At 9:40 p.m., shots rang out. In the restaurant, Jaurès collapses. Hit by two revolver shots, this fervent pacifist has just been assassinated by Raoul Villain, an exalted nationalist student, a supporter of war with Germany. A month after the attack in Sarajevo, nothing can stop the march to war. It will become global and will be frighteningly deadly, with more than 9 million dead and missing (including 1.4 million for France) and more than 21 million injured.
July 31, 1914. The day when “They killed Jaurès!” »
VIDEOS – 110 years ago, at 9:40 p.m., the pacifist Jean Jaurès was assassinated at the “Café du croissant”, in Paris, rue Montmartre, a stone's throw from the grand boulevards. Nothing seemed to be able to stop the march to the First World War.
Pantheonization or “recovery”?
Autumn 1924. Ten years after the assassination of Jaurès, the Left Cartel is in power in France. A birthday that comes at just the right time for the President of the Council of Ministers, the radical Édouard Herriot. Although the socialists gave him their parliamentary support, they refused to participate in the government. To consolidate an alliance that he knows is fragile and recover a little of the aura that Jaurès still enjoys, Herriot decides to have his ashes transferred to the Pantheon, whose pediment proclaims: “To the great men the homeland is grateful.”
However, the country allowed Jaurès' assassin to be acquitted on March 29, 1919, by eleven votes out of twelve. One juror even felt that it was he who had rendered a service to his homeland: “If the adversary of the war, Jaurès, had imposed himself, France would not have been able to win the war. » Worse, his widow was ordered to pay costs, and had to pay the costs of the trial.
The “second assassination” of Jaurès
Agence Rol / Gallica BnF
On November 23, 1924, during the transfer of Jaurès' ashes to the Panthéon, the coffin left the Palais Bourbon, carried by miners.
“Jaurès, who fell into the service of a proletariat which wanted peace, does not belong any more to Mr. Renaudel than to Herriot. By his legend and by his death, it is to the Revolution that he belongs. »
Instead of uniting the left by taking it through its feelings, this symbolic measure will divide it. Voted by the law of July 31, 1924, an eminently symbolic date, the pantheonization of Jaurès was the subject of a grandiose staging on the following November 23, but it took place without the communists. The latter cry out for political “recovery”, denouncing the “second assassination” of Jaurès. The article in “L'Humanité”, published the same day by Paul Vaillant-Couturier, is unambiguous: “Jaurès, having fallen into the service of a proletariat which wanted peace, no longer belongs to Mr. Renaudel than in Herriot. By his legend and by his death, it is to the Revolution that he belongs. »
Mitterrand's tribute to Jaurès at the Pantheon
On the left, the wounds will take a long time to heal. Founded in 1905 under the leadership of Jean Jaurès and then renamed the New Socialist Party, the SFIO claimed to be a “party of class struggle and revolution”. When the Socialist Party succeeded it in 1969, the Tours Congress ratified the split of the SFIO in 1920, with the creation of the French Section of the Communist International, the future French Communist Party. In June 1971, that of Épinay sealed the unity of the forces of the left behind François Mitterrand, elected first secretary of the party. The PS then based its political action on the Union of the Left and the development of a common government program. Winning, the strategy works Mitterrand at the Élysée, May 10, 1981.
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