on the level of observable facts. We have to
question men who take a very active part in the real revolutionary
movement amidst the proletariat, men who do not aspire to climb into the
middle class and whose mind is not dominated by corporative prejudices.
These men may be deceived about an infinite number of political,
economical, or moral questions; but their testimony is decisive,
sovereign, and irrefutable when it is a question of knowing what are the
ideas which most powerfully move them and their comrades, which most
appeal to them as being identical with their socialistic conceptions,
and thanks to which their reason, their hopes, and their way of looking
at particular facts seem to make but one indivisible unity.

Thanks to these men, we know that the general strike is indeed what I
have said: the _myth_ in which socialism is wholly comprised, i.e., a
body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which
correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by
socialism against modern society. Strikes have engendered in the
proletariat the noblest, deepest, and most moving sentiments that they
possess; the general strike groups them all in a co-ordinated picture,
and, by bringing them together, gives to each one of them its maximum of
intensity; appealing to their painful memories of particular conflicts,
it colours with an intense life all the details of the composition
presented to consciousness. We thus obtain that intuition of socialism
which language cannot give us with perfect clearness--and we obtain it
as a whole, perceived instantaneously.

2. The Growth of a Legend[267]

Hardly had the German armies entered Belgium when strange rumors began
to circulate. They spread from place to place, they were reproduced by
the press, and they soon permeated the whole of Germany. It was said
that the Belgian people, instigated by the clergy, had intervened
perfidiously in the hostilities; had attacked by surprise isolated
detachments; had indicated to the enemy the positions occupied by the
troops; that women, old men, and even children had been guilty of
horrible atrocities upon wounded and defenseless German soldiers,
tearing out their eyes and cutting off fingers, nose, or ears; that the
priests from their pulpits had exhorted the people to commit these
crimes, promising them as a reward the Kingdom of Heaven, and had even
taken the lead in this barbarity.

Public credulity ac