Notes
- ↑ Marx, K., and F. Engels, The Holy Family: Critique of Critical Criticism. Ch. VI 3.
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Alexandre Théodore Dézamy (4 March 1808 – 24 July 1850) was a French socialist, a representative of the Neo-Babouvist tendency in early French communism, along with Albert Laponneraye, Richard Lahautière, Jacques Pillot and others. He was also an early associate of Louis-Auguste Blanqui. He and his colleagues formed a link between the extreme left wing of the French Revolution (Babeuf) and Marxism.
Alexandre Théodore Dézamy was born in Luçon (Vendée). He worked as a schoolteacher in Luçon before moving to Paris in the 1830s, where he became superintendent of a rooming house. Dézamy had already been developing ideas for a reorganisation of society on republican, communalistic and collectivist principles. He admired Gracchus Babeuf and Philippe Buonarroti and was influenced by the writing of the utopian communist Étienne Cabet. In Paris he joined Cabet's association and for a time worked as his secretary. He also contributed to Cabet's journal Le Populaire. Dézamy also made contact with several revolutionary secret societies. In particular, he joined the 'Society of the Season' of Auguste Blanqui and Armand Barbès, which carried out an unsuccessful insurrection in 1839. Blanqui and Barbès went to prison, where they became enemies. Dézamy was arrested but in 1840, he was free and collaborated with Jacques Pillot and others in organising the first communist banquet at Belleville. (Banquets were a common way of circumventing prohibitions against political demonstrations, with oppositional speeches disguised as toasts; in the 1840s, republican opponents of the Orléanist monarchy organised a nationwide campaign of banquets, but most were liberal in orientation.)
Dézamy subsequently broke with Cabet, whom he considered too opportunistic and reformist; instead of appealing to the bourgeoisie for sympathy with the proletariat, as Cabet was doing, Dézamy thought the workers should organise themselves and achieve their own liberation. Instead of hoping for reforms from a benevolent monarch, workers should support a revolution and the establishment of a unitary, centralised, egalitarian republic. Dézamy also deplored Cabet's religiosity, seeing the Church as an enemy of the people. He envisaged a republic of federated communes, each comprising about 10,000 people and combining industrial, agricultural and cultural work. Private property was to be abolished; work was to be assigned on the basis of ability; goods were to be distributed on the basis of need. Dézamy combined this social system with militant anti-clericalism, atheism and a materialist metaphysics derived from d'Holbach. Dézamy called his system 'unitary communism' and propagated it in his own journal, L'Égalitaire. In 1842 he published his best-known book, Code de la Communauté. In The Holy Family (1844), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that 'the more scientific French Communists, Dézamy, Gay and others, developed the teaching of materialism as the teaching of real humanism and the logical basis of communism.' [1]
In 1846, Dézamy founded his own association, the 'Egalitarian Communists'. They devoted themselves to revolutionary propaganda and education among workers, in preparation for a revolution and the establishment of a communitarian society. They also tried to combat the influence of religious and reformist communists like Cabet and Lamennais. When the Revolution of 1848 occurred, Dézamy joined the newly liberated Blanqui in founding the 'Central Republican Society', one of the most radical republican socialist clubs of the period. Dézamy also launched a new journal, Les Droits de l'Homme, with the slogan: 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Association, Alliance of Peoples'. He also stood for elections to the National Assembly.
Louis Bonaparte became president in 1849 and the Second Republic took an increasingly conservative turn, with the Second Empire looming on the horizon. Dézamy returned to Luçon, where he died, aged 42. Besides Babeuf and Cabet, his ideas were also influenced by the eighteenth-century utopians Morelly and Mably and by Charles Fourier.
Dézamy's works are not generally available in English. His French works include:
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A Jacobin was a member of the Jacobin Club, a revolutionary political movement that was the most famous political club during the French Revolution (1789–1799). The club got its name from meeting at the Dominican rue Saint-Honoré Monastery of the Jacobins. The Dominicans in France were called Jacobins because their first house in Paris was the Saint Jacques Monastery.
Anarchist communism is a political ideology and anarchist school of thought that advocates communism. It calls for the abolition of private property but retention of personal property and collectively-owned items, goods, and services. It supports social ownership of property and the distribution of resources "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".
Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, OP, often styled Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, was a French ecclesiastic, preacher, journalist, theologian and political activist. He re-established the Dominican Order in post-Revolutionary France. Lacordaire was reputed to be the greatest pulpit orator of the nineteenth century.
