PART V. THE RISE OF ARTISANAL SOCIALISM

Chapter 22 From Jacobinism to Socialism

The influence of the French Revolution did not end with the fall of the Robespierrists on July 28, 1794—or, by the revolutionary calendar, with the tenth of Thermidor in Year Two of the Republic. Among a minority of radical conspirators, the Great Revolution, as it came to be called, was to haunt the Napoleonic era and the Bourbon Restoration that followed it. Although it was given a grisly image by the returning monarchy and nobility and clergy as the incarnation of terror and bloody civil war, the Revolution lived on among beleaguered republicans, and later among socialists, as a valiant attempt to create a new era of freedom for the oppressed masses of France and even for humanity as a whole.

Indeed, as I have noted, it remained an imperishable source of lessons for revolutionaries of every kind who, well into the twentieth century, would model their strategies on the attainments and failings of 1789 to 1794. Later generations of revolutionaries would sing the “Marseillaise” as an international hymn at gatherings throughout Europe, and they would employ the term citizen (until it was supplanted by comrade among socialists and anarchists) as a form of address in correspondence, manifestos, and public orations well into the nineteenth century. In nearly all Western European countries, selfdesignated Jacobins were to proclaim a stridendy republican ideology and establish Jacobin-type societies.

But some of these societies took their views beyond the expansive principles of legal equality embodied in the “Constitution of ’93.” They began to demand not only personal equality but economic equality as well, in what came to be known as red republicanism. Such advances over a stricdy political Jacobinism consisted of notions of distributive economic justice, according to which wealth was to be equitably shared within the existing system of property ownership.

In this respect, the political and economic oudook of nineteenth-century red republicans did not go much beyond that of the radical English Levelers of two centuries earlier. The good society, according to Levelers and red republicans alike, was to consist of small-scale producers, such as peasants and artisans, each of whom was entitled to the basic means of life according to traditional principles of “natural law,” such as those advocated by Colonel Rainborough in the Putney debates.[353] Economic inequities, radical Levelers and red republicans argued, could be eliminated by sharing the resources of society in a just manner, especially by providing a material competence—commonly, a parcel of land—to every poor man and his family. Every “he,” as Rainborough put it, should enjoy the right in a free society to secure a beneficent future as an independent food cultivator or even as a small entrepreneur.

Neither the Levelers nor the red republicans, however, challenged the existence of private property as such. Quite to the contrary, they believed property should be freed of medieval encumbrances that impeded its equitable distribution among the peasantry and the urban poor. What they opposed was the system of privilege, based on birth and the purchase of tides, that formed the social infrastructure of the ancien regime.

These views, of course, were not socialist. They did not call for the collective ownership of property or demand that the products of labor be distributed according to needs. The red republicans, even more decidedly than the Levelers, desired an economically as well as politically equitable society in which artisans, owning their own tools, and peasants, owning their own plots of land, would gain the full rewards of their labor without the exploitation of a propertyless class. In short, they desired a social order that would equalize the ownership of property rather than collectivize it, guaranteeing full economic and political liberty for all.

This basically individualistic system of small-scale production, carefully tuned by a friendly state and/or by cooperatively managed credit institutions to foster equality in the ownership of the means of production, was to become very popular among artisans early in the nineteenth century in Britain and especially in France, whose economy was mainly structured around handicraft production and a peasant agrarian society. Its most famous advocate was Pierre- Joseph Proudhon, whose ideas and influence we shall examine in due course.

Inasmuch as many of these French artisans had to cooperate to defend themselves against the invasion of their markets by cheaper factory goods and to find ample credit to tide themselves over difficult times, they early formed associations or corporations for mutual aid. Such corporations were no more socialist in the present-day sense of the word than, for example, contemporary trade unions or credit unions; but the very fact that they seemed like authentic producers’ cooperatives easily induced social thinkers in the last century to view them as a form of socialism. And in fact, these corporations often engaged in many common activities, ranging from the innocently festive to the militantly defensive, that imparted to them a seemingly socialistic character. Indeed, as they became a sort of programmatic movement, with forceful demands for the rectification of serious injustices, they were often pejoratively called socialists. Thus, following the custom of the day, they may conveniently be included under the general rubric of artisanal socialism.

The earliest authentic artisanal socialists, however, were those artisans and theorists who demanded more than the equitable ownership of private property.[354] They began to challenge the existence of private property as such, calling for the collective ownership of the means of production wherever feasible. (Prudendy and for sound political reasons, these early authentic socialists exempted from collectivization the peasantry, which viewed its ownership of family plots as a sacred right.) As to the distribution of goods produced, these socialists initially believed that the produce of their work should be shared according to the labor contributed by each artisan.

Still other socialists, who by the 1840s were to be called communists, believed in a more ethical system of labor and distribution, one that would avoid the inequities produced by unavoidable differences in individuals’ abilities to contribute their labor to the common society and in individuals’ needs. Guided by the maxim “From each according to his (or her) abilities, to each according to his (or her) needs,” the communists held that a truly egalitarian society had to take full account of the different physical capacities and needs of its members. Accordingly, the distribution of goods should be based not on the labor expended by a worker in the process of production but on the specific needs that he or she had to satisfy—needs that inevitably varied according to the producer’s familial and personal responsibilities.

CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES

During the course of the nineteenth century, the artisanal world of small shops and handicraft production in which these ideas evolved was gradually replaced by the proletarian world of large factories and machine production, giving rise to a class of mainly unskilled machine operatives. Given the emergence of factories that were too large to be owned by a single craftsman, socialism had to change its “scale,” so to speak. Socialist ideologies appeared that emphasized the integration of production on a regional and national level. Socialization soon began to mean the complete takeover of the economy either by the state (nationalization) or by worker-controlled, confederally organized trade unions (syndicalism). Particularly after the Paris Commune of 1871, artisanal socialism steadily gave way, albeit never completely, to proletarian socialism, with corresponding changes in the forms of organization that workers favored and by which their revolutionary leaders hoped to change society.

The strategies that artisanal and proletarian socialists used in their struggles for social change commonly stood in marked contrast to each other. Aside from their corporations, artisans normally belonged to clubs and often to secret societies. They tended to denigrate parliamentary activity, even where they were allowed to vote, and turned to direct action in the form of crowd assaults against the police and military. In periods of serious crisis, they often reared barricades and engaged in outright insurrection. Their organizations were generally transitory, they appeared and disappeared with changes in political and economic conditions.

By contrast, proletarians tended to form trade unions and political parties. When major social crises produced insurrectionary situations, and even in periods of social revolution, industrial workers generally functioned through mass parties, labor unions, and councils, which were often extensions of their coordinating strike committees. Where artisans built barricades, proletarians created paramilitary organizations. Where artisans tended to confine their insurrections to their own neighborhoods, proletarians, united by their factories, rose on a citywide, regional, and national scale, preceded by general strikes that in some cases paralyzed an entire country. These differences in strategy and forms of organization between artisans and proletarians, to be sure, were by no means ironclad. As early as the 1820s, and especially in the 1830s, French artisans took recourse not only to insurrections but to strikes on an increasing scale, and they organized trade unions as well as clubs to pursue their ends. Nor did they eschew the use of political organizations to elect deputies to parliamentary bodies.

