Abstract
For the men of Cieszkowski’s generation France was not a geographical location but an intellectual construct. They were not the first to seek inspiration from across the Rhine but with characteristic intensity they developed an existing legend to staggering proportions. Having shrouded the land of the Revolution in myth, they proclaimed Paris a universal schoolroom, a workshop for their hopes and the capital of the future1.
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Notes
Walter Benjamin has caught the spirit of this phenomenon in Taris capital of the nineteenth century’, Dissent, XVII, September/October, 1970.
Lefèbvre, La Monarchie de Juillet, op. cit., pp. 92–95. I have relied heavily on this excellent source for the historical part of this work.
To publish a newspaper under the Restoration and the July monarchy the publisher had to obtain an officiai brevet, set a bond and obtain a permit of colportage. It became much more difficult to satisfy these conditions under the new laws of September 1835 which put an end to a five-year period of relative liberalism. Ibid., p. 38.
According to the law of 21 March 1831 municipal elections were instituted with approximately 10% of the smaller villages and 20% in towns over 15,000 eligible to vote. Mayors, however, were still appointed from Paris. Ibid., p. 95.
Benjamin, op. cit., p. 443.
Cited in Lefèbvre, op. cit., p. 107. Admittedly, quotation of the full sentence puts Guizot’s much quoted ‘enrichissez-vous’ in a different perspective.
Ibid., p. 208.
Indeed, the railway assumed almost religious proportions for many of the Saint-Simonians. In 1841 Michel Chevalier had priests come to Strassburg to bless a new line but the public imagination was not in the least fired by the first lines. In fact, there was very little interest in this mode of travel perhaps because the first railway was used exclusively for the transport of goods. The first line, Paris-St. Germain, was built privately between 1835 and 1837. Politicians remained long skeptical both because of the expenses involved and the interests affected. They finally adopted a compromise solution between public and private ownership of the railroad. At the same time, peasants resented passing trains out of fear that they would burn the crops and as late as 1848 there were riots in Paris directed against the railway. See Lefèbvre, op. cit., pp. 193ff.
Ibid., p. 232 and D. O. Evans, Social Romanticism in France, Oxford, 1951, p. 5.
Benjamin, op. cit.
Evans, op. cit., p. 7.
Lefèbvre, op. cit., pp. 190–201, passim.
Dominique Bagge, Les idées politiques en France sous la Restauration, Paris, 1952, p. 101.
Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, Discours sur le projet de loi relatif à la répression des délits de presse, 22 January 1822, cited in Bagge, op. cit., p. 102.
Bagge, op. cit., p. 113.
Henri Louvancour, De Henri de Saint-Simon à Charles Fourier, Paris, 1913, p. 21.
D. G. Charlton, Secular Religions in France 1815–1870, London, 1963, p. 99.
Cousin’s debt to German idealism is easily documented historically, see e.g., d’Hondt, ‘Hegel et les socialistes’, op. cit.; his undeniable superficiality, his position as “official philosopher” after 1830, and later on his partiality for Schellingianism made him a superb target for the criticism and the mockery of the Young Hegelians and their friends. Gans, Rückblicke auf Personen und Zustände, p. 2, restricted himself to remarking that “even then (i.e., 1820–25) Cousin did not appear to me to be the gesinnungvollste of men”. Heine was far less merciful. In ‘The Romantic School he wrote Works p. 100: “... the greatness of M. Cousin comes more boldly to light when we see that he has learned German philosophy without understanding the language in which it is taught.... How vastly does such a genius overtop us common mortals who only master with the greatest trouble this philosophy though we have been familiar with German from our infancy”. In a similar, though even more unkind vein, he added: “... the story of the imprisonment of M. Cousin (in Prussia — AL) is by no means of a purely allegorical origin... but that he there studied Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in his leisure hours is doubtful for three reasons: first, this book is written in German; second, to read it one must understand German; third, M. Cousin does not understand German at all”.
Charlton, op. cit., p. 98, writes that in 1838 Cousin’s course drew as many as 2000 listeners.
