Charles Rappoport
{{Short description|Russian and French militant communist politician, journalist and writer}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=December 2018}}
{{Infobox person
| name = Charles Rappoport
| image = Charles Rappoport 1921 (2).jpg
| alt =
| caption = Rappoport in 1921
| birth_name =
| birth_date = {{Birth date|1865|06|14|df=y}}
| birth_place = Dūkštas, Lithuania
| death_date = {{Death date and age|1941|11|17|1865|06|14|df=y}}
| death_place = Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, Cahors, France
| citizenship = Russian Empire {{small|(before 1899)}}
France {{small|(after 1899)}}
| nationality =
| other_names =
| occupation = Politician, journalist, activist, writer
| years_active =
| known_for =
| notable_works =
}}
Charles Rappoport (14 June 1865 – 17 November 1941) was a Russian and French militant communist politician, journalist and writer. A Jewish intellectual, and a multilingual scholar, he's been referred to as "a grand man of French radicalism".{{cite book|last=Epstein|first=Melech|title=Pages from a colorful life: an autobiographical sketch|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZcMrAQAAIAAJ|accessdate=30 April 2012|year=1971|publisher=I. Block Pub. Co.|page=77}}
Biography
Rappoport was born in a Dūkštas shtetl in the Kovno Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Lithuania), grew up in a traditional Jewish area. He attended gymnasium in Vilnius, but left the country after encountering the Narodnaya Volya.{{cite book|last=Hofmeester|first=Karin|title=Jewish Workers and the Labour Movement: A Comparative Study of Amsterdam, London and Paris, 1870-1914|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hYZrdkniDYkC&pg=PA231|accessdate=30 April 2012|year=2004|publisher=Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.|isbn=978-0-7546-0907-0|pages=213, 231–}} He attended university in Switzerland, and then moved to France. As a young man, he was a journalist for Hebrew language periodicals.{{cite book|last=Wasserstein|first=Bernard|title=On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=HJSQZJKHX_8C&pg=PA65|accessdate=30 April 2012|date=1 May 2012|publisher=Simon and Schuster|isbn=978-1-4165-9427-7|pages=65–}} He entered politics in the Russian People's Will Party, later the R.S.D.L.P.{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/r/a.htm#charles-rappoport|title=Charles Rappoport|publisher=Marxists.org|accessdate=30 April 2012}}
He was a member of the Union of Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, along with Chaim Zhitlowsky (founder), M. M. Rozenbaum, and S. Ansky.{{cite book|last=Frankel|first=Jonathan|title=Prophecy And Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, And The Russian Jews, 1862-1917|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-ycwctuCSpQC&pg=PA277|accessdate=30 April 2012|date=8 November 1984|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-26919-3|pages=277–}}
He emigrated to France, setting in Paris at the end of the 19th century, and becoming a French citizen in 1899. Rappoport was instrumental in mobilizing Yiddish-speaking Parisian Jews; in 1901, he founded the Groupe des ouvriers israelites, a club and meeting place for Jewish socialists in the Pletzl's Rue Vieille-du-Temple.
File:Congrès PCF 1921 - Rappoport, Renoult, Frossard, Cachin.jpg in 1921. From the left, Rappoport, Daniel Renoult, Ludovic-Oscar Frossard, and Marcel Cachin.]]
