16 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
Francois Noel Babeuf, an ardent revolutionist of 1789, had
plotted among the soldiers and the workers of Paris to overthrow
the government and establish community of property and had
paid for his radicalism with his life. To men of his type the French
Revolution was a mere precursor of the much greater upheaval
which would end in the establishment of communism by force
and by decree. Babeuf's ideas greatly influenced the French secret
societies of the nineteenth century and were carried by his disciple,
Filippe Michele Buonarroti, into Belgium and Switzerland.^6 Weit¬
ling so deeply admired Babeuf that many years later he named
one of his sons after the great conspirator.
Saint-Simon, a count of noble lineage who had served under
De Grasse with the French fleet before Yorktown, was another of
the pioneers of planned economy. He spent the fortune which he
had made in speculation on a program for a new social order
based on a "physico-politics" and a "science of production" which
would relieve the miseries of the poor. Saint-Simonism, whose
champions spread their new gospel with the zeal of fanatics, was
popular in the Paris of Weitling's day and became one of the
sources of his own social theories. Louis Auguste Blanqui, promi
nent in the French Revolution of 1830 and a leader of the uprisings
in 1839, was another who advocated revolution by secret societies
and made plans to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat by
force of arms.^7
Francois Marie Charles Fourier, though not strictly speaking a
communist and actually a defender of interest, profit, and inherit
ance, probably was the most influential of all the theorists of Weit
ling's time. He advocated a social order based on pure reason,
which would end the waste of competition and establish a co
operative society composed of "phalanxes." Victor Considérant,
(^6) See Filippe Michele Buonarroti, Conspiration pour l'égalité dite de Babeuf
(Brussels, 1828), passim; E. B. Bax, The Last Episode of the French Revolution,
Being a History of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals (London,
1911), passim.
(^7) See A. Thomas, "Blanqui im Jahre 1834," Dokumente des Sozialismus (Stutt
gart, 1903), II, 205-14.