Militarism and Anti-Militarism: Socialists, Communists and Conscription in France and BRITAIN 1900-1940

MILITARISM AND ANTI-MILITARISM:
SOCIALISTS, COMMUNISTS AND

CONSCRIPTION IN FRANCE AND
BRITAIN 1900–1940
I
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THE CONSCRIPTION CONTROVERSY 1939
As sole communist representative in the House of Commons,
William Gallacher was used to defending the actions and pro-
nouncements of communists internationally. Nevertheless, there
was something unusual in the air when, on 27 April 1939,
‘National’ prime minister Neville Chamberlain countered Labour
opposition to his new conscription bill by invoking the approval
of the French communist journalist Gabriel Péri. Vice-president
of the Commission for Foreign Affairs in the Chamber, Péri was
foreign editor of the communist daily L’Humanité and his party’s
most authoritative commentator on international issues. In
demanding that British workers shoulder their military responsi-
bilities, it was clear he was not merely offering a personal opinion.1
Like all communist parties, both the British communist party
(Communist Party of Great Britain, CPGB) and its French coun-
terpart (Parti communiste français, PCF) were committed to
stringent precepts of international discipline as sections of the
ultra-centralized Communist International (Comintern). Gal-
lacher’s response to the mention of Péri — ‘I repudiate him
right away’ — thus betrayed a surprising disregard for such pro-
tocols, which coverage in the communist Daily Worker and a note
of protest to L’Humanité only reinforced.2 John Gollan, the sec-
retary of the Young Communist League (YCL), singled out for
criticism ‘newspapers and individuals on the left in France’,
1
See Guillaume Bourgeois, ‘Entretien avec Sam Russell’, Communisme, lxxxvii
(2006), 14.
2
Hansard, 5th ser., cccxlvi, col. 1348 (27 Apr. 1939); Labour History Archive and
Study Centre, Manchester (hereafter LHASC), CPGB archives, CPGB political
bureau minutes, 27 Apr. 1939.
Past and Present, no. 202 (Feb. 2009) ß The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2009
doi:10.1093/pastj/gtn020
208 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 202
adding pointedly that the issue could ‘best be dealt with by
Labour in this country’.3 This was not the modus operandi of
the Comintern, least of all on issues bearing directly on Soviet
security interests. The CPGB’s representative in Moscow conse-
quently returned home with a revised conscription line which
effectively he bounced on the British party leadership. General
secretary Harry Pollitt, having published a popular exposition of
the anti-conscription case, indicated his willingness to stand
down as party leader. Scottish organizer Peter Kerrigan con-
demned the intervention as a ‘contemptuous flouting of the

whole of the leadership of the Party’.4 Though all was seemingly
papered over, four months later Pollitt, supported by Gallacher,
was removed as general secretary over the issue of war. Evidently
more than just conjunctural issues were involved.
The episode opens up two themes deserving exploration.5 One
is that of the functioning of the Comintern at this late stage of its
development. The resolution of the issue, like Pollitt’s later sack-
ing, underlines the binding character of the communists’ inter-
national disciplines. On the other hand, compared with the close
and continuous supervision exercised by the Comintern in earlier
periods, the clumsiness of co-ordination is striking — especially
as the conscription bill coincided with British diplomatic over-
tures towards the Soviets. One factor was the decimation of the
Comintern apparatus in the terror.6 Another was the apparent
willingness of communists like Pollitt and Gallacher to test the
limits of Moscow’s authority. ‘Forgive me for being British’,
Pollitt had defiantly written to Moscow a few weeks earlier; yet,
with the promotion of local popular fronts, being ‘British’ was
precisely what Moscow ostensibly demanded of him. A tension
with centralized controls was to some degree implicit in such
a conception. In disregarding international commitments in
respect of conscription, Pollitt was thus at the same time faithfully
3
Daily Worker, 28 Apr. 1939.
4
LHASC, CPGB archives, CPGB central committee proceedings, 21 May 1939.
5
See Kevin Morgan, Against Fascism and War: Ruptures and Continuities in British
Communist Politics, 1935–1941 (Manchester, 1989), 77–9 for a conjectural, pre-
archival account; also Kevin Morgan, Harry Pollitt (Manchester, 1993), 104–6.
6
See, for example, Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History
of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (Basingstoke, 1996), 142–57.
MILITARISM AND ANTI-MILITARISM 209
following Comintern injunctions to recognize ‘national forms’ of
political activity and identity.7
What being British — or French — actually meant in respect of
military service is a second theme deserving attention. In exploit-
ing their native radical traditions, British communists were well
aware of the ‘toute petite différence’ between conventional
British patriotism and the ‘revolutionary democratic tradition’
represented by the ‘Marseillaise’ and tricolour.8 Conscription
itself, as we shall see, was a conception of revolutionary proven-
ance; and a discourse of the nation in arms, indigenous to the

French left, was in Britain associated mainly with the political
right. This in turn raised issues of the legitimate prerogatives of
the state; its identification with the ‘people’ as collective actor;
and the character of socialist alternatives, in this case to militar-
ism. Gollan in the Daily Worker expressly rejected transpositions
from countries with different traditions from those of Britain.
Like Gallacher’s interjection in the Commons, his comments
both illuminate a longer tradition and can themselves be properly
understood only within such a perspective.
In approaching these questions comparatively, the present
article focuses on two periods in which the prospect or achieve-
ment of Franco-British military collaboration encouraged
transnational exchanges of a notably heterodox character. The fol-
lowing two sections focus on French and British left-wing attitudes
to conscription prior to 1914, when already these alignments cut
across national as well as political boundaries and exploited both
positive and negative transnational exemplars. A further section
then shows how, in the context of military alliance, British socialists
during the First World War were already confronted by domestic
critics with the pro-conscriptionist sentiments of their French
counterparts. In the next two sections, on communist attitudes
to military service, no comprehensive account is attempted. Nor
is there a detailed discussion of social-democratic views of military
7
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial0 no-politicheskoi istorii [Russian State
Archive of Socio-Political History], Moscow (hereafter RGASPI), f. 495, op. 100,
d. 1040: Pollitt to J. R. Campbell, 20 Mar. 1939. For the adaptation to ‘national
forms’, see Morgan, Against Fascism and War, ch. 2.
8
See Kevin Morgan, ‘Une toute petite différence entre ‘‘la Marseillaise’’ et ‘‘God
save the King’’: la gauche britannique et le problème de la nation dans les années
trente’, in Serge Wolikow and Annie Bleton-Ruget (eds.), Antifascisme et nation: les
gauches européennes au temps du front populaire (Dijon, 1998); also Campbell in
Discussion, June 1936, 7.
service, though it may be noted that in 1939 the socialist leader
Léon Blum was as critical of his British Labour counterparts as
French communists were of theirs.9 Focusing instead on the com-
munists, a watershed moment is identified with the Comintern’s
adoption of the popular-front strategy in the mid 1930s.
Previously, a generalized commitment to revolution had helped
underpin the centripetal authority of the Comintern, and com-
munists had not had to reconcile significant distinctions between
different regimes or political systems with the notion of a single
guiding strategy. During the popular-front period, conversely, as

a generalized hostility to capitalism gave way to the shifting
accents of Soviet diplomacy, differentiated patterns of manipula-
tion or neglect, corresponding to specific diplomatic relationships
with Moscow, aggravated cultural or political differences arising
from the reorientation to distinct progressive national traditions.
At the same time, communists in Britain at least now escaped the
more elaborate machinery of controls that might have smothered
centrifugal tendencies. Gallacher in 1939 even warned of the
‘collapse of the International’.10 Though discipline was finally
upheld, it needed an emergency breakdown service, or a veritable
mode du coup d’éclat, without any obvious precedent in the period
of the Comintern’s fully functioning machinery.11
Striking parallels will become apparent between exchanges at
the times of Britain’s recourse to conscription respectively in
1916 and 1939. Indeed, the parallels might be taken still further
9
See Times, 28 Apr. 1939.
10
Gallacher at CPGB central committee, 2 Oct. 1939, in About Turn: The
Communist Party and the Outbreak of the Second World War, ed. Francis King and
George Matthews (London, 1990), 95. What is here at issue is not the intensity but
the extent of these controls. As William J. Chase has demonstrated, the centrifugal
pressures of the popular front were accompanied by an intensification of discipline
buttressed by the anti-Trotskyist campaign. Concentrated as it was on the Comintern
apparatus, this in its turn, however, undermined the organizational effectiveness of
centre vis-à-vis periphery. Within clear limits, it may even have encouraged that weak-
ening of hierarchical relations, but within the basic framework of the party hierarchy,
which has been identified as one feature of the Terror: see William J. Chase, Enemies
within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939 (New Haven
and London, 2001), 127–8 and passim; also Berthold Unfried, ‘L’Autocritique dans
les milieux kominterniens des années 1930’, in Claude Pennetier and Bernard
Pudal (eds.), Autobiographies, autocritiques, aveux dans le monde communiste (Paris,
2002), 58–9.
11
For le mode du coup d’éclat, in the context of the limits to monarchical authority, see
Philippe Hamon, ‘Une monarchie de la Renaissance? 1515–1559’, in Joël Cornette
(ed.), La Monarchie entre Renaissance et Révolution, 1515–1792 (Paris, 2000), 44–5.
back, for example to the earlier cross-Channel alliance of the
Crimean War, when Alexis de Tocqueville tartly predicted that
Britain could and should no longer ‘continue separated from the
rest of the world, and preserve all her peculiar institutions uninflu-
enced by those which prevail over the . . . Continent’.12 That
Tocqueville was mistaken should not simply be attributed to
some timeless inheritance of argument and experience. Properly
historicized, the alignments of 1939 reveal instead the survival and
maturation of a political generation partly formed by the experi-
ence of earlier controversies. In Britain, at least, this was possibly as