In the opening chapter of the Confession d’un enfant du siècle, Musset draws an unforgettable portrait of his generation. He diagnoses the sickness of his contemporaries as a frustration caused by being born for greatness and condemned to banality: “Worried youth found itself in a world of ruins. All these children were drops of a burning blood which has inundated the earth; they were bom in war, for war... The children looked around at all this (i.e., the present state — AL) thinking all the time that the ghost of Caesar would disembark at Cannes and blow on the larvae but the silence continued unceasingly and all one saw floating in the sky was the pale colour of the fleur-de-lys”. Musset was bom in 1810 and wrote the Confession in 1834–35. Writing almost a generation earlier in the Mémoires d’Outre Tombe, Chateaubriand expressed a similar frustration and astutely connected it to a social problem: “A society in which an individual may possess incomes of two millions while others are reduced to living in hovels on heaps of decayed matter alive with worms... can such a society remain stationary on such foundations in the midst of the advance of ideas?... What the new society will be I know not; I no more understand it than the ancients could understand the slaveless society bom of Christianity”. Cited in Evans, op. cit., p. 3. For Sainte-Beuve’s characterization of the epoch as one of social frustration, see his Portraits contemporains, vol. I, Paris, 1834, p. 244.
Cited in Louvancour, op. cit., p. 8.
Frederic Ozanam to Hippolyte Fortoul, 15 January 1831: “It is your soul which suffers, your thought which is sick, your heart which is disturbed in the expectation of things which are coming. Suspended between a past which is tottering and a future which has not yet arrived... you attempt to penetrate its mysteries, your spirit rushes in a thousand directions, gnaws and is devoured. The result is an inexplicable, invincible sickness”. Cited in Louvancour, op. cit., p. 1.
Louvancour writes, p. 400, of the need to believe and love: “The emptiness left by the immense destruction of Christianity is everywhere; it is in all our hearts; it is obscurely felt by the masses as it is more clearly felt by higher minds... as long as this emptiness has not been filled I predict that society will not be calmed”.
For a discussion of nineteenth-century thought whose principal thesis seems to be that the end of the Enlightenment bequeathed only an unhappy consciousness to its heirs see J. N. Shklar, After Utopia, Princeton, 1957.
See M. Viatte, Victor Hugo et les illuminés de son temps, Montreal, 1942.
To cite a few examples: in 1840, one Gluton declared himself the Christ of the Second Coming; at the same time, one Ganneau appealed to the “army of the disinherited” and “the apostles of hunger” to realize a vague “Napoleonic idea” which rested on the concept of Waterloo as Calvary. Vintras, author of the Oeuvre de la Misericorde Divine, saw the age of the Holy Spirit coming after a great purge. The first age, the Father’s had been that of fear; the second age, the Son’s, was that of mercy, which would give way to the age of love, and he, Vintras, was its paraclete as Montanus had been the paraclete of the second age. For some time, Vintras seemed unable to decide whether salvation was to be sought through a resurrected Napoleon or through Naundorff, the alleged son of Louis XVI.
Lubac op. cit., citing Révolution Sociale, IV, pp. 237–238, gives a vivid, perhaps ironical, picture: “The year 1825 was the famous year of the missions... At that time Rousseau and Voltaire were dammed: young people carried scapularies, the girls were decked out in the colours of the Virgin. The testament of Louis XVI was hung up in houses. It was a universal adoration of the Good Lord, of priests, of the king, of princes. The liberals were wrong...” Although the particular phenomenon recorded here was short-lasting it was typical of the period.
Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France, (1796), chapter V, cited in Louvancour, op. cit., p. 409.
See Bagge, Les idées politiques en France sous la Restauration, Paris, 1952, p. 265.
Swart, op. cit., p. 52 explains the theocrats’ refusal to despair of the future in terms of their national Messianism. “Vive la France, même républicaine!” de Maistre might have said.
Cited by K. Mannheim, ‘Conservative Thought’, op. cit., p. 138.
