Our international history 9

French Socialists and Communists before 1848: Leroux, Buchez, Pecqueur and Dezamy

The period between the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 saw on outpouring of socialistic and communistic theoretical writing.

Pierre Leroux, a mason and compositor, was initially active in the Saint-Simonian movement, helping to edit their journal The Globe. In 1834, he published an essay on Individualism and Socialism, which may have been the first use in France of the term ‘socialism’. In 1840, he published his magnum opus De Humanite.  A collaborator of the republican feminist novelist George Sand, he also engaged in philosophical disputations with the young Hegelians.  From 1845 to 1848, he published a journal, the Revue Sociale, which was critical of the manifesto supported by other democratic reformers promoted in their journal, La Reforme, which was edited by the left-wing republican, Ledru-Rollin, as lacking a basis in a new philosophical and religious system. A supporter of the 1848 revolution, Leroux became mayor of Boussac and a member of the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies. He published a volume titled De La Ploutocratie et du Gouvernement des Riches. After Napoleon’s coup in 1851, he was exiled in London and then Jersey. In 1852, he collaborated with Cabet and Louis Blanc, both then in London, to found a short-lived “Socialist Union”. In 1866, Marx and Karl Jung nominated Leroux to join the central committee of the International Workingmen’s Association in London, though there is no record of Leroux attending any meeting. Leroux returned to France in 1869, dying two years later.  Leroux was a democratic socialist, argued for an egalitarian economy and workers control of the workplace and a political order in which civil liberties are respected under representative institutions of majority rule.  Leroux saw socialism as a new religion, combining a democratic pantheism with an egalitarian social and political order.

Phillippe Buchez was a member of the conspiratorial Carbonari and then a Saint-Simonian. A trained doctor before becoming a historian, between 1833 and 1838, he published a forty-volume history of the French revolution. This was followed in 1842 by a two volume Introduction to the Science of History.  In 1840, Buchez participated in publishing the journal L’Atelier (The Worker) which promoted socialistic, Christian and utopian ideas and at the beginning of the 1848 revolution, another journal – the Revue National, which promoted a broad democratic approach. This led to his appointment as president of the Constituent Assembly. When the Assembly was invaded in May 1848, as a pacifist, Buchez was not prepared to use force to evict the protestors, an inaction which in effect led to his retirement from the political arena.  After the counter-revolution of Louis Napoleon he retired to write numerous philosophical and historical tracts, before dying in 1865.

Constantin Pecqueur was initially a Saint-Simonian, contributing to The Globe, before joining a Fourierist commune and writing a biography of Fourier and contributing to Fourierist journals. An economist, he promoted the collective ownership of property and in 1839, published his magnum opus Economie Sociale, which in its recognition of  the impact of industrial change such as steam power on intellectual development, was to be referenced in Marx’s Capital. Pecqueur contributed to La Reforme. With the establishment of the republican government in 1848, Pecqueur joined the Luxemburg commission , established by the Minister of Labour, Louis Blanc, to review “the organisation of labour”. Collaborating with the Fourierist Victor Considerant, he tried unsuccessfully to introduce several reforms, such as collective bargaining and government funding for agricultural colonies, social housing and co-operative workshops. He then conducted through his journal Le Salut de Peuple, a polemic with the anarchist Proudhon. An internationalist, he promoted the idea of a European parliament. He remained a member of the National Assembly until 1852. In the 1860’s, he provided advice to the socialist Benoit Malon and to the nascent French trade union movement. He died in 1887.

Theodore Dezamy was a schoolteacher. An admirer of Babeuf, he became a follower of Cabet, contributing to his journal. He also became an associate of Louis-Auguste Blanqui and Armand Barbes’ conspiratorial “Society of the Seasons”, who in 1839 attempted an unsuccessful insurrection. In 1840 he collaborated with Jean-Jacques Pillot to organise a communist banquet in Belleville on the outskirts of Paris. Dezamy believed that workers should organise themselves rather than appeal to the sympathy of the bourgeoisie and breaking with Cabet’s Icarian movement, promoted his own journal L’Egalitaire and in 1846 set up his own political organisation, the “Egalitarian Communists”. Dezamy’s best-known work, Le Code to La Comunaute, was published in 1842, advocating a militant anti-clericalism and arguing that workers should prepare for revolution and the establishment of a communitarian society. With the breaking out of the revolution, he participated in Blanqui’s Central Republican Society. He died in 1850 aged only 42.
 

Further Reading:
Evans, David  – Social Romanticism in France  (Oxford University Press 1951)
Billington, James – Fire in the Minds of Men (Basic Books 1980)
Pilbeam, Pamela  – French Socialists Before Marx (Acumen 2000)
Corcoran, Pal ed. –  Before Marx: Socialism and Communism in France 1830-48 (Macmillan 1983)
Petri, Barbara  – The Historical Thought of P-J-P Buchez (Catholic University of America Press 1958)
Bakunin, Jack  – Pierre Leroux and the Birth of Democratic Socialism (The Revisionist Press 1976)