Between Marxism and Anarchism: Benoît Malon and French Reformist Socialism

By K. Steven Vincent

Here is the first scholarly study of the life and thought of Benoît Malon (1841-1893), the most persuasive and visible spokesman for reformist socialism during the early years of the French Third Republic.

Active in the generation of the French Left that came of age under the Second Empire, Malon was a prominent member of the First International in Paris and later joined the Paris Commune. As a result, he was forced into exile in Switzerland and Italy during the 1870s, where he became entangled in the struggles within the International. Malon attempted to steer a course between Marxist authoritarianism and anarchist utopianism, which he continued on his return to France in 1880.

Vincent analyzes Malon's role as activist, editor, and author, arguing that Malon drew on a strong tradition of left-wing French republicanism. In his mature works, Malon articulated a socialism that emphasized broad moral and socioeconomic reform and advocated parliamentary rule as the appropriate source of national sovereignty. In helping the republican socialist Left shed its revolutionary associations, he pointed the way for later reformist socialists from Jean Jaurès to François Mitterrand.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.
Here is the first scholarly study of the life and thought of Benoît Malon (1841-1893), the most persuasive and visible spokesman for reformist socialism during the early years of the French Third Republic.

Active in the generation of the French

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520911406

K. Steven Vincent

K. Steven Vincent is Professor of History at North Carolina State University and the author of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (Oxford, 1984).

Book preview

Between Marxism and Anarchism

Between Marxism and Anarchism

Benoît Malon and French Reformist Socialism

K. Steven Vincent

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley • Los Angeles • Oxford

This book is a print-on-demand volume. It is manufactured using toner in place of ink. Type and images may be less sharp than the same material seen in traditionally printed University of California Press editions.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

Oxford, England

©1992 by

The Regents of the University of California

Frontispiece: Benoît Malon, c. 1890. Photo by Pierre Petit. Originally published in volume 1 of the second edition of Le Socialisme intégral (Paris: Alcan, 1893).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vincent, K. Steven.

Between Marxism and Anarchism: Benoît Malon and French reformist socialism / K. Steven Vincent.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-07460-2

1. Malon, Benoît, 1841-1893. 2. Sodalists—France—Biography.

3. Sodalism—France—History—19th century. I. Title. HX264.7.M34V56 1992

335’.0092—dc20

[B] 91-3434

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. 6

For Sue

Contents

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE The Early Years (1841-1871): Cooperatism, the International, the War, and the Commune

EARLY YEARS, PARIS, AND COOPERATISM

MIKHAIL BAKUNIN AND ANARCHISM

THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL AND COLLECTIVISM

THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR AND THE SIEGE OF PARIS

THE PARIS COMMUNE

MALON’S SOCIALISM: 1866-1871

CHAPTER TWO The Years of Exile (1871—1880): André Léo, the Jura Federation, and Italian Anarchism

EXILE

ANDRE LEO

THE JURA FEDERATION

ITALY: ANARCHISM VERSUS EXPERIMENTALISM

THE WRITINGS OF THE LATE 1870S

FERDINAND LASSALLE AND REFORMISM

CHAPTER THREE Marxism, Collectivism, and the French Left

SOCIALISM IN FRANCE DURING THE EARLY 1870S

THE INTRODUCTION OF MARXISM

THE VICTORY OF COLLECTIVISM: 1879-1880

THE FACTIONALISM OF THE EARLY 188OS AND MALON’S RETURN TO FRANCE

FRENCH MARXIST THOUGHT: PAUL LAFARGUE

MALON ON MARXISM AND COLLECTIVISM

COLLECTIVISM, MARXISM, AND THE FRENCH LEFT

CHAPTER FOUR La Revue socialiste and Integral Socialism

LA REVUE SOCIALISTE

REVOLUTION AND REFORM

REPUBLICANISM

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, NATIONALISM, AND THE THIRD REPUBLIC

INTEGRAL SOCIALISM: SOCIOECONOMIC REFORM

INTEGRAL SOCIALISM: POLITICAL AND SOCIAL REFORM

INTEGRAL SOCIALISM: ALTRUISM

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Preface

The exaggerated sense of hope on the Left that attended the sweeping electoral victories of François Mitterrand and the socialists in 1981 was quickly followed by disenchantment. Frustrated expectations fed earlier feelings of ideological crisis, and the result has been a broad-based reassessment of the French Left.

