IHIRD REVOLUTION Popular Movements in the Era

Volume 2

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From Urbanizationto Cities (1995) Re-enchantingHumanity ( 1995) THE THIRD The Third Revolution,Volume I (1996) The Murray BookchinReader (edited byJaner Biehl) (1997) REVOLUTION

POPULARMOVEMENTS - IN THE REVOLUTIONARYERA

VOLUMLTWO

Murray Bookchin

T r- CASSELL London and Washington t Cassell Wellington House I25 Strand London WC2R 0BB PO Box 605 Herndon Virginia 20172-0605 Contents

@ Munay Bookchin1998

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmittedin any form or by any means,electronic or mechanical,including photocopying,recording or anyinformation storage or retrievalsystem, without Preface vll prior permissionin writing from the publishers. Part V Tur Rlsr oF ARTTSANALSocrnlru I Firstpublished 1998 Chapter22 FromJacobinismto 2 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Chapter23 From Restorationto Revolution 29 24 A cataloguerecord for this book is availablefrom the British Library. Chapter The Revolutionof July 1830 52

Library of CongressCataloging-in-Publication Data PaTt VI THE BARRICADESoF PARIS 7l Bookchin,Murray, l92l - Chapter25 The Revolurionof February1848 72 The third revolu[ion:popular movementsin the revolutionaryera Chapter26 The IncompleteRevolution 94 Murray Bookchin. Chapter 27 "Defeatof the Revolution!" It8 p. cm. Chapter28 The Insurrectionof June 18,18 r44 Includesbibliographical references and index. Chapter29 Reacdonand Revival r68 ISBN 0-304-33595-9(hardback v. 2).-ISBN 0-304-33596-7(pbk v. 2) Chapter30 Preludeto the ParisCommune 192 l. World politics. 2. Revolutions-Europe-History. Chapter31 The ParisCommune of 187I zt9 3. Revolu[ions-United States-Historv. I. Title. D2r.3.866I996 9545955 Part MI PRoLETARIANSocrru_rsrvrs 253 909.07-dc20 CIP Chapter32 The Riseof ProlerarianSocialisms 254 Chapter33 The SocialDemocratic Interregnum ISBN 0 304 33595 9 (hardback) 278 O 304 33596 7 (paperback) BibliographicalEssay 313 lndex 327

Typesetby BookEnsLtd, Royston,Herts. Printed and bound in GreatBriuin by RedwoodBooks, Trowbridge, Wihshire. Preface

This volume, the second of.The Third Rnolution, deals primarily with the major nineteenth-century uprisings of the French working class, from the Revolution of 1830 through the Revolution of 1848 to the ParisCommune of 1871. It also necessarilyexamines the origrns and history of the Internadonal Workingmen's Association (IWMA) or First InternaLional and the Second Internalional, primarily a Marxist social democratic association heavily influenced by the German Social Democratic Party. The increasingly ideological nature of For my granddaughterKaga nineteenth-century workers' movements and the emergence of a modem proletariat and an industrial capitalist class made it necessaryfor me to explore in some detail the transition fromJacobinism, a radical republican ideology and movement, to various socialisms oriented toward the working class.During the first half of the century a modern really appeared in both England and and, with it, various socialist and anarchist ideologies that were already sprouting in the immediate aftermath of the Great French Revolution. Hence, in addition to covering the revolutions themselves,I provide summary accounts of the ideological transilion from left-wing Jacobinism to outright socialism. In a sense,this volume is not only an account.of one of the stormiest periods of popular insurrections in modem history but also an account of nineteenth- century France, as seen through the lens of its great revolutionary movements and ideologies.The revolutions of 1830, 1848, and 1871 in Pariswere, in great part, extensionsof the Revolution of 1789 to 1794, which is also how many of their parficipants regarded them. In contrast to most conven[ional historians, I share Roger V. Gould's view that the June 1848 insurrection of the Parisian workers was the most class-conscious of all nineteenth-century French revolutions, even more than the dramatic of I87I. which was by no means socialist or exclusively working class in character-it was actually less a class revolution than a municipal, political, and patriotic phenomenon, precrpitated by the Prussian siege of Paris. But the June Viii PREFACE PREFACE ix

insurrectionof 1848 canbe seen,as many of its participantssaw it, as the "third employers-indeed,only ten percent of the mastersemployed ten or more revolution" that the sans-culotteshad hoped to make in 1793. workers-and theseordinary workers or journeymen appearto havebeen far This volume is also an accountof the transitionfrom artisanalsocialism to more open to radicalegalitarian ideas about collectiveproperty ownershipand proletariansocialism. The wo forms of socialism,while overlappingin many cooperativeproduction. Thus, the Parisianworking class initially had no respects,were also different in their goals and methods.Indeed, the book's coherent,let alone shared concept of associationand the "organizarionof narrative pivots on this nansition, as well as on the shift from the small work"; flrom mastersto journeymen to outright unskilled proletarianswho handicraft workshop to the modern capital-intensivefactory, with the were litde more than laborers,their demandsprobably varied considerably. differencesin sensibility and politics that the transformationproduced. In In the 1830sand 1840s,any attemprro establisha truly collectivistbasis for 1789 and 1830, the miliuns were primarily arlisans,especially journeymen, industrial production would have encounteredgreat difficulties.But many and by trade were often carpenters,masons, fumiture makers(particularly in French artisans devised ingenious schemes for establishing productive the Saint-Antoinedistrict of Paris),and printers,rather than factoryworkers. By associationsof a socialistickind based on their existing workshops.Hence the tum of the nvenriethcentury, the leadingmilitant membersof the working their carliest calls for a new "organizationof work" often came down to classeswere metalworkers,who retained the independent spirit of skilled demandsfor sharedresources for credit; insurancefunds to tide individual artisans while simultaneously forming an integral part of the factory artisansover in timesof unemployment"illness, and old age;and legislationto environment.Among the thousandsof semiskilledor unskilled and poorly protect their small workshops againstcomperidon from the growing factory educatedproletarians in factories,it was these "arlisan-proletarians,"so to system. speak,who were the most educated,forceful, and independentand to whom In time, however,and in growing numbers,the most sophisticatedworker the others rurned for leadership.They begin to as earlyas June 1848, "militants," comprising both artisansand journeymen laborers,did seek to ^ppear and as the readerof volume 3 will find, theyplayed a very prominentrole in the collectivizemost of the French economy.Many historiansof the Frenchlabor great revolutionarywave that swept over Russiaand Germanybetween I9I7 movementmaintain that nineteenth-centuryFrench craftsmenwere genuine and 192I. proletarianswho were fervently committed to collectivistideas of socialism I sharethe view of BernardH. Moss,William H. Sewell,Jr.,and other recent basedon free associations.Marxist historians,on the other hand, regardmost historians of the nineteenth-centuryFrench working class that ideas of of the Parisian craftsmenas "petty bourgeois" remnants of a preindustrial ,indeed collectiveproduction and distribution (as distinguished society,whose "associationist"ideas were basedon the private ownership of from individualistic forms) becamevery widespreadin Paris in the years after small-scaleproperty. I haveaccepted neither viewpoint in totobut havetried to 1830,and especiallyfollowing the 1848 Revolution.These ideas varied greatly steera middle coursebetween the two. PaceMarx,collectivist goals did emerge and were often vaguein conception,ranging from simple uade unions with amongmany Frenchartisans after the Revolutionof 1830.But thesegoals were guildlike featuresto cooperativeswith egaliurian and collectivistmethods of diverse,often confused,and ultimately unworkablewithin the context of the production and distribution.It is highly unlikely that Parisianartisans or even small-scaleproduction that prevailed in French industry for most of the "skilled workers," as Moss calls them, moved unerringly in the direction of nineteenthcentury. developing collective forms of work. After all, about fifty percent of the One wing of the collectivistideology of artisanalsocialism called for the enterprisesin Paris during the 1840swere owned by artisanalmasters, often nadonalizationof railroads, banks, and major industrial enterprises,to be aided by one or more assis[ants. managedby the men and womenwho worked in them.But in the main,French But many of these master craftsmenaspired to securetheir independent socialiss, not. to speak of anarchists,were generally more enamored of statusagainst the effors of merchantcapitaliss to control them,and againstthe federalistideas of associationthan centralistones, an affinity that,well into the encroachmentsof the factorysystem which, judging from the unsavoryEnglish next century, in conjunction with their commitment to workers' control of example,threatened one day to proletarianizethem aswell. The needto defend industry, would make them either conscious or intuitive supporters of their trades,or d.tats,from merchantcontrol and industrial competitionalike anarchosyndicalism,with its creedof bottom-upindustrial managementwithin madethem eagerto unite with their fellow mastersin cooperativesocieties. But the frameworkof libertariantrade unions. Hence the failureof FrenchMarxists it is unlikely that most of theseartisan masters aspired to createa full-blown to establisha securebasis in the Frenchworking classor to consistentlyabide socialistsociety based on the collectiveownership of property. by Marx's views,either during or afrerhis lifetime. On the other hand, alarge number of artisanswere employeesrather than Unlike Moss, I have eschewedthe appellations"skilled workers" and t X PREFACE PREFACE xr

"skilled proletarians" in favor of "arlisans" and "arlisan proletarians." I believe Severalstaff members of the Bailey-HoweLibrary at the University of that what distinguished most Parisian workers from the emerging factory Vermont in Burlington were also very helpful. Not only did Dean Leary and proletariat was primarily their characteristically strong sense of personal June Trayah go out of their way to make availablebooks from the library's independence and self-reliance,not simply their possessionof skills. Doubtless, excellentcollection, but Craig Chaloneand RebeccaGould actuallybrought the ardsans' independent sensibility was reinforced and partly formed by their someof them to my home after their working hours in the deadof a Vermont skills. But theirs was also a culture and communiry that harked back to an older winter. Beingseriously disabled, I could not pick them up myself.Fred G. Hill era, possessed of civic as well as class consciousness. Revolutions are very of the FletcherFree Library did me a similarkindness and managedto acquire territorial events: the class antagonisms they express occur within distinctive severalindispensable but difficult-to-findbooks through the interlibrary Ioan communides, with their own caf6s,civic halls, squares,and even streets as well systemfor me. To all of thesekind Vermonters,I owe my warmestgratitude. as workplaces. In France in particular, a revolution would actually consist of Finally, I wish to expressmy immensedebt to JaneGreenwood, my editor at many local revolts, each based in a parricular neighborhood. Hence the fatal Cassell,for her generoussupport for the book, and for making it possiblefor tendency of French workers, especially Parisians, to scatter to barricades in me to go to a third volume. I also rememberwith fondnessmy former editor, their own neighborhoods during times of insurrection, instead of organizing a SteveCook, for his interestin and encouragementof the entire project. citywrde and regional coordination against counterrevolutionary military forces. Murray Boohchin It had been my hope to encompass this history of the popular movements in Burlington,Vermont the revolutionary era within two volumes. But as my preparation of the second May 18, 1997 volume continued, it became clear that a third volume would be required. To have limited The Third Revolution to only two volumes, I discovered, would have obliged me to omit crucial events, ideas, and developments within the revolutionary tradition. I can only hope that the reader finds that this three- volume book has been worth his or her attention and that it evokes a sense of the great events that are fading from memory today-and the lessons they have to teach present and future generations. The writing of this volume was very often burdened by the formidable problem of factual discrepancies among the various histories upon which I drew. Many accounts, I found, differed on everything from names to dates to sequences of events, as well as omitting important details of the revolutions at the grassroots level. Not. even contemporary eyewitnesses and participants agreed on all the basic facts: Lamartine's and Blanc's histories of the February 1848 Revolution, for example, diverged even on simple details regarding major events. These discrepancies, which recurred again and again, obliged me to consult many memoirs, contemporary documents, and other histories before I felt I could make reasonablejudgments and present a responsible picture of these nineteenth-century insurreclions. Under such circumstances, errors are difficult to avoid, and I can only hope that any that may persist in the pages that follow are minimal and inconsequenual.

I owe my greatest debt in writing volume 2 of The Third Revolution,once again, to my companion and colleague,Janet Biehl, who helped immensely with the research and edited the manuscript with gleat astuteness,care, and dedication. Her enormous support and assistancewere indispensable in the preparation of this book. I I' PART V

- THE RISE OF ARTISANAL SOCIALISM

I FROMJACOBTNISM TO SOCT.ALISM3

alike, was to consist of small-scaleproducers, such as peasantsand artisans, eacho[ whom was entitled to the basicmeans of life accordingto traditional principlesof "narurallaw," suchas thoseadvocated by colonel Rainboroughin the Putneydebates.* Economic inequities, radical Levellers and red.republicans argued, could be eliminaredby sharing rhe resourcesof society in a just manner,especially by providing a materialcompetence-commonly, a parcelof land-to every poor man and his family. Every "he," as Rainboroughput it, cHAprER22 From Jacobinism to Socialism should enjoy the right in a free societyto securea beneficentfuture as an independentfood cuhivatoror evenas a small entrepreneur. Neither the Levellers nor the red republicans,however, challengedthe existenceof private property as such. euite to the contrary, they believed property should be freedof medievalencumbrances that impededits equiuble distribution amongthe peasantryand the urban poor. wharthey opposedwas The influence of the French Revolution did not end with the fall of the the systemof privilege,based on birth and the purchaseof titles,that formed Robespierristson July 28, I794-or, by the revolurionarycalendar, with the the socialinfrastructure of the ancienregime. tenth of Thermidor in YearTwo of the Republic.Among a minority of radical Theseviews, of course,were not socialist.They did not call for the collective conspirators,the GreatRevolution, as it came to be called,was to haunt the ownership of property or demand that the products of labor be distribured followed it. Although it was Napoleonicera and the Bourbon Restorationthat according to needs. The red republicans,even more decidedly than the given a grisly imageby the returning monarchyand nobiliry and clergyas the Levellers,desired an economicallyas well as politically equitablesociery in incarnalion of terror and bloody civil war, the Revolutionlived on among which artisans,owning their own tools,and peasants,owning their own plots valiant beleagueredrepublicans, and later among socialists,as a attempt to of land, would gain the full rewardsof their labor without the exploitationof a masses France for createa new era of freedomfor the oppressed of and even properrylessclass. In short, they desireda socialorder thar would equalizethe humanity as a whole. ownership of property rather than collectivizeit, guaranteeingfull economic Indeed, as I havenoted, it remainedan imperishablesource of lessonsfor and political liberry for all. revolulionariesof every kind who, well into the nventieth century, would This basically individualistic system of small-scaleproduction, carefully model their strategieson the attainmentsand failingsof l7B9 to 1794. Later tuned by a friendly srareand/or by cooperauvelymanaged credit insriturionsro "Marseillaise" generadonso[ revolutionarieswould sing the as an intemational foster equality in the ownership of the meansof production,was to become would the term hymn at gatheringsthroughout Europe, and they employ very popular among artisansearly in the nineteenthcentury in Britain and citizen(until it was supplantedbycomrade amongsocialists and anarchiss)as a especiallyin France,whose economy was mainly structuredaround handicraft form of addressin correspondence,manifesbs, and public orationswell into production and a peasantagrarian society. Its most famousadvocate was pierre- the nineteenth century. In nearly all Western European countries, self- JosephProudhon, whose ideas and influencewe shall examinein due course. designatedJacobins were to proclaim a stridently republican ideology and Inasmuch as many of these French artisans - had to cooperateto defend establishJacobin-type societies. themselvesagainst the invasionof their marketsby cheaperfactory goods and But someof thesesocieties took their viewsbeyond the expansiveprincrples to find ample credit to tide themselvesover difficurt trmes,they eaily formed "Constitution '93." of legal equalityembodied in the of They beganto demand associationsor corporalionsfor mutual aid. such colporationswere no more not only personalequality but economicequality as well, in what cameto be socialistin the present-daysense of the word than, for example,contemporary known as red .Such advances over a strictlypolitical Jacobinism tradeunions or credit unions;but the very fact that they seemed.like authentic justice, to which wealth producers' consistedof noLionsof distributiveeconomic according cooperativeseasily induced social thinkers in the last cenrury to property ownership. was to be equiubly sharedwithin the existingsystem of view them as a form of socialism.And in fact,these corporations often engaged In this respect,the political and economicoudook of nineteenth-centuryred republicansdid not go much beyondthat of the radicalEnglish Levellers of rwo * centuriesearlier. The good society,according to Levellersand red republicans Seevolume I of The Third Revolution,pp. l12-16. 4 THERISE OF ARTISANAL SOCIALISM FROMJACOBINISM TO SOCI.ALISM5 in many common activities,ranging from the innocentlyfestive to the miliundy a classof mainly unskilled machine operatives.Given the emergenceof factories defensive,that imparted to them a seeminglysocialistic character. Indeed, as thatwere too large to be owned by a single craftsman,socialism had to changeis they becamea sort of programmaticmovement, with forcefuldemands for the "scale,"so to speak.Socialist ideologies appeared that emphasizedthe integration rectificationof seriousinjustices, they were often pejorativelycalled socialists. of production on a regional and national level.Socialization soon beganto mean Thus, following the custom of the day, they may convenientlybe included the completetakeover of the economyeither by the state(nationalization) or by under the general rubric of artrsanal socialtsm. workercontrolled, confederally organized trade unions ().Particu- The earliestauthentic ar[isanal socialiss, however, were those artisansand larly after the Paris Commune of 1871, artisanalsocialism steadily gave way, theorists who demanded more than the equiuble ownership of private albeit never completely,to proletarian socialism,with correspondingchanges in property.* They began to challengethe existenceof privateproperty as such, the forms of organizationthat workers favoredand by which their revolutionary calling for the collectiveownership of the means of production wherever leadershoped to changesociety. feasible.(Prudendy and for sound political reasons,these early authentic The strategiesthat ar[isanaland proletariansocialiss used in their struggles socialists exempted from collectivizationthe peasantry,which viewed is for socialchange commonly stood in markedcontrast to eachother. fuide from ownership of family plos as a sacredright.) fu to the distribution of goods their corporations,ar[isans normally belonged to clubs and often to secret produced, these socialistsinitially believed that the produce of their work societies.They tendedto denigrateparliamentary activity, even where they were should be sharedaccording to the labor contributedby eachartisan. allowed to vote, and tumed to direct action in the form of crowd assaults Still other socialists,who by the 1840s were to be called communists, againstthe police and military. In periods of seriouscrisis, they often reared believedin a more ethical systemof labor and distribution, one that would barricadesand engagedin outright insurrection. Their organizationswere avoid the inequities produced by unavoidable differencesin individuals' generally transitory; they appearedand disappearedwith changesin political abilities to contribute their labor to the common societyand in individuals' and economicconditions. needs.Guided by the maxim "From eachaccording to his (or her) abilities,to By contrast,proletarians tended to form trade unions and political parties. each according to his (or her) needs," the communiss held that a truly When major social crises produced insurrectionarysituations, and even in egalitariansociety had to take full accountof the differentphysical capacities periods of social revolution, industrial workers generallyfunctioned through and needs of its members.Accordingly, the distribution of goods should be massparties, labor unions, and councils,which were often extensionsof their basednot on the labor expendedby a worker in the processof production but coordinating strike committees.Where artisansbuilt barricades,proletarians on the specificneeds that he or shehad to satisfo-needsthat inevitablyvaried created paramiliury organizalions.Where artisans tended to confine their accordingto the producer'sfamilial and personalresponsibilities. 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 panlyzed an entire country. These differences in strategyand forms of organizarionbetween artisans and proletarians,to be CONTINUITIESAND DISCONTINUITIES sure,were by no meansironclad. fu early as the 1820s,and especiallyin the l830s, Frenchartisans took recoursenot only to insurrectionsbut to strikeson During the course of the nineteenth century, the artisanalworld of small shops an increasingscale, and they organizedtrade unions aswell as clubs to pursue and handicraft production in which theseideas evolvedwas gadually replaced their ends. Nor did they eschewthe use of political organizationsto elect by the proleurian world of large factoriesand machineproduction, giving rise to depuriesto parliamentarybodies. But the transition from artisanal to proleurian socialismbelongs to a later chapter.In the earlynineteenth century artisanal socialists had yet to deciphersuch * For a fuller discussion of artisanal socialism, see Chapter 24. As G.D.H. Cole observes, problems as their relationship to the ruling elites of their time, the nature of nineteenth centutry acquired a family of meanings. the word socialism in the early exploitation,and the role of dassesin creatinga new society.Their theoriss viewed Minimally, it meant "collective regulation of men's affairs on a cooperative basis." Socialists at that time might make no reference to class conflict, for example, an_d'-'thgf the formation of a cooperativeworld almostentirely as a problem of moral suasion. all attacked the undue inequality of property and income and they demanded the Theywere convincedthat the wealthyhad to be persuadedby ethicalarguments to regulation and limitation of property rights"-which did not necessarily mean its foster the various socialisticschemes that aboundedafter the French Revolution. vol. l: The Forerunners(London: abolition. G.D.H. Cole, A History of Soaalkt Thought, The Macmillan, 196I), pp. 4-5. good officesof the rich and powerful, they believed,were necessaryto bring 6 THE RISEOFARTISANAL SOCTALISM FROMJACOBTNTSMTO SOCIALTSM7 about social change-hence the importanceof offering compelling examplesof in the way of determining which enemieswere "recognized" and which patrios cooperativeliving and production as a meansto gain the backing of elites. were "indigent." Nor were these laws socialisticin naturq they involved a Obviously, this view of social change discouraged the spread of class simple transferof property from a very limited number of "enemies"to a very consciousness,still less notions of class struggle. In the eyesof early socialist Iargenumber of poor, which left only a pittance to eachelighle parior The theorists,the old and new potentatesof the world were expectedto lend their Vent6se Laws could better be regarded as a form of charity for the support and wisdom to the innovation of socialisticschemes that in fact were impoverishedmasses. expresslyopposed to their interests.Various socialist theoriss eventried to find Far more socialisticin naturewere the demandsof GracchusBabeuf and his a placefor the old elitesin their new world, whetheras the financiersof socialist supporterswho formed the "the Conspiracyof the Equals"during the spring of projects,administrators of socialistschemes, or evenas the potentialleaders of 1796, in the wake of the Great Revolution.The "Manifestoof the Equals," a socialist society.Hence the early socialisttheoriss emphasizednot class written in April by Sylvain Mar6chal as a definitive statement of their aims, strugglebut one or another form of classreconciliation-where the existenceof represented a sharp discontinuity with the French Revolution, even as it classexploitadon was acknowledgedat all. resonated with all the Jacobin verbal flourishes of. 1793. "The French Thus,with such amiableviews toward the wealthyand powerful,the utmost Revolution is only the herald of another revolurion," declaredMar€chal in confusion existed among early socialistsabout how the owners of private the spiritedlanguage of the time, one "far greater,far more solemn,which will property acquired their profis. Did they do it by overchargingconsumers? By be the last of them all." The Constitution of 1793, the manifestoconcluded, exacringinterest from borrowers who needed credit to buy raw materials and "wasa gre tdefacta steptoward real equality;never had anythingcome so near pay wages?By working their hired laborers to the limits of their physical to real equality.Yet even this latter Constituriondid not reach the goal and endurance(an explanationthat conflictedwith the desire of many socialist bring about the common welfare,the greatprinciple of which it nevertheless theorists to foster class harmony)? By reaping surpluses from sound solemnlyconsecrated." agricultural practices?Or simply as just rewards for their contribution to the Giving reality to this "great principle," accordingto the manifesto,would productive process?These were some of the more popular notions that the involve nothing less than creating a "REIUBLIcoF EeUALS,"in which all economists of the day floated for public consideration and that many early discrepanciesof wealthwould be abolishedby establishing"the coMMUNrryoF socialistsincorporated into their analyses. GooDslNo more individual ownershipof land: thelnndbelongsto no one.We The ideological transition from Jacobinism to socialism was greatly are demanding,we desire,communal enjoyment of the fruits of the earth:the complicated by republican myths and conspiratorial organizations.The fruits belongto all;'r prevailing radical ideology during the Bourbon Restoration,especially in the This was heady languageindeed. If doubs remain among historians of 1820s,was still republican-and in many countriesit remainedso for the rest socialismthat the Babouvistsdemanded the evenrualabolition of propertied of the century. Monarchies and aristocraciesstill appeared as the principal society, they may be dispelled by BabeuPsown defenseat his trial, after the obstaclesto political reform, as they would up to the First World War. The Babouvistconspiracy was betrayed and its leadersarrested. fu Babeufread into discinctionbetween republican and socialistaims was not as immediately clear, his trial record passagesfrom his periodical, Tibune of the people,he at that time, as it is in retrospect.The largely republican rhetoric of the French unequivocallyasserted: Revolution colored the oratory and literature of red republicans and socialists alike. lndeed, for a time the two movemens engagedtogether in the same The sole meansof arriving at [the Republicof Equals]is to establisha a)mmon uprisings and conspiraciesand their membersoften belonged to the same adminrstrafnqto suppressprivate propertyi to placeevery man of talent in the secretsocieties. line of work he linows besr;to obligehim to depositthe fruit of his work in the Adding to the confusion,some minimally socialisticideas could be coaxed common store, to establisha simple admintstratbnof needs,which, keeping a out of the GreatRevolution iself. Saint-Just'sproposal, in Ventdse(February record of all individuals and all the things that are availableto them, will and March) 1794, that the property of "recognizedenemies" of the republicbe disribute these availablegoods with the mosr scrupulous equality, and will sequesteredand disributed among "indigent patrios," later seemedlike a seeto it that they make their way into the home of every citizen.2 socialisticwillingness to redistributeproperty. But theseVent6se Laws, which the Conventionenacted some four monthsbefore their sponsorwas brought to But Babeufsappeal for socialismand evencommunism was stillbom; after the guillotine,proved unworkable,especially since enormous difficulties stood the suppressionof the conspirary,these ideas fell victim to the social and 8 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM FROMJACOBINTSM To soctAltsM 9

