Aristide Briand: Naval Disarmament

Many times Premier of France, Briand [1862-1932] was noted for his strong advocacy of international peace and disarmament. He was a vigorous supporter of the League of Nations and took a leading part in its ses­sions. Here is part of his address delivered on November 21, 1921, at the Washington Conference on Naval Disarmament, which he attended as the French representative.



We know there is one part of Germany that is for peace. There are many people, especially among the working classes, who want to work, who have had enough of this war, who have had enough of war altogether, and are most anxious to settle down in peace, and also to set to work. We shall do everything to help that Germany, and if she wants to restore her balance in the bosom of a pacific republic and democratic institutions, then we can help her, and we shall be able to contemplate the future with feelings of security.

But, gentlemen, there is another Germany, a Germany which has not changed her mind and to which the last war has taught no lesson. That Germany keeps thoughts in the back of her mind; she has the same designs which she entertained before the war; she has kept the same preoccupations and she cherishes the same ambitions as the Hohenzollerns did. And how can we close our eyes to this? How can we ignore this state of things?

This, gentlemen, is happening at our very doors; we have only got to look. This is happening but a few miles from us, and we follow the thoughts of the Germans, or certain Germans, and the evolution which is taking place. And more than that, we have witnessed certain attempts to return to the former state of things.

What is Germany but a vast country of industry—industrially organized? Germany always had two aims. The first was trade, commerce. And that is only natural. The second was war. All her industries, all her manu­factures, have been working to the full during the war, and they have developed since.

Everything is ready in Germany, the plans, the designs and calibers. Everything is there ready to insure a steady manufacturing of guns, machine guns and rifles. Suppose that during a period of diplomatic tension, purposely protracted for a number of weeks, certain of the manufactures, certain of the works, begin to fabricate, just at the begin­ning, just to start the war, just to set the war going, and then go on manufacturing guns and rifles and artillery; what would happen? It is not only in Germany that industry can work to the full. You can make prepara­tions outside. In fact, preparations have actually taken place. In fact, great captains of industry or great industrial magnates have bought important firms in Scandinavia and in other parts of Europe.

It is easy enough to fabricate these guns without our seeing it, outside of our supervision. You know very well that it is possible to build great railroads. You know very well that it is impossible to bring here the proof that Germany is not actually making or purchasing war materials.

It is different from the navy. It is rather difficult to lay the keel of a ship in the stocks, to prepare the dockyards without the world knowing it. But suppose that was possible, do you think you could launch a capital ship without somebody being on the spot and knowing what was happen­ing? But the guns, the rifles, the machine guns—any instruments used on the field of battle—they can be manufactured and cannot be controlled with any measure of certainty.

Ah, gentlemen, this is not the first time in history that France has had to face a situation of this kind. We have known Prussia disarmed. And disarmed by whom? By Napoleon. Well, that Prussia, which seemed prac­tically disarmed, which was harmless to all intents and purposes, we found her again on the battlefield and we were nearly bled white. How can we forget that?

Of course, we know what is often said of the French people. It is often said that we are a frivolous nation and that naturally, when the danger is past, we turn our minds to other things—just as befits a frivolous people. Evidently, gentlemen, we are not the sort of men to keep our eyes steadily fixed on whatever is sad and depressing.

We have not been doing that since the war, but we have been too deeply wounded, I might almost say murdered, to forget the direful lesson which has just been taught us. Gentlemen, there are too many homes in mourning in the country, there are too many men in the streets that are disabled and maimed. Even if we wanted to forget, we could not.

Therefore, we have not the right and we do not intend to leave France defenseless. France must, to all intents and purposes, protect herself.

Marshal Ferdinand Foch: Napoleon

This is the closing part of a tribute from one great French soldier to another. The address was delivered before the tomb of Napoleon in Paris, on the one hundredth anniversary of his death, by Marshal Ferdinand Foch [1851-1929], on May 5, 1921.



