Jean Jaurès

Jaurès was a philosophy teacher from the Tarn who became the outstanding orator of the French left and the founder of the newspaper L'Humanité. He came to socialism gradually, through a strike at the Carmaux mines that he watched at close range, and he argued for it as a continuation of the Republic rather than its overthrow — reform through elected assemblies, with the republic's own promises taken seriously. He was one of the first major politicians to defend Dreyfus, at real cost to himself and against much of his own camp.

From 1905 he devoted himself to preventing a European war, working through the Socialist International for a coordinated general strike that would make mobilisation impossible. The nationalist press called him a traitor for months. On the evening of 31 July 1914, sitting by the open window of the Café du Croissant near his newspaper, he was shot twice through the glass by a young nationalist. France mobilised three days later. The killer was acquitted in 1919, and Jaurès's widow was ordered to pay the costs. His ashes were carried to the Panthéon in 1924.