On the evening of July 31, 1914, after their fruitless visit to the foreign ministry to argue for French neutrality in the coming war, Jean Jaurès and Jean Longuet (the grandson of Karl Marx) travelled by taxi to the offices of the party newspaper, L’Humanité, where the socialist leader made notes for his editorial for the next day, a last appeal for peace, before leaving with a few colleagues to dine at the nearby Café du Croissant on rue Montmartre. It was a stiflingly hot evening and Jaurès sat with his back to a drawn curtain, beside an open window. At about 9.15 a young man, Raoul Villain, fired two revolver shots at him from the street. Jaurès died almost instantly.
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Villain, twenty eight years old, the son of a court clerk from Reims, a quiet and polite young man according to all who knew him, but unsettled and apparently directionless in life, had been a member of the Christian social movement Le Sillon (The Furrow) until it was condemned by Pope Pius X in 1910.
Later he joined the League of Young Friends of Alsace-Lorraine, a campaigning group sponsored by various right-wing politicians, including Maurice Barrès, that propagandised, chiefly among students, over the “lost provinces” of Alsace and Moselle and prepared them psychologically for the challenge of a new war with Germany.
The dramatic principle formulated by Anton Chekhov that if in a play a pistol should make an appearance in the first act it will be used in a subsequent one (“Chekhov’s gun”) has perhaps a certain relevance when applied to the habitual rhetoric of French nationalism. If the idea that murdering a political opponent can be seen as a patriotic act is repeatedly broadcast, it is probably just a matter of time before someone decides to translate it into reality. It would have been impossible for an avid reader of the nationalist press like Villain to have been unaware of the frequent accusations of treason against Jaurès and the repeated calls for him to be eliminated.
For many years, but particularly since his campaign in 1913 against the extension of the length of compulsory military service to three years, he had been a particular target, and not just for the usual suspects: his former Dreyfusard ally Charles Péguy, an ardent spirit once a socialist but in the 1900s converted to nationalism and Catholicism, had also subjected him to intemperate attack.
War is above all, in their eyes, the occasion to demonstrate the most noble human virtues…energy, self-mastery, sacrifice to a cause that is greater than oneself.
For Charles Maurras matters were, as always, eminently simple: “Jaurès is Germany.” His colleague “Critias,” writing in the newspaper L’Action française, went a little further: “We wouldn’t want to suggest that anyone should resort to political assassination. But Mr. Jaurès should be seized with trembling,” since it was possible that some zealot, after reading his articles in L’Humanité, might be tempted to seek to “resolve by the experimental method” the question of whether firing a revolver at him would produce the same effect as it did on Gaston Calmette. The editor of Paris-Midi offered the view that a general who assembled a firing squad to “put some lead at point blank range into Citizen Jaurès’s brain” would be doing no more than his duty.
Jaurès’s pacifism was in fact far from absolute, let alone a policy verging on treason. He had always made it clear that while he would do everything within his power to prevent war, if he was unsuccessful in his efforts and France was invaded he would urge socialists to defend their country. This position was endorsed by the trade unions and even the small, traditionally anti-militarist far-left faction of the socialist party led by Gustave Hervé. Over the preceding decades successive governments had assembled a list of potential “subversives” who in an emergency could be interned to prevent them resisting mobilisation for war.
But on August 1st, the interior minister, Louis Malvy, assessing the attitude of the left after the assassination of Jaurès, concluded that there would be no serious agitation and instructed local authorities to cancel the planned detentions. Mobilisation proceeded calmly, even if the mood of the assembling conscripts was more one of quiet resolve than passionate enthusiasm.
The prospect of war did, however, arouse excitement in some quarters. Péguy celebrated it as “the unleashing of all the virile and healthy forces of French youth.” In June 1913, two young intellectuals, Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, writing under the pseudonym “Agathon,” had published a survey of opinion in the Parisian university milieu entitled Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui (Young People Today). “Agathon” claimed to have discovered a new complex of attitudes among the young that set them apart from the previous generation: a renewed interest in religion, a rejection of “intellectualism,” an enthusiasm for physical activity, sport and speed, and an openness to war, a purgative experience it was felt would refresh a world gone stale from the dull pursuit of everyday duties and pleasures.
