566 Ch. 14 • The Industrial Revolution
with the idea of building a canal through the Isthmus of Suez, thus joining
the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, a project later achieved in 1869 by
Ferdinand de Lesseps, another Saint-Simonian.
Practical Socialists
Some utopian socialists carried Saint-Simon’s analysis a crucial step further.
They relegated the bourgeoisie into the category of non-producers, because
they possessed capital, while workers seemed to them to be the real produc
ers by virtue of their labor. In France, a group of Saint-Simonian women in
1832 founded a newspaper, La Tribune des Femmes, that vowed only to pub
lish articles by women, proclaiming that the emancipation of women would
come with the emancipation of the worker.
Gender discrimination led Flora Tristan (1801-1844) to socialism. When
the French government confiscated her Peruvian father’s fortune upon his
death and declared Flora to be illegitimate because it refused to recognize
her parents’ marriage in Spain, she had to take a series of makeshift jobs.
When she separated from her abusive husband, French law decreed that he
receive custody of their children, although she later won custody when he
started to abuse them, too. Tristan campaigned against women’s inequality
within marriage and before the law. Linking feminism and socialism, she
campaigned for female emancipation with impassioned speeches and force
ful prose.
Louis Blanc (1811-1882) looked to governments to give scientists a free
hand in applying their talents to the betterment of the human condition.
The state should also guarantee workers the “right to work,” that is, employ
ment in times of distress and a decent wage in the face of unchecked com
petition. The state should provide credit to workers so that they could form
producers’ associations within their trades, thereby eliminating the middle
man who skimmed off profits that he had not earned. Blanc believed that
these workshops would serve as the basis for the reorganization of society
along cooperative lines. Blanc’s socialism was predicated on increasing
workers’ influence on government through the establishment of universal
suffrage.
In sharp contrast to Blanc, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) looked
not to the strengthening of the state but to its abolition to create a better
world. Proudhon, a typesetter, had grown up among landowning peasants in
eastern France. He believed that the very existence of the state itself was a
principal reason why capitalism exploited workers. In 1840, he published a
fiery pamphlet that answered the question “What Is Property?” with the
resounding reply ‘Theft.” Not surprisingly, this frightened property owners
in France, even though Proudhon defined property as unearned profit that
came to employers from the labor of their workers, and not property per se.
Proudhon wanted workers to organize themselves into small, autonomous
groups of producers that would govern themselves. By preaching the aboli