Histoire des gauches en France (2004), ii. 207.
410
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
programme’ of reforms to be pursued by socialists,90 but the broader question
raised by these developments was whether the socialist movement could be indif-
ferent to the fate of the Republic. Those who answered in the negative did so in the
belief that the Republic remained the most favourable institutional structure within
which socialists could pursue their desired reforms. In Millerand’s formulation this
meant that the Republic was the political form of socialism, whilst socialism was the
economic and social expression of the Republic. For others, the entry of a socialist
into government meant accepting that, for all their doubts about the bourgeois
republic, socialism was an offspring of the traditions of republican democracy. The
harder part of the equation was that of embracing the daily reality of reformism and
of cooperation with the bourgeoisie. Worst of all, and as the most astute observers
saw clearly, the yawning divide between revolutionary rhetoric and reformist
practice ran the risk of reducing socialism to nothing more than meaningless
gestures and verbalism.
These divisions and debates were not without an important international di-
mension.91 From the late 1860s onwards, the congresses of both the First and
Second Internationals frequently revealed the deep schism that existed over the
respective claims of political and economic action and these tensions were only to
be accentuated by the rise to prominence (above all, in Germany) of Marxism
during the final decades of the century. Matters came to a head when Eduard
Bernstein began to challenge the very foundations of historical materialism. Begin-
ning with a series of articles published in Die Neue Zeit in 1896, he plunged
German Marxism into the crisis of revisionism, arguing that the historical necessity
of socialism could not be derived from the evolution of capitalism. At bottom, this
was a difference of opinion about the process and mechanics of revolution. If
democracy was the end, Bernstein believed, so also it should be the means. The
strategy of the dictatorship of the proletariat had to be abandoned. In the French
case, it also denoted a deep-seated disagreement about the nature of the Revolution.
The fractured heritage of 1789 was again to come into play.
I I I
To begin our analysis of what is often referred to as the ‘second left’,92 we might
turn our attention to Charles Fourier’s Théorie des Quatre Mouvements, first
published in 1808.93 With its accounts of copulating planets, the sea tasting of
lemonade, and the nine degrees of cuckoldry, this is undoubtedly one of the
90 See Millerand, Le Socialisme réformiste français (1903), 19–35.
91 See Emmanuel Jousse, Réviser le marxisme? D’Edouard Bernstein à Albert Thomas, 1896–1914
(2007).
92 See Vincent Duclert, ‘La Deuxième gauche’, in Becker and Candar, Histoire des gauches, ii.
175–89.
93 See Œuvres Complètes de Charles Fourier (1846), i. This text is available in English tr. as The
Theory of the Four Movements (Cambridge, 1996). See Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary
and his World (Berkeley, Calif., 1986).
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
411
strangest books ever written. Beneath these numerous oddities, however, lay an
audacious attempt to refashion the principles of social organization following what
Fourier described unequivocally as ‘the catastrophe of 1793’. The Revolution,
according to Fourier, was a direct consequence of the ‘systematic thoughtlessness’
of the moral and political sciences. The philosophes, he wrote, had been like
‘children playing with fireworks amidst barrels of gunpowder’.94 They had for-
gotten that ‘liberty is illusory if the common people lack wealth’, that equality was a
‘chimera’ where the right to work did not exist, and that there could be no
‘fraternity between sybarites steeped in refinements and our coarse, hungry peasants
covered in rags’.95 The result had been ‘civilized chaos, barbarism, and savagery’.
In response, Fourier’s ambition was to sketch out the details of an ‘Ordre
Sociétaire’ that would permit the transition ‘from incoherence to social combina-
tion’, ‘universal harmony’, and ‘a state of great happiness’. This he did through the
formulation of a highly complex theory of ‘passionate attraction and repulsion’.
Hitherto, Fourier argued, the passions had been seen as sources of discord: his
theory, in contrast, would ‘appeal to the passions common to everybody’ and its
success would be guaranteed through ‘the allurements of profit and sensual plea-
sure’.96 There is no need to analyse Fourier’s taxonomy of what he took to be
our ‘luxurious’, ‘affective’, and ‘distributive’ passions, nor to dissect his classifica-
tion of the 810 personality types which derived from it: the point was that Fourier
believed that it was a mistake to repress the passions. This explains why he allotted
such a central place to ‘amorous freedom’ and what he termed ‘combined gastron-
omy’. If, as Fourier believed, sensual pleasure was the primary and immutable
source of human activity, the trick was so to arrange society that it should be
maximized. Exquisite food and a rich diet of sexual partners would secure social
harmony.
