Democracy and the “social question” in the July Monarchy

In July 1830, in a loose alliance with the “liberal” parliamentary opposition (i.e. the Doctrinaires), Parisians took to the streets and overthrew the Bourbon Monarchy. Louis-Philippe of Orléans, the self-proclaimed “citizen-king,” assumed the throne. Yet, in the eyes of many republicans and socialists, 1830 swiftly became a hijacked revolution, or a Doctrinaire coup.Footnote ¹⁵ The new July Monarchy only marginally enlarged the all-male electorate, resisting demands for universal suffrage. Despite their advocacy of freedom of speech and of association during the Bourbon regime, the Doctrinaires abandoned such liberal commitments within a few years. Their governments banned demonstrations, increased surveillance of political clubs, and censored the press. Furthermore, they saw the social problems that accompanied emerging urbanization and industrialization as problems of pauperism—a level of poverty that threatened the moral and social order.Footnote ¹⁶

This perception was a product of the Doctrinaires’ peculiar idea of social progress and democracy. When they were the main opposition party in the 1820s, the Doctrinaires challenged the Bourbon Monarchy's “ultra-royalist” program to restore aristocracy through a particular approach—one that based politics on “sociological terrain.”Footnote ¹⁷ François Guizot, perhaps the most influential of the Doctrinaires, contended that “it is wiser to study first the society to know and understand political institutions … political institutions are an effect; a society produces them before being modified by them.”Footnote ¹⁸ Put otherwise, Guizot argued that a political thinker should first seek to understand the “nature of property relations,” “the manner of individuals according to their social situation, the relationship between different classes, and the state of persons.”Footnote ¹⁹ What this approach revealed was a “great social metamorphosis’—an irreversible social progress in industry, intellect, and morals that made any attempt to restore the Ancien Régime anachronistic.Footnote ²⁰ Against the ultraroyalist Villèle's parliamentary speech that blamed the “new interest” for fomenting “disorder” in the kingdom, Guizot wrote that the real danger was the reactionary “old interests” of aristocracy.Footnote ²¹ “Not only does public opinion in France dismiss this legal and fixed classification of society, the state of society itself refuses it.”Footnote ²² Guizot urged the regime to “help” the “ascendance” of these “new interests,” which he associated with the “young,” educated “middle class.”Footnote ²³ Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard echoed this argument in parliamentary debates. Just like Guizot, he posited the emergence of the “middle classes” as a sign of social progress in “industry and property.”Footnote ²⁴ And Royer-Collard used the term “democracy” to characterize this new “universal form of society”: “This is our democracy, as I see it and; yes, it is in full spate in this beautiful France … The true work of wisdom is to observe and direct it.”Footnote ²⁵

The Doctrinaires argued that this novel democratic society licensed one true political regime: the representative government of the enlightened “middle class.” This also meant a rejection of political democracy. During the Bourbon Monarchy, Guizot claimed in his Sorbonne lectures that “the desire and tendency of society are in fact being governed by the best.”Footnote ²⁶ He asserted that “democratic governments” cannot fulfil this desire because they bring the “despotism of number” and the “domination of inferiorities over superiorities.”Footnote ²⁷ After the 1830 Revolution, this argument in favor of a government of “middle class” became the basis of the July Monarchy's exclusionary governments. In a parliamentary speech in 1837, Guizot targeted proposals for the extension of suffrage with similar language. He argued that “universal suffrage” and “political equality” are expressions of an “envious … democracy” that wants to “lower everything to its level.” The “perfection” of the July government, he claimed, was to blend “social equality” with “true liberty” because it enabled “capacity, virtue, and work” to “rise to the highest offices of the state.”Footnote ²⁸

It is therefore not a coincidence that the “social question” and democracy emerged together as prominent topics in early nineteenth-century French public debates. Indeed, as Daniel Gordon suggests, “the invention of the social” had begun during the late seventeenth century, when French thinkers attempted to demonstrate the existence of a “self-instituting” realm distinct from the supervision and reach of royal sovereignty.Footnote ²⁹ Especially after the 1789 Revolution, with the abolition of the Ancien Régime, the “invention of the social” became an indispensable task.Footnote ³⁰ The Doctrinaires gave a particular direction to this ongoing concern with “the social.” In making “the social” an autonomous condition and a priority for political thought, and in using the term “democracy” to refer to its modern (and antiaristocratic) aspects (e.g. the “middle class,” “social equality” in the sense of social mobility), they created a tension between the imaginary of “the social” (as the condition of progress, mobility, prosperity) and the reality of “the social” (as the condition of poverty and exclusion).Footnote ³¹ In fact, early uses of the term “social question” emerged to express a similar tension. The Journal des débates in 1826 used the term to criticize the Bourbon regime's inegalitarian law of entails that solidified the place of nobles in the electoral college. The periodical commented that the regime was “amusing itself … making a legal question combat a social question.”Footnote ³² Ironically, after the establishment of the July Monarchy, the association of democracy with the “social question” became a threat to the Doctrinaires’ image of “the social” and their self-proclaimed “legal country” [pays légal]—the limited electorate of the “middle class.”Footnote ³³

The uprising of the Lyonnais silk weavers in 1831 was the first real confrontation between the young July Monarchy and the “social question.” The uprising was a result of a dispute between the silk weavers and merchants.Footnote ³⁴ Against the merchants’ pressures to lower silk prices, the Lyonnais weavers asked the local prefect to establish a fixed price. When this demand was rejected, they revolted and took control of the city for a few days. When the army entered to retake the city, their only victory was that there was no bloodshed. Still, the uprising shook the European political scene. The British newspaper Courier published a report, stating that the event raised the “social question.”Footnote ³⁵ In fact, this was a translation of the French interior minister Casimir Perier's words. Casimir Perier told the Chamber of Deputies that the uprising in Lyon was an illegitimate attack against the July Monarchy. He also argued that the uprising did not contest the political principles of the regime:

