Henri de Saint-Simon

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (; ; 17 October 1760 – 19 May 1825), better known as Henri de Saint-Simon (), was a French political, economic and socialist theorist and businessman whose thought had a substantial influence on politics, economics, sociology and the philosophy of science. He was a younger relative of the famous memoirist the Duc de Saint-Simon.

Saint-Simon created a political and economic ideology known as Saint-Simonianism that claimed that the needs of an industrial class, which he also referred to as the working class, needed to be recognized and fulfilled to have an effective society and an efficient economy. Unlike conceptions within industrializing societies of a working class being manual laborers alone, Saint-Simon's late-18th-century conception of this class included all people engaged in what he saw as productive work that contributed to society, such as businesspeople, managers, scientists, bankers, and manual labourers, amongst others.

Saint-Simon believed the primary threat to the needs of the industrial class was what he defined as the idling class: a tier of society that included able-bodied persons who, instead of using their labor to benefit the social and economic orders, preferred what he perceived as a parasitic life avoiding work.

Saint-Simon's conceptual recognition of the merits of broad socioeconomic contribution and Enlightenment-era valorization of scientific knowledge inspired and influenced utopian socialism, anarchism (through its founder, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon), and Marxism—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identified Saint-Simon as an inspiration for their ideas and classified him among the utopian socialists.

Biography

Early years

Henri de Saint-Simon was born in Paris as a French aristocrat, the son of Balthazar Henri de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon, Marquis de Sandricourt (1721–1783) and his wife and cousin, Blanche Isabelle de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon (b. 1737), lady-in-waiting of Marie Joséphine of Savoy, Countess of Provence. His grandfather's cousin had been the Duke of Saint-Simon. His younger sister Marie Louise de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon (1763–1834) was mother-in-law of Princess Maria Christina of Saxony, Dowager Princess of Carignano.

From his youth, Saint-Simon was highly ambitious. He ordered his valet to wake him every morning with, "Remember, monsieur le comte, that you have great things to do." Among his early schemes was one to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans by a canal, and another to construct a canal from Madrid to the sea.

During the American Revolution, Saint-Simon joined the Americans, believing that their revolution signaled the beginning of a new era. He fought alongside the Marquis de Lafayette between 1779 and 1783, and took part in the siege of Yorktown under the command of General George Washington. Saint-Simon was captured and imprisoned by British forces during the end of his service, and upon his release, returned to France to study engineering and hydraulics at the Ecole de Mézières.

Life as a working adult

right|thumb|Henri de Saint-Simon, portrait from the first quarter of the 19th century by [[Godefroy Engelmann]]

When he was nearly 40 he went through a varied course of study and experiment to enlarge and clarify his view of things. One of these experiments was an unhappy marriage in 1801 to Alexandrine-Sophie Goury de Champgrand, undertaken so that he might have a literary salon. After a year, the marriage was dissolved by mutual consent. The result of his experiments was that he found himself completely impoverished, and lived in penury for the remainder of his life. The first of his numerous writings, mostly scientific and political, was Lettres d'un habitant de Genève, which appeared in 1802. In this first work, he called for the creation of a religion of science with Isaac Newton as a saint.

Around 1814 he wrote the essay "On Reconstruction of the European Community" and sent it to the Congress of Vienna. He proposed a European kingdom, building on France and the United Kingdom.

For his last decade, Saint-Simon concentrated on themes of political economy. Together with Auguste Comte, (then only a teenager), Saint-Simon projected a society bypassing the changes of the French Revolution, in which science and industry would take the moral and temporal power of medieval theocracy. In his last work however, Le Nouveau Christianisme (The New Christianity) (1825), Saint-Simon reverted to more traditional ideas of renewing society through Christian brotherly love. He died shortly after its publication.

Suicide attempt

thumb|Saint-Simon's grave in [[Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris]]

On 9 March 1823, disappointed by the lack of results of his writing (he had hoped they would guide society towards social improvement), he attempted suicide in despair. Remarkably, he shot himself in the head six times without succeeding, losing his sight in one eye.

Death

Two years after his suicide attempt, Saint-Simon died on 19 May 1825 and was buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France.

Legacy

After Saint-Simon's death in 1825, his disciples formalized his ideas into a "Saint-Simonian" movement, emphasizing a planned economy, the abolition of inheritance, and the emancipation of women, who is widely regarded as the founder of French socialism and a major early progenitor of sociology. His vision of a scientifically organized society led by "industrials" (productive classes including workers, scientists, and engineers) significantly influenced the development of 19th and 20th-century political thought.

Marx and Engels radicalised Saint-Simon's concepts of class and class conflict. They credited him with perceiving both the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror as a "class war" for recognizing that economic conditions are the basis of political institutions by Robespierre. While Marx and Engels admired his "breadth of view", they critiqued him for believing that social change could be achieved through peaceful persuasion of elites rather than proletarian revolution. The Communist Manifesto was published in London by 1848, commissioned by the Communist League, following the revolution in France, the provisional government invited Marx back. The Central Authority of the Communist League was officially reconstituted in Paris at this time.

