Lost Comrades: Socialists of the Front Generation, 1918-1945 [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674418813, 9780674418790

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Lost Comrades

Lost Comrades Socialists of the Front Generation

1918-1945 DAN S. WHITE

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 1992

Copyright © 1992 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data

White, Dan S. Lost comrades: socialists of the front generation, 1918-1945/ Dan S. White, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-53924-9 1. Socialism—History—20th century. 2. Socialists—Biography. I. Title. HX40.W468 1992 335.43 Ό9Ό4—dc20 91-37561 CIP

For Katie and Susie

Acknowledgments It took a long time to complete this book. Along the way I received help both from individuals and from institutions. It is not possible to thank all of them here, but I hope that these acknowledgments come close. Support for research and writing came from several sources. The National Endowment for the Humanities aided me at the very beginning of this project with a Summer Stipend in 1975 and again midway through it with a Fellowship for Independent Research in 1984-85. The History Department of the University at Albany, State University of New York, granted me a writing semester in the spring of 1989 and provided help in countless other ways. The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University made me welcome as a Visiting Scholar in 1 9 8 4 - 8 5 and extended its hospitality through many summers. The staffs of a succession of archives and libraries gave me friendly assistance. They include the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Bonn; the Hessisches Staatsarchiv and the Hessische Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek in Darmstadt; the Archief en Museum voor het Vlaamse Cultuurleven in Antwerp; the Centre de Recherches et Etudes Historiques de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale in Brussels; the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis in Amsterdam; the Cabinet des Manuscrits of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; the British Library in London; the Public Record Office in Kew, Richmond, Surrey; the University Libraries at the University at Albany; Widener Library at Harvard University; and the Hoover Institution Library at Stanford University. I am indebted to the Journal of Contemporary History for permission to reproduce parts of my April 1981 article "Reconsidering European Socialism in the 1920s." I thank Georges Borchardt, Inc., for permission to reproduce the passage from Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Castle to Castle, copyright © Editions Gallimard 1957, copyright © 1968 by Dell Publishing Co., Inc. I am grateful to the mayor and City Council of Antwerp,

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Acknowledgments

the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Bonn, the Institut d'Histoire Sociale and the photographic documentary service Roger-Viollet in Paris, and to Lord Ravensdale (Nicholas Mosley), M. Claude Harmel, and Mme. Marcel Déat for making available the photographs reproduced in this book. Several individuals gave me the benefit of their own recollections of the Front Generation socialists and their era. I learned much from Alfred Vagts, Carl Landauer, J. P. Mayer, Freya von Moltke, Robert Marjolin, Jan-Hendrik de Man and Marlène de Man-Flechtheim, Lord Ravensdale, and Jeffrey Hamm. In a variety of ways my colleagues at the University at Albany, Warren Roberts, Ben Barker-Benfield, Robert Wesser, and Peter Krosby, provided encouragement and support. Dick Pels of the University of Amsterdam also gave valuable counsel and insights. It was a pleasure to work once again with Aida Donald and Elizabeth Suttell of Harvard University Press, and I am most appreciative of the careful editing of Ann Hawthorne at Harvard. The book is also the better for the thoughtful comments and suggestions of the scholars who read the manuscript for the Press. There would have been no manuscript at all, however, if it were not for Debbie Neuis of the History Department at the University at Albany, who typed chapters, notes, and numerous revisions. The expenditure of time demanded by this book required generosity and patience on the part of my daughters, Katie and Susie, and my wife, Nancy, and they gave more than their share. And although the result takes the form of words, words only inadequately express my gratitude to them.

Contents 1

Who Were the Front Generation?

1

2

Youth and War

9

3

A Season of Learning

26

4

Making Their Way

43

5

Emergence of a Critique

58

6

The Challenge of Fascism

74

7

Visions for the Masses

89

8

Planning

117

9

A Surrender to History

140

10

Paths of Collaboration

157

11

A Struggle with Destiny

175

Epilogue

192

Notes

201

A Note on Sources

243

Index

249

Illustrations Marcel Déat, 1914 (Courtesy of Fonds Georges Lefranc and Fonds Marcel Déat, Institut d'Histoire Sociale, Paris)

10

Hendrik de Man in uniform during the First World War (Copyright Archief en Museum voor het Vlaamse Cultuurleven, Antwerp)

17

Oswald Mosley, 1918 (Courtesy of Lord Ravensdale)

22

Theodor Haubach and Carlo Mierendorff in Darmstadt, around 1919 (Copyright Archiv der sozialen Demokratie, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn)

28

Carlo Mierendorff at the Social Democratic Party congress in Leipzig, 1931 (Copyright Archiv der sozialen Demokratie, Friedrich-EbertStiftung, Bonn)

92

Three-arrow symbol on Social Democratic Party placard, July 1932 (Copyright Archiv der sozialen Demokratie, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn

97

Marcel Déat, socialist member of the Chamber of Deputies, around 1932 (Copyright Roger-Viollet, Paris)

103

Sir Oswald Mosley as a junior cabinet member, 1929 (Courtesy of Lord Ravensdale)

110

Hendrik de Man during the campaign for the Plan du Travail, mid-1930s (Copyright Archief en Museum voor het Vlaamse Cultuurleven, Antwerp)

118

Theodor Haubach in the Resistance years, 1943 (Copyright Archiv der sozialen Demokratie, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn)

190

Lost Comrades

Who Were the Front Generation? One day in April 1942, in a wood just outside occupied Paris, two men sat side by side on a fallen tree trunk, talking of Hitler's war and of what might follow it. They had taken care to be alone, two foreigners shielded by the leaves and blossoms of the French springtime, a German and a Belgian whose friendship lay rooted in their involvement in a socialist movement now suppressed and underground. A few days earlier, after nearly a decade without contacts, they had met by chance on a BrusselsParis express, but under a Nazi surveillance that made private conversation impossible. In the interval they had arranged a cover for this solitary rendezvous through several staged encounters in the company of SS and Occupation officials. The political past which the two men shared justified their caution. In the late 1920s and early 1930s they had ranked among the most innovative figures in European socialism and thus also among the most energetic opponents of the Nazis before Hitler came to power. The German, Carlo Mierendorff, had paid for this distinction with more than four years in concentration camps after 1933. The Belgian, Hendrik de Man, had returned to his homeland, beyond the Nazis' reach, after a decade of teaching and writing in Germany; still, they had shown their respect for him by making his newly published Die sozialistische Idee one of the first books they confiscated and burned. Although each man enjoyed a certain latitude of freedom at the time they met in 1942, neither was much trusted by the German authorities. In order to see de Man alone Mierendorff had to shake the SS shadow assigned to travel with him; while de Man was embarked on the last "legal" trip that would be permitted him during the war. Only de Man's account of their colloquy in the forest remains as a firsthand record of what he and Mierendorff discussed, and it reveals how widely their paths had diverged since the early 1930s. At that time each had viewed resistance against fascism not simply as a duty imposed

2

LOST

COMRADES

by circumstance, but as an opportunity for socialism, a stimulus to the revitalization of the movement which both held to be essential. As they talked on that spring day in 1942, however, only Mierendorff still connected the struggle against Hitler with the hope of socialist renewal. He was involved, he told his friend, in an undertaking to remove "the principal obstacle to a reasonable peace"—it was the plot that was to culminate in the failed attempt on Hitler's life on July 2 0 , 1 9 4 4 . He wanted to know what de Man could do in Belgium after completion of the "first act," to gain goodwill abroad for a new German regime. They appear not to have spoken about the post-Nazi order in any detail. Other evidence on Mierendorff from the wartime years leaves no doubt, however, that he believed it must have a socialist foundation. 1 De Man no longer shared such hopes. His experience in Belgium as cabinet minister and party leader in the middle and late 1930s had left him disillusioned about socialism's capacity for revival. In 1940 he had accepted the German military victory in the West as a verdict on the effort to link opposition to fascism with a socialist rebirth, and had virtually reversed his orientation. A year later he wrote: "I recognize that National Socialism represents the German form of socialism, and I recommend collaboration with Germany within the framework of a united Europe and a general socialist revolution." He was not himself a National Socialist, he went on, for he was not a German. He expected now that in a Europe freed of nationalistic quarrels by the fact of German conquest, "the dynamism of National-Socialism and the fascist movements in general would be able to move from the national domain to the social domain. Instead of working for war, one would be able to work for the cultivation of social well-being and civilization and for the construction of a socialist order." 2 By the time of his furtive meeting with Mierendorff, de Man had given up this final, desperate prospect for the realization of a socialist ideal. Only remnants remained for him of the vision that still animated his friend. His reflections on their conversation bespeak a mood of stoicism and resignation. He would help, but without great hope. 3 For Mierendorff the quest for socialism continued. For de Man, who had carried it into the orbit of fascism, it was over. In the quiet months of the spring of 1942, before that year's crucial battles in Russia, North Africa, and the Pacific, few but the Nazi police would have been interested in this encounter—a dialogue between forgotten men in an obscure corner of Hitler's Europe. In retrospect, however, it stands as a symbol of the divided fate of the most promising and original group of personalities to emerge within the socialist movement during the interwar decades. In the phrase that a number of them used, they were the "Front Generation" of European socialism.4 All the leading

Who Were the Front Generation?

3

figures among them—de Man, Mierendorff and his friend and compatriot Theodor Haubach, Oswald Mosley in Britain, Marcel Déat in France—had fought in the First World War. As socialists their outlook and strivings were indelibly marked by the experience. Looking back, nearly two score years after 1914, the sociologist Paul Keckskemeti summarized the impact of the war upon combatants like himself. "It is somewhat difficult for the present generation," he wrote, "accustomed to living in turmoil and amidst constant outbursts of violence, to recapture the impression of elemental upheaval and total collapse which seared itself into the soul of the 'front generation' of the First World War. . . . What nobody would have thought possible suddenly turned out to be real; what everybody had taken to be reality itself now stood revealed as an illusion. A complete re-orientation was felt to be necessary: a re-examination of all traditional ideas about reality, all values, all principles."5 As total as the impression was, however, its effects were socially bounded. The "nobody" and "everybody" to whom Keckskemeti referred were the young men of the middle classes and, to a lesser extent, the aristocracy. It was from these strata that the Front Generation socialists came. To speak of a generation—any generation—is to seize a very elusive concept. Inasmuch as the cycle of humanity's reproduction is continuous and seamless, there will always be difficulty in contending that people born during a certain span of years share a unique set of attitudes. Yet personal and historical experience tell us that this is so. No less than other, more apparently "objective" and calculable causes—economic conflicts, demographic pressures, and the like—the collective experience of a defined age-group can be a lasting motivating force upon human action. For it to be a fundamental influence, two conditions must be fulfilled: the events which describe the experience must be of sufficient magnitude, and the generation-in-formation must be sufficiently impressionable.6 The First World War was such an event, and it stamped its imprint most deeply upon those young men of comfortable means who stood at the end of their adolescence when they volunteered, young men whose futures were yet undefined because, unlike their working-class contemporaries, they had not, until then, had to confine themselves within the quotidian horizons of vocational choices and daily labor. The death of their illusions is the constant theme of the literature of loss that the war inspired. For these elements of the youth of 1914 enlistment initially represented escape from a world already encroaching upon their future. As the playwright Carl Zuckmayer recalled, it was "liberation. Liberation from bourgeois narrowness and pettiness, from compulsory education and cramming, from the doubts of choosing a profession, and above all from

4

LOST COMRADES

that which we—consciously or unconsciously—felt as the saturation, the stuffy air, the petrifaction of our world." 7 Even before the war some spokesmen of middle-class youth—the Wandervogel in Germany, the pseudonymic Agathon in France—were imparting a sense of community to the notion of generation, finding in it an alternative to the thenpervasive concept of class, with its materialist presuppositions and economic categorizations. 8 The front experience deepened this quality of generational identity and extended it to legions of the privileged young. It severed them physically and spiritually from bourgeois society and placed them in a limbo, a no-man's-land, as Eric Leed has described it, from which the total reexamination alluded to in Keckskemeti's comment became possible. Workers, with their fixed social roots, generally were not affected in this way by the war. Neither, for similar reasons, were older men of whatever class, who had established lives to return to. Only the occasional free-floating individual, who had found neither career nor calling by 1914, could share the unsettled communion of the survivors in their early twenties, emerging after the Armistice to search for their place. 9 In a certain, negative sense, as Eric Leed has suggested, all the returning front soldiers of 1918 were socialists, inasmuch as they harbored a fury against the society which seemingly had abandoned them. But, again following Leed, the political consciousness of the typical veteran was passive; rather than share in and seek to realize a new vision of community, he was capable only of being mobilized by others against the revived established order. 10 Such men were in their way the permanent wounded of the Front Generation. What seems singular about the few individuals who became socialist leaders is the optimism they preserved through the sobering apprenticeship they had endured. Unlike the burntout cases so familiar from the literature of the war, they returned to civilian life with idealism and energy, committed to remaking the world they believed had failed them. The humane and democratic impulses they drew from their experience led them to socialism. Still they did not find it an easy ideological fit. In the trenches they had acquired a revulsion for war that well accorded with traditional attitudes in the movement. But combat had also schooled them in values at odds with those of the Marxism that most socialists accepted. In the long months among the shell holes and barbed wire they had gained a positive attachment to the nation, a respect for will and irrationality as tangible forces in human affairs, and a more emotional sense of comradeship than was comprehended in the conventional notion of class consciousness. After the Armistice their exposure to formal academic disciplines reiterated the lessons of the front. In the sociology of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, with its focus on noneco-

Who Were the Front Generation?

5

nomic motives in mass behavior, or in new economic and philosophical theories which challenged the foundations of historical materialism, they found further ground for separating themselves from the path of orthodox Marxism. A dual education in survival and higher learning thus shaped their views. When they turned, or in some cases returned, to socialism, often after experimenting with rival doctrines or parties, it was with a more passionate, less class-bound spirit than was characteristic of the movement at large. This outlook distinguished them from their ex-combatant contemporaries who became socialists on grounds more compatible with tradition. Marceau Pivert, for example, a year younger than Déat and eventually his doctrinal opposite, came to the front "full of fire and flame, still deluded by his history teacher." By the time the fighting ended he loathed war and hated the generals who directed it. M a x Seydewitz, a few years senior to Mierendorff and Haubach, rejected the military enterprise altogether and got himself deemed unfit for service by playing the earnest but incompetent recruit, the "company idiot." 11 After 1918 ex-soldiers of this stripe found a home amid the left-wing groupings which had developed out of prewar antimilitarist radicalism. Neither exposure to the slaughter of war nor their subsequent academic or doctrinal schooling set them upon a new, unmarked ideological path. By contrast, those who became the socialists of the Front Generation repeatedly defined themselves and their politics through identification with the experience of 1914-1918. Very quickly in the mid-1920s the outstanding figures among the Front Generation socialists established themselves as leaders in the making, men to keep an eye on in the future. By the close of the decade they were gaining an awareness of their similarities—some, like Mierendorff and de Man, now knew each other personally—as piece by piece, along parallel tracks, they developed a common critique of the prevailing theories and practices in European socialism. It is at this point that their stories truly converge and that the focus on the socialist Front Generation can expand beyond the initial core of pathbreakers and leaders to take in a wider group of allies and followers. The largest number were war veterans of similar age and social background. Among the other recruits were men who had been too young to fight in 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 8 and yet had absorbed the values and perspectives of those who had. By 1930, when the Front Generation had become a recognizable presence in socialist ranks, it had come to include individuals who had never seen a trench in wartime. 12 In a movement and within parties in which seniority was unwaveringly respected, the socialist Front Generation still represented potential more

6

LOST COMRADES

than accomplishments at the start of the 1930s. Nevertheless, with its fresh ideas and attractive personalities, its promise shone brightly; no other younger socialist group could match it. Over the decade, however, it revealed itself to be a far more troubling and ambiguous influence than it had seemed, as many of its most talented members, in frustration or impatience, transferred their hopes to fascism or at the least, as Hendrik de Man did, to collaboration with Hitler's "New Order" in 1940. It is true that dramatic shifts of allegiance were a conspicuous feature of political life in Europe between the two world wars. Still, the socialist Front Generation included more than the ordinary quota of ideological pilgrims. Apart from de Man, the most spectacular were Mosley and Déat, both spoken of as future party leaders by the end of the 1920s, both discredited as imitation Nazis by 1945. Of course, ambition played a role in these changes. But ambition cannot be easily separated from the war-rooted motivations that had driven the Front Generation into politics. Above all its leaders meant to break with the "strange view," as Mosley once described it, "that Socialists could do nothing until Capitalism had collapsed." 13 Yet the aging parliamentarians and functionaries who ran the socialist parties had seen little that was strange in such an outlook. In their sight socialism still bore the qualities of its great period of expansion before the war; it remained proletarian, revolutionary, fated to triumph over an inevitably declining capitalism. Where their new critics found stagnation they discerned stability, and they continued to trust in the Marxist expectations they had entertained before 1914. They were unwilling to concede that their hopes of transforming society had been shaken, if not undermined, by the events of the war and its aftermath: the failure of the working classes to prevent or even resist the outbreak of conflict, the postwar defection of segments of the urban electorate to the new communist parties, the marked slowdown in the absolute and relative growth of the proletariat. In 1927 Hendrik de Man told a Brussels university audience that he had "learned to distrust those who place the ideal too far above presentday tasks. They call 'ideal' what they want to put off until tomorrow." 14 On the surface the comment was a slap at the hypocrisy of some socialist leaders. At a deeper level it expressed the Front Generation's conviction that the inertia of the movement was more than the result of bad faith. For them the crucial issue was the manner in which the day-to-day work of socialism could be linked to its ultimate goals. In the orthodox view this question was considered to be beyond argument; everyday activity was assumed to occur in a historical continuum in which socialist present and future were fused by the inexorability of economic development. Neither the presumption nor its corollary was acceptable to the Front Generation critics. Rather than relying on the future to justify the près-

Who Were the Front Generation?

7

ent, they believed that socialists could represent the alternative of a just society only by seeking it directly, through their immediate efforts. "The most essential element in socialism," de Man wrote in 1926, "is the struggle for it." 1 5 Thus the Front Generation attempted to reactivate the movement by orienting it toward near-at-hand objectives. Its efforts were concentrated in two initiatives, partially overlapping in time. The first, extending from 1926 to 1933, centered on ideology and symbol as the means of remobilizing socialism. The second, running from 1930 to 1936, was oriented toward economic planning as both the objective and the guiding myth of socialist action. In the first phase the Front Generation critics worked forward from the recognition that as the realization of its goals receded into a hazy Marxist future, socialism was succumbing to the acquisitive norms of the capitalist order, becoming nothing more than a class movement essentially indistinguishable from those it condemned. Its particular blue-collar interests might be different from those of the middle classes or the rich, but in defense of these material positions socialist parties and trade unions could not claim to stand on higher moral ground than their opponents; in this role they were not the agents of human liberation envisioned in socialist doctrine. It followed that the task of the movement was to relegitimize its universal title, to prove that it stood for something more than a different division of wealth in society. The remedy the Front Generation offered was a new credo "beyond Marxism" that was to tap the urge toward justice which, as they saw it, had been all along the true source of loyalty to socialist ideals. It was a solution that reflected the lessons on human motivation of their dual education in the trenches and the universities. It was also an approach that could separate socialist consciousness from economic categories and so break down the class walls that threatened to contain the movement among a permanent proletarian minority. But the search for "the clear socialist vision which alone is capable of fascinating the masses" 1 6 could also shade into manipulation or become an end in itself. Here the Front Generation's efforts displayed affinities with fascism that foreshadowed the subsequent desertions to the right. By 1933 this phase of ideological renewal was over. The Nazi triumph in Germany signaled its close—or, in the case of Carlo Mierendorff and his confederates, physically enforced it. At the same time, the persistence of the Depression encouraged a shift in emphasis to economic planning. In the 1920s several Front Generation writers had advanced a perspective on economic issues sharply at variance with the conventional Marxist focus on property relations. Ownership seemed to them an inadequate category of analysis, particularly given the separation between shareholders and managers in large corporate enterprises. The real question,

8

LOST COMRADES

they contended, was that of control, of how decisions over production and industrial organization were made. This criterion led them to conclude that partial conquests could be achieved for socialism if the targets were the crucial instrumentalities of power in the system—the banks in Mosley's 1925 Revolution by Reason, the state in Marcel Déat's 1930 Perspectives socialistes.17 After 1930 the scope of such analyses became more ambitious, and planning became the keystone of Front Generation economic thinking, most notably through de Man's Plan du Travail, adopted by the Belgian socialists at the end of 1933. But in planisme, too, with its emphases on organization, solidarity, and the state, there were disquieting parallels to fascist currents. The hopes invested in planning were also to be disappointed. By the end of 1936 this stage was over, and some Front Generation leaders had already moved to fascism, most notably Mosley in 1932. Others were slipping in that direction. From this point in their careers the problematic aspects of their socialism were increasingly prominent, and it is tempting to conclude that the "desire to bring socialism up to date and adapt it to the modern world ultimately resulted in fascism."18 As neat and ironic as this formulation may be, however, it is in error, for it is too simple. Not all of the Front Generation abandoned socialism or, despite the defeats they and the movement suffered in the 1930s, gave up their attempts to renew it. Not fascism, but the wartime struggle against it, became the eventual focus of their hopes, and in the European Resistance they discovered a new foundation for their efforts down to and, for those who survived, beyond 1945. Although the résistants thus kept alive their socialist faith, it is not clear that their former comrades who had moved to the right had entirely lost theirs. Pilgrims are not necessarily converts. Beneath the shifts of those who opted for fascism or collaboration there lay a consistency of perspective that to the end linked them with the members of the Front Generation like Carlo Mierendorff and Theo Haubach, who recognized the attractions of fascism but never accepted them. Even after Hitler's conquest of France in the spring of 1940, when the separation became complete between those who aligned themselves with the "New Order" and those who chose resistance, nearly all the onetime Front Generation socialists remained connected by the common purpose of reshaping European society. It is this split, yet joined destiny that makes their odyssey so central to the understanding of the possibilities and weaknesses of socialism in interwar Europe. It is this division among a generation of such promise that seems caught in one bittersweet moment in the meeting of Mierendorff and de Man on that spring day outside Paris in 1942.

2 Youth and War For the young men who were to become the socialist Front Generation's leaders, the First World War started in a blaze of excitement. Ten years afterward Theodor Haubach remembered the scene in the early August days of 1914 as he stood with a group of rucksack-laden youths amidst the noise and clamor of the Cologne railroad station. "Here and there in the immense hall," he recalled, "people began singing in a confusion of drunkenness and inspiration. Somewhere else there was wild shouting. . . . The tumult grew and grew. A gigantic magnetic force seemed to pull everything in its train. Someone standing on a baggage cart tried to make a speech. He yelled repeatedly! No one understood him! Everybody cheered him, howled along, and the noise became fierce and turbulent. Again and again, as if torn apart from it, one word penetrated through the din: Fatherland—Fatherland!"1 Patriotism and a sort of sporting eagerness drew Haubach and Carlo Mierendorff, inseparable friends from Gymnasium, to the barracks grounds in Darmstadt to volunteer at the outbreak of fighting. They led Oswald Mosley, a cadet at Sandhurst, into the 16th Light Dragoons: "Our one great fear," he wrote much later, "was that the war would be over before we got there." In Brussels Hendrik de Man, who had sat in as a translator at the last attempts of the Socialist International to halt the war, joined the Belgian army as a private the afternoon before the Germans invaded: "The people of which I was a part found itself condemned to fight; the idea of not sharing its fate seemed inconceivable to me." In Paris Marcel Déat, on the verge of beginning his university studies, was one of the conscript age-group that was immediately called up; although he was already affiliated with socialism, he had no doubt that it was his duty to defend his country.2 There was nothing unusual in these responses to the sudden rush of events. The enthusiasm to enlist was contagious in the first weeks of conflict, and the socialist Front Generation's future leaders marched off to war as part of the crowd.

Marcel Déat (right), 1914

Youth and War

11

Within weeks or at most a few months—it depended on the length of training—the intoxication of these early days fizzled away. Once at the front, Haubach wrote of his experiences, in the company of death, wounds, and sickness, sobriety and deliberation took over, and with them a dawning consciousness that the war could not be justified by the appeals preached by official spokesmen and propaganda. 3 For these sons of bourgeois or patrician families, this recognition was the first step in their rejection of the society and values that had been their standards before 1 9 1 4 , and this was true even of those who were already socialists, like de Man and Déat. Their prewar rebellion against the bourgeois world had had its own sort of middle-class conventionality. They had committed themselves to the left, but without really abandoning the norms of their upbringing. The front experience created in them a far more profound and, in its way, revolutionary estrangement. Not enough is known about the lives they left behind them in 1 9 1 4 . Most of the available information comes from individual memoirs or the recollections of contemporaries, each source selective, only a limited revelation of the manner in which a personality was shaped. All the leading figures of the socialist Front Generation grew up in circumstances of reasonable or even considerable comfort. Nothing in their material situation impelled them toward politics; there was nothing singular or extraordinary about any of their backgrounds. In his autobiography Mosley remembered "the warmest and most intimate friendships" with ordinary people on his grandfather's estate: "This was really a classless society." Similarly, de M a n wrote of the farmers and gardeners he knew as equals in childhood summers in the countryside, and of his own "family microcosm . . . ruled by a perfect communism." 4 Such impressions contributed to later attitudes, but their importance should not be overestimated. The experiences of young adulthood were to be far stronger influences on the Front Generation's visions of socialism. " M y outlook was remade in the trenches," Hendrik de Man said soon after the Armistice. 5 As the oldest among this group he had held the most clearly formulated views in 1 9 1 4 . He was twenty-nine when he enlisted, a figure already recognized in Belgium and in the Second International, a classic rebel from the strata "living in easy circumstances, free from material cares," to which both his parents' families belonged. In his late teens he had embraced socialism with the strength of a religious conversion. It had provided him a means to satisfy his uncompromising moral sense and his wish to fight for the underdog. At first it also drew him away from university study—the scientific and technical courses he had neglected successively at Brussels and Ghent—only to lead him back once he had left Belgium for Germany and, as a staff member of the

12

LOST COMRADES

radical Leipziger Volkszeitung, had entered a Marxian milieu which stimulated his interest in social and economic history. From 1905 to 1909 de Man combined journalism and academics, receiving a doctorate summa cum laude from the University of Leipzig for a dissertation on the medieval cloth trade of Ghent. Afterward he spent a year in England, then returned to Belgium. There and in international forums his ideological slant remained radical, even as the activity he now undertook as head of the Educational Institute of the Belgian Workers' Party began to incline him toward a more sober appraisal of the working class's capabilities. It was the background to the more disturbing discoveries he was to make during the war.6 Marcel Déat's prewar path to socialism was virtually the opposite of de Man's. De Man distanced himself from the prosperous middle class in the hope of becoming more of a socialist. Déat's involvement in the movement increased the closer he came to entering the world of the French upper bourgeoisie. It was a no less typical attachment. The difference was a matter of the social origins one broke with, and Déat's were modest. Twenty years old in 1914, he was well embarked on the route that had led clever and talented young men up the social ladder in France for better than a century. The son of a minor official posted to an out-ofthe-way town in the Nièvre, he had advanced through secondary education at Nevers and Clermont-Ferrand with a succession of high marks, scholarships, and prizes. In 1912 he was admitted to the elite Lycée Henri IV in Paris, where he spent two years preparing for the entry examinations to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the summit of French higher education. Like the majority of students who reached this plateau, influenced by teachers including the famous "Alain," the young Déat had developed into a rational moralist, a man of principle. It was also by way of ideas that he came to socialism, attracted above all, like so many bright contemporaries, by the synthesis of idealism and social renovation of the great orator and leader Jean Jaurès. As a recruiting ground for the intellectual leadership of the nation the ENS represented an avenue of social elevation for those whom it accepted. Still, its atmosphere in 1914, when Déat passed his exams, encouraged the moral sort of socialism he adopted. A less removed, more flesh-and-blood commitment awaited his war experience.7 Neither Carlo Mierendorff nor Theodor Haubach was politically involved in 1914. Both were still seventeen and wrapped up in the life of their school, the venerable Ludwig-Georgs-Gymnasium in Darmstadt. Neither was a native Hessian. Mierendorff was born in Saxony, Haubach nearer by in Frankfurt am Main. Both came to Darmstadt as children. Mierendorff's mother was from Hessen; when the family moved to her

Youth and War

13

home region his father established himself as a salesman of textile goods. Haubach's mother left Frankfurt for Darmstadt after being widowed; she and her son lived in one of the attractive sections of the city. In the past Darmstadt had been a sedate place, the longtime residence of the Hessian grand dukes. Its atmosphere was changing, however, as the new century began. Innovation and experimentation were in the air, encouraged by the patronage of the liberal Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig. While Mierendorff and Haubach progressed through school, the Hessian capital became a launching point of new styles—art nouveau in architecture, Expressionism in literature. In a letter from the late 1920s Haubach said that as a youth he was first educated in the "life of art," and the writings that he and Mierendorff produced during the war years manifest their absorption in the creative ferment of the time. They were leaders among their peers and inseparable friends; classmates referred to them as "the Dioscuri" after the twins of Greek mythology. In a school photograph of spring 1914 they stand together, characteristically contrasting in their expressions: Mierendorff, irrepressible, smiling at the camera; Haubach, pensive, looking away; both still innocents. 8 Oswald Mosley also had little interest in politics in 1914. Like Mierendorff and Haubach he was seventeen when the war began. On both sides of his family there was a traditional connection with public affairs. His great-great-grandfather had been a Whig member of Parliament at the time of the electoral reform of 1832. As a child he listened to his maternal grandfather's stories of his own term in Parliament in 1886— 1892, at the spectacular climax of the career of the Irish leader Charles Parnell. But the young Mosley seemed more likely to become a soldier than a politician. He was competitive and athletic, and at school he went in for the gentleman's sports—boxing, fencing, riding—and remembered the regular army sergeants who instructed him more fondly than he recalled his teachers in academic subjects. Mosley's upbringing was typical of the country aristocracy into which he had been born. He was sent for his education first to West Down, near Winchester, then to Winchester itself, and finally in 1914, fulfilling his ambition, to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. Still there were some shadows in his childhood. His mother had obtained a judicial separation when Mosley was just five, and thereafter he saw his father, who drank too much, only rarely. In his memoirs he wrote that his mother "lived in relatively straitened circumstances," and if the emphasis should be on the word "relatively," nevertheless Mosley was aware of the contrast between his own situation and the ample comforts of Rolleston, his grandfather's estate, which he could expect eventually to inherit. He was a privileged young man in 1914, with an even brighter future, so long as the world did not change. 9

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The different personalities that these sketches reveal were bound to confront socialism and its problems in divergent ways; this was to be true even of two individuals as close as Mierendorff and Haubach. Still, obvious a factor as the personal element is, it cannot be made to bear more than its proper burden of explanation. Given the prewar socialist affiliations of de Man and, briefly, Déat, it could be reasonable to conclude that individual character steered the Front Generation's leaders toward their political commitments. War or no war, all might have remained or eventually become socialists. Yet it is not possible to be certain. Still too little is known about any of these personalities to conclude that they were destined under all circumstances to seek a vocation in socialist politics. Their autobiographical writings yield some clues to their motivations, but not enough to allow more than impressions of personality traits or characteristic behaviors. Even de Man, the most introspective memorialist among the Front Generation leaders, left gaps in the three versions of his reminiscences that he published between 1941 and 1953. In the works of the others the hints are fewer. Self-justification tends to crowd out self-examination in Mosley's confident My Life (1968) and in the Mémoires politiques (1989) that Déat left behind as a typescript when he fled into obscurity in 1945. Mierendorff produced a brief curriculum vitae for the Nazi authorities in 1938, but otherwise he and Haubach only scattered scraps of autobiography in articles, speeches, and letters.10 Contemporary witnesses and later biographers have painted in some of the blank spaces, most notably Nicholas Mosley, in his brave and brilliant portrait of his father. Nevertheless, the private sides of these men's lives, with whatever they contributed to the shaping of personalities and political orientations, remain unrecoverable in many respects, and this is particularly true of their early years.11 The enormity and disruptiveness of their experience of 1914-1918 in any case restricted the influence of personality on the course they chose. From the biographical perspective, the individual in history is somewhat like an actor on stage, encountering his environment when driven there by the force of his dramatic character. By contrast, the reality the members of the Front Generation confronted after 1914 imposed a far more circumscribed field of movement. It was as if they had assumed parts in a portrayal in which the scenery closed in upon them, leaving only one or two avenues open, and although there might be variations in the steps or exit lines of the players, they were compelled to follow the same path. In their situation, beginning with the upheaval of the First World War, personality responded to circumstances rather than dominated them; accordingly it is crucial to comprehend the settings. Political actors are always constrained by events beyond their control. The range of their

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freedom is a matter of degree. Few, however, have had to contend with the succession of crises—war, revolution, fascism, depression, war again—that marked the era of the socialist Front Generation's activity. "For better or worse," Oswald Mosley declared in the preface to the American edition of his memoirs, "I owe the dynamism of my political impulse to the First World War." Looking back, other leaders of the Front Generation wrote similarly of the decisive impact of the conflict upon their lives. De Man has already been quoted on the lesson of the trenches. In Déat's words, "This experience in large part formed, molded, fashioned, marked us forever." Haubach described the war as fate, a European destiny that he and his contemporaries could neither escape nor resist. 12 In their unanimity these comments, all written after 1918, reflect the clarity that retrospect brings. During the fighting, however, it was not so easy to define the significance of the struggle. Individually the leaders of the Front Generation knew a war very close to the cataclysmic image familiar from fiction, poetry, and memoir. Save for Mierendorff all were commissioned officers, as were most of the outstanding war writers. Again excepting Mierendorff, who first saw action in Russia, they fought on the Western Front, in the no-man's-land that was the setting for authors like Barbusse, Sassoon, Owen, Jünger, and Remarque. Only de Man emerged unscathed. Others were literally scarred: Haubach with an indentation on his chin—later often mistaken for a dueling wound—from a field-hospital operation; Mierendorff without hearing in his left ear as the result of illness contracted on the Eastern Front; Mosley with a shortened right leg and a permanent limp after repeated injuries. Still, they survived. Their itineraries of combat crisscrossed one another through Flanders and northeastern France: Langemarck, Ploegsteert, Loos; St. Quentin, the Argonne, Verdun. As in every war, however, each traveled his own particular route through the maelstrom. Mosley's was the shortest. Impatient to see action, he got himself detached from his regiment to join the Royal Flying Corps as an observer in the fall of 1914. From then until the following spring he was a witness to the fighting in the West, usually from the air but also occasionally at ground level—he was caught in the German barrage and gas attack that began the Second Battle of Ypres. Even at this early stage, before aerial combat became commonplace, flying was dangerous as well as adventurous. Antiaircraft fire was heavy, and the planes offered little protection; Mosley suffered a concussion from one shell fragment. In mid-1915 he took the opportunity to train as a pilot but injured his leg in a crash before completing his course. Patched up but not properly healed, he returned to the 16th Dragoons

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on the front near Loos. The months he spent in the trenches during late 1915 and early 1916 were a relatively quiet interval. Mosley knew the everyday dangers of ground warfare but experienced no major actions. Eventually the condition of his leg worsened, and he was invalided home. It then took an operation to save him from becoming an amputee, and thereafter he was restricted to noncombatant duties. 13 The war went on longest for Déat and Haubach. Haubach, the only true infantry officer, fought first in Flanders in October 1914. His career as a patrol leader on the Western Front became legendary—eight times wounded, mentioned in dispatches, denied the Pour le Mérite only by bureaucratic obstructions. 14 He said and wrote little about his experiences, however. More is known of Déat's service. He was quickly promoted from private to second lieutenant and assigned to a machine-gun company. In January 1915 his unit was sent into the lines, and over the following months and years he was involved in several major battles, including Verdun and the Somme. He earned the respect of his men with his coolness and humor under fire, qualities noted on the several occasions he was awarded citations, necessary qualities given the nature of his command. Because of the machine gun's deadliness, it was the prime target of enemy attacks and shelling—in the British army the crews were known as "suicide squads"—and Déat was often exposed to the risk of death. He was wounded only once and slightly, with a shrapnel cut on his little finger, but he also endured a two-hour burial under the shower of earth thrown up by a 150-millimeter shell, until his comrades dug him out. At war's end he had attained the rank of captain, but his actual responsibilities, over all the machine-gun units in his regiment, were those of a major. 15 Mierendorff and de Man both saw the conflict at a slight remove, with the artillery. Each also spent intervals away from the front. It took many months for Mierendorff to recover from the illnesses he contracted in Russia in early 1915. When he returned to combat, it was in the West, first in Lorraine, then in other sectors. In the artillery the minute-tominute hazards of the trenches were absent, but danger was never far away. Mierendorff distinguished himself several times in action, most notably early in 1918, when he retrieved some abandoned field pieces while under heavy enemy fire, an exploit for which he was personally decorated with the Iron Cross I by Emperor Wilhelm II. Much later he mirthfully recalled to a friend that the monarch had "said to him, 'Splendid, my son!' Carlo did not neglect to note that the Emperor had no idea to whom he was saying this." 16 De Man's season of fighting was over by 1918. During the invasion of Belgium and on through the "race to the sea" in the fall of 1914 he had served as an infantry volunteer. After the front stabilized he was assigned

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to a training unit and then, at the beginning of 1915, to a liaison role with the British army in Flanders. This posting continued until the summer of 1916, when, at his request, de Man was transferred to the command of a newly formed trench mortar battery. Over the subsequent months he was involved in steady action. With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, however, his abilities as an interpreter made him more valuable to the Belgian government in diplomatic capacities. He was sent to Russia in the summer of 1917 as a member of a delegation representing Allied support for the Kerensky regime. After a brief return to his unit he was dispatched to the United States in the spring of 1918. The

Hendrik de M a n in uniform during the First World War

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several projects of coordination in which he became engaged kept him in America until the Armistice. 17 As divergent as these experiences were, they made for little variation in individual attitudes toward the war. Similar themes characterize what each man said and wrote, both in 1914-1918 and afterward, themes common also in much of the familiar literature. The overwhelming finality of the basic facts—death, fear, comradeship, survival—tended to cancel out differences of station. The Western Front was a great leveler of perceptions. All found reason to justify their side while the conflict went on. In explaining the war to themselves and others, however, they rejected the idea that they were fighting to preserve their country as it was in 1914. Instead they saw the struggle as a vehicle of renewal; the nation for which they engaged their lives was an ideal homeland of democracy and social justice. Afterward Déat bitterly regretted that the French Socialists had not exploited the opportunities that mobilization offered for a thoroughgoing national transformation. Mosley made the same connection: "patriotism to me was not something static, a sentiment of good things to be conserved. It was something dynamic and creative, seeking to build a better and more modern nation, constantly adapted to the development of the age and inspiring it." Even more ambitiously, de Man envisioned Allied victory not simply as benefiting Belgium but as "an indispensable precondition of the German Revolution," a means "to emancipate the German people from the masters who oppress and deceive it." On the other side, however, as a later friend of Haubach and Mierendorff wrote in 1917, "victory of the German Spirit" was linked to "a new, rejuvenated Germany, worthy of the great sacrifices the war has demanded of us." 18 This loyalty to the nation as it should be lasted beyond the war. Later, in the 1920s and 1930s, the Front Generation socialists were powerful advocates of internationalism; it was a consistent and significant element in their politics. Always, however, their vision of relations among states was pluralistic, complementing and extending the attachments that, as they knew from their experience, individuals and peoples felt for their native countries. 19 The war had taught them that the workers did have a fatherland and that the Marxist denial of this truth was erroneous. A socialism that refused to acknowledge the fact of national sentiment forfeited a crucial emotional bond with its followers. The challenge, as they would come to see it, was to create an ideal that could animate such feeling, an alternative nation to the resurrected bourgeois society of postwar, which neither deserved nor received affection from the blue-collar population.

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Country, comrades, combat—apart from gaining a changed perspective on patriotism, the Front Generation leaders shifted their views most radically in regard to the human attachments that warfare engendered and to the "profession of fighting"20 itself. The intensity of comradeship is one of the best-known themes of the literature of the war. In a variety of forms it pervades what Front Generation socialists wrote and remembered about their experiences. The units in which they served became their communities. As Déat observed afterward, with the overlay of sociological terms he absorbed as an academic, "This regiment, this battalion, this company became our real human group . . . the tribe . . . the primitive 'clan.'" As officers, however, they also discovered, in de Man's words, "the true, deep happiness that authority over men can bring when it is based on mutual trust and sympathy." 21 And beyond these ties of collective brotherhood there were the personal bonds. They are visible through Mosley's recollections of the quicksilver "Johnny" Hawker, with whom he flew many times as observer, or in Haubach's reveries on the physical beauty of fellow soldiers. 22 The trenches bred a passionate solidarity, fired by struggle and suffering. Later the orthodox Marxist notion of class consciousness would seem a pallid and theoretical contrast. All this is not to say that these sons of the better-off classes lost their sense of social differentiation at the front. It was rather that they came to know workingmen and peasants as they never had or could have in the stratified prewar world. Even de Man, the most familiar with proletarians through his experience at the Centrale d'Education Ouvrière in Brussels, found much to learn. In uniform, commanding men who neither read, knew, nor thought about the political cause they defended, he lost the last of what he afterward viewed as his socialist "doctrinairism." In the trenches it was not possible to romanticize the working classes or to keep up the illusion that one could simply merge with them regardless of social origins. 23 Close acquaintance with the rank and file instead strengthened the notions of leadership in which the middle-class volunteers had been educated. Yet they also found that their blue-collar subordinates had many practical lessons to teach them, and they learned only too well that ordinary men died as nobly as their purported betters. The war taught the Front Generation socialists respect and affection for working people as they were. This realism also extended inward, to truths about themselves. As much as they hated its results, they understood that they had gained a taste for combat. De Man vividly remembered the day "I secured a direct hit on an enemy emplacement, saw bodies or parts of bodies go up in the air, and heard the desperate yelling of the wounded or the runaways. I

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had to confess to myself that it was one of the happiest moments of my life." 24 Déat likened warfare to sport; it released men into an instinctual freedom: Those who went into combat did not defy death. They affirmed life. They affirmed it all the more that they were more vigorous, more ardent, more alive. At the dawn of our youth, the blood beating rhythmically in our arteries, life gushing through us as a flood, exalting us, hurling us into action, we headed straight into the massacre, crying out our joy to be alive, forgetting death, because we were the very negation of death. 25

Other survivors who had discovered this sense of exhilaration in battle never stopped searching for it afterward. Many joined paramilitary units in the postwar years and eventually, via these organizations, made their way to fascism. The Front Generation socialists, even those who later switched over to the fascists, reacted differently. From their experience they recognized that the liberty to kill could only degenerate into a license for inhumanity. In that knowledge they became committed opponents of war. Their antiwar sentiment accorded with socialist tradition. But they also preserved certain positive attitudes toward the military that were very foreign to the movement. At times they felt a nostalgia for army life; Carl Zuckmayer has recounted how he and Mierendorff, whom he befriended early in 1919, could not refrain from looking for battery positions and estimating firing distances when they strolled around Frankfurt and Heidelberg during their university years. 26 Eventually, as other events affected individual lives, the war occupied a narrower place in their imaginations. Its emotional residues remained strong, however, and they were complemented by a set of affirmative conclusions drawn from reflection on the military practices and institutions the Front Generation socialists had known. Now as political leaders they found virtue in the discipline and cohesion that command structure had been capable of creating— qualities to be wished for in the mass parties in which they had invested their energies.27 Haubach and Mosley were the strongest exponents of this outlook: Haubach, a moving spirit in the republican paramilitary Reichsbanner; Mosley, who turned explicitly to an armylike organization when he founded the British Union of Fascists. Haubach went furthest in ascribing value to soldiering. In 1916 he likened it to the classical Grecian mode of living. Later his tone was more muted but no less insistent. 28 The lessons that the Front Generation leaders learned in war were to influence their socialism and ultimately to set them at odds with the prevailing currents in the movement. Nevertheless^ the knowledge and val-

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ues they gained in the trenches were not intrinsically socialist. Nor were they exceptional among ex-combatants; they cannot be made into emblems of singularity, signs of future ideological commitment. It was only when the fighting ceased that the socialist Front Generation began to define itself politically. It is in its conclusions about the meaning of the war and the tasks of peace that a particular direction first becomes discernible. Survival gave them impetus. "At the Armistice in 1918," Mosley wrote long afterward, "I passed through the festive streets and entered one of London's largest and most fashionable hotels, interested by the sounds of revelry which echoed from it. Smooth, smug people, who had never fought or suffered, seemed to the eyes of youth—at that moment age-old with sadness, weariness and bitterness—to be eating, drinking, laughing on the graves of our companions. I stood aside from the delirious throng, silent and alone, ravaged by memory. Driving purpose had begun; there must be no more war." 29 Mosley always had a gift for self-dramatization, and there is a shade of it in this recollection. All the same, the contrast of mood is striking when it is compared to this passage describing how his later Labour Party colleague Clement Attlee (born in 1883) came home from the war: "He emerged from four years' soldiering having suffered neither permanent physical damage nor obvious mental change. He was anxious to return to the life he had lived before 1914." 3 0 Age accounted for the difference. There was an urgency in the men born in the mid-1890s that was not shared by most older veterans, who, like Attlee, had something to go back to. For men who had just reached the edge of adulthood in 1914 there was no established life to resume; they would have to make one on their own. For the Front Generation socialists this challenge seemed insuperable unless the world were remade as well. They had seen the worst of human destructiveness, but rather than break them or condemn them to an endless search for new combats, it whetted their appetite for existence. "Yet—we lived," wrote Carl Zuckmayer, "we had come home sound, we were young, our imaginations and intellects were only just now opening up, in spite of the lost years we felt more mature and seasoned than other young people in their early twenties, for thunder and lightning had opened our eyes, we had experienced an inner transformation, we had begun to think, we could no longer be fooled, and we knew, despite all hurdles and setbacks, that the era, the future, life itself were running our course and making our pace." 3 1 If a single motif characterized the actions of the Front Generation's leaders throughout their careers, it was the quest for a new beginning. The slaughter of the war had led them to reject the conventional values— bourgeois or socialist—of the world into which they had survived. Now

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Oswald Mosley, 1 9 1 8

they sought a new world. In a certain sense, it has been pointed out, the years of battle from which they had just emerged already had liberated them from the existing universe of Europe. For the front freed them from the sphere of material and economic considerations, calculated upon a now-irrelevant future, and allowed them to dedicate their energies to moral causes—the countries-to-be of their hopes, lands fit for their hero-

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ism. 32 Once peace came and governments and people settled back to normal business, it became clear that the fight for such ideals would have to go on, and that the field on which it must be waged was home ground. In the months immediately after the Armistice the men who were to break the path for the socialist Front Generation addressed themselves to this task. The approaches they chose were very different. Only one of them went directly into electoral and parliamentary politics: Mosley. In the last two years of the war, during his convalescence and then when he was seconded to two governmental departments, he had come to know the political scene in London. He had the right credentials for entry—good family, fine war record—and he met people who could help him along and did, most notably F. E. Smith and Winston Churchill. Meanwhile he was educating himself in politics, reading extensively about past statesmen but also observing the realities of modern state power from his assignments at the Ministry of Munitions and the Foreign Office. As the war drew to a close, advancing the prospect of a national election, Mosley was sought after as a candidate by both Liberals and Conservatives. He chose the latter and was accepted as the Unionist (Conservative) nominee for Harrow, near London, in July 1918. The platform he presented was a mix of standard patriotic sentiment and emphasis on the role the state could play in securing economic productivity and social justice—a foreshadowing of later themes. The campaign he ran was a triumph. On December 14 Mosley became the youngest elected member of the new Parliament. He was to be seated as a supporter of the victorious coalition of Unionists and Liberal followers of the prime minister, David Lloyd George. But Mosley's own oratory suggested service in the ranks of a loftier entity: the "Greatest National Party that the country has ever known . . . a party which was all-embracing, a Party which had in it everything that was worth having." 33 De Man, by contrast, found himself "disgusted by my party, my country, and Europe" in the months immediately after the Armistice. As soon as he was demobilized, he sought a new start in America. During the final two years of the war he had developed "a passionate sympathy for the total phenomenon of the U.S.A." America seemed to him a fresh society. Its vitality bespoke a promise evidenced to de Man in the democratic and internationalist thrust of Woodrow Wilson's diplomacy, in the relative openness of the society, even in American capitalism's frank pursuit of efficiency and profits. In Belgium, on the other hand, the possibility of new departures appeared to be doubly blocked by hostility toward Germany and Bolshevik Russia abroad and by the Socialists' continuance of the wartime parliamentary alliance with the bourgeois parties at home. Already in an article of January 1919 de Man confessed his

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"Grande Désillusion" with the shape of peacetime Europe. A few months later he embarked with his family for the United States.34 Déat's course in the first postwar months was the most prosaic. He was eager to return to academic life and managed to complete his study for the baccalaureate even before he was out of uniform. Activism was not a natural element in the world he entered. European universities tended to discourage innovation, and a student's existence was normally sedentary and contemplative. At the Ecole Normale Supérieure, however, it was possible for Déat to think of himself as one of those "who return from the war, not diminished by submission to the worshippers of the past, but singularly enriched by a constant revolt against the stiflers of the future." Among French educational institutions the ENS had long been particularly congenial to socialism. Its list of graduates included an honor roll of the movement's leaders, most notably Jaurès and Albert Thomas, Déat's two heroes. Not only the school's atmosphere, however, but the field that Déat chose—sociology—gave him reason to believe that higher learning could be a radical enterprise. At the Ecole Normale sociology was taught as a pragmatic science, in the tradition of Emile Durkheim, the dominant French influence in the discipline, both before and after his death in 1917. Déat hoped to discover in his subject a guide to the possibilities for social change, and he was encouraged in this direction by his principal teacher, the Durkheimian popularizer Célestin Bouglé.35 Mierendorff and Haubach, granted emergency Gymnasium diplomas after their enlistment, also turned to university studies in the winter of 1918-19. Nevertheless, in their initial semesters lectures and coursework took second place to the activity that commanded their time and energies: radical journalism. During the war both had written stories, poetry, and essays for a review called Die Dachstube (The Attic), which a group of underclassmen from their school had founded in 1915. It was experimental and expressionistic, a final ornament in Darmstadt's epoch as an artists' capital, and their contributions had reflected its spirit. Yet this literary venture was also an escape, as Mierendorff made clear in November 1918, in the manifesto that declared an end to publication of Die Dachstube: For more than four years we fled from what was monstrous in astral verses. We turned away and denied that fates were being negotiated. We committed lies. For our bodies and souls were in captivity. . . . Not that art should cease to be our final, most fervent goal. But we stand at a point where art can be measured only by what it offers to struggling life. Art is a bridge into infinity, from the temporal to the eternal. But now, when the times are so colossal, so ghastly, in conflict over final things, they have become the measure of all values, and woe to the art that ignores them. 36

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In place of Die Dachstube came Das Tribunal, intended by Mierendorff, its founder, editor, and Regisseur, to be the political voice of a new and revolutionary direction. Its tone was expressionistic and irreverent, a carryover from the artistic and literary enthusiasms of prewar Darmstadt, but its targets were state and society in the new, haltingly republican Germany. Its language ran to rhetorical formulations like the contrast Mierendorff drew in his first contribution: "Calculating the possible is the concern of old minds and atrophying blood; the affair of youth is the will to the impossible, demanding 1000 so that one may be gained."37 But the themes it repeated were clear: a new society must be created, and those who had survived the front must construct it. "Perhaps," Mierendorff wrote early in 1919, "after four years of war something heroic is required from us for the first time," and by this he meant the resolve to reach for ideals and not sink into a dead normalcy.38 However divergent their paths in that first postwar springtime, the future leaders of the socialist Front Generation shared his perception. They saw and accepted the challenge to build a better world. As yet, however, they had found no common route in their quest.

3 A Season of Learning In the months that followed the Armistice hopes of renewal pervaded the European atmosphere. The visions of the young men who would become the socialist Front Generation's leaders flowed in with a broad current of ambitions and ideas of renovation. Nonetheless there was an element of difference in their outlooks. Although the war had made them victims, they could not—as so many others did—equate their wounds with innocence and conceive of solutions solely in external terms—depriving bad men of power and bad institutions of effectiveness. They understood that change must also be a matter of mind, their minds as well as others', and they realized that the war had not taught them all that must be known if they were to remake their world. "All of our feeling and thinking must be transformed," Carlo Mierendorff wrote in the spring of 1919. "We have to begin within ourselves. For the world begins with us." 1 A period of learning lay ahead for them. It was a time of exploration and definition that led them, from their various postwar starting points, to a commitment—or recommitment—to the organized socialist movement. The paths they followed in these intellectual Wanderjahren were not always straight. Where they ended was not necessarily predictable from where they began. In the course of their separate journeys they moved from enthusiasm and spontaneity to more sober and analytic approaches to achieving social change. By one avenue or another they found their way to academic perspectives that had been unknown in Marx's day or fundamentally altered since his death, and these influenced their political convictions. At the end of this peacetime education their formation as socialists was complete. So was their freedom from the movement's orthodoxies. And the resemblances among them, of which they could not yet be aware, were emerging. At the beginning the Germans, Mierendorff and Haubach, were furthest estranged from the socialist mainstream. The best they had to say for the

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Social Democrats who headed the new Weimar Republic was that the party's veteran chiefs in Hessen were good-hearted, if limited men. For the SPD's national leadership, which had opted for parliamentary democracy and bloodily repressed attempts at more radical changes, they had only contempt—"a politically bankrupt clique of bosses" Mierendorff called them in June 1919. 2 In this mood of condemnation he and Haubach were at one with the revolutionary left in postwar Germany. In their anger at the murders of the Communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, in their protests against the suppression of the Munich Soviet Republic, in countless other statements and ripostes they aligned themselves with the antagonists of the moderate new regime. Still, theirs was a different opposition from that of the two Marxist parties, the Independent Social Democrats (USPD) and Communists (KPD), which challenged the SPD. However similar their tone, their radicalism stemmed from other inspirations than Marxism. When Mierendorff and Haubach wrote of revolution in 1919, they drew on German writers and not on analysts of politics or society to explain their meaning. In passing from cultural to political concerns, from Die Dachstube to Das Tribunal, they brought with them the perspectives that men of letters had defined before and during the war, perspectives that had become radical as literature itself had become politicized in 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 8 . Already before the war a rising dissident current had seized German culture. Its embodiment in art and writing was Expressionism, a reaction in the name of the individual and of spiritual values against materialism in science and philosophy and naturalism in the arts. The Expressionists exalted Geist—creative spirit—and their horizons were broad and humanitarian. In their themes and techniques they went well beyond the stuffy, nationalistic limits of official Wilhelmine taste. During the last years before 1914 many had moved from dissidence to criticism and involvement with political and social issues. The experience of wartime accelerated this development. By the midpoint of the conflict the most dissatisfied had become champions of "Activism" (Aktivismus), the engagement of Geist in politics. Their immediate target was the war. Their deeper aim, once peace should be secured, was to allow Geist and those who could interpret it to direct the change that they believed could renew German and European society. It was the spokesmen of Aktivismus—Franz Pfemfert, Kurt Hiller, Ludwig Rubiner, René Schickele, and others—who were the strongest influences upon Carlo Mierendorff and Theo Haubach during their time in uniform.3 Especially in its early numbers Das Tribunal fairly crackled with the language of Expressionism and Activism. For Mierendorff, Haubach and their fellow contributors the goal was nothing less than the renewal of humanity; the overthrow of the Wilhelminian empire was only a first

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Theodor Haubach (left) and Carlo Mierendorff (third from left, rear) with friends in Darmstadt, 1 9 1 9

step in its achievement. In these sentiments they were at one with a broad collection of intellectuals and artists whose hopes for a revolution of spirit made the first months of Weimar a time of hyperbolic expectations, a time, for example, when a Walter Gropius could project a total revision in the training and professional lives of artists.4 All these visions identified a common nemesis, the bourgeois. Haubach offered a typical description in April 1919: "Bourgeois: i.e., wretched person whose horizons are blotted; narrow, limited faultfinder with life; a man full with satisfaction or a mean-spirited improver (all reformers belong here); a bloodless man, a maniac for order, an enemy of all heights and depths, a profane, sterile, obedient person, never altogether pure, never wholly bad." 5 Not a word about capitalism or possessions here, not a mention of class: the essence of the bourgeois lay in his cultural traits—his philistinism, his acceptance of limits, the calculability of his intentions and actions. The radicals of Das Tribunal associated these characteristics with the old order—"the empirically oriented, mechanized, utilitarian Germany" 6 —and with the majority of their fellow students, whom they

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scorned as careerists. Yet because they made the inspiration of Geist the touchstone of their good society, Mierendorff and Haubach were also unsure about the degree of change implied by the active entry of the working class into politics. They described the revolutions about them in physical terms—"an explosion resulting from excessive pressure," "a gigantic eruption of mechanical force" 7 —and left open the question whether they would achieve a true renovation. Haubach expressed his forebodings most pessimistically in the spring of 1919, when he wrote that even socialism and communism, though influenced by Geist, still preserved a fundamentally bourgeois outlook, "lacking consciousness of the action that alone brings liberation: not a reordering of the economy but a transcending of the economic!" 8 The experience of war counted here. Haubach and Mierendorff knew ordinary workingmen well enough from the trenches to understand that their revolutionary vistas would not extend as far as their own images of a republic of Geist. Nevertheless, the respect born of comradeship prohibited them from dismissing the more material goals of the working class or from concluding, like many of their contemporaries, that it must be pulled beyond itself by dictatorial methods. A gap existed. In seeking a means to close it Mierendorff and Haubach parted company with the leaders of Aktivismus, whose attitudes here were uncompromisingly elitist, and began to define a separate position of their own. 9 As the proletariat lost energy and initiative in the middle months of 1919, their concern intensified. "If ever intellectuals were responsible for something in their time," Mierendorff wrote in the fall, "it is for the outcome, the success, the final result of this revolution. They, not the proletariat. They have the broad overview. They have acquired the expertise." 10 But how to find the right connection between their ideas and the now flagging masses, who must be enlisted behind them for change to be assured? For Mierendorff more than for Haubach this dilemma was to become a lasting preoccupation, a focus of his thinking about socialism. In late 1919 and early 1920, however, his responses to it were still more cultural than political. In his stories and essays he had developed a style described by his friend, the poet Fritz Usinger, as Cubist, in which each sentence was crafted to stand by itself. It reflected his conviction that language had power, that Expressionism had begun the work of rescuing words from insignificance. "Revolution and endless electoral campaigns, editions of millions and empty talk have finally degraded the word; it is cheap and vapid and can no longer enchant anyone." 11 At least for the literate, however, there was a way back from indistinguishable babble to common understanding: through simplicity and directness. For Mierendorff language was the fundamental link between human beings. It must be cleansed of the trivial, reinvigorated, if humanity was to advance.

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All the same, Mierendorff knew that the reading public was a minority, beyond which lay the masses who lived without books, newspapers, or even advertising flyers. Reaching them was the essential. In his most incandescent essay of the postwar years Mierendorff plotted a way. His title encapsulated it: "If I Had the Cinema!" Here Mierendorff started from the premise that in the semiliterate mass society which had emerged in his lifetime imagination had become pictorial: For more and more people are losing the great gift of constructing the world from w o r d s . . . . People hear with their eyes. They are losing their inner vision, words are becoming phantoms. " T r e e " — " H o r s e " — " S k y " — n o t h ing lights up at these sounds. M a n is going deaf. He apprehends the world only through sight. 12

For this public of millions which learned by seeing, film offered an eye upon the world. Its potential as a weapon of ideas was thus boundless. Mierendorff could envision it because he realized, as did only a handful of Europeans in 1920, that the new medium was matched to the new masses. The cinema did not reason and convince, however. Mierendorff referred to its drawing power as fascination and fantasy, terms that were to recur in his political vocabulary, terms that blurred the function he wished for film: should it educate or manipulate its audience? Mierendorff wavered on this point between arguing that the public had not asked for the bourgeois Kitsch that the screen industry fed it, and insisting that ordinary people needed to be lifted beyond the horizons of Specksalat and beer. It was only a dream, of course, when he imagined 10,000 films against capitalism which audiences would watch because their favorites would star in them. But Mierendorff was an absolute realist in his views of why and how the cinema could provide "general instruction for everyone."13 His essay reiterated the lesson learned in war, that motivation was as much a matter of feeling and emotion as of the narrow rationality that he and Haubach associated with the bourgeois world and with much of socialism as well. Mierendorff and Haubach spun out their ideas amidst a community of their own age, returned soldiers who had gone into the universities. "Tom" Mosley, as he came to be known to friends, entered a world of older men in the Parliament elected in 1918. Whereas his German counterparts wrote and acted in circumstances that encouraged them to take initiatives, Mosley and the many other war veterans who had become M.P.s deferred to the experienced politicians. "It did not occur to me," he recalled, "as baby of the House, aged twenty-two, or to any of the others that we could at that stage play leading parts."14 Still they wished to play some part, and in April 1919 a number of them organized themselves as a New Members' Parliamentary Commit-

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tee, in order to press for their common goals. Mosley became one of the group's joint secretaries. The membership included men from both the Unionist and Liberal wings of the ruling Lloyd George coalition. For many of them, as for Mosley, party was a secondary matter. They were bound to their generation—the dead and the living—and its claim to a better world, and they were concerned that the coalition, with its overwhelming majority, should make good on its promises for reconstruction. 1 5 Suspicion therefore tempered their deference: "There was a strong movement among the new Members to teach the old fogys their business." 16 Mosley shared in these sentiments. In later years he might scoff at what he called the "youth racket" in politics, but this was to forget the genuine uncertainties of postwar, the worry, as he said in a 1 9 1 9 speech, "lest the old dead men with their old dead minds embalmed in the tombs of the past creep back to dominate your new age, cleansed of their mistakes in the blood of your generation." 1 7 Mosley and his parliamentary friends had more reason for hope than for skepticism in late 1 9 1 9 , for many senior politicians were also inclining to the judgment that the tasks of war and now of peacetime had made party division obsolete. There was much talk of "fusion"—making the coalition permanent. The press had taken to calling the New Members' Group a Centre Party; in the context of the moment they embodied a possibility that seemed both real and desirable to seasoned leaders on both sides of the coalition. Its chances, however, depended on the prime minister, David Lloyd George. In Kenneth Morgan's words, " H e alone in public flaunted that coat of many colours with which the Coalitionism was kaleidoscopically identified." 1 8 More specifically, he was the star on whom Mosley and the rest of the New Members' Group hung their faith. In their most ambitious dreams they envisioned a Centre Party under Lloyd George reaching out to include representatives of the moderate wing of the labor movement. As for the Labour Party itself, it seemed irrelevant to their ends. Looking back upon his career, Mosley saw himself blending "socialism" and "imperialism" in the centrist politics he pursued in the immediate postwar years. 1 9 At least in the former case his quotation marks seem appropriate. Committed though he was to fairness for all ranks in society, this was only one theme in his thinking, and not the major one. In his first months as an M.P. Mosley spoke out chiefly on military matters, demobilization, and the question of the government's support of the League of Nations. In his maiden speech he excoriated the "paralysing influence" of "bureaucratic control" and asserted that Britain's history had been "one long story of individual enterprise and success surmounting every obstacle thrown in its path by official ignorance and apathy." 2 0 These comments scarcely put him in alignment with socialism. As yet

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there was little in what Mosley said and did to hint that within five years he would become the Labour Party's prize recruit. Carlo Mierendorff and Theo Haubach held on to their hopes for a revolution led by intellectuals until the spring of 1920, when Das Tribunal expired for lack of funds; by that time the initiative in Germany had passed out of the hands of the left. By then Mosley had also given up on the "Centre Party" in disappointment that Lloyd George would not or could not carry the idea through. The second postwar year thus became a time of reassessment for these Front Generation figures. By contrast, Hendrik de Man remained an optimist at this stage. His disillusionment with the intellectuals and politicians of Europe had come soon after the Armistice; it had been the starting point of his own quest for renewal. By mid-1920 he believed he had reached his promised land—the Pacific Northwest of the United States. In Europe de Man had been discouraged by the masses as well as by their leaders. As he wrote later in the last version of his memoirs, he had expected the socialist working class of Belgium—and he could have said the Continent—to assume an attitude other than "the indifference they displayed toward anything that did not directly concern their appetites and their pay packets." 21 It was the same question upon which Mierendorff and Haubach were to turn uncertain during 1919. In the United States, by contrast, de Man felt there was a broader view. Because American democracy required public debate over great issues, the American army had gone "to the battlefield with a much more wide-spread consciousness of what it was fighting for than any of the European armies." 22 Similarly in peacetime the perspectives of the ordinary American seemed to de Man to rise above material preoccupations. In the context of his hopes the core of America's appeal lay in "the idealism that permeates its public institutions, and the higher quality given to the life of its citizens by its faith in democracy, freedom, the sanctity of labour, the equality of opportunity it offers to all men." 2 3 De Man's route to his "land of democracy" involved a detour at first. He left Belgium in 1919 to take a commission tendered by a Canadian businessman he had come to know during the war. His task was to lead a surveying team in Newfoundland; he was to locate a site for a large paper mill, with the prospect of becoming its director once it was constructed. The expedition he undertook would have fulfilled any European's dreams of the North American wilderness—Indians, caribou, trappers, waterfalls—and de Man at least played with the idea of becoming an "empire builder" himself. On his return, however, he discovered that the project was tainted with corruption and that the compensation he understood was to be guaranteed to the settlers of the chosen locality would not be forthcoming. In protest he resigned.24

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His next employment accorded better with his political sympathies. It brought him to Seattle in early 1920, on the invitation of the local trade union federation, to establish a "labor college" and to undertake other efforts in workers' education. To de Man the Pacific Northwest was "the birthplace of most of the progressive movements in the United States." 25 Labor was active there: Seattle had experienced the country's first general strike in 1919, and the region had been a stronghold of the radical Industrial Workers of the World. Before coming to Seattle de Man had written skeptically of the IWW as a variety of "Bolshevikism," successful only because of exploitation "in the migratory industries of the West." 2 6 On the scene he gained a more positive view of the "Wobblies," among whom he lived for a few weeks during the summer on an island in Puget Sound. His greatest enthusiasm, however, he extended to the FarmerLabor Party that consolidated itself in Washington in 1920. "I dare predict," he said of this alliance in late July, "that it is going to revolutionize the social constitution of all the new countries of the Anglo-Saxon world, and bring them, perhaps by paths different from those of European socialism, but not less surely nor less rapidly, to a cooperative republic of producers." 27 De Man was too careful an observer not to acknowledge the reactionary side of postwar America. For labor, after all, this was the era of the Palmer raids, strikebreaking, and militant opposition from the newly founded American Legion. Nevertheless, he was reluctant to part with his ideal of a citizenry that could live up to the demands of a just order. On a propaganda campaign in central Washington, he reported in the summer of 1920, "I did not enter a single farmhouse that did not have a library, and let me say parenthetically that socialist authors are well represented." 28 But the Yakima Valley was no Shangri-la of philosopherfarmers, any more than the average IWW member was a reader of Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel, as was de Man's closest acquaintance among the Wobblies. 29 The exile from Europe focused on what he wanted to see. In his eyes the Farmer-Labor Party in Washington symbolized "the great new fact that disturbs the slumbers of old party politicians upset to see this third predator threaten their monopoly of power." 30 The truth was that despite its striking success in November 1920—Farmer-Labor candidates for state office ran second to the Republicans—the party represented an ephemeral coalition whose solidarity would barely survive its first election. However optimistically he interpreted events during his months in the Pacific Northwest, de Man nevertheless resolved to return to Europe in the autumn of 1920. His personal circumstances influenced the decision. The University of Washington had offered him a teaching position for the fall semester; he had been scheduled to present a course on the psy-

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chology of the worker. As the beginning of the term approached, however, conservative political elements undertook a campaign against his appointment, and their pressure prevailed. A few days before classes started, the University's president had de Man's course canceled. Protests on the campus resulted in de Man's being allowed to give one lecture, and his reputation could not have been made too subversive, for late in October he was invited, as the "Famous Belgian Labor Expert," to address the very respectable Municipal League of Seattle. But he was out of a job, and the political tide, as he had to concede, was flowing to the right. It took only an admission of disappointed hopes, then, for him to decide to leave America when he received an offer from Brussels to take over direction of a new advanced institute for workers' education. 31 As it did for de Man, the range of political choice narrowed for Marcel Déat toward the end of 1920. It cannot be said that Déat turned away from socialism, as his Front Generation counterparts did in the months just after the Armistice. But the character of his commitment was not yet distinct. In his anger at the waste of the war and what he saw as the squandering of the peace he struck a radical tone in the articles he published in 1919. 3 2 On the other hand, his socialist models—and predecessors at the Ecole Normale Supérieure—the martyred Jean Jaurès and the wartime armaments minister Albert Thomas, were men who sought realizable gains, not unconditional revolution. Déat got to know Albert Thomas during this period. It was the twilight phase of Thomas's socialist career in France; in 1920 he was to become the director of the new International Labor Office in Geneva, a position that he held until his death in 1932 and that permanently removed him from direct involvement in party politics. Nonetheless, for a brief interval in the postwar era Thomas exercised a powerful influence within the French Socialist Party and even more upon its trade union ally, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). Already before the war, under the inspiration of the economist Edgar Milhaud, he had become an advocate of the nationalization of large enterprise. His experience in 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 8 , both in mobilizing French arms production and in studying developments in Russia, Germany, and the United States, led him to a more comprehensive vision of a collaborative economy in which producers, consumers, and representatives of the state joined together as equals in pursuit of efficiency and growth. H o w genuinely socialist it was remains a matter of debate. In any case it had its appeal for Déat, who was writing in 1919 that the wartime organization of the economy had erred only in not going far enough. 33 Thomas once described his aim as "revolutionary evolution." 3 4 The term was less a contradiction than it seemed, for although his approach began by building upon capitalist enterprise as it existed, its objective

