Saint-Simonians in Nineteenth-Century France

From Free Love to Algeria

Pamela M. Pilbeam

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137313966
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Saint-Simonians were a group of young engineers and doctors who proposed original solutions to the social and banking crises of the early nineteenth century. Through an examination of the lives, ideals and activities of these men and women, the book analyses the influence of the Saint-Simonians on nineteenth-century French society.

1

A New Generation Planning for a Golden Age

Saint-Simonism was born out of the philosophical ferment stimulated by the French and industrial revolutions. The sect developed in 1825 from a small group clustered around Henri de Saint-Simon, mainly consisting of young engineers, doctors and their wives and sisters. The movement reflected the optimism of Romanticism and faith in science.

The legacy of Saint-Simon

Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) was the chief inspiration for the Saint-Simonians’ economic and social ideas. Of impeccable ancient noble pedigree, Saint-Simon was one of the more spectacular class renegades of the 1790s. A supporter of the 1789 Revolution, initially he did well from speculating in church lands confiscated by the revolutionaries and in the new paper money. He lost everything during the Directory, but presumably enjoyed the fun. He was attracted to the École Polytechnique, founded in 1794 by Lazare Carnot (1753–1823) and Gaspard Monge (1746–1818) to train army engineers, which quickly became the most prestigious new educational establishment. In 1798 Saint-Simon took lodgings opposite the École in left-bank Paris. He knew Monge, who had been director of Napoleon’s Egyptian Institute in Cairo. Saint-Simon encouraged polytechnique tutors and students to spend time at his salon.

Saint-Simon acknowledged the leading reformers Turgot, Condorcet and Sieyès as mentors. In the 1790s both Condorcet and Sieyès visualised France being governed by an enlightened elite and a rational constitution. The theme was taken up in the mid-1790s by the intellectuals who advised the Directory government, which struggled to create a stable regime and avoid a repetition of the bloodbath of the Terror of 1793–1794.¹ Saint-Simon adapted these ideas into a blueprint for a future society, which would be rationally governed by its productive and competent elite. Traditional religion and liberal reform having been cast aside in recent developments, he set out the theoretical base for a science of man in which politics had an authoritarian, not a liberal, cast. This draft was published in 1802.² He developed his ideas with a variety of glosses during the Empire, but failed to attract publishers. He struggled to be recognised as a philosopher while earning his living as a clerk.

In 1814 he began to collaborate with the young historian Augustin Thierry (1795–1856), who, after graduating from the École Normale Supérieure in 1813, taught briefly in Compiègne. At the Restoration (1814) his enthusiasm for the French Revolution quickly lost him the job. He and Saint-Simon jointly published a pamphlet which gave unsolicited advice to the diplomats writing the peace treaty. It passed the royal censor after some revision and ran to a second edition. The authors wanted a government for Europe, based on what Saint-Simon understood the British system to be. A European Parliament, or Grand Council, would have the power to tax, to inaugurate major schemes of public works, to devise a common educational policy based on scientific subjects and to establish universal religious toleration.³ Perpetual peace would be guaranteed by the rapid economic development of the backward parts of Europe, by which they meant everywhere except France, England and the German states. The whole world would then be developed economically by European peoples, led by the English, of whose superiority Saint-Simon had long been confident. Unlike some of his earlier bizarre notions, the basic tenets of this pamphlet were shared by many who wrote about the settlement of Europe, including the liberal thinker Benjamin Constant (1767–1830). Saint-Simon’s pamphlet was received with none of the scorn which had greeted him during the Empire.

Saint-Simon and Thierry were now accepted by the assorted businessmen and politicians who came to be called liberals, including the banker Jacques Laffitte, men who previously would have considered him a reprobate and raffish outsider. They welcomed his various proposals that industrialists and businessmen should take a leading role in the state and that economic development should be a priority. For a time Saint-Simon was one of the spokesmen for liberal economists such as J.-B. Say. He claimed to have coined the words industriel and industrialisme.

Curiously, during the Hundred Days, although Saint-Simon and Thierry wrote a pamphlet criticising Napoleon as a despot,⁴ the Emperor made Saint-Simon the librarian of the Arsenal library, a post he lost at the Second Restoration. Saint-Simon increased his standing among the liberals by joining Say, de Laborde and others in founding the Société de Paris pour l’instruction élementaire in June 1815. They were concerned to educate the poor to be submissive and useful at the lowest possible cost, and investigated a monitorial system, devised by Dr Andrew Bell and also by Joseph Lancaster, in which an older, slightly more advanced pupil, taught the younger ones. Saint-Simon was commissioned to write a report on the society’s experimental school at Popincourt. He concluded that they would do better to practise on biddable middle-class children rather than the Popincourt poor.

