The Revolution of 1848

Mary Pickering

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511596551.007

6 - The Revolution of 1848

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010

Mary Pickering

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Mary Pickering: Affiliation:
San José State University, California

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All these various contacts … are developing within me a vivid sense of my present mission as the intellectual and moral director of the great socialist revolution that is rapidly approaching.

Comte, September 1849

COMTE'S RELATION TO THE WORKERS: THE CHALLENGE OF COMMUNISM

A gifted teacher, Comte eagerly responded to artisans' widespread desire for education. The clockmaker André-Auguste Francelle, for example, not only audited his astronomy course, but studied mathematics with other teachers. As Edward Berenson has noted about this period, “Artisans looked to sympathetic members of the middle class for enlightenment. Far from resenting bourgeois republicans, workers respected their knowledge and, more often than not, they were glad to follow bourgeois leadership.” Comte was only too happy to play the part. He was always gratified whenever the workers wrote to him to express their gratitude for his lectures on astronomy.

One of the workers, Jean-Fabien Magnin, began a long correspondence with Comte in August 1845. Born in 1810, he worked for a time as a weaver in Lyon, where he became politicized. He then became a carpenter like his father and eventually gained a solid knowledge of other crafts. After settling in Paris, he began to follow courses in the sciences at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. He also became interested in social reform. However, he kept his distance from Fourierism and communism, especially Etienne Cabet's Icarian variety. In April 1843, he heard from a fellow worker, Pierre Buisson, about Comte's lectures on astronomy.

Type: Chapter
Information: Auguste Comte
An Intellectual Biography
, pp. 266 - 334

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511596551.007 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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