De la République de Constantin Pecqueur (1801–1887)

Constantin Pecqueur is hardly a household name among students of socialist thought. Apart from three studies published respectively in 1934, 1964 and 1969, scholarship would seem to confirm this socialist intellectual’s marginality in the annals of early French socialism. The present volume challenges this dominant impression, and does so with deep grounding in the vast corpus of Pecqueur’s literary output, both that published during his lifetime and the large body of work still available only in manuscript. The product of a workshop organized as part of a multi-year program of recovery of lesser known writings in the early French socialist tradition, the volume is a collection of essays on a wide range of topics by different authors. These include leading authorities in the history of French political economy and early socialist movements as well as a number of recent doctoral recipients. Despite the collective nature of the enterprise, the volume succeeds in offering an integrated portrait of the career, the intellectual evolution and the legacy of this lesser known precursor of modern socialism.

Son of a constitutional priest, Pecqueur served as a public works analyst in the French Nord before making his literary debut with an award-winning essay on education in 1828. The initial chapter of the volume (Thbaut) identifies the practical experiences and friendships of Pecqueur’s early life and career under the Restoration that influenced his later socialist theories. In this period, Pecqueur learned the benefits of steam technology and large factories, observed the positive symbiosis of private and public enterprise and acquired appreciation for religious and moral values in the constitution of an ethically just economy. In the 1830s, Pecqueur affiliated with both of the main socialist movements of the time, Saint-Simonian and Fourierist, in succession. Essays by the two leading authorities on these movements (Régnier, Beecher) chronicle the socialist writer’s affiliation with each movement and assess, with textual precision, his ‘latent’ adherence to the socialist ideas of these schools following a short-lived ‘militant’ involvement with each.

The core of the volume consists of three essays that together provide an overview of Pecqueur’s theories. In two of the essays, Ludovic Frobert surveys the entire corpus of Pecqueur’s writing in what amounts to a comprehensive intellectual biography. Frobert identifies three stages in the production of the body of published writing—a pre-1840 ‘industrialist,’ a post-1840 ‘republican,’ and a 1848–51 ‘popular’ stage—followed by a fourth period, after 1851, when Pecqueur’s largely unpublished writing, most of it undertaken during his self-imposed ‘internal exile’ under the Second Empire, reached voluminous proportions. All of the key themes of the writer’s socialist ideas are highlighted in this well-crafted and lucid overview, including ‘socialization’ of the economy through the ‘communicative’ interlacing of the physical world, notably by means of the railroad, and the gradual, incremental ‘transition’ in the movement towards socialism, inclusive of ‘intermediary classes’. Michel Bellet’s essay explores the legacy of Pecqueur among socialist thinkers who most appreciated his intellectual contribution, those associated with La Revue socialiste, founded in 1885 by Benoît Malon. Bellet highlights the distinctive features of Pecqueur’s ‘collectivism’—the only idea with which the writer would be credited in subsequent histories of socialism—as elaborated in the texts and the editorial directions of La Revue. This idea, claimed the journal’s reform socialists, pre-dated Marx and represented a distinctively French ‘synthetic socialism’ that included personal and cultural emancipation to be achieved in a variable, non-fatalistic fashion, in contrast to the teleological and revolutionary path promoted by the doctrinaire Marxism of German-dominated internationalist socialism. Frobert’s and Bellet’s essays are especially strong in elaborating the economic core of Pecqueur’s socialist ideas. The essays richly situate the writer’s ideas and those of his socialist interpreters in their respective intellectual and political contexts. This is illuminating history, in short, as well as smart analysis.

