“Marcel Sembat was certainly the second most important politician of the Socialist Party after Jean Jaurès”
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Lhe socialist deputy Marcel Sembat was one of the greatest French parliamentarians and political publicists of the early 20th century.e century until his premature death in Chamonix (Haute-Savoie) in 1922. He was born in Bonnières-sur-Seine (Yvelines) in 1862, where his father was director of the post office. After studying law and school, he worked briefly as a lawyer before turning to journalism and politics.
Between 1890 and 1897, he was co-editor of The Little Republic, a journal of intellectuals on the road to parliamentary socialism. For a long time – from 1893 until his death in 1922 – he was deputy for the constituency of “Grandes Carrières” in the XVIIIe district of Paris, then still a pure working-class suburb. Initially assigned to the radical camp of French socialism, Sembat was certainly the second most important politician in the Socialist Party after Jean Jaurès.
Sembat was a brilliant orator. All of Paris relished his parliamentary speeches. His polemical articles and glosses in Humanity were renowned for their irony, their rather unusual wit and their committed intellectuality. Sembat was a socialist not by family tradition but by choice. He was also a fighter for the League of Human Rights.
A friend of Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse
It must be added that this “lovable and charming revolutionary”, according to historian Maurice Dommanget (1888-1976), with a neat full beard, black suit and always fresh shirts was one of the rare socialists to have campaigned energetically for women’s rights. His understanding of art was also unique in this medium.
It is no coincidence that he is married to a renowned artist, the painter and sculptor Georgette Agutte (1888-1922), thanks to whom he reaches the avant-garde of the time. Marcel Sembat was friends with Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse and others and also published about this avant-garde. The Matisse collection of the Sembat-Agutte couple still constitutes an important collection of the Grenoble museum today.
In the French Parliament before 1914, Sembat attracts attention with his speeches, which are really comparable only to those of Georges Clemenceau. There was a “Samba Style” back then: unlike most politicians (then and now), Sembat was always able to say something unpredictable and weave a whole argument into an aporia.
A provocateur who doubted himself
He specialized in the good words on the border between cynicism and sarcasm, which his public expected. Thus in 1912, when he comments on the election of the moderate Republican Raymond Poincaré as President of the Council: “When you have a Waldeck-Rousseau on hand, you take it. When we don’t have it, we take what we have! We take Poincaré. In the absence of sunlight, you have to be content with moonlight. »
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