GUESDE, JULES (1845–1922)

GUESDE, JULES (1845–1922)

In the history of nineteenth-century political thought, Jules Guesde is not recognized for the originality of his ideas. However, he remains a significant figure in the history of French socialism. His personal ideological metamorphosis mirrored the evolution of French socialist thought from being premised on an association of independent producers to the collectivization of resources. More importantly, Guesde contributed to the growth and development of French socialism through the dissemination and popularization of Karl Marx’s ideas. In addition, Guesde reorientated the apolitical stance of the late nineteenth-century French workers movement towards political activism and party formation.

Born Jules Bazile on 11 November 1845 in Paris, the future Jules Guesde first entered political discourse as a journalist in 1867. An advocate of republicanism during the waning years of Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire, Guesde adopted his mother’s family name in order to protect his family. Before being sentenced to five years in prison for his writings in defence of the Paris Commune (his support was predicated less out of an affinity for communard doctrines, than out of a distrust of the ‘republicans’ at Versailles), Guesde fled France, first for Geneva, then for Rome and Milan.

When he went into exile, Guesde was a republican, but not yet an adherent to socialism. His more seasoned compatriots viewed Guesde as an ideological neophyte, still adhering to the centralized statism and social democracy identified with French Jacobinism. However, contact with other French exiles, as well as European socialists who had participated in the First International, exposed Guesde to concepts that he later distilled into his ideas. Exiled socialists were divided between Karl Marx’s collectivist theories (see MARX AND MARXISM) and MIKHAIL BAKUNIN’S anarchism that promoted a stateless society as the end result of a spontaneous social class revolution. The latter’s apolitical tendencies was more consistent with Proudhonian-inspired French socialism’s triad of associationism, mutualism and federalism (see PROUDHON, PIERRE-JOSEPH). Guesde’s move to Milan in 1874 appears to have represented a personal and ideological turning point. He married Mathilde Constantin, an intellectual soulmate who was fluent in five languages. Ideologically, Guesde broadened his

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ideological foundations beyond anarchism’s anti-statism. Under the influence of the works of Théodore Dézamy, a communist during France’s July Monarchy, and Russian utopian socialist Nicolai Chernyshevsky, Guesde’s writings between 1875 and 1876 reflected a burgeoning interest in collectivism.

Returning to France in 1876, Guesde encountered a republic dominated by monarchists who passed laws that restricted the development of socialism. The workers’ movement largely eschewed political measures, let alone revolutionary activities. Although Guesde, in 1878, still drew upon French socialism’s anarcho-federalism’s emphasis on a revolutionary federation of municipal councils and trades, he no longer believed that workers were capable of leading a socialist movement. By contrast, the lead role reserved by Guesde for an intellectual, revolutionary elite provided rudimentary evidence of his exposure and receptivity to Marx’s ideas.

Surrounded by a cadre of revolutionary intellectuals, including Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, Guesde soon attracted Marx’s attention and confidence as a potential leader of the French socialist movement.

However, Guesde faced formidable obstacles in achieving his primary goal— attracting support for a separate workers’ party. Until 1879, defence of the beleaguered Third Republic was a more compelling message than the advancement of a social class agenda. The Republic’s stabilization in 1879, followed by its neglect of the socialist agenda, appeared to substantiate Guesde’s revolutionary, as opposed to co-operative, brand of socialism. At the national labour congress held at Marseilles in 1879, Guesde spoke of how the irreconcilability of class interests rendered reform within the existent system impossible, thus mandating that workers build their own political organization. However, until a unified party emerged in 1905 French socialism was bedevilled by internecine warfare between reformists and revolutionaries, associationists and collectivists. Although little separated Guesde’s programme from that of the majority, Guesde’s continued reliance on revolutionary messianism and a centrally organized party led by an intellectual elite distanced him from French socialism’s traditional message and constituency. Consequently, in 1882, Guesde formed the Workers’ Party, which served as

a vehicle for his introduction of the principal tenets of Marxism to the French political landscape. Recognizing that skilled workers could not be weaned off of their penchant for associationism, Guesde directed his message to the burgeoning, though unorganized, unskilled proletariat, particularly in the industrial north of France.

During the 1890s, the Workers’ Party (renamed the French Workers’ Party), taking advantage of an increase in labour militancy, became France’s largest socialist party. Guesde’s election to the Chamber of Deputies from a constituency in the northern industrial town of Roubaix demonstrated the growing strength of his party. Guesde’s electoral defeat in 1898 demonstrated his vulnerability to nationalist attacks that his embrace of Marxism had tied him too closely to German socialists and ideologies, a particularly potent message when the Dreyfus Affair was reaching its crescendo.

Guesde’s trademark rigidity in refusing to abandon his revolutionary rhetoric rendered him a less than efficacious political figure. Yet in spite of his penchant for doctrinaire stances, Guesde was, at times, plagued by pragmatism; personally repulsed by the misogynistic impulses of French socialism, Guesde’s fears over alienating male voters and enfranchising conservative female voters muted his support for feminism.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 254 By 1900, Jean Jaurès eclipsed Guesde as French socialism’s most identifiable face.

Though re-elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1906, 1910, 1914 and 1919, Guesde’s insistence on revolutionary orthodoxy (including opposition to nationalization of key industries because it did not entail outright expropriation), socialist abstinence from participation in bourgeois governments (though Guesde served as minister ‘without portfolio’ during the First World War) and subordination of every conceivable issue to class struggle (including his characterization of the Dreyfus Affair as being of little relevance to the working class and his responses to war in 1914) marginalized him from the socialist mainstream. In the twentieth century, Guesde was too militant for the increasingly conciliatory Socialist Party, while his open hostility to the Russian Revolution rendered him too distant from new currents of communism.