But the transition from artisanal to proletarian socialism belongs to a later chapter. In the early nineteenth century artisanal socialists had yet to decipher such problems as their relationship to the ruling elites of their time, the nature of exploitation, and the role of classes in creating a new society. Their theorists viewed the formation of a cooperative world almost entirely as a problem of moral suasion. They were convinced that the wealthy had to be persuaded by ethical arguments to foster the various socialistic schemes that abounded after the French Revolution. The good offices of the rich and powerful, they believed, were necessary to bring about total change—hence the importance of offering compelling examples of cooperative living and production as a means to gain the backing of elites.

Obviously, this view of social change discouraged the spread of class consciousness, still less notions of class struggle. In the eyes of early socialist theorists, the old and new potentates of the world were expected to lend their support and wisdom to the innovation of socialistic schemes that in fact were expressly opposed to their interests. Various socialist theorists even tried to find a place for the old elites in their new world, whether as the financiers of socialist projects, administrators of socialist schemes, or even as the potential leaders of a socialist society. Hence the early socialist theorists emphasized not class struggle but one or another form of class reconciliation—where the existence of class exploitation was acknowledged at all.

Thus, with such amiable views toward the wealthy and powerful, the utmost confusion existed among early socialists about how the owners of private property acquired their profits. Did they do it by overcharging consumers? By exacting interest from borrowers who needed credit to buy raw materials and pay wages? By working their hired laborers to the limits of their physical endurance (an explanation that conflicted with the desire of many socialist theorists to foster class harmony)? By reaping surpluses from sound agricultural practices? Or simply as just rewards for their contribution to the productive process? These were some of the more popular notions that the economists of the day floated for public consideration and that many early socialists incorporated into their analyzes.

The ideological transition from Jacobinism to socialism was gready complicated by republican myths and conspiratorial organizations. The prevailing radical ideology during the Bourbon Restoration, especially in the 1820s, was still republican—and in many countries it remained so for the rest of the century. Monarchies and aristocracies still appeared as the principal obstacles to political reform, as they would up to the First World War. The distinction between republican and socialist aims was not as immediately clear, at that time, as it is in retrospect The largely republican rhetoric of the French Revolution colored the oratory and literature of red republicans and socialists alike. Indeed, for a time the two movements engaged together in the same uprisings and conspiracies and their members often belonged to the same secret societies.

Adding to the confusion, some minimally socialistic ideas could be coaxed out of the Great Revolution itself. Saint-Just’s proposal, in Ventose (February and March) 1794, that the property of “recognized enemies” of the republic be sequestered and distributed among “indigent patriots,” later seemed like a socialistic willingness to redistribute property. But these Ventose Laws, which the Convention enacted some four months before their sponsor was brought to the guillotine, proved unworkable, especially since enormous difficulties stood in the way of determining which enemies were “recognized” and which patriots were “indigent” Nor were these laws socialistic in nature: they involved a simple transfer of property from a very limited number of “enemies” to a very large number of poor, which left only a pittance to each eligible patriot. The Ventose Laws could better be regarded as a form of charity for the impoverished masses.

Far more socialistic in nature were the demands of Gracchus Babeuf and his supporters who formed the “the Conspiracy of the Equals” during the spring of 1796, in the wake of the Great Revolution. The “Manifesto of the Equals,” written in April by Sylvain Marechal as a definitive statement of their aims, represented a sharp discontinuity with the French Revolution, even as it resonated with all the Jacobin verbal flourishes of 1793. “The French Revolution is only the herald of another revolution,” declared Marechal in the spirited language of the time, one “far greater, far more solemn, which will be the last of them all.” The Constitution of 1793, the manifesto concluded, “was a great de facto step toward real equality; never had anything come so near to real equality. Yet even this latter Constitution did not reach the goal and bring about the common welfare, the great principle of which it nevertheless solemnly consecrated.”

Giving reality to this “great principle,” according to the manifesto, would involve nothing less than creating a “REPUBLIC OF EQUALS,” in which all discrepancies of wealth would be abolished by establishing “the community of GOODS! No more individual ownership of land: the land belongs to no one. We are demanding, we desire, communal enjoyment of the fruits of the earth: the fruits belong to all.”[355]

This was heady language indeed. If doubts remain among historians of socialism that the Babouvists demanded the eventual abolition of propertied society, they may be dispelled by Babeufs own defense at his trial, after the Babouvist conspiracy was betrayed and its leaders arrested. As Babeuf read into his trial record passages from his periodical, Tribune of the People, he unequivocally asserted:

The sole means of arriving at [the Republic of Equals] is to establish a common administration; to suppress private property; to place every man of talent in the line of work he knows best; to oblige him to deposit the fruit of his work in the common store, to establish a simple administration of needs, which, keeping a record of all individuals and all the things that are available to them, will distribute these available goods with the most scrupulous equality, and will see to it that they make their way into the home of every citizen.[356]

But Babeuf s appeal for socialism and even communism was stillborn; after the suppression of the conspiracy, these ideas fell victim to the social and political amnesia that gripped most of France during the Napoleonic and Restoration years. It was not until the 1830s, more than a generation after Babeuf was executed by the Thermidorian Directory, that socialism arose in Europe as a lasting concept, and even then the word socialism was not minted in the country of the Great Revolution—rather, it first appeared in print in England in 1827, in a periodical committed to Robert Owen’s vision of a new society. During the Restoration, from 1815 to 1830, French radicals were still largely occupied with various neo-Jacobin republican conspiracies against the Bourbons.

Although Babeufs conspiracy was largely forgotten after its leaders were executed or imprisoned, one of the last surviving Babouvists, Philippe Buonarotti, published in 1828 a two-volume documentary history of the Conspiracy of Equals—the Histoire de la conspiration pour legalite, dite de Babeuf-—that catapulted the plot and its drama into public attention and stimulated the development of revolutionary socialist ideas in France, in contrast to the tamer notions that artisanal and similar socialist theorists were propagating. Buonarotti, a fiery Italian of noble ancestry, had been caught up in the Great Revolution while studying law in Paris and was granted French citizenship by the Convention in 1793. Although he subsequendy became involved in the Babeuf conspiracy, he was spared the guillotine after its suppression and was imprisoned. Eventually he went into exile in Geneva, but he remained a volatile insurrectionary whose ideas melded old political enrage sentiments with new artisanal socialistic ideas. For nearly thirty years, the massive cultural and political backlash against revolutionary activity notwithstanding, he actively participated in Italian and French republican conspiracies.

Buonarotti lived long enough to gain the awe of young romantic revolutionaries of all kinds—republican and nationalist as well as socialist— as they began to proliferate once again in the late 1820s. His book may not have been the kindling that fed the socialistic fire that burned in the breast of French youth, but it was almost certainly the spark that set it alight By the time of his death in 1837, he had played a major role in transforming the simple Jacobinism of many of his young followers into the vigorous revolutionary socialism of Babeuf and his supporters that stressed insurrection and class war. Indeed, before he died, Buonarotti would see the tricolor of the First Republic replaced by the red flag of socialism in the streets of Lyon and Paris.

LABORIST RADICALISM IN BRITAIN

To the socialist ideologies that were percolating in France in the early nineteenth century, British radicals added a new and more theoretically sophisticated dimension. In the 1790s many self-styled Jacobins in England had demonstratively hailed the French Revolution from across the Channel, but Britain’s own first steps toward socialism were drawn from uniquely English sources, reflecting a significantly different economic and social dispensation.

