The early 19th century witnessed an outcrop of revolutionary movements in which religious motivations mingled with radical tendencies unleashed by the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. France was thè center of this unrest, and French Socialism became its chief vehicle during the generation which followed the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the old regime in 1815. Of the competing Socialist schools, that of Henri de Saint-Simon was for a time the most influential; and though its founder died virtually unknown in 1825, his followers played a part in the revolutionary upheaval of 1830, before declining through splits and dissensions into yet another quasi-religious sect. Some aspects of this movement, with special reference to the part played in it by Jewish intellectuals, are here analyzed by J. L. Talmon, professor of modern history in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. It is Professor Talmon’s thesis that the Messianic strain in traditional Jewish thinking accounts for the prominence of recently emancipated Jews among the Saint-Simonists, whose doctrine had a religious as well as a political character. The following is a condensation of a chapter from his forthcoming work entitled The High-Tide of Political Messianism. Professor Talmon’s essay “Uniqueness and Universality of Jewish History” appeared in our July 1957 issue.
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“For the last twelve days, my friends, I have been preoccupied with the arrangements best capable of making our enterprise succeed; for the last three hours I have tried, in spite of my sufferings, to give you a résumé of my thoughts. You are coming into an age when properly combined efforts will obtain immeasurable results. . . . The last part of my labors will not be immediately understood. People have thought that the whole religious system would disappear, because they have succeeded in showing the decadence of the Catholic system. They are mistaken: religion cannot disappear from the face of the earth; it can only be transformed. . . . Rodrigues, remember, in order to accomplish great things, one must be passionate. . . . My whole life can be summed up in one single sentence: secure to all men the freest development of their faculties.”1
These were among the last words spoken by Henri de Saint-Simon, the founder of French Socialism, to the small number of disciples assembled around his deathbed in 1825. Few persons marched in the funeral procession to the Père Lachaise cemetery. There were the two most eminent disciples of the philosopher, who had also served as his secretaries: the great historian Augustin Thierry, and Auguste Comte, later to become known as the founder of sociology. Others who had remained faithful to the end included Olinde Rodrigues, Dr. Bailly, and Léon Halévy. When the funeral was over, Rodrigues assembled the faithful at his home. The Saint-Simonian movement was launched at that meeting. Its members felt themselves to be an apostolic community, indeed a replica of that small confraternity in Jerusalem some eighteen hundred years before, with a similar mission before them: “The universe in all its fullness [tout entier] has been given for a second time to men” by Saint-Simon, just as it had been presented for the first time by Jesus Christ. “The world has been waiting for a savior. . . . Saint-Simon appeared. . . . In future, Moses will be the chief of the cult, Jesus Christ the chief of dogma, Saint-Simon the chief of religion, the Pope.”2
Who were the men who saw themselves called upon to revolutionize the whole world, and what were the elements which combined to make up this strangest and yet spiritually most fertile movement of the 19th century, which for all its freakish features was destined to leave an impact on Carlyle and Mazzini, Heine and Alfred de Vigny, Georges Sand and Michelet, Berlioz and Liszt, not to mention Marx and Engels?
To begin with, it was a movement of very young people. There was no one above the age of thirty-five when the school was constituted in 1825. The oldest, Bazard, was then thirty-four; Enfantin, the rival leader, was only twenty-nine, and Rodrigues had just reached the age of thirty-one. Secondly, they were all intellectuals of middle-class origin. There were no aristocrats and hardly any workers among them. Already the contemporaries were struck by the high proportion of former students of the Ecole Polytechnique. Besides engineers and mathematicians, the group comprised some able economists, doctors, lawyers, teachers at higher institutions of learning, and a fair number of litterateurs and publicists, plus a scattering of minor poets, artists, and musicians.
D’Eichthal—as we shall see, a highly representative member of the movement—supplies a revealing piece of information when he remarks that there was hardly a person in the Saint-Simonist school who was not driven by some “family chagrin.” Thus Bazard had had a sombre youth because of his illegitimate birth. Enfantin, the son of a bankrupt, himself unsuccessfully took to commerce during some years in Germany and Russia. Olinde Rodrigues came from a family of Jewish financiers, and although a brilliant mathematician, with some scientific discoveries to his credit, was barred as a Jew from the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Instead he went on the stock exchange and accumulated a fortune.
Quite a few of the Saint-Simonists had played some part in political life before coming to Saint-Simonism. Bazard presided over a Free Masons’ congress in 1821, and in the same year organized a political plot. Buchez, later to become the founder of Christian Socialism, and president of the National Assembly in 1848, began as an active Carbonari. Cerclet, who soon seceded, had been closely connected with the Nestor of conspiracy, Buonarotti, in Geneva. Later he became editor of the influential National, and eventually secretary to the Chamber of Deputies.
Bazard seems to have been speaking for all of them, when he explained the reasons which made him abandon conspiratorial activity in the revolutionary underground and join the Saint-Simonist movement instead. He had begun to feel that plotting was sterile and that the vaguely outlined political ideal of the revolutionary movement under the Restoration government was of too thin a texture. It had no real scientific foundation and failed to give an answer to many human longings. The Saint-Simonian doctrine, he felt, fulfilled all these conditions.
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The Saint-Simonists made their first public appearance as a school in a journal characteristically entitled Producteur—Journal philosophique de l’Industrie, des Sciences et des Beaux-Arts; it carried as a device Saint-Simon’s prophecy of the advent of a golden age of science and progress. The early contributors included men who could hardly be called Saint-Simonists, such as Adolphe Blanqui, the economist and brother of the famous revolutionary; Armand Carrel, the Republican leader; Adolphe Garnier, and others; which again shows how much coming and going there was among the various opposition groups at that period. It was, surprisingly enough, Carrel, a saint of orthodox Republicanism, who replied to the attacks of Liberals like Stendhal and Benjamin Constant on the authoritarianism of the Saint-Simonist “priests of Memphis and Thebes.”
The Producteur came to grief by the end of 1826, after having served as a platform for vigorous ideas expressed in a defiant manner. The demise of the journal was, however, followed by a period of quiet expansion of the movement, lasting for some two years. Personal contacts, correspondence, missionary zeal, and the invisible flow of ideas won over some young men of high ability: Michel Chevalier, a brilliant polytechnician, economist, and publicist who was destined to become a professor at the Collège de France and an important figure under the Second Empire; Henri Fournel, a high priest of technology who gave up the management of the great Creusot steel works to join the inner circle of the school; Jules Lechevalier, an ardent student of Hegel whom he had known during his stay in Germany; the son of the great Carnot, France’s “organizer of victory” during the Revolutionary War of 1793-95; the brothers Émile and Isaac Pereira, two cousins of Rodrigues who, like the latter, became in due course captains of industry, banking, and railway construction; and Gustave d’Eichthal, another Jew, though baptized in early childhood, and a close disciple and friend of Comte; the polytechnicians Cazeaux, Ed-mond Talabot, Abel Transon, Charles Lambert—all men of ability; Hoart, an artillery officer who gave up his commission in order to devote himself to the Saint-Simonist crusade for universal peace; as well as visionaries, orators, and mystics like the poet Charles Duveyrier and the preachers Barrault and Charton.
