Revolution and the Republic

by Jeremy Jennings

  achieved through the moral transformation and resurrection, first, of the oppressed

  and, then, of their oppressors.48 Likewise, it provided ammunition to refute the

  charge—made, for example, by Alexis de Tocqueville—that socialism and commu-

  nism were immoral and materialistic doctrines. Last, but not least, it enabled those

  advocating radical reform to mount a sustained critique of a society deemed to be

  increasingly in the grip of individualism (the word was coined by Pierre Leroux),

  economic anarchy, and plutocracy.49 Jesus, it was pointed out, was no friend of the

  merchants. He was not a king but a liberator and revolutionary, a democrat and

  believer in equality.

  43 Alphonse Esquiros, L’Évangile du peuple défendu (1841).

  44 Pierre Leroux, De l’Humanité, de son principe et de son avenir, ou se trouve exposé la vraie definition

  de la religion (1840).

  45 See Edward Berenson, Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830–1852 (Princeton,

  NJ, 1984).

  46 Cabet, Le Vrai Christianisme, 4.

  47 Ibid. 351.

  48 See Michèle Riot-Sarcey, Le Réel de l’utopie: Essai sur le politique au XIXe siècle (1998).

  49 See Cabet, Le Salut est dans l’union: La Concurrence est la ruine (1845), 1–2, and Pierre Leroux,

  De la Ploutocratie ou du gouvernement des riches (Boussac, 1848).

  Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism

  401

  The socialism of the 1840s was redolent with these themes, its growing number

  of adherents frequently characterizing the new creed as the realization of Christ’s

  message of justice and brotherhood. Expositions of the doctrines of socialism were

  often set out in the form of a catechism. However, the hard-nosed realities of

  industrialization and the pauperization of the working class were increasingly to

  make themselves felt and nowhere more so than in the writings of Louis Blanc.

  Blanc’s prolific outpourings were not immune from the religious drives and

  inclinations of the period—he always retained a faith in Christian ethics and

  what he termed ‘the immortal laws of the Gospel’50—but he devoted his attention

  primarily to what became known as the social question. As Tony Judt has ob-

  served,51 at the centre of socialist discourse in the 1830s and 1840s was the issue of

  whether work was a duty or a right. Seen as a duty, it provided grounds for a moral

  critique of the bourgeoisie and of the idle rich. Seen as a right, on the other hand, it

  placed economic reform and the organization of labour at the forefront of the

  agenda. Blanc, through his tireless advocacy and not inconsiderable influence

  within the French labour movement, played a key role in effecting the shift from

  the former to the latter.

  This he did most obviously in L’Organisation du travail.52 The basic premise

  upon which its argument rested was simply stated: economic competition was a

  ‘system of extermination’. The facts proved, Blanc asserted, that unbridled compe-

  tition led to a systematic lowering of salaries, to a reduction in production, to crime,

  to the dissolution of the family, to child labour, and to ‘a frightening moral

  corruption’. It also gave rise to civil war and ‘necessarily’ to international war.

  The solution lay in the intervention of the State. This would entail not the

  ownership of the means of production but rather funding to allow the establish-

  ment of ateliers sociaux—workers’ co-operatives—with the State acting as the

  ultimate regulator and coordinator of their activities. Blanc’s assumption was

  that, over time, these co-operative ventures would supplant those of private

  enterprise, an intricate web of social workshops gradually taking shape across

  industry as a whole. In place of private monopoly—always something of an

  obsession in socialist literature—the guiding principles would be those of associa-

  tion and solidarity. A similar arrangement would operate for agriculture.

  In this way, Blanc imagined that a new social and economic order would come

  into existence ‘without usurpation, without injustice’ and, above all, without

  violence. He also believed that, in contrast to the radical proposals of 1793, these

  practical reforms would endure. The chance to test these suppositions came in

  1848 when, following the February Revolution, Blanc found himself a member of

  the Provisional Government and head of what became known as the Luxembourg

  Commission.53 His allotted task was to find the means of implementing the right

  to work.54 The result was a dismal failure. Instead of Blanc’s ateliers sociaux, the

  50 Catéchisme des Socialistes (1849).

  51 Marxism and the French Left, 65–8.

  52 Blanc, L’Organisation du travail (1840).

  53 For Blanc’s own account see Histoire de la révolution de 1848 (1848).

  54 For the debate between Blanc and Adolphe Thiers on this issue see pp. 57–8 above.

  402

  Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism

  government set up state-run ateliers nationaux designed primarily to provide poor

  relief for the Parisian unemployed. Opened in February 1848, their closure was

  announced on 21 June of that year (Blanc’s Luxembourg Commission had been

  shut down the previous month): two days later barricades were raised in the poorer

  quarters of eastern Paris and the short, bloody, and ultimately doomed insurrection

  began. Class war, as the ever-prescient Alexis de Tocqueville recognized, had

  returned to the streets.55 Threatened with prosecution, Blanc went into exile in

  England, not returning until the fall of the Second Empire in 1870.

