French Socialists before Marx

French Socialists before Marx PDF

Author: Pamela Pilbeam

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2000-11-17

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0773583858

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French socialism traces its origins to the revolutionary communist Gracchus Babeuf (1760-1797) and for a time during the Second Republic socialists such as Louis Blanc, Etienne Canet, Victor Considérant, Jeanne Deroin, Pauline Roland, Blanqui, and Raspail occupied a prominent place in the attempt to create a reforming social democracy. For Karl Marx, and the dominant academic historians of twentieth-century France who took up his thesis, the early French socialists were worthy only of faint praise or scorn, yet the French parliamentary socialist groups that emerged in the 1880s can be understood only through reference to their predecessors. French Socialists before Marx identifies the major issues for French socialists between 1796 and the 1850s - revolution, religion, education, the status of women, association, and work. Pilbeam demonstrates that the socialists' answer to emerging capitalist competition and social conflict was association, while conservatives, in contrast, defended a liberal economy and united to persecute, prosecute, and deport socialists. French Socialists before Marx fills a significant void in socialist studies, enhancing our understanding of nineteenth-century social thought and strategies. It will be invaluable reading for students of history, politics, gender, French, and European studies.

Jules Guesde

Jules Guesde PDF

Author: Jean-Numa Ducange

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-04-27

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 3030346102

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What explains France’s unique Left? Many works have reflected upon the importance of Marxism in France, yet few studies have been devoted to the man who did most to introduce Marxism into its political culture: the today near-forgotten figure of Jules Guesde. It was with Guesde that Karl Marx drafted the world’s first Marxist program, and Guesde who aroused the enthusiasm of countless worker-militants who saw him as their most important leader. Jules Guesde represents the first book-length study of the French socialist leader translated into the English language. For the radical Left today, Guesde is often considered a dogmatist who supported the Union sacrée during World War I and rejected the Bolshevik revolution; for the governmental Left, he embodies an intransigent ideologue who held back the modernization of the French Left. Throughout Jules Guesde, Jean-Numa Ducange argues that it is impossible to study the history of the French socialist movement without a close look at this singular figure and offers a fuller picture of the deep transformations of the Left and Marxism in France from the late 19th century up to the present. This scholarly biography of Jules Guesde seeks to put Guesde’s record on a properly historical footing, closely analysing both archival sources and accounts by his contemporaries. Chapter One begins with his early life and the mark left on him by the Paris Commune and exile. Chapter Two emphasises Guesde’s importance as leader of a distinct current of French socialism, recognised by figures like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Chapter Three sees Guesde become an MP for working-class Roubaix, exploring the contradictions between his revolutionary rhetoric and concrete political practice. Chapter Four turns to the years following his electoral defeat in 1898 and his renewed intransigence in the period of the Dreyfus affair and rivalry with Jaurès. Chapter Five explores his key role in the formation of a united Socialist Party. Chapter Six examines the test of World War I and Guesde’s anguish at the divisions of French socialism. The book then concludes with an examination of Guesde’s contested legacy, as both a “founding father” and figure subject to often pejorative framings.

Paul Lafargue and the Flowering of French Socialism, 1882-1911

Paul Lafargue and the Flowering of French Socialism, 1882-1911 PDF

Author: Leslie DERFLER

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 0674034228

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Paul Lafargue, the disciple and son-in-law of Karl Marx, helped to found the first French Marxist party in 1882. Over the next three decades, he served as the chief theoretician and propagandist for Marxism in France. During these years - which ended with the dramatic suicides of Lafargue and his wife - French socialism, and the Marxist party within it, became a significant political force. Leslie Derfler explores Lafargue's political strategies, specifically his break with party co-founder Jules Guesde in the Boulanger and Dreyfus episodes and over the question of socialist syndicalist relations. Derfler shows Lafargue's importance as both political activist and theorist. He describes Lafargue's role in the formulation of such strategies as the promotion of a Second Workingmen's International, the pursuit of reform within the framework of the existent state but opposition to any socialist participation in nonsocialist governments, and the subordination of trade unionism to political action. He emphasizes Lafargue's pioneering efforts to apply Marxist methods of analysis to questions of anthropology, aesthetics, and literary criticism.

