Jura Federation
The Jura Federation ( French Fédération jurassienne ; also called Jurassic Bund or Jura Bund ) was a revolutionary movement in western Switzerland , which consisted mainly of watch workers in the historic Bernese Jura and the Neuchâtel Jura. It was founded as a federation of anti-authoritarian and anarchist sections of the First International in 1871 and practically became the center of the international anarchist movement in the 1870s.
history
Beginnings of the International in Western Switzerland (1866–1868)
The call for the unification of all workers by the First International, founded in London in 1864, led to the formation of sections of the International in the Bernese and Neuchâtel Jura in 1866. Particularly active sections were co-founded in Le Locle by James Guillaume and in Sonvilier by Adhémar Schwitzguébel . The members of the Jurassic sections had predominantly jobs in the watch industry and were watchmakers , engravers and guillocheurs, watch shell and pen makers . The members of these sections, such as James Guillaume, still saw themselves as progressive radicals and free thinkers. The church and religion criticism had an important role. The Jurassians saw the religious orthodox Calvinism , which particularly shaped this part of Switzerland, as the main opponent of the labor movement.
The Jurassians shared some anarchist views, such as atheism or the belief that social emancipation could not be achieved through reform. But they were not anarchists when the first sections were founded. In the early days, for example, the section of Le Locle also tried to enter the cantonal and communal parliament in the elections of 1866, but this remained a one-time attempt. On the other hand, abstentionism, i. H. the refusal to take part in elections became an important element of the Jura labor movement. In the course of time, the Jurassians developed more and more radical, revolutionary ideas and steadily approached collectivist and anarchist positions.
In addition to these sections, which later formed the core of the Jura Federation, there were two other centers of the western Swiss labor movement, which were organized in the International. In the Jura, this included the sections headed by Dr. Coullery, a workers' doctor who was close to the Liberal Democratic Party , and the Geneva Fabrique , several sections, most of which consisted of German emigrants. On the fringes of the second congress of the International in Lausanne in 1867, these French-speaking sections decided to push ahead with the formation of a joint federation in order to strengthen cohesion and cooperation.
But relations with Coullery deteriorated rapidly in the course of the year, because he founded his own party together with royalists and clericals for electoral purposes and harnessed the workers for this project under his influence. The open break occurred after the Brussels Congress in 1868, after Coullery had openly criticized the resolutions of the Congress in his newspaper Voix de l'Avenir . Since the Coullery newspaper had previously been made the common organ of the French-speaking Swiss internationals , attempts were now made to counteract this with their own newspaper. In Le Locle, James Guillaume published the first issue of Progrès on December 17, 1868 , which became the organ of internationalists in the Jura.
Formation of the Romance Federation (1869)
On January 2nd, 1869, 30 French-speaking sections of the International met for a joint conference in Geneva, at which the section headed by Dr. Coullery no longer participated. The journal Égalité was appointed as the joint organ of the French-speaking Swiss sections and was founded in Geneva for this purpose. In January and February 1869, the individual sections approved the federal statutes that had been drawn up during the Congress. Thus the Romansh Federation was founded, which was an amalgamation of the western Swiss sections of the International. This was an exception within the International, as usually only entire countries and not individual parts of the country united to form federations.
In the course of 1869, workers in the Neuchâtel and Bernese Jura moved towards more radical, collectivist and anarchist positions, respectively. A successful agitation in the Jura also made the movement interesting for a larger number of workers, which shows the influence of Dr. Coullery in the Jura weakened. The climax of this development was the meeting of Crêt-du-Locle near La Chaux-de-Fonds , which was organized by the core of the radical sections in the Jura, James Guillaume, Adhémar Schwitzguébel and Auguste Spichiger. The meeting attracted many workers and the resolutions voted showed the development of this radical group towards anarchism. In addition, there were lecture tours by Mikhail Bakunin , with whom the Jurassians maintained a friendly relationship.
In 1869, at the Basel Congress, an ideological change took place within the International. Under the influence of the Belgian sections around César de Paepe , the Jurassic sections and Michail Bakunin, the International moved away from mutualism , which has been the most important socialist tendency in the International since the founding of the International. Instead of the mutualists, the collectivist anarchists became the main force, which was also reflected in the debates and the Congressional resolutions of 1869. This development of the International was seen by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , who were active as members of the General Council of the International, as a personal attempt by Mikhail Bakunin to usurp power in the International.
