Chapter 23. From Restoration to Revolution

France was to enjoy pride of place in producing the principal, indeed the legendary revolutions of the nineteenth century, virtually overshadowing uprisings elsewhere on the European continent. The French knew it— particularly the Parisians—and so did other peoples, who either loved or detested the city of the Great Revolution accordingly. Among those who loved it was Arnold Ruge, the German publicist and coeditor with the young Marx of the Deutsch-Franzdsische Jahrbucher, who exclaimed at the outset of a journey to Paris in 1846:

We are going to France, the threshold of a new world. May it live up to our dreams! At the end of our journey we will find the vast valley of Paris, the cradle of the new Europe, the great laboratory where world history is formed and has its ever fresh source. It is in Paris that we shall live our victories and our defeats. Even our philosophy, the field where we are in advance of our time, will only be able to triumph proclaimed in Paris and impregnated with the French spirit.[365]

Nor was Ruge’s romantic buoyancy without historical justification. If Paris never became the center of Young Hegelian philosophy that Ruge naively hoped for, it was certainly the theater for at least three revolutions within a span of forty-odd years. Its romantic aura as the revolutionary center of Europe, indeed of the world, made the city a magnet for radicals from all parts of the continent German, Polish, Italian, and Russian exiles, among many others, mingled and established secret societies in the artisanal neighborhoods of the French capital even during the Bourbon Restoration, despite close surveillance by the French police. Following the substitution of the Orleanist Louis-Philippe for the Bourbons in 1830, the city became the mecca of revolutionary romantics who either permanently—like Chopin—or episodically—like Garibaldi— nourished themselves on the “French spirit” of conspiracy and insurrection.

Of enormous importance were the city’s eastern districts on the right bank of the Seine, which were crowded with ateliers, a word that refers both to the workshops of craftspeople and to the studios of artists. Moreover, planted in these same districts, roughly between the Place Vendome and the Place de la Bastille, lay the principal administrative and financial buildings of the French national government, immense royal palaces and grim bureaucratic edifices, the national bank and the bourse. In times of crisis, the very proximity of this state and capitalistic apparatus to the ateliers invited the discontented to seize the buildings, indeed to do nothing less than seize control of the government The city’s romantic aura, however, was engendered by very real social tensions that prevailed within its gates. The capital was a magnet not only for revolutionaries of all nationalities but for impoverished individuals from other parts of France—for artisans who were being displaced by new technologies, and for peasants displaced by the continual parceling of family-owned land into ever smaller plots that were ever less economically sustainable. Immigrants speaking French in foreign accents increasingly intermingled with uprooted craftspeople and peasants who spoke in the heavy accents of distant provinces. In the two generations following the Great Revolution, the population of Paris soared from about 600,000 to well over a million; many of the newcomers planted no firm roots in the city’s economy and lived in destitution. Wandering nomads, as they were called, from the Auvergne, in south-central France, and other provinces performed the most menial jobs, mainly as construction laborers, usually arriving in the city for work in spring and summer and returning to their villages in winter. Those who remained behind during the colder months tended to drift into the disease-ridden and criminalized slums around the Rue Saint-Denis and other eastern quartiers.

The social volatility brought on by these numerous semi- and unemployed people was heightened by the archaic structure of the French economy itself. However cosmopolitan Paris seemed to foreigners, even to visitors from slum- ridden London, its working classes were highly differentiated. By far the largest number of producers, as we have seen, were artisans, such as printers, tailors, furniture makers, masons, jewelers, and carpenters. The majority were employed by masters, who worked alongside their employes in the ateliers. Accustomed to relatively relaxed work rhythms, they should be clearly distinguished from the proletarians who toiled in the new factories that were emerging on the outskirts of the capital.

On the next lower rung of the working class were those who worked in what we would now call sweatshops: dressmakers, lace workers, spinners, and dyers. Mainly women and children, their status was similar to that of factory workers, and like women and children in English factories, they were difficult to organize in opposition to their ruthless exploiters. At the bottom of the economic ladder were the laborers (redolent of the bras nus of the Great Revolution), a multitude of transient nomads and more permanently settled workers who filled odd jobs on a daily or weekly basis. Finally, residing in their midst was a large lumpenproletariat whose lives were desperate, often criminal, as they preyed on each other and on more fortunate members of the working class. Congested in slums, they were illiterate, short-lived, overworked when not underworked, and half-starved—the victims of epidemics and food shortages. As Louis Chevalier laconically notes in his study of the Parisian lower classes, “No one [in authority] cared what the working class was doing and what was to become of it”[366]

Despite these strong social differentiations, the various classes of the capital were not strongly demarcated by residence or by a lack of contact with each other. To be sure, the worst slums of Paris were filled with the “dangerous classes,” which might include poor and respectable workers and students, as well as nomads, thieves, and prostitutes, often packed together in extremely unhealthy rooms and apartments. But in the “better” neighborhoods individuals of markedly different social positions intermingled with one another physically, even residing in the same buildings. The first floor (or in American parlance, the second) of such a building might be rented by an affluent bourgeois family, its spacious living room adorned with chandeliers and cosdy furniture. The next floor up would house a more modest but still well-to-do family, while on successively higher floors lived craftspeople of limited means. Finally the small, grim, and virtually unfurnished rooms on the top floor would be occupied by the impoverished, who lived in virtual destitution. During the early years of the Restoration, the intermingling of the well-to-do with the poor seems to have been the rule rather than the exception.

Despite this physical proximity, however, social intercourse was becoming ever rarer in the 1820s and 1830s. Increasingly, the middle classes and the better-off workers were migrating to newly constructed open areas, especially in the western sectors, where dwellings were more suitable to their needs and tastes, thereby physically segregating the affluent from the poor. It was a differentiation that would culminate in later uprisings, when the western half of the city would be considered bourgeois and the eastern half working class.

CABET, BLANQUI, BUCHEZ, BLANC, AND PROUDHON

To the radical members of this differentiated population, socialism, as we have seen, was coming to mean a “democratic and social republic,” one in which the state would be responsible for the public welfare. But in the Napoleonic and Restoration eras, few if any of the utopian socialists, like Saint-Simon and Fourier, had a lasting influence on the artisanal workers and the industrial proletariat, with their imaginary utopias and phalansteries. It was the concretely political ideas of socialism that gained far more influence among the working classes, addressing as they did the workers’ lived concerns. Along with the writings and activities of transitional socialists like Cabet, those of Blanqui, Buchez, Blanc, and the individualistic Proudhon played varying roles in the revolutionary upheaval of 1848 and in some cases the Paris Commune of 1871, after which their influence dwindled in favor of anarchistic and Marxian ideologies.

