Jean Jaurès

Background

Jean Jaurès was born on September 3, 1859 at Castres, France into a lower-middle-class family.

Education

After studies at Castres, 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.

Career

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. 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. 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.

Achievements

• He played a key role in the unification of the Socialist movement and in the struggle to prevent World War I. He helped to found the medical faculty of the University of Toulouse, the socialist paper L'Humanité.
  
  Jaurès was a highly influential historian of the French Revolution. In his book Histoire Socialiste Jaurès emphasized the central role the middle class played in the aristocratic Brumaire, as well as the emergence of the working class "sans-culottes" who espoused a political outlook and social philosophy that came to dominate revolutionary movements on the left.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Socialist History of the French Revolution

    ( Jean Jaurès was the celebrated French Socialist Party l...)

  • Les Preuves: Affaire Dreyfus (Classic Reprint) (French Edition)

    (Excerpt from Les Preuves: Affaire Dreyfus Évidemment, le...)

Politics

Jean Jaurès was initially a moderate republican, opposed to both Clemenceau's Radicalism and socialism. He developed into a socialist during the late 1880s.

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.

Jaurès was a committed antimilitarist who tried to use diplomatic means to prevent what became the First World War.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• François Hollande declared that “Jaurès, the man of socialism, is today the man of all of France”.

Connections

He married Louise Bois. They had 2 children: Madeleine Jaurès, Louis Paul Jaurès.

Spouse:

Louise Bois

child:

Madeleine Jaurès

child:

Louis Paul Jaurès

Cousin:

Benjamin Jaurès

admiral and senator

younger brother:

Louis Jaurès

admiral

coworker:

Émile Zola

References

• The Life of Jean Jaures (Biography of the Great French Socialist and Intellect)
• Jean Jaurès: The Inner Life of Social Democracy