The years 1828-29 were years of intense proselytizing activity by way of public lectures under the general title of “Exposition de la Doctrine de Saint-Simon,” later edited in book form. They constitute by far the most comprehensive formulation of the ideas of the school before it became dominated by religious preoccupations. Emissaries were dispatched from the Paris center, and souls were won and brotherhoods set up in all parts of France, as well as in Belgium, England, and Germany. The missionaries’ style of preaching was revivalist, yet distinguished by close reasoning and scientific terms of reference. The age was attuned to this synthesis of dialectics and emotionalism. There was in France a thirst for ideas after the years of intellectual barrenness under Napoleon. The spread of romanticism made people intensely receptive and impressionable. Under a regime of constitutional liberties, but with a very restricted franchise, intellectual debate became a substitute for genuine political action.
We learn something of the response of audiences to Saint-Simonist preaching from a description given by a brother of the famous Catholic leader Lacordaire. His account is paralleled by other reports:
The hall was full to overflowing, and the speaker was listened to attentively. And yet these people were Catholics, Liberals, Republicans, who witnessed Catholicism, Liberalism, Republicanism being torn to pieces. Seeing the enthusiasm, the lively sympathy elicited from the audience, and which I myself felt with an emotion hitherto unknown to me as the speaker’s words conveyed more and more evidence of his profound conviction, I realized that all this was not artificial and that a doctrine which could engender such unexpected sentiments among the audience, and so much devotion in the heart of that young man of twenty-five [Lechevalier], standing alone before a huge crowd, that such a doctrine, I say, was perhaps not merely a philosophical system . . . but one that could contain the destinies of mankind.;3
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The school had by now come into possession of two journals, the weekly Organisateur, subtitled Journal des progrès de la science générale, which soon began to identify itself as the “Journal de la doctrine de Saint-Simon”; and the Globe, originally a liberal daily which was taken over by the Saint-Simonists in 1830 and edited by Pierre Leroux, who was soon to develop his own brand of Romantic socialism. The Globe started with 2,500 copies and 1,300 subscribers. At the end it printed 4,200 copies, but had only 500 subscribers. Most copies were distributed gratis. The paper ceased to appear on April 20, 1832.
Rodrigues, Fournel, Holstein, and Mme. Bazard were concerned with the training of “apostles” to the workers, and Paris was for that purpose divided into twelve districts. It was planned to combine missionary activity with the organization of cooperative workshops and medical services. Three hundred and thirty faithful were organized, including one hundred and ten women. Two workshops were set up, to form “the cadres of that great pacific army of workers with such high destinies before it.” The Saint-Simonists also carried on a special propaganda for the working classes, mainly handbills which were distributed free on Sundays.
Starting as a coterie of like-minded people with a missionary zeal to spread their ideas, the Saint-Simonists gradually transformed themselves into a rigidly organized sect with a ritual, a hierarchy, and a discipline. A number of them went to live together at the rue Monsigny, and their house became the headquarters of the movement. The leading members would meet regularly three or four times a week at the house of Mme. Bazard. These reunions were not mere committee meetings, but the coming together of an apostolic community to break bread, accompanied by the chanting of songs and benedictions, and often culminating in ecstasy. A special ceremonial and elaborate rites were gradually worked out for all kinds of occasions, such as initiation, marriage, burial, etc., etc. We read in a description of one of the “apostolic” reunions: “It is impossible to imagine the charm there was for us in listening to people who were on the threshold of conversion, or in hearing the extravagant things said about us. In that atmosphere of self-dedication, a fervor of the soul would not cease to intoxicate me. I loved all those who surrounded me, and they loved me. Oh! May God attach a similar illusion to all the years that are still left to me!”4
It was in this exalted atmosphere that the earliest apostle, Olinde Rodrigues, on Christmas day 1829, solemnly nominated Bazard and Enfantin as the two Pères, or Fathers, of the school.
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II The Jewish Element
If there is reason to attach special significance to the fact that Karl Marx was of Jewish origin, and that Jews have played a prominent part in modern revolutionary movements, the quest for an explanation should really start with the generation before Marx, namely with the Saint-Simonist school. For while political messianism is a major feature of the modern era in general, its special Jewish ingredient is not an accidental matter. The high tide of political messianism begins with Saint-Simon, himself an aristocrat and, at least nominally, a Catholic. We have already noted the names of individual Jews participating in the movement: Olinde Rodrigues and his younger brother Eugène; their cousins, the brothers Émile and Isaac Pereira; Gustave d’Eichthal; and there were others: the poet Léon Halévy (of the family of the composer); Holstein; the musician Félicien David; Moise Retouret. Their presence did not go unnoted by contemporaries. Indeed, much of the violent anti-Semitism of Fourier and his disciples may be ascribed to the bitter rivalry between the two socialist schools. At the opposite pole, a poetic drama by the Polish Catholic poet Zygmunt Krasinski—significantly called The Godless Comedy (Nieboska Komedja) and composed in the 1830’s—depicts Saint-Simonism as a Judaic plot to subvert Christian civilization and plunge the European nations into an abyss of social anarchy and moral debauchery—all from an implacable hatred of Christianity.
By the middle of the 19th century, long after the formal dissolution of the school, people on the Paris stock exchange would tell each other jokes about a Christian businessman who on being told that to insure the success of his new scheme he would need a Jewish partner, promptly replied that he already had two Saint-Simonists with him. The phenomenal success of Rodrigues and the Pereira brothers in business, their leading role in vital branches of the French economy, coupled with their socialist and universalist ideas, was indeed calculated to suggest the pattern of an anti-Semitic myth which was destined to be revived with such frightful results in the second quarter of the 20th century, the myth that capitalism and socialism were both “Judaic” institutions controlled by a sinister cosmopolitan force, alien and hostile to national tradition, and acting everywhere as a poisonous factor of distintegration.