In the period that followed, the fronts between these two camps within the International hardened. On the one hand stood the supporters of political action (party formation, participation in the elections for the benefit of the workers) and the communists with Marx and Engels, who could count on the support of the English Federation and the German Social Democrats. And on the other side stood the anti-authoritarians and collectivists, who stood for immediate revolutionary actions, the strike and self-government and did not believe in the formation of political parties or participation in electoral politics. After the Congress of 1869 with the Federations of Spain, Italy, Belgium, Holland and large parts of the French Federation, they made up the majority in the International.
Switzerland was a special case in this regard, as the conflict between the two camps began to show itself here within a single country. The anti-authoritarian Jura sections faced large parts of the Geneva sections with their spokesman Nikolai Utin. In addition, there were the few German-Swiss sections with Herman Greulich , which were oriented towards the German social democracy, but did not play a major role in this conflict.
The Romansh Federation as the first arena for the conflict in the International (1870 – September 1871)
The first conflict arose within the Romance Federation because of the Alliance's accession to the International. The alliance was a group of about 80 revolutionaries, which included Mikhail Bakunin, Jurassians James Guillaume and Adhémar Schwitzguébel. However, the Alliance's membership application was rejected by the General Council of the International on the grounds that international organizations could not directly become a part of the International. Instead, it was suggested that the alliance members join the federations of the respective countries of origin, which they in turn accepted.
The debate about the admission of the Alliance members to the Romanesque Federation was turbulent at its congress in April 1870. The Russian Nikolai Utin, a personal enemy of Mikhail Bakunin, appeared as a representative of the Geneva sections of the Fabrique and was implacable. He called on the members of the Romansh Federation to deny the members of the Alliance access to the Federation. In the subsequent vote, the members of the Romance Federation approved the membership of the alliance with 28 to 18 votes . The President of the Congress, who is a section of Dr. Coullery, did not accept the defeat and put the mostly Jurassic participants in front of the door. The excluded then held the congress in their own restaurant, so that two congresses of the Romani Federation met at the same time. The Congress of Jurassians decided in its congress collectivism as a goal and entrusted the publication of its own body with the name Solidarité James Guillaume.
The dispute within the Romance Federation now reached the General Council of the International in London. After reports from both parties on the course of the Congress, the General Council decided in favor of the Geneva Sections. The General Council wrote in a statement that the majority of the Jurassians in the vote on the alliance resolution had only been “nominal” and denied the Jurassians the right to call themselves Romanic Federation . The Jurassians, on the other hand, do not accept the judgment of the General Council and countered that only an ordinary congress of the International can bring a decision in this dispute. However, after the Franco-Prussian War broke out on July 19 , the conflict in the Romance Federation took a back seat for the members of the International. The labor movement looked to France and later especially to the Paris Commune .
In the course of the Franco-Prussian War, James Guillaume published a leaflet entitled Manifesto to the Sections of the International . It was sent to Solidarité subscribers and solicited support for France from them. The Neuchâtel cantonal government then ordered the confiscation of the manifesto and a ban on the further publication of the Solidarité in September 1870. The lack of a separate body, the move of workers to occupy the border due to the war situation and the lack of demand in the watch industry due to the war led to a decline in activities in of the Jura workers' movement in the winter of 1870/71.
After the defeat of the Paris Commune, the Jurassic Internationals founded an aid organization for the commune refugees. The organization made it possible for the refugees to enter Switzerland and organized their accommodation with working-class families. Adhémar Schwitzguébel traveled to Paris for this purpose and helped many Communards to enter Switzerland with the help of Swiss passports they had with them. Many of the French Communards subsequently joined the Jurassic Internationals, such as Gustave Lefrançais, Jean-Louis Pindy and the later Marxist leader of the Parti ouvrier Jules Guesde .
The annual congress of the International was supposed to be held in Amsterdam in the fall of 1870 , but the General Council decided not to hold the congress due to the chaos of the war. Without a Congress, the International could not pronounce a judgment in the dispute in the Romance Federation . The Jurassians tried to re-establish contact with the General Council the following year, which the General Council did not reply. For the year 1871 the General Council also canceled the ordinary congress and instead organized a conference at its location in London. The Jurassians were not invited to the conference by the General Council and entrusted the French Paul Robin, who was part of the General Council at the time, with representing their interests. They gave him a long letter which they addressed to the delegates in London. In it they again insisted that only a regular congress of the International should take a decision on the matter, and complained that the Jurassians would not even be given the opportunity to defend themselves personally and explain their point of view. In addition, they criticized the unauthorized decision of the General Council and deplored its bias, since the General Council practically excluded the Jurassic sections from the activities of the International and broke off contact without sufficient knowledge of the situation.