  Despite this abject defeat, Blanc was a key figure in the development of socialist

  thought in France. Blanc, as we have already seen, set out a vision of the republic

  resting upon the sovereignty of the people mediated through parliamentary repre-

  sentation. When applied to an analysis of the social and economic condition of

  France, this endorsement of the claims of universal suffrage and the ballot box was

  sufficiently strong as to bind him to a vision of democratic socialism. It was this

  commitment to both socialism and democracy that was to be a defining feature of

  the labour movement in the early years of the Third Republic. But as we also saw,

  Blanc was an unashamed advocate of political centralization, of the republic one

  and indivisible. The corollary was that socialism could only be implemented

  through the capture of the State. In part, this followed from Blanc’s conviction

  that the reform of society was such an enormous undertaking that it would require

  the ‘full force’ of government intervention, but it also reflected his belief that the

  State was in the hands of socialism’s enemies. ‘Seize hold of power’, he advised, ‘if

  you do not want it to crush you. Use it as an instrument lest you meet it as an

  obstacle.’56 This was the conclusion he reached as a historian of both the French

  Revolution and the July Monarchy.57

  Blanc’s view was that 1789 had begun the domination of the bourgeoisie and

  that 1830 had served to continue it. There were, he argued, three general principles

  operating in the world: those of authority, individualism, and fraternity. Complet-

  ing a process begun with Luther, 1789 had des
troyed the authority of the Church,

  and in its place a triumphant bourgeoisie had installed the principle of individual-

  ism. If the principle of fraternity had been announced by the Mountain, it had been

  swept away by the ‘storm’ and silenced with the coup of Thermidor. On Blanc’s

  account, therefore, there had been two quite distinct revolutions, one bearing the

  imprint of Voltaire, the other that of Rousseau, but it had been the former, that of a

  bourgeoisie fully armed with its own distinct conception of politics, philosophy,

  and the economy, that had taken root and that now ruled the present.58 This

  analysis was confirmed by Blanc’s reading of the first decade of the July Monarchy’s

  existence. The 1830s, he affirmed, had been nothing else than the rule of the

  bourgeoisie. Blinded by an ignoble preoccupation with its own well-being, the

  55 Souvenirs (1999), 182.

  56 Organisation du travail, 95.

  57 See Histoire de la Révolution française, 12 vols. (1849–62), and Histoire de Dix Ans 1830–1840,

  6 vols. (Brussels, 1843).

  58 This argument is primarily set out in vol. i of Histoire de la Révolution française.

  Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism

  403

  bourgeoisie had allied itself with the monarchy only out of self-interest, believing

  that this course of action would help keep the people in check. The July Monarchy,

  Blanc continued, was a regime marked by the complete abandonment of the poor

  and their subjection to the impersonal and invisible tyranny of the market. It was

  also a regime that in its egoism and cowardice was not worthy of France.

  It was Blanc’s view that the days of the bourgeoisie, and consequently of

  the principle of individualism, were numbered and that the future lay with the

  principle of fraternity. To argue thus, of course, meant that the Revolution needed

  to be cast as a source of inspiration for later socialists and this unavoidably involved

  him in some deft reasoning with regard to the Terror. His argument was that the

  violence and the fury of the Revolution had their origin as a response to counter-

  revolution59 and that the Terror was not a ‘system’ of government self-consciously

  invented by the Jacobins but rather a temporary expedient born of necessity out

  of the ‘entrails’ of a desperate and exceptional situation.60 To believe otherwise was

  mistakenly to dismiss the heroic efforts and achievements of those involved as little

  more than attempts to forge a permanent dictatorship.

  Blanc insisted that this was no apology for terrorism and that its crimes and

  excesses were to be condemned unreservedly, as were those individuals who

  had been motivated by the passions of hatred and vengeance. The latter Blanc

  referred to as ‘the Caligulas of sans-culottisme’. The terrible character of the means

  employed had served only to hide the grandeur of the goal pursued and had served

  not to save the Revolution but to extinguish the very life out of it. More than this,

  and as he made clear from the first pages of his history of the Revolution,61 Blanc’s

  view was that the violence and repression of the Terror had been such as to ensure

  that they would never be resorted to again. And so, according to Blanc, what was

  ‘truly admirable’ about the Revolution was its advocacy of the twin principles

  of individual and social rights. If the first had been the religion for which the

  Girondins had lived and died, the second had been that for which the Mountain

  had suffered the same fate, and if, therefore, the Revolution had never succeeded in

  bringing both principles into harmony, this was to be the task of socialism.

