Charles Rappoport

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,

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. He attended university in Switzerland, and then moved to France. As a young man, he was a journalist for Hebrew language periodicals. He entered politics in the Russian People's Will Party, later the R.S.D.L.P. He was a member of the Union of Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, along with Chaim Zhitlowsky (founder), M. M. Rozenbaum, and S. Ansky.

He emigrated to France, setting in Paris at the end of the 19th century, and becoming a French citizen in 1899. With Paul Vaillant-Couturier and Albert Treint, Rappoport was a representative of the Comintern ("Third International"; 1919–1943). 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,

On 18 September 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.

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). 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. Rappoport's memoir, Une vie révolutionnaire : 1883-1940 : les mémoires de Charles Rappoport, was published in 1991.