SAINT-SIMON, HENRI DE (1760–1825)

SAINT-SIMON, HENRI DE (1760–1825)

Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon was acknowledged as a precursor of socialism, partly because of his ideas on social reform, partly through the movement that took his name.

Despite his impeccable noble pedigree, Saint-Simon was one of the more spectacular class renegades of the 1790s. He supported the revolution and initially did well from speculating in property confiscated from the Church and the new paper money. After a spell of wild debauchery and extravagance during the Directory, he lost the lot. He worked as a clerk and asserted his claim to be heard as a philosopher, although most of the material he wrote during the Empire was not published in his lifetime and he was regarded as a somewhat eccentric ex-libertine. Saint-Simon acknowledged a philosophical debt to Condorcet. His plans for socio-political reform were also related to the ideas of Turgot and SIEYÈS. Saint-Simon’s first draft for the society of the future, in which its productive and competent elements would govern rationally, was published in 1802. He developed his ideas with a variety of glosses during the Empire, but failed to attract publishers.

At the Restoration Saint-Simon quickly insinuated himself as a spokesman for those assorted politicians and businessmen 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. He linked his ideas to those of liberal economists like J.-B.SAY. He claimed to have coined the words ‘industriel’ and ‘industrialisme’. He increased his standing among the liberals by joining Say and others in founding the Société de Paris pour l’Instruction Élementaire in June 1815. They were concerned to define how to educate the poor in obedience and usefulness at the lowest possible cost and investigated the Bell and Lancaster system in England. 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 instead of the Popincourt poor.

During 1816 Saint-Simon published four issues of a journal, L’Industrie, financed by industrialists and scientists, to publicize developments in science. He acquired AUGUSTE COMTE as secretary. The journal appeared irregularly between 1816 and 1818. The first issue contained a fairly routine financial study, but in the second Saint- Simon attacked the thieves and parasites in society who made no productive contribution

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to society. He contrasted them with the industrious Americans. Although the feathers of the cautious subscribers may have been ruffled by this article, the volume also contained the first thorough survey of the previous 30 years of economic development written by a leading expert, Chaptal. The third volume was more provocative. Saint-Simon’s claim that politics stemmed from morals that 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 rethinking; this at a time when France was just beginning to emerge from the White Terror into an age of Catholic religious revival. Some of his subscribers denounced him to the prefect of police.

In 1819 Saint-Simon paid most of the cost of his new periodical, Le Politique. Twelve issues appeared, mostly cautious in tone, although the distinction between idlers and the industrious continued to be stressed. When this journal folded Saint-Simon put up the money for L’Organisateur. He began with a parable in which 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. Not entirely surprisingly, Saint-Simon was charged with insulting the royal family. His jury trial, in February 1820, coincided with the actual, rather than the literary, assassination of the heir to the throne, the duc de Berri. Saint-Simon was acquitted and the juxtaposition of the imagined and real murder gave him the publicity he had been seeking for many years. Saint-Simon, encouraged, combined some of his torrent of brochures exhorting rapid economic growth into a two-volume Système industriel. This was swiftly followed a year later by a further collection of pamphlets, Catéchisme des industriels .

Like other 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. He was not alone in identifying class conflict as a problem aggravated by 1789. He argued for a complete rethinking of the basis of Government and society that took into account that the sources of wealth were varied, including 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; it had been the basis of the 1791 constitution and also that of 1814. Lawyers should be excluded; he judged them parasites, part of the bourgeoisie who had played a dominant and destructive role in the revolution. ‘Industriels’ on the other hand had had no impact in 1789. Economic growth would change their role.

Saint-Simon turned against the liberals in his latter years, realizing that they did not correspond to his ‘industriels’ but 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 began to put large-scale public works and international ventures. Saint-Simon argued that although the revolution had begun the modernization of France, and that the middle class had begun to share power with the nobles, more changes were needed if further revolution and upheaval were to be averted. They should be based on a rational analysis of society. His analysis and the language he used were to be vital building bricks for the early socialists, leading to the construction of 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

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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 farmer, artisan, doctor, journalist and so on. In some ways his ‘industriels’ correspond to the electorate based on tax contributions set up in 1814, although he may have planned to include a wider cross-section of income in his politically active group. Saint-Simon called for a radical reworking of the social framework to address the urgent problems of poverty and social inequality. In his last book, Nouveau Christianisme, Saint-Simon observed the need to work for improvement in man’s moral and physical condition through religion. He urged the development of a new form of purified Christianity, returning to the basic principles of the original disciples. His emphasis on non-traditional simple faith was not unlike that of a number of small sects that sprang up for a time throughout Europe.

