FRENCH WORKERS OPPOSE INCREASED MILITARY SERVICE

Industrial Unionist, Volume 1, Issue 5, 1 June 1913, Page 4

FRENCH WORKERS OPPOSE INCREASED MILITARY SERVICE

Formidable Protest against tfee Law of Three Years

200.000 Parisian Workers Demonstrate

(Translated from La Vosx du People)

Better than our working-class pen, the photos we publish give a better idea of our demonstration.

proclaim their hatred in the face of all the miserable beings who would prolong the chains of military and economic servitude. The people of Paris are reminded by the 16th of March, 1913, of their grandparents of March 17th, 1871.

Also we could not wait to give a complete detailed account, the capitalist dailies amply suffice for that. Better still, the capitalist journals, in spite of their efforts for falsifying the value of our manifestation, have been obliged to acknowledge the defeat of the nationalist bluff.

Thank you, Paris, but thanks also to you, governors and jingoes, for having, by your criminal projects, reawakened the revolutionary ardour of the grand city of barricades.

They have not succeeded in making froth of the review of Vincennes and to their raising of antimilitarist cries. These have surpassed in conscience and morality the noisy jingoes of Vincennes. We repeat here that the Confederal Committee in particular the citizen Semanaz, for organising so suitably our demonstration. Governors and jingoes, exploiters of the patriotic clap-trap, now, with your monstrous projects. In spite of the lies of your press and the provocations of your miserable police, the C.G.T. is before you with whole of the working class. The delegate of the Federations of Miners has brought on Sunday, to the Pre’-Sjaint Gervaise, the solidarity of 250,000 French miners opposed to war and to fresh armaments.

Thanks to the revolutionaries, thanks to the groups that joined with the C.G.T. in order to make a success of this workers’ demonstration. Thanks to the comrades of Pre’Saint Gervais, peasant France participated in the awakening of the Parisian conscience.

It is this that has given to our demonstration its specifically Labour character, and that is not the least of our satisfactions.

Millerand, with his military pensions, has created* if not an awakening of jingo patriotism, at least an element of foolishness and trouble in the popular conscience. It is in this trouble that the military reaction would impose a year of the barracks and more for the young workers and more heavy taxes for our class.

The delegate of the wine-grow-ers and of the peasants of the South is seen saying that antimilitarism in the vine-growing districts has been hereditary. The delegate from Nancy carries the assurance that the workers of the East of France are partisans of peace before everything. “The Lorrains*” added he, “ have no longing to be beaten.” The delegates from Lille and from Lyon spoke in the same strain. And thus, working class and the Union of Unions have said on the day after the demonstration: Bravo, Paris ! The response to the reactionary leaders was magnificent and formidable. Two hundred thousand sons of revolutionary Paris were there to

If we know how to profit by the awakening of the public mind* that affirmed itself on “ The Field of Peace of Pre’-Saint Gervais,” the law of three years will not be voted.

The demonstration unrolled itself in the most perfect calm and the order was absolute. Between the two and three hundred thousands of men, women and children who were on the field of the demonstration, there was not the slightest incident, not the shadow of a disturbance; all was harmony and good humour. Only the agents of Order and Authority provoked disorder. Their attitude was ignoble, scandalous and revolting.