Jean Jaurès

<p>Auguste Marie Joseph Jean Léon Jaurès (3 September 1859 – 31 July 1914), commonly referred to as Jean Jaurès (French: [ʒɑ̃ ʒɔʁɛs] ; Occitan: Joan Jaurés [dʒuˈan dʒawˈɾes]), was a French socialist leader. Initially a Moderate Republican, he later became a social democrat and one of the first possibilists (the reformist wing of the socialist movement) and in 1902 the leader of the French Socialist Party, which opposed Jules Guesde&#039;s revolutionary Socialist Party of France.</p><p>The two parties merged in 1905 into the French Section of the Workers&#039; International (SFIO). An antimilitarist, he was assassinated in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I but remains one of the main historical figures of the French Left.</p><p>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, and patriotism and internationalism.</p>