Jaurès and the Third Republic

Jaurès is the most towering, most dignified, and noblest figure of the Troisième République. Born to a bourgeois family, Jaurès made his political and parliamentary debut within the ranks of radicalism, but soon found himself repulsed by the ideological and moral atmosphere within the bourgeois parties. Socialism proved irresistibly attractive to his robust and combative spirit. Jaurès joined the ranks of the proletariat. His attitude in those early days was collaborationist. He believed that collaboration with a leftist bourgeois administration should not be excluded from the socialist program. But Jaurès toed the line ever since the Second International rejected this thesis, advocated by various socialist leaders, in its Amsterdam Conference. Leon Trotsky, in an astute essay on the personality of the grand tribunal, wrote: “Jaurès had entered the party an already mature man, with a fully-formed idealist philosophy. This did not stop him from offering up his imposing neck (Jaurès was of an athletic build) to the yoke of organic discipline, and several times he was obliged to demonstrate that he not only ‘knew how to command, but to submit.’”

Jaurès led French socialism’s most shining parliamentary battles, while the theoreticians and agitators of the proletarian far left rebelled against his parliamentarism and democratism. Georges Sorel and the syndicalists denounced this praxis as a deformation of Marxism’s revolutionary spirit. But the prewar workers’ movement, as has been said many times before, was inspired not by Marx, but Lassalle. It was reformist, not revolutionary. Socialism developed within democracy, and could not, therefore, extract itself from the influence of the democratic mentality. Socialist leaders had to propose to the masses a program of immediate and concrete action, as the sole means of educating them and positioning them within socialism. Many of these leaders lost all revolutionary energy in this pursuit. Praxis suffocated the theory in them. But no one could confuse Jaurès with such domesticated revolutionaries. A personality as strong as his could not succumb to the democratic atmosphere’s corruption or dilution. Jaurès was reformist, as was the socialism of his time, but always saw in his reformist means a revolutionary end.

He placed his profound intelligence, rich cultivation and indomitable will all in the service of the social revolution. His life was a life given over wholly to the cause of the poor. Books, newspapers, parliament, rallies; Jaurès employed every tribune of thought in his long career as an agitator. He founded and led the newspaper L’Humanité, which today belongs to the Communist Party. He wrote several volumes of social and historical criticism. He completed, with the assistance of some students of socialism and its historical roots, a powerful work: the Socialist History of the French Revolution.

Across this history’s eight volumes, Jaurès and his collaborators focus on the various stages of the French Revolution from a socialist point of view. They study the Revolution as a social and economic phenomenon, without ignoring or diminishing its character as a spiritual phenomenon. In this work, as he would throughout his life, Jaurès retains his idealist position and posture. Nobody is more resistant, nobody more opposed to a cold and dogmatic materialism than Jaurès. His criticism shone a new light on the ‘89 Revolution, and indeed, the French Revolution acquires clear definition in his work. It was a bourgeois revolution, because it could not be a proletarian revolution, as the proletariat did not then exist as an organized and conscious class. The proletariat confused themselves with the humble bourgeoisie in their midst. They lacked a class-conscious ideology and direction. However, during the heated days of the revolution, people spoke of the poor and the rich. The Jacobins and the Babouvists vindicated the rights of the plebeian, and the revolution was, from many points of view, the revolution of the sans culottes. The Revolution was propped up by the peasants who constituted a well-defined social category. The urban proletariat, represented by the artisan, was pervaded by a petty-bourgeois spirit. There did not yet exist large factories or industry. There lacked, in sum, the instrument of the socialist revolution. Furthermore, socialism had not yet found its methodology, but was rather a nebulous grouping of confused and abstract utopias. Its germination and maturation could only have emerged within an age of capitalist development. Just as the entrails of the feudal order gestated the bourgeois order, the bourgeois order was bound to gestate the proletarian order. Finally, the French Revolution emanated from the first communist doctrine: Babouvism.

The spokesman of French socialism, who in this way demarcated the material and spiritual participation of the proletariat in the French Revolution, may have been an idealist, but he was no utopian. The motives of his idealism were in his education, his temperament and psychology. A dryly materialist and schematic socialism was incompatible with his mindset, hence some of his contrasts with the Marxists and his honest and sincere commitment to the idea of democracy. Trotsky makes a very precise definition of Jaurès in the following lines: “Jaurès entered the political arena in the most dismal age of the Third Republic, which at that time counted but a dozen or so years of existence and which, devoid of solid traditions, was forced to battle powerful enemies and fight for the Republic, for its preservation, for its purification. Here is the fundamental idea of Jaurès, the idea that inspires all his action. Jaurès was searching for a wider social base for the Republic; we wanted to bring the Republic to the people to make the republican State an instrument of the socialist economy. Socialism was for Jaurès the sole means of consolidating the Republic and the only possible way of completing and finishing it. In his tireless struggle for idealist synthesis, Jaurès was, in his first period, a democrat prepared to adopt socialism; in his final period, he was a socialist who felt responsible for all of democracy.”

Jaurès’ assassination closed a chapter in the history of French socialism. In a single moment, democratic and parliamentary socialism lost its great leader. The war and the crisis that followed would later come to invalidate and discredit the parliamentary method. An entire age, an entire phase of socialism, concluded with Jaurès.

The war found Jaurès in combat position. Up to his final moments, Jaurès worked with all his strength for the cause of peace. He howled against the great crime in Paris and in Brussels. Only death could silence his elegant, accusing voice.

It fell to Jaurès to be the tragedy’s first victim. The hand of an obscure nationalist, morally primed by L’Action Française and the whole reactionary press, took down the greatest man of the Third Republic. Later, the Third Republic would disown him, and absolve his assassin.