Summary of JOIE article by Marcel Parent, Agrégé de lettres modernes, posthumously, Antoine Parent, LED, Université Paris 8, Pierre-Charles Pradier, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Laurent Gauthier, LED, Université Paris 8. The full article is available on the JOIE website.
Jean Jaurès’s The New Army (1911) is often seen as a dense, sprawling, and outdated work of socialist military theory: part curiosity, part relic. But as we revisit it today, just over a century after Jaurès’s assassination on the eve of World War I, we find in it something far more enduring. At its core, The New Army offers not just a socialist vision of national defense, but a powerful institutional argument for democratic self-protection against war. What has long been read as a period piece can be recast, we argue, as a work of forward-thinking institutional economics grounded in the classical French republican tradition.
A Republican Vision of Social Defense
Jaurès opens his book with an essential premise: socialism requires peace. Democratic progress, social justice, and the organisation of labour cannot unfold under the shadow of militarism. “France needs, above all things, peace and security” (p. 5), he writes, and for that, she must build a defensive force “so formidable that every thought of aggression is put out of the mind” (p. 6). But unlike many contemporaries, Jaurès does not retreat into pacifism or non-violent resistance. Instead, he constructs an intricate argument for a nation in arms, a fully mobilized citizen army built not on hierarchy and professional castes but on democratic engagement and the widespread cultivation of human capital.
The canonical reading of The New Army has emphasized its socialist elements. And it is certainly true that Jaurès saw the proletariat as central to this new democratic force. His vision of the proletarian-soldier can be directly tied to the “farmer-soldier” of ancient Athens and the Revolutionary levée en masse of 1792. Yet his socialism is republican and meritocratic. Rather than calling for the abolition of capitalism by force, Jaurès praises the progressive accomplishments of the bourgeoisie and advocates a gradual, educational transition to a more just social order. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat, he argues, walk on the same path. What he wants, then, is not a military instrument of class warfare, but an army that is of the people and for the republic.
War Prevention as Institutional Design
What makes Jaurès’s argument so striking, and so underappreciated, is that it hinges on an implicit economic logic of prevention. In contemporary terms, he is advancing a model of self-protection against war, one that we can frame using the economics of risk first formalized by Ehrlich and Becker in 1972. In their work, self-protection differs from self-insurance: it aims not to soften the blow of a negative event, but to reduce its probability altogether. War, for Jaurès, is not a manageable loss, it is a risk that must be prevented by making aggression unthinkable. And the only credible way to do that, he argues, is through a nationwide system of citizen defense rooted in education, physical training, and democratic organisation.
To test the consistency of this logic, we propose a simple game-theoretical model of bilateral conflict. Two countries simultaneously decide whether to go to war. The resulting probabilities of attack and defense depend on three key parameters: the benefit of unilateral aggression (u), the damage of being attacked (d), and the cost of bilateral war (b). The genius of The New Army, when seen through this lens, is that it systematically proposes institutional changes that alter all three parameters: lowering u, raising b, and reducing d, all leading towards a lesser likelihood of war. By distributing weapons and training across the population, Jaurès reduces the expected payoff of a surprise invasion usince the defending nation will be far harder to exploit. By investing in widespread military education and officer development, he raises b, the damage suffered in the event of mutual war, thus making such war less appealing. And by creating a decentralized, territorial army that draws on local cohesion, he reduces d, since defensive resilience increases. The resulting effect is a lower probability of war emerging from strategic calculation.
Investing in the Democratic Soldier
The institutional details of Jaurès’s plan are extensive. He proposes that all male citizens from age 20 to 45 serve in the first-line army, reserve, or territorial force. Military training is integrated into education beginning at age 10, not as militarization of childhood but as a civic form of physical and moral preparation. Periodic manoeuvres and regionally-organized units reinforce the attachment of citizen-soldiers to their communities. Officers are to be recruited both from professional ranks and from civil society, with special provisions to promote the children of workers and peasants. Trade unions and cooperatives are invited to participate in their training, sharing the cost, and also ensuring their loyalty to the working class.
This is not merely a military proposal. It is an institutional vision for a democratic society where civic equality extends into the defense of the republic. In fact, Jaurès draws on Athenian democracy and the political reforms of Cleisthenes to argue for the value of intermingling: by mixing citizens of diverse backgrounds in shared military service and responsibility, the army becomes a crucible for democratic solidarity and decentralised intelligence. Such design, as modern scholars of institutional efficiency argue, can enhance both accountability and strategic responsiveness.
The economic model goes further. Investing in human capital, especially in the training and promotion of officers, is not just a cost. Jaurès sees it as yielding both private returns (better pay and social advancement) and social returns (a more resilient and unified military). Borrowing language that anticipates later theories of education economics, he insists that education is costly and must be sufficiently rewarded, and that a nation that trains its officers from all classes will gain not just better leadership but also national cohesion.
Crucially, Jaurès insists on the defensive nature of this army. Article 16 of his proposed legislation makes this explicit: “All war is criminal if it is not manifestly defensive” (pp. 684–5). And the reforms he proposes are aimed not only at deterring aggression but also at disarming it morally. By transforming the army into a mirror of the democratic republic, he hopes to render the idea of militarist adventure repugnant and structurally improbable. He even suggests that the very existence of such a force, visible, widespread, disciplined, and deeply embedded in the civic fabric, will reinforce the norms of arbitration and peaceful resolution.
Conclusion: Armed Pacifism as Democratic Necessity
Of course, as we also point out, Jaurès’s vision abstracts away from many real-world constraints: opportunity costs of citizen training, coordination failures, and institutional path dependencies. But the broader lesson is compelling. Democratic institutions, Jaurès reminds us, do not merely legislate peace: they must also be structured to deter war. The citizen-soldier is not a nostalgic ideal, but a structural necessity in the economics of peace.
We are far today from the world of The New Army: professional armies dominate, conscription has faded, and war has mutated in form. But in an era of strategic uncertainty, renewed great-power rivalry, and democratic fragility, Jaurès’s wager on democratic self-protection deserves renewed attention. He offers not a utopia, but a blueprint, an institutional logic of armed pacifism grounded in universal values, strategic rationality, and the radical idea that democracy, to survive, must learn to defend itself.