Jean Jaurès

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Jean Jaurès. (credit: H. Roger-Viollet)

(born Sept. 3, 1859, Castres, France — died July 31, 1914, Paris) French socialist leader. He served in the Chamber of Deputies (1885 – 89, 1893 – 98, 1902 – 14) and at first adopted the ideas of Alexandre Millerand. After 1899 the socialists split into two groups, and Jaurès headed the French Socialist Party, advocating reconciliation with the state. In the newspaper L'Humanité, which he cofounded in 1904, he espoused democratic socialism, but when the Second International (1904) rejected his position he acquiesced. In 1905 the two French socialist parties united, and his authority continued to grow. On the eve of World War I, he espoused peace through arbitration and championed Franco-German rapprochement, which earned him the hatred of French nationalists, and he was assassinated in 1914 by a young nationalist fanatic. He wrote several books, including the influential Socialist History of the French Revolution (1901 – 07).

For more information on Auguste-Marie-Joseph- Jean Jaurès, visit Britannica.com.

(b. Castres, 3 Sept. 1859; d. 31 July 1914) French; deputy 1885 – 9, 1902 – 14, Deputy Speaker 1902 – 4 From a down-at-heel section of a wealthy and successful family, Jaurès showed early promise and won a place at the École Normale Supérieur and passed the agrégation exam to become a philosophy teacher first in the Lycée d'Albi and then in Toulouse University. In 1885 he was elected on a vague Republican ticket at 25 years of age. He had shaken off his religious affiliations but at that time he did not consider himself to be a "socialist". He was defeated in 1889 and returned to teaching. He then began the process of constructing a non-dogmatic and consensus socialism which was to make him one of the intellectual and practical leaders of the French left and for which he is remembered. He was a brilliant speaker and he wrote copiously on a vast range of subjects but never abandoned scholarly interests including an ambitious and weighty history of the French Revolution. The mining strike in Carmaux completed his transformation and he was returned to the Assembly in 1893 as a nonviolent Marxist "Independent socialist". Although he was a leader in the Assembly he took very much his own path, was not a member of any party, and sometimes (as in his support for the co-operative glassworks in Carmaux) found himself at odds with the rest of the movement. Such was initially the case with the Dreyfus affair. Jaurès was one of those few Socialists who immediately recognized that the socialists had an interest in defence of the rights of the wrongly accused Captain Dreyfus and that it was not just a wrangle between capitalists. The socialist movement had, like the Republic, to ensure justice for all people in all walks of life. When he was defeated in 1898 he flung himself into the Dreyfusard campaign and brought most of the rest of the socialists behind him to the crucial benefit of the Dreyfusards. As a Dreyfusard he became part of the general Republican campaign and brought other socialists in behind him. Jaurès, who sought to unify the socialists in France, was unable to get them all to take his view of the Dreyfus affair and they were split by Alexandre Millerand's participation in Waldeck-Rousseau's Republican unity government. Jaurès was re-elected in 1902 and joined the bloc des gauches, as deputy speaker and supported the Radicals' reform programme. However, forces inside the socialist movement made such continued "class collaboration" difficult and the 1904 Socialist International condemned experiments such as Millerand's ministerial collaboration in "bourgeois" governments. Thus somewhat counter to Jaurès general direction the French Socialist movement was united in 1905 as the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO) on a "revolutionary" platform of non-participation. He founded the socialist daily L'Humanité, in which he wrote regularly and his writings gave him the stature to make him the evident leader of the new party, but he soon became preoccupied with the looming prospect of war. Jaurès was a forceful campaigner for peace but he did not take the extreme view that war should always be opposed, it was not just a clash of competing capitalisms and hence no business of the working class. Jaurès did recognize the right of self-defence and one of his most famous books is L'Armée nouvelle. Jaurès, portrayed as a crazed anti-patriotic extremist by the extreme right, was assassinated on 31 July 1914 as he took a break with colleagues from L'Humanité. There is no telling what his outlook on the war would have been but his humanitarian and consensual legacy has made him a recognized founder of French socialism.

Jean Jaurès (1859-1914), the greatest of the modern French Socialists, played a key role in the unification of the Socialist movement and in the struggle to prevent World War I.

On Sept. 3, 1859, Jean Jaurès was born at Castres, Tarn, into a lower-middle-class family. After studies there, he attended the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. His intellect and articulateness won him first place in the 1878 entrance competition for the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, from which he graduated with a philosophy degree in 1881. While teaching at the lycée of Albi and then at the University of Toulouse, he became involved in politics.

In 1885 Jaurès was elected to the Chamber of Deputies from the Tarn as a moderate, unaffiliated republican. In the Chamber he worked for social welfare legislation and spoke vigorously against Gen. Boulanger. Defeated in 1889, he returned to teaching at Toulouse. His studies and his contact with the workers, especially the miners of Carmaux, whom he aided during the strike of 1892, led Jaurès to socialism.

Running on the platform of the Marxist French Workers' party, Jaurès was returned to the Chamber in January 1893, principally through the support of the Carmaux miners. Both within and without the Chamber he now emerged as one of the most effective spokesmen for the Socialist cause. His appeal was not limited to the working class; indeed, he was particularly effective with the petty bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who were impressed by his stand during the Dreyfus Affair, when he insisted that socialism stood for justice for every individual, regardless of class.

At the same time Jaurès was working to unify the Socialist movement, a role for which his eclectic formation, moralism, preference for synthesis over doctrinal purity, and conciliatory temperament well fitted him. The dogmatists, like Marxist leader Jules Guesde, distrusted him; but because he was the Socialists' most effective parliamentarian and most widely respected figure, they needed him. The first effort at federation (1899) broke down, largely over the entry of Socialist Alexandre Millerand into the ministry.

Jaurès defended ministerial participation under certain circumstances in a democratic regime, but this view was definitively rejected by the Second International (International Working Men's Association) in 1904. His decision to yield the point made possible the unification of French socialism in 1905, and his newspaper, Humanité, became the principal organ of the new party. Unification also forced him to abandon his leading role in the coalition which sustained the anticlerical ministry of J. L. E. Combes and to remain for the rest of his career an opposition leader.

The shadow of the coming war brought forth his greatest effort, to prevent France from causing conflict, to use the International to dissuade the powers, and to appeal to the common sense of mankind, but the forces for war were much stronger. His effort, mistakenly construed as unpatriotic, aroused bitter hatred that led to his assassination on July 31, 1914.

Further Reading

The best book on Jaurès in any language is Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès (1962), a sympathetic, scholarly, and well-written treatment. Two older, briefer works worth reading are Harold R. Weinstein, Jean Jaurès: A Study of Patriotism in the French Socialist Movement (1936), and J. Hampden Jackson, Jean Jaurès: His Life and Work (1943).

Jaurès, Jean (1859-1914). Socialist leader, journalist, orator, and historian. Born in Castres (Tarn), Jaurès was an agrégé who forsook teaching for politics. He sat in the Assembly for most of the years from 1885 to his death, first as an independent socialist, later as a leading figure in the Socialist Party he had tirelessly worked to unify in 1905. An ardent Dreyfusard, he was celebrated for his humanitarian and democratic vision of socialism and for his legendary powers of oratory. Founder of L'Humanité in 1904, he wrote much journalism, but his magnum opus was the Histoire socialiste (1789-1900), of which he was general editor and author of the volumes on the French Revolution. His assassination by a right-wing activist on the eve of World War I came as he strove to organize resistance to the rush to war. His memory is venerated on the French Left; Blum wrote of him that he bore ‘the stamp of genius’.

[Sian Reynolds]