Cats of August

Cats of August is a webcomic that follows the misadventures of four incompetent cat teens as they deliver sausages during the opening days of The Great War.

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Alright let’s finish this.

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I promise this comic won’t devolve into socialist propaganda, but Jaures is worth mentioning since he was the leading voice on the left in France at the time and a pretty good guy in general. I was going to write a longer post about him but I just don’t have the time these days, so I’ll leave it to Barbara Tuchman in The Proud Tower:

“He was the authentic Socialist, not in doctrine, but in the essence of the idea and the cause. He believed that man was good, that society could be made good and the struggle to make it so was to be fought daily, by available means and within present realities ... His Socialism did not stem from Marx; it was, he declared simply, ‘the product of history, of endless and timeless sufferings.’ ... He denied the Marxist concept of the bourgeois state as one in which the working class had no share. He saw the working class not as an outsider at the door waiting to take over but as part of the State now, needing to make itself felt now and needing to use the middle class as an ally in the struggle to reform society toward the realization of the Socialist ideal. ... of all the Socialists he was the most pragmatic, never a doctrinaire, always a man of action. He lived by doing, which meant advance and retreat, adaptation, give and take. A formal dogma that might have closed off some avenue of action was not possible for him. He was always the bridge, between men as between ideas. He was a working idealist.”

I might write a longer post about the schism between the revolutionary and reformist socialists around this period, but for now this is it. The sad thing about the statesman is that he continued working toward stopping war between France and Germany right up until the end; he had left work on July 31, 1914 and was having dinner with friends in a cafe when a young nationalist approached Jaures, called him a “traitor” to the country and a “pacifist, then shot him.