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was to master and direct the process of production as a step toward socialism. This orientation reached far into the European left in the immediate postwar period. A flurry of schemes of economic planning and ideologies of socialist production was in stir. They originated with figures as disparate as Thomas and the young Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, with his factory council movement in Turin; as far apart as Lenin, who wanted to borrow capitalist techniques of management, and the English Guild Socialist G. D. H. Cole, with his notion of "encroaching control" over the workplace.35 In 1919 Hendrik de Man, whose interests also extended in this direction, explained why such ideas were now proliferating. "Only an optical illusion," he wrote, would allow anyone to confuse the conquest of political power with the achievement of a socialist society. Socialists could change society only when they had "a political, administrative, and technical capacity" to run society. "In order better to organize production and better to divide its fruits, it is necessary to begin by assuring its functioning and by making possible the unlimited increase of social productivity."36 Revolutionaries like Lenin would insist that the socialists must nonetheless first take over the state. Reformists like Thomas argued that they need not wait for full political power; they could begin to reshape society through economic restructuring. Later, when economic planning became the key to the realization of their aims, the socialists of the Front Generation would return to the issues that Thomas had raised for the movement, both within and beyond France, during and after the war. In 1919 and 1920, however, these concerns held them only momentarily. By mid-1920 Déat had turned his attention to more mundane and immediate matters. The SFIO (Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière), as the French Socialist Party was formally known, was approaching a crisis of identity over the decision whether or not to join the Communist Third International. Within his local section, in the Latin Quarter of Paris, Déat threw himself into the struggle against adherence. Following the party's split at the Congress of Tours in December, he held his ground, staying with the minority that had refused to change loyalties. Soon he was rebuilding the SFIO organization in his arrondissement.37 Through this conflict his attachment to the party solidified. Déat became the first of the Front Generation leaders to commit himself unequivocally to socialist politics. It remained for him to elaborate the content of his position, but its location on the ideological board was clear. His counterparts, more distant from the socialist mainstream, needed more time to link themselves to it. Wherever they stood in the fall of 1920, the sense of urgency that had possessed these questing ex-combatants in the first peacetime months

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had receded. The social order, they saw, would not be transformed as rapidly as they had wanted it to be, and they had to adjust the clock of their emotions to a more relaxed pace, a different tempo from the marchtime beat of clash and quick resolution that had become second nature to them at the front. Not only the facts of politics, however, but also the savors of life itself softened their intensity. In war they had lived on the edge; even the long intervals of inaction could not release them from the tension of combat. Now they were free to disengage themselves from conflict when they chose to, to go on furlough from politics if they wished, to pursue the private joys that war had denied them. And they did. Such pursuits could be political all the same, but then the fun outweighed the cause. It was sport when Oswald Mosley went down to Plymouth in the fall of 1919 to help Nancy Astor campaign for the parliamentary seat her husband had vacated; photographs from the scene always show him smiling. Electioneering was also a way for Mosley to deepen his friendship with one of Lady Astor's canvassers, Cynthia Curzon, a daughter of the foreign secretary. They were married the following spring in a ceremony that drew two kings in attendance and was the high point of the London social season. "They were going to have a great career together," Cynthia Curzon predicted when she told her father that she and Mosley had become engaged, "and he was destined to climb to the very top—with her aid." 3 8 From the start she was a participant in his efforts. For Mosley in this sunlit time love cast an extra brightness upon the world of politics. Mierendorff and Haubach also mixed lightheartedness and political purpose. Most often they did it with satire. Once they had launched Das Tribunal, they and their friends decided it was not enough to throw barbs at the bourgeoisie; they should also undress its pretensions. So, on April Fool's Day 1919, there appeared Hessenborn, purportedly the antiTribunal of respectable opinion in Darmstadt but in reality the inspiration of Mierendorff and his printer-confederate Pepy Wiirth. One of its contributors later recalled how its editorial conferences kept collapsing in laughter over one or another travesty of middle-class upstandingness, but the joke succeeded. Sales of the "Hessian Review for Moral Culture," as it was subtitled, helped pay for the production costs of Das Tribunal. It was still a time in Germany when one could have fun with one's political opponents. At Heidelberg Mierendorff, Haubach, and the group that gathered around them made the nationalist students frequent targets of their mirth. But politics did not monopolize their lives, and they also aimed their humor at professors, cultural figures, and one another. 39 Heidelberg, in Carl Zuckmayer's words, was then "the most progressive and intellectually exacting university in Germany," and Mierendorff,

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Haubach, and Zuckmayer were the core of a "magic circle" of friends that included talents like the poets Hans Schiebelhuth and Henry Goverts and the future news correspondent and diplomat Egon RanshofenWertheimer. The old yet fresh university was their arcadia of beer and discussion, study and all-night escapades, theater premieres and street melees over the Republic. There was too much to do, see, hear, and experience to discipline one's existence to politics. 40 Elsewhere their counterparts found other diversions. In London Oswald Mosley was making as much of a name for himself among the smart set of society as in politics. Parliament was only one part of his world. Polo, fast cars, parties, and country weekends filled out his calendar.41 By contrast, as they would be throughout his life, Marcel Déat's joys were more ascetic. At the Ecole Normale Supérieure studies consumed the day, and the pleasures tended to be intellectual. But Déat fondly remembered the "perfect comradeship" among the majority of students. A man who did not make friends easily, he found a community to his liking in the "incomparable laboratory of ideas of the Rue d'Ulm." 4 2 Hendrik de \lan pursued his happiness on another continent, but he found much there to satisfy him. For long stretches of time he was alone. Although he had brought his wife and two children with him to America, his marriage was faltering, and the separations imposed by his employments in Newfoundland and Seattle released him from a troubled personal impasse. In his work he was outdoors, and he loved it; for a man with his enthusiasm for fishing, the summer weeks he spent on Puget Sound in 1920 must have come close to paradise. It was his interval of retreat from the wars. 43 Personal diversions thus slowed the drive to forge a new society, but a more serious obstacle was the general postwar stabilization. The Europe to which de Man returned at the end of 1920 was entering a new phase of political and social development. The post-Armistice sense of revolutionary possibilities had been dampened by defeat after defeat in Western and Central Europe: the failure of massive strikes in Britain and France and of the workers' occupation of the factories in Italy, the repression of uprisings in Germany and Hungary. And on top of defeat came division: as in France, with the conflict that confirmed Déat's commitment to the SFIO, during the fall and winter of 1 9 2 0 - 2 1 the majority of socialist parties and trade unions had split over the issue of adherence to the Third International. Remaking the world had proved to be difficult even in what had seemed the most auspicious of circumstances. By the beginning of 1921 the chances for success appeared remote. For those who were to become the leaders of the socialist Front Generation this return to bourgeois normalcy delivered a sobering lesson about the difficulties of change, a lesson further confirmed by events oc-

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curring in Russia. In the immediate postwar period they had displayed a variety of attitudes toward the Bolsheviks. Mierendorff and Haubach had been the most positive, particularly in contrasting the boldness of the revolutionary enterprise in Russia with the timidity of the new Republic's initiatives in Germany. However, the Expressionistic-ge/siig element in their radicalism also colored these views: they tended to portray the Russian Revolution as if it were being led by Maxim Gorky and not by Lenin. 44 By early 1921 it was clear that this was not so. The Bolsheviks' suppression of the Kronstadt sailors' revolt, their curbing of internal party dissent and the economic relaxation of the New Economic Policy all demanded that the ambiguous content of their revolution be weighed against its undeniable magnitude. As they drew that balance, Mierendorff and Haubach found less to hope for from the east. De Man, Mosley, and Déat, who had been skeptical from the start, meanwhile became only more dubious about the value of the Russian experiment. 45 Another expectation had also been blunted by this time. As 1921 began, the Wilsonian vision of a new international order lay crippled. In its place stood the Versailles settlement, with its bifurcation of Europe between the states the treaty had benefited and those it had punished. In this situation a Mosley might be moved to fight all the harder for the League of Nations, whose most energetic parliamentary advocate he became. 46 Nevertheless, the League was already struggling, and with it floundered the hopes that a new politics of cooperation might overcome the old diplomacy of advantage. These reverses provided the transition to a less activist, more reflective period in the parallel evolution of the Front Generation socialists. It was a time to learn what they were to do when it had become evident that neither revolutionary enthusiasm nor favorable circumstances would by themselves transform society. In the universities or on their own they now turned to areas of study—sociology, economics, psychology, philosophy—in which rigor and system were applied to the questions and issues which had preoccupied them since the war. In one of his theater reviews Theo Haubach had praised a stage director for imposing discipline and exactness in place of "the agonized sentimental chaos of the moment." 4 7 He seemed to be speaking as well about the shift in mood that led him and his Front Generation counterparts to seek their answers in more formal and academic approaches. "Learning," Carlo Mierendorff wrote at this time, "is not some kind of trash that today's politician can throw onto the rubbish pile. . . . One element alone—specialized knowledge—is master of the state, of a society split by the division of labor." 48 Mierendorff offered these comments in a tribute to the sociologist Max Weber, whose lectures he heard in Munich just before Weber's death in

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summer 1920. Both personally and intellectually the young veteran had been deeply impressed by the professor who bore "in every respect such a specific imprint" of the educated and wealthy middle class to which he belonged. 49 It was an experience that was characteristic of this phase of the socialist Front Generation's evolution. With few exceptions its future leaders found their academic mentors among liberal bourgeois savants like Max Weber. It is true, of course, that they, and others who would later join them, encountered few Marxists in the universities; political discrimination had kept men with radical views off the faculties. Yet they were not inclined in any case to sip from only a single fountain of learning. Some did become close to scholars who were sympathetic to socialism—the economist Emil Lederer at Heidelberg, and Lucien Herr, the erudite librarian of the Ecole Normale—but these were intellects who drew on Marx as only one of several sources. 50 The Front Generation socialists adopted a similar attitude. They were acquainted with Marxism. They read the literature. But they were also young enough to recognize Marxism's limits. The dimension of time was an element in their criticism, as in these comments by Theodor Haubach: "What was of the greatest validity and significance in the 19th century was already severely shaken at the beginning of the 20th and was in a state of complete disintegration when it sought to become active in 1918 in Germany. That says nothing against Marx. Ideas like his, tied to their era, must also suffer their catastrophes. But it says everything against the Marxists who blindly spew out the most decayed theorems." 51 Rather than follow the movement's established authority, the men who were to lead the socialist Front Generation found a set of intellectual guides who could take them, in the phrase Hendrik de Man later made famous, "beyond Marxism." The concerns that, at this point, they unknowingly shared led them to remarkably similar tutors. They wanted hard knowledge about society. They sought mentors who could offer it to them and would also sympathize with their ambitions. They discovered them, by and large, among the most progressive and engaged of liberal scholars and thinkers, both within and outside the universities. Thus at the Ecole Normale Supérieure Marcel Déat became the prize student of Célestin Bouglé, the most politically involved of Durkheimian sociologists and the only one to author a critical analysis of Marxism. Déat was also directly influenced by the works of Durkheim, who had died only in 1917, and by others of his school such as the economist François Simiand." At Heidelberg the circle of republican students of which Mierendorff and Haubach were heart and soul found their way to academic patrons who included, along with Emil Lederer, the philosopher Karl Jaspers and the sociologist Alfred Weber, the brother of Max Weber and a founder of the Democratic Party of the Weimar Republic. 53

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In London Oswald Mosley met the outstanding liberal economist of his time, John Maynard Keynes, while serving on the Arms Limitation Committee of the League of Nations Union; the contact may have been casual then, but by the mid-1920s he was schooling himself in Keynes's professional writings.54 Meanwhile the polymath de Man conducted his intellectual explorations among a range of social thinkers that extended from the psychologist William McDougall and the efficiency expert F. W. Taylor to prophetic figures such as the industrialist visionary Walther Rathenau and the conservative philosopher Count Hermann Keyserling.55 It would be wrong, as academics themselves know, to overestimate the influence of these theorists and scholars, especially upon as bright a collection of minds as the Front Generation leaders. Still, it mattered. For these ex-combatants, living in different countries and amid contrasting personal circumstances, education, in the form of their parallel ventures into the socially oriented disciplines, became another element of generational identity. It strengthened and refined the commonality of perspective implanted in them by the war. And it furnished them with language and concepts which gave clear definition to the problems that had been only roughly marked out for them during the turbid years of fighting. Most of what they learned fell into two categories. The first centered on the sources of personal action, the second on the workings of the economy—areas which seem in retrospect to have been fields of preparation for the initiatives in political motivation and economic planning with which the Front Generation leaders attempted to renovate socialism a decade later. In regard to the first, more casually framed focus, one idea ran through the work of all their mentors: the sociology of Durkheim and Bouglé or of Max and Alfred Weber, the psychology of McDougall, the Lebensphilosophie of Keyserling. It was that the incentives to action could not be explained exclusively in terms of external factors. Autonomous impulses—they might be labeled spiritual or psychological—also existed. This was a proposition to match the beliefs that the war experience had shaped for the Front Generation socialists. Here they found it elaborated in formal, theoretical terms. It was most prominent in the writings of the sociologists, who had been compelled, in the 1890s and afterward, to devise responses to the historical materialism of Marx. But although theorists like Durkheim or Max Weber denied that personal incentives were invariably reflective of material conditions, they also set them in the social context and rejected the classic liberal assumption of a totally unencumbered individualism. This mode of analysis suggested that motivation was a matter to be approached on the collective level, through a mass movement like that of socialism. The economic insights that the Front Generation's studies yielded were more diffuse. Complexity was the theme that united them: the economy

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was no simple mechanism. Here also, often only implicitly, the essentials of Marxism were challenged. On various grounds the economic theorists whom the Front Generation socialists heeded rejected the scenario of a capitalism collapsing through its internal contradictions. Rathenau and Keynes held that the economy was already a mix of capitalist and socialist elements; it had passed beyond, in Keynes's phrase, "the end of laissez faire.''' François Simiand contended that wage and price levels could not be explained in terms of purely economic criteria, without reference to prevailing structures of values. Alfred Weber and Emil Lederer proposed that new elements be assessed: the rise of the salariat, the dynamics of organization, the effects of location. From one critical perspective or another, then, the ex-soldiers were told that economic restructuring could not be achieved merely by changing ownership; the reality was more complicated than that. But although Marxism now seemed an inadequate approach, those of its critics who influenced the Front Generation's members took a similarly social view of the economy and saw no way back to an individualistic liberalism.56 Friendship was often the leaven of education in these years. Personal sympathies and intellectual resonances reinforced each other in ways that make it difficult to imagine that this period of learning would have been as important if it had been solely a progress of books read or lectures attended. This mutuality of spirit allowed playful moments, as when Mierendorff spoofed Alfred Weber, monocle and all, on a summer night of satire in Heidelberg, with Weber applauding in the audience.57 It also sustained contacts long afterward. Twenty years after completing his doctorate, in the midst of war and plotting against Hitler, Theo Haubach again discussed philosophy with his onetime professor Karl Jaspers. Even into the late 1930s Célestin Bouglé maintained funds on hand in case Déat should want to finish and publish his never-completed dissertation.58 De Man too, probing on his own, gained from such personal ties. In Darmstadt, where he settled in 1922 after new disappointments with socialism in Belgium, he frequently walked the outskirts of the city with Count Keyserling: "Above all he challenged your mind, and there are few people to whom I am indebted for as much intellectual stimulus." 59 At the end of this formative period, then, the men who were to lead the socialist Front Generation had come to recognize how difficult it would be to realize their ambitions for renewal. Difficult but not impossible, however: the same education which sobered their visions of change also encouraged the prospect that action could be effective, if more slowly than they liked. Their separation from orthodox Marxism, with its deterministic biases, worked as a shot of optimism in this respect. The perspectives they had adopted allowed that human initiative was a power

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in itself, independent from the impersonal forces of history. It must be applied, however, on the collective plane. In practice the only movement that suited this outlook was socialism. At this point in the early 1920s they were a tiny minority, a handful of individuals. But they were a nucleus. In their journey through combat and higher learning they had acquired a unique identity. Among no other group were the lessons of the war, refined by a training in theory, so directly transmuted into a socialist commitment. It is on this account that they, among the vast number of ex-combatants who belonged to the movement, were to stand apart as socialism's Front Generation. As they were to discover in coming years, many others were ready to share this identification.

4 Making Their Way On a May Sunday in 1924 Egon Wertheimer, newly arrived in London as correspondent for the Social Democratic Party daily Vorwärts, went to his first Labour Party meeting. Wertheimer, a friend of Carlo Mierendorff and Theo Haubach at Heidelberg, had been one of the small band of officers who flew in the Austrian air corps during the war. Now he was to witness the London socialist debut of another ex-aviator, Oswald Mosley. "Suddenly, there was a movement in the crowd, and a young man, with the face of the ruling class in Great Britain, but with the gait of a Douglas Fairbanks, thrust himself forward to the platform, followed by a lady in heavy, costly furs." As Wertheimer watched, the audience of some two thousand greeted Mosley with "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," listened intently to his speech—"a hymn, an emotional appeal directed not to the intellect, but to the Socialistic idea"—and then called for a few words from Lady Cynthia Mosley, the woman in furs, whom they cheered as loudly as they did her husband. Even as he groped through his dictionary to catch the meaning of all he heard, Wertheimer understood that it was a sensational beginning. 1 Mosley received an equally warm welcome from the Labour Party's leadership. As a socialist he started out in the foreground, and he stayed there. "His quick mind," a Labour nonadmirer wrote later, "combined with his attractive platform personality and eloquence, gained him immediately a prominent place." 2 Among the Front Generation socialists his ascent was the most rapid. Mierendorff and Haubach in Germany and Déat in France progressed more slowly, while de Man, at this stage, had forsaken politics for theoretical pursuits. Still, by the end of 1926, the year in which de Man made his own impact upon the movement with the publication of his Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus (The Psychology of Socialism), all the others had become presences of some force in their respective parties. And they were beginning to attract kindred spirits. *

*

*

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One of the best-remembered images of socialism during the immediate postwar years was the one that Léon Blum offered at the 1920 Congress of Tours, just before the split between French Socialists and Communists: "We are convinced to the depths of our being, that while you go seek adventure, someone must stay to watch over the old house." 3 It was an elegant figure of speech. It was also the literal truth. European social democracy was a vieille maison by the beginning of the 1920s. Although the data on membership are spotty and often impressionistic, it seems clear that the parties to which the Front Generation socialists committed themselves in these years drew the bulk of their support from older workers based primarily in the skilled trades. Younger men generally were inclined at least toward left-wing socialism, but often to communism. The recruits to the left also tended to come from newer and larger-scale branches of industry.4 Apart from its older following, socialism was also distinguished by party structures and elites firmly bound to the past. "Everything points to Labour's enduring ante-bellum character: continuity of leadership and personnel at all levels, effective continuity of policy, and, above all, continuity of organization" 5 —Ross McKibbin's evaluation of the post-1918 British scene could be applied with little modification to the other socialist parties of Western and Central Europe, and this despite the wartime and postwar divisions most of them experienced. The war and the Russian Revolution did not drive socialism to the right as much as they revealed or confirmed the relative conservatism of the movement and its leaders.6 Studies of the class and occupational ties of party officials and parliamentary representatives have shown that many of the socialist elite came from or had ascended to the middle strata of society. Under the influence of Robert Michels' sociology of parties, with its affirmation of an "iron law of oligarchy," it has been argued that this phenomenon produced an inevitable separation in the movement, between leaders either born or become bourgeois and their mass proletarian following: socialism turned conservative because those who set its course no longer belonged to the working class. 7 But familiar and seductive though this interpretation may be, evoking the theme of betrayal so common in the historiography of the European left, it is mistaken. For the fundamental truth about interwar socialism was that its basis remained largely within the industrial working class. If it was threatened by embourgeoisement, this was, as the Front Generation's critique would later insist, a danger for the rank and file no less than for the upper echelons. It does insufficient credit to the intelligence and perceptions of self-interest of the mass of workers to suppose that they accepted leadership from groups who consistently failed to represent them. The hesitancy that socialist parties and trade

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unions displayed in the immediate postwar years was not foisted upon them by sold-out cliques of hierarchs. It was the mood of the movement as a whole. Throughout the interwar era socialist parties generally won the majority of their parliamentary seats and local offices in industrial regions. The French Socialists were the major exception. During the 1920s and 1930s the SFlO's electoral profile changed as it lost support in older manufacturing areas and, in competition with the Communists, failed to gain it in new centers of production like the " R e d Belt" of the Paris suburbs; meanwhile it increased its strength in the classic, small-town southern strongholds of the republican left. Elsewhere far less slippage occurred. In Britain, Germany, and Belgium most socialist votes came from the blue-collar strata, and the parties relied heavily on the assistance of the trade unions. All of them, moreover, including the SFIO, gave priority to holding or recapturing the working-class electorate. Thus into the late 1930s the movement's electoral frontiers, real or perceived, lay within the proletariat—at the point where workingmen's loyalty to Liberalism persisted in Britain, or where the boundary with communism stood on the Continent. That the political struggle was waged on this terrain could only fortify the traditional outlook and habits of the socialist leadership. 8 It was this commitment to established paths that discouraged the young enthusiasts of the Front Generation in the tumultuous months following the Armistice. From a longer perspective, however, the socialists' characteristically muted estimates of the chances for a new order seem realistic; even amid the postwar turmoil, European society remained fundamentally stable. It can be debated whether the socialist leaders' caution made them ultimately seem wise or whether it was their wisdom that made them cautious; in any case they were in closer step with prevailing currents than their more militant critics allowed. Nevertheless, the movement was hurt by its dissociation in practice from anything more than parliamentary democracy. It had lost the majority of younger, activist elements. It had to contend with deeply felt accusations of treachery from groups to the left of the socialist parties. If revolution was out of reach, other, more limited opportunities to advance the working class had also been missed. It would have been difficult for socialists to concede, at the outset of 1 9 2 3 , that the course of events since the Armistice should have produced the bourgeois politicians or national dictators who by then held power nearly everywhere in Western and Central Europe. 9 At least by this time the movement had overcome its wartime and postwar rifts over support of military budgets and adherence to the Third International. The future seemed to present new possibilities, as Rudolf Hilferding, now the foremost socialist theoretician, suggested a year

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later. Unlike Marx after the 1848 revolutions, he wrote, socialists could not withdraw into their libraries or studies while the reaction curbed the working classes. The balance of forces had changed: "The masses, aroused by the war and with a heightened sense of their power, continue as actors on the historical stage." Consequently, socialists could not channel their efforts, as before 1918, in alternating phases—"study in periods of political defeat, struggle and action while on the rise. . . . We must learn to combine both." 1 0 Concluding his appraisal, Hilferding admitted that "we find ourselves in an age in which real changes have outstripped scientific understanding." 11 Notwithstanding his own noteworthy and lasting contributions to the analysis of capitalism in the 1920s, the theoretical gap he identified was not closed subsequently. In Germany it was manifested both in mechanical adherence to Marxist formulas and in an absence of alternatives to them; Hilferding, it has been written, exercised a "tragic influence" on the SPD by rejecting the possibility of socialist solutions for immediate problems and insisting that only a full socioeconomic transformation, which remained far in the future, would help. Similar criticisms have been directed at other prominent Marxists of the era—Otto Bauer in Austria, Adéodat Compère-Morel in France. 12 However, the ideological problem also existed where Marxism was only a secondary influence. Labour in 1924 has been described as "a Party with a socialist objective but no socialist ideology"; the outlook of its leaders, in another formulation, "provided little guidance for the world in which they found themselves now." 13 The only notable exception, and his case is disputed, is Léon Blum, who in 1926 and 1927 developed a principled tactical approach to the question of the SFIO's participation in government. But on economic matters Blum did not advance beyond the Marxist conventions of his party. 14 In general socialists continued to look ahead to the ultimate goal of abolishing capitalism and did not theorize about the intermediate stages. Yet the choices they had made against radical action in 1918-1923 implied that the interval would be lengthy—a long darkness to journey through until the glow of the socialist shore would light the way. An unimaginative collection of party chiefs, an aging blue-collar following—these features seem most characteristic of European socialism in the mid-1920s. In some respects they were its strengths. Loyalties to the working class and to traditional values and ideals ran deep among socialists; they were bonds that went beyond passing styles or the events of the day. Neither did they seem out of date as the decade advanced, and socialism's electoral totals began to rise again. Still, the rather stolid face the movement presented contrasts sharply with the activist profile

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of its Front Generation recruits, a divergence suggesting that their progress within the parties they had chosen would not always be smooth. "My path now led inevitably to the Labour Party," Mosley recalled of his entry in 1924. At that point it seemed clear to him that "the only hope" in politics "now lay in the party which had been thrown up by the mass of the people to right their wrongs."15 This rationale held true for all the Front Generation socialists. They made their commitments with their eyes open to the shortcomings of the parties or trade unions that they joined. But they believed that they must be with the majority and with the organizations that respected majority rule. As their careers evolved, the Front Generation socialists were to demonstrate that leadership was a dynamic value for them, and discipline its necessary complement. At this stage, however, their impulses weighed more toward democracy, and this aligned them with socialism and its priorities. Finding a starting point, a space from which to operate, was a common problem. Both experience and study had shown how necessary it was to have an institutional base in politics, especially within the hierarchical and bureaucratized socialist parties. Locating a place was not a simple matter, however, and to a large extent circumstances dictated individual choices. In Britain and France the particular configurations of electoral systems and party structures led Mosley and Déat to gain their openings in constituencies where socialism was weak and new energies were welcome. In Germany, where a combination of proportional representation and large electoral districts had submerged the autonomy of local party units, Mierendorff and Haubach got their starts outside the SPD. In their cases it was a progress by stages and along separate tracks. Haubach achieved the more immediate prominence through his connection with the Socialist Youth Movement. This had been a prewar creation, intended to serve as the SPD's obedient auxiliary, funneling recruits in their late teens and twenties into the party's intellectual and institutional networks. It never fulfilled this expectation. From restless insubordination before 1914 it had moved to antimili tarisi rebelliousness during the war and a simmering dissatisfaction afterward; at the organization's first postwar national congress, at Weimar in 1920, the delegates threw aside the agenda designed for them by SPD elders and went on to their own order of business. To be accepted as an independent entity, to be heard as a separate voice, had been the essential issue throughout, above specific dissensions over war or revolution. In 1920 it seemed more central than ever to the workers, ex-soldiers, and students who saw in Jungsozialismus a means of expressing the differences between their values

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and those of the older generation. This sentiment lay behind a declaration from Kiel at the beginning of the next year, in which young socialists hesitated to align themselves with the main body of the movement, "for it is . . . so one-sidedly oriented toward the rational and the materialistic that it cannot respond to the spiritual stirrings that exist among the youth and have been galvanized by the war." 16 One of the first to pay attention to this current was Hendrik de Man, who followed events in Germany closely after his return to Belgium. In the youth movement he saw a chance for the renewal he had vainly hoped for since the Armistice, a judgment deepened by firsthand contact as an invited guest at the 1921 congress of the Young Socialists at Bielefeld. Here, he observed several years later, something more was involved than the ordinary frictions between youth and age; it was "the ideological rebellion of postwar socialism against prewar socialism." The fault line of this split ran through the cataclysm of 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 8 . "Between the old and the new generation now lay the dreadful, convulsive experience of the World War," which had undermined the confident expectations with which the movement hadgrown into middle age in the prewar decades.17 Their ambitions for a new beginning and their identification of the war as a breaking point between outlooks set the Young Socialists on common ground with Haubach and Mierendorff, as well as with de Man. Haubach's contact with them came through the friends he made in Hamburg, where he went after receiving his doctorate. One of the themes of the Jungsozialisten was reconciliation of the proletariat and the nation. Their fallen hero was not Karl Liebknecht but Ludwig Frank, the SPD deputy who had volunteered at age forty-four in 1914, the only Reichstag member to be killed in action. Their voice was the worker-poet Karl Bröger, whose "Bekenntnis" (Confession), written at the front, had concluded: Always we have known inside we held a love for you Simply that we never spoke the name of what we knew But your greatest peril set no more magnificent a test It was your poorest son who kept you faith beyond the rest Think of it, O Germany 1 8

This concern with the national issue became primary at the outset of 1923, when French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr to enforce the Allies' reparations claims upon Germany. It led to a conference of some one hundred persons on the Easter weekend at the Hessian village of Hofgeismar, out of which came a loosely organized group that soon became known by the name of its meeting place. It was to this Hofgeismar

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Circle of Young Socialists that Haubach made his way in his first active months in socialist politics.19 In Hamburg he had begun as an assistant at the Institut für Aussenpolitik. Early in 1924, however, he became foreign affairs editor of the SPD newspaper, the Hamburger Echo—succeeding Egon Wertheimer when he left for London. As he established himself professionally, Haubach also developed friendships with local adherents of the Hofgeismar Circle, most notably the educator Alma de l'Aigle and his fellow journalist Gustav Dahrendorf. His talent and interest soon put him in the center of the group's work. At its second general meeting at Whitsuntide 1924, he coauthored a declaration of principles that defined the Hofgeismar position on the major issues confronting socialism. Its key passages spoke the convictions of the Front Generation: the state was a fulcrum of power that must be struggled for; the nation was a binding historical reality; the working class existed and could be liberated only on the actual terrain of nation and state.20 These assertions provoked opposition from more orthodox quarters. Among the Young Socialists an emphatically Marxist counterorganization was created at Hannover in August 1924; it too became known by its place of origin. On Easter weekend of the following year the two factions fought out their differences at a conference in Jena, where a pair of the brightest new minds in socialism, the Austro-Marxist theorist Max Adler for the Hannoverians and the legal scholar Hermann Heller for the Hofgeismarer, engaged in a fiery and memorable debate. The majority attending sided with Adler. It was the beginning of the end of the Hofgeismar Circle's effectiveness.21 Nevertheless the link with the group had served as a starting point for Haubach, and a number of individuals associated with it—Dahrendorf, Heller, Franz Osterroth, August Rathmann—would be later Front Generation allies in the drive to remake German socialism. As Hofgeismar lost impetus, Haubach found new avenues of opportunity. He had gained some notice in the party through his efforts, both in his journalism and in the debates among the Young Socialists, to define a socialist foreign policy. As a result he became a contributor on international subjects to Die Gesellschaft, the review, edited by Rudolf Hilferding, that spoke for the SPD leadership.22 He was also a conspicuous figure in the new paramilitary organization of the republican left, the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold. The Reichsbanner was founded early in 1924 in reaction to the powerlessness which both the Republic and the parties loyal to it had displayed during the previous year against a series of armed threats that culminated in Adolf Hitler's failed Munich putsch in November. Although the Reichsbanner was open to all repub-

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licans and attracted members and support from the Catholic Center and Democratic parties, its mass base and leadership were concentrated in the SPD. Like the Young Socialists earlier, it was another genie in the bottle for the Social Democratic party chiefs: they recognized the potency, even the necessity, of a uniformed defense organization, but even as they gave it their official blessing they remained suspicious of this separate creation whose day-in, day-out affairs were run mostly by excombatants in their late twenties and thirties, men with a different experience and outlook.23 Theo Haubach quickly became one of the guiding spirits of the Reichsbanner. His ambitions for it, with their implicit condemnations of the party's shortcomings, offer reason for the SPD's tentativeness. As Haubach envisioned it, the new league's defensive function was only a beginning. Its more fundamental mission was "the formation and development of a 'republican consciousness'": a goal to be gained not by transmitting what was regarded as "valuable" knowledge—that was the weakness of the conventional Social Democratic approach—but by infusing every facet of its members' activity—marches, sport, ceremony, as well as instruction—with the tenets and symbols of a free order.24 It was an objective that summed up the experience of the front, the lessons of the university, the impulses expressed in Jungsozialismus: political loyalty committed the whole person, heart as well as mind. While Haubach threw his energies into journalism and the Reichsbanner, Carlo Mierendorff followed a more uncertain route into socialist politics. It led him first, in November 1922, from Heidelberg to Berlin, where he took a position as staff assistant for economic policy (wirtschaftspolitischer Hilfsarbeiter) with the Transport Workers' Union. In the little more than two years that he stayed there Mierendorff worked on and, consequently, often wrote about issues of importance to the organization, particularly the 1924 readjustment of Germany's reparations obligations through the Dawes Plan, which affected railroad and postal employees. Occasionally, however, in pieces he contributed to the Hamburger Echo, he revealed his broader preoccupations about the vitality of democratic regimes and the impact of national symbols.25 These were the issues that drew his passion and fired his ambition. Toward the end of 1924 he won a chance to address them as everyday concerns when he was offered an editorship in Darmstadt with the SPD Hessischer Volksfreund. The opportunity did not turn out to be the "sensational event" Mierendorff had hoped it would be when he returned to his home city. Darmstadt soon seemed too small and provincial—not as important as Hamburg, Haubach's base, not to mention Berlin. Mierendorff found himself cramped and unhappy. He is remembered attending a Hofgeismar Circle

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gathering in Hamburg in mid-1925, where he and Haubach amused the group one evening with scenes from a theater piece cast in Darmstadt dialect. In the same period, however, he expressed the fear that he would vegetate if he remained for very long where he was, and he leaped at the momentary possibility that he might be able to replace Egon Wertheimer as Vorwärts correspondent in London.26 No opening emerged there, but release did come at the end of the year with an invitation to return to Berlin as second secretary of the SPD Reichstag delegation. Mierendorff eagerly accepted and took up his new duties early in February 1926. In Berlin Mierendorff became attached to a circle of younger SPD, union, and academic figures who met regularly at one of the cafés on Unter den Linden. Haubach and Wertheimer also took part whenever they were in Berlin. Yet as much as the locale and his contact with likeminded contemporaries encouraged Mierendorff, his dealings with the party's leaders dispirited him. In April he commented on a recent "brief discussion with Hilferding, which again demonstrated with frightful clarity how far apart 'we' are from one another." And he continued: "From the beginning I aimed to oppose ( -I- to come into conflict with) a great many things + a great many people, but the extent to which this has happened nevertheless scares me at times." Others seemed to be content "to snore on their laurels," while the left-wing opposition was "exactly as useless as that which they resist."27 Mierendorff felt such frustration all the more acutely because he believed that the Republic had reached a point of transition, where the struggles that had arisen out of the events of 1918 and 1919 could be left behind. Invoking the military imagery so favored by Front Generation socialists he likened the situation to that at the end of a long sea journey: the embarkation was at hand; now, "Out with the map, routes of march, program!" 28 But would the SPD define its direction and objective in the positive terms that the future demanded? Mierendorff viewed this question from a standpoint which paralleled Haubach's perspective on the Reichsbanner. "The republicans were remarkably late in recognizing the value of symbols," he wrote at another point in 1926. Flags mattered. Allegiances were built on emotion as well as on principle. And what was true of the Republic held for socialism as well. "The banner of the socialist commonwealth will be different: new, unprecedented, invoking the future, free of the past, fascinating as the ideal itself."29 Oswald Mosley, who had chosen a political career well before Mierendorff and Haubach, became a socialist in March 1924, more than a year after they had committed themselves fulltime to German Social Democracy. For Mosley it was the conclusion of a logical progression. He had crossed the floor of the House of Commons to the opposition benches in November 1920 in protest against the coalition government's

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repressive policies in Ireland. He had sat thereafter as an independent M.P. His thinking in this period came nearest to Liberalism, but he was looking for something that the Asquithian remnant of the Liberal Party could not offer. For a time it seemed that the new location he sought might materialize in the Conservative-Liberal combination plotted at in 1 9 2 1 and 1 9 2 2 by his League of Nations Union patron, Lord Robert Cecil. But nothing resulted from Cecil's maneuverings, and Mosley began to consider moving further left, beyond the Liberals. 3 0 For Mosley the attraction of the Labour Party increased as both Conservatives and Liberals appeared to forsake national purpose for the narrower causes of "the great interests." Only, as he wrote after becoming a socialist, in the "great instrument forged in the agony of the working class" was the "soul of England" to be found. 31 He was not so certain about the Labour leadership, however. In April 1 9 2 3 he stated that while they were "worthy of every respect . . . I do wish . . . that they would abandon, at any rate for the time being, their habit of discussing ultimate issues and advance in a concrete and concise form an immediate programme to deal with immediate issues." 3 2 Over the next year he overcame these hesitations. Cynthia Mosley's political involvement increased noticeably as her husband turned toward Labour, and their social life now came to include the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb and the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald. 3 3 When Labour took power after the Conservatives stumbled in the national election that fall, Mosley was ready to join the party, and he did in the following March. As an M.P. with an established reputation, Mosley had no trouble carving out an organizational base within the party structure. In the weeks after he came to Labour some seventy constituencies offered him candidacies in place of Harrow, which he had successfully defended as an independent but could not possibly hold as a socialist. He chose the Ladywood division of Birmingham. It was adjacent to his native county, Staffordshire. M o r e important, it was an inviting challenge, an arena where the new man could prove himself to his party. Since the 1870s Birmingham had been the electoral stronghold of the Chamberlain family, first under the Liberal and then Unionist colors of Joseph Chamberlain, now in allegiance to Conservatism with his sons Austen and Neville. Neville Chamberlain, the home secretary in the recent Conservative government, was the sitting member for Ladywood. He had kept the district with just a 1500-vote margin amid the Labour victory of 1 9 2 3 ; he could be considered vulnerable. Mosley immediately set out to turn this potential into reality. His chance came within months, when the Labour government resigned from office in October 1 9 2 4 after losing the Liberal support it had

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needed to survive. Mosley threw all his oratorical energies into the fight, speaking from dawn to dusk and from neighborhood to neighborhood. He came very close to winning. Chamberlain squeezed by with a margin of 77 votes out of some 27,000 cast. For Mosley it was a defeat of far more benefit than an easy victory in some safe district. In the privacy of their diaries his Conservative opponents called him "that viper," "a hairy heeled fellow." But to his new following he was a hero denied, and the Birmingham Labour organization was his for the taking. He had earned his socialist credentials.34 As popular as Mosley so quickly became in Birmingham, he was regarded with suspicion by some in the national party. "No sooner had Mr. Mosley come into the Party," one member wrote, "than there began the heartbreaking spectacle of Local Labour Parties stumbling over themselves to secure him as their candidate. At that time there was not a particle of evidence to show that he understood one of the problems in their lives." 35 His wealth engendered mistrust as well as a kind of traditional deference. He lived in a high style that some considered an insult to the Labour movement, while others accepted it because Mosley and his wife made no pretenses to humility or sought to excuse what they spent. There was no clear pattern in his reception. He found his allies mostly on the party's left wing in his early Labour years, in the Independent Labour Party, a constituent member of the national organization. He was attracted by the militancy of its dissident leaders, most notably the "Clydesiders" John Wheatley and James Maxton. Yet he belonged to no faction and, especially while out of Parliament, remained something of a solitary force. 36 His loss at Ladywood left Mosley free of the parliamentary calendar for the first time since the war's end, and in the next two years he and Cynthia visited India and the United States, apart from regular vacation trips to France and Italy. He also had time to reflect. For the first time he worked out a theoretical position on the issues before socialism; it became the basis for the "Birmingham Proposals," approved at a district delegates' meeting in the spring of 1925 and summarized in the treatise Revolution by Reason, published later in the year. In Birmingham Mosley was beginning to collect a team of allies. They included Allan Young, a railway worker's son from Glasgow who had been a medical orderly in the war, and John Strachey, too young (b. 1901) to have fought but, like Mosley, a rebel against his upper-class Tory heritage. And Cynthia Mosley herself, for whom the experience of 1914-1918—hosting the exiled Belgian royal family, corresponding with soldiers at the front, working for a time in the War Office—had also been a point of separation. In 1926 she spoke of this to an American reporter:

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If you are to understand my position, you must take into account all the facts in my upbringing. You will understand that either I had to give in absolutely to the p a s t — t o ignore all that was happening in this country and the rest of the world—or to resist upon every issue. I suppose my father and I were two very typical figures, and that the same drama has been enacted in many homes; only I do not know another man who was so splendidly, so utterly symbolic of the old world, the pre-war world, as was my father. I should like to think that I am as typical of the new world, the post-war world. 3 7

Whereas his Front Generation counterparts took several years before they allied themselves with socialism, Marcel Déat had renewed his affiliation to the SFIO immediately after the Armistice. At the same time he had resumed his academic career. In the summer of 1920 he achieved the rank of agrégé, a step beyond the baccalaureate, which qualified him to teach at the secondary school (lycée) level. Ahead lay the doctorat, with its prospective reward, a university professorship, the pinnacle of the French academic pyramid. With the help of Célestin Bouglé, who arranged Déat's appointment as secretary and archivist of a new Centre de Documentation Sociale at the Ecole Normale, he began work on his dissertation. Politics at this stage remained subordinate to Déat's professional work. In 1920 he became a member of the editorial board of La Vie socialiste, the journal of the SFIO's right wing. He stayed active in the party's local branch in the Latin Quarter. But he devoted more time and energy to do research and writing in 1920 and 1921. Again aided by Bouglé, he was appointed to the faculty of the lycée of Reims in 1922. At this point, however, he also began to contribute articles frequently to La Vie socialiste. Most addressed theoretical subjects, drawing their themes from new publications, particularly in sociology. Meanwhile Déat also wrote philosophical essays and reviews for learned journals. By now he was trying to maintain a balance between academics and politics, to be, as he said one could, "both first-rate sociologist and excellent socialist."38 Over the next two years, however, politics began to take more of his time. One sign of this change was a 1923 article on ways of winning over the rural electorate. Another was Déat's joining with a lycée instructor in Caen, Ludovic Zoretti, to found a union for secondary school teachers. Déat was not progressing with his dissertation, and although he enjoyed teaching, its long-term prospects were uncertain. In 1924 he became a candidate for the National Assembly, second on the Socialist list for the département of the Marne, which included Reims. He served as delegate to the SFIO's congress at the beginning of June and made his first speech on the national stage. In the middle of the campaign he also

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married one of his students, Hélène Delaveau, who was to be a political ally to him throughout their life together.39 Déat lost his electoral bid. Although in most districts the Socialists had concluded a tactical alliance—the Cartel des Gauches—with the Radical groups, their effort in the Marne failed against the resistance of the bourgeois parties, and they were lucky to return their one incumbent deputy.40 But Déat was undeterred, and from this time on his academic employment became a reserve vocation by which he supported his political career. It ceased to be an end in itself. He never completed his dissertation. Instead he became a tireless organizer, bicycling across the Champagne countryside to countless meetings with Socialist adherents in the towns and villages of the district. It was, he recalled, "an excellent apprenticeship, a remarkable school, given the necessity of presenting doctrine and program in clear and convincing terms in the most diverse surroundings and before the most heterogeneous audiences."41 He came to know the satisfaction of creating the initial contacts, building networks of supporters, and then returning to places where a dozen or a score of people were in attendance instead of the lone individual or handful who had been there on his first visit. Early in 1925, when the Cartel des Gauches had been tardily constructed in Reims, Déat was elected municipal councillor, his first public office. In the summer he resigned his lycée position to return to Paris, under the sponsorship of both Bouglé and Lucien Herr, as assistant librarian of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and archivist of the Centre de Documentation Sociale. During the next few years he followed a pattern familiar in French politics, splitting his activity between national party involvements and journalism in the metropole and provincial legislative matters in Reims. He also attracted confederates, most notably his fellow lycée instructor and normalien Max Bonnafous, who was to continue the association beyond socialism. In Paris he made an impression on the socialist students at the Ecole Normale, whose outlook paralleled his own. By 1926 he was emerging into notice.42 Apart from de Man, pursuing his breakthrough in ideology rather than politics, all the future leaders of the socialist Front Generation had found an operating base for themselves by the outset of 1926. They were still new and in many ways unknown men to their parties, but by now they were no longer alone. Each, on his own terrain, had gained a core of allies and followers; Carlo Mierendorff spoke in the plural in a letter to de Man early in the year: "we (a few friends and I) have felt ever more clearly from year to year that the party must be renewed from the ground

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up, and that for better or worse we have to carry out this delicate (but also exciting) work." 4 3 Each had also begun to inspire a hope: here might be the individual who, as John Strachey said of his friend "Tom" Mosley, "may some day do the things of which we dream." 44 Yet they were also men who believed that dreams are realized through action, and their eagerness to move ahead made it likely that they would find themselves in conflict with the cautious practices of orthodox socialism. Three episodes in 1926 demonstrated some of the friction points. The first occurred in February, when a by-election was held in the Marne. Two deputies had recently died, a Radical and the lone Socialist incumbent. Representatives of the two parties agreed to operate by the rules of the Cartel des Gauches and lend mutual support in the campaign. Déat, who had been the second-ranking SFIO candidate in 1924, was designated the Socialist entry. By now, however, the Cartel had collapsed in national politics; the Socialist delegation in the Chamber of Deputies had withdrawn from it in August 1925. Consequently, the party's executive committee objected to the Cartel's being continued in the Marne and emphasized its displeasure by denying financial aid to the departmental branch. Déat, running second on the Cartel list after a Radical editor, refused to yield to this pressure and won his seat with an absolute majority on the first ballot. In the following month he was nonetheless accepted into the SFIO parliamentary group. At the party's most recent national congress he had contended that cooperation with progressive bourgeois politicians remained both possible and desirable. Now he had broken discipline and angered some of the Socialist left wing, and yet the election had proved his point. 45 The second incident involved Mierendorff. In his new position as second secretary of the SPD's parliamentary delegation he became involved in a conflict that boiled up at the end of 1926 between the party and the Republic's army, the Reichswehr. Through various channels the SPD had been made aware of an extensive network of secret training and arms supply arrangements between the Reichswehr and Soviet Russia. Mierendorff had had a part in assembling this information, and he pressed for its disclosure. Most Social Democratic leaders would go no further, however, than to complain about the army's actions in behind-closeddoors discussions with the defense minister. On December 16 the veteran SPD deputy Philipp Scheidemann broke this silence. Using information provided by Mierendorff, he denounced the military's links with Russia in the course of a debate over Reichswehr reforms. But the party leadership fell mute behind Scheidemann; one deputy had told Mierendorff that "the man who delivers that speech will never make another in the Reichstag," a prophecy which the SPD executive allowed to be fulfilled.

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The episode's circumstances differed from those of Déat's electoral venture. The lesson was the same. Boldness won no rewards by the standards of conventional socialist practice. 46 Finally, another by-election, also in December, in Smethwick, an industrial Staffordshire constituency bordering Birmingham: here Mosley was the candidate. As Neville Chamberlain had abandoned Ladywood the previous summer, Mosley felt free to leave it also, rather than wait there for the next national election—nearly three years away—to return him to Parliament. So he had accepted an invitation from next door. During these months following the failure of the General Strike the Labour electorate was in an angry mood. There was little doubt that Mosley would win. Labour had taken the seat in 1924, and it was vacant only because the sitting M.P. had resigned on grounds of illness. Nevertheless, the campaign turned vicious very quickly. The bitterness of social divisions and the combativeness of Mosley and his opponents could have been expected, but Mosley was also a target of barbs from within the Labour Party. At first—a parallel to Déat's experience earlier in the year—the National Executive Committee witheld approval of his candidacy on grounds of "technical irregularities"; the constituency organization had named him without giving adequate consideration to possible rivals. But the true reason was mistrust of his wealth—so the negative voices said—or his activism—so says his biographer Robert Skidelsky— or both. Thus along with his victory, a stunning triumph in which he quadrupled the margin of 1924, Mosley learned, as his Front Generation counterparts were also discovering, that in the eyes of party elders, new men on the move might easily appear to be young men in too much of a hurry. 47 The hesitancies and occasional hostilities that these episodes revealed nonetheless remained only shadows over the paths of the Front Generation socialists. From the time of the Smethwick by-election, Skidelsky has written, Mosley "started to be talked about as a future leader of the Labour Party." A year after entering the Chamber of Deputies Déat could be referred to as "a new Jaurès" by a contemporary. 48 In Germany Mierendorff and Haubach advanced more slowly, and it is hard not to believe that they were in the mind of their friend Egon Wertheimer when he wrote of Mosley that in Germany such a recruit "would have had to serve for years in the outer darkness" because of his class origins. "He would have been set to work in the obscurest and most insignificant places, and would have been mistrustfully watched to see whether he was genuine and no careerist. Where I had come from, ambition was illegitimate, and he who had confessed to it was doomed for all time." 49 Still, if by small steps, Mierendorff and Haubach also moved ahead.

5 Emergence of a Critique Some books affect their times by articulating the unrefined, unsorted thoughts that have been dwelling, only half recognized, in people's minds. Hendrik de Man's Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus did this for many of his contemporaries. In 1926, when it was published, a member of the now waning Hofgeismar Circle called it the "most important socialist book to appear in the German language in the last decade."1 Within a few years, when nearly a dozen translations were in print, it was no longer necessary to limit the judgment in this way. De Man's treatise was being read and debated throughout Western and Central Europe.2 It succeeded because it addressed the inquietudes of those socialists looking for an alternative to orthodoxy that would not be just another version of Marxism. For the members of the Front Generation in particular, with the exception of the less ideological British, it became both source and reference point of a developing critique of socialism which focused on the pivotal question of motivation. De Man broke the ice for them. He brought issues which had been submerged to the surface. His audacity encouraged others who shared his experience and outlook to join in widening the peripheries of the critical space he had opened. By the end of the 1920s the critique that de Man initiated had been restated and extended. By and large, with the inevitable individual variations, it had become the Front Generation's base point in the intensifying debate over socialism's future. By then it had also been complemented in the economic sphere by a mode of analysis which portrayed capitalism already in transition to socialist forms. At its boldest, in Mosley's 1925 Revolution by Reason, this approach embraced the idea of national planning. At the least it insisted that progress toward socialist goals need not be deferred until the capitalist economy had totally collapsed. This urge toward action was the common spark of the Front Generation's dissatisfactions with orthodox doctrine. But their criticisms

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did something more than simply give verbal form to the impulse. They beckoned individuals along converging ideological paths and concentrated their energies into a collective force. Their critique thus became a means by which the Front Generation socialists both clarified their identity and attracted new confederates. At the time that his book appeared, de Man had become a fringe figure in European socialism. After resettling near Darmstadt late in 1922 he had devoted his energies to study and writing, as well as to a new marriage and the expanded family responsibilities that came with it. His earnings, apart from private income, came by way of journalism and a teaching engagement at the Frankfurt Akademie der Arbeit. 3 Meanwhile, the pace of his life shifted to conform to the contemplative pursuits he had taken up. Since the war de Man had been a man in motion—in Newfoundland, the American Northwest, and then Belgium. Now he had time to read and think. It was a period of intellectual exploration that paralleled, in its way, the university experience that most of the younger Front Generation socialists had passed through already in the immediate postwar years. Out of this retreat came a succession of publications in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the fruits of de Man's reconsiderations of the issues before socialism. Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus was the first. Although its German title gave it the aura of a professorial dissertation, de Man made it clear in the opening paragraph that it was subjective as well as scientific: "In fact this book is nothing other than a piece of intellectual autobiography." Yet if his inquiry was colored with feeling—"a book written in blood," he said, with reference to his combat experience 4 —it was also disciplined, consistent, and informed. Like the pattern of socialism's development which it described, the Psychologie was rooted in emotion but anchored upon a structure of rational argument. When it appeared in a French edition in 1927, the Psychologie became Au delà du marxisme (Beyond Marxism). This was the more appropriate description of both the intent and the content of the book. As fundamental as the psychological perspective was to de Man's analysis, he had not confined himself within this single discipline. Few intellectual contemporaries, within or outside the socialist movement, were able to match the breadth of de Man's learning; and in constructing his case he drew, as few others could, on the full range of human studies of his time. In truth his work extended beyond psychology as well as Marxism, to take in sociology, anthropology, economics, and the new science of management. There was nothing novel in offering a challenge of Marxism. De Man's

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was "the howmanyeth?" asked his old patron and leader of Belgian socialism Emile Vandervelde.5 But heretics can be the most dangerous critics, for they are as familiar with the doctrine they dissent from, its strengths as well as its weaknesses, as its defenders will be. De Man's was not an unconditional rejection. To go beyond Marx was not to abandon his findings altogether, and de Man repeatedly claimed that his dispute was not with the dead Marx but with Marxism—"what lives on of Marx in the workers' movement." 6 In his time Marx had furthered the understanding of society and the cause of socialism. Marxism, however, had remained stationary, bound to its founding doctrines; its wisdom was interpretation, not discovery. Knowledge, meanwhile, had advanced to new frontiers, and de Man believed that socialism could not progress in blindness to this change. Marxism, "a child of the nineteenth century," was out of step with the consciousness and the generational outlook of the postwar era. A year after the war's end Theo Haubach had said much the same thing in relegating Marx to his era and condemning "the Marxists who blindly spew out the most decayed theorems." 7 It has been suggested that de Man's target could be more fairly described as Kautskyanism rather than Marxism. There is some justice in that view; certainly it rightly acknowledges both the eminence the Austrian-born Karl Kautsky achieved as an interpreter of Marx and the influence of his theoretical writings. By the mid-1920s Kautsky had reached his seventies and contributed only intermittently to socialist debate; still he was heard with respect, the legacy of his quarter-century and more as a chief ideological authority of the movement. Kautsky had accepted Marx's doctrines as a science and had made their materialism the backbone of an "optimistic fatalism." 8 "The public role he assumed," in George Lichtheim's words, "was that of a doctrinaire professor of Marxism who taught the Socialist movement to rely on the relentless march of history." 9 It was with this deterministic conviction, grounded in economic analysis, that de Man stood most at odds in the Psychologie. Kautsky's assured vision of progressive social transformation was cruelly blotted by the war and the subsequent failures of socialism. Still, it defined the contours of socialist Marxism in the 1920s, even as younger theorists like Rudolf Hilferding refined its analytic features to take account of unfavorable turns in circumstances. Economic development remained its reference point, an ultimately positive historical outcome its prognosis, in spite of the new artifices of survival that Kautsky's successors identified in capitalism. It is not necessary to judge here whether theirs was a true reading of Marx. 10 It is, however, relevant to note that much of what developed in opposition to them—later to be celebrated as inspirations for neo-Marxism—was intent on emancipating Marxist doctrine from determinism, an involuntary salute to the

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dominance of the Kautskyan perspective. Such efforts sought to enlist Marx against orthodox Marxismus. De Man went in another direction by insisting on a radically different notion of the interplay among individuals, groups, economy, and society. In constructing his alternative to Marxism de Man focused on motivation. What made people become socialists? The orthodox theory was "no longer tenable, not because this or that sentence needs to be revised, but because a theory which supposes a mass movement to derive from the comprehension of laws of economic necessity is like an experiment undertaken with the wrong equipment." 11 The force of the war experience remained with de Man here. The men he had commanded had not fought for reasoned goals; why should it be different in what Marxists called the class struggle? The proximity in which men lived in the trenches, an existence analogous to proletarian tenement life, had encouraged antisocial behavior as much as solidarity.12 Attitudes could not be accounted for only by material circumstances. For de Man socialism began in people's minds, not in their bellies. De Man himself never put the issue in these crude terms, and it is also true that the more sophisticated defenders of Marxism tried to back away from the notion of an intellectual superstructure springing wholly from a material base. All the same, the primacy of economic development remained their theoretical starting point, and de Man was correct to claim that the Marxist view of motivation rested on a model of humans as rationally calculating beings whose attitudes originated in their responses to the material situation.13 This perspective allowed that people could misread their circumstances or be misled about them; the category of "false consciousness" existed to explain why, to take the most common example, proletarians did not exhibit proper economic understanding. But then the conventional Marxist remedy was enlightenment. It was supposed that true class consciousness came when workers learned to see their place and role in the intelligible yet iron-threaded pattern of history. De Man's complaint with this view was simply that attitudes are not formed in this manner. People do not merely think. They also feel and will, and these elements were inseparable from and prior to rational understanding. This is not to say that de Man criticized Marxism for ignoring "the irrational." Rather he believed, from both experience and study, that certain universal drives existed in human beings independent of material circumstances, class, and history, and that these were at the root of socialism; they represented needs no less pressing than the impulses to be fed and sheltered—responses to the physical environment. De Man described these nonmaterial urges in the conceptual language of his time: instincts of acquisition, self-assertion, sociability, which gave

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rise to emotions of exploitedness, inequality, community, and anticipation of a happier future. 1 4 These categories were drawn principally from the social psychology of a leading contemporary authority, William McDougall. But de Man relied on the psychoanalytic formulations of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler to elaborate his notion of compensatory ideas—freedom, equality, solidarity—which absorbed and redirected the emotional frustration that resulted when the social instincts were blocked. These ideas expressed an element of conscience which de M a n , following Freud and Adler, believed was innate in human beings. Socialism had gained its mass following by embodying them in a political movement; thus it had captured not the intellects but the passions of its followers. 15 In reconceptualizing socialism in this way, de Man offered something different from the idealism the Marxists dismissed as Utopian. Ideals, in his analysis, stemmed from the human condition, which must be seen as something more comprehensive than the sum of material circumstances. They represented the real wants of ordinary people. Beyond this, they also assured the moral status of socialism. Since the 1890s one of the most troubling criticisms of the movement had been the argument, first raised by neo-Kantian philosophers, that the materialist underpinning of Marxist interpretation presented a seamless barrier against all moral evaluation in history. If events proceeded from an ongoing process of economic transformation, what reason was there to say that socialism, if it came, would improve upon bourgeois society; why would its future be better and not simply different? In linking the movement to a universal urge for justice, de M a n neatly differentiated it from existing standards and values. The activity of today was both energized and legitimized by the objective of a more nearly equal tomorrow. 1 6 De Man's insistence on the moral content of socialism revived a concern that the revisionist Eduard Bernstein had made prominent a quarter-century earlier when he had challenged the then reigning Marxist orthodoxy with his dictum: " T h e movement is everything, the goal is nothing." As de M a n recognized, however, to emphasize means alone could easily result in a politics that was moral but not socialist; that was the fault in Bernstein's position. Thus he argued that means and ends, actions and goals, were inseparable. Actions gained their moral validity in being directed toward the construction of socialism, but socialism must not be relegated so far into the future as to be meaningless and imaginary. It was, de M a n told a student audience in Brussels in 1 9 2 7 , " a present-day effort, a perpetual creation." And he added, in a comment that summarized his objective: "Henceforth the ideal stops being an excuse and becomes an obligation." 1 7 In de Man's projection, then, socialism was constantly in the making;

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it would not be achieved in a single revolutionary convulsion. This also followed logically from his abandonment of the Marxist analytical apparatus, for it was only on the level of theory that capitalism and socialism existed as mutually exclusive entities. "In the world of categories socialism is the antithesis of capitalism. In social reality there are no such antitheses at all." 1 8 From his wide-ranging empirical studies de Man knew that this was so, and he worried whether the working class would be ready for socialism should it somehow be realized overnight. It seemed impossible to him that proletarians could run the economy without having been prepared for that task. In 1921 he had described the "real revolution" as the one that would "transform institutions, customs, ideas, not only in political life, but in work life, everyday life," and he said it would not be accomplished even in ten years.19 This was still his judgment when Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus was published. Most of all de Man believed that socialism demanded a new mentality and culture, to enable the real revolution to occur. Otherwise the only change would be a shift in the control of property from one group in society to another, a liberation of goods but not of minds. The true obstacle before socialism, in de Man's judgment, was the fact that the working classes had accepted the norms of the bourgeoisie. The style of life they valued amounted to a cheap imitation of what they read about and saw in newspapers, popular literature, and film; their aspirations were confined to the models of the dominant culture. Here lay socialism's greatest failure of imagination. Orthodox theory postulated that change in these areas would follow revolution; it was not a major concern for the present. For de Man, however, this was the most frustrating element of immobilism in what he called at one point the "cud-chewing" variety of Marxism. 20 De Man did not believe that an alternative mass culture could be created within bourgeois society. The practical task of the present was to activate those elements in the workers' movement that could develop the new ideals which prefigured a socialist future. Renewal, in these terms, was therefore an undertaking for intellectuals. For de Man die Intelligenz were a new class—not the café or salon literati often identified with the term, but the experts, managers, technicians, and professionals whose knowledge was indispensable to society's functioning. Socialism needed them because they dominated the large-scale organizations in which power was now concentrated, and de Man believed that socialism could win them because, in his view, they were impelled by motives of achievement and service, not profit. They were already emancipated from the money norms of capitalism; they were thus free to elaborate "the religious, ethical, soul-transforming content of socialism." Of course this passage described de Man's own freedom and vocation at the time he

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wrote the Psychologie; the personal aspect in his analysis was evident here. Still, his situation in the mid-1920s was reflective of the new status European intellectuals were in the process of achieving, and it indicated their potential importance to socialism.21 Such, then, was the challenge that de Man leveled at Marxism. In the questioning atmosphere generated by war and revolution its blend of doubt and revival placed it among a mounting accumulation of critiques which sounded similar themes: the inadequacy of a mechanistic historical materialism, the importance—even autonomy—of cultural development, the voluntaristic aspect of political action. Not all of these manifestos became well known when they were formulated in the 1920s, but retrospectively, in their collective weight, they confirm the vulnerabilities of the orthodox Marxism of the era, whether socialist or communist. The point is best borne out by the parallelism that existed between the concerns de Man expressed in the Psychologie and the preoccupations of the most original Communist thinker of the period, the Italian theorist and party leader Antonio Gramsci. Although Gramsci's conceptualizations centered on politics and institutions rather than psychology, his main themes—the cultural subjection of the proletariat, the salient role of intellectuals, the importance of transforming the working lives of laboring people—reiterated and validated de Man's analysis.22 In the preface of Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus de Man identified "workers hungering for education" as part of the audience he hoped to reach. As one of his early reviewers pointed out, however, few workingclass readers could afford the book, nor would they easily labor through its involved theoretical discussions.23 De Man was more successful with younger socialists, the other group among whom he wanted to win a broad readership. In essence the Psychologie was a treatise about and for intellectuals, and it spoke to a mood that prevailed in the younger ranks. Again and again in the debates and controversies of the mid-1920s, protests were vented against the dead end that existing ideas and policies seemed to point to. Two years before de Man's book appeared, Julius Leber, another ex-lieutenant who, like Haubach, had become an SPD newspaper editor, had described the party's 1924 congress as a sort of ceremonial combat between a majority which had thrown the old ideology overboard and become practitioners of Realpolitik and a minority which stayed loyal to the old principles, consoling themselves, in their constant defeats, that they remained true advocates of the class struggle. But many younger comrades, he said, wanted neither alternative but rather new terrain, new goals. "It is not entirely false," he concluded, "to label the majority as politicians of only-today, the minority as politicians of only-yesterday. But the call resounds to both factions: What of tomorrow and the day after?" 2 4

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De Man offered a way out of this impasse and into the future. "Thanks to you," wrote the anthropology student Claude Lévi-Strauss, secretary of the Socialist group at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, "socialist doctrines are finally emerging from their long slumber."25 No one, however, spoke more feelingly of the impact of the Psychologie than Carlo Mierendbrff. "I have been deeply moved by your book," he confessed to de Man in a February 1926 letter, "and owe to it perhaps one of the strongest experiences [I have known] in many years. The reasons are obvious: you deal with the subject that is closest to my heart and reach conclusions toward which year by year I have been increasingly driven. In countless passages you have formulated in plain terms what I perceived dully and indistinctly. . . . With this book, which for me is a model of valor, you have earned infinite credit for socialism. Everything has been absolutely crying out for such ideas for a long time. But no one was there who could ponder over, provide a base for, and define the new + necessary in scholarly depth. Now you have done it masterfully."26 Not all of those who belonged among or had gravitated toward the socialists of the Front Generation were as unqualified in their praise. Haubach, for example, gave a nuanced reception to the Psychologie—to Mierendorff's annoyance.27 Like it more or less, however, they read it and absorbed its perspectives. It thus contributed to establishing a common vocabulary among them. It became a link: not a chapter-and-verse source to be quoted but a pole of orientation which helped to align those with similar views about socialism and its dilemmas. In Germany the book drew its strongest response among the younger elements of three groups, all on the fringes of the SPD. Associates of the Hofgeismar Circle comprised one. The others were writers and educators involved with the trade unions and then a collection of thinkers and activists, lay and clerical, who were often described as "ethical" or "religious socialists." For the latter the Psychologies significance lay in its emphasis on motives. In tracing socialism to ethical impulses, de Man crossed paths with their quest to carry morality forward from the personal to the social arena. Most of the clerics among the religious socialists were Protestants, names such as Paul Tillich, Karl Mennicke, and Emil Fuchs. Few took part in socialist party politics. Some of their lay counterparts who did, however, were important in the evolution of the Front Generation, particularly the ex-woodworker and Hofgeismarer August Rathmann and the young French legal scholar André Philip, who promoted de Man's reception in France with a summary of the Psychologie published in 1928 under the title Henri de Matt et la crise doctrinale du socialisme,28 Both Rathmann and Philip were signatories to an invitation for a socialist conference at Heppenheim, in southwestern Germany, at Whitsuntide 1928; its prime mover, organizer, and featured speaker was Hendrik

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de Man. The Heppenheim gathering brought together an array of brilliant intellects: along with de Man and the economist Eduard Heimann, who gave the other main address on theory, the participants included Mennicke, Tillich, Fuchs, the Jewish theologian and socialist Martin Buber, the Swiss pastor Leonhard Ragaz, and academics of the quality of Hugo Sinzheimer, Adolf Löwe, and Gustav Radbruch. Nothing was settled in this weekend of discussions; there remained differences between the more politically minded socialists, like de Man, and the more religiously inclined. But a stimulus was given for further cooperation involving a project that, in separate efforts, de Man, Tillich, and Rathmann all had previously tried to launch: a new socialist journal.29 The key figures now were Tillich, his confederate Fritz Klatt, Heimann, and Rathmann. Klatt was often deputized for by his friend and fellow educator Adolf Reichwein, another former front officer. By the end of May 1929 a publisher had been found and the business and editorial arrangements were made; Rathmann was to become the day-today director of the new monthly. A list of regular contributors included de Man and possibly Mierendorff as well as Haubach's friend Alma de l'Aigle. So the strands became interwoven. From its first appearance in January 1930 the journal, Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus, was to advance the perspectives of the Front Generation.30 Among trade unionists, attitudes paralleling de Man's views were most visible in another journal, Die Arbeit. At the end of 1925 its editor, Lothar Erdmann, wrote to de Man that even before finishing Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus he had been "immediately stirred, as is the case only when one feels that a related vision, a far-reaching mutuality of ideas, is involved."31 A few years later one of Erdmann's collaborators, Walther Pähl, a colleague of Adolf Reichwein, echoed de Man in asserting that the generational tension in social democracy pitted the "constructive will for realizing progress in the here and now" against "a doctrinairism frightened of reality." Among the foremost tasks of the younger generation, he went on, was the shaping of the socialist person, something that Marxism offered no help with. Pähl was soon to become, along with Carlo Mierendorff, one of the most active journalistic spokesmen of the Front Generation's views in German socialism.32 As these examples suggest, de Man's accomplishment with the Psychologie was to win standing not simply for his theses on socialism but for an entire perspective that others, in various ways, shared with him. With the book's success this position became an accepted point of reference in the ongoing dialogue over socialism and its future. De Man did not found a theoretical school or faction, but he inspired and advanced a new critical current, and this was true in France as well as in Germany. Au delà du marxisme, the French translation of the Psychologie, was

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published in 1927. A year later came André Philip's summary, which de Man had read through in proof. As in Germany, the work made an impression upon intellectuals but was little noticed by workers. Its mood seemed anticipated in a motion drawn up by a group centered in the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1926, whose objective was a "program of immediate action" that would answer doubts about the vigor of socialism. Its themes were echoed in 1929 in an article by Claude Lévi-Strauss appealing for a socialism that would satisfy the affective and emotional sides of human nature as well as its rational element. When Marcel Déat addressed a student audience in Paris in 1930, he could speak of de Man and his ideas in a series of shorthand references that reflected his listeners' familiarity with them.33 Déat, who read de Man's book in the summer of 1927, preferred the approach of sociology, his discipline, to de Man's psychological critique, but the concordances in their outlooks during the late 1920s muffled the dissonances between them. Déat was less concerned about rejecting the economic premises of Marxism. Instead, continuing with themes he had developed in his university years, he sought to get above the materialist/ idealist conflict by identifying institutions as the primary elements of society: an institution was "simultaneously material substratum, totality of images, scheme of action, affective consensus, imperative law." So multifaceted a reality could not be broken into separate elements, nor comprehended or changed according to the dictates of a single exclusive thesis. Déat thus argued for a flexibility of method which aligned his views with de Man's, a congruence likewise visible in the priority he gave to education and in his advocacy of l'école unique, a universal and democratic school system that would undermine what he saw as the cultural primacy of the moneyed classes. "The claim of socialism," Déat said in 1930, "will become only more passionate, not only concerning salary increases and the restoration of living standards, but also in regard to independence, liberty, the conquest and appointment of authprity in the factory and the state." 34 In an appraisal of Jungsozialismus in 1927 de Man had contended that the clash of viewpoints within socialism was not a conflict among agegroups; the differences were between old and new, not old and young.35 Nevertheless, nearly all of those who responded positively to his message, the emerging Front Generation leaders among them, were in their twenties and thirties, divided from their elders by the experience of 1914-1918. This was held against them by Karl Kautsky. "The war," he complained in one of his polemics against de Man, "has filled the generation that grew up during it with great distaste and contempt for systematic, diligent work. They all want to be and rank as something, merely by virtue of their aspirations, not their knowledge."36 It was an

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emotional condemnation, attributing dissidence to the moral failing of intellectual laziness, and it was not in keeping with Kautsky's usual mode of scholarly disputation. But then the generational aspect of the new criticism of Marxism prompted a response rooted as much in feelings as in reason: the degree to which disagreement was taken to be disrespect and ingratitude was mirrored in the title of de Man's reply, in the theoretical journal Die Gesellschaft, to some initial negative reviews of his book: "Is Criticism of Marx Harmful to the Party?" 37 The editorial staff, headed by Rudolf Hilferding, apparently believed it was. De Man was never again allowed to publish in Die Gesellschaft.38 It was a reception symptomatic of the way the movement at large answered the challenge represented by Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus. Its novelty held problems. Dissidence from the left, in the name of a purer Marxism, was easier to fend off. Its arguments were familiar. On both sides point and counterpoint could be repeated from memory. The questions de Man raised were more difficult. It was easiest to dismiss them as un-Marxist—de Man, said Kautsky, "at bottom sets himself against economic science itself" 3 9 —or to ignore them, or both. Although it was soon translated into English, de Man's critique barely scratched the surface of British socialism. The Labour Magazine's review, in 1928, treated it as relevant only to "the more bad-tempered section of the Communist or crypto-Communist groups." 40 Marxism was not yet a significant enough element in Labour thinking to make the publication of The Psychology of Socialism the event it became on the Continent. Still, Labour also possessed an orthodoxy. Like Marxism, it was economic, a legacy of the Liberal background of many of the party's chief figures. Among men like Ramsay MacDonald, Arthur Henderson, and, above all, Philip Snowden, the shadow chancellor of the Exchequer, it was a matter of faith that free trade was the solution to Britain's economic problems and that as long as socialism remained in abeyance, policy must operate by the rules of the market.41 Non-Marxists that they were, Labour's leaders followed exactly the same theoretical prohibition on intervention in the economy as their Marxist counterparts did on the Continent. Not long after coming over to Labour, Oswald Mosley had expressed his dissatisfaction with this outlook. He had joined the party not to wait for socialism but to build it, and within a year he outlined a first approach to this goal in the Birmingham Proposals and Revolution by Reason. His analysis also derived from Liberal thinking, but in this case it was from the post—laissez-faire conceptions of J. H. Hobson and John Maynard Keynes. Mosley's starting point was the paradox of underconsumption amid high productive capacity, the bedevilment of economists

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in the postwar decade. As others were to do, he portrayed the solution to the problem as the augmentation of purchasing power among the mass of the population. Uniquely in the mid-1920s, however, he coupled state-paid wage rate increases with a state-directed allocation of credit and investment as the prerequisites of an effective policy. All of this fell under a rubric that was to be no less significant for the Front Generation than the formula of Au delà du marxisme: it was, in Mosley's words, "Socialist planning." 42 Notions of planning had begun to influence European socialism only recently, in the period that bridged the last stages of the war and the first phases of peacetime. Initially they were rather generally formulated and of limited substance. They entered the socialist vocabulary as certain individuals within the movement reflected on their wartime discovery of the power of the state and of the role it could conceivably play as an organizing force in economic life. A few gained this perspective through administrative experience during the war. A larger number had observed from outside how governments had channeled manpower, resources, and expertise to produce demanded results. Among the scattering of socialists who became interested in planning, the most notable was Albert Thomas, who served as minister of munitions in France from 1915 to 1917. Thomas's inclinations were of particular significance for the Front Generation, for he was and remained an inspiration to Déat and to a number of individuals who would later be Déat's allies, like the engineer Barthélémy Montagnon, who participated in Thomas's post-Armistice efforts to organize coordination between labor and capital. 43 Thomas's initiatives fit amid a proliferation of'interventionist schemes broached by socialists in the years just after the war. The most predictable of these designs originated with the unions and focused on nationalization, as in the 1918 manifesto Labour and the New Social Order or the 1919 program of the Confédération Générale du Travail. They remained modest, committed to oversight rather than direction, and insistent that their aim was not what the French called étatisation. It was still generally assumed that with proper adjustments the industrial system could function more or less on its own. Government was to assure that it would, smoothly and with equity. Some proposals set off in more ambitious directions: toward worker discipline and self-management in G. D. H. Cole's Guild Socialist notion of "encroaching control," or toward productive efficiency in the essays of Emil Lederer, who taught Mierendorff and Haubach at Heidelberg. 44 None, however, neither the bold nor the more cautious, was put to the test of practice before the economy stabilized. By 1921—22 the immediate chances of reorganizing production through state action were gone. Although the new orientation was empty of quick results, it signified

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some important shifts in socialist perspective. Certain features of capitalism could now be seen as progressive, or at least potentially so. Certain problems in industry could be understood as integral to the productive process and not simply to the capitalist system. The transformations of war and postwar had blurred the earlier either/or distinction which decreed that what was not wholly socialism must necessarily be capitalism. Of course judgments like these were not shared by Marxist theoreticians, who interpreted the rational features of industrial development and the new interpénétration of state and economy as refinements of capitalist hegemony. Support came instead from outside socialism, in the works of the most flexible and progressive liberal economists and writers of the era, above all, Walther Rathenau and Keynes. Rathenau was more a visionary than an analyst. He was an industrial magnate who yearned to be a philosopher, a Jew who loved Germandom and yet was assassinated by nationalists in July 1922, when he was the Weimar Republic's foreign minister. He had organized the mobilization of the German war economy in the first months of the fighting; later, as the Wilhelminian empire buckled and then collapsed, he had outlined the shape of a successor order, neither capitalist nor socialist, in prophetically titled essays: " O f Things to Come," "The New Society." Rathenau's style was evocative rather than convincing; still it is striking to discover how many individuals of the Front Generation were influenced by him— de Man, Déat, Montagnon, Adolf Reichwein, to name a few. As early as 1919 Déat described Rathenau as a leader of industry "such as we do not have in France, for he has ideas; I mean ideas which go beyond concern for his strongbox or his cartel. He has social ideas which come just short of being socialist." 45 Keynes, by contrast, was a clear and incisive thinker. He was as well known a public figure as Rathenau, a familiar voice in the ongoing debate over British economic policy, but also an internationally heard controversialist and commentator on issues ranging from reparations— which he condemned—to monetary policy. Already by the mid-1920s he had declared the era of laissez-faire to be over. Liberals like Rathenau and Keynes offered their prospectuses of a new, mixed system in the hope of preserving what they could of the values they cherished in the old order. For the dissident socialists who were instructed by their writings, however, they provided an encouraging demonstration of how much of an alternative set of ideals now seemed achievable. In effect they served as the counterparts to the sociologists and psychologists whose works, starting from different foundations, had also called into question the postulates of Marxism. The Front Generation socialists gained further economic perspective from the new literature and practice of scientific management and ration-

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alization. Europeans awkwardly referred to these innovations as Taylorism and Fordism, labels that identified them as particularly American phenomena. On the left they produced disquiet. Time-and-motion studies and the assembly line presented an ambiguous potential of greater exploitation and control over the worker or greater rewards for him, through advances in efficiency, and the United States became a prime subject of socialist interest, as a laboratory for studying the impact of the new methods. In no other industrial society was Marxism as peripheral or union labor as subordinated to nonsocialist political forces; nevertheless, American workers seemed prosperous, productive, and contented. For those socialists who believed that the advanced economies had now entered a mixed stage, America was a perplexing composite of industrial progress and—it was the era of Harding and Coolidge—political retrogression. Several Front Generation figures, including de Man, the Mosleys, Reichwein, André Philip, and Déat's friend Charles Spinasse, studied the problems firsthand in the United States at various times in the postwar decade. If their individual judgments diverged, it is fair to say that the encounter with America distanced them further from Marxist orthodoxy.46 No single piece of economic writing pulled together these strands as de Man did with his psychological critique. All the same, taken together, the half-schemes of planning, the glimpses of socialism amidst capitalism, the hum of inquisitiveness about America raised the same question that was at the heart of Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus: was Marxism still an adequate guide for socialists? The answer, implicit in the questioning, was negative. It meant that the real issue in economics was to define what in fact must be done now and in the future. The attempts that were made in this direction prefigured the turn to planning that the Front Generation was to take in the following decade. The middle and late 1920s, however, were still a time of fitting together new concepts and new facts, digesting their implications, speculating with conclusions. The closest approximation to a planning blueprint in these years was provided by Mosley and, at greater length, John Strachey, in their successive versions of Revolution by Reason. But Mosley's plan remained too sketchy and daring, "an isolated tour de force. " 47 Neither British nor continental socialists were ready to embrace ari effort of its scope, which would have controlled the banks and channeled the expansion of credit. Most of those who sought new departures preferred that they be less abrupt. It was more common to hinge socialist alternatives on the fact of rationalization. A planning element was implied in this approach but not actually identified as an object of policy. French observers generated the most optimistic scenarios. A number of younger socialists, including

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Jules Moch, Charles Spinasse, and Barthélémy Montagnon, foresaw an ineluctable process, already observable in the United States, in which rationalization dictated mass production, which in turn compelled employers to elevate wages in order to stimulate consumption. A technique devised in capitalist self-interest would ultimately manifest an inner logic that was socialist. "After hesitations, retreats, various alternatives," Montagnon wrote in 1929, "the American method will establish itself. To facilitate the increase in products the workers' capacity to consume will be enlarged. High salaries will come." 48 The precision of this outline hints at the professional training that Montagnon and Moch shared in engineering; both had served in this specialty during the war.49 Others of the Front Generation did not foresee so neat a solution. De Man, who had written one of the first assessments of Taylorism in 1919, and later Philip, Déat, and Mosley drew more even balances between the advantages and drawbacks of rationalization and modern management. None believed that the new methods would inevitably benefit socialism. It was necessary, Philip wrote in 1928, "to direct and control" rationalization and to separate "the science of production" from its utilization under capitalism. Philip hoped that the unions, by democratizing management, could become the guarantors of such an outcome. The others concluded that only the state had the power to assure it, and so it must.50 Again the idea of planning infiltrated conceptions without being envisioned as a separate goal. Intervention, however, was understood to be a necessity. No greater confidence was placed in rationalization as an automatically operating process than was vested in the Marxist affirmation of inexorable historical progress or the liberal trust in an ever-recurring market equilibrium. All these interventionist projects and the intellectual reorientation that lay behind them were focused within a national framework. In the Psychologie de Man had said that since 1914 national perspectives had outweighed the traditional internationalism of the workers' movement.51 The economic approaches with which Front Generation socialists were associated generally confirmed that judgment. Some, however, a minority, upheld the priority of action on the international plane. Here again the references to planning were indirect, couched negatively in phrases like "the bankruptcy of laissez-faire." At the core of this outlook, however, was the assumption that rational organization could reshape international trade to enlarge markets and stimulate production and employment, results which in turn would defuse antagonisms between the European states. Though only briefly mentioned, these objectives underlay Walther Pahl's 1928 analysis of the drive for raw materials, Der Kampf um die Rohstoffe. They also provided the rationale behind Déat's arguments in his Perspectives socialistes of 1930. The most developed

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design for international economic revival was offered, however, by an older socialist, Francis Delaisi; his Les deux Europes (1928) foresaw a marriage of industrial potential and underdevelopment between "the Europe of horsepower" of the West and "the Europe of the horse" of the Ekst.52 These flickerings of planisme reflected an age spectrum of imagination that extended back into the pre-1914 years. It was a less time-bound source than the inspiration behind de Man's critique, so specifically rooted in the front experience. Francis Delaisi was born in 1873; he had been an active syndicalist before the war. The German trade unionist Fritz Tarnow, whose 1929 tract Warum arm sein? (Why Be Poor?) verged on planning, was in his late forties when he published it.53 Still, this age difference was more than offset by the manifold personal and ideological bonds which connected adherents of these two critical approaches to Marxism. It was as if the two reassessments encompassed overlapping spheres of individuals and ideas, intersecting circles whose exact alignment was ever-changing but always close. And it was in the shaded area where the arcs crossed that the key figures of the Front Generation were concentrated. They were never alone on that common ground, nor did all of them occupy it at every moment. Mierendorff and Haubach became only tangentially interested in planning. Mosley responded to some of the ideological weaknesses de Man had identified, but never within the frame of reference established by Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus. What singled out this core of individuals and made them central to the fate of these paired activist perspectives was their political talent and promise. For if critiques are to be converted into action, they must have their advocates, leaders who can fashion policies, objectives, and ideals to win a mass following. De Man himself would eventually essay this role in Belgium in the mid-1930s. In the period 1929-1933, however, Déat, Mosley, Mierendorff, and—to a lesser extent—Haubach became the chief actors in what may rightly be seen as the Front Generation's bid to redirect socialism.