There is evidence to show that the Saint-Simonists were not unaware of the presence in their midst of a Jewish element which amounted to more than the accidental fact that a few of their members happened to be of Jewish extraction. Saint-Simon himself had commented on the messianic vision of “the people of God, that people which received revelations before the coming of Christ, that people which is the most universally spread over the surface of the earth, and which has always perceived that the doctrine established by the Fathers of the Church was incomplete.” Saint-Simon fully identified his own vision of the ultimate scheme of things with the “Kingdom of the Messiah, an epoch when religious doctrine shall be presented in all the generality of which it is susceptible; it will regulate alike the activity of the temporal and of the spiritual power; and then the entire human race will have but one religion and one organization.” This emphatic association of ideas must have come to Saint-Simon from his close contacts, in the last years of his life, with a type of recently emancipated Jew who was at pains to bring into relief the universalist nature of Hebrew prophecy and messianic expectation, and to eliminate the nationalist overtones contained in the vision of a miraculous return to Zion and Judah’s triumph over its oppressors. This supposition seems to be confirmed by Olinde Rodrigues, in his preface to the 1832 edition of Saint-Simon’s works, after his break with Enfantin following the latter’s pronouncements which introduced an element of feminist mysticism into the doctrine:
The crisis of destruction has come to an end in you, Enfantin, the crisis of reorganization in politics and morality commences with me, through Saint-Simon, whose heir I am by virtue of function. . . . From the day when Saint-Simon met the man who . . . understood the sciences, was sensitive to the fine arts and practiced industry; the man who carried in him by blood the tradition of Moses, by disinterestedness that of Christ; from the day when that man, who . . . had learned from contact with industrialists and scientists the secret of their force and the weakness of their morality; from the day when that man, burning to his innermost with the living flame of Saint-Simon, felt himself penetrated by a new life, and recognized in Saint-Simon . . . a new father; from that day was born the association of the universal family; from that day there became possible the reunion of Jews and Christians in the bosom of a new Christianity, a universal religion.5
Replying to Rodrigues in defense of Enfantin, d’Eichthal (himself of Jewish birth) wrote: “It is incumbent upon me, a Jew like you, who inherits from his race the language of the prophets, the word of truth, to correct your error.”6
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The man who decisively influenced the religious evolution of Saint-Simonism was Olinde Rodrigues’ younger brother, Eugène, who died at the age of twenty-three, consumed by a fervor which his ailing body could not contain. He had translated Lessing’s “Letters on the Enlightenment of Humanity” into French, and prefaced them with a lengthy statement in which he pleaded in exalted language for a religion of mankind which would synthesize the best contained in all existing religions and turn the progressive endeavor of mankind into an act of religious self-expression. The cry that humanity has a religious future comes from him. Eugène was a dedicated soul, and he parted from the girl he loved with all the tenderness and passion of a young Romantic, in order to devote himself to the cause of humanity.
If Eugène was John the Baptist to Enfantin, Olinde Rodrigues played the part of St. Paul: after Saint-Simon’s death he in fact set the movement going. Although all the disciples who possessed any means generously put whatever they could at the disposal of the fraternity, Rodrigues’ contribution was the most substantial. He was also responsible for the financial side of the missionary work. Many years later, under Napoleon III, he devoted time, effort, and expense to publishing the collected writings of Saint-Simon and his disciples, as well as anything that had any documentary value on the history of the sect. In view of the hopeless verbosity and repetitiveness of Saint-Simonist literature, Rodrigues can hardly be said to have earned the gratitude of posterity, but his zeal is impressive.
Saint-Simonists of Christian extraction on occasion sought to express their respect (and possibly a sense of indebtedness to Judaism) by sending a small delegation in Saint-Simonist robes to attend the Day of Atonement service at the Paris central synagogue. Some of the more exalted members of the sect fervently prophesied that the woman Messiah, “the Mother,” for whose coming they were waiting, would be a Jewess from the Orient—Jerusalem, Constantinople, or Egypt—where in due course they went to find her (and to revive the Orient by constructive works at the same time).
What was it that attracted Jews to Saint-Simonism, and was there a specific Jewish ingredient in the movement?
There is something in the Jewish tradition which refuses to take history, as the flow of time, for granted. History must be heading toward a certain conclusion of a messianic nature. This disposition is partly due to Judaic teachings on history as the story of election, sin, atonement, and redemption at the end of days, partly to the status of the Jews as a dispersed minority. A non-conforming minority, persecuted by the world or at least being questioned by it (and questioning itself) on the meaning and purpose of its separateness, must either assert a superior missionary destiny, or regard its position as essentially provisional and its life as a kind of preparation for some apocalyptic denouement. Hence the heavily charged atmosphere in which a century later the Jews of Eastern Europe, caught between the messianic fires of Zionist redemption and Communist world revolution, lived in the period between the two world wars, before they were engulfed by the abyss of night eternal.
Saint-Simonism presented the life purpose of society as being not simply life as it is and always has been, but as participation in a march toward a universal goal. The universalism of the ideology had a particular attraction for Jews, who could neither identify themselves with, nor be accepted as integrally belonging to the French tradition, so strongly imbued with Catholicism. Most of them had too much self-respect to take the easy way out of baptism and apostasy. The Saint-Simonist “religion of humanity,” superseding all previous religions and expressing what seemed to be the essence of Jewish messianism, appeared to them as a creed which offered salvation also to the special ailments of the Jew in a hostile world. Furthermore, the ideology of scientific industrialism glorified virtues and achievements in which Jews could and did excel, and by promising reward according to personal desert, rendered any question of race and birth irrelevant. For according to Saint-Simon, bankers, industrialists, technicians, and scientists were destined to be the saviors of mankind.
The youthful Jewish followers of Saint-Simon belonged to the type of recently emancipated Jew who, under the impact of rationalism, had shed the Jewish religious heritage to which generations of his ancestors dedicated themselves. The accumulated spiritual fervor was, as it were, suddenly left without an object. In such a situation some people embrace idealism, while others are driven to ruthless and shameless self-assertion. Those who chose the path of spiritual sublimation were predisposed, by the age-long Jewish tradition of solidarity and imaginative compassion with the sufferings of others, to find a kindred disposition in socialism. For Saint-Simonism proclaimed a religion of love. It extended a welcome to the lonely, the injured, the rejected, and those poised between different worlds. It is enough to read the utterances of d’Eichthal, who had been baptized in early childhood, to grasp the operation of this magic.
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III Freedom and Integration
To the Saint-Simonists, the ideal aim was not freedom, but liberation, in the sense of complete self-fulfillment. On the social level this was to be brought about by purposive integration, i.e., by division of labor in a fully planned society. They attached supreme importance to the liberating, revitalizing sense of solidarity which Saint-Simon sought in the living experience of Oneness. History—the sense of its unity and of its messianic purposefulness through apparent incoherence and futility—was to them a life-giving force, for they thought they had discovered that history was moving irresistibly toward a preordained messianic goal: an age which would combine the fullest release of individual potentialities with perfect social harmony.
To the Saint-Simonists, even more than to the founder of the school, the existence of the poor was therefore a standing reproach. In the face of their misery, the assertion of the Oneness of Being sounded hollow. The new enthusiasm encountered as its first obstacle the misery of the most numerous class. It could not take flight without lifting those who dwelt in darkness into brotherly communion. Yet, like their master, the Saint-Simonists insisted that the traditional Jacobin-Babouvist type of equalitarianism, first proclaimed during the French Revolution, was an impediment to progress. Abilities and talents were not equally distributed, hence the imposition of a dead level would stultify the self-expression of the more gifted, i.e., violate their freedom. The division of labor, that great instrument of progress, was based precisely on the classification of men in accordance with their varying abilities. At the same time, privileges of birth or inherited wealth constituted a denial of the sacred principle that everyone should be placed according to his capacity and compensated according to his works.
