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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Selected Writings of
Jean Jaurès
On Socialism, Pacifism
and Marxism

Edited by
Jean-Numa Ducange
Elisa Marcobelli
Translated by David Broder
 Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors
Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique
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Jean-Numa Ducange · Elisa Marcobelli
Editors

Selected Writings
of Jean Jaurès
On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism
Editors
Jean-Numa Ducange Elisa Marcobelli
University of Rouen University of Rouen
Mont St. Aignan, France Mont St. Aignan, France

Translated by
David Broder
London School of Economics
Paris, France

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
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 Series Editor’s Preface

Titles Published
1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions
of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014.
2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideol-
ogy” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach
chapter,” 2014.
3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism,
2015.
4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A
Critique of Marxism, 2016.
5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical
History, 2016.
6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to
Read Marx, 2017.
7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017.
8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of
Karl Marx, 2018.
9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the
Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century,
2018.
10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals:
Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018.

v
vi SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins
of Capitalism, 2018.
12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair
MacIntyre, 2018.
13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian
Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral
Capitalism, 2019.
14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and
Political Theory, 2019.
15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and
Metaphysics of Domination, 2019.
16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative Real-
Time Political Analysis, 2019.
17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Saba-
dini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist
Analysis, 2019.
18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds.), Karl
Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the
Bicentenary, 2019.
19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism:
Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019.
20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile:
The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019.
21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020.
22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020.
23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian
Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and
Smith, 2020.
24. Terrell Carver, Engels Before Marx, 2020.
25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and
Marxism in France, 2020.
26. Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and
Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction.
27. Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space.
28. Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduc-
tion.
29. Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th
Anniversary Edition.
 SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE vii

30. Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twen-

tieth Century.
31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.),
Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the
Dialectics of Liberation.
32. Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in
France and Italy.
33. Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism,
Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism.
34. Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century.
35. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a De-
alienated World.
36. Marcello Musto, Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation.

Titles Forthcoming

Michael Brie & Jörn Schütrumpf, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary

Marxist at the Limits of Marxism
Miguel Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation
Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Self-
organisation and Anti-capitalism
Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment
Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism
Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems
and Debates in Post-war Argentina
George C. Comninel, The Feudal Foundations of Modern Europe
James Steinhoff, Critiquing the New Autonomy of Immaterial Labour: A
Marxist Study of Work in the Artificial Intelligence Industry
Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of
Cosmopolitanism
Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century
Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal
Freedom in Marx
Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis
and Alternatives
Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective
from Labriola to Gramsci
viii SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist

Analysis of Values
Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A
Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy
Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics
Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship,
State, and Revolution
Thomas Kemple, Capital After Classical Sociology: The Faustian Lives of
Social Theory
Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory
of “Labour Note”
V Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in
India
Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’
Insubordination of 1968
Attila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary:
A Marxist Analysis
Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the
French Communist Party
Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.),
Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism
Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism,
Religion, and Emancipatory Politics
Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for Meaning
in Late Capitalism
Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capi-
talism
Tamás Krausz, Eszter Bartha (Eds.), Socialist Experiences in Eastern
Europe: A Hungarian Perspective
Martin Cortés, Marxism, Time and Politics: On the Autonomy of the
Political
João Antonio de Paula, Huga da Gama Cerqueira, Eduardo da Motta
e Albuquer & Leonardo de Deus, Marxian Economics for the 21st
Century: Revaluating Marx’s Critique of Political Economy
Zhi Li, The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx
Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism
Dong-Min Rieu, A Mathematical Approach to Marxian Value Theory:
Time, Money, and Labor Productivity
 SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE ix

Salvatore Prinzi, Representation, Expression, and Institution: The Philos-

ophy of Merleau-Ponty and Castoriadis
Agon Hamza, Slavoj Žižek and the Reconstruction of Marxism
Kei Ehara (Ed.), Japanese Discourse on the Marxian Theory of Finance
Éric Aunoble, French Views on the Russian Revolution
Elisa Marcobelli, Internationalism Toward Diplomatic Crisis: The Second
International and French, German and Italian Socialists
Paolo Favilli, Historiography and Marxism: Innovations in Mid-Century
Italy
Terrell Carver, Smail Rapic (Eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century:
Perspectives and Problems
Juan Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class: Three Essays on Trotsky, Gramsci and
Marxism
Patrizia Dogliani, A Political History of the International Union of
Socialist Youth
Alexandros Chrysis, The Marx of Communism: Setting Limits in the Realm
of Communism
Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General
Electric and a Century of American Power
 Introduction

Jean Jaurès is one of France’s most famous political figures. Many French
people have heard of Jaurès because of the streets and public buildings
named after him, or even the shops situated on a “Rue Jean-Jaurès,” in
their own way recalling the socialist tribune’s memory. In early 2014,
Toulouse University was renamed in his honor, as part of the buildup
to commemorations marking the centenary of his assassination in July
1914. But outside the ranks of history buffs and a few hardened militants,
how many people actually know Jaurès’s works? Surely, very few. Beyond
France itself he is even less well known. Only specialists in the history of
French socialism or the Third Republic know his name and his writings.
Indeed, as soon as we cross the Alps from France into Italy his name
disappears from the toponymy: Milan’s “Via Jean Jaurès” is ’the only
one nationwide. This anthology is intended to help those little-familiar
with Jaurès to discover him. It does so through a selection of his most
emblematic texts, covering some of the great political questions of his
time.

From the Republic to Socialism

Born in 1859 to a bourgeois family in Castres, Jaurès was hardly fated
to become one of history’s great socialist leaders. His first steps in public
life did little to distinguish him from other “opportunist” republicans—
as the men of the center-left were called, in this period. This brilliant

xi
xii INTRODUCTION

student, educated at the École normale supérieure (where he achieved

an agrégation in philosophy) and university lecturer, then became deputy
mayor of Toulouse and, already in 1885, a young MP. Initially hostile to
the socialists, he could have settled for a comfortable political career in
the South of France, just like many others did.
But over the years from 1889 to 1892, Jaurès gradually “passed across
to socialism.”1 There were two major factors at work in this “conver-
sion,” which has long been a subject of discussion among historians. One
was Jaurès’s study of German philosophy: he devoted his complemen-
tary thesis to The Origins of German Socialism (1892), a topic which
he discovered especially thanks to his discussions with the École normale
supérieure librarian Lucien Herr. The other was the importance of the
social question, of which he became conscious through his contact with
the miners of Carmaux—men facing often horrific working conditions,
whom he met during a major strike in 1892. By this point, Jaurès had
very much become a socialist. In that era, socialists were still a scattered
array of loosely organized circles; ten years later, Jaurès would urgently set
about uniting these different currents. For the moment, he was, at least,
certainly to be counted among socialist ranks, and in 1893 he was elected
an MP for the Tarn on the basis of the programme of the Parti Ouvrier
led by Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue—men both close, in this period,
to the ideas of Karl Marx. But more than these others, Jaurès’s socialism
would preserve its republican moorings, which a good proportion of the
socialists influenced by Marxism in fact considered rather suspect. Was
the Republic not fundamentally “bourgeois”—as its violent anti-worker
repression tended to demonstrate?
Jaurès, for his part, thought that there was a deep bond of continuity
between the Republic and socialism. For sure, the current Republic was
imperfect. But for him, it remained the best political regime in existence,
and it was within the Republic that socialism could be gradually devel-
oped. For Jaurès, the social Republic could not spring from some great
cataclysm, as Marx and Engels had forecast in 1848, but rather would arise
from a gradualist approach which took proper account of republicanism’s
achievements. This political outlook also ought to be set in connection
with Jaurès’s great admiration for the legacy of the French Revolution of

1 Jean Jaurès, ‘Le Passage au socialisme (1889–1893)’, in Œuvres, vol. II, Paris, Fayard,
2011.
 INTRODUCTION xiii

1789. Over 1889–90, he established a close continuity between the revo-

lutionary struggles of 1789 and contemporary socialism. Between 1900
and 1904 he published the first volumes (and they were several thousand
pages long!) of a vast Histoire socialiste de la France contemporaine he
had launched; these initial tomes were dedicated to the early years of the
French Revolution from 1789 to 1794. To read the introduction (1900)
and conclusion (1908) to these volumes—texts reproduced in this present
anthology—offers us a marvelous understanding of who Jaurès was and
what his vision of socialism was. These pages are deeply imbued with an
incorrigible optimism in the future, which especially shines through from
the 1908 conclusion.

Jaurès, the Republicans,

the Socialists, and the Syndicalists
If we cannot understand Jaurès without reading him, we also need to
situate him in relation to the other great political figures and forces of
his time. During his own lifetime, Jaurès was no better known than Jules
Guesde or other republican personalities, even though posterity has often
had much less of a place for these latter. Fundamentally, he never broke
with the republicans and especially the radicals, with whom he had, as
Rémy Pech put it, “a dispute but not a rupture.”2 His relations with the
different socialist currents (of which there were five, at the end of the
nineteenth century!) varied with the times. Jaurès had difficult relations
with the “Guesdists,” the partisans of Jules Guesde considered to have
first introduced Marxism to France. An important cleavage divided him
from the allies of Jules Guesde and Édouard Vaillant over the decisive
question of the state, or more precisely, of governmental participation.
In 1899, Alexandre Millerand became the first socialist minister to join
a government, as part of Waldeck-Rousseau’s cabinet. In the context of
the Dreyfus affair and the threat to the republican regime, for some the
notion of a government of “republican defense” justified participation in
exercising power. Jaurès was part of this latter camp, while Guesde and
Vaillant damned what they saw as an inadmissible compromise.

2 Jean-Michel Ducomte and Rémy Pech, Jaurès et les radicaux: une dispute sans rupture,
Toulouse, Privat, 2011.
xiv INTRODUCTION

This dividing line would split them also with regard to their attitudes
toward captain Dreyfus: whereas Guesde considered it damaging to throw
workers into struggle on behalf of a bourgeois army officer, Jaurès—
after a little hesitation—invoked a principle of humanity that stood above
class divides. For the socialist tribune, it was necessary to stand along-
side figures like Zola, who accused the justice system of partiality and
complicity in the military’s efforts to cover up its institutional failings. Les
Preuves —whose foreword is included in this volume—was one of Jaurès’s
great texts on this subject. Yet on some points, there were bridges between
Jaurès and the Guesdists; sometimes these latter were fairly quick to give
up on some of their more doctrinaire aspects, for instance on the ques-
tion of small peasant property. While in some Marxists’ estimation, the
small property would disappear together with capitalist concentration, the
majority of French socialists considered it something that needed to be
defended. At the Nantes Congress of the (Guesdist) Parti ouvrier français
in 1894, there was agreement between Jaurès and Karl Marx’s son-in-law
Lafargue—a Guesde ally—on this point.3 But from 1899 onward, such
areas of agreement rather thinned out. There were, indeed, two different
methods—the deux méthodes which Guesde and Jaurès debated at a
memorable public meeting in 1900, upon the invitation of the mayor of
Lille.4 Two years later, Jaurès’s support for Émile Combes’s new govern-
ment followed this same logic: backing the Radicals’ reform measures,
but this time without direct socialist participation in government, Jaurès
was elected vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies. He now became
the most important political figure, alongside Aristide Briand, in allowing
the vote on—and then the promulgation of—the law on the separation of
churches and state in late 1905. Some socialists asked why Jaurès went so
far in this alliance with the Radicals on the question of state secularism:
wasn’t the essential thing to conquer new social and political rights for
workers, taking up a perspective of overthrowing capitalism? For Jaurès,
who never abandoned the horizon of revolution, it was necessary to break
workers from the grip of Catholicism. How could anyone imagine that a
society still operating under the orders of the Church could be recep-
tive to socialist ideas? Anything that could allow for a secularization of

