Cercle Proudhon

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The Cercle Proudhon was a political group founded in France on December 16, 1911 by George Valois and Édouard Berth. It was to include such people as French writer Pierre Drieu La Rochelle.

The first issue of Cahiers du cercle Proudhon appeared in January - February 1912 and included a Déclaration:

The founders - republicans, federalists, integral nationalists, and syndicalists - having resolved the political problem or dismissed it from their minds, are all enthusiastically in favour of an organisation of French society in accordance with principles taken from the French tradition which they find in Proudhon's works and in the contemporary syndicalist movement, and they are all completely in agreement on the following points:

Democracy is the greatest error of the past century. If one wishes to live, if one wishes to work, if one wishes in social life to possess the greatest human guarantees for production and culture, if one wishes to preserve and increase the moral, intellectual and material capital of civilisation, it is absolutely necessary to destroy all democratic institutions.

Berth and Valois had been brought together by Georges Sorel (who himself was an admirer of Vladimir Lenin) when he was planning a Nationalist and socialist-leaning journal La Cité française in 1910. This journal never appeared, except as heralded in a flyer entitled Déclaration de la Cité francaise signed by Sorel, Valois, Berth, Jean Variot, and Pierre Gilbert. However Variot quarrelled with Valois and went on to publish material with Sorel's support in L'Indépendence.

Controversy surrounds differing historical interpretations particularly following the publication of Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France and The Birth of Fascist Ideology by Zeev Sternhell.

Many anarchists rejected the Cercle Proudhon approach Proudhon's works. For example, Benjamin Tucker argued that Cercle Proudhon purposely misrepresented Proudhon's views, "Democracy is an easy mark for this new party, and it finds its chief delight in pounding the philosopher of democracy, Rousseau. Now, nobody ever pounded Rousseau as effectively as Proudhon did, and in that fact the Cercle Proudhon finds its excuse. But it is not to be inferred that, because Proudhon destroyed Rousseau's theory of the social contract, he did not believe in the advisability of a social contract, or would uphold a monarchy in exacting an oath of allegiance" (Proudhon and Royalism, 1913).

It is also pointed out that Georges Sorel was hardly the founder of French syndicalism and was more of a marxist syndicalist, and the work of Fernand Pelloutier is cited as more important in the creation of French syndicalism and it's rejection of nationalism.