The sanctity of inherited property had resulted in placing the instruments of production in the hands of people incompetent to use them, and in consequence deprived talented people of means of self-expression. Hence it was necessary to reorganize the distribution of property so as to insure that the instruments of production would be in the right hands and that over-all social-economic planning be possible. This meant social ownership and collective control, not only for the sake of planning, but in order to do away with the “heredity of misery,” which was the accompaniment of the “monopoly of wealth” historically based on the right of conquest.
In one respect at least the Saint-Simonists were highly optimistic, where Marx a generation later was most pessimistic. Not only did they not believe in the progressive pauperization of the masses under capitalism—they maintained that history had witnessed a progressive transfer of the means of production from a minority of idlers to a majority of toilers. The Jews and the Lombards are praised by the Saint-Simonists for their highly constructive role in medieval and later times: by lending money to the feudal lords on interest, they gradually squeezed out all the utilizable resources from the nobility and placed them at the disposal of industry. They thereby created the conditions for the transfer of power from the “sterile” to the “productive” classes. According to the school, the bankers were destined to play a similar part in modern capitalist laissez-faire society, since they were in a position to regulate and control production. Gradually they would tend to become planners of the national economy, consciously or unconsciously acting on behalf of the future national planning board. Furthermore, the stock exchange was calculated to spread ownership rather than to restrict it among a few, while rising taxation and death duties were making deep inroads into large inherited fortunes.
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To Saint-Simon, the primary social fact was the cleavage between idlers and producers. The former included nobles, officials, soldiers, priests, lawyers, rentiers—in short, all who had no share in the process of changing matter into something usable. The latter embraced property owners, capitalists, scientists, artists, workers—all groups contributing to the productive effort. The rise of the middle classes was interpreted as a sustained effort on the part of the producers to deprive the feudal lords of their power, and mobilize their resources for the common good. Yet in Saint-Simonist literature the distinction between the non-productive bourgeoisie and the proletariat is already pushed very far. The reality of class conflict is sharply underlined. Characteristically, “liberal” and “bourgeois” are treated as synonymous terms. Liberalism appears as a rationalization of middle-class interest. The bourgeoisie has arrived and has constituted a new class system—this is the theme adumbrated by Saint-Simon, and greatly elaborated by his disciples.
“The bourgeois class has arrived. It would be an error to believe that the central fact of the Restoration [of 1815, after the fall of Napoleon] was the reappearance of the Jesuits and the old nobility; its fundamental character is the triumph of the bourgeoisie. We now have the proof [written after the “bourgeois revolution” of 1830] for in the July [1830] days the bourgeoisie alone remained erect. It has invaded everything: the legislature, the judiciary, and the military power, the elections, the jury, and the National Guard. . . . The bourgeois is on the forum, in the corps-de-garde; he legislates, he sits in judgment, and above all, he grows mustaches. . . . Now the bourgeois as such produces nothing, teaches nothing, and has no other care but himself. It is not he who moves and animates the people, he does not enlighten them nor enrich them; it is not he who directs them in their labors, of which he is ignorant. . . . An idle class in the midst of a working society. And if the existence of such a phenomenon is hard to comprehend, its survival is still less conceivable.”7
Having replaced the feudal nobility, and now living like the feudal lords on the toil of others by collecting tithes and rent from the producers, the bourgeoisie has adopted a suitable ideology. Its contented members are against any violent change—why should they want things changed? The rumblings from below are to be met with electoral chicanery, or suppressed with bayonets. They naturally oppose any collective action by the state in the direction of social reform, since they wish to be left to do what they like. They decry any governmental action as tyranny leading to despotism. Their liberty is only concerned with negative and preventive checks and balances.
Similarly, the liberal-bourgeois theory of economics—stressing the automatic mechanism of supply and demand, and the harmony of interests flowing from perfect competition—is an expression of class interest, where it is not an obsolete doctrine inspired by conditions which no longer exist. The liberal obsession with competition was once a natural response to the spectacle of a disintegrating feudalism. Having landlords at the back of their minds, these economists were anxious to defend the consumer from monopolistic exploitation. They could not see that the idle consumer, who is at the same time a property owner, may impose a tithe on the producers in the form of rent, interest, and profits of all kinds. The capitalist-liberal theory of wages is equally fallacious, for it is just not true that the employer and the worker are equal partners in a freely concluded contract. “It is enough to cast a glance at what is going on around us to realize that the worker . . . is exploited materially, intellectually and morally, as was the slave in the past.”8
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IV Dogma and Experience
Yet the redemption of the “most numerous and poorest class” was to be achieved not by an uprising of the downtrodden, but through the enthronement of the principle of common humanity, i.e., through the triumph of the idea of Oneness. This, in turn, presupposed a clear and trenchant intellectual formula, in other words a dogma. It was the aim of every science to reduce all particular facts to one single principle, one all-embracing conception. So prominent a member of the school as Auguste Comte was at pains to show that “dogmatism is the normal state of human intelligence, the state to which it strives by its nature, continuously, in all ways, even when it seems to depart from it furthest.”9 Every action presupposes some explicit or implicit principle, some over-all view of social relationships. There are no wholly spontaneous acts. Only the vitality of a deeply rooted dogma makes spontaneous action possible. For it implies “the disposition to believe spontaneously without prior demonstration” as well as the ability to act with complete self-assurance.
This conception of the role of dogma is strongly reminiscent of the views of Burke and the ultramontane Right. There is, however, a fundamental difference. To the conservative, dogma was embedded in tradition: partly in history, partly in the religious canon. It implied unreflecting and almost instinctive habit. To the Saint-Simonists, dogma was at first a strictly conceptual term and had a dynamic quality. It connoted a scientific theory, not a texture of habits, prejudices, and reflexes. This had far-reaching implications.
The intellectual character of the Saint-Simonist doctrine renders it inevitable that only a very small number—those who devote their lives to the investigation of the social sciences—will be able to analyze the future scientifically. They will constitute the “competent authority.” As for the masses, most of them will have to dispense with demonstration and proof, and accept the new doctrine, like those of the past, “in one way or another.” This does not really matter, for reason is not a sufficient motive to make people act. Other faculties have to be present in man besides reason: above all, his powers of love and sympathy with the general good.
