The murder of Jean Jaurès, French deputy for Tarn and Socialist politician, took place on Friday, July 31, 1914, at 9:40 pm, as he dined at the Café du Croissant on rue Montmartre in Paris's 2nd arrondissement, in the heart of the Republic of the Croissant, not far from the headquarters of his newspaper, L'Humanité. He was hit by two gunshots: one bullet pierced his skull and the other nestled in woodwork. The famous politician collapsed, mortally wounded.
Committed three days before France's entry into World War I, this murder put an end to the desperate efforts Jaurès had made since the Sarajevo bombing to prevent a military explosion in Europe. It precipitated the rallying of the majority of the French left to the Sacred Union, including many socialists and trade unionists who had previously refused to support the war. The Sacred Union ceased to exist in 1919 when his assassin, Raoul Villain, was acquitted. The transfer of Jaurès's ashes to the Panthéon in 1924 underlined another political split within the Left, between communists and socialists.
Context
After the attack on Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, the European states were gradually drawn into a new international crisis by the play of alliances, leading to the outbreak of World War I within a month. Throughout these four weeks, Jaurès, the most prominent opponent of the war, felt the tension rising inexorably, and tried until his death to oppose it.
At the age of fifty-four, Jean Jaurès was the leading figure in the French socialist movement, the SFIO (French Section of the Workers' International), and a celebrated figure in international socialism, particularly since the death in 1913 of August Bebel, the leader of German social democracy. Jaurès, who entered politics in 1885 as a Republican deputy, an admirer of Gambetta, and a supporter of the Jules Ferry government, was very attached to the defense of the fatherland, as he explained in his book L'Armée nouvelle, published in 1911, criticizing Marx's famous phrase: "proletarians have no fatherland". He was convinced, however, that wars were caused by the clash of capitalist interests, and that it was the duty of the working class to oppose them.Along with the Socialist group, he supported the Viviani government, which he felt was genuinely hostile to the war. On July 14, at the SFIO's extraordinary congress, which met until the 19th, he expressed confidence in the will of the working class and its representatives in the main countries to oppose the conflict, including through the weapon of the general strike. He supported the Keir-Hardie-Vaillant motion, the names of a British and a French socialist, which called for a strike in the event of imminent conflict: "rather insurrection than war", to which Jaurès added that the strike should be "simultaneously and internationally organized". This earned him an attack from a newspaper like Le Temps, which on July 18 accused him of supporting the "abominable thesis that would lead to disarming the nation at a time when it was in peril", to which he replied in L'Humanité that "the strike would also paralyze the aggressor". He learned with concern of the growing number of commitments made as part of the Franco-Russian Alliance to be celebrated in St Petersburg by President Poincaré and Prime Minister Viviani between July 20 and 23. For months, Jaurès' entire strategy had been to condemn the alliance with despotic Russia and to seek mediation and rapprochement with England – in vain. When he was informed of the breakdown of diplomatic relations between Austria and Serbia on July 24, he realized the seriousness of the threat. On July 25, he came to support Marius Moutet, the Socialist candidate in a by-election in Vaise, a suburb of Lyon, and gave a speech denouncing the "massacres to come". As he confessed to Joseph Paul-Boncour, Viviani's chief of staff, he was overcome by pessimism when he expressed himself fatalistically:
Believing he could still put pressure on the government, he maintained a certain reserve with regard to the demonstration organized by the CGT in Paris on July 27. The Socialist Party executive, which met on July 28 at the instigation of Jaurès, again expressed its support to the government.