true of the Conservative Chamberlain as it was of an inner core of
communist leaders tested in the militant struggles of the First
World War. Only after 1939, as the experience of a ‘people’s’ war
combined with the continuing reverberations of the conscription
controversy, did the CPGB, like the Labour Party, remain for the
time being a supporter of conscription. The ironies of this position
are briefly discussed in a concluding section.
II
MILITARISM AND ANTI-MILITARISM IN FRANCE
Born and reborn in war, in France the idea of the republic was
inseparable from that of its willingness to bear arms. Dating from
its first great hour of trial, ‘La Marseillaise’ itself provided both
chant national and chant de guerre. During the union sacrée of
1914–18 it could represent a battle hymn inspired exclusively
by hatred for external foes; and yet for the socialists who adopted
the anthem, in France and internationally, it always conjured
up the battle that had also to be fought against domestic oppres-
sors.13 For the popular-front PCF, as it reclaimed this tradition,
the self-defence of the nation became linked with a communist
rhetoric of revolution, though less as future aspiration than as
a heritage to be defended.14 Annie Kriegel thought there was
12
Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior
from 1834 to 1859, ed. M. C. M. Simpson, 2 vols. (London, 1877), ii, 92–4, citing
Tocqueville to Senior, 21 Jan. and 15 Feb. 1855.
13
See, for example, Louis de Joantho, Le Triomphe de la Marseillaise (Paris, 1917), 5,
8 and passim; for its adoption as a socialist anthem, see E. J. Hobsbawm, Echoes of the
Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution (London, 1990), 35.
14
See Georges Cogniot, ‘La ‘‘Marseillaise’’ au service de l’union de la nation fran-
çaise’, Cahiers du bolchevisme, Aug. 1936.
something almost congenital about this socialist patriotism that
identified universal values with their French apotheosis.15 But as
Kriegel also intimated, the relationship between patriotism, the
army and anti-militarism was a complex and contradictory one.
Conscription itself was a concept of revolutionary provenance,
originating with the tableaux de conscrits of the Jacobins’ first levées
en masse. Annie Crépin’s work has shown how the concept’s
development in its republican form was to reveal numerous
lines of tension regarding the period of military service, the bal-
ance between standing army and reserve, the character and dura-

tion of military training and the selectiveness or universality of the
call-up.16 Conservative advocates were not lacking, particularly
after the debacle of 1870. Nevertheless, it was the republican left
that became identified with what critics described as ‘militarism’,
though in a form self-consciously differentiated from Prus-
sianism. The idea of a ruling officer caste was rejected. So were
the disciplines on which notoriously it depended. A republican
esprit militaire was to be cultivated, not as something apart from
the nation, but as the shared civic duty of self-defence.17
The identification of citizenship with military service did not
therefore mean the idealization of la caserne, or barracks life.
Though compulsion was doubtless implicit in the ideal of univer-
sal service, the real leitmotif was an egalitarian conception of cit-
izenship extending to common burdens as well as rights.18 Here
the battle of Valmy (1792) provided a defining myth of the nation
in arms, conscious of its destiny and confronting Prussia’s mind-
less ‘machines of war’. Often, as in Hugo’s poem ‘Ô soldats de
l’an deux!’, the emergency mobilization of the levée en masse
became confused with this rhetoric of voluntarism and virtual
15
Annie Kriegel, Aux origines du communisme français: contribution à l’histoire du
mouvement ouvrier français, 2 vols. (Paris, 1964), i, 48–9.
16
Annie Crépin, Défendre la France: les Français, la guerre et le service militaire, de la
guerre de Sept Ans à Verdun (Rennes, 2005), 130. For a communist commentary, see
Jules Leverrier [Albert Soboul], La Naissance de l’armée nationale, 1789–1794 (Paris,
1939), 185 and passim.
17
Crépin, Défendre la France, 30 ff., 129, 186–8; also Jérôme Hélie, ‘Les Armes’, in
Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. (Paris, 1997), iii, 3520–2. As Crépin
stresses, common eligibility for military service did not have to imply universal military
service, and the spirit of universalism was thus diluted, notably through the ability to
nominate a substitute.
18
See, for example, Crépin, Défendre la France, 225–6.
spontaneity.19 Communist historians, acknowledging the transi-
tion from free enrolment to compulsion, were to link them in a
process culminating in the levée en masse as the self-mobilization
of the people as collective entity.20 Similarly, under the Com-
mune of 1871 the abolition of conscription and the regular
army was accompanied by the enrolment into the National
Guard of all eligible citizens.21 The common guiding principle
was not so much compulsion itself as the universalism which
presupposed compulsion, but which at the same time could be
depicted as the unforced effort of a united people.

As Alan Forrest has pointed out, debates over military service
thus drew on an ideal soldat-type that in reality was only tenuously
linked with conscription, but which allowed conscriptionists to
borrow some of the positive lustre of the spontaneous call to
arms.22 Crépin similarly notes that the triumph of the soldier-
citizen, though linked indissolubly with the nation he served,
displaced a more radical conception of the citizen-soldier in
which the nation and the military were as one. These distinctions
were not merely semantic ones. Expressed in the alternatives of a
wide conscription for relatively short periods of service, and of a
more limited call-up for longer periods, they lay behind debates
continuing intermittently throughout the Third Republic.
Common to these conceptions, nevertheless, was some basic cor-
respondence between a republican ideal of citizenship and the
readiness to bear arms in its defence. The three-year conscription
law of 1889 hardly gave adequate expression to this ideal.
Nevertheless, the resurrection of the Valmy myth for the same
year’s centenary of the revolution showed its continuing potency
for both supporters and opponents of the law. The alternative of
the purely professional army, indissolubly associated with the
Ancien Régime, was rarely invoked even by Anglophiles. The
British more than anybody, as the Grande Encylopédie scathingly
19
Ibid., 93, 107–8; Annie Crépin, ‘Le Mythe de Valmy’, in Michel Vovelle (ed.),
Révolution et République: l’exception française (Paris, 1994); Alphonse de Lamartine,
History of the Girondists, trans. H. T. Ryde, 3 vols. (London, 1848), ii, 157–66.
20
Leverrier, La Naissance de l’armée nationale, 9–10.
21
Michel Winock, ‘Socialisme et patriotisme en France (1891–1894)’, Revue d’his-
toire moderne et contemporaine, xx (1973), 381.
22
Alan Forrest, ‘Conscription as Ideology: Revolutionary France and the Nation in
Arms’, in Lars Mjøset and Stephen Van Holde (eds.), The Comparative Study of
Conscription in the Armed Forces (Amsterdam, 2002), 106–7.
pronounced, regarded money as the sinew of war: ‘hence their
incoherent and anti-democratic system of enlistment’.23
Just as British socialists responded in disparate ways to the
legacies of liberalism, socialism in France provided a possible
critique and rejection of republican ideals as well as a form of
appropriation and extension. Exactly as in Britain, a considerable
internal factionalism persisted, even after the formal unification
of the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière (SFIO) in
1905. Beyond these rivalries, still sharper differences divided
political socialists from the anti-political industrialists of the

Confédération générale du travail (CGT). Even while excluding
the CGT, Michel Winock thus distinguished several distinct
socialist tendencies in relation to military questions.24 What
they nevertheless had in common was opposition to the standing
army, which they identified with conscription, and advocacy in its
place of some variation of the nation in arms.
Crystallized by discussions within the Second International,
the rationale for anti-militarism was naturally articulated in inter-
nationalist terms. Nevertheless, its quickening in France after
1891 was fundamentally attributable to the use of troops for
domestic policing purposes. This was symbolized by the shooting
down of demonstrators in the northern textile town of Fourmies
on May Day 1891.25 Militarism was henceforth seen as more than
just the preparation for war: according to the leader of the social-
ists’ Marxist faction, Jules Guesde, its primary domestic function
would remain unaffected even by the magical dissolution of inter-
national rivalries.26 Jacques Julliard, in a well-known article on
the CGT, characterized this sort of outlook as ‘corporate anti-
militarism’.27 At its heart was a seeming paradox; for though
recruited from the population as a whole, which some had
23
Crépin, Défendre la France, 195; G. G. Coulton, Fourscore Years: An Autobiography
(Cambridge, 1945), 280.
24
Winock, ‘Socialisme et patriotisme en France’, 398–9.
25
See Maurice Dommanget, Histoire du Premier mai (Paris, 1953), 146–52; Odile
Roynette-Gland, ‘L’Armée dans la bataille sociale: maintien de l’ordre et grèves ouv-
rières dans le Nord de la France (1871–1906)’, Mouvement social, clxxix (1997), 41–4.
26
Guesde in Le Socialiste, 11 Sept. 1898, in Jules Guesde, En garde! Contre les
contrefaçons, les mirages et la fausse monnaie des réformes bourgeoises (Paris, 1911),
182–6.
27
Jacques Julliard, ‘La C.G.T. devant la guerre, 1900–1914’, Mouvement social, xlix
(1964).
thought a safeguard against its abuse, the army in France was
deployed more frequently and more violently in industrial dis-
putes than it was in either Britain or Germany. Again in contrast
to Britain, the very size of the conscript army allowed it to perform
the further strike-breaking function of replacing workers in dis-
pute, quite literally as a reserve army of labour.28
One corollary of conscription was therefore a socialist anti-
militarism more pervasive and confrontational than in Britain
and amounting in some cases to what Julliard described as
‘total’ anti-militarism. Espoused within the socialist movement

by supporters of the former communard Jean Allemane, its most
militant vehicles were the CGT and the Bourses du travail, local
trade union centres. Probably its best-known exposition was
Georges Yvetot’s Nouveau manuel du soldat, which roundly de-
nounced the brutalizing effect of military service and openly
advocated desertion.29 Nevertheless, even at the peak of ‘total’
anti-militarism in 1906–9 the categorical rejection of the army
was qualified in respect of both methods and alternatives.
Though the army was depicted in Yvetot’s manual as generating
idleness, crime and vice, opposition to the standing army was not
usually expressed in his terms of the refusal of military service. For
a Marxist like Guesde, doubtless with an eye to syndicalist rivals,
refraining from participation in war made no more sense than
electoral abstention.30 The CGT itself, through its propaganda
fund Le Sou du soldat, sought contact with the conscripts it
realized would rarely desert. Even those who celebrated the
collective insubordination of mutiny, such as the ones that
occurred in 1907, usually disavowed individual resistance.31
Even the fiercest anti-militarism could be expressed as a sort of
counter-mobilization.32
28
See Anja Johansen, ‘Violent Repression or Modern Strategies of Crowd
Management: Soldiers as Riot Police in France and Germany, 1890–1914’, French
Hist., xv (2001).
29
Fédération des Bourses du travail de France et des colonies, Nouveau manuel du
soldat: la patrie — l’armée — la guerre, 9th edn (Paris, 1903). For Yvetot’s authorship of
the pamphlet, see, for example, Crépin, Défendre la France, 364.
30
Guesde in Le Socialiste, 2 Sept. 1891, in Guesde, En garde!, 99–103.
31
Roland Andréoni, ‘L’Antimilitarisme en Languedoc méditerranéen avant la
première guerre mondiale’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, xx (1973), 114.
32
F. F. Ridley, Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: The Direct Action of its Time
(Cambridge, 1970), 135–9.
This can be seen in the ‘armed nation’ ideal which anti-
militarists proposed in place of the conscript army. Gustave
Hervé, self-styled sans-patrie and editor of La Guerre sociale, was
generally seen as the most extreme of the SFIO’s anti-militarists.
Like many on the left, Hervé nevertheless drew on the notion of a
Swiss-style militia, not only as the best form of military service
under capitalism, but as the harbinger of its overthrow. Again
discountenancing individual acts of resistance, Hervé saw mili-
tary service both as a safeguard against the army’s use against its
own people and as a means of defending the future revolution.