political amnesiathat gripped most of France during the Napoleonic and sophisticateddimension. In the I790s many self-styledJacobins in England Restora[ionyears. It was not until the 1830s,more than a generationafter had demonstrarivelyhailed the FrenchRevolution from acrossthe channe'i,but Babeufwas executedby the ThermidorianDirectory that socialismarose in Britain's own first steps toward socialismwere drawn from uniquely English Europe as a lasringconcept, and eventhen the word socialismwas not minted sourc€s,reflecting a significantlydifferent economic and socialdispensation. in the country of the Great Revolution-rather, it first appearedin print in where early French economictheorists such as the physiocrats,living in a Englandin 1827,in a periodicalcommitted to RobertOwen's vision of a new predominantly agrarian and preindustrial society, appropriately regarded society.During the Restoration,from l8l5 to 1830,French radicals were still agriculture as the source of value and material surpluses,British economic largely occupiedwith various neo-Jacobinrepublican conspiracies against the theorists,faced with an era of industrial growth, adopted a labor theory of Bourbons. value.so pewasivewas this orientationin Englisheconomic theory that many Although Babeufs conspiracywas largely forgotten after is leaderswere economisrsin Britain may properly be called"laborisrs," as GeorgeLichtheim executed or imprisoned, one of the last surviving Babouvists,Philippe calledthem.3 The centralitythat Englisheconomics gave to labor canbe traced Buonarotti, published in 1828 a two-volume documentaryhistory of the from william Petty in the late seventeenthcentury to Adam smith in the Conspirary of Equals-rhe Histnirede la conspirotionpour I'dgalite,dite de eighteenth,but it was David Ricardoa generationlater, living in the full tide of Babeut'-that catapulted the plot and is drama into public attention and the Indusrial Revolution,who drew from laborist theoriestheir broad social stimulatedthe development of.revolutionary socialist ideas in France,in contrast and economicimplications. to the tamer notions that artisanal and similar socialist theorists were The notion that labor is the sourceof all "wealth," as the laborist theorists propagating.Buonarotti, a hery lulian of noble ancestry,had been caughtup put it, could lead to very radicalconclusions. By enhancingthe cenrality of the in the Great Revoludonwhile studyinglaw in Parisand was grantedFrench worker, laborist theorygained a tremendousexplanatory power that was more citizenship by the Convention in 1793. Although he subsequentlybecame appropriatefor socialistideas than earlier,more simplistic notions. Indeed, involved in the Babeuf conspiracy,he was spared the guillotine after its beforeRicardo, English socialism had beenlittle more than a moral theory that suppressionand was imprisoned.Eventually he went into exilein Geneva,but enjoinedthe exploitedand their exploitersto behavewith a decenrr.g"id fo, he remaineda volarileinsurrecrionary whose ideas melded old political enragt eachother's needs.This largely subjectivisticapproach nourished very naive sentimentswith new artisanalsocialistic ideas. For nearly thirty years, the and reformist notions of social change.Most "utopian socialists,"as later massivecultural and political backlashagainst revolutionary activity norwith- generationsof socialistswould call them,were contentto appealto employers, standing,he activelyparticipated in Italian and Frenchrepublican conspiracies. the state,and evendespots to institutevarious reforms and graduallststrategies, Buonarotti lived long enough to gain the awe of young romantic often in ways that were simply patronizingto the "lower orders',and in aweof revolutionariesof all kinds-republican and nationalistas well as socialist- their social"betters." as theybegan to proliferateonce again in the late 1820s.His book maynot have Ricardo,who as a man of wealthwas anythingbut a socialradical, imparted beenthe kindling that fed the socialisticfire that burned in the breastof French to the labor theory of valuea degreeof theoreticalconsistency that none of his youth, but it was almost certainlythe spark that set it alight.By the time of his predecessorshad achieved.Not only did he conceiveof labor as a commodity, death in 1837, he had played a major role in transforming the simple much like any other commodityon the market"but he castthe labor theory of Jacobinismof many of his young followers into the vigorous revolutionary value in terms of subsistence.As a commodity,he said, a worker's labor was socialismof Babeufand his supportersthat stressedinsurrection and classwar. worth no more than the minimum costsof maintaining that worker in everyday Indeed,before he died, Buonarotliwould seethe tricolor of the First Republic Iife-and of reproducing future workers for the pro-ductionof agrarianand replacedby the red flag of socialismin the streetsof Lyon and Paris. industrial commodities(leaving asidewage fluctuationsthat may-arisefrom supply and demand and other factors).To use Ricardo'sown formulationsin his pivotal 1817 work, The pinciples of politrcal Economyand. Taxation, the "naural price" of labor is precisellwh"i i, "n.."rrary to enablethe labourers, LABORISTRADICALISM IN BRITAIN onewith another,to subsistand to perpetuatetheir race,without eitherincrease or diminution." Hencethe value of labor-that is, the wagesto which laborers To the socialist ideologies that were percolating in France in the early are endtled-depends "on the quantity of food, necessaries,and conveniences nineteenth century, British radicals added a new and more theoretically [that] becomeessenrial to him from habit.',a IO THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCTALISM FROMJACOBINTSMTO SOCIALTSMll Followed to its logical conclusion, this "iron law of wages,"as it cameto be THE INDUSTRIALREVOLUTIoN: ENGI-AND called, meant that poverty was a systemic-and endemic-condition of capitalistsociety. Poverty, in effect,was causednot merely by the greed of England is justly cited by most historians as the counnryof origin for the the rich; it stemmed above all from compelling laws of the marketplace, Industrial Revolurion, since it was here that most of the technological including those described in Malthusian theory that maintain that surplus innovations were developed that laid the basis for the factory system and population always drives wagesdown to the barest minimum needed to keep rationalized forms of large-scaleagriculture. Begrnning with james watt,s the labor force alive. sophistication of the steam engine, they .u"rrtudly trinsformed the entire Although socialistswere very critical of Ricardo'simplicit justification for the structureof sociallife both in Britain and on the continent.But the Industrial existenceof poverty, his subsistencetheory of wagesprovided them with the Revolution was not only a processof meciranizationof production: it also means by which they could construct a highly impressive case against mealt the rise of capitalistsocial relations,which had alreadybegun before capitalism. Without abandoning their moral condemnation of the self-seeking mechanization, when relatively independent cottage workeis, uiing fairly bourgeoisie,especially as the Indusrial Revolutionand all its horrors beganto uaditional tools and machines,were grouped togetherinto sheis or factories crest in Britain, they could now support their demands for a complete (so named after the traveling"factors," who provided them with raw materials reordering of society along cooperativelines by pointing to trends inhcrent and bought up their semifinishedgoods) st th"t their output and working within capitalism as such.Armed with this analysis, socialiss influenced by hours_ could be regulated.A large cottageindustry of artisanswas to coexist Ricardo'slabor theory or "left Ricardians,"could now demystifi the hidden with thesefactories well into the nineteenthcenrury but other processeswere nature of capiulist exploitation.They could dispel the characteristicclaim of under way that would finally transformthe natureoiproduction in the modern capitalists to the profits that accruedin their factoriesand banks as a form of world. fairly eamed "remuneration"-the "wages" of capital-for the servicesthey Any accountof the impact of the Indusrial Revolutionon the revolutionary provided to the economy. Ricardo's laborist theory created the basis for tradition musr draw a clear distinction between the striking technological understandingthat wage labor, as a distinct social relationshipbeween the innovarionsthat madethe IndustrialRevolution possible,and,rhi acualchaiges capitalistand the proletarian,was not only exploitativebut necessarilyresulted that industrializarion brought into the lives of ordinary p.opt.. in the impoverishment, indeed the destitution, of the industrial worker. Although "u"ryd^y technicalinnovations were obviouslynecessary for the emergenceof Even among radicalswho had studied Ricardo'sworks, to be sure, these an industrial capitalisteconomy, their impact on societyitself was ofien u.ry ideas remained somewhathazy: they were not to be fully darified until Marx uneven-an unevennessthat pardy explains the varying tensionsthat pervaded brilliantly synthesized English economic theory with French socialist ideas, the entireera. The discoveryof a new technique,it is irnportantto note,was not while in Franceitself, no such argumentexisted until thesetheories crossed the immediately followed by its applicationro industry. oft"r, considerablelag Channel.But awareness,among early British socialists,of the unique featuresof existed " betweena technologicaldiscovery and is piacticaluse in the economy. capitalism was growing, as a result of new economic developments.Far more Because of this lag, the "proletarianization"of the preindusrial artisanworld than any counnryin the early part of the cenrury,Britain waswiuressing a steady was often relatively slow-providing time for the emergenceof widespreadand erosion in the status of traditional artisans,the substitutionof machinesfor often stormy resistanceto the factorysystem. handwork, and the undermining of the family cottageindusuy by the factory The developmentof new machines,well beyondthe resourcesof the artisan system-in short, the Indusrial Revolution.Unavoidably, these basic changes a_nd too large to be used effectivelyin cottages,began modestly. In 1733John in British society-and the searinglyharsh social conditions they generated- Kay invenredthe so-calledflying shuttle,a iimple levice rhat madeit possible obliged early British socialiststo transcendthe political limits ofJacobinism.But for a cotton weaverto producetiti.. much cloth asa singleindividual could. it was above all the early appearanceof the lndusrial Revolution in England I herealter ", necessityclearly became the mother of invention,as eachinnovation that profoundly influencedthe rise of socialism,and not only at home,where indusrry a major disequilibriumin the variousstages of its impact-the degradation of the proletariat-was immediate,but in time on clothll-*" production."*T" -crelted Kay's flying shutde, for example, created an enonnous the contineng where capitalist social relations were poised to penetrateas well, qemand tor thread,a demandthat could not be satisfiedunril new techniques wreaking a similar transformation on continenul working dasses. for spinning becameavailable. A ftill thirry years larer, in 1164, this disparity was sdll only partly resolved when James Hargreavesdesigned a simple spinning jenny that could rurn eight spindles instiad of the siigle spindle of 12 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM FROMJACOBINTSMTO SOCT.ALISM13

the traditional spinning wheel. Five more years then had pass Richard produced to before major changesin the class configurationof Engrandas well. For fukwright, in 1769,patented the water-poweredspinning frame,which, based some four or five generationsbefore the Industrial Revoluti"ontriumphed, the on the rotary motion of two setsof rollers, could produce a finer and tighter traditional working classhad been divided among masters,journeymen, and thread. The water frame allowed for the use of as many as four hundred apprentices: now it underwent a sweeping metamorphosis. ,.workers,' spindles, which could produce inexpensively in England the fine handspun included not only artisans (preindusrial lourneymen ai well as masters), yam and cloth that fashion

contributed to morcrllement[parcelizing] of the peasanrs'lands where they THE INDUSTRIALREVOLUTION IN FMNCE did not encouragethe limitarion of family size. No doubt they helped to consewethe peaiantry,albeit ar a low standardof living, but at the price of On the continent, the lag in industrialization,producing uneven levels of impeding the expansionof the internalmarket and the creationof an urban, technologyin the variousstages of production,was evenmore marked than in industrial proleuriat.6 England.Where, by l8l0, England could boast of possessingsome five thousand steam engines,for example,France had only two hundred. Thus, despite the seemingly "bourgeois" revolution of 1789-94, French Comparabledivergences in mechanizationapplied to nearly all branchesof industrial capitaliss actuallyfound themselvesar a considerabledisadvantage French industry. Generally,too, in the replacementof cottageand artisanal with respectto their Englishcompetitors, whose government. was engagedin a producuon by the factory system,France lagged far behind England.In the frenzyof land enclosuresthat virtually desuoyedthe British peasanrry,leaving England of 1850,for example,nearly a quarter of a million power looms were "desertedvillages" in their wake.French industrial capiulism was significantly in operation,compared with about'+0,000handlooms; in 1848 in France,by impededby the very revoluLionthat hasbeen described as classically bourgeor. contrast, despite is substantiallylarger population, there were only 31,000 Nor was the French bourgeoisieitself disposed to foster industrial power looms. (Nonetheless,France had a large textile output, which suggests development along British lines. In the early ninereenth cenrury the big that French handlooms-whose scalewe can only guessat becauseof the bourgeoisie,largely centeredin Paris,continued to expend its funds on the decentralizednature of cottageproduction-were enorrnouslyproductive.) purchaseof land, on mortgagesand statebonds, and on monetaryspeculation, To be sure, France, like England, had a number of large industrial to the generalneglect of the industrial economy.still predominantlyagrarian, installations.The multistoriedBritish factories like the Boultonand Watt engine the French economywas hidebound by tradition-parochial, craft-oriented, works were matchedby the Le Creusotfoundries as earlyas the I790s. But if and aboveall, fixatedon the valueof land-the very trair.srhat had marked the small firms and cottageproduction lingeredprecariously in Britain evenuntil economyof the ancienregime. fu for the expansionof the internal marketand the middle of the nineteenthcentury, they remaineddominant in France,and the overcoming of regional isolation, few statisticshighlight the differences for a much longer period of time.The hand production of garmentsand Iuxury betweenEngland and Francein theseyears better than the numbersfor railway items that gaveFrench goods their worldwidereputation for artistryand quality mileagelaid down. In 1843 Brirish rails exrendedfor 2,036 miles, compared played a major economicrole eveninto the nventiethcentury. with only 268 miles in France-a nearly tenfold dilference that remained The marked lag in the spread of factoriesin Franceby comparisonwith significantly undiminished for decades.The exrent ro which regional Bdtain is accountablepartly, perhapsdecisively, by what Tom Kemp has aptly distinctions,so pronounced in the preindustrialera of both countnes,were called "the essentialparadox of nineteenth-centuryFrance."5 fu a result of the diminishedby industrializarionand by railroadsstrongly affecred the kinds of Great.Revolution, France had one of the most.individualistic political and socialistideas and practicesthat would developon eachside of the channel. juridical systemsin Europe-which, other things being equal, should have suppliedan enormousimpetus to the rise of industrial capitalismthere. Yet the same Revolution, by removing the feudal burdens on agriculture and contriburingto a widespreadredistribution of land, alsofurnished the material underpinnings for one of the most self-sufficientpeasantries in Western 16 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM FROMJACOBINTSMTO SOCLALTSM17

BRITAIN'SSOCIALIST TMJECTORY The more independenrartisans, still rooted in the cultural lifewaysof rhe preindrrstrialpast, were far lessaccepting of their deterioratingsocial iondition Economic factorsalone, to be sure, cannot accountfor the differencesin the than theseindusrial workers.Riots and near-insurrectionsover food shortages socialistmovements that emergedin BriUin and France political traditions,the and social abuseswere their typical forms of protest. Even strikes began-to flexibility of existinginstiturions, and the cultural 6lan of the laboring classes occur, although they were to becomemore characteristicof industrial than had significanteffecr as well. But the role of economicfactors should not be artisanalworkers. The skilled keelmen of Newcastlewent on strike as earlyas underrated. 1750,as did London tailors a year later,both actionslasting several weeks. In Reachingunprecedented peaks early in the century,British land enclosures 1753 in Manchester,carpenters, joiners, and bricklayers-that is to say, produced it"Uor force that was inchoateand demoralized,one that eventually artisans---aswell as construction laborersengaged in a work stoppagefor higher fell prey ro ruthless exploitation on the part of fiercely competitivefactory wages,even raising money to defendtheir imprisonedleaders. Above all, great owners. In England iseli between 1800 and 1820, about 300,000 acresof hungerriots sweptover Britain in I795-96, markedby virtual insurrectionsand. open land, on which many villagersdepended for wood and pasturage'were attacks on the person of the king in London, led by craftspeoplewhose enclosed,leaving incalculable numbers of rural folk at the mercy of indusrial belligerencywas redolent of the wanlng noncapitalisticworld. capitalists. The labor force that entered the new English factories was thus other artisanrevolts were more organized.The stormy Luddite movemenq madeup of broken people,disheartened by the lossnot only of their homesbut which tried to preserve old artisanal lifeways by damaging new labor-saving of the traditional prorccrions that had once been supplied by the landed machines,was initiated mainly by cottagelace and hosiery workers in the nobility and by guilds. Like the independent artisanalhandworkers who were Midlands, spreadingto croppersand conon weaversin lglt-I2. These facedwith extinction by powerdriven machinery,the new industrial proletariat artisansand cottagerswere hardly a riotous crowd but were made up of a was caught in the harsh tension betweena rationalized factory systemand the number of well-organizedgroups who secretlydirected their activitiesagainst more organic lifeways, however miserable they had been materially, of carefully selected industrial rargers.During rhe summer of lglj the preindusrial villagesociety. government had to station more than 12,000 Foops in places where Cannily, British industrial capitalists exploited the weaknessesof this machine-breakingdisturbances and rios had occuned. After a brief hiatus proletariatby playrngits religious and gender differencesagainst each other. late in 1813, the movementresumed, panicking industrial capitalissinto fears About rwenty percent of the new English proletariatwas comPosedof Irish of a well-organizedinsurrection. Not until a major trial in yorl castlewas their peasantswho had fled devasutingeconomic conditions in their own country. movement effectivelypur down, resulting in the hanging of twenty of their Acrimony flared up easily between Irish Catholicsand English Protestants, leadersand the penal transportationof sevento Australia. despite the misery that both groups shared in factoriesand slums. Such such behaviorand values,as Gwyn A williams so perceptivelyconcludes, differenceskept proletarians sufficiendy divided among themselvesthat their were essentiallypre-industnalin a deepersense than the merely technical. potential to unite in opposition to their employerswas, for a time, diverted into mutual hatred-until class consciousnessbegan to dilute the malice English "Long havewe been endeavoringto find ourselvesmen," said the sailorsof workers harboredtoward "foreigners"and "papiss." the British fleet in 1797. "we now find ourselvesso. we will be treatedas Moreover,an estimatedthreequarters of the factorylabor force was made up such."They learnedthis tone from others.The first politicalstatementof this of women and children. Sociallyvulnerable and relatively docile, these groups instinct was made by men who, however poor, could not conceiveof could be reduced to submissionto factory ownerswith relativeease. No section themselvesas [factory]"hands" or a "labour force,"men with the dignity of a of the working population, during the entire Indusrial Revolution, was more skill and the mystery of a craft, men who polished tools and knew the "fine ruthlessly exploited and more effectivelyconrolled by the industrial bourgeoisie. points," men whose wage was a "selling price,, and whose property was Femaleworkers, generallyintimidated by their employers,could be hired instead labour, men whose values, even in adversity,were fixed Uy earned of miliunt males inclined to trade union organizing. Children, for similar independence.The statement,once made,was universal-since,"" to quote reasons, were worked to exhaustion, growing up into an adult generation anotherof them-"a man's a man for a' that"-but its origin should not be physically weak and deformed by rickets. so warped were their bodies that they overlooked.This is the centralruth. ... The ideologyof democracywas pre- unnewed even the ruling classes,who required a supply of physically able industrial and its first seriouspractitioners were artisans.T recruits, not only for England's factoriesbut for is miliUry forcesas well. IE THE RISE OF ARTISANALSOCIALISM FROMJACOBINTSM To soctALISM 19

