Jean Jaurès

Jean Jaurès
Jaurès in 1904
Editor of L'Humanité
In office
18 April 1904  31 July 1914
Preceded byNewspaper established
Succeeded byPierre Renaudel
Member of the Chamber of Deputies
In office
1 June 1902  31 July 1914
ConstituencyTarn
In office
8 January 1893  1 June 1898
ConstituencyTarn
In office
10 November 1885  11 November 1889
ConstituencyTarn
President of the French Socialist Party
In office
4 March 1902  25 April 1905
Preceded byParty established
Succeeded byParty abolished
Personal details
Born
Auguste Marie Joseph Jean Léon Jaurès

(1859-09-03)3 September 1859
Castres, Tarn, France
Died31 July 1914(1914-07-31) (aged 54)
Paris, France
Manner of deathAssassination
Resting placePanthéon
Political partyModerate Republicans

Independent Socialists
French Socialist Party

French Section of the Workers' International
SpouseLouise Bois
Children2
Alma materÉcole Normale Supérieure
ProfessionProfessor, journalist, historian
Signature

Auguste Marie Joseph Jean Léon Jaurès (3 September 1859  31 July 1914), commonly referred to as Jean Jaurès (French: [ʒɑ̃ ʒɔʁɛs] ; Occitan: Joan Jaurés [dʒuˈan dʒawˈɾes]), was a French socialist leader. Initially a Moderate Republican, he later became a social democrat and one of the first possibilists (the reformist wing of the socialist movement) and in 1902 the leader of the French Socialist Party, which opposed Jules Guesde's revolutionary Socialist Party of France. The two parties merged in 1905 in the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO). An antimilitarist, he was assassinated in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I but remains one of the main historical figures of the French Left. As a heterodox Marxist, Jaurès rejected the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and tried to conciliate idealism and materialism, individualism and collectivism, democracy and class struggle, and patriotism and internationalism.