What explains France’s unique Left? Many works have reflected upon the importance of Marxism in France, yet few studies have been devoted to the man who did most to introduce Marxism into its political culture: the today near-forgotten figure of Jules Guesde. It was with Guesde that Karl Marx drafted the world’s first Marxist program, and Guesde who aroused the enthusiasm of countless worker-militants who saw him as their most important leader. Jules Guesde represents the first book-length study of the French socialist leader translated into the English language. For the radical Left today, Guesde is often considered a dogmatist who supported the Union sacrée during World War I and rejected the Bolshevik revolution; for the governmental Left, he embodies an intransigent ideologue who held back the modernization of the French Left. Throughout Jules Guesde, Jean-Numa Ducange argues that it is impossible to study the history of the French socialist movement without a close look at this singular figure and offers a fuller picture of the deep transformations of the Left and Marxism in France from the late 19th century up to the present. This scholarly biography of Jules Guesde seeks to put Guesde’s record on a properly historical footing, closely analysing both archival sources and accounts by his contemporaries. Chapter One begins with his early life and the mark left on him by the Paris Commune and exile. Chapter Two emphasises Guesde’s importance as leader of a distinct current of French socialism, recognised by figures like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Chapter Three sees Guesde become an MP for working-class Roubaix, exploring the contradictions between his revolutionary rhetoric and concrete political practice. Chapter Four turns to the years following his electoral defeat in 1898 and his renewed intransigence in the period of the Dreyfus affair and rivalry with Jaurès. Chapter Five explores his key role in the formation of a united Socialist Party. Chapter Six examines the test of World War I and Guesde’s anguish at the divisions of French socialism. The book then concludes with an examination of Guesde’s contested legacy, as both a “founding father” and figure subject to often pejorative framings.

How did one man's critique of capitalism guide the course of modern history? When he died in 1883, Karl Marx left behind an intellectual legacy of formidable proportions and revolutionary potential, yet one that exerted limited actual political, social, or economic influence. The full force of his ideas did not come into play for another generation, and only after they had been appropriated and applied by some of Marxism's earliest proponents. The history of Marxism, in other words, is the story of those who brought Marx's ideas into play, transforming a sweeping but fractious and occasionally abstruse view of historical and social forces into a coherent plan of action. Christina Morina's illuminating book focuses on the first generation of Marxists who turned the work and ideas of one social theorist, one among many, into one of the most powerful transnational political movements in modern history. The Invention Of Marxism is therefore a group portrait, featuring such figures as Rosa Luxemburg, Max Adler, Jean Jaurès, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, and Vladimir Lenin -- German, French, Russian, Czech -- whose lives became dedicated to interpreting and applying Marxist thought. They were the vehicles by which his ideas were read, debated, and gradually adopted in socialist movements across Europe. Morina's fascinating book therefore reconstructs the beginnings of Marxism through the individual politicization of a group of intellectuals who made it their purpose in life to solve the 'social question', exploring the nexus between their intellectual constructs and social and political reality. The Invention of Marxism shows how what started as a theory of capitalism grew into a fully-fledged political philosophy and platform, one that shaped the century that followed Marx's death. In short, it reveals how an idea first conquered these individuals and then the world.

Monograph based on a thesis dealing with the history of the labour movement in France - discusses socialism and collectivism of skilled workers, treats the formation of the first French socialist political party (parti ouvrier), discusses the emergence of trade unions, and includes a literature survey. Annotated bibliography pp. 201 to 210, and references.

Many historians have examined the French labor movement, but few have gone beyond chronicling unions, strikes, and personalities to undertake a concrete analysis of workers’ aims in their historical context. Searching for what Marx called the “real movement” of the working class, Bernard H. Moss presents a sophisticated revisionist interpretation that uncovers a core ideology of social vision underlying the many changes and variations in French socialism. To define this ideology and delineate its social base, Moss cuts through conventional distinctions between artisans and proletarians and between anarchism and socialism to derive an intermediate category, the federalist trade socialism of skilled workers. Originally manifested in the trade movement for producers’ associations and cooperatives, this socialism eventually found revolutionary expression in Bakuninism, possibilism, Allemanism, and revolutionary syndicalism. The social base of this movement was the skilled craftsmen undergoing a process of proletarianization. In The Origins of the French Labor Movement, Moss rehabilitates ideology both as a vital force in history and as a serious subject for scientific history. He proposes important revisions in our understanding of French politics and society in the nineteenth century and suggests a new approach to socialist ideology, not as abstract theory, but as the result of historical experience and process. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

A biography of the French Socialist leader.

Paul Lafargue, the disciple and son-in-law of Karl Marx, helped to found the first French Marxist party in 1882. Over the next three decades, he served as the chief theoretician and propagandist for Marxism in France. During these years - which ended with the dramatic suicides of Lafargue and his wife - French socialism, and the Marxist party within it, became a significant political force. Leslie Derfler explores Lafargue's political strategies, specifically his break with party co-founder Jules Guesde in the Boulanger and Dreyfus episodes and over the question of socialist syndicalist relations. Derfler shows Lafargue's importance as both political activist and theorist. He describes Lafargue's role in the formulation of such strategies as the promotion of a Second Workingmen's International, the pursuit of reform within the framework of the existent state but opposition to any socialist participation in nonsocialist governments, and the subordination of trade unionism to political action. He emphasizes Lafargue's pioneering efforts to apply Marxist methods of analysis to questions of anthropology, aesthetics, and literary criticism.

Covering the period from 1789 to 1914, this work primarily deals with key figures and ideas in social and political thinking, but entries also include science, religion, law, art, concepts of modernity, the body and health, thereby covering comprehensively the intellectual history of the period.

Beyond France’s own national historiography, the French Revolution was a fundamental point of reference for the nineteenth-century socialist movement. As Jean-Numa Ducange tells us, while Karl Marx never wrote his planned history of the Revolution, from the 1880s the German and Austrian social-democrats did embark on such a project. This was an important moment for both Marxism and the historiography of the French Revolution. Yet it has not previously been the object of any overall study. The French Revolution and Social Democracy studies both the social-democratic readings of the foundational revolutionary event, and the place of this history in militant culture, as seen in sources from party educationals, to leaflets and workers’ calendars. First published in 2012 as La Révolution française et la social-démocratie. Transmissions et usages politiques de l’histoire en Allemagne et Autriche, 1889–1934 by Presses Universitaires de Rennes in 2012.