ON THE EVE
27
Spaniards as refugees. To have been refugees twice was rather
excessive, one had to admit.
I realized suddenly that we political refugees, we hunted
revolutionists, were doubly, triply, beaten at the moment, for many
of us were no longer "of us," having been defeated and demoral–
ized in the depths of our souls. We had begun to fight among our–
selves for a place on the last boat.
The extremity of our defeat was this
sauve qui peut.
The end
of solidarity means the finish of socialism and the workers' move–
ment. I remembered Jose Negre, one of the first secretaries of the
C.N.T., whom I met at Barcelona in 1917. When I next saw him it
was during the war. He was lying on a pallet in a little concentra–
tion camp in the Jura, half dead with hunger but still full of
enthusiasm at the age of sixty. I got in touch with the Veterans of
the CGT, the printers' union at Paris, and the paper
Proletarian
Revolution;
I had some one speak to Jouhaux-who got out of it
with some useless advice. After having obtained a contribution of
300 francs, I was relieved to learn that the old man had died. The
failure of the French working class (it's hardly worth speaking of
the "left-wing" intellectuals, who went from one failure to another,
rom the Moscow Trials to worm-eaten pacifism or Stalinized bel–
igerency, etc., etc.) this failure lay in its complete passivity in
e face of the White terror in Spain and in its desertion of the
panish refugees. Repression, in its Freudian sense, played a
reat part here. We lived too comfortably, our holidays were too
eautiful; half of the militants of the extreme left-the best of
em-were functionaries. Nobody wanted to see these fugitives
rom hell or hear any talk of them; it would have bothered our
onsciences and spoiled our week-ends. There was a great con–
piracy of proletarian cowardliness in regard to the concentration
amps at
ArgeH~s
and Saint-Cyrprien. A militant trade-unionist
hom I respected (he was a functionary) cried from the platform
fa convention, "Rather slavery than death!" It was a magnificent
logan-magnificent for the partial lucidity of its false reasoning
nd as a confession of degeneration. It was the finish of courage.
or it is not death one accepts when one enters a struggle, but the
isk of it-and there are slaveries indeed so much worse than death
at they only lead the way to it and multiply suicides.
The little towns of the Midi slept in the sun as if nothing had
