Jean Jaurès. Geoffrey Kurtz

their best results yet during the general elections in the autumn of 1893. They won some 600,000 votes, ten times the socialist tally in 1881, and their representation in the Chamber grew to fifty members.⁵ Their electoral allies, the Radicals of the republican Center-Left, increased their numbers as well, although not so dramatically. A reluctant alliance between the more conservative republicans (now often referred to as “Progressists” rather than “Opportunists”) and the remnants of the old monarchist groups still dominated the Chamber, but now the combined Radical and socialist opposition was stronger, with socialists making up nearly one-third of that opposition.⁶ The French socialists were no longer a specter haunting the powerful. They were a substantial political force within the parliament of a republic.

      This was a situation in which no socialist party had ever found itself. As a protest movement defined by what it was against, nineteenth-century socialism naturally spoke in terms of opposition and abolition. What would French socialists do now that they had enough power to influence the society in which they lived, but not nearly enough power to demolish and replace it? To some, their old manner of making a stark contrast between the capitalist present and the communist future seemed less useful than it once had been. Jaurès would find an interested audience for his notions of mixing opposites, of reconciling incompatibles, of battles neither lost nor won.