Central Revolutionary Committee (France)
중앙혁명위원회 (프랑스)
A French Blanquist socialist party founded in 1881 by Émile Eudes, Ernest Granger and Édouard Vaillant to carry on the struggle of Auguste Blanqui, who died that year. Led by Vaillant after Eudes died in 1888, it was weakened by a split over Boulangism in 1889 and then turned towards trade-union action and the general strike. In 1898 it became the Revolutionary Socialist Party.
In depth
Émile Eudes founded the Central Revolutionary Committee in June 1881 to carry on Blanqui's struggle, and Eudes, Ernest Granger and Édouard Vaillant led it in practice. It followed the Blanquist line: revolutionary activism and a taste for conspiracy, atheism, a patriotism that looked back to the Jacobinism of the French Revolution, and socialism. Estimates put its membership between 400 and 4,000, mostly in eastern Paris and the northern and eastern suburbs, a small group isolated and shunned by the other socialist currents. At first it complemented the Federation of the Socialist Workers' Party of France founded in 1879, but when the federation turned reformist at its Reims congress of October 1881 it became an independent party.
Once Vaillant took the committee in hand around 1885 it gradually adapted to the Republic, took up economic questions and made an electoral alliance with the Radicals in Paris that put Vaillant on the municipal council in 1884. Its paper Ni Dieu ni Maître was no more than an annual sheet and stopped in 1885; L'Intransigeant, edited by Henri Rochefort, became the Blanquists' mouthpiece. When Eudes died in 1888, Vaillant became its leader.
Vaillant took a neither-nor position on the movement of General Boulanger. In August 1889, while the general election was being prepared, Granger proposed fielding no Blanquist against his friend Rochefort in Belleville; when the proposal failed to win a majority, 28 votes to 28, Granger and his supporters left and founded the Central Revolutionary Socialist Committee. The committee came out of the split weakened, as cadres and militants such as Rochefort, Granger and Ernest Roche left it to follow Boulanger.
After the split Vaillant refocused the committee on trade-union action and the idea of the general strike. It was strengthened in 1896 by councillors and regional officials expelled from Jean Allemane's Revolutionary Socialist Workers' Party, who grouped in 1897 as the Revolutionary Communist Alliance, and in 1898 it took the name Revolutionary Socialist Party. Marcel Sembat joined the committee and became one of the Revolutionary Socialist Party's leaders.