This thought gives a very sharp and decisive turn to the whole doctrine of the Saint-Simonist school. It envisages the total man: not the reasoning creature alone, but man as he is, with his sentiments, passions, and impulses. “Man is one.” The division into faculties is an arbitrary abstraction. Man acts as a whole, not in any partial capacity. Experience is heightened feeling. As an act of affirmation, feeling is faith. Real scientific discovery and advance is not effected by laboriously putting two and two together. It is preceded by flashes of intuition, which some call revelation and others inspiration. Their source is intense, heightened experience. Some have more of it and others less. Those who have it in the highest degree are called geniuses. Now what is true of scientific endeavor should be no less true of our relationship to the totality of existence, the life of society and the universe. The conception of the unity of history, the meaning of progress which we have been straining so hard to fathom, must be experienced intensely to uncover their mystery and to yield the life-giving power.
This type of experience has been called religion. When one profound impulse is stirred, all others are set in motion. The link between our sentiments is not mere philanthropy, which affects only relations between persons. It is of a higher order, for it propels our experience beyond human beings, into cosmic infinity, evoking religious tremor and a yearning for the absolute.
“The religion of the future will be greater and more powerful than all the religions of the past . . . the synthesis of all the conceptions of mankind, and more still, of all its ways of existence. . . . It will not merely dominate the political order, but will become a religious institution; for no fact shall be conceived outside God or develop outside His law . . . to it industry, the scholar, and the artist will refer all their actions, all their ideas . . . it alone presents the world and humanity, not as an obscure chaos, but as the execution of a plan. . . . It will embrace the whole world, because the law of God is universal.”10
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V The Prophet-Leader
The question of leadership must be viewed in this context. If the reign of dogma requires an intellectual elite to expound it (indeed to impose it on the unenlightened), then a living faith needs priests, or rather prophets of special emotional depth. Now the Saint-Simonist school holds that at all times leadership has fallen into the hands of men “who spoke to the heart.”11 The genuine leader is one who experiences the unity of the universe, as well as the reality of discord, more intensely than others. His affirming and loving faith gives him exceptional, indeed supernatural, power to impart his experience to others. The Leader is above all, however, a seer, a prophet. His experience of universal unity is so heightened that he is able to obtain prophetic intimations into the meaning of the age and the shape of things to come.
If the mark of true and legitimate leadership is divine inspiration, then clearly it cannot be a matter of popular election. Surely the future leader, a privileged being who hears the voice of God and “beholds the majesty of the Most High,” will not wait for an assembly to clothe him with the purple. Genius will reveal itself. Authority imposes itself. It does not argue or teach. It compels.
Life is dynamic, and leadership must be dynamic. Now it was the error of the past to expect abstract, codified law to embrace concrete, individual situations. This outlook envisaged standardized realities, stereotyped cases, forgetting that life consists precisely in exceptions, deviations, differences. Written law, so much vaunted by metaphysicians and logicians, is nothing but a “sterile abstraction,” a dead weight, an impediment to the endless variety of life and an obstacle to the dynamic creative response to it. Furthermore, written law has been revealed by some superior mind at some past date. Why assume that it was revealed for all time? After all, mankind is progressing all the time, and unexpected situations crop up daily. Why should there not be a progressive revelation, a living law (“loi vivante”)? The true leader is this living law. Moses, Jesus, Saint-Simon were three “living laws.”12 The different character of the authority exercised by them resulted from their different missions, but they all represented the same individual, social, and religious principle of authority. The successors of Moses and Jesus had legitimate authority as long as humanity needed the Jewish or the Christian revelation. “That of Saint-Simon is definitive, for it is the revelation of progress.”
Enfantin, who makes these observations, pours scorn on those who claim that the leader-legislator is the creature of the law. His intuitive grasp of the situation, and his response to it, is the law. For the leader is an artist, endowed with “that truly creative primordial faculty.” He lays down the law for every contingency as it arises. He creates, he does not interpret. Hence artists should be the future leaders of society. Their mission will be to sweep the masses on toward the realization of their future destiny.
True, in the past, leaders were almost always the enemies of those they led, consulting their own selfish interests and amassing property and power to pass it on to their descendants. But since in future there will be no inheritance of property and privilege, leader-administrators will behave towards their subordinates like captains to their crew, or officers to their troops. Direction is not arbitrary despotism. People “joyously surrender themselves” to authority when marching under the aegis of men they love and venerate, in a society where “every person, from birth to death, finds a friendly and all-powerful hand which comes to sustain his first steps, helps him find the career he should pursue, gives him the strength he needs to march on, puts him at last in the place marked out for him by God . . . guides him, assists him all the time.”
In the past liberals rightly fought for publicity as a means of control and guarantee against arbitrary despotism. Under the future system, where “the interest of the greatest number is the basis of all social actions,” publicity will have an educational significance, “by which the love of the leaders will ceaselessly solicit the affection and zeal of their subordinates.” Verdicts pronounced by organs of social justice will carry real joy or sorrow into the hearts of all. They will recover the qualities of canonization and excommunication by ecclesiastical authority. Where the individual is left to his own resources, selfishness must be the result. This is one of the reasons why Enfantin insists on the importance of confession, especially public confession, to the leader-priest. It is also essential for the priest to feel all hearts opening themselves unto him, for it enhances his power and sense of authority, and thus heightens his life-giving faculties.
Is this a heavy yoke, a new despotism? “Blessed be the yoke imposed by the conviction which satisfies all sentiments; blessed be the power which drives men on to progress . . . fructifies all the sources of public prosperity.” There is no middle way between centralization and anarchy. “All are free, because they advance with love towards the same destiny.”
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VI The Call to Action
The Saint-Simonist school regarded it as its mission to convert mankind and to bring about its regeneration. What were they to do, apart from teaching, preaching, converting, and waiting, till the fruit was ripe? What attitude should they take to immediate issues in the life of the country, and to the contending forces in the political arena?
The Saint-Simonists considered themselves above parties and factions. It was indeed their aspiration to do away with all political parties. They would not renounce their Salvationist mission by becoming one more party. They considered the representative system a sterile sham and fraud. Secret conspiracy and military violence were likewise condemned: the aim was peaceful reconstruction and reorganization of the totality of human existence. Equally, there was little point in such limited practical measures as organizing cooperatives or espousing particular causes, for all issues were interdependent and none could really be solved in isolation. There was only one all-embracing solution, and it could come only from a complete spiritual rebirth. Once this had happened, everything else would follow suit.
The Saint-Simonist interpretation of the revolutionary events of 1830 is revealing from the doctrinal point of view, as well as for the light it sheds on the inner strains and stresses of the movement in the face of a clear challenge to action.
On August 4, 1830 (following several days of street fighting, barricades, and the abdication of the last Bourbon king, Charles X) the left-wing followers of Lafayette met at the Hotel de Ville, since the Great Revolution the traditional rallying point of popular democracy. Saint-Simonists such as Carnot, Laurent, Michel Chevalier and others sat beside Republican leaders like Godefroy Cavaignac, Arnaud Marrast, Charles Teste, Jules Bastide. (Carnot indeed was a member of the delegation which went to see the Duke of Orleans, the future King Louis Philippe, to offer him the crown.)