  With the advent of the Second Republic in 1848, issues relating to the organiza-

  tion and extension of the franchise again irresistibly came to the fore.62 As we have

  seen, Louis Blanc set himself against proposals for direct democracy, fearing that

  the outcome would be chaos and what he did not hesitate to describe as the reign of

  ignorance. But these were not the only ideas that Blanc felt compelled to combat at

  this time. For some on the left, revolution of the kind recently witnessed presented

  not so much an opportunity to seize hold and democratize the State as an occasion

  to destroy it altogether. The most forceful advocate of this view during the short life

  of the Second Republic was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. We will return to Proudhon

  when we consider those from whom the Jacobin model of social and political

  transformation was never able to obtain general assent, but here it is sufficient to

  59 Ibid. iv. 308–9.

  60 Ibid. x. 5.

  61 Ibid. i 1–6.

  62 Piero Craveri, Genesi di une constituzione: libertà e socialismo el dibattio constituzionale del 1848

  (Naples, 1985). See also Considérant, La Solution du gouvernement direct du peuple (1850).

  404

  Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism

  indicate that Proudhon charged Blanc with being a supporter of despotism. Blanc’s

  indignant response to this accusation—for the most part voiced in his short-lived

  journal, Le Nouveau Monde—served, if nothing else, to highlight a fundamental

  and enduring fissure in socialist thought in France. Blanc’s argument was that

  Proudhon’s vision of a society without a state—anarchy—would give rise to

  ‘tyranny in chaos’, to the domination of the strongest, whereas his own under-

  standing of a state in a democratic regime would engender what he termed an ‘État-

  serviteur’ where, through the practice of universal suffrage and representation, the

  State and the people would merge into one. The words state and liberty, he argued,

  were mutually related.63

  The counter-argument was that the State would always remain the instrument of

  a ruling class and that it would always play the role of master rather than that of

  servant. The introduction of (male) universal suffrage would make no appreciable

  difference to the situation. Indeed, this conclusion seemed to be proved by experi-

  ence. The calamitous result of extending the franchise to include a largely unedu-

  cated electorate was the election of Louis Napoleon to the presidency, an event

  followed by the inauguration of the Second Empire and the descent into ‘césar-

  isme’. The impact upon the left of this disastrous experiment was profound. If for

  some it instilled a profound distrust of a strong executive power, for others it

  undermined their faith in voter competence and the electoral process as a whole.

  This bitterness was only enhanced as a result of further disappointment following

  the inception of the Third Republic. Universal suffrage again failed to deliver

  significant social and economic reform. To this was then added disenchantment

  with the parliamentary regime itself. Rather than the superior capacity of the

  political elite, all that was evident was plain incompetence and corruption. In this

  context, it is interesting to note that the word ‘politician’ made its entry into the

  French vocabulary at the end of the 1870s and that it quickly developed a negative

  connotation, the by-word for self-interest and self-importance.64

  This situation elicited a variety of responses, none of which unfortunately can

  be explored here in the detail they deserve. Some in
the forever-fractured

  socialist movement turned their backs on politics altogether, raising ouvriérisme

  to a matter of high principle.65 This was true, for example, of the Parti ouvrier

  socialiste révolutionnaire, founded by Jean Allemane in 1891.66 Others, especially

  those associated with the orthodox Jules Guesde, sought to construct a ‘class

  party’ that would be immune from the blandishments of parliamentary intrigue

  and ambition.67 Of crucial importance here was the gradual assimilation and

  63 See esp. ‘Hommes du Peuple, L’État, c’est vous! Réponse au citoyen Proudhon’, Le Nouveau

  Monde, 5 (15 Nov. 1849), 195–207, and ‘L’État-Anarchie du citoyen Proudhon’, Le Nouveau Monde,

  7 (15 Jan. 1850), 302–7.

  64 Tuula Varakallio, ‘Rotten to the Core’: Variations of French Anti-System Rhetoric (Jyvaskyla, 2004),

  34–71.

  65 See e.g. Gustave Lefrançais, République et Révolution: De l’Attitude à prendre par le prolétariat en

  présence des partis politiques (Geneva, n.d.).

  66 See Jean Allemane, Notre Programme (1895).

  67 See Claude Willard, Les Guesdistes: Le Mouvement socialiste en France (1893–1905) (1965). See

  also Marc Angenot, Jules Guesde, ou la fabrication du marxisme orthodoxe (Montreal, 1997).

  Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism

  405

  misappropriation of Marxist ideas that occurred in France from the 1880s onwards.

  Marx’s writings were increasingly made available in (often inaccurate) French

  translation and his ideas subjected to detailed discussion in such reviews as Le

  Devenir social and, after the turn of the century, Hubert Lagardelle’s Le Mouvement

  socialiste. Electoral success, however, could not hide the fact that in the hands of

  Guesde and his colleagues, Marxism was reduced to an arid and formulaic doctrine

  resting upon a crude economic determinism and an advocacy of class struggle, the

  inevitability of collectivism, and the seizure, by force if necessary, of the State.

  Somewhat reassuringly for Guesde’s loyal supporters, it was imagined that the

  capitalist system would soon come to an end in a crisis of overproduction. The next

  Revolution, unlike that of 1789, was to be not the Revolution of property owners,

  of financiers, and of the bourgeoisie but of the Fourth Estate. In such circum-

  stances, there was to be no room for ideological deviation. Nevertheless, between