Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and the Icarians, 1839-1851

Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and the Icarians, 1839-1851 by Johnson, Christopher H.. Hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780801408953.

The roots, dynamics, and composition of pre-Marxian socialist movements are only vaguely understood. Curiously, this is particularly the case in the classic context of utopian socialism, France during the July Monarchy. There is no shortage of studies on the founders and major disciples of various socialist schools, but the bulk of this research has been biographical. Even Sébastien Charlétys outstanding work on the Saint-Simonians is primarily an intellectual history, and we still await systematic analysis of Saint-Simons influence not only upon working-class opinion but upon the French business community as well. Fourierism has suffered much the same fate, although historians have pierced beneath the level of the doctrinal journal and the propaganda brochure into the active world of at least one area of Fouriers influence, the worker cooperative movement. Babouvist writers, “romantic socialists”, the wide variety of Jacobin socialists, and the more idiosyncratic leaders and thinkers of the era, such as François-Vincent Raspail, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, have all found their historians. There is certainly no reason to regret this work, for it has created an extraordinarily full picture of the intellectual universe of the French left in the first half of the nineteenth century. Nor is there any reason to doubt the conclusion of E.-C. Larousse that this was an age marked essentially by the "ideological force of socialism and the weakness of the working-class movement.”? But socialism was something more than an idea, especially in the 1840s. For a minority of working people, it was also becoming a source of political identity; men and women were beginning to make conscious decisions to link themselves with socialist organizations or at least to describe themselves as socialists or communists of this or that persuasion. The dimensions of this affiliation, the kinds of people who made this commitment, their rationale for doing so, and the deeper social and economic forces that motivated them all remain obscure. To explore this larger problem, I undertook a study of the Icarian communist movement and the work of its leader, Etienne Cabet. The result is the first full history of a pre-Marxian socialist movement in France and the popular influence wielded by a prominent utopian socialist. (From the Introduction.)