Native name | Troisième Congrès ouvrier socialiste de France |
---|---|
Date | 20–31 October 1879 |
Venue | Salle des Folies-Bergères |
Location | Marseille, France |
Type | Political conference |
Participants | Trade union delegates and socialist leaders |
The Third Socialist Workers' Congress of France was held in Marseille, France, in 1879. At this congress the socialist leaders rejected both cooperation and anarchism, both of which would allow the existing regime to continue, and adopted a program based on collectivism. The congress also adopted a motion that women should have equal rights to men, but several delegates felt that essentially woman's place was in the home. The congress has been called a triumph of Guesdism and the birthplace of French Marxist socialism, but both claims are open to question. The attendees soon split into rival groups with disparate beliefs.
The Third Socialist Workers' Congress was held in Marseille on 20–31 October 1879. [1] It was held in the Salle des Folies-Bergères. [2] [lower-alpha 1] The Marseilles Congress followed the Congress of Lyon of 1878, and was the most important socialist congress in France before 1889 in terms of attendance, resolutions and its effect on the socialist party's constitution. [4] The congress was followed by the 1880 Congress of Le Havre. [5]
Jules Guesde was a former anarchist who had converted to Marxism in 1876. [6] Guesde was sick and bedridden in Paris at the time of the congress, but was represented by two jewelry workers, Jean Lombard of Marseille and Eugène Fournière of Paris. [7] A motion composed by Guesde was moved by the delegates from Paris and carried by a large majority. [4] It was:
Property is the one social question. Seeing that the present system of property is opposed to those equal rights that will condition the society of the future; that it is unjust and inhuman that some should produce everything and others nothing, and that it is precisely the latter who have all the wealth, all the enjoyment, and all the privilege; seeing that this state of affairs will not be put an end to by the good-will of those whose whole interest lies in its continuance; the Congress adopts as its end and aim the collective ownership of the soil, the subsoil, the instruments of labour, raw materials, and would render them for ever inalienable from that society to which they ought to return. [4]
The congress adopted a Marxist program and supported collectivism by 73 votes to 27. [5] The collectivists rejected efforts to found cooperatives as being petty bourgeois and covert capitalism. [8] The delegates were also opposed to cooperation and to anarchism, both of which left the status quo undisturbed, and declared themselves in favor of political action. [4] The congress has been described as a triumph of Guesdism, but in fact was a triumph of collectivism, which Guesde's opponents Paul Brousse and Benoît Malon also supported. [9]
The suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871 was a severe blow to socialism in France, and for several years afterwards workers were reluctant to get involved in politics. At the congresses of Paris (1876), Lyon (1878) and Marseille (1879) only working men could speak and vote, and discussion of politics was banned. However Guesde wanted to organize a political party. He claimed that unlike conventional parties the new party would serve the interests of the workers rather than the ambitions of the party leaders. [6] The congress decided that the proletariat should separate itself from all the bourgeois parties and form a new party. [4] At first the party represented artisans such as hatters and shoemakers, but not weavers, miners or foundry workers. [6] The new party had to compete for the attention of the workers with the Blanquists, the Anarchists, after 1881 with the Possiblists, and after 1890 with the Allemanists. [10]
Although the launch of the Parti Ouvrier (Party of Labour) by the 1879 congress has been treated by socialist and communist historians as the date when Marxist socialism was born in France, the new "party" was a loosely defined movement dominated by anti-political anarchists and anti-socialist radicals, with few members with recognizably Marxist views. It was only between the congress and the 1882 split that Guesde and Lafargue developed hardline Marxist positions. [11] The party suffered from internal disagreements from the start. Anarchists such as Jean Grave disliked political involvement of any type, while Brousse was suspicious of Guesde's Marxist authoritarianism and thought the nationalization program would lead to a socialist dictatorship. [6] [lower-alpha 2]
Some of the delegates defended the concept of the family wage, and argued against women's wage labour. [14] One delegate said "woman's place is in the home, where so many daily concerns call her, and not in a factory or workshop ... The young girl should never learn any trade except those which, later, when she has become a wife and a mother, she can carry out in the home." [15] Isidore Finance, who represented the building painters of Paris, urged "tough-fisted and hardheaded workingmen ... to demand a wage that is not simply the equivalent to the product of their labours, but sufficient to keep women and the aged at home." [14]
Hubertine Auclert made passionate pleas for women's rights, but argued that they needed economic independence due to their "natural" motherhood. [14] Auclert was on a special committee to consider the equality of women, and was given an hour to speak to the congress on this subject. After her speech she was invited to head a committee to prepare a statement on women's rights. This statement, which said women should have the same social, legal, political and working rights as men was approved by the congress. [1]
The Jura Federation represented the anarchist, Bakuninist faction of the First International during the anti-statist split from the organization. Jura, a Swiss area, was known for its watchmaker artisans in La Chaux-de-Fonds, who shared anti-state, egalitarian views on work and social emancipation. The Jura Federation formed between international socialist congresses in 1869 and 1871. When the First International's General Council, led by Marxists, suppressed the Bakuninists, the Jura Federation organized an international of the disaffected federations at the 1872 St. Imier Congress. The congress disavowed the General Council's authoritarian consolidation of power and planning as an affront to the International's loose, federalist founding to support workers' emancipation. Members of the First International agreed and even statists joined the anti-statists' resulting Anti-authoritarian International, but by 1876, the alliance had mostly dissolved. While in decline, the Jura Federation remained the home of Bakuninists whose figures engaged on a two-decade debate on the merits of propaganda of the deed. The egalitarian relations of the Jura Federation had played an important role in Peter Kropotkin's adoption of anarchism, who became the anarchist standard-bearer after Bakunin.
