Jean Longuet

As a child Longuet was doted on by his grandfather Marx and his aunt Eleanor Marx, who played a decisive part in his political formation. He first joined Jules Guesde's French Workers' Party, but disagreeing with Guesde's view of the Dreyfus affair as "a bourgeois affair, of no interest to the working class" he moved towards Jean Jaurès. When the Guesdists and Jaurès's followers united in 1905, it was he who gave the new party its name, French Section of the Workers' International. Fluent in English, German and Italian, he covered international affairs for L'Humanité and wrote for Kautsky's Die Neue Zeit.

He was present when Jaurès was assassinated on 31 July 1914, and after the funeral he rallied to national defence. During the war he led the minority that was pacifist yet kept voting military credits; the current gradually gained strength, was able to launch the daily Le Populaire in 1917, and became the party majority in 1918. On 18 September 1919 he set out the socialists' opposition to ratifying the Treaty of Versailles in the Chamber, publicly declaring solidarity with the colonised peoples.

At the Tours congress in December 1920 he favoured joining the Comintern but would not accept the Twenty-one Conditions set by Lenin, wanting to keep the party united. He stood in the "centre" between the majority that wanted to turn the party into a communist party and the right-wing "reconstructors" led by Léon Blum. But on the third day the "Zinoviev telegram" arrived, calling him "a determined agent of bourgeois influence on the proletariat" and urging the majority to condemn all moderates; indignant, he stayed in the socialist "old house". He then joined the Vienna Union, the so-called "Two-and-a-half International", and in 1923 became a member of the executive of the Labour and Socialist International.