Which is not to saythat the new indusrial proletariatwascompletely passive in quarter signaturesattached to it, the ensuing popular anger generatedriots, the face of the terrible abusesinflicted upon it. The first "modem" industrial srikes, and even local uprisings.Talk of outrighi civil wir rias rife but not strike seemsto have occurredin I8I0, when Manchestercotton spinnersleft frightening enough to prevent the House from rejecting a second chartist their factories by the thousands-disbursing among themselves, for their petition in 1842. In April 184&-irself a year of armed insurrecrionon rhe subsistence,f.1,500 a week in srike funds that they had accumulated.It was a continent-a plan to present chartist demandsto parliamentin yet another harbingerof later strikesthat were to sweepup industrial proleurians in great great petition, accompaniedby a mass demonstration,generated a veritable movementsfor higherwages, shorter hours, and improvedworking conditions. panic among the ruling classes.Expecting hundreds of thousandsof chartiss Yet at the beginningof the centurythe Englishindusrial proletariatwas already to all but invade London, they proceededto tum the capiul into an armed. making iself felt, openingexpectations that would makeit the focusof socialist camp.A large civilian constabularywas recruitedfrom the middle classes;the ideologyfor severalgenerations. aged Duke of wellington was entrustedwith the command of an army ro Nevertheless,neither the industrialproletariat nor the artisancraftworkers in defend the city; and even the queen was spirited off to the Isle of wighi for England challenged the existing structure of society as such, despite the protectionagainst the anticipatedinsurrecfion. attemptsof many radical theoriss to impute such aims to them.In the wake of But the panic, as it tumed out, was unfounded.since its high point in the Cromwell'srule, the ruling classesin Britain had developeda sufficientdegree early 1840s,the chartist movementhad actuallybeen waninglln advanceof of insritutional flexibility to keep mass movements under control, their the 1848 effort"is leaderswere sharplydivided over stratery,arnd the relatively willingnessto use force againstrebels notwithstanding. The greatmovements smallcrowd that massedto presentthe petitionw.r p"t"tttly intimidatedby the of the Englishworking classes,including Luddism, were effectivelyconuined govemment'senormous show of force. The middle-classelements who had within the parliamentary system-to an extent that comparablemovements in formerly supported the chartiss had by now turned their attention to other France were not. Unlike monarchical government in France, parliamentary pressingissues, especially an effort to abolishthe com Laws,which had been governmentin Englandalways held out the prospectthat it could be reformed enactedin I8l5 to restrictthe imporution of corn in the interestsof the landed to benefit the poor and disenfranchised,with the result that any social or classes,but which were keepingdomestic food pricesand wagesinordinately high. political upheaval,far from intensifyinginto a revolutionarysituation, could Industrial workers, for their part, had shifted from Charter-agitationto the ultimately be setdedby compromise,In the 1790s the landed classes,in an formation of trade unions (which the repeal of the combination Acts had attempt to keep the rural poor from migrating to the cities, agreed at permitted) as the most promising means for achievingtheir material goals. Finally, Speenhamland to provide a basic, albeit meager income to the most the artisans,newly harnessedby the industrial system,were turning to underprivilegedresidents of the countryside.This measure,which remained peacefulforms of action to preservetheir waning sutus and lifeways. in effectfor decades,did not preventall hungry and dispossessedvillagers from In fact, a strong prima facie casecan be made ^. for correlatingthe rise of migrating to the new industrial towns. But by providing a semblanceof chartism with worsening economic conditions, and, its ebb with material improvements. patronal concem and by giving traditionalrural societyan extendedlease on It was when the price of corn increased.enormously in lg3g and life, it helped keep revolt in abeyance. when a severedepression developed in lg,l2 that chartism b.."-" , The Chartist movement and its outcome exemplifo this containment of major force,as working-classfury reachednear-insurrectionary proportions- ofy wane during popular opposition. Adopted in 1838 by the London Workingmen's 1' the intervening years and virtually fade iway after Ig46, fusociarion, the People's Charter raised basic demands for reforms like when bread-and-buttertrade unionism began to supplant chartist influence universal manhood suffrage,payment for members of Parliament,a secret among the proletariat ballot, fairly divided electoral districs, the abolition of property qualifications Moreover, even as Parliament was using a firm stick to intimidate the Chartist for membershipin the House,and annualparliaments--demands that more or movement,it was also offering the working classesa carrot in the form of ameliorarive lesshad alreadybeen grantedin the United States. labor legislation.tn ra++ a Toty parliament passeda law reducing Support for the Chartist movementcame from almost every sector of the the_yorking time of children berweenthe-ages of eight *d thirr."r, to six and young English working class-factory workers as well as artisans,laborers as well as a half hours daily. people between tliirt".r, aid eighteencould not intellectuals,clerks as well as alehouseproprietors. The movement had a work more than elevenhours, and child and femalelabor wi! prohibited completely certainvolatility, and someof its actionstook threateningforms: inJuly 1839, in mines. Three yearslater a ten-hourworking day for *", enacted, "u"ryorr" after the House of Commons rejectedthe Charter despitethe million and a making English labor legislarion among trt" irosi ad.vancedin the 20 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM FROMJACOBTNTSM TO SOCIALTSM2l

world. Factory inspectors were appointed to overseeworking conditions, Iaterendeavors he hoped to createa new societystructured around "villages issuing reports that would gain a reputation for an unprecedentedcritical of cooperation." fu Owen envisioned it, these self-sufficient "villages," frankness.In the yearsthat followed,the middle classesand everlarger sectors initially peopled by the unemployed, would combine agriculture with of the working class gained the franchise.Apart from a few flare-ups-which industry to produce for members'needs and then exchangetheir surpluses themselvesnever seriously threatened the socialorder-the Englishproletariat with one another in a spirit of cooperationrather than competition.ln time, was ultimately domes[icated. he hoped, the "villages" would peacefully replace capitalism and its The trajectoryof English socialistmovements was no more revolutionary industrial installations, opening an era of harmony and brotherly love. than Chartism. Socialistproletarians and artisansput their effors into the Owen even tried to gain governmentalassistance to realizehis plan, which, formation of ,benefit and educationalsocieties, and conventional needlessto say,was not forthcoming. trade unions rather than the fomenting of insurrections.Later generationsof Although he devoted the rest of his life to realizing this essentially socialistspinned their hopes on the formation of the Labour Party, which preindustrial vision of a new society, none of his practical schemes professedto seeka socialisdcsociety by electoralmeans. Nonetheless, before succeeded-least of all his attempt to finance, establish,and maintain a English socialism was entirely umed, many early English socialists and their utopian community in the United States.Yet his tirelessefforts to improve the anarchist.affines were committedto lessparliamentary apProaches. In October condition of the working classmade him, for a time, the indubitableleader of lB33 delegatesto a Coopera[iveCongress in London, calledby RobertOwen to early English trade unionism,while his propagandaon behalf of cooperatives unite the cooperativeand tradeunion movements,flirted with the formationof helpedinspire variouscommunitarian movements that flourishedwell into the a "Grand NationalMoral Union of the ProductiveClasses" (the presenceof the next century,both at home and abroad.(In the late twentiethcentury Owen's word "Moral" is worth noting) and with waginga generalstrike as a meansto cooperativevision continuesto be recycledby communitarianswho appearto achievea cooperativesociety. In the samemonth a meetingof Glasgowworkers know nothing of the "villagesof cooperation"or the lessonsto be drawn from endorseda resolution for a generalstrike in terms that Harry W. Laidler calls their failure.) "like a modern syndicalistmanifesto."s For the rest of the nineteenthcentury, British socialismproliferated into a But the strike plan they discussedwas not generalin any syndicalistsense; variety of tendencies:,with its emphasison localism;Fabian on the contrary,it was intermittent and fragmenury.Workers would set aside socialism,with its emphasison gradualismand educadon;and even a small someof their income,and when they had accumulatedsufficient funds to cover Marxian socialisttendenry and a fairly respectableanarchist scene. But all of their living expensesfor an extraweek or month, they would remain at home them culminatedin the creationof a parliamentarianlabor movementof sizable for that period of time. Afterward they would return to work, repeatingthe proportions.As for the laborist ideasof David Ricardoand the socialisswho same alternating sequenceof work and idleness.This "direct action" was had drawn out their radicalimplications, they were absorbed into the synthesis intended to eventuallyreduce capitalism to a shambles.Laidler's opinion of its producedby Marx, whoseeconomics were far more Ricardianthan many of his militancynotwithstanding, the notion wasnaive and nevercarried out. Later,a supportersacknowledged. more resolutenotion of a "Grand National Holiday" of one month's duration Ironically, the greatestsingle achievementof English socialism--or at least would capture the imagination of many Chartiss, who actuallymanaged to the Englishradical milieu-was the work of an exiledGerman who, ensconced bring out workers for severaldays on the "holiday." But the strike had no in the British Museum, produced a masterpiece,Capittl, that profoundly staying power, nor did it assume national dimensions.Following harsh shapedsocialism in most of the world-except, perhaps,in Britain.The passing persecutionby the authoritiesand a lack of conventionaltrade union support, of the artisans-and with them their stong senseof independence,their the effort-and the idea of a generalsrrike-frzzled out. sometimesbenign traditional lifeways, and their commitment to a moral For all his single-mindednessand idealism, the great "utopian socialist" economy-had done much to devitalizethe British working classesand steer Robert Owen was by no means a firebrand. He resolutelyopposed the them toward parliamenurysolutions for socialproblems. Idealistic social goals notions of class conflict that were percolating through the English working were consistendyreplaced with pragmaticreforms to limit working hours in class.lnitially a tex[ile manufacturer,he had introduced sweepingreforms in factories,expand the franchise,and allow for trade unions and a social his factory at New Lanark to show that capitalism could be managed democraticlabor party.In Englanditwas ulcimatelyin parliamentarylegislation beneficently and humanely, while still making a profit-and New Lanark that socialchanges were registered. quickly becamea showplacefor visiting statesmenand industrialists.In his

I I 22 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM FROMJACOBTNTSM TO SOCLALISM 23

THE FRENCHSOCTALIST TRAJECTORY Paris,too, was the centerof the most vigorouscaf6 life in Europe.During the Empire and the Bourbon Restoration,despite repeated attempts to suPpress In France,by contrast, social changeswere ultimately registeredin armed rheirpolitical and oratoricalebullience, radical Parisians took everyopportunity insurrections that, even as failures, left a legacy of radical idealism with to expresstheir causticviews of the culrent regime.Centered in the caf6swhere enonnousinternaLional influence. they dined, drank wine, played chess,and read periodicals,ardent young From an ideological and emotional standpoint, the foremost fact about intellectuals mixed with literate artisans-although seldom with ordinary French socialismwas the dramaof the GreatRevoluLion itself. Haunting every workers-to create a htghly spirited public forum. As wine loosenedboth aspect of Gallic political life-reacrionary as well as revolutionary-ir was tonguesand passions,they transportedone anotherto visionsof a Francethat fought and refought in the very writing of history. Historians of various would once againuphold the torch of an enlightenedEurope against the Holy revolutionary sympathieswrote accouns of the Revolution as Dantonists, Alliance,the union of powers that Metternichof Austria,after the Napoleonic Robespierrists,H6bertiss, and even(albeit rarely) as enragd,s.On the other side wars,had fashionedwith the complicity of Prussiaand Russia. of the debatewere historianswho admired the Bourbons,the Girondins,and Particularlyafter the Bourbon CharlesX was dislodgedfrom the throne inJuly eventhe contempribleDirectory, not to speakof Bonapartistswho claimedthe 1830,Paris became a fertile ground for republicanand socialistclubs. Attracting revolutionarymantle for their Emperor,and moderaterepublicans who were especiallyintellectuals, these political clubs proliferatedwith a new vitality in the ecumenicallyinspired by the monumentalevents of 1789 and afterward. temporarily freer atrnosphereof the Orleanist monarchy.Young Parisiansgave Indeed,until the 1860s,when BaronHaussmann began to destroythe city's avid support to Poland's efforts to emancipateherself from Russiantyranny, to revolutionarycharacter and its many landmarksby building broad avenues- Greeksruggles againstthe gnp of Turkish rule, and to Italian attemptsto forge a so useful for providing a clearline of fire for artillery to rout demonstrators- nation out of the many territories that fractured the peninsula.Poring over the the Revolutionwas inscribedon the city of Parisiself. The Tuileries,in whose pamphles that passed from hand to eagerly waiting hand in the radical magnificentgardens fighting had broken our in July 1789 and whose palace demimonde,their fermentdid not go unnoticedby police agents. Louis XVI and his family had occupiedafter the women'smarch on Versailles Broadconceptions of a socialistsociety were to comeslowly, generally from in 1789,was still the official centerof the nalional governmenr.The H6tel de intellectualsand joumalists. Apart from Babeul whose Conspiracyof Equals ville still stood asa testamentto the revolutionarycommune, where H6bertists, was resurrected by Buonarotti in 1828, the earliest important socialistic enrages,and sectionnaireshad debatedfuriously and where Robespierrehad visionaryin Francewas the Comte de Saint-Simon,who, despitehis title and briefly rakenrefuge after his fall. Inasmuchas the Parisiancity hall becamethe claimto direct descentfrom Charlemagne,had managedto survivethe full fury traditional site for the sanctificationof revolutionary governments,radical of the French Revolution.Saint-Simon remained throughout his life dedicated insurrectionarieswould repeatedlytry to occupy it in the name of popular to the interess of la classela plusnombreuse et la pluspauwe, as he put it-the sovereignty,recapitulating its importancein the GreatRevolution. downtrodden French working class,which was indeed the "most numerous The quartiers,houses, and streetsthat would form settingsfor nineteenth- and the poorest." century barricades-and the paving srones that would be their building His intentions and his fantasiesof a perfectharmonious society aside, Saint- material-bore testimony to Paris as the world center of revolution, but Simon was the most conspicuousof the utopians to make a hardheaded especiallyfor the people of France.To live in Paris in the early nineteenth assessmentof the Indusrial Revolution and to extol its economicpromise. century was to drink at the very fountain of revolution,to feel its presencein Welcoming advancesin technology,he viewed les indnstriekas the elite of the everysueet, alley, cul-de-sac, and avenue.There one could encounterthe sons futurewho would, in a world guidedby reason,reorder society to alleviatethe and daughters of the sans-culotteswho had driven forward the Great materialmisery of the masses.Les industriels included not only the workersbut Revoludon-and evenelderly men and women who themselveshad playeda practical scientists,managers of industry, engineers,factory owners, and role in its events.Physically, despite Napoleon's self-celebratory monuments, especiallybankers, who Saint-Simonbelieved could be persuadedto channel Paris remainedan oversizemedieval city with narrow alleys,culde-sacs, and their financialresources into sociallybenign enterprises.Any conflics between twisting streets,shaded by overhangingtenements as many as sevenstories thesegroups, he contended,were needless,the results of a sociallydistorted high-the ideal urban landscapefor barricadefighters as well as for snipers. societythat his utopia would remedy. However poorly armed, civilians could defend themselvesin this city with The changing emphasesof Saint-Simon'sideas belongs to a history of telling effecteven against trained professional troops. socialistideology rather than to the presentbook, asdoes their evolutionover a 24 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCTALISM FROMJACOBTNTSM TO SOCTALTSM25 spanof somethirty yearsinto a justificationfor a technocraticoligarchy (Saint- this respect it is difficult to call Fourier a socialist Yet he was vigorously Simon held no brief for democracy)and a planned economy.Here it is opposedto capitalism,whose abuseshe neverceased to chronicleand attack. necessaryonly to note that"in certainsuperficial respects, he anticipatedMarx's Moreover, his phalansteriesvery closely resembled Owen's "villages of economistic views; further, he was the earliest thinker to advance the basic cooperation"(so much so that copiousink was spilled, among Owenitesand propositionsof a sute-guidedsocialism, which werenot to be takenup and put Fourierists,over the tiresomeissue of who had "plagiarized"from whom). into pracrice for generarions.In the early 1820s Saint-Simon'sdisciples Significantly,and in stark contrast to Saint-Simon,Fourier eschewedall notions remainedideologically entirely within his essentiallytechnocratic framework. of a centralized,state-managed economy, a featureof his work that endeared But after their master'sdeath in 1825, they set out on a courseof their own, him to anarchistslater in the century. expanding his call for the moral regenerationof society and even for a "New Although only a small number of Fourieristsclustered around the lonely Christianity" into the establishment of a full-fledged Saint-Simonianchurch, man in the 1820s,during the yearsfollowing the Revolutionof 1830 Fourier's repletewith rituals,hymns, costumes, a quasi-religioushierarchy, sermons, and ideasgained a respectablefollowing amongcraftspeople as well asintellectuals. scripturalcompilarions of his writings,supplemented by additionsof their own. Like the Saint-Simonians,the Fourieristsafter the master'sdeath propagated his Although Saint-Simonismsank no lastingroots in the Frenchworking classes,it ideasin a socialisticform. Nor did Fourierismlack for distinguishedadmirers in exerciseda certainfascination on someof the indr^r-srrielsto whom its founder the English-speaking world. ln varying degrees American joumalists and appealed-notably the bankerJacques Laffitte; the P€rierbrothers, financiers authors such as Albert Brisbane,Horace Greeley,Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel who founded the Crddit Mobilier; a number of big manufacrurers;and the Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson disseminatedhis ideas among their giftedjournalist PierreLeroux, whose Saint-Simonian joumal Le Globe"coined" readersas well as their peersin the progressiveNew Englandelite. Some of his the word socialisme(whether independendy of the British or not) in November followers createdphalansteries in the United States,of which Brook Farm, I832. outsideBoston, is the most famous. Of lesserimportance in their daybut nonethelessof considerablelong-range Prior to the 1830 Revolution in France, the leading utopian socialists, influence,particularly among radical bohemians,were the Fourierists,whose including Saint-Simonand Fourier, vigorously opposed insurrections and maiffe, CharlesFourier, devotedmost of his life to formulating a scienceof escheweda class analysis that focused on conllict between the working class human nature based on "universal" laws of attractionand repulsion, and a and the bourgeoisie.To be sure,they despisedthe exploitersof their day.Saint- correspondingplan for social reconstruction.A brilliant pamphleteerand a Simon,for example,detested the idle and reactionarylanded aristocracythat" biting critic of bourgeoispretensions, Fourier remained a loner in the often arid during the Restoration,was the preeminentsocial class (which may accountfor fields of . His spare time-he worked as a traveling the supporthe earnedfrom financiersand manufacturers).Fourier, for his part" salesman-was devoted to creating extraordinarily innovarive schemes for feared the impact of competition upon preindusrial society,and the very socialregeneration. Wilder fantasiesthat he harbored,such as "anti-lions"that nature of his phalansteriesreflected his disposition to favor rural life organized were to replaceexisting camivores, seas to be filled with lemonade,and stages along communal lines. That later socialiss turned their attention away from of human advancementthat sometimesresembled science fic[ion, are easily theseideas and toward the working classis due less to their utopian nature derided.Yet Fourier, who gaugedthe progressof humanity by the statusof than to the great upheavals,early in the century, that occurred in Franc* women in society, drew up serious plans for self-sufficientcooperative nohbly the insurrectionsof the early I830s and the Revolutionof 18,18.These communities,which he called phalansteries,composed of individuals whose evenband the stirring demandsof the working classesfor more freedomcould natureswould complement.each other in exactmathematical ratios. Instead of not be ignored, least of all becausethey were backedup with barricadesand boring toil, work, in Fourier'sutopia, would be an enjoyableand variedactivity, muskets. with an almosthourly rotation of tasksin horticulturalas well as ar[isanalwork. To French artisans,most of whom worked in small shopsand who often aspired His originality in this respect surpassedthat of socialistic theorists who to independententerprises, the institutionalizedtrade unionism that would followed him-indeed, many ideas that he nourished about the social soon gain a sronghold among English factory workers was irrelevanL Nor organization of creativework are relevant to this day. did the French parliamentary tradition, in contrast to the British, open Fourier's utopia *a! by no means an egalitarianone: members of a avenuesfor the expression of workingclass discontent. As a result, French phalansterywere to be rewarded,not on the basisof their labor or their needs, workers, like radical intellectuals, tended to view direct, even armed but according to the financial investment they had made in the community. In confrontation with an oppressiveregime as the principal means for resolving 26 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM FROMJACOBINISM TO SOCIALTSM27

