Jean jaures assassination of archduke

‘Here, on 31st July 1914, Jean Jaurès was assassinated’.

By firing his shots through the window of the Taverne du Croissant where Jaurès, the Socialist leader, was dining with colleagues, the young nationalist Raoul Villain ended French efforts to avoid war with Germany.

I had been cycling down the Aisne valley on Day-8 of a 1,500 km ride along WW1’s Western Front from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border.

After Ypres, Passchendaele and The Somme, I was searching for places described in the memoirs of Amédée Tardieu, my wife’s French grandfather and an artillery officer, and his brother Edmond’s grave.

Earlier that day I had visited the Fort de Condé, a few kilometres east of Soissons, and learned about the Séré de Rivières defence system built in response to the disaster of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 and the resulting inclusion of Alsace and parts of Lorraine in the new German Empire. Here I spent time learning about the causes, course and consequences of that war, and of the desire within parts of the French nation leading up to 1914 for revenge against Germany to regain Alsace and Lorraine.

Chief among those pushing a belligerent agenda was the French President, Raymond Poincaré, born in Lo

Born on 3rd September 1859, Jean Jaurès was the leader of the French Socialist Party

Jean Jaurès, killed on the 31st of July, 1914, was one of the very first fatalities of the Great War.

But Jaurès wasn’t a soldier: he was an anti-war activist, and one of the leading socialists in France.

The son of a farmer, Jaurès was from Castres in the south of France. After excelling at school and university, he became a philosophy lecturer in Toulouse.

Jaurès’ fate, however, was not in academic philosophy, but in the world of politics.

Jaurès would've been 12 years old when the socialist Paris Commune took over the city in 1871.

Click to view our Paris Commune tea towel

In 1885, he was elected as a Republican deputy to the French National Assembly for his home département of Tarn.

The French Republicans of the late-19 century were nothing like the US Republicans of today…

A Party spanning the centre to the centre-left, Jaurès was initially a moderate when he was elected.

But by the end of the 1880s, he had become an out-and-out Socialist.

A photograph of Jean Jaurès in 1904, ten years before his assassination.

The problem for the French Left was that there wasn’t one single socialist party. Marxism hadn’t yet developed a serious foothold in France, and the progressives were still divided amongst themselves.

Like in Britain, a collage of small groups and independents made up the landscape of French socialism.

Against this fractious backdrop, Jaurès agitated for the workers of France: for example, he backed the Carmaux miners whose union leader had been blacklisted.

Jaurès also made moves towards unifying and consolidating the French socialist movement – at a time when Keir Hardiewas doing the same in Britain.

In 1902, Jaurès became leader of the new French Socialist Party, formed from the merger of his fellow independent socialists with a couple of the socialist parties.

The one remaining holdout was

The 56 year Jean Jaures, the Socialist leader in France, was an enthusiastic, educated and informed voice in 1914 Europe. He wanted to finding a peaceful settlement between European powers after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. His arguments however went counter to the mood of late July 1914 as Austria, Germany and Russia and the Serbs mobilised for war.

Jean Jaures was teaching philosophy at the University of Toulouse when in 1892 he had supported the miners of Carmaux when they went on strike over the dismissal of their leader, Jean Baptiste Calvignac. Jaurès’ campaigning forced the government to intervene and reinstate Calvignac’s. The following year Jaurès stood for election and became deputy of Carmaux in the Midi-Pyrenees, a seat he lost in 1898 largely as a consequence of his staunch support to overturn of the false accusations against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who had been falsely accused of spying for Germany. During his time out of government Jaurés completed the mammoth ‘Socialist History of the French Revolution’.

As leader of the Socialist Party, Jean Jaures became a figure of hate of a radical and probably unhinged nationalist Raoul Villain, a 29 year old studying archaeology in Paris and a member of the League of Young Friends of Alsace-Lorraine.

Villain bought a revolver and stalked the socialist leader keeping tabs on his every movement in a pocket-book.

At around 9.40pm on Friday, July 31st Villain approached Le Cafe du Croissant at the corner of Rue Monmarte and Rue du Croissant in Paris. Jaures was discussing with colleagues how to make an appeal to the US President Woodrow Wilson when Villain saw him sitting in a bay window. Villain raised the revolver and shot Jaures twice in the head.

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Tags:1914, Alfred Dreyfus, Carmaux, French Revolution, Jean Jaurès, paris, Raoul Villain, University of Toulouse, Woodrow Wilson, ww2

1914 shooting of a French politician

The assassination of Jean Jaurès occurred on Friday 31 July 1914. Jaurès was a French deputy for the department of Tarn, a Socialist politician, a prominent antimilitarist, and editor of the newspaper L'Humanité. He was attacked by Raoul Villain at 9:40 pm while he dined at the Café du Croissant on rue Montmartre in Paris's 2nd arrondissement, close to the newspaper's headquarters. Jaurès was hit by two gunshots: one bullet pierced his skull and killed him almost instantly.

Committed three days before France's entry into World War I, the murder ended Jaurès' campaign to prevent war in Europe in the aftermath of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Following the death of Jaurès, the majority of the French political left rallied to the Sacred Union, including many socialists and trade unionists who had previously refused to support the war. The Sacred Union ceased to exist in 1919 when Villain was acquitted of murder. The transfer of Jaurès's ashes to the Panthéon in 1924 contributed to another political split within the Left, between communists and socialists.

Context

After the attack on Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, the European states were gradually drawn into a new international crisis by the play of alliances, leading to the outbreak of World War I within a month. Throughout these four weeks, Jaurès, the most prominent opponent of the war, felt the tension rising inexorably, and tried until his death to oppose it.

At the age of fifty-four, Jean Jaurès was the leading figure in the French socialist movement, the SFIO (French Section of the Workers' International), and a celebrated figure in international socialism, particularly since the death in 1913 of August Bebel, the leader of German social democracy. Jaurès, who entered politics in 1885 as a Republican deputy, an admirer of Gambetta, and a supporter of the Jules Ferry government, was very attached to the def