[550] As a matter of fact it first appeared as an article in the Revue du Progrès in 1839.
[551] Buonarotti was the author of La Conspiration pour l’Égalité, dite de Babeuf, published in 1828. Little notice was taken of the volume by the public, but it was much discussed in democratic circles.
[552] Organisation du Travail, 5th ed. (1848). p. 77.
[553] We refer to it as the commonest type because in the previous section we have shown that other co-operative societies exist, such as Le Travail, for example, which claims to be modelled upon Fourier’s scheme, especially in the matter of borrowed capital. But the usual type is affiliated to the Chambre consultative des Associations de Production. Article II of its regulations reads as follows: “No one will be allowed to become a subscriber who is not a worker in some branch of production or other.” See the volume published by the Office du Travail in 1898, Les Associations Ouvrières de Production.
[554] In the Journal des Sciences morales et politiques, December 17, 1831. Only one association—the goldsmiths’, in 1834—was founded as the result of this article.
[555] Quoted by Festy, Le Mouvement ouvrier au Début de la Monarchie de Juillet, p. 88 (Paris, 1908).
[556] Buchez’s proposals for the reform of the “great industry” were of an entirely different character.
[557] François Vidal, De la Répartition des Richesses (1846).
[558] “The emancipation of the working classes is a very complicated business. It is bound up with so many other questions and involves such profound changes of habit. So numerous are the various interests upon which an apparent though perhaps not a real attack is contemplated, that it would be sheer folly to imagine that it could ever be accomplished by a series of efforts tentatively undertaken and partially isolated. The whole power of the State will be required if it is to succeed. What the proletarian lacks is capital, and the duty of the State is to see that he gets it. Were I to define the State I should prefer to think of it as the poor man’s bank.” (Organisation du Travail, p. 14.)
[559] “The illusive conception of an abstract right has had a great hold upon the public ever since 1789. But it is nothing better than a metaphysical abstraction, which can afford but little consolation to a people who have been robbed of a definite security that was really theirs. The ‘rights of man,’ proclaimed with pomp and defined with minuteness in many a charter, has simply served as a cloak to hide the injustice of individualism and the barbarous treatment meted out to the poor under its ægis. Because of this practice of defining liberty as a right, men have got into the habit of calling people free even though they are the slaves of hunger and of ignorance and the sport of every chance. Let us say once for all that liberty consists, not in the abstract right given to a man, but in the power given him to exercise and develop his faculties.” (Organisation du Travail, p. 19.)