socialinjustrces. French socialist movements, in effect,differed profoundly from charbonneielimited each component group, or vente,to rwenty or fewer their British counterparts,not only becausethey appearedlater but because,the members.Again like the Masons,their nenvork was sEucturedhierarchically, pacifism of early socialist theoristsnotwithstanding, they were much more culminatingin a commandingventesuprhne in Paris. insurrecrionary. Although the charbonneie had been formed by Jura workmen, the The counterrevolutionarybacklash against the FrenchRevolution, especially movementin RestorationFrance became essentially an elite phenomenon.Its under the Bourbon monarchs Louis XVIII and CharlesX, also brought the red republican and other members tended to be not artisansbut students, repressignof republicanand socialistmovements. Young radicals were obliged former Napoleonicofficers, romantic writers and poets,and evenliberals who to form secretconspiratorial groups, many of which favoredas their ideal a preferredan Orleanistthrone to a Bourbon one.Artisans, who constitutedthe "democraticand socialrepublic." This slogan,which was to resound through greatmajority of Frenchworkers at the time, createdtheir own societiesbased much of Frenchrevolucionary history during the century,fused radical political on fellowshipand mutual aid, quite apart from intellectualsand professionals. Jacobinismwith clearly socialisticends, pointing to a changenot only in the Despitelegislation that had been passedduring the Revolutionbanning the governing regime but in the social order iself. A "democratic and social traditional guild systemand all kinds of trade unions, mastercraftsmen and republic" would be one that providedfor the poor, the underprivileged,and the journeymenestablished benefit and mutual aid groups to advancetheir own helpless,and one that protected craft workers from the depredationsof the interests.Here concepts oI mutuellismewere nourished into a specifically privileged and powerful, and from the inroads of industrial capitalism.For artisanalsocialism well in advanceof Proudhon'swritings on mutualismin the many ordinary Parisians,prior to the I830s, it was thus essentiallya defensive 1840s. concept,in which governmentwould rectifu gross economicinequities and The most conspicuousand rambunctiousmutual benefit societiesat this protect artisansin their traditionalvocations. Nonetheless, so intensewas the time were rhe compagnonnages,which were formed by journeymen artisans. reacLionarybacklash during the Restorationthat eventhis moderateidea could Compagnons,or bachelorjoumeymen, wandered around Franceseeking work be advancedonly in secretconspiratorial societies. and gaining skills, finding temporary housing in hostels. Although their How widespreadrepublican conspiratorial groups were in this period, and socielieswere formed for their mutualbenefit, compagnons, organized according how many were socialistic,is hard to judge, given the demimonde they to their trades and housed togetherin close quarters,were imbued with a inhabited.But the undergroundworld clearlybecame a uaining ground for the strong senseof craft exclusivity and arrogance.Compagnons from different formation of expresslyinsurrectionary secret societies.Although the Italian trades frequently clashed with one another, often violendy and riotously name for these societies,carbonan, is the more familiar one in present-day expressingtheir trade parochialismas well as their socialdiscontents. In the accounts,the Frenchname, charbonneie may be more appropriatebecause the cafesand streetsof small towns and cities they were a perennial source of societiesprobably originatedin French-speakingareas of the Jura Mountains working-classdivisiveness-although in times of socialcrisis, they might unite among militant charcoalbumers. Their name comes from the carbon they to fight the authoritiesas well. Nonetheless,as their infighting illustrates,craft produced, not from any use of carbine weapons.And their rituals and distinctionsstill divided French workers.Indeed, it should be noted that the hierarchicalstructures were redolent of the Masons,albeit without any quasi- slogan on which the Communkt ManiJestoended-"Workingmen of all metaphysicallanguage. countries,unilg!"-'il/25 a plea not only for intemational classsolidarity but The af{initybetween their namesnotwithstanding, the two movementswere alsofor intemal classunity. of a considerably different nature in the two countries. Where the Italian By the I830s, however,a new mood was in the air. There was a growing carbonanwere primarily nationalists,the Frenchcharbonnene brought together feelingamong workers that the term citrzen,so commonlyused as a mode of red republicans,embittered Bonapartists, and socialiss like Buonarotti (who addressduring the GreatRevolution, had a dual meaning;it meant one thing actually played a major role in both the Italian and French groups). "At its for thosewho worked and anorherfor thosewho idly enjoyedthe fruis of the workers' height [the charbonnenelhadabout 60,000 membersin sixty departmens [of labor. If economistsand utopian socialistsstill puzzled over the France],the majority in the east," observesPamela Pilbeam. "Its aims were sources of profits and preached class conciliation, ordinary workers vaguely subversive,stressing the brotherhood and equality of man, and it insdncrivelyknew that they were being exploited,in effect robbed of their attractedyoung idealiss as well as republicansand Bonapartistsunreconciled labor dme.A realizarionwas growing,ever more clearly,thatJacobinism, with to the new regime."e To circumventthe Restorationpenal code that required its messageof political freedom, was inadequateto addressthe needs of any organization of more than twenty people to be officially approved, the workers, skilled and unskilled alike. Workers in England and France were 28 THERISE OF ARTISANAL SOCIALISM coming to understandthat freedomwas incompleteif they were insecure,ill- fed, ill-housed, short-lived,and denied the simplest amenitiesof life. This understandingdid not, in itself, render workers, least of all masterartisans, receptiveto sophisticatedideas of socialism,but it did open their minds to ideas of cooperativeproduction, spelling an end to Jacobinismas the dominant ideology of socialrebellion. fu the nineteenthcentury approachedis midpoint, it was evident to the clearestminds of the time, be they communists such as Marx or astute cHAprER23 From Restoration to Revolution consewativessuch asAlexis de Tocqueville,that the futurewould be shapedby classconflicts, in which the propertylessmasses would be alignedagainst their propertied opponents.In France,the transitionfrom Jacobinismto socialism, while painfully slow, was to be completedin the fourth decadeof the century, when the red flag was pitted in open insurrectionagainst the tricolor of 1789. Francewas to enjoy pride of place in producing the principal, indeed the Iegendary revolutions of the nineteenth century, virtually overshadowing uprisings elsewhere on the European continent. The French knew it- NOTES parucularly the Parisians-and so did other peoples,who either loved or l. Sylvain Mardchal, "Manifesto of Equals" (April 1796), in SocialistThought: A detestedthe city of the GreatRevolution accordingly. Among thosewho loved it DocumentaryHktory, ed. Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders(New York Doubleday, wasArnold Ruge,the Germanpublicist and co-editorwith the young Marx of 1964),pp. 52, 55,53; emphasesin the original. rheDeutsch-FranZcisrsche Jahrbicher, who exclaimedat the outsetof ajourney to "Babeufs 2. Defense"(Vend6me, February-May 1797), in SoaalktThought, ed. Fried Parisin 1846: and Sanders,pp. 67-8; emphasesin the original. 3. GeorgeLichtheim, The Onginsof Socialism(New York FrederickA Praeger,1969), p. 135. We are going to France,the thresholdof a new world. May it live up to our 4. David Ricardo, The Pnnciplesof PoliticalEconomy and Taxanon(1817; London: dreams!At the end of our joumey we will find the vast valley of Paris,the Everyman,1926), p. 52. cradleof the new Europe,the greatlaboratory where world historyis formed 5. Tom Kemp, EconomicForces in FrenchHrstory (London: Dennis Dobson, 1971), and hasits everfresh source. It is in Paristhat we shalllive our victoriesand p, I02. our defeas.Even our philosophy,the field wherewe are in advanceof our 6. Ibid.,pp. 103-4. time,will only be ableto triumph proclaimedin Parisand impregnatedwith (London: 7. Gwyn A Williams, Artrsansand Sans{ulottes Edward A Arnold, 1968), the French spirit.I p. 114. 8. Harry W Laidler, Historyof Sociahsm(New York ThomasY. Crowell, 1968),p. 97. Nor without historicaljustification. If Paris 9. PamelaPilbeam, The 1830Revolution in France(New York St. Martin's Press,1991), was Ruge's romanlic buoyanry o.2I. never became the center of Young Hegelianphilosophy that Ruge naively hoped for, it wascertainly the theaterfor at leastthree revolutions within a span of forty-odd years.Is romanlic aura as the revolutionarycenter of Europe, indeed of the world, made the ciry a magnetfor radicalsfrom all pars of the conlinent. German,Polish, ltalian, and Russianexiles, among many others, mingled and establishedsecret societies in the artisanalneighborhoods of the Frenchcapiul evenduring the BourbonRestoration, despite close surveillance by the Frenchpolice. Following the substitutionof the OrleanistLouis-Philippe for the Bourbonsin 1830,the city becamethe meccaof revolu[ionaryromantics who either permanently-like Chopin-or episodically-like Garibaldi- nourished themselveson the "French spirit" of conspiraryand insurrecLion. 30 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM FROM RESTOMTION TO REVOLUTION 3I

Of enormousimportance were the city'seastem districts on the right bank of Revolution),a multitude of transientnomads and more permanentlysettled the Seine,which were crowded with atelicrc,a word that refers both to the workers who filled odd jobs on a daily or weekly basis.Finally, residing in their workshops of crafspeopleand to the studios of artists.Moreover, planted in midst was a large lumpenproletariat whose lives were desperate,often criminal, thesesame districts, roughly betweenthe PlaceVend6me and the Placede la as they preyed on each other and on more fortunate membersof the working Bastille, lay the principal administrative and financial buildings of the French class. Congestedin slums, they were illiterate, short-lived, overworked when nationalgovernment, immense royal palacesand grim bureaucraticedifices, the not underworked, and half-suwed-the victims of epidemics and food nationalbank and the bourse.In timesof crisis,the very proximity of this state shortages.As Louis Chevalier laconically notes in his srudy of the Parisian and capitalistic apparatus to the ateliersinvited the discontented to seize the lower classes,"No one [in authority] caredwhat the working classwas doing buildings, indeed to do nothing lessthan seizecontrol of the government. and what was to becomeof iL"2 The city's romantic aura, however, was engenderedby very real social Despitethese srong socialdifferentiations, the variousclasses of the capital tensions that prevailed within its gates.The capital was a magnet not only for were not strongly demarcatedby residenceor by a lack of contact with each revolucionariesof all nationaliciesbut for impoverishedindividuals from other other. To be sure, the worst slums of Pariswere filled with the "dangerous pars of France-for ar[isanswho were being displacedby new technologies, classes,"which might include poor and respecubleworkers and students,as and for peasantsdisplaced by the continualparceling of family-ownedland into well as nomads, thieves,and prostitutes,often packed togetherin exremely ever smaller plos that were ever less economicallysustainable. Immigrans unhealt\ rooms and apartments. But in the "better" neighborhoods speaking French in foreign accentsincreasingly intermingled with uprooted individuals of markedly different social positions intermingled with one craftspeopleand peasantswho spokein the heavyaccents of disunt provinces. another physically, even residing in the samebuildings. The first floor (or in In the two generationsfollowing the GreatRevolution, the population of Paris American parlance,the second) of such a building might be rented by an soaredfrom about 600,000 to well over a million; many of the newcomers affluent bourgeoisfamily, its spaciousliving room adorned with chandeliers plantedno firm roots in the city'seconomy and lived in desdnrrion.Wandering and costiy furniture. The next floor up would house a more modestbut still nomads, as they were called, from the Auvergne,in south-centralFrance, and well-todo family, while on successivelyhigher floors lived craftspeople of other provinces performed the most menial jobs, mainly as construction limited means.Finally the small, grim, and virtually unfurnished rooms on the laborers, usually arriving in the city for work in spring and summer and top floor would be occupied by the impoverished,who lived in virtual retuming to their villagesin winter. Those who remainedbehind during the destitution.During the earlyyears of the Restorarion,the interminglingof the colder months tended to drift into the disease-riddenand criminalizedslums well-to-dowith the poor seemsto havebeen the rule rather than the exception. around the Rue Saint-Denisand other easternquartierr,. Despitethis physicalproximity, however,social intercourse was becoming The socialvolatility brought on by thesenumerous semi- and unemployed ever rarer in the 1820s and 1830s.Increasingly, the middle classesand the people was heightenedby the archaicstrucure of the French economyiself. betteroff workers were migrating to newly constructedopen areas,especially in Howevercosmopolitan Paris seemed to foreigners,even to visitorsfrom slum- the western sectors,where dwellings were more suitableto their needs and ridden London, its working classeswere highly differentiated.By far the largest tastes,thereby physically segregatingthe affluent from the poor. It was a number of producers,as we haveseen, were artisans,such as printers,uilors, differentiation that would culminate in later uprisings,when the westernhalf of furniture makers, masons, jewelers, and carpenters.The majority were the city would be consideredbourgeois and the easternhalf working class. employed by masters,who worked alongside their employeesin the ateliers. Accustomed to relatively relaxed work rhythms, they should be clearly distinguishedfrom the proletarianswho toiled in the new factoriesthat were emergingon the outskirts of the capital. CABET,BLANQUI, BUCHEZ, BI.ANC, AND PROUDHON On the next lower rung of the working classwere those who worked in what we would now call sweatshops:dressmakers, lace workers, spinners, and dyers. To the radical members of this differentiatedpopularion, socialism,as we have Mainly women and children,their statuswas similar to that of factoryworkers, seen,was coming to meana "democraticand socialrepublic," one in which the and like women and children in English factories, they were difficult to statewould be responsiblefor the public welfare.But in the Napoleonicand organize in opposition to their ruthless exploiters.At the bottom of the Restorationeras, few if any of the utopian socialists,like Saint-Simonand economic ladder were the laborers (redolent of the bras nus of the Great Fourier, had a lasting influence on the artisanal workers and the indusrial 32 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM FROM RESTOMTION TO REVOLUTION 33 proletariat,with their imaginaryutopias and phalansteries.lt was the concretely Blanqui'slife is so enmeshedwith the history of nineteenth-centuryFrench political ideasof socialismthat gainedfar more influenceamong the working revolutionary and workingclass insurgenciesthat an account.of one is classes,addressing as they did the workers' lived concems.Along with the integrally an account of both. He deservedlypersonifies the era of French writings and acrivitiesof transitionalsocialists like Cabet,those of Blanqui, revolutionary politics in which conspiraciespersistently attempted-and Buchez,Blanc, and the individualisticProudhon played varying roles in the failed-to violently replace capiulism with what would have been a fairly revoludonaryupheaval of 1848 and in somecases the ParisCommune of 187I, authoritariansocialist order. Born in 1805,he was a fiery product of the Great after which their inlluence dwindled in favor of anarchistic and Marxian Revolution:his father,a Bonapartistofficial, had beena Girondinmember of the ideologies. Convention. A stunningly brilliant student, the young Blanqui received a Etienne Cabet,a transitionalutopian thinker, still had one foot in Owenite classicaleducadon atttelycie, from which he graduatedwith honors,and went and Fourierist schemesand anotherin down-to-earthradicalism. His utopian on to study law and medicinein Paris.Like his father,he had a passionfor novel Voyagean lcaie (Voyageto lcaria), published in 1840,was basedvery revolutionarypolitics and early in his youth joined rhe charbonneie. much on ThomasMore's classic Utopia: it advanceda state{ommunisticvision The young Blanqui was the very incarnation of the committed and of production and distribution,guided by the maxim that adornedthe novel's unrelenting revolutionary activist. In 1827, while reporting for the liberal opening page:"From eachaccording to his strength;to eachaccording to his periodicalLe Globe,he was wounded in popular rios. After the publicationof needs." The book, which popularizedthe word communktenearly a decade Buonarotti'shistory of the Conspiracyof Equals in 1828, he gaveup on a beforeMarx and Engels'sCommunistManiJesto, enjoyed an immensereadership conventionaljournalistic career,adopting essentially Babouvist political views. when it appeared. After the revolution of 1830 he helped organizeseveral of the conspiraciesthat But the book's generous social ideas were malred by the author's jolted the reign of LouisPhilippe, and by lB48 he had gaineda widespread preferencesfor uniformity in clothing,shelter, and almostevery detail of daily reputationfor his intracUblerevolutionary activities, which senthim in and out life-a degreeof standard'zationthat anticipatesdystopias rather than their of prison for most of his adult life. Only imprisonmentprevented him from opposite.The livesof Cabet'sIcarians are shaped by an eliteof technicians,who participatingin the Paris Commune of 1871.Altogether Blanqui spent some rule the utopia firmly. Indeed, Cabet's version of communism was so thirty-oneof his seventy-sixyears behind the bars of onejail or another. authoritarianthat it gavethe word a dictatorialand statistconnotation that it The French bourgeoisiereacted to this dedicatedman as if he were a never fully shed. Cabet himself firmly opposed insurrections,nor did his nineteenth-centuryMarat. Writing of an event during the 18'18Revolution in sincerity in trying to advance the interests of the working class outweigh his which the Nationalfusembly wasinvaded by a "mob," the aristocraticAlexis de failingsin its behalf.Yet despitethe comparativeharmlessness of his views,he Tocquevillegave a patendyhateful descriptionof him: was to be hounded out of Franceas a rabid ammuntste. Among the other radicalswho surfacedin Franceduring the first half of the It was then that I saw appear,in his turn, in the tribune a man [Blanqui] nineteenthcentury, three figuresshould be singledout becauseof their direct whom I havenever seen since, but the recollectionof whom hasalways filled influenceon Parisianworkers and radicalintellecruals: Louis-Auguste Blanqui, me with horror and disgust.He had wan, emaciatedcheeks, white lips, a , and Pierre-JosephProudhon. Blanqui, although he had a sickly,wicked and repulsiveexpression, a dirty pallor, the appearanceof a mesmerizingeffect on young romanticrevolutionaries as a mysteriousfomenter mouldy frock corpse;he wore no visiblelinen; an old black frock coattightly and dark geniusof insurrectionarypusches, was lesspopular amongworkers coveredhis lean, withered limbs; he seemedto have passedhis life in a themselvesin the earlyyears of his revolutionaryactivities. By contrast,Louis sewer,and to havejust left it. t was told it was Blanqui.3 Blanc,the sober statesmanof the Parisianworking class,exercised a brief but considerableinfluence on the workers of 18'18,in spite of his distastefor The words of the fastidiots comtereek with dass haued and socialalrogance insurrection.Finally, Proudhon, a latecomerto French revolutionarypolitics, toward a man whose health had been all but desroyed by the maltreatmentof known to his admirersas the fatherof anarchismand syndicalism,exercised a hislailers.Yet asa completeproduct of the FrenchEnlightenment, Blanqui was a considerableinternational influence well beyond his lifetime. Despite committed materialist, a strong believer in the power of education to change Proudhon'simprisonment and his flighs into exile to escapepersecution, he human behavior,and a bitter opponentof all forms of oppression.He regarded was more of a writer than an activistlike Blanqui;nor was he by any meansas belief in a supernatural being as the greatestideological impediment to the consistenta thinker as Blanc. developmentof a revolutionarymentality and spirir Contraryto the conventional 34 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM FROM RESTOMTION TO REVOLUTION 35

revolutionarydid not regardputsches notion that Blanqui expectedto adrievea socialistor communistsociety by In fairnessto Blanqui,this dedicated for popular uprisings.Nor did he seekto replacemass action with sudden putsches,he actually thought that" while putschesand conspiracies as substitutes a small elite. the contrary: the essentialfunction of a playedan importantrole, a long period of moral educationwould be necessary the actions of Quite pusch was ignite the massesinto a widespreaduprising against to abolish cupidity and material greed in favor of a communistic economy. Blanquist to In respect,Blanqui was actuallyfollowing an image of Like Marx, Blanqui abjured giving a detailed description of the kind of the social order. this .id"ly in France,namely, that revolutionswere communistsociety he hoped would succeedthe presentone. "One of our most revolution that was shared merespark, like the seizure grotesque presumptions is that we barbarians,we ignoramuses,pose as essentiallyspontaneous popular actionsin which a rearing of barricadesin workers' districts,was all legislatorsfor furure generations,"he wrote in responseto utopian socialiss of the Hdtel de Ville or the in motion. Had not the GreatRevolution who tried to chart out the contoursof a future society.Cabet's communism and that was neededto set the oppressed initiated Desmoulins'scry to Proudhonism"argue vigorously on the bank of a streamover whether there is a begun as an irrepressiblemass uprising by spontaneous field of com or wheaton the other side.Let us crossfirst, we will seewhen we insurreclion at the PalaisBourbon in July l7B9? Had not the get there."a barricadesof 1830 toppled a king?A Blanquistpusch wasintended essenrially kind Desmoulins'scry, both dependingfor their Yet Blanqui'sproclivity for agitationof a practicalnature often concealeda as a gestureof the same as masses.This revolutionas relativelyinsightful theory of classconflict and is role in history,including a successon the enthusiasticresponse of the vision of of ordinaryFrench workers recognitionthat "toilers" were a classdistinct from the old Third Estate.In this basicallyspontaneous was cherishedby thousands ParisCommune of 1871,after which it respect, he was unique among the French socialists of his day. He and middle-classrepublicans up to the unequivocallyopposed the ownership of private property, particularly in its faded awayin favor of organizedsocialist parties. is later in life, Blanqui wavered in his capiulist forms, and he vigorously despised reforms as soporifics that Finally, what is less known that the meansfor socialchange. ln narcotizedthe desirefor revolu[ionarychange. But like many Parisiansocialist emphasison putschesand secretconspiracies as importanceof popular educationand popular writers before Marx, his economic theorieswere fixated not so much on the I870s he beganto stressthe indusrial working class.But he industrial capitalas on financecapiul, which he believeddrained the poor and socialmovements based in large part on the to revolutionaryaction, and it was this exploited of society.For him, the sourceof capitalistprofit lay not with the alwaysretained a consistentcommiEnent he left unclear or continually exploitationof the working classbut with the ability of capitaliststo overcharge commitmentrather than his socialtheories--which him masses,especially the young, who buyers-a view that dovetailed closelywith the prevailing socialisttendency to modified-that finally endeared to the (the "Old honesty,and make moral condemnationsof the profit system. reveredle Viatx Man") for his unswervingdedicarion, decisiveness. this extraordinary and selfless man Contraryto many historiesthat attributeit ro him, Blanquidecidedly did not It is not surprising that suddenly after addressinga massmeeting on behalf of invent the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat." The notion that the died of a stroke shortly imprisoned Although he was most belovedby radical industrial proletariat(as yet a very small minority in France)was a hegemonic Communardsof 1871. intellectuals publicists, a vast crowd of workers accompaniedhis remainsto classthat would lead all other "toiling" stratain transformingsociety was alien and their restingplace Frenchworkers cherished him not only as a to his thinking. But he emphaticallydid believethat a temporarydictatorship by inJanuary 1881. legendarysymbol of the for socialismbut as a committed revolutionary an elite of single-mindedrepublicans-more precisely,a dictatorship of socially struggle who madeno and exploitationof the masses. progressiveParis over the peasantry,which seemedto impede any social compromiseswith the oppression Even before Blanqui'sred republicanviews yielded to a clearly socialistic advancesin France-would be needed to abolish the existing society.His outlook, Philippe-Joseph-BenjaminBuchez, a physician and former charbon- Marxist and anarchistcritics were not wrong when they describedBlanqui as a naire, was propagandizing ideas of associationamong French man who envisionedthe seizureof political power as the work of a small,well- socialistic workers, equality.A educated,and highly committed conspiratorialgroup. The secretsocieties he based on Christian principles of charity, fraternity,and populist, Buchezresponded plight the formed in the 1830s were impressivemilitnry organizations,with command with considerablesensitivity to the of workers gave practical Known the systemsbased on completeobedience to a secretcentral committee. However and them help in forming associations. as founder of French him indirecdy,they were to inspire,if not prefigure,the undergroundorganizations the cooperativemovement, what made distinctive among esublishedor envisionedyears later by Russianpopulists, even anarchists such the theorists of the 1830s was his emphasis on working-class independence asMikhail Bakunin,and the Bolshevikleader Lenin, despite his firm opposition and cooperationin resistanceto the encroachmentsof finance and to Blanqui'sputschist tactics. industrial capitalism. 36 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM FROMRESTOMTION TO REVOLUTION 37

