Babeuf was like a last convulsive effort of the principles of the great French Revolution to work themselves out to their logical ends. The race of equalitarians and collectivists who came to prominence in the first years of the next century, though born at about the same time as Babeuf, belong to a different world.
The Comte de Saint-Simon is their prototype. He came of a younger branch of the family of the famous duke, the chronicler of the court of Louis XIV; and, although he had dropped his title and no longer believed, as his relative had, in the paramount importance of dukes, he was in his peculiar way equally convinced of the importance of the owning classes, and especially of the family of Saint-Simon. At seventeen, he had ordered his valet to wake him up every morning with the exhortation, “Get up, monsieur le comte! remember you have great things to do!”; and when he had been in prison during the Terror, he had imagined that his ancestor Charlemagne appeared to him and announced that it had been reserved for the Saint-Simon family alone to produce both a great hero and a great philosopher; he himself was to equal in the intellectual field the achievements of Charlemagne in the military.
Saint-Simon had stood aside from the Revolution. He believed that the old regime was doomed; but although he had gone earlier to America to fight on the side of the Colonies, he regarded the French Revolution, when it came, as a process, he said, mainly destructive, and could not bring himself to take an active part in it. He speculated in confiscated estates and made a certain amount of money; but was cheated out of a good deal of it by a partner. Then, instructed in his mission by Charlemagne, he set out with heroic naïveté systematically to make himself a great thinker.
First he took a house opposite the Polytechnic School and studied physics and mathematics; then he took a house near the Medical School and studied medicine. At one period, he led a life of dissipation, from motives, he said, of moral curiosity. He got married in order to have a salon. Then he divorced his wife and presented himself to Mme. de Staël, declaring that, since she was the most remarkable woman and he the most remarkable man of their time, it was plain that they ought to collaborate in producing a more than remarkable child. But Mme. de Staël only laughed. He traveled to both Germany and England in search of intellectual illumination, but came back disappointed from both.
When we read about Saint-Simon’s life, we are likely to think him a little mad, till we observe that the other social idealists of this period were cranks of the same extravagant type. The first years of the nineteenth century were a highly confused epoch when it was still possible to have simple ideas. The rationalistic philosophy of the eighteenth century, upon which the French Revolution had been based, was still the background to most people’s thinking (Saint-Simon’s education had been supervised by d’Alembert); but this rationalistic philosophy, which had been expected to solve all the problems, had failed to rescue society from either despotism or poverty. Today the authority of the Church, the coherence of the old social system, were lost; and there was no longer any body of thought accepted as more or less authoritative, such as the work of the Encyclopaedists (one of Saint-Simon’s projects was an encyclopedia for the nineteenth century). The mechanical inventions of which it had been expected that they would vastly improve the lot of humanity were obviously making many people miserable; but the encroachments of commerce and manufacture had not yet reached the overwhelming point where philanthropy and philosophy themselves were to come to seem out of date and merely the whims of ineffective persons. So that Frenchmen, deprived of the systems of the past and not yet foreseeing the society of the future, were free to propose any system, to hope for any future, they could conceive.
Some tried to return to the Catholic system in a more modified or more romantic form. But it is greatly to the credit of Saint-Simon that, descendant of Charlemagne though he was and admirer of the Middle Ages, he possessed the intellectual courage to take the post-revolutionary world as he found it and to plunge into its conflicting currents for principles which would render it intelligible and which would make possible a new systematization. Dilettante on an enormous scale, made restless by an all-trying curiosity, great noble of the old regime stranded in the new France and sworn to take a nobles responsibility for the whole of the new humanity, he was able to understand and to indicate—in a series of writings beginning in 1802 with the Letters of an Inhabitant of Geneva—certain fundamental elements of the present and certain trends toward the society of the future which were invisible to the professional thinkers.
The eighteenth century, said Saint-Simon, had committed a fundamental error: in assuming that human beings, on the one hand, were endowed with complete freedom of will while the processes of the physical world, on the other hand, were regulated by invariable laws, it had cut man off from Nature. For there were laws of society, too; there was a science of social development; and through the study of human history, we ought to be able to master it.
What Saint-Simon concluded from the examination of history was that society had alternate periods of equilibrium and breaking down. The Middle Ages, he thought, had been a period of equilibrium; the Reformation and the Revolution had been a period of breaking down. Now society was ripe for the consolidation of a new period of equilibrium. The whole world should now be organized scientifically; and this was obviously an industrial problem, not, as the eighteenth century had believed, a metaphysical one. The old politics of the Revolution had no relation to social realities; and the military dictatorship of Napoleon had as little relation to society’s needs. Napoleon assumed that the objects of society were perpetual war and conquest, whereas its actual objects were production and consumption. The solution of social problems consisted in the adjustment of conflicting interests; and the real business of politics, then, was simply the control of work and of the conditions under which work was performed. The liberals were altogether wrong in their insistence on individual liberty; in society, the parts must be subordinated to the whole.