‘Hence, the Countryless who refuses to be a soldier, does well; but
he who enters the barracks with the firm resolution of behaving as
a soldier of Socialism, does a hundred times better’, he wrote in
his famous exposition Leur patrie.33 By 1913, Hervé was frankly
propounding a form of ‘revolutionary militarism’ which recog-
nized the virtues of military discipline and the need to win the
army over from within.34
Patrice Buffotot describes this as a ‘total conversion’ on Hervé’s
part.35 However, though Hervé was pilloried as an enemy of the
republic, the then socialist Aristide Briand observed how he
invoked the same avowed revolutionary legacy as those accusing
him of subverting it. Conscription and militia alike were predi-
cated upon a universalism implying compulsion, and it was pre-
cisely Hervé’s Swiss-style citizens’ army that British critics
identified, not as an alternative to conscription, but as conscrip-
tion itself. What in France appeared as the stark opposition of
militarism and anti-militarism thus concealed the possibility of
abrupt transitions from the one to the other. No transition, indeed
— if we exclude those of the PCF that followed — was more
dramatic than Hervé’s apostasy as a virulent supporter of the
union sacrée after 1914.36
Subsequently targeting the left in voluminous writings, Hervé’s
extreme volatility left little in the way of a usable legacy. Instead it
was Jean Jaurès, steadiest and most revered of the SFIO’s leaders,
33
Gustave Hervé, My Country, Right or Wrong, trans. Guy Bowman (London,
1910), 144–55.
34
See Gilles Heuré, Gustave Hervé: itinéraire d’un provocateur (Paris, 1997), 173–5.
35
Patrice Buffotot, Le Socialisme français et la guerre: du soldat-citoyen à l’armée
professionnelle, 1871–1998 (Brussels, 1998), 68.
36
See Heuré, Gustave Hervé, 36–9 and ch. 6.
who offered the left a common point of reference that remained
uncompromised by virtue of his assassination in July 1914. For
the PCF, Jaurès’s socialist appropriation of republicanism came
to have a particular resonance. More than that, he was a military
thinker without peer in the ranks of European socialism, and his
L’Armée nouvelle of 1911 provided a matchless synthesis and sum-
mation of socialist ideas on the subject.37 The volume was occa-
sioned by the debate which in 1905 saw the period of military
service reduced to two years, and in 1913 restored again to three.
Painstakingly located within a long republican tradition, it pro-

vided an exhaustive exposition of the socialist case for militias,
deriving much force from the French revolutionary experience of
which Jaurès himself was a chronicler of considerable erudition.38
Like almost any advocate of militias, however, Jaurès also drew
extensively on the contemporaneous exemplar of the Swiss.
Proposing a truncated period of military service, he envisaged
the balance between the standing army and ‘reserve’ — a term
he rejected as implying a subordinate role — as being decisively
tilted towards the latter.39 The barracks would thus function as a
military training school, with the nation itself constituting ‘an
immense and vigorous army in the service of national indepen-
dence and peace’.40 Again reworking an old refrain, it was this,
according to Jaurès, which guaranteed the union of army and
people and the purely defensive functions to which the military
could safely be committed. While invoking the revolutionary tra-
dition of the people in arms, Jaurès had little time for the Napo-
leonic heyday of conscription, and none at all for the Prussian
conceptions influencing current French military thinking.41
Combining universal service with apostrophes to internation-
alism, Jaurès’s commitments were subjected neither to the
harsher test of the war, nor to the upheavals and divisions
which followed. Buffotot comments that it was he above all who
continued to provide French socialism with a coherent military
doctrine.42 Through Leon Trotsky, he also had an influence on
37
Jean Jaurès, L’Armée nouvelle: l’organisation socialiste de la France (1911; Paris,
1915).
38
Ibid., ch. 6.
39
Ibid., ch. 2.
40
Ibid., 57–8.
41
Ibid., ch. 4.
42
Buffotot, Le Socialisme français et la guerre, 51.
early Soviet military thinking.43 In Britain, however, Jaurès’s
ideas proved more contentious. Already during the First World
War they provoked the first cross-Channel exchanges over con-
scription; and it was their explicit revival by the PCF that lay
behind the further controversy of the spring of 1939.
III
BRITISH SOCIALISTS AND THE ‘FOREIGN YOKE’

Historians have stressed the resilience in Britain of a voluntarist
conception of military service rooted in liberal ideas of limited
government.44 Combining liberal instincts with socialist or
‘labourist’ conceptions of workers’ rights, the labour movement
for the most part was deeply imbued with such ideas. Unim-
pressed by Swiss or Jacobin analogies, conferences of the Inde-
pendent Labour Party (ILP) and Labour Party overwhelmingly
rejected conscription or a citizens’ army; while the Trades Union
Congress (TUC) in 1913 described the nation in arms as a
‘vicious principle’.45 Whereas in France universal military service
was legitimized as an exercise in citizenship, British radicals iden-
tified the ‘free British citizen’ with exemption from compulsory
service, for example under the Foreign Enlistment Acts of
1757.46 In the labourist inflection of economic citizenship, this
was also identified with the right to a trade, more specifically ‘at
the time of life when excellence of craftsmanship is most easily
obtainable’.47 John N. Horne has suggested that the state ‘as an
administrative and coercive system’ was more highly differen-
tiated from society in France than in Britain and generated greater
hostility from the left.48 Politically, however, as Horne also allows,
the pervasiveness of the French republican tradition provided a
massive complicating factor, not just in respect of a generalized
ideal of the nation, but in more specific forms such as those of the
nation in arms. The linked ideals of the citizen and of the ‘one and
43
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1897–1921 (Oxford, 1970), 477–80.
44
See, for example, Forrest, ‘Conscription as Ideology’, 111–15.
45
Cited by B. S. Townroe in Nation in Arms, Michaelmas 1913, 427–8.
46
J. A. Farrer, Liberalism and the National Service League (London, 1911), 24.
47
TUC congress resolution 1907, cited in Nation in Arms, Oct. 1907, 246–7.
48
John N. Horne, Labour at War: France and Britain, 1914–1918 (Oxford, 1991),
21–3.
indivisible’ republic suggested a significant blurring of the bound-
aries of state and society, symbolized in revolutionary iconog-
raphy by the device of the fasces.49 It is difficult to think of a
British equivalent.
In Britain, as in France, ideas of military service were neverthe-
less confused and contested, and already prior to 1914 cross-
Channel influences helped foster alternatives to the dominant
voluntarist discourse. Within the labour movement, the Fabians
provided one source of support for militias, though failing to
devote even one of their famous tracts to the issue. More energetic

was Britain’s main Marxist grouping, the Social Democratic
Federation (SDF), whose vision of the armed nation was outlined
in a pamphlet by the editor of the SDF weekly Justice, Harry
Quelch.50 Originally prompted by the South African war of
1899–1902, Quelch’s pamphlet was justified as representing
‘the formulated opinions of the International Socialist Party’.
Its citizens’ army proposals were thus presented as the antidote
to militarism, not one of its possible forms. Roundly denouncing
‘any form of compulsory service’, though admittedly he preferred
even conscription to the voluntary system, Quelch advocated
instead what he called ‘training’ on the Swiss model. The deriva-
tion of such arguments from Continental precedents was clear.
Guy Bowman, for example, while vigorously upholding them
within the SDF, also produced an English version of Hervé’s
Leur patrie, published in 1910.51 Subsequently, along with Tom
Mann, Bowman adopted a syndicalist programme strongly influ-
enced by the CGT. When two years later they took their militant
but corporate anti-militarism to the point of a famous ‘Don’t
Shoot’ prosecution, the distinction between militarism and
anti-militarism seemed unambiguously attested.52
Despite protestations to the contrary, the socialist case for mili-
tias nevertheless converged with, and was exploited by, the wider
49
See James A. Leith, Space and Revolution: Projects for Monuments, Squares, and
Public Buildings in France, 1789–1799 (Montreal and London, 1991).
50
Harry Quelch, Social-Democracy and the Armed Nation, new edn (London, 1907).
The Labour MP Will Thorne, a member of the SDF, subsequently sponsored a citizen
army bill.
51
For Bowman’s views on military service, see Justice, 2 Apr. 1910. Though re-
named the Social Democratic Party in 1908, the organization is here referred to
throughout as the more familiar SDF.
52
Joseph White, Tom Mann (Manchester, 1990), 158–9, 183–4.
‘national service’ lobby that emerged in the same period. Its main
vehicle, the National Service League (NSL), was dominated by
establishment figures avowedly moved by anxieties for empire,
including Lord Meath, Lord Milner and the NSL president
Lord Roberts. Its secretary, George Shee, represented a strand
of liberal imperialist opinion, but even this was in a minority.53 By
1911 all but three of the NSL’s 105 parliamentary supporters
were said to be Conservatives. Critics described the league as
‘the military wing of the Tory party’.54
It was not, however, as simple as that. Soon after its formation

in 1901, the NSL abandoned conscription in the narrow sense for
a citizens’ army model very much akin to that of the Continental
socialists. This was commended as such in the National Service
Journal, which sought to assuage socialists and anti-jingoists with
the words of Quelch and the German socialist Bebel.55 Indeed,
the very term ‘conscription’ was discarded. In Shee’s Briton’s First
Duty, initial inspiration for the NSL, it had at first been accepted
with caveats regarding duration and field of service.56 Neverthe-
less, it was quickly supplanted by the idea of ‘universal service’ or
‘universal military training’, and Quelch’s disavowal of conscrip-
tion in the Continental sense was cited with warm approval.57
Assurances were given against the use of such a force in industrial
disputes; Roberts advanced the Jaurèsian argument that a genu-
inely national army could never be used against the people or in an
unjust war.58 In 1906, the ‘military wing of the Tory party’
renamed its journal The Nation in Arms.
Anne Summers has called this ‘a very singular, insular and lib-
eral choice for the champions of the British Empire’.59 It was not,
53
For Shee’s liberal imperialism, see, for example, George Shee, The Briton’s First
Duty (1901; London, 1902), 29, 122.
54
Farrer, Liberalism and the National Service League, 15–17.
55
See, for example, National Service Jl, Nov. 1903.
56
Shee, Briton’s First Duty, 65.
57
‘The Tyranny of Words — ‘‘Conscription’’’, National Service Jl, Feb. 1904, 59–
61. See also, for example, Lord Newton, introduction to George Shee, The Advantages
of Compulsory Service for Home Defence (London, 1902), 1–2.
58
See J. Ellis Barker, National and Non-National Armies: A Study in Military Policy
(London, 1907), 12–13; Shee, Briton’s First Duty, 130–1; Roberts, speeches at
Bristol, in Nation in Arms, Easter 1913, 264–9, and at Leeds, ibid., Midsummer
1913, 332–6. See also Jaurès, L’Armée nouvelle, 514.
59
Anne Summers, ‘Militarism in Britain before the Great War’, History Workshop,
no. 2 (1976), 112.
however, an illogical one; and both the ‘freeing’ of the regular
army from tasks of home defence and the expectation of similar
citizens’ forces in the dominions underpinned the NSL’s ideal of
imperial union and federation.60 Shee’s object was a ‘Pan-
Britannic Militia . . . uniting the whole of our race in the strong
bonds of a brotherhood-in-arms’.61 At a characteristic NSL rally,
‘Pan-Britannic Militia’ and ‘A Nation in Arms’ were both among
the mottoes displayed, and Roberts took the stage to strains of
‘Land of Hope and Glory’.62 ‘Liberalism’ at home was therefore
compatible with ‘police’ functions abroad, and it was on this point