In a sense, the regime officially recognized the term “social question.” But this recognition was also a refusal in two senses. First, it refused to explore the connections between the “social question” and the exclusionary representative government of the July regime. Second, it refused to acknowledge the emerging problem of class conflict. Casimir Perier reduced the “question” to an overall problem of unemployment and poverty resolvable through administrative measures. Guizot was soberer in his assessment:

Guizot's remarks meant that the regime acknowledged that “the social” had become an ominous “question” in the sense that it forced the regime to inquire how industrialization brought tensions that challenged its formulation of “the social” and the “middle class.”Footnote ³⁸ Consider Guizot's words:

Strikingly, despite the claim to keep the “middle class” open (which aligns with the idea of a flexible democratic social condition), Guizot explicitly drew a boundary around it. His remarks created the other of the “middle class,” namely a distinct “class” of wage laborers that cannot be included in the political sphere because their life conditions and work do not give them the capacity for political participation. Consistent with its rejection of political democracy, the July regime characterized this working class as a “social danger” that is prone to criminality and the popular violence of the 1789 Revolution.Footnote ⁴⁰ For instance, the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1838 sponsored a competition for studies that offered “positive observations” on “the dangerous class” and its “vices, ignorance, and misery.”Footnote ⁴¹ The prize-winning work (which Blanc discussed in Organization of Labor), Honoré Frégier's The Dangerous Classes, gave an alarming picture of criminality in Paris, arguing that the culprits were the poor and their bad morals.Footnote ⁴² The solution to this “invasion of vice,”Footnote ⁴³ Frégier argued, was to promote the morals of the “middle class” through private (e.g. the mentorship of industrialists over workers) and public (e.g. libraries, shelters) initiatives.Footnote ⁴⁴ This problem of “dangerous classes” swiftly became the “social question” in the eyes of the regime and many other “social economists.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Their focus on moral vices allowed them to characterize poverty not as a product of emerging industrial capitalism but as a moral anomaly that could be remedied through paternalistic and pedagogical interventions.Footnote ⁴⁶

Yet, ultimately, the July regime's search for a new superior class (i.e. the “capable” middle class) created a paradoxical conceptual framework that supported the socialist and democratic opposition. On the one hand, because the regime rejected corporatism, it formulated its idea of the modern “social” by using terms like democracy, mobility, and individual voluntarism. On the other hand, because it wanted to differentiate the capable from the rest of society, it used idioms of collectivity (i.e. the “middle class” vis-à-vis the “poor”) that could easily be transformed into a new collectivist language in the hands of workers.Footnote ⁴⁷ This meant an opportunity for new visions of collectivity, including democracy, the people, and the working class.

For example, in 1840, a flood of socialist works appeared: Étienne Cabet's The Voyage to Icaria, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's What Is Property?, Pierre Leroux's On Humanity , and, indeed, Blanc's Organization of Labor. Christian socialist Philippe Buchez's worker-edited journal L'Atelier was also launched this year, followed a few years later by other works such as romantic socialist Victor Considerant's journal La démocratie pacifique (1843) and feminist socialist Flora Tristan's The Workers’ Union (1843). While there was no cohesive definition of socialism (and, in a similar manner, of radicalism, republicanism, communism, or democracy), these works overlapped on one objective: a search for a new response to the “social question”—in the sense of both finding reforms to remedy the problems of industrial capitalism and creating a new egalitarian society.Footnote ⁴⁸ In fact, puzzled by the proliferation of such works, liberal Catholic Louis de Carné wrote a review of new “democratic and communist” works, including Blanc's Organization.Footnote ⁴⁹ Blanc later responded to Carné, blaming him for misrepresenting the “democratic party.” Against Carné's argument that in the “last ten years” the “democratic party” and its “utopias” had increasingly gained popularity, Blanc wrote that the “democratic school” had not existed ten years ago and that neither the “liberals” (Doctrinaires) nor the “utopians” were “truly the democratic school.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Carné's review and Blanc's response, therefore, demonstrated that the term “democracy,” thanks to the proliferation of socialist works, had become central to the debates on reforming industrial society.

Blanc's Organization was one of the most popular socialist works.Footnote ⁵¹ Three thousand copies of the first edition sold out in two weeks. Alarmed by such popularity, the government ordered its confiscation.Footnote ⁵² By 1847, its fifth edition had been published (republished again in 1848), thicker in size as Blanc revised his work and added new chapters to respond to his critics.Footnote ⁵³ Blanc aspired to offer an accessible depiction of industrial capitalism's ills and a peaceful and practical solution to them. As he declared in the introduction to the fifth edition,

There is a “peaceful solution,” Blanc claimed: “Their [the excluded poorer classes’] enfranchisement alone can open to you [the rich] the unknown realm of tranquil enjoyment, and such is the virtue of the principle of fraternity, that whatever is taken from their sufferings is necessarily added to your enjoyments.”Footnote ⁵⁵ With these sentences, Blanc summarized the overall argument of the “democratic party”: the democratic reorganization of industry and government was the only way to remedy the industrial disorder that threatened all classes (even the middle class) and promote social solidarity (as expressed by the revolutionary republican principle of “fraternity”). Blanc made democracy a call for political and social reform. The “social question,” in Blanc's Organization, became a democratic question—a question of establishing democratic participation in work and in the republic.

