Georges Valois

From Kaiserreich

Georges Valois (real name Alfred-Georges Gressent, born in Paris on 7 October 1878) is a French journalist and politician and is the founder and leader of the Sorelian faction of the Commune of France.

Early life and career

Georges Valois was born in Paris on 7 October 1878, in a working-class and peasant family. He went to Singapore at the age of 17, returning to Paris three years later in 1898. In his early years he was an Anarcho-syndicalist. He found work as a secretary at L'Humanité Nouvelle where he met Georges Sorel. Later, after a stay in Russia in 1903, he worked as a secretary at Armand Colin publishing house.

After having written his first book, L'Homme qui vient, he met the nationalist and monarchist writer Charles Maurras and became a member of his Action Française (AF) league, where he continued to follow the workers' movement. As his employment would have been compromised by an involvement in the far-right monarchist league, he took the pseudonym of Georges Valois. In 1911, he created the Cercles Georges Sorel, a syndicalist group inspired by Sorel's teaching, and took direction of the AF's publishing house, the Nouvelle librairie nationale, in 1912. The Cercle mixed Sorel's influence with the Integralism favored by Charles Maurras, and was overtly Antisemitical.

Role in French Syndicalism

When the French Civil War broke out, after the German occupation of Paris in 1919, Valois joined the general uprising and was therefore banned from Action Française, since Maurras chose to follow the French government in exile. After the war, Valois kept gaining more and more support. In 1925 he founded the weekly Le Nouveau Siècle (The New Century) and then he officially founded the Sorelians, which became of the main political faction of the Commune of France. The Sorelians quickly became one of the more radical faction, supporting a more centralized economy (with elements of corporatism, according to his enemies) and better control of the state over the political life of the country.

Writings

• L'Homme qui vient, 1906
• L'économie nouvelle, 1919
• La révolution nationale : philosophie de la victoire, 1924
• La politique de la victoire, 1925
• Basile ou la politique de la calomnie, 1927
• L'Homme contre l'argent, 1928
• Un Nouvel âge de l'humanité, 1929
• Finances italiennes, 1930
• Économique, 1931
• Guerre ou révolution, 1931
• Journée d'Europe, 1932