The London Conference, which met on September 17, 1871, was then heavily criticized by many sections and federations. Of the 23 participants in the conference, 13 were members of the General Council and it was decided that only the General Council may determine the exact wording of the resolutions. One of the few independent delegates, Anselmo Lorenzo from the Spanish Federation, was shocked by what had happened and described the conference as a private congress of Marx. The conference passed some resolutions, which were mainly directed against the anti-authoritarians, and gave the General Council the right to determine the time and place of the next ordinary congress of the International itself. The dispute in the Romansh Federation was raised by the Geneva delegate Nikolai Utin . A five-person commission was formed to deliberate on the question, and Marx de facto chaired it. The decision of the conference confirmed the decision of the General Council on the question of the Romansh Federation and called on the Jurassians to either reunite with the Genevans in the Romansh Federation or to re-constitute themselves as a separate federation with the name Fédération Jurassienne .
Formation of the Jura Federation (November 1871 – February 1872)
After the Jurassians heard of the London resolutions, they decided to convene a federal congress. On November 12, 1871, the congress met in Sonvilier, attended by 14 delegates. They decided to found the Jura Federation and gave themselves new statutes, which were drafted by James Guillaume. The Jura Federation thus united the majority of the French-speaking Swiss sections that represented collectivist, anti-state and federalist theses and rebelled against the decisions of the London Conference of 1871.
The delegates agreed on a letter of protest against the decisions of the London conference, the so-called Sonvilier circular . 500 copies were printed and sent to all federations of the International. In Sonvilier's circular , the members of the Jura Federation called for the International to be reorganized on a federal basis. The General Council of the International should be subordinate to the general congress and be converted into a simple correspondence office. They criticized the power and the dictatorial behavior of the General Council, which no longer acts as a neutral mediator between the various federations and sections of the International. Instead, the General Council is trying to impose its own orthodox doctrine on the International. Furthermore, the form given to the International as a revolutionary organization must correspond as closely as possible to the ideal of the society aimed at. The revolutionary organization is to a certain extent the embryo of the future society. As a result, an authoritarian organization could never develop into a free society.
On February 13, 1872 the first edition of the newspaper Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne appeared , which from then on was published as organ of the Jura Federation by James Guillaume. Before that, the Jura Federation published its announcements in the magazine Révolution Sociale , which was aimed primarily at French readers and could no longer appear due to the ban in France. The first four issues were hectographed and the newspaper initially appeared every two weeks, but then quickly switched to weekly.
In spring 1872 Peter Kropotkin visited the Jura Federation to get an idea of the socialist labor movement. Members of the Jura Federation like James Guillaume and Adhémar Schwitzguébel played a key role in Peter Kropotkin's transition to anarchism. In the memoir of a revolutionary , Kropotkin wrote about his stay in the Jura in 1872:
«The way in which everyone saw and treated everyone as equals, which I found in the Jurassic mountains, the independence in thought and expression, as I saw it develop among the workers there, and their boundless devotion to the common cause spoke my feelings much more; and when I left the mountains behind me after a good week's stay with the watchmakers, my socialist views were clear: I was an anarchist. "
In addition, other socialist personalities also visited the Jura Federation, such as André Léo , Carlo Cafiero and the French geographer Élisée Reclus , who joined the Jura Federation in exile in Switzerland.
Escalation of the conflict with the General Council (March 1871 – September 1871)
In March 1872 the General Council of the International responded to Sonvilier's circular with a 38-page booklet entitled Les Prétendues Scissions dans l'Internationale ( The alleged divisions in the International ). The work was mainly written by Marx and, like the circular by Sonvilier, was sent to all federations of the International. In the brochure, Mikhail Bakunin in particular is attacked as the alleged head of a sectarian movement within the International and the alliance , which at that time no longer existed, was described as a parasitic organization to the detriment of the International. James Guillaume and his magazine Progrès were also mentioned by name and attacked for their criticism of the General Council. The polemical pamphlet was badly received by the federations. The general council was also hostile to the brochure, including, for example, the Zurich social democrat Herman Greulich, who strongly criticized the text in a letter to a member of the general council.
The polemical and unobjective way in which the Jura Federation and the anti-authoritarians were attacked completely poisoned the relationship between the two camps in the International. The Italian Federation completely ceased relations with the General Council and the Belgian Federation demanded the abolition of the General Council in its current form. Those attacked in the private circular Les Prétendues Scissions dans l'Internationale vehemently contradicted the allegations of the General Council. In various personal reports in the magazine Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne of June 15, 1872, they described their point of view and rejected the allegations because they were not true. The articles were then collected in a pamphlet and published under the title Réponse de quelques internationaux à la circulaire privée du Conseil Général (English: response from some members of the International to the private circular of the General Council ).