3 Gilles Candar and Jean-Numa Ducange, ‘Paul Lafargue: la propriété paysanne et

l’évolution économique’, Cahiers Jaurès, no 195–196, pp. 70–80.
4 Jean Jaurès, Jules Guesde, Rosa Luxemburg, Les Discours des deux méthodes, Paris, Le
Passager clandestin, 2014 (2nd edition).
 INTRODUCTION xv

citizens’ minds, even while respecting individual religious beliefs, was a

step forward for socialism. Again, here, there was a sharp difference of
method. Yet in the meantime, a few months before the law on separa-
tion of churches and state, the splits among France’s socialists had finally
been healed: whatever their differences, they all came together at the Le
Globe congress in Paris in April 1905 to found the Section française de
l’Internationale ouvrière (SFIO), the now unified socialist party. More
than anything, Jaurès feared that this unity would crack and thus socialism
would fall back into the fragmented condition it had been in before 1905.
Unity had been one of his life’s great works, and he had a particular
attachment to it. The subsequent splits in the French Left would likely
have badly wounded him…
Formally speaking, the rhetoric of Guesde’s supporters prevailed in the
new party’s statutes.5 But at the SFIO’s Toulouse Congress in 1908, there
was no doubt that Jaurès’s viewpoint chalked up some decisive victories.
When, two years later, Guesde expressed opposition to the first law on
“worker and peasant” pensions—to his eyes, the bill offered only weak
guarantees to those on the lowest incomes—he was very much isolated
compared to Jaurès who, despite the law’s distinct weaknesses, voted for
it because it would at least mean that the Republic would recognize the
principle of pensions.6 In the long run, it was, indeed, his perspective that
prevailed among France’s socialists, even though it would continue to be
counterbalanced by other political choices.
What, at root, was Jaurès’s perspective? A sensible gradualist and
reformist attitude, as against the other socialists who wanted to over-
throw capitalism? We should be careful not to plaster the realities of
another era onto the socialism of 1900: the oppositions and ruptures
that emerged after the Russian Revolution of 1917 were not already
evident in Jaurès’s own time. Some have spoken of a typically Jaure-
sian “revolutionary reformism”,7 a “Jauresian synthesis” which resists any
over simplistic oppositions incapable of capturing the thought of a plural
and complex French socialism. Indeed, there was no ready-made model

5 Claude Willard, Jules Guesde, l’apôtre et la loi, Paris, Éditions ouvrières, 1991.
6 Gilles Candar et Guy Dreux, Une loi pour les retraites. Débats socialistes et syndicalistes
autour de la loi de 1910, Lormont, Le Bord de l’eau, 2010.
7 See especially Bruno Antonini, État et socialisme chez Jean Jaurès, Paris, L’Harmattan,
2004.
xvi INTRODUCTION

for revolution such as the Bolshevik revolution later proposed, notably

including the centralized party-form as theorized by Lenin. Jaurès had no
theory of the party, and even if he opposed the most centralizing tenden-
cies among the Guesdists inspired by the German model, he proposed
no alternative conception. This, even as he remained attached to the exis-
tence of a political party that would be pluralist yet united on the essential
questions. Doubtless, he had no hesitation in referring to the example of
the French Revolution of 1789–1794. But he did this less with a view
to repeating the particular phases it had gone through, than as a matter
of drawing inspiration from the great principles which had bloomed in
that era. And when great upheavals struck other countries and revolu-
tion again seemed to be on the order of the day, Jaurès’s thoughts would
spontaneously turn to the French Revolution. When, in January 1905,
a revolution began on the soil of the Tsar’s despised authoritarianism—
raising hopes across Europe—his lyrical speeches spontaneously mobilized
the glorious French revolutionary tradition. The word “revolution” was,
indeed, very much part of the Jauresian vocabulary, but it did not appear
to stand in contradiction with partial victories through reforms. Tellingly,
in expounding his political vision Jaurès used the formula “revolutionary
evolution,” which he had early on adopted from a formula used by Karl
Marx.8 If one wanted to apply a label to Jaurès, at the very limit one could
term him a “radical reformist”: deeply pacifist, he was distrustful of violent
and brutal ruptures and, in this sense, he clearly distinguished himself
from many other socialists with a stronger inclination toward a revolu-
tionary rupture with the existing order. But he also distrusted the repub-
licans’ conservatism—and had no hesitation in speaking up for political
and social reforms that some considered dangerous or impossible. Here
again, his decision to defend particular laws (on pensions, on secularism)
was well-indicative of his approach.
Jaurès was, moreover, a socialist attentive to other sensibilities,
convinced as he was that the appropriateness of a given political line
would become clear through debate—even if that debate was robust and
sometimes violent. This is the spirit in which we should understand his
creation of l’Humanité in April 1904. He never saw this “socialist daily”
as an organ subservient to the party, but rather as a free tribune for
the working-class and socialist movements of the time. He stuck to this

8 Jean-Paul Scot, Jaurès et le réformisme révolutionnaire, Paris, Seuil, 2014.

 INTRODUCTION xvii

pluralist decision to the last, even if it sometimes risked stormy polemics

and splits with some of his friends. For evidence of this, we need only
look to a 1911 editorial in l’Humanité where he paid an emphatic tribute
to Paul Lafargue, who had just committed suicide together with his wife.
This article came just a few weeks after Lafargue and Jaurès had clashed
over major disagreements with a manifest harshness of tone. For Jaurès,
his activity as a journalist was essential: before (and sometimes in parallel
with) his work for l’Humanité, he was an active contributor to La Dépêche
and La Petite République. A man of action, he published hundreds of
newspaper articles, often much longer and denser than one might read
today; for proof of that, one need only consult some of his pieces, which
could at times even be difficult to follow given the sheer volume of histor-
ical and philosophical references they mobilized. Jaurès the journalist was
a remarkable example of a politician who kept pace with the most imme-
diate current events, without ever losing a depth of analysis that was
bound to a vast culture.9
One particular point worth mentioning regards trade unionism. The
situation in the France of this period was rather particular. The Confédéra-
tion générale du travail (CGT), founded in 1895 was animated by a
revolutionary-syndicalist majority very hostile to political parties and
parliamentarism, who considered the “general strike” as the working
class’s main means of action and who characterized universal suffrage as a
sham which prevented the active mobilization of the popular masses.10
At the Amiens congress in 1906, the CGT jealously defended its
autonomy from the SFIO, in a text that has gone down in history as the
“Charter of Amiens.” Jaurès obviously opposed the CGT members’ ideas
as expressed in this document, for he remained attached to parliamen-
tary, republican forms of political action. But there was a notable evolu-
tion in his understanding of the general strike after 1905: well aware of
the strength that the CGT’s syndicalism represented, and perhaps also
conscious of the limits of parliamentary democracy, which could not alone
suffice, he came to consider specific uses of the general strike as a useful
means of action. A real—and fruitful—dialogue thus developed between
Jaurès and the revolutionary-syndicalist CGT starting in the years from

9 Charles Silvestre, Jaurès, la passion du journaliste, Pantin, Le Temps des cerises, 2010.
10 Miguel Chueca, Déposséder les possédants. La grève générale aux « temps héroïques »
du syndicalisme révolutionnaire (1895–1906), Marseilles, Agone, 2008.
xviii INTRODUCTION

1906 to 1908, in a context in which Georges Clemenceau’s government

repressed workers’ strikes.11 Jaurès again distinguished himself from the
partisans of Guesde, who wanted to subordinate the union to the party
and saw the former only as an appendage of the latter. We again see this in
Jaurès’s attitudes toward the cooperative movement: unlike other social-
ists who held that it had to be placed in service of the party, Jaurès saw it
as one of the means of social emancipation, alongside the SFIO and the
union. He arrived at the consideration that a socialist militant must find
their place in all three poles of party, union and cooperative. This showed
his real feeling for the workers’ movement’s diverse forms of expres-
sion, where others insisted that one form must necessarily be prioritized
over the others. He paid occasional tributes to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
father of anarchism and an influential figure in the workers’ movements
of the 1840s–60s, himself attached to the cooperative idea. Obviously, as
against the anarchists, Jaurès believed in the regulating action of the state.
But he also sometimes showed his attentiveness to arguments criticizing
the bureaucracy and authoritarianism of certain republican and socialist
currents. There was a Proudhonian or even libertarian streak in Jaurès,
even though it was not the dominant one.

Jaurès, Germany and Marxism

Jaurès could understand and read German much better than English—
indeed, this was often true in the international socialist milieu of the
time. He had many friends in Europe, especially among the Belgian social-
ists, like Émile Vandervelde, leader of the Parti ouvrier belge and some-
time president of the Socialist International. But in this period, German
socialism was very much the model. Jaurès entertained a rather particular
relationship with German socialism and its developments. As we have said,
his thèse complémentaire, written in Latin, was a study of the origins of this
movement and, most importantly, he regularly referred to it in many arti-
cles and speeches. There were several reasons for this focus. Firstly, Jaurès
was a philosopher by training, and the Germany of Kant and Hegel was
an essential reference point in this era. When Jaurès became a historian,
with his Histoire socialiste de la France contemporaine, he took a close

11 Alain Boscus, Jean Jaurès, la CGT et le syndicalisme révolutionnaire, Toulouse, Institut

CGT d’histoire sociale, 2010.
 INTRODUCTION xix

interest in the French Revolution’s impact on Germany, and he person-

ally wrote the 1907 volume dedicated to the Franco-German war of 1870.
Germany was also the country where the first independent workers’ party
in Europe had been founded, by Ferdinand Lassalle back in 1863; this
was one of the components of what would become the Social Democratic
Party in 1890. Of course, this was also the land of origin of Marx and
Engels, and indeed of “Marxism” (a term which entered general use in
the 1880s)—the doctrinal reference point for the SPD, the most powerful
party in the Socialist International founded in 1889. Without this Interna-
tional, coordination among Europe’s socialists and their collective action
in the face of the danger of war would have been impossible. This explains
why, despite the distance which separated Jaurès’s republicanism from the
Marxism of the German Social Democrats, the French socialist tribune
always maintained a keen eye toward developments in that party and was
active in the International’s own structures. He published multiple articles
on the SPD’s internal debates and especially with regard to the “revision”
of Marxism, revolving around Eduard Bernstein.
One of the great moments of this friendship, colored by intense debates
and even sharp opposition, was the Amsterdam Congress of the Socialist
International in 1904, which saw a notable clash between Jaurès’s ideas
and those of SPD party president August Bebel. Amsterdam was a deci-
sively important congress, for the French: a motion was passed strongly
exhorting the French socialists to unite, and this would encourage the
creation of the SFIO in 1905. But the Republic was also a focus of debate.
Formally at least, the SPD continued to call for a German Republic, in
continuity with the ideals of the revolution of 1848. But this demand
was increasingly pushed into the background. As we have seen, Jaurès
remained firmly attached to the republican form, an imperfect founda-
tion but a necessary one for any further advance to be made. Yet Bebel
as well as many German Marxists like Karl Kautsky—the great intellec-
tual authority of this era—considered Jaurès imbued with “republican
superstitions.” For them—and, as we have emphasized, French Marx-
ists like Guesde and Lafargue—the republican form at most opened the
way to a clearer expression of class struggles, allowing the clash between
bourgeoisie and proletariat to appear with sharper contours. Sometimes
they considered it outright superfluous, in light of political developments
in France and Germany: had Bismarck’s German empire not granted
much more generous social guarantees than those offered by the French
Republic? What good was there in celebrating a Republic which seemed
xx INTRODUCTION

