French antimilitarism before World War I: Gustave Herve ´ and L’Affiche Rouge of 1905 Michael Burt Loughlin* History, Politics, & Justice, Ohio Northern University, Ada, Ohio, USA (Received 6 February 2011; final version received 10 July 2011) Gustave Herve ´’s political emergence occurred amidst the Dreyfus Affair. This accelerated his radicalisation. By 1901 he attained notoriety for an apparent image of the tricolour on a dungpile. Soon, his antimilitarist movement called Herve ´ism attempted to unite the revolutionary Left. After socialist unification, Herve ´ led the most extreme faction and created a weekly newspaper, La Guerre sociale. In 1905 he joined the Association Internationale Antimilitariste (AIA) which issued a poster based on his ideas. His experience with the AIA presaged several transformations on the French Left. Before 1914 Herve ´ was a strident voice within European socialism, advocating revolutionary means to prevent war. Years of incendiary campaigns failed to implement his ideas. Despite his dedication, the quixotic Herve ´ grew frustrated with leftist divisions. His disillusionment arose from a naive reading of an anachronistic revolutionary tradition. Herve ´’s sincere, yet romantic and eclectic, socialism exhibited atavistic features. Before the war Herve ´ rallied to ’la patrie en danger’; in 1919 he created a French national socialist party. Such shifts have been tied to Fascism. Though some recent scholars have stressed the dangers posed by antimilitarism, this article documents a more ambiguous picture of Herve ´’s experience with the AIA and his later antimilitarist activities. Keywords: antimilitarism; Affiche Rouge; Gustave Herve ´; World War I; Socialism; syndicalism; anarchism; the Second International On the eve of the departure of the new class of conscripts in the autumn of 1905, an antimilitarist poster entitled Conscrits appeared on walls in Paris and other provincial cities. That poster, soon to be known as L’Affiche Rouge for its red paper and extreme ideas, was drafted by a group called the Association Internationale Antimilitariste des Travailleurs (or AIA), a European antimilitarist group created in Amsterdam the previous year. The poster borrowed heavily from arguments and images created by France’s most notorious antimilitarist of the era, Gustave Herve ´. Even though the poster aroused the authorities and created a temporary scandal, it represented the views of a very small minority in France. The information gathered by the police and their reactions throughout this affair, help to explain both the weaknesses and the frustrations of antimilitarists before World War I. Undoubtedly, the poster’s greatest impact, however unintended, was on the French police rather than average citizens. The poster called for conscripts to rebel against strikebreaking and war by means of violence against officers, a military strike, an ISSN 1350-7486 print/ISSN 1469-8293 online q 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2012.663079 http://www.tandfonline.com *Email: m-loughlin@onu.edu European Review of History—Revue europe ´enne d’histoire Vol. 19, No. 2, April 2012, 297–322