Etienne Cabet, a transitional utopian thinker, still had one foot in Owenite and Fourierist schemes and another in down-to-earth radicalism. His utopian novel Voyage en Icarie (Voyage to Icaria), published in 1840, was based very much on Thomas More’s classic Utopia: it advanced a state-communistic vision of production and distribution, guided by the maxim that adorned the novel’s opening page: “From each according to his strength; to each according to his needs.” The book, which popularized the word communiste nearly a decade before Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, enjoyed an immense readership when it appeared.

But the book’s generous social ideas were marred by the author’s preferences for uniformity in clothing, shelter, and almost every detail of daily life—a degree of standardization that anticipates dystopias rather than their opposite. The lives of Cabet’s Icarians are shaped by an elite of technicians, who rule the utopia firmly. Indeed, Cabet’s version of communism was so authoritarian that it gave the word a dictatorial and statist connotation that it never fully shed. Cabet himself firmly opposed insurrections; nor did his sincerity in trying to advance the interests of the working class outweigh his failings in its behalf. Yet despite the comparative harmlessness of his views, he was to be hounded out of France as a rabid communiste.

Among the other radicals who surfaced in France during the first half of the nineteenth century, three figures should be singled out because of their direct influence on Parisian workers and radical intellectuals: Louis-Auguste Blanqui, Louis Blanc, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Blanqui, although he had a mesmerizing effect on young romantic revolutionaries as a mysterious fomenter and dark genius of insurrectionary putsches, was less popular among workers themselves in the early years of his revolutionary activities. By contrast, Louis Blanc, the sober statesman of the Parisian working class, exercised a brief but considerable influence on the workers of 1848, in spite of his distaste for insurrection. Finally, Proudhon, a latecomer to French revolutionary politics, known to his admirers as the father of anarchism and syndicalism, exercised a considerable international influence well beyond his lifetime. Despite Proudhon’s imprisonment and his flights into exile to escape persecution, he was more of a writer than an activist like Blanqui; nor was he by any means as consistent a thinker as Blanc.

Blanqui’s life is so enmeshed with the history of nineteenth-century French revolutionary and working-class insurgencies that an account of one is integrally an account of both. He deservedly personifies the era of French revolutionary politics in which conspiracies persistently attempted—and failed—to violendy replace capitalism with what would have been a fairly authoritarian socialist order. Bom in 1805, he was a fiery product of the Great Revolution: his father, a Bonapartist official, had been a Girondin member of the Convention. A stunningly brilliant student, the young Blanqui received a classical education at the lycee, from which he graduated with honors, and went on to study law and medicine in Paris. Like his father, he had a passion for revolutionary politics and early in his youth joined the charbonnerie.

The young Blanqui was the very incarnation of the committed and unrelenting revolutionary activist. In 1827, while reporting for the liberal periodical Le Globe, he was wounded in popular riots. After the publication of Buonarotti’s history of the Conspiracy of Equals in 1828, he gave up on a conventional journalistic career, adopting essentially Babouvist political views. After the revolution of 1830 he helped organize several of the conspiracies that jolted the reign of Louis-Philippe, and by 1848 he had gained a widespread reputation for his intractable revolutionary activities, which sent him in and out of prison for most of his adult life. Only imprisonment prevented him from participating in the Paris Commune of 1871. Altogether Blanqui spent some thirty-one of his seventy-six years behind the bars of one jail or another.

The French bourgeoisie reacted to this dedicated man as if he were a nineteenth-century Marat Writing of an event during the 1848 Revolution in which the National Assembly was invaded by a “mob,” the aristocratic Alexis de Tocqueville gave a patendy hateful description of him:

It was then that I saw appear, in his turn, in the tribune a man [Blanqui] whom I have never seen since, but the recollection of whom has always filled me with horror and disgust. He had wan, emaciated cheeks, white lips, a sickly, wicked and repulsive expression, a dirty pallor, the appearance of a moldy frock corpse; he wore no visible linen; an old black frock coat tighdy covered his lean, withered limbs; he seemed to have passed his life in a sewer, and to have just left it 1 was told it was Blanqui.[367]

The words of the fastidious comte reek with class hatred and social arrogance toward a man whose health had been all but destroyed by the maltreatment of his jailers. Yet as a complete product of the French Enlightenment Blanqui was a committed materialist a strong believer in the power of education to change human behavior, and a bitter opponent of all forms of oppression. He regarded belief in a supernatural being as the greatest ideological impediment to the development of a revolutionary mentality and spirit Contrary to the conventional notion that Blanqui expected to achieve a socialist or communist society by sudden putsches, he actually thought that, while putsches and conspiracies played an important role, a long period of moral education would be necessary to abolish cupidity and material greed in favor of a communistic economy.

Like Marx, Blanqui abjured giving a detailed description of the kind of communist society he hoped would succeed the present one. “One of our most grotesque presumptions is that we barbarians, we ignoramuses, pose as legislators for future generations,” he wrote in response to utopian socialists who tried to chart out the contours of a future society. Cabet’s communism and Proudhonism “argue vigorously on the bank of a stream over whether there is a field of com or wheat on the other side. Let us cross first, we will see when we get there.”[368]

Yet Blanqui’s proclivity for agitation of a practical nature often concealed a relatively insightful theory of class conflict and its role in history, including a recognition that “toilers” were a class distinct from the old Third Estate. In this respect, he was unique among the French socialists of his day. He unequivocally opposed the ownership of private property, particularly in its capitalist forms, and he vigorously despised reforms as soporifics that narcotized the desire for revolutionary change. But like many Parisian socialist writers before Marx, his economic theories were fixated not so much on industrial capital as on finance capital, which he believed drained the poor and exploited of society. For him, the source of capitalist profit lay not with the exploitation of the working class but with the ability of capitalists to overcharge buyers—a view that dovetailed closely with the prevailing socialist tendency to make moral condemnations of the profit system.