Fourier was not much read until around 1829, the year in which he published Le
Nouveau Monde industriel et sociétaire.97 If the basic principle of Fourier’s argument
remained unchanged—‘it will be proven’, he wrote, ‘that true happiness consists in
the enjoyment of great riches and an infinite variety of pleasures’98—the emphasis
upon ‘amorous corporation’ was much less evident. ‘The vice of our so-called
regenerators’, Fourier wrote, ‘is to condemn this or that abuse instead of condemn-
ing civilization in its entirety, for the latter is nothing but a vicious circle of
abuses.’99 The remedy to these vices, he continued, lay ‘in the discovery of a
mechanism of industrial attraction’ which would transform work into a pleasure
and guarantee a minimum income to all members of the community. Labour was
no longer to be regarded as a duty but as an enjoyable and satisfying activity
structured in such a way as to ensure that all necessary tasks would be accomplished
without coercion.
94 Œuvres Complètes de Charles Fourier, 284.
95 Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu (eds.), The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier (London,
1972), 160–2.
96 Œuvres Complètes de Charles Fourier, 8.
97 Ibid. vi.
98 Ibid., p. xiv.
99 Ibid., p. xv.
412
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
Needless to say, Fourier provided a detailed breakdown of how this would be
done—work was to be of infinite variety, of short duration, and carried out in clean
surroundings, for example—but the fundamental principle underlying the whole
operation was arguably best discerned in the proposal that children—the ‘little
hordes’—should perform such unsavoury tasks as
cleaning the drains and shifting
manure.100 The trick, in other words, was to align the job with the natural
propensities of those involved (in this case, the ‘love of dirt’ dear to so many pre-
adolescents). Crucially, such work was to be undertaken in the new material
conditions provided by the phalange, an association of approximately 1,600 in-
dividuals—twice the number of identified personality types—the physical and
organizational arrangements of which Fourier planned down to the last detail.
For the most part these aspects of Fourier’s argument, intriguing as they are, can be
passed over but we should perhaps note that members were to live in a condition of
what was described as ‘graduated inequality’ and that remuneration was to be made
according to a complicated formula taking into account labour performed, capital
invested, and talent displayed. Placed in a rural setting, at the centre of the phalange
would be a vast Palace of Harmony or phalanstère. The architectural drawings used
to adorn various Fourierist publications indicate that this magnificent edifice,
replete with dining rooms, libraries, workshops, ballrooms, private apartments,
and street gallery, would bear a marked resemblance to the palaces of Versailles and
the Louvre.
The organizational difficulties arising from such arrangements are presumably
self-evident. It is, therefore, all the more important to understand that Fourier
believed his proposals to be far from utopian. Indeed, he insisted that he had
revealed the principles of a new ‘social science’ and that his discoveries bore
comparison with Newton’s theory of gravitational attraction. By the same token
he was unfailingly critical of what he saw as the impractical schemes put forward by
Robert Owen and the various Saint-Simonian sects.101 Moreover, it was as a
doctrine which located society’s ills within the social system that Fourier’s ideas
were taken up by his growing number of followers.102
Fourier’s big breakthrough came in 1831 when the schism within the Saint-
Simonian movement led to the conversion of sizeable numbers of its members to
Fourierism. The following year saw the creation of a weekly journal, Le Phalanstère,
edited jointly by Jules Lechevalier, Victor Considérant, and Fourier himself. That
year also saw the first concerted attempt to create a model community, located not
far from Paris. Early optimism quickly gave way to personal acrimony and the
disciples distanced themselves more and more from their troublesome master. As a
consequence Fourierism was gradually purged of many of its wilder eccentricities.
This was especially so after Fourier’s death in 1837. Le Phalanstère was superseded
by Considérant’s La Phalange: Journal de la Science Sociale and by the daily La
100 Œuvres Complètes de Charles Fourier, 207.
101 See e.g. Fourier’s Pièges et charlatanisme des sectes Saint-Simon et Owen (1831).
102 See Jonathan Beecher, Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism
(Berkeley, Calif., 2001).
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
413
Démocratie pacifique in 1843. Although never as large as that achieved by Cabet’s Le
Populaire, their audience was substantial, and the École Sociétaire (as Fourierism
was now known) secured a sizeable following across France into the 1840s.
Ultimately what emerged from this process of transition was a vague form of
democratic socialism much removed from Fourier’s original intentions. A place was
found for the State—in the form of a Ministry of Progress—and Considérant’s
vision of the future was noticeably more egalitarian than that of his former master.
