The assassination of Jean Jaurès occurred on Friday 31 July 1914. Jean 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
Since the crises in Morocco and the Balkans in recent years, confrontation between France and Germany had become increasingly likely. 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 defense of the fatherland, as he explained in his book L'Armée nouvelle, published in 1911, criticizing Marx's famous phrase: "proletarians have no fatherland".Mehring, Franz, Vie de Karl Marx (in French), 1984, . He was convinced, however, that wars were caused by the clash of capitalist interests, and that it was the duty of the working class to oppose them. In the winter of 1913 and spring of 1914, he clashed fiercely with Clemenceau over Jaurès' hostile stance against the three-year military service law. Along with the Socialist group, he supported the Viviani government, which he felt was genuinely hostile to the war. On July 14, at the SFIO's extraordinary congress, which met until the 19th, he expressed confidence in the will of the working class and its representatives in the main countries to oppose the conflict, including through the weapon of the general strike. He supported the Keir-Hardie-Vaillant motion, the names of a British and a French socialist, which called for a strike in the event of imminent conflict: "rather insurrection than war", to which Jaurès added that the strike should be "simultaneously and internationally organized". This earned him an attack from a newspaper like Le Temps, which on July 18 accused him of supporting the "abominable thesis that would lead to disarming the nation at a time when it was in peril", to which he replied in L'Humanité that "the strike would also paralyze the aggressor". He learned with concern of the growing number of commitments made as part of the Franco-Russian Alliance to be celebrated in St Petersburg by President Poincaré and Prime Minister Viviani between July 20 and 23. For months, Jaurès' entire strategy had been to condemn the alliance with despotic Russia and to seek mediation and rapprochement with England – in vain. When he was informed of the breakdown of diplomatic relations between Austria and Serbia on July 24, he realized the seriousness of the threat. On July 25, he came to support Marius Moutet, the Socialist candidate in a by-election in Vaise, a suburb of Lyon, and gave a speech denouncing the "massacres to come". As he confessed to Joseph Paul-Boncour, Viviani's chief of staff, he was overcome by pessimism when he expressed himself fatalistically:
Believing he could still put pressure on the government, he maintained a certain reserve with regard to the demonstration organized by the CGT in Paris on July 27. The Socialist Party executive, which met on July 28 at the instigation of Jaurès, again expressed its support to the government.
Hoping that Paris and Berlin would be able to retain their mutual alliances, he attended the emergency meeting of the International Socialist Bureau of the Second International, which met in Brussels on July 29 and 30, at the request of the French Socialists. The aim was to urge the German and French leaders to take action against their allies. The board decided to convene the congress of the Socialist International on August 9 in Paris, instead of August 23 in Vienna. In a somewhat surreal atmosphere, most of the delegates, including Hugo Haase, co-chairman of the German SPD, expressed confidence in the ability of the people to avoid war. On the evening of the 29th, at the Cirque Royal, Jaurès and Rosa Luxemburg were acclaimed at a massive anti-war rally. The International Socialist Bureau voted unanimously to call for more anti-war demonstrations.Nettl, J.P., La Vie et l’œuvre de Rosa Luxemburg (in French), Maspéro, 1972, .
Jaurès wanted to use the power of trade union and political forces, but without paralyzing government action. To this end, on July 30 he persuaded Léon Jouhaux to postpone the day of demonstrations planned by the CGT on August 2 until the 9th.
Assassination When he returned to Paris on the afternoon of July 30, he found out that Russia was mobilizing. At the head of a socialist delegation, he obtained an audience with Viviani at around 8 pm, who revealed to him the state of preparation of the troops on the borders. Jaurès implored him to avoid any incidents with Germany. Viviani replied that he had ordered French troops to retreat ten kilometers from the border to avoid any risk of incident with Germany.
On the morning of July 31, the Parisian press was unanimous in seeing Europe "on the brink of collapse". After consulting with friends and family such as Charles Rappoport and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Jaurès went to the Chamber of Deputies, where he was informed of the Austrian mobilization and the declaration of a state of threat of war (Kriegsgefahrzustand) in Germany.