Blanc and democracy

Early expressions of Blanc's idea of democracy are evident in his reviews of the first volume of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835). Tocqueville's favorable portrayal of democracy in the United States gave Blanc the opportunity to reassert that political democracy did not mean “riot” or “all the frightening dimensions of a revolution” but an “organized” exercise of popular sovereignty.Footnote ⁵⁶ Blanc acknowledged that democracies could create the tyranny of masses.Footnote ⁵⁷ But he added that a shorthand equation of democracy with tyrannical masses revealed a confusion: democracy can bring such tyranny only if politics is confused with administration, and if a democratic government is confused with a centralized administration.Footnote ⁵⁸ Blanc emphasized Tocqueville's twofold conceptual distinction: first, between centralization and decentralization, and second, between politics and administration. Blanc summarized: political centralization means concentrating “in the same hand the power to direct the common interests of all parts of the nation,” whereas administrative centralization means concentrating “in the same hands the power to direct the special interests of certain parts of the nation.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The real danger, Blanc declared, is the latter because it “fatally” hinders “the public life.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Blanc here referred to Tocqueville's warning that there can be a tension between administration and politics. Tocqueville argued that administration concerns itself with “proper order” and “public tranquility.”Footnote ⁶¹ Tocqueville, however, was wary of administrative power—especially when it was centralized. He wrote, and Blanc quoted, “It excels at preventing, not at doing. When it is a matter of stirring a society to its depths and spurring it forward in a rapid pace, centralization's strength deserts it. Even if the slightest cooperation is required of individuals, the vast machine turns out to be astonishingly feeble.”Footnote ⁶² In other words, administrative power could undermine politics in the sense that it could relieve citizens of public affairs which, in effect, could debilitate any citizen participation or action. This is what Tocqueville argued when he wrote that the decentralization of administration in the United States created a key “political advantage”: it did not put a distance between citizens and their responsibility and interest to take charge of their public affairs.Footnote ⁶³ Democracy created an energetic society, in which each citizen, “from the level of the town to the Union as a whole,” cared about the “public interest” as though it was “their own.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Therefore Blanc suggested that when citizens exercised their political power at local and national levels, they would not relinquish power to the central government. Therefore democracy was, in fact, the remedy to a despotic centralized administration.Footnote ⁶⁵

Blanc's emphasis on democracy as a practice was important here—and as we will see later, it informed his proposals for establishing democratic participation in work. But, before that, Blanc was aware that a discussion of American democracy and democratic participation immediately evoked the French debates on political democracy and universal suffrage. Thus Blanc introduced the topic of reform in Organization by voicing the socialist criticisms of “parliamentary disputes.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In the 1841 edition, Blanc added explicit references to the “social question,” “democratic government,” and “universal suffrage”:

In the same year, reflecting on the first ten years of the July Monarchy, Blanc wrote elsewhere that universal suffrage was forcefully demanded because it was seen as the only way to make the law a product of “the will of the whole people.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Blanc's emphasis was on the universalizing aspect of suffrage—the displacement of the will of the “bourgeoisie” or “wealth” in favor of the “will of the whole people.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Blanc here was not alone. Several other socialist and reformist thinkers also wanted to create a collective will and realize ideals such as “fraternity.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Yet there were two points of contention among the socialists. First: does this will of the people mean the will of the working class or the poor in conflict with the will of the bourgeoisie or the rich, or does this will of the people mean a harmony of the interests of all classes—the whole society? For instance, Auguste Blanqui targeted the July regime by appropriating the term “democracy” to underline class antagonism: “One hundred thousand bourgeois form what is called, by a bitter irony, the ‘democratic element’.”Footnote ⁷¹ He asserted that the real “democratic elements” were the “republican” “proletarians” who “raised it [the tricolor flag of the revolution] in 1830.”Footnote ⁷² Blanqui added, “We call for the thirty million French people to choose the form of their government … through universal suffrage.”Footnote ⁷³ As is evident in Blanqui's words, while this language of collective will or the people rendered universal suffrage a forceful demand for the inclusion of the excluded classes, it also sat uneasily with the universalist aspirations of suffrage since it still equated the collective will of the people with the excluded working class.

The second and related point of contention was this: are political democracy and universal suffrage capable of realizing “the people” (in its either possible meaning: the empowerment and inclusion of the excluded class or the harmonization of the interests of the whole society)? For instance, Considerant argued that while the “unity of the people in government” was the ultimate political goal, “neither the electoral mechanism nor universal suffrage could bring harmony out of the chaos” caused by class “war.”Footnote ⁷⁴ For his part, after the 1848 Revolution, Proudhon embraced “the principle of democracy” in his proposal for the “People's Bank” but blamed “universal suffrage” for “pretend[ing]” to create the “republic” (which he equated with “the people acting and speaking as one person”).Footnote ⁷⁵ Therefore, while many socialists shared an aspiration for solidarity, some saw “the political” as secondary to “the social,” some were skeptical of political democracy's ability to bring social change or unity, and some were hostile to political democracy as a ruse that concealed class inequality.Footnote ⁷⁶

Blanc's thought was squarely entangled in these questions. On one general point, Blanc was unwavering: political and social democracy are inseparable.Footnote ⁷⁷ Yet Blanc's justification of this argument was not as clear or convincing to his readers. One reason for this was Blanc's idea of the state. In the first edition of Organization, Blanc introduced the state as the new “organized power” in the new social condition: “without doubt, a renovated society would call for a new power, but is this power so independent from society that one can be changed without the other?”Footnote ⁷⁸ In other words, Blanc appropriated the Doctrinaires’ argument that the modern state was not a power external to society, that the state was merely the political center of the “social powers.”Footnote ⁷⁹ As such, the task was to give the state its true role, namely to emancipate and organize all powers in society—including the productive classes. “It would be foolish to think that it [the emancipation of the proletariat] can be achieved through partial efforts or isolated attempts. The whole strength of the state must be applied. The proletarians lack the instruments of labor to liberate themselves, and it is the government that must furnish them.”Footnote ⁸⁰ As the later versions of Organization summarized, “the state is the banker of the poor.”Footnote ⁸¹ For Blanc, political and social democracy were inseparable because only a democratic state could legitimately realize social reform.