In the summer of 1872, after two years without an ordinary congress, the General Council again invited the sections of the International to a general congress. The annual congress was scheduled for September 2nd in The Hague, The Netherlands . The Jura Federation immediately criticized the choice of the congress location in a letter to the General Council, as this was not central to enable all federations to attend the congress in sufficient numbers. The General Council rejected the criticism and also rejected the Jura Federation's counter-proposal for a conference venue in Switzerland.
When the delegates for the Congress of the International met in The Hague on September 2, Marx had already created a majority through blank mandates from Germany and America and several members of the General Council, which allowed him to approve all of the proposals he himself proposed Measures to receive. In addition, the election of The Hague also made it impossible for Mikhail Bakunin to participate as one of the main defendants, as the police wanted him in France and Germany. The members of the Jura Federation reacted and announced that, together with the members of the Spanish Federation, they wanted to devalue every vote by abstaining from voting and, because of its composition, simply described the Congress as a "ridiculous comedy."
As spokesman for the opposition at Congress, James Guillaume demanded the withdrawal of the Basel administrative resolutions, which conferred far-reaching powers on the General Council, and called for the General Council to be abolished and a central office for statistics and correspondence to be set up. He refused to appear or testify before an alliance investigation commission created by Marx . After hearing four witnesses, including Marx and Engels, the investigative commission came to the conclusion that Bakunin, Guillaume and Schwitzguébel were guilty of the conspiracy against the International and requested their expulsion from the International. After Victor Dave read out a declaration of solidarity from the Belgian, Dutch, Spanish and parts of the English and American federations , the Congress voted to expel James Guillaume and Michail Bakunin from the International. The anti-authoritarian delegates protested and then left the congress.
Center of the Anti-Authoritarian International (September 1871–1877)
Numerous representatives of the anti-authoritarian federations traveled from The Hague to Saint-Imier in the Bernese Jura after the congress. At an international counter-congress, the delegates founded on 15./16. September 1872 the Anti-Authoritarian International , which from then on had its center in the Jura. The anti-authoritarian International united after its foundation all active country Federations of International and looked as if legitimate successor of the International Working Men's Association, and it would continue. The national federations of Belgium , England , Holland , Italy , Spain , France and the USA joined together with the Jura Federation of the Anti-Authoritarian International .
The anti-authoritarian part of the International should include all sections and members who advocate a strengthened federal organization of the International. At the founding congress, the delegates unanimously decided to destroy all power structures and to use anarchy as the goal, and as a means to this end, the revolutionary strike. However, since not all national federations were present at the founding congress, this point was later rejected by the British and American federations, which considered the influence of the workers on politics to be necessary. It was agreed that the International - as before - could not dictate to the national sections which strategy they had to pursue in the struggle for the emancipation of the workers, and they spoke out in favor of flow pluralism within the International. At the congress, the Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne newspaper also became the organ of the Anti-Authoritarian International .
After the Congress, the federations of Belgium, England, Spain and the Jura Federation were excluded from the International by the new General Council in New York ; the Italian federation was not recognized at all. This step was not taken seriously by the affected federations and led to a further isolation of the General Council. The decisions of the London Conference and the Hague Congress were subsequently annulled by all regional federations of the International at their respective congresses. The resolutions of 1871 and 1872 did not correspond to the will of the members of the International because the majority of the delegates did not represent any sections of the International.
Delegates from the federations of England, Belgium, Spain, Holland, Italy, Switzerland and France took part in the first congress of the Anti-Authoritarian International in Geneva in 1873. In a first resolution, the delegates decided to abolish the General Council and partially restored the statutes of 1866. In general, the revision of the statutes was the largest and most important part of the congress. The autonomy of the federations and sections was strengthened by making all resolutions binding only to the approving federations or sections. Every year a different regional federation should take over the federal office of the International and be charged with correspondence, statistics and the organization of the next congress. So that similar incidents like the Hague Congress could not be repeated, it was decided that voting could only be on administrative issues and no longer on questions of principle. Finally, on the last day of the congress, the congress delegates sent a conciliatory address to the congress of the General Council, which was also to hold its congress two days later in Geneva.
In the years that followed, the Jurassians strived for closer cooperation with the German-speaking Swiss socialists. For this purpose, some members of the Jura Federation took part in the founding congress of the Swiss Workers' Union in Olten in 1873 and tried to publicize their collectivist ideas. However, due to ideological differences, there was never any real cooperation between the centralized Swiss-German Social Democrats and the federal Jurassists.
