Jules Guesde - in The Early Movement

In The Early Movement

He was born in Paris on November 11, 1845, on the Ile-St-Louis. He began his career as a clerk in the Interior Ministry, but, on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, he was editing Les Droits de l'Homme at Montpellier, and had to take refuge in Geneva in 1871 from a prosecution instituted on account of articles which had appeared in his paper in defence of the Paris Commune. There he read the works of Karl Marx. In 1876, he returned to France to become one of the chief French advocates of Marxism, being imprisoned for six months in 1878 for taking part in the first Parisian International Congress. He edited at different times Les Droits de l’Homme, Le Cri du peuple, and Le Socialiste, but his best-known organ was the weekly Égalité.

He had been in close association with Paul Lafargue, and through him with Karl Marx, whose daughter Lafargue had married. It was in conjunction with Marx and Lafargue that he drew up the programme accepted by the National Congress of the French Workers' Party at Le Havre in 1880, which laid stress on the formation of an international labour party working by revolutionary methods. The following year, at the Reims Congress, the orthodox Marxian programme of Guesde was opposed by the "possibilists", who rejected the intransigeant attitude of Guesde for the reformist policy of Benoît Malon.