It is, therefore, quite natural that the writers representing the General Confederation of Labor who address the workingmen directly do not reproduce these theories of M. Sorel. As has been indicated already, their writings bear a different stamp. And if among these writers some, as for instance M. Griffuelhes, seem to have come more under the influence of the group _Le Mouvement Socialiste_, the rest occupy an independent position even from the theoretical point of view.
How little M. Sorel could have been the "leader" of the revolutionary syndicalist movement may be illustrated by the following comparison. At the Congress of Lyons in 1901 the secretary of the General Confederation of Labor, M. Guérard, wrote, as we have seen, that the Confederation is destined to transform society. In the same year, M. Sorel, in his preface to Pelloutier's _Histoire des Bourses du Travail_, wrote: "The Confederation of Labor appears to me to be destined to become an officious Council of Labor, and an academy of proletarian ideas, which will present its wishes to the government, as the large agricultural societies do." The history of the General Confederation of Labor since 1902, to be considered in the following chapter, will show that M. Sorel missed the point too far to be able to claim the title of "leader" whose function, presumably, is to point out the way and not to acknowledge it, after it has once been taken.
It is necessary to bear all this in mind in order to grasp the real character of revolutionary syndicalism. M. Sorel has recently renounced his revolutionary syndicalist ideas. In December, 1910, he wrote to the Italian revolutionary syndicalists who invited him to their Congress at Boulogne:
It seems to the author [of the _Reflections on Violence_] that syndicalism has not realized what was expected from it. Many hope that the future will correct the evils of the present hour; but the author feels himself too old to live in distant hopes; and he has decided to employ the remaining years of his life in the deepening (_approfondir_) of other questions which keenly interest the cultivated youth of France.[178]
[178] _Le Mouvement Socialiste_ (March, 1911), pp. 184-5.
Previous to that, M. Sorel and M. Berth had both promised collaboration in a so-called neo-monarchist monthly, _La Cité Française_, which, however, did not see the light. This probably seemed to them natural in view of their opposition to democracy. But under the political conditions of France such an act could not but shock the workingmen who may criticise democracy but who are bitterly opposed to everything connected with the _ancien régime_. This act of M. Sorel and M. Berth weakened the group of _Le Mouvement Socialiste_ which, however, is still published by M. Lagardelle, though with less force and _éclat_ than before. The act of M. Sorel, however, could have no perceptible significance for the revolutionary syndicalist movement. The latter is led by other leaders and is determined in its march by other influences.