6 The Challenge of Fascism Under any set of circumstances the leaders of the socialist Front Generation would have bid to redirect their parties in the early 1930s. They had served their apprenticeships, attracted followers, and worked out an ideological critique; now they were on the threshold of a new plateau of action. As they crossed it, however, events around them accelerated the momentum of their effort. The atmosphere of politics became charged with a burden of urgency, generated by the onset of the Depression and, with it, the rise of National Socialism in Germany. In these conditions policy decisions took on critical significance; choices became matters no longer of preference but, it seemed, of survival. Correspondingly, the Front Generation leaders pressed their causes more rapidly and more boldly than they would have in ordinary times. The particular challenges of depression and fascism also encouraged emphases—on youth and propaganda, for example—that might have remained secondary under other circumstances. Still, the responses of the Front Generation socialists were consistent with the positions they had developed before 1930. If anything, the acuteness of the twin dangers they faced set them more firmly in the avenue of their experience, for as their speeches and writings reveal, it was inescapable that they would draw parallels with the war and would see socialism engaged in an allor-nothing struggle of a magnitude equal to that of the conflict they had endured in 1914-1918. There was little to show for their endeavors by the end of 1933. In one way or another most of them had reached a dead end with socialism. Mosley had passed from Labour through the half-life of his New Party in 1931, and on to the British Union of Fascists, which he founded in October 1932. Déat had not won the SFIO majority over to his perspectives socialistes and had broken with it late in 1933 to start an already floundering party on the center-left of French politics. In Germany Mier-

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endorff and his friends neither changed the SPD nor halted Hitler; many of them were now in Nazi concentration camps. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to measure what the Front Generation socialists attempted by the slimness of their achievements, which, after all, were neither more nor less than the accomplishments of the movement as a whole. Their failures were entwined in the fabric of defeat that enveloped European socialism for most of the 1930s. Rather it is the thread of their initiatives that must be followed, for its pattern uniquely exposes socialism's faults and its vulnerabilities to the challenges it now had to confront. Often the Front Generation socialists responded simultaneously to the Depression and the Nazi advance. Nonetheless it is easiest to track their counterefforts separately, because in practice their orientations were not identical. In opposing fascism the Front Generation concentrated on the political and psychological motivations that had brought Hitler and other leaders their mass following, a diagnostic focus which extended the approach de Man had applied in Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus. In regard to the economy the thrust was institutional, aimed at planning as the means to reverse the slump. To some extent there was also a chronological disjunction. The economic issue received more attention after the Nazis gained power in early 1933; planning gradually became the instrument through which it was hoped to capture popular enthusiasm, beginning with de Man's Plan du Travail of December 1933. It was only in character, however, that the Front Generation socialists initially gave priority to contending with a "national fascism" which, in Hendrik de Man's words, appealed "to political motives which socialism has all too much neglected in the last few decades . . . the urge toward myth and utopia, the need for unreserved criticism of institutions, the impulse to launch the masses forward in aggressive action, the desire for leadership personalities [Führerpersönlichkeiten] ."1 Before the autumn of 1930 socialists treated fascism as a tendency of limited significance. They associated it primarily with Italy; frequently, enlarging upon the Italian example, they classified it as a phenomenon rooted in poverty-ridden, semi-industrialized societies.2 They did not ignore it, however: the most gratuitous act of Fascist violence in Italy had been the murder of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in June 1924, and other party members had been jailed or exiled as Mussolini's regime progressed toward the outright dictatorship which was in place by 1927. This brutality and persecution earned the enmity of socialists throughout Europe. Nevertheless, a measure of ambivalence persisted toward Italian Fascism and personally toward its leader, a socialist himself until 1915.

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From time to time it surfaced amid the ranks of the Front Generation. "Fascism is certainly not just to be dismissed with the catchword tyranny," Walther Pähl wrote in 1927. 3 What intrigued Pähl and others was the regime's proclaimed ambition to bring the economy under state control, ostensibly guaranteeing an equal partnership between capital and labor. This was also on de Man's mind in August 1930, when he replied to a letter from Mussolini commenting on the Italian edition of Au delà du marxisme. He was willing, he said at one point, "to render justice to certain organizational aspects of the Fascist achievement"; he could only hope, however, that "a man of your intellectual dynamism" would overcome his fears that Fascism would fail to restore liberty and ensure peace for Italy.4 Less than a month later, in the Reichstag elections of September 14, 1930, Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) vaulted from the margin into the center of German politics, advancing from 12 seats to 107, second only to the SPD itself. Overnight the significance of fascism was transformed. Events in Italy might be seen as peripheral to the key concerns of socialism. Events in Germany were critical. Along with the Labour Party, the SPD was a main pillar of the movement. Now its position was endangered by the new force on the right, whose spectacular surge at the polls had shaken the internal balance of the Weimar Republic. Germany was central in another way as well. Peace was a constant preoccupation of socialists. The Nazis told their electorate that if they achieved power they would revise the Versailles settlement, and they left the clear impression that if necessary, they would do so by force. There was no hint here of conceptions shared with socialism, as existed in Italian Fascism, nor would de Man have imagined writing to Hitler as he had to Mussolini. Until the 1930 elections Social Democratic observers had viewed the Nazi leader as nothing more than a racist demagogue, and they dismissed the reference to socialism in his party's name as a sham. The "earthquake" of September 14 was only the first shock. Over the next twenty-two months the Nazis steadily gained on every electoral front—local, regional, and national—reaching a high point with their triumph in the Reichstag balloting of July 31, 1932: 230 of 608 parliamentary seats, 37.3 percent of the votes cast. 5 By then the Front Generation socialists were struggling, often in frustration, for effective responses to a movement which displayed the energy they were seeking to infuse into socialism, which was attracting the youth for whom they were competing, and which claimed entitlement to the legacy of the war they had fought. It is easy to understand the exasperation and anger that led Mierendorff and his fellow Social Democratic deputy Kurt Schumacher,

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who had lost an arm on the Eastern Front, to rush the podium of the Reichstag in a February 1932 session when the Nazi speaker Joseph Goebbels called the SPD "the party of deserters." One can likewise inhale the bitterness from another occasion, this time with Mierendorff at the rostrum and the NSDAP delegation ostentatiously rising to leave the hall, when he called out to Goebbels to have the courage to stay, "so that we will see if you can dare to look a combat soldier in the eye." 6 Front Generation leaders easily held their own in such parliamentary confrontations. But the real battle lay outside the debating chambers. In waging it they worked forward from the conceptual ground which they had defined in the late 1920s. In the September 1930 elections the NSDAP had drawn the bulk of its votes from the intermediate strata of society. Yet according to the critique which had separated socialist consciousness from the material circumstances of the proletariat, at least a potential existed for socialism to appeal to wide segments of the middle classes. It followed that in seeking to counter fascism, the Front Generation socialists would attempt to compete directly for the loyalties of its following. It was a commonplace of socialist analysis to identify fascism with the middle classes. In the conventional view, the attachment of these strata to movements like Hitler's was a derivative phenomenon, a reflex of capitalist evolution. Fascism had won mass support, the argument went, as a beneficiary of the Depression. It had profited from the bourgeois inclination to escape into some form of what Marxists described as false consciousness, such as nationalism or anti-Semitism, a tendency encouraged by the industrial and financial elites who controlled economic power. From this perspective fascism was seen as negative, defensive, and artificial. It was an illusory shield for the frightened middle strata who feared being driven into proletarization, and simultaneously a capitalist-fed parody of radical populism that was to immunize the white-collar population against the viruses of the left. Inauthentic on its own, its prospects depended on economic developments. Total collapse would make the facts of their exploitation inescapable to the middle classes; in that eventuality fascism would lose its mass constituency and, in turn, its financial backers. Alternatively, recovery would render the fascists equally superfluous. The middle classes would be relieved of their fears of social decline, the capitalists of their need for a buffer against their enemies. Either way, economics and not politics would determine the outcome. The socialists could not resolve it through their own actions. 7 The Front Generation socialists rejected this conclusion that there was little to do but hold one's ground and wait. In some respects, it is true, their analysis of the situation paralleled the orthodox view. All located

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fascism in the context of slumping production, wage cuts, and unemployment. "The economic explanation," Hendrik de Man wrote early in 1931, "certainly suffices to answer the question as to the cause to which this movement's enormous increase in power at this time is to be attributed." 8 Nevertheless, even as they agreed that fascism had thrived since the American stock market crash in October 1929, Front Generation observers linked its growing strength to discontents that went beyond economic concerns. Fascist movements had been winning adherents before the Depression broke. The downslide dramatically enlarged their field of recruitment. It did not explain their appeal. Fascist success, Carlo Mierendorff said of the Nazis in June 1930, months before their stunning electoral breakthrough, could be traced to a crisis which went "in truth much deeper" than economic troubles. 9 This was to become a shared perspective among the Front Generation socialists. Its societal focus was the intermediate sector, whose various elements were discovering themselves to be trapped in a net of impersonal forces—concentration, rationalization—which threatened their status as well as their material living standard. Their feeling that control and opportunity were slipping away from them seemed instrumental in disposing the middle strata toward fascism. Fears of losing attributes of identity and relative standing evenly balanced their anger toward the dominant elements in society. Mierendorff described the seeming contradiction of three million white-collar employees who belonged "among the section of the proletariat that is working class from head to toe, but do not want to be proletarians at any price." 10 For Marxists, de Man pointed out, this left a paradox. As much as economic developments might appear to have validated Marx's prediction that most bourgeois would become proletarized, the continuing hostility of the middle strata toward the working class and socialism contradicted his political conclusions. 11 The riddle to be solved was why these negative attitudes had prevailed. The Front Generation socialists sought their answer by accepting middle-class receptiveness to fascism as genuine and not manipulated, the expression of needs that socialism had not met but might have. This understanding came gradually. In the late 1920s Front Generation commentators noted the unrest of the middle strata optimistically. Scanning the Nazis' appeal to "exploited white-collar employees and peasant youths" in the spring of 1929, Julius Leber remained untroubled: "Those who demonstrate against us tomorrow—in two years more than 90 percent of them will be with ms." 12 As late as the summer of 1930 Marcel Déat echoed this mood in his Perspectives socialistes: the SFIO's opportunity lay in seizing the leadership of the middle-class groups—peasants, artisans, civil servants, employees, small merchants, and rentiers—who

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were now at odds with capitalism. 13 Déat saw his party's chief competition to its immediate left and right among the Communists and the Radicals. He did not consider fascism, still a minor current in France, as a threat. Nevertheless, by this time the pendulum was swinging toward a more disquieting appraisal of the emergent radicalism of the intermediate strata. Already in June Mierendorff identified many of the same elements—artisans, small businessmen, employees, peasants, and poor students—as the social core of the Nazi movement. A few months later de Man was to use a nearly identical categorization in his own dissection of

Nationalfascismus.u

As emphatically as the NSDAP's electoral victory of September 14 seemed to confirm a middle-class turn to fascism, Front Generation observers did not believe it signified a permanent loss. At least in part they credited it to socialist inertia, a default that could be reversed. The SPD had wasted a year, Mierendorff wrote soon after the election, during which it could have taken action. "It let escape this great opportunity to propagandize true socialist tenets, through affirmation and rebuttal against a pseudosocialist movement, among entirely new groups of voters." Although circumstances were now more difficult, the setback could be overcome and the wavering elements of the population won over, "if the fight to destroy the National Socialist illusion among the electorate and in public opinion is taken up as rapidly as possible." 15 At this juncture, in the fall of 1930, this was the prevailing judgment among the Front Generation socialists. In one form or another they shared Mierendorff's premise that socialism could offer something more attractive to the disaffected middle strata than the cheap ideological goods of fascism. Most often they justified their confidence by characterizing middle-class resentments as expressions of anticapitalism. This was a new term in their analytical vocabulary, a label that could accommodate several shadings of meaning: economic, psychological, and spiritual. All, however, rested on the recognition, gained since the war, that capitalism itself had come to encompass much more than the relationships between factory owners and their workers, that its power and organization now also defined the lives of the intermediate ranks of society. Anticapitalism was viewed as the initial response of these groups to their new circumstances, an ideological near-beer to socialism, accustoming them to its taste, but devoid of the ingredients that could excite and inspire their social vision. For the Front Generation the spread of anticapitalist sentiment seemed an opportunity, the chance to turn into allies and even friends those who had now become the enemies of their enemies. Such anticipation was strongest in the early stages of middle-class attraction to fascism, when the latter appeared most to be, as Mierendorff said, a pseudosocialist

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movement, successful because the socialists had not known or thought to resist it. Even in Britain, where white-collar dissatisfactions were more diffuse and the scattered clusters of fascists were divided and selfabsorbed, there was still a parallel feeling that the chance existed for alliances extending beyond the working class. What would happen, John Strachey asked in October 1930, if "whole great classes of English men and English women demanded that their rulers should really rule, that reality should be faced and grasped, that the slow decay of British economic greatness should at all costs be arrested, that the vast reservoirs of enthusiasm, of self-sacrifice and of service which the nation possesses should be mobilized at last for action? Then, indeed, the future would be very different." 16 The idea of an anticapitalist rassemblement was never thereafter to leave the minds of the Front Generation's leaders. It became a main theme in the mature phase of their political careers. In the longer perspective it was the practical conclusion of the views they had developed before 1930 concerning socioeconomic structure, human motivation, and the prospects of socialism. Now the pressures of the moment made it something not only to be desired but to be achieved. At this early stage, when it could be hoped that socialism could counteract fascism in Germany and preempt it elsewhere, the problem appeared to demand few compromises. It was the middle class that must adjust its values and ambitions. Later in the 1930s and during the war years, these comfortable expectations would give way to the conviction that the working class would gain nonproletarian allies only by dropping some—or many—elements of socialism. How much to concede was one of the issues that eventually divided the Front Generation socialists between those who transferred their hopes to fascism and those who resisted it. At the beginning, however, the price seemed slight, only to sacrifice the blue-collar exclusiveness within which they felt the movement had become unnecessarily trammeled. It did not take long to discover that a more serious barrier of exclusiveness lay among the middle-class elements which appeared to be socialism's potential allies. As 1930 gave way to 1931, Front Generation analyses began to emphasize the anti-Marxism of the middle strata more than their anticapitalism. Behind this "widespread and deep-rooted hatred of socialism and the workers' movement," as de Man described it, were fears of losing status and identity and not simply economic opportunities. The result was an attachment to imagery and symbols that denied the common economic deprivations of middle and working classes and instead provided compensatory identifications, through nationalism and anti-Semitism, for "the collective self-regard" of the white-collar groups. 17 De Man elaborated this approach most completely in his essay

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Sozialismus und Nationalfascismus, published in January 1931, and it quickly became a reference point for others in the Front Generation. A few months later Mierendorff extended it to specific German circumstances by suggesting that middle-class resentment against socialism in part went back to 1918 and expressed a wish to repress feelings of failure and inadequacy at not preventing the collapse of the Empire. 18 Recognition of these impulses to fascism made it clear that neither National Socialism nor any similar movement would simply vanish if the economy recovered. Overcoming them was to be no easy task. Part of the solution seemed to be simply to take action. Front Generation critics harped on the timidity of party and union leaders, and they insisted that socialists must risk initiatives rather than settle behind safe defenses. "This is not an age of dreams and fancies," Oswald Mosley told a workers' audience late in 1930; "it is an age of iron, in which an iron spirit and an iron will are needed by men to cut their path through to victory. Let us have no sentiment. We know of the agony of the country, of the tears of women and the misery of men, but we must steel ourselves and organize, plan and fight to cure these things. Don't let's talk about them. Let us do something." 19 The same restiveness underlay Mierendorff's questioning of the SPD's willingness to abide the stringently deflationist Brüning government as a lesser evil compared to the Nazis: "The meaning of 'toleration' cannot be simply to accept what is handed down from 'above.'" 2 0 But to the Front Generation it seemed that in the upper ranks of their own movement inaction was the preferred course. Déat mocked such caution at the decisive SFIO congress of July 1933. The delegates had been told, he said, that "it was necessary to be prudent, it was necessary to be patient, it was necessary to measure the opposing forces accurately. We were not to advance toward power because that would be too dangerous; we would be crushed by the resistance of capitalism itself; we were not to advance toward revolution because we were not ready, because the time was not ripe. . . . We are to advance nowhere! And meanwhile events will proceed, and you will be swept away!" 2 1 Only longer passages like this one convey the emotion which stirred the Front Generation's impatience, the anger born of their exasperation. At times it flashes from the page, as in Julius Leber's condemnation of the SPD leadership, written from a Nazi jail in 1933: "They did not swim with the current, neither did they swim against it. They stood astonished and helpless on the shore. And when the dam broke and the riverbank was flooded, then there remained only one escape: headlong flight. Every man for himself!" 2 2 And yet it must also be asked whether such harsh verdicts were justified. For it is possible to regard them as nothing

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more than the disappointed chants of younger men who could not have their way. It can be argued, and it often has been, that the prudence of socialist policy was dictated by circumstances which might be regretted but could not be ignored. The debates over these questions are now more than a half-century old. They are still not resolved, nor are they soon likely to be. Nevertheless, it can be said that within the range of choice they defined for themselves, the most accomplished socialist leaders of the 1930s achieved only limited and fleeting successes; this is true even of Léon Blum, who eventually did risk the experiment of the Popular Front. For this reason the Front Generation's pleas for energetic alternatives retain their vitality. They breathe the life of unexpended options. This urging to action, this fury against passivity, was often clothed in metaphors whose filaments were drawn from the experience of the front. "It is not a case of moidering in the trenches," Déat wrote in 1930 of the socialists' possibilities of exploiting state power, "but of waging a war of mobility." 2 3 At the end of 1932 de M a n employed similar language in calling for new initiatives: "the defensive battle for what has already been achieved can lead to success only if it is conducted as an offensive struggle for what is not yet won and until now not yet really demanded. Today the requirements of this defensive battle are defined for socialism exactly as is the task of digging and erecting emplacements for an army in combat which is preparing for a shift from positional warfare to mobile warfare." 2 4 Earlier Mierendorff had also rejected the stationary horizons of a static resistance: " M o r e than ever the hour requires a grand strategic stroke from Social Democracy, the resoluteness to abandon terrain temporarily for the sake of reconquering freedom of maneuver against the National Socialist offensive. It is a situation very similar to that of a general who withdraws his troops kilometer by kilometer, rather than, by his own choice, boldly breaking contact with the enemy and shortening the front by 100 k m " ; better such a retreat than a vain effort to retain "illusory strongholds." 2 5 These images did not arise by accident. The parallels to the war were too evident. To the Front Generation socialists it appeared that as in 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 8 , incompetent leaders were squandering the lives entrusted to them. In its reactive posture the movement was allowing its following to be worn down in a process of attrition whose casualties steadily mounted among the unemployed, the ill-fed, and the hopeless. "The leaders, not the soldiers, lost this battle," Mierendorff declared after the September 14 elections. " T h e unknown functionary" had defended his "bit of trench. . . . But the best army cannot be victorious under faulty leadership." 26 Such criticisms multiplied as fascism advanced and the Depression worsened, while party and union executives seemed no more ca-

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pable of devising new responses than the general staffs which had belittled the machine gun and continued to dream of cavalry breakthroughs even after Verdun and the Somme. Failure of direction from above also meant that too little was being asked of those below, the rank-and-file socialists. From their war experience the Front Generation's leaders knew that men could do more than the movement's chief figures appeared to wish for or expect. In analyzing the Nazis' ability to mobilize their followers, de Man pointed out that they had responded to "needs of the masses, politically shaken by distress and doubt, to give heroic stature to their own conduct in easily understood suggestive/symbolic form. Those who are familiar with the socialist working class know that there, as well, similar needs exist and are not satisfied." 27 Front Generation socialists wanted to tap this potential. It was not only an unspent resource. As they had concluded during the 1920s, the willingness of ordinary individuals to go beyond themselves lay at the heart of socialist motivation. Agreement on this value extended even to the choice of words used to describe it, as when in a passage from Perspectives socialistes Déat cited Au delà du marxisme and de Man's own quote of "the striking and attractive formula of a young German whose thought is close to de Man's: our existence cannot be paradisaical, but it will be heroic." The "young German" whom Déat did not name and probably did not know was Theodor Haubach. 28 Heroism, however, was not a notion with which the men at the head of European socialism were comfortable. The distance between generations counted for much here. "The types which have emerged from the pre-war and post-war periods are so different," Mosley asserted in May 1930, "that they can scarcely understand each other's language when they face the economic and administrative problems of the present time." 29 Two years later Mierendorff drew a similar contrast in defining what separated him and his confederates from the SPD leadership. Although he blanketed his distinctions under ill-fitting labels, opposing a "new left" against an old right, the polarities he outlined were valid, not only for German Social Democracy but for other European parties as well. Rhetorically as well as substantively, they divided activism from immobility: on the one side terse words—radical, heroic, militant, dynamic; on the other lumpy phrases—organic process of development, merit of the lesser evil, careful preservation of what has been gained. 30 Mierendorff was too good a polemicist not to have given his categories a favorable slant, but the differences were real: the experiences of two eras in collision. This gap in perspectives encompassed not only the content and style of socialism but also the role to be permitted to individuals within the movement. The new men of the Front Generation did not believe that

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the committees which controlled the socialist parties would undertake bold initiatives; socialists needed to regain an appreciation of the nature and qualities of leadership, to make room for outstanding personalities. In the past the movement had obeyed autocrats like August Bebel and followed visionaries like Jaurès and Keir Hardie. Now it preferred to forget them as individual talents and to merge their memories into a bland collective pantheon. Front Generation critics saw this denial as an evasion of both the realities of politics and the basic issues of responsibility and democracy. No leaders meant no one to present a policy, to have it approved or rejected, to stand accountable for it. In socialist practice, however, the party executive committees ran affairs, made the decisions, and then offered them for endorsement in the "democratic ritual" of branch meetings and national congresses; "social democracy," Haubach wrote in 1931, "and not only in Germany but in nearly all sections of the International, is surely excellently administered, but in no manner is it led." 31 These routines had remained unchanged in spite of the new challenges to the movement. Additional frictions became attached to the generational conflict as, from the onset of the Depression, the signs multiplied that socialism was losing ground with younger people. Déat connected policy shortcomings and this waning appeal in 1930 in remarking on criticism of the movement by "a youth eager for action." 32 Occasionally individuals within the Front Generation classified themselves apart from what they called youth, la jeunesse, die Jugend, but as a rule they did not. When they spoke of younger people they meant those who had reached maturity during or after the war, a constituency which should be theirs on the strength of common experience and outlook. 33 As they were acutely aware, however—more than most socialists—not enough young people were joining them, and significant numbers were finding a home with fascism. They could be won over, both Mierendorff and Haubach noted in mid-1930, as they had been through the Reichsbanner, whose membership mirrored the age makeup of the NSDAP. But that was the exception. As Front Generation observers ceaselessly reiterated over the next few years, the clear goals and decisive actions that the young sought remained wanting among socialist parties. 34 This yearning for direction gave further evidence that socialists must cultivate the art of leadership. Fascism might become a temptation in Britain, C. Ε. M. Joad suggested, because of "the need which so many young people feel consciously or unconsciously for discipline." 35 This tendency must be harnessed constructively. In Haubach's judgment socialism had senselessly resisted the uniforming of political groups, "which today answers an enormously powerful, burning impulse among all young people." Youth had turned away from the prewar era's "eudaemonistic-rational ideal of life"; military values were not foreign to them.

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Thus the summons: " O u r movement must learn to understand that ceremony, command, and firm leadership are in no way undemocratic and most certainly not unsocialistic." 3 6 In the late 1920s the members of the Front Generation had talked of the need to impart an immediacy to socialism that it no longer seemed to possess. The distance between the critique they had formulated just a few years earlier and their demands now for action and leadership was the space between ought and must, a gap measurable not in ideological lengths but along a grid of intensity and urgency. With this change had come a boldness which allowed a Haubach to say outright that uniforms could be a good thing for socialism. That willingness to cast precedent aside was equally unconcealed in Front Generation proposals regarding the state, the indispensable tool of effective action. Here the chief target was parliamentary government as it had functioned since the war; the complaint was that it was irresolute, ineffective, and thus, despite its form, profoundly unrepresentative. More than a half-century after the Front Generation pressed the point, it is an even plainer truth that inaction is frequently the easiest policy for parties and elected deputies to agree upon and that stalemate and the flight from hard decisions are persistent weaknesses in electoral democracies. Little wonder that in the crisis of their era the Front Generation socialists sought to redesign the structure of government. In Germany they wished to replace the edifice of proportional representation introduced by the Republic with a voting system more conducive to action and participation. This was not a new cause. Mierendorff and Julius Leber had been pressing for such a change since the mid1920s. From the late spring of 1 9 3 0 , however, until about a year later, "electoral reform" became a constant theme in Mierendorff's journalism: "the solution of the young generation" he called it in one article. 37 Here as elsewhere the advance of National Socialism gave the issue currency. As Mierendorff pointed out even before September 14 and as the NSDAP's victory confirmed, the electoral system's most damaging effects were the ways in which it devitalized the political process. Coupled with the Weimar structure, in which votes had to be cast for multicandidate party slates contesting large regional constituencies, proportional representation had made for little variation in the strength of the forces in the Reichstag and few changes in the parliamentary delegations. The result was political atrophy: voting became a secondhand affair, a matter of ratifying the choices of the party directorates. The Nazis had profited immensely from the alienation this system had produced, while Social Democracy had suffered from the indifference of its supporters. All this, Mierendorff argued, reversed the priorities of democracy, in which "everything depends on educating the voters and keeping them in contin-

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uous touch with political events." It also deepened the deficit of leadership with which both the Republic and the SPD were burdened. In another passage on democracy Mierendorff portrayed the individual talents that were needed to match a system "whose life's breath is dialogue, the play of argument against argument in debate. All the essential irrational qualities" were demanded here: "the capacity to fascinate masses, rhetorical persuasiveness, intellectual deftness, and argumentative impact in debate, which can be cultivated only when one is matched against an opponent." 3 8 Underlying Mierendorff's comments were the same assumptions about politics that had steadily set the Front Generation at odds with the reductionism of orthodox socialist thought: that loyalty and commitment must be constantly motivated, that political confrontation created its own opportunities, and that the ties between state and society were not simple reflections of economic relationships. From these convictions concerning the value of political action it was possible to interpret the antiparliamentary sentiment which had surfaced with fascism as a response to democratic and socialist failures, but not necessarily a rejection of democratic and socialist principles. C. Ε. M. Joad, who worked closely with John Strachey at this time, caught the distinction in the writing of students early in 1931: they were "not professedly anti-democratic in the sense that they wish to abolish Parliament; on the contrary, they still hold that the mass of people should either directly or through its elected representatives exercise an influence, and on vital issues a decisive influence, on national policy. But this does not mean that these elected representatives should be entrusted, as they are entrusted at present, with almost unlimited powers of obstruction and delay." 39 Again the issue came down to action and initiative. Again Joad: "But if the party system does not produce a body of men willing and anxious to take over the reins of government, what, it may be asked, is there to be said for it?" 4 0 In Germany Front Generation critics appear to have believed that electoral reform would be sufficient to reinvigorate parliamentary government. In Britain and France, however, there was relative satisfaction with the voting process; the trouble was identified with the governing structure itself, and the Front Generation's solutions were aimed at the state. In their final appeals to the Labour Party in December 1930-January 1931 and in the New Party's proposals in subsequent months, Mosley and his allies argued that Parliament must limit itself to selecting a government and reviewing its actions and that executive power should be concentrated in a cabinet of five, given "a clear run and a free hand"; its policies could be rejected by Parliament, but they could not be amended or impeded. 41 Déat's approach was oriented more to-

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ward power relationships than toward institutions. Holding that in current circumstances the state had become a neuter, balanced between the forces of capitalism and anticapitalism, he contended that it would be turned toward socialist ends to the degree that the SFIO became a partner in and influence on government, beginning with "participation"— coalition with nonsocialist parties. 42 To some extent all these projects simply objectified the Front Generation's desire for action. When John Strachey speculated that a government "formed from the members of every party (and of every class) who are under forty-five years of age . . . could tackle the immediate problems of the nation" and that he would probably agree with a Conservative counterpart "about what in practice could immediately be done," he made no claims that the state machinery would have to be changed.43 If the members of the Front Generation had actually gained power in the early 1930s, the existing institutions might well have carried them a long way toward their goals. Still, their comments frequently tended toward judgments that these structures were leftovers from the prewar era and that the age in which they lived would impose different models, of one pattern or another and under one set of masters or another. Déat expressed this conviction in the fall of 1933, in the aftermath of his confrontation with Léon Blum at the SFIO's July congress: "In the present historical phase forms of society appear possible which are not yet socialist but are no longer capitalist. Are we to allow these experiments to be carried out without us, as in the United States; must we let them be carried out against us, as in Italy or Germany? . . . We are for action, even if it admits of some risk." 4 4 Action at what risk, however? What version of socialism was the Front Generation creating, that was sympathetic to strong leadership and middle-class grievances and found virtue in a powerful state and a uniformed youth? After listening to Déat's ally Adrien Marquet elaborate on such themes before the French party in July 1933, Léon Blum had responded that "I wondered where I was. . . . I must warn you against the dangers in Marquet's statement, the danger that in our opposition to fascism, we come to adopt its own methods and even its ideology. . . . We socialists are not a party of what is commonly meant by 'authority and order'; we are a party of liberty and justice." 45 For the Front Generation the differences were not so absolute; the borderline was not so easily discerned. Socialists, Theodor Haubach said in 1931, were going to have to borrow much from their opponents—both fascist and communist—in order to be able to defeat them. The choices at issue involved defining essential matters: the boundaries of socialism, the tendency of the era. The difficulties seem epitomized by Haubach's

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distinction between the "militant p a r t y " which socialism must forge and the "military p a r t y " which he identified with fascism. 46 If one looked like a tiger and moved like a tiger, would one not become equally savage? Or in the jungle did all have to act like tigers, and yet some would remain creatures of a different stripe?

7 Visions for the Masses If the Front Generation socialists confronted similar dilemmas in the strained years after 1 9 2 9 , their attempts to resolve them were played out separately, with varying and, as of late 1 9 3 3 - e a r l y 1 9 3 4 , when this phase ended, still indeterminate outcomes. On the surface they might appear to have lost a common focus by this time. Mosley, now the leader of the blackshirted British Union of Fascists, and Déat, the oracle of a "neosocialism,"each together with some important associates, had claimed new political identities, while their German counterparts, in confinement or under Nazi surveillance, were blocked from the socialist activity they would have persisted with otherwise. All the same, the patterns of action which had led to such seemingly scattered destinations still betrayed deep affinities. Under the pressure of economic and political crisis and in rebellion against the immobilism of socialist policy, all had sought fields of initiative free of the established leaderships' constraints. Given opportunities or seizing them, they had concentrated their efforts upon two objectives which their parties continued to ignore: to create the ideology and propaganda that could mobilize the masses, and to organize and bring to life the popular movement extending beyond the working class which they were convinced lay waiting to be aroused. Often they chose divergent means. The goal, however, was defined by what fascism apparently had accomplished. It was to match or outdo this achievement or, as Mosley decided by late 1 9 3 2 , to emulate it. As alike as these undertakings were, the Front Generation socialists still had only a limited awareness of their mutual interests during this time. Part of the reason was situational. As de M a n had earlier observed, it was now necessary to operate primarily within the national framework, a circumstance that encouraged parochialism. Beyond this, however, with the exception of de M a n , the Front Generation socialists were not particularly well instructed about the tensions and conflicts that par-

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alleled their own struggles. There were few opportunities for contact through travel or international meetings, and they generally did not follow one another's journals. Thus while they tended to view their own leaders as clay-footed, they frequently expressed uncritical admiration for similar figures elsewhere in Europe. Mierendorff could speak highly of Léon Blum and Déat of Rudolf Breitscheid, yet Front Generation unhappiness with the two parliamentary leaders was identical: a feeling that each used rhetorical elegance as an escape from fundamental decisions.1 Such resemblances remained unrecognized. De Man might have been a link between the French and the Germans. He also had ties to the Labour Party. At this stage of his activity, however, he kept his involvements separate. In Germany his essays and his contributions to the Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus influenced the Front Generation elements within the SPD. Once, in September 1930, he shared the podium with Carlo Mierendorff at a campaign rally. But the political life that Hendrik de Man led in the Weimar Republic remained a distance apart from Henri de Man's connections to the SFIO in Paris, where he periodically addressed socialist meetings—at least once at a common forum with Marcel Déat—and maintained touch with the former normaliens who founded the new group Révolution Constructive in 1932. The one Franco-German colloquy he did attend, in the spring of 1932, was a cultural not a socialist gathering.2 For some months after he returned to active politics in Belgium late in 1933, he and Déat practiced a sort of ideological reciprocity, but this link belonged to the phase of Front Generation planisme. In his memoirs Déat wrote of how in Britain in 1930 "a small group of the Labour opposition, with a certain Oswald Mosley, began to be talked about." Nevertheless, his journalism of the period betrayed no hint of recognition toward Mosley. For its part the BUF weekly The Blackshirt greeted the neo-socialist manifesto of summer 1933 with the headline "France Is Going Fascist," but it reported nothing more of Déat and his associates after they organized themselves as the Parti Socialiste de France/Union Jean-Jaurès. 3 Occasional mentions like these indicate how little mutual consciousness existed among Front Generation socialists in different countries in spite of their common predicaments. A lone exception was the Germans' perception of Mosley, which almost certainly was filtered through the reporting of Egon Wertheimer. In 1930, when Mosley challenged the Labour leadership, Wertheimer still judged him positively, though uncertainly. His tone turned negative with the founding of the New Party in February 1931; now a commentary recalled Mosley's speech before Labour's annual conference the previous October: "'the English Hitler,' we tell our friends"—but Wertheimer had not printed that remark at the time. After the New Party was launched

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and, coincidentally, Wertheimer left London for a League of Nations post at Geneva, neither side paid the other attention. The degree of their mutual obliviousness is underscored in the itinerary of a BUF German tour in July 1933: "By bus to HEIDELBERG, visit University and castle, then by motor-coach through the BERGSTRASSE to OSLHOSEN [SZ'C], visiting concentration Camp for political prisoners, communists and other Reds." Actually the location of the camp was Osthofen, and by then one of the "other Reds" imprisoned there was Carlo Mierendorff.4 Two years earlier, in more hopeful days, Mierendorff and his allies had been shifting their sights to a new ideological goal. By the spring of 1931 they had reached the point of abandoning their emphasis on electoral reform. It was clear that in the prevailing circumstances the SPD would not be able to modify the constitutional structure. Beyond that it was now evident that a correction in the mechanics of politics would not be change enough; socialism needed a vision that could counter the motivational appeal of Nazism. The Front Generation found it in the concept of Europe. De Man appears to have influenced this choice, for the theme of a European ideal emerged at the beginning of the year in his Sozialismus und Nationalfascismus: "I believe that there is no greater need today than the courage to make a radical separation from all nationalism, the courage to appeal again to the not only international but cosmopolitan humanistic thought of the greatest Europeans and men of the world." This challenge, Mierendorff commented a few months later, pointed toward the positive objective that the struggle against National Socialism demanded.5 Europe as a goal embraced both concrete and mythical elements. In economic terms it meant an international approach to the Depression, something which governments at least talked and negotiated about and most socialist experts believed in through the end of summer 1931. Mierendorff, who emphasized German-French cooperation as the basis for action, was increasingly hopeful about it during the summer months, especially after the visit of French leaders to Berlin at the end of September. But the ideal of Europe also offered an answer to nationalism that both accepted and transcended it: "the positive incorporation of the nation within the international order," in Walther Pahl's formula.6 Just as the vision of an anticapitalist alliance beyond classes stayed with the Front Generation in later years, so did this ideal of a European entity built upon the legitimate and peaceful national aspirations of its members. As with electoral reform, the practical difficulty with this goal was that Mierendorff, Pähl, and their friends could rely only on their own talents of persuasion in seeking to realize it. Power lay beyond their reach, both

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in the SPD and in the state, and their influence as critics was limited. Moreover, whatever were its objectives, by the middle of 1 9 3 1 German Social Democracy faced an uphill struggle to achieve them. To the Front Generation their party might seem only a sleeping giant, but in many respects it was now toothless as well. It had no prospect of regaining a place in a governing coalition, nor would the army have allowed it the chance at this point. The Social Democrats still presided over the state of Prussia, with its large and efficient police force, but they were in no position to extend their power from there. Consequently, the SPD's leaders stayed with their policy of toleration and justified it as best they could at the party's national congress in July, while the Marxists of the left wing incessantly disputed them and the Front Generation's members smoldered in silence. 7 Over the remainder of the summer and into the fall, the conflict between the leadership and the left wing reached a breaking point. At the end of September the party expelled the most prominent dissidents. The dissidents then founded a new Socialist Workers' Party (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei). The entire fight had little meaning for the Front Generation. Mierendorff judged that the left opposition had "fished out certain

Carlo Mierendorff at the Social Democratic Party congress, Leipzig, 1 9 3 1

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rigid formulas from the 'Marxist' inventory of the 1890s which have nothing in common with Marxist thought, therefore were already sterile then and remained without revolutionizing effect."8 Upon this foundation and with the handicap of small numbers they were condemned to irrelevancy. Still, Mierendorff and his counterparts were also becoming impatient. In October they forced an editorial realignment which turned the Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus onto a more narrowly political track.' Yet this was only a small step forward in the face of a rapid succession of unfavorable developments. Hope for European economic coordination had been damaged, if not totally undermined, by Britain's abandonment of the gold standard in August. Since then the internal pendulum in Germany had swung further rightward, as first Brüning reshuffled his cabinet in that direction, and then, in response, the Nazis and the German Nationalists, the most powerful of the older antidemocratic parties, staged a demonstration of unity at the spa of Bad Harzburg. The "Harzburg Front" has often been dismissed as a display of opportunism by Hitler and the Nationalist leader Alfred Hugenberg. To the Front Generation Socialists, however, it appeared to presage a union of old and new enemies; thus its formation became a final incentive for them to initiate action if the SPD leadership would not.10 In this they were not alone. Harzburg provoked a broad reaction within the ranks of Social Democracy. Little more than a month later the leadership of the Reichsbanner called for the formation of a new antifascist organization, an "Iron Front" of republican loyalists. By the end of December the SPD and its trade union ally, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (ADGB), had endorsed the idea, and a drive had begun to create local branches all across Germany. Late in January a rally at the Berlin Sportpalast launched the effort before the public; the featured speaker was the new head of the Reichsbanner, Karl Höltermann, another former combat officer. The founders of the Iron Front hoped that it would unite under its independent aegis all the forces that could defend the Republic; it should be the sort of alliance that extended the reach of Social Democracy. This expectation was to be disappointed. Very few nonsocialist labor or party groups sought affiliation, while the leaders of the SPD and ADGB preserved ultimate authority for themselves in lending the new grouping their organizational and financial support.11 Still, much of this byplay was missed by the Social Democratic rank and file, whose enthusiastic response confirmed the Front Generation's conviction that action would produce its own rewards. Afterward Julius Leber remembered the new organization's advent as a liberation: "Finally there had been enough of the eternal debating, the endless factional quarrels. Everything breathed again."12

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The Iron Front was too loosely structured for any individual or group to be able to control it. But it is fair to say that its activist nucleus was drawn from the Front Generation. For all its institutional weakness, it presented the mass organizational opportunity that men like Mierendorff and Haubach, Leber and Kurt Schumacher had been seeking; it was their best chance to bypass the SPD Apparat and reach the electorate directly. Their hopes for it are visible in a commentary of Haubach, published as the Iron Front was taking shape, on the fundamental role of political agitation in reactivating the party. Agitation, he wrote, "is more than mere advertising, more than a crafty method of stirring up voters or calming them down. The consciousness of a movement develops spontaneously through agitation; its picture of its tasks, hopes, and limits is clarified. At the same time this is the activity in which the simple party soldier becomes a combatant, an actor, a creator of history."13 In other words, mobilize socialists, and you can transform socialism. Motivation and organization became the focal points of the Front Generation's efforts to engage the Iron Front in this process. For Mierendorff, who was to guide the new body's propaganda, it was an unparalleled possibility to give play to his feeling for the visual and dramatic, to attempt, as he often said in these years, "to captivate and fascinate the fantasy of the masses."14 Together with the Russian émigré psychologist Serge Chakotin, whom he recruited to be director of propaganda for the Iron Front, Mierendorff created an array of mass persuasion devices in the early months of 1932. Most were designed to match successful Nazi and Communist techniques. There was a shouted greeting—Freiheit!— Freedom!—the response to the Nazis' Sieg Heil! and the Communists' Rot Front! There was a raised-arm, clenched-fist salute. Most important, Mierendorff and Chakotin produced a symbol, the Dreipfeile, three diagonally parallel arrows to counteract the swastika.15 According to one account by Chakotin, the inspiration for the Dreipfeile came when he saw a swastika crossed out by a chalk line on a wall in Heidelberg. Whether this was true and its originator was "an impulsive worker . . . no longer able to stifle his feelings," the new symbol was a weapon that every rank-and-file socialist could employ. And it "had the further advantage that it could not be destroyed: our opponents could not superpose their symbol on ours as we could on theirs, for in this case it would still look as though the swastika had been struck through by the three arrows." 16 By June it had been officially accepted by both the Iron Front and the SPD leadership. Later in the summer it was adopted by the Austrian socialists. Thereafter it traveled further: a three-arrow banner stands as backdrop for Hendrik de Man in a mid-1930s photograph of a Belgian socialist meeting; and in France Chakotin, who fled Germany following the Nazi takeover, introduced the trois flèches to the SFIO in

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1 9 3 6 , when he became an assistant to Marceau Pivert, who headed propaganda for the French party at the outset of the Popular Front. As late as the 1950s the three-arrow symbol still appeared on some socialist occasions. 17 In 1 9 3 0 Mierendorff had asserted that National Socialism overemphasized irrational factors in political attitudes to the same degree that the SPD neglected them. By the early summer of 1 9 3 2 he and Chakotin no longer spoke in terms of a balance between feeling and reason: "Among the majority of people at present emotion plays a greater role in political struggle than rationality, cool calculation, pure logic." Successful propaganda must therefore seek to direct "all the basic human drives." 18 It had to be understood that the vast majority of the electorate were passive. In a city like Heidelberg, where there were some 6 0 , 0 0 0 voters, the total number of activists from all political groups would be no more than 5 , 0 0 0 . Necessarily, by sheer weight of numbers, the 5 5 , 0 0 0 "inactive" voters determined how elections came out. Until the founding of the Iron Front, however, only the Nazis had reached and influenced them, primarily by playing on their aggressive drives through tactics of intimidation. Now the Social Democrats would employ the same techniques " s o that the undecided and waverers and those the Nazis had frightened could reflect whether they could risk helping the National Socialists to come to power without incurring harm to themselves." 19 The view which underlay this approach differed markedly from the perceptions of Social Democracy's needs and National Socialism's strengths which Front Generation observers had offered in 1 9 3 0 and 1 9 3 1 . Class analysis was now a subordinate theme. Rather than a confrontation between the representatives of broad social groups, the conflict between SPD and NSDAP was presented as the struggle of activist minorities to manipulate the passive mass of voters. "As immensely as National Socialism may yet expand," Walther Pähl wrote on the eve of presidential balloting in March, "it does not possess a lasting sociological foundation in the German people." A few months afterward, following staggering Nazi gains in Reichstag and state elections, Mierendorff held to the point: "Adolf Hitler's success is not political but solely a success of propaganda." 2 0 Such judgments suggested that there was no longer much value in goals like the electoral reform which Mierendorff had championed in 1 9 3 0 - 3 1 or the European vision which he and Pähl had more recently promoted. In a handbook they produced in July 1 9 3 2 Mierendorff and Chakotin described the ideal formula for propaganda as 80 percent intimidation of voters and 2 0 percent ridicule of opponents. 21 It was as if politics was no longer the art of persuasion or even of inspiration. Chakotin had trained with the famous behaviorist Ivan Pavlov in Russia, and

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he appeared to expect that political propaganda could produce a sort of conditioned reflex among the electorate. How deeply Mierendorff shared his view is unclear. It rested on a more mechanistic and pessimistic conception of human psychology than he had admired in de Man's analysis, and it held implications at odds with the confidence he had expressed as late as the summer of 1930 in the educative function of public debate. For the moment such considerations seem to have counted less than the satisfactions of occasions like a July Iron Front rally and parade in Dortmund, where an eyewitness remembered watching "as every two minutes the Reichstag deputy Carlo Mierendorff, one of the fathers of the new style of demonstration, loudly called out to the oncoming marching columns, 'What do we want, comrades?' and heard the thundering reply, 'Freedom!'" 2 2 The new propaganda of 1932 thus stepped back from democratic practice. Similarly, the organizational structures which the Front Generation socialists sought to establish within the Iron Front stressed hierarchy and control. Propaganda, Mierendorff and Chakotin wrote in July, had now to be run on a modern footing; its effectiveness must be intensified through rationalization of its methods, just as productivity had been raised in the economy. 23 In a set of "Proposals for the Reforming of Party Propaganda" drawn up about this time, Mierendorff and Haubach contended that the party member detailed for agitational work "must be prepared, within the compass of his particular task, to waive certain ordinary party freedoms. He does not discuss, object, or equivocate, and is capable of unconditional obedience to the leader who issues orders to him." 24 Where the Iron Front claimed propaganda successes, in the second round of presidential balloting on April 10, and in state elections in Prussia (April 24) and Hessen (June 19), organization was said to be as responsible as the new symbols themselves for the results. The high point of this effort came in Darmstadt, in the Hessian voting. Here Mierendorff exercised direct control over the campaign, and he was able to produce an SPD increase of 12 percent, while the Nazis actually lost votes. 25 The significance of the Iron Front, Walther Pähl wrote in March, was "that it wages the defensive struggle against National Socialism with methods (within the limits that this is possible in the socialist workers' movement) adapted to those of its opponents." 26 But was such an adaptation possible without going beyond acceptable boundaries, without such resistance becoming a form of imitation? Certainly the SPD's chiefs were uncomfortable with the similarities. When in July they ordered Mierendorff and Chakotin's propaganda handbook held back from distribution, the reason given was that the Nazis might learn something from it. 27 For the Front Generation, however, what was at issue was not

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Three-arrow symbol on Social Democratic Party placard, July 1932

adoption of a fascist style of politics but the need to adjust to changed realities. If Mierendorff and Haubach insisted upon obedience among those who did the propaganda work, it was for the sake of efficiency and—the alternative had to be recognized by 1 9 3 2 — t h e possibility that the whole enterprise might have to go underground if the SPD were outlawed. In the rest of their party activity these functionaries were to be free to speak their minds. 28

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The activity of the Iron Front also revealed a clearer socialist identity than its theoretical approaches to propaganda implied. Mierendorff and Chakotin may have written that 90 percent of the electorate were inactive and wavering, but their campaign strategies scaled the employment of personnel and resources according to levels of Social Democratic strength: the heaviest concentrations in blue-collar districts, the weakest in the Nazified countryside. The first objective became to rally their own ranks; accordingly, their propaganda emphasized socialist themes—the image of the party founder, August Bebel, became a brooding sentinel in the Iron Front's posters and flyers. Socialists should find nothing foreign in the new methods, Mierendorff argued. The SPD had begun with symbols—the red flag, the salutation "Comrade," the red necktie and carnation and the floppy hat, which had become a sort of uniform of the early years.29 Symbols, however, could only alert the electorate, prepare it for a more concrete—and socialist—message, and here lay the SPD Front Generation's enduring problem. "German socialism," Mierendorff wrote in September 1932, "never succeeded in becoming a popular movement [Volksbewegung], although social divisions and the economic situation of the postwar era bore all the necessary preconditions. Lacking was the chief requisite: the clear socialist vision which alone can fascinate the masses." And he went on to repeat words he had written a year previously. "If we cannot say what we want clearly and understandably, if we cannot hammer out socialist aims in state, economy, and society, we will never defeat fascism."30 Defeat fascism or not, the task as Mierendorff described it was the problem the Front Generation had grappled with since the mid-1920s: to define a socialist road beyond Marxism. Committed as they had been to defend the existing but imperfect Republic, the Germans had always had trouble plotting such a way from the present into the future. By the time Mierendorff repeated his appeal, however, the obstacle of the Weimar system was, to all effects, gone. Once Hindenburg had been reelected in April 1932 against Hitler's challenge, the antiparliamentary coterie around the old president had persuaded him to replace Brüning with the right-wing Catholic Franz von Papen. Papen had then proceeded on July 20, with a show of military force, to oust the caretaker SPD government in Prussia, which still commanded that state's police. The Front Generation's leaders—particularly Höltermann and Haubach, who did not move to activate the Reichsbanner—were no more prepared than the SPD executive to resist the coup. Afterward, however, they were under no illusions about the blow the party and, even more, the Iron Front— now the name clanged rather hollow—had undergone.31 Even after two

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further defeats in the Reichstag elections of July 31 and November 6, the Social Democrats' chairman, Otto Wels, could declare his disbelief "that democracy is suffering serious harm." For the Front Generation socialists, however, the present was a void. "Our party faces an entirely new phase of its history," Mierendorff wrote in September; "We have to recognize that the cornerstone of the Weimar Constitution, the parliamentary system, belongs until further notice to history. The new task stands before us: the Republic of tomorrow." 32 Although Mierendorff continued to speak of the importance of propaganda techniques in these waning months of Weimar, he and his allies were turning their attention again to the question of goals. In the "struggle for mastery over public opinion," he wrote at the end of the year, connecting the fight against the Nazis to "positive concrete objectives which can ignite the will of the masses and focus it as in a reflecting mirror" was as important as creating an effective Apparat.33 It was a tacit admission that Chakotin's instrumental approach had proved insufficient, and simultaneously a return to the premise which de Man had most clearly formulated for the Front Generation: that motivation could succeed only with a new and positive socialist vision. In describing the "socialist path," Mierendorff reiterated the commitments of 1930 and 1931 to a less "formal" democracy than the Weimar model and to a socialist Europe. These aims, however, were now joined to a third: "socialist planned economy"—"conquest of the commanding heights of the economic structure." 34 Such terms, as will be seen, had varying meanings for members of the Front Generation. It may also be wondered whether these objectives, however designed, could incite popular enthusiasm. Under the circumstances of late 1932 the prospects were not good. With the Iron Front blunted since the events of July 20 the Front Generation had lost much of the tentative influence it had possessed within German Social Democracy. Amid the constant crises of confrontations with authoritarian chancellors—Papen and then General Kurt von Schleicher—in the Reichstag and with Nazis and Communists in the streets and at the polls, there was little time to paint a broader canvas of the socialist future; nor could Mierendorff, Haubach, Pähl, Leber, Schumacher, or others relay their messages beyond the columns of friendly newspapers and journals. Meanwhile the party's leaders spoke of returning "to the basic concept of the Weimar Constitution." 35 When Hitler became chancellor at the end of January 1933 and a new phase opened in German politics, the SPD Front Generation was far away from winning over either the party or the electorate. And yet Mierendorff was right when he identified Social Democracy's failure as its reactive bent, its willingness to wait to take the

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wind from others' sails, whereas its need was to create its own tempests.36 At the time the Nazis gained power, fascism was not a significant presence in French politics. The one group which had taken the name, Georges Valois's Faisceau, had been an ephemeral creation of the mid1920s, and Valois himself had afterward swung to the left and become the publisher of Déat and Barthélémy Montagnon, among others. Some other small factions had appeared, but into the early 1930s older organizations like the Action Française dominated the French right; veterans' associations also tended toward traditional attitudes.37 Meanwhile, the Depression affected the economy only gradually. There was no mass dislocation of the middle classes. These circumstances gave the question of resisting fascism a prospective cast. As debate over the issue developed among French socialists, it operated most frequently in the future conditional; disagreements flared over what might happen and how it could be prevented. With the Nazi triumph, however, such questions gained a sudden immediacy. The worries that Marcel Déat and his friends had harbored over the SFIO's passivity and its unwillingness to seek ties with the middle classes now became acute. They had already been searching for new initiatives. Following his defeat in the Marne in 1928, Déat had been singled out by Léon Blum as "a man who, in my opinion, has dedication and a genius for propaganda." 38 Blum arranged for him to become secretary of the SFIO's parliamentary delegation, and from that position Déat set out to revamp the party's agitational message and—with Perspectives socialistes in 1 9 3 0 — its doctrine. On both fronts, however, he quickly encountered factional opposition. When he broached the idea of establishing an informational service for the party, the project was taken out of his hands by the lefttending general secretary Paul Faure and entrusted to an ex-Communist adherent of the "revolutionary" wing. When his book appeared, it was attacked uncompromisingly from the radical side, most notably in a pamphlet by Jean Lebas, the leading SFIO figure in the industrial Nord, who coined the term néo-socialisme for Déat's views. In the middle ground of the party Perspectives socialistes was received in silence. Neither Blum nor any of his chief lieutenants would comment on it.39 Blowing hot or blowing cold, the response was discouraging; it amounted to resistance against any serious change of approach. Déat's effort also ran up against its own limitations. While still a deputy for the Marne he had developed "a method of 'propaganda by category'" targeted to specific economic groups—vintners, artisans, shopkeepers. From his success with it he concluded that appeals to the

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electorate "must be 'inductive' and not 'deductive,' " that one must progress from the concrete to more general concepts. 40 Not surprisingly, then, he settled on a broad ideal which he could describe in 1929 as "positive . . . definite, it is not a symbol or a myth, it advances through day-by-day struggle and it is nevertheless lofty enough to inspire, to stir élan and sacrifice." 41 This "idée-force," as Déat called it, was "the conquest and exercise of power by the working class in a capitalist regime." "Exercise of power" was the phrase that Léon Blum had introduced into the SFIO's internal dialogue in 1926, in attempting to specify the terms under which the Socialists might join a governing coalition. The issue of participation was and would continue to be an explosive point of controversy between the left and right wings of the party. Blum had tried to defuse it by restricting the option to participate to governments in which the SFIO would be the dominant element; exercise du pouvoir in such arrangements was distinct from the "conquest of power" by the Socialists alone. However, when Déat employed this language, it was with a more flexible view of participation than Blum entertained. For Déat, who argued in Perspectives socialistes that socialists must make control of the state their foremost objective, access to power was an ideal for which not only voters but also parties might make sacrifices.42 There is little to suggest that voters heard these nuances in the years between the elections of 1928 and 1932. Déat invigorated the party in this period, but with his energy rather than with the ideal he promoted. "Every Saturday, and often Friday evenings" he was "on the roads of France, not to return until Monday." He organized "mass visits" of twenty or thirty Socialist deputies "arriving the same day in a single region" to "stupefy our adversaries, incapable of imitating us." 43 A series of by-election victories gave momentum to the Socialist drive, which carried over into the elections of May 1932, in which the SFIO registered significant gains. By and large, however, the campaign held to established, standard formulas. Déat's own fight against the Communist Jacques Duelos in the twentieth arrondissement of Paris resulted in a valuable victory, but it displayed few innovations; the tenor was negative and insulting on both sides. Several months later a Socialist constituency secretary could complain: "It is necessary to modernize our propaganda and to exploit the progress made, if you will excuse the word, in the art of advertising." 44 This was to confess how little distance the French had come in comparison with the Front Generation socialists in Germany: there, by May 1932, the month of the French elections, Mierendorff and Chakotin had achieved nationwide currency for the new three-arrow emblem of the Iron Front. At this point, however, for Déat, the moment for symbols and propa-

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ganda had passed. With a new legislative period beginning in which the non-Communist left held a substantial majority of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies, extraparliamentary initiatives receded in importance. The possibility of exploiting the electoral outcome through a SocialistRadical arrangement captured attention; on the eve of the session Déat wrote that "bold government action" was now the lever that could activate a vast anticapitalist rassemblement. In the SFIO's parliamentary delegation he rejoined allies from the Front Generation like Barthélémy Montagnon as well as older men schooled in prewar reformism like Pierre Renaudel. Tensions immediately surfaced over the question of participation. An extraordinary congress tried to satisfy both the left and right wings of the party by agreeing in principle to participation but then clothing it in a set of conditions, the "Cahiers de Huyghens," won by the left, which made it a practical impossibility.45 The issue became moot in any case, as the Radicals initially chose to ignore the Socialists' demands. The first governments which served after the elections, under the veteran leaders Eduard Herriot and Joseph PaulBoncour—an ex-Socialist—lived on the SFIO's toleration and collapsed when it was withdrawn. At the end of January 1933, however, the debate over participation recommenced when the fall of the latest cabinet produced a new premier-designate in Eduard Daladier, an ex-combatant and the hope of the younger and more left-inclined elements among the Radicals. Daladier began negotiations to form a government, possibly to include the Socialists, on the day before Hitler became Germany's chancellor. He took office, without agreement with the SFIO, on the day after. By that conjunction of events alone the stakes of participation rose.46 Although Daladier quickly retreated from his own overtures, the Socialist parliamentary delegation meanwhile responded independently, hinging the SFIO's participation in a government upon the premierdesignate's acceptance of the spirit of the Cahiers de Huyghens. This action provoked complaints from the Socialist center and left that the deputies' initiative was illegitimate and insubordinate, an offense to the authority of the party which must not be repeated. Most members of the parliamentary group, however, defended their right to take independent decisions, and at the end of February a majority of them voted in favor of Daladier's budget. Blum and Vincent Auriol, the delegation's chairman and secretary, were among this number in spite of their personal inclinations to oppose; nevertheless, a few days later they resigned their positions. An emergency party congress convened in April at Avignon papered over the differences and settled nothing.47 At the congress and in the press there was much talk about rules, discipline, and unity. The real fight, however, was over policy. Here the position of Déat and his friends paralleled that of the Front Generation

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socialists in Germany two years earlier, in mid-1931: there was an identical impatience with a policy of tolerating the lesser evil—in this case supporting the Radicals but not joining with them. But whereas, with the Iron Front, the Germans had turned toward a semiautonomous mass organization built upon the working class, their counterparts in France concentrated on the anticapitalist motif and insisted on participation— an alternative not available to the SPD under Brüning and his successors—as the means to realize its potential. In April Déat still wrote, "In France no other mystique is possible but that of power." 4 8 Under the impact of the Nazis' success, the néos now also accented the national aspect of the alliance they sought with the middle classes. In projecting their arguments in this direction, they exposed themselves to accusations of imitating fascism similar to those the SPD Front Generation had encountered earlier. It has been common to represent their shift and the response it drew by quoting the remarks of Adrien Marquet at the SFIO's July 1 9 3 3 congress and then adding the interruption they evoked from Léon Blum. For Marquet the decisions which Socialists confronted in the Chamber compelled them, if involuntarily, to abandon proletarian defense for a policy of democracy in the national framework. And if we, who are above all the party of the proletariat, practice this policy in contradiction to our affirmations of proletarian defense, it is because circumstances are stronger than our declarations of yesterday and our intentions of today. It is because other nations, by retreating into their national framework, have forced us to follow their example.·"

A few moments later he reiterated the point with a question: "But at present are not the nations in the process of moving onto the level of a new national reality?" At which point Blum interjected, " I am listening to you with an attention of which you can be the judge, but I confess that I am horrified." Later Blum was to add the warning, quoted earlier, that Marquet's speech, which also referred favorably to order and authority, had sounded more National Socialist than Socialist. But this verdict dismissed the national issue too easily. A decade earlier, in a rare theoretical article, Marquet had characterized French socialism's reliance on Marxism as a means of evading new problems. For Marquet, another veteran of the war, the nation was just such a reality, which must be contended with and not simply deplored. 50 The issue of socialism's link to the nation was an emotional magnet. Like the question of participation, however, it only manifested the basic conflict; it was not its core. Rather, the opposition between the néos and the center and left of the French party grew out of the fundamental challenge the Front Generation posed to socialism: whether and how to go beyond Marxism. The movement stood amidst a "crisis of old things,"

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Montagnoli told the July congress, "crisis of old formulas, old ideas, crisis of transition." Afterward Déat asked how it was possible "in 1933 to have confidence in a mysterious, more or less Hegelian dialectic" when one could not be sure of what was preliminary, intermediate, or final.51 However, the leftists in the party were becoming more intransigently committed to the tenets questioned by the néos. The lesson they drew from Germany was not that socialism had ignored the national issue, but that the SPD and unions had forgotten their Marxism and lost their class militancy. Already by the time of the emergency congress in April the two sides were scarcely civil to each other. At the July meeting there was little hope of reconciliation. Montagnon, Marquet, and Déat informally coordinated their speeches around similar themes so as to construct as effective a platform for their case as they could. They cannot have expected to win over a majority. A party split was likely. It was their last, best chance to gain followers. The risks of a break were high. In the France of the Third Republic it was always easy to create a new political grouping but difficult to carve out an electoral base for it. When the néos left the SFIO—their leaders were expelled at the beginning of November—they took thirty-four deputies and senators and four departmental associations: fewer, in both cases, than they had hoped for and Léon Blum had feared.52 In their new Parti Socialiste de France/Union Jean-Jaurès leadership balanced between the néos and the veteran reformers Renaudel and Paul Ramadier. The party's local strength was concentrated in the home constituencies of the best-entrenched parliamentarians: Marquet's in the Gironde and Renaudel's in the Var. Some important allies among the Front Generation, like Jules Moch or Louis L'Héveder, did not join. Neither did many of the younger socialist intellectuals who sympathized with the néos' views but were committed to the principle of unity.S3 Still, a new beginning generates its own energy, and Déat, who more than anyone else shaped the ideology and organization of the party, treated the split as an opportunity. His initiatives followed patterns common to the Front Generation. In designing the PSdF's statutes and strategy, Déat emphasized themes which had been prominent in the Iron Front's development in Germany two years earlier: propaganda, uniforms, a positive stance toward the state. In his broadest vision the new party was to orient its effort to the nation rather than to the National Assembly. It was to develop a massive propaganda campaign that would mobilize the population, create uniformed action teams (équipes d'action) for defensive but eventually also offensive purposes, and form units of technical experts (équipes techniques) capable of directing the state apparatus. Accomplishments, however, did not measure up to these ambitions. Few of the specialists' units were actually established. There were

