Jean JAURÈS (1859-1914). Autograph manuscript signed, Programme d'hier et programme de demain, [August 1905]; 21pages, large folio, mounted on tabs and bound in one vol. half red basane with corners (binding a little rubbed). Important political article, published on the front page of L'Humanité of August 26, 1905. The manuscript shows a few erasures and corrections. Jaurès begins by evoking Georges Périn (1838-1903), "one of the men who, through moral high ground, inflexible probity of life and firmness of intellect, have best served the Republic and honored the Republican party". In particular, he cites the program presented by Périn to his constituents in Limoges in February 1876, including "the democratic revision of the Constitution" and "the appointment of the Senate by direct universal suffrage", as well as the income tax. Jaurès also quotes other speeches by Périn, outlining his reform program, before noting that "the vote for the ten-hour law, applied even to men in mixed workshops, and the serious start-up of the law on pensions, which introduces the principle of social insurance into our legislation, are very much in line with George Périn's thinking, and no doubt even go beyond what he wanted at that time [...].In short, in both the social and political spheres, the Republic has achieved almost all of George Périn's program in the space of thirty years. In any case, only a slight effort is needed to ensure that nothing of the radical program of 1876 remains unfulfilled. Thirty years is a long time, no doubt, and at the dawn of the Republic, many republicans and workers had hoped for more rapid reform and progress. What has slowed this march? Was it the natural resistance of prejudice and egoism? Was it the difficulty of achieving action and vigorous joint decisions in a people still hampered by many of the ties of the past, and tormented by the growing antagonism of the modern classes, the capitalist bourgeoisie and the proletariat? Or is it also the fault of party combinations and rivalries, and the guilty calculations of those who used the very popularity of the marching people against them? In spite of everything, it is comforting, and should confound skeptics, that within the space of a generation, what was in 1876 the program of the most intransigent extreme left has been realized. Through all the difficulties, all the competitions and all the crises, through the Sixteenth of May, the bitter conflicts between opportunists and radicals, Boulangisme, and the Panama quagmire which reaction wanted to turn into an abyss, finally, despite nationalism and the hypocritical appeals of reactionaries to the fatherland, what was in 1876 an ultra-radical program, denounced by the timorous as revolutionary, and which Gambetta was beginning to disavow, has entered entirely into French law. And this, by the legal effort of democracy without violence, without bloodshed, without street movement, the proletariat having always remained on the side of legality. Jaurès then outlines his program for "transforming the political Republic into a social policy", by changing "the very system of property". For this arduous task, "socialism can count on new forces, a Republic strengthened by duration and by a long series of victorious battles, a more enlightened people, soon to be freed from the last remnants of the Church's political tutelage, a working class better grouped in its economic organizations, better prepared to understand and manage the new world and, finally, the logical driving and expanding power of the first social reforms, in particular the social insurance laws which, extended to all natural and social risks and applied in a democracy, will soon bring the proletariat into control of production". And he concludes: "In its defense of the Republic and human rights, and in its active collaboration in the fulfillment of the old radical program, socialism has conquered a political and moral authority that the relentless slanders of reactionary patriots will not wrest from it, and which it will devote entirely to the realization of the new program. This socialist, collectivist, communist program will be both an integral program and an evolutionary program. By this I mean that it will have to specify, in legislative texts, the full functioning of the new society, rid of all capitalist property and administered by the workers themselves.