Jean Jaurès, French Socialist
Reformist and Antimilitarist
Jean Jaurès was one France’s first social democrats who in 1902 became the leader of the French Socialist Party. He was influenced by the eclectic socialism of Benoit Malon, which mixed the anarchist ideas of Proudhon and Saint-Simon with a more positive attitude towards the state and the republic. Jaurès’ party opposed both Jules Guesde’s revolutionary socialism and the Radicals under George Clemenceau.
The Miners of Carmaux
The miners of Carmaux found in Jean Jaurès a staunch defender of their right of suffrage. A mining town and one of the few industrial centres in Tarn, south-western France, Carmaux had become a hotbed of labour radicalism. In the 1892 municipal election it voted overwhelmingly for Jean-Baptiste Calvignac, secretary of the miners’ union and outspoken socialist, for mayor. Following his victory, Calvignac was fired by the mining company, an event that made the union to call a strike. Jaurès counselled and supported the union throughout the long strike forcing the company to reinstate Calvignac. Jaurès was as a result re-elected as a socialist deputy for Tarn in the general election of 1893, a seat he retained until his death (except from 1898-1902).
The Dreyfus Affair
Jaurès campaigned passionately for Alfred Dreyfus, the French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent, who was unjustly convicted for treason in 1894. The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal that shook France and Jaurès’ stance against the racist and militaristic bigotry had a positive influence in the development of reformist socialism in France. Jaurès did not dispense with the Affair as a quarrel between rival factions of the bourgeoisie as Guesde had done. He instead stood for the defence of human and democratic values. His campaign was an inspiration to the French youth and to many bourgeois intellectuals.
Socialist Leader
All his life Jaurès strove to achieve a compromise between reformists and revolutionaries in France. In 1902, he led the Socialist Party which excluded Guesde’s revolutionary socialists but after the Second International Congress in Amsterdam in 1904, Jaurès’ and Guesde’s parties agreed to merge and form the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). It was Jaurès, however, who had de facto leadership of PSU.
Jaurès was a reformist at heart who believed in class cooperation within the framework of the French republic. He was a brilliant orator and as historian Albert Lindermann writes “a warm yet deeply serious man” who is “widely regarded as the most attractive, certainly the most beloved of the pre-war socialist leaders”. Jaurès was a prolific writer and co-founder of the newspaper L' Humanité.
The young Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote of Jaurès: “One had only to listen to the ringing voice of Jaurès, to see his enlightened look, his imperious nose, his thick and unyoked neck, to say to himself: There is Man!” (Lindermann, 1983).
Antimilitarist
Jean Jaurès was devoted to the antimilitarist cause and strove to prevent the outbreak of the war by diplomatic means. He wanted to forge an understanding between France and Germany as a means to avert war. Jaurès believed that if the workers in both countries could be convinced to stage a general strike the war could be prevented. He worked towards this end with Rosa Luxemburg, the German socialist revolutionary and activist of Spartacus.
Assassination
In 1914 the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) won its greatest electoral victory. Jaurès considered joining the Radical-led cabinet in a bid to prevent war. But on June 28, 1914, the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo, and what became known as the First World War broke out.
A month later, on July 31, Raoul Villain, a French nationalist fanatic, murdered Jean Jaurès in a Paris café.Ten years after his death, Jaurès’ remains were transferred to the Pantheon.
Sources
Albert Lindermann, A History of European Socialism, Yale University Press, 1983
Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaures, University of Winconsin Press, 2003
Encyclopedia Britannica
Joan Wallace Scott, The Glassworkers of Carmaux, Harvard University Press 1974
Jean Jaurès
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Jaurès speaking at a rally
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