Ideas

Industrialism

thumb|Posthumous 1848 portrait by Charles Baugniet

In 1817 Saint-Simon published a manifesto called the "Declaration of Principles" in his work titled L'Industrie ("Industry"). He claimed that feudal society in France and elsewhere needed to be dissolved and transformed into an industrial society. As such, he invented the conception of the industrial society. He shared with Smith the belief that taxes needed to be much reduced from what they were then in order to have a more just industrial system.

Saint-Simon reviewed the French Revolution and regarded it as an upheaval driven by economic change and class conflict. In his analysis, he believed that the solution to the problems that led to the French Revolution would be the creation of an industrial society, where a hierarchy of merit and respect for productive work would be the basis of society, while ranks of hereditary and military hierarchy would lessen in importance in society because they were not capable to lead a productive society. Writing in Introduction aux œuvres scientifiques du XIXe siècle, Saint-Simon states that he does not believe negroes to be equal to the Europeans for physiological reasons. In Lettres, he writes: "The revolutionaries applied the principles of equality to negroes. If they had consulted the physiologists they would have learned that the negro, because of his basic physical structure, is not susceptible, even with the same education, of rising to the intellectual level of Europeans." Jan Eijking writes that "Saint-Simon's understanding of a neutral, technocratic international sphere took existing social, economic, and racial hierarchies for granted".

Religious views

Prior to the publication of the Nouveau Christianisme, Saint-Simon had not concerned himself with theology. In Nouveau Christianisme, Saint-Simon presupposes a belief in God; his object in the treatise is to reduce Christianity to its simple and essential elements. He does this by clearing it of what he thought to be the dogmas and other defects that had come to define the Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity.

Saint-Simon posited a comprehensive formula for a "new Christianity": "The whole of society ought to strive towards the amelioration of the moral and physical existence of the poorest class; society ought to organize itself in the way best adapted for attaining this end."

Influence

Saint-Simon's thought exerted significant influence upon French and European technocratic thought, the development of technocratic internationalism, as well as major industrial and financial projects including the Suez Canal, the Channel Tunnel, the Crédit Mobilier, and the Chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée. Following Saint-Simon's death in 1825, his followers began to differ as to how to promulgate his ideas. The most acclaimed disciple of Saint-Simon was Auguste Comte.

In 1831 Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin and Amand Bazard purchased the newspaper Le Globe as the official organ for their revolutionary fraternity Friends of the Truth. Initially both men were supposed to be co-leaders naming themselves Supreme Fathers. However, Bazard left the group as it became increasingly ritualistic and religiously minded with Enfantin founding a community at Ménilmontant where he decried marriage as tyranny, promoted free love, declared himself "chosen by God", and began predicting that a "female Messiah" would soon save humanity.

Gustave d'Eichthal was a sympathiser of the Saint-Simonian movement who developed Saint-Simonian notions practically and involved himself in the development of the French economy, founding a number of leading concerns including the Suez Canal Company, founded by Saint-Simonian sympathiser Ferdinand de Lesseps, and the bank Crédit Mobilier, which was established by the Pereire brothers who had been members of the Saint-Simonian movement. It has also been noted that Saint-Simonian ideas exerted a significant influence on new religious movements such as Spiritualism and Occultism since the 1850s. Karl Marx considered the Saint-Simonians to be the "patriarchs of socialism".

French feminist and socialist writer Flora Tristan (1803–1844) claimed that Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, anticipated Saint-Simon's ideas by a generation.

Karl Marx identified Saint-Simon as being among whom he called the "utopian socialists", though historian Alan Ryan regards certain followers of Saint-Simon, rather than Saint-Simon himself, as being responsible for the rise of utopian socialism that based itself upon Saint-Simon's ideas. Ryan further suggests that by the 1950s it was clear that Saint-Simon had presaged the "modern" understanding of industrial society.

Works

Saint-Simon wrote various accounts of his views:

De la réorganisation de la société européenne (1814)
L'Industrie (1816–1817)
Le Politique (1819)
L'Organisateur (1819–1820)
Du système industriel (1822)
Catéchisme des industriels (1823–1824)
Nouveau Christianisme (1825)
An edition of the works of Saint-Simon and Enfantin was published by the survivors of the sect (47 vols., Paris, 1865–1878).

Citations

Sources

External links

"Saint-Simon and Saint-Simonism"—Catholic Encyclopedia article
Saint-Simon and Saint-Simonism: A Chapter in the History of Socialism in France by Arthur John Booth
The French Faust: Henri de Saint-Simon, 1955 biography by Mathurin Dondo
Henri de Saint-Simon: The Great Synthesist by Caspar Hewett
New Christianity, 1825, Henri de Saint-Simon