For the French syndicalists, the servile mentality allegedly fostered by wage labor could be countered only by a movement that upheld discarded ideals of honor, glory, and "pessimism." Guild socialists, more heavily committed to the Enlightenment, had little enthusiasm for austerity and self-denial. They were more concerned with the practical business of showing how workers' control of industry could be reconciled with the technological advantages of large-scale production.

The contrast between the two movements was not simply a matter of national temperament. In England, the factory system was far more deeply entrenched than it was in France, where small workshops still predominated, even on the eve of the First World War. An American observer, the radical socialist William English Walling, pointed out in I9I2 that France remained "economically backward in some respects." The middle class of small proprietors was still quite large, the workers constituted a minority of the population, and skilled workers still made up a large section of the "proletariat." It was the "craftsmen and artisans," Walling noted, who spoke the "revolutionary and syndicalist phrases," even though "in actual practice" they were "more conservative" than the unskilled workers. Their radicalism derived in part from their resistance to new machinery. The class composition of the syndicalist movement, Walling thought, helped to explain why the movement represented a dead end. His unsympathetic account caught something of the mixture of radicalism and moral conservatism that distinguished French opposition to "wage slavery" from its British counterpart. Notwithstanding its willingness to embrace such advanced thinkers as Bergson and James, syndicalism is best understood, it would seem, as part of a continuous tradition of popular radicalism in France that drew most of its strength from artisans' long-standing resistance to factory production.

In the United States, on the other hand, the factory system had established itself even more firmly, by the turn of the century, than it had in England. Criticism of wage labor therefore had to contend with an apparently irreversible trend. Even so, the ten years preceding World War I were a time of intense political and intellectual excitement, in the United States as in Europe. The prospects for a radical transformation of the industrial system seemed brighter, on the whole, than they have seemed in any subsequent period.

As in Europe, the rise of syndicalism touched off a bitter controversy on the left. Progressives and social democrats united in their opposition

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