A forgotten tradition: French Socialist intellectuals and reformers 1830-1870 – UTOPIES19

Beginning with the development of socialist doctrines during the Restoration era and concluding with the diverse socialist reform proposals made during 1848-1851 period of the Second Republic, the UTOPIES19 project is openly interdisciplinary. It regroups the collaborative efforts of historians, philosophers and economists affiliated with the Universities of Burgundy (Dijon) and Franche-Comté (Besançon) and the Ecole Normale Superieure of Lyon. To cover the maximum amount of research territory, the various axes of the project focus on the study of both major and minor authors (Philippe Buchez, Constantin Pecqueur, Louis Blanc, François Vidal, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Jenny d’Héricourt); canonical texts (notably the Encyclopédie Nouvelle and Blanc’s Organisation du Travail); overarching themes (technology; food; and mores and sexuality); and, on a more micro-level, of particular regional experiences (notably of Lyon and its militant silk-workers, and of the Cabetiste communist communities created in the United States). These studies will be complimented by a collective work examining the vocabulary of the French socialist press between 1815 and 1852. On the basis of this study of the history of socialist propaganda, the project members hope subsequently to develop a much more ambitious lexicon of socialist concepts during the same period in France.

The expected results of the UTOPIES19 project are twofold. Project members have organized seminars, workshops and colloquia with the aim publishing their findings in the form of monographs, articles, collective books on particular themes (technology, food; and sexuality), and critical editions of particular authors (notably Proudhon, Pecqueur, Blanc, and d’Héricourt). These various studies will be complimented by a larger synthetic study of the French socialist press between 1815 and 1852, with the aim of constructing a lexicon of the conceptual vocabulary of French socialism during the same period.

The UTOPIES19 project seeks to provide the groundwork for subsequent study of the mutations of French socialism during the Second Empire, the Paris Commune, and the early years of the Third Republic. But by re-examining the origins of socialism in France, the project also hopes to open the research horizons of scholars to the much larger comparative study of the genesis of socialism on an international scale over the course of the long 19th century. It aims to provide the foundation for the subsequent study of the circulation and reception of socialist ideas on both a European scale (and notably the to-and-fro of French socialist ideas in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, Spain and Italy), and an international one (by examining, for example, how French socialist thought was implanted in Latin American political culture). It also aims to study how French socialist thought itself was influenced after the Paris Commune by the development of rival doctrines abroad – notably, in the second half of the 19th century, by Marxism in Russia and the German-speaking world; marginalist economics in universities in Britain, France, Switzerland, Germany and Austria; and the immensely popular land reform ideas of Henry George and the Georgist movement in the English-speaking world.

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