Lucien Deslinières, un socialiste utopique au XXe siècle
Résumé
The story of Lucien Deslinières presents a historiographical interest in the study of both socialism and the first French Communists. As a republican journalist who became a socialist, a non-conformist Guesdist, and a frenzied anti-Marxist after a short but intense conversion to the Bolshevik cause, his fights led him from the Allier département to Ukraine, from the Seine département to the Eastern Pyrenees. Both a theorist and a publicist, he produced an abundant and sometimes disconcerting work that clearly included him in the lineage of utopian socialists. The recent opening of several fonds, in France and in the Netherlands, sheds light on his chaotic and poorly known career. His career before 1914 was representative of the rallying of many Republicans converted to socialism in the late XIXth century. On the eve of Wold War I, he had become a recognized publicist within working-class circles. He was more a reformist than a revolutionary, and Jean Jaurès prefaced his main work, L’Application du système collectiviste. The inability of Lucien Deslinières to move up the governing bodies of the SFIO (the French Section of the Workers' International), the painful loss of his two sons during World War I, and the marvel of the “bright glimmer from the East”, modified his path and thus explains his historical depth. Attracted to the Russian Revolution, Lucien Deslinières, at the age of 60, headed to Moscow, where he had direct access to Lenin. His role in the process leading to the split of the Tours Congress had not been decisive, but he was among the few French militants who attended the first Comintern Congress during the summer of 1920. He was appointed People's Commissar in Ukraine and then in Turkestan, but was unable to implement his theories on land collectivization. He came back to France and broke away from the communist circles, but he could not find much support within the SFIO. Lucien Deslinières returned to theory and started to write a monumental and anti-Marxist work, Le socialisme reconstructeur, that had a sceptical and contemptuous reception: the utopians had become outmoded among the left wing groups between the two world wars. The famous publicist of the early XXth century died as an isolated and impoverished prophet.
L’itinéraire de Lucien Deslinières (1857-1937) présente un double intérêt historiographique pour l’étude du socialisme comme pour celle des premiers communistes. Il traverse en effet plusieurs âges de la gauche française. Journaliste républicain, il se rallie au socialisme à la fin du XIXe siècle. Guesdiste hétérodoxe, il se singularise dès les années 1900 par une frénésie d’écriture qui l’amène à échafauder des projets très détaillés de société, dans la lignée des utopistes. Séduit par la révolution russe, il tente de mettre ses théories en pratique dans la jeune République des soviets, comme commissaire du peuple en Ukraine puis au Turkestan. Rentré en France, Lucien Deslinières rompt avec les milieux communistes mais ne trouve guère de soutien au sein de la SFIO. Réendossant son habit de théoricien, il se lance en 1923 dans la rédaction d’une somme monumentale antimarxiste, Le socialisme reconstructeur, qui recueille scepticisme et mépris. Son itinéraire recoupe ainsi les différentes tendances du mouvement ouvrier français, dont il illustre les évolutions. Lucien Deslinières, théoricien reconnu préfacé par Jean Jaurès lui-même au début du XXe siècle, se retrouve peu à peu cantonné au rôle de prophète isolé. La restitution de son parcours est possible grâce à l’ouverture récente de plusieurs fonds d’archives publiques et privées, en France et aux Pays-Bas.