If one considers that Napoleon revealed his powers in 1796 at the age of twenty-seven, it is plain that nature endowed him extraordinarily. These talents he applied unceasingly through the whole length of his prodigious career.

Through them he marks out his way along a resplendent path in the military annals of humanity. He carries his victorious eagles from the Alps to the Pyramids, and from the banks of the Tagus to those of the Moskova, surpassing in their flight the conquests of Alexander, of Hanni­bal and of Cæsar. Thus he remains the great leader, superior to all others in his prodigious genius, his need of activity, his nature, ardent to excess, which is always favorable to the profits of war but dangerous to the equilibrium of peace.

Thus he lifts the art of war far above all known heights, but this carries him to regions of dizziness. Identifying the greatness of the country with his own, he would rule the destinies of nations with arms, as if one could bring about the prosperity of the people from a succession of victories at grievous sacrifices. As if this people could live by glory instead of by labor. As if the conquered nations, deprived of their independence, would not rise some day to reconquer it, putting an end to a régime of force and presenting armies strong in numbers and invincible in the ardor of outraged justice. As if in a civilized world, moral right should not be greater than a power created entirely by force, however talented that force might be. In attempting this Napoleon himself goes down, not for lack of genius, but because he attempted the impossible, because he undertook with a France exhausted in every way, to bend to his laws a Europe already instructed by its misfortunes, and soon entirely in arms.

Decidedly, duty is common to all. Higher than commanding armies victoriously, there is our country to be served for her good as she under­stands it; there is justice to be respected everywhere. Above war there is peace.

Assuredly, the most gifted man errs who, in dealing with humanity, depends upon his own insight and intelligence and discards the moral law of society, created by respect for the individual, and those principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, the basis of our civilization, and the essence of Christianity.

Sire, sleep in peace; from the tomb itself you labor continually for France. At every danger to the country, our flags quiver at the passage of the Eagle. If our legions have returned victorious through the triumphal arch which you built, it is because the sword of Austerlitz marked out their direction, showing how to unite and lead the army that, won the victory. Your masterly lessons, your determined labors, remain indefea­sible examples. In studying them and meditating on them the art of war grows daily greater. It is only in the reverently and thoughtfully gathered rays of your immortal glory that generations of the distant future shall succeed in grasping the science of combat and the management of armies for the sacred cause of the defense of the country.

Vladimir Lenin: The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat

Leader of the Bolshevist party and first dictator of Soviet Russia, Vladimir Lenin [1870-1924] was also a great orator. The following defense of pro­letarian dictatorship was made by Lenin before the Communist Inter­national Congress in 1919.


The growth of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat in all coun­tries has called forth convulsive efforts of the bourgeoisie and its agents in workmen’s organizations, to find ideal political arguments in defense of the rule of the exploiters. Among these arguments stands out particu­larly condemnation of dictatorship and defense of democracy. The false­ness and hypocrisy of such an argument, which has been repeated in thousands of forms in the capitalist press and at the conference of the yellow International in February, 1919, Berne, are evident to all who have not wished to betray the fundamental principle of socialism.

First of all, this argument is used with certain interpretations of “democracy in general” and “dictatorship in general” without raising the point as to which class one has in mind. Such a statement of the question, leaving out of consideration the question of class as though it were a general national matter, is direct mockery of the fundamental doctrine of socialism, namely, the doctrine of class struggle, which the socialists who have gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie recognize when they talk, but forget when they act. For in no civilized capitalist country does there exist “democracy in general,” but there exists only bourgeois democ­racy, and one is speaking not of “dictatorship in general” but of dictator­ship of the oppressed classes, that is, of the proletariat with respect to the oppressors and exploiters, that is, the bourgeoisie, in order to over­come the resistance which the exploiters make in their struggle to preserve their rule.