to lag behind the Reich when it came to social policy? Jaurès challenged
this interpretation of the political struggle in France, which he considered
an overly narrow reading, wasn’t it, rather, that the Social Democrats no
longer demanded the establishment of a Republic because they no longer
dared to confront the imperial powers that be in Germany? In other
words, behind their oh-so radical Marxist formulas, were there perhaps
concealed other motives which they would have been less eager to admit?
Paradoxically, though she was very critical of the French socialist tribune,
a few years later Rosa Luxemburg recognized that he was correct on this
point, at least. In 1910, she broke with her old friend Karl Kautsky when
he refused to publish an article… which demanded that the party should
propagandize for the German Republic!
From this point of view—and beyond what was specifically at stake
in the republican question—there was a real distance between Jaurès and
Marxism such as his German counterparts understood it. For Jaurès, there
were indeed “class struggles”: in his writings, we regularly find the expres-
sion “working class”; historical materialism was very much part of his
intellectual hinterland, especially when it came to interpreting a process
like the French Revolution. Moreover, Jaurès did not stand so far from
Friedrich Engels’s late reflection (before his death in 1895) considering
the state not only as the instrument of a social class (“the bourgeois state”)
but as one of the sites where the contradictions among social classes
expressed themselves. In such a reading, it was thus necessary to inter-
vene at the state level and embrace compromises, but this did not invari-
ably mean an abandonment of the perspective of socialism. But Jaurès
accorded a much higher importance to institutional forms of politics and
believed in the virtue of republican values.
There was also a certain moral dimension in Jaurès. This was apparent
in his appreciation of the Republic, which made him rather unique—
even if this aspect ought not be overstated. After all, on this point the
French socialist could certainly be compared to those in Germany who
made a “return to Kant” the better to attack what they considered the
analytical rigidities resulting from the dialectical method. The religious
dimension of Jaurès’s political engagement has also been the focus of
several important studies; it would, indeed, be senseless to portray this
socialist leader as an intransigent atheist, given the mystical strands that
 INTRODUCTION xxi

ran throughout his career and his writings.12 What is more, Jaurès repeat-
edly sought to distance himself from an overly rigid materialism, which he
detected especially in Paul Lafargue’s historical writings; in this sense, he
quite clearly distinguished himself from Marx, even if it is difficult to draw
firm conclusions on his relationship with the great German socialist theo-
rist. Jaurès was a politician who wrote editorials day after day; he read
an enormous amount, but he also cited from memory—and sometimes
in rather approximate fashion—authors whom he had not always been
at leisure to study in any great depth, Marx first among them. Without
doubt, he took a certain distance from the self-styled Marxists of his time;
but his relationship with Marx’s oeuvre is rather more difficult to parse.
Jaurès was, certainly, a sharp critic of certain “catastrophist” predictions
among those who, taking Manifesto of the Communist Party in the most
literal terms, swore that capitalism’s collapse was imminent. Moreover,
one can only be struck by the weak presence—or absence—in Jaurès of
any reflection on political economy, an absence which he also shared with
other French socialists like Guesde. In contrast, his German Social Demo-
cratic friends—across all tendencies—paid a striking amount of attention
to economic problems and to the nature of capitalism. In France, one
would have to search among academic economists to find any serious
discussion on this terrain. As a philosopher and historian, Jaurès did
clearly take an interest in the world’s economic developments, as shown
by his reading of one work much-discussed in this era, Rudolf Hilferd-
ing’s Finance Capital (1910).13 He concerned himself with the problem
of the distribution of wealth, and of questions of fiscal and tariffs policy.
But we would search in vain for any original economic thinking. His intel-
lectual formation and his tireless political activity did not push him into
any in-depth analysis of the country’s industrial and agricultural develop-
ments. Hence the absence of such questions from this anthology—which
may seem rather surprising—does not owe to any deliberate choice on
our part, but rather reflects their objectively limited place in his oeuvre.

12 See in particular the works of Jordi Blanc and his volume of philosophical texts
(Valencia, Vent terral, 2014).
13 Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital. A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist
Development, London: Routledge, 1981 [1910].
xxii INTRODUCTION

Jaurès, Peace and the World

For all the divergences—and the polemics—with the German Social
Democrats, there were also great moments of fraternity. One such
instance was the speech that Jaurès was meant to give in Berlin in 1905,
only for the authorities to refuse him entry into German territory. For
Jaurès, right up till his final hours, it was utterly essential to establish closer
bonds with the SPD, as he sought to save what remained his fundamental
ambition—peace.
Jaurès, a martyr for peace. This is, without, the great cause that has
made his name in France and around the world. On this point, we should
emphasize that Jaurès was always a convinced patriot and a defender of
his country and its values. This was true even to the extent that during
his first years of political engagement—and even once his socialist beliefs
were well-established—he remained convinced of the need for coloniza-
tion in North Africa in order to bring French civilization to the indigenous
population. This colonization would, supposedly, provide the first, indis-
pensable step before emancipation. Jaurès remained “pro-colonial” up till
the early 1890s.14 In his days as a moderate republican, he had defended
colonization, in an era in which certain left-Radicals like Clemenceau had
already taken a strong stance against the dichotomy between “higher” and
“lower” races, as advanced by the famous Jules Ferry. This latter brought
compulsory, secular public schooling to France but was also the man of
“Ferry-Tonkin”—that is, the conquest of Indochina…
The chronology speaks for itself: the more we proceed through time,
the more Jaurès critiqued and condemned France’s “colonial policy.” The
brutalities of military conquest would make him more and more circum-
spect, and in Parliament he became one of the fiercest opponents of
colonial policy—earning him virulent attacks from the right wing of the
Chamber.15 Jaurès never went so far as to challenge the very principle
of colonialism, but his colonial reformism went much further than many
socialists of the time, even ones more radical on other questions than he
was. Here, we can grasp how far his patriotism was melded with a vigorous
internationalism. For, even beyond the friendships around Europe, which
he continued to develop till the end of his days—and this despite many

14 Gilles Candar, Jaurès et l’extrême-orient. La patrie, les colonies, l’Internationale, Paris,

Fondation Jean Jaurès, 2011.
15 See Jean Jaurès, ‘Le Pluralisme culturel’, in Œuvres, vol. XVII, Paris, Fayard, 2014.
 INTRODUCTION xxiii

ideological clashes and tensions—Jaurès was also one of the few figures
to turn his attention toward non-European peoples. Doubtless, he did so
within a perspective that may seem narrow and limited for us, today; but
it was undeniably a bold one in the context of his own times. Indeed, his
interests were highly varied: for example, his foreword to Turot’s book
on the Philippines’ struggle to free itself from the colonial yoke, and the
l’Humanité piece he devoted to the situation of the Peruvian workers
inhumanly exploited by the British in the rubber plantations.
It was no accident, then, that Jaurès was one of the first figures to
take an interest in anti-colonial movements, as he prepared his Histoire
socialiste de la France contemporaine. Where most historians of the French
Revolution had haughtily ignored the struggles outside the metropoles,
Jaurès offered a first insight that would later be hailed by historians of
colonization. This constant attention to the situation of non-Western
peoples should also be connected to the Socialist International’s own posi-
tions. At the Amsterdam Congress in 1904—the same congress which
imposed on the French socialists the unification which resulted in the
creation of the SFIO the following year—another resolution exhorted
them to “intransigently oppose colonial expeditions.”16 The influence
of the International, to which Jaurès accorded such great importance,
undoubtedly contributed to this turn of his. The cycle that began with
the Russian Revolution in 1905 and continued at least up till the 1908
Young Turk revolution in the Ottoman empire stirred great enthusiasms
in Jaurès. “Red Sunday” in St. Petersburg and all that followed was hailed
in lyrical tones. These events opened up new hopes for French socialism,
and all the more so given a crucial part of the context: namely, that the
Left would more gladly accept a French-Russian alliance if this was to be
sealed with a Russian Republic and not with the Romanov monarchy… If,
by conceding a few reforms, Russia ultimately remained under the Tsar’s
leadership, the Russian Revolution had nonetheless shaken the certain-
ties of many European socialists. On the one hand, the revolution would
not necessarily break out in one of the “great” countries of the West,
but instead in the “Orient.” On the other hand, the revolution was also
intertwined with the Russo-Japanese war, which ended in Russian defeat:
so, what was called a “yellow” people could defeat “whites.” This was

16 Sixième congrès socialiste international tenu à Amsterdam du 14 au 20 août 1904.

Compte rendu analytique par le Secrétariat socialiste international, Brussels, 1904, p. 43.
xxiv INTRODUCTION

a stinging and historic refutation of then-widespread racial theories on

the “yellow” peoples. Similar factors explain Jaurès’s enthusiasm for the
Chinese Revolution of 1911. It is worth mentioning that this latter revo-
lution’s main leader Sun Yat-Sen had spent a spell in France, reflected on
the Western revolutionary experiences of the nineteenth century and even
been interviewed in l’Humanité. Of course, this revolution did not put an
end to the “century of humiliations” that had begun with the “unequal
treaties” of the mid-nineteenth century which carved up China and trans-
formed much of its coastline, now almost entirely under the heel of the
Western powers. But China had embarked upon a long movement that
would lead to its national liberation—and this challenge to the domina-
tion of one people over another was welcomed by Jaurès, even as many
others constantly denounced the “Yellow Peril.”
To understand Jaurès, it is worth keeping in mind his line in L’Armée
nouvelle, “A little internationalism takes us further away from our home-
land: a lot of internationalism brings us closer to it.” The one did not rule
out the other. In this regard, L’Armée nouvelle deserves particular atten-
tion: alongside the Histoire socialiste, this was his other main book. This
had originated in 1910 as a parliamentary bill but was later transformed
into a volume for J. Rouff, the same publisher which issued the Histoire
socialiste.17 Reading this work allows us to avoid the many misinterpreta-
tions regarding Jaurès’s pacifism, which was neither abstract nor absolute,
and took its place within a specific context.
Jaurès did not dismiss either borders or the various contingent
measures associated with protecting the patrie. He sought a root-and-
branch reform of the military in order to preserve peace, but efforts to
avert conflict could not rely on an anti-militarism that stood outside time
and space. Clearly, Jaurès did all he could to oppose the ambient jingoism
and the mood of revanchism against Germany—widespread among much
of the French political class. The plans set forth in L’Armée nouvelle
were not adopted, and the law stipulating three years’ military service—
against which he and the socialists had demonstrated at the Pré-Saint
Gervais—was passed in 1913. But Jaurès also distinguished himself from a
socialist like Gustave Hervé18 —the champion of a virulent anti-militarism,