Contrary to many histories that attribute it to him, Blanqui decidedly did not invent the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The notion that the industrial proletariat (as yet a very small minority in France) was a hegemonic class that would lead all other “toiling” strata in transforming society was alien to his thinking. But he emphatically did believe that a temporary dictatorship by an elite of single-minded republicans—more precisely, a dictatorship of socially progressive Paris over the peasantry, which seemed to impede any social advances in France—would be needed to abolish the existing society. His Marxist and anarchist critics were not wrong when they described Blanqui as a man who envisioned the seizure of political power as the work of a small, well- educated, and highly committed conspiratorial group. The secret societies he formed in the 1830s were impressive military organizations, with command systems based on complete obedience to a secret central committee. However indirectly, they were to inspire, if not prefigure, the underground organizations established or envisioned years later by Russian populists, even anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin, and the Bolshevik leader Lenin, despite his firm opposition to Blanqui’s putschist tactics.

In fairness to Blanqui, this dedicated revolutionary did not regard putsches as substitutes for popular uprisings. Nor did he seek to replace mass action with the actions of a small elite. Quite the contrary the essential function of a Blanquist putsch was to ignite the masses into a widespread uprising against the social order. In this respect, Blanqui was actually following an image of revolution that was widely shared in France, namely, that revolutions were essentially spontaneous popular actions in which a mere spark, like the seizure of the Hotel de Ville or the rearing of barricades in workers’ districts, was all that was needed to set the oppressed in motion. Had not the Great Revolution begun as an irrepressible mass uprising initiated by Desmoulins’s cry to insurrection at the Palais Bourbon in July 1789? Had not the spontaneous barricades of 1830 toppled a king? A Blanquist putsch was intended essentially as a gesture of the same kind as Desmoulins’s cry, both depending for their success on the enthusiastic response of the masses. This vision of revolution as basically spontaneous was cherished by thousands of ordinary French workers and middle-class republicans up to the Paris Commune of 1871, after which it faded away in favor of organized socialist parties.

Finally, what is less known is that later in life, Blanqui wavered in his emphasis on putsches and secret conspiracies as the means for social change. In the 1870s he began to stress the importance of popular education and popular social movements based in large part on the industrial working class. But he always retained a consistent commitment to revolutionary action, and it was this commitment rather than his social theories—which he left unclear or continually modified—that finally endeared him to the masses, especially the young, who revered le Vieux (the “Old Man”) for his unswerving dedication, honesty, and decisiveness. It is not surprising that this extraordinary and selfless man suddenly died of a stroke shortly after addressing a mass meeting on behalf of imprisoned Communards of 1871. Although he was most beloved by radical intellectuals and publicists, a vast crowd of workers accompanied his remains to their resting place in January 1881. French workers cherished him not only as a legendary symbol of the struggle for socialism but as a committed revolutionary who made no compromises with the oppression and exploitation of the masses.

Even before Blanqui’s red republican views yielded to a clearly socialistic outlook, Philippe-Joseph-Benjamin Buchez, a physician and former charbon- naire, was propagandizing socialistic ideas of association among French workers, based on Christian principles of charity, fraternity, and equality. A populist, Buchez responded with considerable sensitivity to the plight of the workers and gave them practical help in forming associations. Known as the founder of the French cooperative movement, what made him distinctive among the theorists of the 1830s was his emphasis on working-class independence and cooperation in resistance to the encroachments of finance and industrial capitalism.

Buchez was sufficiently tame politically to write for the moderate republican periodical, Le National, and to be elected briefly to the presidency of the Constituent Assembly that emerged out of the 1848 Revolution. But in contrast to top-down Saint-Simonian ideas that favored economic associations controlled by entrepreneurs, he was convinced that the workers must form and control their own associations. And in contrast to his collectivist contemporaries Constantin Pecqueur and Francois Vidal, who envisioned the rise of large-scale industry, called for the nationalization of the economy, and relied on the state for the establishment of an associationist economy, Buchez relied on the workers themselves, to whom he turned for the financial contributions necessary to create productive associations.

Buchez’s notion of association was, in many respects, radically collectivist. An association, in his view, should be established by collecting dues from workers, which would then constitute its common capital, free of any individualistic encumbrances or claims. Means of production would belong to no individual but exclusively to the association as a whole. Nor could they be restored, even in part, to an individual worker who decided to withdraw from the association. The proceeds derived from this inalienable capital would be used to purchase raw materials and machines, with which the members, working cooperatively, would produce goods for the market. The earnings would then be shared among all the association’s members in an equitable and democratic manner.

Buchez’s scheme was wholly oriented toward artisans and small-scale forms of production, not toward industrial proletarians and factories. His system of artisanal socialism was anachronistically counterposed to the industrial system and the advanced technology that were percolating into France. But perhaps Buchez’s most important heir was Louis Blanc, whose place in the history of socialism gready eclipsed his and who figured very significandy in the 1848 Revolution.

Characterized in his own day as a utopian socialist, Blanc’s political behavior was that of a prudent parliamentarian with generous but moderate social ideals. Like Blanqui, Blanc was the son of a French Bonapartist official; he was born in Madrid in 1811 and educated in Corsica. In 1837, having made his way to Paris, he founded a radical democratic periodical, La Revue du progres, and during the 1830s and early 1840s he acquired a measure of scholarly distinction for his historical works, particularly his account of the French Revolution, in which he was partial to the Jacobin republic. But Blanc was no insurrectionary. He opposed the uprising of the Parisian workers in June 1848 and the Commune of 1871, and in 1872 he even supported legislation against the International Workingmen’s Association, or First International. By the time of his death in 1882, he had become so domesticated politically that the Chamber of Deputies, of which he was a member, voted to give him a state funeral.

What initially won Blanc wide acclaim among the working class was his book Organization du travail (The Organization of Work), initially published as a series in his Revue in 1840, in which he elaborated his scheme of ateliers sociaux, or sodal workshops as a cooperative alternative to a capitalist economy. In the final form in which Blanc envisioned them, these workshops would be governed by the workers themselves and would be federated into large worker- controlled productive associations.