One recurrent theme in this new critical appraisal is the presumed failure of the French Left to theorize convincingly about the state. Several analysts have argued that the Left is part of the French revolutionary tradition that gives priority to politics over economics and believes the power of centralized politics to be almost limitless.¹ It has been further argued that the left-wing version of this tradition has been more concerned with the grounds upon which one can justify centralized authority than with the ends for which this authority might be used.

Another recent analyst, curiously enough, has advanced the opposite criticism of the French Left—namely, that it tends to neglect politics, to reduce it to insignificance because of the unfortunate influence of two potent theoretical models of power coming from Marx and Rousseau.² Marx’s vision is flawed, this critic charges, because it assumes that all political power is a reflection of social antagonisms. Rousseau’s vision has a similar problem: though it remains a quintessentially political vision, it mortgages real politics—deliberative politics—for the purchase of abstract conceptions like general will and popular sovereignty.

What these critics share is a belief that the French Left has been theoretically deficient, unable to articulate a theory of politics that confronts the interaction of political and socioeconomic issues in a clearheaded manner. Unfortunately, these criticisms are more effective as contemporary polemics than as serious historical analyses: they do not successfully characterize the theoretical core of the French Left’s vision because they fail to describe adequately the ideological diversity of the French Left.³

The first view—that the French Left is part of the revolutionary tradition that exaggerates the power of politics—neglects a central strain of thinking on the French Left that has regarded centralized politics with suspicion. To argue that the Left has devoted its efforts to justifying centralized authority neglects the entire antistatist strain on the socialist Left and belittles the serious efforts at socioeconomic change that socialists have always held to be central to the program of reform. Many French socialists have insisted that it is a mistake to place too much faith in the political arena, suggesting that the democratic enthusiasm associated with the French Revolution needed to extend to social and economic institutions. The second view—that socialists have never had a realistic conception of the give-and-take of concrete politics—also neglects significant traditions on the Left. It fails to take seriously those who have been concerned with economics and politics, and indeed with how to fashion realistic participatory arenas for deliberation about immediate economic and political issues.

My point in criticizing these current examples of reflection about the agony of the Left is not to make a plea for political conversion, nor is it prefatory to making a claim that socialists have had an easier time than others in outlining a salutary orientation toward politics. It is rather to insist on a more accurate accounting of the historical record, to demand recognition of the variety of stances taken by those who have called themselves socialists. If the term socialism evokes the image of a coherent and enduring movement pressing for certain common aims, then we see a mirage. Fundamental differences in program have always existed—over the role of the state, over the status of property, over the meaning and import of Marxism, over the issues of consumerism and quality of life. Complex and fluid patterns should not be forced into too rigid an order.

But if programs differ, problems recur. The history of the French socialist movement is an especially rich and varied one, and French social thought has contributed greatly to our ideas about the nature of a just society and about the intractable difficulties encountered in moving toward it. My own attempts to contribute to a historical understanding of the French Left have focused on the nonauthoritarian side of French socialism, and more specifically on the republican, reformist, and federalist strains associated with mutualism, syndicalism, and (in this study) reformism.⁴ Given the current ideological climate—the growing opposition to the Marxism that was so central to intellectual debates after liberation in 1944, the belated abhorrence of Soviet totalitarianism, the new resistance to the statist ideas of the Old Left, whether Soviet or social democratic—it is perhaps timely to insist on the importance of such pluralistic and libertarian currents on the French Left.

Acknowledgments

I have been fortunate to have received financial assistance for this project from a number of organizations. An NEH Summer Stipend and a North Carolina State University Faculty Research and Professional Development Grant allowed me to make my first exploration of the archival sources in Paris during the summer of 1983. A major part of the conceptualization, organization, and writing was done during the 1986-87 academic year while I was a fellow at the National Humanities Center. I am grateful to the Mellon Foundation for their financial support, to the staff of the NHC for their many kindnesses, and to the other fellows, who made it such a stimulating year. I was able to spend portions of the summers of 1988 and 1989 in Amsterdam and Paris doing further research, thanks to a North Carolina State University Research Grant and an NEH Travel Grant.

