Charles Victor Jaclard (1840–1903) was a French revolutionary socialist, a member of the First International and of the Paris Commune. Jaclard is noted for his political adaptability and the ease with which he maintained good personal as well as political relations with representatives of very different, and in some cases mutually hostile, ideological tendencies: Blanquism, Proudhonism, Bakuninism, Marxism, Clemenceauvian Radicalism and Boulangism.
Charles Victor Jaclard came from a humble working-class family, but, as a precocious student, he was given a good education. After working as a military nurse and then a mathematics teacher, he moved to Paris in 1864 to pursue further studies in medicine. He soon fell in with the followers of the veteran revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui and joined the Blanquists' secret society. In 1865 he helped organise Blanqui's escape from prison to Belgium. That year, Jaclard attended the International Student Congress in Liège, where he attended speeches expounding atheism and socialism. On 26 December, the French Council of Universities banned him from all French universities because of his politics, particularly a speech he gave at Brussels on 3 November, in which he declared that there would be a new Congress, "held in the streets, and concluded by our rifles."[1]
Anna Jaclard died in 1887. Victor Jaclard married a second time, on 12 July 1894, to 25-year-old Joséphine Eugénie Desprès. Jaclard died on 14 April 1903 and was cremated at Père-Lachaise Cemetery.[1]
Although Jaclard had not spent much of his time practising medicine, he seems to have remained a doctor in good standing in the eyes of his profession. At any rate, the British Medical Journal of May 2, 1903, noted his recent death.[2]