Figure 1 Henri de Saint-Simon. Collection Images, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF)

During 1816 Saint-Simon published four issues of a journal, L’Industrie, financed by industrialists and scientists, in which he publicised new developments in science. He lost Thierry and gained Auguste Comte as secretary, Thierry resenting his dictatorial methods. The journal appeared irregularly between 1816 and 1818. The first issue contained a fairly routine financial study, but in the second Saint-Simon made a more radical attack on the ‘thieves and parasites’ who made no productive contribution to society. He contrasted them with the industrious Americans. The third issue was even more radical. Saint-Simon’s claim that politics stemmed from morals which were based on relative, not absolute, values shocked his readers, especially when he asserted that the Christian moral code was out of date and needed re-fashioning. This was a provocative statement, given the aggressive, highly politicised Roman Catholic missions which were touring the country to re-Christianise and seek forgiveness for the 1789 Revolution. Some of his subscribers denounced him to the prefect of police.

In 1819 Saint-Simon himself paid most of the cost of his new periodical, Le Politique. Twelve issues appeared, more cautious in tone, although the distinction between idlers and the industrious continued to be stressed.

What do they want?

What do we want?

They want 1788, we want 1789.

They want privileges.

We want civil, judicial and political equality.⁵

When this journal folded, Saint-Simon himself financed L’Organisateur. He began the first issue with a parable. He asked his readers to consider the contrasting consequences of the loss to France of all its royals and senior clerics, whom he thought would be eminently and immediately replaceable, compared with the loss of its major businessmen and industrialists, whose loss would be very damaging. He was charged with insulting the royals, and his jury trial coincided with the actual, rather than the literary, assassination of the heir to the throne, the duc de Berry, in February 1820. Saint-Simon was acquitted. The juxtaposition of the imagined and real murder gave him the degree of publicity he had been seeking for many years.

Saint-Simon’s torrent of brochures exhorting rapid economic growth continued, and in 1822 he issued a number of them as a two-volume Système industriel, swiftly followed a year later by a further collection of pamphlets, Catéchisme des industriels. Like many contemporary theorists, Saint-Simon addressed the combined problems of the repercussions of the French Revolution and the impact of economic change in the context of social evolution over a long time-span. Like others, he saw class conflict, particularly since 1789, as an integral part of the process. He argued for a complete re-thinking of the basis of government and society, to take into account that wealth included industry and commerce as well as land. All of those with an active stake in the country should be involved in government. There was nothing particularly new in this thesis: all constitutions since 1791 had restricted meaningful voting by a tax qualification. But Saint-Simon excluded lawyers; he thought them parasites who had played a destructive role in the Revolution.⁶ In the future, industriels (anyone who made a positive contribution to the economy) would have a major part. They had had no influence in 1789, but economic growth would change that. Saint-Simon demanded a radical re-working of the social framework to address the urgent problems of poverty and social inequality. At the end of his life he concluded that a new form of purified Christianity, focused on social regeneration, was needed.⁷

Saint-Simon turned against the liberals in his last years, realising that they did not correspond to his industriels, and concluding that many were the lawyers and other idlers he detested. He also lost faith in the power of liberal economics to generate the industrial growth he considered vital. In place of liberalism he argued that growth would best be achieved through largescale public works and international ventures. Although the Revolution had begun the modernisation of France, and the middle class had started to share power with the nobles, he argued that more changes were needed if further revolution and upheaval were to be averted. These had to be based on a rational analysis of society.

His analysis and the language he used were to be vital building bricks for the Saint-Simonians, leading to theories of class conflict. Saint-Simon divided society into industriels and oisifs, terms he used in varying ways and whose ambiguity offered ample scope for confusion. For him, oisifs were those who did not work for their crust: primarily landowners and investors at the top of the ladder. The industriels were the productive sector, including everyone who had to do some work to survive – as farmers, artisans, doctors, journalists and so on. Not many of these qualified as voters in 1814; the majority of electors were oisifs according to Saint-Simon’s definition.⁸

Saint-Simon himself had little time for religion for most of his life. Shortly before his death he sketched New Christianity in a short book published anonymously in 1825. The title is actually somewhat misleading, since Christianity barely figures.