17 Jean-François Chanet (ed.), ‘Lire L’Armée nouvelle’, Cahiers Jaurès, nos. 207–208,
January–June 2013.
18 Gilles Heuré, Gustave Hervé. Itinéraire d’un provocateur, Paris, La Découverte, 1997.
 INTRODUCTION xxv

hostile to any reform of the army—as well as all those who advocated a
radical internationalism which sought the disappearance of all borders.
For example, in her review of L’Armée nouvelle Rosa Luxemburg sharply
polemicized with Jaurès: she accused him of abandoning the socialist
movement’s traditional demands and in particular the dissolution of the
standing army in favor of worker militias.19

Jaurès’s Legacy
The link between patriotism and internationalism—and the complex rela-
tionship between the two—was one of Jaurès’s most enduring legacies to
the French left, across its various branches. But, having been assassinated
by a nationalist fanatic on July 31, 1914, on the eve of World War I,
he was not there in August 1914 to pronounce on the attitude socialists
should take toward national defense. Would he have opposed the “union
sacrée”? What would he have done, faced with the Russian Revolution
of 1917, especially after the Bolsheviks took power? We ought not to try
to make dead men speak. Even at the moment of his burial, Jaurès was
immediately mobilized to justify the union sacrée; yet a few years later,
he would become the very symbol of peace. A discussion of the political
and historical uses of Jaurès could itself fill hundreds of pages: indeed,
there have been studies on this particular theme, showing the incredible
mobilization of this socialist tribune in the most varied of causes!20
Here, we will simply cite some telling examples, which show how
hard it is to dissociate the knowledge of Jaurès’s work from the various
ways it was used over the twentieth century. After the Tours Congress
of 1920, which marked the definitive separation between the Social-
ists and Communists, these latter initially attempted to recuperate this
figure to their own ends—an effort facilitated by their takeover of l’Hu-
manité, which became the central daily organ of the Parti Communiste
Français. But then, the Communists wavered between rejecting a man
who appeared flatly “reformist,” in contrast to Leninist revolutionary
audacity, or else (especially during periods of left unity) foregrounding the
l’Humanité founder and ardent fighter for peace. Jaurès would also have a

19 Rosa Luxemburg, Le Socialisme en France, Marseille, Agone, 2013.

20 Vincent Duclert, Jean Jaurès. La politique et la légende, Paris, Autrement, 2013.
xxvi INTRODUCTION

long posterity in Socialist memory—though this was not free of contradic-

tion, either. His friend Léon Blum, the future head of the Popular Front
government in 1936, made impassioned references to Jaurès. But this
figure’s “popularity” did not stop there. During the German occupation,
some of the “pacifist” collaborationist forces—advocating a new “French-
German friendship” within the framework of the new order of 1940—
were quick to identify themselves with Jaurès’s tradition, in an opera-
tion driven by several long-standing Socialists-become-collaborationists!21
Parallel to these various political uses of Jaurès, scholarly studies of Jaurès
got underway in 1959 with the creation of a Société d’études jaurési-
ennes successively chaired by Ernest Labrousse, Madeleine Rebérioux
and, to this day, Gilles Candar. Among Jaurès’s great legacies it is worth
emphasizing the singular importance of his Histoire socialiste de la Révo-
lution française, repeatedly republished on account of its reputation as
a work which founded a whole tradition of studies. The greatest histo-
rians of the Revolution, from Albert Mathiez to Michel Vovelle, have
identified with this same tradition, and even a historian sharply critical
of these latter like François Furet saw Jaurès as one of the few authors
who had provided a strong interpretation of the revolutionary process.22
Jaurès’s commitment to publishing historical documents would also leave
a lasting trace. He initiated a parliamentary commission for the study
of documents concerning economic history in the period of the Revo-
lution, later nicknamed the “Commission Jaurès.” It would continue
its work until 2000.23 But if scholarly studies of Jaurès have continued
apace, he has never become just a cold historical artifact. The 2007 and
2012 French presidential elections provided a rather striking demonstra-
tion of this: candidates across the political spectrum laid claim to his
legacy, including—and most surprisingly—on the Right, which was eager
to highlight his role as defender of “work” and of “the patrie”…24 In

21 Guillaume Pollack, ‘Une mémoire improbable: Jaurès sous l’Occupation (1940–

1944)’, Cahiers Jaurès, no. 211, January–March 2014, pp. 95–114.
22 Christophe Prochasson, ‘Sur une réception de l’Histoire socialiste de la Révolution
française: François Furet lecteur de Jean Jaurès’, Cahiers Jaurès, no. 200, April–June 2011,
pp. 49–67.
23 Michel Vovelle, ‘Un centenaire qui n’aura pas lieu’, Annales historiques de la
Révolution française, no. 332, April–June 2003, pp. 179–182.
24 Marion Fontaine, ‘Les usages politiques de Jaurès’, Cahiers Jaurès, no. 200, April–
June 2011, pp. 17–35.
 INTRODUCTION xxvii

April 2014, president François Hollande gave a speech in Carmaux paying

tribute to Jaurès’s “optimism”25 ; just a day later, Jean-Luc Mélenchon
gave another in Castres, laying claim to Jaurès’s militant ardor as he advo-
cated a “left-wing opposition” against a president accused of abandoning
the popular classes so important to the tribune assassinated in 1914. In all
this, should we see a betrayal of Jaurès? A posthumous triumph? Or, more
simply, multiple (ab)uses of a figure who represents a fundamental refer-
ence point in France’s political history? An attentive reading of the texts,
set back in their proper context, may perhaps allow us to decide. In any
case, that is the modest goal that this anthology sets for itself, in bringing
together both famous texts and others that have gone unpublished since
their first appearance. The reader will then be able to develop their own
opinion of Jean Jaurès—a figure often cited, but ultimately little-known.

25 Vincent Chambarlhac, ‘Une vidéo de l’Élysée… (Hollande dans la continuité de

Jaurès?)’, 22 April 2014, Comité de vigilance face aux usages publics de l’histoire. http://
cvuh.blogspot.fr/2014/04/une-video-de-lelysee-hollande-dans-la.html.
 Contents

1 The Socialist and Republican 1

The Socialism of the French Revolution 1
For Dreyfus 6
“Collectivism and the Peasants” 15
“Jaurès to His Constituents” 19
Secular Education 22
The General Strike and Universal Workers’ Suffrage 32
“No Ambiguity” 36
2 The Champion of French–German Unity 41
German Socialism 41
“The Enduring Problem” 43
“German Controversies” 48
Revolutionary Germany 54
Germany’s Political and Economic Condition 54
The Obstacles to Revolutionary Action 56
Revolutionary Germans 58
“Peace and Socialism” (Berlin Lecture) 59
3 The Philosopher and Historian 67
“Idealism and Materialism in the Conception of History” 68
A Socialist History 82
The Social Balance-Sheet of the Nineteenth Century 90

xxix
xxx CONTENTS

4 Internationalism, Peace, and the World 99

Capitalism and War 99
For Peace 104
“In the Orient” 108
Aguinaldo and the Philippines 111
Against the Colonial Policy 114
Race War 117
The European Revolution 119
The Renewal Movement in China 123
“Speech by Citizen Jaurès” 124
Turkey and Morocco 126
The New Army 129
Speech on Asian Emancipation 134
Speech on Turkey and China 148
Too Late 150
“On the Need for Sang-Froid” 152

Index 155
 CHAPTER 1

The Socialist and Republican

Jean Jaurès’s socialism had deep roots in the heritage of the French Revo-
lution of 1789. At first a moderate republican, he gradually became a
socialist between 1889 and 1892. Yet unlike other socialists who insisted
on seeing the Republic as nothing but the latest instrument of bourgeois
domination, he never abandoned a republican political framework. This
deep conviction was visible in his many battles, from his commitment to
the Dreyfusard cause in 1898 to his stout secularism, and indeed every-
thing from the value of strikes to the definition of peasant property and
the merits of a partial nationalization of the economy. The great histo-
rian Ernest Labrousse once said that French socialism was a “maximalist
republicanism.” Such a definition applies wonderfully to Jaurès’s texts
included in this first part.

The Socialism of the French Revolution

At the moment he wrote this article for La Dépêche in 1890, Jaurès was
no longer an MP, following his election defeat the previous year. Now he was
deputy mayor of Toulouse, responsible for public instruction—hence his early
interest in educational matters. In this period, he was gradually becoming
more convinced of socialist ideas, and in this text, we see how the legacy of the
French Revolution, whose centenary republicans had celebrated the previous

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
J.-N. Ducange and E. Marcobelli (eds.), Selected Writings of Jean
Jaurés, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71959-3_1
2 J.-N. DUCANGE AND E. MARCOBELLI

year, allowed Jaurès gradually to make his journey from republicanism to

socialism.
When we look at our socialist congresses, like the one in Calais,1
which could almost be taken for a local strike, or the one in Châteller-
ault,2 where the members of the Workers’ Party miserably fell out and
insulted each other, we see small gatherings wracked with tumult. And
when we compare them to the magnificent assembly of the English
trade unions, definitively pledging their allegiance to socialism, or to
the Halle congress,3 where all the delegates of socialist Germany—from
workers with calloused hands to millionaire merchants and doctors with
gold-rimmed glasses—fraternally discussed the party’s organization and
program, one is tempted to believe that socialism is possible in England,
mighty in Germany, but doomed to a dismal, abortive end in France.
But this is not the case—and the retrograde and oligarchic parties are
celebrating too soon.
Socialist schools may well transform into something else and socialist
sects, even after providing some temporary service, may well perish
because of their exclusive character. But in France there is an immense
socialist party—one which is, quite simply, called the republican party.
Neither England nor Germany have had a democratic Republic in their
past such as the one proclaimed in France in 1792. So, the English
and German workers’ aspirations for emancipation do not take the same
republican form, and this is why the party of popular reforms is, more
specifically, called the socialist party. In France, however, the mere word
“Republic,” filled with the magnificent dreams of the first republican
generations, itself carries all the promises of fraternal equality.
Maybe someday soon the real French republican party—the party
which does not stop at taking the republic as an inevitable fait accompli,
but which loves it, as the necessary form of right—will come to embrace
the name “socialist-republican party.” Maybe the French Republic will
carry the name of socialist Republic throughout the world. I personally

1 October 1890 congress of the Fédération nationale des syndicats ouvriers, dominated
by partisans of Jules Guesde (1845–1922).
2 October 1890 congress of the Fédération des travailleurs socialistes de France; the
partisans of Jean Allemane (1843–1935) abandoned the hall and founded the so-called
“Allemanist” Parti ouvrier socialiste révolutionnaire.
3 The Halle Congress in 1890 was the German Social-Democrats’ first after twelve years
in clandestinity.
 1 THE SOCIALIST AND REPUBLICAN 3

hope and believe this to be the case, and I will soon go on to say why that
is so. But I shall start by saying that the French Republican party, which
claims the legacy of the French Revolution, is a socialist party, whether it
says so or not. For the Revolution itself contains the whole of socialism.
I am well aware that some have questioned this—and that exclu-
sivist doctrinaires such as Louis Blanc, who only ever saw one side of
things, have identified the French Revolution as the triumph of individu-
alism.4 But the French Revolution, in all it did, and in all it thought, was
manifestly socialist.
It was socialist when it proclaimed the Republic. Today, when socialism
rails against the exclusive ownership of the means of production by a
handful of capitalists, orthodox political economy replies that manual
workers had no part in the creation of the large companies which are the
source of wealth. Doubtless, it says, these industrial firms would not have
been possible if they had no workers. But their real creators are the people
who have founded and directed them to this day. Their wage workers are
the condition of their wealth, but not its cause, and, therefore, they are
entitled to no stake in industrial capital and economic power.
In France, the champions of traditional monarchy, of such “legitima-
tion,” have always thought in that way. There is no doubt, they say,
that without the masses of peasants and workers, without the honest,
hard-working people of France, royalty could never have built modern
France, strong and united. But ultimately it was one family, the royal
family, which, through its initiative, its perseverance, its skill in war, its
alliances and marriages, gradually created France. The dark and unpre-
dictable masses were but a necessary tool in the hands of this family. This
family holds legitimate ownership of sovereign power in perpetuity—and
it can delegate part of this power, as it pleases, to the great and loyal
families which so keenly aided it in its work of expansion and unity.
The Revolution provided its riposte to all these arguments. It answered
that historical tradition could not forever be put before the rights of
man—that it was impossible, worthless, to go looking in the past to pick
out all the elements that combined to make up France. The Revolution
answered that, from the day that men started to feel the need for freedom
awakening within themselves, they had a right to this freedom. What,

