Each chapter examines either one major text or a small number of related texts, set in their respective contexts. There is one chapter each on Jaurès’s doctoral theses (chapter 1), his Histoire socialiste (chapter 2), his major speeches during the reformism debates toward and just after the end of the nineteenth century, especially his 1900 speech on “the evolution of socialist method” (chapter 3), his Études socialistes of that period (chapter 4), and his L’armée nouvelle (chapter 5). In the conclusion, I try to make room for both clarity and murkiness, piecing together the implications of Jaurès’s thought for politics in our time.
Jean Jaurès is remembered as a speechmaker and a polemicist, as a tribune of the labor movement and the helmsman of a political party. I propose, however, that the best way to understand his political thought, the relationship of his thought to his own times, and the meaning of his thought for us today is to begin by considering his two doctoral theses, especially—as strange as this may sound—his first thesis, “De la realité du monde sensible” (On the reality of the sensible world). Jaurès’s early scholarship on metaphysics might seem far removed from politics, but in it he developed ideas about conflict and conciliation, the limited and the absolute, space and spirit that would set the pattern for his account of social democracy and its inner life. By the time he completed his theses in 1892, Jaurès had confronted the contrasts between country and city, classical and modern, philosophy and politics, republic and socialism. It is not surprising that he seems to have been preoccupied with reconciling what common sense would say cannot be reconciled. The quest for harmony that began in Jaurès’s early years would come to define his mature political thought.
Although Jaurès would live in Paris for most of his life, he was born 350 miles to the south, in the small commercial town of Castres, which sits on the river Agout in the department of the Tarn, a region of hills and river gorges. By the time of his birth in 1859, some mining, metallurgy, glassmaking, and textile manufacturing had come to the Tarn, but it was for the most part a place of grain fields, vineyards, and orchards.1 The Jaurès family—Jules, an unsuccessful businessman, Marie-Adélaïde, a devout Roman Catholic from a family of textile merchants, and their sons, Jean and Louis (a daughter, Louise, died in infancy)—spent part of each year in a townhouse but lived the rest of the time on their farm, La Fédial Haute, about 3 miles outside Castres. Jean and Louis began their education at a small school run by a Castres clergyman and continued it a few years later at the Collège de Castres. The boys walked about an hour each day from La Fédial to reach their schools; when not in class, they spent much of their time out of doors.2
Jaurès excelled in his Greek and Latin studies, which most likely included readings in Homer, Thucydides, the classical Greek playwrights, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and Cicero.3 In 1875, he was recruited to attend one of the best Parisian lycées, Sainte-Barbe, where he would prepare for the entrance exams to the École normale supérieure, the elite institution of higher learning for future academics, teachers, and civil servants. In the fall of 1876, Jaurès left the Tarn for Paris.4
Absorbed in the Greek and Latin classics during his two years at Sainte-Barbe, Jaurès spent most of his time in classes or studying in a small room at the student pension where he lived.5 In one of his student writings, Jaurès argued that the classics “have, after their long sleep, a youthful freshness and vivacity.” They are important not so much for their doctrines as for their sensibility: they “refresh and revive” modern minds. In particular, Jaurès commended Plutarch’s Lives to a modern world too ready to surrender to the debilitating idea that history is a continuous sequence of causes and effects. Plutarch’s writings, he declared, refute the proposition that “everything is enchained, and necessity directs even the heroes,” and they show modern people that one can “ally valor with prudence, liberality with respect for law, freedom with rule, and that good things do not lose their worth by avoiding extremes.”6
Jaurès entered the École normale supérieure in 1878 and soon decided to focus his studies on philosophy.7Although some French philosophers of that time had become interested in the work of Immanuel Kant, the core texts of the École’s philosophy curriculum remained the works of Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and Epictetus, with only secondary attention paid to Kant and other modern thinkers.8 The École sequestered its students in poorly lit and stuffy buildings, allowing them only two afternoons a week to explore the city. Although Jaurès apparently found time to read works by the French utopian socialists Claude Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, his course work took most of his attention. The normaliens did discuss politics, and most were supporters of France’s new republican regime—among them, one of Jaurès’s friends, the future sociologist Émile Durkheim, was known to attend republican rallies9—but Jaurès would remark years later on the lack of connection between his studies at the École and the political life of the city around him. “In minds nurtured in that fashion,” Jaurès wrote, “the most subtle and profound knowledge is found side by side with the most extraordinary ignorance. It is like a vast secluded room where the light penetrates only dimly.” Studying the ancients’ ideas about justice and friendship and the utopians’ visions of cooperative societies, he “did not know that there were socialist groups in France and a whole agitation of propaganda and fervor of sectarian rivalry.”10 The idea that classical republican thought might be relevant to political life in the French Republic was at least one of the reasons that the École retained a classical curriculum. However, as Jaurès would later write, although “the idea of freedom in Cicero and Tacitus was honored” there, “popular protest was scornfully treated as intemperate brawling.”11
What did it mean to speak of a republic in France in the 1880s? For the ancient Romans, “res publica” (literally, “public thing”) had meant a political order in which the Senate and the popular assemblies each had some power, much like the blend of oligarchy and democracy that the Greeks before them had called a “politeia” (meaning something like “the political way of doing politics”). A “res publica” meant not only a system for making and enforcing law, but also an aspiration toward a certain moral order, toward a devotion to the common good. A classical republic was a regime of mixing and balancing, and of shared life in public spaces.
What use these ideas might have under modern conditions has never been self-evident. Classical republicanism assumed independent cities with a stability of culture and economy, not to mention a scale of social life that has long since become unavailable. By the end of the nineteenth century, the French word “république” had its own complex relationship to modern upheaval. When the First French Republic was declared in 1792, “république” meant, above all, a regime in which the sovereignty of the monarch had been overthrown and had been replaced by the sovereignty of “la nation,” the people as a whole. The close association between “république” and “révolution” continued through the series of uprisings and regimes—empires, monarchies, and the Second Republic of 1848 to 1852—that followed. “République” came to mean not only the people ruling, but also the people rebelling; it meant violent and disruptive acts by the people en masse, as well as the state of affairs those acts were intended to create.
The Third Republic was something different. When Emperor Napoléon III was captured by the Prussians in the summer of 1870, France’s previously weak National Assembly became the country’s only available government. The Assembly called for elections, after which a new National Assembly was to decide what sort of regime would govern France. In the meantime, the National Assembly would serve as a provisional parliament in what amounted to a provisional republic. But when the monarchist majority in the new National Assembly found itself unable to unite around a single royal house,