Blanc explained his idea of the democratic state further in a later article: “In a real democracy, the state is not the executive power … it is the society itself … by the word state we understand the society acting as a body … [for] the free development of the individual, not for the benefit of a few only, but for the benefit of all.”Footnote ⁸² Blanc's sentences here had a noticeably normative or aspirational tone:Footnote ⁸³ in a truly democratic state, there would be no difference between the “individual,” the “social,” and the state because political government would not be an external agent imposing power and partial interests on society. Yet Blanc was aware that a purely aspirational argument would be inconsistent with his above-mentioned argument that the “organized power” of the state is also the best practical option to realize reform. Therefore it was important to clarify how a democratic state realizes this aspiration of “society acting as a body.” Blanc's answer built on his review of Tocqueville. Revisiting his Tocquevillian argument for the separation of politics and administration, Blanc celebrated democracy for combining “two principles”: “political centralization” and “administrative decentralization.”Footnote ⁸⁴ He reiterated that the former did not mean concentrating power in the hands of the state administration but creating a government that directs the “common interests.”Footnote ⁸⁵ When such power was combined with administrative decentralization, political power did not become a monopoly of a centralized administration. Rather, it created a robust political sphere in which both participatory citizenry and common interests flourished. Democracies therefore enabled the “exercise of popular sovereignty.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Thus Blanc maintained that democratic participation, including universal suffrage, was a practical school for creating “the people.” In so doing, Blanc challenged the Doctrinaires’ exclusionary idea of “capacity.” If political democracy and participation were central to people's capacity to orient themselves to their common interests, then the exclusion of the poor or the working class could not be justified through the argument that they lacked “capacity.” In fact, it was the opposite: they lacked “capacity” because they were deprived of their exercise of political participation. This is why Blanc argued that political democracy and universal suffrage were indispensable: they allowed people to really exercise their capacity for self-government. Elsewhere, Blanc specified this point by advocating for the imperative mandate. In response to Considerant's proposals for a localized direct democracy, Blanc argued that such a plan would not realize the “direct government of the people by the people” because it would mean the fragmentation of the people's will, thereby creating the “direct government of one party over others.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Instead, Blanc turned to Montesquieu's depiction of democracy: “a people having sovereign power should do all for itself all it can do well, and what it cannot do well, it must do through its ministers.”Footnote ⁸⁸ While this may sound like celebration of the rule of the capable, Blanc's emphasis was on the opposite: the “people's capacity to perceive merit.”Footnote ⁸⁹ As Montesquieu wrote, people “learn better in a public square than a monarch does in a palace” and an integral part of this political education is the capacity to unite voices behind an enlightened will.Footnote ⁹⁰ Hence Blanc's demand for the imperative mandate: a popularly elected government consisting of mandates would ensure the real exercise of people's capacity in this extended meaning—perceiving, exercising, delegating, and supervising merit. Overall, Blanc maintained that only a political democracy ensured the rule of the enlightened common interests.

However, one question still lingers: can there be common interests in a society divided by class inequalities? Or, to repeat the earlier point of contention, is this democratic will the will of the excluded classes or is it the will of the whole society? To address these questions, Blanc needed to show how class divisions can be overcome. This required a study of how industrial capitalism leads to social conflict and disintegration, and how the “social question” concerns the whole of society.

Blanc and “the social”: “tyranny of circumstances”

Since its first edition, Blanc's Organization had rebuked the Doctrinaires’ idea of the “democratic” social condition. “In modern societies,” Blanc began the first two editions, the “public order rests on two men: one parades, the other cuts off heads. The hierarchy of the old school of politics starts with the king and ends with the executioner.”Footnote ⁹¹ Blanc's rhetoric was striking but not original. Blanc opened his Organization with the claim that modern societies are as hierarchical and oppressive as the Ancien Régime. As he acknowledged, Blanc drew on the discourse of Fourier and Considerant. “Fourier, who through his vigorous attacks on the present social order, and after him, his disciple, Victor Considerant, have laid bare with an irresistible logic the great wound of society that we call commerce.”Footnote ⁹² Blanc implicitly voiced Fourier's argument that modern commerce did not replace the conflicts of the old order (e.g. poverty, slavery, conquest), but added new conflicts such as the one between the merchant and the producer.Footnote ⁹³ Moreover, Blanc borrowed Considerant's argument that mercantilism was the “great wound” of modern society because it promoted self-interestedness and poverty.Footnote ⁹⁴ Like Fourier and Considerant, Blanc did not reject the historical progress from the old to the new social order. Rather, the point was that the progress was not yet complete. In other words, a new revolution was necessary to finish what the 1789 Revolution had started: the complete abolition of the old order by extending the revolution into social relations.

