Jean Jaurès, French journalist and politician (b. 1859)

Auguste Marie Joseph Jean Léon Jaurès (3 September 1859 – 31 July 1914), commonly referred to as Jean Jaurès (French: [ʒɑ̃ ʒɔʁɛs]; Occitan: Joan Jaurés [dʒuˈan dʒawˈɾes]), was a French Socialist leader. Initially a Moderate Republican, he later became one of the first social democrats and the leader of the French Socialist Party in 1902, which opposed Jules Guesde's revolutionary Socialist Party of France. The two parties merged in 1905 in the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO). An antimilitarist, Jaurès was assassinated at the outbreak of World War I, and remains one of the main historical figures of the French Left. Jaurès was a heterodox Marxist: he rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat and tried to conciliate idealism and materialism, individualism and collectivism, democracy and class struggle, patriotism and internationalism.