5. Finally, Syndicalism proclaims that democracy is a "fraud" perpetrated upon the workingmen by the property-owning bourgeois; representative government and majority rule is to them merely a polite form of tyranny, and patriotism a farce. Potaud says: "Patriotism can only be explained by the fact that all patriots without distinction own a part of the social property, and nothing is more absurd than a patriot without a patrimony." "We workingmen will have none of these little fatherlands! Our country is the international world!" cried Yvetot to the post-office strikers in Paris. They regard the soldiers with enmity. At the national congress at Amiens, 1906, they resolved that the "anti-military and anti-patriotic propaganda should be promulgated with the greatest zeal and audacity."[30] Syndicalism is the extreme pessimism of the laboring class. It reached its height about 1907-1908. Portions of France were terrorized, more by its extravagant language than by its overt acts. There was no limit to their superlatives. "Rip up the bourgeois!" "Turn your rifles on your officers!" "Cut buttonholes in the skins of the bourgeois!" were familiar battle-cries. There was so much talk about putting vitriol into coffee, ground glass into bread, pulling the fire-plug out of engines, that finally language came to mean nothing. The "new commune" thought it was coming into reality with the post-office and railway strikes. We have seen how these outbreaks were met by a Radical government. Since then their ardor has cooled, and their adjectives grown flabby. They are now devoting themselves to organization. Anti-militarism does not mean merely opposition to standing armies. All Socialists are opposed to the maintenance of armaments. Anti-militarism is opposition to all force used by the state to assert its sovereignty. This includes the police and constabulary as well as the army, and courts and parliaments as well as the navy. Since soldiers and policemen are servants of the state, and since the state is the expression of nationalism, the anti-militarist concludes that his supreme enemy is the nation, the master of the soldier. Anti-militarism is the forerunner of anti-patriotism. In 1906 this doctrine was so rampant that, on May Day, an uprising was feared in Paris. A prophet had arisen, proclaiming the most extreme doctrines of anti-patriotism. This was Gustave Hervé, a teacher of history from Auxerre. He had spoken the suitable word, and became famous overnight: "The French flag arose from dirt!"; and to the peasantry he shouted, "Plant your country's flag in the barnyard dung-heaps!" He came to Paris and started a daily paper, _La Guerre Sociale_. Syndicalists and Socialists flocked to his standard, and even Jaurès was compelled to acknowledge his influence.[31]