History teaches that no oppressed class has ever come into power and cannot come into power, without passing through a period of dictatorship, that is, the conquest of power and the forcible suppression of the most desperate and mad resistance which does not hesitate to resort to any crimes, such has always been shown by the exploiters. The bourgeoisie, whose rule is now defended by the socialists who speak against “dictator­ship in general” and who espouse the cause of “democracy in general,” has won power in the progressive countries at the price of a series of uprisings, civil wars, forcible suppression of kings, feudal lords, and slave owners, and of their attempts at restoration. The socialists of all countries in their books and pamphlets, in the resolutions of their congresses, in their propaganda speeches, have explained to the people thousands and millions of times the class character of these bourgeois revolutions, and of this bourgeois dictatorship. Therefore the present defense of bourgeois democracy in the form of speeches about “democracy in general,” and the present wails and shouts against the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of wails about “dictatorship in general,” are a direct mockery of socialism, and represent in fact going over to the bourgeoisie and denying the right of the proletariat to its own proletariat revolution, and a defense of bourgeois reformism, precisely at the historic moment when bourgeois reformism is collapsing the world over, and when the war has created a revolutionary situation.

All socialists who explain the class character of bourgeois civilization, or bourgeois democracy, of bourgeois parliamentarism, express the thought which Marx and Engels expressed with the most scientific exact­ness when they said that the most democratic bourgeois republic is nothing more than a machine for the suppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, for the suppression of the mass of the toilers by a handful of capitalists. There is not a single revolutionist, not a single Marxist of all those who are now shouting against dictatorship and for democracy, who would not have sworn before the workmen that he recognizes this fundamental truth of socialism. And now, when the revolutionary prole­tariat begins to act and move for the destruction of this machinery of oppression, and to win the proletarian dictatorship, these traitors to socialism report the situation as though the bourgeoisie were giving the laborers pure democracy, as though the bourgeoisie were abandoning resistance and were ready to submit to the majority of the toilers, as though there were no state machinery for the suppression of labor by capital in a democratic republic.

Workmen know very well that “freedom of meetings,” even in the most democratic bourgeois republic is an empty phrase, for the rich have all the best public and private buildings at their disposal, and also sufficient leisure time for meetings and for protection of these meetings by the bourgeois apparatus of authority. The proletarians of the city and of the village, and the poor peasants, that is, the overwhelming majority of the population, have none of these three things. So long as the situation is such, “equality,” that is, “pure democracy,” is sheer fraud.

The capitalists have always called “freedom” the freedom to make money for the rich, and the freedom to die of hunger for workmen. The capitalists call “freedom” the freedom of the rich, freedom to buy up the press, to use wealth, to manufacture and support so-called public opinion. The defenders of “pure democracy” again in actual fact turn out to be the defenders of the most dirty and corrupt system of the rule of the rich over the means of education of the masses. They deceive the people by attractive, fine-sounding, beautiful but absolutely false phrases, trying to dissuade the masses from the concrete historic task of freeing the press from the capitalists who have gotten control of it. Actual freedom and equality will exist only in the order established by the Communists, in which it will be impossible to become rich at the expense of another, where it will be impossible either directly or indirectly to subject the press to the power of money, where there will be no obstacle to prevent any toiler from enjoying and actually realizing the equal right to the use of public printing presses and of the public fund of paper.

Dictatorship of the proletariat resembles dictatorship of other classes in that it was called forth by the need to suppress the forcible resistance of a class that was losing its political rulership. But that which definitely distinguishes a dictatorship of the proletariat from a dictatorship of other classes, from a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in all the civilized capitalist countries, is that the dictatorship of the landlords and of the bourgeoisie was the forcible suppression of the resistance of the overwhelming majority of the population, namely, the toilers. On the other hand, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the forcible suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, that is, of an insignificant minority of the population—of landlords and capitalists.

It therefore follows that a dictatorship of the proletariat must neces­sarily carry with it not only changes in the form and institutions of democracy, speaking in general terms, but specifically such a change as would secure an extension such as has never been seen in the history of the world of the actual use of democratism by the toiling classes.