An old post of mine:
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So what if Jean Jaures isn't killed on July 31, 1914?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Jaur%C3%A8s
Although Jaures was completely sincere in his antimilitarism and his attempts to prevent the war, nevertheless, once the war would come despite his efforts, I believe that he would support it. Donald Sassoon, in *One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century*, p. 19, notes that "As to war, the traditional Jacobin view, epitomized by Guesde, that socialists had to be ready to fight in defence of the French Republic, was accepted by Jaures who, while believing that 'war is evil', rejected the Marxian idea that the workers had no country: 'If our country were threatened,' he said, 'we would be the first at the border to defend France whose blood runs through our veins.'"
Would he even go so far as to support Socialist participation in the government? Possibly. Jaures was not a dogmatist one way or the other on the question of Socialist participation in bourgeois governments, as his attitude toward Millerand's participation in the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet showed. (He favored it, but later acquiesced in the 1904 Amsterdam congress's condemnation of such participation. This acquiescence, though, was for the sake of Socialist unity, and not out of any belief that such participation was under all circumstances bad. As he noted, it was easy for the German Social Democrats to take such a position, since Kaiser Wilhelm was not going to invite them into the German government, anyway...)
However, it should be noted that there was a disagreement among French Socialists as to what Jaures would have done. Harvey Goldberg in *The Life of Jean Jaures* (University of Wisconsin Press 1962) wrote (p. 473):
"And what of Jaures? Would he have resisted the war to the bitter end? [Charles] Rappoport [who would later be a founder of the French Communist Party] believed so. Hoping to fortify the weak forces of peace, the old Marxist recalled in the *Berner Tagwacht* (July 31, 1915) Jaures' mood and attitude on the last day of his life. During these crucial hours, Rappoport insisted, he uttered not a single word which implied any course other than continuous opposition to war. But Renaudel and all those Socialists who rallied to the national effort repudiated Rappoport's interpretation. Jaures, Renaudel insisted, would not have hesitated a minute to defend the homeland."
https://books.google.com/books?id=s69nrb-cVn0C&pg=PA473
Here, in a footnote, Goldberg goes into the Rappoport-Renaudel dispute in more detail (pp. 566-7):
"To a great extent the debate centered around the question whether or not, as Rappoport reported in the *Berner Tagwacht*...Jaures actually said to Abel Ferry: 'We will continue our campaign against war.' This, of course, could have implied action, even strike action, in case of war. Renaudel, who was witness to the conversation with Ferry, did not mention it in his article in L'Humanité, August 2, 1914; then he categorically denied it in his response to Rappoport. But Marcel Cachin and Jean Longuet, both of whom were with Jaures during his interview with Ferry, confirmed it...Essential confirmation, however, has come from Abel Ferry himself, who wrote in his private notebook, recently published: 'He [Jaures] had come to see me with a delegation three hours earlier, and here are the notes I took while he spoke: 'You are victims of Isvolsky and Russian intrigue; we will denounce you, harebrained ministers, even if we should be shot.' *Les Carnets secrets d'Abel Ferry 1914-18* (Paris,
1958, pp. 26-27.
"Two other reports of comments by Jaures in the last days before the war, both of them unconfirmed by other sources, indicate that he would have considered the French government less guilty than the German when war came. Roubanovitch reported as follows a conversation between Jaures and the German Socialists at Brussels on July 29; 'At around six in the evening, during the meeting of the International Socialist Bureau, Jaures, turning to comrades Kautsky and Haase, asked them the following question: 'Are you absolutely sure, as you have just said in your analysis of the situation, that your government and your emperor especially, knew nothing of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia?' Haase replied: 'I am absolutely convinced that our government has had no part in that quarrel.' Jaures shook his head and expressed his doubts....'
"Bedouce, who saw him frequently during those last days, reported that Jaures, from the time he returned from Brussels, was in daily touch with the French government, First, he was assured by M. Binevenu-Martin, the acting Foreign Minister during Viviani's absence, that France would work with England to mediate the conflict. Then, after his interview with Viviani, when the Premier had not only reiterated the government's agreement with British mediation proposals but had also said that French troops would be pulled back from the frontier, Jaures seemed satisfied that his government was doing what it could. On leaving Viviani's office, he reportedly turned to Bedouce and said: 'You know, Bedouce, if we were in their place, I don't know what more we could do now to assure peace.'"