Where early French economic theorists such as the Physiocrats, living in a predominandy agrarian and preindustrial society, appropriately regarded agriculture as the source of value and material surpluses, British economic theorists, faced with an era of industrial growth, adopted a labor theory of value. So pervasive was this orientation in English economic theory that many economists in Britain may properly be called “laborists,” as George Lichtheim called them.[357] The centrality that English economics gave to labor can be traced from William Petty in the late seventeenth century to Adam Smith in the eighteenth, but it was David Ricardo a generation later, living in the full tide of the Industrial Revolution, who drew from laborist theories their broad social and economic implications.

The notion that labor is the source of all “wealth,” as the laborist theorists put it, could lead to very radical conclusions. By enhancing the centrality of the worker, laborist theory gained a tremendous explanatory power that was more appropriate for socialist ideas than earlier, more simplistic notions. Indeed, before Ricardo, English socialism had been little more than a moral theory that enjoined the exploited and their exploiters to behave with a decent regard for each other’s needs. This largely subjectivistic approach nourished very naive and reformist notions of social change. Most “utopian socialists,” as later generations of socialists would call them, were content to appeal to employers, the state, and even despots to institute various reforms and gradualist strategies, often in ways that were simply patronizing to the “lower orders” and in awe of their social “betters.”

Ricardo, who as a man of wealth was anything but a social radical, imparted to the labor theory of value a degree of theoretical consistency that none of his predecessors had achieved. Not only did he conceive of labor as a commodity, much like any other commodity on the market, but he cast the labor theory of value in terms of subsistence. As a commodity, he said, a worker’s labor was worth no more than the minimum costs of maintaining that worker in everyday life and of reproducing future workers for the production of agrarian and industrial commodities (leaving aside wage fluctuations that may arise from supply and demand and other factors). To use Ricardo’s own formulations in his pivotal 1817 work, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, the “natural price” of labor is precisely what is “necessary to enable the laborers, one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution.” Hence the value of labor—that is, the wages to which laborers are entitled—depends “on the quantity of food, necessaries, and conveniences [that] become essential to him from habit”[358]

Followed to its logical conclusion, this “iron law of wages,” as it came to be called, meant that poverty was a systemic—and endemic—condition of capitalist society. Poverty, in effect, was caused not merely by the greed of the rich; it stemmed above all from compelling laws of the marketplace, including those described in Malthusian theory that maintain that surplus population always drives wages down to the barest minimum needed to keep the labor force alive..

Although socialists were very critical of Ricardo’s implicit justification for the existence of poverty, his subsistence theory of wages provided them with the means by which they could construct a highly impressive case against capitalism. Without abandoning their moral condemnation of the self-seeking bourgeoisie, especially as the Industrial Revolution and all its horrors began to crest in Britain, they could now support their demands for a complete reordering of society along cooperative lines by pointing to trends inherent within capitalism as such. Armed with this analysis, socialists influenced by Ricardo’s labor theory, or “left Ricardians,” could now demystify the hidden nature of capitalist exploitation. They could dispel the characteristic claim of capitalists to the profits that accrued in their factories and banks as a form of fairly earned “remuneration”—the “wages” of capital—for the services they provided to the economy. Ricardo’s laborist theory created the basis for understanding that wage labor, as a distinct social relationship between the capitalist and the proletarian, was not only exploitative but necessarily resulted in the impoverishment, indeed the destitution, of the industrial worker.

Even among radicals who had studied Ricardo’s works, to be sure, these ideas remained somewhat hazy: they were not to be fully clarified until Marx brilliantly synthesized English economic theory with French socialist ideas, while in France itself, no such argument existed until these theories crossed the Channel. But awareness, among early British socialists, of the unique features of capitalism was growing, as a result of new economic developments. Far more than any country in the early part of the century, Britain was witnessing a steady erosion in the status of traditional artisans, the substitution of machines for handwork, and the undermining of the family cottage industry by the factory system—in short, the Industrial Revolution. Unavoidably, these basic changes in British society—and the searingly harsh social conditions they generated— obliged early British socialists to transcend the political limits of Jacobinism. But it was above all the early appearance of the Industrial Revolution in England that profoundly influenced the rise of socialism, and not only at home, where its impact—the degradation of the proletariat—was immediate, but in time on the continent, where capitalist social relations were poised to penetrate as well, wreaking a similar transformation on continental working classes.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: ENGLAND

England is justly cited by most historians as the country of origin for the Industrial Revolution, since it was here that most of the technological innovations were developed that laid the basis for the factory system and rationalized forms of large-scale agriculture. Beginning with James Watt’s sophistication of the steam engine, they eventually transformed the entire structure of social life both in Britain and on the continent But the Industrial Revolution was not only a process of mechanization of production: it also meant the rise of capitalist social relations, which had already begun before mechanization, when relatively independent cottage workers, using fairly traditional tools and machines, were grouped together into sheds or factories (so named after the traveling “factors,” who provided them with raw materials and bought up their semifinished goods) so that their output and working hours could be regulated. A large cottage industry of artisans was to coexist with these factories well into the nineteenth century, but other processes were under way that would finally transform the nature of production in the modem world.

Any account of the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the revolutionary tradition must draw a clear distinction between the striking technological innovations that made the Industrial Revolution possible, and the actual changes that industrialization brought into the everyday lives of ordinary people. Although technical innovations were obviously necessary for the emergence of an industrial capitalist economy, their impact on society itself was often very uneven—an unevenness that partly explains the varying tensions that pervaded the entire era. The discovery of a new technique, it is important to note, was not immediately followed by its application to industry. Often a considerable lag existed between a technological discovery and its practical use in the economy. Because of this lag, the “proletarianization” of the preindustrial artisan world was often relatively slow—providing time for the emergence of widespread and often stormy resistance to the factory system.

The development of new machines, well beyond the resources of the artisan and too large to be used effectively in cottages, began modesdy. In 1733 John Kay invented the so-called flying shuttle, a simple device that made it possible for a cotton weaver to produce twice as much cloth as a single individual could. Thereafter necessity clearly became the mother of invention, as each innovation in the textile industry created a major disequilibrium in the various stages of doth production. Kay’s flying shutde, for example, created an enormous demand for thread, a demand that could not be satisfied until new techniques for spinning became available. A full thirty years later, in 1764, this disparity was still only partly resolved when James Hargreaves designed a simple spinning jenny that could turn eight spindles instead of the single spindle of the traditional spinning wheel. Five more years then had to pass before Richard Arkwright, in 1769, patented the water-powered spinning frame, which, based on the rotary motion of two sets of rollers, could produce a finer and tighter thread. The water frame allowed for the use of as many as four hundred spindles, which could produce inexpensively in England the fine handspun yam and cloth that fashion-conscious Britons had previously had to import from India.

