Revolution and the Republic
Page 84
21 See e.g. Cabet, Correspondance avec sa Majesté Louis-Philippe 1er (Dijon, 1830).
22 Révolution de 1830 et situation présente (Novembre 1833) expliquées et éclairées par les révolutions de
1789, 1792, 1799 et 1804 et par la Restauration (1833), i. 157.
23 Cabet, Histoire Populaire de la Révolution Française de 1789 à 1830, 4 vols. (1839–40).
24 Ibid. i. 145.
25 Ibid., p. v.
396
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
contemporaries, he also believed that it could only be understood if it were located
in the long sweep of French history from its very origins onwards. The first men,
Cabet affirmed in Rousseauian tones, were born free and equal in rights. Only later
did political society and government begin to emerge and when they did so
governments were either ‘popular or democratic or republican’. Monarchy ap-
peared only later still and initially had been either ‘elective, personal, temporary,
or for life’. It was therefore solely through ‘usurpation’ that monarchies had been
able to become ‘hereditary and permanent, aristocratic and patrimonial, irresponsi-
ble and despotic’.26 It was from that point onwards, and not before, that society had
been divided into ‘a conquering aristocracy’ which owned everything and a people
reduced to either serfdom or slavery. The course of French (and, more generally, of
European) history had thus been one of progressive and mounting insurgence
against oppression, reaching its culmination in the writings of the eighteenth-
century philosophes—Rousseau, Cabet wrote, ‘demonstrated the justice and the
necessity of establishing social, civil, and political equality’27—the American Revo-
lution, and then the French Revolution. At this point, ‘an old and great nation’ set
about the task of regenerating itself and in so doing became ‘the tribune of the
universe’.
What followed was an account of how that potential for emancipation had failed
to be realized, the key moment for Cabet being the introduction of the distinction
between active and passive citizens. This was a theme he returned to time and time
again in his long narrative, its significance being that it excluded the people from
the Revolution and opened the door to the emergence of a new ‘aristocracy of
wealth’. In summary, Cabet praised the National Assembly of 1789–91 for its
proclamation of the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme and for its affirmation of
the principles of equality and the sovereignty of the people, but condemned it for
not having had the courage to press forward towards social and political equality.
Corrupted by ‘the ambitious, by intriguers, aristocrats, renegades, and traitors’, it
had established ‘an aristocratic bourgeoisie and a bourgeois aristocracy’ and from
this flowed ‘the greater part of the terrible struggles that were to follow’.
Given this betrayal, Cabet absolved the people of all blame for the massacres that
were subsequently to occur, repeatedly challenging Thiers’s depiction of their
barbarous behaviour and eulogizing their devotion to the cause of liberty, equality,
and the patrie. In like fashion, he poured scorn upon Thiers’s praise of the
Girondins, condemning them for their cowardice, their hypocrisy, their lack of
morality, their vanity and self-interest. Had the Girondins remained in power,
Cabet insisted, their weakness and treachery would have ensured that France would
have been lost. ‘In reality’, he maintained, ‘it was the Girondins who were
responsible for the Terror and for its consequences.’28 Danton fared little better.
If he had displayed audacity, it had only been to enrich himself. He was, Cabet
wrote, ‘perhaps the most striking example there is of the disastrous influence of
26 Cabet, Histoire Populaire de la Révolution Française de 1789 à 1830, 145–6.
27 Ibid. 150.
28 Ibid. iii. 328.
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
397
corruption, of immorality, and of the infernal temptation of the love of money’.29
Danton’s opposition to the Committee of Public Safety, he concluded, had been ‘a
political crime’ of enormous magnitude.
Thus it was that Robespierre and the Jacobins were singled out for special praise.
When contrasted with the traitors and conspirators around them, they were
principled and beyond corruption. They alone had possessed the courage and
heroism required to defend France and had understood ‘the horrible necessity of
destroying their enemies in order not to be destroyed themselves’. When they came
to power, the distinction between active and passive citizens had been abolished.
