This new edition is an updated assessment of the ideas and strategies of early French socialists, incorporating recent research observing the practical and scientific nature of their proposals.
The second edition provides increased coverage of women’s contributions, including the important roles of activists like Flora Tristan and Jeanne Deroin, socialist women’s newspapers, schools run by women, and the demand for suffrage in 1848. There is also further emphasis on socialist experiments in France’s new colony, Algeria, and on transnational connections, particularly with Owen in Britain and Fourierist communities in North America. Association still figures prominently as the solution to the social and economic problems created by modernisation and capitalist exploitation. It took a variety of forms, from Fourier’s proposal that private finance create profit-sharing communities, to Leroux’s practical cooperative venture at Boussac, through Blanc and Considérant’s demands for state initiative to set up worker alternatives to capitalism. The democratic republic of 1848 gave socialists the opportunity to engage in politics, and despite the setbacks of the Second Empire, socialists were set on a parliamentary route in which they still have a presence.
French Early Socialists 1790s–1870s is an engaging resource for students and scholars in histories of France, politics and gender.