Jean Jaurès

Jean Jaurès (born September 3, 1859, Castres, France—died July 31, 1914, Paris) was a French socialist leader, cofounder of the newspaper L’Humanité, and member of the French Chamber of Deputies (1885–89, 1893–98, and 1902–14); he achieved the unification of several factions into a single socialist party, the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière. During the war fever of July 1914, he was assassinated by a young fanatic who believed that Jaurès’s pacifism was playing into the hands of imperial Germany.

Jaurès was born into a lower middle-class family that had been impoverished by business failures. He excelled in secondary school and was given a scholarship to attend the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. After passing his qualifying examination, Jaurès taught at the lycée of Albi from 1881 to 1883, and from 1883 to 1885 he was a lecturer at the University of Toulouse.

A convinced republican and a brilliant orator, Jaurès was more attracted to politics than to teaching and in 1885 was elected deputy from the Tarn. As he did not yet belong to any party, he took his seat in the centre of the Chamber. His election prompted the parents of the girl he loved, Louise Bois, to consent to their marriage. Madame Jaurès received as her dowry a handsome rural estate of 91 acres (37 hectares). Because his own political creed disclaimed the ownership of private property, Jaurès was often reproached for his possession of this estate.

Jaurès’s untidy personal appearance provided his enemies with much material for ridicule. Short and obese, he was described as having the appearance of “a teacher who does not exercise or a fat merchant who overeats.” Yet no one ever accused him of vulgarity.

Defeated in the 1889 elections, Jaurès returned to teaching at the University of Toulouse, and in 1891 he received his doctorate of philosophy. In 1892 he supported the striking miners of Carmaux, and that constituency elected him deputy to the Chamber in 1893. By this time he had become a socialist, though without accepting all of Karl Marx’s ideas. Rather, of the five schools of French socialism, he chose the least revolutionary, the Independent Socialists, led by Alexandre Millerand.

During the campaign on behalf of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, who had been convicted of treason and given a life sentence at hard labour on the basis of what later turned out to be forged evidence, Jaurès joined those demanding a revision of the trial. His position was not approved by the Marxist socialists, who did not believe that a socialist should defend a man who was both an officer and a member of the middle class. His book Les Preuves, asking for Dreyfus’s retrial and rehabilitation, caused his defeat in the elections of 1898.

Temporarily retired from national politics, Jaurès began to compile his monumental Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française (1901–07; “Socialist History of the French Revolution”). This work, written “under the triple inspiration of Marx, Plutarch and Michelet,” gave new impetus to studies on France’s Revolutionary period.

Are you a student?

Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.

Subscribe

In spite of their dispute over the Dreyfus affair, the different socialist factions became reconciled and held their first joint congress in 1899. But, after Millerand agreed to join the leftist government dedicated to securing the republic headed by René Waldeck-Rousseau, the socialists divided into two groups: those who refused to cooperate with the government and advocated class war founded the Socialist Party of France (Parti Socialiste de France), and those who preached reconciliation with the state, headed by Jaurès, formed the French Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste Français). At this time Jaurès wrote many articles supporting Waldeck-Rousseau’s policy of reform. After his reelection in 1902, he continued to support the leftist bloc within the Chamber of Deputies.

In 1904 Jaurès was cofounder of the newspaper L’Humanité, in which he continued to espouse the principles of democratic socialism. That same year the congress of the Second International, held in Amsterdam, condemned socialist participation in bourgeois governments, thus rejecting Jaurès’s position. He acquiesced in the decision, and in 1905 the two French socialist parties joined together to form the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO). This party remained in opposition to the government, with the result that the reform policies originally advocated by Waldeck-Rousseau were not carried out. Jaurès’s authority continued to grow within the party, though, and, on the eve of World War I, the majority of the SFIO were won over to his reformist ideas.

He fought the supremacy of the German Social Democratic Party in the Second International and, in order to deprive it of its revolutionary reputation, confronted it at the Congress of Stuttgart in 1907 with his formula “insurrection rather than war.” This statement, though, did not completely summarize the whole of his political thought; he strove for the adoption of a system that would ensure “peace through arbitration” and recommended a prudent policy of “limitation of conflicts.” He therefore opposed colonial expansion, such as the French invasion of Morocco, because it provided a source of international conflicts.

Hostile to the Franco-Russian alliance and suspicious of the Franco-British alliance because it seemed to be directed solely against Germany, Jaurès became the champion of Franco-German rapprochement; as Germany was France’s traditional enemy, his position earned him the hatred of French nationalists. His passion for reconciliation ultimately led to his tragic death. Up to the last moment, however, he was actively exhorting the European governments to avert a world war and to peacefully settle the conflict that followed the archduke Ferdinand’s assassination at Sarajevo in June 1914. On the very day of his own assassination, Jaurès was considering an appeal to Pres. Woodrow Wilson of the United States for help in solving this crisis.

Jaurès was a man of enormous literary, philosophical, and historical erudition as well as great eloquence. His capacity for self-sacrifice enabled him to put aside his own political beliefs in order to achieve the unification of factions into a single socialist party.

Aside from his gifts as a political organizer, Jaurès was well known for his personal generosity, intelligence, and tenacity of purpose. An excellent scholar and polemicist, he wrote throughout his entire career. Apart from La Guerre franco-allemande 1870–1871 (1908; “The Franco-German War”), L’Armée nouvelle (1910; “The New Army”), which set forth an effective plan for organizing an armed nation and contained a famous study of the concept of the fatherland, and his two doctoral theses, the remainder of Jaurès’s works are collections of articles and speeches.