Saint-Simon wrote fast and frequently changed his mind; it is easy to point to contradictions in his thought. He did not develop a single, coherent blueprint for the future. In his last book he argued that society should no longer be based on war but on industry and the love of Christ. He recommended large-scale public works and the return to religious faith as the way to reform society and the economy. This solution attracted young graduates of the École Polytechnique and the School of Medicine, engineers, doctors and their sisters and wives. This new band of reverent followers created what they called a Saint-Simonian ‘school’. After Saint-Simon’s death in 1825, the group, several of whom were young Jews, dispossessed from university and other careers by the intolerance of the Restoration, including Halévy and Rodrigues, also Duvergier and Bailly, agreed to publicize his ideas and worked to turn them into a coherent creed for social reform. Rodrigues, formerly a lecturer at the École Polytechnqiue and Enfantin, a graduate of the school, embarked on Le Producteur, a journal that Saint-Simon had been planning at the time of his death. It survived until September 1826. The founding group were young men who had been active in the charbonnerie, including Bazard, Carnot, Chevalier, Adolphe Blanqui, Leroux and Buchez; men whose subsequent careers were very divergent. A series of public lectures given by Bazard in 1828 stating their theories were published, Doctrines de Saint-Simon. Exposition (1828–30). They provided a clear account of Saint-Simon’s demands for a rationally ordered society and described the present ‘class’ system in the country. In 1830 Leroux dedicated his paper Le Globe to Saint-Simonian ideas.

Although they called themselves Saint-Simonians, their ideas seemed much nearer, initially, to those of FOURIER. Like Fourier they argued that the worst faults of their own society were the repression of women and workers, and they dedicated themselves to reforming these iniquities. At the outset the group took decisions by majority vote and men and women shared the leadership. Like Fourier, they emphasized the very practical nature of their solutions. They embarked on small-scale projects to promote self-help among workers. Saint-Simon, on the other hand, had looked to a more cosmic statement of the problem, to be addressed by changing the state. The affinity of Saint-Simonians to Saint-Simon was closest in the increasing importance they all placed in a revivalist ‘new’ Christianity. Saint-Simonians addressed the social question from a spiritual base, turning their organization into a sect.

Saint-Simonian women constituted a separate section from 1829. They organized their own meetings, which by October 1830 had a regular attendance of around 200. Their

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leader was Claire Bazard, wife of one of the main theoreticians. The women’s section lacked the discipline and hierarchy of the men, but was more active in its social work, particularly in educational classes for working people. Cécile Fournel, whose engineer husband devoted his fortune to the cause, and Eugénie Niboyet, also took a leading role.

Uniquely for their time they sought artisan members, including women. Following the 1830 revolution they held large public recruitment meetings, ran evening literacy classes, and members with medical training offered their services free to bring in converts. By the summer of 1831 the Parisian group had 220 worker members, 100 of them women, who had taken the Saint-Simonian membership oath. Saint-Simonians became enthusiastic believers in the ‘new woman’ (their own phrase). According to ENFANTIN, on his deathbed Saint-Simon had declared, ‘Man and woman together constitute the social individual.’ Saint-Simon himself however had little input into this feminism. His only links with women’s rights were his fleeting aspiration to marry MME DE STAËL and his suggestion in 1802 that women should be represented in his proposed Conseil de Newton,

a sort of European brains trust.

The most ambitious Saint-Simonian project was hostels for worker members, whose structure is reminiscent, in some aspects, of Fourier’s phalange, and theoretically would have offered women freedom from domestic and family responsibilities. Working in the poorest and most deprived parts of Paris, two directors in each section, one male, one female, tried to acquire a building where the members could live and eat, and hold meetings together. These ‘communal houses’ were supposed to be self-supporting, run on the wages contributed by their worker residents. The directors actively sought worker, particularly family, membership. Unsurprisingly they were often regarded as a soft touch,

a charitable foundation, and the artisans who joined were frequently in financial difficulties. The directors then helped to pay off members’ debts and redeem their property if it was in pawn. Funds did not always stretch so far. Only two hostels were actually created, housing twenty-five families and 1,200 non-resident worker members, one run by Prévost in rue Popincourt and one run by Botiau and Niboyet in rue Tour d’Auvergne. The hostel project had to be abandoned when money ran out. During 1831 the movement became dominated by Prosper Enfantin whose influence caused it to fragment. Many Saint-Simonians became Fourierists. Although the movement disappeared, Saint-Simonians tended to maintain links with each other. The Saint- Simonians attracted members who were to play leading roles in France long after the movement had collapsed, including Hippolyte Carnot and Michel Chevalier.