Friends and colleagues have also helped in countless ways. I would like to thank John Rudge and Ochrid Hogen Esch in Amsterdam for making the summer of 1988 a pleasure on so many levels. The staff at the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis also deserves a special thanks—not only do they have a marvelous collection, but they seem to take pleasure in making it accessible to researchers. Mieke Ijzermans of the IISG provided extraordinary assistance, even after I had left Amsterdam. In Paris, I owe special thanks to Rachel Mizrahi for accommodation, friendship, and many hours of verbal rumination about workers, exiles, death, et l’autre aussi.

Early versions of the manuscript, or portions of it, were read by Jim Banker, Bill Beezley, Alex DeGrand, and Tony LaVopa. A portion of chapter 3 was presented as a paper at an annual meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies, and Joel Colton gave a useful commentary . Leslie Derfler subsequently read the whole of chapter 3 and provided helpful suggestions, especially concerning the pages relating to Lafargue and the Marxists. Later versions of the manuscript were read by Tony LaVopa (again!), Keith Luria, Pat O’Brien, Don Reid, and Bernard Wishy. Each had recommendations for stylistic and substantive revisions, some incorporated, others (as they will no doubt remind me) stubbornly rejected. I am very grateful for their help. The majority of these people are members of my own department or teach in neighboring institutions of the North Carolina Triangle, a good indication of how fortunate I am to be part of a lively and supportive intellectual community. Peter Vincent, my brother, prepared the photograph of Malon. Sharon Darden and Janice Mitchell helped prepare the final typescript. At the University of California Press, Sheila Levine, Pamela MacFarland, and Marian Shotwell did a wonderfully efficient job of editing the manuscript and seeing it through the production process.

I have saved the most important acknowledgments for last. Sue Vincent has read, reread, and rewritten much of this manuscript, and it is immeasurably better as a consequence. She has also endured its author (and the environment in which he has been constrained to work) through a difficult period. I hope that she knows and feels the depth of my gratitude. Daniel, our son, has been forced to put up with the peculiarities of my travel and work schedule; I hope that he will come to understand—and that I shall not come to regret—the postponement of all those games of basketball and soccer.

Introduction

The guiding thread of this study is an intellectual biography of Benoît Malon, a prominent, but often overlooked, socialist of the late nineteenth century. Malon (1841-93) is characteristically presented as the most visible spokesperson for French reformist socialism during the early years of the Third Republic. Assessments of his thought have varied dramatically—from Gabriel Deville’s charge that Malon effected a systematic deformation of Marxism fit only for masons and spiritualists and Zeev Sternhell’s recent implication that Malon was protofascist to Leon Blum’s fond reference to Malon as a true proletarian hero.¹ Such partisan assessments indicate more about the polemics of their authors than about Malon, who has never been comprehensively studied. The tendency of the literature, as these citations indicate, has been to relegate Malon to a position in the emergence of true Marxist socialism in France (Deville), to see him as an important, but immature, precursor of Jean Jaurès (Blum), or to place him in relation to some ahistorical definition of French fascism (Sternhell). In attempting to penetrate such partiality and to understand Malon in his historical context, we must locate him chronologically in what might be termed the generation of the Commune.

Malon was a member of the generation on the French Left that came of age under the Second Empire and was initiated into the working-class movement and socialism during the 1860s, with the reemergence of the labor movement and the establishment of the First International. The defining event for this generation was the Paris Commune of 1871, which they experienced in their late twenties. Because of their participation in and sympathy for the Commune, many were forced to spend the decade of the 1870s in exile or prison, returning to France in the 1880s and 1890s to edit journals and help form socialist labor and political organizations. The number of influential left-wing personalities of the early Third Republic born during the 1840s is striking—Edouard Vaillant (b. 1840), Paul Lafargue (b. 1842), Jean Allemane (b. 1843), Paul Brousse (b. 1844), Jules Guesde (b. 1845), and Georges Sorel (b. 1847), in addition to Malon. Not all of the notable socialist theorists of this generation had the same experiences, of course, but they shared a great deal, and their ideals and fears reflected the trials of these years.

