Jean Allemane

Jean Allemane (1843, Sauveterre-de-Comminges, Haute-Garonne – 1935, Herblay in Seine-et-Oise) was a French socialist politician, veteran of the Paris Commune of 1871, pioneer of syndicalism, leader of the Socialist-Revolutionary Workers' Party (POSR) and co-founder of the unified French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) in 1905. He was a deputy in the National Assembly of the Third French Republic.

Jean Allemane was born into a working-class family in Sauveterre-de-Comminges (Haute-Garonne) in southern France. In 1853 he came to Paris with his parents and was apprenticed as a printer. The hardship of working conditions, the republican sympathies of his family and the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon conspired to radicalise Allemane early on. As a teenager he became involved in trade union activity, which was still illegal in France (unions were not legalised until 1906). In 1862, aged 19, he was arrested for his role in organising the first typesetters' strike in Paris. Subsequently he helped found the typesetters' union. Despite his youth, Allemane played an important role in the emerging French syndicalist movement and emphasised the need for workers to form their own organisations, independent of bourgeois radicals.

In 1870 Allemane served in the Parisian National Guard, where he became a corporal. In this capacity he participated in the uprising of the Paris Commune at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. Although he welcomed the fall of Napoléon III, he mistrusted the conservative republicans around Adolphe Thiers who replaced him. In the Commune, Allemane sympathised with the Proudhonist faction. Allemane participated actively in the fighting. After the suppression of the Commune, he went into hiding but was captured, and in 1872, he was sentenced to hard labour in perpetuity and banished to the penal colony of New Caledonia. In 1876 he made an unsuccessful attempt to escape. In 1878, he was ordered to participate in suppressing a revolt of the native population but refused. This led to further penalties. However, in 1879, a general amnesty enabled Allemane to return to France.

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