Jean Allemane

Jean Allemane

Jean Allemane (born August 25, 1843 in Sauveterre-de-Comminges , Haute-Garonne department , † June 6, 1935 in Herblay , Seine-et-Oise department ) was a French socialist politician and veteran of the Paris Commune from 1871, pioneer of the Syndicalism , leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Workers' Party (POSR) and co-founder of the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière (SFIO) in 1905. He was a member of the national assembly of the Third French Republic .

Early life: worker activist and communard

Jean Allemane was born into a working class family in the south of France. In 1853 he moved with his parents to Paris, where he worked as a printer. The poor working conditions, the influence of his parents and the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon made Allemane a staunch socialist. As a young man he participated in union activities (which were illegal in France until 1906). In 1862, at the age of 19, he was arrested for the first time. He had founded the printers' union and organized a strike.

In 1870 Allemane served in the Paris National Guard, where he became a captain. Following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, he took part in the uprising of the Paris Commune. He also welcomed the fall of Napoleon III . Within the commune he belonged to the Proudhonists . Allemane fought gun in hand during the uprising, was arrested and sentenced to forced labor in New Caledonia in 1872 .

In 1876 he tried unsuccessfully to escape. In 1878 he was supposed to take part in the suppression of the New Caledonians who rebelled against the French occupation forces, which he refused. In 1879 he was allowed to return to France due to a general amnesty.

Socialist partisan: POF, FTSF, POSR

In 1880 Allemane Drucker joined the radical newspaper L'Intransigeant , founded by Henri Rochefort . In the same year he became a founding member of the French labor party Parti ouvrier français (POF), founded by Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue . Guesde and Lafargue were Marxists (Lafargue was Karl Marx 's son-in-law), but the POF was not a homogeneous Marxist party. Allemane sympathized with the syndicalist and Proudhon. In 1882 he supported the ' possibilist ' Paul Brousse in his conflict with Guesde. When the party became more moderate in the 1880s, Allemane became estranged from it. In his own journal Parti Ouvrier , he called for a more radical course. He also favored direct actions (sabotage, strikes, factory occupations) and purely proletarian associations that were not run by the bourgeoisie .

During the state crisis from 1886 to 1889, when the nationalist General Georges Boulanger threatened the state with a coup, Allemane sided strictly with the republic.

During this time he entered into an alliance with Brousse. After the crisis he continued his radical course and in 1890 he was expelled from the FTSF. He founded his own party, the Parti Ouvrier Socialiste-Révolutionnaire . This party called for general strikes and faced headwinds from the more moderate left. Allemanes POSR merged with Brousses FTSF in the early 20th century . In 1905 the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière was founded. Alleman was their delegate from 1906 to 1910 (for the XI arrondissement of Paris). During this time he continued to work as a printer. In 1910 he published a communard's memoir .

war

The outbreak of World War I led to a split in the French left (similar to that in other European left parties). Allemane, who had always spoken out against militarism, sided with the French government and became a supporter of the war.

In 1917 he welcomed the February Revolution . He was skeptical of Lenin , but he also welcomed the October Revolution . After the victory of France in 1918, he returned to his radical left positions.

post war period

In 1920 the congress of Alleman's party took place. Here the party split over the question of whether to join Lenin and the Third International . The majority supported this step and the party was renamed the Communist Party of France (PCF). Allemane voted for the International, but did not join the PCF. In the 1920s he moved close to Gustave Hervé National Socialist Party . The party, originally founded by socialists who had advocated war during the war, moved more and more towards fascism in the period that followed . Allemane did not participate in the activities of this party, but devoted the rest of his life to the work of his Masonic Lodge . He was a member of the Grand Orient de France , he died in Herblay in Seine-et-Oise in 1935. He is on the Parisian cemetery Pere Lachaise buried.

Sources and literature

• B. Didier: L'Allemanisme 1890-1905. Reims 1990.
• S. Reynolds: La vie de Jean Allemane (1843-1935). PhD thesis. University of Paris, 1981.
• D. Bigorgne: Les allemanistes (1882-1905). Itinéraires, place et rôle dans le mouvement socialiste français. PhD thesis. University of Paris, 2001.
• M. Winock: 'La naissance du parti allemaniste (1890-1891).' In: Le Mouvement social. No. 75, avril-juin 1971.
• S. Reynolds: 'Allemane, the Allemanists and Le Parti Ouvrier: The Problems of a Socialist Newspaper 1888-1900.' In: European History Quarterly. vol. 15, 1985, pp. 43-70.
• The Great Soviet Encyclopedia . Moscow 1979.
• GDH Cole: The Second International. New York 1956.
• A. Noland: The Founding of the French Socialist Party (1893-1905) . Cambridge 1956.
• jeanallemane.free.fr
• jeanallemane.free.fr

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Daniel Ligou: Dictionnaire de la franc-maçonnerie. 3. Edition. Presses universitaires de France, Paris 1991, p. 37.