Jean Allemane
Jean Allemane (25 August 1843, Sauveterre-de-Comminges, Haute-Garonne – 6 June 1935, Herblay in Seine-et-Oise) was a French socialist politician, veteran of the Paris Commune of 1871, pioneer of syndicalism, leader of the Socialist-Revolutionary Workers' Party (POSR) and co-founder of the unified French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) in 1905.
The hardship of working conditions, the republican sympathies of his family and the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon conspired to radicalise Allemane early on.
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.
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.
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 (FTSF) – adopted an increasingly reformist course.
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 (sabotage, strikes, factory occupations) and the formation of separate proletarian organisations not subject to bourgeois leadership.
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.
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.
[citation needed] In January 1901 he ran successfully against the antisemite Max Régis in a Paris by-election for the Chamber of Deputies.
During the Dreyfus affair, Allemane was a staunch defender of the Jewish officer, who, it turned out, was unjustly accused of treason.
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.
This group sought to unite socialists who had taken a 'patriotic' position during the First World War, but it also attracted old Boulangist and anti-Dreyfusard elements, as well as anti-Marxist syndicalists.