But initially, Blanc’s social workshops were to be aided by benevolent banks and a sympathetic state, which would provide the credit needed to subsidize them. Insofar as this scheme depended at first upon state subsidies, it has been regarded as an early form of state socialism. By cooperating with each other and fostering a high level of morale, the ateliers would ultimately be able to gain a stronger competitive edge over capitalist enterprises. Gradually, Blanc hoped, capitalist firms would find it more profitable to merge with the more efficient social workshops, for which they would receive a suitable profit and the assurance of a more stable society. Class conflict, in effect, would be abolished by the sheer play of market forces.

The competitive success Blanc envisioned for his ateliers should not be taken as an indication that he thought highly of either competition or the market Quite to the contrary, his horror at the effects of the laissez-faire economy’s impact on the English proletariat made him into a communist although he carefully eschewed this word in favor of socialist. Nevertheless, he was clearly guided by communist principles of production and distribution. Natural inequalities, he believed, existed among individuals, but these inequalities must be compensated for in a free and humane society.

All men are not equal in physical force, in intelligence; all have not the same tastes, the same inclinations, the same aptitudes, any more than they have the same visage or the same figure;... but each one should be placed in a condition to derive the greatest possible advantage from his faculties, in so far as this can be done with due regard to others, and to satisfy as completely as possible, without injuring others, the needs which nature has given him.[369]

The moral improvement of humanity, Blanc believed, would spawn an entirely new set of values that would recognize the need to compensate individuals for these inequalities. He was voicing, in effect, a communistic critique of the liberal assumption (previously held by Jacobins) that freedom exists when everyone, irrespective of capacity, is equal before the law and is compensated by society according to the work they have performed. Blanc, on the contrary, argued that under this system, some would suffer privation regardless of their performance, because they would be beset by greater material requirements. Instead, he maintained, an individual’s remuneration should depend upon his or her needs and those of their families, irrespective of their labor and skills.

Like Cabet before him and like Marx after him, Blanc rejected the contractarian notion of compensation according to the amount of work people performed—or what Marx would later call “bourgeois right”—and replaced it with the notion of compensation according to the needs that they had to satisfy. Or as Blanc was among the first to put it: “From every man according to his faculties” (which Blanc designated as “duty”) and “To every man—within the limits of the resources of the community—according to his wants” (which he called “right”).[370] This principle by far outweighs in importance Blanc’s naive prescriptions for class collaboration and renders his name highly significant in the history of socialist ideas. For Blanc had stated more clearly than any theorist of his day the basic maxim of a communist society: “From each according to ability, to each according to need.”

But given his reliance on the state for initial financing and for technical and managerial expertize for his ateliers, was Blanc committed to permanent state control over society? Surprisingly, he was not: he never intended that his social workshops would be nationalized or placed in the hands of a bureaucracy. Quite to the contrary, he was one of the earliest French socialists to advocate workers’ control of production. An earnest advocate of voluntary association, he fervently believed that social workshops would be impossible unless the workers were strongly committed to socialist ideas and unless all the workshops were equally committed to acting cooperatively in their common interest—ethically as well as materially—to produce a cooperative society. As such, his views more closely resemble those of syndicalism, which places a high premium on libertarian networks of worker-controlled enterprises. His plan for ateliers sociaux, more than any socialist ideas advanced in the 1840s, approximated the most socialistic goals that could have been achieved by the artisanal society of his day, and in later decades, in continental Europe as a whole, they indirectly influenced many confederal and decentralistic notions of a socialist economy.

By contrast, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who himself has been credited with fostering syndicalist ideas under the name of “mutualism,” seems to have taken a remarkably jaundiced view of the “principle of association.”[371] Like Fourier nearly forty years earlier, Proudhon was born in Besangon, in his case to parents of a working-class and peasant background. Unlike Fourier, however, he seems to have been incapable of transcending the provincialism and parochialism of small-town France. A firm paterfamilias (indeed, a misogynist), Proudhon mystified the peasant family as the basic unit of social life, and like many French peasants, whose notion of exploitation seldom extended beyond the necessity of paying interest to moneylenders, he thought of economic ills as caused primarily by finance capital—particularly by Jewish lenders. In fact, long after his death, his bitter anti-Semitism, combined with his patriarchal outlook, were to make many of his views congenial to European reactionaries, including outright fascists.

These limitations did not prevent Proudhon from acquiring the lofty title of the “father of anarchism.” His avowed hostility toward government and politics, however, was by no means unique; it was very much in harmony with a rural mentality that resented tax collectors and notaries as oppressors. Nor was his attitude toward the state consistently negative. Despite his frequent denunciations of state power and authority in general, he often softened his attitude with changing circumstances and even whims. Nevertheless, his defiant rejection of many economic and political shibboleths of the day gave him notoriety as a provocative contrarian, an image that he carefully cultivated, despite his numerous ideological self-contradictions and pedestrian views.

Proudhon, in fact, was not quite the enfant terrible he made himself out to be. It is true that he holds a place in the trajectory of French socialism—if socialist he was—by virtue of his commitment to a labor theory of value. By calling for exchange based on the amount of labor that was required to manufacture the products involved, his ideas potentially gave an important centrality to the proletariat, although he was strongly focused on artisans and their concerns. Despite his famous cry, “Property is theft!” however, Proudhon was no socialist: he definitely favored private property, advancing an economy structured around small privately owned enterprises that would be linked together by contracts untainted either by profit considerations or by exploitation.

By making a distinction between “property” acquired by exploitation and “possession” acquired by labor, Proudhon essentially smuggled into his vision a belief in private property, albeit with a moral aura. His statement “property is theft” did not refer strictly to tangible economic property; nor was it intended to lead to the abolition of private property. Rather, in Proudhon’s thinking, property was a vague moral category—and had it been generally understood for what it was by his capitalist critics in 1840, when What Is Property? was published, Proudhon would not have been considered “the terror of the French bourgeoisie,” as George Lichtheim sardonically observes.[372]

In fact, Proudhon was a committed individualist and proprietarian who expressly denounced “the principle of association” because it “necessarily implies obligation, common responsibility, fusion of rights and duties in relation to outsiders.” As such, he argued, it inhibits the allegedly “stimulating” effects of competition in advancing technological development In fact, in order to denounce association, Proudhon invoked nearly every philistine argument that could be drawn from the bourgeois repertory, including the canard that association rewards “the weak and lazy associate.” Association requires, much to his outrage, that “all are responsible for all: the smallest is as great as the greatest: the last comer has the same rights as the oldest member.”[373] As for communism, he considered it authoritarian in all its forms, presumably because of Cabet’s statism and Blanc’s associationism.