De Maistre would even have agreed substantively: “Through its monstrous alliance with the wrong principle during the last century the French nobility lost everything; it is now up to it to repair everything”, J. de Maistre. Du Pape, cited in Bagge, op. cit., Robespierre cited in Charlton, op. cit., p. 2.
For a comparison of French and German conservatism see Rohden, op. cit., and Mannheim, ‘Conservative Thought’ op. cit. It should be noticed that social legislation in France was initially entirely in the hands of elements which can be only termed conservative. The first bill on child labour was initiated by the “société industrielle de Mulhouse”; it was the Chamber of Peers which raised the project to the level of a legislative act. Although the Mulhouse Society was a Protestant body, such leaders of Social Catholicism as Montalembert and Villeneuve-Bargemont were active in the adoption of the project. The latter was the first to present the problem of the worker as such in the Chamber of Deputies, carefully distinguishing the solution to “generalized misery” which he proposed from the “English solutions”. The former defended social legislation as “an opportunity for the Chamber of Peers to exercise its lofty social role, its conservative mission” (emphasis mine-AL). See Duroselle, op. cit., p. 228.
Duroselle’s superb monograph on this subject, already cited, remains the most complete study of this phenomenon.
Ibid., p. 63 and passim.
Ibid., p. 42.
Ibid., p. 47.
Ibid., p. 142. For study of this interesting thinker see l’Abbé P. Fleury, Hippolyte de La Morvonnais; étude sur le romantisme en Bretagne, Paris, 1911.
For a biographic treatment of Buchez see Armand Cuvillier, P. J. B. Buchez et les origines du socialisme chrétien, Paris, 1948.
Buchez, ‘De l’Egalité’ in l’Européen, 3 March 1832, cited by Duroselle, op. cit., p. 81.
Ibid., pp. 81 and 83ff.
Cuvillier, op. cit., p. 56.
For biographic treatment of Hughes-Félicité-Robert de la Mennais or Lamennais as he later called himself see Bagge, op. cit., pp. 213ff.
Ironically, Lamennais began his career as a fierce ultra-montanist condemning even the liberalism of the Charter and villifying the religious indifference of the age. His conversion to social radicalism came by steps; the final break with Catholic orthodoxy can be put at 1832 when the papal encyclical Mirari Vos condemned L’Avenir, the newspaper of Lamennais and many other Social Catholics.
For Sismondi’s role see Duroselle, op. cit., pp. 7–12. See also: C. Gide and C. Rist, A History of Economic Doctrines, 2nd Eng. ed., London, 1948, 1st ed., 1909, pp. 185ff.
There is a vast literature on both the Fourierists and the Saint-Simonians. The latter attempted a most concise summary of their doctrine in a brochure prepared by Bazard and Enfantin for the benefit of the National Assembly, entitled La Religion Saint-Simonienne, Paris, 1831. It is to this brochure that I refer in the above paragraph. An excellent history of the Saint-Simonian movement is Sébastien Charléty’s, Histoire du St. Simonisme, Paris, 1896. The unsystematic nature of Saint-Simon’s doctrine made it essential to elaborate and develop the teachings of the master. Fourier’s system, on the other hand, was so complete in itself that it allowed very little room for development. In this sense, it can be said that Fourierism has less of a history than Saint-Simonianism. For a good study of Fourier, see E. Poisson, Fourier, Paris, 1932.
Cited in Charléty, Histoire du St. Simonisme, Paris, 1896, p. 42. For a view of the Saint-Simonians which treats them, following Hayek, as the forerunners to totalitarianism, see George G. Iggers, The Cult of Authority, The Hague, 1958.
La Religion Saint-Simonienne, p. 31.
See Poisson, op. cit., passim, and Lichtheim, op. cit., pp. 30–38.