It was not until a decade later that Hargreaves’s spinning jenny and Arkwright’s water frame were improved still further by Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule in 1779. Now the English textile industry had a surplus of thread but not enough mechanized weavers to turn it into cloth. Until mechanized weaving machines came into use, mechanically spun thread was still woven by artisans using handlooms. Indeed, the intervals between each successive but partial technical innovation were filled by using the labor of many traditional artisans and cottage workers. Small producers who wholly or partly finished machine-produced commodities were thus long indispensable to the operations of large mills. Some six years after Crompton, in 1785, Edmund Cartwright finally patented the power loom, which, after important refinements, laid the basis for the mechanization of the entire cotton cloth industry.

None of these inventions could have been sufficient to assure England’s industrial hegemony if the prime mover had been only water power, an unreliable source of energy that limited factory sites to streams that were often remote from commercial centers and ports. This crucial problem was ultimately resolved by James Watt’s modem steam engine, patented in 1769, which in time was to become the pulsating heart of factories, locomotives, and steamships. Yet Watt’s steam engine was still too inefficient and fragile, even decades after it had been invented, to completely free factories from their reliance on water power. Indeed, many of the eighteenth-century inventions, in their original form, were very cumbersome and crude and constantly in need of repair. Mining operations were plagued by flooded pits, and cheap steel long remained unavailable, despite improvements in smelting.

Not until the next century did further improvements, especially more sophisticated techniques of instrumentation, make these innovations eminently feasible and economically predominant. Indeed, it was not until the 1830s, a century after Kay’s flying shuttle and some sixty years after Watt’s steam engine, that modem industry in England finally arrived. By that decade more than 270,000 operatives were producing cotton goods, many in factories in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Still another generation had to pass before the new system crowded out nearly all handworkers and cottage producers—by which time England had earned its title “the workshop of the world.”

The technological changes introduced by the Industrial Revolution produced major changes in the class configuration of England as well. For some four or five generations before the Industrial Revolution triumphed, the traditional working class had been divided among masters, journeymen, and apprentices: now it underwent a sweeping metamorphosis. “Workers” included not only artisans (preindustrial journeymen as well as masters), who worked in fairly small installations with tools and hand-operated machines, but industrial workers who were unskilled adjuncts of huge, highly rationalized, capital-intensive factories, closely supervised by foremen and managers.

Although both artisans and proletarians were regarded as workers and although both assumed the name proletarians (particularly in France), their interests, behavioral patterns, and degree of militancy diverged markedly. Generally artisans, working outside the industrial environment, had a certain latitude in determining their working hours, and they enjoyed a degree of independence in producing a fairly complete product—imparting to them a sense of craftsmanship and pride that was denied to factory proletarians. Not surprisingly, these artisans opposed the encroaching industrial system with a militancy that was rare among early factory proletarians, many of whom were more subdued and deferential toward factory owners.

A similar differentiation occurred within the “bourgeoisie.” Initially meaning “burgher” or city dweller, the word bourgeois in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was increasingly applied to professionals, merchants, financiers, and well-to-do retailers who enjoyed a comfortable income and held property— especially land—in amounts that now set them apart from ordinary city dwellers. Within even this fairly amorphous category, the Industrial Revolution slowly produced another cleavage. The new industrial class, which more appropriately should be called capitalists, began to develop interests that were separate from—indeed, in collision with—those of the traditional bourgeoisie. The term bourgeois was thus more appropriately applied to nonindustrial upper classes—until a capitalist ruling class with shared social interests emerged that encompassed financiers and merchants as well as industrialists.[359]

These distinctions are far from semantic quibbles. The social metabolism of the early nineteenth century was profoundly guided by struggles between craftsmen, landed bourgeois, merchants, proletarians, and industrial capitalists.

As new situations arose, these strata variously worked with each other at some times and opposed each other at other times. By the end of the century, when artisans had all but disappeared as an important productive force in England and Germany, the words bourgeois and capitalist came to denote a broad but single social group—such as factory owners, bankers, and large commercial wholesalers and retailers—whose interests were not only basically shared but organically interlocked.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN FRANCE

On the continent, the lag in industrialization, producing uneven levels of technology in the various stages of production, was even more marked than in England. Where, by 1810, England could boast of possessing some five thousand steam engines, for example, France had only two hundred. Comparable divergences in mechanization applied to nearly all branches of French industry. Generally, too, in the replacement of cottage and artisanal production by the factory system, France lagged far behind England. In the England of 1850, for example, nearly a quarter of a million power looms were in operation, compared with about 40,000 handlooms; in 1848 in France, by contrast, despite its substantially larger population, there were only 31,000 power looms. (Nonetheless, France had a large textile output, which suggests that French handlooms—whose scale we can only guess at because of the decentralized nature of cottage production—were enormously productive.)

To be sure, France, like England, had a number of large industrial installations. The multistoried British factories like the Boulton and Watt engine works were matched by the Le Creusot foundries as early as the 1790s. But if small firms and cottage production lingered precariously in Britain even until the middle of the nineteenth century, they remained dominant in France, and for a much longer period of time. The hand production of garments and luxury items that gave French goods their worldwide reputation for artistry and quality played a major economic role even into the twentieth century.

The marked lag in the spread of factories in France by comparison with Britain is accountable partly, perhaps decisively, by what Tom Kemp has aptly called “the essential paradox of nineteenth-century France.”[360] As a result of the Great Revolution, France had one of the most individualistic political and juridical systems in Europe—which, other things being equal, should have supplied an enormous impetus to the rise of industrial capitalism there. Yet the same Revolution, by removing the feudal burdens on agriculture and contributing to a widespread redistribution of land, also furnished the material underpinnings for one of the most self-sufficient peasantries in Western Europe. By its very self-sufficiency, this peasantry closed off much of France’s domestic market to factory-made goods, creating litde incentive for the mass production of commodities such as textiles, leather products, and the like.

To exacerbate the situation, the very individual rights that the Revolution had expanded “confirmed the peasant custom of [land] division on inheritance,” Kemp notes, “and thus prevented the development of a really individualist agriculture over the country as a whole.” The inheritance clauses of the revolutionary and Napoleonic civil codes

contributed to morcellement [parceling] of the peasants’ lands where they did not encourage the limitation of family size. No doubt they helped to conserve the peasantry, albeit at a low standard of living, but at the price of impeding the expansion of the internal market and the creation of an urban, industrial proletariat.[361]

Thus, despite the seemingly “bourgeois” revolution of 1789–94, French industrial capitalists actually found themselves at a considerable disadvantage with respect to their English competitors, whose government was engaged in a frenzy of land enclosures that virtually destroyed the British peasantry, leaving “deserted villages” in their wake. French industrial capitalism was significandy impeded by the very revolution that has been described as classically bourgeois.

Nor was the French bourgeoisie itself disposed to foster industrial development along British lines. In the early nineteenth century the big bourgeoisie, largely centered in Paris, continued to expend its funds on the purchase of land, on mortgages and state bonds, and on monetary speculation, to the general neglect of the industrial economy. Still predominantly agrarian, the French economy was hidebound by tradition—parochial, craft-oriented, and above all, fixated on the value of land—the very traits that had marked the economy of the ancien regime. As for the expansion of the internal market and the overcoming of regional isolation, few statistics highlight the differences between England and France in these years better than the numbers for railway mileage laid down. In 1843 British rails extended for 2,036 miles, compared with only 268 miles in France—a nearly tenfold difference that remained significantly undiminished for decades. The extent to which regional distinctions, so pronounced in the preindustrial era of both countries, were diminished by industrialization and by railroads strongly affected the kinds of socialist ideas and practices that would develop on each side of the Channel.