Proudhon consistendy condemned the communist principle of distribution according to needs rather than ability “as unproductive and harassing, applicable to quite special conditions, its inconveniences growing much more rapidly than its benefits, ... equally opposed to the advantageous use of labor and to the liberty of the workman.”[374] The worker’s salvation, he argued, lies in “competition which gives [skill and talent] life.”[375] One may reasonably wonder why Proudhon felt it necessary to promote this viewpoint among French workers when bourgeois economists everywhere were also hailing competition as humanity’s salvation. Nor is it quite clear that workers, rather than the Parisian bourgeoisie, made Proudhon’s General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (from which the foregoing passages are taken) a publishing success upon its appearance in July 1851.

The “reciprocity” that Proudhon favored seems to have been nothing more than the solid bourgeois principle of equivalence: each person should receive exactly what is his or her due, exclusively on the basis of an “equal” exchange of commodities. His anarchism, if such it can be called, rewarded hard, virtuous toil but made no social allowance for the care of the weak, infirm, aged, or even physically impaired who were unable to perform such toiL These unequal individuals would be left to the ministrations of charity or, more likely, to care by the family, the basic unit of Proudhonist social life. There is nothing in Proudhon’s image of the good society that obliges a collective concern for their fate. The systemic “equalization” of inequalities in ability among real people under a communist system seems, if anything, to have affronted Proudhon, since it violated his sacred precept of the exchange of equivalences.

The sinew of Proudhon’s social vision was his commitment to contract: not, let it be emphasized, a Rousseauean “social contract” but the mundane everyday contracts that uphold the capitalist economy. Only one moral provision distinguished the Proudhonist contract from the capitalist contract: it abjured profit and exploitation. In Proudhon’s anarchist society, free and completely autonomous individuals, indeed property owners, would contract to exchange of goods and services with one another, taking exacdy their due— no more and no less—in terms of the value of labor involved in producing the goods exchanged. Nor was contract, for Proudhon, merely an economic instrument for assuring fair trade—rather, it was the mainstay of industrial labor as well. Workers within factories would contract with one another to exchange their labor, and factories would contract with one another to form federations, as would communities, all on the basis of the equal exchange of goods and services. The notion of associating on an ethical basis seems to have eluded Proudhon’s social vision. At the core of his “mutualism” lay not a moral concept but a plan to finance these enterprises by means of a People’s Bank, or Bank of Exchange, which would afford small proprietors low-interest loans drawn from the savings and investments of ordinary workers.

Obviously, Proudhon’s proprietarian views, based above all on the patriarchal family and individual possession, brought him into opposition to communism in all its forms. What made him seem socialistic was his hectoring rhetoric, his slogans formulated more for their shock value than for their substance, and his moral injunctions against the exploitation of labor and the pursuit of profit But his strong emphasis on individual ownership, self-interest, contractual market relationships, and distribution based on ability rather than need—and his implacable hostility to assodationism and communism—all were surprisingly indistinguishable from the conventional bourgeois wisdom of his day.

Nor were his acolytes by any means the most radical in France, rarely designating themselves as anarchists but preferring the milder and more socially acceptable term mutualists. Where Proudhon opposed strikes and insurrections as too coercive, his dosest adherents were only too eager to follow in their maitre’s path. Bakunin, who regarded Proudhon as a pioneering theorist of anarchism, was nonetheless sharply critical of “Proudhonist individualists.” Some Proudhonists, like his own heir apparent, Henri Tolain, were actually very conservative in their sodal views. Tolain, a true contractarian, not only opposed dvil rights for women but sat in the very Chamber of Deputies that presided over the suppression of the Paris Commune of 1871, for which he was understandably reviled by French workers, many of them his former admirers.

Given Proudhon’s gradualist approach to sodal change and his opposition to militant actions of almost any sort, his ideas required major surgery before they could be accepted by neo-Proudhonist supporters of the Paris Commune of 1871. What Proudhonist Communards absorbed from his work was his emphasis on federalism as the basic structure of social life, rather than his strident individualism. Indeed, the dwindling number of Proudhonists who helped establish the syndicalist movement in France during the dosing decades of the nineteenth century, based on the general or mass strike, would have shocked their maitre, had he not died six years before the Commune. The fact is that Proudhon’s connection with syndicalism rests on an artificially generated myth. As Bernard H. Moss notes,

During the height of revolutionary syndicalism, a circle of French intellectuals, in opposition to Germanic Marxism, sought to define the French socialist tradition as Proudhonian. While they found no historical filiation between Proudhonism and syndicalism, they established the myth of a Proudhonian labor movement, shared by liberal and Marxist historians alike, which has never been confirmed by historical investigation. In only one period, the early 1860s, did Proudhonism have a definite impact upon labor militants, but this was in the early stages of a movement that soon violated its precepts in theory and practice. The goal of trade socialism, the collective ownership of industry by trade federations, was incompatible with Proudhon’s anarchism of small independent producers. If one is to attach trade socialism to the anarchist tradition, then it is surely closer to the “collectivist” anarchism of Bakunin than to the individualistic anarchism of Proudhon.[376]

Although syndicalists were to borrow certain key ideas from Proudhon, as we shall see, libertarian working-class movements, especially in Spain, were obliged to shed Proudhon’s essential gradualism and proprietarianism. His notion of a low-interest People’s Bank, which he tried in vain to establish, was all but dropped from the theoretical armamentarium of anarchism and syndicalism (see Chapter 32). Later anarchists were obliged to turn to figures like Bakunin and Kropotkin for inspiration, both of whose oudooks were not only collectivistic and communistic but decidedly revolutionary.

By the 1850s, Proudhon’s influence on French workers had declined to a near vanishing point; his opposition to strikes, his on-off support of Louis Bonaparte, and other such retreats from his seemingly militant stance left him, after his death in 1865, with a dwindling following. Only because anarchists, by sorting out ideas that he had left vague or contradictory, turned him into one of their saints did his work manage to gain posthumous fame. A number of his ideas affected the thinking of Tolstoy, Martin Buber, and Gandhi—as well as corporatist tendencies on the right that were to feed into the fascism of Mussolini and of Vichy France. In more recent times he has been revived by anarchists drifting toward “market socialism,” a phrase that may reasonably be considered a contradiction in terms.