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some action teams, a few outfitted with gray shirts and armbands. But Renaudel and others objected to the uniforms, and they were quickly given up.54 As for propaganda, Déat and the head of the équipes techniques, Claude Bonnier, carried over the method of "choosing the most responsive and striking arguments for each profession, for each social category."55 Yet the SFIO advances in 1932 had not proved the effectiveness of this approach, and in any case it demanded organizational and financial resources that the PSdF did not possess. Still, Déat held back from appeals to the irrational and emotional such as Mierendorff and Chakotin had launched in Germany in 1932. Early in 1934 he expressed his agreement with an observation of de Man, that the SPD had failed to fashion a mystique that could move the masses to action. His own ideal, however, remained programmatic, focused on a strengthened and rejuvenated democracy. If anyone on the French left had noted the techniques used in Germany, it would seem to have been the dissident Radical Gaston Bergery, who told an interviewer in March 1934 that 90 percent of the electorate ignored the doctrines of the parties they voted for: "Those who are the first to find simple formulas and vivid slogans will be the masters of the herd."56 Concurrent with his attempts to build up the PSdF, Déat sought to make it the nucleus of the anticapitalist rassemblement for which he had failed to win the SFIO. And for a few months, in early 1934, he believed his moment lay within reach. All that had seemed prospective about the danger of fascism in France became instant and violent reality on the night of February 6, when, in the midst of a major political scandal, right-wing crowds rushed and nearly seized the National Assembly building. The police opened fire. The rioters eventually fell back, with their dead and wounded. In a few hours, however, the vulnerability of the Republic had been displayed. In the same way that the Harzburg Front had given immediacy to the fascist threat in Germany in the fall of 1931, the events of February 6 shocked the French left into action. The most spectacular response was the counterdemonstration that came six days later, when Socialists and Communists marched together in Paris and other cities in defense of the Republic, an initial step toward the Popular Front of 1936. 57 Although the PSdF participated in them, the manifestations of February 12 represented a different alliance from the one Déat was seeking. Some months later he described his preference, his "cadres," in terms that recall the composition of the Iron Front. They were: "the CGT, which has stopped speaking only of occupational claims, which has agreed to educate itself to the conception of the national interest; the Union of War Veterans, which has drawn up a pro-

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gram of economic reconstruction and social renovation; [and] finally, our section of the Socialist Party of France. Of France." 58 It is easy to wonder at the hope Déat expressed, for so little came of it. It is true that the veterans' organizations, some of which were actually involved in the turbulence of February 6, came forward afterward with projects to reform the state and the economy. For a few months in the spring and early summer they seemed ready to claim a major role in national affairs. This ambition foundered amid political disagreements, however. By mid-July the veterans could no longer be counted on for the alliance which Déat had envisioned. 59 Neither, by that time, could the unions. The Confédération Générale du Travail never came as close to Déat's image as he believed. It did turn for guidance to individuals and groups whose views often paralleled the néos' positions; these elements, however, had not separated themselves from the SFIO. To Léon Jouhaux, the chief of the CGT, the purpose of Déat's intended coalition was foggy. "What is he driving at with that?" he once asked a confederate. 60 So the rassemblement did not come about. Yet what Déat was driving at was neither mysterious nor, in spite of his failure, altogether illusory. Unable to build an anticapitalist front from within the SFIO, he had tried to construct one without his former party but with the mass organizations that appeared to be possible allies after February 6. Déat's initiative was only one among a multitude of attempts during this period to spring the boundaries of party and ideology and create unity on the democratic left. Like his, the vast majority of them turned out to be more the expressions of wishes than of possibilities. Taken together, however, they attest to the exceptional sense of fluidity that people felt in the weeks and months surrounding February 6. Some bids at alliance had already been ventured in the previous year, most notably the Front Commun, which Gaston Bergery launched in March 1933 in the hope—premature then—of linking Radicals, Socialists, and Communists. During the summer and fall, as the néo crisis peaked within the SFIO, a series of discussions among journalists and writers ranging from the Socialists to the extreme right took place in Paris, orchestrated by Paul Marion, an ex-Communist who was now close to Déat. Although Déat and Marquet were interested, this "Complot de l'Acaçia," as it was called after the brasserie where the talks were held, produced nothing tangible in the end. 61 Again, regardless of the results, the most striking element was the eagerness of younger men, shaped by the war, to find political solutions outside the categories defined by the existing but immobile parties. At the beginning of 1934 the tx-normalietts of the new group called Révolution Constructive attempted to take up where the néos had left off

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when they broke with the SFIO. Their focus of unity was within the party; as Georges Lefranc said some time later, they had not believed the néos' approach to the middle class was justified if it meant turning away from a part of the working class. Their instrument for unity was a manifesto, "For a Socialist Offensive," drawn up by Lefranc, Pierre Brossolette, and the economist Lucien Laurat and submitted to the party's branch meetings which were convening preparatory to its congress, scheduled to open at Lille on February 10. Looking back long afterward, participants like Lefranc and Georges Soulès, who pressed for the new orientation in the Drôme, believed they had been on the verge of success, only to be deprived of it by the "thunderbolt" of February 6, which moved the party directorate to postpone the congress until May.62 Whether in retrospect they overestimated their chances is less important than their belief—another expression of the mood that pervaded the time—that this was the moment when a new start could succeed. It was as if unity was a banner atop a pole, placed in the middle of a wide field, surrounded by throngs of people, tantalizingly within grasp, individuals jumping vainly to reach it. Seize the flag, and the crowd will follow you. But it could not be done alone; one needed cooperation to begin with, a boost up from others. But this unity to create unity failed to materialize. The CGT offered its own version in April, an "EstatesGeneral of Labor," a gathering of representatives of trade unions, cooperatives, small businessmen, the lesser peasantry, white-collar workers, intellectuals, and veterans. But it produced no resonance and ended in disaccord. The public meeting that was scheduled for its conclusion was blocked by the Communists, whose threats of demonstrations prompted the withdrawal of the hall where the event was to be held. 63 Nothing substantial soon followed. By the summer of 1934 the effort toward rassemblement was momentarily spent, and Front Generation aspirations in France were stalemated. In contrast to his French and German counterparts, Oswald Mosley gave up his hopes for a socialist alternative early in the Depression years. Then, by founding the British Union of Fascists in October 1932, he seized the option which had been rejected by those who said that socialists must learn from fascism but not imitate it. By early 1934 he had built his blackshirted movement into a small but acknowledged force in British politics. Within the ranks of the Labour Party it was easy for the Itold-you-sos to claim that he had campaigned under false colors all along, that socialism had always come second to his personal ambition. But more clear-sighted opponents, like the left-wing M.P. Ellen Wilkinson, recognized that Mosley had abandoned socialism in reaction against

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the inaction of the Labour leadership and its "passion for evading decisions." 64 Whereas Front Generation socialists in Germany and France responded to the challenges of Depression and fascism by first seeking to invigorate the movement's spirit and only afterward by elevating economic planning to a prime objective, Mosley took the reverse course. He resigned from the Labour government in 1930 and then the Labour Party in 1931 because he could not get accepted his planning strategy for economic revival. Only when he turned to fascism in 1932 did he begin to talk about the state of mind of the masses. Thereafter this became an increasingly prominent concern for him, while his economic approach solidified into standard formulas, its analytical sharpness more and more blunted by the anti-Semitism that suffused BUF thinking and action from 1934 on. At the time that Labour took office, in the late spring of 1929, a few months before the Depression began, Britain was reaching the end of a postwar decade of economic trouble, a long doldrums of unregained markets and unemployed workers. Throughout the party there was a sense of anticipation that something could now be done. Mosley's comments indicate that he saw leadership as the crucial element: the people had the will for action, but Labour must devise the way. As a junior minister—chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster—delegated to work with the lord privy seal, J. H. Thomas, who was charged with finding solutions for unemployment, Mosley was confident that he could help to shape "a big, bold policy driven through with unflinching determination."« Neither boldness nor determination characterized "Jimmy" Thomas, however, and Mosley was soon chafing at the inactivity of his chief. But the problem was not just Thomas, whose best days lay behind him in the years when he had headed the Railwaymen's Union. It was the entire senior leadership of the Labour Party, to whom Mosley's proposals seemed hazardous and chancy—a walk on the high wire with no net below. The sticking point was Mosley's reliance on public expenditure to create jobs both through work programs and, indirectly, through pension increases that would induce older workers to retire. These were familiar notions among the left wing of Labour. Liberals like Keynes were also sympathetic. 66 But Mosley could not capture the audience that counted, either within the government, which rejected his January 1930 memorandum for short- and long-term recovery, or within the Labour Party at large, at its annual conference the following October, where a motion favoring the memorandum fell short by a painfully narrow margin. Mosley could have won the cabinet only by winning the prime minis-

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Sir Oswald Mosley as a junior cabinet member, 1929

ter, Ramsay MacDonald. But MacDonald was both unpersuaded and irresolute; the only decisive voice was that of the chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, whose fiscal views were implacably orthodox. It was scarcely upon socialist principle that Snowden protested that Mosley wished "to embark upon a campaign of unrestricted expenditure financed out of loans, with its inevitable concomitants of special powers

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to coerce labour, landowners, etc., and its attempt to force capital into unremunerative channels or to attract it at the cost of subsequent increases in taxation." 6 7 But Snowden prevailed, and in mid-May the cabinet turned down Mosley's proposals. Mosley then resigned office in order to be free to argue his case to Parliament, the public, and, in the fall, the party, at its annual conference at Llandudno, in northern Wales. Although the seaside setting was pleasant, it failed to screen the delegates from the unemployment of the nearby Merseyside or the Welsh coalfield belt to the south. MacDonald was at his wordy best in opening the main debate, but Mosley, speaking later, electrified the gathering with his appeal for action. "It was hypnotized by the man," one eyewitness recounted, "by his audacity, as bang! bang! bang! he thundered directions. The thing that got hold of the conference was that here was a man with a straight-cut policy. It leapt at him." N o socialist of the Front Generation ever came closer to capturing a party forum of this magnitude. But Mosley lost by 1 , 0 4 6 , 0 0 0 votes to 1 , 2 5 1 , 0 0 0 , the big trade unions lining up their proxies with the leadership. 68 He might have concluded that he had lost a battle. He chose to judge that he had lost the war. After Llandudno he was resolved to quit Labour and to found a New Party—that was what he called it—which could be a nucleus for active policy. Tactically it was as ill-advised a move as Déat was to make three years later when he accepted the prospect of leaving the SFIO. Or more mistaken, for Mosley had no want of advice against such a step, most perceptively from his Conservative friend Robert Boothby: "the only game worth playing," Boothby wrote to him in the summer of 1 9 3 0 , "is to try and collar one or other of the [party] machines and not ruin yourself by beating against them with a tool which will almost certainly break in your hand." But if Mosley were to stay with Labour, he would have to endure " a further bleak period in the wilderness," a time of "consolidating and strengthening your hold on the Labour movement in the country and persuading the workers that they will not always be betrayed." 6 9 Mosley was not willing to wait. He did not believe the circumstances allowed hesitation. At Llandudno he had asked the delegates, "When, within the memory of any man or woman in that Hall, was the nation demanding action as it was then? . . . With courage, vigour, decision, and a policy, they could use that situation to remodel the whole structure of the country." 7 0 Nor did Mosley believe he would be alone in this effort. He had attracted some of the brightest among the younger Labour figures to his side, not only his Birmingham confederates Strachey and Allan Young but also W. J . Brown of the civil servants' union and the militant Welsh miner's son Aneurin Bevan. He could hope for support from his generational counterparts in

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the Conservative Party, some of whom, like Boothby and Harold Macmillan, were personal as well as political friends. And in the background were interested older men like Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George, mold-breakers themselves but also political outsiders now, who might be tempted to join a bold new enterprise. 71 Leaving the Labour Party was less difficult for Mosley than for others who were tempted to join him. He had always tended to talk about the working class in the context of the nation. It did not seem to him that he was abandoning the ordinary people of Britain in creating a new political organization. "He really does believe he can save the British working classes and no one else can," one of his allies wrote in the summer of 1931. 72 The economic plan he offered in the "Mosley Manifesto" of December 1930 was a national strategy designed from a socialist perspective. In the pamphlet of February 1931 authored by Strachey, Young, Brown, and Bevan, Mosley's "emergency programme" was presented under the title A National Policy. "We surrender nothing of our Socialist faith," the seventeen Labour M.P. signatories of the Manifesto declared in December. "The immediate question is not a question of the ownership, but of the survival of British Industry." 73 The ambiguity of their position was not so easy to dismiss, however, and the uncertainties increased with the applause which Mosley and the Manifesto gained from nonsocialist quarters. The friendliness of this response encouraged Mosley to believe that his independent venture might succeed. It troubled some of his Labour allies, however. Aneurin Bevan, for one, hung back when money began to flow in from industrial sources. Others also got cold feet as Mosley's intentions became visible and, in late February, public—Brown dropped out at the last moment under pressure from his union. Thus when the New Party was launched on the last day of February 1931, it was with a smaller band than its leader had hoped for. Along with Cynthia, John Strachey, and Allan Young, the main figures included only two other M.P.s, the Scottish Labourite Dr. Robert Forgan and W. E. D. Allen, a Conservative from Belfast. It was a stumbling start, and the party was further lamed by Mosley's being laid up for a month by pleurisy and pneumonia. For an enterprise which meant to stress youth and energy, it was an embarrassingly uninspiring beginning. 74 It has been said that no one was ever really serious about the New Party, that it was only an episode. It had its incongruities. Little else but Mosley's personal magnetism could have attracted individuals as different as the fastidious diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson and the former middleweight boxing champion Kid Lewis. But it did have a design. It existed because Mosley and his confederates believed that there should be at least one political force that would confront the crisis they saw

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overtaking Britain's economy and society. Labour would not do it, even though, as they gauged the public mood, the country wanted purpose and action. As conditions worsened—unemployment continued to climb and trade to slump in the spring and summer of 1931—the New Party's chance could come. 75 In politics it is not uncommon for people to reckon on the worst contingencies when their advice has been ignored. Events, however, did not evolve as Mosley and his friends anticipated, and the consequence was the collapse of the New Party. The party's first electoral bid gave an early reading of the difficulties ahead. The battleground was a vacant Labour seat at Ashton-underLyne, near Manchester. Allan Young contested for the New Party. With Mosley invalided until the final days of the campaign, it fell to Cynthia, Strachey, C. Ε. M. Joad, and Young himself to carry on with the canvassing and speeches. The result was both heartening—a two-week effort produced nearly 4 5 0 0 votes for Young, about 16 percent—and disappointing, for the New Party fell far short of its two established rivals. Mosley's two appearances just before the balloting drew large crowds, but most voters did not depart from habit on election day.76 Afterward he began to talk more about the need for a new psychology, a change of view that would mobilize what one of his aides called "the vast and phlegmatic lump which is the great British public." 77 It was the same problem that was to confront Front Generation socialists in Germany in 1932 and in France a year later. In the summer of 1931 Mosley still expected the Depression to force people to recognize the New Party as their best hope, but he now also displayed a pronounced eagerness to recruit the young into a disciplined auxiliary organization that could protect party speakers and perhaps serve offensive functions as well. It was no secret that he was influenced here by fascist models, but so was Theodor Haubach when he wrote in these same months of the need for socialism to make its peace with the idea of putting its young people into uniform. This tendency disquieted Strachey and Young—the New Party's left wing—and contributed significantly to their decision, at the end of July, to break with Mosley and leave the party.78 The defection came as the economic crisis reached its peak in the summer, following bank collapses in Austria and Germany. In August Forgan wrote to Mosley that the moment they had foreseen was upon them; on the twenty-fourth MacDonald, Snowden, Thomas, and two other Labour ministers joined with the Conservatives to form a National government. "Oh, if Oswald had only waited," Bernard Shaw lamented to Cynthia, "if only he had known that MacDonald was contemplating political suicide!" 79 But Mosley by now had no intention of returning to the Labour Party, which he believed had learned nothing from its two years in office.

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If he was tempted to move in any direction, it was toward the new governing coalition. He cared too much for his independence, however, and thought too little of the National government's leaders to take that step. Thus when the government followed its crucial economic decision to abandon the gold standard with a dissolution of Parliament, the New Party stood completely on its own. Most of the twenty-five candidates it put up in the election, held October 27, were political unknowns. The program they campaigned on, with its blueprint images of executive power, national planning, and tariff protection, aroused little excitement. The mass of voters preferred to stick with the "old men," as Mosley said of them, "who have laid waste the power and glory of our land." In the balloting the New Party lost all the seats its members had occupied in the previous Parliament and won no others. It was around this time, Nicholas Mosley has written, that his father gave up his belief that politics must be waged solely on the plane of rationality. 80 The New Party lingered on for a few months, achieving its most memorable cultural impact with its short-lived journal Action, edited by Harold Nicolson and featuring contributions from Peter Quennell and Christopher Isherwood among others. But Action was scarcely going to rouse the masses, and in the wake of the National government's triumph it appeared equally unlikely that the economic situation would shift political loyalties. A new psychology had not yet emerged; it would have to be made. In 1914-1918 the war had imposed such an outlook, but history, Mosley wrote in 1932, "provides few cases in which the enthusiasm and unity of a whole people have been so sustained through a long struggle to emerge from disintegration and collapse." And he went on: "For such purpose is needed the grip of an organized and disciplined movement, grasping and permeating every aspect of national life." 81 In the months after the election Mosley became convinced that only a new force could achieve his end, a British variant of fascism "greater, more practical and more humane . . . than has yet been created in any country." 82 Fascism had caught the interest of members of the Front Generation by 1930. Boothby and other young Tories could sit together and imagine a respectable English fascist regime modeled on Mussolini's—a world apart from the eccentric fringe organizations which actually represented British fascism at the time. The notions which Mosley developed in late 1931 and early 1932 carried forward the themes that he and his friends had dwelt on—a strong state, an unshackled executive power— but they were edged with a combative plebeianism that reflected the attention he was now paying to discipline and morale. These tendencies were strengthened by a visit he made in January 1932 to Rome, where he was impressed both by Mussolini and by the accomplishments that were displayed to him by his hosts. The jokes about "Moslini" had

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started long before, but it was from this time that they were really justified. Mosley came back from Rome talking about the ethic of solidarity and service he had observed in action—the "new psychology" in uniform and in place.83 By now he had also found a historical context for fascism. "It is, of course, true," he wrote in the spring of 1932, "that a great movement of political modernism has swept the rest of the world in forms as various as Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism and even Kuomintang and the Young Turk Movement."84 A year later Déat and his fellows néos would be describing the situation before them in remarkably similar terms, save that they believed that a revived socialism could take its place among the forces of modernism. Mosley had given up on that hope. In his view only the return of normality could allow "the wooly-headed and woolyhearted Social Democrats of Labour" to survive; if crisis persisted, they would be destroyed by the Communists, "a new and modern reality" which could be defeated only by the equally modern fascist movement which he now set out to organize.85 Mosley formally established the British Union of Fascists on October 1, 1932. By then he had written a founding manifesto for it, The Greater Britain, and had chosen the black shirt as the party uniform. Like his Front Generation counterparts on the Continent, he had found it impossible to reach the objectives to which he aspired by working through existing socialist structures. In seeking his alternative, however, he had gone further than a parallel organization like the Iron Front, further than a rival socialism such as the PSdF represented. He now portrayed the socialists as the enemy, one of the "Old Gangs" which had driven Britain to the brink of ruin.86 All the same, socialist conceptions still influenced the economic program of The Greater Britain. Mosley had not entirely changed course. Neither the BUF nor its leader presented an unequivocal face in the first months of the movement. Mosley had not, as he did later, cut himself off from the wider political world. In February 1933 he engaged in a round of debates with Labour and Liberal opponents: Clement Attlee, James Maxton, Megan Lloyd George. The columns of the national press also remained open to him. In The Greater Britain he professed that he and his allies were seeking "to create the Modern Movement in Britain in a form very different from Continental forms, with characteristics which are peculiarly British and in a manner which will strive to avoid the excesses and the horrors of Continental struggle."87 One difference that the BUF maintained at the beginning was to disavow anti-Semitism; Jews were not mentioned in The Greater Britain. Still, the uniforms and the confrontational tone—"We must be prepared to save Britain by force from those who seek to destroy her by force," Mosley wrote in the first

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number of The Blackshirt88—followed the Italian and German pattern, and a number of early BUF staff recruits came from right-wing or fascist backgrounds. Hitler's achievement of power at the end of January 1933 further compounded the question of the movement's identity, for it was a success story that offered enticing parallels. "A few years ago," Mosley wrote in March 1933, "six men met in a beer cellar and started the Nazi movement with a capital of 7s. 6d. After a year's struggle they numbered only 63 men in the whole country—what slow progress compared to the great strides of our British Union of Fascists in these first five months of its existence!" 89 If the beginnings could be compared in this way, it was not unreasonable, notwithstanding Mosley's disclaimers, to anticipate or at least to fear similar outcomes. Personally as well as politically it was an unsettled time for Mosley. Throughout his marriage to Cynthia he had passed from one brief affair to another; his erstwhile Labour colleague Ellen Wilkinson had not just been joking when she likened him to a sheik in her Peeps at Politicians. During 1932, however, he had developed a relationship more serious than the liaisons which had been his norm. The woman in question was Diana Guinness, née Mitford, one of a legendary clan, a beauty with ties to both the arts and politics, already married and estranged. Mosley found it impossible to give her up, but neither did he wish to break with Cynthia. Then suddenly and tragically the decision was made for him when Cynthia contracted peritonitis following an appendectomy in May 1933. In a few days she was dead. She had been a reluctant and uncertain fascist, and her death severed a crucial link to old political attachments.90 Mosley turned away from his loss and back to politics in fits and starts. In the last half of 1933 the BUF progressed along a still wavering course, yet displaying elements of the socialism that its leader and associates like Robert Forgan, the journalist W. J. Leaper, and the Birmingham organizer Bill Risdon had left behind. At this stage the BUF represented the extreme point reached by members of the socialist Front Generation. They had lengthened the terrain upon which the crisis of socialism could be confronted so that it now extended across the political divide to a fascism that claimed to stand in socialism's place. Nevertheless, although there was a clear break in terms of alignments—visualize again the BUF visitors outside the barbed wire at Osthofen and Carlo Mierendorff on the inside—ideas, viewpoints, and practices were not so abruptly divorced. In many places they continued to overlap. No single path led out of this confused territory. No necessary passage from left to right was to be read from this landscape. Different outcomes remained possible, a truth further clarified when the Front Generation's efforts at planning are examined.

8 Planning The months of late 1933 and early 1934 were a contradictory time for the men who had led the socialist Front Generation. Their efforts to project a new vision for the movement and to construct a popular coalition beyond the working class were dissipating in confusion. Yet disappointment stood juxtaposed with revived hope, for it was also a period of clarification and covergence of energies, the beginning of a phase of promise. The pivotal figure in this fresh departure was Hendrik de Man. Returning to Belgium from Germany after the Nazi seizure of power, he had set out to define a positive socialist aim so that instead of fighting "a defensive battle to maintain lost positions," the movement could "wage an offensive struggle for new terrain." 1 By the fall of 1933 he had elaborated an objective that appeared to blend mystique and practical targets in a manner that could appeal to both the working classes and the middle strata. It was the Plan du Travail (Plan of Labor, in Flemish Platt van den Arbeid) which the Belgian Workers' Party (Parti Ouvrier Belge; POB) adopted in near-unanimity at a conference in Brussels at Christmas. Planning had been an important theme of the economic discussions in which Front Generation socialists participated during the late 1920s. With the Depression it assumed increased prominence. The Mosley Manifesto's first policy heading was "The Need for Economic Planning." Mierendorff had made "socialist planned economy" one of the triad of goals ahead on the socialist path which he described at the end of 1932. Some schemes designed to reduce unemployment took on the label "plan." 2 The Plan du Travail, however, gave a new and comprehensive dimension to the term. In it de Man offered a set of specific targets and finite goals for socialist actions, all set in the context of a historical progression from capitalism into a mixed economy. The time was past, he argued, for the movement to pursue an infinity of undifferentiated demands, to be achieved in an indeterminate future. As he put it with the

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Hendrik de Man at the time of the campaign for the Platt du Travail, mid19308

analogies to warfare which the Front Generation's experience so frequently evoked, a socialist plan "must trace out just as exact a likeness of its economic initiative as the military mobilization and operational plans of a general staff." It would define priorities: "what should come first and what later." It would leave behind the piecemeal tactics of conventional socialist policy which could "take twenty years to get through no-man's-land" and aim "simultaneously along the entire attacking front at the central positions" of a capitalist order already in transition. 3 The Plan de Man, as some quickly nicknamed it, aroused enthusiasm both within and beyond the POB. Over the next two years the image of de M a n with his ever-present pipe became as familiar in Belgium as that of Franklin Roosevelt with his jauntily angled cigarette holder was to be in America. Elsewhere in Europe, in the democratic states where socialism remained a competitor for power and popular allegiance, a train of plans emerged under party or union sponsorship, fashioned more or less after the Belgian model. Accompanying them, however, also came a debate over the compatibility of certain features of planning with socialist principle. As with the Front Generation's efforts to inspire and mobilize

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mass support, the Plan du Travail again raised the question whether the antidote to fascism was overloaded with the virus it was meant to nullify. In the first years of the Depression the notion of socialist planning often ran ahead of its substance. Much of the early discussion, in 1930 and 1931, held close to orthodox thinking, capitalist as well as Marxist. Most of it, moving forward from the projections and starts of the late 1920s, centered on international solutions. The analytic tenor was underconsumptionist. The common objective was to devise a global or at least European mechanism that could revive purchasing power. Among the proposals put forward in this phase, the most prominently considered sought to create some kind of international plan of public works. From Geneva Albert Thomas gave this option the support of the International Labor Office, and its aid and that of other League of Nations affiliates figured in some of the blueprints for action. In 1931 the German unions' statistical expert, Wladimir Woytinsky, suggested that an international agreement to reduce the gold cover for currency could liberate funds which should then be channeled into public works allocations through the Bank for International Settlements or the League. A plan on this scale, he claimed, would create employment for four or five millón men.4 In Woytinsky's view the overriding problem of action was to generate the credits for the project. Defining the specific undertakings they would finance was a technical matter. By contrast the "five-year plan" advanced by the French economist Francis Delaisi focused on the targets of expenditure and assumed that the necessary capital would be forthcoming. Delaisi's plan, which had Albert Thomas's enthusiastic backing, was modeled on his 1928 vision of a marriage of assets and resources between Western and Eastern Europe. It called for an outlay of 100 billion francs for a network of roads, rail lines, and canals that would enable sixty million peasants in "horse-drawn Europe" to enter the commercial economy. Industrial states would benefit initially by providing the necessary capital goods and over the long run by gaining an immense new market in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.5 Nothing in the financial mechanisms of these plans was socialist by definition. In urging the necessity of increased investment, Woytinsky lengthily quoted the report of the Macmillan Committee, which had investigated the condition of finance and industry in Britain; most of its text had been written by Keynes. Both Woytinsky and Delaisi expected that the funds needed for their respective plans would come from conventional capitalist sources. They may have underestimated the practical difficulties of both raising and placing funds, but at least until the late

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summer of 1931 the resources were available, particularly in France, which had not yet been badly hurt by the slump. 6 It was in inspiration, not in means of execution, that their projects were colored by socialism. The idea of unifying the European economy, though not exclusively a goal of the movement, fit more comfortably with its orientation than with any other ideology. Socialists had also been the firmest advocates of public works as measures of relief for unemployment. And it was socialist principle that effective policy must proceed collectively and not through individuals. Among the Front Generation socialists Déat and Mierendorff offered the most visible support for this approach. Déat, who was familiar with Delaisi's writings and friendly with Albert Thomas, was alert to the encouragement of the ILO, and through 1931 he insisted that the only true remedy for the economic crisis would be European in scope. Capitalism itself, he argued, "through its growing internationalization, goes beyond nationalism." It was logical, then, that "a common front of the civilized nations" be constituted to fight the slump. "So much the better if, under the pressure of the working class, a collective economy develops and gains structure beyond the old national boundaries." 7 Mierendorff meanwhile threw his journalistic energies behind what amounted to a smaller version of Delaisi's design. In this case the pairing was to be between French capital, still obtainable for investment, and German industry, stagnated since the Depression's beginning. The revival of production that should ensue was to serve a double purpose: as well as returning the unemployed to work, it would enable Germany to meet its reparations obligations to France, currently temporarily suspended, through deliveries of material goods. In December 1931, alluding to Woytinsky's proposals, Mierendorff suggested that such payments in kind could be the yield of the internationally financed public works that the German unions were seeking. "If our party is striving to ease domestic tensions by the creation of employment, here it is on the grand scale." 8 By the time these words were written, however, the financial debacles of the summer—bank failures in Austria and Germany, followed by Britain's abandonment of the gold standard—had undermined both the technical and the political basis for international action. Commenting early in 1932 on a plan whose outlines matched parts of both Woytinsky's and Delaisi's models, Hendrik de Man stated that "if such a plan is labeled not feasible, something else is really meant to be said"—that no supernational power existed—not the International Labor Office, not the League of Nations—which could compel individual states to range themselves behind such a project. 9 By the end of the year he was to draw the necessary conclusion: in the circumstances of the Depression, planning could operate only on the national level.

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What de Man and other Continental socialists came to understand during 1932 was clear to Oswald Mosley and his friends from the first months of the Depression. The particular dilemmas posed by Britain's post-1918 economic difficulties did not encourage tendencies toward planning on an international scale. Rather the opposite: an orientation toward abroad was the hallmark of orthodox economics, whether represented by the Treasury, the banks, much of industry, or the leadership of the Labour Party. Across the breadth of established opinion reigned a consensus that the supreme commandment of policy was to recover the overseas markets which Britain had dominated before 1914. For Mosley, however, "the whole fetish of Export trade," 10 as he called it in his memorandum, was doubly senseless. It demanded that the nation's older basic industries—cotton and coal—outcompete foreign producers who had entered untended markets during the war and kept them by dint of a variety of relatively permanent advantages—new equipment, inexpensive labor, favorable locations. And it required that the working class in Britain pay the price of this vain pursuit. It had done so in lowered wages during the struggling 1920s. It did so now in unemployment. The result was decline in its purchasing power, diminishing already inadequate levels of consumption. 11 Mosley condemned this as bad economics as well as unjust policy. "The high purchasing power of home population is the only solution," he insisted at the next-to-last cabinet-level meeting he attended before resigning from the government. In his memorandum and afterward in the Manifesto and the collaboratively written A National Policy he and his associates called for industry to shift its focus to the domestic market, an effort, they asserted, that required "the co-ordination, the balance, and the guidance which only a national planning organization can give." Old solutions would not suffice, Mosley said in the memorandum, for "a long term programme for a great transition of our industrial life from a pre-War to a post-War basis." 12 In sounding these themes, Mosley carried forward the perspectives of Revolution by Reason and, in a broader sense, of the entire body of activist criticism of the previous decade, most of which had come from the Labour left. His stress on action, however—the "disciplined national effort" of A National Policy—separated his proposals from the policy alternatives of the mid-1920s and identified them as the initial ventures of Depression-era socialist planning. The difference was particularly evident in the scale of the public works projects that constituted Mosley's major short-term initiative and in the emphasis on executive power in his long-range strategy. Latter-day skeptics justifiably doubt whether a design like Mosley's for spending 200 million pounds over three years to employ 100,000 men annually could have significantly affected the econ-

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omy.13 But that is to miss the more important point, which is that in 1930 and into early 1931 no other leading Labour figure was advancing plans to put 300,000 men to work. As for executive power, the objective was to get things done. Mosley's frustrations with J. H. Thomas and others in the cabinet contributed to his impatience with government as it was, but his call for concentrating power in an inner cabinet of five replicated the model which had evolved during the war. As he and his friends saw it, the Depression posed a challenge of equal magnitude to that of 1 9 1 4 1918, and it must be met with a governmental machine to match that of wartime. Commenting on the Manifesto soon after its release, John Maynard Keynes put its fate up to "the natural forces themselves." If the optimists are right who look for a substantial and lasting recovery of employment within six months, we shall slide back, not unhappily, into our old ways. If not, the Mosleyites will, at the least, find their planks purloined. For the choice will be ever more openly and obviously set between forcing a reduction of wages and a scheme of national planning. But, however this may be, looking further ahead I do not see what practical socialism can mean for our generation in England, unless it makes much of the manifesto its own—this peculiar British socialism, bred out of liberal humanitarianism, big-business psychology, and the tradition of public service. 14

Keynes was correct, and much of Mosley's thinking did find its way— unacknowledged—into the Labour Party's program by the mid-1930s. Later, in the 1960s and afterward, some British socialists would look back upon Mosley as a prophet unheeded.1S Yet the appeal he fashioned for planning also had its weaknesses. In his writing and oratory Mosley reached his most eloquent flights in passages of exhortation. With planning this meant that he conveyed the value of the effort more successfully than the soundness of the policies. As much as he and his associates tried to put the stamp of immediacy and realism on their formulations, they did not make a deep impression on the general public or the Labour electorate. A further problem lay in Mosley's insistence that planning must be coupled with the "insulation" of British industry from the fluctuations of world trade. "Five Dictators and a Tariff" was the unsympathetic Hugh Dalton's forecast of the content of the Manifesto.16 To Mosley and his confederates, however, tariffs seemed too simple and inflexible to serve their ends effectively. A National Policy proposed that imports be controlled through commodity boards utilizing a full range of economic weapons for the twin purposes of advancing rationalization and preserving wage and employment levels. Meanwhile, exports were to be assisted "under a Commonwealth plan of mutual advantage," as the Manifesto

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described it, through which British manufactures and the dominions' foodstuffs and raw materials would achieve a "natural balance of trade." 17 Notwithstanding the denials, these conceptions were protectionist in principle. Among British socialists, however, Mosley was not alone in turning in this direction at the beginning of the Depression. The most powerful trade union leader of the era, Ernest Bevin, also entertained protectionist notions. So had the most formidable figure of the Labour left, John Wheatley, in the years before his death early in 1930. 18 Nevertheless most British socialists held loyal to free trade. If they envisioned a commercial bloc, it was one that would join Britain and Soviet Russia. Within the New Party John Strachey and Allan Young preferred this alternative; their disagreement with Mosley over it was the immediate cause of their breaking with him in July 1931. Three years later Young, no longer a socialist or a Mosleyite, had swung back to "insulation"— using Stalin's Russia as an example.19 By then, however, Mosley had moved further toward an imperial orientation with the BUF. The planning elements had lost prominence in his economic thinking. In Germany, meanwhile, socialists had begun an extensive yet ultimately unresolved discussion of planned economy. In the summer of 1931 Walther Pähl wrote of the complexity of the issue. Socialism needed the dynamism of "a plan that . . . sets a goal for the will to socialist action," yet expert opinion within the movement was divided over what constituted proper and effective means of socialization. Silence, inaction would be fatal. "In a crisis like that of the present, which puts on display a colossal failure of capitalist economics, the masses await an answer to the question that presses in on them, of what socialism summons up against this crisis, not only in the way of specific demands but in terms of a system, a perspective."20 In framing the issue in this manner, Pähl did not recognize, as Mosley had and as Hendrik de Man would, that an effective plan must combine short-term measures with a long-range vision and that it would be its more immediate features, not its "system" or "perspective," which would make the most concrete impression on the population. This was to remain a common fault in union and Social Democratic thinking on planning even as, in the same winter of 1931-32 in which the Iron Front was born, a proposal for rapid economic action became a prominent subject of socialist debate. The project in question was formally called the Plan to Create Employment (Arbeitsbeschaffungsplan). More commonly it was referred to as the WTB Plan after the initials of its three authors, Wladimir Woytinsky, Fritz Tarnow, and Fritz Baade, their surnames arranged to match the familiar abbreviated signature of the Wolffsche Telegraphen-Büro, one of

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Germany's leading news agencies. The order was equally correct inasmuch as Woytinsky was the plan's chief architect. By late 1931 he had given up hope for international undertakings and had relocated his conception of providing credits for job creation within the national context. The result was a program resembling the public works initiative which Mosley had submitted to the Labour Party. Its scope was larger, however. Woytinsky, Tarnow, and Baade envisioned spending 2 billion reichsmarks to put a million men back to work.21 The parallel with Mosley's proposals extended to the negatives as well. Doubts were expressed from the beginning about the WTB Plan's practicality. Most of the Front Generation socialists kept their distance. Mierendorff and Pähl, who commented most frequently on economic subjects, continued to champion international solutions to unemployment until the middle of 1932. Mierendorff also worried about the possible inflationary effect of Woytinsky's proposed credit mechanisms. It is likely as well that he was influenced by the arguments of his old Heidelberg mentor Emil Lederer, who contended that job creation could be undertaken only on the idled margin of production.22 Mierendorff turned his interest to planning on the national level only in the late summer of 1932, when he hailed legislation submitted by the SPD Reichstag delegation that would have begun a process of socialization of the economy. These propositions were patterned after the "Guiding Principles for Economic Transformation" (Richtlinien für den Umbau der Wirtschaft), jointly endorsed by the Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund and the white-collar Allgemeiner freier AngestelltenBund in June. Along with the WTB Plan, the goal of a socialist restructuring of the economy had been approved by the ADGB's "crisis congress" in April. Spelled out, the Guiding Principles defined an alternative system such as Walther Pähl had called for a year previously. Key industries and banking were to be nationalized, monopolies and cartels placed under state oversight, and a planned economy initiated. Many of these features anticipated elements of de Man's Plan du Travail. The trouble was, however, that at best they were only tenuously linked to the WTB Plan. As Harold James has written, the Guiding Principles "drowned the idea of work-creation in a flood of much more far-reaching proposals." 23 In the second half of 1932, under the chancellorships of Papen and Schleicher, legislative attempts to implement such measures had no chance of passage. Their value could be only demonstrative—but how much? Certainly not enough to project, as Pähl was urging, a Social Democratic equivalent of the Soviet Five-Year Plan or the Nazis' Third Reich.24 Some years earlier, in 1926, Mierendorff's friend Egon Wertheimer had observed the inspirational potential of a well-chosen economic

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goal. Evaluating the new program of the ILP, one of the Labour Party's member organizations, he wrote: Objectively considered, it is a matter of attempting to create a new symbol. The "living wage" is to cease to be the sober political and trade union demand it was until now; it is to become myth. Practical questions of feasibility thereby lose all warrant, and any analysis misses the point. It is now no longer a question of the plan's being logically practicable, politically expedient, economically watertight, but of its advocates' success in hammering the symbol so deeply into the consciousness of millons of people that they are ready to march for it. The plan has become a matter of belief.25

Could the WTB Plan have become such a symbol? There was no way of knowing this once it had been swamped by the array of objectives in the Guiding Principles. For all his interest in imagery, Carlo Mierendorff remained blind to the propagandistic possibilities which the plan of Woytinsky and his confederates offered to the SPD in 1932, and his adoption of "socialist planned economy" as a goal, in the spirit of the Richtlinien für den Umbau der Wirtschaft, set no one to marching in the final months of Weimar. Even before Hitler achieved power, Hendrik de Man had decided to return to Belgium and commence a new phase of activity, in politics again and directed toward practical ends. In 1931 and 1932 he discussed this prospect with Emile Vandervelde, the POB's leader, who was eager to have him come back to head a research office for the party. Conversations with party and union figures moved the project ahead in late 1932. The Nazis' triumph then assured de Man's departure from Germany. By April 1933 he was resettled in Brussels.26 His exodus quickened the sense of urgency he had already voiced to an audience in Hamburg the previous December, warning that socialism could no longer wait to embark upon a new path. In January 1933, at the invitation of the Hamburger Echo, he had a elaborated his views in a series of six articles under the title "Wende des Sozialismus" (Turning Point for Socialism). The last appeared just four days before Hitler became chancellor.27 De Man afterward claimed that the articles stirred considerable interest. That is hard to verify; whatever the extent of discussion they stimulated, it was overwhelmed by the demands of the moment, as the SPD and unions struggled for survival. Similarly, de Man's book Die sozialistische Idee, published in March, was soon confiscated by the Nazi authorities and had little immediate impact upon opinion within the movement.28 Once in Belgium, however, he was free to write and be heard,

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and within months of his return he had exploited this opportunity to exercise, for the second time in the post-1918 era, a major influence on the direction of socialism. The instrument of his reascendance was the Plan du Travail. To a degree luck was on de Man's side. The situation in Belgium in 1933 presented opportunities that other Front Generation socialists would have envied. The country had borne the early shocks of the Depression with limited harm, but its economy, geared to export manufactures, slid into difficulty following Britain's desertion of the gold standard and the subsequent decline in the value of sterling. By the time de Man returned, unemployment had jumped from 28,000 in 1929 to 350,000 in 1932. Pressure for remedies weighed on the socialist trade unions united in the Commission Syndicale. As in Germany, where the ADGB had provided the launching platform for the WTB Plan, the Belgian unions proved eager to support the proposals which de Man and the assistants he assembled developed over the summer.29 The POB was also receptive. Ideologically it was no more prepared to abandon orthodox doctrine than other socialist parties. Unlike MacDonald and Snowden, however, or Otto Wels and Hilferding, Vandervelde was willing to give room to a different approach. The issue was touchy. Vandervelde remained a loyal if flexible Marxist. But he extended a careful patronage to de Man's ideas as he observed the positive response they drew from the upper echelons of the party and unions. Uncharacteristically—at least in comparison with the patterns in the SPD and SFIO—the left wing of the POB, under the young deputy Paul-Henri Spaak, also reacted favorably to de Man's planisme. The appeal of action overrode possible theoretical misgivings.30 De Man and his Bureau des Etudes Sociales thus worked out their projects in an unusually positive atmosphere, a mood of promise that grew stronger as the details of the Plan du Travail gained circulation. In October the leading bodies of the Commission Syndicale and the POB successively accepted the general ideas of the Plan. Over the next weeks a Committee of Fifteen, with representatives from all important Belgian socialist groups and with de Man as secretary, put the proposals into final language; a joint session of the executive committees of the party and the unions then formally endorsed the Plan. Ratification by the full party came with the congress of December 24—25.31 When, nearly a year before, de Man had written of socialism at a turning point, the editors of the Hamburger Echo had prefaced his articles with the assertion that to a certain extent they provided the theoretical base for the German unions' Guiding Principles for Economic Transformation.32 Parallels did exist between the Plan du Travail and the ADGB/ AfA Richtlinien. But the Belgian Plan also resembled Mosley's propos-

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als—and others—in some respects. De Man, omnivorous in his reading, blended elements from a variety of sources into his planiste conceptions. He found G. D. H. Cole more persuasive than Keynes. He reflected on Walther Rathenau's postwar essays. As an editor of the Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus he probably read the contributions of Mierendorff and, here more importantly, of Walther Pähl, whose May 1932 piece "The Economic Crisis and the Question of Socialization" foreshadowed the thinking of de Man's Hamburger Echo articles.33 Yet numerous as the possible antecedents of the Plan du Travail are—and the list could go on—they do not explain its essence. For as Michel Brélaz convincingly argues, the Plan represented something new. In a single formulation de Man had connected immediate action against the slump with the longterm processes that would lead to socialism. And he had located the link between them not only in the workings of society and economy but, no less important, in the agency of human will.34 "The plan of action which I propose to you," de Man told the POB executive committee in October, "is an attempt to solve this problem [of socialist policy] by functioning on the terrain of currently existing facts and with a method that is essentially realistic and, in a nonpejorative sense of the word, opportunistic, which implies that any political strategy, like any military strategy, must base its choice of objectives upon cool and precise calculation of the forces at hand and upon an exact knowledge of the landscape." The minimum goal of this field plan was to socialize the institutions of credit. The overall aim was "to establish a mixed regime of capitalist and socialist economic sectors."35 As approved at Christmas 1933 the Plan du Travail proposed "creation of a State Credit Agency, with the duty of subjecting the operations of lending agencies to the directives of the Plan." It further envisaged the formation of public authorities for "the principal monopolized industries producing raw material and power." It alluded to public works undertakings, but it spoke most directly to the issue of unemployment by raising the prospect of a five-year blueprint that would achieve a 50 percent increase in purchasing power within three years and would double it by the end of the period.36 The Plan's provisions for exercising direction over the banks and basic industry most immediately recalled the thrust of the ADGB's program of 1932. More fundamentally, however, de Man's design (like the Germans' Guiding Principles) reflected the analytic focus on finance capital which had become the standard within socialism during the 1920s. Similarly, it hinged on the equally ubiquitous underconsumptionist thesis, which envisioned the remedy for unemployment in a transfer of wealth to be achieved through the mechanism of investment controls. The Plan may have broken new ground with its activist premises. Its conceptual lan-

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guage conveyed familiar orientations. 37 Many socialists did not have far to go to concur with it. In Belgium and elsewhere in Europe the Plan's appeal was enhanced by the contrast between the activism it professed and the passive stance of most socialist leaders. In the first of his memoirs de Man recalled that Vandervelde had confessed to him, "What is killing us is that we are powerless against the economic crisis. I myself do not easily see what can be done. My education took place at a time when much less importance was attached to economic and financial problems." 38 Nothing more positive than this was offered by those socialist authorities whose theoretical outlook was based in classical economics, whether of the liberal strain, like Snowden, or of the Marxist, like Hilferding and the ADGB expert Fritz Naphtali. "In regard to economic policy," Naphtali wrote in 1931, "I do not believe that we can do very much, anything really decisive, to overcome the crisis. When the defects of the upswing period were allowed to develop as extensively and unrestrainedly as is normal in capitalist economy and now on a world scale as well, then it is scarcely possible to halt this crisis during its actual duration." 39 Most socialist economic commentators agreed that planning was not possible in a capitalist order. In theory, they may have been correct, but politically this view left socialism permanently on the defensive. Retrospectively, after January 1933, it could be judged to have been no help to the SPD. As the year went on, moreover, the energies displayed by Hitler and, across the Atlantic, by Roosevelt gave impetus to the sense that the time was one of movement and new starts. However mixed its success and fearsome its human cost, Stalin's first Five-Year Plan, under way since 1929, had already made such an impression. "It suffices," de Man told Belgian union representatives in October, "to consider countries as different as the United States of America, Soviet Russia, Italy, or Germany to understand the irresistible force of this push toward a planned national economy." 40 The Plan du Travail appeared to launch socialism into this current. Consequently, it rapidly captured attention, particularly in other small states where democracy persisted and socialism remained strong but economies were struggling. The Swiss civil servants' union adopted a Platt du Travail in June 1934; it was accepted by the Swiss Socialist Party, though not by the main union confederation, in January 1935. In the Netherlands party and trade unions jointly approved a Plan van der Arbeid in April 1935. There was also a socialist plan in Czechoslovakia. 41 Nowhere, however, did the Plan du Travail make more of an impression than in France. Although Léon Blum responded to it guardedly and the SFIO left was hostile, other socialists eagerly aligned themselves with it. Within the CGT younger leaders like Robert Lacoste and René Belin

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became outspoken partisans of planisme along the lines of the Belgian model. After the events of February 6, 1934, Léon Jouhaux threw his prestige and the unions' resources into the effort to create a Plan de la CGT. Among socialist intellectuals the Belgian Plan also aroused widespread interest. Most committed to it were the members of Révolution Constructive, one of whose prominent figures, Georges Lefranc, had been among the first champions of Au delà du marxisme in France in the late 1920s. 42 As firmly, however, as Lefranc held that he and his friends were de Man's truest French disciples, they could not have identified themselves more closely with the Plan du Travail than Marcel Déat did. "In the history of socialist doctrine," Emile Vandervelde said around the time the POB adopted the Plan, "I fully believe that de Man and Déat will appear the most representative figures of the postwar intellectual movement of revolt of the under-forties." But, Vandervelde added, de Man had advanced the unity of Belgian socialism, whereas Déat had promoted discord in France. 43 It is valuable to keep this judgment in mind in seeking to understand the circumstances in which the two Front Generation leaders portrayed their relationship during this period. As the Plan du Travail became public in late 1933, Déat, just organizing the Parti Socialiste de France, sought to show that he and his fellow exiles from the SFIO adhered to the same principles that the overwhelming majority of the POB was to endorse at Christmas. "In reality," he wrote at the beginning of 1934, "the Plan du Travail. .. was born under the sign of neo-socialism." Further, Déat drew attention to his personal ties to de Man. In another reference he recalled a conversation in August 1933, in which "we easily found ourselves in agreement regarding the possible lines of constructive action to respond simultaneously to fascism and the [economic] crisis." 44 Déat could hope to escape the label of dissident by attaching himself and his new party to the mainstream of planisme. In contrast, de Man deemphasized his affinities with the French néos because he—an exile returned—wished to avoid or be rid of the aura of outsider. In the confidential memorandum he submitted to the POB executive committee in October 1933 he offered only backhanded praise to Déat and his allies: "Many militants in Belgium are not at all agreed with the program of the French neo-socialists, but it takes very little not to regret that in place of a discussion allowing a resolution of the new problems which this movement at least has had the merit to raise, the polemic among leaders of the French party has taken on the appearance of a sterile and dangerous quarrel over questions of administrative discipline, which inevitably turn into personal disputes." 45 In his 1941 memoir, Après coup, de Man drew a parallel between Déat and himself, noting that the new outlook associated with the Plan du

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Travail "horrified" the orthodox Belgian Marxist Louis de Brouckère just "as the neo-socialism of Marcel Déat horrified Léon Blum."46 Even if his memory tricked him here—it was the oratory of Adrien Marquet which provoked Blum's horror—the remark suggests reasonably close ties. These were most clearly on display at a conference at the Sorbonne in December 1934, where de Man summarized his perspectives on planning, and the discussion included comments by representatives of the French groups most sympathetic to his views—Georges Lefranc from Révolution Constructive, René Belin from the CGT, and Déat from the PSdF. It was an epiphany of planisme and for Déat the best opportunity to affirm his "complete agreement . . . with my friend Henri de Man." Afterward he said of de Man's talk, "This time the words which we have so often repeated, the theses which we have explicated so many times were presented in all their force with, if I may say so, their guaranty of origin."47 In Paris de Man was optimistic about the prospects of the Plan. "Last week," he told his audience, "we decided that from this moment the organization of our propaganda campaign is to base itself on the proposition of a final three months' pull. That is to say, we are counting on the fulfillment of the formula 'The Plan in power' in a not-too-distant future."48 At this point the effort to realize the Plan had been under way for nearly a year on two main fronts. With twenty-two subcommittees working under its aegis, the Office of Social Research was close to completing its elaboration of the Plan of December 1933 into a full-scale blueprint of change. It was published early in 1935 as L'exécution du Plan du Travail. Meanwhile de Man had also been directing the propaganda drive for the Plan through a newly created Action Committee. On the whole he received only tepid support from the orthodox-controlled socialist press. Nevertheless, through a stream of posters and pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and mass meetings, de Man and his associates implanted the idea of the Plan into public consciousness. As 1934 reached its end, de Man, the père du Plan, found to his discomfort that many of his countrymen had come to view him "as a kind of savior."49 The first three months of 1935 turned out to be a critical phase in the campaign for the Plan, but they led to a different outcome than the unqualified triumph which de Man had anticipated in his talk at the Sorbonne. The causes were the failure of the deflationary policy of the last of a series of right-wing cabinets and a sharp rise in the number and seriousness of workers' protests, raising the threat of a general strike. When the cabinet fell in March the POB, following de Man's lead, entered a "Government of National Renovation" under the Catholic politician and banking expert Paul Van Zeeland. De Man became minister of public works and of the reabsorption of unemployment—he had the

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latter title added to his portfolio—with a commitment from Van Zeeland to place him in charge of a new Office of Economic Recovery. This was not a government of "the Plan, the whole Plan, nothing but the Plan"— the heady slogan of the POB's propaganda drive. Yet although the party had "violated the letter of the resolution for the Plan du Travail, " as de Man admitted to an emergency congress on April 1, still he claimed it had not strayed off course. "I would not dare to ask you for absolution if I were not able to prove to you that in refusing to participate in the government we would have violated the spirit of the resolution of 1933." 5 0 In de Man's view the results were to justify this decision. A year later unemployment was down by half, partly the dividend of a devaluation which the government had immediately imposed, but partly also the consequence of the public works program de Man had organized. As he had hoped, moreover, the elections of 1936 produced an increased socialist vote and strengthened the POB's position in parliament. It did not, however, yield the "economic majority" that would enact the full Plan. Similarly, although the campaign for the Plan and the early successes of the Van Zeeland government had restored the standing of the POB, de Man had not transformed his party. Neither had he truly reoriented it toward a new socialism. A year later one of his associates interpreted these developments as positively as their limits allowed: "The Belgian experience has therefore not been, properly speaking, a planning experience, but an experience which I could describe . . . as a politics of the public welfare, in which we have achieved the maximum possible permeation of the planiste idea."51 In France meanwhile Déat was unable to gain a parallel success. Beginning in early 1934, when he made the creation of an anticapitalist rassemblement his immediate goal, his articles and commentaries gave equal prominence to a plan of action similar to the Plan du Travail. He held back from specifying its details, however, in part because amid the flood of plans which coursed through public debate in 1934, to choose particular approaches could be to rebuff prospective allies. As one of his associates said in April, the aim was to identify the minimum of common points among the various projects. The PSdF supported the "Plan d'Adrien Marquet," a six-year public works undertaking devised by the mayor-deputy of Bordeaux, "on leave" from the party while serving as minister of labor in the "Government of National Union" formed in the wake of February 6. In April Déat was one of 214 signers of an action plan circulated among deputies in the National Assembly. But in May, at its second congress, the party avoided the term plan in approving a resolution calling for the "organization of the national economy."52 Politically the advantage remained with generalities.

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After Déat's hopes for a commitment from the veterans' groups were disappointed in July, he began to appeal more insistently for consensus around a plan. Other shifts in the political landscape probably contributed to his new tone. After several months of hesitation following the antifascist demonstration of February 12, the SFIO and the Communists signed a "Unity Pact" on July 27. It was little more than a nonaggression agreement—positive steps toward a Popular Front would come a year later—but it signaled a stronger Socialist orientation toward the left, and by September Déat would be refuting the contention of Révolution Constructive's Georges Lefranc that a plan on de Man's model could provide common ground for joint efforts by the two parties. "Planning already separates socialists into two categories," he wrote; "so much the more does it divide them from the Bolsheviks."53 Déat still expressed optimism: "And in a few months, perhaps in a few weeks, our slogans will be those of the immense majority of the country."54 By December, when de Man spoke at the Sorbonne, it was no longer easy to entertain such hopes. The PSdF was struggling for support among the electorate and against division within its ranks. Marquet, along with his "collaborators who had absolutely no team spirit and were occasionally scatterbrained," had left in the fall. Renaudel, in declining health, was to die in the spring of 1935. If the party, as Barthélémy Montagnon asserted in this period, was "only a tool," then it was time to fashion a different instrument to effect the still elusive rassemblement.ss In March 1935 Déat made the attempt with the formation of the Comité du Plan. It was the month in which the Van Zeeland government took office in Belgium. For Déat this event signaled the abandonment of a "politics of resignation and catastrophe" and the commencement of "an era of bold projects and planned revolutions," whose standard-bearer and moving force the new committee must become in France. With a logic that recalled Mosley's reasoning about the New Party's chances in 1931, Déat declared, "This effort will succeed, we are certain, because without it there is only misery and collapse."56 But the Comité du Plan won few followers. It did not become the axis of a broad alliance of the centerleft. Meanwhile, at the end of 1935, the PSdF coalesced with two other small parties into the Union Socialiste Républicaine. The new party was never to be more than a parliamentary home for refugees from Radicalism or the SFIO. A stronger thrust toward planning came from the CGT during this period. Again the stimulus was the rioting of February 6. In the following weeks Jouhaux established an Office of Research on the Belgian model. By the spring of 1934 it was functioning as a Commission du Plan, drawing upon the expertise of economists and union figures including Lefranc,

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Francis Delaisi, Ludovic Zoretti, Lucien Laurat, Robert Lacoste, and the PSdF members Claude Bonnier and Louis Vallon.S7 Although the members of the commission came from different conceptual backgrounds and diverged over various aspects of planning, most had connections to de Man or Déat or both and were not close to the leadership of the SFIO. Jouhaux gave them an opportunity that the party would not make available, and they responded with a work of consensus that became the draft Plan of the CGT when it was completed in the fall. Thereafter a campaign of propaganda and education began, extending over the first nine months of 1935. In September a definitive text was completed. But the Plan had not caught on among the union rank and file, while the idea of the Popular Front—which could mean unification of the CGT and the Communist CGTU—had begun to generate enthusiasm. As alliance among the three major parties of the left became the preeminent question for all, prospects for the CGT's Plan dimmed. Objected to by both Radicals and Communists, it was omitted from the joint program of the Popular Front in January 1936. 58 As much, then, as the Plan du Travail and, to a lesser extent, the French plans may have excited expectations in 1934 and 1935, none became a successful vehicle of socialist regeneration. In the judgment of some observers, planisme—like other elements of the Front Generation's socialism—led in the opposite direction. In the words of Zeev Sternhell: Belgian planism, and then neosocialist planism, represented a total alternative to Marxism and to social democracy: as a form of rebellion against Marxism, planism contributed greatly to the creation of a national, authoritarian, antiparliamentarian form of socialism, a socialism for the entire nation over and above the divergent social classes and opposed interests. Planism did more than advocate a planned and rationalized economy: far from being the harbinger of a renewal of socialist thought, it prepared the way for, it already was, a national socialism. 59

In one respect this condemnation proposes too little. Its prosecutor restricts his case primarily to France and Belgium. In fact it can be extended to Germany and Britain; moreover it is possible to discover that planisme and fascism shared more than a rejection of Marxism. Yet to expand the scope in which this thesis may be applied is in the end only to project a larger screen upon which its fallacies become apparent. Planning may have been an alternative to Marxism. It was not by nature a departure from social democracy. To contend that it was is to impose an ideological determinism upon the individuals of an era, the 1930s, characterized by experimentation and flux made necessary because the old formulas of Marxism had failed. It is to say that socialist planistes were

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inescapably to turn toward the opposite pole of politics, when the truth is that most of them did not. All this is visible in the evolution of the Front Generation's socialism. In Germany fascism did tempt a few trade union advocates of planning from the milieu of the Front Generation. In April 1933, as the Nazis moved to redefine the status of the ADGB and other unions, a former partisan of the WTB Plan who had also been a participant at the 1928 Heppenheim conference, Franz Grosse, wrote that the new regime must leave the unions their autonomy so that they might play an effective role in the work of economic recovery. Inevitably this would be an effort of planning. Half a year earlier, before Hitler gained power, Grosse had rejected a Nazi claim that Italian Fascism had created a planned economy. Now he noted tendencies toward planning emerging under Mussolini and indicating a pattern: "The planned economic order that is presently getting its start in Italy must also prevail in Germany, as little as this may be perceived at the moment." 60 Grosse did not assert that a marriage of planning and National Socialism was a certainty. He was to find them compatible enough, however, to be able to make his peace with the Third Reich. Similarly, Walther Pähl saw a potential opportunity for the workers' movement during the first spring of the Nazi regime. On the eve of the May 1 "Day of German Labor" he searched for common ground: "No other hierarchy of the values Nation and Socialism but only a different order of priority separated us from National Socialism." Now it remained to the Nazis to make good on their declared commitment to socialist achievement. Pähl held that they must do this through a process of nationalization of credit and basic industries which he described in essentially the same terms he had used in his writings on planning during the last months of the Weimar Republic. In politics, he said, the prospects for a planned economy had improved. Weimar had always suffered from a diffusion of power, whereas Planwirtschaft demanded unified political control. "Today this control exists! . . . With it, however, National Socialism is also charged with an historic responsibility of frightful magnitude: it must achieve socialism because it has succeeded in establishing for the first time a power which not only wants to achieve it but also can achieve it." 61 Following the Nazis' suppression of the unions after May 1, Pähl appears to have decided that Hitler had failed this test. For an interval he chose exile. In 1935, however, he returned to Germany, and by the time of the fall of France he had reached the point of revising his early work on the international struggle for raw materials to justify the Nazi quest for domination in Europe.62 He and Grosse thus may appear to be early travelers on a road that other planistes like de Man, Déat, Georges Le-

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franc, and René Belin—the speaker and the chief commentators at the Sorbonne conference of December 1934—would also take.63 And of course Mosley, as both planner and socialist-turned-fascist of the first hour, can be added to the list. The affinities between planning and fascism may be extended beyond personalities into the arena of propaganda and motivation. In the confidential memorandum which he submitted to the POB executive committee in October 1933, de Man projected three successive concentric waves of agitation. The first, aimed at party militants, would educate them to the tasks ahead. The second, reaching "the mass of our socialist troops," was to surround the Platt du Travail with an aura sustained by the movement's salient ideals. The third, targeting the population at large, would have to rely, however, on a "yet more elementary mystique which must appeal to instincts and needs. The social lever of this propaganda must be the wish for a more comfortable life, for reemployment, for a return to prosperity, and the basic sentiment to which it appeals, the more or less instinctive hostility toward high finance and speculators. This propaganda must operate much more with images than with words."64 This approach fit comfortably with the anticapitalism which de Man believed could unite blue-collar and white-collar strata behind the Plan. It also carried him into borderline territory that edged close to fascist themes. Once one had placed the planiste renewal on national terrain, it was not a great distance to go to label the bankers and speculators as outsiders. De Man did not take this step, but others moved in that direction. A few years earlier Barthélémy Montagnon had already referred to the "financial-industrial oligarchy," socialism's enemy, as "cosmopolitan," a term usually employed by anti-Semites. And Mosley went beyond hints when, in the fall of 1933, the BUF began agitating against "the international finance of the City of London, which is of course largely Jewish."65 If planning, as de Man had said, could carry socialism through the noman's-land in which conventional policy was mired, its conceptions of what lay beyond were not always defined, nor, some of its adherents argued, could they be.66 At times this indeterminacy was also reflected in rhetoric that exalted action above objectives. Denying in July 1934 that a fascist triumph was inevitable in France, Georges Lefranc spoke in phrases which nonetheless sounded concordances with the vocabulary of fascism: "The future will be what we make it; men forge their own history and, if they wish, can master their fate. It is up to us and those around us to stir people's wills."67 Interpreted critically, whatever its intended meaning, such terminology appeared to blur the boundaries between socialism and fascism. Inherent in any conception of planning was the assumption that both

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capital and labor would hold allotted roles in a directed economy. In the circumstances of the Depression, with the Plan du Travail and its counterparts promising to control banking and management and to provide work to the unemployed, socialist and trade union planistes generally dismissed the restrictive potential that such arrangements might possess for their constituencies. Yet it was also possible to view the economic organization of planning as a species of corporatism, which Italian Fascism and then other fascist movements had laid claim to and promoted as their design for society. In The Greater Britain, his manifesto for the newly founded BUF, Mosley advanced such a synthesis, adopting the corporate state as a framework for the planned economy which he continued to project on the basis of his socialist blueprints of 1930 and 1931. Later The Blackshirt held Mussolini up as an example to Franklin D. Roosevelt, as the American president confronted industrialists' opposition to his recovery plans: "Just imagine an Association of Manufacturers circulating its members to disobey an order of a Fascist Government. If this occurred in Italy, the little pleasure steamers which ply between the mainland and the Lipari Islands would indeed be overladen!" 68 If one retreated from imagining, however, and scanned the Italian reality, the picture was rather different: it was Socialist, Communist, and labor leaders, opponents of the working class's subordination under corporatism, who populated the Lipari prisons. A number of socialist planistes nevertheless employed the language of corporatism. Foremost among them was Hendrik de Man. Socialists, he argued, would not give up their name simply because the German National Socialists had misappropriated it; they had no more reason to reject corporatism, which he portrayed—understood properly—as an integral element of the trade unionist tradition. Similarly, Louis Vallon, outlining the PSdF's proposal to direct the labor force into new and technologically advanced branches of production, described corporatism as a French tradition; they could not control what the Italians did with it. As late as 1938 Marcel Déat would separate a true from a false corporate structure; whatever phrases they used, the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini had achieved only approximations and caricatures of the real thing. 69 Yet even among those who were committed to planning, such assertions evoked hesitation and discomfort, if only because in both theory and practice most versions of corporatism were at home on the political right and were unequivocally hostile to socialism. Reviewing the corporatist phenomenon in 1934, Georges Lefranc concluded in effect that socialists would do best to keep their distance from it. More critical observers have judged that the planistes who did not had already moved away from socialism. 70 All this evidence of interconnections and parallels leaves it beyond ar-

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gument that a fascist potential lay within socialist planisme. Possibility is not inevitability, however. The planning current of the 1930s left an equally significant legacy for socialism in the decades that followed. As with other facets of the Front Generation's evolution, the phase of planning made it clear that to depart from a pur et dur orthodoxy was to move into a present and future in which, precisely because the terrain was uncharted, the socialist identity of any new course had to be tested and justified. It is wrong, therefore, to contend, as Sternhell has done, that it "makes no difference" that individuals who were to remain socialists joined with future fascists or collaborators in the planning enthusiasm of the Depression decade.71 It makes all the difference that the planistes included later résistants and exiles like Vallon, Claude Bonnier, and Henry Hauck as well as Déat and Lefranc, or Max Buset in Belgium as well as Hendrik de Man. Indeed, judged by the loyalties of the majority of its advocates, planning cannot be said to have embodied an insidious desertion of socialism. In Britain it attracted not only Mosley but later G. D. H. Cole, Ernest Bevin, Barbara Wooton, Stafford Cripps, Hugh Dalton, Hugh Gaitskell, and Evan Durbin, all important figures in the Labour Party of the 1930s and 1940s. 72 It was Cole who wrote the introduction to the English translation of the Plan du Travail, published as a Fabian pamphlet in 1935, and who bemoaned the prospects of the British party in a letter to de Man the following year: "My information, which may be jaundiced, is that there will be much talk and little done, and, in practice, a reversion to a policy of new-Liberalism rather an attempt to work out a pianist sort of Socialism." Cole would have been surprised at retrospective assertions that planning was preparing "the way for, it already was, a national socialism."73 It must also be remembered that if the propaganda of planisme verged upon themes prominent in fascism, it was not singular in this regard. High finance, for example, was a common target across most of the political spectrum in the 1930s. It is necessary only to recall Franklin Roosevelt's attacks on the "economic royalists" or the constant Communist drumfire against the power of "finance capital." Such rhetoric stood no further from anti-Semitism than did the formulas of socialist planners; in no case was it inevitable that the divide be crossed. Similarly, if de Man may be accused of seeking to mobilize the petits against the gros in an alliance that would leave aside the ultimate objectives of socialism, the same can be said (and has been) of the Popular Front.74 Congruence of views did not mean identity of viewpoint. In its early stages the BUF provided a negative demonstration of this truth, when its journal eagerly attempted to cast the net of fascist conceptions over as broad a body of opinion as possible. "Well spoken, President Roosevelt!"

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The Blackshirt applauded in the first August of the New Deal. "You and your Brains Trust of economists have got almost as far, in 1933, as the point to which 'The Greater Britain' took economic thought in 1932." A fortnight earlier readers of the same weekly had been told of J. M. Keynes's "complete capitulation to Fascist economics." Later in the year Stafford Cripps was portrayed as offering the Labour Party a copy of Mosley's policies, and Harold Macmillan, a partisan of planning by 1933, was listed among a group of Tory "quasi-fascists."75 But the logic of such equations was faulty, for fascism had no exclusive purchase on conceptions of a strong state, a mixed economy, or a regime of production restricting labor as well as capital. No doubt planning could "serve the cause of fascism," de Man's chief economic expert, Albert Halasi, admitted in 1937. It would not do so, however, when education, propaganda, and effort pointed it along the right path. "Yet all these techniques," Halasi added, "will not suffice to lead us to socialism if they are not created and guided by socialist inspiration."76 Such inspiration was manifest in the three international meetings convened in 1934, 1936, and 1937 to discuss planned economies. According to the "Theses of Pontigny," drafted by de Man and named after the former abbey in eastern France that was the site of the first conference, planning was to achieve "a mixed economic system (a nationalized and a private sector), which can be considered as transitional between the capitalist and the socialist economies." 77 The two subsequent gatherings, at Geneva and then again at Pontigny, reviewed various problems of implementation. Most of those who attended were from socialist and union organizations. Opening the initial session, the Swiss Hans Oprecht told the participants that they were to explore planning and its ramifications in order to see if and how it might "possibly offer a new foundation to the workers' movement by means of new policies." At its best, Albert Halasi declared at the last conference, planning was "in some degree a school of socialism." 78 By 1937, however, the prospects of such a renovation were clouded. Not only had the Platt du Travail in Belgium and the CGT Plan in France been sacrificed to political exigencies, but both theoretical reflection and practical experience had taught socialist planistes that no single formula could engineer the transformation they sought. Neither had the idea of the Plan exercised a lasting pull on popular imagination. For all its promise, the planisme of the mid-1930s had produced inconclusive and ambiguous results for socialism. As the decade approached its end, planning remained a theme of discussion, but its importance diminished. Symptomatically, international events forced the cancellation of two more projected conferences in 1938 and 1939. The first, scheduled for October 15-16, 1938, appears to have

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been scuttled by the Munich crisis. The second, which was to convene on September 9 - 1 0 of the following year, became a casualty of the outbreak of the Second World War on September l. 7 9 It is emblematic of the change in socialism's focus in these years that issues of war and peace disrupted the final efforts of planisme. Yet a link also existed between the two preoccupations. Whatever their differences over particulars, the socialist champions of planning almost uniformly presented it as a means of blocking the spread of fascism. In the late 1930s, however, in the face of German and Italian territorial expansion, the primary site of the confrontation with fascism became the international arena. Among socialists, to utilize a formula which Jean-Pierre Azéma applies to the SFIO, a clash of approach "separated those who maintained that the fight against fascism—even accepting the risk of war—was the only way of fighting for peace and those who countered that to fight for peace was to fight against fascism."80 For the socialists—and ex-socialists—of the Front Generation, this was a question which led back to their formative experiences of 1914-1918.