that socialist compulsionists and the NSL differed most widely.63
Even so, Quelch sometimes spoke from NSL platforms, where his
commitments to national service were prominently advertised;
and like the National Service Journal his SDF pamphlet borrowed
an epigraph saluting the ‘armed nation’ from the former Tory
premier Lord Salisbury.64
Though support for these ideas was expressed in publications
such as Robert Blatchford’s Clarion and A. R. Orage’s Fabian-
influenced New Age, they have had little recognition in discus-
sions of the British left. Where exceptions like Blatchford and the
SDF leader H. M. Hyndman are noted, it is usually in sole refer-
ence to their chauvinism and bellicosity.65 Even Logie Barrow
and Ian Bullock, in their otherwise comprehensive survey of the
‘democratic ideas’ which the SDF contributed to British social-
ism, provide only a summary discussion of their military dimen-
sion.66 Even so, the ‘armed nation’ policy was explicitly based on
the democratic premise that ‘only the people that is armed . . . can
maintain its freedom’. As expounded by Quelch, it also involved
characteristic socialist themes of revolutionary manhood and a
counteraction of the ‘artificial’ nature of ‘modern town life’ and of
60
‘Some Objects of the League’, National Service Jl, 1903–5, inside cover.
61
Shee, Briton’s First Duty, 104–5.
62
Nation in Arms, June 1907, 144–8.
63
If I prefer the neologism ‘compulsionist’ to ‘conscriptionist’, it is because they
themselves denied the latter appellation.
64
See National Service Jl, Nov. 1903, 12; Dec. 1904, 266–7; Dec. 1905; Nation in
Arms, Feb. 1907, 45; see also Quelch, Social-Democracy and the Armed Nation.
65
See, for example, R. J. Q. Adams and Philip P. Poirier, The Conscription
Controversy in Great Britain, 1900–18 (Basingstoke, 1987), 21.
66
Logie Barrow and Ian Bullock, Democratic Ideas and the British Labour Movement,
1880–1914 (Cambridge, 1996), esp. 167–9.
over-specialization in the division of labour.67 The arguments, if
not the application, were ones that William Morris would have
recognized. But they also had much in common with the NSL’s
vision of a healthier, manlier and more industrious population.68
Lines of militarism and anti-militarism were thus drawn differ-
ently in the two countries. Except that it left the existing profes-
sional army intact, a model of breadth in place of length of service
was in Britain synonymous with the NSL’s notion of universal
training, and alleged ‘conscriptionists’ proposed a model of mil-
itary service actually less onerous than the one for which Jaurès

was assassinated as a ‘traitor’ by a right-wing zealot.69 With a
slight increase in the proposed period of service, from four to
six months, it was something like the NSL model which
Chamberlain was to introduce in 1939 — not as conscription,
but as a Military Training Bill. But after all, Chamberlain himself
had in this period spoken from NSL platforms when still hardly
known beyond his native Birmingham.70
IV
CROSS-CHANNEL EXCHANGES
It is not surprising that Jaurès in L’Armée nouvelle made no refer-
ence to British Marxists who could add so little to the moral or
political authority of his case. What is remarkable is the use he
made of the arguments of the National Service League.71 Indeed,
in welcoming their support for what he called a ‘vast English
militia’, Jaurès accorded British compulsionists a prominence in
his case for a people’s army second only to the ubiquitous Swiss.
Citing the high Tory Lord Curzon, he conceded ‘something
paradoxical and disturbing in the sight of one of the most obstin-
ate defenders of aristocratic privilege, one of the most aggressive
imperialists, pleading before . . . the English proletariat the
67
Quelch, Social-Democracy and the Armed Nation, 1–2, 5, 11. For further discus-
sion of these themes, see Kevin Morgan, ‘British Guild Socialists and the Exemplar of
the Panama Canal’, Hist. Polit. Thought, xxviii (2007).
68
See, for example, Roberts at the AGM of the NSL, Armed Nation, July 1906, 19.
69
Gerd Krumeich, Armaments and Politics in France on the Eve of the First World
War: The Introduction of Three-Year Conscription, 1913–1914, trans. Stephen Conn
(Leamington Spa, 1984), 14–15.
70
Nation in Arms, Christmas 1913, 449; Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British
Power (London, 1972), 458.
71
The following paragraph draws on Jaurès, L’Armée nouvelle, 496–515.
cause of militias which in France, Germany and almost all of
Europe is supported by the socialists’. He even noted the refer-
ence made by such figures, not only to Switzerland, but to the
French Revolution itself. Here was a form of transnational cor-
roboration echoing Quelch’s appearances on NSL platforms. On
the one hand, Jaurès invoked the challenge to the French military
establishment ‘at once . . . from the British aristocracy as from the
Swiss democracy’. On the other hand, British compulsionists not
only celebrated the Jacobin origins of the modern ‘national army’
— one comprising the ‘voluntarily united citizens of the whole

nation’ — but contrasted this with its degeneration under Napo-
leon and his successors.72
Much was made of the contemporaneous German exemplar
seemingly linking military service with economic dynamism and
disciplined productivity.73 At the time of the Russo-Japanese war
of 1904–5 there was a flurry of interest in Japan, while the NSL
also advertised sympathetic tendencies within labour movements
in the dominions as part of its case for imperial home defence.74
Nevertheless, the Swiss militia from the start provided the chief
support for the democratic case for compulsion.75 In 1907 the
NSL even included five Labour MPs in a committee of inquiry
sent to Switzerland, though they declined to sign its final report.76
These Swiss ideals were very much those invoked by Jaurès, and it
was perhaps inevitable that the NSL should also have claimed the
implicit endorsement of Jaurès himself in seeking to win over
Labour supporters.
A key figure in this respect was the Cambridge medievalist
G. G. Coulton.77 A liberal by instinct and political formation,
72
Barker, National and Non-National Armies, 5–10.
73
See, for example, Barker, National and Non-National Armies, 15–16; B. H.
Thwaite, ‘Universal Military Training and the Efficiency of Labour’, National
Service Jl, July 1904, 156–8; ‘Laissez Faire and State Control’, ibid., Oct. 1905,
449–51; M.E.H., ‘The Patriotism of the Soldier-Citizen’, ibid., Nov. 1905.
74
Especially important was Australia, which in 1909 introduced its first measures of
compulsory training with significant Labour support. See, for example, ‘An Australian
Labour Leader on National Service’ (W. M. Hughes), Nation in Arms, May 1907, 116–
17; also Leslie C. Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia (London, 1935), ch. 1.
75
See, for example, ‘The Swiss Militia and its Lesson for England’, National Service
Jl, Dec. 1903, 17–21; A. Keene, ‘The Swiss Army at Work: A Study in National
Service’, ibid., Nov. 1906, 80–2. The Norwegian example was also publicized but
on a lesser scale.
76
Nation in Arms, Sept. 1907, 219–21, and Oct. 1907, 236–52.
77
For biographical details, see Coulton, Fourscore Years, ch. 28 and passim.
Coulton wrote articles and speeches for Lord Roberts and even
before 1914 took up the challenge of the NSL’s radical detractors.
Another devotee of the Swiss militia, impressed at first hand by its
efficiency and democratic ‘commonness’, he also invoked the
indigenous precedent of English militias and the achievements
of the Hundred Years War.78 Confronting the conflation of all
such measures as ‘conscription’, Coulton carefully distinguished
the concept’s different meanings while celebrating its French
revolutionary provenance as ‘one of the most democratic of
words’.79 His particular concern with the left was reflected in

repeated allusions to Continental socialists. Arguing for ‘true lib-
eralism’ against the politician C. P. Trevelyan, Coulton hence
made something of J. S. Mill’s support for conscription, but
more still of L’Armée nouvelle as ‘the most important democratic
manifesto’ recently published on the subject.80
In debate with William Paul of the Socialist Labour Party,
Coulton similarly propounded both the ‘Swiss principle’ of mili-
tias and its endorsement by Jaurès and Bebel. Subsequently a
lifelong communist, Paul repudiated such analogies as vigorously
as Gallacher would in 1939.81 Gallacher, meanwhile, already as a
young man rejected Quelch’s nostrum of a citizen army as irre-
levant as well as dangerous. ‘The principal line of defence would
be the Navy, and they could not have a Citizen Navy’, he rebutted
him in 1912. ‘They should condemn all idea of patriotism and all
idea of militarism unless it took the form of shooting down those
who exploited them’.82 Not compulsion and anti-militarism, but
voluntarism and anti-militarism here existed in unstable juxta-
position; for how, Quelch might have countered, were they to turn
weapons on their exploiters unless they first got their hands on
them? Trevelyan’s liberal case against compulsion was doubtless
characterized by greater internal consistency.
78
G. G. Coulton, A Strong Army in a Free State: A Study of the Old English and
Modern Swiss Militias (London, 1900).
79
G. G. Coulton, True Liberalism and Compulsory Service: An Appeal to the British
Working Man (London, [c.1912]), 8–12; G. G. Coulton and William Paul, Compulsory
Military Service: Should the Working Class Support It? (Glasgow, [c.1912]), 2–5.
80
Coulton, True Liberalism and Compulsory Service.
81
Coulton in Coulton and Paul, Compulsory Military Service, 4, 27.
82
See Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900–21: The Origins
of British Communism (London, 1969), 56; Times, 27 May 1912.
Following the outbreak of war, the NSL as a body refrained
from immediate propaganda in order to avoid raking up old divi-
sions.83 Coulton, however, proved an indefatigable propagandist,
and Jaurès was now more actively drafted into the argument.
Visiting France, Belgium and Switzerland in early 1914, Coulton
had secured the endorsement of Jaurès’s socialist colleague Albert
Thomas, the future munitions minister; and on the outbreak of
war he produced a pamphlet once more rehearsing the views of
Continental socialists, with Jaurès to the fore.84 Following
L’Humanité’s reissue of L’Armée nouvelle in 1915, Coulton then

