French Socialists Before Marx. (Reviews/Comptes Rendus).

Pamela Pilbeam, French Socialists Before Marx (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000)

THE VOLUMINOUS secondary literature on early French socialism consists mainly of monographs on individual theorists, militants, trades, cities, or regions. A new attempt to make sense of the whole is therefore welcome. Pilbeam's quite brief survey (205 pages, plus notes and bibliography) is organized around a limited number of themes: the social question, the Jacobin legacy, religion, education, women, utopian communities, workers' associations, and the failure of the Second Republic. Her treatment of these topics varies considerably in depth, quality, and originality. One of her best chapters is on feminists within the Saint-Simonian and Fourierist groups. Her account of their ideas and activities is enthusiastic and informative, yet she is not uncritical. For example, she notes their frequent commitment to an evangelical form of Christianity, she makes no unwarranted claims about the originality of their ideas, and she recognises that they rarely agreed about anything, except possibly their moralistic rejec tion of the gospel of sexual liberation preached by Fourier and Enfantin. There is little new in …