A Surrender to History As the shadow of war settled over Europe in the late 1930s, Marcel Déat, out of parliament and again a lycée instructor, found himself imagining his students in uniform. "I sometimes saw them," he wrote later, "dressed as soldiers and marching in formation toward horizons enveloped in flame and smoke. I could not help thinking that these young men of 1936-1938 were not made for such a fate, and my resolve hardened to prevent, as much as it was in my power, this flesh from being fed into the meat grinder." 1 Others who had been prominent among the Front Generation socialists expressed similar sentiments. They had kept informed about strategic and tactical developments. Individually they preserved ties with military life. Déat and Hendrik de Man both held reserve commissions and did occasional tours of service. Mosley could not because of his wartime disability, yet "I had reached marksman standard in the army and kept up practice afterwards with a nice collection of weapons which I still possessed; also I had my old uniform, which would still fit me." 2 Opposed to war in any case, they feared it all the more because of the shortcomings they perceived in their respective countries' states of preparedness. As their rhetoric so frequently documented, the experience of 1914— 1918 had remained with them throughout their political careers. All the same, the further they were distanced from the war, the more diffuse its impact had become. Now the possibility of a new conflict reconcentrated impulses that had slackened over two decades. "War resolves nothing," de Man wrote in 1938. "There is no more a 'good' war between peoples than there is a 'good' murder among individuals. The results of war are always worse than any evil whatsoever that it seeks to avoid." 3 Yet if such statements recalled the intensity of the returned veterans of the Armistice era, the atmosphere in which they were made differed sharply from the euphoric mood of those earlier months of release from the

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trenches. It contrasted as well with the temper of positive effort toward socialism and peace which had carried the Front Generation's leaders well into the Depression years. Now the tone of those who resisted war was somber and pessimistic. In taking up the campaign for peace, they were turning away from frustrations in domestic politics. De Man, minister of finance in both a second Van Zeeland government and a successor cabinet, had resigned in disappointment early in 1938. By that time, similarly, Déat had given up his hopes that the Popular Front would revive the French economy and expand to become a true national rassemblement. At the other pole of politics, meanwhile, the BUF had suffered several important defections in 1937, and Mosley was struggling to give it direction. 4 In such circumstances the antiwar cause provided a refuge. It also presented a potential opportunity, an issue around which to capture popular support. Some successes resulted. At the beginning of May 1939 Déat published his "Mourir pour Dantzig"—one of his associates did not exaggerate in calling it "probably the most sensational article to appear in the world press" between the wars. On July 16 Mosley addressed his largest indoor meeting ever, over 20,000 persons at Earls Court in London. 5 Nevertheless, no great waves of recruits against war afterward materialized. Neither, of course, did these endeavors prevent the outbreak of conflict on September 1. During the period of the "phony war" Déat and Mosley, with their countries now engaged, and de Man in still neutral Belgium persisted in their opposition, in the conviction that it was not too late to restore peace. Then the German triumph in the West in May-June 1940 transformed all the possibilities. It might have meant the end of Mosley's crusade against British involvement. In case of invasion, he wrote on May 9, British Union "would throw ourselves into the effort of a united nation until the foreigner was driven from our soil." The government did not allow him the chance to make good on this promise. On May 23 Mosley was arrested on grounds that his movement was subject to foreign influence and control. 6 He would have no further public say on questions of war and peace. With their homelands attacked and soon militarily crushed—Belgium surrendered on May 28, France on June 22—de Man and Déat faced a different situation. And amid rout and internal collapse each discovered opportunity: as if overnight, the encumbrances which they believed had immobilized socialism had disappeared, buried in the wreckage of defeat. A fresh start thus seemed possible. History had rendered its verdict against electoral and parliamentary politics and the bourgeois society they served. Socialism's future rested with structural development and

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institutional authority. Whatever were Hitler's intentions, he too would be unable to resist these forces, which would produce an integrated socialist Europe. This judgment represented a critical shift in outlook. In discerning a new opening for socialism, de Man and Déat were also retreating from the voluntarism which had marked their thoughts and actions between the wars and had given them confidence that the cause of social justice could be made to rally the masses. Their antiwar efforts had been consistent with this view, as well as with the lessons of their experience of 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 8 . In contrast, their assessments of early summer 1940 struck echoes of the socialist orthodoxy they had fought against for so long. History set the choices. Economic forces would ultimately determine political outcomes. It was this turn in perspective that enabled de Man and Déat to enter into collaboration with the Germans, convinced that it would lead to socialism and a "European Revolution." In adopting this strategy, however, they allowed themselves to ignore essential truths about the Nazis and their ambitions for racial empire. Yet the temptation was powerful to believe in the socialist potential of Hitler's New Order. From mid1940 not only de Man and Déat but a number of other figures associated with Front Generation socialism reunited around the illusory revival of their European ideal of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Well before the defeat of 1940 both de Man and Déat were worrying about the state of readiness of their respective countries' armies. De Man had resigned his officer's commission in 1923 in protest against Belgium's participation in the Ruhr occupation. In 1935, upon his entry into the Van Zeeland government, he reactivated his reserve status and thereafter became a member of a Committee on National Security which was to recommend military reforms. He found the Belgian general staff still bound to the diplomatic and strategic conceptions of 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 8 . Anticipating a conflict fought on a static front and in conjunction with major allies, the military chiefs gave priority to the army's numerical strength, which they proposed to increase by extending the standard term of service. De Man, in contrast, started from the premise that the country should be free from ties to other states, and he projected war as a purely defensive contingency. "Instead of more troops," he called for "a reduced complement, but better armed, better equipped, better trained, and better paid." The bulk of these forces should be positioned in a deep network of concrete bunkers, while those units which would advance to meet the enemy would be motorized and supported by a powerful air arm. De Man's suggestions were not adopted, however, and his concerns, which included morale, persisted, "reinforced rather than diminished by

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what I observed around me as an infantry officer called up when the army was put on an alert footing in September 1938." 7 In urging socialist renewal in the late 1920s and early 1930s de Man had frequently invoked military metaphors. It was necessary to move from the defensive to the offensive, he had said, to shift from positional to mobile warfare. Confronting the prospect of actual and not figurative combat, however, his language only partially echoed those reveilles to socialism. The profundity of the war experience had led him then to reach as if by second nature for its terminology. The memory of its murderousness compelled him now to reject any option of offensive action. It followed that his reform proposals both aimed at a defensive strategy and sought to liberate it from an immobility like that of the Western Front. His solution was to modernize the defense by endowing it with the advantages that technological development had provided. Such thinking fit a pattern common to the pacifists among the leaders and former leaders of Front Generation socialism. Attuned to the progress of industry, they were sensible to the potential of new modes of combat, even as they censured their use. Like de Man, Marcel Déat revived his involvement with military affairs in the mid-1930s. A reserve stint in September 1935 left him concerned about the army's pace of modernization. A subsequent tour in the fall of 1937 showed no significant improvement.8 By then Déat had become acquainted with the "innovative ideas" of Colonel Charles de Gaulle, whom he also came to know personally. It is not surprising that Déat, the machine-gun officer of 1914-1918, was receptive to de Gaulle's emphasis on the new weaponry of speed and armor. Air power also preoccupied Déat, particularly after his tenure in the Air Ministry as a member of the caretaker Sarraut cabinet in the early months of 1936. The following year, together with Claude Bonnier, Déat published a work on air policy which included the scenario of a possible conflict with Germany and Italy in which control of the skies would be decisive. In the authors' view, as in de Man's, correct preparation must combine a defensive orientation with modern technology. France could protect itself if it built enough tracking stations, antiaircraft batteries, and interceptors and pursuit planes.9 Mosley took a very similar approach to defense questions in these years. In 1932 in The Greater Britain he wrote of the need for "scientific examination" of imperial security requirements and pointed—in italics—to the necessary conclusions: " T h e arrival of the Air factor has altered fundamentally the position of these Islands, and the consequences of that factor have never yet been realised by the older generation of politicians. We will immediately raise the air strength of Britain to the level of the strongest power in Europe."10 More optimistic than Déat

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would be, Mosley was convinced that a sufficiently strong air arm would deter attack from abroad. In the aftermath of the Second World War he claimed justification: "If the Germans with their numerically far superior force could not cross the Channel in face of the heroic band of Spitfire pilots in 1940, what hope had they of defeating us if our air defences had been not betrayed but fortified to the point of equality?" 11 Complementing this posture on military questions was an insistence on freedom from obligations that could compel a country to go to war for reasons other than protection of the national territory. In the summer of 1935, as an Italian invasion of Ethiopia became increasingly probable, Mosley, the former champion of the League of Nations, unleashed a campaign against possible sanctions by Geneva under the slogan "Mind Britain's Business." 12 Similarly, as a cabinet minister de Man supported the initiatives of 1936-37 which released Belgium from its 1920 military agreement with France and from its responsibilities under the Locarno Pact.13 By this time Germany was supplanting Italy as the chief threat to peace in Europe. In March 1935 the Third Reich had publicly confirmed the open secret that it possessed an air force and had reinstituted conscription—a twin violation of the Versailles treaty. A year later Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland. As the danger of Nazi aggression grew, so, from some Front Generation perspectives, did the dual necessities of modernizing national defenses and avoiding entanglements in extraneous quarrels. Shortly after the Rhineland crisis Marcel Déat warned that the crusading impulse must be kept out of foreign affairs. "We have too much experience of war's realities," he wrote, "to respond to shortsighted chauvinist enthusiasms. Neither are we any more inclined to follow other nations, even allies, in we know not what adventures. Insofar as it will depend on us, French policy will preserve full autonomy and will not be pulled along in anyone's wake." By autonomy he did not mean isolation. During these months Déat stated repeatedly that France had to strengthen ties with its allies in Eastern Europe. Otherwise a barricade against German expansionism would fall, and Hitler could eventually turn westward with three-fourths of the continent under his control. Not only the democracies, Déat said, but also states sharing historic interests with France belonged in the "single common front of pacific nations" that could persuade the Germans to choose the path of negotiation. 14 In other words, the basis of solidarity vis-à-vis the Third Reich was to be opposition to war rather than commitment to antifascist ideals. In the political circumstances of the late 1930s this conclusion had a practical rationale. Democracy by this time still existed in Eastern Europe only in Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, in separating defense of the nation from the defense of specific institutions and principles, Déat threw

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a shadow of uncertainty over the socialist content of his views on foreign policy. His longtime associate Henry Hauck broke with him on this issue in mid-1936 and returned to the SFIO. At this point, however, their division only potentially encompassed ends rather than means. Although he was a skeptical recruit, Déat supported the Popular Front governments through the premierships of Léon Blum in 1936—37 and then the Radical Camille Chautemps in 1937-38. Through at least the middle of 1937 he remained hopeful that the coalition of democratic forces could reform France internally.15 When it failed, his tone darkened. Déat lost his parliamentary seat to a Communist in 1936. When he returned to the Chamber of Deputies in the spring of 1939, the victor in a by-election at Angoulême, his judgments on the existing political structure were negative and bitter. Parliament babbled on, he told an audience in May. Electoral life was stuck in the same old ruts. Escape from stalemate could come only under a government committed to "a few clear and simple leading ideas" and granted full parliamentary powers for a specific term in order to achieve its objectives.16 The end of the Van Zeeland experiment promoted a similar change of views in de Man. By 1938, he recalled during the war, he had "lost faith" in the parliamentary system. It was corrupted, he believed, by the irresponsibility of parties, the power of money, and the demoralizing influence of the press. It could be reformed only if the state was strengthened and recognition sank in "that democracy does not exclude authority." Very much like Déat, de Man wanted to free the executive from parliamentary control. His particular constitutional design would have installed a government for a four-year term and disallowed the possibility of a legislative denial of its budget. Without such changes attempts at reform amounted, even in favorable conditions, to undertaking "to use a crane to shift a brick." De Man thus concluded that "parliamentary democracy as it existed in Belgium had ceased to be a means of realizing socialism."17 It was a verdict that denied the justice of waging war to protect the existing order. Thus it lent strength to de Man's conviction that in foreign policy the ultimate priority was to avoid war. Because de Man and Déat eventually chose collaboration, it is tempting to read their critiques of liberal democracy as implicitly embracing fascism. Yet similar thoughts were expressed by other socialists upon whom no hint of compromise later fell. Paul-Henri Spaak, who became the ranking socialist in the wartime Belgian government-in-exile, spoke no less forcefully than de Man in the late 1930s in favor of "authoritarian democracy" and a socialisme national. Across the Channel, in the last prewar months, G. D. H. Cole could assert that "democrats need the will and the capacity to choose a leader who can lead, and to give him rope and authority."18 After a decade of economic decline and limited

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recovery, punctuated by the collapse of parliamentary systems, the desire for effective government, for deeds rather than words or programs, was widespread among socialists and hardly restricted to those who were eventually to discern a field for initiative in Hitler's New Order. Mosley could have taken satisfaction in this development. As far back as the period of his memorandum and the Manifesto and then during the New Party days, he had pressed the case for a strengthened executive power. Yet although this idea gradually won broader acceptance, it produced no dividends for him in political support. In its early months the BUF could not gain a following as a movement for governmental reform. Its great increase in numbers came when Mosley gave primacy to antiSemitism in the second half of 1934, whereupon British Fascism acquired a plebeian edge with the emergence of agitators like John Beckett—excombatant and former Labour firebrand—and William Joyce, the future "Lord Haw-Haw" of the Second World War. Anti-Semitism, however, attracted recruits only in receptive localities, above all the East End of London. Elsewhere the BUF gained little with it, while its tone and the street violence it frequently engendered kept moderate conservatives as well as potential contributors at a distance. The movement's failure to contest the 1935 national election testified to the inadequacies of its new tactics and left a question mark over its future direction.19 In 1937 Joyce and Beckett led a secession of radical anti-Semites from British Union, as it was now called. Mosley held his ground. His Tomorrow We Live, written in the winter of 1937-38, mostly restated the positions he had taken previously. The maladies of the time still started with economics, "and here," Mosley said two years later, "I am almost at Carl Marxism which we largely accept as origin."20 The primary remedy remained the creation of a strong state which would organize a selfsufficient corporate economy. Mosley struck a new accent, however, in discussing foreign affairs, where "the feud of international finance and its twin, international Socialism, thrusts the manhood of Britain toward mortal quarrel" with Germany and Italy because those nations had broken the power of these "complementary forces of disaster." It would be "the ex-serviceman of the last war," Mosley asserted, who would reply "with British Union that we have fought Germany once in a British quarrel and we shall not fight her again either in a Socialist or a Jewish quarrel." 21 Thus, even as he identified a different set of incendiarists against peace from those feared by Déat or de Man, Mosley showed himself to be at one with his former socialist counterparts in regard to action: no antifascist crusade could be allowed to provoke a new war. This position was tenable so long as German demands could be accepted as responses to the injustices of Versailles. "No one from the generation of fire," Déat wrote in 1936, no one who "grew up and lived

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through the great crisis which began in 1 9 1 4 imagines that the precarious order established in 1 9 1 9 would last a century." 2 2 From the perspective of the Front Generation socialists who had become partisans of appeasement, the proper means of blunting Germany's aggressive tendencies lay in economic and territorial readjustments within the matrix of a new European settlement. By late 1 9 3 8 , however, with Hitler pressing new grievances despite the satisfaction of his claims to Austria and the Sudetenland, this prospect became more a wish than a likelihood. Additional demands from Berlin had to be judged in terms of the plain criterion of maintaining the peace. Unpersuaded of their countries' military readiness, dubious about the democracy which others insisted must be defended, Déat and de Man and, paralleling them, Mosley grasped at what straws of hope still blew in the increasingly turbulent international atmosphere. The memory of the trenches was one such recourse. Thus de M a n counted himself among those who "have often believed the evocation of the frightful image of war in [Hitler's] speeches to reveal the sincere tone of the veteran who has not forgotten what that word means." Mosley was more positive about the chances for negotiation because "despite every divergence of policy and difference of national character, we have the same origin in the struggle of our betrayed generation of the war to redeem great nations from corruption and in common with these others we have passed through the same ordeals and faced the same enemies." 2 3 In the months following Munich de M a n conducted a pacifist campaign on two fronts. Within the POB he struggled against those, led by the dying Vandervelde, who contended that liberty could now be protected only by a coalition of states prepared to resist fascism by arms. Abroad he undertook a diplomatic mission in December 1 9 3 8 - J a n u a r y 1 9 3 9 seeking to arrange a general conference of the four " M u n i c h " powers by means of an appeal from the chief "Oslo states"—Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Spaak, now foreign minister, provided the needed technical and financial support. King Leopold III, with whom de M a n had developed a personal friendship, offered his encouragement. In meetings with leaders of the Oslo group governments de Man encountered goodwill or enthusiasm for the project. His soundings of the French and British indicated their readiness to participate. The Germans, however, prevaricated and finally expressed lack of interest. 24 Thereafter until the outbreak of war de Man turned again to internal matters. Mosley meanwhile relentlessly pleaded for peace, both on the platform and in the pages of his movement's journals. By the spring of 1 9 3 9 his efforts were attracting interest from beyond the ranks of British Union.

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Some Catholic newspapers, a number of prominent individuals, even certain pacifist elements from the left found themselves aligned with Mosley on the question of war, as were, more predictably, pro-German fringe organizations like the Link and the Nordic League. The high point of this endeavor was Mosley's appearance at Earls Court in July. "I can still, when I read this speech, get some tingling in my spine," his son Nicholas wrote half a lifetime later. "We were most of us at the end standing on our seats and cheering." 25 By then the Polish question monopolized international concern. Following Germany's seizure and division of the post-Munich Czechoslovakia on March 15, Britain had assured Warsaw of its full assistance against any threat to Polish independence. Mosley's response was to write off Eastern Europe to the Germans' account, a stand which continued the logic of the Munich agreement's abandonment of Czechoslovakia. There was no sense, he argued, in the Chamberlain government's change of policy, for it could meet its obligation to Poland only through an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance which would make war certain. Otherwise Britain and France alone could not safeguard the Poles; thus it had been foolhardy to offer to do so. And in consequence, "British Government places the lives of a million Britons in the pocket of any drunken Polish corporal." 26 These words, published on March 25, anticipated one of the most provocative statements in Déat's article of May 4: "it is a little too much to spill Europe into war for the sake of Danzig, and French peasants have no desire at all 'to die for the Polacks.' " 2 7 Insult had joined argument, a sign of the frustration felt by those who both opposed war and feared that its onset was nearer. Like Mosley, Déat now questioned the value of any engagement on behalf of the states of Eastern Europe—a retreat from his stance of 1936. He was an active presence in the loose community of antiwar sentiment, a broader grouping in France than in Britain. Former allies like Ludovic Zoretti and many ex-members of Révolution Constructive also found their way into this camp; so did some of Déat's erstwhile antagonists both within the SFIO—most notably Paul Faure—and beyond it. Once more Déat had cause to envision an alliance that could cut across the conventional barriers of politics; in his memoirs he called it a rassemblement instinctif of the partisans of peace. 28 Old dreams died hard. Efforts to avert war became efforts to halt it once the fighting commenced in September. With their countries engaged, Mosley and Déat, following the precedent of socialist tradition, took up loyal but critical opposition. In a message to his followers issued September 1 Mosley instructed British Union "to do nothing to injure our country, or to help the other power." If in the services, they were to obey orders. "But," he

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ended, "I ask all members who are free to carry on our work to take every opportunity within your power to awaken the people and to demand peace." Déat meanwhile became the sole parliamentary signatory of a manifesto titled "Immediate Peace!" 29 During the "phony war" which followed the fall of Poland, both urged negotiation with Germany. It was difficult, however, to make headway with the war in stalemate, and, like all other pacifists in these months, they were hampered by official harassment and their inability to present a plausible alternative. British Union showed poorly in by-elections in February and March 1940. Mosley met periodically with other opponents of the war, but the gatherings were unproductive. Déat could be little more than an approving witness of the maneuverings to replace Paul Reynaud, who succeeded the less bellicose Daladier as premier in March, with Daladier again.30 After September 1 de Man sought to keep Belgium out of the conflict. This was also the objective of the government, to which he returned for a brief time as minister without portfolio. Although he resigned this position in January 1940, it was not as a result of a disagreement over foreign policy. His battles in that arena took place within the POB. In mid-193 9 he became president of the party, only a half-honor under the circumstances, as his opponents delayed confirmation of his succession to Vandervelde for several months and restricted his influence over publications to Flemish-language journals. The intraparty dispute over confrontation with the fascist states accounted for a good part of the antagonism. In October de Man intensified the quarrel with an article titled "Enough Sabotage of Neutrality!" which triggered an acerbic exchange with Max Buset, his chief associate in the not-so-long-ago heyday of the Plan du Travail. In the end, de Man said, people's lives must come first. He recalled the sadness of a cleaning woman he had met on the elevator in the party's Brussels headquarters just after the outbreak of the fighting, and he returned, as he had so often before, to the front experience that had never left him. "I will stand against war and for peace wherever and as long as I can, even if I were to be alone, because I think of mankind— of the men who suffered with me in the trenches between 1914 and 1918, of the old woman in the elevator, of her grandson, the soldier called up to duty. I will keep faith with these men." 31 These last attempts to stem the tide were swept aside with the opening of the German offensive against France and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940. The war, already heating up with the Norwegian campaign of April-May, descended in full force upon the West. No diversion of Germany toward Eastern Europe had supervened. Neither had scrupulous neutrality protected small states. And there seemed no hope of stopping Hitler's armies—Déat and Mosley were among those whose confidence

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in the Maginot Line was now revealed to be illusionary. In Belgium de Man, attached to the king's military staff, observed the fracturing of the nation's defenses and agreed with and supported Leopold Ill's decision in late May to capitulate to the invaders. In Paris Déat, awaiting orders to join a unit, contemplated the fulfillment of his nightmares of French weakness. By May 29, a day after the Belgians ceased fighting, he judged the battle of France to be lost: "It is better to make peace on the Somme than on the Seine; on the Seine than on the Loire; on the Loire than on the Garonne." 3 2 Amid the collapse of resistance to the Nazi armies, however, far more than a military defeat appeared to have taken place. "The history of Europe is not over," Déat confided to his war diary on June 14. "In a sense it is beginning." 33 For Déat, for de Man, for others who identified themselves with Front Generation socialism and then with appeasement, the German triumph became a transforming event. After months and years of stalemate and frustration it kindled a flash of opportunity in spite of the humiliation of arms their countries had undergone. At the end of June de Man delineated the possibilities in a manifesto to the members of the POB which was soon widely circulated in the Belgian press: The war has led to the debacle of the parliamentary regime and of the capitalist plutocracy in the so-called democracies. For the working classes and for socialism, this collapse of a decrepit world is, far from a disaster, a deliverance. Despite all that we have experienced of defeats, sufferings, and disillusions, the way is open for the two causes that sum up the aspirations of the people: European peace and social justice. Peace has not been able to develop from the free understanding of sovereign nations and rival imperialisms; it will be able to emerge from a Europe united by arms, wherein the economic frontiers have been leveled. Social justice has not been able to develop from a system calling itself democratic but in which the money powers and the professional politicians in fact predominate, one more and more incapable of any bold initiative, o f any serious reform. It will be able to develop from a system in which the authority of the state is strong enough to undercut the privileges of the propertied classes and to replace unemployment by the universal obligation to work. . . . By linking their fate to the victory of arms, the democratic governments have accepted in advance the verdict of the war. This verdict is clear. It condemns the systems where speeches take the place of actions, where responsibilities are dissipated in the babble of meetings, where the slogan of individual liberty serves as a cushion for conservative egoism. It calls for an era in which an elite—preferring a lively and dangerous life to a torpid and

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easy one, and seeking responsibility instead of fleeing it—will build a new world. In this world, a communal spirit will prevail over class egoism, and labor will be the only source of dignity and power. The socialist order will be thereby realized, not at all as the thing of one class or of one party, but as the good of all, in the name of a national solidarity that will soon be Continental, if not worldwide. 34

Only through their past can it be understood how de M a n , Déat, and their counterparts glimpsed liberation in Hitler's victory. Although their choices in 1 9 4 0 were neither determined nor inevitable, they were rooted in the Front Generation's history, and they reflected two aspects of the chief actors' evolution. One was ideological. By the time of the fall of France they had become fatally disillusioned with parliamentary politics and, even more significantly, in view of their confident voluntarism of the 1920s and early 1930s, with the ability of the masses to act for themselves. In addition there was the personal element. They stood at a stage in their lives at which alternative courses seemed used up or unavailable, while the situation in which they found themselves allowed them one last bid to bring about the renewal which had been their goal for so long. They seized the chance. Hope in a new start enabled them to look past the ugly truths of Nazism. Their sense of finality about the German triumph was fundamental to their decisions. " I f one wants to understand the state of mind which prevailed at that time," de M a n claimed later, "it is important not to forget that the end of the war appeared near and the establishment of German power in Continental Europe firm, if not final. At least in Belgium and France everyone believed this, especially after Dunkirk and the French capitulation." This was no less the judgment of a report of early 1 9 4 2 to the Belgian government-in-exile, which described the general attitude following defeat as "strongly favorable or at least largely resigned to what people began to call the 'new order' and to collaboration with Germany under the sign of the seemingly inevitable approaching victory of the Third Reich." 3 S The breadth of this sentiment in the summer of 1 9 4 0 encouraged thinking about what lay beyond the war. So did the military situation. Even if Britain was not defeated, Marcel Déat wrote in mid-July, alone it could not reverse the outcome in Europe. For that it would need the aid of the United States and Soviet Russia, a likelihood taken seriously only "by the research office at [the insane asylum of] Charenton." 3 6 In his manifesto of June de M a n said that a socialist order would be realized in Europe. Over the next few years those collaborationists who had previously subscribed to Front Generation socialism repeated this theme, yet in a key that had earlier been very foreign to them. Now, like

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the orthodox Marxists they had criticized so harshly in the past, they argued from economic necessity. Following an August 1 9 4 0 conversation with the Reich economics minister Walther Funk, Déat asserted that at the given moment Germany would be ready to participate in a vast Continental economy: "Europe's economic revolution is commencing; it is impossible that its political destinies will not thereby be influenced." Such reasoning allowed confidence that the Nazis would eventually place their social mission above their national objectives, once peace was restored. Such a shift, de M a n affirmed in 1 9 4 1 , lay "in the logic of Europe's entire evolution." A year later Déat spoke of Germany as bound to a social revolution in Europe "even if she did not conceive of it, even if she did not desire it, even if among her people there are still elements hostile to it." 3 7 At a time when continuity and change jostled side by side in their thinking, this surrender to history marked the most profound departure from what had been the outlook of the Front Generation socialists. Complementing it was a new, negative view of the capabilities of the masses, a far cry from earlier convictions that the moral foundation of socialist action was embedded in every human being. Looking back in early 1 9 4 1 upon the fallen parliamentary system, de Man commented pessimistically on the majority of ordinary citizens. "For this mass," he wrote, "far from being the source of sovereignty, was in large part only an object, worked upon by the power of suggestion of all the modern technical means of shaping public opinion; and these means were at the disposition of whoever had the money for them." 3 8 These remarks recall the manipulative propaganda methods that Carlo Mierendorff and Serge Chakotin had developed during the electoral campaigns in Germany in 1 9 3 2 . Mierendorff, however, had ultimately shifted his approach, convinced that common men and women would again march with socialism if it advanced an ideal to stir them—his "republic of tomorrow." Nearly a decade later in occupied Belgium de Man was less sanguine. Human nature did not change, he mourned, and that included "the need for subordination, if not to say the sheeplike nature of the great mass of people." Déat expressed himself in similar terms when he contended that the men who presided over socialism between the wars had failed their rank and file: " B u t what could they do, those who were not the leaders but the people, the crowd, the mass, those who followed, committing the great sin of trust? Like other crowds and other masses, always naive and exploited, during the Crusades, the great insurrections, the general mobilizations." 3 9 The conclusion was that the masses must be directed. The necessary technique was a matter, as Front Generation socialists had earlier said regarding the battle for voters, of learning from the fascists. In the sum-

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mer of 1940 both de Man and Déat urged the formation of a parti unique, a disciplined, hierarchical, all-encompassing organization analogous to the German and Italian models. Many of the features they proposed—elite selection, the rejection of class identification, commitment to the nation—had surfaced in their criticisms of socialism in the late 1930s. They carried a different significance, however, as facets of an instrument through which populations were to be marshaled and integrated into the European New Order. Déat and de Man still talked about democracy, but it was now an authoritarian strain that they had in mind. Whereas this retreat from voluntarism signified a break with the past, a divide between interwar and post-1940 attitudes, there was more of a transitional quality in the European ideal upon which collaborationists from the world of Front Generation socialism placed their hopes following the fall of France. European economic union had been a prominent theme in the first socialist discussions of planning in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It never disappeared from consideration even when, in the mid-1930s, conceptions of national plans prevailed. At the beginning of 1937 Déat resuscitated the idea with comments that both restated earlier formulations and foreshadowed those of wartime: As is said, it is necessary to allot raw materials and to regulate the migrations of labor. As it is necessary to think about the financing of Europewide public works. As it is necessary to establish balanced trade between industrial Europe and agricultural Europe. Old ideas already, of Delaisi, of Albert Thomas, of still o t h e r s . . . . H o w to pay for all of this? When one considers that America and Britain sterilize the gold supply? Means are not lacking. Tomorrow Europe can have a unitary organization for credit and payments. It can be linked up in a common effort, it can restore its trade, its real solidarities, and look forward to something better. But feelings will catch up later. And they will develop in conformity with the nature of things, not from diplomatic efforts. Thus we will have peace and bread at the same time. As for liberty, its salutary contagiousness will win over the autarkic and totalitarian countries. 40

In 1940, however, the contagion traveled in the opposite direction. In his "Program of June 19" submitted to Leopold III de Man defined a general identity of domestic political systems as a requirement of European unity; the parliamentary regimes had proved incapable of achieving that end and must now be dispensed with. As for the shape of entente: "To the degree that on their own initiative the defeated peoples draw the lessons of this experience, the political unity to be maintained will require less coercion from above and will be able to be so much the less imperial and the more federal." 41 Upon this anticipation those who turned from Front Generation socialism to collaborationism built their

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European dreams. It followed that in the summer months of 1940 they attributed exaggerated importance to the remarks of Reich Minister Funk implying that the New Order would institute a genuine Continental economic partnership, when actual German policies aimed at exploitation of the defeated states rather than cooperation with them. 42 It was the socialist cast of their thinking, etched deeper by their shocked acceptance of the power of historical forces, that disposed them to misread Nazi designs. They took the de facto unity of the Continent as a blank canvas upon which they initialed new versions of old projects. Names linked to the planning schemes of the early 1930s reemerged behind blueprints for the New Order's economy. Writing of the "European revolutionary war" in 1942, Francis Delaisi portrayed the conflict as a struggle for liberation from the Anglo-American cartels and the gold standard, while National Socialism made it possible "to set prices according to the needs of the producers—the manager as well as the work team—and to subject the trusts to the discipline of state planning through supervision of raw materials, credits, and reserves." In an essay published by the Occupation-sponsored Institut Allemand in Paris, Walther Pähl, also hailing the dethroning of the gold standard, presented the war as a fight to break the monopolistic stranglehold of Anglo-Saxon imperialism and to open the way for a just distribution of the world's resources. For all their analytical transpositions, the socialist roots of these appraisals remained visible. "The rising protest against the dictatorship of the monopolies would lose its moral value if it was purely and simply a matter of the poor devils of yesterday becoming the fortunate rich of tomorrow": Pahl's words of 1942 were a recitation of one of the salient points of de Man's Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus,43 Capitalism, however, was now endowed with national identity. In 1940 Pähl equated the defeat of the "raw materials plutocrats" with the overthrow of the "British economic dictatorship." After Pearl Harbor Delaisi depicted the enemy as the entente of English and American trusts, for which "it is a secondary question whether the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack rules the seas." No necessary role was allotted to the Jews in these analyses. In one of his books Pähl mentioned positively their exclusion from public life but assigned it no particular economic significance. Delaisi only dropped hints, as when he heralded the victory of "the grower bound to his land over the rootless middleman, the producing and consuming masses over the financial oligarchy which exploits them to this day." 44 Marcel Déat, however, explicitly placed the Jews in this alignment of plunderers and also included the Soviet Union, representing a Bolshevism that he would eventually describe as the "fraternal antithesis" of capitalism. It was the same array of antagonists that Mosley identified in 1938, when he asserted that "every force of the money

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power throughout the world" had been mobilized to crush the fascist states and that the "virtual alliance of Conservative Government in Britain with Communist Government in Russia is at the root of all evil in foreign policy." 45 For these past opponents of war the current struggle had to be more than a contest for wealth and territory. Delaisi described it as a "conflict of two economic and social systems based on diametrically opposed principles and methods." In 1941 Pähl portrayed the stakes as the dominance of an independent Europe or of the British Empire and concluded that "the weapons and soldiers of Germany and Italy will force the answer: Europe!" Again, however, this prospect recalled a theme of Front Generation socialism. At the beginning of 1932 Pähl had written that "only relatively autonomous large economic complexes will be able to hold out in the coming epoch of competition." This meant a unified Europe anchored on Franco-German cooperation and excluding Britain, whose economic sphere lay in her empire. Now, in the wartime context and under Nazi auspices, this ideal appeared to Pähl to be approaching realization. 46 By contrast, de Man never identified his European vision unconditionally with National Socialism, even while contending that the vanquished must draw the political lessons of their defeat. Rather he defined Continental unification as a stage in a necessary historical progression. After the summer of 1940, when it become clear that the war would go on for some time, he indicated that the transformation of Europe could only be prepared for but not initiated before the restoration of peace. In his new formulations de Man posited a symmetry in the solution of national and class problems in Belgium and the achievement of a Europe connected across borders and economic barriers. Only with "a definitive reconciliation of France with Germany," he told a Paris audience in April 1942, could the future of Belgium—a multicultural state dependent on external trade—be assured. Marcel Déat introduced de Man on this occasion, a gathering of the collaborationist Cercle Européen. After the war de Man maintained that although they had shared the podium, there was no identity in their outlooks, "he Germanophile and Anglophobe, I being solely preoccupied to safeguard Belgian interests whatever could be the outcome of the war, without taking a position in favor of any belligerent." 47 Yet in April 1942, before Stalingrad and El Alamein, on whose terms but the Nazis' could Franco-German reconciliation be imagined? Toward the end of the year, in retreat from collaboration and active politics, de Man expressed himself more equivocally about the future. The difficulties in reshaping Europe transcended the ongoing conflict, he said; they were present before its outbreak, and "regardless how the war might further develop, must in any case be solved as problems of exis-

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tence." His arguments pointed to a similar outcome whether the Allied or Axis powers were victorious, and again the long processes of history were his assurance. "Even in the classic lands of liberal capitalism and parliamentary democracy," he affirmed, "in obedience to necessity, accommodation has had to be made to the planned economy and to authoritarian methods of governing." On the other hand, he declared one peacetime task to be the search for what William James had called "the moral equivalent of war"—neither an oracle nor a goal acceptable to Nazi ideology. In a concluding passage he seemed to straddle the line between the warring alliances: "every people will have to carry out its own national and socialist revolution, each according to its particular situation and its spiritual character." 48 But this synthesis rested on a false foundation, on the wishful thinking that the Germans were what de Man had wanted them to become in summer 1940 and not, as they were, the masters of the racial empire of Hitler's Grossdeutsches Reich. These thoughts, first presented to the Cercle Européen in November, appeared in a German version in the Europäische Revue of January 1943, printed on the cheap paper that was by then commonplace in German publishing, a material sign of the swing of the conflict against the Third Reich. The journal itself was not important to the Nazi leadership; it was a forum for intellectuals, a group of lessened status as defensive measures displaced European projects as primary concerns for the Germans. In truth if a vision of Europe like de Man's had any chance of realization by the beginning of 1943, that possibility lay across the lines of conflict, with the anti-Nazi Resistance.

Paths of Collaboration In his June 1940 manifesto to the Parti Ouvrier Belge Hendrik de Man, after referring to his title as president of the party, described leadership with a word more common to fascist than socialist vocabularies. "The role of a chief [chef]," he declared, "is not to follow his troops but to advance in front of them to show them the way." 1 In the situation of the summer of 1940 this was a risky formula. For de Man, as for Marcel Déat in France, it meant seizing the chance to gain the head of a popular following by plunging forward into the unmapped no-man's-land of collaboration. Apart from the socialist logic they applied to it, their readiness to gamble everything on this thrust also betrayed a sense that there might be no opportunities afterward. In 1942, from across the Atlantic and from the other side of the fighting lines, their Front Generation contemporary Egon Wertheimer offered insight into this predicament. "The surviving combatants of the first World War are still in the zenith of their physical and mental faculties," he wrote. "Never in history, with the sole exception perhaps of the generation of 1792, has so much knowledge, experience and suffering been vested in one generation." But its members had fallen short of the high goals they had set for themselves. Now, Wertheimer said, they must meet "their duty to step into the charmed circle of action." 2 Wertheimer spoke as an opponent of fascism, but his view applied no less to those who opted for collaboration. De Man was fifty-four in the spring of 1940, Déat forty-six. They had exhausted their political alternatives but not their ideals or, it should be added, their ambitions. Collaborationism offered them one final beginning. In choosing it they reached out to capture power and position as well as ideological satisfaction. In this respect it is telling that even as they pursued what they still described as socialist goals, they accommodated themselves to the antiSemitism of the Nazis. This was not a matter, as one of Walther Pahl's postwar defenders would have had it, of making "certain concessions to

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the jargon of the time." 3 If their indulgence in anti-Semitic rhetoric did not leave them personally responsible for violence and murder, it compromised them nonetheless. Long-standing admiration of Germany, heightened by the shock of the Blitzkrieg in the West, contributed to this default. Still, other socialists linked to the Front Generation were moved by the same enthusiasms and the same stunned response to defeat without finding reason to adjust their perspectives to the styles of the Third Reich. Some time afterward Déat speculated that had he not been a parliamentary deputy, he would have been caught up in the fighting and probably taken prisoner; he would have been repatriated as an honored veteran in 1941 or 1942 to find himself on the sidelines of events. It seems an unlikely outcome for this most single-mindedly political personality among the Front Generation socialists. The house of his dreams, his friend Barthélémy Montagnon remarked later in regret, had no room for the distractions of ordinary life.4 Politics and ideas were his sustenance— after July 1940 as before. Whereas de Man always displayed more ambivalence toward public activity; in the 1920s and 1930s he had shifted back and forth between involvement and nonparticipation. In electing to cooperate with the victors he did not make as irrevocable a choice as Déat. Mosley's inclinations ran both ways. The camaraderie of the BUF gave him what he cherished most in politics throughout his career. "This was the most complete companionship I had ever known," he recalled, "except in the old regular army in time of war, more complete even than my early days in the Labour Party, when I enjoyed every night the warm hospitality of a different working-class home." Yet Mosley could also separate himself from the meetings, marching, and campaigning. There was no more time for Mediterranean vacations, but periodically he got away to Diana, whom he had married in 1936, and the country house they had rented in Staffordshire. 5 How he would have chosen in 1940 had he faced circumstances like those in France and Belgium can only be guessed at, for the government deprived him of his options on May 23, detaining him under Defence Regulation 18B(1A), approved the previous evening by the cabinet, which permitted internment of members of organizations deemed to be under foreign influence or in friendly contact with enemy governments. By the time he was released from confinement, in November 1943, the tide of conflict had turned, his son Nicholas was about to go into battle against German troops, and Mosley himself had conceded that "the war having developed as it had done he realised now that it must proceed to the 'knock-out' blow." 6 A fortnight before he was arrested Mosley stated that in the event of an invasion of Britain, "every member of British Union would be at the

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disposal of the nation. Every one of us would resist the foreign invader with all that is in us." In July, appearing before the Home Office's Advisory Committee to Consider Appeals against Orders of Internment, he insisted on the sincerity of that pledge.7 Yet Mosley also expressed doubt in May that the Germans actually would strike at England, and he had not committed his movement to support the war if there were no invasion, much less if Hitler extended an offer for peace negotiations. Police informants' reports and interrogations of 18B (1A) detainees hint at other possibilities. A. H. Maule Ramsay of the Nordic League "related remarkable conversations with MOSLEY in one of which Captain Ramsay had been invited to take over Scotland in certain circumstances." Addressing British Union district officials in January, Mosley said that they "knew what they wanted and knew what would happen but they must not talk—everyone present would know what he meant. They must bring in new members—not necessarily a large number but a moderate number of reliable men and women who would take their place in the ranks when the time came for the sweep forward, which the movement would make, as their brother parties in other countries had made when their hour of destiny struck." 8 All this was, to be sure, only talk. Such evidence, however, left the Advisory Committee unsatisfied with its appellant's protestations of innocence. Its chairman, Norman Birkett, K.C., judged that Mosley, with whom he had clashed in a libel action in 1934, framed his testimony as would a politician sizing up his audience. Yet Mosley's answers also suggested the boy who has committed mischief and is telling his accusers how clever he is because they cannot prove it. In this circumstance, however, they did not have to. Suspicion was enough to keep Mosley in prison. And neither could he prove them to be in error. At the end of his third and last interview with the Advisory Committee he said that he "should not mind in the least" if he were detained at home or on a farm somewhere rather than in jail. When he was released in 1943, it was on condition that he would in fact reside quietly in a rural location. He did. He cultivated his garden. Even granting his ability earlier to preserve a private sphere apart from politics, it is difficult to imagine this life as his preference.9 Opportunity to choose another course—collaboration or resistance—had been, however, denied him. Like Mosley, Hendrik de Man lived out the last phase of the war in seclusion. By then his hopes in collaboration had been disappointed. As late as the spring of 1941 he expressed optimism about socialism's future under the New Order. Thereafter he progressively removed himself from public activity, withdrawing altogether, save for an occasional speech or publication, after the early months of 1942. Rather than on a farm, de

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Man found his refuge in a mountain chalet in French Haute-Savoie, near the Swiss border. Unlike Mosley, he was at peace in his isolation. 10 Above all it was the feeling of release from a stale and decrepit bourgeois order that let de Man picture a field of open possibilities in J u n e July 1940. Several particular aspects of the situation further encouraged him. Initially the Germans appeared ready to deal with a new Belgian regime, and such a regime seemed capable of being built around the unifying figure of the king, at the height of his popularity because of his decision to remain with his army and his people. Support for a fresh beginning could be measured as well by the generally favorable response to de Man's manifesto to the POB. Nevertheless, this conjuncture was only temporary. In an early conversation with the military commander, Baron Alexander von Falkenhausen, de Man was assured that the Germans had no intention of intervening in Belgium's domestic affairs. The implication was that normal governmental relations would be resumed. No clear German policy emerged, however, in June or early July. Hitler was still considering his options. In mid-July he resolved to maintain the military administration and to recognize no Belgian government. Thereafter the agencies of the occupying power proliferated, and relations with them were not easy. In mid-1941 de Man spoke enviously of the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain: "the French are luckier than we, since they have a government, which allows them entry onto the path of a policy of collaboration with Germany, which circumstances until now have prohibited Belgium from pursuing." 11 De Man was also disappointed by Leopold III. In the immediate aftermath of capitulation the Germans advanced the idea of a meeting between the king and Hitler. Leopold III declined on the ground that such a discussion should await the cessation of fighting in the West. He did not seek de Man's advice when making this decision; in retrospect the latter believed that the monarch had missed a chance to strengthen Belgium's position vis-à-vis the victor. In June the king continued to consult with de Man, among other unofficial advisers. Responding to several requests from Leopold III for reform plans, de Man drew up his "Program of June 19," outlining a series of institutional changes that would have introduced an authoritarian, corporative, leveling social order such as he had called for in the final prewar years. But the king did nothing with it and seemed more inclined to avoid decisions by insisting on his status as prisoner of war. Thus at the end of June, when the ministers of the government-in-exile informed him from unoccupied France that they would resign if doing so could assist the repatriation of soldiers now held captive, he did not reply. For de Man the king's inactivity signaled that whatever were the Germans' intentions, Leopold III was unready to attempt to initiate change in Belgium's domestic affairs.12

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The publication of the manifesto to the POB, which first appeared in La Gazette de Char 1eroi on July 3, brought de Man a rebuff from the military authorities. Not only were they annoyed that it had escaped the still incomplete censorship. Its references to national solidarity and resurrection angered Flemish nationalist groups, whose völkisch pretensions enjoyed some sympathy in Berlin. Over the summer, as access to the German administration rather than to the king became essential, de Man found himself in competition with other aspirants to collaboration—along with the Flemish organizations there was Léon Degrelle's revived Rexist movement—whom the Germans found more ideologically agreeable. By fall it was clear to him that in the existing circumstances an internal transformation in Belgium was beyond his reach. It was also evident that the war would not end soon. 13 By then, as well, de Man had been labeled a traitor, "a perfect Nazi," by exile POB members in London. In Belgium, however, many socialists had welcomed his manifesto, and even Spaak, in France, through an intermediary had sent a message of approval, "except for the passage against the 'runaways.'" De Man's connections to Leopold III were well known and viewed as an asset. His many years in Germany could be seen as an advantage in dealings with the occupiers. And he had offered a lead while others remained silent or confused, at a time when, as Spaak ruefully confessed in his memoirs, the leaders of the government-in-exile "did not shine morally." No small number of those who would condemn de Man in 1945 applauded his initiatives in 1940. Support from socialist ranks fortified his hopes in June and July. It followed that as the prospect of institutional change receded later in the summer, he reoriented his activity toward the labor questions that most interested the majority of those who had rallied behind him. 14 In his first postwar memoir de Man claimed that from the fall of 1940 into the following year "the considerations of European politics or socialist ideology stirred up by the initial shock of the Western collapse of May-June hardly played a role" in his undertakings. This statement is belied by his actions and writings during the period. In greeting the traditional workers' holiday of May 1 in 1941 he did not remark on wages and hours or on bread and coal. His theme was rather that "truly the establishment of a socialist order appears far closer at this moment than socialists themselves have believed for many years." 1S The chief instrument of his hopes at this time was a new organization, the Union des Travailleurs Manuels et Intellectuels (Flemish Unie van Hand- en Geestesarbeiders: UHGA), commonly known by its initials. UTMI was intended to bring all factions of labor together—blue-collar and whitecollar, socialist, Catholic, and Flemish nationalist. In de Man's evolution it represented a new bid to create the coalition that had escaped him

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during the mid-1930s campaign for the Platt du Travail. Belgian workers needed protection, particularly against wage cuts imposed by employers in the early stages of the Occupation. De Man became the chief negotiator on the Belgian side in gaining approval from the Dienststelle Hellwig, an agency of the German Labor Front, for the founding of UTMI in November 1940. 1 6 De Man's socialist opponents described UTMI as a tool of his ambitions for power. Its head, Frans Victor Grauls, was, according to his pro-Nazi successor, universally viewed as a mouthpiece for de Man. 17 Unquestionably de Man had an indispensable part in starting the organization and retained influence over some of its leaders, but from the beginning of 1941 his interest and energies were more engaged in the journalistic enterprise of Le Travail, intended eventually to become the official newspaper of UTMI but conceived of initially as serving the independent function of "defending the interests of labor and a socialisme national above the parties." Outlining his goals for Le Travail in January 1941, he paired winning the working class to the objectives of UTMI and countering the anticollaborationist propaganda directed at union members from London. He had come to doubt the wisdom of the masses. His remedy was a controlled and thus, from his standpoint, responsible press. The right message should then produce the proper response. "It is more forgivable," he wrote in his directives for the new publication, "to overestimate the intelligence and political maturity of the readership than to underestimate them." Yet this perspective prevented de Man from appreciating that if the message did not prevail, the reason might lie with its content rather than with its mode of presentation. Not long after the war he expressed scorn for the "low intellectual and moral level" of the attacks leveled at him from London during the Occupation. The comment reversed the image but maintained the standard of judgment he used in 1941 in prescribing that Le Travail "must preserve an elevated intellectual and moral level, worthy of the cause it defends." 18 These concerns were not the preoccupations of a man who, as his critics and enemies charged, intended above all to augment his personal power. It is more faithful to the individual and the time to view de Man as still the captive of his socialist vision, which he continued to believe could be realized in Hitler's Europe. The fullest statements of his outlook at the high point of his expectations for UTMI and Le Travail appear in his 1941 May Day article and in the text of a speech he delivered before and after May 1 to audiences in Antwerp, Brussels, Charleroi, and Liège. His confidence was sustained by his sense of historical change. Although now he said that a revolution in society must await the restoration of political life when the war was over, he remained certain that it would

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come, for Europe had already witnessed "the irremediable collapse of the capitalist regime." Once peace was achieved, "the dynamism of National Socialism and of the fascist movements in general could shift from the national to the social domain. Effort would be expended not for war but for the recovery of social well-being and civilization and for the construction of a socialist order."19 De Man's conviction of the rightness of his course also reassured him that the future held promise. In his revision of Marxism in the 1920s he had celebrated Eduard Bernstein's dictum that the movement was everything and the goal nothing, that the quality of socialist motivation counted most. This credo had stayed with him. It allowed him to dismiss those who rejected his hopes in collaboration as agents of baser intentions. Hence he cast his conflict with the POB exiles in London as a continuation of the prewar fight between new and old socialism. Hence he accounted for what he called the "equivocal character" of Belgian political opinion—the lack of enthusiasm for UTMI and Le Travail—by asserting that "the psychoses of war disturb the judgment of a great number of our compatriots." Beyond this, he said, the disruptions caused by the conflict had enabled the moneyed powers and the plutocracy to amass unprecedented influence in domestic affairs.20 Nevertheless, UTMI faltered, and the circulation of Le Travail, only five thousand copies to begin with, suffered attrition during the spring and summer. At the end of August de Man halted the newspaper's publication as a daily; it continued a half-life as a weekly until February 1942. The mood of the population was now swinging against the occupying power and those who cooperated with it, whatever their motives. The Germans, meanwhile, were looking for more dedicated allies than de Man, whose speeches in the spring, too collaborationist for his socialist opponents, had sounded too independent to the military authorities. They reacted by prohibiting him from making further public appearances. By the autumn of 1941 de Man's outlook was turning bleak. A series of articles in the weekly Le Travail reaffirmed his positions of the spring, but in a tone of reflection rather than exhortation. He now expected little from the German administrators in Brussels, whom he accused of "rallying the least of the Belgians (in quantity and quality) and uniting the maximum number in opposition." He attempted to relay his misgivings to the highest powers of the Third Reich with a report transmitted through Otto Abetz, the German ambassador in Paris, who was friendly to collaborationists from the prewar left. Two related initiatives were urgently needed, de Man said. Belgium must be assured an adequate food supply; otherwise antagonism toward the Germans would persist. Evening the distribution of resources, however, could proceed

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only within a framework of economic and political integration. The construction of a new Europe must therefore commence immediately. Its start could not be delayed until the end of the war. 21 This appeal produced no response, and de Man began to pull back from politics. Meanwhile, with the invasion of Russia under way, the Germans pressed UTMI to take a more partisan, pro-Axis stance. Within months, at the end of March 1942, they replaced Grauls, the organization's head, with Edgar Delvo, a former demaniste in the POB who had crossed over to the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Nationaal Verbond after the defeat in 1940 and established himself favorably with the Occupation authorities. De Man's response was a semipublic letter of protest—several thousand copies were made and distributed—addressed to Dr. Voss, the Brussels administrator of the Dienststelle Hellwig. It was his valediction to active collaboration. 22 Afterward, save for a few trips, including the one in April when he unexpectedly met Carlo Mierendorff on the train to Paris, he stayed in his retreat in Haute-Savoie. At this point the only ideal which still engaged his hopes was the unification of Europe. In the end the impulses which had led him into collaboration turned him away from it. De Man was never a fascist. He had thought that he could deal with the Germans on his terms, and that in time events would compel them to treat him with due respect. On that calculation he was willing to make certain compromises with the Occupation authorities. The manner in which he approached the "Jewish question," never previously one of his concerns, offers one indication of the limited yet measurable extent to which he stretched the boundaries of his earlier positions. In the unpublished Program of June 19 he included a provision for "protection of the race and gradual reduction of the number of foreigners, given due respect for the commandments of humanity and excluding all illegal action." Later, in one of his articles for Le Travail, he wrote of "intellectual abstractions" having taken disproportionate precedence over "biological facts." More explicitly, in his memoir Après coup, published in the spring of 1941, de Man said that he had "long been convinced of the necessity to eliminate from our political organism the foreign body which is constituted by all the residues or embryos of the ghetto." 23 Even with the proviso that any solution must be based on international agreement, this was not an innocent statement in a Europe dominated by Hitler. Still, it must be observed of this episode that de Man's complaints against Jewish influence involved what he saw as its effects on socialism or, at the most, politics, rather than on society or the economy. This was something very different from Mosley's mid-1930s diatribes against "the Jewish interest in this country commanding commerce, commanding the press, commanding the cinema, commanding the City

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of London, commanding sweatshops," or Déat's nearly identical wartime attacks on "the Semitic invasion of all compartments of national life, especially those whose essential levers of command could be maneuvered: banks, press, commerce, cinema, parties, and parliament."24 And in private de Man is said to have assisted Jews who were in difficulties with the military government. De Man's collaboration was always conditional. In his view the parameters of his cooperation with the Germans never exceeded his socialist intentions. Others would not agree. Their reservations are well stated in a postwar letter in which the writer declined to associate his name with an appeal for reconsideration of the 1946 court proceedings which sentenced de Man in absentia to twenty years' hard labor: Having spent the war in Belgium, I could follow M. de Man's activity closely enough, and I considered that he erred greatly. My impression was not one of treason in the proper sense of the word, but, under the Occupation regime and in the dreadful circumstances in which we found ourselves, of a mistake regarding the limit within which it is necessary to collaborate with an enemy in control of one's territory, a very serious mistake coming from a man having the reputation and authority of the president of one of our great political parties. 25

In contrast to de Man, Marcel Déat never abandoned the course of collaboration upon which he embarked in 1940. Before the war Déat had assailed opponents of appeasement as "bitter-enders." During the Occupation years in France he became his own kind of jusqu'auboutiste. Through his more than two decades in politics he had come back again and again to one phrase: il faut choisir—one must make a choice.26 Déat's was irrevocable. Like de Man, Déat took his country's debacle in 1940 to be an opportunity. "And now," he led off his first article following the French surrender, "everything must be reconstructed." Not just any France could be rebuilt, however. It must be a country "changed in its political morality and social spirit. Ten years too late and in the midst of military defeat, we have to undertake, direct, and carry through that planned, intelligent, efficient, and constructive revolution which in victory, in peacetime, with willing understandings among free peoples, we were incapable of achieving and even of conceiving."27 At Vichy, where the Chamber of Deputies reconvened on July 9 and 10, Déat voted with the majority—569 to 80—to transfer full powers to the new premier, Marshal Philippe Pétain. The chance seemed open, under the respected hero of Verdun, to create the "strong state" that Déat and so many other critics of the inertia of Third Republic politics had called for throughout the 1930s. Déat was on good terms with Pierre

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Laval, the deputy premier and political stage manager of Pétain's cabinet. As yet there was no place for him in the government, but he anticipated that eventually, through Laval's good offices, there would be. Yet in Déat's judgment reform of the institutional structure was not enough. It was equally vital to mobilize the population. "But the French nation," he observed in July, "severely shaken by the disaster, is of necessity worn out, disoriented, and from all evidence it lacks the human resources, as it lacked them during the crisis it has just lived through." 28 Thus the effort of reinvigoration must be sparked from above. Déat's faith in the initiative of the masses was spent. A single national party should become the agent of renovation. The grand popular alliance that Déat had earlier sought to assemble around socialist and planning ideals would now take the form of the parti unique. Like de Man, Déat here departed from previous models, for this organization was not "to relapse into the democratic errors of the past." It would be hierarchical and disciplined. Ideology would take second place behind practical action. And, Déat contended, the German victor "will take us more seriously and will be all the more ready to discuss or collaborate when he sees developing a great party analogous to those which have been the instruments of national revolutions in Germany, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere." 29 In the 1930s Déat had frequently resorted to the metaphor of a race, a cours de vitesse in which fascism was the socialists' primary competition. Now he judged both socialism and France to have lost the contest. Like de Man in the summer of 1940, he expected that his country could become a full partner in the European New Order. But whereas de Man maintained a distinction between Belgium's evolution and the forms of development in the fascist states—both Hitler and Mussolini had labeled their doctrines not for export—Déat's approach to integration shaded into imitation. His new respect for history counted here. In August he compared the Germans' military triumph to that of the armies of the French Revolution. The result, he said, as in the 1790s, must be the creation of "a new type of civilization" in which France would have a part. 30 With this parallel he was able to identify himself simultaneously with the tradition of the French left within which he had traced his political career and with the German-dominated new Europe whose construction he anticipated. But would France adjust to the German reality as, a century and a half earlier, Europe had accommodated itself to the First Republic? Over the summer this question increasingly troubled Déat as he discovered that the representatives of what he viewed as the Old Regime were gaining ascendance in Pétain's entourage at Vichy. At the end of July the marshal turned down the formal proposal for a parti unique submitted by Déat

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and several other figures of what had been the antiwar group in the Chamber. Laval had sympathetically equivocated his way out of any commitment to the project. For the moment, therefore, Déat was left with journalism. Soon after his arrival at Vichy he had accepted an offer, transmitted by an intimate of Laval, to become political editor of L'Oeuvre, the newspaper which had published his famous article on Danzig. It was temporarily being printed at Clermont-Ferrand, near Vichy. As August succeeded July and the Pétain government revealed an ever more conservative face, Déat began to consider a return to Paris.31 Inclination became resolve after September 6, when Pétain replaced all the ex-parliamentarians in his cabinet, with the exception of Laval (but including Adrien Marquet). By late September Déat and L'Oeuvre were back in Paris. There the German Occupation authorities received him more congenially than had the coterie holding influence at Vichy. Otto Abetz, the ambassador, was friendly. The political counsellor, Ernst Achenbach, "interpreted National Socialism as a revolutionary movement, socially progressive, indubitably halted to a certain degree by the necessities of wartime, but destined as soon as possible to resume the alluring effort of transformation." Beyond Achenbach there was the labor expert Franz Grosse, and here the strands of Front Generation socialism reconnected, for Grosse had been not only a Social Democrat until 1933 but a partisan of Hendrik de Man's ideas and a trade union advocate of planning. In 1933, it will be remembered, Grosse found positive features in the National Socialist regime. By 1940 he served it. It impressed Déat, one of his wartime confederates recalled, that a former socialist like Grosse had rallied to National Socialism. When Déat asserted in 1941 that the best men of the SPD had joined the Nazi party, it is hard not to imagine that he had Grosse in mind.32 The German officials offered encouragement to Déat, but not preferential status. Rivals for their favor abounded in Paris in the summer and fall of 1940. The most dangerous to Déat's ambitions was the exCommunist Jacques Doriot, whose Parti Populaire Français, founded in 1937, bore legitimate fascist credentials and attracted Nazi support on ideological grounds. At best Déat's relations with "le grand Jacques," as he disparagingly called Doriot, were cordially hostile. Not only temperamentally but physically they were a study in contrasts: Déat, short and trim, always conveying in his manner something of the teacher he had been; Doriot, bluff and burly, never letting his origins as a metalworker be forgotten. Nevertheless, it was the Germans rather than Doriot who impeded Déat's designs. They neither intended nor wished to promote one collaborationist group above the rest. From the beginning they cultivated division among the aspirants. Déat never understood that he had no better chance in Paris than in Vichy of realizing the parti unique.33

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In the fall of 1940, however, his attention remained fixed on Vichy and on what he held to be the subversion of the necessary national revolution by the reactionaries surrounding Pétain. For a time he hoped that Laval might prevail against them. As this prospect dwindled, his columns in L'Oeuvre ever more caustically attacked the "anonymous clique," the "intriguers without mandate, who in fact have been calling the tune since the armistice." All his fears seemed confirmed on December 13, when Pétain dismissed Laval and placed him under house arrest, while in Paris Déat himself was taken into police custody early the next morning. He was not held long. Hélène Déat contacted Grosse in the German embassy, and before the end of the day Déat was free again. 34 He now returned to the project of the single party. After five months of standstill, he wrote at the end of December, the hour had come "to resume the revolutionary endeavor at the precise point where it was interrupted at the end of July." This time Déat put his longtime ideal into the organization's name. On February 1, 1941, the formation of the Rassemblement National Populaire was announced, with Déat at the head of its five-man directorate. Yet this grouping possessed a different political complexion from any of those he had pursued or created previously. Its other major personality, Eugène Deloncle, had been the guiding spirit of the conspiratorial right-wing Comité Secret d'Action Révolutionnaire of the late 1930s, the Cagoule, known for its assassinations of figures on the political left. Its most prominent victims were the brothers Carlo and Nello Rosselli, Italian antifascist exiles murdered near Bagnères-del'Orne in 1937. During the early 1930s more than one reviewer had noted the similarities between Déat's Perspectives socialistes and Carlo Rosselli's Socialisme libéral, published about the same time. 35 In allying with Deloncle, Déat took a long step away from his socialist past. When he first proposed the parti unique in July 1940, Déat diverged from his previous orientation in another way, with the provision that Jews would be denied membership. His columns of that time also raised anti-Semitic themes: of a financial power "most often foreign in its origins and inspirations"; of the "latent nomadism" of the Jewish deputy Georges Mandel. 36 Such sentiments were not much different from the verbal thrusts of Hendrik de Man in 1940 and 1941, but what remained an episode for his Belgian counterpart turned out to be only a beginning for Déat. Stronger language and harsher attitudes were to come. For the time being, however, he directed his journalism against Vichy. It was his obsession. Visiting Déat early in 1941, the former planiste Georges Soulès found his host's conversation repeatedly coming back to "the incapacity and malfeasance of the people at Vichy." Later in the year, when an assassin's shots wounded both Déat and Laval, one of Déat's lead columns in L'Oeuvre painted a scene of the masks being

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taken off among Pétain's entourage: "Upon the first report, which pretty much conveyed the sense of the deaths of the two men who stood most in their way, many countenances were adorned with joy. And they went into mourning when it was confirmed that we had not been killed. There were a few minutes when the most cunning gave themselves away because they believed the game was won." 3 7 After the scission of 1933, positioned between the SFIO and Radicals, Déat had envisioned his own smaller group—first the Parti Socialiste de France, then the Union Socialiste Républicaine—as the pivotal link between the forces of the left. With the RNP he was again placed between two powers, the Occupation authorities and the regime at Vichy. But he was at war with the latter, and only one of several contenders for the goodwill of the former. Little prospect existed that the intermediate position of the RNP could be transformed into a fulcrum of energy. Influence appeared possible only if the Germans would allow it. In these circumstances Déat's inclination differed from the response of de Man in his somewhat parallel situation, which had been to insist that the military administration recognize that it would have to deal with representatives of the defeated population as equal partners. In contrast, Déat sought to prove the RNP—and France—to be worthy of the Germans' respect. Opportunity presented itself with the German invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941. The idea of a French volunteer contingent was soon advanced in collaborationist circles, most notably by Deloncle and Doriot. Whereas they envisioned a military tool that might eventually be employed to seize power at Vichy, Déat conceived of it as a means of proving good faith to the Germans and possibly of unifying the various collaborationist organizations. All five members of the RNP directorate—all veterans of the First World War—joined the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism (Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme), usually known by its French initials, LVF. Déat, lukewarm about campaigning in the East, was nevertheless designated to command the Legion's Third Battalion. 38 But on August '27, as he and Laval attended a ceremony honoring the departure of the first detachment of volunteers, a young man fired on them and wounded both. Déat's second military career was over before it had commenced. While hospitalized he was visited by a secretary of Deloncle who informed him that the assassin, Paul Colette, had been put up to his act by her chief. Within days the woman was dead, murdered. Whether her story was true has never been settled, but Deloncle's past made it plausible to Déat. Once he had recuperated, and with the help of the German political counsellor Achenbach, he forced Deloncle and his followers out of the RNP.39 Thereafter he controlled the organization. He brought together a tal-

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ented staff of assistants and attracted some figures from socialist ranks who had held themselves clear of the RNP out of dislike of Deloncle. Early membership figures are untrustworthy, but after the break with Deloncle the RNP undertook a recruitment drive which raised its strength to 15,000-20,000 and possibly more. In size it was the only rival to Doriot's PPF. Its activity, however, was heavily concentrated in the occupied zone; it was allowed to operate in what had been Vichy's domain only when the Germans extended their military presence to unoccupied France after the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942. 40 In his journalism and later in his memoirs Déat insisted on the continuity in his ideas, from Perspectives socialistes to the RNP. In regard to institutional and economic questions this consistency did generally obtain. Phrases and concepts from the 1930s—the strong state, the planned economy—were prominent in his wartime articles and in the RNP program of 1942. Commenting on the need "to subordinate the interests of a few great producers to the interests of the many consumers and wage earners," he referred to conceptions of Francis Delaisi and Edouard Chaux, representatives, respectively, of the CGT's planning "brains trust" and of Déat's Comité du Plan of the mid-1930s. Within the RNP itself, as previously, under the direction of Claude Bonnier, in the PSdF and USR, there were to be teams of experts (équipes techniques). The Rassemblements auxiliary organizations also followed older models and were usually staffed by ex-tiéos and SFIO members.41 Greeting the publication of Après coup in the spring of 1941, Déat compared his evolution to de Man's. "In fact I find in him, with delight but not amazement, the same progression of thought."42 If the parallelism held until this time, however, thereafter Déat's evolution more closely resembled Mosley's. His analysis of society, economy, and history remained rooted in socialist conceptions. In other respects his views were changing, and the balance was shifting toward new notions. In conformity with his negative reappraisal of "those who followed," he described the party he wished to perfect not as an agent of representation but as "the permanent mediator between the masses and power." As for leadership: "And certainly the role of the Chief, or the chiefs at all echelons, will be great." By the time of its 1942 youth congress the RNP's ceremonial forms recalled the spectacles staged in the 1930s by Mosley or even Hitler rather than anything from Déat's socialist past: "While the double line of the youth groups' color guard descends to the rostrum, it is preceded in the center aisle by the flag of the chief. The entire audience spontaneously rises and with a single voice continuously acclaims Marcel Déat." 43

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The change was also visible in the polemic Déat carried on against Charles Spinasse in summer 1942. Spinasse, a generational counterpart, had traced a political path similar to Déat's but always within the SFIO. Under the Popular Front he served as minister of national economy. He belonged to the party's antiwar wing, however, and after the defeat cooperated with Déat on the early project to establish a single party, while also contributing some articles to L'Oeuvre. In November 1941 he was allowed to begin publishing a new weekly, Le rouge et le bleu, in the occupied zone. His main disagreements with Déat came over the parti unique, which he now opposed, and over what Spinasse called mimetisme—imitation of German models. The fundamental division between the two, however, was over how much of pre-1940 socialism should be abandoned. Déat's response was that it was possible to learn from other countries' experiences. One of the lessons was soon on display: his intercession with the military authorities helped persuade them to close down Le rouge et le bleu in August 1942. 44 "It is National Socialism alone," Déat wrote a year later, "which today carries the hopes of the revolutionaries of Europe, those who resolutely assert themselves as the only French patriots conscious of the interests of France." 45 This consciousness, as Déat defined it, had expanded to include a full-blown rhetoric of anti-Semitism. Some Germans as well as some collaborators never felt that Déat was enough of an anti-Semite. In his memoirs he denied ever being one and affirmed that he had known nothing of the extermination centers in the East and had helped individual Jews. It is also true that the RNP favored naturalization of Jews who were considered to have done service for France. Such distinctions were absent, nevertheless, from Déat's increasingly strident commentaries, according to which the Jews "lived as parasites in every country of the world," were "in London, Washington, and Moscow the permanent animators of the policy of war," and should be sent after the fighting ended to a territory of their own where they would have to take up pursuits other than "the exploits of the black market and the acrobatics of stockexchange speculation." 46 Such sentiments must have been pleasing enough to the Germans, especially when Déat coupled them with the ideal of "a European community defined not only by political volition and institutional similarities but also by the profound identity of blood." Yet he insisted that his countrymen could achieve this new entity "without breaking with our past: French liberty and German liberty, and in like manner equality are integrated into an order." Rousseau himself was in his time a socialiste national. Looking back upon the wartime evolution of his old friend, Barthélémy Montagnon thought Déat had been seduced by German phi-

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losophy. This was to place things at too sophisticated a level. It was not higher thought but far cruder Nazi conceptions that Déat blended with elements of his socialism. 47 One strand from the past gained new prominence in the ideological fabric of Déat's collaborationism. It was the sense of community he had experienced at the front in 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 8 . At the beginning of 1941 he reached back to the experience of "a sort of elementary socialism, even communism," for which he had "retained a deep nostalgia." Speaking to the RNP's youth auxiliary in 1942, he called on them to make "the same discoveries one also makes in war, where, the rules being nullified, one is obliged to organize a sort of integral community. People, in direct contact with one another, are content together; and it is sufficiently comforting that men thrown back upon themselves, disentangled from the entire social matrix, behave more naturally, more agreeably, more simply, more directly." 48 Socialisme communautaire, in Déat's view, must replace the socialism of class, and if this notion betrayed some infiltration of Nazi ideas in his thinking, far more profoundly it displayed the persistent influence of the maxims to which he had been led by his years under fire in the First World War. Like Mosley, Déat held onto this piece of the Front Generation legacy even as he thrust much else aside. Understanding his course after 1940 is not a matter, however, of defining his point of arrival, of settling whether he became a fascist or, as he always held, remained a socialist. Of much greater significance is the fact that whichever label is appropriate, Déat had abandoned the voluntarist element in his approach to politics, and with it his commitment to a just order and his trust in the moral capacities of individuals. Accounting for his crossing this line in contrast to others who did not, or did and withdrew again, requires a level of familiarity with his personality which is not accessible to historical observation. Nothing better testifies to this difficulty than the variety of explanatory models that have been cited for him: "the paradigm of the 'authoritarian personality,'" the "phenomenon of the militarized pacifist," an "exemplary" case of "masochism and homosexuality," an instance of "willing 'victimization.'" 49 Against these more abstract categorizations a reflection of Georges Albertini, Déat's chief lieutenant in the RNP, comes closer to the mark. Déat's intelligence, he said, was exceptional, but it "was more germinative than creative." By this Albertini meant "that it manifested itself especially in miraculously bringing to blossom a seed gathered at random in conversation"—but a seed planted by someone else. 50 It is a characterization that offers the context for Déat's change of orientation: over the war years his source, or at least reference figure, the warrantor of his self-confirmation, became Adolf Hitler instead of Hendrik de Man.