4 Indeed, Louis Blanc (1811–1882) considered the early phases of the Revolution of
1789 as primarily individualist and bourgeois.
4 J.-N. DUCANGE AND E. MARCOBELLI

then, did the Convention5 do when it proclaimed the Republic? Rather

than leave political ownership of France in the hands of a family intent on
keeping it to itself indefinitely, on the pretext of having led its centuries-
long establishment, the Convention handed this ownership to the whole
nation. If you apply these principles to the economic order, you have
absolute socialism.
The Revolution was socialist in its organization of the family. When it
abolished or almost abolished the right of the family father to determine
his inheritance, it set the will of the nation in place of the will of the
sole creator of wealth and regulated the distribution of wealth within the
family according to the principles of social equality. At the hour of death,
it is not the father, the creator of wealth, who has rights over this wealth,
but his children, who are most of the time alien to its formation. This is
an almost absolute socialism within the family.
The Revolution was socialist in its organization of public education.
The Convention had provided not only free primary schools, but also,
in the main town of each département, free secondary schools, which
were called central schools. Were we to follow the Convention’s principles
today, education would be entirely free in our middle and high schools,
just as in our elementary schools, and the best pupils of our elementary
schools would be entitled to a secondary education.
Thus, in the Convention’s thinking, the level of education each child
should receive was in no way determined by their parents’ wealth,
but rather by their own personal value. However, it would have been
absurd if the poor man’s child—through this higher level of education
summoned to take up the leading functions in the social order—was
then denied these functions on account of his lack of capital. Such an
educational system thus had the immediate and necessary consequence of
subordinating capital to man and property to personal value. The educa-
tion system decreed by the Revolution was thus—in itself and through
its immediate consequences—the boldest socialism that had yet been
dreamed of.
The Revolution was socialist in its administration of the public domain.
It would never have agreed to the dismantlement of the state’s power
to the profit of railroad companies. It despised all the monopolies that
had been handed to private individuals—and broke them up. It itself

5 The Convention: the revolutionary assembly which governed France from September
1789 to October 1795.
 1 THE SOCIALIST AND REPUBLICAN 5

carried out all major public works, through state resources, instead of
leaving them up to the financiers who have held France to ransom ever
since Louis-Philippe. The Convention ordered great public sanitation
projects, for which it was to be paid back by annuities paid by the owners.
With a boldness amazing for us today, it commissioned its architects to
rebuild the villages of France, at that time almost everywhere made up of
miserable huts.
The Revolution was socialist in its conception of property. Before the
unfortunate events of May 31,6 both Girondins and Montagnards made
a supreme effort to join together and discuss the new constitution of
the Republic. In an outstanding speech, Vergniaud demonstrated why the
French Republic should not restrict the rise of wealth, luxury, literature,
and all the joys of civilization; rather, it should be a new and greater
Athens without slaves. Robespierre also put his name to these views,
saying “We do not mean to proscribe opulence, but to make poverty
honourable”—meaning, to give the poor security and independence. But
at the same time, Girondins and Montagnards agreed that they could
not leave the economic relations between men up to the laws of chance
and strength alone. Together they approved decisive proposals, which
were definitively adopted after May 31 and became part of the 1793
Constitution.
Article 7: “Property is the right of each citizen to enjoy and dispose
of the share of goods guaranteed to him by law.” For the Convention,
therefore, property is above all not a natural fact, but a social fact, and
thus subjected to society’s supreme control.
Article 9: “The right to property may not impair either the security,
the freedom, the existence, or the property of others.” However, with
the development of mechanization and the gradual takeover of small
industries, i.e., small property by joint-stock capital, bearing enormous
impact on workers’ political and religious consciousness, it is obvious that
the current state and form of ownership in France no longer meet the
imperative conditions put forward by the Convention.
Article 11: “Society is obliged to provide for the subsistence of all
its members, either by providing them with work, or by guaranteeing
those unable to work the means of existence.” Such is the organization
of assistance and of work.

6 31 May 1793 (and 2 June) was marked by the fall of the Girondins, in favor of the
Montagnards Robespierre and Danton.
6 J.-N. DUCANGE AND E. MARCOBELLI

I have only barely touched on what is a vast subject. I think I have said
enough to show that the Revolution, in its free development from 1789
to 1795, was imbued with socialism; and that from the day when it broke
with the inconsistencies of the initial phase and the ill-fated attempt at
constitutional monarchy, and thus proclaimed a Republic, it gave explicit
formulation to the truths of socialism.
From this, I draw two conclusions. The first is that despite appearances
to the contrary, there is in France a great socialist party, which is the
party of the Revolution. And the second is that since socialism has been
inherent within the republican idea from the outset, the most absolutist
socialists work against their own interests when they isolate themselves
from the great Republican Party.
For my part, I feel closer by heart and by reason to a republican,
however moderate, who sees the Republic as not just the reality but the
basis of right, than to so-called socialists who do not uphold the Republic
or who remain aloof from the great Republican Party. Our goal should
not be to found socialist sects outside of the Republican majority, but
rather to bring the party of the Revolution to boldly, explicitly acknowl-
edge itself for what it is—a socialist party. Before long, it will be compelled
to do so.
La Dépêche, October 22, 1890.

For Dreyfus
This text, published at the height of the Dreyfus affair, commented among
other things on the decision by Henri Brisson’s government to refer the
Dreyfus trial of December 1894 to the Cassation Court. If Jaurès doubted
what result this might have, he considered the referral as a first step toward
truth. This preface to Les Preuves, a book in which he detailed his point of
view on the Dreyfus affair, was presented at a rally in October 1898.
I am putting together a book with the articles on the Dreyfus affair
published in La Petite République. First of all, I wish to thank the readers
of this newspaper for their indulgence as I delve into the details of this
complicated case, and for kindly following me along some rather long
chains of inferences.
It seems obvious that the proletariat no longer wants to stop at general
formulas. It has an overall conception of the evolution of society, and the
socialist idea sheds light on the path ahead of it. But it also wants a deep
 1 THE SOCIALIST AND REPUBLICAN 7

understanding—right down to the smallest nuts and bolts—of the mech-

anism driving the great events. It knows that if it does not unravel the
complicated intrigues of reaction, it will remain at the mercy of all manner
of demagogic lies. And by thwarting a plot in which Rochefort was the
Abbé Garnier’s accomplice, it has just proven its intellectual strength.7
For the proletariat to gain a comprehensive understanding, it must
grasp the general direction of the movement of the economy which leads
to socialism, and penetrate, through analysis, into the details of a complex
and moving reality. And from now on, the proletariat will be a force to
be reckoned with in all major national crises.
One first great result has been achieved. The review process has been
initiated and the case has now been presented before the Court of Cassa-
tion. But the battle is not over, and there is a great risk of being lulled
to sleep. The men who devised the dreadful trial against Picquard8 in
order to prevent the reopening of the case will undoubtedly resort to the
most shameless, most criminal initiatives, so as to disturb and distort the
current review procedure, to panic people and mislead public opinion.
To lay down our arms while they are engaging in the shadiest manoeu-
vres would be to betray the truth once again. It would also betray the
working class, against which the high military reaction would unleash its
full revenge. So, the battle continues.
We have no specific reason to doubt the good faith and courage of the
Court of Cassation with regard to the Dreyfus affair. It may very well be
that it understands the importance of its duty and its role, that it wants
to put the truth on display, to bring all the crimes and all the dishonor
into the light of day, to correct the mistakes and repress the violence of
military justice. But it may also come up against tough obstacles, and its
vigor may fail it. It will face two main difficulties. First, the terrain of
the Dreyfus affair is, so to speak, congested with inept and unfair judicial
decisions, which could stop or at least hinder the progress of the investi-
gation. Esterhazy was acquitted after a real judicial comedy; but at least he
was acquitted and it would probably be difficult to get him to come and

7 Henri Rochefort (1831–1913), a former communard at one time close to the socialists,
was now one of the figures most implacably opposed to Dreyfus. The Abbé Garnier
(1850–1920) was an antisemite hostile to the socialists.
8 The head of the army’s statistical bureau, and himself an antisemite, Picquart was
nonetheless convinced that Dreyfus was innocent. Sent abroad, he was arrested in July
1898 for having leaked secret documents, and thus became a Dreyfusard hero.
8 J.-N. DUCANGE AND E. MARCOBELLI

explain himself once more. Despite the overwhelming charges coming

from the Bertulus inquiry, the indictment court exonerated Esterhazy, du
Paty de Clam and Madame Pays of the “Speranza” forgery. The Court of
Cassation may have baulked at these strange judgments, yet it was obliged
to fundamentally confirm them and although for the Blanche forgery a
path to prosecution remains open, there is still a large block obstructing
the main road.
In the end, the military authorities captured Colonel Picquart by a
procedure which is Jesuitic, but maybe not literally illegal. It will doubtless
try, using the petit bleu [telegram], to keep the Dreyfus affair to itself, and
to oppose the review with a criminal but legal condemnation of Colonel
Picquart, strangled behind closed doors.
On the terrain that the Court of Cassation is meant to be combing,
there is no fragment of truth that is not covered by a judicial lie. Will the
Court of Cassation have the courage to disregard these legal lies—and
search for the truth? Will it manage to combine the legal function the
Code grants it with the almost revolutionary role granted it by events?
The Court of Cassation is the guardian of the law. But in this whole
affair thus far, the law, which has been applied so monstrously, has worked
against truth. Will the Court of Cassation be able to establish the truth
without offending the law? And will it dislodge Esterhazy and Du Paty
from the legal protection which governmental treachery provided for the
spy and the forger? Such is the first difficulty.
There is another one. The Court of Cassation will most certainly
discover some terrible truths during its investigation. The long series
of forgeries produced by the War Office could certainly not have been
fabricated without the complicity, or at least the indulgence, of the top
leaders. Moreover, we have clear proof of general Mercier’s misconduct
in communicating to the judges—in violation of the law—documents of
which the accused were not aware, even borrowing these documents from
a case other than the Dreyfus affair itself. The heaviest responsibilities
therefore lie with general Mercier.
Will the Court of Cassation have the energy to attack the great leaders,
the great culprits? And knowing that scrutiny is deadly to them, will it
dare to bring matters fully to light?
Once again, I do not mean to insult the Court of Cassation with these
words. It may well be that it rises above all fear, above all false caution,
and that it has the full courage to tell the whole truth.
 1 THE SOCIALIST AND REPUBLICAN 9