After the conflicts in the International had ended and the Anti-Authoritarian International had been successfully organized, the Jura Federation again put the syndicalist struggle in the foreground. Through the syndicalist agitation new members could be won and some new sections of the Jura Federation were formed. In the years 1873/74, 300 to 400 activists belonged to the Jura Federation, who were spread over around twenty sections in western Switzerland.
In 1876, the Frenchman Paul Brousse and Peter Kropotkin, two anarchists, came to the Jura who had a strong influence on the struggle of the Jura Federation until 1878. They became members of the Jura Federation and for a while took over the publication of the Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne newspaper . Above all, they tried to win over German and German-speaking Swiss workers to anarchism and founded the workers' newspaper in Bern for this purpose . Paul Brousse later founded the newspaper L'Avant-Garde , which was primarily intended for socialists in France and was smuggled into France.
The organ of the Jura Federation Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne de l'Association internationale des travailleurs counted around 600 subscribers in around ten countries. Since it was also the organ of the Anti-Authoritarian International , the Jura Federation became the informal international center of the anarchist movement.
Decline (1878–1882)
From 1878 the Jura Federation became weaker and weaker. It lost its most active member in 1878 when James Guillaume emigrated to Paris. He retired from the movement for many years, primarily for family reasons. With Guillaume's departure, the Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne appeared for the last time on March 25, 1878. Adhémar Schwitzguébel and Auguste Spichiger, who were also among the most active figures in the movement, also moved away; Spichiger emigrated to the United States. In addition, there was the crisis in the watch industry, which began in 1876 and brought about major restructuring in the watch industry by 1880. Many watch workers lost their jobs and the Jurassic resistance organizations that had been founded were not strong enough to fight against it. This ongoing crisis forced many members of the Jura Federation to look for work abroad. In 1880, the Social Democratic Party, a predecessor of the SP Switzerland, was founded, which grew rapidly in western Switzerland and the Jura and also attracted some members of the Jura Federation.
These factors resulted in the Jura Federation in decline. Soon it also dropped the continuation of the Anti-Authoritarian International after it was abandoned by the Belgian Federation. The Belgian Federation failed to fulfill its duty of organizing a congress in 1878 and, like many other federations, placed its hopes in a new all-socialist international. The inclusion of all socialist currents was already an explicit goal of the Jura Federation with the formation of the Anti-Authoritarian International . However, after many unsuccessful attempts, the Jurassians ultimately failed in this project.
After the Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne was discontinued in 1878, Paul Brousse's L'Avant-Garde became the organ of the Jura Federation. But in the same year it was banned again by the Swiss Federal Council . After that, the Jura Federation remained without its own body. In 1880 the Jura Federation held its last congress and then virtually ceased to exist.
literature
- Franz Berghoff-Ising : The socialist workers' movement in Switzerland: A contribution to the history of the social movement in the last thirty years . Duncker & Humblot , Leipzig 1895
- Rolf R. Bigler : Libertarian Socialism in Western Switzerland. A contribution to the development history and interpretation of anarchism . Kiepenheuer & Witsch , Cologne 1963.
- Florian Eitel: Anarchist watchmaker in Switzerland. Microhistorical global history on the beginnings of the anarchist movement in the 19th century transcript , Wetzlar 2018 ISBN 978-3-8376-3931-5 Open Access PDF available online
- Marianne Enckell: La fédération jurassienne . Âge d'Homme, Lausanne 1971 (new editions: Canevas Editeur, St-Imier 1991 ISBN 2-88382-008-2 ; Entremonde, Geneva 2012 ISBN 978-2-940426-16-4 )
- Max Nettlau : History of Anarchy , (several volumes, several publishers, first Berlin 1927)
- Charles Thomann: Les hauts lieux de l'anarchisme jurassien . Édition du Haut, La Chaux-de-Fonds 2002
- Mario Vuilleumier: Horlogers de l'anarchisme . Payot, Lausanne 1988 ISBN 2-601-03042-9
Web links
- The Jura Federation in the Lexicon of Anarchy
- François Kohler: Fédération jurassienne. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne n ° 1: À nos lecteurs . (February 15, 1872).
- ↑ quoted from Kropotkin, Peter A .: Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Volume II. Münster 2002, p. 319.
- ↑ Rolf R. Bigler: Libertarian Socialism in Western Switzerland. A contribution to the development history and interpretation of anarchism. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne / Berlin 1963, p. 141.
- ^ François Kohler: Fédération jurassienne. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . October 1, 2014 , accessed August 18, 2016 .