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Several times in his memoirs Déat compared himself to de Gaulle. Though on opposite sides, he suggested, they alone sought a genuine renovation of France. Yet whereas de Gaulle found a way, or was compelled to enlarge his political horizons as head of the Resistance, the arc of Déat's activity and conceptions gradually narrowed. Déat, said Georges Soulès (in his postwar persona as the novelist Raymond Abellio), "seemed to believe that action, revolution would commence simply from the time that his article was published or his speech delivered." 51 As the war turned against the Axis powers in 1942 and 1943, and as attitudes in France became indifferent or hostile to collaboration, he held to his positions. After Italy shifted to the Allied side, Déat took consolation in Mussolini's foundation of an Italian Social Republic in the territory still under German control: "The case was not without significant analogies to our own, and I was well justified in seeing authoritative confirmation of the truth of my political views in this tardy republican and socialist orientation on the part of the Duce." Although he recognized the change in military fortunes, he was resolved to stay his course to the end. 52 In 1942, when Laval returned to power at Vichy, Déat hoped for a more positive official policy of collaboration. Gradually, however, he became disappointed with and then estranged from Laval. In September 1943 he joined with four other leading figures in issuing a "Plan for French National Recovery," which urged the Germans to install a government fully committed to their cause. Hitler, with other concerns on his mind, had no wish to replace either Laval or Pétain, but in the winter of 1 9 4 3 - 4 4 his authorities in Paris forced the marshal and the premier to accept several militants, including Déat, into the cabinet. Still, the negotiations for Déat's entry lagged over several months. He initially hoped to replace Laval as head of government. In the end he settled for an office he had not wanted, the ministry of labor, coupled with a new portfolio for national solidarity, in which four social services agencies were to be consolidated. He assumed his position on March 17, 1944. 53 The previous summer Déat had complained to a visitor from the Reich that "it must no longer be tolerated that Germany is regarded by the French population as the representative of reaction and militarism, while the Anglo-Saxons would bring freedom, the Republic, and socialism. Germany must appear to the French people as the bearer of the new socialism." 54 His tenure as minister of labor and of national solidarity was to disappoint this hope. His most important dealings with the Germans involved their demands that workers perform draft service in the Reich. In fact few French laborers were transferred to Germany while he belonged to the government, but the circumstances of the war were chiefly responsible for this result. Déat, browbeaten by the Nazi pieni-

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potentiary Fritz Sauckel, promised to satisfy Berlin's monthly quota of 91,000 men; his major triumph was to gain a year's reprieve in the prospective evacuation of the 17,000 members of the disbanded Chantiers de la Jeunesse. As a cabinet minister the resolute polemicist of L'Oeuvre displayed a surprising readiness to compromise and at times to sacrifice his objectives. His aide Albertini judged later that after long years in opposition Déat was willing to swallow defeat in order to remain in office. Success, however, would have been difficult in any case in the waning months of Vichy, and the new man, not a political infighter, had little leverage against either the Germans or Laval. So Déat achieved none of his socialist ambitions while in power. The appropriate signature of his term in office came near its conclusion, in July, following the Allied landings in Normandy, when he was outmaneuveted by Laval after a final attempt, with other pro-German ministers, to gain control of the failing regime.55 As the Allied armies neared Paris in mid-August, Déat left the capital, finding refuge eventually at Sigmaringen, in southwestern Germany, where the Nazis relocated what was left of the collaborationist leadership. In September, in company with others from Sigmaringen, he finally met Hitler at the latter's East Prussian headquarters. Thereafter, through the declining months of the war, he sparred with fellow exiles for the shadow of power, attended congresses of phantom organizations, and began to write his memoirs. The novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline's portrayal is fictionalized memory, but it captures the atmosphere well enough: "Déat never came along on these outings . . . that giant of political thought preferred to stroll in the woods by himself . . . he didn't mix much . . . he preferred . . . he was working on a program for a 'Burgundian and French Europe' with primo-majoro-pluri-deferred elections . . . he was meditating . . ."56

11 A Struggle with Destiny A few weeks before he left Paris in 1944, Marcel Déat later recalled, "I had in front of me a number of publications, Gaullist or originating in the 'Resistance' and its modest 'brains trusts.' Wholly without astonishment I verified a striking parallelism, near-total convergences, between our conceptions and those of our brother-enemies. In fact there was nothing to be very surprised about in that: more than one of the doctrinaires on the other side had been molded in the same school as we, had lived through the same experiences, and in more than one case it even happened that these men had been my personal disciples." 1 Déat may have felt mixed satisfactions at this discovery, but his observation was accurate, and the pattern extended beyond France. As in the world of collaborationism, individuals and ideas closely linked to Front Generation socialism played prominent roles in the European Resistance. N o simple formula can explain why and to which side people committed themselves. The evening after the French surrender in 1940, Christian Pineau, secretary of a white-collar union and a prewar planiste, sat among a group of family members and associates, contemplating "the unavoidable choice that must be made for one path or the other." Among those present was Francis Delaisi, one "of my oldest friends, whose ideas I had often shared during our common struggle against fascism." Yet Delaisi, in words that foreshadowed his opting for collaboration, now said that to resist would be to have Frenchmen die for the sake of the financial interests of the City of London. "I believed I had everything in common with him," Pineau reflected afterward: "a certain peasant background, a common method of analyzing economic and political matters, the same hatred of the moneyed powers." Suddenly that was no longer true, "and for reasons which escape the rules of logic as well of concern for oneself." 2 Pineau had had a rather peripheral association with Front Generation socialism before 1940. Others closer to its core drew more directly upon

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its impulses in their new circumstances—in the Germans' case from the time of Hitler's consolidation of power. In jail in the summer of 1933, Julius Leber thought back to his first months in combat in 1914 and 1915 and took consolation from them. "The sun does not ask about war or politics," he wrote to his wife; "it sets and rises again no matter what." He could remember the harder times in the trenches better than the easier, and from that fact he knew that "even he is not defenseless who is locked up, shackled, and silenced. Oh no! . . . Where there is an idea there is also hope, and where hope exists, life does not pass senselessly by but stores itself up, gathers itself, lays up strength and willpower." 3 For the resistere, then, the front experience taught not pacifism—much though they hated war—but endurance in their new struggle. And it was there, not in the Third Reich or the New Order, that they rediscovered or, if they had only been old enough to be envious witnesses in 1 9 1 4 1918, found comradeship and community. The conditions they faced, in confinement or clandestineness, and even sometimes in exile, fostered this intimacy. The cement of their closeness, however, was the socialist ideal for which they engaged their lives. Like their counterparts among the collaborationists, they imagined a break with the past—the "doctrinaire-Marxist form" of German Social Democracy was dead, Leber wrote from his cell in 1933, and in Belgium the desire for "no return to before May 10" was expressed by acceptance of a new name: the Parti Ouvrier Belge gave way to the Parti Socialiste Belge.4 In contrast to de Man and Déat, however, the Front Generation resisters could not trust history to be the midwife of their ambition—not through the years of Hitler's triumphs. "History," Theodor Haubach commented in the summer of 1941, "is a trial in which sublime mercilessness presides." 5 Like the ideal with which the Front Generation had opposed the classbound orthodoxy of the 1920s and 1930s, the resisters' socialism was framed for a broader audience than the traditional proletariat. The peacetime encounter with fascism and economic depression had left many of them with reservations about the political behavior of the masses. All the same, in contrast to the collaborationists, they still held sufficient trust in the moral sense of ordinary people to appeal to their better instincts. In this respect they maintained perspectives which had been central to Front Generation socialism. Similarly, their economic approaches were focused on planning, and figures prominent in earlier debates took leading roles in Resistance discussions. The vision of a unified Europe was another element of continuity. The struggle against fascism awakened the same sense of fraternal internationalism that the Front Generation had felt in the interwar period. Still, the résistants also emphasized their attachment to the nation more strongly than their collaborationist counterparts. The circumstances of

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war imposed this identification, whether they waged resistance in the name of France against the Germans, the groups in Paris, and the Vichy regime; or for Belgium against the Occupation authorities, de Man and UTMI, the Flemish nationalists and the Rexists; or for "the other Germany" against the Nazis. In another respect, however, the résistants of the Front Generation simply reasserted themselves on home ground. The tie to the nation had been integral to their socialism from the start of their political careers. In January 1945, awaiting his turn before the Nazi "People's Court" on charges of involvement in the failed plot against Hitler, Haubach offered the simple assertion, "Wherever Germany stood in need, there I always stood as well." Now, he said, it was up to him to validate his commitment to the nation. A few weeks later he gave that proof when, racked with pain from gastric attacks, he was carried on a stretcher to the shed where he and nine others were hanged. 6 Nearly a year earlier Claude Bonnier, Déat's close associate until 1940 but then a Resistance operative, had stood a similar trial. Betrayed to the Gestapo but determined to remain silent, he managed, with his wrists bound, to rip open a lining to free a cyanide pill, which he then reached by stretching himself across the floor; he was dead when his interrogators came to question him. 7 And before this episode occurred, Carlo Mierendorff had fallen victim to an RAF bombing of Leipzig in December 1943—hit by his own artillery, as Alfred Vagts put it in remembering his friend at a memorial gathering among émigrés in New York. 8 Beyond these sacrifices there were others: Leber, Pierre Brossolette, Adolf Reichwein . . . Only a fragmentary record exists of the wartime socialist formulations of Front Generation resisters. While collaborationists enjoyed access to the press within the tolerance of Nazi censorship, their opponents on the Continent were limited to irregular publications and underground newspapers. French and Belgian exiles in London had more opportunity to sound their views, and from mid-1943 on a stream of material also issued from the newly organized French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers. In Germany, where Nazi control was tightest, a minimum of programmatic comment was put into writing, much less set in print. There and elsewhere, moreover, propaganda and appeals often served tactical ends or were designed to speak not for socialism alone but for the broader Resistance movement. Positions taken at an early date might also be superseded or abandoned with shifts in the tides of war or in the alliances among groups. The documentation that has been preserved or rediscovered is precious for what it tells of socialist and Front Generation thinking in the Resistance, but it does not tell all. In France the first socialist résistants took the collapse of May-June 1940 as a verdict on the Third Republic but not as the death knell of

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socialist democracy. They harbored nothing of the collaborationists' expectation that the Germans could be liberators. Not all, however, were immediately certain about the right course for France, and in the early days of Vichy some figures who were soon to choose resistance consulted with René Belin, the CGT planiste whom Pétain had made minister of labor, or even with Marcel Déat. Such conversations only demonstrated a gap in perspectives that quickly became tinged with bitterness. Déat may later have still discerned a sort of fraternal bond linking him to former colleagues who had joined the Resistance, but the latter expressed no reciprocal sentiment, not when Henry Hauck wrote of "Nazi demagogues like Doriot and Déat," and Louis Vallon labeled his former party leader in the Parti Socialiste de France and Union Socialiste Républicaine a "French Quisling."9 For the time being, with party politics suspended, the SFIO had ceased to function. When resistance began, it was on a local or regional plane, and individuals who had been close to Déat or run a parallel course to his were frequently involved. Libération-Nord, which was to become a major force in the occupied zone, was founded late in 1940 by Christian Pineau and Robert Lacoste, another prominent trade union planiste in the previous decade, and by Jean Texcier, a néo secessionist in 1933 who afterward returned to the SFIO.10 Previously, in London, Henry Hauck ("my colleague from the earliest hour," said Charles de Gaulle in his War Memoirs) and other exiles had organized a Union Jean-Jaurès; the name echoed the subtitle of the néos' PSdF, to which Hauck had belonged.11 In unoccupied France activity developed more slowly. The differences in circumstances influenced the thrust and forms of resistance. Relations with de Gaulle and the movement known first as Fighting France (La France Combattante) were of singular importance in London. In the occupied zone direct confrontation with the Germans encouraged socialist resistere to place party interests second to unity—a sacrifice most easily made during the phase before June 1941, while the French Communists, in deference to the Nazi-Soviet pact, remained neutral. By contrast, party affiliation was more distinctly profiled in the incipient Resistance within the Vichy regime's domain.12 The résistants most willing to go beyond the old limits were those who had been outside the SFIO mainstream and had swum with the currents emanating from Front Generation socialism. An indication of the difference is visible in the surprise experienced successively in 1942 by Pineau and Brossolette on their first sorties from occupied France to London, when they discovered a vocal faction opposed to de Gaulle within the Union Jean-Jaurès. Neither could understand its rationale, and their discussions with the recalcitrants recall earlier divisions over similar themes.

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"We need a flag," Pineau said of de Gaulle to Louis and Marthe Lévy; "we have no other; so we take this one," and Brossolette urged the necessity of "a symbol" upon a meeting of the Union Jean-Jaurès, but only to meet disagreement that led to shouting and broken chairs. 13 As in the late 1920s and the 1930s, the issues that charged tempers were whether to reach out to potential nonsocialist allies and whether to give immediate objectives priority over ultimate ends. When the war was over, both Pineau and Brossolette agreed, they might part ways with de Gaulle, but such a step was out of the question in the face of the present challenge. "I am discovering here in amazement," Brossolette wrote in an émigré journal in September, "a lot of people who seem to believe that in France there are 'résistants' who are not Gaullists. I have learned with yet even greater amazement that it appears that one can be a 'résistant' without being 'Gaullist.' For French opinion, for all of it, such an attitude will be incomprehensible. In France one is Gaullist or anti-Gaullist." 14 As for party attachments, Brossolette said in the same piece, "André Philip [by then also in London], myself, all my friends in France have not renounced socialism, but our socialism has been altogether renewed by the global upheavals of the past three years, and there again I am not at all afraid of being contradicted in saying that the case is the same with Léon Blum." 15 Yet this assertion was not as well founded as Brossolette would have wished. In the wartime world of socialism Blum's situation was unusual, for he was one of the few pre-1939 leaders on the Continent who retained his influence. His courage and intelligence in defending his prewar actions before a Vichy tribunal at Riom in the spring of 1942 had restored to him the moral authority that had always been his strength. He supported de Gaulle without equivocation. His fundamental outlook had not shifted, however; "we have absolutely nothing to change in our socialist doctrine," he wrote in August 1942. "Nothing there to 'rethink,' nothing to revise. Socialist doctrine emerges unaltered, intact from this test. It has been confirmed day by day by the events of the last three years." For Blum Marxism was still basic. The Popular Front remained the model for alliances. Those who mistrusted de Gaulle found or regained an ideological base with Blum, and even after he was deported to Germany in 1943, activists loyal to his outlook took the major role in the organizational reconstruction of the SFIO.16 The program of the clandestine SFIO, approved in December 1943, testified to this continuity of perspective and to the boundaries beyond which the war-born conceptions of men like Brossolette, Philip, or Louis Vallon did not reach. With the Communists now a redoubtable and independent force in the Resistance, those socialists who leaned toward Blum's positions were more inclined to reaffirm a known, established

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identity than to attempt to create a new one. If, with this posture, they ran the danger of slipping once more into the attentisme which had plagued the party in the internar years, they saw the risk offset by their anticipation that with the right discredited by Vichy and on condition that the Communists could be isolated, an atmosphere of socialism would suffuse the broad middle spaces of French politics. Against this prospect the résistants linked to the earlier dissidence of the Front Generation could only argue that de Gaulle had been persuaded by Pineau, Hauck, and Adrien Tixier to express himself favorably toward economic planning and that André Philip had put him more at ease with the practices of political democracy. Nevertheless, de Gaulle was not going to be the leader of a new socialism. 17 In September 1942 Brossolette summarized the objectives of socialists like Philip, Vallon, and himself: "Necessity of a strong and stable executive, necessity of a planned economy, necessity of 'control' in every concentrated sector of industry, fixed will not to see again the 'mess' of past times, necessity of putting the country back on its feet through a close and friendly collaboration drawing upon the best of the left and the right." 18 By the summer of 1944, however, when Liberation came, Brossolette was dead, and the ideal of an alliance bridging the old political divisions was expiring. The inspiration which those socialists influenced by Front Generation ideas had discovered in the struggle against Nazism, collaboration, and Vichy, with its blend of commitment to the nation and to socialism, could not last beyond the return to more institutional politics. It was the common fate of Resistance movements.19 What remained was a collection of planning proposals, descended from those of the 1920s and 1930s, mostly the work of key figures in the Depression-era debate: Philip, Vallon, and also Jules Moch. Their main outlines reproduced those of the period, just a decade before, when one commentator had remarked that it was raining plans in France. They commonly projected three sectors of the economy: nationalized, supervised, and uncontrolled. Past fears of étatisme, now reinforced by the negative experience of Vichy's comités d'organisation, led most of them to insist on decentralization and worker participation in management. Philip was an exception with his advocacy of a powerful ministry of national economy. 20 In all the variations, however, the common thread was the structural character of these designs. None advanced the notion of the plan as rallying myth, the vehicle of a transcending faith in socialism. In a brochure recapitulating French socialism's history, issued after the Liberation and prefaced by the party's initials superposed upon the three-arrow insignia, Henry Hauck declared that four years of resistance had produced a new SFIO, "reconstituted, purified, rejuvenated," and loyal above all to the tradition of Jaurès. This was his hope, the hope of

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résistants who had been connected to Front Generation socialism. But the postwar party would instead follow an unadventurous, defensive course under Léon Blum, who survived Nazi imprisonment to return and lead it in the critical first years of the Fourth Republic.21 In France, then, the Resistance years provided an interlude in which perspectives stemming from the critiques and initiatives of the Front Generation enjoyed a temporary prominence. In the end, however, they did not prevail. Appeals to sentiments of common interest and social justice lost force with the return of peace and politics-as-usual and with de Gaulle's postwar separation from his former allies on the left. A few years after the Liberation it was being said that the Fourth Republic had given way to the Third. In Belgium, by contrast, the unorthodox socialist approaches of the 1930s gained programmatic ascendance in wartime—in many respects a demanisme without de Man. Here Paul-Henri Spaak and Max Buset emerged at the head of the new PSB, along with others who had followed de Man in the initial months of the Occupation, most notably Achille Van Acker, who became the first post-Liberation Socialist premier in February 1945. During the war there had never been as much of an attempt to build bridges to other groups—"I always considered the war period," Van Acker told friends, "as a sort of political truce among the parties and the Belgians." Neither was there the same sense of immediacy as with resisters like Pineau or Brossolette in France. Rather there dominated an expectant mood, like that of the SFIO résistants around Léon Blum: the PSB was convinced, Buset told its "Victory Congress" in June 1945, that the "internal contradiction of capitalism will become apparent to all during the next five years."22 In 1940, in the confusion of defeat, Buset had not been so confident. "And the party? And socialism? What is to become of it in this tempest?" he wrote to his veteran colleague Camille Huysmans as they both tried to find an avenue of escape from France to England following the Belgian collapse. Once in Britain, having sought unsuccessfully to persuade the members of the uprooted cabinet, then in France, to reestablish themselves in London, they decided to participate in the formation of a resistance "government." Although they did not win official recognition from the British or, for that matter, the aid they hoped for from the Labour Party, the pressure they exerted helped to convince the errant Belgian ministers, including Spaak, to move to London in the early fall.23 Meanwhile, encouraged by the example of the Union Jean-Jaurès, they formed their own Groupe Emile Vandervelde in December. The name reiterated a disavowal of de Man which they had earlier registered in responding to his June 28 manifesto to the POB. "Poor Buset! He adored him!" a British acquaintance lamented in the fall, but Buset was no

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longer the praiseful reviewer of Au delà du marxisme or the loyal lieutenant of the Plan du Travail years, nor was he unique as a disillusioned admirer of the POB's last president. 24 It is difficult to imagine a harsher condemnation of de Man than that broadcast over the BBC by the union leader Jef Rens. Yet Rens had been a receptive reader of Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus, a student of de Man in Frankfurt in 1931—32 and a collaborator in the work of the Platt du Travail. As Rens's words reveal, de Man's cooperation with the Germans in itself mattered less than his rejection of the socialism he had inspired and championed. "Betrayer of your country, of your own ideas," so ran Rens's indictment, "you have, besides, betrayed those who believed in you, and they were numerous among the youth and the working class. Many of the best of us had a boundless trust in you and were ready to follow you through thick and thin. Your low, shabby outrage has forever shattered their enthusiasm and trust in people." 25 It was this feeling of disappointment and disillusionment which barred forgiveness of de Man. Down to the liberation of Belgium, however, in the fall of 1944, he did not grasp the depth of the estrangement. At that time he was fashioning a case for his reintegration into his country's political life. He had crossed from Haute-Savoie into Switzerland in early September. On October 10 he wrote from Bern to Spaak in Brussels asking that provision be made for his return, "to demonstrate the falseness of the accusations which have been spread against me." What others had labeled treason he referred to as "divergences of political views which separated us and still do." 2 6 Already in petitioning the Swiss authorities for asylum in September, de Man had extended his self-defense in a new direction. While in HauteSavoie, he asserted, "given the political reserve that I, as a foreigner, had to observe, I always cultivated good and helpful relations with members of the Resistance movement who were in the neighborhood or passing through." 2 7 This was the first piece in a pastiche of arguments that de Man developed to suggest that while formally remaining neutral after leaving Belgium in 1942, he had favored the forces opposed to Nazism. In a justificatory memorandum of January 1945 he noted that while in Haute-Savoie he had met with Robert Lacoste and another LibérationNord leader, Charles Laurent, an encounter to which the Gestapo reacted with suspicion. 28 A year later he went further, referring to his April 1942 meeting with Mierendorff and affirming that he had placed himself at the disposition of his German friend to undertake political steps following the removal of Hitler. 29 The chronology of de Man's wartime movements makes this assertion particularly intriguing. For it was on the evening before his excursion

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with Mierendorff that he had addressed the Cercle Européen in Paris— with Marcel Déat presiding—and delivered an analysis founded on the assumption that Nazi dominance in Europe would be of long duration.30 Did de Man begin to play a double game in the spring of 1942? Even if he did commit himself to Mierendorff in the way he later described, it obligated him to no initiative previous to the "first act" in Germany, and he took none. In a file note of November 1944 he wrote of the advice he offered to Mierendorff during their conversation but said nothing about a promise of participation. Neither did he mention the meeting in his January 1945 memorandum.31 On the strength of available evidence it is better to see him in his Haute-Savoie refuge placing himself figuratively as well as literally au-dessus de la mêlée. For Belgian socialists who chose resistance, however, this was an unacceptable option. De Man had stood on the other side and not crossed back. Nevertheless, for all its leaders' desires to exorcise him from memory, through the force of his ideas de Man remained a presence in the wartime and postwar PSB. Even in a negative sense this was so. In rejecting neutrality and nonresistance against aggression in foreign policy, in declaring itself "more than ever attached to representative government," the party cast off the shadow of its former president's 1940 manifesto and the policies which had preceded it. In other respects, however, it carried forward de Man's conceptions. At the congress of June 1945 Max Buset condemned a dirigisme capitaliste controlled by high finance, with the assistance of members of the press and of parliament—the same unholy triad which de Man had excoriated in the pages of Après coup. The PSB, said its new president, would press for the immediate socialization of credit and insurance and of the coal, electrical, chemical, steel, milling, and sugar industries. In nonsocialized branches it would seek tripartite representation of employers, employees, and consumers. It would work to gain the participation of technical experts and intellectuals. Yet amid all these echoes of the 1930s in his elaboration of the means to "organize the national economy," not once did Buset utter the word platt.32 Something else was missing as well. Although the legacy of Front Generation socialism was more influential in the post-1945 Belgian party than in the French—in its social openness and its embrace of the machinery (if not the label) of planning—still the PSB closely resembled the reconstituted SFIO in its anticipation of an atmosphere receptive to socialism and in its neglect of the moral thrust that had inspired its members during the Resistance. A new leadership had displaced the leftover hierarchs of the POB, and the ranks of party militants had been rejuvenated. All the same, the PSB followed a careful political line once parliamentary government was restored in the fall of 1944. It was not a free

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agent. It had to contend with a newly energetic Communist Party to its left and with the traditional Catholic and Liberal forces on the right. The situation well suited the practical virtues of the man who became, along with Spaak, the party's most prominent figure in government: Achille Van Acker. For a few months in the summer and fall of 1940 Van Acker had followed de Man's lead. He had then turned to the Resistance and quickly assumed a central role in its organization. His grammar, one newspaper noted early in 1945, was not always correct, either in his native Flemish or in French. From another perspective, however, this shortcoming was his strength. He came from humble circumstances and had the gift of speaking to ordinary people in their language. His approach to social and economic policy emphasized the achievement of material benefits more than the fulfillment of ideological hopes, and the party was to follow him in that direction. 33 A dozen years later, when Van Acker was again prime minister, a Resistance and government colleague summarized where that course had led. Van Acker, he said, was a man of few abstractions, and in that he had only one equal, M a x Buset, then still the PSB's president. Either could easily teach young theoreticians a thing or two, but that was not their orientation. "They don't have the time. They have passed that age. They have better things to do." 3 4 In Germany an initial period of opposition and then, in the cases of the leading personalities, an interval of imprisonment preceded the involvement of Front Generation Social Democrats in the Resistance movement itself. When Hitler became chancellor at the end of January 1933 it was not yet clear how rapidly politics would depart from the old rules. Neither was the Nazis' talent at exploiting legal powers for dictatorial ends yet appreciated. Carlo Mierendorff, for one, at first warned that the Nationalist party chief, Alfred Hugenberg, was the real force in the new government. 35 Enlightenment came quickly during the last weeks in which political activity remained more or less free. Julius Leber experienced it most directly in a middle-of-the-night brawl in Lübeck which left him badly injured and one of his Nazi assailants dead. For the others combat remained rhetorical, but the danger quickly became real. Opportunity still existed to choose emigration and safety. Each individual had to weigh the alternatives. With few exceptions the Front Generation socialists stayed in Germany. 36 To remain, however, was to risk almost certain arrest. Leber was apprehended in Berlin on March 23 on charges connected with the fight in Lübeck. Mierendorff, in Switzerland for two weeks early in that month, was on the run, shuttling from one friend's apartment to another, from

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the time he returned. Kurt Schumacher led a similar existence over the next few months. While what remained of the SPD leadership sought compromise with the regime in the vain hope of saving the party, those of the Front Generation who were at liberty began the work of illegal organization. They could not elude the police indefinitely. Mierendorff was seized in Frankfurt in mid-June, Schumacher in Berlin early in July. Haubach was left free for a while longer but then detained. 37 The Nazi authorities were well aware of whom they should worry about among the Social Democrats. At first in opposition and then in the various jails and concentration camps of the Third Reich the Front Generation socialists gained a full understanding of the enemy who now held the upper hand over them. Even before his arrest Mierendorff offered a clear-sighted estimate of the regime's direction. "Fascism's goal," he wrote, "is the spiritual, organizational, and economic preparation of the population for the next European war. . . . Since Fascism threatens the population with ruin, the struggle against it is a supreme national obligation." 3 8 For a time while in prison in the summer of 1 9 3 3 Julius Leber took a more equivocal stance. As Walther Pähl had done in the spring, before M a y Day, Leber explored the possibility that the Nazis might achieve a true social revolution. But he did not entertain this prospect for long. 39 Soon the question was rather when and whether socialism itself would gain another chance. In September 1 9 3 3 , delivering a funeral eulogy for the miners' leader Nikolaus Osterroth, Haubach could only say metaphorically to his audience of mourners and Gestapo observers that "in the midst of autumnal decay we want to be alert and to await the fanfares of spring, which will help bring the work of the deceased to new life and worth in a new order of things." And at Christmas a year later, from his cell in the Lichtenburg concentration camp, Mierendorff resorted to verse: Old Lichtenburg, yet see the hour stays no wait When unchained we march on through your wide front gate You may stand unchanging We'll go further ranging The day of freedom nears The day of freedom nears 40

Freedom came for Haubach and Leber only in 1937, for Mierendorff at the beginning of 1 9 3 8 . Others experienced variously shorter or longer terms—Schumacher was released only in 1 9 4 3 . In confinement they withstood beatings, maltreatment, and the strain of uncertainty. They endured in the spirit of the motto from Nietzsche which Mierendorff quoted as the epigraph to a drama completed at his last stopping place,

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Buchenwald: "What does not destroy me makes me stronger." Upon discharge they were obligated to pledge good behavior—abstention from politics—and remained under police surveillance, subject to detention at any time, as Haubach was at the outbreak of war in September 1939. Nevertheless, they quickly renewed contact. 41 Berlin became the focal point of their activity. Some, like Haubach and Adolf Reichwein, already lived there. Others—including Leber, Mierendorff, and Wilhelm Leuschner, Mierendorff's former chief at the Hessian Interior Ministry—found opportunities for employment in the capital. Leuschner, who had shared several months of captivity with Mierendorff in the Börgermoor and Lichtenburg concentration camps, had been freed in June 1934. In Berlin he took over the management of a small factory run by old SPD friends. He also began to build a network of opponents of the regime. In 1938, after Leber and Mierendorff were again at liberty, Leuschner arranged a meeting with them at the home of another former Hessian official, Ludwig Schwamb. Other connections came by way of different intermediaries. Mierendorff and Haubach, for example, were put in touch with Adolf Reichwein by a younger activist, Willi Brundert.42 A small group of Social Democratic leaders, meeting furtively on ostensibly social occasions, could do little on their own against the Nazi dictatorship. Following the Kristallnacht outrages of November 1938 Leuschner and Leber participated in a meeting where it was agreed that talks with oppositional elements in the army should be sought. Not until a year later, however, after the Polish campaign, was the liaison actually fixed. Conversations with some high officers began during the lull of the "Phony War" but came to a halt following the German conquests in the spring of 1940 in Scandinavia and the West. For a time little could be done. Haubach and Leber withdrew from activity. Mierendorff stayed involved, confident even at this point that the Nazis would fall because ultimately Germany would be militarily defeated. In his years in the camps he had learned patience.43 Given the need for secrecy within the Resistance, its members' attitudes toward the present and future must often be gleaned from bits and pieces—a few paragraphs here, a conversation there. In the only published collection of Theo Haubach's letters from these years, for example, it appears that he was preoccupied by religion, not by socialism. He was deeply concerned with questions of faith, but by 1942 he was also again an active participant in the Resistance—something he could not risk writing about under the Nazi censorship. Similarly, although much attention has been given to the protocols of the three meetings held in 1942— 43 at Kreisau, the Silesian estate of the Resistance activist Count Hel-

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muth James von Moltke, probably of equal importance were the far more numerous but undocumented discussions in Berlin among the circle around Moltke, which included most of the Front Generation Social Democrats. 44 Certain themes persist in the scattered evidence. "Under all despotisms the masses themselves are passive," Emil Henk wrote in a 1946 postmortem on the Resistance which emphasized the socialists' role in it. Henk, a close friend and ally of Mierendorff and Haubach, here reiterated a judgment that Leuschner had offered repeatedly both before and after the war commenced. A major reason behind the Social Democrats' decision to seek an alliance with anti-Nazis in the army was their awareness that opposition to the regime could not be built upon a mass movement. One of the few political as well as religious statements in Haubach's letters touched upon this point in commenting on a painting by Pieter Brueghel: "Is it saying too much to assert: at the beginning of the era of the masses Brueghel saw its results and end with the censuring assurance of a prophet? All that he portrays here, the masses flown from divine obligation and discipline, who, dependent upon themselves, estranged from the gods, degenerate into grotesques, ghouls, and specters—is all that not as valid today as then?" 4 5 Such sentiments sound much like the negative verdicts rendered by de Man and Déat in 1940 and afterward. The German socialist resisters, however, drew different conclusions—conclusions that derived from the political approach which they had tried to introduce in the early 1930s. They raised again the necessity of leadership. "Illegality is the affair of elites," Henk said. "But it is never a matter for the masses." And Reichwein stated in 1943 that "only the best material withstands the severe tests of the forces that shape an environment. The weak shatters. If much was expected of someone, he has to have proved that he was malleable, sustained the expectations of his life's destiny, and responded to them by reaching a higher level. Those so chosen are the hope of the weak. Through that hope the strong are again and again bound to new obligations." 46 These obligations were not to be authoritarian duties. Although the Social Democrats of the Resistance understood that democracy could not be reintroduced in Germany overnight and that the nation needed to be politically reeducated, they were confident that this task could be accomplished. Mierendorff and Leber appear to have expressed the greatest certainty in this prospect, another strand of continuity with the 1930s, as they were the two figures among the socialist resisters who, through journalism and in public forums, best knew the popular temper during the final years of Weimar. In Mierendorff's view, imaginations dulled by

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Nazi propaganda must be revived and recaptured. To that end, with the help of the artist Harro Siegel, he devised yet one more symbol in 1943: a socialist ring circumscribing a cross upon a red background. 47 The cross represented a bid for alliance with religious elements in the Resistance. It also recalled the Front Generation's earlier effort to reach beyond the working-class base of Social Democracy. Then anticapitalism was to become the cement of coalition. Now opposition to Nazism was to perform that function. Religion had not been important to the Front Generation socialists of Weimar, even with their links to thinkers like Paul Tillich through the Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus. They kept their distance from the established churches, which had, as Mierendorff put it in 1933, "allowed themselves to be so unreservedly misused for the political purposes of the ruling class." In the Third Reich, however, at least some of the clergy, including dignitaries of the highest rank, both opposed the regime and adopted an outlook favoring social reform. Front Generation resisters discovered Christian allies—laymen as well as clerics—within the web of contacts woven by Moltke. Not all were at ease with the connection. Leber worried that it would cause a loss of working-class support, especially as a Communist resistance formed. The issue had not been resolved at the time of the attempt on Hitler's life.48 Some resonances of the planning ideas of the 1930s characterized the economic standpoint of the Front Generation resisters. In his draft proclamation "Socialist Action," drawn up in mid-1943 at the time of the third Kreisau conclave, Mierendorff called for expropriation of key heavy industries as the basis of a socialist economic order. The appeal also urged the introduction of self-management, with equal participation by the workers. No document survives to explain the full meaning of these demands. They parallel some of the passages on economy agreed upon at Kreisau, but the word socialism did not appear in those texts. It would seem that Mierendorff and his friends had in mind an approach like that of the ADGB's 1932 "Guiding Principles for Economic Transformation," which had advanced similar broad objectives. 49 In regard to trade union organization the Resistance socialists were divided, both by previous attachments and by age differences. Leuschner, who came from the unions and had established a bond with the leaders of the former Catholic and white-collar labor organizations, insisted that there must be a single union in post-Hitler Germany. His younger allies, and especially Mierendorff, Reichwein, and Haubach, who were engaged in the "Kreisau Circle" of Moltke, found a decentralized structure acceptable; in the weeks before his death Mierendorff tried frustratedly and in vain to mediate the disagreement. That the younger Social Democrats were receptive to the idea of decentralization—in government as well as

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in the economy—expressed a reaction against the Weimar system but also a restatement of the contention that individuals must feel themselves to be participants in society—the notion behind the Front Generation socialists' proposals for electoral reform at the end of the 1920s. 5 0 Toward the end of 1 9 4 2 the outlook for the opposition brightened as Germany shifted onto the defensive in Russia and North Africa. At this point the energies of the Social Democratic resisters had become concentrated along parallel but interconnected tracks. Mierendorff, Reichwein, and now Haubach were deeply involved in the efforts of the Kreisau Circle to define the institutions of a liberal and socially reformist postNazi Germany. Leuschner and the union people close to him were working with the more conservative groups around Carl Goerdeler, the former lord mayor of Leipzig, who provided an avenue to the military leaders. Loss of the initiative on the battlefield and the likelihood of future defeat encouraged the dissidents within the officer corps to think again more seriously about taking action. Although Moltke and some other individuals rejected assassination, both his socialist allies and those close to Goerdeler were agreed that the sooner Hitler and his chief associates were removed, the better. 51 Only the military had the means and opportunity to achieve this end, and they continued to hesitate. Nineteen forty-three became a hard year for the Social Democrats in the Resistance. Leber resumed his activity, establishing ties with both Goerdeler, via Leuschner, and Moltke. The discussions and divisions over future plans intensified. Waiting allowed time for argument. Direct experience of bombing added to the sense of urgency as raids upon Berlin became part of ordinary life. Both Haubach and Reichwein had to find new living quarters after theirs were destroyed. 52 And then, at the year's end, came a crushing blow. "Carlo is no longer among us," Reichwein wrote to a friend a week before Christmas. " O n December 4 in Leipzig a bomb snuffed out this life bursting with energy and fire. We learned of it only 10 days later, but then with a certainty that can be neither contradicted nor redressed. . . . None of us needs to say to the other what he has lost. We know i t — . " A few days earlier Theo Haubach confessed, " I am benumbed and weary and yet know that this is only the beginning of the full horror. It is not the danger that frightens m e — b u t the question whether I endure the danger as one should before God and other men." 5 3 Haubach and the others nevertheless went ahead. Leber now came forward as a major figure among the Social Democratic resisters, all the more central through the entente of temperaments that bonded his liaison with the new driving personality within the military conspiracy, Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg. In June 1 9 4 4 , however, Leber and Reichwein were arrested in the course of an effort to sound out the Com-

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Theodor Haubach in the Resistance years, 1943

munists regarding cooperative action; one of their contacts was a Gestapo spy. They were in custody on July 20 when the bomb planted by Stauffenberg failed to kill Hitler at the Nazi leader's East Prussian headquarters. In the aftermath of the attempt nearly all the other important Resistance socialists were apprehended. Most were executed following their sham trials in the "People's Court." Leuschner was hanged in September; Reichwein in October; Leber, Haubach, and Schwamb in January 1945. 5 4 Mierendorff's 1943 proclamation had closed with the affirmation that the opponents of Hitler would "in the end furnish the proof to history that we are stronger than our fate since we become its master." 5 5 His words once more spelled out the voluntarist legacy of Front Generation socialism for the Resistance. But when the war ended in Germany, the ranks of those who had lived and often died by this code were painfully diminished. Among the Front Generation's few survivors, Kurt Schumacher quickly asserted leadership over the reconstituted SPD. His long imprisonment had walled him off from the Resistance and its socialist currents. The perspective he adopted after 1945 was narrower than the wartime outlook of Mierendorff or Leber. He utilized Marxist categories more than they had done. He remained suspicious of the churches. He sought an opening beyond the working class by associating himself with

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national issues.56 But the tactic was not successful, and the first elections of the new Federal Republic of Germany in 1949 confirmed that the revived SPD was a party much like the postwar SFIO or the PSB. The Resistance element had faded and withered. Its martyrs were honored, but the prevailing spirit of post-1945 Social Democracy had little left of the inspiration they had attempted to capture.

Epilogue "Wahnsinn!" Carlo Mierendorff is said to have cried out in the rubble of the house in which he d i e d — " I n s a n i t y ! " 1 Irony is the mode of much of the history written in the twentieth century. Filtered through its lens, Mierendorff's death may seem cruelly emblematic of the fate of the Front Generation socialists—not masters of their destinies, as he wished, but victims of forces that they saw clearly but could not dominate. Further ironies may be read out of the lives of those who survived the war. Déat provides an example. As the Allied armies advanced into southwestern Germany in April 1 9 4 5 , he and his wife made their way into the Austrian and then the Italian Alps. Later Hélène Déat recalled that even when American troops were close behind them her husband was calm, as he must have been thirty years before on the Somme or on some other front. From this point on, however, the life he had led became part of an irretrievable past. The Déats managed to reach Milan and then Genoa, where, from June 1 9 4 5 to April 1 9 4 7 , they lived anonymously on what resources they had kept and among people who asked few questions. Various Catholic clergy and agencies, knowing them only as refugees, had assisted their flight. In the spring of 1 9 4 7 the church helped them further, allowing them to stay in a convent and a nearby monastery in Turin while they awaited passage to Spain or Argentina. 2 The arrangements fell through, however, and they remained in their new locations. Hélène Déat had developed a strong Catholic faith. In June she and her husband, wed in a civil ceremony in 1 9 2 4 , were, in her words, "united before G o d " in a private mass. At Vichy in the summer of 1 9 4 0 Marcel Déat had publicly raged at a procession bearing a likeness of the Madonna. In Turin he became reconciled with Catholicism. In their "new life" he and Hélène taught French at the convent's school and observed a chaste marriage. He died of a lung ailment in early January 1 9 5 5 , having taken his first communion a few months before. 3 Déat never renounced his actions during the Occupation. He viewed

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the emergence of the Cold War and the Western alliance as latter-day confirmations of his wartime anticommunism and partisanship of a united Europe. In June 1945 he had been tried in absentia on charges of treason and had been convicted and sentenced to death. He dismissed the verdict as the justice of the victors but did not risk his safety in Italy by openly challenging it.4 Exile also remained the lot of de Man, who was similarly unwilling to entrust himself to the authority of a judicial system which had rejected his various appeals. At least, however, he was able to live in freedom in Switzerland, where he was allowed to reside until his death in 1953. De Man found happiness in a new marriage. In the years immediately after the war he scraped by financially, but eventually he was able to live on his earnings as an author. Gradually some barriers to his activity fell. He traveled to Spain and then to Italy. In 1952 he lectured in West Germany. The following spring he returned to France for the first time since the war, though only for a fishing holiday. Politically he remained controversial and subject to ostracism. It was not easy for him to publish his works. There were contacts with a few old friends—G. D. H. Cole, André Philip—from the other side of the divide of the war, but most often de Man found himself in company with a community of figures like himself—Bertrand de Jouvenel, Achille Dauphin-Meunier, Georges Lefranc—men who had accommodated themselves to the results of 1940 and only later had loosened or dropped their ties to the New Order.5 At the end of 1952 de Man sent an essay for publication to the German trade union journal Gewerkschaftliche Monatshefte, whose editor at the time was Walther Pähl—his wartime writings for the moment forgiven or forgotten. With the article already typeset, however, "adverse circumstances" intervened in the form of objections from some quarters in Antwerp. Publication was deferred indefinitely. De Man could only assure Pähl that he should not worry over the matter; it was not the first time this sort of episode had occurred. And anticipating understanding from one who had traced a route comparable to his own after 1933, de Man expressed the hope that at some point he would be able to speak with Pähl about these things and "also, to be sure, about other, more pleasant [subjects]." 6 This eventuality was not to be. In June 1953, returning from his fishing trip to France, de Man was killed when a train struck his automobile at a railroad crossing near his Swiss home. His wife also died in the accident. The violence of his passing stood in awkward contradiction to the contemplative mood of his final years. He had accepted his place on the margin of events. He was still a socialist, he insisted, but this meant attachment to the idea, not to the movement, which he criticized—as before and during the war—for its adherence to parliamentary govern-

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ment and its unwillingness to champion pacifism. Given humankind's capacity to achieve "génosuicide" with atomic weapons, he wrote, the antithesis between capitalism and socialism had become a secondary concern. Peace was the overriding necessity of the time, and it must now be constructed not only upon a European, but on a world scale. His logic held this result to be improbable, but, he confessed, by temperament he was still an optimist. One more analogy with warfare made the point: "We can always choose between fighting and fleeing; and battles are decided, not by the odds as they appear at the beginning, but by the use commanders and soldiers make of such chances as are given to them."7 It is not surprising that those of the Front Generation's leading figures who survived the Second World War did not change their outlooks and judgments upon politics and socialism after 1945. None of their subsequent experiences could match in effect what they had lived through previously. This or that focus might shift. The overall orientation stayed constant. Mosley well exemplified the pattern. In reviving the Union movement in the postwar years, he turned its international policy toward a broader arena than the BUF had surveyed in the 1930s. No longer was the goal to divide Europe among self-contained regional hegemonies. "Europe a Nation," with Africa appended to it, was now the objective, to stand in competition with other continent-based powers. Domestically, the Jewish question slipped behind the immigrant issue, as West Indians and Asians from Commonwealth territories arrived in Britain during the 1950s. The solution remained the same, however: they should all be sent overseas. As in the 1930s, Mosley addressed the issue with both measured-sounding proposals and inflammatory rhetoric. His public appearances produced a repetition of the rough-and-tumble scenes of two decades before, only now with Teddy Boys instead of Blackshirts at his side. The results, in successive London candidacies in 1959, 1964, and 1966, were progressively more disappointing, and after the last of these defeats Mosley withdrew from active leadership of the movement.8 He and Diana lived mostly in France by then. They settled in Orsay, outside Paris, where they were near neighbors of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, with whom they were friendly—the most glamorous mighthave-beens of the 1930s winding down their days in common exile. With the publication of his memoirs in 1968, however, Mosley's public career entered a new, unexpected phase. Retired and no longer considered dangerous, he was readmitted to the head table of respectability. Politicians and scholars who had never accepted him as a fascist now celebrated him, at least through his Labour Party years, as a great talent who had missed his moment. He was permitted to appear on British television and did several well-received interviews. He wrote book reviews and published occasional articles. Robert Skidelsky's serious and favorable bi-

Epilogue

195

ography, published in 1975, furthered the process of rehabilitation. By the time Mosley died, in 1980, he had been brought in from beyond the pale.9 Hendrik de Man's reputation underwent a similar if posthumous evolution. Again a biography played an essential role in promoting a positive réévaluation. In this case it was the American scholar Peter Dodge's Be-

yond Marxism: The Faith and Works of Hendrik de Man, which ap-

peared in 1966. Seven years later, in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of de Man's death, an international colloquium on his life and thought was held at Geneva. On that occasion an Association for the Study of the Work of Henri de Man was founded. Finally, in 1985, on the centenary of his birth, de Man was accorded recognition in his homeland, with an exhibition and conference sponsored by the Archive and Museum of Flemish Culture in Antwerp, his native city.10 Even Déat achieved a certain legitimation with the publication of his memoirs in Paris in 1989. Previously they had been accessible only to researchers, who ran through sheaves of pencils copying the texts by hand. Meanwhile, Leber and Mierendorff had also found their biographers. It might have appeared to be a trick played by history that the Front Generation socialists, who had so often struggled in vain to be heeded, now had gained sympathetic interpreters and audiences. But tempting though it might be, it would be mistaken to regard them as scorned prophets, to portray them as rejected leaders having the last laugh because they had been right. It is doubtful that there was a correct course for European socialism in the era between the wars. The singularity of the Front Generation activists lay in their ability to identify the problems of the movement. Here they were well ahead of their party and ideological rivals. The answers they offered, like all solutions in politics, had their own flaws—grievous defects in their collaborationist manifestations. Yet however diverse their responses to fascism's triumphs, however scattered their final destinations, they merit both distinction and attention for their efforts to revivify socialism. These struggles gave a common identity to the socialists of the Front Generation, and the perspective that best suits it is tragic, not ironic. Since Marx socialists had envisioned a triumphant working class asserting control over an economy that would operate by itself. In the 1920s and more insistently in the 1930s the newcomers of the Front Generation questioned this prospect. Their understanding that production and distribution must be directed, that industry must be managed, led them to seize upon planning as both an ideal and an objective. The actual plans they developed were never specific enough to demonstrate that they would have succeeded, and none was ever put to a trial. Still, whether more or less workable, the creations of Front Generation plan-

196

LOST C O M R A D E S

isme confronted the realities of both existing capitalism and the socialist economy that was to be built. Similarly, the Front Generation's view of society recognized the numerical limits of the working class and the necessity and desirability of reaching beyond them to strata which a movement founded upon the dignity of labor and the necessity for democracy had both right and need to claim. The socialist left never admitted this to be a legitimate task. The Front Generation also grasped the problematical aspect of a workers' movement which was only that: if it did gain power, would it only split the pot differently, not more justly? In effect, their criticism ran, ouvriérisme reduced socialist ambitions to the priorities described by Bertolt Brecht in his famous line from The Threepenny Opera (1928): "Food is the first thing. Morals follow on." 1 1 Yet if it is true that people cannot eat inspiration, it must also be observed that they do not always vote from their bellies. The Front Generation was right to hold that if socialism was to be loyal to its own ambitions, it must practice more than the politics of redistribution. De Man did not err in his last memoir when he credited much of the success that the movement had known to its Utopian impulses.12 The Front Generation wanted to reawaken them. They achieved only limited success with their symbols and propaganda. They stood at the beginning of an era of politics in which appeals to the emotions would become ever more calculated and sophisticated. Inescapably such mechanisms of persuasion blended manipulation with idealism. That the fascists grasped this point made it urgent that socialism respond in kind, but the Front Generation encountered strong resistance within their parties in seeking, as Carlo Mierendorff liked to say, to fascinate the masses. Yet the conventional socialist outlook was blind to its own mechanistic presumptions that consciousness was the product of material circumstances. The Front Generation dissidents knew that followers must be won and, to be kept active, perennially recaptured. Nevertheless, their enterprise could not overcome the inertia of the class allegiances and ideological attachments of interwar Europe. Even as the political and economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s spurred the Front Generation's attempts to transcend these ties, such loyalties became defensive and more rigid. Coalitions like the Popular Front or the parliamentary alliance behind the Van Zeeland government did not contradict this trend. Rather they made headway only to the degree that they did not fundamentally threaten existing social and economic relationships. There are eras in which the forces and comforts of stalemate are sufficient to obstruct the energies of change, even when it is clear that the status quo holds no promise over the long run. This was the historical trap in which the Front Generation socialists were caught. In the end the events of 1940 broke the deadlock. At that point the

Epilogue

197

more disillusioned among the Front Generation socialists sought their goals in collaborationism. The more resilient chose the Resistance. Yet if the hopes born in 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 8 had by then undergone alterations and in some cases metamorphoses, the impulses behind them remained constant. Mierendorff expressed them eloquently in a 1931 Reichstag speech when he described the society that he and his comrades in the trenches had imagined, "built from the spirit of freedom, justice, and humanity." Against the challenge of fascism that dream must be protected, and the socialists, he said, "believe that we are better executors for the combatants who lie in their graves than the gentlemen of the swastika." These were words which all of the Front Generation could still have seconded then. And further on, Mierendorff spoke once more for all his socialist counterparts: "We will fight for our ideals and will know how to fight for them as old front soldiers." 13 Throughout their careers they always did.

Notes Note on Sources Index

Abbreviations

Archief Hendrik de Man/Antwerp

Archief Hendrik de Man, Archief en Museum voor het Vlaamse Cultuurleven, Antwerp

Archief Hendrik de Man/Brussels

Archief Hendrik de Man, Centre de Recherches et d'Etudes Historiques de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, Brussels

Archief Hendrik de Man/IISG

Archief Hendrik de Man, Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam

HE

Hamburger

HC Deb.

House of Commons

NB

Neue Blätter für den

SM

Sozialistische

VS

La Vie socialiste

Echo Debates Sozialismus

Monatshefte

Notes

1. Who Were the Front Generation? 1. De Man's account appears in two versions, with slightly differing emphases, in his postwar memoirs. See Henri de Man, Cavalier seul: Quarante-cinq années de socialisme européen (Geneva: Editions du Cheval Ailé, 1948), pp. 273-275; Hendrik de Man, Gegen den Strom: Memoiren eines europäischen Sozialisten (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1953), pp. 2 6 6 269. Since de Man wrote and published in Flemish, German, French and English, his first name is variously entered as Hendrik, Henri, or Henry, depending on the language. Although the discussion between de Man and Mierendorff took place "without witnesses"—the term de Man used in both accounts—a third person, referred to in his notes as F. P., accompanied them to Viroflay and prepared their "pic-nic." Introduced to Mierendorff, F. P. was told "to forget his name." See de Man's notes of September 15, 1944, and February 23, 1946, dossier 14, no. 430, Archief Hendrik de Man/Brussels. An accompanying document (no. 441), a letter of August 8, 1947, to de Man from Elisabeth Schwamb, the widow of one of Mierendorff's co-conspirators, recounts (with some obvious errors of memory) Mierendorff's description of the meeting to friends in Berlin. A surviving document conveying Mierendorff's continuing socialist commitment is his draft proclamation for a post-Hitler political movement, composed in June 1943, included in Ger van Roon, Neuordnung im Widerstand: Der Kreisauer Kreis innerhalb der deutschen Widerstandsbewegung (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1967), p. 589. 2. "Henri de Man a parlé," Le Travail (Brussels), May 6, 1941, as translated in Peter Dodge, Beyond Marxism: The Faith and Works of Hendrik de Man (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 202. 3. See de Man, Gegen den Strom, pp. 268—269. 4. See de Man's letter to Benito Mussolini, August 23,1930, in Dodge, Beyond Marxism, p. 245; Walther Pähl, "Der Kampf um die Jugend: Zum sozialdemokratischen Parteitag in Leipzig," SM 73 (1931), 419.

202

Notes to Pages 3 - 5

5. Paul Keckskemeti, "Introduction," in Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Keckskemeti (London: Routledge, 1952), p. 2. 6. The literature on generations is vast. Useful bibliography on methodology is provided by Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 239-240. Most helpful to this study were the Introduction and Chapter 6 of the same work and Mannheim, "The Problem of Generations," in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, pp. 2 7 6 - 3 2 2 . Theodor Haubach addressed the generational issue in a 1930 essay: "Die Generationenfrage und der Sozialismus," in Soziologische Studien zur Politik/Wirtschaft und Kultur der Gegenwart: Alfred Weber gewidmet (Potsdam: Alfred Protte Verlag, 1930), pp. 106-120. Although he asserted at one point that "the younger forces" in German Social Democracy "know that the community of an age group is a fiction," he went on to raise the prospect that it would be this cohort which would rally to the new goals the movement needed (pp. 116-117). This was Haubach's hope, and the fact that he belonged to the Front Generation was instrumental in sustaining it: in the same essay (p. 113) he singled out the SPD's paramilitary affiliate, the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, for attracting young workers "not with a specific ideology of youth . . . but through modes of activity particularly suited to youthful masculine instincts"—soldierly pursuits which Haubach's own generational experience had taught him to value. 7. Carl Zuckmayer, Als war's ein Stück von mir (Vienna: S. Fischer Verlag, 1966), p. 198, as translated in Eric J. Leed, No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 16-17. 8. Wohl, The Generation of 1914, pp. 5-18, 4 2 - 4 7 . 9. '"Kat and Detering and Haie will go back to their jobs because they had them already. . . . But we never had any. How will we ever get used to one after this, here?'—he makes a gesture toward the front": Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. A. W. Wheen (London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1930), p. 98. In 1920 Carlo Mierendorff wrote, "Among young people there yawns a gap between those already 30 now and those only 22. The former got through their examination in a different school of life. It shut down, and the latter came under the thumb of other drillsergeants." The older group had seen opportunity in literary pursuits. War and revolution directed the younger into politics. "Porträt eines Politikers (Max Weber ins Grab)," Der neue Merkur 4, no. 1 (1920), 335. 10. Leed, No Man's Land, pp. 197-200. 11. Jean Rabaut, Tout est possible! Les "gauchistes" français, 1920-1944 (Paris: Denoël, 1974), p. 133; Max Seydewitz, Es hat sich gelohnt zu leben, vol. 1, Erkenntnisse und Bekenntnisse (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1976), pp. 5 2 55. 12. See Georges Lefranc, "Histoire d'un groupe du Parti socialiste S.F.I.O.: Révolution constructive (1930-1938)," in Mélanges d'histoire économique et sociale en hommage au professeur Antony Babel à l'occasion de son soix-

Notes to Pages 6-12

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

203

ante-quinzième anniversaire (Geneva: Imprimerie de la Tribune de Genève, 1963), vol. 2, pp. 402-404. A nonsocialist who would trace a parallel career expressed a similar perspective at the end of the 1920s: Jean Luchaire, Une génération réaliste (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1929), pp. 7-15. Quoted by Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), p. 144. Henri de Man, "La crise du socialisme," in Peter Dodge, ed., A Documentary Study of Hendrik de Man, Socialist Critic of Marxism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 173. Hendrik de Man, Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1926), p. 415. Carl Mierendorff, "Die Republik von Morgen," SM 76 (1932), 742. In his journalism of the late 1920s and early 1930s Mierendorff used the formal Carl rather than the familiar Carlo, with which he had signed his writings in previous years. Oswald Mosley, Revolution by Reason (Leicester: Blackfriars Press, 1925); Marcel Déat, Perspectives socialistes (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1930). Zeev Sternhell, "Fascist Ideology," in Walter Laqueur, ed., Fascism, A Reader's Guide: Analyses, Interpretations, Bibliography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 353.

2. Youth and War 1. T. H.[Theodor Haubach], "Den Toten des Weltkrieges," HE, August 3, 1924, p. 1. Carl Zuckmayer remembered a similar scene in the Cologne railway station: Als war's ein Stück von mir (Vienna: S. Fischer Verlag, 1966), pp. 92-93. 2. Mosley's and de Man's statements, respectively, in Sir Oswald Mosley, My Life (New Rochelle, Ν.Y.: Arlington House, 1972), p. 44 (and see pp. 4 4 46); and Henri de Man, Cavalier seul: Quarante-cinq années de socialisme européen (Geneva: Editions du Cheval Ailé, 1948), p. 83. On the others: Kasimir Edschmid, "Einst Nachbarn in Darmstadt," in Walter Hammer, ed., Theodor Haubach zum Gedächtnis, 2d ed. (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955), p. 7; Marcel Déat, Mémoires politiques (Paris: Denoël, 1989), pp. 32-33, 57-58. 3. Haubach, "Den Toten des Weltkrieges," HE, August 3,1924, p. 1. 4. Mosley, My Life, p. 11; Henri de Man, Après coup (Brussels: Editions de la Toison d'Or, 1941), pp. 11-12. 5. Henri de Man, "La leçon de la guerre," in Peter Dodge, ed., A Documentary Study of Hendrik de Man, Socialist Critic of Marxism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 62. 6. De Man's recollections: Après coup, pp. 7-106; Cavalier seul, pp. 11-83; Hendrik de Man, Gegen den Strom: Memoiren eines europäischen Sozialisten (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1953), pp. 7-105. See also Peter

204

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

Notes to Pages 12-16

Dodge, Beyond Marxism: The Faith and Works of Hendrik de Man (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966). pp. 1-37. Déat, Mémoires, pp. 17—31; Emily Hartshorne Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1973), pp. 1 4 - 3 3 . Walter Euler, "Die Dioskuren," in Ludwig-Georgs Gymnasium, Darmstadt, Agora: Zeitschrift eines humanistischen Gymnasiums 2, no. 7 - 8 (1956), 55-58—the photograph faces p. 58; Richard Albrecht, Der militante Sozialdemokrat: Carlo Mierendorff 1897 bis 1943: Eine Biografie (Berlin and Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1987), pp. 16-21 (with the photograph printed backward on p. 19); Ludwig Breitwieser, Fritz Usinger, and Hermann Klippel, Die Dachstube: Das Werden eines Freundeskreises und seiner Zeitschrift, Darmstädter Schriften 38 (Darmstadt: Justus von Liebig Verlag, 1976), pp. 15-16, 36; Edschmid, "Einst Nachbarn in Darmstadt," p. 7; Walter Poller, Gedenkblatt für Theodor Haubach (Frankfurt and Dortmund: Verlag "das segel," 1955), pp. 11-13; "Haubachs Briefe," in Darmstadt und der 20. Juli 1944 (Darmstadt: Justus von Liebig Verlag, 1974), p. 52. Mosley, My Life, pp. 1—42; Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), pp. 3 1 - 4 3 ; Nicholas Mosley, Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley, 1896-1933 (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1982), pp. 1-5. Excerpts from Mierendorff's curriculum vitae appear in Albrecht, Der militante Sozialdemokrat, pp. 16, 22, 68, 178-179. An illustration: in a letter of spring 1944 Haubach said of the tribute he had delivered at Mierendorff's funeral that some things had to be left out, that "a truly fundamental analysis" of his friend's character "would have to explain Carlo's relationships with women." Haubach thought that this more searching probe might be done later, but it has not been; completing it, learning enough of the formative years of childhood and adolescence—and even of later periods of Mierendorff's life—seems an impossibility now. See Hammer, Theodor Haubach, p. 69, n. 1; Albrecht, Der militante Sozialdemokrat, p. 302, η. 115. Mosley, My Life, p. v; Déat, Mémoires, p. 62, as translated in Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," p. 33; Haubach, "Den Toten des Weltkrieges," HE, August 3, 1924, p. 1. Mosley, My Life, pp. 4 5 - 7 0 ; N. Mosley, Rules of the Game, pp. 5 - 7 ; Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 61—65; Michael Moynihan, ed., People at War, 1914-1918 (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973), pp. 31, 3 3 - 3 5 ; Colonel Henry Graham, History of the Sixteenth, The Queen's, Light Dragoons (Lancers), 1912 to 1925 (Devizes: George Simpson, 1926), pp. 7 4 - 7 6 . Zuckmayer, Als war's ein Stück von mir, p. 305. Déat, Mémoires, pp. 5 9 - 7 5 , 85-110; Taëd [Marcel Déat], Cadavres et maximes: Philosophie d'un revenant (Paris: Libraire d'action d'art de la ghilde "Les Forgerons," 1919), passim; Arthur Russell, The Machine Gunner (Kineton [Warwicks.]: Roundwood Press, 1977), pp. 5 - 7 . Albrecht, Der militante Sozialdemokrat, pp. 2 2 - 2 3 ; Willi Brundert, "Carlo Mierendorff," in Darmstadt und der 20. Juli 1944, p. 55. On how the war

Notes to Pages 18-24

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

205

looked to artillerists like Mierendorff, see Herbert Sulzbach, With the German Guns: Four Years on the Western Front, 1914-1918, trans. Richard Thonger (London: Leo Cooper, 1973). Henry de Man, The Remaking of a Mind: A Soldier's Thoughts on War and Reconstruction (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1919), passim; see also de Man, Gegen den Strom, pp. 117-146. Taëd [Marcel Déat], review of Paul Bornet, Le rôle constructeur de l'Armée, La forge (Paris) 17-18 (July-August 1919), 48; Déat, "Choisir," VS, no. 122 (July 22, 1922), 2; Mémoires, pp. 7 8 - 8 1 , 95-96; Mosley, My Life, p. 90; Julien Kuypers, "Hendrik de Man an Karl Kautsky: Ein unveröffentlichter Brief aus dem Jahre 1917," Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 5 (1965), 438; de Man, Cavalier seul, p. 86; Walter Hammer, "Glaube," Kriegsflugblätter: Feldzeitung derer vom Inf.-Reg. 457, no. 2 (June 1917), 1. Carl Mierendorff, "Nach 14 Jahren: Heidelberg 1918 und 1932," p. 8, manuscript in unpublished Festschrift für Emil Lederer, Emil Lederer Collection, Special Collections, University Libraries, University at Albany, State University of New York. Taëd [Déat], Cadavres et maximes, p. 5. Déat, Mémoires, p. 73, as translated in Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," p. 40; de Man, Remaking of a Mind, p. 218. Mosley, My Life, pp. 5 4 - 5 7 ; Theodor Haubach, "Aus den Argonnen," Die Dachstube 47 (February 1917), 179-181; "Abend," ibid., 52 and 53 (August-September 1917), 205. See also Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 220. De Man, Remaking of a Mind, p. 91; "European Unrest and the Returned Soldier," Scribner's Magazine 66 (1919), 4 3 5 - 4 3 6 . See Eric J. Leed, No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 8 0 - 9 6 . De Man, Remaking of a Mind, p. 196. Taëd [Déat], Cadavres et maximes, p. 19, as translated in Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," p. 42. Zuckmayer, Als wär's ein Stück von mir, p. 275; Déat also viewed landscapes as possible battlefields, Mémoires, p. 156. Mosley, My Life, pp. 4 6 - 4 8 ; Déat, Mémoires, pp. 7 4 - 7 5 ; Theodor Haubach, "Die militante Partei," NB 2 (1931), 2 1 0 - 2 1 3 . Theodor Haubach, "Bemerkungen zum Militarismus," Die Dachstube 44 (October 11, 1916), 164. Mosley, My Life, p. 70. Roy Jenkins, Mr. Attlee: An Interim Biography (London: William Heinemann, 1948), p. 79. Paul Hertz, Alfred Vagts, and Carl Zuckmayer, Carlo Mierendorff: Porträt eines deutschen Sozialisten (Santiago: Imprenta Universitara, 1944), p. 19. See also Mierendorff, "Nach 14 Jahren," pp. 1 - 2 . Leed, No Man's Land, pp. 6 0 - 6 4 . Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 67-75, with the quoted passage on p. 75; Mosley, My Life, pp. 71-91. De Man, Après coup, pp. 137-150, with quoted passages on pp. 141, 150;

206

35.

36.

37. 38.

Notes to Pages 2 4 - 3 1

Cavalier seul, pp. 107-116, with quoted passages on pp. 110, l i é ; Dodge, Beyond Marxism, pp. 4 7 - 4 8 . Taëd [Marcel Déat], review of Dominique Parodi, La philosophie contemporaine en France, La forge 17-18 (July-August 1919), p. 48, as translated in Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," p. 47. On the Ecole Normale see ibid., pp. 5 0 - 5 1 ; Robert J. Smith, The Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Third Republic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), pp. 9 3 - 1 0 0 , 111-114, 1 1 8 - 1 2 2 . [Carlo Mierendorff], "Aufruf" (untitled), Die Dachstube 65 (November 1918), 255. On Die Dachstube see Breitwieser, Usinger, and Klippel, Die Dachstube. C. Mierendorff, "Zeit und Jugend," Das Tribunal 1 (1919), 11. C. Mierendorff, "Nach uns die Liebe," ibid., p. 44.

3. A Season of Learning 1. C. Mierendorff, "Nach uns die Liebe," Das Tribunal 1 (1919), 43. 2. [Carlo Mierendorff], "Hütet euch," ibid., p. 75; see also "Köpfe—und keine," ibid., pp. 63—64. 3. C. Mierendorff, "Und doch Politik," ibid., p. 63. On Aktivismus see Lewis D. Wurgaft, The Activists: Kurt Hiller and the Politics of Action on the German Left, 1914—1933, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 67, part 8 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1977), pp. 5—65; Eva Kolinsky, Engagierter Expressionismus: Politik und Literatur zwischen Weltkrieg und Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1970), pp. 7 - 1 2 5 . 4. See Marcel Franciscono, Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar: The ¡deals and Artistic Theories of Its Founding Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), pp. 1 3 - 2 5 , 127-152; Klemens Von Klemperer, Germany's New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 7 6 - 8 0 . 5. T. Haubach, "Wider die Politik," Das Tribunal 1 (1919), 52. 6. Hadrianus (pseud.), "Auch eine Totenfeier," ibid., p. 89. 7. T. Haubach, "Offener Brief an Kurt Hiller," ibid., p. 76. 8. Haubach, "Wider die Politik," p. 52. 9. See Wurgaft, The Activists, pp. 5 7 - 6 1 . 10. Mierendorff, "Die Konferenz zu Bern—Etappe der Revolution," Das Tribunal 1 (1919), 118. 11. Carlo Mierendorff, "Erneuerung der Sprache," in Fritz Usinger, ed., Carlo Mierendorff: Eine Einführung in sein Werk und eine Auswahl (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1965), p. 108. See also Usinger's comments, ibid., pp. 1 3 - 2 1 . 12. Carlo Mierendorf, "Hätte Ich das Kino!" in Usinger, Mierendorff, p. 65. 13. The complete essay, ibid., pp. 6 4 - 8 3 . 14. Sir Oswald Mosley, My Life (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1972), p. 102. 15. Ibid., pp. 1 0 0 - 1 0 2 ; Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (New York: Holt,

Notes to Pages 31-35

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

207

Rinehart and Winston, 1975), pp. 8 0 - 8 3 ; Kenneth O. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government, 1918-1922 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 177-179; Colin R. Coote, Editorial (London: Eyre &c Spottiswoode, 1965), p. 103. Colin Coote, A Companion of Honour: The Story of Walter Elliot (London: Collins, 1965), p. 48. Mosley's speech quoted in Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, p. 83; his later reflections on youth in politics in Mosley, My Life, pp. 128-136. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity, pp. 179-191; quotation on p. 184. Mosley, My Life, p. 101. HC Deb. 112 (February 17, 1919), 671, 674. See ibid., 123 (December 15, 1919), 110-113; 125 (February 12, 1920), 3 3 8 - 3 4 1 ; 130 (June 17, 1920), 1590-93; (June 23, 1920), 2 3 2 3 - 2 5 . Hendrik de Man, Gegen den Strom: Memoiren eines europäischen Sozialisten (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1953), p. 147. Henry de Man, "European Unrest and the Returned Soldier," Scribner's Magazine 66 (1919), 435. Henry de Man, The Remaking of a Mind: A Soldier's Thoughts on War and Reconstruction (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1919), p. 256. This episode is most completely described in de Man, Gegen den Strom, pp. 149-158. Henri de Man, "Lettre d'Amerique," in Peter Dodge, ed., A Documentary Study of Hendrik de Man, Socialist Critic of Marxism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 96; Gegen den Strom, pp. 158-160. De Man, Remaking of a Mind, pp. 273-274. De Man, "Lettre d'Amerique," p. 99; Gegen den Strom, pp. 160-168. De Man, "Lettre d'Amerique," p. 97. De Man, Gegen den Strom, p. 163. On the Yakima Valley from a native's viewpoint, see William O. Douglas, Go East, Young Man: The Early Years (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 5 5 - 8 6 . De Man, "Lettre d'Amerique," p. 99. See Hamilton Cravens, "The Emergence of the Farmer-Labor Party in Washington Politics, 1919-1920," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 56 (1965), 148-157. De Man, Gegen den Strom, p. 170; Seattle Municipal News, October 23, 1920, p. 1; November 6, 1920, pp. 1 - 2 . Täed [Marcel Déat], review of Paul Bornet, Le rôle constructeur de l'Armée, La forge 17-18 (July-August 1919), 48; review of J. Payot, Le travail intellectuel et la volonté, La forge 1 9 - 2 0 (September-October 1919), 138-139. Marcel Déat, Mémoires politiques (Paris: Denoël, 1989), pp. 38-39, 118; Emily Hartshorne Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1973), pp. 4 6 - 4 7 , 86; Georges Lefranc, Essais sur les problèmes socialistes et syndicaux (Paris: Payot, 1970), pp. 117-122; Richard F. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modem France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 31-37. Barthélémy Montagnon, De Jaurès à de Gaulle: Néo-capitalisme? Néosocialisme? (Paris: d'Halluin, 1969), p. 44. Martin Clark, Antonio Gramsci and the Revolution That Failed (New Ha-

208

36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

Notes to Pages 35-38

ven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 5 5 - 7 3 ; Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 4 3 - 4 4 ; L. P. Carpenter, G. D. H. Cole: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 4 6 - 1 1 1 . De Man, "La leçon de la guerre," in Dodge, Hendrik de Man, p. 80. Déat, Mémoires, pp. 125-129, 135-139; Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," pp. 87-88. Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 8 3 - 9 0 ; quotation on p. 86; Nicholas Mosley, Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley, 1896-1933 (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1982), pp. 10-26; John Grigg, Nancy Astor: A Lady Unashamed (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 75-76. Ludwig Breitwieser, Fritz Usinger, and Hermann Klippel, Die Dachstube: Das Werden eines Freundeskreises und seiner Zeitschrift, Darmstädter Schriften 38 (Darmstadt: Justus von Liebig Verlag, 1976), pp. 5 4 - 5 7 ; Jakob Reitz, Carlo Mierendorff, 1897-1943, Darmstädter Schriften 51 (Darmstadt: Justus von Liebig Verlag, 1983), pp. 21-22, 113-117; Carl Zuckmayer, Als wär's ein Stück von mir (Vienna: S. Fischer Verlag, 1966), pp. 3 0 4 - 3 0 6 ; George W. F. Hallgarten, Als die Schatten fielen: Erinnerungen vom Jahrhundertbeginn zur Jahrtausendwende (Frankfurt and Berlin: Verlag Ullstein, 1969), pp. 109-112. Zuckmayer, Als wär's ein Stück von mir, pp. 283-304; quotation on p. 286; Henry Goverts, "Unsere Heidelberger Jahre," in Landeshauptstadt Mainz and Carl-Zuckmayer Gesellschaft, Festschrift für Carl Zuckmayer (Mainz: Verlag Dr. Hans Krach, 1976), pp. 34—43; Fritz Croner, Ein Leben in unserer Zeit (Frankfurt and Zurich: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1968), pp. 1 6 6 172. Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 8 9 - 9 0 . Marcel Déat, "Lucien Herr," VS, η.s., no. 16 (June 19, 1926), 5; Emily Hartshorne Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," pp. 52, 54. See de Man, Gegen den Strom, pp. 160—165. See C. Mierendorff, "Nach uns die Liebe," Das Tribunal 1 (1919), 43; "Bücher," ibid., pp. 78-79. Mierendorff's dissertation documents the change: Carl Mierendorff, "Die Wirtschaftspolitik der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands (KPD)" (Inaugural-Dissertation, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität, Heidelberg, 1922). See Peter Dodge, Beyond Marxism: The Faith and Works of Hendrik de Man (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), pp. 4 3 - 4 6 ; de Man, "La leçon de la guerre," pp. 6 8 - 6 9 , 8 8 - 9 0 ; HC Deb. 130 (June 17, 1920), 1593; Marcel Déat, review of Simon Zagorsky, La République des Soviets: Bilan économique, VS, no. 34 (February 26, 1921), 4; "Histoire ou apologétique?" VS, no. 73 (December 31, 1921), 1. Donald S. Birn, The League of Nations Union, 1918-1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 36, 41. Theodor Haubach, "Gustav Härtung," Die neue Schaubühne 4 (1922), 6 4 65. Mierendorff, "Porträt eines Politikers (Max Weber ins Grab)," Der neue Merkur 4, no. 1 (1920), 336.