New Christianity will be purged of all heresy. New Christians will prioritise moral doctrine; religious belief and doctrine will only be seen as ... accessories. In New Christianity, all morality will be drawn from the principle that men will treat each other as brothers ... the main aim of religion is to improve the condition of the poorest section of society as rapidly as possible.⁹

Saint-Simon’s book praised the primitive church but dismissed all branches of all the churches since the fifteenth century: the Inquisition, the Jesuits and the Protestant sects all came in for a roasting. The aim of the book was to expound a doctrine of social reform rather than a new sort of Christianity. Saint-Simon urged rulers to take care of their poor and condemned rulers, churches and nobles who neglected them.¹⁰ His book offered a rational framework for comprehensive social reform.

From this short summary it will be obvious that Saint-Simon frequently changed his mind; it is easy to point to contradictions in his thought. Towards the end of Saint-Simon’s life, Auguste Comte broke with him, and Saint-Simon acquired a new band of reverent young followers.

The emergence of a Saint-Simonian movement

The original group who had sat at the feet of Saint-Simon consisted of Olinde Rodrigues (1795–1851), Saint-Amand Bazard (1791–1832), Philippe Buchez (1796–1876), Prosper Enfantin (1796–1864), Pierre-Isidore Rouen and Paul-Mathieu Laurent (1793–1877). They were held together after his death in 1825 by Olinde Rodrigues, Saint-Simon’s most devoted follower. At first their ideas were those of Saint-Simon. Like him, they argued that the impact of the 1789 Revolution and radical industrial change necessitated a fundamental new philosophy based on reason and science, from which religion would be excluded. Then they started to debate other new ideas which contributed to the ‘spirit of our times’. Their focus was universal association, which they imbued with a ‘vague pantheism’. This was a social religion which concentrated on

the improvement of the condition of the poor and a new organisation of industry in which exploitation of man by man would give way to equality. Privileges of birth would disappear and each would be judged by his ability (capacité) and rewarded according to his work.

They identified the problems to be solved in achieving this goal, but at first they did not try to define the process.¹¹

Gradually their ideas went beyond those of Saint-Simon. Gustave d’Eichthal, who became one of their leaders, noted that Saint-Simonism was

never a utopia, an abstraction like Fourier’s doctrine or Owen’s, but prophetic. We found Saint-Simon’s ideas a guide to the nineteenth century ... Saint-Simon and his followers were very involved in what was happening around them. Their role was prophetic and sometimes what they said seemed strange. The first rule we followed was to separate Saint-Simon from the École; they were very close, but quite distinct. Saint-Simon himself was almost exclusively concerned with the political and religious organisation which would replace the theological and feudal regime which the French Revolution destroyed. On the other hand the École, and its inspiration, Enfantin, were particularly concerned with what needed to be done about workers and the role of women.¹²

Saint-Simon had nothing to say about women. The efforts of Saint-Simonians to improve the status of workers and women were closely related to the thinking of other leading radicals also searching for solutions to the social problems thrown up by industrialisation. Thanks to d’Eichthal, in particular, the Saint-Simonians knew of and admired the attempt by Robert Owen (1771–1858), a leading cotton magnate, to provide a better life for his workers and develop a harmonious and more egalitarian alternative to existing capitalism. Buchez and others had a detailed knowledge of the ideas of Jeremy Bentham. Charles Fourier had the most profound impact on their thinking. Fourier wanted to created autonomous work- and profit-sharing communes, or phalanxes, within which marriage would be replaced by sexual freedom and the common rearing of children.

The failures of 1789 were their starting point. The upheavals of the intervening quarter of a century had destroyed old certainties and identities, but expectations of reform had not been realised. The Restoration was a huge setback. The old elites attempted to revive traditional privileges, aristocratic and clerical. Even within higher education clerica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. A New Generation Planning for a Golden Age
• 2. Religion and the Liberation of the Poorest Classes
• 3. The Cost of Free Love
• 4. Reconfiguring New Worlds
• 5. Transnational Reformers
• 6. Egypt: Orientalism and Modernisation
• 7. Algeria 1830–1848: Conquest and Exploration
• 8. Prolétaires into Propriétaires: The Promised Land, 1848
• 9. Urbain and the Arab Empire
• 10. Conclusion: Remembering the Saint-Simonians
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index