It was not until well after the Revolution of 1830, when a self-conscious workers’ movement appeared, that Blanqui, Cabet, Buchez, Blanc, and Proudhon were to become voices, to one degree or another, of a class-oriented social movement. Although both Cabet and Blanqui were participants in local upheavals during the Restoration, Blanc and Proudhon were much too young to have become involved in the early revolutionary movements of the period. Nor did any of them exercise influence among actual French working people, be they artisans or industrial proletarians, in the 1820s. In fact, what mainly concerned French workers at the end of the decade was economic difficulties and the increasingly repressive behavior of Charles X.

THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION

The fragility of the Bourbon Restoration is perhaps most dramatically revealed by the ease with which Napoleon Bonaparte, on his sudden return from exile in Elba, temporarily deposed Louis XV11I in the famous one hundred days of the emperor’s rule in 1815. Only the exhaustion of France after Waterloo—the last batde in the seemingly interminable wars associated with Bonaparte’s name— gave the Bourbon monarchy any staying power in the country.

France wanted peace—peace from imperial conflicts, as well as peace from revolution. The Congress of Vienna that followed Napoleon’s defeat—a concert of Europe’s principal powers—left no doubt that any renewal of revolution or warfare on the part of the French would meet with swift repression and a stern occupation. A Holy Alliance among Prussia, Russia, and Austria, fashioned by Alexander I of Russia and Metteraich of Austria, was established to forestall any Bonapartist ambitions and, more significandy, to prevent France from once again initiating a revolutionary wave across the European continent.

Yet nothing was farther from the minds of the French people than revolution. Neither the peasantry, who were major recipients of the Revolution’s and Bonaparte’s agrarian policies, nor the bourgeoisie—and least of all the great financiers, its most powerful stratum—wanted a continuation of war and social instability. The rest of French society, in turn, had been drained by taxes and demands for military service. Despite certain technological advances, industry had gained very litde from the Napoleonic wars. On the contrary, the British blockade had appreciably reduced France’s international markets and domestic standard of living, setting back the country’s economic development for all strata of the population.

Thus Louis XVlll’s nine-year reign, from 1815 to 1824, was one of economic retrenchment and peace at any cost Fat and clumsy, the brother of Louis XVI must have known he was not loved, not even by the contemptuous and arrogant emigres whom he eventually remunerated for the loss of their estates during the Great Revolution and who, together with an accommodating nobility that had arisen under Napoleon, formed the predominant land-owning ruling class during the Restoration. The country, in short, needed to catch its breath and recover a measure of normality, which a stable monarchy seemed able to provide. The king, in turn, was shrewd enough to realize that, while his status was shaky, the monarchy was desirable, and the better part of wisdom was to govern his country with fairly loose reins.

The economic changes produced by the Revolution, he realized, could not be undone. Although he remunerated the emigres, the peasants and land speculators would never give up the holdings they had gained. Nor would the bourgeoisie allow the juridical rights it had acquired since 1789 to be completely effaced. Yet the very republic that had initiated the new agrarian dispensation and the new individual rights was hardly spoken of in polite company. Clerics and secular educators saw to it that republicanism was identified with terror, civil war, social instability, material deprivation, and foreign conflict. Even in the 1820s there were young men who knew nothing whatever about the Girondins and Jacobins, including many whose fathers had been among their strongest adherents.

But the old nobility was not to be stilled. The first year of Louis’s reign saw the emergence of bitter fury on the part of the aristocracy, which sought redress for its smoldering grievances and reprisals against the revolutionaries who had driven them from France a generation earlier. Injuly 1815 the ostensibly “free” elections to the Chamber of Deputies, based on a scandalously restricted electorate, brought a vindictive royalist majority (or “ultras,” as they were called) of 350 legislators out of 420 to power. A “white terror” ensued that placed stringent restrictions on the press and removed innumerable Bonapartists from the bureaucracy and other public offices. Thousands of highly qualified officials—from the municipal level, through the departmental, to the highest national offices—were sent into a counterrevolutionary limbo, where they were left to seethe in fury against their old opponents. Special military tribunals were established throughout the country that delivered not only prison but death sentences. Even Marshall Ney, Napoleon’s most popular commander, who had received a peerage from Louis XVIII but defected to the emperor during the “hundred days,” was executed after a trial in the Chamber of Peers.

Louis XVIII, however, was still committed to making compromises with social changes that he knew could not be undone without plunging the country into civil war. Even before Napoleon’s “hundred days,” Louis had adopted the Charter of 1814, or Charte, which allowed for a carefully selected hereditary Chamber of Peers, an elected Chamber of Deputies, and guarantees of equality before the law and freedoms of expression, conscience, and worship, as well as the inviolability of citizens from arbitrary arrest and seizure of property. The Napoleonic Code, which had rationalized the country’s legal system, was kept intact, and gifted men like Talleyrand, who had served not only the early revolutionary government but the Directory and Bonaparte, retained important offices. Louis, in fact, took umbrage at his Chamber of Deputies, whose ultraroyalist convictions were so extreme that, in pursuing monarchical absolutism, it gathered parliamentary power for itself at the expense of the throne’s authority, not unlike the notables who tried to weaken Louis XVI’s power in 1789.

Finally, little more than a year after the Chamber of Deputies of 1815 was installed, Louis had had enough of its proscriptive legislation, and he dissolved the Chambre introuvable (“Incomparable Chamber,” as it was maliciously called). The elections that followed returned a majority of moderate royalists who, under various ministries, remained in power until 1821, providing France with a period of relative prosperity and stability.

This quiet period also allowed for a political regroupment in the Chamber of Deputies, yielding a “Left” composed of reconstructed republicans such as the aging Marquis de Lafayette, as well as moderate constitutional monarchists such as Benjamin Constant, Hippolyte Carnot (whose father had been an outstanding general during the Revolution and a member of the Directory), and other men who were loathed by the ultraroyalist minority in the Chamber. This quasi-factional “Left” worked in conjunction with the larger group of moderate parliamentarians, or “Independents,” in the Chamber, including wealthy bourgeois elements such as the banker Jacques Laffitte, the cotton and sugar baron Benjamin Delessert, the merchant Temaux, and the entrepreneur Casimir Perier.