War! The word has assumed a sudden prestige. It is a young word, all new, adorned with the seduction which the eternal martial instinct has revived in the hearts of men. These young people attribute to it all the beauty of which they are enamoured and which everyday life fails to provide them. War is above all, in their eyes, the occasion to demonstrate the most noble human virtues…energy, self-mastery, sacrifice to a cause that is greater than oneself.
While the sample of students that “Agathon” drew on in their survey represented only an infinitesimal fraction of those who were young in 1913, they had nevertheless identified the beginnings of a shift in attitudes among intellectuals, and one that was by no means confined to France. At the end of 1915, the Irish revolutionary Patrick Pearse had greeted the European war as a welcome spiritual rebirth, for “the old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields.”
On August 1st Germany declared war on Russia; and two days later, on France. On August 4th it invaded Belgium. On the same day Britain declared war on Germany.
As Italy entered the conflict, the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio rejoiced: “The cannon roars. The earth smokes… Companions, can it be true? We are fighting with arms, we are waging our war, the blood is spurting from the veins of Italy! We are the last to join this struggle and already the first are meeting with glory…” In more elegiac mode, the English poet Rupert Brooke imagined young men going off to war as “wakened from sleeping,” cheerfully accepting death, like “swimmers into cleanness leaping, / Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.”
Such expressions of enthusiasm should not be surprising. In each of the future belligerent countries, elite schools would have long regarded it as their duty to instill in their pupils, the officer class in the making, a martial spirit. They would have been made familiar with the idea of sacrifice, transferred from the religious to the secular sphere, or with the secular concept of the nation or “fatherland,” now imbued with religiosity, and the sentiment expressed in the Roman poet Horace’s much-quoted maxim “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori ” (It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country). While rank-and-file soldiers might not have had the Latin, they too would mostly have had some appreciation of what was meant by patriotic duty, though perhaps more as a burden that had to be shouldered than something to be rejoiced over. On August 1st Germany declared war on Russia; and two days later, on France. On August 4th it invaded Belgium. On the same day Britain declared war on Germany.
German military planning envisaged a lightning invasion of north-eastern France through neutral Belgium, followed by a rapid advance towards Paris. A quick victory in the west would then enable it to switch most of its forces to tackle the Russian adversary in the east. The French too favoured an aggressive strategy, pushing into Alsace and Moselle and on into southern Belgium. The initial fighting, later known as “the Battle of the Frontiers,” brought heavy losses on each side and the comprehensive defeat of the French all along the front. An estimated 40,000 French soldiers lost their lives in fighting near the borders, a figure that had probably doubled by the end of August as the Germans continued their surge westward, their advance taking them to within thirty miles of Paris.
Then, in the second week of September at the Battle of the Marne, came a successful French counterattack, with General Joseph Joffre’s armies reinforced by the British Expeditionary Force under Sir John French fighting across a front line of 140 miles, from close to Paris to Verdun in the east. German losses for September according to official sources—a figure that includes the dead, the injured and those taken prisoner—amounted to 220,000 men out of a fighting force of 1,300,000. The estimate for the dead was 26,000.
Yet despite the severity of their defeat they managed to retreat in good order and set up a new line of defence twenty-five miles north. Further fierce battles followed as both armies, in “la course à la mer ” (the race to the sea) tried to occupy as much of the Channel coast as they could. Germany failed in its objective to capture Calais and Boulogne, the ports where British reinforcements disembarked, and the front settled down on a long north–south line from near Ostend in Belgium to the Swiss border. By mid-November the French had already lost half a million men and the Germans 300,000. The first phase—that of a “war of movement”—had ended and the armies settled down into a long and exhausting “war of position”: the slaughter had a full four years still to run.
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From The Dark Side of France. Used with the permission of the publisher, Liveright. Copyright © 2026 by Enda O’Doherty.