Victor Jaclard

Charles Victor Jaclard (1840–1903) was a French revolutionary socialist, a member of the First International and of the Paris Commune.

Charles Victor Jaclard came from a humble working-class family, but, as a precocious student, he was given a good education, obtaining degrees in mathematics as well as medicine. However, during his studies, he became involved in the radical republican opposition to Napoléon III. After working as a mathematics teacher, he moved to Paris in 1864 to pursue further studies in pharmacology. He soon fell in with the followers of the veteran revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui and joined the Blanquists' secret society. In 1865 he helped organise Blanqui's escape from prison to Belgium. That year, Jaclard attended the International Student Congress in Liège, where he held a speech expounding atheism, materialism and socialism. The speech led the French Council of Universities to ban him from all French universities.

Jaclard was one of the earliest French Blanquists to join the First International, which had been founded in 1864. Other Blanquists initially remained aloof from the organisation because its French section was dominated by followers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whom they considered insufficiently revolutionary. Jaclard, however, seems to have moved easily among the factions of contemporary revolutionary socialism. While he remained involved in the Blanquist organisation, he was on friendly terms with Proudhonist Internationalists like Benoît Malon. In 1866, Jaclard was imprisoned for six months for participating in a demonstration. After his release, he went to Geneva, Switzerland, where he met the Russian feminist and revolutionary socialist Anna Vasilevna Korvin-Kurkovskaya (1843–1887). She had left Russia in 1866, after rejecting a marriage proposal from the famous writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Jaclard and Korvin-Kurkovskaya were married in 1867.

In 1868, Jaclard was one of the founding members of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy in Geneva. This was an organisation created by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. It was affiliated with the International Workingmen's Association (the First International), but Bakunin's International Alliance soon came into conflict with the London leadership of the International Association, dominated by Karl Marx. Jaclard's involvement with the Bakuninist Alliance once again demonstrated his ability to transcend factional disputes; in general, the Blanquists were wary of anarchism. Furthermore, Jaclard and his wife were both personal friends of Bakunin's great rival Marx.

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