The context outlined

Setting the stage

Beyond these authors, however, the critiques levelled at political economy came from very different quarters and were not limited to social reformers, associationists or socialists who thought that the 1789 Revolution had not yet fulfilled all its prom­ises and that it was high time to work towards the advent of a new society.

In a nutshell, most of them were characterised by three intertwined features, the relative importance of each of which depended on the different approaches. (1) First of all, there was the conviction that liberal political economy was inap­propriate and dangerous because, of all the passions that drive men, only one was selected: self-interest. All other passions and sentiments were neglected. Conse­quently, the morals of interest and utilitarianism had free rein and society was seen merely as a juxtaposition of selfish individuals in a regime of free trade. The material consequences for nations were inescapable: inequality, injustice, economic crises and pauperism. (2) In order to avoid these plagues, society had to be reorganised on a new basis. Stress was put on the action of sentiments and passions other than selfishness, and on the necessity for private and public wealth to proceed together instead of being opposed to each other.

Two main periods must be distinguished during the century, punctuated by major political events. The first roughly includes the First Empire, the Res­toration, the July Monarchy and the Second Republic, that is, the first half of the century, marked by two revolutions - the July Revolution of 1830 which put an end to the Restoration, and the 1848 Revolution which caused the fall of the July Monarchy and gave rise to the Second Republic. This hectic period was of great intellectual ferment, what Paul Benichou ([1977] 2004) called Le temps des prophetes. It saw a remarkable flowering of books, pamphlets and theories, along with lively debates between the various parties, including liberal economists - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for example, was published by Guillaumin, and one of his papers came out in the Journal des economistes; and in 1838 the Academie des sciences morales et politiques gave an award to Constantin Pecqueur’s book, published one year later, Economie sociale. Des interets du commerce, de l'industrie, de l'agriculture, sous l'influence des applications de la vapeur. Critics of (liberal) political economy, also, whether conservative or liberal Catholics, or socialists, sometimes used the same vocabulary, speaking of “exploitation of man by man”, “new feudalism” or “new aristocracy” of indus­try and money, “proletarian” and “proletariat”, or else “new slavery” to which workers were subjected. The second period includes the Second Empire and the Third Republic and saw instead a rigidification in the positions and an increased aggressivity between them - a kind of trench warfare in part due to the dramatic events of the 1848 Revolution, the forced exile of many protagonists after the coup of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the establishment of the authoritarian political regime of the Second Empire, and finally the tragic events of the Paris Commune in 1871.

The content of intellectual developments also changed over time. While open from the start to the ideas developed by foreign authors, the intellectual produc­tion of the first period was original in relation to the foreign literature. The sec­ond period, instead, saw a growing influence of foreign ideas and organisations on the French publications, which was a sign of a growing internationalisation of the debates: for example, Catholic authors often took part to the European movement which led to the publication in 1891 of the encyclical letter Rerum Novarum on the condition of the working classes by Pope Leo XIII,^[137] and socialist authors had grad­ually to face the formation of a Marxist orthodoxy. Many authors, however, above all socialists, were careful to preserve their links with the developments made dur­ing the first half of the century, which they often called the French tradition(s) and intended to perpetuate and update.

The importance of the religious context

A last important point is in order. To properly understand the debates of the time, it is not sufficient to refer to the hectic political events. The peculiar situation of religion in France must be noted because it played a non-negligible part in the intellectual developments and motivations of the opponents to liberal economists. To put it briefly, the situation was characterised by three major features. (1) The first was a permanent fight of the Catholic Church against Protestant denomina­tions. During the sixteenth century, the Wars of Religion devastated the country until the 1598 Edict of Nantes - a treaty proposed by King Henri IV - put an end to the hostilities and managed to preserve a space for the Protestants. Nevertheless, Henri’s successors considered Protestants with great suspicion. Intolerance led Louis XIV to repeal the Edict of Nantes in 1685, provoking new persecutions and the emigration of many Protestants out of the kingdom. Protestant denominations were again officially recognised in France during the 1789 Revolution.

And yet, while the official cult was discredited and seemed to draw strength only from mutual support with political authorities, some authors noted a signifi­cant religious revival in the population. Sismondi did not hesitate to write that “The nineteenth century proves to be eminently religious”, and added: “It is so by choice, freely and consequently in a deeper and more innermost way than all the centuries that came before” (Sismondi 1826, 21) in order to affirm that this revival did not owe anything to institutions.

Jouffroy’s celebrated paper, “Comment les dogmes finissent” (“How dogmas come to an end”), was published as a supplement in the 24 May issue of the liberal journal Le Globe and caused a sensation. Without mentioning the Catho­lic Church, it analysed how a religion progressively emerges, establishes itself, becomes an institution with a powerful clergy, loses sight of its original motiva­tion and finally declines because it authoritatively imposes on the population dog­mas that have become incomprehensible and meaningless: the cult is thus bound to come to an end because of indifference in the population and the fierce criti­cism and mockeries it attracts over the years. However, Jouffroy noted, people cannot live without religion and, unavoidably, the destruction of one faith must be followed by the emergence of another. In 1825, the future was still blurred, undecided.^[138] The following decades, however, witnessed a blossoming of various denominations of which Jouffroy could only have a vague premonition - even if the same year 1825 saw the publication of Saint-Simon’s Nouveau christianisme. Dialogues entre un conservateur et un novateur.

Constant’s article, “Du developpement progressif des idees religieuses”, was published in 1826 in Encyclopedie progressive, and Sismondi’s “Revue des pro­gres des opinions religieuses” was a series of three papers published in 1826 in Revue encyclopedique. In a sense, they complemented Jouffroy’s analysis, with their insistence on the negative aspects of institutionalised religions - which only reason in terms of power, are characterised by rigid structures and are enemies of any evolution - as opposed to natural and genuine religiosity, that is, a “religious sentiment” felt everywhere by each human being and a source of continuous posi­tive evolution and morality.

Let man... abandon himself without scruple to the inspirations of his heart which raise him to the Divinity.... But he must beware as soon as a man wants to come between him and his God, when a man wants to teach him what he should believe and dares to assert that it is on this doctrine... that the mercy towards him of the God of all creatures will depend. This man, who is no nearer to God than himself, is deceiving him.

(Sismondi 1826, 351)

True religiosity rhymes with liberty. This approach was rapidly shared by a great number of (especially left-wing) critics of liberal economists, who tried to establish alternative religions as part of their new visions of society.

The early nineteenth century was thus a period of great uncertainty and question­ing of received doctrines. As Constant noted eloquently in another paper, “Coup d’oeil sur la tendance generale des esprits dans le dix-neuvieme siecle”, published in 1825 in Revue encyclopedique:

Politics, literature, philosophy, the exploitation of the material world by the sciences, the need to penetrate the invisible world by religion,... all that serves as a basis for physical life, or as an ornament to moral existence, is in an accelerated movement, in an ever more active fermentation. A new order of things is brewing; but, as chaos precedes creation, the fragments of what is crumbling prevent us from distinguishing the edifice that is to rise.

(Constant 1825, 663)

Through the examination of some significant examples, and as a complement to the following chapters, this Prelude is an illustration of the debates embedded in this peculiar intellectual landscape. It first deals with some early critiques expressed at the very beginning of the century. It then proceeds thematically, first with the evolution of some Catholic authors, conservative or liberal, and then with some associationist or socialist approaches.

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