Get rid of the old liberals, then; get rid of the soldier in politics; and put the world into the hands of the scientists, the industrial captains and the artists. For the new society was to be organized, not, like Babeuf’s, on the principle of equality, but according to a hierarchy of merit. Saint-Simon divided mankind into three classes: the savants, the propertied, and the unpropertied. The savants were to exercise the “spiritual power” and to supply the personnel of the supreme body, which was to be known as the Council of Newton—since it had been revealed to Saint-Simon in a vision that it was Newton and not the Pope whom God had elected to sit beside Him and to transmit to humanity His purposes. This council, according to one of Saint-Simon’s prospectuses, was to be made up of three mathematicians, three physicians, three chemists, three physiologists, three littérateurs, three painters and three musicians; and it was to occupy itself with devising new inventions and works of art for the general improvement of humanity, and in especial with discovering a new law of gravitation applicable to the behavior of social bodies which would keep people in equilibrium with one another. (So the eighteenth-century communist philosopher Morellet, in a book called The Code of Nature, had asserted that the law of self-love was to play the same role in the moral sphere as the law of gravitation in the physical.) The salaries of the Council of Newton were to be paid by general subscription, because it was obviously to everybody’s advantage that human destinies should be controlled by men of genius; the subscription would be international, because it would of course be to the advantage of all peoples to prevent international wars.
The actual governing, however, was to be done by those members of the community who possessed enough income to live on and could work for the State without pay. The unpropertied classes were to submit to this, because it was to their own best interests to do so. When they had tried to take things into their own hands at the time of the Revolution, they had made a most terrible mess of it and landed themselves in a famine. The propertied classes were to govern by reason of the fact that they possessed “more lights.” But the purpose of all social institutions was to better, intellectually, morally and physically, the lot of “the poorest and most numerous class.”
There were to be four great main divisions of government: French, English, German and Italian; and the inhabitants of the rest of the globe, whom Saint-Simon considered definitely inferior, were to be assigned to one or other jurisdiction and to subscribe to the maintenance of its council.
Saint-Simon, with his salon, his dissipations and his travels, had now managed to spend all his money and was able to investigate poverty at first hand. He had especially insisted on the importance of mixing with all classes of society, yet of looking at all classes from outside, of examining them in the spirit of science. And the “grand seigneur sans-culotte,” as he was described by a contemporary who had admired him, with his gaiety, his cheerful open countenance and his long Don Quixotic nose, who had lived in “cynical freedom” at the Palais-Royal, now became a copyist on Montmartre, working nine hours a day for small pay. A former valet in his service came to his rescue and gave him a place to live. No one except a very few disciples ever seemed to read the books he published; yet he kept on writing more of them, working on them now at night, the only time he had to himself.
And in his last book, The New Christianity, he restates his system from a new point of view. The beneficent power of genius alone no longer seems to Saint-Simon sufficient. He agrees with reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre that, in order to bring order out of the anarchy, a dominant religion is needed; but he rejects both the Catholic and the Protestant churches: it is time for a new kind of Christianity. The prime principle of Christ, Love thy neighbor, applied to modern society, compels us to recognize that the majority of our neighbors are destitute and wretched. The emphasis has now been shifted from the master mind at the top of the hierarchy to the “unpropertied” man at the bottom; but the hierarchy still stands as it was, since Saint-Simon’s whole message is still his own peculiar version of the principle of noblesse oblige. The propertied classes must be made to understand that an improvement in the condition of the poor will mean an improvement in their condition, too; the savants must be shown that their interests are identical with those of the masses. Why not go straight to the people? he makes the interlocutor ask in his dialogue. Because we must try to prevent them from resorting to violence against their governments; we must try to persuade the other classes first.
And he ends—the last words he ever wrote—with an apostrophe to the Holy Alliance, the combination of Russia, Prussia and Austria which had been established upon the suppression of Napoleon. It was right, says Saint-Simon, to get rid of Napoleon; but what have they themselves but the sword? They have increased taxes, protected the rich; their church and their courts, their very attempts at progress, depend on nothing but force; they keep two million men under arms.
“Princes!” he concludes, “hear the voice of God, which speaks to you through my mouth: Become good Christians again; throw off the belief that the hired armies, the nobility, the heretical clergy, the corrupt judges, constitute your principal supporters; unite in the name of Christianity and learn to accomplish the duties which Christianity imposes on the powerful; remember that Christianity commands them to devote their energies to bettering as rapidly as possible the lot of the very poor!”
Saint-Simon himself was now worse off than ever. His valet-patron had died, and he was unable to get his books even printed. He was obliged to make copies of them himself. He continued to send them out in this form to the learned and distinguished persons whom he still hoped to interest in his views; but they ignored him as blankly as ever. “For fifteen days,” he writes at this period, “I have been eating bread and drinking water. I work with no fire and I have even sold my clothes to make it possible to get my work copied. I have fallen into this distress through my passion for science and the public good, through my desire to find a way of bringing to an end without violence the terrible crisis in which today the whole of European society is involved. And I can therefore confess my misery without blushing, and ask for the necessary assistance to enable me to continue my work.” He finally succeeded in getting his family to send him a small pension.
He tried to shoot himself in 1823, but survived and went on writing till 1825, an eventuality which caused him surprise: “Can you explain to me how a man with seven balls of buckshot in his head can go on living and thinking?” When he was dying in 1825, he declined to receive one of his relations for fear of breaking his train of thought.
“All my life,” he is reported to have said by one of his disciples who was present at his deathbed, “all my life may be summed up in one idea: to guarantee to all men the free development of their faculties. Forty-eight hours after our second publication, the party of the workers will be organized: the future belongs to us!” … “He put his hand to his head and died.”