressing the peasantry, which constitutes half of France’s toilers. Trotsky counters that this objection is dangerous in the extreme. The French revolution requires winning the majority of the working class first; only a united proletariat can attract and lead the peasantry. The peasant is a petty bourgeois, sceptical and hard-headed, who will not be drawn by programmatic slogans alone but by the sight of a massive, disciplined force. To subordinate proletarian demands to peasant sensibilities—to curtail the eight-hour day because it does not interest the peasant—is to dissolve the party’s class character into a formless “party of toilers.” Trotsky accuses Jean of abusing sociological terminology by conflating the proletariat with the peasantry, a symptom of a policy that would sow confusion. Peasant anti-militarism, moreover, is not revolutionary but boycottist-pacifist: the peasant wants to be left alone, not to organise for the destruction of bourgeois violence. To elevate such moods into a programme would be criminal. The united front must first unify the proletariat itself; only then can it lead the peasantry. The polemic is directed against both Jean’s specific agrarian orientation and the broader French party’s tolerance of bourgeois-democratic ideology, which Trotsky sees as the real obstacle to revolutionary clarity.