In Marxist practice, a minimum programme consists of a series of demands for immediate reforms and, in far fewer and less orthodox cases, also consists of a series of political demands which, taken as a whole, realise key democratic-republican measures enacted by the Paris Commune and thus culminate in the strictly political dictatorship of the proletariat.
Paul Louis Marie Brousse was a French socialist, leader of the possibilistes group. He was active in the Jura Federation, a section of the International Working Men's Association (IWMA), from the northwestern part of Switzerland and the Alsace. He helped edit the Bulletin de la Fédération Jurassienne, along with anarchist Peter Kropotkin. He was in contact with Gustave Brocher between 1877 and 1880, who became anarchist under Brousse's influence. Brousse edited two newspapers, one in French and another in German. He helped James Guillaume publish its bulletin.
The Possibilists, also called Broussists, were a faction of the French socialist movement led by Paul Brousse. Benoît Malon and others supported the faction although they did not always fully share its inspiring principles. It originated within the "Federation of the Socialist Workers' Party of France", a Marxist-inspired organisation founded by Paul Lafargue, Jules Guesde and others, in Marseilles, in 1879.
The Federation of the Socialist Workers of France was France's first socialist party, being founded in 1879.
Benoît Malon, was a French Socialist, writer, communard, and political leader.
The first meetings of the Second International were held in Paris, beginning on July 14, 1889, on the centenary of the storming of the Bastille. Internecine conflicts within the French socialist movement had prompted the "possibilist" and Marxist factions to hold their own congresses at the same time. The Marxist congress resolved to arrange a second meeting at Zurich, while the Possibilists would arrange one in Brussels. However the Marxist organizing committee would later decide to join the Brussels congress, and the next congress would meet in 1891.
Auguste Marie Joseph Jean Léon Jaurès, commonly referred to as Jean Jaurès, was a French Socialist leader. Initially a Moderate Republican, he later became one of the first social democrats and the leader 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 in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, but remains one of the main historical figures of the French Left. As a heterodox Marxist, Jaurès rejected the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and tried to conciliate idealism and materialism, individualism and collectivism, democracy and class struggle, patriotism and internationalism.
The Socialist Revolutionary Party was a French Blanquist political party founded in 1898 and dissolved in 1901. It is indirectly one of the founding factions of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO), founded in 1905.
Jean Allemane was a French socialist politician, veteran of the Paris Commune of 1871, pioneer of syndicalism, leader of the Socialist-Revolutionary Workers' Party (POSR) and co-founder of the unified French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) in 1905. He was a deputy in the National Assembly of the Third French Republic.
Paule Mink was a French feminist and socialist revolutionary of Polish descent. She participated in the Paris Commune and in the First International. Her pseudonym is also sometimes spelled Minck.
Adéodat Constant Adolphe Compère-Morel was a French Socialist politician, agronomist, orator and writer. Characterized as a Marxist doctrinaire, he was one of the founders of the Socialist Party of France. A gifted propagandist, he was a particular expert on social reform in rural France and became viewed as his party's agrarian specialist. He was an associate of the likes of revolutionary Marxist socialist journalist and literary critic Paul Lafargue and authored many books and papers, several of which were partly written with Lafargue. His best known and most influential work was Encyclopédie socialiste syndicale et coopérative de l'International ouvrière, published in 1912.
The Socialist Party of France was a socialist political party.
The French Workers' Party was the French socialist party created in 1880 by Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law. A revolutionary party, it had as aim to abolish capitalism and replace it with a communist society.
Paul Lafargue was a Cuban-born French revolutionary Marxist socialist, political writer, economist, journalist, literary critic, and activist; he was Karl Marx's son-in-law, having married his second daughter, Laura. His best known work is The Right to Be Lazy. Born in Cuba to French and Saint Dominican Creole parents, Lafargue spent most of his life in France, with periods in England and Spain. At the age of 69, he and 66-year-old Laura died together by a suicide pact.
Jules Bazile, known as Jules Guesde was a French socialist journalist and politician.
The Left in France was represented at the beginning of the 20th century by two main political parties, namely the Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party and the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO), created in 1905 as a merger of various Marxist parties.
The Second International (1889–1916) was an organisation of socialist and labour parties, formed on 14 July 1889 at two simultaneous Paris meetings in which delegations from twenty countries participated. The Second International continued the work of the dissolved First International, though excluding the powerful anarcho-syndicalist movement. While the international had initially declared its opposition to all warfare between European powers, most of the major European parties ultimately chose to support their respective states in World War I. After splitting into pro-Allied, pro-Central Powers, and antimilitarist factions, the international ceased to function. After the war, the remaining factions of the international went on to found the Labour and Socialist International, the International Working Union of Socialist Parties, and the Communist International.
Isidore Finance, Paris was a French house painter and decorator and syndicalist.
Gabriel Pierre Deville was a French socialist theoretician, politician and diplomat. He was a follower of the Guesdist movement in the 1880s, and did much to raise awareness of Karl Marx's theories of the weaknesses of capitalism through his books and articles. Later, without abandoning his beliefs, he became more pragmatic and was twice a deputy in the National Assembly. After leaving office he accepted various diplomatic positions.