Revolution and Morale in Modern French Thought: Sorel and the Sorelians

Abstract

The role of revolution and morale in the careers of Sorel and the Sorelians is a problem in apocalyptic political conceptions: They desired a drastic and total renovation of society. This article aims to establish that Sorel's search was always for such a politico-spiritual conquest; that though the basic pattern of his apocalyptic views was repeated for each of his affiliations, his views nevertheless underwent important evolution; and that his thought and action initiated in France an identifiable and significant Sorelian movement.' How and why did Sorel become a revolutionary? Long before he began to write, there appeared in his background a number of paradoxes which possibly prepared the way for his later intellectual development.2 There were mystical tendencies in his Catholic family environment, yet he turned to a career as an engineer in the civil service; His was an intensely bourgeois appearance and demeanor, yet he lived for over twenty-two years with an illiterate working-class woman whom he considered the inspiration of his work. His sympathies were royalist after the fall of the Second Empire, yet his reading and re-education in social thought drew him to the anarchist Proudhon.