Notes to Pages 39-43

209

49. Ibid., pp. 3 3 5 - 3 3 8 ; Carlo Mierendorff, "Nach 14 Jahren: Heidelberg 1918 und 1932," p. 5, manuscript in unpublished Festschrift für Emil Lederer, Emil Lederer Collection, Special Collections, University Libraries, University at Albany, State University of New York. 50. Déat, "Lucien Herr," p. 6; Robert J. Smith, The Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Third Republic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), pp. 67-69, 87-97; Jürgen Kocka, "Einleitung des Herausgebers," in Emil Lederer, Kapitalismus, Klassenstruktur und Probleme der Demokratie in Deutschland 1910-1940, ed. Kocka (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &C Ruprecht, 1979), pp. 12-13. 51. Theodor Haubach, "Zur Krisis der Revolution," Das Ziel 4 (1920), 181. 52. Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," pp. 5 0 - 7 7 ; Marcel Déat, Sociologie (Paris: Librairie Félix Alean, 1925), pp. 27-49, 71-76; "La définition du socialisme d'après E. Durkheim," VS, no. 75 (January 14,1922), 2 3; "Socialisme et communisme d'après E. Durkheim," VS, no. 76 (January 23, 1922), 1 - 2 . On Bouglé: W. Paul Vogt, "Un durkheimien ambivalent: Célestin Bouglé, 1870-1940," Revue française de sociologie 20 (1979), 123-139; "The Politics of Academic Sociological Theory in France, 1 8 9 0 1914" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1976), pp. 212-221, 321-326. 53. Mierendorff, "Nach 14 Jahren," pp. 3 - 7 ; Croner, Ein Leben, pp. 155-163; Wolfgang Petzet, "Stationen," in Walter Hammer, ed., Theodor Haubach zum Gedächtnis, 2d ed. (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955), p. 8; Hallgarten, Als die Schatten fielen, p. 108. 54. Birn, The League of Nations Union, p. 36; Ν. Mosley, Rules of the Game, pp. 5 9 - 6 1 ; Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, p. 138. 55. See Michel Brélaz, Henri de Man: Une autre idée du socialisme (Geneva: Editions des Antipodes, 1985), pp. 96-120, 389-391; A. DauphinMeunier, "Henri de Man et Walther Rathenau," Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto: Revue européenne des sciences sociales 12, no. 31 (1974), 103-120; Henri de Man, Au pays du Taylorisme (Brussels: "Le Peuple," 1919); Henry de Man, "Germany's New Prophets," Yale Review 13 (1923-24), 667-675. 56. See Margarete von Eynern, ed., Walther Rathenau in Brief und Bild (Berlin and Frankfurt: Verlag Annedore Leber, 1967), pp. 3 2 6 - 3 2 9 , 372-374; John Maynard Keynes, Collected Writings, vol. 9, Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 272-294; Déat, Sociologie, pp. 71-76; Hans Speier, "Emil Lederer: Leben und Werk," in Lederer, Kapitalismus, pp. 2 5 3 - 2 5 6 , 260—264; Croner, Ein Leben, pp. 163-164. 57. Goverts, "Unsere Heidelberger Jahre," pp. 4 0 - 4 1 . 58. Karl Jaspers, "Doktor der Philosophie," in Hammer, Theodor Haubach, pp. 16-17; Georges Lefranc, Le mouvement socialiste sous la Troisième République (1875-1940) (Paris: Payot, 1963), p. 288, n. 3. 59. De Man, Gegen den Strom, pp. 185-186.

4. Making Their Way 1. Egon Wertheimer, Portrait of the Labour Party, 2d ed. (London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1930), pp. ix—xiv. 2. John Paton, Left Turn! (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1936), p. 336; see also

210

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

Notes to Pages 44-46

pp. 178-179, and Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), pp. 124-127. This is the rendition of Robert Wohl, French Communism in the Making, 1914-1924 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), p. 199. See Robert F. Wheeler, "German Labor and the Comintern: A Problem of Generations?" Journal of Social History 7 (1973-74), 3 0 4 - 3 2 1 ; Richard A. Comfort, Revolutionary Hamburg: Labor Politics in the Early Weimar Republic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), pp. 133-140; Hans Mommsen, "Die Sozialdemokratie in der Defensive: Der Immobilismus der SPD und der Aufstieg des Nationalsozialismus," in Mommsen, ed., Sozialdemokratie zwischen Klassenbewegung und Volkspartei (Frankfurt: Athenäum Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1974), pp. 123-125; Tony Judt, La réconstruction du parti socialiste, 1921-1926 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1976), pp. 17-19; Georges Lefranc, Le mouvement syndical sous la Troisième République (Paris: Payot, 1967), pp. 2 6 9 - 2 8 2 . Ross McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910—1924 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 240. See Mommsen, "Sozialdemokratie," pp. 128-131; Judt, Réconstruction, pp. 71-78. For two examples in which Michels' influence is explicit, see Richard M. Hunt, German Social Democracy, 1918—1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 241-242; Jean Touchard, La gauche en France depuis 1900 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977), pp. 141-145. Dan S. White, "Reconsidering European Socialism in the 1920s," Journal of Contemporary History 16 (1981), 2 5 8 - 2 6 2 ; Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left: Studies in Labour and Politics in France, 1830—1981 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 129-138. On revolutionary possibilities see Albert S. Lindemann, The "Red Years": European Socialism versus Bolshevism, 1919-1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). Rudolf Hilferding, "Probleme der Zeit," Die Gesellschaft 1 (1924), 1. Ibid., p. 17. See Robert A. Gates, "German Socialism and the Crisis of 1929—33," Central European History 7 (1974), 342-348; Alexander Gerschenkron, "Reflections on European Socialism," in Gregory Grossman, ed., Essays in Socialism and Planning in Honor of Carl Landauer (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 2—15; Hans Mommsen, Dietmar Petzina, and Bernd Weisbrod, eds., Industrielles System und politische Entwicklung in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1974), pp. 3 5 2 - 3 5 9 ; Norbert Leser, Zwischen Reformismus und Bolschewismus: Der Austromarxismus als Theorie und Praxis (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1968); Judt, Réconstruction, pp. 74—75. McKibbin, Labour Party, p. 245; David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), p. 310. The most balanced consideration of Blum's approach remains Gilbert Ziebura, Léon Blum: Theorie und Praxis einer sozialistischen Politik (Berlin:

Notes to Pages 47-50

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

211

Walter de Gruyter, 1963), vol. 1, pp. 121-160, 3 3 1 - 4 6 5 . See also Judt, Marxism and the French Left, pp. 1 4 8 - 1 5 1 , 158. Sir Oswald Mosley, My Life (New Rochelle, Ν.Y.: Arlington House, 1972), p. 172. Mierendorff expressed similar sentiments in 1932: "Nach 14 Jahren: Heidelberg 1918 und 1932," p. 7, manuscript in unpublished Festschrift für Emil Lederer, Emil Lederer Collection, Special Collections, University Libraries, University at Albany, State University of New York. Franz Osterroth, "Der Hofgeismarkreis der Jungsozialisten," Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 4 (1964), 5 2 5 - 5 3 1 ; quotation on 531. Prewar developments in Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905-1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 9 7 - 1 0 8 , 2 7 1 - 2 7 4 . Hendrik de Man, "Kritik des Jungsozialismus," Die Tat 19 (1927), 289. See Hendrik de Man, Gegen den Strom: Memoiren eines europäischen Sozialisten (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1953), pp. 179-180. Karl Bröger, Aus meiner Kriegszeit, 2d ed. (Nürnberg: Verlag und Druck der Fränkischen Verlagsanstalt & Buchdruckerei, n.d. [1915]), p. 33. On the Hofgeismar Circle: Osterroth, "Der Hofgeismarkreis," 5 3 5 - 5 4 4 ; "Erinnerungen," typescript, Archiv der sozialen Demokratie, FriedrichEbert-Stiftung, Bonn, vol. 1, " 1 9 0 0 - 1 9 3 4 , " pp. 116-122a; August Rathmann, Ein Arbeiterleben: Erinnerungen an Weimar und danach (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1983), pp. 6 5 - 6 8 ; Franz Walter, Nationale Romantik und revolutionärer Mythos: Politik und Lebensweisen im frühen Weimarer Jungsozialismus (Berlin: Verlag Europäische Perspektiven, 1986), pp. 4 0 - 5 0 . "Politische Grundsatzerklärung des Hofgeismarkreises," in Werner Kindt, ed., Die deutsche Jugendbewegung, 1920-1933: Die bündische Zeit, Dokumente der Jugendbewegung 3 (Düsseldorf and Cologne: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1974), pp. 1 0 3 6 - 3 7 . See Walter, Nationale Romantik, pp. 8 5 - 8 7 ; Walther G. Oschilewski, Gustav Dahrendorf: Ein Kämpferleben (Berlin: Arani-Verlag, 1955), pp. 1 2 - 1 5 . Heller's and Adler's Referate and the ensuing debate in Hermann Heller, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, Orientierung und Entscheidung (Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1971), pp. 5 2 7 - 5 6 3 . See Osterroth, "Der Hofgeismarkreis," pp. 5 4 8 - 5 5 6 ; Walter, Nationale Romantik, pp. 113-115, 169-177. Theodor Haubach, "Sozialistische Aussenpolitik," Die Gesellschaft 1 (1924), 4 1 8 - 4 2 0 ; "Militärische und politische Gewalt," ibid., 2 (1924), 30-39. Karl Rohe, Das Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Struktur der politischen Kampfverbände zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1966), pp. 4 4 - 8 0 , 3 1 4 - 3 1 5 . Theodor Haubach, "Republikanisches Bewusstsein," Das Reichsbanner, May 1, 1926, pp. 6 3 - 6 4 . See Walter Hammer, ed., Theodor Haubach zum Gedächtnis, 2d ed. (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955), pp. 3 3 35, 4 2 - 4 3 . Richard Albrecht, Der militante Sozialdemokrat: Carlo Mierendorff 1897 bis 1943: Eine Biografie (Berlin and Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1987),

212

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

Notes to Pages 51-55

pp. 6 8 - 7 0 ; C. M. [Carlo Mierendorff], "Dawes und die Eisenbahner," HE, June 30, 1924, sec. 3, p. 1; "Gelehrte Unkenschreie," HE, July 15, 1924, p. 1; "Kriegs- oder Friedensluftschiff," HE, September 27, 1924, p. 1. Albrecht, Der militante Sozialdemokrat, pp. 7 2 - 7 9 ; Osterroth, "Erinnerungen," 1:148. Letter of Carlo Mierendorff to Hendrik de Man, April 18, 1926, Archief Hendrik de Man/IISG, dossier 195. Carlo Mierendorff, "Die Politik von Morgen—das Problem von heute," HE, April 2 5 , 1 9 2 6 , p. 1. Carlo Mierendorff, "Republik oder Monarchie?" SM 63 (1926), 4 3 8 - 4 3 9 . Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 99-100, 109-113; Robert Rhodes James, Victor Cazalet: A Portrait (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976), pp. 8 8 - 8 9 . On Cecil's maneuverings see Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Labour, 1920-1924: The Beginning of Modern British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 6 0 - 6 9 , 106-107; Kenneth O. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government, 19181922 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 205-212. Sir Oswald Mosley, "From Tory to Labour," Labour Magazine 8 (192930), 6. Quoted by Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, p. 126. Nicholas Mosley, Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley, 1896-1933 (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1982), pp. 5 0 - 5 3 ; Norman Mackenzie, ed., The Letters of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, vol. 3, Pilgrimage, 1912-1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 737. Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 130-132; Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 116-117; John Barnes and David Nicholson, eds., The Leo Amery Diaries, vol. 1, 1896-1929 (London: Hutchinson, 1980), p. 389. John Scanlon, Decline and Fall of the Labour Party (London: Peter Davies, 1932), pp. 180-181. N. Mosley, Rules of the Game, pp. 57, 81-82, 8 6 - 9 3 ; Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 90, 129-130, 159-160. Quoted in N. Mosley, Rules of the Game, p. 79. On Strachey: Hugh Thomas, John Strachey (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). Marcel Déat, "Marxisme et science des moeurs," VS, no. 107 (October 7, 1922), 2; Mémoires politiques (Paris: Denoël, 1989), pp. 129-132, 1 3 6 143, 149-150; Emily Hartshorne Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1973), pp. 52-53. Marcel Déat, "Propagande rurale," VS, no. 131 (March 26,1923), 1; Mémoires, pp. 151—165; Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," pp. 53, 88-91. Georges Clause, "L'évolution politique du département de la Marne à travers la Troisième République (1870-1940)," Mémoires de la Société d'Agriculture, Commerce, Sciences et Arts du Département de la Marne 96, no. 1 (1981), 2 4 8 - 2 4 9 . Déat, Mémoires, pp. 154-155.

Notes to Pages 55-60

213

42. Ibid., pp. 174-175, 179-181; Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," pp. 53, 91. 43. Letter of Carlo Mierendorff to Hendrik de Man, February 26,1926, Archief Hendrik de Man/IISG, dossier 190. 44. John Strachey, Revolution by Reason: An Account of the Financial Proposals Submitted to the Labour Movement by Mr. Oswald Mosley (London: Leonard Parsons, 1925), p. v. 45. Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," pp. 92—94; Déat, Mémoires, pp. 181-187; "Pourquoi nous avons fait le Cartel dans la Marne," VS, n.s., no. 2 (March 11, 1926), 5 - 6 ; "Echoes de l'élection de la Marne," ibid., pp. 14-15. 46. See Harold J. Gordon, Jr., The Reichswehr and the German Republic, 1919-1926 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 393-394; F. L. Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics, 1918 to 1933 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 254-256. It is likely that Mierendorff was the author of the Hamburger Echo lead article originating "from an especially well informed quarter . . . in Berlin": "Der Geheimbund Reichswehr-Sowjetrussland," HE, December 7, 1926, p. 1. 47. Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 157-163. 48. Ibid., p. 158; Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," p. 97, n. 26. 49. Wertheimer, Portrait of the Labour Party, pp. xii-xiii. 5. Emergence of a Critique 1. ar. [August Rathmann], "Zur Erneuerung des Sozialismus," 5. Politischer Rundbrief des Hofgeismarkreises der Jungsozialisten (January 1926), p. 28. Rathmann also communicated his enthusiasm personally: letter to Hendrik de Man, December 10, 1925, Archief Hendrik de Man/IISG, dossier 190. 2. Hendrik de Man, Gegen den Strom: Memoiren eines europäischen Sozialisten (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1953), p. 187; Peter Dodge, Beyond Marxism: The Faith and Works of Hendrik de Man (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 249. 3. De Man, Gegen den Strom, pp. 184—185. 4. Hendrik de Man, Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1926), pp. 1-2. 5. Emile Vandervelde, "Jenseits des Marxismus," Die Gesellschaft 5:1 (1928), 223. 6. De Man, Zur Psychologie, p. 3. 7. Ibid., pp. 31—34; Theodor Haubach, "Zur Krisis der Revolution," Das Ziel 4 (1920), 181. 8. Guy Desolre, "Henri de Man et le marxisme: Critique critique de la critique," Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto: Revue européenne des sciences sociales 12, no. 31 (1974), 37. 9. George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 272. 10. See Günter Könke, Organisierter Kapitalismus, Sozialdemokratie und Staat:

214

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

Notes to Pages 61-66

Eine Studie zur Ideologie der sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik (1924-1932) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1987). De Man, Zur Psychologie, p. 27. Ibid., pp. 9 2 - 9 3 . Ibid., pp. 16-17. Ibid., pp. 3 4 - 4 3 , 165-183, 205-207, 227-231; Michel Brélaz, Henri de Man: Une autre idée du socialisme (Geneva: Editions des Antipodes, 1985), pp. 273-300. See Brélaz, Henri de Man, pp. 104-120; William McDougall, An Introduction to Social Psychology, 15th ed. (Boston: John W. Luce, 1923). De Man, Zur Psychologie, pp. 118-121, 4 1 0 - 4 2 4 . Henri de Man, "La crise du socialisme," in Peter Dodge, ed., A Documentary Study of Hendrik de Man, Socialist Critic of Marxism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 173. De Man, Zur Psychologie, pp. 7 8 - 8 1 ; quotation on pp. 8 0 - 8 1 . De Man, "Le contrôle ouvrier," in Dodge, Hendrik de Man, p. 133. De Man, Zur Psychologie, pp. 149, 313-334. Ibid., pp. 2 7 6 - 3 1 0 , 3 3 4 - 3 3 7 ; quotation on p. 309; de Man, Die Intellektuellen und der Sozialismus (Jena: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1926). See Brélaz, Henri de Man, pp. 309—324; James Joll, Gramsci (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977), pp. 88-105. De Man, Zur Psychologie, p. 3; Karl Mennicke, review of Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus, Die Arbeit 3 (1926), 211. Julius Leber, Schriften, Reden, Briefe, ed. Dorothea Beck and Wilfried F. Schoeller (Munich: Verlag Annedore Leber, 1976), pp. 50—51; quotation on p. 51. See the parallel comment in André Philip, Henri de Man et la crise doctrinale du socialisme (Paris: Librairie universitaire J. Gamber, 1928), pp. 2 0 - 2 1 . Letter of Claude Lévi-Strauss to Hendrik de Man, January 31, [1928], Archief Hendrik de Man/IISG, dossier 253. Letter of Carlo Mierendorff to Hendrik de Man, February 26,1926, Archief Hendrik de Man/IISG, dossier 190. Theodor Haubach, review of Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 55 (1926), 2 5 4 - 2 5 8 ; letters of Carlo Mierendorff to Hendrik de Man, February 12 and March 11, 1926, Archief Hendrik de Man/IISG, dossier 190. See August Rathmann, Ein Arbeiterleben: Erinnerungen an "Weimar und danach (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1983), pp. 122-128; Philip, Henri de Man. The minutes of the Heppenheim conference were published in Sozialismus aus dem Glauben: Verhandlungen der sozialistischen Tagung in Heppenheim a. B., Pfingstwoche 1928 (Zurich and Leipzig: Rotapfel-Verlag, 1929). See Rathmann, Ein Arbeiterleben, pp. 144-161; de Man, Gegen den Strom, p. 193; Brélaz, Henri de Man, pp. 427-448. Martin Martiny, "Die Entstehung und politische Bedeutung der Neuen Blätter für den Sozialismus und ihres Freundeskreises," Vierteljahreshefte für

Notes to Pages 66-69

215

Zeitgeschichte 25 (1977), 373-385, 391-406; Rathmann, Ein Arbeiterleben, pp. 161-170. 31. Letter of Lothar Erdmann to Hendrik de Man, December 23, 1925, Archief Hendrik de Man/IISG, dossier 190. 32. Walther Pähl, "Die Jugend und die Sozialdemokratie," SM 68 (1929), 8. 33. See François Gaucher, Contribution à l'histoire du socialisme français (1905-1933) (Paris: Presses Modernes, 1934), pp. 118-120, 123; Georges Lefranc, Le mouvement socialiste sous la Troisième République (1875— 1940) (Paris: Payot, 1963), pp. 273-274, 283-284, 405-406; Marcel Déat, "Le socialisme spiritualiste," L'étudiant socialiste, November 1930, pp. 2-6.

34. Déat, "Le socialisme spiritualiste," pp. 4, 6. See Lefranc, Le mouvement socialiste, p. 274, n. 3; Emily Hartshorne Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1973), pp. 151-152, 169-178. 35. Hendrik de Man, "Kritik des Jungsozialismus," Die Tat 19 (1927), 2 8 9 290. 36. Karl Kautsky, "De Man als Lehrer: Eine Nachlese," Die Gesellschaft 4:1 (1927), 71. 37. Hendrik de Man, "Ist Marxkritik parteischädigend?" Die Gesellschaft 3:1 (1926), 458-472. 38. Dodge, Beyond Marxism, p. 84. 39. Kautsky, "De Man als Lehrer," 72. 40. C. D. Β., review of The Psychology of Socialism, Labour Magazine 7, no. 1 (May 1928), 41. See Brélaz, Henri de Man, p. 349. 41. Robert Skidelsky, Politics and the Slump: The Labour Government of 1929-1931 (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 37-46, 61-69. 42. Oswald Mosley, Revolution by Reason (Leicester: Blackfriars Press, 1925), passim; quoted phrase on p. 12. 43. See Richard E Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 3 4 - 3 7 ; Madeleine Rebérioux and Patrick Fridenson, "Albert Thomas, pivot du réformisme français," Le mouvement social 87 (1974), 85-97; Alain Hennebicque, "Albert Thomas et la régime des usines de guerre, 1915-1917," in Patrick Fridenson, ed., 1914-1918: L'autre front (Paris: Editions Ouvrières, 1977), pp. 111144; Barthélémy Montagnon, De Jaurès à de Gaulle: Néo-capitalisme? Néosocialisme? (Paris: d'Halluin, 1969), pp. 4 1 - 4 5 ; Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," p. 86. 44. See Adrian Oldfield, "The Labour Party and Planning—1934 or 1918?" Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, no. 25 (1972), 4 1 55; Kuisel, Capitalism and the State, pp. 5 9 - 6 2 , 78-80; Georges Lefranc, Essais sur les problèmes socialistes et syndicaux (Paris: Payot, 1970), pp. 109-125; L. P. Carpenter, G. D. H. Cole: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 75-84; Hans Speier, "Emil Lederer: Leben und Werk," in Emil Lederer, Kapitalismus, Klassenstruktur und Probleme der Demokratie in Deutschland, ed. Jürgen Kocka (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979), p. 265.

216

Notes to Pages 70-76

45. Marcel Déat, review of G. Raphael, Walther Rathenau, La forge 21 (November 1919), 218. See A. Dauphin-Meunier, "Henri de Man et Walther Rathenau," Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto: Revue européenne des sciences sociales 12, no. 31 (1974), 103—120; Barthélémy Montagnon, Grandeur et servitude socialistes (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1929), pp. 188-190; Adolf Reichwein, Ein Lebensbild aus Briefen und Dokumenten, ed. Ursula Schulz (Munich: Gotthold Müller Verlag, 1974), p. 73. On Rathenau: James Joll, Three Intellectuals in Politics (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 59-129. 46. See Sir Oswald Mosley, My Life (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1972), pp. 199-203, 207-208; Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), pp. 146-150; Reichwein, Ein Lebensbild, pp. 81—89; André Philip, Le problème ouvrier aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Félix Alean, 1927), p. 2; Lefranc, Le mouvement socialiste, pp. 2 7 3 274. 47. Sidney Pollard, "Trade Union Reactions to the Economic Crisis," Journal of Contemporary History 4, no. 4 (1969), 105. 48. Montagnon, Grandeur et servitude, p. 66. See ibid., pp. 55-68; Jules Moch, Socialisme et rationalisation (Brussels: Eglantine, 1927), pp. 38-73. 49. Montagnon, De Jaurès à de Gaulle, pp. 18, 35-36; Raymond Abellio [Georges Soulès], Ma dernière mémoire, vol. 2, Les militants, 1927-1939 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1975), p. 108. 50. Philip, Henri de Man, pp. 19-50; quotation on p. 41; Marcel Déat, Perspectives socialistes (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1930), pp. 99-107; Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 196, 201. 51. De Man, Zur Psychologie, pp. 363-381. 52. Walther Pähl, Der Kampf um die Rohstoffe (Berlin: Zentral-Verlag, 1928), pp. 70-73; Déat, Perspectives socialistes, pp. 107-113; Francis Delaisi, Les deux Europes (Paris: Payot, 1928). 53. Fritz Tarnow, Warum arm sein? (Berlin: Verlagsgesellschaft des Allgemeinen Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, 1929). It should be noted, however, that Tarnow had fought and been wounded in the war: "Fritz Tarnow," Gewerkschafts-Zeitung 41 (1931), 782. 6. The Challenge of Fascism 1. Hendrik de Man, Sozialismus und Nationalfascismus (Berlin: Alfred Protte Verlag, 1931), p. 48. 2. See Theodor Haubach, "Die Richtlinien zur Wehrfrage," Die Gesellschaft 6:1 (1929), 107-109. 3. Walther Pähl, "Staatssozialismus," SM 64 (1927), 49; see also Pähl, "Der italienische Fascismus und der internationale Sozialismus," SM 66 (1928), 490-500. A never-ending debate swirls about the seriousness and consistency of Mussolini's ideological positions. Positive and negative verdicts are registered, respectively, for example, by A. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), passim; and Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (London: Weiden-

Notes to Pages 76-81

4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

217

feld & Nicolson, 1981), pp. 14-16, 23, 3 0 - 3 3 . On Rosselli: Carlo Rosselli, Socialisme libéral, trans. Stefan Priacel (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1930), pp. 101-118; Louis Vallon, review of Socialisme libéral, VS, η.s., no. 225 (February 21, 1931), 15—16; Alexander J. De Grand, In Stalin's Shadow: Angelo Tasca and the Crisis of the Left in Italy and France, 1910-1945 (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), pp. 85-90. Quoted by Peter Dodge, Beyond Marxism: The Faith and Works of Hendrik de Man (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 245. Wilhelm Dittmann, Das politische Deutschland vor Hitler (Zurich and New York: Europa Verlag, n.d. [1945]), unpaged [p. 6]. Verhandlungen des Reichstags, 5th legislative period 1930, vol. 444, 18th sess. (February 6, 1931), 740; vol. 446, 57th sess. (February 23, 1932), 2250—52; "Ein Skandal im Reichstag," Frankfurter Zeitung, February 24, 1932, 2d morning ed., p. 1. See Rudolf Hilferding, "Under der Drohung des Faschismus," Die Gesellschaft 9:1 (1932), 6 - 1 2 ; Fritz Naphtali, "Der Ablauf der Krise," Die Gesellschaft 10:1 (1933), 5 3 - 6 3 ; as well as Robert A. Gates, "German Socialism and the Crisis of 1929-33," Central European History 7 (1974), 342-353; Günter Könke, Organisierter Kapitalismus, Sozialdemokratie und Staat: Eine Studie zur Ideologie der sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik (1924-1932) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1987), pp. 195-210; Michael Held, Sozialdemokratie und Keynesianismus: Von der Weltwirtschaftskrise bis zum Godesberger Programm (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 1982), pp. 107-114, 123-131. De Man, Sozialismus und Nationalfascismus, p. 10. Carl Mierendorff, "Gesicht und Charakter der nationalsozialistischer Bewegung," Die Gesellschaft 7:1 (1930), 494. Ibid., p. 496. De Man, Sozialismus und Nationalfascismus, p. 11. Julius Leber, Schriften, Reden, Briefe, ed. Dorothea Beck and Wilfried F. Schoeller (Munich: Verlag Annedore Leber, 1976), p. 115. Marcel Déat, Perspectives socialistes (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1930), pp. 4 6 88; "Démocratie et salariat," VS, n.s., no. 177 (February 15, 1930), 5. Mierendorff, "Gesicht und Charakter," pp. 494—496; de Man, Sozialismus und Nationalfascismus, pp. 7-15. Carl Mierendorff, "Lehren der Niederlage," NB 1 (1930), 483, 484. John Strachey, "The Coming Session—and After: A Three-Party Symposium," Week-end Review, October 25, 1930, p. 571. De Man, Sozialismus und Nationalfascismus, pp. 7-17; quotations on pp. 11, 16. Carl Mierendorff, "Uberwindung des Nationalsozialismus," SM 73 (1931), 2 2 6 - 2 2 7 ; "Was ist der Nationalsozialismus," NB 2 (1931), 150. Quoted by Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), p. 232. Carl Mierendorff, "Tolerieren—und was dann?" SM 73 (1931), 315-318; quotation on p. 318.

218

Notes to Pages 8 1 - 8 6

21. Β. Montagnoli, Adrien Marquet, and Marcel Déat, Néo-socialisme? Ordre—autorité—nation, ed. Max Bonnafous (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1933), pp. 9 4 - 9 5 . 22. Leber, Schriften, Reden, Briefe, p. 182. 23. Déat, Perspectives socialistes, pp. 180—181. 24. Hendrik de Man, "Die Folgen der kapitalistischen Monopolwirtschaft," HE, January 24, 1933, p. 2: reprinted in Wende des Sozialismus (Zurich: Verband des Personals öffentlicher Dienste, 1934), p. 21. 25. Carl Mierendorff, "Die Lehre von Oldenburg," NB 2 (1931), 297-298. 26. Mierendorff, "Lehren der Niederlage," p. 482. 27. De Man, Sozialismus und Nationalfascismus, p. 55. 28. Déat, Perspectives socialistes, p. 63. Haubach's original wording was slightly different: "It is not a matter of a paradisaical but of a heroic existence": Dr. T. Haubach, "Zu einer positiven Theorie sozialistischer Aussenpolitik," Politischer Rundbrief des "Hofgeismar "-Kreises der Jungsozialisten, no. 1 (October 1924), 11, quoted by Hendrik de Man, Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1926), p. 415. 29. Quoted by Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, p. 225. 30. Carl Mierendorff, "Aufbau der neuen Linken," Marxistische Tribüne für Politik und Wirtschaft 2 (1932), 123. 31. Theodor Haubach, "Die militante Partei," NB 2 (1931), 211-212. 32. Déat, Perspectives socialistes, p. 8. 33. Pähl separated "Front Generation" and "Youth" on the eve of the Jugenddebatte of the 1931 SPD congress: Walther Pähl, "Verjüngung, Aktivierung, konstruktive Politik," NB 2 (1931), 198. But Mierendorff joined them as "We the Youth" (Wir Jungen) following the party's discussions: Carl Mierendorff, "Konkretisierung unserer Zielvorstellung!" NB 2 (1931), 466. 34. Theodor Haubach, "Die Generationenfrage und der Sozialismus," Soziologische Studien zur Politik/Wirtschaft und Kultur der Gegenwart: Alfred Weber gewidmet (Potsdam: Alfred Protte Verlag, 1930), pp. 112-113; Mierendorff, "Gesicht und Charakter," p. 498, n. 5; "Das Fazit von Leipzig," NB 2 (1931), 3 2 8 - 3 2 9 ; Montagnon, Marquet, and Déat, Néo-socialisme? pp. 2 6 - 2 8 , 3 4 - 3 5 . 35. C. E. M. Joad, "Prolegomena to Fascism," Political Quarterly 2 (1931), 98. 36. Haubach, "Die militante Partei," pp. 210-212. 37. Carl Mierendorff, "Wahlreform, die Losung der jungen Generation," NB 1 (1930), 342-349. See Mierendorff, "Wahlreform oder Faschismus?" ibid., pp. 410, 412; "Die Gründe gegen die Verhältniswahl und das bestehende Listenwahlverfahren," in Johannes Schauff, ed., Neues Wahlrecht: Beiträge zur Wahlreform (Berlin: Verlag von Georg Stilke, 1929), pp. 1 4 - 3 5 ; Leber, Schriften, Reden, Briefe, pp. 95-96. 38. Mierendorff, "Wahlreform, die Losung der jungen Generation," pp. 3 4 5 346. 39. Joad, "Prolegomena to Fascism," p. 92. 40. Ibid. 41. Allan Young, John Strachey, W. J. Brown, and Aneurin Bevan, A National

Notes to Pages 8 7 - 9 3

42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

219

Policy: An Account of the Emergency Programme Advanced by Sir Oswald Mosley, M.P. (London: Macmillan, 1931), pp. 4 5 - 4 8 ; John Strachey and C. E. M. Joad, "Parliamentary Reform: The New Party's Proposals," Political Quarterly 2 (1931), 319-336. Marcel Déat, "Jaurès et la conception socialiste de l'état," VS, n.s., no. 174 (January 25, 1930), 8; "Une enquête de La vie socialiste," VS, n.s., no. 287 (May 28, 1932), 5; "La deuxième journée du Congrès," VS, n.s., no. 288 (June 11,1932), 19. John Strachey, "The Future of Parties," Week-end Review, March 22, 1930, p. 51. Marcel Déat, "Socialisme ou fascisme," La grande revue 142 (1933), 191. Déat also likened the economic efforts of "Russian Bolshevism" to those of fascism and Roosevelt: ibid., p. 190. Quoted by John T. Marcus, French Socialism in the Crisis Years 1933-1936: Fascism and the French Left (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976), p. 29. Haubach, "Die militante Partei," pp. 212-213.

7. Visions for the Masses 1. Carl Mierendorff, "Der Weg zur Abrüstung," SM 75 (1932), 22-23; Marcel Déat, "L'Internationale et la Section française," VS, n.s., no. 253 (October 3, 1931), 7. 2. See "Der letzte Appell," Hessischer Volksfreund, September 13, 1930, p. 2; "Une série de débats autour du socialisme," VS, n.s., no. 185 (April 12, 1930), 19-20; Hendrik de Man, Gegen den Strom: Memoiren eines europäischen Sozialisten (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1953), p. 262. 3. Marcel Déat, Mémoires politiques (Paris: Denoël, 1989), p. 228; "France Is Going Fascist," The Blackshirt, no. 20 (September 9-15, 1933), 3. 4. See "Sir Oswald Mosley," Hessischer Volksfreund, May 26, 1930, p. 1; "Englands 'Retter,'" ibid., March 7, 1931, p. 3; "Itinerary for German Tour," The Blackshirt, no. 9 (June 16, 1933), insert; Richard Albrecht, Der militante Sozialdemokrat: Carlo Mierendorff 1897 bis 1943: Eine Biografie (Berlin and Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1987), pp. 159-160. 5. Hendrik de Man, Sozialismus und Nationalfascismus (Berlin: Alfred Protte Verlag, 1931), p. 33; Carl Mierendorff, "Uberwindung des Nationalsozialismus," SM 73 (1931), 227. See also Walther Pähl, "Positive Radikalisierung," NB 2 (1931), 303-304. 6. Pähl, "Positive Radikalisierung," 304; see his "Europa als Reichsidee," SM 75 (1932), 9 - 1 4 ; and the series of articles by Mierendorff in SM 74 (1931), 625-630, 841-848, 9 5 1 - 9 6 0 , 1 1 5 6 - 6 3 . 7. See Richard Breitman, German Socialism and Weimar Democracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), pp. 161-173; William Harvey Maehl, The German Socialist Party: Champion of the First Republic, 1918-1933 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986), pp. 165-181. 8. Carl Mierendorff, "Parteispaltung," SM 74 (1931), 1083.

220

Notes to Pages 93-95

9. Martin Martiny, "Die Entstehung und politische Bedeutung der Neuen Blätter für den Sozialismus und ihres Freundeskreises," Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 25 (1977), 388; Fritz Borinski, "Die Neuen Blätter für den Sozialismus," in August Rathmann, Ein Arbeiterleben: Erinnerungen an Weimar und danach (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1983), pp. 177178. 10. Sergei Tschachotin [Chakotin], "Aktivierung der Arbeiterschaft," NB 3 (1932), 151. 11. Karl Rohe, Das Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Struktur der politischen Kampfverbände zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1966), pp. 392-403; Franz Osterroth, "Erinnerungen," typescript, Archiv der sozialen Demokratie, FriedrichEbert-Stiftung, Bonn, vol. 1, "1900-1934," pp. 227-229. 12. Julius Leber, Schriften, Reden, Briefe, ed. Dorothea Beck and Wilfried K. Schoeller (Munich: Verlag Annedore Leber, 1976), p. 237. 13. Walter Glenlow [Theodor Haubach], "Politik und Agitation," NB 2 (1931), 610. According to Martin Martiny, Haubach wrote under the pseudonym Walter Glenlow: "Die Entstehung . . . der Neuen Blätter," p. 390, η. 99. Richard Albrecht asserts on the contrary that Mierendorff used this nom de plume: Der militante Sozialdemokrat, p. 273, η. 12. The style of the article by "Glenlow" is Haubach's. 14. Carl Mierendorff, "Die Lehre der Hessenwahl: Aktive Auszenpolitik," SM 74 (1931), 1160. 15. See Professor Dr. S. Tschachotin and Dr. C. Mierendorff, Grundlagen und Formen politischer Propaganda (Magdeburg: Bundesvorstand des Reichsbanners Schwarz-Rot-Gold, 1932), pp. 4 - 7 , 11-22; Richard Albrecht, "Symbolkampf in Deutschland 1932," Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 22 (1986), 523-529. 16. Serge Chakotin, The Rape of the Masses: The Psychology of Totalitarian Political Propaganda, trans. E. W. Dickes (New York: Alliance Books, 1940), pp. 112, 115. 17. See Maurice De Wilde, De Nieuwe Orde, België in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, 3 (Antwerp and Amsterdam: Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1982), p. 85; Jean-Paul Joubert, Révolutionnaires de la S.F.I.O.: Marceau Pivert et le pivertisme (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977), p. 99; Jean Rabaut, Tout est possible! Les "gauchistes" français, 1920-1944 (Paris: Denoël, 1974), photograph "Militants pivertistes" following p. 192; Bernard Ménager et al., eds., Guy Mollet, un camarade en république (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1987), frontispiece and photograph "Guy Mollet lors d'un congrès national du Parti socialiste S.F.I.O.," following p. 262. And in the New World: "The Mohegan Colony still exists—it's right near Peekskill, New York. In the 1920s, a number of anarchists and then later some socialists and communists bought land to set up summer homes, but some people live there all year round. They had Attica School, the Ferrer School. Later there was one called Three Arrows, which the socialists built farther up in New York." Daniel Bell in Howard

Notes to Pages 95-100

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

221

Simons, Jewish Times: Voices of the American Jewish Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), p. 69. Tschachotin and Mierendorff, Grundlagen, p. 4; see Mierendorff, "Gesicht und Charakter der nationalsozialistischen Bewegung," Oie Gesellschaft 7:1 (1930), 500. Tschachotin and Mierendorff, Grundlagen, pp. 4 - 5 , 8 - 9 ; quotation on p. 9. See Chakotin, Rape of the Masses, pp. 172-176; Carl Mierendorff, "Die Bedeutung der neuen Propaganda," NB 3 (1932), 517-518. Walther Pähl, "Was bedeutet die Eiserne Front?" SM 75 (1932), 228; Carl Mierendorff, "Die Rettung Deutschlands," SM 76 (1932), 577. Tschachotin and Mierendorff, Grundlagen, p. 8. Osterroth, "Erinnerungen," 1:249. Tschachotin and Mierendorff, Grundlagen, p. 3. "Vorschläge zur Reformierung der Parteipropaganda," in Martiny, "Die Entstehung . . . der Neuen Blätter," p. 416. Walter Glenlow [Theodor Haubach], "Geist und Technik des Preussenwahlkampfes," NB 3 (1932), 232-239; K. Wiegner, "Mit Höltermann im Hessenwahlkampf," Das Reichsbanner 9, no. 25 (June 18, 1932), 194; Carl Mierendorff, "Die Freiheitspfeile siegen in Hessen," NB 3 (1932), 3 8 6 - 3 8 8 ; S. Tschachotin, "Das hessische Experiment," Deutsche Republik 6 (1931— 32), 1355-58. Pähl, "Was bedeutet die Eiserne Front?" p. 231. Rohe, Das Reichsbanner, pp. 4 0 9 - 4 1 0 . See Martiny, "Die Entstehung . . . der Neuen Blätter," pp. 389, 416. See Mierendorff, "Die Bedeutung der neuen Propaganda," pp. 517-521; Rohe, Das Reichsbanner, pp. 4 0 2 - 4 0 3 ; Siegfried Höxter, "Strategie des Angriffs," Deutsche Republik 6 (1931-32), 1645-52. Carl Mierendorff, "Die Republik von morgen," SM 76 (1932), 742-743. Rohe, Das Reichsbanner, pp. 426—439. Retrospectively Leber viewed the failure to resist Papen's coup as a disaster for the SPD, but it is not clear from the published collection of his writings that he made this judgment at the time: Leber, Schriften, Reden, Briefe, pp. 184-185, 238-240. Mierendorff's carefully worded interpretation of the party leadership's actions leaves uncertain his own opinion: Carl Mierendorff, "Sommer der Entscheidungen," SM 76 (1932), 656. Hagen Schulze, ed., Anpassung oder Widerstand? Aus den Akten des Parteivorstands der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 1932/33, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, suppl. 4 (Bonn and Bad Godesberg: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1975), p. 92; Mierendorff, "Die Republik von morgen," p. 739. Carl Mierendorff, "Was ist ausserparlamentarischer Kampf?" Deutsche Republik 7 (1932-33), 487-488. Ibid., p. 489; Carl Mierendorff, "Der sozialistische Weg," SM 76 (1932), 992. Schulze, Anpassung oder Widerstand? p. 47. Mierendorff, "Der sozialistische Weg," p. 992. J. Plumyène and R. Lasierra, Les fascismes français, 1923-1963 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963), pp. 15-50.

222

Notes to Pages 100-106

38. Quoted by Emily Hartshorne Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1973), p. 99. 39. Ibid., pp. 1 0 2 - 1 0 4 ; Déat, Mémoires, pp. 2 3 6 - 2 3 7 ; Louis Vallon, "L'action socialiste devant la crise," VS, n.s., no. 258 (November 7, 1931), 5. 40. Déat, Mémoires, p. 203. 41. Marcel Déat, "Problèmes confédéraux et problèmes socialistes," VS, n.s., no. 159 (October 12, 1929), 10. 42. Ibid.; Déat, Mémoires, pp. 2 3 3 - 2 3 4 ; Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," pp. 1 0 9 - 1 1 1 ; Gilbert Ziebura, Léon Blum: Theorie und Praxis einer sozialistischen Politik (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1963), vol. 1, pp. 3 5 9 372. 43. Déat, Mémoires, pp. 2 1 7 - 2 1 8 . 44. Paul Klotz, "En faisant du tour des Fédérations," VS, n.s., no. 319 (February 25, 1933), 12. See George Lefranc, Le mouvement socialiste sous la Troisième République (1875-1940) (Paris: Payot, 1963), pp. 2 9 2 - 2 9 3 , n. 1; Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," pp. 1 0 4 - 1 0 5 . 45. "Une enquête de La vie socialiste," VS, n.s., no. 287 (May 28, 1932), 5. See Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," pp. 111-113; Lefranc, Le mouvement socialiste, pp. 292—294. 46. Ziebura, Léon Blum, 1:426—440; Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," pp. 113—116; Peter J. Larmour, The French Radical Party in the 1930s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), pp. 1 2 6 - 1 3 0 . 47. Ziebura, Léon Blum, 1:440—444; Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," pp. 115-118. 48. Marcel Déat, "Méditations sur les problèmes du jour," VS, n.s., no. 326 (April 15, 1933), 6. 49. Β. Montagnon, Adrien Marquet, and Marcel Déat, Néo-socialisme? Ordre—autorité—nation, ed. Max Bonnafous (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1933), p. 57. 50. Ibid., p. 60; see Tony Judt, La réconstruction du parti socialiste, 1921-1926 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1976), pp. 8 7 - 8 8 . 51. Montagnon, Marquet, and Déat, Néo-socialisme? p. 20; Marcel Déat, "Socialisme ou fascisme," La grande revue 142 (1933), 192—193. 52. Philippe Burrin, La dérive fasciste: Doriot, Déat, Bergery, 1933-1945 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986), p. 138. Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," p. 127, puts the number of parliamentarians at thirty-nine; thirtyfive is the figure given by Stanley Grossman, "Neo-Socialism: A Study in Political Metamorphosis" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1969), p. 129. See also Déat, Mémoires, pp. 2 8 2 - 2 8 3 . 53. Lefranc, Le mouvement socialiste, p. 292. 54. Burrin, La dérive fasciste, pp. 138—140, 155—156; Grossman, "NeoSocialism," pp. 1 3 9 - 1 4 8 ; Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," pp. 2 0 8 - 2 1 4 . 55. "Sur les équipes techniques," VS, n.s., no. 355 (December 23, 1933), 15. 56. Marcel Déat, "Crise de réadaptation," VS, n.s., no. 359 (January 20, 1934),

Notes to Pages 106-112

57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

62.

63.

64. 65.

66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

223

10—11; Louis Mingaud, "La réunion de Marcel Déat à Marseille," VS, η.s., no. 361 (February 3, 1934), 15; Plumyène and Lasierra, Les fascismes, p. 90. See Marcel Déat, "Problèmes politiques et questions practiques," VS, η.s., no. 364 (February 24, 1934), 2; "Et maintenant, travaillons," VS, n.s., no. 365 (March 3, 1934), 2 - 3 . See Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934-1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 1 - 6 ; Larmour, The French Radical Party, pp. 141-143. Quoted by Plumyène and Lasierra, Les fascismes, p. 88. See Déat, Mémoires, pp. 3 0 2 - 3 0 4 ; Antoine Prost, Les anciens combattants et la société française, vol. 1, Histoire (Paris: Presses de la Fondation National des Sciences Politiques, 1977), pp. 1 5 9 - 1 7 0 . Lefranc, Le mouvement socialiste, p. 311, n. 1. On the Front commun: Burrin, La dérive fasciste, pp. 101-117. On the "Complot de l'Acaçia": J.-M. Aimot, "Paul Marion et le 'Complot de l'Acaçia,'" Défense de l'occident, no. 34 (June-July 1956), 7 0 - 8 0 ; Dieter Wolf, Die Doriot-Bewegung: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des französischen Faschismus (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1967), pp. 1 2 0 - 1 2 2 . Georges Lefranc, "Histoire d'un groupe du Parti socialiste S.F.I.O.: Révolution constructive (1930-1938)," Mélanges d'histoire économique et sociale en hommage au professeur Antony Babel à l'occasion de son soixantequinzième anniversaire (Geneva: Imprimerie de la Tribune de Genève, 1963), vol. 2, pp. 4 1 1 - 4 1 6 ; Le mouvement socialiste, p. 305; Raymond Abellio [Georges Soulès], Ma dernière mémoire, vol. 2, Les militants, 19271939 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1975), pp. 2 2 6 - 2 2 8 . Claude Harmel, "Le Front Populaire contre le Planisme," Etudes sociales et syndicales, no. 120 (September 1965), 4 - 1 0 ; René Belin, Du Secrétariat de la CGT au gouvernement de Vichy (Mémoires, 1933-1942) (Paris: Editions Albatros, 1978), pp. 4 6 - 4 7 . See Ellen Wilkinson and Edward Conze, Why Fascism? (London: Selwyn & Blount, 1934), p. 58. Sir Oswald Mosley, "Mr. Lloyd George and Unemployment," Labour Magazine 7 (1928-29), 559. See Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), pp. 177-178. See John Maynard Keynes, Collected Writings, vol. 20, Activities, 1929— 1931: Rethinking Employment and Unemployment Policies, ed. Donald Moggridge (London: Macmillan and Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 3 1 2 - 3 1 5 , 4 7 3 - 4 7 6 . Cabinet Papers 24/211, Unemployment Policy (1930) Committee, "Report," p. 464, Public Record Office, Kew, Richmond, Surrey. Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 2 2 8 - 2 3 1 ; quotation on p. 231. Quoted by Nicholas Mosley, Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley, 1896-1933 (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1982), pp. 1 5 2 , 1 6 7 . The Labour Party, Report of the 30th Annual Conference (London: Transport House, 1930), p. 203. See N. Mosley, Rules of the Game, pp. 147-153; Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley,

224

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

Notes to Pages 112-119

pp. 2 2 4 - 2 2 8 ; W. J. Brown, So Far . . . (London: Allen and Unwin, 1943), pp. 156-159; Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan: A Biography, vol. 1, 1897— 1945 (New York: Atheneum, 1963), pp. 121-129. Quoted by Anne Wolrige Gordon, Peter Howard: Life and Letters (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), p. 51. A National Policy for National Emergency: Text of Manifesto Issued December 7th, 1930 (n.p., n.d.), unpaged [p. 4], N. Mosley, Rules of the Game, pp. 169-174; Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 236-244; Brown, So Far . .., pp. 159, 162; Foot, Aneurin Bevan, 1:131-133. See Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 247-250, 263-271. Ibid., pp. 250-253. Quoted by Gordon, Peter Howard, p. 51. Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 253-262; Hugh Thomas, John Strachey (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 101-108; N. Mosley, Rules of the Game, pp. 187-191. Quoted by Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, p. 278. Excerpt from Forgan's letter: N. Mosley, Rules of the Game, p. 197. Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 265-280; quotation on p. 275; N. Mosley, Rules of the Game, pp. 184-185. Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain, new ed. (London: Jeffcoats, 1934), p. 32. Sir Oswald Mosley, "Old Parties or New?" Political Quarterly 3 (1932), 31. See Mosley, "Have We a Policy—Yes!" Action 1, no. 12 (December 24, 1931), 1-2. See Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 224, 238, 284-285; N. Mosley, Rules of the Game, pp. 207-212. Mosley, "Old Parties or New?" pp. 30-31. Ibid., p. 30. See Mosley, The Greater Britain, pp. 178-179. Ibid., pp. 185-186. Sir Oswald Mosley, "On to Fascist Revolution," The Blackshirt, no. 1 (February 1933), 1. See "Editorial," ibid., no. 7 (May 16, 1933), 2. Sir Oswald Mosley, "Hitler—The New Man of Germany," The Blackshirt, no. 2 (March 1933), 2. N. Mosley, Rules of the Game, pp. 215-219, 2 2 3 - 2 2 8 , 2 3 2 - 2 5 4 ; Ellen Wilkinson, Peeps at Politicians (London: Philip Allan, 1930), p. 38. 8. Planning

1. Hendrik de Man, Wende des Sozialismus (Zurich: Verband des Personals öffentlicher Dienste, 1934), p. 8. 2. A National Policy for National Emergency: Text of Manifesto Issued December 7th, 1930 (n.p., n.d.), unpaged [p. 1]; Carl Mierendorff, "Was ist ausserparlamentarischer Kampf?" Deutsche Republik 7 (1932-33), 489. 3. De Man, Wende des Sozialismus, pp. 23, 26. 4. Wladimir Woytinsky, "International Measures to Create Employment: A

Notes to Pages 119-123

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

225

Remedy for the Depression," International Labour Review 25 (1932), 1 22; "Internationale Arbeitsbeschaffung," Gewerkschafts-Zeitung 41 (1931), 721-723. Francis Delaisi, "La restauration de l'Europe par l'application d'un plan quinquennal," L'état moderne 5 (1932), 2 7 9 - 2 9 4 ; B. W. Schaper, Albert Thomas: Trente ans de réformisme social (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1959), pp. 321-326, 332-334. See W. Woytinsky, "Ein neues Programm zur Bekämpfung der Krise in England," Gewerkschafts-Zeitung 41 (1931), 5 6 3 - 5 6 6 ; Charles Loch Mowat, Britain between the Wars, 1918-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 2 6 0 - 2 6 2 ; E. Lederer, Wege aus der Krise (Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1931), pp. 2 6 - 2 8 . Quotations from Marcel Déat, "L'Internationale et la Section française," VS, n.s., no. 263 (October 3, 1931), 7; "La crise allemande. II: La crise économique et l'évolution intérieure," VS, n.s., no. 257 (October 31,1931), 12. See Marcel Déat, Mémoires politiques (Paris: Denoël, 1989), p. 225; "Les problèmes du chômage. I: De Zurich à Genève," VS, n.s., no. 225 (February 21, 1931), 6. Carl Mierendorff, "Die Lehre der Hessen wähl: Aktive Auszenpolitik," SM 74 (1931), 1162. See his earlier comments: "Brünings einzige Chance," SM 74 (1931), 630; "Die Unbelehrbaren," SM 74 (1931), 845. Hendrik de Man, "Die Planwirtschaft," Soziale Revue (Prague) 2 (1932), 394. Cabinet Papers 24/209, Unemployment Policy, Memorandum accompanying letter of Sir Oswald Mosley to the Prime Minister, January 23, 1930, 235, Public Record Office, Kew, Richmond, Surrey. Allan Young, John Strachey, W. J. Brown, and Aneurin Bevan, A National Policy: An Account of the Emergency Programme Advanced by Sir Oswald Mosley, M.P. (London: Macmillan, 1931), pp. 7-16. Quotations successively from Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary, vol. 2 , 1 9 2 6 1930, ed. Keith Middlemas (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 258; A National Policy for National Emergency, [p. 2]; Cabinet Papers 24/209, Unemployment Policy, Memorandum, p. 234. See Ross McKibbin, "The Economic Policy of the Second Labour Government, 1929-1931," Past and Present, no. 68 (1975), 102-109. John Maynard Keynes, Collected Writings, vol. 20, Activities, 1929-1931: Rethinking Employment and Unemployment Policies, ed. Donald Moggridge (London: Macmillan and Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 475. See Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan: A Biography, vol. 1, 1897-1945 (New York: Atheneum, 1963), pp. 120-121; Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), pp. 517-518. The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton: 1918-1940, 1945-1960, ed. Ben Pimlott (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986), p. 133. A National Policy for National Emergency, [p. 3]. See Young et al., A National Policy, pp. 19-29. Alan Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, vol. 1, Trade Union Leader, 1881-1940 (London: Heinemann, 1960), pp. 4 4 2 - 4 4 7 ; David

226

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Notes to Pages 123-127 Howell, A Lost Left: Three Studies in Socialism and Nationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 2 6 0 - 2 6 2 , 2 6 8 - 2 7 0 . See Hugh Thomas, John Strachey (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 1 0 1 - 1 0 6 ; Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals, Manifesto, ed. C. E. M. Joad (London: Allen and Unwin, 1934), pp. 7 6 - 7 8 . Walther Pähl, "Die Krise des Sozialismus und die Sozialisierungsfrage," Die Arbeits (1931), 845, 852. See Michael Schneider, Das Arbeitsbeschaffungsprogramm des ADGB: Zur gewerkschaftlichen Politik in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik (Bonn and Bad Godesberg: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1975), pp. 5 9 - 8 8 ; Michael Held, Sozialdemokratie und Keynesianismus. Von der Weltwirtschaftskrise bis zum Godesberger Programm (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 1982), pp. 1 1 4 - 1 2 3 . See Held, Sozialdemokratie und Keynesianismus, pp. 1 2 3 - 1 3 1 ; Carl Mierendorff, "Bedrohtes Deutschland," SM 75 (1932), 2 2 0 - 2 2 1 ; E. Lederer, Planwirtschaft (Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1932), pp. 1 2 - 1 6 . Harold James, "The SPD and the Economic Depression, 1930—1933," in Roger Fletcher, ed., Bernstein to Brandt: A Short History of German Social Democracy (London: Edward Arnold, 1987), p. 153. See "Der Umbau der Wirtschaft," Gewerkschafts-Zeitung 42 (1932), 4 1 8 - 4 2 0 ; Schneider, Das Arbeitsbeschaffungsprogramm, pp. 8 9 - 1 0 2 ; Walther Pähl, "Die Wirtschaftskrise und die Sozialisierungsfrage," NB 3 (1932), 2 4 3 - 2 5 1 ; Carl Mierendorff, "Die Republik von morgen," SM 76 (1932), 7 4 2 - 7 4 3 . Pähl, "Die Wirtschaftskrise," pp. 2 4 2 - 2 4 3 . Egon Wertheimer, "Sozialismus für unsere Generation?" Die Gesellschaft 3:1 (1926), 4 5 6 - 4 5 7 . Peter Dodge, Beyond Marxism: The Faith and Works of Hendrik de Man (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), pp. 1 2 9 - 1 3 0 ; Michel Brélaz, Henri de Man: Une autre idée du socialisme (Geneva: Editions des Antipodes, 1985), pp. 631—636; Mieke Claeys—Van Haegendoren, Hendrik de Man: Een Biografie (Antwerp: Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1972), pp. 177-179. The Hamburger Echo articles appeared on January 17, 19, 20, 24, 25, and 26, 1933. De Man, Wende des Sozialismus, p. 6; Gegen den Strom: Memoiren eines europäischen Sozialisten (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1953), pp. 2 0 5 - 2 0 6 . See Dodge, Beyond Marxism, p. 126; Brélaz, Henri de Man, pp. 6 9 3 - 6 9 4 . Dodge, Beyond Marxism, pp. 1 5 2 - 1 5 3 ; Brélaz, Henri de Man, pp. 6 3 9 646, 6 9 2 - 6 9 5 ; Claeys-Van Haegendoren, Hendrik de Man, pp. 185-187. Dodge, Beyond Marxism, pp. 1 3 0 - 1 3 2 ; Brélaz, Henri de Man, pp. 6 8 7 691, 7 0 1 - 7 1 0 ; Claeys-Van Haegendoren, Hendrik de Man, pp. 1 8 3 - 1 8 5 . Introduction to Hendrik de Man, "Wende des Sozialismus," HE, January 1 7 , 1 9 3 3 , p. 2. See Henri de Man, "Le capitalisme libéral," reprint from Bulletin d'information et de documentation de la Banque Nationale de Belgique, 6:1, no. 8 (1931); A. Dauphin-Meunier, "Henri de Man et Walther Rathenau," Ca-

Notes to Pages 127-130

34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

111

hiers Vilfredo Pareto: Revue européenne des sciences sociales 12, no. 31 (1974), 103-120; Pähl, "Die Wirtschaftskrise," pp. 243-251. Brélaz, Henri de Man, p. 686. Note soumise par H. de Man au Bureau du C.G. du P.O.B, en vue de sa séance du 27 octobre 1933, pp. 4, 6, Archief Hendrik de Man/IISG, dossier 422. Peter Dodge, A Documentary Study of Hendrik de Man, Socialist Critic of Marxism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 292, 293, 298. See Brélaz, Henri de Man, pp. 695—701. See, for example, de Man's comments as reported in La Wallonie (Liège), June 18,1934, and Le jour (Verviers), July 18,1934, and transcribed as "En route pour le Plan" from a RESEF broadcast, October 25, 1934, Archief Hendrik de Man/IISG, dossiers 361, 363, 365, respectively. De Man, Après coup (Brussels: Editions de la Toison d'Or, 1941), pp. 2 0 5 206. Quoted by Held, Sozialdemokratie und Keynesianismus, p. 128. Henri de Man, "Un plan économique pour la Belgique," Mouvement syndical belge, no. 11 (November 20, 1933), 297. See Michel Brélaz, "Le Plan du Travail suisse," Bulletin de l'Association pour l'étude de l'oeuvre d'Henri de Man, no. 12 (December 1984), 4 5 - 6 6 ; Erik Hansen, "Depression Decade Crisis: Social Democracy and Planisme in Belgium and the Netherlands, 1929—1939," Journal of Contemporary History 16 (1981), 292-322. On Blum see Jean-François Biard, Le socialisme devant ses choix: La naissance de l'idée de plan (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1985), pp. 185— 196, 207-218, 293—309. On French partisans of planisme: Georges Lefranc, "Henri de Man et le planisme en France: Une série de déceptions," Bulletin de l'Association pour l'étude de l'oeuvre d'Henri de Man, no. 12 (December 1984), 37—44; Bernard Georges and Denise Tintant, with MarieAnne Renauld, Léon Jouhaux dans le mouvement syndical français (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979), pp. 9 2 - 9 9 ; René Belin, Du Secrétariat de la CGT au gouvernement de Vichy (Mémoires, 1933-1942) (Paris: Editions Albatros, 1978), pp. 4 5 - 4 8 . Quoted in "Henri de Man et Marcel Déat," VS, n.s., no. 358 (January 13, 1934), 4. Marcel Déat, "Le Plan belge et nous," VS , n.s., no. 357 (January 6, 1934), 3; "Pour l'élaboration d'un Plan . . . d'un Plan unique," VS, n.s., no. 395 (November 24, 1934), 6. Note soumise par H. de Man au Bureau du C.G. du P.O.B., p. 3. De Man, Après coup, p. 236. The parallel with Déat was absent from de Man's post-1945 memoirs. Marcel Déat, "Offensive générale sur le Front du Plan," VS, n.s., no. 399 (December 22, 1934), 1; "Le socialisme devant la crise," ibid., p. 11. Déat, "Le socialisme devant la crise," p. 10. De Man, Après coup, p. 231. See ibid., pp. 212-217, 2 3 3 - 2 3 5 ; Brélaz, Henri de Man, pp. 714—726; Dodge, Beyond Marxism, pp. 156-159; Claeys-Van Haegendoren, Hendrik de Man, pp. 2 0 6 - 2 1 0 ; Hansen,

228

50. 51.

52.

53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

Notes to Pages 131-134

"Depression Decade Crisis," pp. 306-314; Raymond Polin, "Politique et économique dans le Parti ouvrier belge," in Inventaires II: L'économique et le politique (Paris: Librairie Félix Alean, 1937), pp. 134,140-141. Dodge, Beyond Marxism, pp. 161-167; quotation on p. 166; de Man, Après coup, pp. 237-247; Claeys-Van Haegendoren, Hendrik de Man, pp. 216-225. Ille Conférence international des Plans du Travail, Abbaye de Pontigny, 23— 24 Octobre 1937 (Brussels: Editions "Labor," 1937), p. 40. See Dodge, Beyond Marxism, pp. 167-169; Claeys-Van Haegendoren, Hendrik de Man, pp. 226-229; Polin, "Politique et économique," pp. 144-145; Henri de Man, "La résorption du chômage," L'Europe nouvelle 19 (1936), 425-427. "Les résolutions de Ile Congrès du Parti socialiste de France," VS, n.s., no. 377 (May 26, 1934), 2. See "Le Plan d'Adrien Marquet," VS, n.s., no. 369 (March 31, 1934), 3 - 4 ; "Le plan d'action des '214,'" VS, n.s., no. 371 (April 14, 1934), 13-15; Robert Bobin, "Confrontation des 'Plans,'" VS, n.s., no. 372 (April 28, 1934), 8; Julian Jackson, The Politics of Depression in France, 1932-1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 86-88. Marcel Déat, "Les élections cantonales et nous," VS, n.s., no. 387 (September 29, 1934), 5. See Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934-1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 6 - 7 . Déat, "Les élections cantonales et nous," p. 6. Déat, Mémoires, pp. 301, 316—317; B. Montagnon, Essai de synthèse néosocialiste (Paris: PSdF, 1935), p. 4. Marcel Déat, "Pour un rassemblement autour du Plan," L'état moderne 8 (1935), 299-300. Georges Lefranc, Essais sur les problèmes socialistes et syndicaux (Paris: Payot, 1970), p. 210; Lucien Laurat, "Mémoires d'un planiste (19321939)," Etudes sociales et syndicales, no. 120 (September 1965), 22. Jackson, The Politics of Depression, pp. 156—163; The Popular Front, pp. 79-80. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 208. On the debate surrounding this view see Robert Wohl, "French Fascism, Both Right and Left: Reflections on the Sternhell Controversy," Journal of Modern History 63 (1991), 91-98. Franz Grosse, "Deutschland-Italien," Gewerkschafts-Zeitung 43 (1933), 225—227; quotation on p. 227. See Grosse, "Henri de Man et les sociauxdémocrates allemands avant 1933," Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto: Revue européenne des sciences sociales 12, no. 31 (1974), 126; "Wirtschaftssystem und Wirtschaftspolitik des italienischen Faschismus," Gewerkschafts-Zeitung 42 (1932), 632-633, 651-652. Walther Pähl, "Der Feiertag der Arbeit und die sozialistische Arbeiterschaft," Gewerkschafts-Zeitung 43 (1933), 259-261; quotations on pp. 259, 261. August Rathmann, Ein Arbeiterleben: Erinnerungen an Weimar und danach

Notes to Pages 135-138

63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68. 69.

70.

71.

72.

73. 74. 75.

76. 77.

229

(Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1983), p. 191; Walther Pähl, Weltkampf um Rohstoffe (Leipzig: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, 1940), pp. 282-283. See Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left, pp. 192-193. Note soumise par H. de Man au Bureau du C.G. du P.O.B., p. 13. Barthélémy Montagnon, Grandeur et servitude socialistes (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1929), pp. 154-159; "Shall Jews Drag Britain to War?" The Blackshirt, no. 28 (November 4 - 1 0 , 1933), 1. For example, Marcel Déat, "La nouvelle épouvante de Léon Blum," VS, n.s., no. 360 (January 27,1934), 5 - 6 . G. Lefranc, "La lutte contre le fascisme," Les problèmes d'ensemble du fascisme: Semaine d'études d'Uccle-Bruxelles (10-15 Juillet 1934), Publications de l'Institut Supérieure Ouvrier, 6 (Paris: Centre Confédérale d'Education Ouvrière, 1935), p. 34. "Fascism and America," The Blackshirt, no. 15 (August 5-11, 1933), 1. Henri de Man, Corporatisme et socialisme (Brussels: Editions Labor, 1935), pp. 32-34; Louis Vallon, "La réforme de l'économie," VS, n.s., no. 377 (May 26, 1934), 12; Marcel Déat, "Corporatisme et liberté," Archives de philosophie du droit et de sociologie juridique 8, no. 3 - 4 (1938), 41. G. Lefranc, "Le mouvement ouvrier devant le corporatisme," Crise et Plan (Quinze conférences et études sur le Plan de la C.G.T.), 3d ed., Publications de l'Institut Supérieur Ouvrier, 9 (Paris: Centre Confédérale d'Education Ouvrière, 1935), pp. 88-94; Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left, pp. 1 9 6 199. Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left, p. 208. On this question see Dick Pels, "Hendrik de Man and the Ideology of Planism," International Review of Social History 32 (1987), 217-223. Burrin notes this in the French case: La dérive fasciste, p. 261. Buset, as well as Isabelle Blume, another of de Man's planiste confederates, arrived in London at the end of June 1940 having "a single goal: to continue the war": Marcel-Henri Jaspar, Souvenirs sans rétouche (Paris: Fayard, 1968), pp. 4 4 8 - 4 4 9 . On socialist planners in Britain see Elizabeth Durbin, New Jerusalems: The Labour Party and the Economics of Democratic Socialism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985); and Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour People: Leaders and Lieutenants: Hardie to Kinnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 107-118. Letter of G. D. H. Cole to Hendrik de Man, February 22, 1936, Archief Hendrik de Man/IISG, dossier 227; Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left, p. 208. Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche: L'idéologie fasciste en France (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983), pp. 210-211; Jackson, The Popular Front, p. 48. "J. M. Keynes' Conversion to Fascist Economics," The Blackshirt, no. 13 (July 22-28, 1933), 1; "Fascism and America," ibid., no. 15 (August 5-11, 1933), 1; "'Dickie' Mouse: 'Sir Stafford Explains,'" ibid., no. 20 (September 9-15, 1933), 1; "Forward from Chaos," ibid., no. 36 (December 30, 1933January 5, 1934), 4. Hie Conférence international des Plans du Travail, p. 13. Dodge, Hendrik de Man, p. 303.

230

Notes to Pages 138-144

78. Konferenz zur Besprechung der Probleme der Planwirtschaft, 14. bis 16. September 1934, Abbaye de Pontigny (Frankreich) (Zurich: Verlag VPOD, [1934]), p. 3; list of participants, pp. 7 6 - 7 7 ; Hie Conférence international des Plans du Travail, p. 13. 79. See letter of the Secretary to Hans Oprecht, August 30, 1938, and letter of Hans Oprecht to Hendrik de Man, September 1, 1939, Archief Hendrik de Man/IISG, dossiers 227 and 229, respectively. 80. Jean-Pierre Azéma, From Munich to the Liberation, 1938-1944, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press/Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1984), p. 16.

9· A Surrender to History 1. Marcel Déat, Mémoires politiques (Paris: Denoël, 1989), p. 383. 2. Sir Oswald Mosley, My Life (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1972), p. 401. 3. Henri de Man, "Faut-il sacrifier la paix à la liberté?" in Peter Dodge, ed., A Documentary Study of Hendrik de Man, Socialist Critic of Marxism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 309. 4. See Peter Dodge, Beyond Marxism: The Faith and Works of Hendrik de Man (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), pp. 169-170; Déat, Mémoires, pp. 3 9 6 - 3 9 9 ; Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985 (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 140-143. 5. See Claude Varennes [Georges Albertini], Le destin de Marcel Déat (Paris: Editions Janmaray, 1948), p. 21; Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), pp. 4 4 0 - 4 4 1 ; Nicholas Mosley, Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family, 1933-1980 (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1983), pp. 153-156. 6. Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 4 4 6 - 4 4 9 , quotation on p. 446; Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, pp. 193—198. 7. Henri de Man, Après coup (Brussels: Editions de la Toison d'Or, 1941), pp. 2 5 9 - 2 6 2 , 3 1 4 - 3 1 5 , quotations on pp.261 and 314; Michel Brélaz, Léopold III et Henri de Man (Geneva: Editions des Antipodes, 1988), pp. 86, 103. 8. Déat, Mémoires, pp. 317-318, 4 0 8 - 4 1 0 . 9. Ibid., pp. 4 0 9 - 4 1 0 ; Philippe Burrin, La dérive fasciste: Doriot, Déat, Bergery, 1933-1945 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986), pp. 2 5 6 - 2 6 1 ; Marcel Déat and Claude Bonnier, Pour une politique de l'air (Paris: Editions du Journal "La Concorde," 1937), pp. 95-113. 10. Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain, new ed. (London: Jeffcoats, 1934), pp. 155-156. 11. Mosley, My Life, p. 392. 12. See D. S. Lewis, Illusions of Grandeur: Mosley, Fascism, and British Society, 1931-1981 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 188-190. 13. De Man, Après coup, pp. 262-263. See David Owen Kieft, Belgium's Return to Neutrality: An Essay in the Frustrations of Small Power Diplomacy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).

