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over half a million votes sending thirty-seven deputies to the Chamber. Dominant among them was the newly famous thirty-four-year-old Jean Jaurès, whose championship of the Carmaux strike in his home district of the Tarn had aroused sympathies all over France. The miners of Carmaux, an area of old and bitter labour disputes, succeeded in 1892 in electing as mayor the secretary of their union, a Socialist, who, upon being refused time off to perform his political duties, took it anyway and was thereupon dismissed from his job by the company. It was a blow at the intent of the vote, an insult to the suffrage understood by every heir of the Revolution. When the miners struck in protest, Jaurès, the former professor of philosophy, made himself their adviser, leader and spokesman. His opponent, the Marquis de Solages, master of Carmaux, owner of iron mines, glass works, timber forests, a title and a seat in parliament, was the epitome of capitalism with whom Jaurès fought an endless duel, through strikes and elections, that lasted most of his life. As a candidate of the French Workers’ Party, elected from Carmaux, Jaurès entered the Chamber.

Short and heavy set, a “robust caryatid” with a “jubilant and humorous” face, Jaurès glowed with the warm vitality of the South. “Everything interested him, everything excited him,” said Vandervelde. With his voice which had the volume and range of an organ, his command of debate, his formidable intelligence, inexhaustible energy and unquenchable enthusiasm, he drew leadership upon himself. When he spoke he was in constant motion with bearded head thrown back or body thrust aggressively forward and short arms flailing. “His shoulders trembled and his knees shook under the burden of his thought. All the force of his immense culture and conviction were poured into words to guide the multitude who believed in him toward a better future.” He seemed to combine the solidity of earth with the mobility of fire. His phrasing was so admired that even political opponents would go to hear him as they would to hear Mounet-Sully speak Racine. Hearing him discuss astronomy at a dinner party, a guest wrote, “The walls of the room seemed to dissolve: we swam in the ether. The women forgot to re-powder their faces, the men to smoke, the servants to go in search of their own supper.” Remy de Gourmont said, “Jaurès thinks with his beard,” but the man who wrote Les Preuves and had been in youth the glory of the Ecole Normale thought more clearly than most. Although the French Socialist movement had no official chief, since it was constantly splitting and subdividing, uniting and splitting again, Jaurès, gradually replacing Guesde, came to be accepted as its leader.

He was the authentic Socialist, not in doctrine, but in the essence of the idea and the cause. He believed that man was good, that society could be made good and the struggle to make it so was to be fought daily, by available means and within present realities. He fought it wherever it appeared: in the Fourmies fusillade, at Carmaux, in the lois scélérates, over the bill for the income tax, in the Dreyfus Affair. His Socialism did not stem from Marx; it was, he declared simply, “the product of history, of endless and timeless sufferings.” His Latin thesis for his doctorate was on the origins of German Socialism beginning with Luther, De primis socialismi germanici lineamentis apud Lutherum, Kant, Fichte et Hegel. Elected to the Chamber first as a Republican in 1885, when he was twenty-six and its youngest member, he had become discouraged with politics and had returned to the academic life as professor at the University of Toulouse, where his lectures were soon thronged by workmen and bourgeois townsmen as well as students and faculty. The labour struggles of Toulouse and the Tarn drew him back into public life and he announced himself a Socialist in 1890. Edouard Vaillant once said he never knew any kind of revolution Jaurès was not in favor of, but Jaurès’ idea of revolution was rather of taking over than of overthrowing the State. His Marxism