At the outbreak of the revolution, the Saint-Simonist leaders had felt that they should keep clear of the turmoil. Mere rioting and destruction was an impious act from the Saint-Simonist point of view. All the same, there was an intense urge to go out and mix with the crowds, the troops, the leaders—old comrades in the fight for liberal ideas; to discover whether there could be found leaders who would resolutely prevent the return of the old order, even in a modified form, and who were animated by some conception of aims and rights going beyond the liberal clichés and the old revolutionary ideas. The Saint-Simonists would then have tried to calm or guide those aspirations, hoped for vaguely by some, dreaded by others. This was the background of their approach to Lafayette.
In the circumstances—since the Doctrine and its prophets were still little known to the masses—it was felt that for the time being a short-cut was needed. The program of dictatorship submitted to Lafayette was intended to do away with the Chamber elected under the old dispensation, and to make the existing parties ineffective. The Dictator would call together Primary Assemblies after a fair interval, and during that interval the Saint-Simonist school would do everything possible to saturate the masses with their doctrine. But—exclaims Bazard—the General was totally deaf on that ear, while in his entourage they found no one capable of understanding and leading the masses. Elsewhere there were men admirably fitted to carry out a coup, but incapable of realizing a social revolution. And so the conclusion was that the people had no leaders. No heads “ambitious for the people”13 could be seen above the “dead level of equality.” “The bourgeois could still sleep in peace. . . The representative machine was going to resume its grinding for some time still.” The hour had not yet struck for the disciples of Saint-Simon. They beat a retreat.
The failure to meet the 1830 challenge engendered a deep malaise in the Saint-Simonist ranks. It strengthened the tendency toward pantheism and chiliasm, in which the individual, with his free will and concrete responsibility, was absorbed completely by superior forces. Owing to the prevailing Romantic predispositions, and to the fact that the whole development of Saint-Simonism had taken place within the sphere of an intellectual and emotional dialectic gone wild—without any contact with real situations and definite tasks—a school which originally started with a defiantly positivist message succumbed completely to the most extravagant irrationalism, albeit buttressed by a vigorously consistent logic of a kind. We are faced here with what one may call the Romantic version of totalitarianism.
In disavowing any claim to leadership (in spite of his being the only direct disciple of the Master) and in laying his hands on Bazard and Enfantin as more deserving to lead, Olinde Rodrigues had wished to demonstrate the living truth of Saint-Simon’s philosophy: everyone takes the place assigned to him by virtue of his abilities and the requirements of the collective endeavor. Rodrigues claimed that he had “never felt greater in Saint-Simon than that day, when he succeeded in raising greater men above himself.”14
A duumvirate was hardly a way of insuring monolithic thinking and action, on the basis of a sole and exclusive dogma. There were fundamental differences in temperament and approach between the two “Fathers.” Bazard had a clear mind and was a man of great integrity who would not be carried away by emotional self-deception. Whereas Enfantin, though a highly trained polytechnician and economist, represented a unique mixture of natural gaiety, exceptional physical magnetism that irresistibly attracted weaker natures in need of affection, and an almost megalomania-cal belief in himself and his mission, which no humiliation or failure could shake. In the emotionally charged climate of the “apostolic community,” where men’s nerves were subject to constant tensions and ecstasies, Enfantin easily won complete ascendancy.
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VII The Great Schism
The issue came to a head in a controversy between Enfantin and Bazard over the role of women. The Saint-Simonist school had from the start preached the emancipation of women, along with the liberation of the proletariat. Now, perfect brotherhood and collective ownership do not go very well with the family (which at first they also upheld), since paternal love will always militate against total self-dedication to a collective ideal. In denying the ascetic distinction between matter and spirit, the School had laid great emphasis on the rehabilitation of the flesh. The problem of love and sex thus became a test case. Curiously, the first solution was the Catholic distinction between the ordinary believers, who were enjoined to live in marriage, according to the traditional way, and the “priests” and “priestesses,” who were advised to observe strict celibacy, because their only spouse was the new Church—the ideal of association. But the Saint-Simonist antinomy between liberation of natural impulses and total collectivism pressed for another solution: to release the sexual instinct—a thing that seemed called for by the basic philosophy of the legitimacy of all impulses—without creating, in monogamic marriage, a partial bond militating against universal brotherhood. The abolition of the traditional type of marriage seemed the only answer.
Enfantin in consequence taught that account must be taken of the existence of two types: those who are constant by nature, and those whose passions are changing and restless. Granted that passion is not evil, it must be allowed to assert itself, freed from the restraints of monogamic marriage. False pretense and hypocrisy would thus no longer feed prostitution and adultery. Mothers alone would know the secret of the paternity of their children. This would clinch their emancipation. But in the eyes of Bazard, such a doctrine was calculated to lead to promiscuity, and consequently to a greater degradation of woman, instead of to her liberation.
The conflict between the two leaders was at first kept secret from the general body of believers. In fact, some months before it came into the open, Bazard and Enfantin sent a joint letter to the president of the Chamber of Deputies, protesting against the charge that the sect favored promiscuity and holding wives in common. Desperate efforts were made to prevent a break. The Saint-Simonist women leaders who were in the secret, and who were deeply repelled by Enfantin’s theories, anxiously tried to overcome their repugnance. Cécile Fournel, tormented by the conflict between ardent love for her husband (from whom she had to separate because of the provisional obligation of celibacy on the apostles), horror of Enfantin’s ideas, and passionate faith in Saint-Simonism, left the sect for a while and then returned again, yielding to Enfantin. Agla Saint-Hilaire, a severe idealist, found it extremely difficult to overcome her promptings to quit.15
At last the duel was fought out before the whole assembly. In the course of the deliberations, the stern logicians were seized, like the crudest revivalists, by ecstasies and shakings. Some had fainting fits; others fell into a trance and began to prophesy. When Jean Reynaud expressed his disbelief in Olinde Rodrigues’ claim that the Holy Ghost dwelt in him, Olinde had an attack of apoplexy. Several members addressed an imploring letter to the “Fathers” begging them to settle their differences and not to wreck the sect. By the end of August 1831, Bazard had a stroke. Soon after his recovery, trouble broke out anew. Enfantin insisted on public confession by everyone. He gave the lead. Then came the turn of Bazard. In the middle of his confession he was interrupted by a brother member who shouted: “You lie!” (The old Carbonari, trained in conspiratorial secrecy, had, deliberately or unwittingly, omitted some detail.)
