From Revolutionary Theater to Reactionary Litanies

Gustave Herv (18711944) seemed to have traditional Breton roots and a typical republican education. As a young socialist journalist and professor, he gained notoriety following a 1901 article which appeared to plant the tricolor in a dung pile. When French socialists unified in 1905, the Hervistes were an influential minority. The antimilitarist movement called Hervism gradually emerged as a quixotic crusade to unite revolutionaries against war and for socialism. Herv soon founded a weekly newspaper, La Guerre Sociale. Over the next six years, press campaigns, trials, prison, demonstrations, strikes, and conspiratorial organizations maintained Hervs profile and sold newspapers. Ironically, Herv advertised conspiracies, which suggests revolutionary theater more than practical politics. Among Hervs rivals, such theatrics often generated resentment. While Hervs movement succeeded as a media experience, his leftist competitors became jealous and skeptical. As revolutionary theater Hervism might have been entertaining, but the actors and some of the audience often confused revolutionary art with political reality. By 1911 the ingenuous Herv felt betrayed. His failure to unite revolutionaries began an evolution toward the nation and its traditional Catholic faith. Besides the international situation, one crucial determinant in Hervs evolution toward French national socialism sympathetic to fascism involved ongoing rivalries within the French Left. Hervs marginal interwar national socialist parties sought to employ patriotism and religion to solve French problems. By 1935 he attempted to draft Ptain to lead an authoritarian republic. Gradually losing hope in Ptain after the fall of France, the aging Herv put his faith in Christian socialism.