In Organization, Blanc characterized the 1789 Revolution as a “bourgeois” revolution: “1830 belongs to the chain of which 1789 was the first link. 1789 had commenced the dominion of the bourgeoisie; 1830 continued it.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The 1789 Revolution ended up as a bourgeois revolution because the rights it declared were only formal. “Considered in an abstract manner,” rights are a “mirage,” a “metaphysical and lifeless protection.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The abstractness of rights, Blanc's argument ran, “masks all the injustice of a system of individualism, and all the barbarity of abandoning the poor.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Thus formal rights are not only imperfect but also a device for the disenfranchisement of the poor and the working class. “Let us say once, and for all: liberty consists, not only in the rights accorded, but in the power given to men to exercise and develop their faculties.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Blanc effectively argued that liberty and power are the same; that there is no liberty if there is no power to exercise it. This also shed light on why the 1789 Revolution failed to completely overthrow the Ancien Régime. While it abolished legal and political privileges of nobility and proclaimed the equality of rights, it left society in one sense disorderly, and in another sense hierarchical and aristocratic. The new society was disorderly because the Revolution abolished labor corporations without reintroducing a new form of organization. And this new society was hierarchical and aristocratic because it left workers in a condition of perpetual inferiority and dependency. Blanc wrote, “In the present social regime, we have the inequality of means of development instead of muscular force; the contest of capital with capital instead of body with body; the abuse of conventional advantages instead of physical superiority; the ignorant instead of the weak; the poor instead of the powerless.”Footnote ⁹⁹ A social condition that did not allow the majority of the population to develop and exercise their capacities could not be called a democratic social condition.

Using Academy-sponsored works (including Frégier's Dangerous Classes), Blanc documented this inegalitarian condition of disorder and dependency: the low levels of wages (particularly lower for women workers), unsanitary living conditions, commonness of industrial child labor, and serious levels of poverty that engendered criminality.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Yet, contra these works, Blanc did not blame the so-called “dangerous” poor and their moral vices. He located a different cause: “competition produces poverty; this is a fact proven by figures.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ “Competition” produced not only “horribly prolific misery” but also class antagonism and social disorder.Footnote ¹⁰² Thus competition was the proof of the “regime of individualism”—an atomized and antagonistic society that was on the brink of ruin.Footnote ¹⁰³ Blanc here forwarded a version of an argument that was commonplace among French socialists. For instance, Considerant warned that competition drove “European societies” toward an industrial “jacquerie.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Leroux also lamented the “immense anarchy” created by competition and “individualism” in commercial societies.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ However, a noteworthy characteristic of Blanc's Organization was its appropriation and subversion of the language of political and social economy. As William Roberts observes, “one of the most important divisions” among the European socialists at the time was “the division between those who sought some accommodation or confrontation with political economy and those who refused outright to engage with the new science.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Blanc was in the former camp. Appropriating the language of political and social economy, Blanc aimed to show that the logical end of this language was, in fact, the democratic organization of labor.

Since the first edition of Organization, Blanc targeted one common assumption of political economy—that competition would bring “cheapness.” For Blanc, this assumption failed to see the self-destructive tendency of competition. “Cheapness—this is the big word which, according to the economists of the school of Smith and Say, contains all the advantages of unlimited competition. But why stubbornly refuse to face the result of cheapness, except as it affects the momentary benefit of the consumer?”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The supposed benefits of cheapness to workers-as-consumers arose only when competition subjected workers-as-producers to poverty. “Cheapness is the mace with which the wealthier crush the poorer producers.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Competition was also harmful to the small industrialists and the middle class because it led to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few powerful industrialists. “Cheapness is the executer of the grand schemes of monopoly. It is the funeral of the moderate industry, commerce, and property; it is, in a word, the annihilation of the middle class for the benefit of a few oligarchic industrialists.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ “It is maintained as long as there is a struggle: as soon as the wealthier has eliminated all the rivals, the prices rise.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Cheapness revealed that the end point of competition was not the permanent reduction of prices, or the perfection of competition, or general prosperity, but monopoly and competition's self-destruction.

Blanc also challenged the Malthusian premises of the July regime's “social economy”: the problem of poverty was separate from the progress of industry and could be resolved by controlling population growth among the poorer classes.Footnote ¹¹¹ Blanc criticized the Malthusian “overpopulation” argument, first, by denouncing its inherently paternalistic outlook. He wrote, “does population have any bound which it is not permitted to exceed? Are we allowed to say to production, which is abandoned to the caprices of individual selfishness, to this industry, which is an ocean full of shipwrecks: ‘Thus far you shall go but no further?’”Footnote ¹¹² More importantly, even if population growth was halted, competition would still diminish wages or lead to unemployment. “Who is blind enough not to see that under the empire of unlimited competition, the continuous decline of wages necessarily becomes a general and by no means exceptional fact?”Footnote ¹¹³ The diminution of wages was therefore not an anomaly in industrial competition solvable through Malthusian measures to control population growth. The deprivation of workers was built into industrial competition and progress. For instance, technological progress forced workers to compete against machinery and against each other. “The thousand workers that the new machine displaces, will come knocking at the door of the neighbor factory, reducing the wages of their fellow workers.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Overall, Blanc declared, “a systematic diminution of wages, resulting in the elimination of a certain number of workers, is the inevitable effect of unlimited competition. It is nothing but an industrial process by means of which the workers are compelled to exterminate each other.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

At this point, Blanc's critical appropriation of political economy took a peculiar turn. He contended that the system of competition, in fact, undermined the power of all classes—including the so-called capable “middle class.” He wrote, “As paradoxical as this may sound, both the oppressor and the oppressed are equal gainers by the destruction of oppression and equal losers by its maintenance. Do you want a striking proof? The middle class established its dominion by unlimited competition; the principle of tyranny. Very well, it is by the unlimited competition that we see today the middle class perishing.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Here, Blanc did not simply repeat his above-mentioned argument that competition leads to monopoly and oligarchy. He contended that competition was destructive for all classes and for the whole of society. He bolstered this point in the later editions of Organization. Blanc argued that “competition”