As a Marxist, Rappoport campaigned in the French Section of the Workers' International (Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière, SFIO). In 1914, he denounced the SFIO's acceptance of the First World War. An early Zimmerwaldian. he was neither a reformist nor a modernist in his ideology.{{cite book|last=Aldanov|first=Mark Aleksandrovich|title=Lenin|url=https://archive.org/details/lenin00alda|accessdate=30 April 2012|year=1922|publisher=E. P. Dutton & company|page=[https://archive.org/details/lenin00alda/page/194 194]}} With Paul Vaillant-Couturier and Albert Treint, Rappoport was a representative of the Comintern ("Third International"; 1919–1943).{{cite book|last=Wohl|first=Robert|title=French Communism in the Making, 1914-1924|url=https://archive.org/details/frenchcommunismi00wohl|url-access=registration|accessdate=30 April 2012|date=1 June 1966|publisher=Stanford University Press|isbn=978-0-8047-0177-8|pages=[https://archive.org/details/frenchcommunismi00wohl/page/214 214]–}} At the SFIO's Tours Congress in December 1920, he was part of the majority who founded the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français, PCF), and was elected to the Steering Committee. Although in 1922-1923 he supported the Frossard centre of the group, following the Stalinization of the PCF in the late 1930s, he strongly disagreed with the party line and support for the Soviet Union, and he left the PCF in 1938.{{cite book|last1=Bailey|first1=Andrew|last2=Brennan|first2=Samantha|last3=Kymlicka|first3=Will|title=The Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought: Volume 2: The Twentieth Century and Beyond|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=iyHWNveKt-gC&pg=PA36|accessdate=30 April 2012|date=12 September 2008|publisher=Broadview Press|isbn=978-1-55111-899-4|page=36}}
On September 18, 1923, a 32-year-old cleaner and former White Russian officer came to Rappoport's home, intending to assassinate him. However, Rappoport was in Strasbourg at the time, and his daughter Fanny answered the door instead. When the officer learned she was Rappoport's daughter, he shot her at point blank range. He then turned himself in to the police. Reporting at the time indicates Fanny likely survived.{{cite news |author= |date= September 18, 1923 |title=Communist not home, so foe shoots daughter instead |url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/130203997/st-louis-post-dispatch/ |work=The St. Louis Post-Dispatch |location=St. Louis |access-date=September 19, 2023}}{{cite news |author= |date= September 24, 1923 |title=Communist Rappaport's Daughter Shot by a Wrangel Officer |url=https://www.jta.org/archive/communist-rappaports-daughter-shot-by-a-wrangel-officer |work=The Jewish Telegraphic Agency |location=New York City |access-date=September 19, 2023}}
At the time of the Second World War, he retired to Saint-Cirq-Lapopie where he died in 1941. One can read on his tomb at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris the following epitaph: Le socialisme sans la liberté n'est pas le socialisme, la liberté sans le socialisme n'est pas la liberté ("Socialism without freedom is not socialism, freedom without socialism is not freedom.")
Works
Rappoport was the author of numerous works such as La Philosophie de l'histoire comme science de l'évolution (1903), Un peu d'histoire : origines, doctrines et méthodes socialistes (1912), and La Révolution sociale, (1912), and Pourquoi nous sommes socialistes? (1919). In La Crise socialiste et sa solution, par Charles Rappoport (1918), Rappoport discusses his intellectual and ideological development.{{cite book|last1=Chall|first1=Leo P.|last2=Illumina|first2=CSA|title=Sociological abstracts|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EaTZAAAAMAAJ|accessdate=30 April 2012|year=1973|publisher=Sociological Abstracts|page=1128}} The biography of Jean Jaurès, Jean Jaurès: l'homme, le penseur, le socialiste (1915), written after his assassination, is considered the best biography of Jaurès.{{cite book|last1=Besier|first1=Gerhard|last2=Piombo|first2=Francesca|last3=Stokłosa|first3=Katarzyna|title=Fascism, Communism and the Consolidation of Democracy: A Comparison of European Dictatorships|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=un1vs4Vtv0cC&pg=PA93|accessdate=30 April 2012|year=2006|publisher=LIT Verlag Münster|isbn=978-3-8258-9657-7|page=93}} Rappoport's memoir, Une vie révolutionnaire : 1883-1940 : les mémoires de Charles Rappoport, was published in 1991.{{cite book|last1=Rappoport|first1=Charles|last2=Lagana|first2=Marc|title=Une vie révolutionnaire, 1883-1940: Les mémoires de Charles Rappoport|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=L7takb1G93IC|accessdate=30 April 2012|date=1 January 1991|publisher=Editions MSH|isbn=978-2-7351-0423-9}}
References
{{Reflist}}
External links
{{Commons category}}
- [https://www.marxists.org/archive/rappoport/index.htm Charles Rappoport Archive] at marxists.org
- [http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=Charles+Rappoport&fq=ap%3A%22rappoport%2C+charles%22&dblist=638&qt=sort&se=yr&sd=asc&qt=sort_yr_asc Charles Rappoport at Worldcat]
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Category:People from Novoalexandrovsky Uyezd
Category:Emigrants from the Russian Empire to France
Category:French people of Lithuanian-Jewish descent
Category:French Section of the Workers' International politicians
Category:French Communist Party politicians