Socialist Imaginations

Utopias, Myths, and the Masses

Stefan Arvidsson, Jakub Beneš, Anja Kirsch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367585464
• eBook ISBN: 9781351536042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

This volume offers new perspectives on the appeal and profound cultural meaning of socialism over the past two centuries. It brings together scholarship from various disciplines addressing diverse national contexts, including Britain, China, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the USA. Taken together, the contributions highlight the aesthetic, narrative, and religious dimensions of socialism as it has developed through three broad phases in the modern era: early nineteenth-century beginnings, mass-based political organizations, and the attainment of state power in the twentieth century and beyond. Socialism did not attract millions of people primarily because of logical argument and empirical evidence, important though those were. Rather, it told the most compelling story about the past, present, and future. Refocusing attention on socialism's imaginative dimensions, this volume aims to revive scholarly interest in one of the modern world¹s most important political orientations.

Part I
The nineteenth-century socialist future

1
Contested Christianities

Communism and religion in July Monarchy France

Julian Strube

In a newspaper article from June 13, 1843, Heinrich Heine provides us with a vivid description of the radical reformist landscape in France. While the Saint-Simonian movement, of whom Heine had been a supporter, lay shattered, the Fourierists were still “fresh and active” – but the greatest current that would eventually unite all reformers were the communists.¹ Friedrich Engels, writing in October of the same year, noted that the communist movement in France was represented especially by the Icarians led by Étienne Cabet, but also by Pierre Leroux, George Sand, the Abbé Lamennais, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.² The latter claimed, in 1844, that communism was the current name for socialism, which still lacked consciousness and unity, but could count over 100,000 followers, maybe 200,000.³ Communism had certainly become a mass movement by the mid-1840s, and it was Cabet (1788–1856) who established his Icarian communism as the most influential school.⁴ In 1844/1845, the police regarded him as the leader of the communists.⁵ It would be misleading to assume, however, that communism was a monolithic movement with a fixed doctrine and identity. At that time, the distinctions between “communism” and “socialism” are often unclear, and they remain so up to this day.⁶ Generally, it can be said that most communists differed from many socialists in that they proclaimed a radical abolishment of private property, and sometimes of marriage and traditional family structures. These aims can as well be found, to varying degrees, across the socialist spectrum – for example among Saint-Simonians and Fourier-ists; and although some reformers did indeed wish to abolish the marriage-based family as the smallest social unit, the alleged communist threat to the institution of marriage is mostly a product of anti-reformist polemics. In short, the different reformist identities were anything but stable, and it was often unclear what exactly it meant to be a “socialist” or “communist.” Not surprisingly, then, the 1840s saw fierce struggles among reformers who claimed to be the representatives of “true” communism or socialism.

In what follows, it will be argued that religion emerged as a central identity marker in these debates. The development of Cabet’s understanding of religion will serve to illustrate this argument and will first be discussed against the historical background of the relationship between religion and communism in France. On this basis, Cabet’s polemics against other communist and socialist understandings of religion will be discussed, which will finally help to highlight similarities and differences among radical reformers. The year 1841 forms the stage for a decisive conflict in this respect, whose protagonists were Cabet, the aforementioned Félicité de Lamennais (1782–1854), and the more obscure young radical Alphonse-Louis Constant (1810–1875). Cabet’s polemics are especially relevant since the two authors can be regarded as the most radical religious communists at that time. In 1841, both were sentenced to prison in spectacular trials for their recent publications, Constant for his Bible de la liberté (1841), and Lamennais for his Le pays et le gouvernement (1840). In 1841 and 1843, Cabet launched extensive attacks on them. The great importance that he attached to the matter is remarkable: While he was notorious for his polemics against rivals in numerous articles,⁷ especially in his journal Le Populaire, he dedicated two independently printed pamphlets to denounce Lamennais and Constant – a practice that he took up against only one more individual opponent, Théophile Thoré. Evidently, Cabet felt it necessary to distance himself from Lamennais and Constant, who were both clerics and thus addressed with the title abbé. This circumstance allows for instructing insights into the development of Cabet’s communism, since the years around 1841 mark the shift to his passionate proclamation of “true Christianity.” In earlier years, he had been more reserved about the topic of religion. While the first edition of his famous Voyage en Icarie, published in 1840, mentions religion or Christianity rather in passing, the edition of 1842 contains an appendix emblazoned with Cabet’s new rallying cry, “La communauté c’est le christianisme.” By 1846, the Christian identity of Icarian communism was firmly established, as expressed by Cabet’s highly popular Le vrai christianisme suivant Jésus-Christ.