There is one key argumentative maneuver here. By characterizing competition as the “tyranny of circumstances,” Blanc maintained that the problems of poverty and class domination cannot be explained through a focus on morals and classes. Such problems were, instead, a product of the system of competition—a novel and impersonal form of oppression that was different from, as he wrote above, the “palpable tyrannies with a human face.” In fact, Blanc made this argument repeatedly: “I know an inexorable tyranny, far more difficult to elude or shake than that of a Nero or a Tiberius; it is the tyranny of circumstances.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ It was harder to locate and combat this novel tyranny because it was “invisible” in the sense that it did not belong to persons or classes.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The “circumstances” figured as the tyrannical agent. Therefore, in this “tyranny of circumstances,” the poor became “the slaves of hunger, the slaves of cold, the slaves of ignorance, and the slaves of chance.”Footnote ¹²⁰ In a similar vein, workers were “reduced to dependence not on [their] prudence or foresight but on the disorders that competition naturally creates: a distant bankruptcy, a ceased order, an invented machine, a closed workshop, an industrial panic, unemployment!”Footnote ¹²¹ As such, even a prudent worker and the so-called capable “middle class” were subject to the unpredictable and destructive consequences of the system of industrial competition. “Tyranny is not only odious, it is blind … All interests are one, and social reform is a means of salvation for all the members of society, without exception.”Footnote ¹²²

Evident in Blanc's “tyranny of circumstances” was his critical appropriation of the language of political economy. This appropriation allowed him to demonstrate the systemic nature of domination and impoverishment and to refute the moralistic approaches to the “social question.” However, it also created an ambiguity in his characterization of class power and antagonism. Blanc sometimes used a language focused on classes. For example, as we saw, he wrote that the “the middle class established its dominion by unlimited competition; the principle of tyranny.”Footnote ¹²³ When discussing “cheapness,” Blanc highlighted the domination of “oligarchic industrialists.”Footnote ¹²⁴ He also at times characterized competition as a product of bourgeois “individualism.”Footnote ¹²⁵ In fact, this oscillation between a focus on system and classes was a point that Blanc's contemporaries targeted. For instance, questioning Blanc's characterization of competition as “individualism,” Considerant's La Phalange commented that the real cause of “industrial anarchy” was not competition but industrial “fragmentation.”Footnote ¹²⁶ The same review also criticized Blanc for understating the clash of interests between the capitalists and the workers.Footnote ¹²⁷

Arguably, Blanc did not clearly explain the relationship between systemic domination (the “tyranny of circumstances”) and class power (of the “middle class” or “oligarchic industrialists”). Yet he had a clear general argument: industrial capitalism bears internal contradictions that would eventually lead to its destructive demise. For instance, Blanc asserted that political economists never questioned the fact that competition requires ever-increasing production and consumption. In fact, for political economists, this idea of ever-increasing production and consumption was celebrated as one of the basic ways of keeping capital and labor in balance. Blanc sardonically summarized: “The worker must never lack work; the master, on the other hand, should always find a ready market for his productions and the means to pay work accordingly. Isn't the problem solved?”Footnote ¹²⁸ In other words, when there is an increase in the supply of labor, industrialists would increase production to alleviate unemployment. In turn, employed workers would be encouraged to consume, creating profits that would fund further investment in production. The result: workers would always have work and wages; industrialists would always have profits. For political economists, when left to itself, the market could achieve this equilibrium of ever-increasing production and consumption. To criticize this outlook, Blanc sarcastically wrote, “Let us open the gates of infinity to human activity and let nothing hinder its expansion. Let us proclaim the laissez-faire principle boldly and openly.”Footnote ¹²⁹ For Blanc, this outlook further evidenced the self-destructive tendency of industrial capitalism because such a goal of incessant expansion in production and consumption required competition in another area: colonial expansion.Footnote ¹³⁰ Imitating “the English,” Blanc declared, “The number of raw materials offered by our agriculture is too circumscribed. Very well! We will seek at the extreme ends of the earth materials for our manufactures. All nations shall become consumers of the produce of England.”Footnote ¹³¹ In addition to causing war,Footnote ¹³² colonial expansion was a recipe for further impoverishment both at home and in the colonies because, in this expansionist economy, what was increasingly produced was not the “means of subsistence” but commodities such as “cotton” and “silk.”Footnote ¹³³ “This political economy carried in itself a fatal vice to England and to the world. It posed, as a principle, that all that was required was to find customers. It should have added: consumers who can pay.”Footnote ¹³⁴ The impoverishment of workers-as-producers through competition was the real issue because competition “poisoned” the “fountain of all wealth—labor.”Footnote ¹³⁵ The proof was nothing other than “the pauperism of whole masses of workers” in England and the “general impoverishment” of its colonies.Footnote ¹³⁶

Ultimately, Blanc argued that the system of competition is harmful to all classes, and, as colonialism demonstrates, to all societies. This point also turned the Doctrinaires against themselves because competition, with its unpredictable and destructive consequences, undermined any class's control and capacity. Against such a system of domination and disorder (as expressed by Blanc through phrases like the “tyranny of circumstances” and “industrial anarchy”), Blanc emphasized organizational restructuring rather than class power or antagonism. In so doing, he formulated the main question of social reform: how can industrial production be reorganized so that people can take control over their social conditions? Blanc answered: democratically associated labor that promotes “fraternal” production.