All in all, however desperately Jaures wanted to prevent the war (and any threats he may have made to Abel Ferry have to be seen as part of this attempt to prevent the war) once it had broken out--and once it was clear the working classes of the belligerents were not going to stop the war with a general strike--even if he held France's leaders partly to blame for the war, I find it impossible to see him taking a defeatist position a la Lenin. (When Jaures spoke of a general strike as a method of preventing a European war, he was careful to emphasize what he meant: "Not a strike of French workers alone, he explained, which could paralyze France before an invader, but a coordinated proletarian effort in every belligerent country." Goldberg, p. 461) He had repeatedly insisted that the French workers did (contrary to orthodox Marxists) have a *patrie.* He had even co-written a book *L'armee nouvelle* about how France might defend herself against a German attack. He had denounced the antipatriotism of Gustave Hervé
http://www.marxists.org/archive/herve/index.htm (who ironically would later became a superpatriot and founder of a French "national socialist" party). "So there was no sense arguing, as Hervé did, that workers would lose nothing if their nation were conquered. Frenchmen feel themselves Frenchmen, cried Jaures; they would fight to defend their native soil, and if subdued, to liberate it. Nor was it true that under the Republic workers had nothing to defend. Marx and Engels asserted in the *Communist Manifesto* that 'the workers have no fatherland.' But their words reflected an age before democracy had endowed men with the instruments of their liberation." (Goldberg, pp. 351-2)
Goldberg in his conclusion (pp. 473-4) notes that "Thus, both the internationalists and the patriots attempted to justify their position with authority from beyond the grave. The controversy, of course, can never be resolved. But in a fruitful insight, G. D. H. Cole offered probably the best key to speculation:
'It has often been said that Jaures, had he lived, would have rallied to the cause of national defense against Germany, as Guesde and Vaillant both actually did. This view is probably correct; but it is also probably the case that he would have shown greater wisdom than they did in working for a negotiated peace. His chance for this could have come only later, after Germany had failed to achieve a rapid victory. But it would have come; and in the situation after 1916 his presence might have made a real difference.'
That Jaures would *eventually* have turned against the war was apparently the belief of Clemenceau: "But towards the end of his life, in a day-long talk with Rene Benjamin, Clemenceau declared that Jaures' death was a happy deliverance for France. 'I can never think without a shiver' he said 'of the first, the very first, cause of victory. The murder of Jaures!' He believed, and his belief was justified by his knowledge of the Socialist leader's character, that if Jaures had been in the Chamber in 1917-18 he would have been calling for peace instead of the prosecution of the war, and sooner or later would have overthrown Clemenceau's government." Edgar Holt, *The Tiger: The Life of Georges Clemenceau, 1841-1929,* p. 166. (This harsh verdict recalls the poet Charles Péguy's notorious 1913 *fatwa*: "En temps de guerre il n'y a plus qu'une politique, et c'est la politique de la Convention nationale. Mais il ne faut pas se dissimuler que la politique de la Convention nationale c'est Jaures dans une charrette et un roulement de tambour pour couvrir cette grande voix." "In time of war, there is only one policy, and that is the policy of the National Convention. But one must not hide from oneself that the policy of the National Convention means Jaures in a cart [on the way to being executed] and a drum-roll to drown out that great voice.")
Clemenceau was hardly an objective observer, but it is possible that he was right that Jaures would oppose his government on the issue of peace terms; but that is far from being for peace at any price. Unfortunately, I do not see Germany agreeing to reasonable peace terms even after her hopes for a quick victory were frustrated, so I am less confident than Cole of the difference Jaures could make. Indeed, the very fact that a France led or influenced by Jaures (in, say, 1917) would be talking about peace would probably be seen by the Germans as proof that the French were being worn down, and that one last offensive could defeat them. But since the Germans believed that anyway in OTL, I don't think the survival of Jaures would damage France's security.
Of course, as Goldberg notes (pp. 567-8), there remains the question "Even if he had rallied to the national cause, would Jaures, once the spokesman of Ministerialism, have accepted a government post? Again, there is no definite answer, despite the assumption of many commentators. One might well ponder the implication of a statement Jaures made ten years earlier in the midst of the debates at Amsterdam. Under discussion was the resolution Kautsky had composed at the Congress of Paris of 1900, which foresaw ministerial participation only under exceptional circumstances, by which, he explained, he meant a threat of invasion. At Amsterdam Jaures answered Kautsky in these words: 'When I heard citizen Kautsky say that he could conceive of the possibility of socialist participation in the government in case of a threat to the nation, I asked myself whether Ministerialism would become orthodox only to support nationalism and whether it was legitimate to abandon the class struggle only in order to run and defend a homeland run and exploited by the bourgeoisie. I asked myself if political liberty, individual freedom, the right of association were not of more essential interest to socialists than *la patrie.* I feel, in certain circumstances, that I could not follow our comrade to the limits of his nationalistic Ministerialism.'" But it seems to me here that Jaures' point is *not* to rule out Socialist participation in a wartime government; he is merely arguing aginst the notion that war could provide a justification for ministerialism but things like the defense of personal liberty in peacetime could not.
Maybe Guesde was right: "Jaures is too complicated." (Goldberg, p. 479)
https://books.google.com/books?id=s69nrb-cVn0C&pg=PA479