He decided to meet again with the President of the Council, who was also Minister of Foreign Affairs, but saw only the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Abel Ferry, nephew of Jules Ferry. At the same time, Viviani was unavailable, as he was receiving the German ambassador, Count von Schoen, who had come to convey his government's ultimatum to France: to say by 1 p.m. on August 1 whether it was in solidarity with Russia. He realized that conflict could no longer be avoided. At the same time, prefects warned all French mayors to have horses and carriages ready for requisition orders. According to Pierre Renaudel, who witnessed his meeting with Abel Ferry, Jaurès declared that if the government persisted in going to war "(he) would denounce the crazy-headed ministers". Abel Ferry, in a distressed – and by no means threatening – tone, simply replied, "But my poor Jaurès, we'll kill you at the first street corner! ... ". Abel Ferry was killed at the front, mortally wounded by shrapnel in 1918.
At the end of the day, he went to his newspaper's headquarters to prepare an anti-war mobilization article for the August 1 issue. Beforehand, he went out to dinner at the Café du Croissant on rue Montmartre, with his newspaper colleagues, including Pierre Renaudel, Jean Longuet, Philippe Landrieu, Ernest Poisson and Georges Weill. He sat with his back to the open window, separated from the street by a simple screen. Observing from the street the café room where he had spotted Jaurès dining, hidden by the curtain, the assassin fired two shots: the first penetrated the parietal region of the head, the second lost itself in the woodwork surrounding a mirror.. Jaurès was killed almost instantly by a cerebral haemorrhage.Poisson, Ernest, « L’assassinat de Jean Jaurès », in Bulletin de la Société des études Jauressiennes (in French), April 1964. In the confusion, Madame Poisson, wife of L'Humanité contributor Ernest Poisson, shouted: "Jaurès is dead! She was later credited with the exclamation "Ils ont tué Jaurès!" (They've killed Jaurès!), echoed by the workers, who lamented, ""They've killed Jaurès. It's war!" It is this apocryphal version blaming the nationalists that has survived.
The murderer was Raoul Villain, a 29-year-old from Rémois, an archaeology student at the École du Louvre, and a member of the Ligue des jeunes amis de l'Alsace-Lorraine, a nationalist, pro-war student group close to Action Française.Broche, François, Jaurès, Paris 31 juillet 1914. He was arrested and declared that he had acted alone to "suppress an enemy of his country". This theory of an isolated act was repeated unchanged in the indictment drawn up on October 22, 1915. He is described as an unassuming, calm and pious character, blond-haired, blue-eyed and youthful in appearance. Without ever having seen Jaurès, he gradually took it into his head to kill the traitor, the German. Doubtless convinced of the necessity of his action since the previous December, he matured his deed throughout July, bought a Smith & Wesson revolver, practiced shooting, wrote a few incoherent letters, located the socialist leader's home, his newspaper, the café where he was a regular.
For many months, even years, the nationalist press and representatives of the "patriotic" Leagues (such as Léon Daudet and Charles Maurras) had been raging against Jaurès' pacifist declarations and his internationalism, and singling him out as the man to be shot, because of his past commitment to Alfred Dreyfus. Statements of this kind abounded in the preceding weeks.
Even apart from such the outrageous statements, there had been a gradual rise of nationalism in public opinion. The rallying of many radicals to the Republicans and representatives of right-wing parties to elect Poincaré as President of the Republic in January 1913 had testified to the political shift underway. In May 1912, Council President Poincaré's decision to declare Joan of Arc's feast day a national holiday had also been symptomatic.Dupeux, G., in L’Histoire de France, under the direction of Georges Duby, Larousse, 1970, .
In his 1968 book Ils ont tué Jaurès (They killed Jaurès), François Fontvieille-Alquier notes the troubling relationship between Raoul Villain and the Imperial Russian ambassador Izvolsky. On several occasions, people close to Jaurès accused the Russian services of colluding with Raoul Villain, who may have been manipulated. In fact, Izvolsky generously showered the nationalist and warmongering press with money, prompting Jaurès to describe its financing as being in the pay of "that scoundrel Izvolsky". However, the reality of Villain's manipulation has never been formally proven.
Political consequences
Reactions
While the assassinated leader's relatives and socialist activists in Paris and Carmaux were shocked ("They've killed Jaurès"), and some right-wing extremists rejoiced loudly, all historical research shows that the population generally reacted with sadness to an event that symbolized the tipping point into uncertainty and fear of the horrors of the now inevitable war.