18 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
tive Christianity. His influence spread even to the United States.
Orestes A. Brownson read the Paroles d'un Croyant, as well as the
same author's Le Livre du Peuple, a book which Weitling trans
lated under the title Das Buch des Volkes and which was pub
lished in Boston as The People's Own Book. Through the efforts
of Brownson and others, it exercised some influence on the de
velopment of Jacksonian democracy in the United States.^8
Thus, during the years which Weitling spent in Paris, revolu
tionary propaganda filled the air; and the ideas of Fourier, Saint-
Simon, Considérant, Cabet, the communist priest, and many others
already had affected the thinking of many people, and had seeped
down from the intellectual groups to the workers, to whom Weit
ling belonged. He owed nothing to the universities, and he had
the honest craftsman's contempt for mere theory. His contacts
were largely with fellow workers, whose problems and reactions
he understood because they were his own. He entered upon the
path of social revolution through the door of the worker's move
ment by way of the secret societies to which he and many of his
class belonged, for, after the suppression of the workers' uprisings
in Paris and Lyons in 1834, there was no other place for radicals to
go except underground.
Paris, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was the mecca
for refugees from many lands, and particularly from Germany.
Arnold Ruge, the intellectual, once wrote: "Leaving Paris is like
leaving life, a complete retreat from the world"; and he paid trib
ute to French humanism in these words: "Paris is no less important
for Germany than it is for the departments. Our victories and our
defeats we experience in Paris. Even our philosophy, for the mo
ment one step ahead of theirs, will never be a significant force
until it makes itself felt in Paris and in the French spirit."^9
But Paris also was the home of thousands of German craftsmen(^8) See also Victor Giraud, "Le Cas de Lamennais," Revue des Deux Mondes,
L (March, 1919), 112-19.
(^9) See Arnold Ruge, Zwei Jahre in Paris: Studien und Erinnerungen (Leipzig,
1846), I, 59, 431.