Buchezwas sufficiendytame politically to write for the moderaterepublican What initially won Blanc wide acclaimamong the working classwas his periodical, Le National, and to be electedbriefly to the presidencyof the book Organisationdu travail(The Organizationof Work), initially publishedas Constituentfusembly that emergedout of the lB48 Revolution.But in contrast a seriesin his Revuein 1840, in which he elaboratedhis schemeof. ateliers to top-down Saint-Simonian ideas that favored economic associations sociaux,or socialworkshops as a cooperativealternative to a capitalisteconomy. controlled by entrepreneurs,he was convincedthat the workers must form In the final form in which Blanc envisionedthem, theseworkshops would be and control their own associadons.And in contrast to his collectivist governedby the workers themselvesand would be federatedinto largeworker- contemporariesConstantin Pecqueur and FranqoisVidal, who envisionedthe conrolled productiveassociations. rise of large-scaleindustry, calledfor the nationalizationof the economy,and But initially, Blanc'ssocial workshops were to be aidedby benevolentbanks relied on the statefor the establishmentof an associationisteconomy, Buchez and a sympatheticstate, which would provide the credit neededto subsidize relied on the workers themselves,to whom he rurned for the financial them.Insofar as this schemedepended at first upon statesubsidies, it hasbeen contributionsnecessary to createproductive associations. regardedas an earlyform of sute socialism.By cooperatingwith eachother and Buchez'snotion of associationwas, in many respects,radically collectivist. fosteringa high level of morale, rhe atelierswould ultimatelybe able to gain a An association,in his view, should be establishedby collecting dues from strongercompetitive edge over capitalistenterprises. Gradually, Blanc hoped, workers, which would then constitute its common capital, free of any capiulist firms would find it more profiuble to mergewith the more efficient individualistic encumbrancesor claims.Means of production would belong social workshops, for which they would receive a suitable profit and the to no individual but exclusivelyto the associationas a whole.Nor could theybe assuranceof a more stablesociety. Class conflict, in effect,would be abolished restored,even in part, to an individual worker who decidedto withdraw from by rhe sheerplay of market forces. the association.The proceedsderived from this inalienablecapital would be The competitivesuccess Blanc envisioned for his ateliersshould not be taken used to purchase raw materials and machines,with which the members, as an indication that he thought highly of either competitionor the market. working cooperatively,would produce goods for the market. The earnings Quite to the contrary,his horror at the effectsof" rhe latssezJaireeconomy's would then be sharedamong all the association'smembers in an equitableand impact on the English proleuriat made him into a communist,although he democraticmanner. carefullyeschewed this word in favor of sociahst.Nevertheless, he was clearly Buchez'sscheme was wholly orientedtoward artisansand small-scaleforms guided by communist principles of production and distribution. Natural of production, nol toward industrial proletariansand factories.His systemof inequalities,he believed,existed among individuals, but theseinequalities must artisanalsocialism was anachronisticallycounterposed to the industrial system be compensatedfor in a free and humanesociety. and the advancedtechnology that were percolatinginto France.But perhaps Buchez'smost important heir was Louis Blanc,whose place in the history of All men are not equal in physical force, in intelligence;all have not the socialismgreatly eclipsedhis and who figured very significantlyin the 1848 sametastes, the sameinclinations, the sameaptitudes, any more than they Revolution. havethe samevisage or the samefigure; .. . but eachone shouldbe placed Chxacteruedin his own day as a utopian socialist,Blanc's political behavior in a condition to derive the greatestpossible advantage from his faculties, was that of a prudent parliamentarianwith generousbut moderatesocial ideals. in so far as this can be done with due regard to others,and to satisfyas Like Blanqui,Blanc was the son of a FrenchBonapartist official; he wasborn in completelyas possible, without injuring others,the needswhich naturehas Madrid in I81I and educatedin Corsica.In 1837,having made his way to Paris, given him.5 he founded a radical democraticperiodical, La Rewedu progris,and during the 1830sand early 1840she acquireda measureof scholarlydistinction for his The moral improvementof humanity,Blanc believed, would spawnan entirely historicalworks, particularlyhis accountof the FrenchRevolution, in which he new set of valuesthat would recognizethe need to compensateindividuals for theseinequalities. was partial to the Jacobin republic. But Blanc was no insurrectionary.He He wasvoicing, in effect,a communisdccritique of the liberal opposedthe uprising of the Parisianworkers inJune 1848and the Communeof assumption(previously held by Jacobins)that freedomexists when everyone, 1871, and in 1872 he even supported legislationagainst the International irrespectiveof capacity,is equalbefore the law and is compensatedby society Workingmen'sAssociation, or First International.By the time of his death in accordingto the work they haveperformed. Blanc, on the contrary,argued that 1882,he had becomeso domesticatedpolitically that the Chamberof Deputies, under this system,some would sufferprivation regardless of their performance, of which he was a member,voted to give him a state funeral. becausethey would be beset by greatermaterial requirements.Instead, he I t 38 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCTALISM FROM RESTOMTION TO REVOLUTION 39

maintained, an individual's remuneration should depend upon his or her By contrast"Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who himself has been creditedwith needs and those of their families, irrespectiveof their labor and skills. fosteringsyndicalist ideas under the nameof "mutualism,"seems to havetaken Like Cabet before him and like Marx after him, Blanc rejected the a remarkablyjaundiced view of the "principle of association."6Like Fourier contractariannotion of compensationaccording to the amount of work people nearly forty years earlier, Proudhon was born in Besanqon,in his case to performed-or what Marx would later call "bourgeoisright"-and replacedit parentsof a working-classand peasantbackground. Unlike Fourier,however, with the norion of compensationaccording to the needsthat theyhad to satisfy. he seems to have been incapable of transcendingthe provincialism and Or as Blanc was among the first to put iL "From everyman accordingto his parochialismof small-townFrance. A firm paterfamilias(indeed, a misogmist), faculties" (which Blanc designatedas "d,tty") and "To every man-within the Proudhonmystified the peasantfamily as the basicunit of sociallife, and like limis of the resourcesof the community-according to his wants" (which he many Frenchpeasants, whose notion of exploitationseldom extended beyond called "right").* This principle by far ounreighs in importanceBlanc's naive the necessityof payinginterest to moneylenders,he thought of economicills as prescriptions for class collaboration and renders his name highly significant in causedprimarily by finance capital-particularly byJewish lenders.In fact, long the history of socialistideas. For Blanchad statedmore clearlythan any theorist afterhis death,his bitter anti-Semitism,combined with his patriarchaloutlook, of his day the basic maxim of a communist society:"From each according to were to make many of his views congenialto Europeanreactionaries, including ability, to eachaccording to need." outright fasciss. But given his reliance on the statefor initial financing and for technii:al and Theselimitations did not preventProudhon from acquiringthe lofty title of managerialexpertise for his ateliers,was Blanc committedto permanentstate the "father of anarchism." His avowed hostility toward government and control over society?Surprisingly, he wasno[ he neverintended that his social politics,however, was by no meansunique; it wasvery much in harmonywith workshops would be nationalizedor placed in the hands of a bureaucrary. a rural mentality that resentedtax collectorsand notariesas oppressors.Nor Quite to the conrrary, he was one of the earliestFrench socialiss to advocate was his attitude toward the state consistendynegative. Despite his frequent workers' control of production.An eamestadvocate of voluntary association, denunciationsof statepower and authority in general,he often softenedhis he fewendy believedthat socialworkshops would be impossibleunless the attitude with changing circumstancesand even whims. Nevertheless,his workers were srongly committed to socialist ideas and unless all the defiantrejection of many economicand political shibbolethsof the day gave workshops were equally committed to acting cooperativelyin their common him notoriery as a provocative contrarian, an image that he carefully interest-ethically as well as materially-to produce a cooperativesociety. fu cultivated, despite his numerous ideological self-contradictionsand pedes such,his viewsmore closelyresemble those of syndicalism,which placesa high trian views. premium on libertariannetworks of worker-controlledenterprises. His plan for Proudhon,in fact,was not quite the att'antternble he madehimself out to be. ateliers sociaux,more than any socialist ideas advanced in the 1840s, It is true that he holds a placein the rajecrory of Frenchsocialism-if socialist approximatedthe most socialisticgoals that could havebeen achievedby the he was-by virtue of his commitment to a labor theory of value. By calling for artisanalsociety of his day, and in later decades,in continenul Europe as a exchangebased on the amount of labor that was required to manufacturethe whole, they indirecdyinfluenced many confederaland decentralisticnotions of products involved, his ideas potentially gave an important centrdity to the a socialisteconomy. proletariat,although he was strongly focusedon artisansand their concerns. Despitehis famouscry, "Propertyis theft!" however,Proudhon was no socialist: he definitely favored private propefiy, advancing an economy structured * Louis Blanc, 1848. Histancal Re*lanons: Inscribed to Lord Normanby (London: around small privately owned enterprisesthat would be linked togetherby Chapman and Hall, 1858), p. 109. This virtually forgotten account of the 1848 contracr untainted eitherby profit "wants" considerationsor by exploitation. Revolutioncontains one of the ablestexpositions of written by any communist By The rather sophomoric criticism of communism is . making a distinction between"property" acquiredby exploitationand and warrants careful rereading. "possession" sometimesmade that individuals who are free to take as much as they want might very acquiredby labor, Proudhonessentialiy r-uggl.d into his vision well exhaustthe common pool and render a communistsociety impossible; a coercive a beliefin privateproperty, albeit with a moral Hir rt"t"-.nt "property is authority, such as a statebureaucracy, would thereforebe necessaryto allocateavailable thett" did not refer sricdy to tangible "ut". "wans" "needs" economicproperty; nor was it intended goods. Blanc's qualification that or would be circumscribed by 4. to lead proudhon's '-resourcesof the community" answers this claim. It would obviously be the to the abolition of private properry. Rather, in thinking, responsibility of the community to decide, in a rational and democratic manner, what property was a vague moral category-and had it been generally understood was available. tor what it was by his capitalist crirics in 1840, when What Is property?was t_ 40 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM FROM RESTOMTION TO REVOLUTION 4I

profit In Proudhon's anarchist society,free and published,Proudhon would not havebeen considered "the terror of the French abjured and exploitation. autonomousindividuals, indeed propefty owners,would contract bourgeoisie,"as GeorgeLichtheim sardonicallyobsewes.T completely of goodsand serviceswith one another,taking exacdytheir due- In fact, Proudhon was a committed individualist and proprietarianwho to exchange no more and no less-in termsof the valueof labor involvedin producing the expressly denounced "the pnnciple of association"because it "necessarily exchanged.Nor was contract, for Proudhon, merely an economic implies obligation, common responsibility,fusion of rights and duties in goods for assuring fair trade-rather, it was the mainstay of industrial relation to outsiders."As such,he argued,it inhibits the allegedly"stimulating" instrument as well. Workers within factorieswould contractwith one another to effectsof competitionin advancingtechnological development. In fact,in order labor their labor, and factorieswould contractwith one another to form to denounceassociation, Proudhon invoked nearly everyphilistine argument exchange as would communities,all on the basisof the equal exchangeof that could be drawn from the bourgeoisrepertory, including the canardthat federa[ions, and The notion of associatingon an ethicalbasis seems to have associationrewards "the weak andlazy associate."fusociation requires, much goods services. Proudhon'ssocial vision. At the coreof his "mutualism"lay not a moral to his ouUage,that "all are responsiblefor all: the smallestis as great as the eluded plan finance enterprisesby meansof a People'sBank, or greatest the last comer has the samerighS as the oldest member."8fu for conceptbut a to these Bank of Exchange,which would afford small proprietors low-interestloans communism,he consideredit authoritarianin all its forms,presumably because from the savingsand investmentsof ordinary workers. of Cabet'sstatism and Blanc'sassociationism. drawn Proudhon's proprieurian views, based above all on the Proudhon consistentlycondemned the communistprinciple of distribution Obviously, patriarchalfamily and individual possession,brought him into opposition to according ro needs rather than ability "as unproductive and harassing, communismin all its forms.What madehim seemsocialistic was his hectoring applicable to quite special conditions, its inconveniencesgrowing much more rhetoric, his formulated more for their shock value than for their rapidly than its benefits,... equallyopposed to the advantageoususe of labor slogans substance,and his moral injunctions againstthe exploitationof labor and the and to the liberty of the workman."eThe worker's salvation,he argued,lies in pursuit of profit. But his srong emphasison individual ownership,self-interest, "competitionwhich gives[skill and talent]life."lo One may reasonablywonder basedon ability rather than why Proudhon felt it. necessaryto promote this viewpoint among French contractualmarket relationships,and distribution need-and and communism-all workerswhen bourgeoiseconomists everywhere were alsohailing competi[ion his implacablehostility to associationism were from conven[ionalbourgeois wisdom of as humanity's salvation.Nor is it quite clear that workers, rather than the surprisinglyindistinguishable the his Parisianbourgeoisie, made Proudhon's Gnteral ldea oJ the Revoluhonin the day. Nor means most radical in France, rarely NineteenthCenfiiry (from which the foregoingpassages are taken) a publishing were his acolytes by any the designating but preferring the milder and more socially successupon is appearanceinJuly 1851. themselvesas anarchists acceptable strikes and insurrections The "reciprocity" that Proudhon favoredseems to havebeen nothing more term mutualists.Where houdhon opposed as too coercive,his closest adherentswere only too eager to follow in their than the solid bourgeoisprinciple of equivalence:each Person should receive maitre'spath. Bakunin, who regardedProudhon as a pioneeringtheorist of exactlywhat is his or her due, exclusivelyon the basisof an "equal" exchange anarchism, was nonetheless sharply critical of "Proudhonist individualiss." of commodities.His anarchism,if suchit canbe called,rewarded hard, virtuous Somehoudhoniss, like his heir apparent,Henri Tolain, were actuallyvery toil but made no socialallowance for the careof the weak, infrrm, aged,or even own conservativein not only opposed physically impaired who were unable to perform such toil. These unequal their socialviews. Tolain, a Eue contractarian, civil righs for Deputiesthat presidedover individualswould be left to the ministrationsof charityor, more likely, to care women but sat in the very Chamberof the suppressionof the Paris Commune of 187I, for whidr he was under- by the family, the basic unit of houdhonist social life. There is nothing in standablyreviled by French workers, many of them his former admirers. Proudhon'simage of the good societythat obligesa collectiveconcem for their Given Proudhon'sgradualist approach to socialchange and his opposition fate.The systemic"equalization" of inequalitiesin ability among real people to militant actionsof almost any sort, his ideasrequired major surgerybefore under a communist systemseems, if anything,to have affronted Proudhon, they could be acceptedby neo-Proudhonistsupporters of the ParisCommune sinceit violatedhis sacredPrecept of the exchangeof equivalences. of I87I. What Proudhonist Communardsabsorbed from his work was his The sinew of Proudhon'ssocial vision washis commitmentto contract:not, emphasison federalismas the basic structure of social life, rather than his let it be emphasized,a Rousseauean"social contract" but the mundane strident individualism. Indeed, the dwindling number of Proudhoniss who everyday contracts that uphold the capitalist economy. Only one moral helped establishthe syndicalistmovement in Franceduring the closing decades provisiondistinguished the Proudhonistcontract from the capitalistcontrac[ it t 42 THE RISE OF ARTISANAL SOCIALISM FROM RESTOMTION TO REVOLUTION 43