The measures they implemented in order to win the war had amounted to the
introduction of the common ownership of property. More than this, the Jacobins
identified the goal of the Revolution to be that of ‘radically regenerating France and
Humanity’ and of securing the reign of ‘eternal Justice’.30 Assuredly, Robespierre
was not a perfect human being, but had he been a tyrant? Rather, it had been his
enemies and assassins who had been the tyrants. Robespierre had spurned personal
power and had wanted to bring the Terror to an end as quickly as possible. Had he
been cruel and merciless? No one, Cabet replied, had been more devoted to the
happiness of the people and it was because he had preferred kindness to violence
that he had perished. In brief, from 1789 until the moment of his downfall
Robespierre had been ‘the most faithful instrument of the Revolution and the
truest representative of the People’. Indeed, he had been their very incarnation.31
Thus, with Robespierre’s execution, the movement towards equality and the
eradication of poverty came to an end and Robespierre himself was to be treated as
nothing more than a brigand and a monster, the perpetrator of unimaginable
crimes and excesses. Nothing less had been required if the meaning of the Revolu-
tion was to be disfigured and its memory shrouded in calumny. What remained of
Cabet’s history is outside our compass. His tale was one of France’s decline into
violence and immorality under the Directory, dishonour and criminality under the
Consulate, and, finally, despotism and conquest under the Empire. The Revolu-
tion, Cabet concluded, had been ‘vanquished’. What lies within our compass is
how Cabet related this experience to his own views about the radical reform of
society.32
Cabet had not a good word to say for the political order that emerged after
Thermidor. It was, in his view, the embodiment of everything that was malign and
repressive. Reduced to despair, the people, and especially those of the poorer
quarters of Paris, had seen no alternative other than that of insurrection. None
was remotely successful and all were subject to brutal repression but it had been this
experience, Cabet acknowledged, that had given rise to Babeuf’s conspiracy. Cabet
had known Buonarroti personally and, as he commented in his text, he did not for
one minute doubt either his sincerity or disinterestedness, but was his account of
Babeuf’s devotion to the people sufficient reason for ‘blindly’ adopting his ideas and
29 Ibid. 571.
31 Ibid. 108.
32 For Cabet’s own account of the emergence of socialist and communist ideas in France see État de
la Question Sociale en Angleterre, en Ecosse, en Irlande et en France (1843), 58–94.
398
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
for turning Babouvism ‘into some sort of cult’?33 Cabet’s answer was in the
negative. Babeuf, he argued, had not invented the doctrine of communism. This
honour went to Lycurgus and the Greek philosophers, to Jesus Christ and the early
Christians, and, later, to such writers as Thomas More, Morelly, and Mably.
Moreover, it was Cabet’s contention that, for all their opposition to the ‘inoppor-
tune’ and ‘atheistic’ proposals of the Hébertists, both Robespierre and Saint-Just
had been advocates of ‘real equality’ and of communism and that they had intended
to march towards these goals by means better suited to success. Second, Babeuf ’s
conspiracy had been imprudent and incompetently organized. It was destined to
end in catastrophe. It was a ‘fatal error’ to believe that an uprising, even if it were
defeated, advanced the cause of the people. If the ideal of communism was in no
way ‘chimerical’ or ‘impracticable’, Cabet concluded, ‘we are at the same time
deeply convinced that a minority cannot establish it through violence and that it is
realizable only through the power of public opinion’.34
Cabet was in no doubt as to the principal lesson that was to be learnt and he
never tired of repeating it. If the communist society of the future could not be
instituted as a result of one violent and impulsive revolutionary coup, it would
rather require the establishment of a transitionary and preparatory regime lasting
for perhaps as long as fifty years.35 During that time the right to private property
would continue to exist but all legislation would have as its goal to ‘diminish
superfluity, to improve the condition of the poor and progressively to establish
equality in everything’.36 The transition would be effected through civic education
and a reformed political structure resting upon a sovereignty of the people made
real through the existence of 1,000 deliberative assemblies scattered across the
Republic. It would equate, Cabet avowed, to something like ‘a pure democracy’,
with the executive branch of government firmly subordinated to the legislature and
never consigned to one person. All citizens would be eligible to vote and to stand for
election. There would be no upper chamber full of aristocrats.
Cabet described this process of transition in a variety of different ways, at times
outlining its general principles, less frequently doing so as part of a utopian vision.
The latter received its most vivid and extended expression in Cabet’s Voyage en
Icarie, first published in 1839. Here the stylistic device employed was that of a
voyage by a rich English aristocrat, Lord Carisdall, to the distant island of Icarie, his
journal being presented as a portrayal of an imaginary ideal society. Cabet provided
a detailed picture of virtually every aspect of the new social order, depicting its
towns, its public monuments, its theatres, its housing, the clothing and diet of its
inhabitants, as well as a multitude of other facets of its existence right down to the
benefits of cremation. As might be readily imagined, there would be no money;
nothing would be bought and sold; and production would be carried out commu-
nally. All would work equally and all would be rewarded equally, new working
practices ensuring the creation of material abundance. There would, of course, be
33 Histoire Populaire, iv. 328.
34 Ibid. 333–4.
35 e.g. ibid. 333; Comment je suis communiste (1845), 6–7; Voyage en Icarie (1842), 343, 357–71.
