Quite different from the Parti ouvrier français in outlook was the small group of “independent socialists” influenced by the writings of Benoît Malon, a veteran of Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association and of the Paris Commune (where he was a Proudhonian dissenter against the Jacobin majority). Malon wanted to turn the moral impulse of French utopian socialism toward what he called the “reformist” and “experimental” process of change that was now possible within the Third Republic.25 Aside from Malon’s circle of followers, the Marxists’ main rival among the socialist factions was a group led by Paul Brousse, labeled by Guesde the “Possibilists” for their interest in advancing the class struggle bit by bit and by any means possible. Indeed, it may have been Brousse who invented the term “Marxist” as an unfriendly label for his opponents in the POF.
To both Malon and Brousse, the Guesdists of the Parti ouvrier français seemed slavish followers of an authoritarian—and, worse, a foreign—thinker. As one associate of Malon wrote, Marxism was “essentially un-French,” mired in German “local prejudices,” and utterly lacking the “flexibility” and “passion” of French political thought.26 Moreover, the Guesdists’ insistence that socialism was the inevitable result of historical processes left socialists without an intellectual guide to the complicated work of achieving reforms that might be immediately possible. Other smaller groups of French socialists—followers of Auguste Blanqui, who dreamed of a revolutionary conspiracy led by a small band of devotees, or of Jean Allemane, who wanted a revolutionary movement composed solely of real workers with “calloused hands”—added their own criticisms of the POF’s Marxism, but the common refrain was that Marxism, in addition to being a German import, seemed to lead its followers into a closed world of military-style party discipline and deterministic thinking, in which the lessons of France’s revolutionary past and the benefits of life in a republic were forgotten.27
The newly elected Jaurès had little interest in any of these socialist groups. He found them self-marginalizing and simplistic, and he thought that none of them understood the importance of consolidating recent republican achievements before pressing for further reforms. Even Brousse’s Possibilists seemed narrow in their perspective and sectarian in their style, despite their interest in gradual change, and the Radicals’ impatient condescension toward the Opportunists dismayed him. Unwilling to join any of these groups, he declared himself an unaffiliated “republican at large” with an interest in the reconciliation of, or at least mutual respect among, all republican groups. The youngest member of the Chamber, he was slow to draw attention to himself. He sat quietly with the Opportunists and voted with them more often than not.28 The question for Jaurès was, how to build and keep a republican majority? The best approach, it seemed to him, was to begin with the largest republican group and make it more inclusive. Aligning with the Opportunists required patience. It meant working for a distinctly nonrevolutionary republic and making majority building a higher priority than any policy question. To Jaurès, this was acceptable.
Jaurès had only an informal connection with the Opportunists; sitting with them in the Chamber did not make him a member of an organization. He would not remain unorganized for long, however. In 1886—which was also the year of his marriage to Louise Bois, the daughter of a wholesale merchant from Albi—Jaurès helped to found a labor caucus within the Chamber. Since his department included coal-mining towns like Carmaux, he had some acquaintance with the miners’ union, one of France’s first significant industrial unions. Composed of socialists, Radicals, and a few independent deputies like Jaurès, the labor caucus was formed in the wake of a bloody miners’ strike in Decazeville, some 100 miles northeast of Toulouse. Caucus members traveled to Decazeville, conducted an investigation there, and returned to the Chamber to call for policies that would benefit workers.29
The caucus’s open and organized support for strikers was a scandal according to the dominant interpretation of the French republican tradition. With few dissenters, Radicals and Opportunists alike shared the horror that the Jacobins of the First Republic had felt toward any organization that set itself apart from the general will of the nation. A trade union, in this view, was no better than an aristocratic house or a monastic order. Although an Opportunist-led government had legalized unions in 1884, partly as a response to an unprecedented wave of strikes, for most French republicans, this law represented an unhappy accommodation with a new and disturbingly significant force in French society, a foreign object too firmly lodged within the body politic to be safely excised. The labor caucus represented a dissident variety of republicanism in France, in some ways closer to the classical model of making latent conflicts public, of openly balancing different classes and interests.30
After joining the labor caucus, Jaurès drew closer to the miners’ union. In 1886, not long after the Decazeville strike, he was invited to the congress of the miners’ federation at Saint-Étienne to speak about union rights and the prospect of pension legislation. In 1887, he led a parliamentary fight to require that miners’ delegates be included in mine safety inspections, and he worked, although with little success, to introduce pensions, accident and sickness insurance, and other social welfare measures that would benefit his working-class constituents.31
In the Chamber and in the Dépêche, Jaurès defended the place of unions in the Republic. René Waldeck-Rousseau, the interior minister who had ushered in the labor law of 1884, had argued that “the association of individuals in accordance with their professional affinities is not so much a weapon of combat as an instrument of material, moral, and intellectual progress.”32 Jaurès, however, insisted that unions were instruments of moral progress in part because they engaged in political combat. The strike might be a “terrible weapon,” he wrote in 1887, but it was necessary if civic life were to be possible under modern conditions, since “there [was] no other way to reconcile humans than to render them truly equal,” and equality was not achieved without the development of organizations that could guarantee some measure of power to those previously powerless. At the same time, unions showed the republic what it was like for citizens to be not only neighbors but fellows as well. “The greatest good that the Revolution has given to men is surely liberty,” Jaurès wrote, but “liberty without solidarity is only a word, and solidarity itself is nothing if it remains a mere sentiment, if it does not take institutional form.” When unions engaged in peaceful strikes and orderly collective bargaining on progressively larger scales, they enlarged their circles of solidarity. With this organizational expansion would come a new consciousness for union members, more political and less strictly economic, more appreciative of negotiation and less enamored of revolution—but, for all that, the daily activities of unions would be no less an attack on social inequality and on the privileges of the upper class. An expansion of “association” among workers, Jaurès concluded, would provide workers with “both wisdom and power.”33
As the elections of 1889 approached, Jaurès began to express a new confidence in his own political purposes. Campaigning in his hometown of Castres that August, he said: “I hold in my heart a dream of fraternity and justice. I want to work for it until it has been realized.”34
Jaurès lost his bid for reelection, however.35 Returning to Toulouse with Louise and their newborn daughter, Madeleine, he took up teaching once more and wrote frequently for the Dépêche. At times, Jaurès now used the word “socialism” as a name for his political position.36 Socialism seemed a “luminous ideal that shines before the working class, guiding them,” he wrote in an October 1889 essay. None of the existing socialist groups, however, had figured out how to follow the socialist pillar of fire without getting lost in the wilderness. Even the Possibilists stumbled at the same point that other socialists did: their sole political task, as they saw it, was to engage in class struggle. The Possibilists understood the need