Three generations of authors

The socialist landscape of the time can be described using various criteria, intel­lectual generations being the most obvious. For convenience’s sake, we identify at least three generations in France.

While this first generation was contemporary with the unfolding of the 1789 Revolution and its direct aftermath, the second generation, which we could call its first heirs, saw the industrial and social revolution begin more distinctly and, on a more political level, was truly awakened by the Revolution of 1830. The Saint- Simonians, under the leadership of Barthelemy-Prosper Enfantin (1796-1864) and Saint-Amand Bazard (1791-1832), went through a theoretical period (1825-32), published the collective manifesto Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition (1829­30) before multiple schisms led them to part ways. Political liberalisation now made it possible to air one’s views in newspapers. As much as the technical dimension, the media dimension of their calls for social transformation was crucial (Bouchet et al. 2015). During the first half of the 1830s, while the Saint-Simonians still faith­ful to Enfantin published their opinions in Le Globe - a newspaper that was origi­nally liberal - the dissidents established their own newspapers. In the footsteps of Philippe Buchez (1796-1865), the school publishing in L'Europeen asserted itself. For their part, the Saint-Simonians who were sympathetic to the Republican idea^[229] - for example, Pierre Leroux (1797-1871), Hippolyte Carnot (1801-1888) and Jean Reynaud (1806-1863) - wrote for the Revue Encyclopedique, while Etienne Cabet (1788-1856), Republican and not yet Socialist, wrote in Le Populaire and Francois-Vincent Raspail (1794-1878) spread his ideas for work­ers in Le Reformateur.

We can also identify a third generation whose particularity was to anticipate and, partially, become a reality - albeit fleetingly - during the “People’s Spring” in 1848. In France, this period was foreshadowed in the early 1840s by social movements and waves of strikes, demands for electoral reform, the rise of an early communism inspired by Robespierre and Babeuf, and the publication of seminal studies such as Pierre Leroux’s De l’Humanite, Le Voyage en Icarie by Etienne Cabet, and Theorie nouvelle d’economie sociale etpolitique by Constantin Pecqueur (1801-1887), as well as contributions from younger men, such as Organisation du travail by Louis Blanc (1811-1882), Code de la communaute by Theodore Dezamy (1808-1850) and Qu’est-ce que lapropriete ? by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865).

The criteria of sociological and even geographical differentiation should also be taken into account. Although Paris was indisputably the hub, discussions were also taking place in the provinces, with original and significant theoretical and practical contributions from men such as Ange Guepin (1805-1873) in Nantes, Barthelemy Arles-Dufour (1797-1872) in Lyon and Joseph Rey (1779-1855) in Angers and later Grenoble. The main socio-economic categories of the principal contribu­tors to these original socialisms can be identified. Most of them were doctors and hygienists, engineers, lawyers and entrepreneurs. However, this list obscures a crucial aspect of the question because it is notable that, championed by intellectu­als, this early socialism was also expressed through the voices of dominated and censored categories. In fact, this socialism was contemporary and complicit with an early feminism demanding new civil and political rights for women - rights diminished in France by the 1804 Civil Code - offering them the hope of emanci­pation.

This socialism was intertwined with the rise in working-class thought, which did not involve workers in the strictest sense but above all the urban craftsman, educated and politicised, best represented by the typographer. It is, in fact, some­what artificial to attempt to distinguish between the intellectual and the craftsman: Proudhon was a typographer, as was Leroux. The first ephemeral workers’ expres­sion appeared in the aftermath of the Trois Glorieuses of July 1830,^[230] when Arti­cle 7 of the new Constitutional Charter enshrined freedom of expression: the first enduring newspaper emerged in Lyon among the canuts (silk weavers) who pub­lished the weekly L'Echo de la Fabrique from 1831 to 1834. Although at the dawn of the 1840s, communist pamphlets and single-issue tracts appeared everywhere, workers following Buchez’s thought expressed their views in L 'Atelier (1840-50), while Saint-Simonian workers published La Ruche Populaire. And lastly, this early socialism developed in relation to the interests and expressions of the populations living in the first colonies (the conquest of Algiers and the constitution of French colonial territory began in 1830). Although all of them denounced colonialism in the way that was being carried out, some, however, saw it as a nuanced response to the social question in the metropolitan suburbs and as a laboratory to test associa­tions in concrete terms,^[231] such as Buchez’s project. Denouncing the system of slav­ery, some became abolitionists, including Victor Schoelcher (1804-1893), author of De l'Esclavage des Noirs et de la Legislation Coloniale in 1833, and perhaps more significantly, because of his mixed-race origins, Ismayl Urbain (1812-1884) who, along with Gustave d’Eichthal, wrote Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche and later, L'Algeriepour les Algeriens (1861).

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