of the nineteenth century,based on the generalor mass strike, would have upheavalsduring the Restoration,Blanc and Proudhonwere much too young shockedtheu maitre,hadhe not died six yearsbefore the Commune.The factis to havebecome involved in the early revolutionarymovements of the period. that Proudhon's connection with syndicalismrests on an artificially generated Nor did any of them exerciseinfluence among actual French working people, myth. As BernardH. Moss notes, be they artisansor indusrial proletarians,in the 1820s.In fact,what mainly concerned French workers at the end of the decadewas economic difficulties During the height of revolutionarysyndicalism, a cirde of Frendr intellectuals, and the increasinglyrepressive behavior of CharlesX. in opposition to Germanic , sought to define the French socialist radition as Proudhonian. While they found no historicd filiation between Proudhonism and syndicalism,they establishedthe myth of a Proudhonian labor movement, shared by libad and Marxist historians alike, which has THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION never been confirmed by historicalinvestigation. In only one period, the early 1860s,did Proudhonismhave a definite impact upon labor militants, but this The fragility of the BourbonRestoration is perhapsmosr dramaricallyrevealed was in the early stagesof a movementthat soon violatedits preceps in theory by the easewith which NapoleonBonaparte, on his suddenreturn from exilein and practice.The goal of rade socialism,the collectiveownership of indusury Elba,temporarily deposed Louis XMII in the famousone hundred daysof the by trade federations,was incompatible with Proudhon's anarchismof small emperor'srule in 1815.Only the exhaustionof Franceafter Waterloo-the last independent producers. If one is to attach nade socialism to the anarchist batdein the seeminglyinterminable wars associatedwith Bonaparte'sname- tradirion, then it is surely closer to the "collectivist" anarchismof Bakunin gave the Bourbon monarchy any staying power in the counry. than to the individualistic anarchismof Proudhon.ll Francewanted peace-peace from imperial conflicts,as well as peacefrom revolu[ion. The Congress of Vienna that followed Napoleon's defeat-a Although syndicalistswere to borrow certain key ideas from Proudhon, as concert of Europe's principal powers-left no doubt that any renewal of we shall see, libertarian working-class movements, especiallyin Spain, were revolution or warfare on the part of the French would meet with swift obliged to shed Proudhon's essential gradualism and proprietarianism. His repressionand a stern occupation.A Holy Alliance among Prussia,Russia, notion of a low-interestPeople's Bank, which he aied in vain to establish,was and Austria,fashioned by AlexanderI o[ Russiaand Metternichof Austria,was all but dropped from the theoretical armamentariumof anarchism and esublished to forestall any Bonapartistambitions and, more significandy,to syndicalism (see Chapter 32). Later anarchistswere obliged to tum to figures prevent France from once again initiating a revolutionary wave across the like Bakunin and Kropotkin for inspiration,both of whoseoudooks were not Europeancontinent. only collectivistic and communistic but decidedly revolutionary. Yet nothing was farther from the minds of the Frenc-h people than By the I850s, Proudhon'sinlluence on Frenchworkers had declinedto a revolution. Neither the peasantry, who were major recipients of the near vanishing point; his opposition to strikes,his on-off supPort of Louis Revolution'sand Bonaparte'sagrarian policies, nor the bourgeoisie-and least Bonaparte,and other such retreatsfrom his seeminglymilitant stanceleft him, of all the greatfinanciers, its most powerful stratum-wanted a continuationof afterhis deathin 1865,with a dwindling following.Onlybecause anarchists, by war and socialinstability. The rest of Frenchsociety, in tum, had beendrained sorting out ideas that he had left vagueor contradictory turned him into one of by taxes and demands for military sewice. Despite certain technological their saints did his work manageto gain posthumous fame.A number of his advances,indusuy had gained very little from the Napoleonicwars. On the ideas affected the thinking of Tolstoy, Martin Buber, and Gandhi-as well as contrary, the British blockade had appreciablyreduced France'sintemational corporatist tendencieson the right that were to feed into the fascism of marketsand domesticstandard of living, settingback the country'seconomic Mussolini and of Vichy France.In more recent times he has been revivedby developmentfor all strataof the population. anarchistsdrifting toward ","a phrase that may reasonablybe Thus Louis XVIII's nine-yearreign, from I8I5 to 1824,was one of economic considered a contradiction in terms. retrenchment and peaceat any cost. Fat and clumsy, the brother of Louis )(V'l It was not until well after the Revolutionof 1830, when a self-conscious must have lorown he was not loved, not. even by the contemptuous and workers' movement appeared, that Blanqui, Cabet, Buchez, Blanc, and arrogant 6migr6swhom he evenruallyremunerared for the loss of their estates Proudhonwere to becomevoices, to one degreeor another,of a class'oriented during the Great Revolution and who, together with an accommodating social movement.Although both Cabet and Blanqui were participants in local nobility that had arisenunder Napoleon, formed the predominant land-owning t 44 THE RISE OF ARTISANAL SOCIALISM FROM RESTOMTION TO REVOLUTION 45 ruling class during the Restoration.The coun!ryt,in short" needed to catch is revolurionarygovernment but the Directoryand Bonaparte,retained important breath and recovera measureof normality,which a stablemonarchy seemed offices. Louis, in fact" took umbrage at his Chamber of Deputies, whose able to provide. The king, in turn, was shrewd enough to realizethat, while his ulraroyalist convictions were so extreme that" in pursuing monarchical statuswas shaky,the monarchywas desirable,and the better part of wisdom absolutism,it gatheredparliamentary power for iself at the expenseof the was to govern his counry with fairly loose reins. throne's authority, not unlike the notableswho tried to weakenLouis XVI's The economicchanges produced by the Revolution,he realized,could not power in 1789. be undone. Although he remuneratedthe €migr6s,the peasantsand land Finally, litde more than a year afterthe Chamberof Deputiesof I8I5 was speculatorswould nevergive up the holdings they had gained.Nor would the installed,Louis had had enoughof its proscriptivelegislation, and he dissolved bourgeoisie allow the juridical rights it had acquired since 1789 to be the Chambreintrouvable ("Incomparable Chamber," as it was maliciously completely effaced.Yet the very republic that had initiated the new agrarian called).The electionsthat followed returned a majority of moderateroyaliss dispensationand the new individual rights was hardly spoken of in polite who, under variousministries, remained in poweruntil 182I, providingFrance company. Clerics and secular educators saw to it that republicanism was with a period of relativeprosperity and stability. identified with terror, civil war, social insubility, material deprivation, and This quiet period also allowed for a political regroupmentin the Chamberof foreign conflict.Even in the 1820sthere were young men who knew nothing Depuries,yrelding a "Left" composedof reconstructedrepublicans such as the whateverabout the GirondinsandJacobins, including manywhose fathers had aging Marquis de Lafayette,as well as moderate constitutional monarchists been among their strongestadherents. such as Benjamin Constant,Hippolyte Camot (whose father had been an But the old nobility was not to be stilled.The first year of.Louis's reign saw oustanding generalduring the Revolutionand a memberof the Direcrory),and the emergenceof bitter fury on the part of the aristocracy,which soughtredress other men who wereloathed by the ulcaroyalistminority in the Chamber.This for its smoldering grievancesand reprisals againstthe revolutionarieswho had quasi-factional"Left" worked in conjunctionwith the largergroup of moderate driven them from Francea generationearlier. InJuly I8I5 the ostensibly"free" parliamentarians,or "Independents," in the Chamber, including wealthy elections to the Chamber of Deputies,based on a scandalouslyresricted bourgeoiselements such as the bankerJacques Laffitte, the cotton and sugar electorate,brought a vindictive royalist majority (or "ultras," as they were baron Benjamin Delessert,the merchant Temaux, and the entrepreneur called) of 350 legislatorsout of 420 to power. A "white terror" ensuedthat CasimirP6rier. placed stringent restrictions on the press and removed innumerable The moderateor liberal governmentsof theseyears provided the country Bonapartiss from the bureaucracyand other public offices.Thousands of with sufficienteconomic prosperity to keep the bourgeoisieand the working highly qualified officials-from the municipal level, through the departmental, classfairly quiescenl Although the wrangling benveenthe liberal coalition and to the highest national offices-were sent into a counterrevolutionarylimbo, the uluaroyalistsin the Chamber of Deputiescontinued, it was not serious where they were left to seethe in fury against their old opponents. Special enough to be of major concem to the lower classes.France was still ruled by military tribunals were establishedthroughout the country that deliverednot landowners.The nobility and its minions exercisedtheir most effecrivepower only prison but deathsentences. Even Marshall Ney, Napoleon's most popular through the prefecs and subprefectswho administered the departments,the commander,who had receivedapeerage from Louis XVIII but defectedto the provincial judges, and the municipal hirelings who genuflected before their emperor during the "hundred days," was executedafter a rial in the Chamber agrarianmasters. craftsmen and peasants,living in their own self+nclosed of Peers. world, were indifferent to a national regime over which they had no influence Louis XVIII, however,was still committed to making compromiseswith whatever.The electoralbase for the chamber of Depurieswas brazenly limired to socialchanges that he knew could not be undonewithout plunging the country well-to-do individuals who paid a minimum of 300 francs in taxes-which meant into civil war. Evenbefore Napoleon's "hundred days,"Louis had adoptedthe that only t 10,000our of a population of about nine million adults had the right Charter of 1814, or drarte, which allowed for a carefullyselected hereditary to vore. But Chamberof Peers,an electedChamber of Depucies,and guaranteesof equality this basicallystable situarion came ro an end in 1820,when the Duke of Berri, beforethe law and freedomsof expression,conscience, and worship,as well as the king's nephew, was assassinated,unleashing a furious royalist backlash. the inviolability of citizens from arbirary arrest and seizure of property. The Louis, who was also outraged,restricted the franchiseeven further by NapoleonicCode, which had rationalizedthe counory'slegal system,was kept establishing the so-called "double vote," according to which the inuct, and gifted men like Tallegand, who had served not only the early wealthiest quarter of the electorate-about 25,000 men-were given the 46 THE RISEOFARTISANAL SOCTALISM FROM RESTOMTION TO REVOLUTION 47

exclusiveright to select165 deputiesout of the 265 chosenby the "general" The king is the supremehead of rhe state.He commandsthe land and sea electoratefor the Chamber.(In the electionsof 1823 the ultraswere to gain forces, declareswar, makes treaties of peace, alliance, and commerce, a huge legislative majority-not only by means of the new franchise appointsall public officials,and makesall regulationsand ordinancesfor the restrictions, but because local notables, state-appointedprefects of the executionof the laws, and the securityof the state.l2 departments,and local ultra thugs engagedin crassmanipulation and fraud to assuretheir victory. They did not hesitateto use the names of dead Under Louis, all of these royalist formulations had been regardedas mere royalists to pack the electoral lists in support of their candidates.That the rhetoric that assertedFrance's monarchical status. But Article 14 waswaiting in elections were blatandy rigged was a widely known fact to which the the wings, at the disposalof any authoriurian monarchwho.might chooseto government turned a blind eye.) exercise it And it was precisely such a monarch, " aided by an In l82I Louis XVIII replacedthe moderateministry of Eli Decazeswith one entourageof unforgiving ulcas, who took control of the French throne upon presidedover by the extremelyreactionary Count of Villile, the leader of the the death of Louis in 1824. ultraroyalistsin the Chamberof Deputies.fu presidentof the king's council, If Louis likely knew he was not beloved, Charles ar leasr should have Villdle floateda stateloan to further recompense6migr6s and otherswho had suspectedthat most of the French people thoroughly detestedhim. Only the lost their lands during the Republic-a gesture that many peasant and most fanaticalulrras of the dmigrdpopulation and their offspring-those who bourgeoiswho had purchasedbiens nationar,rx in the 1790sfeared might lead to abominated the Revolurion and republicanismin any form-rallied around the a wholesalerestoration of the old noble estates.His ministry suoked the new king, feeding his worst fears of revolutionary conspiracies.fucending the Catholic Church by making obeisancesto its authority, grving it emoluments throne at the age of sixty-seven,Charles had been an 6migr6 for rwenty-five and an enhancedstatus as "the religion of Frenchmen."Above all, it increased years as the Count of futois. Having left France as early as 1789, he clerical control over education,which createdwidespread uneasiness among subsequentlyplotted with Bourbon loyaliss abroadagainsr the Republic,the many secularcitizens, especially those who had benefitedfrom the sale of Directory,and the Empire.ln 1824,once Charlesbecame king, he and Villdle Church lands during the Revolution. Restricrions,including unbridled acs of matched each other like a royal hand and a perfectly fitting ministerial glove. censorship,were placed on the liberalpress; the term of servicefor membersof But evenwithin the limited and wealthy electorateon which Villdle basedhis the Chamberof Deputieswas extendedfrom four to sevenyears; and to the authority,a major split soonappeared. Many voters felt that the presidentof the fury of liberals who still claimed some filiations with the causeof freedom, king's council was spinning too far to the right, while the zealousultras in the French troops were used in support of the Spanishmonarchy against Spanish legislaturefelt that he was not going far enough.By 1827VillEle had alienated revolurionariesduring the peninsularuprising of 1823.His ministry spanning his ulra supporters as much as his liberal opponenrsin the Chamber,making it Louis's and CharlesX's reigns,Villdle personifiedthe new Chambreretrouvde, difficult, if not impossible, for his minisry to govem the country effectively. much to the approvalof the reactionaryultras. Although it is difftcuh ro see how he could have hoped to realign French Under Villdle, the Right could alsosettle its scoreswith its liberal opponents political life in his favor, he was obliged to urge Charles to call new elecrions. by making use of loopholes in the Charte of 181'1 that favored the king. The liberals, in turn, had learned only too well that they had to organizear a Although nearly all deputies avowed their allegiance to the document, its grassrootslevel to prevent more outrageouselectoral malfeasances from the preambleaverred that the monarchhad grantedit "volunurily" to France,"by right. In 1827 lawyers,journalists, and the editors of the liberal periodicalLe the free exerciseof our royal authority."This phrasecoupled the Charteto the Globecreated a public supervisoryand educarionalgroup with the nameAide- will of the monarch,who theoreticallycould rescindit just as freelyas he had toi, le ciel t'aidera("God helps those who help rhemselves,"or more loosely, "self-help"), granted it. Additionally, the Charteaverred that the governmentministers were to disencumberthe forthcoming elections of manipulation by "responsible,"but to whom-the king or the Chamberof Deputies?-it did not notables and royal prefects.A large network of. Aide-ni committeeswas specify.Thus ministerialresponsibility seemed to float freelyin the air, at the established all over France to oversee the electoral lists, obstruct ultra discretionof the king, as the ultras claimed,or the Chamberof Deputies,as the interferencein voting assemblies,and propagandizevoters in support of opposicionclaimed. Finally, the Aarte containeda stipulation,Article l'1, that liberal candidates.Their highly effecriveactiviries successfullyaugmented the gave the king the authority to dispatch the entire consdfudonal systemat will, number of liberal voterswho participaredin the elecrionsof November 1827, should he choose: reducing the ulras in the Chamberro a small bloc of 60 to 80, as againstl8O liberals.VillBle resigned and wasreplaced by a the liberalviscounr of Martignac t ,'8 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM FROM RESTOMTION TO REVOLUTION 49

(albeit officially as the minister of interior rather than as president of the avowalof adherenceto the charte,the king at heartwas a devoutsupporter of council, leavingthe king free to run the ministry as he chose). the traditional institutions and valuesof the ancien r6gime:tt e quasi-reudat The liberal victory in 1828 had causesthat went far beyond ultra political nobility, the moral authority of the catholic church, and the absolure intransigencealone. Since 1827 and evensince 1825 in the north, Francehad supremacyof the monarch over all other insritutions of the realm. Almost economic crisis. Especiallyin north, bad been sinking into a deepseated the blind to the socialchanges in Francesince the GreatRevolurion, he retainedan hawests,particularly of grain and of potatoes,deprived indusrial workers and unswerving commitment to the very views that had sent his brother Louis )(vl the poor of staple foods. These shortages,combined with a major financial to the scaffoldseveral decades earlier. (partly crisis and unemployment due to imports of cheap British iron), Perhapsno king was less suited to occupy the French rhrone than charles, deepenedthe popular hared of VillEle and Martignacand stokedwidespread whosesocial vision extendedno further than that of his guillotinedbrother. His cases of the king. Textile riots and denunciations of the regime--in some unreconstructedworldview stood in flat opposition to the discontentof the workers in Normandy and Alsace were either thrown out of work owing to liberals,who felt in varyingdegrees rhat France had yet to catchup with Briuin These foreign imports or suffered cuts in their already low wages. economic as a consdrudonalmonarchy. If the French king regardedliberal views as jobs, afflictionsinduced further riocing,and many cityworkers,having lost their political heresy, indeed outrighr treason, the liberals and their various were obliged to return to the villages from which they had drifted in supporters,even moderate royalists, regarded the king as a political retrograde, economicallymore halcyon days.Although the workers most deeply affectedby with a chilling incapaciry ro srabilize rhe counrry, stili less io rule it. the the economiccrisis had no stakein the political world that denied them In 1829,when the minisrer,Marrignac, attempted to allayliberal hostility to vote, their actions unnenred all the middle and upper classesof the counry, the crown by abolishing press censorship and curbing Jesuit control of inspiring fearsof a new socialupsurge by the lower classes. education,the king replacedhim withJules Armand,the prince of polignac-a interestin And for good reason:the 1820shad seena revivalof srong public reactionaryso extremeand a catholic so devout that he flatly refusedto take and even the GreatRevolution. Memoirs by participantshad begun to appear, the constitutional oath to obey rhe charte. The polignac ministry and the journalist , a gifted for the liberal press,published his Histnirede Chamberof Deputieswere now on a direct collision course.Even a bloc of la revolutionJrangatse between 1823 and 1827, which dealt sympathetically royalistsled by FranqoisRendde chateaubriand,a prominent romanricwriter with the Convention, even trying to account for the Terror objectively,despite of the day, angrily defectedfrom the ulua camp,leaving the king with a hostile the author'spredilection for constitutionalmonarchy. Uterate young peoplefor majority againstthe ministry.The liberalpress, in turn, particularlyLe National, whom the Revolution had been shrouded in mystery could now become raised a howl againstthe new regime, comparing charles with JamesII of acquaintedwith the eventsof 1789 to 1794,and they did so with genuinezesl England,the monarchwhose harsh reacrionism had inducedthe Englishruling The death of Napoleonin his St. Helenaexile in 182I, moreover,rendered classesto unseathim in the "Glorious Revolution"of 16gg. the emperor a safesubject for public adulation as well, adding to the fascination Nor was the comparisonbetween the late stuarts and the late Bourbons with France'srevolutionary past. A flood of memoirs by Bonapartistswere unwarranted.In England,after cromwell's protectorate,the compliantcharles in form published, and memorabilia from the erabefore Waterloo, generally the II had been succeededby his brother JamesII, whose absolutismled to the of insignias,songs, and busts of the emperor,became popular consumeritems. definitive end of the stuart kings. In FranceLouis XVIII, who had seemed. Napoleon,reviled by the Bourbon monarchy as a "monster," now becamea willin_sto compromise,was succeeded by the unbendingreacrionary charles X. for popular hero, initiating the Napoleoniclegend that was to haunt France A replayof 1789 now appearedto be in the offing.when a shufflingof cabinet republican and generations.The govemment was continually on the watch for positions and some feeble attemps by charles to limit the chamber of to Bonapartist conspiracies,whose importance VillEIe cynically exaggerated Depudes' legislative agenda to safe budgetary issues failed to quell the from retain his hold on his royalist consrituency.In reality, the danger discontent,it becameclear that the king haveto resort to his Article 14 republicans and Bonapartistswas negligible during the Villdle and Martignac powersand take dictatorialcontrol of the-ould state to annul the legislativepowers ministries,but as the l,82Osdrew to their end, exaggerationsof their danger of the Chamber. growing public senseof socialcrisis. In a threatening added to a , addresson March 2 to a packedmeeting of the legislaturein In fact, it was Charleshimself who was the immediatesource of the crisis. the Louwe, the king significantly denounced"criminal Iganst the The king, ever mindful of 1789, viewed the growing miliuncy of the liberal govemmentand issuedwamings that he would "maintain-"In".ru"rr" public oid.er."To press and liberal organizationsas evidenceof a looming revolution. Despitehis this announcement the Chamber defiantly drafted ,h"rp reply. ..The " 50 THERISE OF ARTISANAL SOCIALISM FROMRESTOMTION TO REVOLUTION5T 5. Louis Blanc,organisation permanentaccord" between the wishesof the peopleand the government,the du travair,quoted in Harry w. Laidler, History (NewYork Thomis y oJ Sociarbm liberal deputiesdecided to sayro the king, "doesnot now exist," people Croweil,196g), p. ;3. il io g rra verysimilar discussion and the CritiqueoJ the Gothaprogram. in his viewed his regime as "a threat.to their liberties."I3After two days of secret 6. Pierre-Josephproudhon, Generar rdea of the Rewrutionin the Nineteenthcentury discussionby the Chamberover the reply,22I depuriesvored ro support the (1851)'trans.John Beverry Robinson rr-o"a6n'-ptutopress, rs8si, pp i;;-d,l. The reply,and l8I voted against. mufualistwas minted bv word thesilk weav..r oiiy"nr, *no wagedtwo greatinsurrections the early I830s, lone proudh;;;;."; in The die was now cast between the king and the Chamber. Further before prominence.They used denote a kind the term ro of guil-dcommunrli; rh;;;.;;, therr negotiations,in which the king averred that his "resolvesare unalterable," than own experience,rather f.oro tiie rl.i, or any orher ,fiL::"t endedin predicuble collapse,after which, on March 19, Charlesdissolved the 7' GeorgeLichtheim, "ip.""ohon The originsoJ Sociarkm(New york Frederick praeger, Iegislature,amid furious liberal cries of 'Yive la charte!" and exultant royalist p. 90. A 1969), '\ive criesof le roi!" The constitutionwas now unmistakablypitted againstthe 8. Proudhon,General ldea of the Revolution,pp. g3_4. arbitrary authority of an absolutistmonarch. 9. Ibid, pp. 84-5. Although the king had dismissedthe Chamberof Deputies,rhe July 1830 10.Ibid, p. 89. electionretumed a new chamber with a greatlyincreased 1I' BemardH. Moss.The,origins liberal opposition, of the FrenchLabor Moyement, 1g30-i9i4: The socialism of Shilledworhers lBerkergy ind I-ts from 22I to 274-reelecting 201 of the 22I defiantdepuries from the preuous engera: u;iversity ch-ir".ri. pi.rr,' uzoy, pp. 6-7' Among the "circle of Frenchi"t.tt.7iu"[;*tto "rproudhonism legislature-as againsta mere 145 for the king's ministry.To deepenthe crisis, gaie -'*-" thr*"" s]mdicalist spin, Moss citesJules L. puech,Gaeran plrou, onJuly 25 ani V"aximef-eroy. the monarchand his supportingcouncil issued five ordinances,four 12. Quoted in David H |,lll.y, The French Rrvolutionof 1g30(princeton, NJ.: of which amountedto a defacto cancellation of theCharte's provisions for limited PrincetonUniversity press, 1972),'p. lln. constitutional govemment One ordinance annulled the new election by 13.Quoted in ibid.,p. 20. dissolvingthe new Chambereven before it had an opportunity to convene, while anotherreduced the elecroratefor depuuesto includeonly the wealthiest, generallylanded men of the realm,disenfranchising most businessmen, lawyers, and professionals.Still another ordinance required editors and printers to acquirepreliminary authorizationbefore publishing any periodical,subject to reviewevery three months, essentially suspending freedom of the press. To the liberalsand many moderareroyalists, as well as the politically aware public, the ordinances-essendallymonarchical decrees-amounted to noth- ing less than a reactionarycoup d'6tat that effectivelynullified the charte of 1814.By turning back the clock to the daysof Louis XVI, rhefive ordinances,so peremptorilyissued by Charles,opened the door to revolution.