Malon has been undeservedly neglected by historians of French socialism, though many have judged him to be—in the words of Georges Lefranc—the most striking personality among the independent socialists [of the 1880s and 1890s].² Malon produced the first large-scale History of Socialism and edited the influential paper La Revue socialiste from 1885 until his death in 1893. Activist, author, editor, and the principal proponent of what at the time was called integral socialism, he was a particularly prominent and visible socialist writer during these years.³ Jaurès recalled that as a young man he had had to screw up his courage to climb the stairs to the editorial offices of La Revue socialiste in anticipation of meeting the great Malon.⁴

Ironically, Malon’s influence seems to have led many analysts of French socialist thought to pass him by, anticipating the more illustrious figures to follow and attracted by the explosive debates surrounding the Dreyfus affair and the attainment of socialist unity. In curious contrast to the superficial recognition of the importance of Malon and his contemporaries, there has been a tendency to take this generation less seriously than earlier or later French socialists.⁵

This study will attempt not only to reintroduce Malon but also to illuminate how pivotal he and his generation were in accommodating socialism to the Republic. It will attempt to put to rest those characterizations that reduce Malon and his contemporaries to the status of quasi Marxists or protofascists and to clarify how they established an enduring reformist socialist tradition. This will necessitate relating Malon and his contemporaries to the critical public struggles of their lives—the First International, the Paris Commune, exile, Third Republic politics, and so on. It will entail, in addition, the reexamination of some of the myths that still pervade the historiography of French socialism.

The most enduring of these myths is the centrality of Marxism. Sixty years ago, Roger Soltau claimed that none of the leaders of French socialism between Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Jaurès was in any sense an original thinker and that the real history of French socialism becomes that of its varied reactions to Marxism.⁶ This reduction of French socialism to the status of a proto- or immature Marxism still has its adherents, but its popularity as a serious interpretive strategy is declining.⁷ Few historians would contest the assertion that Marxism was an important element in the ideology of the French Left during the last years of the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth; and Marx’s writings were indisputably significant in the intellectual development of numerous luminaries on the Left, from Sorel and Jaurès to Louis Althusser. By the late nineteenth century, Marxism was a theory with which socialists had to come to terms, and debates between selfstyled Marxists and their opponents were an important part of the socialists’ continuing efforts at intellectual self-definition. But it would be inaccurate to claim that Marxism was the dominant ideology. Indeed, in the early history of French socialism, the role of Marxism was marginal, and even after 1880 it remained only one ideological strain among many.

More important than Marxism in the development of French socialism was an indigenous tradition of republican socialist thought that had emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century.⁸ This tradition, which drew from classical models, insisted on the interaction of political institutions and social mores. The institutional side of republicanism was distinctive in that the people were considered not only the ultimate repository of sovereignty (an ideal compatible with monarchy and empire) but also active participants in politics. Although there were disputes concerning the nature of their participation—whether it should be direct or through representatives—all republicans shared a belief in self rule of the people. But the success of a republic was dependent on more than just an institutional organization: it required that citizens exercise virtue, a political morality which entailed respect for law, love of country, and a willingness to sacrifice immediate interests for the good of the larger community. Many socialists focused on the decadence of modern society, contrasting this with virtue, which French thinkers since Montesquieu had argued was necessary for the survival of republics.

Within this tradition, the contrary of virtue is corruption, not alienation.⁹ The modern concern for the latter is rooted in Hegelian philosophy and has received a great deal of attention since the rediscovery of Marx’s early writings. But what concerned republican socialists like Malon was corruption—specifically, the corruption of virtue, which, according to the republican tradition in France, was brought on by a decline of public-spiritedness. Corruption meant a loss of public life, a turning inward, a transition from public concerns to selfish private considerations. Rousseau, Robespierre, and Tocqueville—to name several from across the political spectrum—were all concerned with corruption and the loss of republican virtue. This seemed the underlying problem of French society and, therefore, of its politics. Republican socialists were particularly alarmed by the increased tendency toward selfish individualism and the untempered economic ambition encouraged by liberal economists.