returned to Paris to solicit further support, this time apparently
including the communard, Anglophile and sometime anti-
militarist Édouard Vaillant. Coulton’s abridgement of Jaurès’s
work, Democracy and Military Service, appeared the following
year with a preface by Jaurès’s vaunted successor, L’Humanité
editor Pierre Renaudel.85 ‘Where all are in equal danger, equality
of sacrifice is the necessary consequence’, Renaudel pointedly
observed; British socialists could learn from Jaurès how even
the ‘noblest traditions of liberty’ could be reconciled with organ-
ization for national defence.86 His moral authority redoubled by
his assassination, for supporters of the war Jaurès’s conception of
the citizen army now found realization and vindication in the
unprecedented mobilizations of the trenches.
Some British socialists agreed. The dockers’ leader Ben Tillett
reminded Mann that the French, who had so influenced Mann’s
syndicalism, also looked on conscription as ‘the most democratic
form of militarism’.87 H. M. Hyndman extended the SDF tradi-
tion into the perceived corollary of wartime mobilization, though
persisting even now in distinguishing ‘Continental Conscription’
from ‘democratic’ compulsion.88 Nevertheless, few even among
83
See Bodleian Library, Oxford, Milner MS 156, fos. 159–62: NSL council min-
utes, 27 Apr. 1915; Milner MS 156: NSL, Report for the Year Ending 31st March 1916.
84
G. G. Coulton, Workers and War (Cambridge, 1914).
85
Jean Jaurès, Democracy and Military Service: An Abbreviated Translation of the
‘Armée nouvelle’ of Jean Jaurès, ed. G. G. Coulton (London, 1916), editorial note by
Coulton, p. x; also G. G. Coulton, Pacificist Illusions: A Criticism of the Union of
Democratic Control (Cambridge, 1915), 95; Coulton, Fourscore Years, 273.
86
Jaurès, Democracy and Military Service, ed. Coulton, preface by Renaudel, p. vii.
87
Cited by Chushichi Tsuzuki, Tom Mann, 1856–1941: The Challenges of Labour
(Oxford, 1991), 182.
88
H. M. Hyndman, The Future of Democracy (London, 1915), ch. 6.
Jaurès’s British admirers thought such distinctions tenable. In an
otherwise fulsome tribute, the socialist Margaret Pease demurred
at Jaurès’s armée nouvelle on grounds both of custom and of prin-
ciple. In place of ‘that individual determination of one’s acts
which has been held so precious by the Anglo-Saxon race’, she
stressed how Jaurès’s notion of liberty focused on ‘the whole
people’ as collective actor and underestimated the danger of the
‘absolute devotion of the individual to the state’. Depicting ten-
sions with democracy as almost inherent in the organization of a
successful army, Pease thus echoed an older liberal critique that

saw in these French constructions of liberty, carried forward into
socialism, primarily a collective property.89
The ILP-er Ramsay MacDonald, who wrote an introduction
for Pease’s book, was at once the most notorious and most cau-
tious of Britain’s anti-war minoritaires. In 1917 he penned his own
counterblast to Democracy and Military Service in which he
described Jaurès’s ideas as ‘utterly false’, unreal, misleading —
and in any case neither applicable nor intended to be applied to
Britain.90 Under the Jaurèsian heading ‘the military nation’,
MacDonald even ascribed the origins of militarism not so much
to aggression as to national defence and the French revolutionary
experience which Jaurès had celebrated.91 Though dealing with
conscription, the logic of MacDonald’s case was against any form
of military organization, which he argued must henceforth always
tend towards compulsion.92 He was even rather dismissive of
campaigns against conscription per se, privately describing the
voluntary principle as ‘fraudulent’ and overt compulsion as less
objectionable than the economic and social pressures on which
the appearance of voluntarism depended.93 A prominent figure in
89
Margaret Pease, Jean Jaurès, Socialist and Humanitarian (London, n.d.), ch. 5; see
also Georgios Varouxakis, Victorian Political Thought on France and the French (Basing-
stoke, 2002), ch. 3.
90
Coulton in Times, 30 Dec. 1915; J. Ramsay MacDonald, National Defence: A
Study in Militarism (London, 1917), chs. 2–3. As MacDonald recalled, ‘I have had
many conversations with him [ Jaurès] on the subject, and he never expressed to me the
view that what was best for France was also best for England’: ibid., 30.
91
MacDonald, National Defence, ch. 7.
92
Ibid., 47.
93
MacDonald in Labour Leader, 21 and 28 Jan. 1915; John Rylands University
Library, Manchester, MacDonald Papers, RMD 1/3/53: MacDonald to H. Bock-
house, 3 May 1916.
the Union of Democratic Control (UDC), MacDonald urged a
new conception of international relations, not any particular
model of military organization, as the alternative to militarism.
More significant for the anti-conscription campaign of 1939
was a strand of ‘corporate’ anti-conscriptionism which already
during the First World War stressed the threat posed to liberties
at home and the likely sequel of industrial conscription. In the
form of a resolution of the militant Clyde Workers’ Committee,
this apprehension of the ‘military control of industry’ was to find
its way into communist folklore through reproduction in Galla-

cher’s popular autobiography Revolt on the Clyde.94 Indeed, one of
Pollitt’s supporters in the CPGB leadership specifically recalled
this Clydeside tradition to explain the communists’ later resis-
tance to conscription.95 Strikingly similar language had also
been used by the ILP anti-conscriptionist Philip Snowden.
Though anything but a Marxist, and a vigorous critic of syndic-
alism, Snowden’s wartime reading of the state was of a compar-
able starkness and simplicity, undisturbed by any republican
discourse of the nation. When conscription was introduced in
Britain in 1916, Snowden described its aim as being ‘to destroy
the power of Trade Unionism and . . . democracy’ and establish
‘Universal National Servitude’ with state-appointed ‘slave direc-
tors’. Socialists, he conceded, also looked to national service, but
not to the Servile State: ‘They do not believe in forcing workmen
into gangs of slave labour to work at the bidding of bureaucrats for
the profit of private employers. The form of national service
which Socialism will bring will be a democratic service . . .
made from within by the people themselves’.96 Partly in recogni-
tion of such concerns, the government in practice always stopped
short of industrial compulsion. Among the dissenting voices,
however, was that of Neville Chamberlain, now director-general
of national service, who believed in just such an ‘industrial army’
subject to central direction.97
94
William Gallacher, Revolt on the Clyde: An Autobiography (London, 1936), 116.
95
Ted Bramley, interview with the author, 21 Apr. 1988.
96
Philip Snowden, Labour in Chains: The Peril of Industrial Conscription (London,
1917), 2, 12–16.
97
The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters, i, The Making of a Politician, 1915–20,
ed. Robert Self (Aldershot, 2000), 64.
The intricate interplay of national and transnational frames of
reference may again be detected. Though an ILP manifesto in
1915 described the absence of ‘the ‘‘foreign yoke’’ of conscrip-
tion’ as ‘one of the few great heritages of freedom that belong to
the British nation’, MacDonald for his part said less about
English traditions than about general principles. Like Pease, he
cited in preference to Jaurès another French socialist, Marcel
Sembat, who before the war had sought to extricate the republi-
can ideal from the ‘jacobin rhetoric’ of the armed nation.98
Though Sembat, like Guesde, had since become a minister in

the wartime coalition, his suggestion that modern warfare of its
very nature demanded anti-democratic forms of authority was
very much in the spirit of the UDC. So was Sembat’s idea of a
république universelle to be pursued through a radical foreign
policy.99 At the same time, France as well as Germany continued
to be cited as an example of ‘Continental’ oppression, and anti-
conscriptionists as well as their opponents sought French corrob-
oration of their views. When Lloyd George as munitions minister
commissioned an anodyne report on the conditions and morale of
French workers, it was thus Alphonse Merrheim, secretary of the
CGT’s metal federation, who provided a rebuttal of its findings
for circulation by the ILP. Still championing a sort of corporate
anti-militarism, Merrheim urged that in Britain and France alike
conscription led to ‘industrial slavery’ and the general deteriora-
tion of the workers’ conditions.100
The very contestedness of these different traditions might have
provided scope for manoeuvre and expediency as communists in
the 1930s sought to reconcile them with fluctuating Comintern
directives. Nevertheless, if Hyndman or Blatchford offered a pos-
sible left-wing discourse of national defence, it was one difficult to
reconcile with the CPGB’s attempted reorientation to main-
stream labour movement values over the course of the 1930s.
The impulse to unity was common to both countries; but in
France it meant left-wing co-operation on a Jaurèsian military
98
ILP national council statement in Labour Leader, 10 June 1915.
99
Marcel Sembat, Faites un roi, sinon faites la paix (Paris, [1913?]), pp. viii–ix, 62–3,
267 and passim; see also MacDonald, National Defence, 36.
100
First published in Labour Leader, 3 and 10 Feb. 1916; see also Nicholas
Papayanis, Alphonse Merrheim: The Emergence of Reformism in Revolutionary Syndical-
ism, 1871–1925 (Dordrecht, 1985), chs. 7–8.
programme, in Britain a shared suspicion of the state.101 Though
Pollitt recalled his distaste for the ILP’s pacifism, its strand of
corporate anti-militarism sat easily with the CPGB’s own trade
unionist instincts and was manifestly an influence helping shape
them. Snowden in 1917 described the ‘Conscriptionist agitation’
as a ‘deliberate, long planned and carefully devised plot to destroy
the growing power of democracy . . . [as] a menace to the security
of the privileged and propertied classes’.102 Pollitt in 1939
described its sequel as the attempt of the ‘cool, scheming leader
of British monopoly capitalism’ to ‘break the power of the trade

unions and the Labour and Co-operative movements, and make
the complete suppression of democracy possible’.103 For Pollitt,
for Gallacher, perhaps even for Chamberlain, if these were not
formative experiences, they provided a fund of argument and
analogy on which to take such curiously familiar positions
almost a quarter of a century later.
V
THE COMINTERN AND ANTI-MILITARISM
This was not, of course, any simple story of continuity — least of
all for the communists. Opposed alike to pacifism and chauvin-
ism, the Comintern’s original objective was to subordinate or
suppress such differences of policy among its individual national
sections. The instrument for this ‘international class discipline’
was a formidable political apparatus whose duties and preroga-
tives included cadre formation, the receipt and scrutiny of min-
utes and reports of national sections, and the sending out of
‘instructors’ and ‘representatives’ responsible for the carrying
out of international directives.104 Though it never worked flaw-
lessly, a historically unparalleled degree of co-ordination and cen-
tral direction was achieved within a decade of the Comintern’s
formation in 1919.
101
For France, see Martin S. Alexander, ‘Soldiers and Socialists: The French
Officers’ Corps and Leftist Government, 1935–7’, in Martin S. Alexander and
Helen Graham (eds.), The French and Spanish Popular Fronts: Comparative Perspectives
(Cambridge, 1989), 76.
102
Harry Pollitt, Serving my Time: An Apprenticeship to Politics (London, 1940), 68;
Snowden, Labour in Chains, 16.
103
Harry Pollitt, Can Conscription Save Peace? (London, 1939), 7, 22.
104
‘Constitution and Rules of the Communist International’, in The Programme of
the Communist International (London, 1932), 66–72.
Its functioning depended not only on the acceptance of central
authority, but on the generalization of a set of political positions
requiring relatively little distinction according to time, place or
circumstance. Where choices had to be made — not just to pro-
mote revolutionary trade unionism, for example, but deciding
which revolutionary unions should be set up and when — intensive
and continuous direction was needed if a clear margin of discre-
tion was not to be left to national or sub-national leaders. In
respect of military questions, significant differences of emphasis
were possible even at the height of the Stalinized ‘Third

