THE SYNDICALIST CHALLENGE
Sorel; but the Dreyfus case seems to summarize it all. It
proved to Sorel what he termed the putrefaction of democracy.
Its first phase, down to 1902, showed the utter moral and
political rottenness of the Conservative parties, ready to sacrifice
an innocent man rather than admit a court martial could have
been mistaken, and stopping short at no denial of justice, at
no violation of law or equity, not even at civil war, to preserve
the " honour " of the army. Those so-called governing classes
were enough to turn any honest man utterly sick.
But there were those at least who had not bowed the knee
to Baal, who had risked reputation, livelihood, life even, in
defence of the unjustly accused; and behind leaders like
Jaures, Millerand, Clemenceau, Brisson, were the organized
Socialist and Radical parties, who could be trusted to defend
morality and law. But were they indeed? The defenders of
Dreyfus had resorted to illegality to obtain the final quashing
of the verdict, and the parties of the Left, once in office, had
used their power with the same selfish immorality, packing
army, university, Civil Service with their nominees, using the
body of Dreyfus as a spring-board for their own advancement,
and displaying in their policy towards the Church a petty re-
vengeful spirit which showed them to be on the same ethical
level as those whom they had displaced. No, the middle classes,
whatever their political labels, Radicals, Liberals, Progressi-
vists. Conservatives, were all rotten through and through—
nothing more was ever to be hoped for in that quarter.
Sorel's hostility to the bourgeoisie was thus born originally
from a moral revolt against its selfishness and cowardice, and
his early leanings towards the proletariat were inspired by
the belief that the world needed new moral values, and that
the proletarian alone could create these. "The middle classes
cannot find in their conditions of existence the materials out
of which to produce ideas contradictory to those of the bour-
geoisie: they lack utterly the sense of sudden catastrophic
change. But the proletarian, on the contrary, finds in his daily life
the essential factors both of solidarity and of revolt: he is in
daily warfare with the powers that be, political and economic,
and can therefore conceive of moral values opposed to those
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