BRITAIN’S SOCIALIST TRAJECTORY

Economic factors alone, to be sure, cannot account for the differences in the socialist movements that emerged in Britain and France: political traditions, the flexibility of existing institutions, and the cultural elan of the laboring classes had significant effects as well. But the role of economic factors should not be underrated.

Reaching unprecedented peaks early in the century, British land enclosures produced a labor force that was inchoate and demoralized, one that eventually fell prey to ruthless exploitation on the part of fiercely competitive factory owners. In England itself, between 1800 and 1820, about 300,000 acres of open land, on which many villagers depended for wood and pasturage, were enclosed, leaving incalculable numbers of rural folk at the mercy of industrial capitalists. The labor force that entered the new English factories was thus made up of broken people, disheartened by the loss not only of their homes but of the traditional protections that had once been supplied by the landed nobility and by guilds. Like the independent artisanal handworkers who were faced with extinction by power-driven machinery, the new industrial proletariat was caught in the harsh tension between a rationalized factory system and the more organic lifeways, however miserable they had been materially, of preindustrial village society.

Cannily, British industrial capitalists exploited the weaknesses of this proletariat by playing its religious and gender differences against each other. About twenty percent of the new English proletariat was composed of Irish peasants who had fled devastating economic conditions in their own country. Acrimony flared up easily between Irish Catholics and English Protestants, despite the misery that both groups shared in factories and slums. Such differences kept proletarians sufficiendy divided among themselves that their potential to unite in opposition to their employers was, for a time, diverted into mutual hatred—until class consciousness began to dilute the malice English workers harbored toward “foreigners” and “papists.”

Moreover, an estimated three-quarters of the factory labor force was made up of women and children. Socially vulnerable and relatively docile, these groups could be reduced to submission to factory owners with relative ease. No section of the working population, during the entire Industrial Revolution, was more ruthlessly exploited and more effectively controlled by the industrial bourgeoisie. Female workers, generally intimidated by their employers, could be hired instead of militant males inclined to trade union organizing. Children, for similar reasons, were worked to exhaustion, growing up into an adult generation physically weak and deformed by rickets. So warped were their bodies that they unnerved even the ruling classes, who required a supply of physically able recruits, not only for England’s factories but for its military forces as well.

The more independent artisans, still rooted in the cultural lifeways of the preindustrial past, were far less accepting of their deteriorating social condition than these industrial workers. Riots and near-insurrections over food shortages and social abuses were their typical forms of protest. Even strikes began to occur, although they were to become more characteristic of industrial than artisanal workers. The skilled keelmen of Newcastle went on strike as early as 1750, as did London tailors a year later, both actions lasting several weeks. In 1753 in Manchester, carpenters, joiners, and bricklayers—that is to say, artisans—as well as construction laborers engaged in a work stoppage for higher wages, even raising money to defend their imprisoned leaders. Above all, great hunger riots swept over Britain in 1795–96, marked by virtual insurrections and attacks on the person of the king in London, led by craftspeople whose belligerency was redolent of the waning noncapitalistic world.

Other artisan revolts were more organized. The stormy Luddite movement, which tried to preserve old artisanal lifeways by damaging new labor-saving machines, was initiated mainly by cottage lace and hosiery workers in the Midlands, spreading to croppers and cotton weavers in 1811–12. These artisans and cottagers were hardly a riotous crowd but were made up of a number of well-organized groups who secretly directed their activities against carefully selected industrial targets. During the summer of 1812 the government had to station more than 12,000 troops in places where machine-breaking disturbances and riots had occurred. After a brief hiatus late in 1813, the movement resumed, panicking industrial capitalists into fears of a well-organized insurrection. Not until a major trial in York Casde was their movement effectively put down, resulting in the hanging of twenty of their leaders and the penal transportation of seven to Australia.

Such behavior and values, as Gwyn A. Williams so perceptively concludes, were essentially pre-industrial in a deeper sense than the merely technical.

“Long have we been endeavoring to find ourselves men,” said the sailors of the British fleet in 1797. “We now find ourselves so. We will be treated as such.” They learned this tone from others. The first political statement of this instinct was made by men who, however poor, could not conceive of themselves as [factory] “hands” or a “labor force,” men with the dignity of a skill and the mystery of a craft, men who polished tools and knew the “fine points,” men whose wage was a “selling price” and whose property was labor, men whose values, even in adversity, were fixed by an earned independence. The statement, once made, was universal—since, to quote another of them—“a man’s a man for a’ that”—but its origin should not be overlooked. This is the central truth.... The ideology of democracy was preindustrial and its first serious practitioners were artisans.[362]

Which is not to say that the new industrial proletariat was completely passive in the face of the terrible abuses inflicted upon it. The first “modem” industrial strike seems to have occurred in 1810, when Manchester cotton spinners left their factories by the thousands—disbursing among themselves, for their subsistence, £1,500 a week in strike funds that they had accumulated. It was a harbinger of later strikes that were to sweep up industrial proletarians in great movements for higher wages, shorter hours, and improved working conditions. Yet at the beginning of the century the English industrial proletariat was already making itself felt, opening expectations that would make it the focus of socialist ideology for several generations.

Nevertheless, neither the industrial proletariat nor the artisan craftworkers in England challenged the existing structure of society as such, despite the attempts of many radical theorists to impute such aims to them. In the wake of Cromwell’s rule, the ruling classes in Britain had developed a sufficient degree of institutional flexibility to keep mass movements under control, their willingness to use force against rebels notwithstanding. The great movements of the English working classes, including Luddism, were effectively contained within the parliamentary system—to an extent that comparable movements in France were not. Unlike monarchical government in France, parliamentary government in England always held out the prospect that it could be reformed to benefit the poor and disenfranchized, with the result that any social or political upheaval, far from intensifying into a revolutionary situation, could ultimately be settled by compromise. In the 1790s the landed classes, in an attempt to keep the rural poor from migrating to the cities, agreed at Speenhamland to provide a basic, albeit meager income to the most underprivileged residents of the countryside. This measure, which remained in effect for decades, did not prevent all hungry and dispossessed villagers from migrating to the new industrial towns. But by providing a semblance of patronal concern and by giving traditional rural society an extended lease on life, it helped keep revolt in abeyance.

The Chartist movement and its outcome exemplify this containment of popular opposition. Adopted in 1838 by the London Workingmen’s Association, the People’s Charter raised basic demands for reforms like universal manhood suffrage, payment for members of Parliament, a secret ballot, fairly divided electoral districts, the abolition of property qualifications for membership in the House, and annual parliaments—demands that more or less had already been granted in the United States.

Support for the Chartist movement came from almost every sector of the English working class—factory workers as well as artisans, laborers as well as intellectuals, clerks as well as alehouse proprietors. The movement had a certain volatility, and some of its actions took threatening forms: in July 1839, after the House of Commons rejected the Charter despite the million and a quarter signatures attached to it, the ensuing popular anger generated riots, strikes, and even local uprisings. Talk of outright civil war was rife but not frightening enough to prevent the House from rejecting a second Chartist petition in 1842. In April 1848—itself a year of armed insurrection on the continent—a plan to present Chartist demands to Parliament in yet another great petition, accompanied by a mass demonstration, generated a veritable panic among the ruling classes. Expecting hundreds of thousands of Chartists to all but invade London, they proceeded to turn the capital into an armed camp. A large civilian constabulary was recruited from the middle classes; the aged Duke of Wellington was entrusted with the command of an army to defend the city; and even the queen was spirited off to the Isle of Wight for protection against the anticipated insurrection.

