Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 5. The Romantic School in France

by Georg Brandes

Since these men are the real productive power of the country, the flower of the French nation, at least another whole generation would be required to repair the misfortune. For the human beings whose life-work is unmistakably of use are exceptions, and nature is not prodigal of these exceptions.

Let us suppose another case. Let us suppose that France keeps all her gifted scientists, artists, industrial and mechanical geniuses, but has the misfortune to lose his Royal Highness the King's brother, their Royal Highnesses the Dukes of Berry, Orléans, and Bourbon, the Duchess of Angoulême, the Duchess of Bourbon, and the young Duchess of Condé. She at the same time loses all the great officers of the crown, all the ministers of state, chamberlains, masters of the hunt, marshals, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, deans, and canons, all the prefects and sub-prefects, all the judges, and into the bargain 10,000 of the richest of those landed proprietors who live in great style.

The event would undoubtedly cause grief to the nation, because the French are a good-hearted people, and not capable of regarding with indifference the sudden disappearance of such a number of their fellow-citizens. But this loss of not fewer than 30,000 of the persons who are esteemed the first in the state could occasion sorrow only on purely sentimental grounds; for no serious harm to the state as state would arise from it. It would be very easy to fill the vacant places. There are any number of Frenchmen who could occupy the position of His Majesty the King's brother quite as well as that august prince, any number who could fill the place of prince of the blood royal, &c., &c. The anterooms of the court are crowded with aspirants ready and fit to be invested with the rank of officers of the crown. The army possesses any number of officers who are quite as good generals as our present marshals; and how many commercial travellers are cleverer men than our ministers of state, how many priests quite as devout and capable as our cardinals, archbishops, deans, and canons! As regards the 10,000 landed proprietors, their heirs would scarcely need any apprenticeship to make quite as charming hosts.

The idea underlying this jest, for which, by the way, Saint-Simon had to answer to the authorities, is, of course, that only the productive class of citizens is in reality useful. Before the Revolution the conflict was between the nobility and the bourgeoisie; now that a part of the bourgeoisie is elevated to the same position as the nobility and shares its privileges, the division is between the unproductive and the productive class; the future belongs to industry, labour, the deeds of peace and utility. But whereas contemporary French political economists only went the length of granting the individual the greatest possible amount of liberty to develop his powers, Saint-Simon demanded the interference of the state. It was, according to him, the province of the state to organise labour and production; it alone could ensure that for the future man should utilise nature only, and not his fellow-man. The state ought, while fully acknowledging the natural differences between man and man, to do its utmost to abolish the artificial differences—ought, therefore, to abolish all hereditary privileges, and to annul or modify the law of succession.

In Saint-Simon's writings we find, then, in the first place, the fundamental ideas of modern socialism—distrust of the consequences of free competition and the demand that productive labour shall receive the recompense and the honour which are its due—ideas which prompted his famous dictum, that every member of society ought to hold the place in it to which his abilities entitle him and receive the due reward of his labour (à chacun selon sa capacité!). In the second place we find, as a result of this demand, the inculcation, for the first time in the writings of a French author, of the doctrine of the complete equality of woman and man as members of society. And, lastly, we have, in the matter of religion, rejection of all dogma, not with the aim of destroying religion, but for the purpose of rescuing from the grave of orthodoxy the one command: Love one another! This is the Christianity which Saint-Simon expounded in his last important work, Le nouveau Christianisme, a Christianity with only one doctrine, which may be expressed as follows: The task of religion is to help society to accomplish that great object, the speediest possible improvement of the condition of the poorest and most numerous class.

There was something in Saint-Simon's personality which could not but be congenial to the more simple-minded among the Romanticists. He had the unbounded self-confidence which inspires others with confidence; the philosopher's inclination to self-examination formed no part of his nature; he was dogmatic; he was a prophet. He was, moreover, possessed by the Romantic desire to experience everything, to feel everything. The lines of conduct which he prescribed as indispensable to progress in philosophy do not differ materially from those which a young Romantic poet would have named as requisite for poetical production. They are: (1) to lead during one's vigorous years as active and independent a life as possible; (2) to make one's self thoroughly acquainted with every variety of theory and every variety of practice; (3) to study all classes of society and to insinuate one's self into the most varied social positions; (4) to sum up one's observations and draw a conclusion from them.

