Jean Allemane
Jean Allemane was a French socialist politician, veteran of the Paris Commune of 1871, pioneer of syndicalism, leader of the Socialist-Revolutionary Workers' Party and co-founder of the unified French Section of the Workers' International in 1905. He was a deputy in the National Assembly of the Third French Republic.
Early life: labour activist and Communard
Jean Allemane was born into a working-class family in Sauveterre-de-Comminges in southern France. In 1853, he came to Paris with his parents and was apprenticed as a printer. The hardship of working conditions, the republican sympathies of his family and the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon conspired to radicalise Allemane early on. As a teenager he became involved in trade union activity, which was still illegal in France. In 1862, aged 19, he was arrested for his role in organising the first typesetters' strike in Paris. Subsequently, he helped found the typesetters' union. Despite his youth, Allemane played an important role in the emerging French syndicalist movement and emphasised the need for workers to form their own organisations, independent of bourgeois radicals.In 1870, Allemane served in the Parisian National Guard, where he became a corporal. In this capacity, he participated in the uprising of the Paris Commune at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. Although he welcomed the fall of Napoléon III, he mistrusted the conservative republicans around Adolphe Thiers who replaced him. In the Commune, Allemane sympathised with the Proudhonist faction. Allemane participated actively in the fighting. After the suppression of the Commune, he went into hiding but was captured, and in 1872, he was sentenced to hard labour in perpetuity into Fort Quélern and banished to the penal colony of New Caledonia. In 1876 he made an unsuccessful attempt to escape. In 1878, he was ordered to participate in suppressing a revolt of the native population but refused. This led to further penalties. However, in 1879, a general amnesty enabled Allemane to return to France.
Socialist partisan politics: POF, FTSF, POSR
In 1880, Allemane became a typesetter at the radical newspaper L'Intransigeant, founded by the republican Henri Rochefort. That year, he became a founding member of the French Workers' Party, founded by Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue. Guesde and Lafargue were by then Marxists, but the POF was not yet a homogeneous Marxist party, and Allemane sympathised with syndicalist and Proudhonist tendencies. In 1882, he supported the 'Possibilist' Paul Brousse in his conflict with Guesde. Like Allemane and Guesde himself, Brousse had been a Communard and had once sympathised with anarchism, but in the 1880s, the party he led – the Federation of the Socialist Workers of France – adopted an increasingly reformist course. Allemane became increasingly discenchanted with this. In his own journal, Parti Ouvrier, he called for a more radical course and advocated syndicalist ideas such as a general strike that was to precipitate a revolution, direct action and the formation of separate proletarian organisations not subject to bourgeois leadership.Anti-Boulangist, Dreyfusard
During the Boulangist crisis of 1886–1889, when the popular nationalist General Boulanger seemed to threaten a coup d'état, Allemane became one of the most vocal defenders of the Republic. This temporarily re-enforced his alliance with Brousse and with reformist socialists and republicans who opposed the general. However, once the crisis had passed, Allemane's radicalism put him at odds with the Possibilists and reformists. In 1890 he was expelled from the FTSF and formed his own party, the French Socialist-Revolutionary Workers' Party, which called for a general strike, worked closely with the trade union movement and rejected bourgeois parliamentary democracy as insufficiently democratic. Nevertheless, the Allemanists, as they were called, stood for elections, and Allemane later became a deputy in the National Assembly. The Guesdists, as orthodox Marxists, strongly criticised Allemanism: 'general strike is general nonsense' was their slogan, and trade unions should be placed firmly under the political leadership of a socialist party. By contrast, the Allemanists insisted on the autonomy of the trade unions and saw the socialist party merely as the political representative of the extra-parliamentary workers' movement.Allemane's support of the labour movement and his involvement in the CGT translated into working-class support for his party.
In January 1901 he ran successfully against the antisemite Max Régis in a Paris by-election for the Chamber of Deputies.
He was elected again in 1906. During the Dreyfus affair, Allemane was a staunch defender of the Jewish officer, who, it turned out, was unjustly accused of treason. He denounced the rising tide of anti-Semitism. Again, this aligned him with the Broussists and reformist socialists around Jean Jaurès. In 1899, the Independent Socialist Alexandre Millerand precipitated a fierce controversy in French and European socialism by joining a bourgeois republican cabinet – something no socialist had done since Louis Blanc's ill-fated participation in the Provisional Government of the Second Republic in 1848. The controversy over Millerandism coincided with the Revisionist controversy in German Social-Democracy and with the controversy over 'Economism' among Russian Marxists. Revolutionary socialists like Guesde and Édouard Vaillant saw all three phenomena as a betrayal of the working class; Jaurès and the reformists supported Millerand, albeit reluctantly. Allemane took an intermediate position, sceptical of participation in bourgeois cabinets but willing to support reformist social legislation. Eventually, Millerand left the socialist party altogether.