In Honor Of The 94^th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Three –A Daughter of The Communards?

Claudette Longuet idolized her grandfather, her maternal grandfather, Louis Paret, called the Lyonese Jaures by his comrades in the Socialist Party and by others as well not attuned to his political perspectives by respectful of the power of his words nevertheless, an honorific well-deserved for his emulation of the internationally famous French socialist orator, Jean Jaures, who had been villainously assassinated just before the war. Claudette had reason to idolize Papa Paret for his was a gentle man toward his several grandchildren and so had a built-in fan club of sorts before he even left the comfortable confines of his townhouse on the edges of downtown Lyon.

More importantly Claudette had idolized him for his political past, his proud working class and socialist political past. As a mere boy he had fought on the barricades during the Paris Commune, a touchstone for all those who survived the bloody massacre reprisals of the Theirs government carried out by the sadistic General Gallifit. He just barely missed being transported. Fortunately no “snitch” could place him on the barricades, although the Theirs government was not always so choosey about such things when they had their killing habits on. He had defended the poor Jewish soldier Dreyfus when Emile Zola screamed for his release. He had opposed Alexander Millerand, an avowed socialist, in joining the murderous bourgeois government when he took that step. He tirelessly campaigned against war, signed all the national and international petitions to prevent that occurrence, and attended all the conferences too. Although he himself was no Marxist, his socialism ran to more mystical and philosophical trends, he welcomed the Russian revolution of 1905 with open arms. So, yes, Claudette, as she grew to young womanhood and began her own search for social and political meaning, understandable took her cues from her Papa. Moreover before the war she spent many hours in his company at the local socialist club doing the “this and that” to spread the socialist faith around and about Lyons.

Then the war came, that dreaded awful August 1914 when the guns of war howled into the night and her grandfather changed, almost chameleon-like. From a fervent anti-warrior he turned overnight into a paragon of defense of French culture, French bourgeois culture, as he would have previously said against, against, the Hun, the Boche, the, the, whatever foul word he could use to denigrate the Germans, all of them. He stood in the central square in Lyon and preached, preached the duty of every eligible young Frenchman to defend the republic to the death, no questions asked. And since he had that Jaures-like quality those young boys listened and sadly went off to war, many to never return. For a while he also had Claudette with him, for the first couple of years when he, they uttered not one anti-war word, not one. But after about two years, after some awful battles fought on French soil, some awful battles that were just stacking up the corpses without let-up, she started to listen to that younger Papa voice, the voice that thrilled her young girl-hood, and silently began to oppose the war, to oppose her grandfather who had not changed his opinion one iota throughout the carnage.

Claudette kept his silence until the February revolution in Russia in 1917 when it seemed like peace might be at hand. He grandfather cursed the Russians whenever there was talk that they might withdraw from the war but she saw that their withdrawal might stop the war on all fronts. Mainly she was tired of seeing the weekly casualty lists and all the women, young and old, in black, always black. Then in November or maybe December 1917 she heard, heard from her new beau (a beau a little younger than her, almost just a boy, since the men her age were either at the fronts or down in the ground) who had been agitating for an end to the war (and getting hell for it from the local government, and her grandfather) that the Russians under the Bolsheviks had withdrawn from the war. Things were sketchy, very sketchy with the wartime censorship on but that is what she heard from him. She talked to, or tried to talk to her grandfather about it, but he would not hear of the damn Bolshevik rabble.

Papa Paret moreover said when peace came, and it would come, with or without the damn Russians, since the entry of the American would take the final stuffing out of the Germans, then everybody could go back to arguing against war and French and German workers could unite again under the banner of the Socialist International and maybe really end war for good. And the war did end, and the various socialists who had just supported the massive blood-letting in Europe and elsewhere started talking of brotherhood once again and of putting that old peacetime International back together. Claudette though, now more under the spell of that feisty boyfriend, was not sure that grandfather had it right. And in the summer of 1919 when she heard (via that same boyfriend who had already joined the French Communist Party, or really the embryo of that party) that the Bolsheviks had convened a conference to form a new International, a Third International, to really fight against war and fight for socialism she was more conflicted. See she really did idolize Papa and so she would wait and see…

Leon Trotsky

Great Times

(1919)

---

Written: 1919
First Published: The Communist International [Petrograd], Vol.I, No.1, 1919.
Translated: Unknown.
Transcription/HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.
Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) August 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

---

The Tsars and the priests – the former lords of the Moscow Kremlin – never foresaw, we may imagine, that within its hoary walls would one day gather the representatives of the most revolutionary part of contemporary humanity. Nevertheless, this has happened. In one of the halls of the Palace of Justice, where still are wandering the wan ghosts of the criminal paragraphs of the Imperial code, at this moment the delegates of the Third International are in session. Verily, the mole of history has dug his tunnel well beneath the Kremlin walls.

These material surroundings of the Communist Congress are merely the outward expression; the visible embodiment, of the gigantic changes which have taken place in the world during the last ten or twelve years.

In the days of the First, and again in those of the Second Internationals, Tsarist Russia was the chief stronghold of world reaction. At the International Socialist Congresses, the Russian revolution was represented by emigrants, towards whom the majority of the opportunist leaders of European Socialism adopted an attitude of ironical condescension. The bureaucrats of Parliamentarism and Trade Unionism were filled with an unshakeable certainty that the miseries of a revolution were to be the lot only of semi-Asiatic Russia, while Europe was assured of a gradual, painless, peaceful development from Capitalism to Socialism.

But in August, 1914, the accumulated antagonisms of Imperialism tore to pieces the “peaceful” cloak of capitalism, with its Parliamenterism, its established “liberties,” and its legalised prostitution, political and otherwise. From the heights of civilization mankind found itself hurled into an abyss of terrifying barbarism and bloodstained savagery.

Notwithstanding that Marxist theory had foreseen and foretold the bloody catastrophe, the social-reformist parties were taken completely by surprise. The perspectives of peaceful development became smoke and dust. The opportunist leaders could find no work left for them but to call upon the toiling masses to defend the capitalist national State. On August 4, 1914, the Second International perished with dishonour.

From that moment, all true revolutionary heirs of the Marxian spirit placed before themselves the task of creating a new International – an International of unquenchable revolutionary struggle against capitalist society. The war let loose by Imperialism upset the balance if the whole of the capitalist world. All questions revealed themselves as revolutionary questions. The old revolutionary cobblers applied all their arts in order to preserve the balance of the old hopes, the old lies, the old organisations. All was of no avail. The war – not for the first time in history – showed itself the mother of the revolution. An imperialist war brought forth a proletarian revolution.

The honour of having taken the first step belongs to the Russian working class and its veteran, battle-scarred Communist Party. By its November revolution the Russian proletariat not only opened the gates of the Kremlin to the representatives of the international proletariat, but also laid the foundation stone for the building of the Third International.

The revolutions in Germany, Austria and Hungary; the stormy tide of the Soviet movement and of civil war that has poured over Europe, crested by the martyrdom of Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and many thousands of nameless heroes; these have shown that the paths of Europe are not other than those of Russia. The unity of method in the struggle for Socialism, revealed by practice, has laid the ideal foundations for the creation of a Communist International, while, at the same time, it has rendered impossible the postponement of a Communist Congress.

At this moment, that Congress is sitting within the walls of the Kremlin. We are witnesses of and participants in one of the greatest events in the history of the world.

The working class of the whole world has wrested the most impregnable fortress of all – that of former Imperial Russia – from its enemies. On it as its base, it is uniting its forces for the last decisive battle.

What happiness – to live, and fight at such a time!

L. TROTSKY