French Socialists before Marx

“The French Revolution contains the whole of socialism” declared Jean Jaurès, the leader of the first united socialist party and one of its most eloquent and influential historians during the Third Republic. Karl Marx looked to 1789 as the genesis for his own revolutionary creed. Everyone knows that Marx and Engels urged workers of all countries to unite in their Manifesto of the Communist Party, published as numerous European revolutions were underway in the spring of 1848. Neither Marx nor Engels had any substantial impact on the revolutions of 1848, but subsequently Marx wrote, misleadingly, that the rebellions of the Paris workers in the June Days, 1848 and in March 1871 constituted the first proletarian revolutions. Contemporary conservatives were convinced that socialism was a revolutionary threat to the established order. Alexis de Tocqueville, a conservative liberal, was in accord with Marx that the June Days were a “servile war”. The legend of June 1848 as a proletarian socialist revolution was born, which Tilly and Lees5 and Traugott6 have challenged in recent years.

In reality the legacy of the 1789 Revolution was interpreted in contrasting ways by early socialists. The period of the constitutional monarchy was personified in the ideas of Sieyès and the abolition of feudal rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, over which he had a considerable influence.