Gustave Tridon (1841–1871) was a French revolutionary socialist, member of the First International and the Paris Commune and anti-Semite.
Blanquism and the International
Edme Marie Gustave Tridon was born in Châtillon-sur-Seine on January 1, 1841. He came from a very wealthy family. Although he studied law and obtained all his professional qualifications, he never actually practised law, due to his independent wealth. As a student Tridon became a radical republican and an opponent of the Second Empire of Napoléon III. He became a convinced atheist, considering atheism the highest achievement of scientific reason, a metaphysical materialist and a revolutionary socialist. Among the figures of the first French Revolution, he most admired Jacques-René Hébert (1757–1794), the Parisian sans-colotte leader who was guillotined by the Jacobins. Tridon published two books on the Hébertists: The Hébertists: Protest Against a Historical Calumny (1864) and The Commune of 1793: The Hébertists (1871). He also published a history of the Girondists, The Gironde and the Girondists (1869). In addition, Tridon was a glowing French patriot.
Tridon's views in all these matters corresponded closely to Louis Auguste Blanqui. Tridon first met Blanqui in the Sainte-Pélagie prison in 1865; Tridon had been incarcerated there for writing anti-religious articles that were deemed contrary to morality. He became a close friend and follower of Blanqui. After his release, Tridon founded the journal Candide in 1865. Tridon financed the paper, which served as a platform for Blanqui and his associates. Blanqui himself contributed articles under a pseudonym. The paper was eventually shut down by the authorities, and Tridon was jailed again. In 1866, he joined the First International, one of the first Blanquists to do so. (Some Blanquists were wary of the International because its French section was dominated by syndicalists, Mutualists and Proudhonists, whom they considered insufficiently revolutionary.) Tridon was one of six French Blanquists who attended the Geneva congress of the First International in 1866; he acted as Blanqui's representative. Tridon and his fellow Blanquists angrily denounced the Proudhonist majority of the French delegation as agents of Napoléon III. The Blanquists were thrown out of the congress, but they earned the gratitude of Karl Marx, whose feud with Proudhon dated back to the 1840s. On his return to France from the International congress, Tridon was arrested. He remained in prison until 1868. Imprisonment, however, did not stop his publicistic activities. He founded the journal Revue, among others, and contributed articles to several other journals. In January 1870, he was implicated in a political trial at Blois; fearing imminent arrest, he went to Brussels.
The Paris Commune
Although Tridon detested the régime of Napoléon III, he was a passionate advocate of national defence during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. In 1870 he founded the journal La Patrie en Danger (The Fatherland in Danger), another Blanquist mouthpiece. In its pages, Tridon sharply attacked the government of Napoléon III for prosecuting the war so badly. Tridon returned to France after Napoléon III fell from power. He strongly opposed the peace negotiations with Germany carried out by the conservative republican government of Adolphe Thiers. On October 31, 1870, the Blanquists led an unsuccessful uprising against the Thiers government, but Tridon avoided imprisonment. In January 1871, as Paris lay besieged by the German army, Tridon collaborated with Édouard Vaillant, Jules Vallès and others in writing the Affiche rouge (red poster), which denounced the Thiers government, called for the establishment of an autonomous Paris Commune and put forward three main demands: general requisitioning of all human and material resources, free rations for all, and fighting to the utmost against the siege. Tridon joined the Republican Central Committee of the Twenty Districts, in which Blanquists, Proudhonists, Jacobins and various other radicals, who had until recently been rivals, collaborated.