Ovi Magazine Issue #26: WWI - 100 years - Published: 2014-07-28

Rene Wadlow is the editor of the online journal of world
politics www.transnational-perspectives.org and the representative
to the United Nations, Geneva, of the Association of
World Citizens.
Jean Jaurès (1859-1914) was first a professor of philosophy having
attended l’Ecole Normale Supérieur, the French elite institution which
forms teachers for the last years of secondary schools and universities.
Jaurès was a classmate of Henri Bergson who later became known as the
leading philosopher of his day. Jaurès was elected to the French Parliament
when only 26, and in 1893 defended local coal miners from his southwest
area (Tarn) and gained a national reputation.
Jaurès was an outstanding speaker, fired by a humanistic, non-dogmatic
drive that led to his speaking to meetings in all parts of the country. As
a non-dogmatic person, he was able to bring different strands of social
reformist thought together into a relatively unified socialist party.
Increasingly, Jaurès represented French socialism abroad. As a student,
he had written on German thinkers, in particular Fichte and Hegel and so
was at ease with German socialists.
The idea of an “international general strike” were war declaired was one
of the ideas being discussed in socialist circles in England, France and
Germany. However no definite plans were set. Many socialists accepted
the narrow nationalist spirit of their countries.
Two days after the Brussels meeting, on 31 July 1914, when Jaurès was
back in Paris and sitting in a café, he was shot dead by a man claiming
to be a nationalist. In the violent style of writing of the time, Rightist
newspapers had been calling for the death of Jaurès. Jaurès had earlier
defended the Captain Dreyfus in what was a crucial division of French
political life, and so he had many enemies from the Right. Jaurès had said
that Dreyfus was “a living witness to military lies, to political cowardice,
to the crimes of authority.”
Whatever the motivations, the killing of Jaurès silenced a voice that might
have called for restraint and reason as the governments rushed to war based
on the fear that the other side would change power relations decisively in
its favor.