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The struggle for supremacy between Bazard and Enfantin was at first patched up, but soon Enfantin emerged victorious. A decision was taken that Bazard was to be “chef du dogme,” Rodrigues “chef du culte,” and Enfantin “Père suprème.” Bazard could not bring himeslf to acquiesce and left the sect.16
A general assembly of the College was summoned. It was a moment of supreme crisis, one of those moments which follow an open split between leaders sharing dictatorial power. Whom would the rank and file, or rather the lower leadership strata, follow? The more politically-minded veterans of the secret societies, nurtured on Jacobin traditions, such as Carnot and Pierre Leroux, announced their departure with furious determination. The predicament of those who had placed all their ardent hopes in the movement, who saw in it the meaning of their life, the cornerstone of their philosophy, was tragic. Thus Lechevalier cried: “On the day of my conversion I said that in God’s name I put my destiny into the hands of Bazard-Enfantin. They are no longer in agreement, I withdraw. . . . I recognize the Saint-Simonist Family no more.” Then came the heart-rending cry of disenchantment: “Yes, I doubt, I doubt even Saint-Simon, I am full of doubts about his successors; I doubt everything now; I am again a philosopher . . . I am once more alone in the world.”
“The heart seems to fail at times,” wrote Jean Reynaud. But he would not quit. “We have brought men to this creed; it is an enormous responsibility.”17 Reynaud was determined to unmask Enfantin when the time came. Quite different was the reaction of Baud, one of those who could not resist the magnetic serenity of Enfantin: “No, God would not have allowed a man to stand before his fellow men with that calm and serene face, with such greatness and beauty, in order to use them as tools, in order to seduce and destroy them.” This evoked such a general ecstasy that Reynaud threw himself upon Enfantin’s neck. Whereupon Rodrigues, the last of the early apostles to remain in the fold, cast all the weight of his patriarchal authority on Enfantin’s side:
In the name of the living God who was revealed to me by Saint-Simon, the master of all of you, and in particular mine, this shall be my first act of faith here—to proclaim you, Enfantin, the most moral man of our time, the real successor of Saint-Simon, the supreme chief of the Saint-Simonist religion.” The Saint-Simonist journal summed up the reaction: “Every one of the members felt his love for Our Père Suprème grow hundredfold . . . for he . . . has revealed himself to all a hundred times more moral, a hundred times better, a hundred times greater and deeper, a hundred times more priestly. The Family has in one little while lived the life of the Père Suprème. . . . His smile delivers from sorrow and gives joy.
And what was said about the schismatics? No word of abuse, no invectives, no insinuations of evil motives; no personal attacks. The declarations of the dissidents were even published in the official Saint-Simonist organ. While paying tribute to their idealism and devotion, Enfantin proclaimed them without real religiosity. “The dissidents have never felt who I am; they are all susceptible of the most generous devotion to principles and ideas, but they are ashamed to confess the same love for men, as if God had not made His word incarnate. None of them has been truly religious.” Outside the Church they were dry branches, withered limbs, dead.
Rodrigues himself soon broke with the Père Suprème and left the Family. The last straw was Enfantin’s verdict that it was the woman’s exclusive right to know the secret of the paternity of her child. It was particularly sad that the break should have come in the midst of the successful launching of a Saint-Simonist loan. Although there were no suggestions of bad faith, the dispute led to squalid court proceedings. Rodrigues then proclaimed himself head of the Church and direct disciple of the Master. There were by now three Supreme Fathers at war with each other, for Bazard, too, continued to claim to be the true Father. However, he died shortly as a result of the stroke he had suffered earlier.
Yet through all the turmoil, the elaboration of dogma by way of debate and discussion had been accomplished. Leadership was now undivided, all authority vested in Enfantin.
In the last number of the Globe, Enfantin issued the following proclamation: “I, Father of the new family. . . . God has given me the mission to call the proletarian and the woman to a new destiny; to cause to enter into the holy family of man all those who have hitherto been excluded, or treated as minors; to realize the universal association which the cries of liberty intoned by slaves, women or proletarians have invoked since the birth of the world.” He had spoken, the time had come to act. But before acting he needed to be silent for a while. He was therefore retiring with forty disciples into solitude at Ménilmontant, leaving to his “sons” the apostolate in the world.
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VIII The Monastery
The retreat to Ménilmontant and the monastic experiment there mark the climax of the Saint-Simonist story. It was meant to be a period of preparation, but it was also perhaps an act of despair. The Globe had ceased to appear; the lecture hall which had witnessed so many triumphs of Saint-Simonist oratory and preaching had been closed by the police; a trial for illegal gatherings, incitement to immorality, and financial fraud was impending. The resources of the School, in spite of the admirable generosity of members and sympathizers, were nearly exhausted. Lastly, the sect had been shattered by a terrible schism and painful secessions.
Life at Ménilmontant was austere. Strict celibacy was introduced by the emancipators of the body, and heart-rending separations were enforced between young loving spouses. All menial work was done by the monks themselves, in order to demonstrate the rehabilitation of the proletariat. The hours were strictly regulated: they rose at five in the morning, breakfasted at seven, lunched at one, had dinner at seven, went to bed at ten. All was held in common, all meals were taken together, accompanied by singing. Lectures and seminars were held—which goes without saying. But the Saint-Simonists were also anxious to surround their life with all possible solemnity and symbolic meaning: they grew beards in order to acquire a more majestic air; they resorted to all the arts—poetry, painting, and music—in order to lend the character of a pageant to their festivals and celebrations, and indeed to every trivial occasion. Not for nothing were some of them artists. The retreat was punctuated by solemn celebrations. The prologue, as it were, was the funeral of Enfantin’s mother, with all disciples present. The adoption by the sect of Enfantin’s illegitimate son was another solemn day. The festival of prise d’habits, after the Père had withdrawn for three days into total solitude and silence, was a great occasion. The robes were so made that the buttons were at the back: one always needed the help of someone else to button them up—symbol of brotherly love and aid! The ceremony of “Ouverture des travaux du Temple” was probably the climax of the monastic experiment; it attracted huge crowds from Paris, who stared open-mouthed at this grand review of a semi-priestly and semi-military character, underlined by chants, well-rehearsed motions, and an air of unearthly solemnity on the handsome faces of forty young men parading with working utensils on their shoulders.
A pantheistic philosophy—or should one say poetry?—was worked out at Ménilmontant. All is God, and God is in all. Everything is part of the one cosmic organism, in space as well as in time: the inchoate mass of matter which was there before the planets, land masses and oceans were shaped; formed matter and living organisms; and especially those marginal phenomena which betoken the passage from matter to life. There is affinity between the conscious and the unconscious, the natural and the supernatural, as reflected in magnetism, mesmerism, somnambulism, telepathy, or dreams, from the lowest level up to the most advanced creative intellect. One living substance works through all; and the creative effort of artists, poets, scientists, implies not resistance to nature, but the most refined activity of the divine substance, its highest sublimation.18
This type of pantheistic affirmation of cosmic oneness was bound to lead to moral antinomism. The seeming contradictions must be made to appear unreal. The world cannot have two contradictory principles, like the Manichean distinction of original good and perennial evil. There is only one thing with two aspects, between which there is a continuous flow. The cardinal principle of the world is the law of contradiction and tension, yet they are all reconciled in the real oneness: the ego and the non-ego, virtue and vice, Othello and Don Juan, the Jew and the Christian, the Orient and the Occident, thought and action, constancy and change. If this be so, can one really speak of evil at all? Ultimately, no. The distinction between matter and spirit, soul and flesh, good impulses and evil urges cannot be maintained. Hence the rehabilitation of the flesh.