Period’.105 Nevertheless, discipline in this area was assisted by
the international character of the basic policy followed. Already in
1920, the Comintern’s ‘Twenty-One Conditions’ of entry de-
manded systematic agitation within the army.106 ‘Anti-militarist
agitation in the pacifist sense’, on the other hand, was rejected as
disarming the proletariat.107 In the new Comintern programme
of 1928 the obligation of organized work in the armed forces was
again combined with the exposure of ‘pacifist phrase-mongering’
and ‘‘‘socialistic’’ sophisms’.108 This unity of approach was sym-
bolized by the inauguration of an international ‘day of action’
against war, and by the anti-war Amsterdam–Pleyel movement,
whose first congress in 1932 attracted delegates from some
twenty-seven countries.109 Where no basic distinction was
drawn between different imperialist powers, a generalized anti-
war platform was as straightforward to achieve in theory as it once
had been for the Second International.
Until the mid 1930s, the French and British communist parties
thus pursued parallel anti-militarist campaigns that were partic-
ularly entrusted to their youth sections. Different forms of mili-
tary service were no more an issue than the different forms of
capitalist state. What mattered was who controlled both state
and army; debates over ‘purely organisational’ issues — militia,
conscription or professional army — merely obscured their role as
instruments of class rule.110 Communists in any case believed,
105
These points are discussed by Tauno Saarela, ‘From Revolution to Peaceful
Roads’, unpubd paper for the Nordic Communism project.
106
See The Communist International, 1919–1943: Documents, i, 1919–1922, ed. Jane
Degras (London, 1956), 169.
107
Theses of the Third Comintern Congress, July 1921, ibid., 265.
108
Programme of the Communist International, 64–5.
109
E. H. Carr, The Twilight of Comintern, 1930–1935 (Basingstoke, 1982), 388–94.
110
A. Alfred, The Red Army (London, n.d.), 15–16.
like MacDonald, that supposedly voluntary systems also rested
on compulsion, but of an economic character. The army’s class
significance was the same in any capitalist country, just as dif-
ferent state forms masked the same underlying class dictator-
ship.111
As so often in the early Comintern, variation took the form of
the differential impact and application of a common programme.
This was not only due to Britain’s speedy abandonment of the
conscription that continued to prevail elsewhere. It also reflected
the persistence within the founding cohorts of the communist

movement of the diverse traditions of anti-militarism to which
conscription had given rise. Typically, it was subjection to con-
scription that before 1914 had provided a catalyst for the socialist
youth movements in which so many founding communists cut
their teeth, and a reinforcement of their character as movements
of young males.112 Conversely, the absence of conscription in
Britain helps explain what the CPGB’s official history describes
as the ‘deep traditional neglect of the youth in the British labour
movement’.113 At the youth conference of the Second Inter-
national in 1912, seventeen countries were represented and dele-
gates included future communists such as the Swede Höglund
and the Dutchman Wijnkoop. British youth, on the other hand,
was unrepresented, and the only effective sections it had really
established were middle-class initiatives like the University
Socialist Federation.114 Subsequent developments underlined
the connection, as wartime conscription in Britain belatedly
proved a catalyst for what Fenner Brockway, co-founder of the
No-Conscription Fellowship (NCF), described as a ‘Youth
Movement’ proper.115
Its character remained distinctive. Derided by some as ‘a soci-
ety for the prevention of cruelty to conscientious objectors’, the
111
What the Young Communist League Stands For (London, 1925), 8–10, 17–19.
112
For the French, Swedish and Italian cases, see, for example, the importance
ascribed to this issue in the articles by Gaston Levy, Fernand Strago and Raoult in
Socialiste, 9–16 June, 8–15 Sept. and 20–27 Oct. 1912.
113
James Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, i, Formation and
Early Years, 1919–1924 (London, 1968), 226.
114
See Kevin Morgan, Bolshevism and the British Left, i, Labour Legends and Russian
Gold (London, 2006), 63–71.
115
Fenner Brockway, Inside the Left: Thirty Years of Platform, Press, Prison and
Parliament (London, 1942), 66.
NCF’s preoccupation with the individual war resister implied
both affirmation of the voluntary principle and a sort of demili-
tarization by example.116 Arguably this had less in common with
communist anti-militarism than had the rejection of such ‘fren-
zied individualism’ detectable on both pro- and anti-war wings of
the CGT.117 In France, significantly, it was only after the First
World War that organizations in defence of the conscientious
objector were founded.118 Compared with its nearest French
counterpart, Le Conscrit (The Conscript), the NCF journal The
Tribunal paid little regard to workers actually in the forces; and

whereas Le Conscrit and La Caserne (The Barracks) continued to
appear sporadically under communist auspices, the Tribunal per-
ished with conscription itself. Compounding these differences,
the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 provided a formative
experience of militarism in action which had no precise British
equivalent. Jeunesses communistes (JC) secretary Jacques Doriot
wrote pamphlets suffused with anti-militarism while reclaiming
the idea of the soldier-citizen in Soviet Russia.119 Péri himself
edited a conscript issue of the JC journal L’Avant-Garde and
was arrested after publishing a pamphlet on the Ruhr.120 Péri’s
later ideal of the armed republic may seem as dimly prefigured
here as Doriot’s subsequent fascism. Even so, in chronicling PCF
attitudes to the army, Georges Vidal has described its initial anti-
militarism as in one aspect ‘a form of militarism’ in which con-
scripts represented the French red army of tomorrow.121
Conversely, it was in view of the absence of conscription in
Britain that Brockway for the ILP urged the futility of any such
hopes of insurrection on the part of the CPGB.122
116
James Hinton, Protests and Visions: Peace Politics in Twentieth-Century Britain
(London, 1989), 50–4.
117
Léon Jouhaux, Le Syndicalisme et la C.G.T. (Paris, 1920), 180.
118
Crépin, Défendre la France, 391, 393.
119
Jean-Paul Brunet, Jacques Doriot: du communisme au fascisme (Paris, 1986),
34–41.
120
Gabriel Péri, Les Lendemains qui chantent, ed. Louis Aragon (Paris, 1947),
35–40.
121
Georges Vidal, ‘Le Parti communiste et l’armée dans les années 1930’, paper
presented to ‘Communismes’ seminar, Centre d’histoire sociale, University of Paris,
10 Dec. 2005.
122
Which Way for the Workers? Harry Pollitt, Communist Party, versus Fenner
Brockway, Independent Labour Party (London, 1932), 14.
According to Vidal, even the PCF’s attention to such matters
began to tail off from the late 1920s. The CPGB, meanwhile,
never managed much practical activity. In 1922 the YCL could
report little significant anti-military activity, while the CPGB’s
seminal Report on Organisation of the same year failed to mention
anti-militarist work.123 Following criticisms from the Comintern,
a CPGB–YCL ‘Anti-Militarist Department’ was established in
1924; and by 1929, when the issue was incorporated in the party’s
election manifesto, the CPGB had issued a Soldiers’ Programme
upholding the soldier’s status as a worker in uniform.124 Still, in

1925 the CPGB boasted just thirty-one contacts in all three arms
of the forces.125 In the absence of conscription, the only real pros-
pect of anti-militarist activities was therefore through deliberate
infiltration, or quixotic approaches to the forces from outside.
These had their culmination and greatest advertisement in the
Invergordon mutiny over naval pay cuts in September 1931.
Communist propaganda was seen by the authorities as one of
the mutiny’s causes, and it is true that two of its ‘ringleaders’
went on to join the CPGB. Nevertheless, even these had had no
prior contact with the party, and any prospect of a systematic
agitation among serving personnel quickly receded.126 John
Gollan, who was deeply involved in such activities, received a
six-month prison sentence for them, also in 1931. Nevertheless,
by the time that Gollan became YCL secretary in 1935, the new
popular-front approach was to see him involved in a much
broader youth movement embracing a wide range of voluntary
social organizations. It was this eclectic and unstable mix which
underlay his exchanges with Péri referred to at the outset.
123
National Archives, London, Public Record Office, CAB 24/139, CP 4204: cab-
inet reports on revolutionary organizations, 5 Oct. 1922; Report on Organisation
Presented by the Party Commission to the Annual Conference of the Communist Party of
Great Britain (London, 1922).
124
Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, i, 340; RGASPI,
f. 495, op. 100, d. 156: CPGB party council, 20 Nov. 1924; What the Young Communist
League Stands For, 8–10, 17–19; The Soldiers’ Programme (London, [1928]); Class
against Class: The General Election Programme of the Communist Party of Great Britain,
1929 (London, 1929), 28–9.
125
RGASPI, f. 495, op. 100, d. 243: Albert Inkpin to Ernest Brown enclosing
report of Anti-Militarist Department, 12 Sept. 1925.
126
For these activities, see Noreen Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great
Britain, 1927–1941 (London, 1985), 61–71.
VI
FROM JAURÈS TO STALIN
By the mid 1930s, the more calculating use of the Comintern as
an instrument of Soviet foreign policy implied a differentiated
approach to security issues through the accommodation of
Stalin’s shifting diplomatic priorities. In the absence of collective
security, these were frequently of a bilateral character: notably in
this context, Stalin’s endorsement of French national security
measures after the signing of a Franco-Soviet pact in May