According to Charlèty, the only expression of a Saint-Simonian metaphysics is the ‘Lettre d’Enfantin à Duveyrier’, cited p. 142: “God is all that there is... souls are finite manifestations of the infinite, all eternal like God... love is the guarantee of a future life”. As befits a religion of humanity, the theological element is lacking in the Saint-Simonian creed. In the Exposition de la Doctrine, cited in Louvancour, p. 84, the Saint-Simonians declared: “If we understand by theocracy, a state in which political and religious law are identical, where the leaders of society speak in God’s name, then assuredly we do not hesitate to say that mankind is moving towards a new theocracy”. Fourier’s attitude to religion was more complex. The Saint-Simonians accused him of not having any sort of moral doctrine and of being simply a technician fiddling with society. Even though Fourier spoke of himself as the vice-Messiah it is certainly true that he had no use for moral chatter and reproached Christianity bitterly for stifling men’s passions. Historically, however, the Fourierists were on better terms with Christian reformers and indeed many Fourierists converted to Catholicism. See Louvancour, op. cit., passim.
Lichtheim, op. cit., p. 26 and passim, emphasizes the antipathy of the Utopian socialists to Jacobin democrats. The frontiers between conservatives and socialists remained fluid for some time; for instance, not until 1848 did a natural association between communism and atheism develop.
Louvancour, op. cit., is a most thorough treatment of the movement from Saint-Simonianism to Fourierism.
Louvancour, op. cit., p. 37 citing Jules Lechevalier.
Fourier, Unité Universelle, II, p. 115, cited in Louvancour, p. 39.
Gans, op. cit., p. 1.
Arnold Ruge, Zwei Jahre in Paris, Leipzig, 1846, p. 60.
Arnold Ruge, Zwei Jahre in Paris, Leipzig, 1846, p. 103.
Arnold Ruge, Zwei Jahre in Paris, Leipzig, 1846, p. 105.
Arnold Ruge, Zwei Jahre in Paris, Leipzig, 1846,
The notion of a “Holy Intellectual Alliance” found numerous proponents: Hess, Ruge, Bakunin, Marx to name a few. In fact, the Deutsche Französiscne Jahrbücher were founded on the premise of such an alliance and their failure is testimony to the overall fate of this bold and original conception. Quite striking, however, is the fact that the notion was not an exclusive possession of radical elements but was equally shared by a small group of conservative aristocrats. See Barchou de Penhoen, Histoire de la philosophie allemande, Paris, 1836, for the latter variant. See also P. Haubtmann, Marx et Proudhon, Paris, 1947; C. Bougie, Chez les prophètes socialistes, Paris, 1918; d’Hondt, op. cit.
Ruge, op. cit., p. 416.
Diary II, p. 10, July, 1838.
Ibid., August, 1838.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Cieszkowski did, however, meet a sizable group of English vacationers: Farbes, professor of physics at Edinburgh; Baring, son of Lord Ashburton; Johnson, astronomer; Switwich, anglican pastor at Oxford. There is no evidence that these were anything more than casual acquaintances. Diary II, p. 10, August, 1838.
Among other readings of the same period: Anciaux, Exposé des opérations financières du roi Guillaume; Richard, Guide des voyageurs en France: Revue des Deux Mondes, six issues; E. de Girardin, vues nouvelles sur l’application de l’armée aux travaux publics: Laity, Le Prince Napoléon à Strasbourg. Evidently, this is what Cieszkowski considered light reading contrast to the more serious philosophical readings of his student days!
Cited in Lubac, op. cit., p. 17.
For a brief biography and summary of Wołowski’s economic position, L. Guzicki and S. Zuraniecka, Historia polskiej myśli społecznoekonomicznej, Warsaw, 1969; for further bibliographical references see Jules Rambaud ‘Louis Wołowski’ in L. Say and J. Chailley, Nouveau dictionnaire d’économie politique, vol. II, Paris, 1892, pp. 1192–1194.
Cieszkowski’s name appears occasionally in Proudhon’s Carnets, M. Haubtmann, ed., vols. I, II, III, Paris, 1961–68.