I am just saying that the continuing crimes of the army tops and
the long series of judicial lies have created such a terrible situation that
perhaps no organized force in today’s society could solve the problem
without the passionate backing of public opinion. What institution is left
standing? It has been proven that the courts-martial passed their judg-
ment in the most deplorably biased way. It has been proven that the
General Staff concocted dreadful forgeries in order to save the traitor
Esterhazy and that the army tops were in communion with treason,
through this type of forgery.
It has been proven that the public authorities, out of ignorance or
cowardice, have been dragged along behind this lie for three years.
It has been proven that civilian magistrates, from President Delegorgue
to Prosecutor Feuilloley,9 have worked to use procedural devices to cover
up military crimes.
And even universal suffrage itself, in its legal and parliamentary expres-
sion, has for too long done nothing but give these lies and fakes a national
institutional legitimacy.
So, what institutions are still left standing? There is only one left, and
it is France itself. For a moment, she was caught surprised. But she is
pulling itself together. And even if all the flames of official authority have
gone out, France’s clear common sense can still push back the night.
France—and she alone—can take charge of the review. By this, I mean
that all legal bodies, the Court of Cassation, the courts-martial, are now
incapable of telling the whole truth, unless the French conscience itself
daily demands the whole truth.
And that is why the citizens who have taken up the fight against the
violence and fraud perpetrated by military justice must not lay down their
arms. Rather, they must redouble their efforts to awaken and enlighten
the country. That is also why we are determined to provide the proletariat
with the arguments and proofs we have gathered.
Even many of those who initially opposed us were kind enough to tell
us how our demonstration had shaken their thinking. But a doubt kept
returning to their minds: how would it be possible, they asked, for seven
French officers to condemn another officer if they did not have robust
evidence? In truth, such a general argument would rule out any judicial

9 Two figures who made every effort to frustrate the review process.
10 J.-N. DUCANGE AND E. MARCOBELLI

mistake a priori. But it is wrong to say that there is always and in every
case such close solidarity between officers.
Yes, they do unite when they have to defend themselves against civilians
or ordinary soldiers. But there is a terrible competition between them in
terms of career, self-esteem and ambition. How many times generals have
betrayed each other even on the battlefield itself, so as not to let some
rival bask in the full lustre of victory!
And in recent years there has been fierce clan fighting within the army.
The clerical party, having lost the leadership of public administrations
and civil services during the republican period of the Republic, had taken
refuge in the army. There, the former ruling classes, the descendants of
Condé’s army, gathered in a closed and haughty caste. There, the influ-
ence of the Jesuits, patient and subtle recruiters for the top ranks of the
army, reigned sovereign. The watchword had become: close the door to
the enemy, to the republican, to the dissident, whether he is Protestant
or Jewish.
For years, the Catholic press had been reporting on the increasing
number of Jews entering the army via the Ecole Polytechnique or the
Ecole de Saint-Cyr. Drumont had kindled a sort of civil war against Jewish
officers.10 And now for the first time, a Jew entered the very core—the
General Staff. No doubt others will follow in his footsteps. And now the
intruder will put his feet under the table in the ancient domain which
the clerical aristocracy—at one point excluded from other functions—had
kept to itself.
We must put a stop to this scandal at once. Firstly, vague rumors
and loose theories are being put about. Why, they say, does the French
nation so imprudently welcome into the heart of its military institution
members of this accursed race, the treacherous people who, no longer
able to crucify God—withdrawn into the skies above—will now crucify
the country?
And as soon as it is noticed that documents are being leaked from the
High Command, furtive eyes turn toward the Jew: and how convenient
it would be, if he were the one! What a favor from Providence, what
a divine blessing it would be if treason had set into the first Jew who

10 Édouard Drumont (1844–1917) is one of the best-known exponents of antisemitism

in France. His book La France juive (1886) had a major impact, as did his newspaper La
Libre Parole.
 1 THE SOCIALIST AND REPUBLICAN 11

violated the sanctuary of the High Command by his mere presence! By

him and through him, all the others would be discredited forever.
And so, when Du Paty de Clam detected some sort of similarity
between the handwriting on the note and Dreyfus’s own handwriting, all
these sly hatreds, now having found their rallying point, surged forth—
and got organized. How far were Du Paty de Clam and Henry, the
two leaders of the Dreyfus trial, themselves the dupes of this onrush of
opinion? Were they warmly indulgent toward the general prejudice? Or
having taken the stance they had, were they fully conscious that they were
striking against an innocent man? The truth will be known to us only once
the investigation has been completed in full. We still cannot know for sure
what was the importance of this half-voluntary impulse, and what was the
share of scoundrel calculation.
But what is already certain is that, in the War Office, hearts and minds
had long been ready to condemn the Jew. And this probably the original
root of the error. But that was not enough. It also took the ambitious
stupidity of a mediocre and unfaithful minister. General Mercier, hesitant
at the beginning, was gradually dragged into this by a mixture of flattery
and threats.
This simple, presumptuous mind, who claimed he could solve the most
complicated technical problems, even without studying them, through his
mere “intuition as an artilleryman,” had been exhilarated by the applause
following his banal words to the Chamber. He thought that, through
the Dreyfus case, he could play a major role: beat down the Jews, save
France from treacherous dealings, gain the favor of the Church, and the
support of Rochefort, to rebuild the fortune Boulanger once enjoyed but
on stronger foundations.11 When his clerical entourage saw him looking
favorably on this idea, they rushed him into it by handing the newspapers
the name of the accused officer. Later on, L’Eclair bragged about how
difficult it had been to get his consent. But once he had taken this step,
when he had opened himself up to La Libre Parole, when he had staked
all his ministerial fortune on this one card, he wanted to win the hand at
all costs.

11 Boulanger (1837–1891): a French officer who caused a grave political crisis in the
Third Republic in the latter half of the 1880s. Wielding demagogic themes, he managed
to rally around his own person many who had been disappointed by Bonapartism and
monarchism and even some socialists. His rise was brought to a halt in 1889.
12 J.-N. DUCANGE AND E. MARCOBELLI

And when one adds to all this the stupidity of the army’s legal
personnel, and when one remembers Besson d’Ormescheville and
Ravary’s pathetic foolishness,12 one can imagine that the biggest clanger
could sprout in these tired brains.
As fate would have it, there was no artillery officer in the war council
which had to judge Dreyfus. An artillery officer might have pointed out to
the judges that the note includes details inconsistent with an artilleryman
being the author. In particular, there is a mistake that an artillery officer
could not have made—for the author of the note substituted the hydro-
pneumatic brake with the hydraulic brake. Nobody on the council did
manage to notify the judges. And, deliberating as they did on the basis
of the imperative communication of secret documents, they convicted in
the calmest of fashion.
Thus, we cannot be surprised by the conviction of the innocent
Dreyfus: so much force of error and crime contributed to his defeat that
it could almost have been taken for a miracle if he had escaped.
How can those who are surprised by Dreyfus’ conviction not find it
more astounding that deep into the nineteenth century, in the middle
of republican France, under a regime of public opinion and control, the
General Staff was secretly able to build up, for three years, the stack of
crimes that Henry’s confession brought to light?13 Yes, for three years,
as if it were in a deep shelter impenetrable to all light, the top ranks
of France’s army could create forgeries, and deploy all manner of lies,
and perhaps even distance themselves from them through the crime of
Lemercier Picard and Henry. If I may say so, it took an accident, an
outburst of light, for the normal functioning of this villainy to attract the
country’s suspicions.
This war fought with fake papers seems like a reproduction of the
sneaky war of poisoned chalices which the Italians fought in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. This is what is strange and surprising, and not
that innocent Dreyfus was convicted.
We must, therefore, set this kind of prejudice aside and look straight
at the facts. However, upon an examination of the facts, it is certain that
Dreyfus is innocent. The military tops could assert his guilt. As long as

12 The former was the officer responsible for the indictment during the first trial of
Dreyfus; the latter was rapporteur to the first war council in 1897, and responsible for
the indictment against Esterhazy, whom he entirely covered up for.
13 Colonel Henry, linked to Esterhazy, committed suicide in August 1898.
 1 THE SOCIALIST AND REPUBLICAN 13

they did so in general terms, their statement looked to be beyond discus-

sion. But as soon as they tried to clarify matters and produce evidence,
that evidence collapsed. Whenever they delve into this famous dossier,
they pull some piece of foolishness or forgery to the surface of this myste-
rious well. Should we believe, perhaps, that some spell has been cast on
them? All the sticks they rely on break in their hands: the wood is rotten.
And when the reviewing starts and the trial is reopened in broad daylight,
it will be difficult—or rather, impossible—for the General Staff to draw
up an indictment, and it will itself plunge into the void.
And so the army tops, now giving up any hope of uncovering serious
charges against Dreyfus, but helped by the weakness of the rulers and the
sneaky complicity of the Elysée, attempted a last diversion by trying to
discredit and cast off Colonel Picquart.
Hence the monstrous accusation of forgery made against him, with
regard to the “petit bleu” document. We had already responded to this
accusation in advance, in the series of articles today gathered in this
volume. I only add, in this short preface, that this villainous conspiracy
has been prepared for a long time. Of course, the General Staff itself finds
this risky. As long as it hoped to escape and prevent the review without
resorting to this supreme villainy, it put it on hold—and only when the
threatening review was already upon it, did it strike this desperate blow.
But it had thought about it and held it in reserve for a while. The
two counterfeiters, Henry and Du Paty, had been preparing the accusa-
tion of forgery against Picquart for quite some time. It first appeared in
Henry’s letter to Colonel Picquart in June 1897, in which he spoke of
“the attempt to bribe two officers of the service to make them say that a
classified document in the service was in the writing of a certain person-
ality.” Henry, who had already fabricated the false letter against Dreyfus,
was now preparing false testimonies against Picquart.
Lauth’s depositions,14 both so perfidious and so incoherent, bore the
mark of unfinished coaching.
Then, in November 1897, there was the fake Blanche dispatch in which
Esterhazy and Du Paty told Colonel Picquart: “We have evidence that the
petit bleu was fabricated by Georges.” Thus, the accusation of forgery
started to be ventured within a document that was itself a forgery; a
forgery served as a nest for a lie that was still in its teething phase. But

14 Henry’s deputy.
14 J.-N. DUCANGE AND E. MARCOBELLI

then, a terrible question was posed to the liars and the forgers: why did
you not officially denounce Colonel Picquart from the outset?
At Esterhazy’s trial in January 1898, when it was necessary to save
the Uhlan at all costs, the illustrious Ravary tried in his report to cast
a doubt on the authenticity of this document. But now the question
became even more crucial: Esterhazy was accused of treason. The former
head of the intelligence service claims to have received from his agents
a document establishing a suspicious relationship between Esterhazy and
Mr. de Schwarzkoppen.15
If this document is a fake, Esterhazy is the victim of the most abom-
inable conspiracy. If it is authentic, there is a serious presumption against
him. The first duty of investigators and judges is, therefore, to clarify the
authenticity of the petit bleu. But instead they are content with perfidious
insinuations. They do not dare to officially declare this document a fake
when they know that it is authentic. They simply discredit it with hints
and innuendoes. Never before did a more heinous conspiracy spread more
cynically.
So, before again taking up more thoroughly the discussion on this
miserable accusation, we will wait to see if the General Staff persists in
this manoeuvre. It is so repulsive to engage in sincere discussion with the
organizers of such an ambush, that we have chosen to postpone the new
and fundamental discussion that we could well provoke.
It would be easy for us to prove with Mr. Lauth’s own words the
falseness of several parts of his testimony and the authenticity of the petit
bleu. But we want to wait for the General Staff to pull out the new fake
documents it has presumably fabricated for this last-gasp attempt.
For the time being, it will be enough to warn citizens once again, that
they must not allow Colonel Picquart to be tried behind the scenes. All
we ask for is that he faces the accusations in broad daylight. We do not
demand anything else; we are sure that the infamy of his accusers will
burst out into the open. Nothing else behind closed doors! This is the
republicans’, all honest people’s watchword. May it be our battle cry! And
we shall win through the power of light alone. And our great generous
France, once again facing the powers of reaction and darkness, will have
earned the merit of the human race.