The moderate or liberal governments of these years provided the country with sufficient economic prosperity to keep the bourgeoisie and the working class fairly quiescent Although the wrangling between the liberal coalition and the ultraroyalists in the Chamber of Deputies continued, it was not serious enough to be of major concern to the lower classes. France was still ruled by landowners. The nobility and its minions exercised their most effective power through the prefects and subprefects who administered the departments, the provincial judges, and the municipal hirelings who genuflected before their agrarian masters. Craftsmen and peasants, living in their own self-enclosed world, were indifferent to a national regime over which they had no influence whatever. The electoral base for the Chamber of Deputies was brazenly limited to well-to-do individuals who paid a minimum of 300 francs in taxes—which meant that only 110,000 out of a population of about nine million adults had the right to vote.

But this basically stable situation came to an end in 1820, when the Duke of Berri, the king’s nephew, was assassinated, unleashing a furious royalist backlash. Louis, who was also outraged, restricted the franchise even further by establishing the so-called “double vote,” according to which the wealthiest quarter of the electorate—about 25,000 men—were given the exclusive right to select 165 deputies out of the 265 chosen by the “general” electorate for the Chamber. (In the elections of 1823 the ultras were to gain a huge legislative majority—not only by means of the new franchise restrictions, but because local notables, state-appointed prefects of the departments, and local ultra thugs engaged in crass manipulation and fraud to assure their victory. They did not hesitate to use the names of dead royalists to pack the electoral lists in support of their candidates. That the elections were blatantly rigged was a widely known fact to which the government turned a blind eye.)

In 1821 Louis XV1I1 replaced the moderate ministry of Eli Decazes with one presided over by the extremely reactionary Count of Villele, the leader of the ultraroyalists in the Chamber of Deputies. As president of the king’s council, Villele floated a state loan to further recompense emigres and others who had lost their lands during the Republic—a gesture that many peasant and bourgeois who had purchased biens nationaux in the 1790s feared might lead to a wholesale restoration of the old noble estates. His ministry stroked the Catholic Church by making obeisances to its authority, giving it emoluments and an enhanced status as “the religion of Frenchmen.” Above all, it increased clerical control over education, which created widespread uneasiness among many secular citizens, especially those who had benefited from the sale of Church lands during the Revolution. Restrictions, including unbridled acts of censorship, were placed on the liberal press; the term of service for members of the Chamber of Deputies was extended from four to seven years; and to the fury of liberals who still claimed some filiations with the cause of freedom, French troops were used in support of the Spanish monarchy against Spanish revolutionaries during the peninsular uprising of 1823. His ministry spanning Louis’s and Charles X’s reigns, Villele personified the new Chambre retrouvee, much to the approval of the reactionary ultras.

Under Villele, the Right could also setde its scores with its liberal opponents by making use of loopholes in the Charte of 1814 that favored the king. Although nearly all deputies avowed their allegiance to the document, its preamble averred that the monarch had granted it “voluntarily” to France, “by the free exercise of our royal authority.” This phrase coupled the Charte to the will of the monarch, who theoretically could rescind it just as freely as he had granted it. Additionally, the Charte averred that the government ministers were “responsible,” but to whom—the king or the Chamber of Deputies?—it did not specify. Thus ministerial responsibility seemed to float freely in the air, at the discretion of the king, as the ultras claimed, or the Chamber of Deputies, as the opposition claimed. Finally, the Charte contained a stipulation, Article 14, that gave the king the authority to dispatch the entire constitutional system at will, should he choose:

The king is the supreme head of the state. He commands the land and sea forces, declares war, makes treaties of peace, alliance, and commerce, appoints all public officials, and makes all regulations and ordinances for the execution of the laws, and the security of the state.[377]

Under Louis, all of these royalist formulations had been regarded as mere rhetoric that asserted France’s monarchical status. But Article 14 was waiting in the wings, at the disposal of any authoritarian monarch who might choose to exercise it. And it was precisely such a monarch, Charles X, aided by an entourage of unforgiving ultras, who took control of the French throne upon the death of Louis in 1824.

If Louis likely knew he was not beloved, Charles at least should have suspected that most of the French people thoroughly detested him. Only the most fanatical ultras of the emigre population and their offspring—those who abominated the Revolution and republicanism in any form—rallied around the new king, feeding his worst fears of revolutionary conspiracies. Ascending the throne at the age of sixty-seven, Charles had been an emigre for twenty-five years as the Count of Artois. Having left France as early as 1789, he subsequendy plotted with Bourbon loyalists abroad against the Republic, the Directory, and the Empire. In 1824, once Charles became king, he and Villele matched each other like a royal hand and a perfectly fitting ministerial glove.

But even within the limited and wealthy electorate on which Villele based his authority, a major split soon appeared. Many voters felt that the president of the king’s council was spinning too far to the nght, while the zealous ultras in the legislature felt that he was not going far enough. By 1827 Villele had alienated his ultra supporters as much as his liberal opponents in the Chamber, making it difficult, if not impossible, for his ministry to govern the country effectively. Although it is difficult to see how he could have hoped to realign French political life in his favor, he was obliged to urge Charles to call new elections.

The liberals, in turn, had learned only too well that they had to organize at a grassroots level to prevent more outrageous electoral malfeasances from the right. In 1827 lawyers, journalists, and the editors of the liberal periodical Le Globe created a public supervisory and educational group with the name Aide- toi, le del t’aidera (“God helps those who help themselves,” or more loosely, “self-help”), to disencumber the forthcoming elections of manipulation by notables and royal prefects. A large network of Aide-toi committees was established all over France to oversee the electoral lists, obstruct ultra interference in voting assemblies, and propagandize voters in support of liberal candidates. Their highly effective activities successfully augmented the number of liberal voters who participated in the elections of November 1827, reducing the ultras in the Chamber to a small bloc of 60 to 80, as against 180 liberals. Villele resigned and was replaced by a the liberal Viscount of Martignac (albeit officially as the minister of interior rather than as president of the council, leaving the king free to run the ministry as he chose).

