Radicals/Radicalism

Utopian socialism emerged as a rejoinder to liberal policies and practices during the Industrial Revolution and assumed different forms between 1816 and 1848. In England, Robert Owen (1771–1858) a civic-minded reformer experimented with planned communes in pursuit of the perfect socialist community. Owen's strong social consciousness and his belief in the power of science to create a better world led him in 1834 to found the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, England's first national labor organization. Like Owen, the social theories of Count Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Charles Fourier (1772–1837), Auguste Comte (1798–1857), and Karl Marx (1818–1883) assumed the possibility of a perfect society. Such thinkers believed in progress and the ability of science to end scarcity and establish a better world, a perfect community supported by moral political institutions.

In France, utopian socialism grew out of the economic ideology of the revolutionary sans-culottes and the social criticisms of Saint-Simon and Fourier. A child of the revolution himself, Saint-Simon envisioned a world where parasites stepped aside and allowed doers to organize a planned community. In that same spirit of progress, Fourier championed sexual freedom and female emancipation. In 1830 he criticized arranged marriage, likening it to prostitution. Such a challenge to conventional thinking marked Fourier as dangerous if not subversive.

Utopian socialism appealed to the working classes primarily because of socialist opposition to laissez-faire capitalism. French workers adopted either a socialist political outlook or an egalitarian republican one. In June 1848 the two factions united against the French king Louis-Philippe, hoping to replace monarchy with a popular democratic government. Within days of accomplishing this goal, class warfare erupted in Paris (primarily over the issue of national workshops), and workers took to the streets. When the army quelled the riot, liberals returned with a constitution featuring a strong executive. Even so, working-class radicalism remained strong. In 1871 workers again stormed the capital (after national elections returned a majority of conservatives to the Assembly), set up the Paris Commune, and demanded the right to govern without interference. At the behest of Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877), the army smashed the rebels and destroyed the Commune. France was slowly stabilizing when in 1898 to 1899 an anti-Semitic controversy, the Dreyfus Affair, once again pitted the old and traditional—Catholics, racists, and the army—against democratic republicans. Under threat of yet another revolution, the government severed ties with the Catholic Church. The literary realist, Émile Zola (1840–1902) played an influential role in exposing the lie and reviving animosity against the church.

On the heels of the Dreyfus Affair came war with Germany. Brutalized by Germany's threat to "bleed France white" during World War I, survivors of the bloody conflict lost faith in reason and turned a curious eye toward totalitarian regimes. With the Great Depression of the 1930s, an innate weakness of capitalism lay exposed causing widespread panic to set in. As workers began to migrate toward fascism and communism, socialists led by Léon Blum (1872–1950) responded, forming an alliance between radicals and communists in opposition to conservatives and fascists. The Popular Front, the result of this alliance, failed when rapid inflation curtailed Blum's efforts at reform. Blum resigned in 1937, leaving the French to choose between Stalinist Russia and Fascist Germany. The Parti Républican Radical et Radical Socialiste shifted toward the moderate center.