15 Military attache to the German embassy, he had become connected to Esterhazy in

1894 before breaking with him two years later.
 1 THE SOCIALIST AND REPUBLICAN 15

Les Preuves, foreword, September 29, 1898.

“Collectivism and the Peasants”

One of the main arguments against the socialists consisted of accusing
them of wanting to attack all property without distinction, including small
peasant holdings. It is true that socialists had long considered that the devel-
opment of capitalism would favor the concentration of property ownership,
the first necessary step toward socialization, and thus it was backward-
looking to seek to oppose this process. Nonetheless, at the Nantes Congress of
the French Workers’ Party in 1894, both Jaurès and Paul Lafargue upheld
the need to defend small peasant property (“the small field is the peasant’s
too, just like the trying plane for the joiner or the scalpel for the surgeon”).
This angered Friedrich Engels, over the border in Germany, but years later
Jaurès returned to this idea, elaborating his outlook on this question.
It would seem that socialism’s opponents are starting to give up on
calling us “sharers.”16 The notion that they attributed to us was so
absurd that they met with nothing but outright disbelief. First, because
the sharing would have to be started again from scratch, day after day.
Further, the tendency of science and big industry is not to divide produc-
tion into smaller pieces, but, on the contrary, to create vast organizations,
huge factories, and railway networks that span entire countries. The idea
of sharing everything out into individual parts, of fragmentation, goes
against civilization itself. Finally, because the peasants whom they were,
essentially, trying to frighten and to set against us with this talk of sharing
and sharers, soon came up with quite a simple little piece of reasoning. If
land is, indeed, at issue, then whom is it to be shared between?
The land workers, the day laborers, the sharecroppers’ sons, and even
small landowners’ sons are leaving the countryside behind to go to the
city, to the factories, where wages are higher. But on what possible
grounds would anyone assume that the socialists’ intention is to draw the
workers back to the countryside, luring them with a piece of land from
which all they would harvest is misery and suffering? No, this would be
too absurd—and they are having to give up on imputing us such foolish
thoughts. So, now they are trying to scare the peasants with collectivism.

16 “Partageux,” referring to the idea that socialists wanted to share everything, including
properties, equally; the term was used by conservatives to frighten the peasants and turn
them away from socialism.
16 J.-N. DUCANGE AND E. MARCOBELLI

I admit there is some improvement in the discussion, for the question will
be drawn into sharper focus. So, they tell farmers: “Collectivists want the
state to seize all properties; therefore, they want the state to seize all land.
Which means collectivism will take the peasant’s land from him.”
I must answer this right away, in the most categorical and absolute
terms: “No, collectivists do not want to take away the peasants’ land.”
I could simply answer: “if collectivism took their land away from them,
what use would it have for it? Whom would it give it to? Who would it
get to work the land? As soon as the little holdings had been taken from
the peasant proprietors, it would be necessary to hand them straight back,
only too glad to have someone to keep on working them.”
Yes, I could settle for this common-sense reply. But I should elab-
orate further. First of all, it is wrong to say that collectivism wants to
transfer all property, including industrial properties, to the state. Rather,
what we are talking about transferring is big capitalist property—that
property which has concentrated capital and men into large companies
and separated property from labor. Nobody today—among the Radicals
at least—is scandalized at the idea of the state taking over the bank,
the railways and the mines; why not accept that this transformation of
large capitalist companies into public services should extend to all large
capitalist companies, such as glassworks, blast furnaces, sugar mills, large
textiles factories, refineries, etc., etc., which by their growing scale are
taking on an ever more social aspect? I cannot fathom how come the
Radicals, after accepting state control over a number of large capitalist
companies, can be scared off by the notion of socialization extending
further. Perhaps they will argue that the Radical program talks only about
a buy-out of the mines and railways, and that the Socialists instead talk
about expropriation without compensation?
But first of all, if this does appear as a very important issue for a
whole category of people, it does not affect the ultimate functioning of
the social system. Even with the more or less heavy or long burden of
paying compensation, public service, social service, would still end up
replacing capitalist enterprise. Secondly, it is absolutely wrong to say that
socialism has taken sides on the issue of such compensation. Marx often
said, Engels tells us, that the “Social Revolution,” i.e., the transforma-
tion of capitalist property into social property, would be achieved at the
lowest possible price if a compensation was granted to the current owners
of capital. By this, he meant that a kind of amiable arrangement between
the new and sovereign force of the proletariat and the abolished capitalist
Other documents randomly have
different content
 CIRCUS TENT AND CIRCUS GROUNDS

Material Required to Make a Circus Tent: a round bandbox

and a sheet of cardboard.

Material Required to Make Circus Cages: three or four

hardware boxes from three to five inches long. A booth may be
made from half of a flat letter-paper box. Some cotton mosquito-
netting will be the cage bars.

A circus tent is a very easy thing to make. It needs nothing but a

sheet of cardboard and the lower half of a round bandbox to make
it. The lower half of the bandbox must be turned over to stand upon
its rims. This forms the sides of the circus tent. The roof is cut from
a large circle of cardboard.
First, arrange the box to make sides for the tent. Then, cut the
roof.
In the edge of the bandbox rim, cut out a piece of cardboard the
shape of tent canvas looped back to make an entrance. Draw some
folds upon this with blue pencil. If you prefer, use your water-color
paints instead.
When this is done, glue across the top of your bandbox some
strips of string to form tent ropes. The roof of the tent, round and
pointed, may next be made.
Take a large sheet of cardboard and draw upon it a circle that is
half again as large around as the base of your bandbox. Cut this out.
Cut from the circle a quarter piece like the slice of a pie. (See
Diagram Three, D, page 171.) Lap the cut sides of this three-quarter
circle, and glue together to make a pointed roof like that of a circus
tent. When the roof is dry, slip it upon the top of the hat-box, and
your circus tent is done.
If you find some corrugated cardboard, it may be slightly curled
and pressed so that it will stand on its rim, to make a board fence
for the circus enclosure. Of course, you must have a fence! Of
course!
Hardware boxes that come with covers double and close telescope
fashion make very good circus cages. To make these cages, you will
need to cut top and bottom from the boxes, leaving rims only. You
may, if you wish, keep a very narrow margin of rim around the top
and bottom cutting of your box. Paste strips of coarse netting, like
cotton mosquito netting, over each opening of the box. It should be
glued inside the box from side to side. This makes bars for the
cages. (For cutting a box to make a cage, see Diagram Eight, page
182.)
Wheels may be added to the cages, so that the animals may go
out on parade. The wheels are small circles cut from cardboard.
There should be four for each cage, of course. When they are cut
out from the cardboard, fasten each through its center to the base
of a cage by a round-headed paper-fastener. The prongs of the
paper-fastener should be bent to right and left inside the covers of
the box. This holds wheels firm. If you have no paper-fasteners, sew
the wheels to your box with raffia, or glue them to your box.
A booth for the circus grounds may be made from a box about
three or four inches in size. Stand the box on its long side. Cut in its
back an awning. The awning is made first by drawing an oblong
space upon the back of the box, cutting this outline down at each
side line and across its base. The cardboard is then pressed outward
and upward to make the awning. (See Diagram One, C, page 166,
for cutting awning.) Color the awning with red stripes.
 Side-show tents for circus grounds are made like the tents of
Camp Box. (See Diagram Three, E, page 171, for cutting the rim of a
shallow box and bending it to make a tent.)
All toy figures that you can muster—tumble toys, wooden dolls,
penny dolls, Noah’s Ark ladies, shepherds and shepherdesses, should
go to Box Brothers’ Circus on the play-room floor. If you look among
your toys, you will find animals for the circus, I know. They may
even be animals cut from old magazine pictures.

One day I made a circus

(A bandbox was the tent),
I advertised in Boxville,
But it didn’t cost a cent!

The penny dolls of Boxville

Turned out on Circus Day!
I made pretend sell peanuts,
And I tell you, it was gay!
 BOXTOWN ZOO GARDEN

Material Required to Make a Boxtown Zoo: some shoe-

boxes, their covers, strips of cardboard or toothpicks to make bars
for cages.

A zoo is really a splendid thing to make. You can cage all your wild
animals—Noah’s Ark animals, or whatever other ones you may
happen to have. The cotton animals that are bought in Japanese
stores, “three for five,” are just right for zoo animals. You can buy
chenille monkeys, one for a penny, at the toy shops.

This is Boxtown Zoo. Its cages are cut from shoe-boxes. Box rims are
used to make enclosures for the animals.
 Boxtown’s Hose House. It is made from a deep square box. The roof is
the cover of another box.

When you start to build your zoo, the cages will be made from
boxes. Cut out a large square from each side of the rim. Toothpicks
make bars for cages. They will need to be pressed down: through
the top of the box over openings you cut in the box rims. If you
have no toothpicks, you may make bars for the cages by pasting
very narrow strips of paper or cardboard inside the box cages over
the openings in the box rims. (For cutting a zoo cage, see Diagram
Eight, page 182.)
Dens for animals are boxes that have their covers taken off. These
boxes must be turned over to stand on their upper rims. Doors are
cut in the edge of box rims, as you see them in the picture.
Rims cut from box covers make fences for enclosures.
Little box covers make feeding-troughs.
“Do not worry the animals!” This is the rule of all zoos.
I have a lion, and a bear,
I have a tiger, too!
A monkey, and a “nelephant,”
And so I made a zoo!

I put a tiger in a cage,

An’, if you’re good to-day,
I’ll show you how I made it,
For it’s lots of fun to play.
 BOXTOWN HOSE HOUSE

Material Required for Making a Hose House: a box deep and

square, about six or seven inches long, and the shallow square cover
of some larger box.

If you own a toy fire-engine or a hook and ladder, there is every

reason why it should have a home. The engine-house that you see
in the picture is made from a deep, square box. It is quickly made by
cutting a square doorway in one side of the box rim and by adding a
flat roof.
Turn your box over so that it rests inverted upon its rims. Outline a
three- or four-inch square on one end of your box. Its base must
come at the edge of your cardboard box rim.
Draw a line down the center of this square, vertically. Cut with
scissors up this line and across the top line. This gives two doors,
that should be pressed outward against the sides of your box. (See
Diagram Two, B, page 167, for making the double doorway.)
Place over the top of the box the cover of a larger box, and the
hose house will be finished. Why, it took you no time at all to do
that, did it? Let’s see how the toy engine looks inside its new
building!

I have a little engine,

And it clangs across the floor
Right into Boxville Hose House,
Where they’ve opened wide its door.
 HOW TO MAKE A WIGWAM

Material Required to Make the Wigwam: half a round

bandbox cover and a few small sticks or pencils.