Blanc and organization: “social workshops”

Blanc's Organization proposed three successive stages for a democratic reorganization of labor: first, the gradual replacement of privately owned industries with what Blanc called “social workshops”; second, the mobilization of industrial competition toward a state-level industrial cooperation; and finally, the establishment of workers’ democratic control in the “social workshops.”Footnote ¹³⁷ In the end, Blanc suggested, these measures would transform the “industrial world” from a world of competition to a world that is “at the service of all.”Footnote ¹³⁸

The state would play a key role in the first two steps. First, it would give financial support to the “social workshops” through public loans to ensure that they are not eliminated by big privately owned industries in their founding stage.Footnote ¹³⁹ The social workshops would also admit “all workers who give guarantees of good conduct.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In the second step, once the “social workshops” became productive and outcompeted their private counterparts, the state would regulate the incorporation of the defeated private industries into the “social workshops.” This regulation would not mean that the state would expropriate private industries. The state instead would let the system of competition gradually eliminate private industries. Blanc wrote, “instead of being like the great capitalist, at present the master and tyrant of the market, the government would be its regulator. It would use competition as a weapon, not for violently destroying private industry, which would above all be its own interest to avoid, but for gradually guiding it to a composition.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ This meant steering industrial competition toward industrial “association.”Footnote ¹⁴²

Before moving to the third stage (which concerns the democratic internal organization of the “social workshops”), we must note Blanc's choice of the term “association.” “Association” was one of the most important and polyvalent terms in post-Revolutionary France because it expressed a wide array of visions (religious, pedagogical, economic, utopian, humanitarian) for creating modern social bonds.Footnote ¹⁴³ In a nutshell, it was the term to replace the old word corps. During the 1789 Revolution, the abolishment of corporate bodies was seen as the first indispensable step toward emancipating individuals from the rigid and hierarchical structure of the Ancien Régime. However, atomism also needed to be thwarted. Association therefore became a key concept for envisioning new social bonds in post-Revolutionary France—bonds that are voluntary and egalitarian as opposed to the Ancien Régime's hierarchical corporate bodies.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Just like the term itself, Blanc's use of “association” was not straightforward. In one sense, Blanc used the term as the opposite of competition and “individualism” akin to other above-mentioned socialists like Considerant and Leroux. In this sense, “association” meant the “defeat of competition.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ “From the solidarity of all the workers in the same workshop we infer the solidarity of all workshops in the same industry. To complete the system, we must establish the solidarity of various industries.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Such solidaristic association among industries would end not only the “tyranny of individual egotism” but also the “extraordinary and unforeseeable” circumstances that competition created, such as worldwide industrial “crises.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In fact, Blanc aspired that such an association should become universal: “we substitute a system of alliance founded on the needs of industry and the reciprocal conveniences of workers in all parts of the world.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Blanc did not dwell much on this universal association—except for an admission that such an aspiration was harder to realize in the present global “industrial anarchy.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Yet he insisted that a state-level association of industry would be the most practical path for social reform. This is where he expressly differentiated himself from Owen, Saint-Simon, and Fourier in the first edition of Organization. While acknowledging their importance in popularizing reformist “social studies,” Blanc contended that each thinker failed to offer practical means of social reform: Owen's theory of distribution based itself on needs instead of labor, Saint-Simonians focused on family and inheritance instead of labor, and Fourier left his theory of organization at the mercy of “individual caprices” because he lacked a fully fledged idea of “power.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ In the later editions, Blanc dropped such explicit polemics and resorted to implicit criticisms. For instance, he repeated his criticism of Fourierists, arguing that their schema would fail because they relied on efforts of “isolated” communities instead of the power of the state.Footnote ¹⁵¹

Blanc's readers were quick to target this idea of the state. Republican Alphonse de Lamartine blamed Blanc for making the state a monopolist in property and industry at the expense of individual liberties;Footnote ¹⁵² political economist Michel Chevalier blamed Blanc's state for imposing “absolute equality” on society and crippling industry;Footnote ¹⁵³ Fourierist journal La Phalange contended that Blanc's idea of the state is not different than the Saint-Simonian idea of a technocratic state.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Carné claimed that Blanc's idea of the state evidenced how the idea of the free market was under attack.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ As a response to these criticisms, Blanc inserted a hundred-page-long section in the fifth (1847) edition of the Organization.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ But, first, Blanc in the 1845 edition gave a response to Lamartine that sounded more like a general clarification: those who characterize Blanc's idea of the state as despotic fail to see that Blanc always means a “democratically constituted” state.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ To further clarify his democratic proposals, Blanc refuted the criticisms that his idea of the state is a Saint-Simonian state—a monopolist, hierarchical, and dirigiste state.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ “In the Saint-Simonian doctrine,” he contended, “the intervention of the state in industry is permanent. In our project, it is only primordial.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Given the “tyranny of circumstances” and industrial competition, the organized force of the state was practically necessary to establish “social workshops,” to “furnish” workers with “the instruments of labor.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Blanc wrote, “After the first year … the workers having had the time to appreciate one another, all being equally interested … in the success of the association, the hierarchy [of the “social workhops”] would proceed on the elective principle.”Footnote ¹⁶¹

This brings us to a more specific meaning of “association” in Organization: the democratic organization of industrial labor. In other words, “association” specified the third stage of Blanc's plan for social reform: the establishment of workers’ democratic control in the “social workshops.” Once the “social workshops” were secure thanks to the sponsorship of the state, their administrations would be handed over to the associates. Blanc repeated that the state's role was to protect the autonomy of workshops, not to control them. The administration of workshops was entirely left to workers themselves: “the associated workers will choose freely … [their] administrators and chiefs; they will divide the profits among themselves; they will form plans for the extension of their operations—what opens a path to arbitrary power or tyranny in this system?”Footnote ¹⁶² Blanc once again drew a distinction between administration and politics. When citizens could equally and freely express their will, the state was nothing other than the political association of citizens. The “social workshops” therefore would not bring state administration into industry. To the contrary, it would extend political association into industry by establishing democratic participation in industry.

