institutions like upper legislative chambers and standing armies. They wanted what the revolutionaries of 1848 had called “la république démocratique et sociale.”21 But most nineteenth-century socialists also made a qualitative distinction between their proximate and their ultimate goals. Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto—a document with a modest but increasing number of enthusiasts—promised that in time “the public power will lose its political character.”22 Or, in the words of Eugène Pottier’s “L’Internationale,” the movement’s anthem:
The world shall rise on new foundations;
We are naught, let us be all.
This is the final struggle.23
These were aspirations that pushed beyond the bounds of politics. Democratic in practice, the nineteenth-century socialists drew previously voiceless members of the working class into political action. For many socialists, however, their democratic practices seemed no more than means to the end of a society in which political action and political movements would no longer be needed.
The first French socialist party had been organized in 1879, as the exiled revolutionaries of the Paris Commune returned; by 1885, there were at least five socialist groups. Although Marxism was an increasingly prominent tendency among socialists in some parts of Europe—most notably in Germany—Marx’s ideas were but one current among several within French socialism. The series of revolutions in France from 1789 to 1830 to 1848, the memory of the Paris Commune, and the utopians of the early nineteenth century—especially Proudhon, with his vision of a federation of local democracies—all informed and inspired French socialists.24
That is not to say that Marxism was unimportant in France. The Parti ouvrier français (POF), led by Jules Guesde, was the largest and most organizationally coherent of the French socialist groups. Anomalous within the freewheeling French Left, the POF fiercely defended its rigid catechism of Marxist doctrines. Its style was marked by disdain for compromise, skepticism toward the institutions of the Republic, and unshakable confidence in the prospect of revolution. For Guesde and the POF, Marxism meant class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and the promise of a dramatic break between capitalism and the socialist system that would succeed it.
Quite different from the Parti ouvrier français in outlook was the small group of “independent socialists” influenced by the writings of Benoît Malon, a veteran of Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association and of the Paris Commune (where he was a Proudhonian dissenter against the Jacobin majority). Malon wanted to turn the moral impulse of French utopian socialism toward what he called the “reformist” and “experimental” process of change that was now possible within the Third Republic.25 Aside from Malon’s circle of followers, the Marxists’ main rival among the socialist factions was a group led by Paul Brousse, labeled by Guesde the “Possibilists” for their interest in advancing the class struggle bit by bit and by any means possible. Indeed, it may have been Brousse who invented the term “Marxist” as an unfriendly label for his opponents in the POF.
To both Malon and Brousse, the Guesdists of the Parti ouvrier français seemed slavish followers of an authoritarian—and, worse, a foreign—thinker. As one associate of Malon wrote, Marxism was “essentially un-French,” mired in German “local prejudices,” and utterly lacking the “flexibility” and “passion” of French political thought.26 Moreover, the Guesdists’ insistence that socialism was the inevitable result of historical processes left socialists without an intellectual guide to the complicated work of achieving reforms that might be immediately possible. Other smaller groups of French socialists—followers of Auguste Blanqui, who dreamed of a revolutionary conspiracy led by a small band of devotees, or of Jean Allemane, who wanted a revolutionary movement composed solely of real workers with “calloused hands”—added their own criticisms of the POF’s Marxism, but the common refrain was that Marxism, in addition to being a German import, seemed to lead its followers into a closed world of military-style party discipline and deterministic thinking, in which the lessons of France’s revolutionary past and the benefits of life in a republic were forgotten.27
The newly elected Jaurès had little interest in any of these socialist groups. He found them self-marginalizing and simplistic, and he thought that none of them understood the importance of consolidating recent republican achievements before pressing for further reforms. Even Brousse’s Possibilists seemed narrow in their perspective and sectarian in their style, despite their interest in gradual change, and the Radicals’ impatient condescension toward the Opportunists dismayed him. Unwilling to join any of these groups, he declared himself an unaffiliated “republican at large” with an interest in the reconciliation of, or at least mutual respect among, all republican groups. The youngest member of the Chamber, he was slow to draw attention to himself. He sat quietly with the Opportunists and voted with them more often than not.28 The question for Jaurès was, how to build and keep a republican majority? The best approach, it seemed to him, was to begin with the largest republican group and make it more inclusive. Aligning with the Opportunists required patience. It meant working for a distinctly nonrevolutionary republic and making majority building a higher priority than any policy question. To Jaurès, this was acceptable.
Jaurès had only an informal connection with the Opportunists; sitting with them in the Chamber did not make him a member of an organization. He would not remain unorganized for long, however. In 1886—which was also the year of his marriage to Louise Bois, the daughter of a wholesale merchant from Albi—Jaurès helped to found a labor caucus within the Chamber. Since his department included coal-mining towns like Carmaux, he had some acquaintance with the miners’ union, one of France’s first significant industrial unions. Composed of socialists, Radicals, and a few independent deputies like Jaurès, the labor caucus was formed in the wake of a bloody miners’ strike in Decazeville, some 100 miles northeast of Toulouse. Caucus members traveled to Decazeville, conducted an investigation there, and returned to the Chamber to call for policies that would benefit workers.29
The caucus’s open and organized support for strikers was a scandal according to the dominant interpretation of the French republican tradition. With few dissenters, Radicals and Opportunists alike shared the horror that the Jacobins of the First Republic had felt toward any organization that set itself apart from the general will of the nation. A trade union, in this view, was no better than an aristocratic house or a monastic order. Although an Opportunist-led government had legalized unions in 1884, partly as a response to an unprecedented wave of strikes, for most French republicans, this law represented an unhappy accommodation with a new and disturbingly significant force in French society, a foreign object too firmly lodged within the body politic to be safely excised. The labor caucus represented a dissident variety of republicanism in France, in some ways closer to the classical model of making latent conflicts public, of openly balancing different classes and interests.30
After joining the labor caucus, Jaurès drew closer to the miners’ union. In 1886, not long after the Decazeville strike, he was invited to the congress of the miners’ federation at Saint-Étienne to speak about union rights and the prospect of pension legislation. In 1887, he led a parliamentary fight to require that miners’ delegates be included in mine safety inspections, and he worked, although with little success, to introduce pensions, accident and sickness insurance, and other social welfare measures that would benefit his working-class constituents.31
In the Chamber and in the Dépêche, Jaurès defended the place of unions in the Republic. René Waldeck-Rousseau, the interior minister who had ushered in the labor law of 1884, had argued that “the association of individuals in accordance with their professional affinities is not so much a weapon of combat as an instrument of material, moral, and intellectual progress.”32 Jaurès, however, insisted that unions were instruments of moral progress in part because they engaged in political combat. The strike might be a “terrible weapon,” he wrote in 1887, but