I shall have occasion to return to Wroński in part III. The best, and one of the only, short summaries of Wronski’s philosophy with a selection of his works is Philippe d’Arcy, Wroński: une philosophie de la création, Paris, 1970.
Fernand Baldensperger, ‘Hoëné-Wronski a Francja intelektualna’, Przeglad Współczesny, XXV, 1928, cites this judgement from Parisian police files of 26 March 1826.
According to. Baldensperger, op. cit., Wroński appears as Grodninski in Balzac’s Martyrs ignorés, as well as in his Recherche de l’Absolu.
Wroński appears to have been a particularly luckless inventor. Much of his energy was consumed in fruitless lawsuits and accusations of plagiarism against men more powerful than himself. Thus, his work of 1819 on mobile rails appears to have been an independent foreshadowing of the railway but attracted no attention. See further on Wroński: W. M. Kozłowski, Les idées françaises dans la philosophie nationale et la poésie patriotique de la Pologne, fase. 1er Hoëné-Wronski, Paris, 1930.
Cieszkowski records having offered the Historiosophie to the Académie in November 1838 and of having it reviewed later that month by H. de Passy, a prominent academician and minister under the July monarchy as well as an outspoken liberal. Cieszkowski commented: “in general a quite flattering judgement, though rather false”. In February, 1839, at a similar session of the Académie Passy is reported to have reviewed Cieszkowski’s economic work. I have been unable to find any confirmation of this because of the unavailability of documents.
Custine was close to the Polish émigré community in Paris at the time and it is probable that his impressions of Russia were strongly influenced by this notoriously hostile group. See George F. Kennan, The Marquis de Custine and his Russia in 1839, Princeton, 1971, pp. 23–29 and passim.
Ruge, op. cit., p. 107 wrote: “French manners predominate in the salon of the Démocratie Pacifique (the successor to the Phalange — AL) which are so much superior to those of the Germans... People move about freely, read, if they wish, play chess, stand about, discuss, listen, politicize or take counsel... all this has certain preconditions unknown to us Germans; the opposition is public. Here free men come together”. During his first winter in Paris, Cieszkowski also visited Fourier’s grave, then less than two years old.
See Marguerite Thibert, Le rôle social de l’art d’après les saint-simoniens, Paris, n.d. See also Charléty, op. cit.
Letter to Michelet, letter nr 3, in Kühne, op. cit., p. 367, the project found expression in ‘O romansie nowoczesnym’, Biblioteka Warszawska, VI, part 1, 1846, pp. 135–166.
Viatte, op. cit., p. 80.
Diary II, p. 12, 23. October, 1838 records the prophecies of Mile Lenormand: “a splendid future... most important period will be from ages of twenty-eight to thirty-three (i.e., 1842–47 — AL) but it is the present time which is decisive; from April of next year important progress. A long life... numerous trips even beyond Europe, Italy and England several times-danger on the sea — authorship, not to work excessively — soon public opinion will learn about me, all eyes of society would be drawn to me-one natural child and several in wedlock-a good husband and father-twice already in love — now two women very interested in me — ability to feel and to awaken laws of love. A mild temperament but constant and capable of realizing important aims — not to accept duels, planned marriage in the family — foresight in my character — two romances one with a free woman, the other not-when I return to Paris it will be to play a rôle éclatant -in a word, a very fine and important life, full of happenings. I have lived through a great deal already and from my fifteenth year life began to be important...”
Cieszkowski went to Rome first in the spring of 1839 from Paris and then seems to have returned to Rome in December 1839. The account published as ‘Kilka wrażen z Rzymu’, Biblioteka Warszawska, II part 11842, pp. 642–657 is dated from the latter trip but portrays a first encounter with the “Eternal City”. The overwhelming general impression conveyed is one of tension between the capital of the pagan and the Christian world, between the grandeur of the past and the shabbiness of the present.
Ibid., p. 655.
Krasiński, Listy do Augusta Cieszkowskiego.
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Liebich, A. (1979). A Hegelian in France. In: Between Ideology and Utopia. Sovietica, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9383-9_6
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