French Socialist Party (1902)
프랑스사회당(조레스)
A reformist socialist party founded in 1902 by the independent socialists, among them Jean Jaurès, together with Paul Brousse's possibilist Federation of the Socialist Workers of France (FTSF). Led by Jaurès, it supported the Bloc des gauches alliance with the non-socialist left, unlike Jules Guesde's revolutionary Socialist Party of France (PSdF). In 1905 the two parties merged into the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO).
In depth
The party was founded at Tours in 1902 by the merger of the independent socialists with the possibilist FTSF. The independent socialists were local federations and deputies who refused to join an existing party, among them Jaurès, Alexandre Millerand, René Viviani and Aristide Briand. They took a reformist line that relied on parliamentary action and representative democracy, while the revolutionaries of Guesde and Édouard Vaillant, who called for the seizure of power by the proletariat, formed the separate Socialist Party of France (PSdF) that same year.
Jaurès returned to the Chamber as deputy for Albi in 1902, and under the Combes ministry he held together the Radical-Socialist coalition known as the Bloc des gauches, influencing the 1905 law on the separation of the churches and the state. In 1904 he founded the socialist paper L'Humanité. After the Amsterdam congress of the Second International in 1904 called for a single socialist party in each country, the two parties merged at the Globe congress in Paris in 1905 to form the French Section of the Workers' International.