As a heterodox Marxist, Jaurès rejected the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and tried to conciliate idealism and materialism, individualism and collectivism, democracy and class struggle, and patriotism and internationalism.

[1][need quotation to verify] The son of an unsuccessful businessman and farmer, Jean Jaurès was born in Castres, Tarn, into a modest French provincial haut-bourgeois family.

A brilliant student, Jaurès was educated at the Lycée Sainte-Barbe in Paris and admitted first at the École normale supérieure, in philosophy, in 1878, ahead of Henri Bergson.

[3] In 1889, after unsuccessfully contesting the Castres seat, this time under the banner of Socialism, he returned to his professional duties at Toulouse, where he took an active interest in municipal affairs and helped to found the medical faculty of the university.

He also prepared two theses for his doctorate in philosophy, De primis socialismi germanici lineamentis apud Lutherum, Kant, Fichte et Hegel ("On the first delineations of German socialism in the writings of [Martin] Luther, [Immanuel] Kant, [Johann Gottlieb] Fichte and [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel") (1891), and De la réalité du monde sensible.

During the Combes administration his influence secured the coherence of the Radical-Socialist coalition known as the Bloc des gauches,[2] which enacted the 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and the State.

[7] According to Geoffrey Kurtz, Jaures was "instrumental" in the reforms carried out by the administration, Emile Combes, "influencing the content of legislation and keeping the factions within the Bloc united.

[10] As the revolt of the Languedoc winegrowers developed, on 11 June 1907 Jaurès filed a bill with Jules Guesde that proposed nationalization of the wine estates.

He supported, albeit not without criticisms, the teaching of regional languages, such as Occitan, Basque and Breton, commonly known as "patois", thus opposing, on this issue, traditional Republican Jacobinism.

In 1913, he opposed Émile Driant's Three-Year Service Law, which implemented a draft period, and tried to promote understanding between France and Germany.

As conflict became imminent, he tried to organise general strikes in France and Germany in order to force the governments to back down and negotiate.

This proved difficult, however, as many Frenchmen sought revenge (revanche) for their country's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the return of the lost Alsace-Lorraine territory.

Then, in May 1914, with Jaurès intending to form an alliance with Joseph Caillaux for the labour movement, the Socialists won the General Election.

Jaurès accused French President Raymond Poincaré of being "more Russian than Russia" and premier René Viviani as being compliant.

Forty minutes later, Raoul Villain, a 29-year-old French nationalist, walked up to the restaurant window and fired two shots into Jaurès's back.

Jaurès had been due to attend an international conference on 9 August, in an attempt to dissuade the belligerent parties from going ahead with the war.

[clarification needed] Speaking at Jaurès's funeral a few days later, CGT leader Léon Jouhaux declared, "All working men ... we take the field with the determination to drive back the aggressor.

[24] In the centenary year of his assassination, politicians from all sides of the political spectrum paid tribute to him and claimed he would have supported them.