Consistent with his celebration of political democracy and participation, Blanc's plan for solving the “social question” relied on the collective agency of the people. Blanc extended democratic participation, suffrage, and the imperative mandate to the “social workshops.” This was not solely a procedural proposition. This was also a way to blend work and collective will formation. Recall that Blanc's demand for universal suffrage was based on the argument that it would mend social ties because, as a practice of self-government, it oriented all citizens toward common good. In Blanc's eyes, democracy in the “social workshops” was essential for the same reason. As democratic institutions, the “social workshops” could become the practical schools of associative industry and self-government. Building on his definition of liberty as power, Blanc argued that the exercise of democratic participation in industry would be the way to abolish the “tyranny” of systematized competition and its accompanying destructive morals such as individualism. “Industrial reform,” in Blanc's words, “will be, in fact, a profound moral revolution.”Footnote ¹⁶³ Blanc's equation of “industrial reform” and “moral revolution” did not mean a moralist argument for pedagogical or paternalistic reform. It meant revaluing work, restoring work's moral and material purpose.

Note, for instance, Blanc's criticisms against the “savings banks”—one of the institutions, along with assistance societies, that the July regime promoted. The Doctrinaires’ celebration of “capacity” was visible in these two social institutions. Savings banks aimed to create security funds for the poorer classes as well as to teach them good morals such as economic prudence. Assistance societies aimed to create relations of tutelage between the rich and the poor. In between the state and individuals, they constituted secondary bodies that not only alleviated hostility or atomism but also served as a model for social bonds.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ To further emphasize the moral aims of these institutions, and to ensure that they did not license any legal–social right (e.g. a right to assistance from the state), the July regime identified them as voluntary and philanthropic institutions.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Therefore saving banks and assistance societies were based on the principle of philanthropy, and they functioned strictly as mechanisms for the integration of paupers into moral society.

For Blanc, savings banks were at best “delusional” and at worst iniquitous.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ “The worker is advised to save for the future … For what? To arrive at the possession of petty capital, reserved as a prey for competition.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ More dangerously, paternalistic institutions like savings banks stripped work of its real value and purpose. Targeting Guizot's remark that “work is a moral restraint” against dangerous pauperism, Blanc asserted, “For the work to be a moral restraint, it first needs to be available for those it is supposed to contain.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Since, “in the current regime,” competition systematically deprived people of work, Guizot's remarks were “absurd.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Blanc commented sardonically that when the Lyonnais workers adopted the slogan “Live Working or Die Fighting,” “they probably lacked Guizot's moral restraint!”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Only once work was emancipated from the purpose it was condemned to in industrial capitalism (i.e. a “forced” competition for “subsistence”Footnote ¹⁷¹) could it have a moral value and become an activity that “universalize[s]” wealth and “elevate[s] … the standard of humanity.”Footnote ¹⁷² Savings banks failed to have any educative effects on society because they neither transformed work nor abolished “individualism” and the antagonism of interests.Footnote ¹⁷³ The “social workshops,” on the other hand, would overcome “individualism” and the antagonism of interests because they would promote an interest in making prosperity a common good. Blanc's response to La Phalange was especially telling here. The journal questioned Blanc's plan for admitting capitalists to “social workshops,” arguing that capital and labor were at odds with each other.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Blanc responded that labor and capital were two integral elements for production, and that their antagonism was, in fact, abnormal. A “general association,” Blanc asserted, would overcome such antagonism and “renovat[e]” industry so that it can “embrace the whole society.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Blanc once again expressed his belief in the educative role of democratic participation. When exercising work and self-government simultaneously, workers could seek and articulate their common interests without competing against each other. Blanc's implicit point was that everybody, even the capitalists, would become associates in industry as they learn the virtues of solidarity over destructive competition.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ This is another reason why Organization lacked phrases such as “class antagonism.” Crucially, this union of democratic participation and work would give work its true purpose. Industry would become an activity “animated by the same spirit” and by “common hopes and a common interest.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ This associational work would be instructive of the “principle of fraternity.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸

As his turn to “fraternity” evidenced, Blanc invested a great deal of trust in the republican tradition and its unificatory power. This is not surprising given Blanc's own intellectual trajectory: he started his career as a journalist in a republican journal and published his above-mentioned review of Tocqueville in a republican journal. In a sense, Blanc himself was part of the increasing interaction between republican and socialist movements and the increasing effort of both movements to recruit workers during the July Monarchy.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ For Blanc, republican principles like “fraternity” could incorporate socialist reorganization of labor into a legible political tradition and program.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ He summarized his vision: “Moral and material amelioration of the lots of all by the free consent of all, and their fraternal association!—which brings us back to the heroic device of our fathers, fifty years ago, on the flag of the revolution: ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity.’”Footnote ¹⁸¹ Blanc saw political and social reform (“moral and material amelioration”) as a progressive step in the history of republicanism (“liberty, equality, fraternity”), and called for a solidaristic and democratic action (“by the free consent of all, and their fraternal association”).

The “social workshops,” overall, expressed an argument: the “social question” could not be answered by administrative measures but through the democratic activity of citizens themselves. Blanc made the democratic capacity of people the basis of social solidarity and prosperity. In so doing, Blanc inverted the July regime's approach to the “social question.” He maintained that workers were not disenfranchised because they lacked morality and capacity. They lacked capacity because they were disenfranchised. By the same token, workers were not disenfranchised because they were poor, but they were poor because they were disenfranchised. The “tyrannical” competition deprived them of their capacity to ameliorate their own conditions and the whole society. The solution to the “social question,” then, was not voluntary tutelage in philanthropic societies. Nor was it the tutelage of the state administration in industry. The solution was establishing democratic egalitarianism and participation in political and social relations. Democracy enabled individuals to develop their capacities because only through the practical experience of democratic participation could individuals gain an ethos of solidarity and the notion of common good. The erasure of the distinction between work and democratic participation would not only bring social solidarity but also new meaning and purpose to the activity of work. Only once democracy was realized in political relations (i.e. universal suffrage and imperative mandate) and social relations (i.e. the “social workshops”) could a “democratic and social republic” be established.