An atmosphere of studious mutiny reigns at 87 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, in the 10^th arrondissement of Paris, on Wednesday 19 March. The premises of the Independent Workers Party (POI), of Lambertist Trotskyist affiliation, is hosting a public conference by the Pierre-Lambert Study Circle on the theme: “March to war: how to stop it?”

At the podium, facing about a hundred activists, Jérôme Legavre, a member of the POI and an MP sitting in the La France insoumise (LFI) group, denounces the “war propaganda” and the “brainwashing climate” in favour of the rearmament effort.

Since the clash between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, a majority of the political spectrum in France has accepted this effort. Even if they differ on the level of defence to build and warn against the neoliberal shock strategy, the left has rallied to a principle of reality in the face of the imperialist and warlike threats posed by Trump and Putin. With a few exceptions.

“You don’t accumulate such mountains of ammunition, missiles, and weaponry without running the risk of it leading to a catastrophe,” warns Jérôme Legavre, who places a large part of the outcome of the conflict on “Ukrainian and Russian deserters”. This strict anti-war stance is not common in the political landscape.

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the MP has opposed weapons deliveries – all weapons, unlike LFI. Jérôme Legavre had also been the only one to vote against a resolution in the National Assembly in support of Ukraine in December 2022. He was accused of turning a blind eye to Russian imperialism due to “campism”. He describes himself as internationalist and anti-imperialist. “This war pits the mafia oligarchy around Putin’s rotten and tyrannical regime against Western states serving the arms multinationals,” he affirms today.

Reactivated memories

He recalls that his political formation, formerly known as the Internationalist Communist Organisation (OCI), is not “pacifist” however: it had, for example, supported the Algerian National Movement of Messali Hadj during the Algerian War. His singular position evokes the “revolutionary defeatism” professed by Lenin during the First World War and the antimilitarism of the socialists who met at the Zimmerwald Conference in 1915. A vision that other components of the anti-war left reject as anachronistic.

“This theory dates from before fascism; it no longer corresponds to the reality of a civil society having to resist such a power and Putin’s war crimes,” points out Christian Varquat, a member of the international commission of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA). In the meantime, the Second World War and the trajectory of certain absolute pacifists such as Louis Lecoin or René Dumont – who remained pacifists under the Occupation – have made this interpretive framework difficult to sustain. In June 1944, the newspaper La Vérité wrote that “Roosevelt’s liberation was worth just as much as Hitler’s socialism”.

“After 1945, it was rather the Resistance, which is an armed national independence movement, that took precedence in the imagination of the left in many countries,” analyses historian Gilles Candar – even if the pacifism embodied in 1914 by Jean Jaurès regained strength during the colonial wars, particularly that of Vietnam.

“From the antimilitarist point of view, there is a form of shock and wait-and-see attitude.” - Éric Fournier, historian

In general, the return of conflicts and the sharp break caused by Donald Trump over Ukraine are bringing about unprecedented realignments, in a field where positions had been frozen by the distancing of wars outside the European continent.

“The Russian invasion of Ukraine has reconfigured the lines,” notes historian Éric Fournier, who co-directed the book Down with the Army! Antimilitarism in France from the 19^th century to the present day (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2023). “From the antimilitarist point of view, there is a form of shock and wait-and-see attitude, even if the memory of the anarchist Makhno has been reactivated by European libertarians. What was taken for granted – the rejection of war that only benefits large arms groups, contempt for officers – is changing with Ukraine. It was easier to take an interest in Kurdish militias in Syria than in a state fighting group.”

Engaged in the European Network of Solidarity with Ukraine and Against War, the NPA supports Sotsialnyi rukh (the “Social Movement”, a Ukrainian left organisation with militants in the army) and assumes its commitment to the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion, “in complete independence from the Ukrainian neoliberal government and the major Western powers,” says Christian Varquat.

“Armed aid is not only requested by the Zelensky government, but by all components of society that are resisting Russian aggression,” economist Catherine Samary, a member of Attac and the NPA, recalled in an interview with Mediapart. “Insisting on the need to have the means to defend oneself is not warmongering. Without this, diplomacy comes down to an appeal for pity,” says Oleksandr Kyselov, a member of the Sotsialnyi rukh council in the newspaper L’Anticapitaliste. It is on this ridge line, without naivety or warmongering, that the anti-war left is rebuilding itself.

The nuances between antimilitarism and pacifism

Historically, antimilitarism is not contradictory with armed support for resisting peoples. “The antimilitarist differs from pacifism by his systematic hostility to the military institution and especially to the chain of command, with career officers being easily assimilated to reactionary aristocrats. But this hostility, which targets the barracks and the uniform, likened to a slave’s outfit, is not at all accompanied by a refusal of civic or popular armed action,” recalls historian Éric Fournier.

Before the reversal of alliance and the Trump-Putin deal made behind Ukraine’s back, the Earth Uprisings had revived this memory of antimilitarism by joining the “War on War” coalition, calling to “disarm militarism”. This coalition aimed to stand against France’s “military interventionism in the Sahel, in Kanaky, in Martinique, in Mayotte”, and against the “internal war, waged by a police force with militarised means, which primarily targets non-whites and minorities”.

“The cause of absolute refusal of the military fact and the logic of war is condemned to remain a moral protest.” - Gilles Candar, historian

But the geopolitical upheavals around Ukraine have changed the situation. Now, the coalition is seeking a line that suits all its components. The anti-war left, partly marked by a purely anti-Atlantic vision of international relations until recently, has been taken by surprise and must quickly rearm itself intellectually. “The Trump-Putin rapprochement plunges into ideological bewilderment all those who opposed the Atlantic alliance. Years of discourse must be reconsidered,” observes Éric Fournier.

The Ecologists, who had already strongly nuanced their pacifist heritage over the years, have confirmed this evolution since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Even if nuances exist within them, the time when the ecological presidential candidate Éva Joly proposed the abolition of the military parade on 14 July seems far away. “Refusing campism means analysing the conflict as it is and not as it is fantasised. We must not be content with hailing the heroism of Ukrainians; we must support them,” explains Jérôme Gleizes, vice-president of the ecological group at the Paris City Hall, author of a blog post on this subject.

As the great powers opposing liberal democracies and with growing expansionist ambitions increase in strength, from Putin to Trump, via Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi, the space for pacifism is shrinking accordingly. “The cause of absolute refusal of the military fact and the logic of war is condemned to remain a moral protest of very minority forces that have the value of testimony,” analyses Gilles Candar. Antimilitarism, which articulates criticism of militarism and support for peoples fighting for their self-determination, has a better chance of being heard in the face of the military escalation that is emerging.

Mathieu Dejean

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