The assassination of Socialist leader Jean Jaurès days before WWI silenced France's foremost antiwar voice and accelerated left-wing support for the conflict.
Key Facts
- Date of assassination
- 31 July 1914
- Location
- Café du Croissant, rue Montmartre, Paris 2nd arrondissement
- Perpetrator
- Raoul Villain
- Time of attack
- 9:40 pm
- Days before France entered WWI
- 3 days
- Villain's acquittal year
- 1919
By the Numbers
Location
Cause → Event → Consequence
Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Europe moved rapidly toward war. Jean Jaurès, a prominent French Socialist deputy, antimilitarist, and editor of L'Humanité, was actively campaigning to prevent France's entry into the conflict, making him a target for nationalist opposition.
On the evening of 31 July 1914, Raoul Villain shot Jaurès twice at the Café du Croissant in Paris while he dined with colleagues. One bullet pierced Jaurès's skull, killing him almost instantly. The attack occurred just three days before France formally entered World War I.
Jaurès's death removed the most prominent antiwar voice from French politics. The majority of the French left, including socialists and trade unionists who had resisted supporting the war, subsequently joined the Sacred Union. Villain's acquittal in 1919 ended the Sacred Union, and the transfer of Jaurès's ashes to the Panthéon in 1924 provoked a further split between communists and socialists.