Edouard Vaillant

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Édouard Vaillant (center) in front of the Mur des Fédérés , a memorial wall for the killed revolutionaries of the Paris Commune in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris (photograph taken at the end of May 1908 at the demonstration to mark the 37th anniversary of the so-called "bloody week of May" )

Édouard Vaillant (born January 26, 1840 in Vierzon ; died December 18, 1915 in Saint-Mandé ) was a socialist politician in France in the last quarter of the 19th and early 20th centuries . In 1871 he was a member of the revolutionary Paris Commune , and from 1893 until his death in elected representatives in the Chamber of Deputies of the French Third Republic .

At the supranational level, he gained prominence in the late 1860s and early 1870s as a member of the International Workers 'Association , and - 13 years after its dissolution - in 1889 as a co-founder of the Second International of the socialist workers' movement .

Life

Vaillant was the son of a lawyer in Vierzon.

He graduated from the École centrale Paris in 1862, initially as a graduate engineer. He then obtained his doctorate in natural science at the Sorbonne . In Paris he was in contact with Charles Longuet , Louis-Auguste Rogeard , Jules Vallès and the early theoretician of mutualist anarchism Joseph Proudhon .

In 1864, Vaillant joined the International Workers' Association (IAA), which was essentially founded on the initiative of Karl Marx and is now known as the First International . In 1866 he went on a study trip to Germany, where he came into contact with the religious-critical philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach .

At the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War he returned to Paris in 1870 and after the victory of Prussia and the North German Confederation over the Second French Empire in March 1871, he joined the left-wing revolutionary Paris Commune . In this - according to Marxist diction - the first proletarian revolution, he followed the ideas of Blanquism .

After the bloody suppression of the Commune de Paris at the end of May 1871, he emigrated to British exile , where he had close contacts with the Blanquist wing of the International Workers' Association. In 1872 he was sentenced to death in absentia by the French judiciary as a participant in the Commune. He only returned to France after the general amnesty of 1880.

After the IAA disintegrated in 1872 due to the fundamental ideological conflict between Marxists and anarchists following the expulsion of Mikhail Bakunin and was formally dissolved in 1876, Vaillant was one of the prominent founding members of the Second or Socialist International in 1889 . Together with the German socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht , he was chairman of the international socialist congress, which met with around 400 delegates from 20 countries in Paris from July 14 to 20, 1889, and which led to the establishment of the Second International.

In 1893 Vaillant was elected to the Chamber of Deputies of the Third French Republic for the socialist faction, which was still divided into various individual organizations . During his deputies activities were in Parliament he ideologically between the more reformist Jean Jaurès and the revolutionary Marxism oriented Jules Guesde , but worked closely with both. With them he was one of the leading founding members of the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière (translated: French Section of the Workers' International , abbreviated: SFIO ), which emerged from the merger of the Parti socialiste de France (PSDF) and the Parti socialiste français (PSF) ), the predecessor party of the French Socialist Party that emerged in 1969 . This Marxist-oriented party fought on an anti-imperialist basis in particular the French colonial policy and the growing nationalism . By 1914, the SFIO had developed into the second largest group in the French parliament.

In the run-up to the First World War , Vaillant was one of the opponents of the looming "great war". In accordance with the commitment of the Socialist International to supranational solidarity of the working class (see internationalism ), he called for a general strike with the aim of preventing war . After his pacifist party comrade Jean Jaurès had been murdered by a nationalist assassin and the anti-war sentiment had also turned over among the left in France, Vaillant, after a speech by French President Raymond Poincaré , endorsed the idea of ​​the Union sacrée (“ sacred covenant "), A kind of amalgamation of the political parties with the preference of the" defense of the fatherland "(similar to the truce policy of the SPD with war opponent Germany ). With the start of the war and the associated subordination of most of the socialist parties to the respective national government interests, the Second International, in the establishment of which Vaillant played an important role, also collapsed.

Édouard Vaillant died on December 18, 1915 in the second year of the First World War at the age of 75.

Works (in German translation)

  • Unemployment. International Socialist Congress in Vienna (23-29 August 1914) Brussels 1914.

literature

  • Ossip Zetkin character heads from the French labor movement. Berlin 1889.
  • Max Quarck (transl.) The future state debates in the French Parliament - speeches by Jaurès, Vaillant and Clemenceau in the Chamber of Deputies June 1906. Frankfurt am Main 1906.
  • Edouard Vaillant . In: The True Jacob . No. 770 of January 21, 1916, p. 8894 digitized

Web links

Commons : Édouard Vaillant  - album with pictures, videos and audio files