Marxism at Work

Marxism at Work PDF

Author: Robert Stuart

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-05-02

Total Pages: 540

ISBN-13: 9780521893053

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This book examines the socialists who introduced Marxism to France in the decades before the First World War.

The Origins of Socialism

The Origins of Socialism PDF

Author: George Lichtheim

Publisher: New York : Praeger

Published: 1969

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13:

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"Socialism in its conceptual origins is an Anglo-French creation, but its classical formulation was achieved by Marx in Germany. This three-fold movement, involving the principle countries of western Europe, is the theme to which George Lichtheim turns his attention in his new history of early socialism. Beginning with the utopians and egalitarians of revolutionary France, and dealing in turn with the major figures of French socialist and communist thought--Fourier, Proudhon, Saint-Simon, and many minor ones, with the economists and theorists who shaped the socialist movement in England before 1848, and finally, with Germany's "pre-Marxist" thinkers and with Marx himself, the author offers a pioneering analysis of the interrelation between socialist theory and the historical circumstances in which it arose and flourished. Socialism was not, of course, a homogeneous movement, and it is the particular merit of Mr. Lichtheim's discerning and eloquent presentation that it preserves all the richness and complexity of the political history of those tumultuous decades before 1848. In particular, the author throws new light on the distinctive meanings--then and later--of the terms "socialism" and "communism." Mr. Lichtheim offers an analysis of the major theoretical formulation of socialism, but at the same time he sets them in larger philosophical and historical contexts in which they belong. This is intellectual history of the highest order, and a major contribution to the study of European political philosophy." -- Publisher's description

Paul Lafargue and the Founding of French Marxism, 1842-1882

Paul Lafargue and the Founding of French Marxism, 1842-1882 PDF

Author: Leslie Derfler

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 9780674659032

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Paul Lafargue, disciple and son-in-law of Karl Marx, was among the most important persons giving organized political expression to Marxism in France. He helped found both the first French collectivist party and the first French Marxist party. He was the first Marxist to sit in the French legislature and for three decades served as the chief theoretician and propagandist for Marxism in France. With his wife, Laura, he translated the Communist Manifesto and other works, introducing and applying Marxist thought in France. Demonstrating an almost seamless web between intellectual and family history, Leslie Derfler relates ideas and family identity in this account of the first forty years of Paul Lafargue's life. Lafargue, like his famous father-in-law, called for ideological purity and demanded total hostility to anarchists and reformists. He insisted on economic determinism, the primacy of the concept of the class struggle, and the theory of surplus value. But he made his own contributions as well, particularly in his insistence on rejecting the domination of bourgeois values. Lafargue's most famous pamphlet, The Right To Be Lazy, showed the advantages that labor could derive by rejecting the bourgeois work ethic. An intellectual of power, he pioneered in the application of Marxist methods of analysis to questions of anthropology, aesthetics, and literary criticism. Born in Cuba of mixed racial descent, Lafargue joined in demonstrations as a medical student in Paris in the 1860s and was forced into exile. Resuming his studies in London, he became a fixture in the Marx household until he married Laura Marx and moved to Paris. There he worked to expand the influence of the International Workingmen's Association, but fled to Spain following the general repression after the fall of the Paris Commune. He continued his efforts on behalf of Marxism in Spain and then for ten years in London before returning to France, where he helped to found the new Marxist Parti Ouvrier Français, in 1882.

Socialism Before the French Revolution

Socialism Before the French Revolution PDF

Author: William Buck Guthrie

Publisher:

Published: 1907

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13:

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The author contends that the ideas behind modern socialism are rooted in the time preceding the French Revolution. The book is his attempt to systematize the early idea from important resources.