The liberal victory in 1828 had causes that went far beyond ultra political intransigence alone. Since 1827 and even since 1825 in the north, France had been sinking into a deep-seated economic crisis. Especially in the north, bad harvests, particularly of grain and of potatoes, deprived industrial workers and the poor of staple foods. These shortages, combined with a major financial crisis and unemployment (partly due to imports of cheap British iron), deepened the popular hatred of Villele and Martignac and stoked widespread riots and denunciations of the regime—in some cases of the king. Textile workers in Normandy and Alsace were either thrown out of work owing to foreign imports or suffered cuts in their already low wages. These economic afflictions induced further rioting, and many city workers, having lost their jobs, were obliged to return to the villages from which they had drifted in economically more halcyon days. Although the workers most deeply affected by the economic crisis had no stake in the political world that denied them the vote, their actions unnerved all the middle and upper classes of the country, inspiring fears of a new social upsurge by the lower classes.

And for good reason: the 1820s had seen a revival of strong public interest in the Great Revolution. Memoirs by participants had begun to appear, and even Adolphe Thiers, a gifted journalist for the liberal press, published his Histoire de la revolution Jran<;aise between 1823 and 1827, which dealt sympathetically with the Convention, even trying to account for the Terror objectively, despite the author’s predilection for constitutional monarchy. Literate young people for whom the Revolution had been shrouded in mystery could now become acquainted with the events of 1789 to 1794, and they did so with genuine zest.

The death of Napoleon in his St. Helena exile in 1821, moreover, rendered the emperor a safe subject for public adulation as well, adding to the fascination with France’s revolutionary past. A flood of memoirs by Bonapartists were published, and memorabilia from the era before Waterloo, generally in the form of insignia, songs, and busts of the emperor, became popular consumer items. Napoleon, reviled by the Bourbon monarchy as a “monster,” now became a popular hero, initiating the Napoleonic legend that was to haunt France for generations. The government was continually on the watch for republican and Bonapartist conspiracies, whose importance Villele cynically exaggerated to retain his hold on his royalist constituency. In reality, the danger from republicans and Bonapartists was negligible during the Villele and Martignac ministries, but as the 1820s drew to their end, exaggerations of their danger added to a growing public sense of social crisis.

In fact, it was Charles himself who was the immediate source of the crisis. The king, ever mindful of 1789, viewed the growing militancy of the liberal press and liberal organizations as evidence of a looming revolution. Despite his avowal of adherence to the Charte, the king at heart was a devout supporter of the traditional institutions and values of the ancien regime: the quasi-feudal nobility, the moral authority of the Catholic Church, and the absolute supremacy of the monarch over all other institutions of the realm. Almost blind to the social changes in France since the Great Revolution, he retained an unswerving commitment to the very views that had sent his brother Louis XVI to the scaffold several decades earlier.

Perhaps no king was less suited to occupy the French throne than Charles, whose social vision extended no further than that of his guillotined brother. His unreconstructed worldview stood in flat opposition to the discontent of the liberals, who felt in varying degrees that France had yet to catch up with Britain as a constitutional monarchy. If the French king regarded liberal views as political heresy, indeed outright treason, the liberals and their various supporters, even moderate royalists, regarded the king as a political retrograde, with a chilling incapacity to stabilize the country, still less to rule it.

In 1829, when the minister, Martignac, attempted to allay liberal hostility to the crown by abolishing press censorship and curbing Jesuit control of education, the king replaced him with Jules Armand, the prince of Polignac—a reactionary so extreme and a Catholic so devout that he flady refused to take the constitutional oath to obey the Charte. The Polignac ministry and the Chamber of Deputies were now on a direct collision course. Even a bloc of royalists led by Frangois-Rene de Chateaubriand, a prominent romantic writer of the day, angrily defected from the ultra camp, leaving the king with a hostile majority against the ministry. The liberal press, in turn, particularly Le National, raised a howl against the new regime, comparing Charles with James II of England, the monarch whose harsh reactionism had induced the English ruling classes to unseat him in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.

Nor was the comparison between the late Stuarts and the late Bourbons unwarranted. In England, after Cromwell’s Protectorate, the compliant Charles II had been succeeded by his brother James II, whose absolutism led to the definitive end of the Stuart kings. In France Louis XVIII, who had seemed willing to compromise, was succeeded by the unbending reactionary Charles X. A replay of 1789 now appeared to be in the offing. When a shuffling of cabinet positions and some feeble attempts by Charles to limit the Chamber of Deputies’ legislative agenda to safe budgetary issues failed to quell the discontent, it became clear that the king would have to resort to his Article 14 powers and take dictatorial control of the state to annul the legislative powers of the Chamber.

In a threatening address on March 2 to a packed meeting of the legislature in the Louver, the king significandy denounced “criminal maneuvers” against the government and issued warnings that he would “maintain public order.” To this announcement the Chamber defiandy drafted a sharp reply. “The permanent accord” between the wishes of the people and the government, the liberal deputies decided to say to the king, “does not now exist,” and the people viewed his regime as “a threat to their liberties.”[378] After two days of secret discussion by the Chamber over the reply, 221 deputies voted to support the reply, and 181 voted against.

The die was now cast between the king and the Chamber. Further negotiations, in which the king averred that his “resolves are unalterable,” ended in predictable collapse, after which, on March 19, Charles dissolved the legislature, amid furious liberal cries of “Vive la Charte!” and exultant royalist cries of “Vive le roi!” The constitution was now unmistakably pitted against the arbitrary authority of an absolutist monarch.

Although the king had dismissed the Chamber of Deputies, the July 1830 election returned a new Chamber with a greatly increased liberal opposition, from 221 to 274—reelecting 201 of the 221 defiant deputies from the previous legislature—as against a mere 145 for the king’s ministry. To deepen the crisis, on July 25 the monarch and his supporting council issued five ordinances, four of which amounted to a de facto cancellation of the Charte‘s provisions for limited constitutional government One ordinance annulled the new election by dissolving the new Chamber even before it had an opportunity to convene, while another reduced the electorate for deputies to include only the wealthiest, generally landed men of the realm, disenfranchizing most businessmen, lawyers, and professionals. Still another ordinance required editors and printers to acquire preliminary authorization before publishing any periodical, subject to review every three months, essentially suspending freedom of the press.

To the liberals and many moderate royalists, as well as the politically aware public, the ordinances—essentially monarchical decrees—amounted to nothing less than a reactionary coup d’etat that effectively nullified the Charte of 1814. By turning back the clock to the days of Louis XVI, the five ordinances, so peremptorily issued by Charles, opened the door to revolution.