In Saint-Simon's philosophy there was one outstanding feature that, as a rule, repelled the Romantic authors, namely, his enthusiasm for industrial pursuits, which, as merely useful, were repugnant to most of them. But the philosophy was by no means destitute of poetry. Its revolutionary, its fantastic, and its Utopian elements were certain to appeal to a Romanticist, as also its insistence upon natural inequality, its idolisation of genius, and its leaning to religion. It was poetical, too, in its solicitude for the welfare of woman and its affectionate interest in the most unfortunate classes of society.

And it was not until after 1830 that Saint-Simonism began to be a social power. Saint-Simon himself, like most founders of religions, was both prophet and exemplar; he made of his disciples real apostles; regarding him in sober earnest as the modern Messiah, they went out into the world as his messengers. It was through these men and their intellectual kin that society in general made acquaintance with the doctrines of Saint-Simon during the reign of Louis Philippe, though some of the intellectually vigilant had before this read the master's own writings. There is a memorandum in Victor Hugo's diary for 1830 (Littérature et Philosophie mêlées I.) which shows that he, for one, was already acquainted with Saint-Simon.

A year after Saint-Simon's death, his organ, Le Producteur, had to be given up; but this very circumstance brought his disciples into more personal and intimate relations with their adherents. And when Enfantin, the St. Paul of the new faith, a man of imposing appearance, a sacerdotal genius of the first rank, with something of a Brigham Young's capacity for rule and leadership, became the real head of the sect, it made proselytes of numbers of clever young men and cultivated, high-spirited women. Large sums were voluntarily contributed towards the support of the Saint-Simonist "family"; in 1831 alone they amounted to 330,000 francs. A new weekly paper, L'Organisateur was started, and from 1830 onwards Paul Leroux edited the Globe. But the doctrines propagated deviated ever more and more from Saint-Simon's original system. In his scheme of organisation an important rôle was assigned to the capitalists; one of the three Chambers proposed by him was to consist exclusively of capitalists. But now capital was attacked. Saint-Simon had distinctly reprobated every species of communism; now, in the "family," community of goods was the order of the day, and state communism was considered desirable. One particular conclusion deduced from Saint-Simon's doctrines led to the downfall of the system and the break-up of the sect. The master had taught that, since the old Christianity had put enmity between the flesh and the spirit, it was the task of the new to reconcile them. The old Christianity had made self-denial and mortification of the flesh man's aim, the new ought to make it well-being and universal happiness. Employing other words we may express his thought thus:—The Christianity of renunciation has been a sharp and violent remedy for that indulgence in the satisfaction of every desire which was the order of the day under the empire of Rome; but the remedy has shown itself to be quite as dangerous as the disease. We have got rid of the disease, but what can free us from the remedy without exposing us to a relapse? No power except that of the new Christianity.

From this comparatively sensible idea Enfantin deduced doctrines the practical application of which would have resulted in much such a state of matters as prevailed amongst Jan van Leiden's Anabaptists. One of the original doctrines of Saint-Simonism was that now, in the new era, man, the individual, was superseded by the individual, man-woman, whose constituent parts possessed equal rights and full liberty to dissolve an unsatisfactory marriage, it being in the double, not the single, being that true humanity is realised. From this doctrine Enfantin drew the conclusion that there are two kinds of marriage, the one the marriage of monogamists, the other the marriage of those who in course of time become polygamists—that is to say, the enduring and the ephemeral marriage; actual, simultaneous polygamy was to be the prerogative only of the priests and priestesses. Although little could be advanced, either in general discussion or in the court of justice, against the Saint-Simonists' argument that the inauguration of this order of things would have no other consequence than the confirming and legalising of relations which at present existed illegally, this particular practical conclusion sufficiently showed the entire incapacity of the young enthusiasts to judge what was possible and what impossible of realisation in the existing, state of society; it proved them to be of the number of those who believe that society can be reformed by a stroke of the pen. Their excuse is to be found in the circumstance that, with the exception of Enfantin and Bazard, all the Saint-Simonists of 1830 (as also all Lamennais' disciples) were about twenty years of age. Ridicule cooled their ardour for the spread of the faith. In the summer of 1832 the heads of the "family" were sentenced, Enfantin to a year's imprisonment, Michel, Chevalier, and Duveyrier to a trifling fine. The young enthusiasts of whom the little sect was composed were scattered; but almost all of them distinguished themselves in later life, either in the domain of science, of industry, or of art. Their exaggerations of the theories of Saint-Simon had, like the Utopian schemes of Fourier which belong to the same period, no influence upon literature. It was influenced only by the original ideas.