As recent scholars have pointed out, the development of this republican tradition in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century France often reinforced patriarchy because it restricted the public sphere to independent, autonomous men. Women were widely associated with weakness and the corruption of public morals, and the logic of republicanism thereby excluded them from political action. It was not uncommon to find republicans across the political spectrum arguing that women should be confined to the home. Here chastity, simplicity, and frugality could prevail, and here women could attain the ideal of the Spartan mother educating her children to virtue.¹⁰

The left-wing socialist version of the republican tradition emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, and it carried the legacy of these ideals of virtue and patriarchy.¹¹ This is not to imply that French socialism glorified the martial virtues or the independence bestowed by property ownership associated with the ideal of the ancient citizen. Socialists sought to delineate a less chauvinistic, more benevolent, and more inclusive polity than the full-blown participatory republic associated with Greece and Rome. They believed that citizenship should be based on labor, rather than on landed property, because such property often blinded its owners to the suffering of others and could become itself the source of social and political corruption. Labor, on the other hand, was the key to social reform and human self-realization, and workers—at least some workers—were perceived as the most important human agents for historical transformation.¹²

This republican socialism of the mid-nineteenth century was a potent influence on later French socialists. The moralism, for example, that continued to animate French socialism throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth has its roots here, as do the increasingly vociferous critiques of commercialism, consumer society, and bourgeois decadence. Ideals of virtue and patriarchy also found their echoes in late nineteenth-century French sodalist thought, and the general revalorization of labor continued to provide the basis for redefining the appropriate locus for power. The dynamics of these influences are an important part of the story of Malon and his generation.

The legacy of the republican tradition is connected closely to the issue of the relation between society and the state. This has long been a central issue in French history and a pivotal concern of French thinkers. Should the state be strong, provide economic guidance, control and harness private interests, set high cultural standards, and protect the weak from the strong—in short, embody the general interest over the lesser and dubious private interests, as Rousseauist myth suggests? Or should society emancipate itself from the constraints of state control and emphasize the autonomy of citizens and their voluntary associations? This debate transcends political boundaries. There is a right-wing etatiste or dirigiste tradition (monarchical, Bonapartist, and, more recently, Gaullist) and a corresponding left-wing tradition (Jacobin, Saint- Simonian, and, more recently, communist); and there is a right-wing anti-dirigisme (aristocratic and, more recently, liberal) and a corresponding left-wing version (federalist, syndicalist, anarchist, and, more recently, autogestionnaire).

The left-wing version of this debate has divided French socialism since its inception in the early nineteenth century. Many have viewed themselves as heirs of the French Revolutionary tradition that posited almost limitless power for centralized politics. Left-wing statism shared much with the monarchical tradition in which policy emanated from above and property was the domain of the state. As kings owned the domaine royale and enlightened despots made reform policy from above, so revolutionary governments imposed laws and confiscated and sold biens nationaux. Their nineteenth-century emulators similarly viewed the state’s role as central, and many socialists adopted a Saint- Simonian vision of elite-led social engineering.

Others on the Left have opposed the notion of a paternalistic state and have favored what since the 1840s has been termed industrial democracy. This associationist tradition (also known as Proudhonian, federalist, or syndicalist) was neither as intellectually impoverished nor as historically unimportant as some recent analysts have suggested.¹³ Drawing from pluralistic traditions that opposed the excessive powers of kings and emperors, antistatist socialists insisted that political power be divided and shared by occupational and regional bodies.

Debate over the relationship of state and society has transcended changes of regime, but with the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870, and especially with its consolidation after 1876, it acquired a new acuity. The problem stemmed from the fact that it was now not just the state, but the republican state, that required assessment. The Left had always had an ambiguous view of French republics. On the one hand, the republic represented the rupture with the Old Regime and with the privileges associated with it. It stood for the realization of civil liberties and wider political participation. On the other hand, the republic was essentially a bourgeois republic, which in its various incarnations (1792, 1848, 1870) had proved unsympathetic to fundamental social reform.

French socialists of the Third Republic were divided on how to deal with the demonstrably conservative republic that they faced. Whether revolutionary or reformist, they recognized the need for a revision of the economic and social institutions upon which practical political power was based. But there was also near-unanimous agreement among them that a republic provided the most favorable political setting in which such a revision could be brought about. As a result, developing a particular stance vis-a-vis the Third Republic was a difficult task.

In the development of these ideas, the contributions of Benoît Malon are of considerable importance. An account of his career and ideas illuminates the general development of socialist thought during the last third of the nineteenth century. More specifically, it highlights the emergence of a modern reformist socialist movement in France. Malon was instrumental in intellectually accommodating socialism to the Republic: he moved from advocating abstention