1935. ‘Stalin is right’, the PCF immediately pronounced; and
by the time of the Munich crisis in September 1938 the party
had step by step adopted an unambiguous programme of national
defence, freed, as Vidal puts it, ‘from all allusion to class’.127
This was exemplified by Thorez’s demand for the ‘organ-
ization of the armed nation’ in his post-Munich report and
manifesto L’Heure de l’action.128 Over the following months, the
same motif figured prominently in the communists’ energetic
commemoration of the revolution’s 150th anniversary. Eric
Hobsbawm notes that it appears as surprising for French com-
munists to champion Robespierre, the man of 1793, as it would
have been for their British counterparts to have championed
Cromwell against the Levellers.129 Nevertheless, it was not so
much Valmy and what Crépin calls the ‘time of volunteers’, but
Robespierre’s moment of the levée en masse — and, incidentally, of
épuration, ‘purges’ — which for communists provided the revolu-
tion’s apogee. A long exposition in Cahiers du bolchevisme in
March 1939 saluted the ‘Jacobin’ or ‘democratic’ conception of
the armed nation, culminating in the integrated national army as
the first modern occasion on which a country’s entire resources
and manpower were ‘placed by the will of the people in the service
of the nation’.130 As the convention had famously decreed in
August 1793, every Frenchman was ‘in permanent requisition
for the service of its armies’ — precisely that corporate conception
127
Vidal, ‘Le Parti communiste et l’armée’.
128
Maurice Thorez, L’Heure de l’action (Paris, 1938), 23–4, 85–6.
129
Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise, 89–90.
130
A. Pommery, ‘La Révolution française et la défense de la Nation’, Cahiers du
bolchevisme, Mar. 1939, 344, 348, 351.
of liberty to which Pease and others drew attention.131 Also in the
spring of 1939, the historian Albert Soboul, later holder of the
Sorbonne chair in the History of the Revolution, produced his
book La Naissance de l’armée nationale pseudonymously for the
PCF’s official publishers. In it, Soboul described how the Jacobin
ideal had first become corrupted as Prussianism and then been
rediscovered in the popular revolutionary armies of the twentieth
century.132 Parallels were also drawn between 1789–93 and
1934–9, with themes of popular upsurge, external threat and
internal treachery intricately combined.133

A second reference point was Jaurès himself. Again following
Thorez’s lead, communists not only described their goal as an
armée nouvelle but outlined its features in explicitly Jaurèsian
terms.134 Jean Bruhat, another professional historian and one
of Thorez’s entourage of intellectuals, was possibly the most pro-
lific excavator of republican precedent: collaborator with Jean
Renoir on the film La Marseillaise and chronicler for Stalinism
of the Jacobin example of revolutionary vigilance.135 Writing on
the twenty-fifth anniversary of Jaurès’s death, Bruhat conceded
the utopian aspect of his thinking but reaffirmed the republican
symbiosis of class and nation for which Jaurès stood.136 Soboul
similarly commended Jaurès’s insight and largeness of concep-
tion, while Florimond Bonte included a section on the armée
nouvelle in a long exposition of the PCF’s peace policy at
the start of 1939.137 Another of Thorez’s closest collaborators,
Bonte sat with Péri in the Chamber as secretary of the Commission
for Foreign Affairs. Not just the character of these policies but
the importance the PCF attached to them called to mind Jaurès’s
claim to a sort of custody of the best interests of the nation.
131
Crépin, Défendre la France, 93–108.
132
Leverrier, La Naissance de l’armée nationale. I am grateful to Alan Forrest for the
information as to the author’s real identity.
133
Pommery, ‘La Révolution française’, 344, 347.
134
See, for example, ibid., 345.
135
See, for example, Jean Bruhat, ‘Du Dumouriez à Toukatchewski’, Cahiers du
bolchevisme, Aug. 1937; Jean Bruhat, Le Châtiment des espions et des traı̂tres sous la
Révolution française (Paris, 1937).
136
Jean Bruhat, ‘À propos du 25e anniversaire de la mort de Jean Jaurès’, Cahiers du
bolchevisme, Aug. 1939.
137
Leverrier, La Naissance de l’armée nationale, 12–13; Florimond Bonte, ‘Le
Problème de la paix’, Cahiers du bolchevisme, Jan. 1939.
In Britain, the transmutation of anti-militarism into demo-
cratic militarism was more problematic. Without an Anglo-
Soviet pact or any experience of popular-front government,
neither native discourse nor Stalinist realpolitik favoured a local
reworking of such themes. Adapting to the prevailing cultures of
the British labour movement, communism instead drew on
voluntarist traditions in which a sort of corporate anti-militarism
was almost implicit. This was particularly an issue for the youth
sections directly threatened by any future call-up, and here it was
given a distinctive inflection. A viable communist youth move-

ment at last existed in Britain, initially stimulated by unemploy-
ment and anti-fascism, but increasingly before the war exercised
by government pressures for national ‘service’. Notably, this was
a campaigning focus for the communist-sponsored British Youth
Peace Assembly (BYPA), which through the cultivation and per-
meation of a range of youth organizations argued for voluntary
service and in February 1939 organized a ‘Youth Pilgrimage’ to
publicize its conditions for such service.138 Gollan was one of the
movement’s chief inspirers, and he would draw directly on this
rhetoric two months later in opposing the conscription bill.
The persistence of these different inflections, even in their
common international endeavours, can be traced in communist
responses to the Spanish Civil War. According to Soboul, the
Spanish republican army, along with its Russian and Chinese
counterparts, represented the recovery of the Jacobin military
ideal from the bastardized versions of capitalist militarism.
Reconciling spontaneity and discipline, it evoked the formative
myth of Valmy; and it was to this army, and not his countrymen in
the International Brigades, that Soboul dedicated his history of
the French revolutionary armies.139 Even in initially opposing
conscription under Chamberlain, the British communist theor-
etician Palme Dutt acknowledged these general democratic argu-
ments in favour of the principle of compulsion.140 On the other
hand, if for the Spanish people republican discipline demanded
the channelling and even suppression of revolutionary spontan-
eity, the volunteer force of the International Brigades suggested a
very different moral. In the official discourse of the French
138
LHASC, Labour Party NEC minutes: memorandum on ‘League of Youth’,
about Feb. 1939.
139
Leverrier, La Naissance de l’armée nationale, 12, 186–91.
140
Daily Worker, 10 May 1939.
brigades, it was still the levée en masse which was invoked.141 Even
the British battalion’s chronicler described the brigades as assist-
ing and inspiring the creation of a regular people’s army.
Nevertheless, he also depicted this as a ‘spontaneous movement
of individual volunteers’, confronting the ‘conscript’ battalions of
the dictators, and this was the dominant emphasis in the British
solidarity campaign.142 How telling it was that the French brig-
aders’ journal should be called Le Soldat de la République, and its
English-speaking counterpart Volunteer for Liberty.
Initially British communists showed little interest in applying

these military lessons to their own country. Perceptions of the
mechanized character of modern warfare may have contributed
something to this, and in 1935 Tom Wintringham in his Coming
World War effectively discounted military organization in his pre-
occupation with industrial technique.143 When subsequently he
proposed a programme of military reforms influenced by his
Spanish experiences, Wintringham again stressed the voluntary
basis of recruitment.144 By this time, however, he had been
expelled from the CPGB on personal grounds, and it was the
YCL leader Gollan who in the winter of 1938–9 prepared a
book expounding for the first time in Britain a detailed commu-
nist policy for defence and military service.145 Completed in
March or April 1939, Gollan’s manuscript followed recent
British communist literature in describing fascism as an intensi-
fication of capitalist organization for war, and conversely the mil-
itary preparations of capitalism as steps towards fascism.146
Communists in theory stressed the differences between the cur-
rent fascist war threat and that of 1914. Nevertheless, in rework-
ing the themes of corporate anti-militarism Gollan in practice
141
Rémi Skoutelsky, ‘Les Volontaires français des Brigades internationales: patri-
otisme et/ou internationalisme?’, in Wolikow and Bleton-Ruget (eds.), Antifascisme
et nation, 92–3.
142
William Rust, Britons in Spain (London, 1939), 4, 18–19, 173–4, 181.
143
T. H. Wintringham, The Coming World War (1935; London, 1936), 151, 225–8
and passim.
144
Tom Wintringham, How to Reform the Army (London, 1939); David Fernbach,
‘Tom Wintringham and Socialist Defense Strategy’, History Workshop, no. 14 (1982),
63–9. Despite Wintringham’s expulsion from the CPGB, the book was welcomed in
the Daily Worker, 3 May 1939, by the former International Brigader Malcolm Dunbar.
145
The full manuscript with annotations (hereafter Gollan manuscript) is in
LHASC, CPGB archives, CP/Ind/Goll/1/6.
146
Gollan manuscript, ch. 3. For this theme, see Morgan, Against Fascism and War,
ch. 1.
emphasized common features and analogy both in the dangers of
industrial conscription and in the forms of resistance to which it
should and did give rise. Britain’s re-emerging conscription lobby
was thus squarely identified with the interests of big business,
while a ‘deep-rooted hatred’ for the army was attributed to the
passion of the people for ‘freedom’.147 Gollan’s alternative to
conscription stressed issues of both morale and technique in
urging the redundancy for defensive purposes of a mass conscript
army and the necessity instead for defences against the new threat
of aerial bombing.148 If this recalls Britain’s traditional reliance

on the navy, though in the unambiguous context of defensive war,
Gollan also described increased recruiting for the Territorial
Army as sufficient to meet genuine defence requirements, and
urged its root-and-branch reform to provide a ‘real democratic
voluntary force’.149 The book was marked up as ready for the
printers when the conscription controversy intervened.
In declaring against Chamberlain’s conscription bill, British
communists therefore drew on a repertoire of images and argu-
ments dating from at least as far back as the First World War.
A pamphlet of the BYPA-sponsored National Youth Campaign
(NYC) followed earlier writings by Gollan in stressing themes of
conscience and the voluntary principle. Conscription threatened
a rupture with ‘English’ traditions of ‘free service’ through the
forcing of the conscript — a notably individualist flourish —
‘whatever he may think about the cause for which this service is
being demanded’.150 Images of Prussianism were revived and
updated by reference to fascism as anti-model, as the Daily
Worker warned of Chamberlain’s ‘military jack-boot’, and Galla-
cher described the early military training so esteemed by Jaurès
as ‘children doing the goosestep’.151 That the NYC also found
reassurance in the millions of Russians under arms suggested
continuing ambiguities which not even Britain’s ‘glorious record
for the voluntary system’ could entirely assuage.
147
Gollan manuscript, ch. 12.
148
A prominent communist campaign of the period; see, for example, J. B. S.
Haldane, A.R.P. (London, 1938).
149
150
No Conscripts: But Free Volunteers for a Collective Peace Policy (London, 1939); see
also John Gollan, Youth Will Serve for Freedom (London, 1938), 7–8 and passim.
151
Daily Worker, 6 May 1939; Hansard, 5th ser., cccxlvii, col. 1111 (9 May 1939).
The principal statement of communist policy was Pollitt’s Can
Conscription Save Peace? This presented a case of corporate
simplicity unmixed with the PCF’s cross-class republicanism.
‘Britain is ruled by the rich for the rich’, it roundly stated, and
Chamberlain’s proposals meant ‘industrial slavery’ for British
workers through the suppression of their industrial and political
liberties. No ‘arguments about what the French workers have to
put up with’ could affect the issue, and Pollitt noted the reaction-
ary social role played by French conscripts both as recently as
1938 and as far back as their notorious intervention in the railway

