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Title: Letter to Pierre Monatte Author: Marie Guillot Date: 1914 Language: en Topics: letter, nationalism, syndicalism, World War I Source: Retrieved on 10th September 2021 from https://forgottenanarchism.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/letter-to-pierre-monatte-marie-guillot/
St. Martin d’Auxy, December 29^(th), 1914
Dear friend,
I just received your manifesto.
I very much agree with you on the mistakes committed by the
Confederation Committee. The last one may be the most incredible of all.
Do enlightened revolutionaries not know that the working class, more
than any other class, are paying for this disaster? Are they not able to
understand that a country like Germany cannot be annihilated and that
war can only exasperate the faults of its public opinion, supposing that
the Germans are more blind than we are? To make the revolution, to free
a people from tyranny with cannon fire, this is the whole 1793 ideology
which reappears here. We know how this ends. The Germans are good to
free themselves; and peace will put better weapons in their hands than
war. Let’s do our work which is to develop the organisations of
struggle, and let’s leave our neighbours do theirs. People say: “If we
do not defeat Germany, we leave it the possibility to take its revenge.”
Let’s imagine Germany is defeated (could it be more defeated than France
in 1870, and can we prevent a nation which wants to live to be reborn
from its ashes?), okay, let’s admit it is. Chances of war will in no way
be reduced, they will only be moved: the centre will be at St.
Petersburg and London instead of Berlin and Vienna. Capitalist chaos
still has bright days to live. And the best, and quickest, despite its
extreme slowness, way to avoid wars is to kill capitalist society, to
install a social justice regime, where economic rivalries are replaced
with international economic calculations.
When I read what L’Humanité makes its readership swallow – but, believe
me, they don’t all digest it and people will be held accountable – I
moan about this new socialist mentality. It is a return to ancestral
brutality: let’s beat them up and kill them to bring them freedom. We
can only wonder: is it madness, stupidity, or braggartism?
The duty of workers’ organisation was to do all they could to prepare
peace: that will be enough work already. And we shouldn’t have
discouraged the neutrals in their effort of working-class humanity and
clear-sightedness.
Maybe a neutral who we do not worry about enough, cholera, will come and
make everyone agree. And, in the springtime, maybe a peace of cholera
will be signed, like the Turks and Bulgarians had to sign. But, then,
there won’t be many of our guys left to count.
As for the causes of the war and its responsibilities, it is too soon to
tell: they are in the end economic, I know, and each country was
carrying its burden. Everything will become clearer after a few years of
peace, and our duty will be to inform the working class at large, in
order to make people understand that, as always, the awfully tragic joke
is on them.
The C.G.T. will need a strong purge. And Merrheim and the others should
not follow you; we need, on the inside, some good pilots to parry as
best as we can.
Your resignation, as much as it is useful to attract the attention of
the groups, must remain an only case; the other comrades will only have
to approve your reasons – at least, that’s my advice. Let’s not drown
everything, the rescue operation would be impossible.
My best to your wife and yourself. When is this Council? That is the
sword of Damocles which just won’t fall…
Marie Guillot