Marcel Sembat and the Daily Life of Socialism

The concepts of ‘experience’ and ‘enthusiasm’ were set out by Marcel Sembat as ways of focusing intensely on the present and the nature of socialist party activity. Sembat had been close to the ‘Blanquist’ wing of the French socialist movement, with its emphasis on revolutionary rupture. But his wide reading and interest in psychology, sociology, and physiology led him to seek a present-minded focus for his socialist militancy, through his work in the eighteenth arrondissement and his long reflections in his private diary. His passionate enthusiasm for the life of the socialist party was also a visceral, daily experience of engagement, and the divides that shook the party in the First World War and with the split at the Congress of Tours in 1920 gravely affected him. This chapter assesses the present in the thought of an intellectual who was at the heart of Jaurès’ socialist party.