This development, which has puzzled many later observers, is anything but surprising when seen in its historical context. Cabet’s polemics of 1841–1843 show how different reformist claims to “true Christianity” clashed, and how Cabet responded to this challenge by bringing his Christian identity more and more to the fore. This illustrates not only the contested religious identities among social reformers but also their opposition to the Christianity of the established Churches, which proved to be an especially sharp weapon against the two abbés. It can be demonstrated that Cabet did not go through a sudden “Pauline conversion,”⁸ but that his growing emphasis on Christianity was the outcome of a much more nuanced process that reflected the inherent intertwining of religion and radical reform in France.

Religion and the French communists

The central role of religion for the emergence of communism in France has long been overshadowed by the historical narratives of post-1848 reformers, most notably Marxism.⁹ Nowadays, we can rely on a wealth of scholarship that has recognized the religious elements at the basis of communist and socialist ideas – especially with regard to what has been called “Romantic socialism.”¹⁰ However, the interpretations of these elements diverge significantly. While Henri Desroche emphasized the inherent millenarianism in early socialist theories and viewed them against the background of a longer tradition of religious ideas, Pamela Pil-beam emphasized the “pragmatic” character of religion in socialist theories, and Cabet’s Icarianism in particular.¹¹ In a similar although less nuanced fashion, Cabet’s biographer Christopher H. Johnson regarded Cabet’s religious ideas as a pragmatic means to stimulate the “enthusiasm” of the masses.¹² Indeed, several classic studies have demonstrated how Christianity functioned as a vital way of communication between social reformers and their working-class followers, especially artisans.¹³ However, if a merely “pragmatic” interpretation of socialist and communist religiosity might be able to explain the populist strategies of certain reformers, it sheds light on only a part of the overall picture. There is abundant evidence that religion was not simply a tool that socialists and communists chose to employ at a certain moment. Not only were thousands mobilized by their religious ideas, but also their sociopolitical theories, as well as their own reformist identities, were profoundly marked by religious concepts.¹⁴ In short, religion was integral to the formation of reformist identities and political programs.

Contemporary observers were very well aware of this. In his article from 1843, Engels scoffed at the French communists, who “are themselves Christians. One of their favourite axioms is, that Christianity is Communism, ‘le Christianisme c’est le Communisme.’”¹⁵ Heinrich Heine, in a much more favorable manner, likened them to the Church Fathers. And indeed, literally all French commentators perceived the communists as a decidedly religious movement. Until the 1850s, the histories of socialism and communism were the product of a veritable “heretical historiography,” in which radical reformers formed part of a long history of religious reform that often began with the ancient Gnostics and included later Christian reform movements and “mystics.”¹⁶ In a pioneering effort, the liberal Louis Reybaud (1799–1879) published a series of articles in the Revue des deux mondes toward the end of the 1830s, which was edited in 1840 as Etudes sur les réformateurs ou socialistes modernes. In this standard work, Reybaud provided a fascinating heretical historiography of the socialists, especially the Saint-Simonians and Fourierist. This was followed by an article about “the communist ideas and sects” in 1842. Reybaud was much less sympathetic to the rapidly growing communist “sects,” which he denounced as the successors of a long tradition of “mystics” that stretched back to the Moravians, the Anabaptists, the adherents of Wycliffe, Luther, and Müntzer, and finally to the Therapeutae, Essenes, Philo, and Josephus.¹⁷ Providing an interpretation quite akin to Desroche’s, Reybaud maintained that communists were the direct heirs of medieval chiliasts and millenarianists. Similar accounts can be found in other critical histories of communism and socialism,¹⁸ but also in highly diverse historiographies from within the reformist camp until the end of the nineteenth century.¹⁹

A look at the 1830s reveals a certain ambivalence of religion in the context of communism, which helps to illustrate Cabet’s increasing focus on Christianity. The term communisme emerged to denote a political theory that was based on the concept of the communauté – and it is significant that this concept used to be related to the communauté des biens, the Apostolic Community of Goods. This becomes evident in the earliest self-referential “communist” writings, the most famous of which is the Conspiration de Babeuf, first published in 1828 by Philippe Buonarroti (1761–1837). It described the system of the communauté des biens et des travaux that had been proclaimed by Gracchus Babeuf (1760–1797) and his followers.²⁰ This system stipulated the abolishment of private property.²¹ While other revolutionaries had often appealed to Christianity, Buonarroti made the link between the communauté and primitive Christianity explicit only once. In a footnote, he explained that “the pure doctrine of Jesus” was identical with “the natural religion” and could be the foundation of a wise reform, as well as the source of “truly social customs,” since it was irreconcilable with materialism – “if Christianity had not been disfigured by those who deceive to oppress.”²² Buonarroti envisioned that “all republican institutions and customs” should be based on religious ideas. However, this should not be a certain culte, but equality itself should be deified and revered by the people.²³ This understanding of religion was clearly prone to the revolutionary cults, of which the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: socialist imaginations
• PART I The nineteenth-century socialist future
• PART II Ideals for the working-class movement
• PART III The imagination of socialism in power
• Afterword: socialist cultures and sociabilities
• Index