36 Voyage en Icarie, 359.
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
399
virtually no crime; the streets would be clean; and everyone would live long
and healthy lives. Indeed, one of the few surprises in this otherwise predictable
montage was Cabet’s enthusiastic endorsement of heterosexual marriage and
the family.37 Icarie also had neighbouring colonies, each conquered peacefully
as well as to the delight of their ‘savage’ inhabitants, now brought gratefully into
the arc of civilization.
Several points are worthy of remark. The first is that in such texts as Comment je
suis communiste and Mon credo communiste Cabet set out identical principles
without recourse to a utopian framework. Paradoxically, his very point was that,
now more than ever before, the establishment of a communist society was a
practical possibility made daily more feasible by advances in production and
machinery. Second, when Cabet sketched the history of Icarie’s successful transi-
tion to communism he framed it explicitly in terms of France’s own revolution of
1789. Imagined was a bloody struggle lasting two days, followed by ‘a terrible war’
against a foreign coalition, leaving the revolution and the people ultimately victori-
ous. More intriguing was Cabet’s description of the emergence of the ‘immortal’
Icar as a ‘dictator’ inspired by a boundless love of the people and concern for their
well-being. ‘It was he, as dictator,’ Cabet wrote, ‘who recommended social and
political equality, common ownership and the democratic Republic to his fellow
citizens.’38 The parallel with Robespierre was presumably not lost on Cabet’s audi-
ence. Next, Cabet saw his imagined egalitarian society as a fulfilment of the hopes
and aspirations of 1789. Here was a system of government, born of the revolutionary
barricades, which remained true to its origins and which saw that all the vices of
society—poverty, idleness, immorality, opulence, adultery, hatred, and war—had
their source in the unequal ownership of property. The guiding maxims of the new
society, therefore, were to be equality, community, and association. Where did
liberty fit into this picture? It is true, Cabet wrote, that the desire for liberty was
now a ‘universal passion’ but such a ‘blind passion’, he countered, was ‘an error,
a vice, a grave evil’, born of ‘violent hatred’. As the goal was to ‘produce wealth and
happiness’ it was only right that society ‘should subject all wills and all actions to
its rules, its laws, and its discipline’.39 The ‘lying liberty’ associated with freedom of
the press would be brought to an end through the establishment of one single
newspaper whose function it would be to express public opinion.40 Finally, if Cabet
located his argument firmly within an Enlightenment framework that assumed
the perfectibility, innate sociability, and natural goodness of human beings, he did
not hesitate to equate the advocates of communism to the ‘disciples, the imitators,
and continuators of Jesus Christ’.41 In fact, he suggested that communism was ‘the
true Christianity’.42
37 For a fuller statement of Cabet’s views on this subject see La Femme (1844). See also Pamela
Pilbeam, French Socialists before Marx: Workers, Women, and the Social Question in France (Teddington,
2000), 75–106.
38 Voyage en Icarie, 217.
39 Ibid. 403–4.
/>
40 Ibid. 197–8.
41 Ibid. 567.
42 Cabet, Le Vrai Christianisme suivant Jésus-Christ (1846).
400
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
Quite remarkably, there was little that was unusual in this opinion. Similar
sentiments were found, for example, in Alphonse Esquiros’s L’Évangile du peuple
défendu43 and in Pierre Leroux’s De l’Humanité.44 Indeed, framing the case for
socialism or communism in the language of Christianity was something of a
commonplace among left-wing opinion during the 1840s.45 Nor was it mere
window dressing designed to give moral lustre to a secular ethic or Rousseau-style
civil religion. Rather, writers such as Cabet were entirely sincere when they affirmed
that the doctrines, morality, and conduct of Jesus Christ provided inspiration and
guidance for everyone who wished to deliver humanity from the evils afflicting it.
When practised in accord with the ‘true’ spirit of Christ himself, Cabet argued, no
one would refuse to describe themselves as a Christian.46 The argument, as might
be guessed, was that the precept of love thy neighbour was a divine expression of
the call to fraternity. This was then bolstered by a portrayal of Christ as a man of the
people, always living among the sick, the poor, and the persecuted. The reign of
God would mean no more rich and poor, no more masters and slaves, no more
oppressors and oppressed. Crucially, however, Cabet and those like him located
the promise of salvation in this world rather than the next, the transition to the ‘new
Jerusalem’ or ‘holy City’ being placed invariably on the immediate horizon.
Just as intriguing was the question of why a religious characterization of aspira-
tions towards social justice and equality held out such appeal to its proponents as
well as to its audience. At least four considerations came into play. Stripped of its
impurities and returned to its original doctrinal core, Christianity was perceived as a
motivating and inspirational force. ‘If the doctrine of Christ is a Religion of Hope’,
Cabet wrote, ‘it is also a Religion of Activity and of Courage’.47 Christianity
provided much-needed evidence to support the view that it was not by violence
or insurrection that humanity was to be set free and that emancipation was better