Centre national et Musée Jean Jaurès

Jean Jaurès, the most important French socialist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was born in Castres in 1859. The town's small but well-made museum traces his life — schoolteacher in Albi, then philosopher, then journalist, then the deputy who led the parliamentary fight against the First World War — through letters, manuscripts, photographs, and political cartoons.

The exhibits are bilingual French-English, which is rare in a French regional museum, and the politics are presented with unusual clarity. Jaurès comes across not as a relic but as someone whose arguments — about pacifism, secularism, and the social state — still resonate. Allow an hour, more if the subject interests you. Admission is free.

things to do museum
A story
Jaurès was assassinated on 31 July 1914 at the Café du Croissant in Paris by a young nationalist, Raoul Villain, who shot him through the window as he ate dinner. Jaurès died trying to prevent the war that was declared three days later. Villain was acquitted by a jury in 1919 — French nationalist sentiment was at its peak — and eventually fled to Spain, where he was shot by anarchists in 1936.