ABSTRACT
The Waldeck-Rousseau Ministry of 1899-1902 was one of the most remarkable of the Third Republic as well on account of its composition, its duration, its achievements and the direction it gave to French politics as because of the personality of its head. In addition to a number of distinguished young Radicals, such as Delcassé at the Foreign Office and the 36-year-old Joseph Caillaux at the Ministry of Finance, it included General the Marquis de Galliffet as Minister of War and Millerand, the first Socialist to enter any European Cabinet, as Minister of Commerce. These last two appointments raised an outcry, yet both showed the boldness and wisdom of the new Prime Minister. In Galliffet, an old beau of the Second Empire, a gallant soldier and an aristocrat of independent views, who had been a friend both of Gambetta and the Prince of Wales, Waldeck-Rousseau had chosen a man whom he could expect to have the necessary prestige and courage to carry out reforms in an army still largely officered by aristocrats; in selecting Millerand he had recognized the importance of the parliamentary Socialists, invited them to become a respectable government party and shown his intention of tackling problems of social reform. Millerand’s acceptance of office had, however, been made without the formal approval of his party and his cas was hotly disputed by his Socialist colleagues several of whom wished to exclude him for the crime of entering a ‘bourgeois’ Cabinet. Until 1904 he was allowed to retain his party membership, but the dispute helped to retard the union of French Socialists in a single political party which Jaurès had long been working for. This was not to be achieved until 1905, when the Guesdists and Moderates, or Reformists, at length fused in what was to be known as the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO). In other words, the French Socialist party in 1905 became a single branch of the Second International which was at this time largely dominated by German Marxists, and in doing so the moderates had to yield to the intransigence of the doctrinaires, to forgo co-operation with other parties, to submit to a discipline alien to them,1 to refuse to take part in ‘bourgeois’ governments and to vote against all credits for military expenditure or colonial domination. The international character of French Socialism becomes much more marked, and with it its emphasis on the solidarity between Socialists and workers in all countries and its pacifism and opposition to what it denounces as Imperialism and Militarism. In the years after 1905 when France is adding the last territory to her colonial Empire and when the danger of war in Europe more than once seems imminent this trend of French Socialism is, as we shall see, of great importance.
