French Workers' Party (The Holy Deliverance)

The French Workers' Party (French:Parti ouvrier français, POF)  was the French socialist party created in 1880 by Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law. A revolutionary party, it had as aim to abolish capitalism and replace it with a socialist society.

The party originated with a secession from Federation of the Socialist Workers of France (FTSF), which was founded in 1879, after a split with Paul Brousse's possibilists. The party's programme, written by Guesde with input from Marx, Lafargue and Friedrich Engels, was approved at the opening congress. The party officially became the POF in 1893.

After the assassination attempt of an anarchist Paul-Marie Curien against the King Philippe VII, a serial laws ("villainous laws", in French: lois scélérates) are voted to condamed any anarchist propaganda and try to condamed socialists and republicans ideas by extension. Laws inspired by Anti-socialists laws voted in Germany in the same time. The POF is baned a first time in 1885, after the legislative election of 1884 and the come of first real socialists in Chamber of Deputies. Jules Guesde, deputy of Nord circonscription is arrested, but quickly liberated after a defense of Alexandre Millerand, a young republican-socialist lawyer. In 1886 the POF is reauthorized, but again bannd in 1887 after the defense of a workers' demonstration violently repressed. The POF is finnaly reauthorized in 1889.

In 1902, the party merged with the Blanquist Central Revolutionary Committee (CRC) to form the Socialist Party of France.