But the panic, as it turned out, was unfounded. Since its high point in the early 1840s, the Chartist movement had actually been waning. In advance of the 1848 effort, its leaders were sharply divided over strategy, and the relatively small crowd that massed to present the petition was patently intimidated by the government’s enormous show of force. The middle-class elements who had formerly supported the Chartists had by now turned their attention to other pressing issues, especially an effort to abolish the Com Laws, which had been enacted in 1815 to restrict the importation of com in the interests of the landed classes, but which were keeping domestic food prices and wages inordinately high. Industrial workers, for their part, had shifted from Charter agitation to the formation of trade unions (which the repeal of the Combination Acts had permitted) as the most promising means for achieving their material goals. Finally, the artisans, newly harnessed by the industrial system, were turning to peaceful forms of action to preserve their waning status and lifeways.

In fact, a strong prima facie case can be made for correlating the rise of Chartism with worsening economic conditions, and its ebb with material improvements. It was when the price of com increased enormously in 1838 and when a severe depression developed in 1842 that Chartism became a major force, as working-class fury reached near-insurrectionary proportions— only to wane during the intervening years and virtually fade away after 1846, when bread-and-butter trade unionism began to supplant Chartist influence among the proletariat.

Moreover, even as Parliament was using a firm stick to intimidate the Chartist movement, it was also offering the working classes a carrot in the form of ameliorative labor legislation. In 1844 a Tory parliament passed a law reducing the working time of children between the ages of eight and thirteen to six and a half hours daily. Young people between thirteen and eighteen could not work more than eleven hours, and child and female labor was prohibited completely in mines. Three years later a ten-hour working day for everyone was enacted, making English labor legislation among the most advanced in the world. Factory inspectors were appointed to oversee working conditions, issuing reports that would gain a reputation for an unprecedented critical frankness. In the years that followed, the middle classes and ever larger sectors of the working class gained the franchise. Apart from a few flare-ups—which themselves never seriously threatened the social order—the English proletariat was ultimately domesticated.

The trajectory of English socialist movements was no more revolutionary than Chartism. Socialist proletarians and artisans put their efforts into the formation of cooperatives, benefit and educational societies, and conventional trade unions rather than the fomenting of insurrections. Later generations of socialists pinned their hopes on the formation of the Labor Party, which professed to seek a socialistic society by electoral means. Nonetheless, before English socialism was entirely tamed, many early English socialists and their anarchist affines were committed to less parliamentary approaches. In October 1833 delegates to a Cooperative Congress in London, called by Robert Owen to unite the cooperative and trade union movements, flirted with the formation of a “Grand National Moral Union of the Productive Classes” (the presence of the word “Moral” is worth noting) and with waging a general strike as a means to achieve a cooperative society. In the same month a meeting of Glasgow workers endorsed a resolution for a general strike in terms that Harry W. Laidler calls “like a modern syndicalist manifesto.”[363]

But the strike plan they discussed was not general in any syndicalist sense; on the contrary, it was intermittent and fragmentary. Workers would set aside some of their income, and when they had accumulated sufficient funds to cover their living expenses for an extra week or month, they would remain at home for that period of time. Afterwards they would return to work, repeating the same alternating sequence of work and idleness. This “direct action” was intended to eventually reduce capitalism to a shambles. Laidler’s opinion of its militancy notwithstanding, the notion was naive and never carried out. Later, a more resolute notion of a “Grand National Holiday” of one month’s duration would capture the imagination of many Chartists, who actually managed to bring out workers for several days on the “holiday.” But the strike had no staying power, nor did it assume national dimensions. Following harsh persecution by the authorities and a lack of conventional trade union support, the effort—and the idea of a general strike—fizzled out.

For all his single-mindedness and idealism, the great “utopian socialist” Robert Owen was by no means a firebrand. He resolutely opposed the notions of class conflict that were percolating through the English working class. Initially a textile manufacturer, he had introduced sweeping reforms in his factory at New Lanark to show that capitalism could be managed beneficently and humanely, while still making a profit—and New Lanark quickly became a showplace for visiting statesmen and industrialists. In his later endeavors he hoped to create a new society structured around “villages of cooperation.” As Owen envisioned it, these self-sufficient “villages,” initially peopled by the unemployed, would combine agriculture with industry to produce for members’ needs and then exchange their surpluses with one another in a spirit of cooperation rather than competition. In time, he hoped, the “villages” would peacefully replace capitalism and its industrial installations, opening an era of harmony and brotherly love. Owen even tried to gain governmental assistance to realize his plan, which, needless to say, was not forthcoming.

Although he devoted the rest of his life to realizing this essentially preindustrial vision of a new society, none of his practical schemes succeeded—least of all his attempt to finance, establish, and maintain a utopian community in the United States. Yet his tireless efforts to improve the condition of the working class made him, for a time, the indubitable leader of early English trade unionism, while his propaganda on behalf of cooperatives helped inspire various communitarian movements that flourished well into the next century, both at home and abroad. (In the late twentieth century Owen’s cooperative vision continues to be recycled by communitarians who appear to know nothing of the “villages of cooperation” or the lessons to be drawn from their failure.)

For the rest of the nineteenth century, British socialism proliferated into a variety of tendencies: guild socialism, with its emphasis on localism; Fabian socialism, with its emphasis on gradualism and education; and even a small Marxian socialist tendency and a fairly respectable anarchist scene. But all of them culminated in the creation of a parliamentarian labor movement of sizable proportions. As for the laborist ideas of David Ricardo and the socialists who had drawn out their radical implications, they were absorbed into the synthesis produced by Marx, whose economics were far more Ricardian than many of his supporters acknowledged.

Ironically, the greatest single achievement of English socialism—or at least the English radical milieu—was the work of an exiled German who, ensconced in the British Museum, produced a masterpiece, Capital, that profoundly shaped socialism in most of the world—except, perhaps, in Britain. The passing of the artisans—and with them their strong sense of independence, their sometimes benign traditional lifeways, and their commitment to a moral economy—had done much to devitalize the British working classes and steer them toward parliamentary solutions for social problems. Idealistic social goals were consistendy replaced with pragmatic reforms to limit working hours in factories, expand the franchise, and allow for trade unions and a social democratic labor party. In England it was ultimately in parliamentary legislation that social changes were registered.

THE FRENCH SOCIALIST TRAJECTORY

In France, by contrast, social changes were ultimately registered in armed insurrections that, even as failures, left a legacy of radical idealism with enormous international influence.

From an ideological and emotional standpoint, the foremost fact about French socialism was the drama of the Great Revolution itself. Haunting every aspect of Gallic political life—reactionary as well as revolutionary—it was fought and refought in the very writing of history. Historians of various revolutionary sympathies wrote accounts of the Revolution as Dantonists, Robespierrists, Hebertists, and even (albeit rarely) as enrages. On the other side of the debate were historians who admired the Bourbons, the Girondins, and even the contemptible Directory, not to speak of Bonapartists who claimed the revolutionary mantle for their Emperor, and moderate republicans who were ecumenically inspired by the monumental events of 1789 and afterwards.

