Jean Jaurès

Auguste Marie Joseph Jean Léon Jaurès, commonly referred to as Jean Jaurès, was a French Socialist leader. Initially a moderate republican, he was later one of the first social democrats, becoming the leader, in 1902, of the French Socialist Party, which opposed Jules Guesde's revolutionary Socialist Party of France. The two parties merged in 1905 in the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO). An antimilitarist, Jaurès was assassinated at the outbreak of World War I, and remains one of the main historical figures of the French Left. Jaurès was a heterodox Marxist: he rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat and tried to conciliate idealism and materialism, individualism and collectivism, democracy and class struggle, patriotism and internationalism.