Félicité Robert de La Mennais was a French Catholic priest, philosopher and political theorist. He was one of the most influential intellectuals of Restoration France. Lamennais is also considered the forerunner of liberal Catholicism and social Catholicism.
Louis Auguste Blanqui was a French socialist, political philosopher and political activist, notable for his revolutionary theory of Blanquism.
Filippo Giuseppe Maria Ludovico Buonarroti, more usually referred to under the French version Philippe Buonarroti, was an Italian-French utopian socialist, writer, agitator, freemason, and conspirator; he was active in Corsica, France, and Geneva. His History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals (1828) became a quintessential text for revolutionaries, inspiring such socialists as Blanqui and Marx. He proposed a mutualist strategy that would revolutionize society by stages, starting from monarchy to liberalism, then to radicalism, and finally to communism.
Henri (Hendrik) de Man was a Belgian politician and leader of the Belgian Labour Party (POB-BWP). He was one of the leading socialist theoreticians of his period and, during the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, played a limited role in collaboration.
Armand Barbès was a French Republican revolutionary and an opponent of the July Monarchy (1830–1848).
Charles Bettelheim was a French Marxian economist and historian, founder of the Center for the Study of Modes of Industrialization at the EHESS, economic advisor to the governments of several developing countries during the period of decolonization. He was very influential in France's New Left, and considered one of "the most visible Marxists in the capitalist world", in France as well as in Spain, Italy, Latin America, and India.
John Goodwyn Barmby was an English Victorian utopian socialist thinker. He and his wife Catherine Barmby (1816/17–1853) were influential supporters of Robert Owen in the late 1830s and early 1840s before moving into the radical Unitarian stream of Christianity in the 1840s. Both had established reputations as staunch feminists and proposed the addition of women's suffrage to the demands of the Chartist movement.
Marc Angenot is a Belgian-Canadian social theorist, historian of ideas and literary critic. He is a professor of French literature at McGill University, Montreal, and holder of the James McGill Chair of Social Discourse Theory there. He is a leading exponent of the sociocritical approach to literature.
Samuel Bernstein (1898–1987) was an American historian born in France. His field of study was history of social movements. His 1933 work The Beginnings of Marxian Socialism in France was a reworking of his thesis and has been criticized for its very narrow scope.
While Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defined communism as a political movement, there were already similar ideas in the past which one could call communist experiments. Marx himself saw primitive communism as the original hunter-gatherer state of humankind. Marx theorized that only after humanity was capable of producing surplus did private property develop.
Charles Constantin Pecqueur was a French economist, socialist theoretician and politician. He participated in the Revolution of 1848 and influenced Karl Marx.
Jean-Jacques Pillot was a French revolutionary and republican communist. He participated in the Revolution of 1848 and in the Paris Commune of 1871.
Auguste-Richard Lahautière was a French socialist, journalist, poet and lawyer. He is commonly grouped with Théodore Dézamy, Albert Laponneraye, Jean-Jacques Pillot and others as belonging to the Neo-Babouvist tendency in French nineteenth-century socialism, which formed a link from the utopian communism of Gracchus Babeuf to Marxism. He contributed to and was the editor of several important socialist publications prior to the Revolutions of 1848.
Albert Laponneraye was a French republican socialist and journalist, popular historian, educator and an editor of Robespierre's writings. He was a representative of the Neo-Babouvist tendency in the 1840s, along with Richard Lahautière, Jean-Jacques Pillot and others. He combined Jacobin republicanism with egalitarian communism and anti-clericalism. He was influenced by the doctrines of Philippe Buonarroti and Étienne Cabet. In the 1830s and 40s Laponneraye was one of the best known advocates of republican communism. He is viewed as a forerunner of Karl Marx.
Projet de communauté philosophe is a book written by the French philosopher Victor d'Hupay, published in 1777.
Gabriel Pierre Deville was a French socialist theoretician, politician and diplomat. He was a follower of the Guesdist movement in the 1880s, and did much to raise awareness of Karl Marx's theories of the weaknesses of capitalism through his books and articles. Later, without abandoning his beliefs, he became more pragmatic and was twice a deputy in the National Assembly. After leaving office he accepted various diplomatic positions.
Communism has been a part of French politics since the early 20th century at the latest. It has been described as "an enduring presence on the French political scene" for most of the 20th century.