In view of the interconnection of spirit and matter, one could hardly dissociate physical from spiritual aspects. External, physical beauty is held to betoken spiritual fineness, and En-fantin insists on the junction of the two elements, the sensual and the spiritual. The pantheist philosophy was worked out to its last conclusion. There is no I and thou, but a universal life, of which I and thou partake. Insofar as we are joined in love we dwell in each other, I am an aspect of you, and you are an aspect of me. This interpenetration takes place not only among contemporaries, but also between the living and the dead, and those yet unborn.
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IX The Mother
Enfantin proclaimed that it was not his wish to introduce the new morality preached by him here and now. The final decision, the task of formulating the new code, must be left to the Woman—the Mother—who would one day make her appearance and take her seat at the Father’s side. Until then the old morality was binding, and thus strict celibacy was imposed. Gradually, however, the expectation of the Mother and her final dispensation assumed the dimensions of a chiliastic, all-embracing experience.
The woman appeared to these young men not just as a person of the opposite sex, but as a savior, a superior being, offering love, forgiveness, and comfort. There was furthermore a potent symbolism in the image of the Woman-Messiah coming to undo the fatal act of Eve, to turn doom into redemption, to lift mankind from sin and fall into guilt-free self-expression.
“It is from the hands of a woman that the new Adam regenerated by Saint-Simon will receive the fruit of the tree of science; by her he will be led to God, contrary to the Christian belief that he has been removed from Him by her. Mary has already come to console the woman by giving a Savior to men. . . . Alone with God, she has conceived the law of love; the mysterious prophecy of the order of the future.”19
An empty chair is always reserved at the side of the Father’s chair for the Mother-Messiah. Again and again he takes God to witness that he cannot carry out the promise as long as the Mother has not arrived, that he is paralyzed by her absence. All is provisional until her appearance. Ultimately, Enfantin is only the messenger of her coming, her John the Baptist.
This frame of mind was intensified by the disintegration of the Ménilmontant retreat and the imprisonment of the Père. The Saint-Simonists appeared in court in priestly attire. They refused, at the Père’s order, to take the oath. Their speeches, overflowing with the pride of the twice-born, and full of contempt for the pettiness and stupidity of the un-regenerate world, exasperated judges, jury, and counsel. Enfantin tried the power of his magnetic eyes on the judges, and expressed his compassionate contempt at their insensitiveness to spirit-soaked beauty. At the end of the trial, and on the eve of his imprisonment, the Père abdicated. While he was serving his sentence in prison, Barrault reorganized the group and called it “Les Compagnons de la Femme” (The Companions of the Woman).
At this stage the vision of the Woman-Messiah becomes associated with the grandiose dream of wedding the Orient to the Occident and effecting an apocalyptic synthesis between the world of Othello and of Don Juan, between the mysterious, dream-like, contemplative East and the dynamic, restless West. This vision has its positivist aspect in Michel Chevalier’s scheme of a huge network of railways to join together all parts of the Mediterranean with the capitals of Europe, and in the project of a Suez Canal and gigantic public works in the Near East.20
But, above all, the Woman-Messiah will reveal herself in the Orient. It is fitting that she should emerge from her hiding in Constantinople, the capital first of Byzantium and then of the Ottoman Empire; or in Egypt of the burning desert and the Pharaohs, builders of the Pyramid; or in Judea, cradle of religions, prophets, and saviors; or in India, that mysterious continent of mysticism and romance on the banks of the Ganges—where fecundity is worshipped and bulls have altars. All the signs of the prophecies—comets, Jewish dreams of Zion, epileptic prophecies—betoken her coming in the new year, and in the Orient.21
The mother is on her way, the gift of the Orient. In fact, she has already arrived. Barrault knows it, because he feels it. And the Mother will be a Jewess. She will make her appearance in Constantinople, in the coming year, in the month of May. At long last Barrault issues anonymously a proclamation to Jewish women:
Glory, glory to you, Jewish women! You who have protested against this monstrosity of the spirit, this infantilizing of the woman who brings to the world her Lord, her Master, her God. For the Messiah is not a man, but a man and woman conjoint. . . . The men of your race are the industrial and political link between the nations. . . . And you, women, are called upon to reforge a new moral law for the world. . . . Where is there among you the one who is willing to save the world?. . . . The world is harassed, the torment has been long-lasting; will the star of salvation not arise soon?. . . . Man’s word fails, man has said and thought everything, man alone cannot save the world any more: Woman! The world needs your word, your action, your love!. . . . Daughter of Abraham, pure blood of David, helper of the prophets, ark of the covenant, redemptress of women and of the toilers. . . . well-beloved companion, sacred spouse, appear, appear!
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1 Oeuvres complètes de Saint-Simon et d'Enfantin (Paris, 1865-78), Vol. I, p. 121.
2 Doctrine de Saint-Simon (Paris, 1924), p. 116; L. Reybaud, Etudes sur les reformateurs ou socialistes modernes (Paris, 1856), p. 107-8.
3 Oeuvres, vol. III, pp. 169-171 note.
4 Sébastien Charléty, Histoire du Saint-Simonisme (Paris, 1931), p. 73.
5 Globe, Jan. 16, 1832.
6 Oeuvres, vol. VI, p. 53.
7 Extraits du Globe (Paris, 1832), p. 98.
8 Doctrine, pp. 239-40.
9 Ibid., p. 450 note.
10 Doctrine, pp. 452-53.
11 Oeuvres, vol. II, pp. 99-100.
12 Oeuvres, vol. XIV, pp. 84-85.
13 Oeuvres, vol. II, pp. 207-208.
14 Oeuvres, vol. I, p. 211.
15 Charléty, p. 145 f; Globe, Feb. 12, 1832; Oeuvres, vol. IV, p. 38, pp. 119-125.
16 Oeuvres, vol. IV, 136 ff., 155 ff., 160-92; Charléty, p. 131.
17 Oeuvres, vol. IV, pp. 238-39, p. 157; Globe, Nov. 28, 1831; Charléy, p. 135.
18 Prosper Enfantin, Science de l'homme (Paris 1858).
19 Charléty, p. 129.
20 Oeuvres, vol. VI, pp. 55-87.
21 Enfantin in a letter to Heine: “The Orient is calling upon God's chosen people; here is the wandering Jew, he is more than an individual, his name is Israel.” (Zosa Szajkowski, “The Jewish Saint-Simonians and Socialist Anti-Semites in France,” Jewish Social Studies, vol. IX, No. 1, 1947.)