It was, moreover, a socialism which (echoing the familiar refrain of the time) saw
itself as ‘the social realization of Christianity’. The commitment to a ‘peaceful
democracy’ also entailed a willingness to engage in electoral politics.103 Here it was
Considérant, now the effective leader of the movement, who led the way. Having
first stood for election in 1839, he became a member of the National Assembly in
1848 and there championed both the right to work and female suffrage. Although
deeply unsettled by the popular violence of 1848–9, he was arrested in June 1849
and, like so many other radicals, went into Belgian exile. Four years later, following
a visit to the United States in 1852, Considérant published Au Texas,104 a detailed
report and programme for the establishment of an experimental colony on Ameri-
can soil. Buoyed up by the enthusiastic reception his ideas received, on 15 January
1855 he set sail again for the New World, from whence he did not return until
1869. Predictably, the new settlement on the banks of the Trinity River near Dallas
was rapidly to fall prey to feuds and factions, with the result that a discouraged and
disenchanted Considérant spent the remainder of his American sojourn as a farmer
near San Antonio.
This sorry end to a tale fuelled by such exalted expectations should not blind
us to what was of intellectual significance in the Fourierist movement. Fourier
and those who followed him saw that the profound ills afflicting society derived
not from any defects intrinsic to human beings or from causes that had political
solutions but from evils inherent to a system of industrial organization char-
acterized by disorder, oppression, and deceit. They concluded that abstract
political rights were of little import when placed beside claims to a right to
work and to a basic minimum subsistence and that violent revolution and
insurrection was the route least likely to engender a ‘perfect social state’ resting
upon the ‘sacred principles of justice, liberty, and humanity’. Rather than relying
upon what Considérant portrayed as ‘the eruption of a popular volcano’, they
saw themselves as ‘social engineers’ intent on securing ‘universal union’ through
the progressive application of the principles of voluntary association. From
this standpoint, it became possible to conceive of a new set of social arrange-
ments where everyone would work ‘freely and passionately’ for the general
good and where everyone would identify that good with his or her own personal
103 In addition to the various Fourierist journals already cited, see Victor Considérant, Bases de la
Politique Positive (1842); Exposition abrégée du système phalanstérien de Fourier (1845); Principes du
socialisme: manifeste de la démocratie au XIXe siècle (1847); and Le Socialisme devant le vieux monde
(1848).
104 Considérant, Au Texas (1854).
414
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
well-being. It was these truths that were repeated incessantly in Fourierist tracts
and periodicals, in lectures and in speeches, and in the press, but which also
resolutely escaped practical application.
Considérant was prepared to accept that his conception of socialism was anti-
revolutionary, if not counter-revolutionary, and he went to great lengths to dem-
onstrate that socialism should not seek to imitate the bloody and destructive
example provided by the emancipation of the bourgeoisie in 1789. The violent,
subversive, and conspiratorial socia
lism of Babeuf, he wrote, would ‘immolate’
liberty and destroy all personal spontaneity, putting in its place ‘the absolute
despotism of the law’. The communism of Cabet, he likewise argued, drew
inspiration from the ‘democratic and political tradition’ of the Revolution and
accordingly paid little attention to the immense difficulties posed by the organiza-
tion of society and of collective labour. ‘To invoke fraternity’, Considérant wrote,
‘is to resolve nothing.’ As for the ‘errors’ of Louis Blanc, Considérant was of the
opinion that his distinguished colleague had no other idea than that of ‘imposing
his egalitarian socialism through the exercise of authority and by surprise’. Relying
solely upon the instrument of the State, Blanc intended to bring socialism into
existence by decree.105
Another fellow socialist for whom Considérant had few kind words was Pierre-
Joseph Proudhon.106 His ‘portrait of the beast’ revealed a man of paradox who
delighted in self-contradiction and argument and this, with some justification, has
remained the view of almost all those who have subsequently read his work.
‘I distrust an author’, Proudhon wrote, ‘who pretends to be consistent with himself
after an interval of twenty-five years.’107 Something of an autodidact, Proudhon
possessed a capacity to arouse controversy—it was in his Qu’est-ce que la propriété?
of 1840 that he launched his famous slogan that ‘property is theft’—and he
continued in this vein until the end of his life in 1865. Never a supporter of
feminism, it was Proudhon’s opinion that the choice facing women was that of
being either housewives or courtesans. Like many a radical of his day, he published
a series of newspapers, of which the most successful was Le Représentant du
peuple, launched in February 1848. He also spent three years in prison (where he
both married and fathered a child) and a further four years in exile. He was a man
of notoriously poor political judgement—believing, for a short time, that Louis
Napoleon Bonaparte might serve the cause of revolution—and frequent ill-humour.
Nevertheless, in the hydra-headed world of the socialism of the 1840s not only
did Proudhon achieve sufficient prominence as to attract the attention (and briefly
Revolution and the Republic Page 87