strike of 1910.152 Though stress was also placed on the tactical
issue of keeping in step with the CPGB’s labour movement allies,
Pollitt seemed resistant to the very principle of compulsion. He
did not, he said,
want anyone to tell me about the professional army. There has always
been conscription, there has been hunger and starvation, but I believe
that with a government of the type we want, we could get everything in
this country on the basis of voluntary service which expresses a very high
thing in politics and could have been won.
Neither conscription under Chamberlain, nor conscription under
the communists: this was Pollitt’s stated position; this alone
accorded with ‘the traditions that we have to take into account
here’.153 Like the manuscript of Gollan’s book, with the interven-
tion of the Comintern it was good for nothing but the archives.
VII
CONCLUSION
In his wide-ranging study of the British political tradition, W. H.
Greenleaf identified ‘statism’ as the dominant stream of ideas
within British socialism.154 This was not conspicuous in its atti-
tudes to conscription. Rather, these might seem to bear out
Michael Freeden’s contention of the ‘predominance of the con-
cept of liberty’ in all variants of British social and economic
152
See, for example, Charles Trevelyan, Democracy and Compulsory Service
(London, 1913); also Pollitt, Can Conscription Save Peace?, 2, 4–9, 12–17.
153
LHASC, CPGB archives, CPGB central committee proceedings, 21 May 1939;
see also the contributions of Peter Kerrigan and Marion Jessop.
154
W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, ii, The Ideological Heritage
(London, 1983), 359 ff. See also the discussion in Morgan, Bolshevism and the
British Left, i, 17–19.
thought, including socialism.155 As even the communist Gollan
put it, Britain was ‘a home of freedom. The history of its people
from Wat Tyler onwards, is the history of the struggle for free-
dom’.156 How far this should be attributed to the liberal ideo-
logical influence central to Freeden’s account is a question
that would repay closer examination. Socialism in Britain was
shaped to an unusual degree by the prior existence of robust
social movements, notably the unions, possessing a solidaristic
ethos which nevertheless made a virtue of independence and was
not simply to be realized through, or projected onto, the state.

Indeed, it could equally be associated with a profound suspicion
of what militants around the time of the First World War thought
of as the servile state.157 Precisely as in France, liberty was not a
concept synonymous with individualism; but in its corporate
aspect for British socialists, it was more clearly distinguishable
from the existing state. A notion of ‘freedom’ against the state
was thus advanced in which group rights were affirmed in a lan-
guage incorporating individualist accents, but rarely reducible to
them. In the testing times of the First World War, this labourist
distrust of state compulsion was evidently more resilient than that
of political liberalism. Given whom as well as what these rival
outlooks represented, this should perhaps not be surprising. As
Coulton often observed, Mill himself, the very fount of British
liberalism, had in his own time supported conscription out of a
sense of military insecurity — and perhaps an unusual sensitivity
to French intellectual influences. And as a liberal critic reminded
Mill, workers had a much surer instinct than men of letters that
they could not afford ‘to be dragged away . . . into fatuous
soldiering’.158
At the level of what Freeden calls the perimeter — that is, the
interaction between concrete ideologies and ‘real-world’ contexts
— the boundaries of these ideological families seem in this case
to be diffuse.159 Formative at the perimeter were lines of succes-
sion, competition and cross-fertilization, not least across national
155
Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford,
1996), 457.
156
157
See, for example, James Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement (London,
1973), ch. 1.
158
John Morley, Early Life and Letters of John Morley, ed. F. W. Hirst, 2 vols.
(London, 1927), i, 174–5.
159
Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, 78–80.
frontiers, that were not confined to or determined by particular
ideologies. Rather, they adapted and reshaped them according to
imperatives which were usually not exclusively ideological in the
formal sense. Nor, conversely, can much credence be given to
the notion of an illiberal French Sonderweg: not only because of
the evident movement of ideas across national boundaries, but
because, in the matter of military service, it was not the French
but the Anglo-Saxon model which on all sides was seen, as
Tocqueville had seen it, as ‘peculiar’.160 In so basic a matter as
the right of the state to conscript its citizens for war, the correla-

tion between real-world attitudes and conventional ideological
demarcations was thus especially complex. One result was the
sheer level of movement from one family to another: from the
socialists like Hervé and Mussolini who gravitated to the chau-
vinistic right, to the stream of British liberals that in the 1910s and
1920s made its way into the Labour Party. Another was that even
ideologies with strong international identities, such as socialism,
both influenced and were profoundly susceptible to local specifi-
cities of cultural formation and political space.
Whether as a new ideological family, or as an estranged detach-
ment of the socialist one, communism after 1917 was also a bene-
ficiary of these movements across ideological boundaries. More
than any previous political movement, on the other hand, it aimed
at overriding national specificities through the imposition of a
unified central ideology and policies purportedly deriving from
it. Much discussion in communist historiography has focused on
the extent and effectiveness of this control of periphery by centre.
In this respect, the conscription controversy of 1939 offers no
facile resolution. On the one hand, the CPGB did not consult
the Comintern over its original policy; leading figures resisted a
change of policy; the party’s general secretary proposed his own
removal; and Britain’s sole communist MP did not even attend
the critical meeting of the central committee. Clearly this was not
the ‘military apparatus of the USSR’ familiar from an older lit-
erature.161 On the other hand, the Comintern did in the end
160
On French exceptionalism, see François Furet, Jacques Julliard and Pierre
Rosanvallon, La République du centre: la fin de l’exception française (Paris, 1988);
Robert Tombs, ‘Was there a French Sonderweg?’, European Review of History / Revue
européenne d’histoire, i (1994).
161
Henry Pelling, The British Communist Party: A Historical Profile (London, 1975),
107.
prevail; the leadership in Britain was, as Kerrigan put it, con-
temptuously flouted; and the very embeddedness of an anti-
conscriptionist discourse only underlined the cavalier way in
which it was set aside. The writing of Gollan’s book shows how
texts on the most sensitive issues could be completed and even
published without proper reference to a higher authority. On the
other hand, the periodic abandonment or withdrawal of such
projects also confirms the limits of local initiative. When push
came to shove, it was Moscow’s position that determined that
of British communists. But how often push came to shove, and

over what range of issues, was a matter of very considerable
variation.
This needs to be registered in our understanding of the
Comintern. An influential conceptualization of communist his-
toriography has been that of the linear dynamic of Stalinization,
initially deriving in Hermann Weber’s work from a German nar-
rative terminating in 1933.162 Of considerable cogency in its ori-
ginal application, to the extent that the concept signifies a sort of
closure, it is difficult to apply it to a popular-front experience in
which the intense ideological and organizational controls docu-
mented by Weber for various reasons proved unsustainable.
Instead, one can trace the coexistence of a political line deriving
from Russia with diverse social, political and cultural influences
whose eclecticism was to varying degrees left undisturbed unless
and until it came into conflict with that line. For communists like
Gallacher and Pollitt, whose familiarity with notions of the servile
state pre-dated their attachment to communism, the conscription
controversy of 1939 was very much a case in point. In a manu-
script such as Gollan’s, these militant traditions mingled eclec-
tically with diverse national and international influences in a
combination which — like Labour’s rather similar policies —
was unlikely in any case to have survived the test of the coming
war.
Paradoxically, it was with the final decay and dissolution of the
Comintern that a more rigorous and systematic effort was made
to develop an Anglicized version of the Continental Marxism now
primarily identified with official communism. Already into the
162
For further discussion, see the introduction to Norman LaPorte, Kevin Morgan
and Matthew Worley (eds.), Bolshevism, Stalinism and the Comintern: Perspectives on
Stalinization, 1917–1953 (Basingstoke, 2008).
CPGB’s new draft programme of August 1939 there crept the
demand for ‘military training for the people in a democratically
organised system of defence’.163 During the war that followed,
both communists and mainstream Labour revived a language of
national service, combined as never before with that of the people
in arms. Communists, even in their anti-war phase of 1939–41,
failed to make the once axiomatic connection between conscrip-
tion and industrial servitude; and as falteringly they adopted
more ‘defencist’ positions, they linked these instead with the
slogan of a ‘people’s army’. As subsequently the erstwhile anti-

compulsionist Attlee became the first British prime minister to
retain conscription into peacetime, Britain’s communists upheld
the same basic position even as they came to denounce Attlee’s
foreign policy.164 In actuality in Labour’s case, and in the imagi-
nation of the communists, this in part represented an adaptation
to the perceived challenges and responsibilities of power. For the
communists, who now fitfully championed Cromwell as the PCF
did Robespierre, the memory of an English revolution played an
important part in this project. In the words of Christopher Hill,
foremost communist authority on the subject, the experience pro-
vided an antidote to the congenital anti-statism and ‘oppositionist
habit of mind’ of English radicals. ‘In France’, Hill observed on
the revolution’s tercentenary in 1949, ‘the experience of 1793
taught the Left that state power might be used in their interests,
that power was not bad in itself but according to its use’.165 There
are parallels here with Labour’s promotion of a discourse of the
nation through the real or anticipated exercise of power, and
through the concept of ‘national service’ which James Hinton
has seen as part of its ‘nationalisation of socialism’ in the
1940s.166
There was therefore nothing innate or unchanging about these
traditions. When finally conscription was abandoned in Britain,
163
CPGB, Draft Programme To Be Submitted to the 16th Party Congress (London,
1939), 40.
164
See, for example, the CPGB pamphlet Towards a People’s Army (London, 1946).
165
Christopher Hill, ‘The English Revolution and the State’, Modern Quart., iv
(1949), 127; see also the more specific application in his ‘England’s Democratic
Army’, Communist Rev., June 1947, 171–8.
166
Hinton, Protests and Visions, 120. However, L. V. Scott, Conscription and the Attlee
Governments: The Politics and Policy of National Service, 1945–1951 (Oxford, 1993),
stresses that the main arguments for peacetime conscription were military ones. These
the CPGB did not share.
it was on the initiative of a Conservative government. Britain’s
communists upheld the concept almost to the last; while in
France the idea of a citizens’ army continued to retain its force.
A sequel remains to be told in which issues of freedom and
national service were once again recast in complex ways, and
once more both within and across national boundaries.
University of Manchester Kevin Morgan

Militarism and Anti-Militarism: Socialists, Communists and Conscription in France and BRITAIN 1900-1940

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MILITARISM AND ANTI-MILITARISM:

SOCIALISTS, COMMUNISTS AND

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University of Manchester Kevin Morgan

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