NOTES

1. Amold Rtge, ZweiJahre in Paris (Leipzig, 1846), quoted in David Mclellan, : HrsLife and Thought(New York Harper and Row, 1973),p. 62. 2. Louis Chevalier,Laboing Classesand DangerousClasses in ParisDunng theFirst Half of the NineteenthCentury, trans. Frank Jellinik (Princeton:Princeton University Prisi, 1973),p. 189. 3. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Recollectionsof Aleis de Tocqueville,trans. Alexander Teixeirade Mattos (New York: Macmillan,1896), p. 163. 4. LouisAugusteBlanqui, Critique socialc (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1885), quoted in Alan B. Spitzer,The RrvolutionaryTheories oJ Louis Auguste Blanqui (New York: AMS Press,1970), pp. r05 and 108. THE REVOLUTIONOF I83O 53

him that his police forcesmight soon be neededto curb public violence.Many liberals and royalists in their country homes learned about the king's coup d'etatfrom visitors streamingin panic from the capital.The public that did not subscribeto the Moniteurheard the news in reading rooms and caf6s.The leading and lesser lights of the Parisianbusiness, journalistic, and political communitiesnervously gathered-in small numbers or large-to discussthe implicarions of the king's action, fearful of acung in a manner that would cHAPTER24 The Revolution of 1830 destabilizethe monarchy. Reportsthat were later published suted rhar owners of printing establish- ments had closed their shops to protest the restrictivepress ordinance,but theseaccounts have no basisin reality.The esublishmentsthat did closedown seemto havedone so more becausethey fearedprosecution by the authorities than as a "strike" againstthe king's directives.In short, the middle classes None of the Ieading liberals, still less the ultras, had any suspicion that behavedwith the characteristiccowardice that markedtheir behaviorin the face induce Paris in revolution.Nor Charles'scoup d'€ut would to explode did the of any assaulton their freedoms. opposition factions in the Chamberof Deputieshave any desire to see the Initially, in fact, the Parisianpublic seemedro be quite indifferent to the return of armedmasses-so redolentof thejournees of the GreatRevolution- coup.Monday,July 26, was a very hot day and, for workersin cerrainrrades, a with their capacityfor violenceagainst the well-to-doand againstproperty. In holiday.Large crowds flocked out of doors, seekingrelief from the sweltering 1830,bourgeois and nobles were still alive who could vividly recall the great weather.They were not protestors,let aloneinsurgents, and seemedcompletely massesof sans-culotteswho had stormedthe Bastille,batded the king's uoops in indifferent to the king's ordinances,which, after all, affectedonly a small well- the LuxembourgGarden, and roaredapprovingly at the drop of the guillotine's to-do minority of the populauon.Journaliss and editors from a variety of blade.Yet despiterumors that the king might use his futicle 14 powers to act periodicals,to be sure,did flock to the officesof the moderateNational, which sternlyagainst the new, more liberal Chamberof Deputies,the full scopeof his publisheda protest callingupon the peopleof Francero refusero pay taxes(a repressiveplans was virtually unknown to anyone outside the circle of his futile gesturethat wasnot obeyed).Once the excitedgathering at the National's closestministers. The new ordinanceshad been composedin such complete officesmanaged to sort itself out, it establisheda committeeto draw up a secrecythat Polignackept the sole copy of them on his own person, even protest against the ordinances.Written by rhe young Adolphe Thiers, a refusingto place them in a locked drawerin his desk. constitutionalmonarchist, it vaguelycalled for disobediencein responseto the Nor did Charlesneed to be convincedby any of his ministersthat he had to king's action. After great deal of bickering, the document was srgnedby act forcefully against the opposition in the Chamber. According to one ^ joumalists and editors of elevenleading periodicals in the capiral,bur beyond recollection,the king, who soon left for his summerresidence at Saint-Cloud, this gesture,none of the meetings that ensued in the late afternoon and firmly declaredon signingthe ordinances:"The more I think aboutit the more evening,or even the following day, could produce agreementon a concrete I am convincedthat it is impossibleto do otherwise."l form of action. In the meantime, the king, his ministers, and officials in various governmentaldepartments rested in the serenebelief that the ordinances would evokevery litde public response.None of the commandinggenerals in ..THREE DAYS'' GLORIOUS the country'smilitary districtswere ordered to mobilize any troops,nor were any special measurestaken to prepare the police for public disorders.On But if the king was resolute, his liberal opponents were not. For them, the Monday the king, confident that the country was indifferent ro his coup, publication the ordinances-in the Moniteur on 26-arrived like offrcial of July followed his normal daily routine: he attendedmorning massand then went sending them scurrying around, disoriented, to the homes and a thunderclap, hunring with the dauphin.In rhe eveningthe royal party returnedto the palace, Even the commander of the Parisian Gendarmerie editorial offices of their allies. where they dined and spent the eveningplaying cards. was taken completely by surprise, no one in the ministry had seen fit to inform As for the holiday crowdsin the streets,they too were quiescentfor most of 54 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM THE REVOLUTIONOF I83O 55

that Monday,July 26. Not evenprinters, faced with the loss of work, who took Parisians,Marmont wasparticularly detested for abandoningNapoleon in April to the streetsin angry protest, could persuadepassersby to join them. But 1814 and defectingto the Allies.In fact"his very namehad becomea synonym whatevercatalyst it is that turns mildly curious crowds into protestorsand (a "Ragusard")for "opportunist" and "traitor." The duke reactedforcefully to protestorsinto insurrectionarieswas very much at work on Mondayevening. In the shootings by sending out the entire Parisian garrison-royal guards, the garden of the PalaisRoyal, a small crowd gatheredbefore a print shop to gendarmes,and troops of the line-to occupy the capiul's major squaresand read some versesposted in the window, when police officersarrived to close avenues-a provocative action that only stoked the crowd's fury. down the esublishment,presumably because of an offenseit had committed Finally, on Tuesday,July 27, the sporadic demonsrarionsignited into a againstthe new pressrestrictions. fu the curiouscrowd multiplied in number, wrdespreadinsurrection. To slow down the movementof Marmont'scolumns it becameunruly, booing the officersand shouting,"Long live the Chartet"and, toward their prescribed destinarions,barricades were reared all over the striking a new and dangerousnote, "Down with the Bourbons!"An enrirely working-classdistrics in the centralpart of the right bank, where most of the spontaneousdemonstration sprang up. The gendarmes,trained for crowd governmentbuildings were located.By seveno'clock in the evening,the troops control, arrivedin force,arrested eight resisting demonstrators, and dearedthe were indiscriminately using their firearmsagainst crowds that pelted them with gardenand closedis gates. srones, adding to the toll of the revolution's martyrs. At nvilight, far from But the crowd did not disperse-indeed, it reformed in the squareof the diminishing, the crowds swelled,using the cover of night to ransackgun shops. PalaisRoyal. A number of riotersran up the Ruede Rivoli,breaking streetlamps Systematicallyblotting out the streetlamps,they plunged the insurrectionary and shouting denunciationsof the ministry,singling out Polignacin particular pars of the capitalinto total darkness,enabling them to build their defenses for condemnation.When the crowd reachedthe Ministry of Finance,it became and frnd weaponswith impunity. violent, throwing stones at the guards and breaking office windows. Still The crowd behaved with remarkablejudiciousness and discrimination another group, chanting denunciationsof the ordinances,marched Past the toward the various armed forces deployed againstthem, probably because Ministry ofJustice,where Polignac and four of his ministerswere conferringon many of the older insurrectionarieswere veterans of the NapoleonicWars and how to control the growing unrest.After moving off to the main boulevards,it werepossessed of a degreeof political consciousness.They realized that in this dispersed.ny midnight, in fact,the city was deceptivelycalm, and the Prefectof situation the loyalties of the troops of the line-ordinary soldiers-were Policereported that tranquillity had been restored.Small-scale riots had been uncertain,as those of the hated gendarmesand royal guardswere not. If the seenbefore in Paris,and the authoritiesthought they had no reasonto view crowdbehaved well toward the soldiers,they might crossover to the sideof the theseones with any alarm. people. Shrewdly they raised the cry, "Long live the line! Down with the But a major insurrecdonwas in the offing.On the moming of Tuesday,June gendarmesand the guard!" Demonstratorsstayed at their barricadesuntil 27, crowds more menacingthan thoseof the day beforebegan to collectin the aroundten o'clock,when theybegan to retum home for the night. By midnight, streetsand squaresof the Faubourg Saint-Antoine,the crucible of Parisian the crowdshad all but disappeared.The authorities,thinking the lull meantthe journdesduring the Great Revolution,while bands of printers roamed the end of resistance,reduced their troop levels to mere streetpatrols near the streetsof the capital,calling on workers to support.their protest.fu the Palais Tuileriesand the Placede la Bastille,while Marmont assuredthe imperturbable Royal filled once againwith angry crowds,the police tried to closethe gates, king that the uprising had been snuffedout. scatteringprotestors into the surrounding squaresand streets.The mounted But on Wednesdaymorning, July 28, the crowdsreappeared in full forcein gendarmes,whom the authoritieshad sent to the squareto prevent further the centraldistricts. Indeed, they were even more numerous and threatening,as uouble, themselvesprovoked unrest:irritated by the heat and losing patience Marmont newously reported,than they had been before.They were building with the taunting crowds, they began to fire on the people. Faully, the evermore elaboratebarricades in evergreater earnest-felling trees,pulling up governmenthad spilled blood, and the bodiesof the revolution'sfirst martyrs paving stones,and overturningwagons and market stalls to constructthem. were paraded through the streetswith cries of "Death to the ministers!"and Troops that ried to passthrough the insurrectionaryanondissements met with "Deathto Pohgnac!" furiousresistance. In the narrow streetsadjoining the squaresand boulevards, What had begun as protestsand scatteredriots soon turned into an armed the columns were blocked by one barricadeafter anotheralong their lines of confrontationbetween the governmentand especiallythe workersof Paris.The advance.Each time they were halted, they were exposedto fire from insurgent king reacted to the gendarmerie'sshootings by appointing Auguste de rnusketsin adjacenthouses and to barragesof paving stones,fumiture, and Marmont, Duke of Raguse,to command the security forces.Among most tiles from the rooftops. Even when the troops succeededin demolishinga t 56 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM THE REVOLUTIONOF I83O '7 barricade,a new one would quickly spring up in their rear, trapping them, so most of the Swisshad to fight their way back to the outskirtsof the city, once that they were sandwichedwithin the narrow streetsand caughtin murderous againbanaged by fire from nearby buildings and narrow streets. crossfire. Finally, lacking food, drink, and even ammunition,Marmont's forces grew At around elevena.m. a crowd in the Placede Grdveoverwhelmed the guard ever more demoralized.The widespreadrevolt of the populacenow seemed post before the Hdtel de Ville, forced open the gates,and invaded the aged beyond their power to vanquish.At length,before Wednesday was out, nearly labyrinthine building, causingthe prefect to flee.The National Guard,which all the key govemmentareas had fallen into insurgenthands, leaving only a Charleshad disbandedin 1827 as a politicallyunreliable force, reappeared and singleroute open to troop movements.The columns that Marmont had sent occupiedthe city hall. Atop the building, in the centralcupola, they replaced into strategicareas during the previous day were thinned out not only by the white Bourbon flag with the outlawedtricolor as a symbol of revolutionary casualtiesbut-perhaps more imporundy-by a steadyflow of defections.The victory. Indeed,in one of their most inspired actions,the insurgentsraised the loyalty of entire regimentswas now totally unreliable.Units that had managed tricolor on a tower of Notre Dame as well, where it could be seenby most ro passthrough the barricadedstreets found that they were confinedto mere residentsof the city. The soldiersof the line, surroundedby friendly crowds, plazas,a few broad avenues,and governmentbuildings, while the maze of beganto fraternizewith the workers.By noon Marmont,hearing reports of this srreetssurrounding them were held fast by the insurgents.Attemps by dangerousdevelopment, sent out his troopsin largerunits, in order to prevent Marmont'stroops to subduethe denselypopulated areas that surroundedthe small groups of soldiersfrom defecting.Battalion- and regiment-sizedcolumns seatsof governmentwere met with fiercebut calculatedresistance, and eventhe supportedby artillery thus salliedforth to reclaimthe city's center,its strategic neighborhoodsthat Marmont'stroops had apparentlyconquered were quickly avenues,and the H6tel de Ville. Despitesome short-lived advances, the results reclaimedafter the soldiersmoved on. were disastrousfor the Bourbon monarchy. By Thursday,July 29, the army had essentiallybeen defeated.Even units of The Napoleonicveterans seem to haveprovided the insurgentswith a degree the normally reliable Royal Guards now refused to fight the populace. of tacticalflexibility that was lacking among their opponents'officers. A direct Moreover,any fears that loyal troops from the provinces would arrive to confrontationon an open battlefieldwould havesurely led to their defeat,but reinforcethe Parisiangarrison were dispelledas the provincialsen route not from the roofs and windows of their own apartmentbuildings, the insurgents only refusedto supply the troops with food and drink but evenattacked them could rain tiles and pavdsas well as bullets onto the hated guards and along the roads. What remainedof Marmont's forceson this last day of the gendarmerie.With their intimate knowledgeof their mazelikeneighborhoods, insurrectionwere either withdrawn to the outskirts of the city or fled of their they could establish communication links between barricadesand srong- own accord. "three points, transforminglarge parts of the city into one vastrevolutionary fortress. Some2,000 people had died during the gloriousdays," from Tuesday Troops were lured into confusingblind alleys and intricate passageswhere, to Thursday.The overwhelmingmajority, some 1,800, were artisans, principally despite their superior anns and uaining, they were placed on the defensive carpentersand joiners, cabinetmakers,stonemasons, shoemakers, locksmiths, jewelry makers,printers, and tailors.The middle classesdo not seemto have against the knowledgeableand agile insurgents.By July 29, a travelerwho played walked from the northem part of Paristoward the centerof the citywould have a consequential role in the fighting, judging from claims for compensation encounteredbarricades on nearly everystreet, at intewals of thirty feet or so, that wounded insurgents put in to the Commission des R6compenses someof formidablesize. Rareties during the GreatRevolution, more barricades Nationalesafter the uprising. During the street fighting class divisions were rearedin 1830 than in any Parisianinsurrection before or since. had been marked,even in singlebuildings, let aloneneighborhoods. July Well-to-do Everywhere insurgent sniper fire took its demoralizing toll. Some royalists who rented apartments on the lower floors of the tenemenb, commanders,especially those of the Swiss mercenaryunits in the Royal for example,provided food and drink for the troops rrying to suppressthe insurrection,while Guard,were unfamiliar with the winding streeb,alleys, and culde-sacsof Paris, the workers who lived on the upper floors fought the so that their forces lost nearly all communication with nearby troops. Even same troops with weaponsand stones from their windows and roofs.fu David protectivestructures proved to be traps.The SwissGuards seeking to retakethe H. Pinkneysardonically observes: H6tel de Ville from the National Guards found themselveshopelessly In the so-called surroundedby armed crowds in the Placede Grive and fired upon from the Bourgeois Revolurion of 1830 the middle and upper bourgeoisiewere building. When the Swiss finally succeededin taking the city hall, they soon either immune to bulles or absentfrom the firing line. Immunity found that they could get no reinforcements or supplies. Ordered to depart, is improbable,however, for some bourgeoismet their ends as 5E THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM THE REVOLUTIONOF I83O 59

uninvolved bystanders.... On the ... list of dead [compiled by the Commission,he ensured that the commission was the sole administrative Commissiondes R€compenses Nationalesl were one doctor and one teacher power in Paris.Like the chamber of Deputies,the commission favored the but no bankers, no lawyers, no deputies,no publishers or journalists, establishmentof a liberal consritutionalmonarchy along the British parliamen- although one source listed one journalist dead.A few from this classdo tary model. But who would fill the requiredrole of monarch?The choicewas figure among the wounded and other combatants-four doctors, one made not by the insurrecrionariesbut by the banker Laffitte, his journalist lawyer, and eight teachersbut no joumalists,no publishers,no deputies- colleagueThiers, and the historian FranqoisGuizot, who formed a cabal to and all combined thea numbers do not even approach the number of promote the candidacyof Louis-Philippe,the Duke of Orleans.The duke was masons or of cabinetmakersalone. The tophatted bourgeois on the the son of Louis XVI's rival, Philippe Egdir6, who during the Great Revolurion barricadein Ferdinand Delacroix's"Liberty Leading the People" scarcely had abandonedhis lofty title ro supporr the First Republic. deserveshis conspicuousplace, certainly not as a symbol of his kind in this Egalit€'srenunciation, however, had not savedhim from the guillotine,a fate perilous spot.2 that madehis son, Louis-Philippe,all the more prudent. The Orleanists,as his supporterswere called,and the republican"men of order" such as Lafayette, who upheld the leadershipof the Municipal Commission,feared that any republic would necessarilybecome a terroristicJacobin regime.Laffitte and THE UNRESOLVEDREVOLUTION Thiers thereupon entered into negotiationsto bring Louisphilippe to the throne under the tide "citizen king" or, more absurdly, the "king of the In the week that followed the uprising, the defeatedking and his entourage barricades"-despitethe fact that during the streetfighting the Duke of orleans departedParis, drifting slowly to the Channelpors and exile in England.To had abandonedthe embattled capital for his safe retreat at Neuilly. In the replace him, journaliss, publishers, deputies, and, above all, dispossessed political labyrinth after the insurrection,posters all over Pariswere hailing him Bonapartistbureaucrats and officerswere only too eagerto use the popular as the most suitablesuccessor to Charles-a propagandaenterprise guided by uprising carried on and won by the workers of Paris to erect a regime that Thiers and apparentlyfinanced by Laffitte.Finally, with the guidanceof his would be sympatheticto their own interestsand prestige. Iiberaladvisers, none of whom had beenactive participants in the uprising,the As we have seen, the Parisianliberals were republicansof various hues, duke began to sidle his way roward the throne. someof them ostensiblyJacobinin spirit. OnJuly 29 theywere still nervously What finally validatedLouis-Philippe as a king "surroundedby republican debatingthe courseof the revolution,rather than leadingit on the barricades. institu[ions"(as his supporterswere to put it) wasLafayette's public embraceof But with the collapse of the royal defenseof the city, they hastily draped him at the H6rel de ville onJuly 31. Lesr rhe crowd that gatheredourside- themselves in the old tricolor and, joining with the constitutional which seemedto prefer a republic-get out of control and act on its own, monarchists, took the step of choosing a Municipal Commission, with Lafayette,as Chateaubriandtells us in his memoirs,"gave the Duc d'Orleansa membersincluding Pdrier,the banker. Chargedby the subdued Chamberof tricolor flag, wenr out on the balcony of the H6tel de Ville, and embracedthe Deputies to provision and defend the capital and mainuin order, this Prince before the eyes of the astoundedcrowd, while the Duke waved the Commission-and it noticeably did not call itself a Commune, as nadonalflag." one of the more principledroyalists, chateaubriand sardonically revolutionary tradition prescribed-installed iself in the H6tel de Ville and concludes:"The republicankiss of Lafayettecreared a king."3 Far began to sort out the extent of its authority. . from exhibiting any reluctance,Lafayette was only too willing to accept The miliury power in Paris now consisted of two forces: the unorganized the duke as a monarch, a crassbetrayal of the hopes of many of th1 workers armed workers and the National Guard.As the only organizedmilitary force in who had made the l83o Revolurion.Indeed, chateaubriand'saccount takes Paris,the Guard was commandedby a constitutionalmonarchist" the Marquis norc of the astonishmentof the crowd at the action, not the "cheers" that de Lafayette,who, in his dubious transformationinto a republicanleader, had somehistorians attribute to them.Thus, Lafayetteonce againshowed himself assiduouslyundertaken the job of holding at bay the more radical tendencies to be a cons[itutional monarchist whose commitment to a republican among the republican students, workers, National Guards, and Bonapartists. Sovernmentwas largely rhetorical. Soon thereafter,nearly everyonein the Among the disorganizedforces of the worker-insurgents,there was no potential new governmentapparently wanred to be rid of this relic of I7g9. After being leader who could match Lafayette'sprestige and repuurion. Thus when grantedthe vacuoustide of "Honorary commanding-Generalof the National l-afayetteordered the muskets of the National Guard to back up the Municipal Guard of the Kingdom," which the seventy-three-yeai-oldmarquis consid,ered