Indeed, until the 1860s, when Baron Haussmann began to destroy the city’s revolutionary character and its many landmarks by building broad avenues— so useful for providing a clear line of fire for artillery to rout demonstrators— the Revolution was inscribed on the city of Paris itself. The Tuileries, in whose magnificent gardens fighting had broken out in July 1789 and whose palace Louis XVI and his family had occupied after the women’s march on Versailles in 1789, was still the official center of the national government. The Hotel de Ville still stood as a testament to the revolutionary Commune, where Hebertists, enrages, and sectionnaires had debated furiously and where Robespierre had briefly taken refuge after his fall. Inasmuch as the Parisian city hall became the traditional site for the sanctification of revolutionary governments, radical insurrectionaries would repeatedly try to occupy it in the name of popular sovereignty, recapitulating its importance in the Great Revolution.

The quartiers, houses, and streets that would form settings for nineteenth-century barricades—and the paving stones that would be their building material—bore testimony to Paris as the world center of revolution, but especially for the people of France. To live in Paris in the early nineteenth century was to drink at the very fountain of revolution, to feel its presence in every street, alley, cul-de-sac, and avenue. There one could encounter the sons and daughters of the sans-culottes who had driven forward the Great Revolution—and even elderly men and women who themselves had played a role in its events. Physically, despite Napoleon’s self-celebratory monuments, Paris remained an oversize medieval city with narrow alleys, cul-de-sacs, and twisting streets, shaded by overhanging tenements as many as seven stories high—the ideal urban landscape for barricade fighters as well as for snipers. However poorly armed, civilians could defend themselves in this city with telling effect even against trained professional troops.

Paris, too, was the center of the most vigorous cafe life in Europe. During the Empire and the Bourbon Restoration, despite repeated attempts to suppress their political and oratorical ebullience, radical Parisians took every opportunity to express their caustic views of the current regime. Centered in the cafes where they dined, drank wine, played chess, and read periodicals, ardent young intellectuals mixed with literate artisans—although seldom with ordinary workers—to create a highly spirited public forum. As wine loosened both tongues and passions, they transported one another to visions of a France that would once again uphold the torch of an enlightened Europe against the Holy Alliance, the union of powers that Mettemich of Austria, after the Napoleonic wars, had fashioned with the complicity of Prussia and Russia.

Particularly after the Bourbon Charles X was dislodged from the throne in July 1830, Paris became a fertile ground for republican and socialist clubs. Attracting especially intellectuals, these political clubs proliferated with a new vitality in the temporarily freer atmosphere of the Orleanist monarchy. Young Parisians gave avid support to Poland’s efforts to emancipate herself from Russian tyranny, to Greek struggles against the grip of Turkish rule, and to Italian attempts to forge a nation out of the many territories that fractured the peninsula. Poring over the pamphlets that passed from hand to eagerly waiting hand in the radical demimonde, their ferment did not go unnoticed by police agents.

Broad conceptions of a socialist society were to come slowly, generally from intellectuals and journalists. Apart from Babeuf, whose Conspiracy of Equals was resurrected by Buonarotti in 1828, the earliest important socialistic visionary in France was the Comte de Saint-Simon, who, despite his tide and claim to direct descent from Charlemagne, had managed to survive the full fury of the French Revolution. Saint-Simon remained throughout his life dedicated to the interests of la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre, as he put it—the downtrodden French working class, which was indeed the “most numerous and the poorest”

His intentions and his fantasies of a perfect harmonious society aside, Saint- Simon was the most conspicuous of the Utopians to make a hardheaded assessment of the Industrial Revolution and to extoll its economic promise. Welcoming advances in technology, he viewed les industries as the elite of the future who would, in a world guided by reason, reorder society to alleviate the material misery of the masses. Les industries included not only the workers but practical scientists, managers of industry, engineers, factory owners, and especially bankers, who Saint-Simon believed could be persuaded to channel their financial resources into socially benign enterprises. Any conflicts between these groups, he contended, were needless, the results of a socially distorted society that his utopia would remedy.

The changing emphases of Saint-Simon’s ideas belongs to a history of socialist ideology rather than to the present book, as does their evolution over a span of some thirty years into a justification for a technocratic oligarchy (Saint- Simon held no brief for democracy) and a planned economy. Here it is necessary only to note that, in certain superficial respects, he anticipated Marx’s economistic views; further, he was the earliest thinker to advance the basic propositions of a state-guided socialism, which were not to be taken up and put into practice for generations. In the early 1820s Saint-Simon’s disciples remained ideologically entirely within his essentially technocratic framework. But after their master’s death in 1825, they set out on a course of their own, expanding his call for the moral regeneration of society and even for a “New Christianity” into the establishment of a full-fledged Saint-Simonian church, replete with rituals, hymns, costumes, a quasi-religious hierarchy, sermons, and scriptural compilations of his writings, supplemented by additions of their own. Although Saint-Simonism sank no lasting roots in the French working classes, it exercised a certain fascination on some of the industries to whom its founder appealed—notably the banker Jacques Laffitte; the Perier brothers, financiers who founded the Credit Mobilier; a number of big manufacturers; and the gifted journalist Pierre Leroux, whose Saint-Simonian journal Le Globe “coined” the word socialisme (whether independendy of the British or not) in November 1832.

Of lesser importance in their day but nonetheless of considerable long-range influence, particularly among radical bohemians, were the Fourierists, whose maitre, Charles Fourier, devoted most of his life to formulating a science of human nature based on “universal” laws of attraction and repulsion, and a corresponding plan for social reconstruction. A brilliant pamphleteer and a biting critic of bourgeois pretensions, Fourier remained a loner in the often arid fields of utopian socialism. His spare time—he worked as a traveling salesman—was devoted to creating extraordinarily innovative schemes for social regeneration. Wilder fantasies that he harbored, such as “anti-lions” that were to replace existing carnivores, seas to be filled with lemonade, and stages of human advancement that sometimes resembled science fiction, are easily derided. Yet Fourier, who gauged the progress of humanity by the status of women in society, drew up serious plans for self-sufficient cooperative communities, which he called phalansteries, composed of individuals whose natures would complement each other in exact mathematical ratios. Instead of boring toil, work, in Fourier’s utopia, would be an enjoyable and varied activity, with an almost hourly rotation of tasks in horticultural as well as artisanal work. His originality in this respect surpassed that of socialistic theorists who followed him—indeed, many ideas that he nourished about the social organization of creative work are relevant to this day.

Fourier’s utopia was by no means an egalitarian one: members of a phalanstery were to be rewarded, not on the basis of their labor or their needs, but according to the financial investment they had made in the community. In this respect it is difficult to call Fourier a socialist Yet he was vigorously opposed to capitalism, whose abuses he never ceased to chronicle and attack. Moreover, his phalansteries very closely resembled Owen’s “villages of cooperation” (so much so that copious ink was spilled, among Owenites and Fourierists, over the tiresome issue of who had “plagiarized” from whom). Significantly, and in stark contrast to Saint-Simon, Fourier eschewed all notions of a centralized, state-managed economy, a feature of his work that endeared him to anarchists later in the century.