The other essays in the volume address a variety of specialized topics, each accenting a particular theme in Pecqueur’s writing. One essay (Bourdeau) demonstrates the re-formulation of Pecqueur’s non-juridical concept of property in terms of a social science that gives precise meaning to the notion of ‘function’ as service, a concept central to this socialist thinker’s political economy. Another essay (Clément) addresses Pecqueur’s analysis of inequality—what his contemporaries called ‘pauperism’—and, echoing Rousseau, Pecqueur’s locating its origins in property that disrupts the intrinsic synergy between labor and the ‘material of labor’. Two remarkable essays articulate Pecqueur’s distinctive fusion of social, political and moral theory through a close analysis of the specialized themes of taxation (Coste) and credit (Lanza). Coste’s analysis of taxation distinguishes the utopian from the transitional horizons in the socialist writer’s consideration of solidarity in the democratic Republican state. The analysis raises questions that preoccupy authors today, such as Thomas Piketty, regarding the proper form and incidence of tax in conditions of inequality fostered by modern capitalism. Lanza’s analysis of credit follows the evolution of Pecqueur’s collectivist ideas from an earlier fascination with unified state direction of concentrated production to a later valorization of the autonomous cooperative enterprise of workers’ associations. The incentivizing rather than directive collectivism made possible, according to this analysis, by the democratic Republic’s provision of credit was at variance with that for which Marx gave Pecqueur credit in Das Kapital and with which Marx mobilized Pecqueur in the assault on Proudhon. An essay on Pecqueur’s ideas of ‘direct government’, elaborated in his Second Republic writings, notes the priority he gave to the canton as the elemental unit of citizen participation and the possibility he recognized of government by ‘conciliation’, by which popular consent is achieved through moral suasion rather than by majority rule (Chambost). Two essays, finally, sketch Pecqueur’s little known attention to women’s emancipation (Lauricella), highlighting his planned but never written Histoire des femmes (1844–45), and his correspondence with Romantic writers George Sand and Lamartine on the occasion of the publication of De la République de Dieu, where Pecqueur’s religious impulse is prominent (Henriet). Several essays rely on unpublished writings of Pecqueur along with his published work. Throughout the volume, excerpts from Pecqueur’s writings, both published and unpublished, elucidate themes developed in essays on corresponding topics.

This collection of essays provides the best introduction to Constantin Pecqueur’s intellectual contribution to the history of socialist thought to date, and for a number of specific topics, offers trenchant analysis. Two topics worthy of further elaboration emerge from reading the essays. One pertains to the socialist writer’s role on the 1848 Luxembourg Commission, where he was a central actor along with Louis Blanc and Vidal. As several of the essays indicate (notably Lanza), Pecqueur’s first-hand encounter with workers’ everyday realities as well as with their workers’ societies led Pecqueur to re-assess his previously formed socialist ideas, inducing an evolution of his thought in some respects. Treatment of this part of Pecqueur’s personal and intellectual biography conveys the sense that the story of the Luxembourg Commission has not been fully told, despite the laudable studies of the Commission by Rémi Gossez and William Sewell. A comprehensive history is in order, benefitting from the kind of archival and manuscript sources used to good effect in this volume, such as those found in the library of the Assemblée Nationale.

A second topic meriting further elaboration concerns Pecqueur’s religious ideas. The central place of religious and moral themes in the writer’s socialist thought is addressed in Frobert’s essays. Two other essays (Régnier, Coste) recognize Pecqueur’s ‘spiritualist’ tendencies as more than incidental attributes, while one essay (Bellet) presents the reform socialists’ efforts later in the century to read out such tendencies as extrinsic to Pecqueur’s core theories. The one essay dedicated to De la République de Dieu (1844), where Pecqueur elaborates a quasi-religious fraternal utopia of ‘philadelphes,’ addresses primarily the writer’s correspondence with George Sand and Lamartine, not the core ideas of the work (Henriet). The intersection of religion and economy calls for treatment on its own account, not only for its part in Pecqueur’s thought but also for the way in which political economy was addressed in relation to religion elsewhere in France of the 1830s and 1840’s. The kinship of Pecqueur’s thinking about religion and economy with that of Lamennais, Philippe Buchez and Pierre Leroux is duly noted by Frobert. There is a story to be told about the intersection of political economy and religious ideas on the left of the political spectrum through 1848–51 at least. In this story, Constantin Pecqueur would surely occupy a major chapter.