shared life in public spaces.
What use these ideas might have under modern conditions has never been self-evident. Classical republicanism assumed independent cities with a stability of culture and economy, not to mention a scale of social life that has long since become unavailable. By the end of the nineteenth century, the French word “république” had its own complex relationship to modern upheaval. When the First French Republic was declared in 1792, “république” meant, above all, a regime in which the sovereignty of the monarch had been overthrown and had been replaced by the sovereignty of “la nation,” the people as a whole. The close association between “république” and “révolution” continued through the series of uprisings and regimes—empires, monarchies, and the Second Republic of 1848 to 1852—that followed. “République” came to mean not only the people ruling, but also the people rebelling; it meant violent and disruptive acts by the people en masse, as well as the state of affairs those acts were intended to create.
The Third Republic was something different. When Emperor Napoléon III was captured by the Prussians in the summer of 1870, France’s previously weak National Assembly became the country’s only available government. The Assembly called for elections, after which a new National Assembly was to decide what sort of regime would govern France. In the meantime, the National Assembly would serve as a provisional parliament in what amounted to a provisional republic. But when the monarchist majority in the new National Assembly found itself unable to unite around a single royal house, the provisional republic remained in place. Patiently, the republican minority managed the country’s affairs, outlasted the internecine fights among the monarchist factions, and negotiated a peace with Prussia. In 1875, a new election gave the republicans enough seats in the National Assembly to establish, by a one-vote margin, a new set of governing institutions: a Chamber of Deputies and a Senate, a cabinet, a prime minister, and a president of the Republic. The provisional government had become a permanent government, not through a dramatic uprising but through an unheroic combination of political gambits, competent governance, and good luck.12
“République” now meant a regime that was anything but revolutionary. In fact, the militants of the Paris Commune, who briefly created a radical urban democracy in the spring of 1871, had been among the first foes of the nascent republic. Adolph Thiers, one of the Third Republic’s early leaders, spoke frankly: “The Republic will be conservative, or it will not be.”13
This was the “Republic” that Jaurès and his friends at the École normale supérieure knew and supported, the Republic that the student Jaurès endorsed when he became, according to the reminiscences of a friend, “a republican in the style of Ferry and the Opportunists of 1880.”14 Jules Ferry, along with Léon Gambetta, led a faction of republicans who wanted to consolidate the institutions of the new republic while putting off unwinnable or controversial social reforms until more opportune times. Their opponents thus named them the “Opportunists.” Ferry and the Opportunists were men of the Enlightenment tradition; they saw free thought and public debate as weapons against outmoded dogmas and as tools for building a modern republic. At the same time, they were in at least one sense republicans in the classical style: they thought of civic education—that is, the moral formation of a citizenry capable of self-government—as an essential element in the constitution of a republic. Thus, once the structure of the parliament, cabinet, and presidency had been settled, the Opportunists turned their attention to local government, to public education, and to citizens’ freedom of association.15
In 1881, just before he completed his studies, Jaurès began his involvement in political life. He joined a committee of Paris republicans, mainly Opportunists, that met to nominate a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies.16 Jaurès would not be long in the city, however. After finishing third in that year’s aggregation—the competitive exam for École graduates seeking teaching positions—he requested a position as professeur at a lycée near Albi, where he would be only 25 miles from his parents. He left Paris that summer to take up his teaching duties.17
Jaurès’s lectures at Albi take up themes that he would later develop. Because mind and matter act on each other “in constant rapport,” Jaurès taught his students, “we cannot understand the essence of matter without the essence of mind, and the reverse as well.”18 Made of mind and matter, human beings are obligated to uphold the dignity of the individual person, as Immanuel Kant had demonstrated: “In the individual we see one man, one example of human life in its ceaseless flux, one form and incarnation of the human person from which we must displace suffering and degradation” (PTA, 102).
Along with Kant, Jaurès worried that human beings rarely obey the moral law for its own sake: “It commands, and we do not listen to it.” Because of the rapport of mind and matter, Jaurès proposed, if we are to obey the moral law, we need not only the rational conviction regarding morality that Kant had described, but also a “feeling of duty,” a deep sensation of moral obligation that is to the human personality “as the core of the trunk is to the tree” (PTA, 90).
Asking how someone might acquire this moral feeling, Jaurès found himself turning toward public life. In 1882, only months after he arrived at Albi, Jaurès wrote his École classmate Charles Salomon that he might run for the Chamber of Deputies in 1885 if a seat was open: “When I shall have fathomed the depths of the universe, I will have to come back to the surface. . . . I tell you, my dear friend, that instead of taking me away from politics, my studies push me into it.” Jaurès began to attend meetings of the local republican club. After his father died in the spring of 1882, Jaurès no longer felt bound to remain in Albi. He found a position teaching philosophy at the University of Toulouse and moved there, bringing his mother with him, in the fall of 1883. He began to write articles for the local republican journal, La Dépêche de Toulouse, and won notice as a public speaker eager to defend the Republic against its critics. In 1885, he asked the Toulouse republicans to include him on their list of candidates for the Chamber. They agreed. Jaurès’s political career had begun.19
Republicans and socialists won 383 seats in the Chamber of Deputies in the 1885 elections, against 201 for the monarchists and Bonapartists of the Right. This meant a continued left majority in the Chamber, to be sure, but a narrowed majority: the Right had almost doubled the number of its seats since 1881, and its partisans remained unreconciled to the Republic. Although the basic institutions of the Republic had been in place for nearly a decade now, the regime’s stability was still in question. One reason why the Left’s candidates did not win as many seats as they had in 1881 was that the republicans were now divided into two loosely organized parties. Once republicans had to govern, they faced decisions about how to use their power, and such decisions are hardly ever simple. Ferry’s Opportunists were now met with bitter criticism from republicans who called themselves “Radicals” (or, in some cases, “Radical-Socialists”). The Radicals, led by Georges Clemenceau, deputy from and former mayor of the commune of Montmartre, differed from the Opportunists in both style and program. Enamored of the French Revolution, the Radicals saw themselves as latter-day Jacobins fighting for the purity of the Republic, and they disdained those who did not share their sense of urgency. They objected to the Opportunists’ policy of imperial expansion, and they insisted on immediate social reforms such as a progressive income tax, the introduction of pensions, the nationalization of the railroads, and limits on the length of the working day and on child labor. “Everything all at once,” sneered the Opportunists.20
There were only about half a dozen deputies in the Chamber of 1885 who could properly be called “socialists.” French socialism was eclectic, and the socialists were even more fractious than their republican colleagues. Different from one another in mood and in strategy, these groups were nevertheless recognizable as members of the same political family. For socialists of that generation, “socialism” (or “communism” or “social democracy”—at this point, the terms were more or less interchangeable) meant a commitment to replacing the existing society with an utterly different social order based on mutuality, community, and cooperation.