Notes to Pages 144-149

231

14. Marcel Déat, "La lutte pour la paix," Paris-Demain, March 28, 1936, p. 2. See in the same journal "L'ouverture de la campagne électorale par Marcel Déat," April 4, 1936, p. 2; and Déat, "L'Europe en pleine crise," April 18, 1936, p. 2. 15. Marcel Déat, Le Front Populaire au tournant (Paris: Imprimeries Dubois et Bauer, 1937). 16. Marcel Déat, "Pour une action cohérente," L'état moderne 12 (1939), 327328. 17. De Man, Après coup, pp. 294-307, quotations on pp. 296 and 300; "Van Zeeland's Achievements and Failures [1939]," Bulletin de l'Association pour l'étude de l'oeuvre d'Henri de Man, no. 13 (November 1985), 151-152, quotation on p. 152. See Dodge, Beyond Marxism, pp. 173-187; Mieke Claeys-Van Haegendoren, Hendrik de Man: Een Biografie (Antwerp: Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1972), pp. 263-264, 272-274. 18. G. D. H. Cole, "The Lesson for Democracy [1939]," Bulletin de l'Association pour l'étude de l'oeuvre d'Henri de Man, no. 13 (November 1985), 156. On Spaak, see de Man, Après coup, pp. 296-299, 306-307. 19. See Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, pp. 92-93, 100-111, 122, 132; Lewis, Illusions of Grandeur, pp. 62-67, 90-110; Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 317-333, 379-392; John D. Brewer, Mosley's Men: The British Union of Fascists in the West Midlands (Aldershot: Gower, 1984), pp. 72-113. 20. Home Office, Advisory Committee to Consider Appeals against Orders of Internment, Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, Case heard on July 2, 1940, HO 283/13, p. 12, microfilm, Public Record Office, Kew, Richmond, Surrey; Oswald Mosley, Tomorrow We Live, 3d ed. (London: Greater Britain Publications, n.d. [1938]), pp. 3-56. 21. Mosley, Tomorrow We Live, pp. 67-68. 22. Déat, "La lutte pour la paix," Paris-Demain, March 28, 1936, p. 2; see in the same journal "L'ouverture de la campagne électorale par Marcel Déat," Aprii 4,1936, p. 2. 23. De Man, "Faut-il sacrifier la paix?" p. 308; Mosley, Tomorrow We Live, p. 75. 24. Henri de Man, "Mission de paix hiver 1938-1939," in Le "Dossier Léopold III" et autres documents sur la periode de la seconde guerre mondiale, ed. Michel Brélaz (Geneva: Editions des Antipodes, 1989), pp. 51-62; Brélaz, Léopold III, pp. 85-95; Henri de Man, "Pour une politique socialiste de paix [1938]," Bulletin de l'Association pour l'étude de l'oeuvre d'Henri de Man, no. 13 (November 1985), 163-169. 25. Ν. Mosley, Beyond the Pale, p. 155. See Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 436-441. 26. Quoted by Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 437-438. 27. Marcel Déat, "Mourir pour Dantzig?" L'Oeuvre, May 4, 1939, reprinted in Perspectives françaises (Paris: Editions de "L'Oeuvre," n.d. [1940]), p. 31. 28. Déat, Mémoires, p. 338. 29. Ν. Mosley, Beyond the Pale, pp. 159—160; Guy Rossi-Landi, La drôle de guerre: La vie politique en France 2 septembre 1939-10 mai 1940 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971), pp. 116-118.

232

Notes to Pages 149-155

30. Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, pp. 178-187; N. Mosley, Beyond the Pale, p. 162; Rossi-Landi, La drôle de guerre, pp. 72-76; Burrin, La dérive fasciste, pp. 323—326. 31. Henri de Man, "Assez de sabotage de la neutralité!" in Le "Dossier Léopold III," pp. 157-169, quotation on p. 168; Après coup, pp. 297-298, 307; Cavalier seul: Quarante-cinq années de socialisme européen (Geneva: Editions du Cheval Ailé, 1948), p. 213. 32. Quoted by Emily Hartshorne Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1973), p. 292. See Henri de Man, "Les dix-huit jours," in Le "Dossier Léopold III," pp. 63-106, Brélaz, Léopold III, pp. 119-141; Déat, Mémoires, pp. 515-525. 33. Quoted by Burrin, La dérive fasciste, p. 327. 34. Henri de Man, "Manifeste aux membres du Parti Ouvrier Belge," in Dodge, Hendrik de Man, pp. 326-328. 35. Henri de Man, "De la capitulation à l'exil," in Le "Dossier Léopold III," p. 304; [J. Struye], "L'opinion publique en Belgique après vingt mois d'occupation," February 15,1942, Archief Hendrik de Man/Brussels, dossier 12, no. 420, p. 1; Claeys-Van Haegendoren, Hendrik de Man, pp. 308-311. 36. Marcel Déat, "Dangereuses illusions," L'Oeuvre, August 15,1940; "Limites de l'autarcie," L'Oeuvre, August 21, 1940, in Perspectives françaises, pp. 19, 23. 37. Henri de Man, "Henri de Man a parlé," in Le "Dossier Léopold III," p. 220; Marcel Déat, Jeunesse et révolution (Paris: Jeunesses Nationales Populaires, 1942), p. 8. 38. De Man, Après coup, p. 305. 39. Henri de Man, "Illusions et réalités de la démocratie," Le Travail, September 20, 1941, in Le "Dossier Léopold III," p. 238; Marcel Déat, "Socialistes d'hier et socialistes de demain," L'Oeuvre, December 2,1941, in Révolution française (Paris: Editions du Rassemblement National-Populaire, n.d. [1942]), p. 31. 40. Marcel Déat, "L'heure du Plan européen," Le Front, January 14,1937, p. 2. 41. Henri de Man, "Programme du 19 juin 1940," in Le "Dossier Léopold III," p. 176. 42. See Alan S. Milward, The New Order and the French Economy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 46-50. 43. Francis Delaisi, "Der europäische Revolutionskrieg," Europäische Revue 18 (1942), 303; Walther Pähl, "Monopoles ou grandes espaces?" in Economie continentale: Cahiers de l'Institut allemand, vol. 5 (Paris: Fernand Sorlot, 1942), pp. 129-148, quotation on p. 131. 44. Walther Pähl, Das politische Antlitz der Erde: Ein weltpolitischer Atlas (Leipzig: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, 1938), p. 79; Weltkampf um Rohstoffe (Leipzig: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, 1940), pp. 282-283; Delaisi, "Der europäische Revolutionskrieg," pp. 302—304. 45. Marcel Déat, "Aspects du Gaullisme," Notre combat, no. 7 (November 1941), 3 - 4 ; "Cette guerre n'est pas marxiste!" Notre combat, no. 33 (January 1943), 14; Pensée allemande et pensée française (Paris: Aux Armes de France, 1944), p. 52; Mosley, Tomorrow We Live, pp. 67, 69.

Notes to Pages 155-159

233

46. Delaisi, "Der europäische Revolutionskrieg," p. 297; Walther Pähl, Die britische Machtpolitik (Berlin: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1941), p. 117; "Europa als Reichsidee," SM 75 (1932), 11. 47. Max Hodeige, "Une conférence de M. Henri de Man, à Paris, sur 'La Belgique devant l'Europe,'" Le Soir (Brussels), April 24, 1942, clipping in Archief Hendrik de Man/Brussels, dossier 31 A, no. 706; Henri de Man, "P.S. à ma note sur l'UTMI du 1er septembre 1946," in Le "Dossier Léopold III," pp. 348-349. 48. Hendrik de Man, "Jenseits des Nationalismus," Europäische Revue 19 (1943), 5-15, quotations on pp. 5, 12, 13, 14, 15; the French version, "Au delà du nationalisme," in Le "Dossier Léopold III," pp. 278-293.

10. Paths of Collaboration 1. Henri de Man, "Manifeste aux membres du P.O.B.," in Le "Dossier Léopold III" et autres documents sur la periode de la seconde guerre mondiale, ed. Michael Brélaz (Geneva: Editions des Antipodes, 1989), p. 183. See J. Plumyène and R. Lasierra, Les fascismes français, 1923-1963 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963), p. 123. 2. Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer, Victory Is Not Enough: The Strategy for a Lasting Peace (New York: W. W. Norton, 1942), p. 15. 3. Privatklage des Dr. Walther Pähl, Chefredakteur der Gewerkschaftlichen Monatshefte . . . gegen den Chefredakteur Karl Gerold in Frankfurt/Main, Druck- und Verlagshaus Frankfurt/Main G. m. b. H., March 29, 1954, p. 5, Bestand Personalia, PAF-PAK, Sondermappe Dr. Walther Pähl, Archiv der sozialen Demokratie, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn. 4. Barthélémy Montagnon, De Jaurès à de Gaulle: Néo-capitalisme? Néosocialisme? (Paris: d'Halluin, 1969), p. 139. 5. Sir Oswald Mosley, My Life (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1972), p. 306; Nicholas Mosley, Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family, 1933-1980 (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1983), pp. 126-127. 6. J. C. M. Mathewson to Undersecretary of State, G-2 Division, Home Office, May 12,1943, HO 45/24892, p. 193, microfilm, Public Record Office, Kew, Richmond, Surrey. See N. Mosley, Beyond the Pale, pp. 1 6 3 - 1 6 5 , 2 3 4 - 2 3 5 ; Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985 (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 188-198. 7. Mosley, My Life, p. 401; Home Office, Advisory Committee to Consider Appeals against Orders of Internment, Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, Rehearing July 22, 1940, HO 283/16, pp. 103-106, microfilm, Public Record Office, Kew, Richmond, Surrey. 8. Draft of Advisory Committee report in the case of Sir Oswald Mosley, Dictated by Mr. Norman Birkert, K.C., undated [August 1940], HO 283/18, p. 21; Metropolitan Police, Special Branch, Special Report, Subject: B.U.F., February 1, 1940, Report of conference of district officials, January 30, 1940, HO 45/24895, p. 4; microfilms, Public Record Office, Kew, Richmond, Surrey. See Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, pp. 178-187, 197. 9. Draft of Advisory Committee report, HO 283/18, pp. 9-10; Home Office,

234

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

Notes to Pages I6O-I63

Advisory Committee, HO 283/16, p. 92; Metropolitan Police, Special Branch, Special Reports, Subject: Sir Oswald Mosley, various dates, February-July 1944, HO 45/24894, pp. 91, 95, 103-105, 116-117; microfilms, Public Record Office, Kew, Richmond, Surrey. See N. Mosley, Beyond the Pale, pp. 236-237. Hendrik de Man, Gegen den Strom: Memoiren eines europäischen Sozialisten (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1953), pp. 273-276. '"Les Français ont plus de chance que les Belges . . . ' dit M. Henri de Man," Le petit parisien, June 3,1941, typescript, Archief Hendrik de Man/Brussels, dossier 31 A, no. 704. See Henri de Man, Cavalier seul: Quarante-cinq années de socialisme européen (Geneva: Editions du Cheval Ailé, 1948), pp. 251-252; Albert De Jonghe, Hitler en het politieke lot van België (1940-1944): De vestiging van een Zivilverwaltung in België en NoordFrankrijk (Antwerp: Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1972), pp. 1 1 4 - 1 2 0 , 1 4 8 151,186-198; Mieke Claeys-Van Haegendoren, Hendrik de Man: Een Biografie (Antwerp: Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1972), pp. 336-339. Michel Brélaz, Léopold III et Henri de Man (Geneva: Editions des Antipodes, 1988), pp. 142-160; De Jonghe, Hitler, pp. 78-113, 159-169; Wilfried Wagner, Belgien in der deutschen Politik während des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt Verlag, 1974), pp. 187-194; Paul-Henri Spaak, Combats inachevés, vol. 1, De l'indépendence à l'alliance (Paris: Fayard, 1969), pp. 108-109. De Man, Cavalier seul, pp. 257—260; Brélaz, Léopold III, pp. 198-201, 207-222; De Jonghe, Hitler, pp. 141-146; Wagner, Belgien, pp. 185-187, 199-205. Camille Huysmans, Geschriften en Documenten, vol. 8, De Belgische Socialisten en Londen, ed. José Gotovitch (Antwerp: Standaard Wetenschappelijke Uitgeverij, 1981), p. 83; Edgard Delvo, De Mens Wikt: Terugblik op ein wisselvallig Leven (Antwerp and Amsterdam: Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1978), pp. 116-117; Spaak, Combats inachevés, 1:107; Maurice De Wilde, De Nieuwe Orde, België in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, 3 (Antwerp and Amsterdam: Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1982), pp. 83-84; Jacques Willequet, La Belgique sous la botte: Résistances et collaborations, 1940-1945 (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1986), pp. 95-98. De Man, Cavalier seul, p. 260; "Message aux militants socialistes," Le Travail, May 1, 1941, in Le "Dossier Léopold III," p. 208. De Man, Cavalier seul, pp. 263-265; "De la capitulation à l'exil," in Le "Dossier Léopold III," pp. 313-315. Huysmans, Geschriften en Documenten, 8:119; Delvo, De Mens Wikt, p. 166. Henri de Man, "Directives pour la redaction du 'Travail,'" March 5, 1941, Bulletin de l'Association pour l'étude de l'oeuvre d'Henri de Man, no. 13 (November 1985), 171; Entwurf für die Herausgabe einer Tageszeitung "Le Travail," January 19, 1941, p. 1, Archief Hendrik de Man/Brussels, dossier 11, no. 401; Cavalier seul, p. 278. De Man, "Message aux militants socialistes," in Le "Dossier Léopold III," p. 208; "Henri de Man a parlé," ibid., p. 220.

Notes to Pages 163-168

235

20. De Man, "Henri de Man a parlé," pp. 214, 222, 225-226. 21. Huysmans, Geschriften en Documenten, 8:108-122; de Man, Cavalier seul, p. 265; "La situation de la Belgique au debut de l'octobre 1941," in Le "Dossier Léopold III," p. 260. 22. Delvo, De Mens Wikt, pp. 166-167; Henri de Man, "Lettre au Dr. Voss du 29 mars 1942," in Le "Dossier Léopold III," pp. 263-269. 23. De Man, "Programme du 19 juin 1940," in ibid., p. 175; "Echec à la peur," Le Travail, October 11, 1941, in ibid., p. 248; Après coup (Brussels: Editions de la Toison d'Or, 1941), p. 84; Dick Pels, "Treason of the Intellectuals: Paul de Man and Hendrik de Man," Theory, Culture, and Society 8 (1991), 4 4 - 4 8 . 24. N. Mosley, Beyond the Pale, p. 108; Marcel Déat, Le parti unique (Paris: Aux Armes de France, 1942), p. 130. 25. Chanoine Jacques Leclerc (Louvain) to Yves Lecocq (Dilbeek), January 21, 1949, Archief Hendrik de Man/Antwerp, dossier 110. See Willequet, La Belgique, pp. 100-101; P. De Buyser, "Correspondence avec Jef Rens à propos de l'article 'Beter laat dan nooit,'" Bulletin de l'Association pour l'étude de l'oeuvre d'Henri de Man, no. 16 (November 1989), 91-96. 26. Marcel Déat, Mémoires politiques (Paris: Denoël, 1989), pp. 716, 757-760; Le parti unique, p. 178. 27. Marcel Déat, "Au pied du mur," L'Oeuvre, July 5, 1940, in Perspectives françaises (Paris: Editions de "L'Oeuvre," n.d. [1940]), p. 3. 28. Marcel Déat, "Rapport présenté à Monsieur le Maréchal Pétain sur la constitution d'un parti national unique," appendix to J.-P. Cointet, "Marcel Déat et le parti unique (été 1940)," Revue de l'histoire de la deuxième guerre mondiale 23 (1973), 17. See Philippe Burrin, La dérive fasciste: Doriot, Déat, Bergery, 1933-1945 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986), pp. 342-343; Friedrich Grimm, Frankreich-Berichte: 1934 bis 1944 (Bodman-Bodensee: Hohenstaufen Verlag, 1972), pp. 152-153. 29. Déat, "Rapport," 18, 21. 30. Marcel Déat, "Pour remonter la pente," L'Oeuvre, August 18, 1940, in Perspectives françaises, p. 20. See de Man, "Henri de Man a parlé," pp. 215— 216. 31. Déat, Mémoires, pp. 5 4 2 - 5 4 3 , 5 4 8 - 5 5 2 ; Burrin, La dérive fasciste, pp. 3 4 4 - 3 4 9 . 32. Déat, Mémoires, pp. 571-572; "Socialistes d'hier et socialistes de demain," L'Oeuvre, December 2, 1941, in Révolution française (Paris: Editions du Rassemblement National-Populaire, n.d. [1942]), p. 31; Claude Varennes [Georges Albertini], Le destin de Marcel Déat (Paris: Editions Janmaray, 1948), pp. 211-212. 33. Déat, Mémoires, p. 370; Michelle Cotta, La collaboration, 1940—1944, 2d ed.(Paris: Armand Colin, 1964), pp. 1 9 - 2 1 ; Burrin, La dérive fasciste, pp. 353-354. 34. Déat, Mémoires, pp. 5 7 6 - 5 8 4 ; Varennes, Le destin, pp. 113-126, quotation on p. 121. 35. Bertram M . Gordon, Collaborationism in France during the Second World War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 5 8 - 5 9 , 9 4 - 9 5 ; Déat,

236

36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

Notes to Pages 168-174

Mémoires, pp. 410, 5 9 4 - 5 9 6 ; Louis Vallon, review of Carlo Rosselli, Socialisme libéral, in VS, η.s., no. 225 (February 21, 1931), 15-16. Déat, "Rapport," 22; "Bastilles à prendre," L'Oeuvre, July 15, 1940; "La balance et le glaive," L'Oeuvre, July 26, 1940, in Perspectives françaises, pp. 6, 10. Raymond Abellio [Georges Soulès], Ma dernière mémoire, vol. 3, Sol invictus, 1939-1947 (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1980), p. 191; Déat, "Du rassemblement au parti," L'Oeuvre, September 17, 1941, in Révolution française, p. 88. Déat, Mémoires, pp. 6 2 5 - 6 2 7 ; Burrin, La dérive fasciste, p. 391; Gordon, Collaborationistι, p. 104. Déat, Mémoires, pp. 627-630, 6 3 5 - 6 3 6 ; Gordon, Collaborationism, pp. 106—108; Abellio, Ma dernière mémoire, 3:259—262. Gordon, Collaborationism, pp. 108—111; Burrin, La dérive fasciste, pp. 391-392. Déat, Le parti unique, pp. 16-17, 80, 135; Gordon, Collaborationism, pp. 114-123. Marcel Déat, "De la lutte des classes au socialisme national," L'Oeuvre, June 4, 1941, in Révolution française, p. 39. Déat, Le parti unique, pp. 64, 113; account in L'Oeuvre, September 27, 1943, quoted by Marc Sadoun, Les socialistes sous l'occupation: Résistance et collaboration (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1982), p. 100. Sadoun, Les socialistes, pp. 80, 89—95; Burrin, La dérive fasciste, p. 405; Déat, Le parti unique, pp. 2 5 - 4 0 . Marcel Déat, "Du fascisme a l'union sacrée," Notre combat, no. 57 (August 7, 1943), 19. Déat, Le parti unique, pp. 130-131; "Cette guerre n'est pas marxiste!" Notre combat, no. 33 (January 1943), 14; Mémoires, pp. 6 1 8 - 6 1 9 ; Emily Hartshorne Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1973), pp. 3 3 8 - 3 4 2 , 351—352; Burrin, La dérive fasciste, pp. 4 1 2 - 4 1 3 . Déat, Le parti unique, p. 131; Pensée allemande et pensée française (Paris: Aux Armes de France, 1944), pp. 110, 127; Montagnon, De Jaurès, p. 140. Marcel Déat, "Retrouver les hommes," L'Oeuvre, March 3, 1941, quoted by Burrin, La dérive fasciste, p. 416; Jeunesse et révolution (Paris: Jeunesses Nationales Populaires, 1942), p. 15. Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," p. 362; Gordon, Collaborationism, pp. 331-332; Burrin, La dérive fasciste, pp. 417—418. Varennes, Le destin, p. 49. Déat, Mémoires, pp. 574, 703, 759; Abellio, Ma dernière mémoire, 3:190. Déat, Mémoires, p. 744. Gordon, Collaborationism, pp. 287—291, 298-299; Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," pp. 3 0 8 - 3 0 9 ; Varennes, Le destin, pp. 163-170. Grimm, Frankreich-Berichte, p. 239. Gordon, Collaborationism, pp. 2 9 9 - 3 1 0 ; Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," pp. 3 1 0 - 3 1 3 ; Varennes, Le destin, pp. 170-208.

Notes to Pages 174-179

237

56. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Castle to Castle, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Delacorte Press, 1968), pp. 157-158. See Déat, Mémoires, pp. 8 8 3 889, 897-910, 914-917, 920-926; Delvo, De Mens Wikt, pp. 172-173.

11. A Struggle with Destiny 1. Marcel Déat, Mémoires politiques (Paris: Denoël, 1989), p. 765. 2. Christian Pineau, La simple vérité, 1940-1945 (Paris: René Juilliard, 1961), pp. 72-73. 3. Letter of August 18, 1933, in Dorothea heck, Julius Leber: Sozialdemokrat zwischen Reform und Widerstand (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1983), pp. 271— ΠΙ. 4. Julius Leber, Schriften, Reden, Briefe, ed. Dorothea Beck and Wilfried F. Schoeller (Munich: Verlag Annedore Leber, 1976), p. 241; Jacques Willequet, La Belgique sous la botte: Résistances et collaborations, 1940-1945 (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1986), pp. 135-137. 5. Alma de l'Aigle, Meine Briefe von Theo Haubach (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, 1947), p. 41. 6. Walter Hammer, ed., Theodor Haubach zum Gedächtnis, 2d ed. (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955), pp. 59, 68; Walter Poller, Gedenkblatt für Theodor Haubach (Frankfurt and Dortmund: Verlag "das segel," 1955), pp. 6 - 8 . 7. Henri Noguères, with Marcel Degliame-Fouché, Histoire de la Résistance en France de 1940 à 1945, vol. 4, Formez vos bataillons! Octobre 1943—mai 1944 (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1976), pp. 398-399. 8. Paul Hertz, Alfred Vagts, and Carl Zuckmayer, Carlo Mierendorff: Forträt eines deutschen Sozialisten (Santiago: Imprenta Universitara, 1944), p. 9. 9. Pineau, La simple vérité, pp. 76—77; Gordon Holman and Henry Hauck, La Résistance ouvrière française (French Workers Resist) (New Delhi: Bureau d'Information de la France Combattante, n.d. [1942]), pp. 13-14; Gérard Brun, ed., Louis Vallon ou la politique en liberté de Jaurès à de Gaulle (Paris: Economica, 1986), p. 66. 10. Pineau, La simple vérité, pp. 85-90; Daniel Mayer, Les socialistes dans la Résistance (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), pp. 16-17. 11. Mayer, Les socialistes, pp. 74—76; Charles de Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs, trans. Jonathan Griffin and Richard Howard (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), p. 404. 12. Marc Sadoun, Les socialistes sous l'occupation: Résistance et collaboration (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1982), pp. 118-126. 13. Pineau, La simple vérité, pp. 162—165; Gilberte Brossolette, Il s'appelait Pierre Brossolette (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), pp. 180-181; Mayer, Les socialistes, pp. 77-79. 14. Brossolette, Pierre Brossolette, p. 270. 15. Ibid. 16. See Sadoun, Les socialistes, pp. 133-139, 148-149, 183-185; Léon Blum,

238

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Notes to Pages 180-184

L'oeuvre de Léon Blum, 1940-1945 (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1952), p. 364. See Sadoun, Les socialistes, pp. 188, 209-216; Mayer, Les socialistes, pp. 65-68; Pineau, La simple vérité, pp. 174-175, 184-186, 189-191. Brossolette, Pierre Brossolette, p. 271. Sadoun, Les socialistes, pp. 216-226; on the general issue: James D. Wilkinson, The Intellectual Resistance in Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). See Richard F. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modem France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 173-179; Andrew Shennan, Rethinking France: Plans for Renewal, 1940-1946 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 4 4 - 4 9 , 234-286. Henry Hauck, Histoire du socialisme: Conférence du 19 décembre 1944 (Paris: Fédération Socialiste de la Seine, n.d.), p. 16; Sadoun, Les socialistes, pp. 268-276. Stad Brugge [Bruges], Liber Amicorum Achtel Van Acker (Bruges: Uitgeverij Orion, 1973), p. 15; Parti Socialiste Belge, Congrès de la victoire (9, 10 et 11 juin 1945), Rapport sur la ligne politique du parti présenté par Max Buset (La Louvière: Imprimerie Cooperative Ouvrière, n.d.), Part B, p. 4. Camille Huysmans, Geschriften en Documenten, vol. 7, Camille Huysmans in Londen, ed. Herman Balthazar and José Gotovitch (Antwerp and Amsterdam: Standaard Wetenschappelijke Uitgeverij, 1978), pp. 16-17, 26— 30, 37, 4 1 - 4 7 , 6 4 - 6 7 . Ibid., p. 59. Jef Rens, Ontmoetingen (Antwerp: Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1984), p. 96. Letter of Hendrik de Man to Paul-Henri Spaak, October 10, 1944 (copy), Archief Hendrik de Man/Antwerp, dossier 110. Memorandum by Henri de Man, Bern, September 4 - 5 , 1944, pp. 6 - 7 , Archief Hendrik de Man/Antwerp. Henri de Man, "De la capitulation à l'exil," in Le "Dossier Léopold III" et autres documents sur la periode de la seconde guerre mondiale, ed. Michel Brélaz (Geneva: Editions des Antipodes, 1989), pp. 327-328. Note of November 15, 1944, and postscript to memo of January 20, 1945, February 23, 1946, Archief Hendrik de Man/Brussels, dossier 14, no. 430. Max Hodeige, "Une conférence de M. Henri de Man, à Paris, sur 'La Belgique devant l'Europe,'" Le Soir (Brussels), April 24, 1942, clipping in Archief Hendrik de Man/Brussels, dossier 31 A, no. 706. Note of November 15, 1944, Archief Hendrik de Man/Brussels, dossier 14, no. 430; de Man, "De la capitulation," passim. Parti Socialiste Belge, Rapport sur la ligne politique, passim. Willequet, La Belgique, pp. 136-140; José Gotovitch, "Ruptures et continuités: Personnel dirigeant et choix stratégiques socialistes de la clandestinité à la Libération," Socialisme, no. 184 (1984), 305-320. On Van Acker: Henri de Man, "Note du 19 octobre 1945," in Le "Dossier Léopold III," pp. 335-336; Stad Brugge, Liber Amicorum, pp. 13-20, 96-101, 246-248; Herman Todts, September 1944 De Bevrijding (Brussels: Grammens, 1984), pp. 38, 5 4 - 5 5 ; Rens, Ontmoetingen, pp. 55—57.

Notes to Pages 184-189

239

34. Victor Larock, Preface to Gustave Fischer, Achille Van Acker: L'idéaliste réaliste (Brussels: Editions Esséo, 1957), p. 6. 35. Carl Mierendorff, "Sozialismus in Front," SM 77 (1933), 87-88. 36. Beck, Julius Leber, p. 133; Richard Albrecht, Der militante Sozialdemokrat: Carlo Mierendorff 1897 bis 1943 (Berlin and Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1987), p. 134; Hammer, Theodor Haubach, p. 40; Günther Scholz, Kurt Schumacher (Düsseldorf and New York: ECON Verlag, 1988), p. 86. 37. Beck, Julius Leber, p. 133; Albrecht, Der militante Sozialdemokrat, pp. 131-139; Scholz, Kurt Schumacher, pp. 8 2 - 8 7 ; Ger Van Roon, Neuordnung im Widerstand: Der Kreisauer Kreis innerhalb der deutschen Widerstandsbewegung (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1967), p. 187. 38. Quoted by Albrecht, Der militante Sozialdemokrat, pp. 138-139. 39. Leber, Schriften, Reden, Briefe, pp. 2 4 2 - 2 4 6 ; Beck, Julius Leber, pp. 1 4 3 149, 231-232, 2 5 3 - 2 5 4 . 40. Quoted, respectively, by Poller, Gedenkblatt für Theodor Haubach, p. 19; Albrecht, Der militante Sozialdemokrat, p. 167. 41. Albrecht, Der militante Sozialdemokrat, pp. 177-181, 187-189; de l'Aigle, Meine Briefe, p. 38. 42. Joachim G. Leithäuser, Wilhelm Leuschner: Ein Leben für die Republik (Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1962), pp. 168-169, 175; Beck, Julius Leber, pp. 162-168; Van Roon, Neuordnung im Widerstand, p. 227. 43. Leithäuser, Wilhelm Leuschner, pp. 181-182, 191-195; Beck, Julius Leber, pp. 168-169; Willi Brundert, "Carlo Mierendorff," in Darmstadt und der 20. Juli 1944 (Darmstadt: Justus von Liebig Verlag, 1974), pp. 61-62. 44. See de l'Aigle, Meine Briefe, pp. 3 9 - 7 0 ; Freya von Moltke, Michael Balfour, and Julian Frisby, Helmuth James von Moltke 1907-1945: Anwalt der Zukunft (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1975), pp. 187-193; Eugen Gerstenmaier, "Der Kreisauer Kreis: Zu dem Buch Gerrit van Roons Neuordnung im Widerstand," Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 15 (1967), 2 2 4 227. 45. Emil Henk, Die Tragödie des 20. Juli 1944: Ein Beitrag zur politischen Vorgeschichte (Heidelberg: Adolf Rausch Verlag, 1946), p. 20; Leithäuser, Wilhelm Leuschner, pp. 171, 195, 204; de l'Aigle, Meine Briefe, p. 59. 46. Henk, Die Tragödie, p. 12; Adolf Reichwein, Ein Lebensbild aus Briefen und Dokumenten, ed. Ursula Schulz (Munich: Gotthold Müller Verlag, 1974), p. 178. 47. Van Roon, Neuordnung im Widerstand, p. 260; Albrecht, Der militante Sozialdemokrat, p. 227. 48. "Umfrage: Religion, Kirche und Sozialismus," Zeitschrift für Religion und Sozialismus 5 (1933), 25; Van Roon, Neuordnung im Widerstand, pp. 2 3 5 247, 3 5 3 - 3 5 6 ; Keck julius Leber, pp. 176-177. 49. Van Roon, Neuordnung im Widerstand, p. 589. 50. Ibid., pp. 2 2 9 - 2 3 3 ; Beck, Julius Leber, pp. 178-182; Moltke, Balfour, and Frisby, Helmuth James von Moltke, pp. 195-196, 2 7 6 - 2 8 0 ; Leithäuser, Wilhelm Leuschner, pp. 215-216. 51. Henk, Die Tragödie, p. 22. 52. Hammer, Theodor Haubach, p. 55; de l'Aigle, Meine Briefe, p. 65; Reichwein, Ein Lebensbild, pp. 185-190.

240

Notes to Pages 189-194

53. Reichwein, Ein Lebensbild, pp. 2 0 4 - 2 0 5 ; Hammer, Theodor Haubach, p. 60. 54. Beck, Julius Leber, pp. 182—186, 195-206; Leithäuser, Wilhelm Leuschner, pp. 242—249; Reichwein, Ein Lebensbild, pp. 3 6 4 - 3 6 5 ; Hammer, Theodor Haubach, pp. 57-59, 73. 55. Van Roon, Neuordnung im Widerstand, p. 590. 56. See Lewis J. Edinger, Kurt Schumacher: A Study in Personality and Politcal Behavior (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), pp. 77-93.

Epilogue 1. Gerhart Pohl, "Freund Theo," in Walter Hammer, ed., Theodor Haubach zum Gedächtnis, 2d ed. (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955), p. 26. In his novel Fluchtburg (Berlin: Lettner Verlag, 1955), p. 344, Pohl's fictional counterpart to Mierendorff dies with the same word on his lips. 2. Mme. Marcel Déat, "Epilogue," in Marcel Déat, Mémoires politiques (Paris: Denoël, 1989), pp. 947-961. 3. Ibid., pp. 961-963; Emily Hartshorne Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1973), pp. 315-317; Jef Rens, Ontmoetingen, 1930-1942 (Antwerp: Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1984), pp. 13-14. 4. Goodman, "The Socialism of Marcel Déat," pp. 3 1 6 - 3 1 8 ; Bertram M. Gordon, Collaborationism in France during the Second World War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 351. 5. "Chronologie," Bulletin de l'Association pour l'étude de l'oeuvre d'Henri de Man, no. 13 (November 1985), 204. See Hendrik de Man, "Die französische Gewerkschaftsbewegung in ihrem Verhältnis zu Partei und Staat," manuscript (1951), p. 7, Archief Hendrik de Man/Antwerp, dossier 53; undated declaration signed by G. D. H. Cole, undated letters of Bertrand de Jouvenel to Hendrik de Man, letters of André Philip to Hendrik de Man, July 23, 1952, and May 15, 1953, Archief Hendrik de Man/Antwerp, dossier 110. 6. Letter of Hendrik de Man to Walther Pähl (copy), March 18, 1953; letter of Walther Pähl to Jan de Man, February 4 , 1 9 5 4 , Archief Hendrik de Man/ Antwerp, dossier 46. See Karsten Linne, "Walther Pähl: Eine Gewerkschafter-Karriere," 1999: Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 5 (1990), 5 3 - 5 5 . 7. See Hendrik de Man, "The Age of Doom," in Peter Dodge, ed. A Documentary Study of Hendrik de Man, Socialist Critic of Marxism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 331—353, quotation on p. 351; Gegen den Strom: Memoiren eines europäischen Sozialisten (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1953), pp. 2 8 6 - 2 9 2 ; Henri de Man, "Lettre sur le socialisme," Bulletin de l'Association pour l'étude de l'oeuvre d'Henri de Man, no. 13 (November 1985), 197-200; Ivo Rens, "Pacifisme et internationalisme dans la dernière partie de l'oeuvre d'Henri de Man (19421953)," Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto: Revue européenne des sciences sociales 12, no. 31 (1974), 2 4 3 - 2 7 1 . 8. Mosley's postwar political career can be followed from various vantage

Notes to Pages 195-197

241

points: Sir Oswald Mosley, My Life (New Rochelle, Ν.Y.: Arlington House, 1972), pp. 4 3 3 - 5 0 5 ; Nicholas Mosley, Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family, 1933-1980 (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1983), pp. 3 0 0 - 3 0 9 ; Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), pp. 481-517; Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985 (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 237-239; D. S. Lewis, Illusions of Grandeur: Mosley, Fascism, and British Society, 1931-1981 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 2 3 8 247; Jeffrey Hamm, Action Replay: An Autobiography (London: Howard Baker, 1983), pp. 134-209. 9. Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 517-520; Diana Mosley, A Life of Contrasts (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977), pp. 2 3 0 - 2 6 7 . 10. See Bulletin de l'Association pour l'étude de l'oeuvre d'Henri de Man, no. 14 (May 1987), passim. 11. Bertolt Brecht, Collected plays, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, vol. 2, pt. 2, The Threepenny Opera, trans. Ralph Manheim and John Willett (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), p. 55. 12. De Man, Gegen den Strom, p. 287. 13. Verhandlungen des Reichstags, 5th legislative period 1930, vol. 444, 18th sess. (February 6,1931), p. 743.

A Note on Sources

Unprinted materials relevant to the careers of the major Front Generation socialists were ample for some figures, scanty for others. Moreover, not all of the existing documentation was accessible while research for this study was in progress. Sources on Hendrik de Man were drawn from three depositories: the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Gechiedenis in Amsterdam, valuable for letters to de Man from the 1920s and 1930s and for documents from the period of the Platt du Travail; the Centre de Recherches et d'Etudes Historiques de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale in Brussels, which yielded later letters as well as notes and memoranda from the wartime and postwar years; and the Archief en Museum voor het Vlaamse Cultuurleven in Antwerp, with its holdings of book manuscripts and letters (as well as hard-to-find printed sources). In the interval between research for and publication of this volume a number of de Man's unpublished writings appeared in print in the work edited by Michel Brélaz, cited below. Also now published are Marcel Déat's Mémoires politiques, before 1989 available only in typescript at the Cabinet des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque Nationale, in Paris. Déat's typescript diary from the Second World War, in the same location, was not accessible at the time of research. Unpublished sources regarding Sir Oswald Mosley were official documents deposited at the Public Record Office, Kew, Richmond, Surrey. These included Cabinet Papers 24/209, Unemployment Policy, which center on the 1930 Mosley Memorandum; police records relating to British Union and to Mosley's actions while in confinement (1940-1943) and after his release (HO 45/24892, HO 45/ 24894, HO 45/24895, microfilm); and the minutes and reports of the Advisory Committee which considered Mosley's appeal against his internment, all under HO 283, microfilm. The few unprinted materials on Carlo Mierendorff included his remembrance "Nach 14 Jahren. Heidelberg 1918 und 1932," manuscript in unpublished Festschrift für Emil Lederer, Emil Lederer Collection, Special Collections, University Libraries, University at Albany, State University of New York; some letters from 1918 through the 1920s at the Hessisches Staatsarchiv in Darmstadt; and letters written to Hendrik de Man, mostly in 1926, in the Archief Hendrik

244

A Note on Sources

de Man at the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam. For Theodor Haubach there were only a few postwar letters at the Hessisches Staatsarchiv in Darmstadt. The Front Generation socialists wrote prolifically. The publications of each individual which proved most useful for this study are grouped below in three major categories—memoirs and letters; books, essays, and pamphlets; and journals and newspapers—followed by several invaluable biographies. Hendrik de Man M E M O I R S AND L E T T E R S

Après coup. Brussels: Editions de la Toison d'Or, 1941. Cavalier seul. Quarante-cinq années de socialisme européen. Geneva: Editions du Cheval Ailé, 1948. Gegen den Strom. Memoiren eines europäischen Sozialisten. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1953. B O O K S , E S S A Y S , AND P A M P H L E T S

The Remaking of a Mind: A Soldier's Thoughts on War and Reconstruction. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1919. Au pays du Taylorisme. Brussels: "Le Peuple," 1919. Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus. Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1926. Sozialismus und Nationalfascismus. Berlin: Alfred Protte Verlag, 1931. Die sozialistische Idee. Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1933. Wende des Sozialismus. Zurich: Verband des Personals öffentlicher Dienste, 1934. Brélaz, Michel, ed. Le "Dossier Léopold III" et autres documents sur la periode de la seconde guerre mondiale. Geneva: Editions des Antipodes, 1989. Dodge, Peter, ed. A Documentary Study of Hendrik de Man, Socialist Critic of Marxism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. J O U R N A L S AND N E W S P A P E R S

Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus. 1930-1933. Bulletin d'information et de documentation de la Banque Nationale de Belgique. 1930-1934. Le Travail. 1941 (also published in Brélaz, ed., Le "Dossier Léopold III"). BIOGRAPHIES

Brélaz, Michel. Henri de Man. Une autre idée du socialisme. Geneva: Editions des Antipodes, 1985. Léopold III et Henri de Man. Geneva: Editions des Antipodes, 1988. Claeys-Van Haegendoren, Mieke. Hendrik de Man. Een Biografie. Antwerp: Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1972. Dodge, Peter. Beyond Marxism: The Faith and Works of Hendrik de Man. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966.

A Note on Sources

245

Marcel Déat M E M O I R S AND L E T T E R S

Mémoires politiques. Paris: Editions Denoël, 1989. B O O K S , E S S A Y S , AND P A M P H L E T S

Taëd [Marcel Déat]. Cadavres et maximes. Philosophie d'un revenant. Paris: Libraire d'action d'art de la ghilde "Les Forgerons," 1919. Sociologie. Paris: Librairie Félix Alean, 1925. Perspectives socialistes. Paris: Librairie Valois, 1930. Néo-socialisme? Ordre—autorité—nation (with Β. Montagnon and A. Marquet), introduction by Max Bonnafous. Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1933. Pour une politique de l'air (with Claude Bonnier). Paris: Editions du Journal "La Concorde," 1937. Le Front Populaire au tournant. Paris: Imprimeries Dubois et Bauer, 1937. Jeunesse et révolution. Paris: Jeunesses Nationales Populaires, 1942. Pensée allemande et pensée française. Paris: Aux Armes de France, 1944. J O U R N A L S AND N E W S P A P E R S

La Forge. 1919-1920. La vie socialiste. 1922-1935. Paris-demain. 1933-1936. Le Front. 1936-1938. Selected articles in L'Oeuvre, 1940-1942, compiled in: Perspectives françaises. Paris: Editions de "L'Oeuvre," n.d. [1940], Révolution française. Paris: Editions du Rassemblement National-Populaire, n.d. [1942]. Le Parti Unique. Paris: Aux Armes de France, 1942. BIOGRAPHIES

Burrin, Philippe. La dérive fasciste. Doriot, Déat, Bergery, 1933-1945. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986. Goodman, Emily Hartshorne. "The Socialism of Marcel Déat." Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1973. Varennes, Claude [Georges Albertini], Le destin de Marcel Déat. Paris: Editions Janmaray, 1948.

Sir Oswald Mosley M E M O I R S AND L E T T E R S

My Life. New Rochelle, Ν.Y.: Arlington House, 1972. B O O K S , E S S A Y S , AND P A M P H L E T S

Revolution by Reason. Leicester: Blackfriars Press, 1925. A National Policy for National Emergency. Text of Manifesto issued December 7, 1930. N.p., n.d.

246

A Note on Sources

The Greater Britain. New ed. London: Jeffcoats, 1934. Tomorrow We Live. 3d ed. London: Greater Britain Publications, n.d. [1938]. J O U R N A L S AND N E W S P A P E R S

Action. 1931. The Blackshirt.

1933-1935. BIOGRAPHIES

Mosley, Nicholas. Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley, 1896-1933. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1982. Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family, 1933-1980. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1983. Skidelsky, Robert. Oswald Mosley. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975.

Carlo Mierendorff B O O K S , E S S A Y S , AND P A M P H L E T S

"Die Wirtschaftspolitik der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands (KPD)." Inaugural-Dissertation, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität, Heidelberg, 1922. Grundlagen und Formen politischer Propaganda (with Professor Dr. S. Tschachotin). Magdeburg: Bundesvorstand des Reichsbanners Schwarz-Rot-Gold, 1932. Usinger, Fritz, ed. Carlo Mierendorff. Eine Einführung in sein Werk und eine Auswahl. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1965. J O U R N A L S AND N E W S P A P E R S

Die Dachstube. 1915-1918. Das Tribunal. 1919-1920. Hamburger Echo. 1924-1926. Sozialistische Monatshefte. 1926,1930-1933. Hessischer Volksfreund. 1930-1933. Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus. 1930—1933. Deutsche Republik. 1930-1933. BIOGRAPHIES

Albrecht, Richard. Der militante Sozialdemokrat. Carlo Mierendorff 1897 bis 1943. Berlin and Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1987. Hertz, Paul, Alfred Vagts, and Carl Zuckmayer. Carlo Mierendorff. Porträt eines deutschen Sozialisten. Santiago: Imprenta Universi tara, 1944. Reitz, Jakob. Carlo Mierendorff, 1897-1943. Darmstädter Schriften 51. Darmstadt: Justus von Liebig Verlag, 1983.

Theodor Haubach M E M O I R S AND L E T T E R S

Alma de l'Aigle. Meine Briefe von Theo Haubach. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, 1947.

A Note on Sources

247

J O U R N A L S AND N E W S P A P E R S

Die Dachstube. 1915-1918. Das Tribunal. 1919-1920. Hamburger Echo. 1924-1929. Die Gesellschaft. 1924-1929. Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus. 1930-1933. Deutsche Republik. 1930-1933. BIOGRAPHIES

Hammer, Walter, ed. Theodor Haubach zum Gedächtnis. 2d ed. Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955.

Index Abellio, Raymond (pseudonym for Georges Soulès), 173 Abetz, Otto, 163, 167 Achenbach, Ernst, 167, 169 Action, 114 Action Française, 100 ADGB. See Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund Activism (Aktivismus), 27-29 Adler, Alfred, 62 Adler, Max, 49 Agathon (pseudonym for Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde), 4 Alain (pseudonym for Emile Chartier), 12 Albertini, Georges, 172, 174 Allen, W.E. D„ 112 Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, 93, 124, 126-127, 128, 134, 188 Allgemeiner freier Angestellten-Bund, 124, 126 Anticapitalism, 7 9 - 8 0 , 91, 131, 135, 188 Anti-Semitism, 80, 109, 115, 135, 137, 146, 157-158, 164-165, 168, 171 Après coup (de Man), 129-130, 164, 170, 183 Arbeit, Die, 66 Astor, Nancy, 36 Attlee, Clement, 21, 115 Au delà du marxisme (de Man), 59, 6 6 67, 83, 129, 182 Auriol, Vincent, 102 Azéma, Jean-Pierre, 139 Baade, Fritz, 123-124 Barbusse, Henri, 15 Bauer, Otto, 46

Bebel, August, 84, 98 Beckett, John, 146 Belgian Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste Belge/PSB), 176, 181, 183-184, 191 Belgian Workers' Party (Parti Ouvrier Belge/POB), 12, 117-118, 126-127, 129, 130, 131, 135, 147, 149, 150-151, 157, 160-161, 163, 176, 181, 183 Bergery, Gaston, 106, 107 Bernstein, Eduard, 62, 163 Bevan, Aneurin, 111-112 Bevin, Ernest, 123, 137 Birkett, Norman, 159 Blackshirt, The, 90, 116, 136, 138 Blum, Léon, 44, 46, 82, 87, 90, 100, 101, 102, 104-105, 128, 130, 145, 179, 181 Bonnafous, Max, 55 Bonnier, Claude, 106, 133, 137, 143, 170, 177 Boothby, Robert, 111-112, 114 Bouglé, Célestin, 24, 39, 40, 41, 54, 55 Brecht, Bertolt, 196 Breitscheid, Rudolf, 90 Brélaz, Michel, 127 Breughel, Pieter, 187 British Union of Fascists (BUF, from 1936 British Union), 20, 74, 89, 9 0 - 9 1 , 108, 115-116, 123, 135, 137-138, 141, 146, 147, 148-149, 158-159, 194 Bröger, Karl, 48 Brossolette, Pierre, 108, 177, 178-180, 181 Brouckère, Louis de, 130 Brown, W.J., 111-112 Brundert, Willi, 186 Brüning, Heinrich, 81, 93, 98, 104

250

Index

Buber, Martin, 66 BUF. See British Union of Fascists Buset, Max, 137, 149, 1 8 1 - 1 8 2 , 1 8 3 - 1 8 4 Cartel des Gauches, 55, 56 Cecil, Lord Robert, 52 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 174 Cercle Européen, 155-156, 182-183 CGT. See Confédération Générale du Travail CGTU (Confédération Générale du Travail Unifiée), 133 Chakotin, Serge, 9 4 - 9 9 , 101, 106, 152 Chamberlain, Austen, 52 Chamberlain, Joseph, 52 Chamberlain, Neville, 5 2 - 5 3 , 57, 148 Chartier, Emile. See Alain Chautemps, Camille, 145 Chaux, Edouard, 170 Churchill, Winston S., 2 3 , 1 1 2 Cole, G. D. H., 35, 69, 127, 137, 145, 193 Colette, Paul, 169 Collaborationism, 134-135, 141-142, 151-174, 184 Comité du Plan, 132, 170 Communist parties: Germany (KPD), 27, 94, 99, 188, 189-190; France, 106, 108, 132, 133, 178, 179-180; Belgium, 184 Compère-Morel, Adéodat, 46 Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), 34, 69, 106-107, 108, 128-129, 130, 132-133, 170 Cripps, Sir Stafford, 137, 138 Curzon, George Nathaniel, Marquess of, 36, 54 Dachstube, Die, 2 4 - 2 5 , 27 Dahrendorf, Gustav, 49 Daladier, Eduard, 102, 149 Dalton, Hugh, 122, 137 Dauphin-Meunier, Achille, 193 Déat, Hélène, 55, 168, 192 Déat, Marcel, 3, 5, 6, 43, 69, 73; Perspectives socialistes (1930), 8, 72, 78, 83, 100, 101, 168, 170; in First World War, 9 - 1 1 , 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 172; youth, 12; and Ecole Normale Supérieure, 12, 24, 34, 37, 39, 54, 55; Mémoires politiques (1989), 14, 90, 148, 173, 195; early career in SFIO, 35, 37, 47, 5 4 - 5 5 , 56—57; judgments of Bolshevism and Soviet Communism, 3 8 - 4 1 , 154; teaching

career, 5 4 - 5 5 , 140; and de Man's Au delà du marxisme, 67, 83; economic views, 70, 72; attempts to change SFIO policy, 74, 78, 81, 87, 100-105; use of military imagery, 82; and neosocialism, 89, 100, 104-107, 115; and de Man, 90, 129-130, 155, 170, 172, 182-183; and PSdF, 90, 105-107; propaganda initiatives, 100-102, 105-106; and planning, 129-130, 1 3 1 - 1 3 2 , 1 3 3 , 137, 153; and Union Socialiste Républicaine, 132, 169, 170, 178; collaborationism, 1 3 4 135, 141-142, 151-155, 157-158, 1 6 5 174; antiwar stance, 140-141, 143-145, 146-150; disillusionment with parliamentary government, 145, 165-166, 187; reaction to German victory (1940), 150-151, 158, 165-166, 176; and antiSemitism, 157-158, 164-165, 168, 171; and Vichy government, 165-169, 173— 174; and RNP, 168-170; and Hitler, 170, 172, 173, 174; and Resistance, 175, 178; after Second World War, 1 9 2 193, 195 de Gaulle, Charles, 143, 173, 178-181 Degrelle, Léon, 161 Delaisi, Francis, 7 2 - 7 3 , 119-120, 133, 153, 154-155, 170, 175 Deloncle, Eugène, 168-170 Delvo, Edgar, 164 de Man, Hendrik, 3, 5, 7, 14, 35, 89, 94, 96, 106, 167, 168; Die sozialistische Idee (1933), 1, 125; meeting with Mierendorff (1942), 1-2, 8, 164, 182-183; collaborationism in Second World War, 6, 134-135, 141-142, 151-156, 157158, 159-165, 169, 184; Plan du Travail, 8, 75, 117-119, 123, 124, 1 2 5 128, 130-131, 135, 137, 161-162; in First World War, 9, 15, 16-17, 18, 1 9 20, 59, 61, 149; youth, 11-12; in United States, 17-18, 2 3 - 2 4 , 3 2 - 3 4 , 37, 71; judgments of Bolshevism, 38; post-1918 intellectual influences, 4 0 - 4 1 , 70, 127; Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus (1926), 43, 5 8 - 6 8 , 71, 72, 73, 75, 99, 154; and Socialist Youth Movement in Germany, 48; letters from Mierendorff (1926), 5 5 56; Au delà du marxisme (1927), 59, 6 6 - 6 7 , 83, 129; and Heppenheim conference (1929), 6 5 - 6 6 ; Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus, 66, 90, 127; analysis of

Index fascist success, 75, 7 8 - 7 9 , 8 0 - 8 1 , 83; use of military imagery, 82, 117-118, 127, 143, 194; and Déat, 90, 129-130, 132, 155, 170; ideal of Europe, 91, 120, 151-152, 155-156, 162-164; Après coup (1941), 129-130, 164, 183; antiwar stance, 140-141, 142-143, 145, 147, 149; disillusionment with parliamentary government, 145, 152, 156, 187; manifesto to members of POB (1940), 150-151, 156, 1 5 8 , 1 6 0 , 1 6 6 , 176; and anti-Semitism, 157-158, 1 6 4 165, 168; and UTMI, 161-164; and Le Travail, 162-164; and Resistance, 177, 182-183; after Second World War, 1 9 3 194, 195, 196 Dienststelle Hellwig, 1 6 2 , 1 6 4 Dodge, Peter, 195 Doriot, Jacques, 167, 169, 178 Duelos, Jacques, 101 Durbin, Evan, 137 Durkheim, Emile, 4, 24, 39, 40

251

23, 3 5 - 3 6 , 4 1 - 4 2 , 73, 81-82, 87, 151; academic mentors, 3 9 - 4 1 ; and Marxism, 3 9 - 4 1 , 7 0 - 7 1 ; criticism of parliamentary government, 8 5 - 8 7 ; parallelism of careers, 8 9 - 9 1 ; antiwar sentiments, 140-141, 147; collaborationism, 141142, 151 Fuchs, Emil, 65, 66 Funk, Walther, 152, 154

Ecole Normale Supérieure, 12, 24, 34, 37, 39, 54, 55, 65, 67 Erdmann, Lothar, 66 Emst Ludwig, Grand Duke of Hessen, 13

Gaitskell, Hugh, 137 Gesellschaft, Die, 49, 68 Goebbels, Joseph, 77 Goerdeler, Carl, 189 Gorky, Maxim, 38 Goverts, Henry, 37 Gramsci, Antonio, 35, 64 Grauls, Frans Victor, 162, 164 Greater Britain, The (Mosley), 115, 136, 138 Gropius, Walter, 28 Grosse, Franz, 134, 167, 168 Groupe Emile Vandervelde, 181 Guiding Principles for Economic Transformation (Richtlinien für den Umbau der Wirtschaft, 1932), 124-125, 126-127, 188

Falkenhausen, Baron Alexander von, 160 Farmer-Labor Party (Washington), 33 Fascism, 6, 7, 8, 7 5 - 8 1 , 114-115, 134 Faure, Paul, 100, 148 Fordism, 71 Forgan, Dr. Robert, 112, 116 Frank, Ludwig, 48 French Socialist Party (Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière/SFIO), 3 4 - 3 5 , 37, 44, 45, 46, 5 4 - 5 5 , 56, 74, 78, 81, 87, 90, 100-105, 106, 107-108, 126, 128-129, 132, 133, 145, 148, 169, 170, 171, 178-181, 191 Freud, Sigmund, 62 Front Generation, 2 - 4 , 20 Front Generation socialists (general references): formation and definition, 2 - 4 ; and socialism, 4 - 5 , 26, 42, 47, 5 8 - 5 9 , 7 4 - 7 5 , 8 3 - 8 5 , 154, 195-197; and fascism, 6, 7, 8, 7 5 - 8 1 , 87-88; economic planning, 7 - 8 , 71, 75, 117-119, 175; and Resistance (1940-1945), 8, 1 7 4 175, 177; and First World War, 17-18, 20, 139; quest for new beginning, 2 1 -

Halasi, Albert, 138 Hamburger Echo, 49, 50, 125, 126-127 Hardie, Keir, 84 Harzburg Front, 93, 106 Haubach, Theodor, 3, 5, 8, 43, 64, 73, 83, 99, 176; in First World War, 9, 11, 15, 16, 18, 19; youth, 13-14; and Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, 20, 4 9 - 5 0 , 51, 84, 98; Die Dachstube, 2 4 - 2 5 , 27; Das Tribunal, 27-30, 32, 36; university years, 3 6 - 3 7 , 3 8 - 4 1 , 69; judgments of Bolshevism, 38; and Socialist Youth Movement, 47; and Hofgeismar Circle, 4 8 - 4 9 ; Die Gesellschaft, 49; early socialist career, 57; and de Man's Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus, 65; attempts to change SPD policy, 8 4 - 8 5 , 87-88, 94, 113; responses to National Socialism, 8 4 - 8 5 , 9 6 - 9 7 ; trial and execution, 177, 190; arrests by Nazis, 185, 186; resistance against Nazis, 185-190 Hauck, Henry, 137, 145, 178, 180 Hawker, Lanoe ("Johnny"), 19 Heimann, Eduard, 66

252

Index

Heller, Hermann, 49 Henderson, Arthur, 68 Henk, Emil, 187 Heppenheim conference (1929), 6 5 - 6 6 , 134 Herr, Lucien, 39, 55 Herriot, Eduard, 102 Hessischer Volksfreund, 50 Hilferding, Rudolf, 4 5 - 4 6 , 49, 51, 60, 68, 126, 128 Hiller, Kurt, 27 Hindenburg, Paul von, 98 Hitler, Adolf: achievement of power in Germany, 1, 99, 102, 125, 128, 134, 136, 184; assassination attempt against (1944), 2, 190; policies toward Occupied Europe, 6, 142, 146, 156, 160, 164, 166; military successes, 9, 151; in Weimar Republic's politics, 49, 75, 76, 93, 95, 98; foreign policy, 144, 147, 159; and Déat, 170, 172, 173, 174 Hobson, J. H., 68 Hofgeismar Circle, 49, 5 0 - 5 1 , 58, 65 Höltermann, Karl, 93, 98 Hilgenberg, Alfred, 93, 184 Huysmans, Camille, 181 Industrial Workers of the World, 33 Institut Allemand (Paris), 154 Iron Front, 9 3 - 9 8 , 103, 105, 115, 123 Isherwood, Christopher, 114 James, Harold, 124 James, William, 156 Jaspers, Karl, 39, 41 Jaurès, Jean, 12, 24, 34, 57, 84 Joad, C. E. M., 84, 8 6 , 1 1 3 Jouhaux, Léon, 107, 129, 132-133 Jouvenel, Bertrand de, 193 Joyce, William, 146 Jünger, Ernst, 15 Kautsky, Karl, 6 0 - 6 1 , 6 7 - 6 8 Keckskemeti, Paul, 3, 4 Keynes, John Maynard, 40, 41, 68, 70, 109, 119, 122, 127, 138 Keyserling, Count Hermann, 40, 41 Klatt, Fritz, 66 KPD. See Communist parties: Germany Labour Party, 31, 32, 44, 46, 47, 5 2 - 5 3 , 68, 76, 86, 90, 108-112, 113, 115, 121123, 124-125, 138, 181

Lacoste, Robert, 128, 133, 178, 182 l'Aigle, Alma de, 49, 66 Laurat, Lucien, 108, 133 Laurent, Charles, 182 Laval, Pierre, 165-169, 173-174 League of Nations, 30, 38, 144 League of Nations Union, 40, 52 Leaper, W. J., 116 Lebas, Jean, 100 Leber, Julius, 64, 78, 81, 85, 9 3 - 9 4 , 99, 176, 177, 184-190, 195 Lederer, Emil, 39, 41, 69, 124 Leed, Eric, 4 Lefranc, Georges, 108, 129, 130, 132, 1 3 4 - 1 3 5 , 1 3 6 , 137, 193 Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism, 169 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 35, 38 Leopold III, King of the Belgians, 147, 150, 153, 160-161 Leuschner, Wilhelm, 186-190 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 65, 67 Lévy, Louis, 179 Lévy, Marthe, 179 L'Héveder, Louis, 105 Libération-Nord, 178, 182 Lichtheim, George, 60 Liebknecht, Karl, 27, 48 Link, the, 148 Lloyd George, David, 23, 30, 112 Lloyd George, Megan, 115 Löwe, Adolf, 66 Luxemburg, Rosa, 27 MacDonald, J. Ramsay, 52, 68, 109-111, 113, 126 Macmillan, Harold, 112, 138 Marion, Paul, 107 Marquer, Adrien, 104-105, 130, 131, 132, 167 Marxism, 4, 5, 7, 18, 19, 3 9 - 4 1 , 46, 5 8 64, 6 7 - 6 8 , 7 0 - 7 3 , 104-105, 139, 146, 179 Massis, Henri. See Agathon Matteotti, Giacomo, 75 Maxton, James, 53, 115 McDougall, William, 40, 62 McKibbin, Ross, 44 Mémoires politiques (Déat), 14, 90, 148, 173, 195 Mennicke, Karl, 65, 66 Michels, Robert, 44 Mierendorff, Carlo, 3, 5, 14, 26, 43, 73,

Index 90, 195; meeting with de Man (1942), 1-2, 8, 164, 182-183; in First World War, 9, 15, 16, 18, 197; youth, 13-14; Die Dachstube, 2 4 - 2 5 , 27; Das Tribunal, 25, 27-30, 32; "If I Had the Cinema!" 30; university years, 3 6 - 3 7 , 3 8 41, 69; judgments of Bolshevism, 3 8 41; early socialist career, 47, 5 0 - 5 1 , 5 6 57; use of military imagery, 51, 82; letters to de Man (1926), 5 5 - 5 6 ; and de Man's Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus, 65; Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus, 66, 93; attempts to change SPD policy, 7 4 - 7 5 , 81, 82, 83, 91-100, 117; responses to National Socialism, 7 6 - 7 9 , 81, 9 4 - 9 5 , 184, 197; advocacy of electoral reform, 8 5 - 8 6 , 91, 95, 99, 189; ideal of Europe, 91-93, 95, 99; imprisonment by Nazis, 91, 116, 184-186; propaganda initiatives, 9 4 - 9 8 , 101, 106, 152, 196; and planning, 117, 120, 1 2 4 125, 188; death, 177, 189, 192; resistance against Nazis, 185-190 Milhaud, Edgar, 34 Moch, Jules, 71-72, 105, 180 Moltke, Count Helmuth James von, 1 8 6 187 Montagnon, Barthélémy, 69, 70, 71-72, 100, 102, 104-105, 132, 135, 158, 171-172 Morgan, Kenneth O., 31 Mosley, Lady Cynthia, 36, 43, 52, 5 3 - 5 4 , 7 1 , 1 1 2 - 1 1 3 , 116 Mosley, Lady Diana, 1 1 6 , 1 5 8 , 194 Mosley, Nicholas, 14, 114, 147, 158 Mosley, Sir Oswald, 3, 6, 37, 56, 73, 81, 140, 170, 172; Revolution by Reason (1925), 8, 53, 58, 6 8 - 6 9 , 71, 121; in First World War, 9, 1 5 - 1 6 , 1 8 , 1 9 ; youth, 11, 13; My Life (1968), 14; and British Union of Fascists, 20, 74, 89, 9 0 - 9 1 , 108, 114-116, 123, 135, 141, 146, 147, 148-149, 158-159, 194; parliamentary career, 23, 3 0 - 3 2 ; judgments of Bolshevism and Soviet Communism, 38, 115, 1 5 4 - 1 5 5 ; and Keynes, 40, 109, 122; early career in Labour Party, 43, 47, 51-53, 57, 158; economic views, 6 8 - 6 9 , 71, 72, 146; planning, 69, 109, 117, 121-123, 124, 126, 137; and New Party, 74, 86, 90, 111-114, 123, 132, 146; criticism of parliamentary government, 86, 114, 121-122, 146; anti-

253

Semitism, 109, 115, 135, 1 4 6 , 1 6 4 - 1 6 5 ; attempts to change Labour policy, 1 0 9 111 ; memorandum for economic recovery (1930), 109-111, 121, 145; Mosley Manifesto (1930), 1 1 2 , 1 1 7 , 1 2 1 , 1 2 2 123, 146; The Greater Britain (1932), 115, 136; antiwar stance, 141, 143-144, 146-149; arrest and imprisonment, 141, 158-159; Tomorrow We Live (1938), 146; after Second World War, 194-195 Mosley Manifesto, 112, 117, 121, 1 2 2 123, 146 Mosley memorandum, 1 0 9 - 1 1 1 , 1 2 1 , 146 Mussolini, Benito, 75-76, 114-115, 136, 166, 173 My Life (Mosley), 14 Naphtali, Fritz, 128 National Policy, A (Strachey et al.), 112, 121, 122 National Socialism, 7 4 - 7 5 , 7 6 - 8 1 , 85, 9 4 - 9 9 , 100, 104, 116, 134, 151-152, 154, 155-156, 163, 167, 171-172 Neosocialism (néo-socialisme), 89, 100, 104-107, 115, 129 Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus, 66, 90, 93, 127, 188 New Order (1940-1944), 6, 8, 1 4 2 , 1 4 5 , 153, 154, 159, 166, 176 New Party, 74, 86, 90, 111-114, 123, 132, 146 Nicolson, Harold, 112 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 185-186 Nordic League, 148, 159 L'Oeuvre, 167, 168-169, 170, 173 Oprecht, Hans, 138 Osterroth, Franz, 49 Osterroth, Nikolaus, 185 Owen, Wilfred, 15 Pähl, Walther, 66, 72, 75, 91, 95, 96, 99, 123-124, 127, 134, 154-155, 157, 185, 193 Papen, Franz von, 98, 99, 124 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 13 Parti Ouvrier Belge. See Belgian Workers' Party Parti Populaire Français, 167, 170 Parti Socialiste Belge. See Belgian Socialist Party

254

Index

Parti Socialiste de France/Union JeanJaurès (PSdF), 90, 1 0 5 - 1 0 7 , 1 1 5 , 1 2 9 , 131, 132, 133, 169, 176, 178 Paul-Boncour, Joseph, 102 Pavlov, Ivan, 95 Perspectives socialistes (Déat), 8, 72, 78, 83, 100, 101, 168, 170 Pétain, Philippe, 160, 165-169, 173, 178 Pfemfert, Franz, 27 Philip, André, 65, 67, 71, 72, 179-180, 193 Pineau, Christian, 175, 178-180, 181 Pivert, Marceau, 5, 95 Plan de la CGT, 129, 133, 138 Plan du Travail, 8, 75, 117-119, 123, 124, 125-131, 133-135, 136, 137, 138, 161162, 182 Plan du Travail (Switzerland), 128 Planning, 7, 69, 117-139, 154, 184 Plan van de Arbeid (Netherlands), 128 POB. See Belgian Workers' Party Popular Front, 82, 95, 106, 132, 133, 137, 141, 145, 196 PSB. See Belgian Socialist Party PSdF. See Parti Socialiste de France/Union Jean-Jaurès Quennell, Peter, 114 Ragaz, Leonhard, 66 Ramadier, Paul, 105 Ramsay, A. H. Maule, 159 Ranshofen-Wertheimer, Egon. See Wertheimer, Egon Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP), 168-170, 171, 172 Rathenau, Walther, 40, 41, 70, 127 Rathmann, August, 43, 65, 66 Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, 20, 4 9 50,51,84, 93,98 Reichwein, Adolf, 66, 70, 71, 177, 1 8 6 190 Remarque, Erich Maria, 15 Renaudel, Pierre, 102, 105, 106, 132 Rens, Jef, 182 Revolution by Reason (Mosley), 8, 53, 58, 6 8 - 6 9 , 71, 121 Revolution by Reason (Strachey), 71 Révolution Constructive, 90, 107-108, 129, 130, 132, 148 Reynaud, Paul, 149 Risdon, Wilfred, 116

RNP. See Rassemblement National Populaire Roosevelt, Franklin D., 118, 128, 136, 137-138 Rosselli, Carlo, 168 Rosselli, Nello, 168 Rouge et le bleu, Le, 171 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 171 Rubiner, Ludwig, 27 Sassoon, Siegfried, 15 Sauckel, Fritz, 173-174 Scheidemann, Philipp, 56 Schickele, René, 27 Schiebelhuth, Hans, 37 Schleicher, Kurt von, 99, 124 Schumacher, Kurt, 76, 94, 99, 185, 1 9 0 191 Schwamb, Ludwig, 186, 190 Section Française de l'Internationale Socialiste. See French Socialist Party Seydewitz, Max, 5 SFIO. See French Socialist Party Shaw, George Bernard, 113 Siegel, Michael Harro, 188 Simiand, François, 39, 41 Sinzheimer, Hugo, 66 Smith, F. E., 23 Snowden, Philip, 68, 110-111, 113, 126, 128 Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands/SPD), 27, 46, 47, 4 9 - 5 0 , 51, 56, 64, 75, 76, 77, 81, 83, 8 5 - 8 6 , 90, 91-100, 104, 105, 106, 124, 126, 128, 167, 176, 185, 190-191 Socialism, 4, 5, 4 4 - 4 7 , 6 2 - 6 4 , 83, 141142 Socialist Youth Movement, 4 7 - 4 8 Soulès, Georges, 108, 168, 173 Sozialistische Idee, Die (de Man), 1, 125 Spaak, Paul-Henri, 126, 145, 147, 161, 181-182, 184 SPD. See Social Democratic Party Spinasse, Charles, 7 1 - 7 2 , 171 Stalin, Joseph, 128 Stauffenberg, Count Claus Schenk von, 189-190 Sternhell, Zeev, 133, 137 Strachey, John, 53, 56, 71, 80, 86, 1 1 1 113, 123 Tarde, Alfred de. See Agathon Tarnow, Fritz, 73, 123-124

Index Taylor, Frederick W., 40 Taylorism, 71, 72 Texcier, Jean, 178 "Theses of Pontigny," 138 Third International, 35, 37, 45 Thomas, Albert, 24, 3 4 - 3 5 , 69, 119, 120, 153 Thomas, J. H., 109,113, 122 Tillich, Paul, 65, 6 6 , 1 8 8 Tixier, Adrien, 180 Tomorrow We Live (Mosley), 146 Travail, Le, 162-164 Tribunal, Das, 25, 27-30, 32, 36

Unie van Hand- en Geestesarbeiders, 161 Union des Travailleurs Manuels et Intellectuels (UTMI), 161-164, 177 Union Jean-Jaurès, 178, 181 Union Socialiste Républicaine, 132, 169, 170, 178 Usinger, Fritz, 29 UTMI. See Union des Travailleurs Manuels et Intellectuels Vagts, Alfred, 177 Vallon, Louis, 133, 136, 137, 178, 1 7 9 180 Valois, Georges, 100 Van Acker, Achille, 181, 184 Vandervelde, Emile, 60, 125, 126, 128, 129, 147, 149 Van Zeeland, Paul, 130-131, 132, 141, 142, 145, 196 Versailles, Treaty of, 38, 76, 146

255

Vichy government, 160, 165-169, 1 7 3 174,177, 178,180 Vie socialiste, La, 54 Vlaams Nationaal Verbond, 164 Voss, Dr., 164 Wandervogel, 4 Webb, Beatrice, 52 Webb, Sidney, 52 Weber, Alfred, 39, 40, 41 Weber, Max, 4, 37-38, 39, 40 Weimar Republic, 27, 39, 70, 76, 8 5 - 8 6 , 90, 9 8 - 9 9 , 134 Wels, Otto, 99, 126 Wertheimer, Egon, 37, 43, 49, 51, 57, 9 0 9 1 , 1 2 4 - 1 2 5 , 157 Wheatley, John, 53, 123 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 16 Wilkinson, Ellen, 108, 116 Wilson, Woodrow, 23, 38 Windsor, Duchess of, 194 Windsor, Duke of, 194 Wooton, Barbara, 137 Working classes, 6, 18-19, 29, 4 4 - 4 7 , 6 1 63, 8 0 , 1 0 4 , 1 9 6 Woytinsky, Wladimir, 119-120, 123-125 WTB Plan, 123-125, 126, 134 Würth, Joseph ("Pepy"), 36 Young, Allan, 53, 111-113, 123 Zoretti, Ludovic, 54, 133, 148 Zuckmayer, Carl, 3, 20, 21, 3 6 - 3 7 Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus (de Man), 43, 5 8 - 6 8 , 71, 72, 73, 75, 99, 154, 182