Although only a small number of Fourierists clustered around the lonely man in the 1820s, during the years following the Revolution of 1830 Fourier’s ideas gained a respectable following among craftspeople as well as intellectuals. Like the Saint-Simonians, the Fourierists after the master’s death propagated his ideas in a socialistic form. Nor did Fourierism lack for distinguished admirers in the English-speaking world. In varying degrees American journalists and authors such as Albert Brisbane, Horace Greeley, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson disseminated his ideas among their readers as well as their peers in the progressive New England elite. Some of his followers created phalansteries in the United States, of which Brook Farm, outside Boston, is the most famous.

Prior to the 1830 Revolution in France, the leading utopian socialists, including Saint-Simon and Fourier, vigorously opposed insurrections and eschewed a class analysis that focused on conflict between the working class and the bourgeoisie. To be sure, they despised the exploiters of their day. Saint- Simon, for example, detested the idle and reactionary landed aristocracy that, during the Restoration, was the preeminent social class (which may account for the support he earned from financiers and manufacturers). Fourier, for his part, feared the impact of competition upon preindustrial society, and the very nature of his phalansteries reflected his disposition to favor rural life organized along communal lines. That later socialists turned their attention away from these ideas and toward the working class is due less to their utopian nature than to the great upheavals, early in the century, that occurred in France— notably the insurrections of the early 1830s and the Revolution of 1848. These events and the stirring demands of the working classes for more freedom could not be ignored, least of all because they were backed up with barricades and muskets.

To French artisans, most of whom worked in small shops and who often aspired to independent enterprises, the institutionalized trade unionism that would soon gain a stronghold among English factory workers was irrelevant Nor did the French parliamentary tradition, in contrast to the British, open avenues for the expression of working-class discontent. As a result, French workers, like radical intellectuals, tended to view direct, even armed confrontation with an oppressive regime as the principal means for resolving social injustices. French socialist movements, in effect, differed profoundly from their British counterparts, not only because they appeared later but because, the pacifism of early socialist theorists notwithstanding, they were much more insurrectionary.

The counterrevolutionary backlash against the French Revolution, especially under the Bourbon monarchs Louis XVIII and Charles X, also brought the repression of republican and socialist movements. Young radicals were obliged to form secret conspiratorial groups, many of which favored as their ideal a “democratic and social republic.” This slogan, which was to resound through much of French revolutionary history during the century, fuzed radical political Jacobinism with clearly socialistic ends, pointing to a change not only in the governing regime but in the social order itself. A “democratic and social republic” would be one that provided for the poor, the underprivileged, and the helpless, and one that protected craft workers from the depredations of the privileged and powerful, and from the inroads of industrial capitalism. For many ordinary Parisians, prior to the 1830s, it was thus essentially a defensive concept, in which government would rectify gross economic inequities and protect artisans in their traditional vocations. Nonetheless, so intense was the reactionary backlash during the Restoration that even this moderate idea could be advanced only in secret conspiratorial societies.

How widespread republican conspiratorial groups were in this period, and how many were socialistic, is hard to judge, given the demimonde they inhabited. But the underground world clearly became a training ground for the formation of expressly insurrectionary secret societies. Although the Italian name for these societies, carbonari, is the more familiar one in present-day accounts, the French name, charbonnerie may be more appropriate because the societies probably originated in French-speaking areas of the Jura Mountains among militant charcoal burners. Their name comes from the carbon they produced, not from any use of carbine weapons. And their rituals and hierarchical structures were redolent of the Masons, albeit without any quasimetaphysical language.

The affinity between their names notwithstanding, the two movements were of a considerably different nature in the two countries. Where the Italian carbonari were primarily nationalists, the French charbonnerie brought together red republicans, embittered Bonapartists, and socialists like Buonarotti (who actually played a major role in both the Italian and French groups). “At its height [the charbonnerie] had about 60,000 members in sixty departments [of France], the majority in the east,” observes Pamela Pilbeam. “Its aims were vaguely subversive, stressing the brotherhood and equality of man, and it attracted young idealists as well as republicans and Bonapartists unreconciled to the new regime.”[364] To circumvent the Restoration penal code that required any organization of more than twenty people to be officially approved, the charbonnerie limited each component group, or vente, to twenty or fewer members. Again like the Masons, their network was structured hierarchically, culminating in a commanding vente supreme in Paris.

Although the charbonnerie had been formed by Jura workmen, the movement in Restoration France became essentially an elite phenomenon. Its red republican and other members tended to be not artisans but students, former Napoleonic officers, romantic writers and poets, and even liberals who preferred an Orleanist throne to a Bourbon one. Artisans, who constituted the great majority of French workers at the time, created their own societies based on fellowship and mutual aid, quite apart from intellectuals and professionals. Despite legislation that had been passed during the Revolution banning the traditional guild system and all kinds of trade unions, master craftsmen and journeymen established benefit and mutual aid groups to advance their own interests. Here concepts of mutuellisme were nourished into a specifically artisanal socialism well in advance of Proudhon’s writings on mutualism in the 1840s.

The most conspicuous and rambunctious mutual benefit societies at this time were the compagnonnages, which were formed by journeymen artisans. Compagnons, or bachelor journeymen, wandered around France seeking work and gaining skills, finding temporary housing in hostels. Although their societies were formed for their mutual benefit, compagnons, organized according to their trades and housed together in close quarters, were imbued with a strong sense of craft exclusivity and arrogance. Compagnons from different trades frequendy clashed with one another, often violently and riotously expressing their trade parochialism as well as their social discontents. In the cafes and streets of small towns and cities they were a perennial source of working-class divisiveness—although in times of social crisis, they might unite to fight the authorities as well. Nonetheless, as their infighting illustrates, craft distinctions still divided French workers. Indeed, it should be noted that the slogan on which the Communist Manifesto ended—“Workingmen of all countries, unite!”—was a plea not only for international class solidarity but also for internal class unity.

By the 1830s, however, a new mood was in the air. There was a growing feeling among workers that the term citizen, so commonly used as a mode of address during the Great Revolution, had a dual meaning; it meant one thing for those who worked and another for those who idly enjoyed the fruits of the workers’ labor. If economists and utopian socialists still puzzled over the sources of profits and preached class conciliation, ordinary workers instinctively knew that they were being exploited, in effect robbed of their labor time. A realization was growing, ever more clearly, that Jacobinism, with its message of political freedom, was inadequate to address the needs of workers, skilled and unskilled alike. Workers in England and France were coming to understand that freedom was incomplete if they were insecure, ill- fed, ill-housed, short-lived, and denied the simplest amenities of life. This understanding did not, in itself, render workers, least of all master artisans, receptive to sophisticated ideas of socialism, but it did open their minds to ideas of cooperative production, spelling an end to Jacobinism as the dominant ideology of social rebellion.

As the nineteenth century approached its midpoint, it was evident to the clearest minds of the time, be they communists such as Marx or astute conservatives such as Alexis de Tocqueville, that the future would be shaped by class conflicts, in which the propertyless masses would be aligned against their propertied opponents. In France, the transition from Jacobinism to socialism, while painfully slow, was to be completed in the fourth decade of the century, when the red flag was pitted in open insurrection against the tricolor of 1789.