Why, of course, you may make an Indian wigwam! It will take

about two minutes to make one like this one in the picture. With it,
you may play all kinds of Indian plays. It will be ever such fun! You
will need half an old bandbox cover to help make the wigwam. The
cover must be a round one.
One bandbox cover will make two wigwams. Cut the cover into
halves. Take one of these and lap its edges to form a cone. Glue or
sew these edges together.
Cut off the point of the cone. This makes the opening at top of the
wigwam.
The Indian Wigwam is cut from half of a round bandbox cover.

This is Fort Box. It is made from a deep box and its cover.
 In the rim of the bent bandbox cone, cut a flap, and bend this
back against the outer side of the tent. Stand the tent up upon its
broad base, and there will be its entrance. Small sticks or thin
pencils may be thrust through the top to make tent sticks. Indian
symbols may be painted on the sides of the tent.
I had an Indian doll, Big Chief Ten-Cent Store. He came in a canoe
made of wood. I made a green woods for him out of crape paper,
and he lived near a silver paper spring upon my play-room floor in
his home.
All the toy animals that I have played in the woods and Big Chief
Ten-Cent Store hunted them. There was a deer that came off our
Christmas tree, and a whole family of china bunnies, and—and you
just ought to see him on the trail of Noah’s Ark animals! And—and
you ought to see the lovely mats that are inside the Indian’s tent. I
made them at Kindergarten myself.

By the shores of Abigmirror,

By the shining of its water,
Stood the wigwam of Big Box Chief,
Builded from a half a bandbox.
Dark behind it rose a mountain
Made of paper-covered boxes:
There were pebble rocks upon it,
Caverns where Big Box Chief hunted.
 FORT BOX

Material Required to Make a Box Fort: a deep, square box

with its cover. A round hair-pin box and a spool will make a cannon
for the fort.

Would you like to make a fort for your leaden soldiers? Shall I tell
you how to do it? If your soldiers are small, a box three inches deep
may answer for the building. Its cover forms ramparts of the fort.
To start the building of your fort, turn your box over upon its rims
so that its base becomes the top of the building. Take the box cover
off and lay it aside.
Find a pencil and mark the openings for guns. They are made like
windows upon the box front. Draw each about a half-inch square,
and use your ruler to make each opening even. Cut these squares
out, if you wish. They may also be painted black, should you prefer
not to cut them out.
To add ramparts to the building, take the cover of your box and
make a pencil mark upon its rim every half-inch all the way around.
Cut sections from the rim, as marked, every other half-inch. Turn the
box with its rim upward and glue it to the top of your box. (For
making ramparts, see Diagram Three, page 172.)
At the back of the fort, you may easily devise a sallyport by
cutting the cardboard door shaped. (For cutting a door, see Diagram
Two, A, page 167.)
 A toy cannon may be made with a small round hair-pint box by
pasting it upon the side of a spool between the wheels of the spool.
A thumb-tack pressed beneath one wheel of the cannon will keep it
upright and prevent rolling. I painted my guns black. If you like, you
may easily do this with water-color paints.
An encampment of tents may be made from small white box
covers cut through each long side rim up to the top of the cover and
bent, to each side of the center downward. (See Diagram Three, E,
page 171, for making a tent.)
If you happen to have a penny flag, it will be just the very thing to
wave over Fort Box.
You can arrange your fort upon a sheet of crape paper and make
streams and woods all about it. The streams will be strips of silver
paper pasted onto the green crape paper. The woods will be bits of
twigs pressed into the holes of spools so that the trees stand
upright. Bushes are just bits of twigs that may be laid down flat.
Rocks and mountains may be made from stones.

I had a leaden soldier,

His name was Tommie Tin!
Oh, he was brave in battle,
And always fought to win!

I made him into general,

And he is in command
Of all my Boxville Army
At Box Fort in Boxland.
 HOW TO BUILD A TOY CASTLE AND A FAIRYLAND
HOUSE

Material Required to Make a Castle: any box, either round or

square—one at least six or seven inches deep is best.

Material Required to Make a Fairyland House: an oblong box

deep enough for door and windows to be cut in its sides, a few little
crackers or “goodies”—possibly some gilt or silver paper in place of
these.

Have you ever played in fairyland? Well, if you have not been
there, you can very well make a fairyland upon the play-room floor,
and in it you may gather together all the people of your Red, and
Blue, and Green, and Yellow Fairy Books. These people will be
Knights, and Princesses, Witches, Goblins, Fairies. All are toys, and it
is an easy matter to get them together—quite as easy as it is to
make a fairyland castle.
I will tell you how. First, you may like to build the castle, for that is
all-important. There never yet was a fairyland without that!
Find some deep box with its cover. It really matters little whether
the box is round or square-sided. A round box will make a high
tower-like castle similar to the one in the picture. A square one will
make one more like a fortress. It scarcely matters which you choose.
Take the cover from your box. This is to form the castle ramparts
later. High up in the box rim cut one or two long tower windows. Cut
a door at the base of the rim. Next cut the ramparts in the box
cover. (For cutting ramparts, see Diagram Three, F, page 172.) Glue
these to the top of your castle box—and the castle is made!
The Princess who lives in the Castle is a penny doll dressed in a
silver robe (made of tinfoil). My Princess has golden hair. It is long
and beautiful. You can see it in the picture.
The Knight is a leaden soldier. His spear is a bit of wire. His shield
is a brass button, polished and shining.
You can easily find the proper kind of dragon at a little Japanese
shop. Mine was made of crockery and cost ten cents, but you will
surely find among the cotton animals that are sold three for five
cents something far better than my crockery dragon. There are the
most dragon-like of cotton animals at the Japanese stores where I
buy penny toys. Sometimes they are spidery and sometimes they
are like crocodiles—only they aren’t crocodiles but DRAGONS. When
you go to a Japanese shop and look for penny animals you will know
exactly what I mean. They are all queer, and will work into any
fanciful fairy tale that you wish to play with your castle.
Don’t forget to make the dragon a lair, when you have bought
him. It may be just a box with a hole in it for the mouth of a den,
but if you have some pretty stones and pebbles, you can build a real
lair on the play-room floor with these.
Almost any fairy tale may be acted out with the Knight and the
Princess. Little toys which you have among your playthings may help
out. I know you will have a good time playing at fairyland. I did.
I built me a Hansel and Gretel house, too. This was to help with
my fairyland play.
Hansel and Gretel were two tumble toys—a boy and a girl. Their
home was in a Boxville Cottage. When they went to the woods and
found the Witch’s House, I made that. It was in a forest of clothes-
pins like the trees made for Camp Box.
I made the fairyland house of the Witch from a deep oblong box. I
cut two windows in one rim and a door between them, as you see it
in the picture of the fairyland house.
To the sides of the house, I pasted some little crackers and
goodies. The roof of the house was of crackers. It was very fairy.
I used some pretzels for a fence around it.
There were some small celluloid dolls among my playthings, and I
made fairies of them. You can see one that is a Daisy. Her dress is
an artificial flower off my old hat. I took the center out of the daisy
and made a skirt of the petals. The fairy’s wings were cut from white
tissue-paper. They were glued to the back of her body.
All kinds of Halloween figures that are little favors will answer
splendidly for this fairy boxcraft play. You can easily find dwarfs,
gnomes, goblins, witches, elves. Oh, it will be fun, I know!
A Fairyland Castle made from a round box and its cover.

A Fairy House made of a box covered with goodies.

 Building Blocks and Box Building with small boxes.]

Building Animals and Box People from a collection of boxes.

 In summer you can go out into the garden and gather hollyhocks.
The flowers make real little flower ladies—just like fairies dressed up
in red, and pink, and white dresses to go to a party. The buds of the
hollyhocks make the heads for the ladies, and you just stick a pin
through these and press it down at the base of the full blown flower
to make the fairy lady. Acorns make fairy dishes too—did you ever
happen to know that!

Once there lived a dolly princess, with soft, flaxen, curly hair,
By a cruel spell imprisoned near a Chinese dragon’s lair.
Day and night her pasteboard tower, dragon-guarded, you’ll agree,
Offered ill to those in Toyland who would set the Princess free.
Many little dolls essayed it—in a truly frightful way
They were gobbled by the dragon one and all, I hate to say!
But there came a leaden soldier, all in tinfoil armor dressed;
Bravely on his steed he bore him, valiant, in his chosen quest.
At his blow, the green tin dragon toppled over, vanquished quite,
And the rescued dolly princess was set free, then, by her Knight.
King and Queen, they reign in Playtown even to this very day,
And they live forever happy, as the fairy stories say!
 BOXES USED AS BLOCKS

Material Required for Block Building: an assortment of boxes

varied in size and shape.

Building with blocks is always fun, as you know. You have tried it
with cubes, and with dominoes, and with cards—but did you ever try
to build with boxes in the same way?
The boxes do not need to be glued. Their covers may or may not
be used. Small boxes make walls, and box covers form roofs. You
will see a tall block building in the picture. It was made from small
drug-store boxes. There is really no end to the ways in which you
may build with these.
From boxes of uneven size, men and animals may be made.
Round boxes or small oblong boxes form heads. Larger boxes make
bodies. Legs and arms are boxes of equal size.
The faces are drawn with pencil upon the back of boxes where
there is no print. A wire hair-pin will keep the arms in place. It will
need to be pressed through the box sides and bent so that the arm
boxes may be slipped upon it. Men of all sorts may be made. There
is great variety, as forms vary with the shape and size of boxes that
you use.
If you are playing with some other child, you will find that it is
amusing to divide your store of boxes, each choosing one at a time
till the supply is exhausted. Then, you may each see how many
different things you can build. It will be a game, and the winner will
be the one who can make the most with his store.
 It is entertaining to play with box animals and box men when you
have to spend a day in bed. They may be placed upon a table near
the bedside. They are light to handle, and they require no cutting or
pasting to muss you up. If you decide to have measles or mumps,
the little boxes may be disposed of easily after you have played with
them. You can always find new ones to take their place when you
are well again.
You may make a puzzle for yourself out of a large box and a
number of smaller boxes of varied size. Try to pack as many boxes
as you can into the large box. Make them come as evenly as you can
in packing. There will be some space at sides, but with care and
thought you will be surprised to see how small a space they may be
packed into. Try them in various forms, till you are sure you have
reached the best way to arrange them. Then, give the box puzzle to
some friend to see if he can do with one or two attempts what you
have accomplished. When you give some person this puzzle, mix
your boxes well so there is no clue to their proper arrangement
inside the larger box.
Toys like trains may be built with little more than a long cracker
box for a coach and some oblong box for engine. The engine’s
smoke-stack is a round box. Its coal-car is a cover taken from a
candy box. Its wheels are buttons or button molds placed on the
ends of wire hair-pins that have been pressed through the sides of
the cardboard boxes. A bit of wax or plasticine will keep the wheels
in place.
Paste boxes to the back of your cut-outs when you buy these
sheets at the penny store. The Indians, cowboys, soldiers, and
animals will then stand erect by themselves.
 A Toy Train that is built from boxes. Its wheels are button molds.

Cut-out Pictures may be made to stand when glued to small boxes.

You will have an interesting time, I am sure, in finding new ways

to use your boxes in this kind of play. It is always new, for you may
always find different kinds of boxes to adapt to the building. And the
nice thing about it is that you can make almost anything you choose.
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