L _.". THE REVOLUTIONOF 1830 6T 60 THERISE OF ARTISANAL SOCIALISM that had plaguedher in the late I820s and early I830s and beganto enjoy a an insult, he resignedfrom his commandand virtuallydisappeared from the period of relativeprosperitY. scene. political But the new electorallaw of April f831, heraldedas an Orleanistreform On August 9, scarcelya week after Laf.ayette'sdemonstrative blessing, measure,still deprivedthe vastmajority of adultsof the franchise:only 166,000 Louis-philippe,with the agreementof the Chambersof Deputiesand Peers, out of 9 million adults were able to meet the 200-franccens ttal made them *", .ro*n"d sovereign.th" .orotrttion, which took place at the Palais eligible to vote. "The situation may have been even worse than the figures (the seat of ihe Chatnber),was deliberatelymarked by an almost Bourbon notes Priscilla RoberSon, "but at any rate small and middling to Charles'sornate ceremonyat the show," puritanicai simplicity, in stark contrast and professionalclasses "the of businessmenwere excluded along with the learned Cathedralof Rheims.ln a largely civil ceremonythat referred to will and,of course,the workersand peasants."5Disqualified Frenchmen could look rarher rhan "divine right," the new monarch pledged to uphold the people" envy across the Channel, where the Reform Bill of 1832, for all its by the removal of the noxious with the Chirte, which itself was liberalized by about 50 percent to The shortcomings,had expandedthe English electorate preamble srating the document was a "voluntary" gift from the crown' some750,000. Although 32 per thousandnow had the franchisein Britain, a also limited hereditary membership in the Chamber of Peers, ievislons mere 5 per thousand could vote in France. To demands for a more voring age from 30 io 25, and reduced the tax qualificationsfor lowered rhe suffrage, Guizot, the king's premier, arrogantly responded, The chamber of Deputies was representaLive the franchise from 300 francs to 200. as late as 1836,the jury "Ennch yourselves;then you can vote,"with the result that instructed to pass laws to abolish press censorshipand require trials Chambei of Deputrescontained only 45 bankers,industrial capiulisS, and instead of arbirraryjudgmens for journalistic malfeasances.Even education merchants,as againstl16 landed proprietorsand parasiticrentiers. a stater"ttt.i than a Church affair throughout the country, when was made Indeed,Marxls analysisof the 1830 Revolutionas a shift in power from the of Deputies appropriated funds to afford secular primary the chamber landednobility to the financialbourgeoisie is not supportedby the realitythat, to communesinstead of churches' schools apart from a few individuals, the financial and certainly the industrial In deferenceto romanticnostalgia, the Uecolorwas madethe officialsymbol bourgeoisiegained little power from the July Monarc\. The same landed Louis-Philippe,in turn, pledged to "govern only by the laws and of France. nobility, especiallylocal notables,who had formed the baseof the Bourbon laws.i4 Amid cries of "Long live the kingl" and."Long Iive accordingto the RestoraUoncon[inued to constitutethe baseof the new monarchy,although 1," the duke acceptedthe crown, the scepter,and the royal Lout-nhi'lippe their numberswere augmentedby ex-Bonapartistofficials and a few bourgeois. sword from the peers and deputies, dutifully signing in triplicate the were a fu Wlliam L. Langerremarks, declarationsendowing him with his new status,much as though they businesslikefashion, which presumably commercialcontract. in this prosaic lB3O,which wassurted by Parisprinters the duke It is true that theJuly Revolutionof represented the triumph of republican virtue over absolutism, of i'kittg and fought out by craftsmenand artisans,was taken over by a group throne of the French" rather than "king of France'" acceptedthe adroitbankers, of whom Laffitte,casimir-P6rier, and Delessertwere the most "r had traveledwrdely during his years of A calcularingman, LouiJ-Philippe it turned out that for the next for prominent.But when the excitementwas over, exile, even ro the United states, nra spent his time patiently waiting ""a Light""tt yearsFrance was to be ruled not by bankersand industrialistsbut his behalf.When Villele'scompensation law waspassed in eventsto unfold on by provincial notables,by lawyersand by bureaucrats,many of whom were regainedthe considerablelanded propertiesthat had been 1g25,he had duly offrcersor officials of the Napoleonicregime. In 1837 there were hardly much of his familyfortune, and he rose expropriatedfrom hiifamily, recouping be fairly describedas membersof the reflecteda more than forry deputieswho could ,oiigi, posirionln the Bourbonregrme.Indeed, the king's behavior his novels. new industrial class.6 ,,"*Lrrd of Frenchmanthat Honor6 deBalzacwas depicting in was a Despite his aristocratic pedigree, in his habits Louis-PhilipPe indeed, And as Pinkney terselyobserves, parsimoniousand stolid bourgeois,cautious about advancinghimself; king, he retained a cordial attitude toward even after he was established-as The new regime did differ from its predecessorin that there was a larger visited the royal palaceas though it were a public ordinary people,who freely placein it for businessmenlike Laffitteand P6rier.... Nonetheless,political "citizen king" was plain, and his reign-the July institution. In his dress the power was still firmly in the hands of the landed proprietors, the free of ostentation.Fortunately for the new Monarchy,as it was called-was officeholders,and the professionalmen.7 monarch, moreover,France began to recoverfrom the economicdepression 62 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM THEREVOLUTION OF I83O 63

On the other hand, the workers who had done all the fighring gained people of Paris, back into politics in a way they had not been involved since the nothing whatsoever,politically or materially,from the very uprising that made 1790s."e possible the Orleanist regime. Having shattered Marmont's army in an insurrection,the "heroes of July" (as the artisanswere called) were saddled with an electorallaw that, in 1831,slammed the political door in their faces. Indeed,from theJuly days onward,the Orleanistregime was wary of working THE SECRETSOCIETIES people,not only in Parisbut in the rest of Franceas well. Actually,in December 1830 the heatedconflict over the fate of the former Bourbon ministers,who The crowds who watchedLafayette embrace the Duke of orleans at the H6tel were treatedfairly benignlyby the new monarchy,nearly threw the capitalinto de Ville chafed at the incomplerenessof the July evenrs,whose vicrory they another insurrection.By putting up a suong show of force, mobilizing the reasonablyfelt was being brazenlysnarched from them. Having risen against National Guard,and placing ordinary troops on alert,the governmentshowed the detestedBourbon monarchy and defeatedit once, working people were that it was quite preparedto use all the military forceat its disposalto conuol now acutely aware of their power. It was almost.certainly the Revolutionof rhe "anarchistes"(a word that cropped up in ministerialdeliberations) who IB30 that createdthe sizableFrench public for Buonarotti'saccount of the threatenedpublic order. Following the crisisof the ex-ministers'trial, a rash of Babouvistconspiracy, which waspublished only two yearsbefore theJuly days. strikesand economicdislocations obliged the ParisianMunicipal Commission Buonarotti'sbook now fed a growing desireto turn to conspiratorialmethods to provide public works for thousandsof unemployed,in order to allaypublic to overthrowtheJuly Monarchy-and amongthe Frenchrevolutionaries of the unrest. period, none embodied this tendencymore consistentlyand miliuntly than Indeed,as radicalrepublican groups began to conspireagainst the Orleanist Blanqui.When the July insurrecLionexploded, Blanqui may alreadyhave been regime and as assassinsstalked the king, the governmentbecame more and a republican-in any case,he abandonedhis moderatejoumalist colleaguesat more conservative.In April f 83I, in responseto riots and demonstrations,the rji'eGlobe and threw himself into the streetfighting, brandishinga musket in Chamberof Deputresenacted legislarion against unlawful meetingsor socalled one hand and a tricolor in the other.He was wounded,for which the Orleans attroupementsand resumedthe prosecutionof oppositionalleaders. That most govemmentawarded him a decoration,but he emergedfrom the fighting as a sacred cow of the liberals, namely freedom of the press, which had been red republicanand rapidly evolvedinto a socialist. affirmed by LouisPhilippe on acceptingthe throne, was repeatedlyabridged InJanuary 1832,while defendinghimself at a highly publicizedtrial for his from the autumn of 1830until September183,1, when presslimitations forbade radicalviews, he delivereda passionatespeech thar J. Tchernoff describesas not only the use of the word republicbut evenpolitical caricatures.A Law on "the first socialistmanifesto of this epoch."loThe ,Blanqui said, fusociationpassed in 1834 requiredmost. societies-even those that conuined was "the governmentof the bourgeoisclasses," and societywas in "a stateof fewer than twenty members, which the Bourbons had tolerated-to be war betweenrich and poor."tt fuked by the presidentof the court to namehis authorizedby the statebefore they could function legally.This law effectively own "estate,"or class,Blanqui answeredforthrightly, "Proletaire."When the quashed not only republican societiesbut even early trade unions seeking presidentdenied that the proleuriat was an estate,Blanqui roared,"How is it higher wagesand betterworking conditions,as well as murual aid societies.fu not an estate!It is the estateof thirty million Frenchmenwho live by their labor PamelaPilbeam observes,the Orleanistspursued "a poliry of surveillance, and are deprived of political rights!"tz The languageof socialismwas already prosecutionand ultimately changesin the law on associationswhich madethe verymuch in his mind aswell asin the minds of a growingnumber of ordinary new liberalregime even less tolerant than the Restoration."8 Betweenministries republicansin France. headed alternatelyby Guizot, the ever-adapubleNicolas Soult (formerly a An early arena for generatingsocialists was the secretrepublican society marshalof Napoleon),and the perennialenemy of rebelliousworkers Thiers, Societedes ArnB du Peuple(society of rhe Friendsof the people),inspired by the Orleanistcommitments to freedomwere steadilyabridged. republicanpublicist Godefroycavaignac. The Amis, who wereorganized onJuly Inasmuch as "political power was still firmly in the hands of the landed 30, immediately afrer the Paris sueer fighring, demanded rhar France be proprietors,the officeholders,and the professionalmen," Pinkney concludes, permittedto elect.a new constituentassembly to decidethe natureof the state, ". . . the July Days had effectedno revolutionin France."But the uprising had instead of restoring the old Chamber of Deputies. The many repubrican made "one revolutionarychange, one that its principal beneficiarieshad not banquetsand oratoricaltournaments the societyheld challengedihe legitimary intended and thoroughly deplored.It had brought the people,particularly the of the new monarchy,even atracdng as many as a thousanl people to their 64 THERISE OF ARTISANAL SOCIALISM THE REVOLUTIONOF I83O 65 meetings.In reality the Amis had only I50 committed membersin Paris- surmounted by a cap of liberty. It was the symbol of '93 that was thus Buonarottiwas amongthem, as was Blanqui,although how intimatethey were revivedbefore the eyesof the bourgeoisie. remainsundear. More radicaland largerthan the Amiswas the Societddes Droits de I'Homme(Society for the Righs of Man), a higtrly discplined offshootof the The flag so disconcertedLafayette that, although he was a closeassociate of Amisthat, after 1832,managed to collecta considerableworking-class following Lamarque's,he abruptly left the funeral. and extend its reach throughout the anondrssementsof Paris and into some of the provinces.Hierarchically structured, the top levelof the Droitswas an eleven- The indignationwhich this spectacleexcited, was extreme,especially on the man centralcommittee, below which cametwelve commissioners, one for each part of the republicans,whose principles this fearful appaririontended to anondrssement,and below them anotherforty-eight commissioners, one for eadt misrepresentand throw a slur upon. One shout of reprobationburst from all of the four quartiersinto which eachanondissementwas divided. The quartiers,in present"with the excepdonof a few, who applauded,either with imbecile turn, were subdividedinto sections,whose clubs claimedto be independentin fanaticism,or with the treacherouspurpose of throwing odium on the cause order to evadegovemment restricLions on membershipin societies. of the republic. Clubs like the Amis and the Droits,which proliferatedthroughout France, were expresslyrepublican and sometimeseven socialistic in oudook. By 1833 The man's appearance,in Blanc'sview, succeededin tuming many membersof the Droits claimed a total membershipof 4000 in Paris,while its branch in the cortegeagainst the prospectiveinsurrection, by associatingrepublicanism Chilons, one of severaloutside the capital,had as many as 1500. Nor were with "sanguinaryjacobinism." theserepublican clubs mere debaringsocieties. A number o[ them, including certain sectionsof the Droits,were armed, while others, particularly in the The red flag had produced its effecl he who bore it immediately provinces, drilled and held target practice. The mushrooming of such disappeared;and from that moment, the republicanshad to renouncethe revolutionary societiesamong artisansprovided the upper classeswith the hope of drawing after their stepsthe bulk of the bourgeoisie.la excuse-and the need-to accept the repressivemeasures on association imposedby the Orleanistgovemment. We will neverknow whetherthe horsemanwas a policeprovocateur or not, OnJune 5, 1832,a funeralwas held for MaximilienLamarque, an immensely but his action did succeedin prevenlinga wide-scaleinsurrection that day.* popularBonaparfist general on whom the exiledNapoleon had lookedwith such The more militant republicansin Paris,however, were not to be deterred:they favorthat he bequeathedupon him, on his deathbedat St Helena,the honorific went on, in spite of the horseman,to stagean uprising,raising huge barricades title of marshal.Now a conegeof thousands,led by severaldistinguished military at someof the capiul's key crosssections (vividly describedby Victor Hugo in men, including Lafayette,followed Lamarque'scoffin as it wound its way to the Les Mherables),exhibiting exceptional courageand panicking many members Panth6on.Many who followed behind in the processionwere membersof of the govemment.fu it tumed out, however,Louis-Philippe was well prepared revolutionary societieswho expected,in the aftermathof the funeral, to stagea to confront any insurrection:he had about24,000 troops at his disposal,as well full-scalerepublican insurrection againstthe monarchy. as most of the Narional Guard. On June 6, after two days of valiant but futile streetfighting on the part of the rebels,the uprising was crushed. One of apafiy of studens havingexclaimed, "But, afterall, whither are they Following the June 1832 uprising, societiesthat had enjoyed a semilegal leadingus?" "To the republic,"replied a person,wearing theJuly decoration, status were driven completely underground, but the more stringently the who was actingas chief of the troop, "and makeyourself sure of this, that to- societieswere repressed,the more broadly socialisticideas spread among the night we will sup in the Tuileries."l3 red republicans.Soon the newly formed socialist.societies were collaborating with the older republican societies,interpenetrating one another with joint The cortegestopped before a speciallyprepared scaffold to hear dignitaries conspiraciesand actions.By hounding theserepublican and socialistgroups deliversolemn eulogies to Lamarque,when suddenly,as Louis Blancrecounts,

* Although which he had great difficulty in the appearanceof the horseman at Lamarque's funeral cortege has been cited a srrangercame up, mounted on a horse, as the first time the red flag was raised in Paris, it had already been raised the year before, getting through the immenseconcourse. The appearanceof this man was in 1831, in an insurrection at Lyon, and it was to reappear in French uprisings most sinister:he was dressedin black, and held in his hand a red flag, throughout the 1830s. 66 THE RISEOF ARTISANALSOCIALISM THE REVOLUTIONOF I83O 67 alike, the Orleanist regime forced them to take desperate and often of whom togetherconstituted a "week,"led by "Sunday."Four weeksformed a adventuristicactions. But perhaps the most memorableof the underground "month"-under the command of 'July"-and three months formed a societies,serving pardy as an inspiration and partly as a model, were those "season,"led by "spring." All four seasonstogether constituted a "year," createdby Blanqui and his supporters.In the summer of 1834 (or 1835, which was directedby a "revolutionaryagent." Since the societyhad about a accordingto some sources),Blanqui founded the Socidtddes Familles (Society thousandmembers, it consistedof three "years,"each of which was led by a of the Families), a secret conspiratorial organization that was avowedly "revolutionary agent"-who happened,in fact, to be Blanqui, Barbds,and committed to orchestratinga coup d'6tat againstthe Orleanistmonarchy. By Bernard. This elaboratesystem of small units and cenualizedcontrol was 1836, the membershipof the society,it has been estimated,numbered about meant to neutralizeany police infiltration and at the sametime maximizethe 1200. organization'scoordinaLion during the coup that it intended to stage,the date The structure of the Familles,again, was hierarchical,patterning itself on of which was known to no one but the top leaders. the classicalorganizational forms of.the charbonnene.Itsbasic unit was a six- Membersof the Saisonsengaged in uaining exercisesfor the coup amid the to-twelve-member"family"; five or six familiesconstituted a "secdon" under a unknowing Sunday-afternooncrowds of Parisianswho were enjoyrngtheir day chief; three or four sectionsmade up a "quarter," led by a commandantde off out of doors. Theseinsurrectionary exercises were conductedunder the quartier; severalquarters were led by an agentrevolutionnaire. Finally, guiding closesupervision of Blanqui,who, in his black coat and black gloves,would this apparatusfrom abovewas a Comitdsecret, or central committee,whose calmlyassess the strengthsand weaknessof his future insurgents,often from a membership was unknown to the rest of the organization.Actually, the caf6window as they passedby. The moment of truth for the Saisonsfinally central committeewas more or lessa fiction. The real commandof the society cameon the morning of May 12, 1839,when the conspiratorsraided gunsmith consistedof three "revolutionaryagents," the most notableof whom were shops and seizedthe Palaisde Justiceand the H6tel de Ville, proclaiming a Blanqui and fumand Barbds.Barbds, whom Max Nomad describesas "young, republic and wildly singing the "Marseillaise."The Natronal and Municipal rich, enthusiastic,good-natured, and heroic-the idol of the student youth Guardswere quickly mobilized,driving the insurgentsbehind barricadesin the and popular with all the republic opponentsof the regim€,"I: lotrt remained, workers' districts.Despite the Saisons'largely working-class following, ordinary in his revolutionary career,a perpetualadolescent and recklessromantic. In working peopleremained passive, absuining from participaLionin the uprising. fact, the Famillesdid not acquire much significanceuntil Blanqui joined it Two patently hopelessdays later, the entire enterprisecollapsed, with no around1835. impact upon the Parisianworking class. Each member of a "family" was expectedto join the National Guard, in After five months of hiding in cellarsand attics,Blanqui was caught and order to gain military training,propagandize among the Guards,and if possible condemnedto death,a sentencethat wascommuted to life imprisonment.The acquirea weaponand gunpowder.This typicallyBlanquist society had its own conspiratorwas confinedto the island fortressof Mont Saint-Micheland later to gunpowderlaboratory (possibly rwo) in the very heart of Paris,as well as anns a prison hospiul at Tours, from which he was releasedin 1844 becauseof his cachesin different parts of the capiul, and before the police learned of its fragilehealth. Although he had planned the May uprising in everydetail, he existence,it had evenbegun to infiluate two regimentsof the Parisgarrison. seemsto have developeddoubs about its chancesfor successonce it was Upon its discoveryBlanqui was arrestedand jailed, but a year later he was under way. In any case,when it becameclear to Blanqui that the uprising releasedunder a generalamnesty and sent into a rather pleasantsemibanish- would be a failure,he prudendy but reprehensiblywithdrew himself from the ment near Paris,where he had a brief period of domestichappiness with his action-an act that led to an irreconcilablebreak between himself and the more belovedwife, Am€lie-Suzanne(whose early death only a few yearslater casta adventurousBarbds, who had been wounded in the fighting pall over Blanqui'smany remainingyears). Despiteits failure,the Saisonsconspiracy was to seizethe imaginationof later In exile Blanqui formed still anothersecret network, the Socidtddes Saisons revolulionaries,including anarchists,and it may have supplied the conspir- (Societyof the Seasons),in collaborationwith, once again,BarbEs, and the atorial atmospherefor novels on anarchistterrorism written by distinguished printer Martin Bernard.More than rheFamilles,its membershipgrew to consist authors from Dostoyevskyto Conrad. Blanqui, to be sure, was no anarchist; of a large percentageof workers. (Marx, in fact" regarded the society as indeed, the leadersof the Saisonshoped ultimately to preside over a highly exclusivelyproleurian, but this is probably a simplification.)Once again the centralizedrevolutionary state. But the NarodnayaVolya (people'sWill or Saisons,following the Charbonneie,was organized into a hierarchyof levelsof People'sFreedom-the Russianword,volya has both meanings),the populist groups.This time individual conspiratorswere each named after a weekday,six and terrorist organizationthat assassinatedTsar AlexanderII in 188I, was 68 THE RISEOF ARTISANAL SOCIALISM THEREVOLUTION OF I83O 69 influenced by Peter Tkachev, one of Blanqui's collaborators. The notion that Even more than Danton a half-centuryearlier, Blanqui developedthe technique of turning the tableson prosecutorsand judges, transforming the accusedinto the accuser small groups, if not individual conspirators, could initiate sweeping revolu- and his trials into forums for advancinghis ideas.His suys in prison, too, became tionary events through heroic actions is a legacy of early -however educationalexperiences for other politicalprisoners, many of whom he recruitedto his much Blanqui himself, over [ime, arrived at a more realistic appraisal of the ideas. limits of secret conspiratorial organizations. 13. Louis Blanc,The Historyof Ten Years:1830 tn 1840,vol. 2 (London: Chapman& Hall, 1845),p. 30. In fact, by the 1840s, in the face ofrepeated defeats,arrests, and repression, 14. Ibid., pp. 3I-2. Blanc'sapparently firsthand account seems more reliable than others popular belief in the effectiveness of Blanquist conspiratorialism was that placethe red flag,not in the hand of the anonymous"stranger," but on Lamarque's diminishing. The regime shrewdly exploited the conspiracies and various coffin. This would havebeen impossible,especially since Lafayette, one of the leading attempts to assassinateLouis-Philippe in order to arouse public opinion against figuresin the cortege,certainly would neverhave assented to such a gesture. republicanism and socialism. Whether because of this repression or for other 15. Max Nomad, Apostlesof Rewlution(New York Collier Books,l96L), p. 27. reasons, the secret societies awakened no mass movement against the July Monarchy. For the most part, the workers of France had a traditional agenda of their own-to retain control over their working conditions, indeed to establish cooperative workshops that implicitly challenged the legitimacy of the property system itself, as well as to live decendy and with self-respect.In time, once sweeping transformations had occurred in the economic and political Iandscape of Western Europe, they were to flock into socialistic organizations that sought to create a better society by other means.

NOTES

1. Martial de Guernon-Ranille,Joumal d'un ministre(Caen, 1873), quoted in David H. Pinkney, The FrenchReyolution of 1830(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p.75. 2. Pinkney,French Ranolution of 1830,pp.255-6. 3. FranqoisRendde Chateaubriand,Mdmoires d'outre-tombe (Paris, n.d.), quored in Amold Whitridge, Men in Cnsis:The Revolutionsof 1848(New York CharlesScribner's Sons,1949), p. 21. 4. Quoted in Pinkney,French Rnolution of 1830,p. L94. 5. PriscillaRobertson, Revolutions of 1848:A SocialHistory (New York: Harper & Row, 1952),p. 15. 6. William L. Langer,Political and SocialUpheaval, 1832-1852 (New York Harper & Row, 1969),p. 52. 7. Pinkney,French Revoluhon of 18j0, p. 367. 8. PamelaPilbeam, The 1830Rcvolution in France(New York St. Martin's Press,1991), p 93. 9. Pinkney,French Rnolunon of 1830,p. 367. 10.J. Tchernoff,Le Parti rdpublicainesous la monarchiede ]uillet (Paris:A Pedone,1901), p. 261; quoted by Alan B. Spitzer,The RewlutionaryTheoies of LoursAuguste Blanqui (New York:AMS Press, 1970), p. 6. 11. Blanqui quoted in SamuelBernstein, Auguste Blanqui and the Art of Insunection (London: Lawrence& Wishart, I97I), p. 47. 12. Quoted by Maurice Dommanget,Augtste Blanqui: Des Origines d la rewlution de 1848:Premiers combats et premiiresprisons (Paris and La Haye:Mouton, 1969),p. 99.