Saint-Simonism

Utopian Socialism played an important role in radical Romanticism, and the most visible and active Socialist community in their milieu was Saint-Simonism. The Saint-Simonists advocated a feminist, technocratic form of socialism, founded in a heretical religion asserting the bisexual nature of the godhead. After the death of the founder, Claude-Henri Saint-Simon, his followers launched a massive campaign of advocacy and experimentation.

 

Both movements were fringe forces in the intellectual community prior to the July Revolution of 1830, and both exploded suddenly into popular consciousness in its wake; inevitably, Saint-Simonian ideas were an important influence on the emerging Romanticist avant-garde, though the nature of that influence was complex and often indirect. Their periods of most intense group activity co-incided almost exactly.
 

During this brief period of freedom of speech in the wake of the revolution, Saint-Simonists established a commune in Paris in which the genders were (theoretically) equal, set up soup kitchens and free schools in working-class neighbourhoods throughout Paris, attracted thousands of workers, students and women to weekly lectures, acquired the ex-Romanticist newspaper The Globe as their public organ and began a journal for self-taught working-class writers as well as the first Feminist newspaper in France. They distributed many pamphlets mapping out their vision of a new socialist society; this pamphlet is one of those, issued within months of the Revolution, printed crookedly on cheap paper and stab-bound with string to make as inexpensive as possible to buy.

While mainstream Liberal Romanticism was tolerated, and then adopted by the "Bourgeois King" in exchange for tolerance of the Monarchic system itself, Saint-Simonism soon became a major target of the new Orleans regime. A smear campaign by government-associated newspapers was followed by censorship of the newspapers and lectures, a series of police raids on two subsequent communes, and sensational trials. By 1835 the popular movement had died out, though a small community continued on France, Northern Africa and the United States into the 1860s.

The Saint-Simonists made a particularly strong appeal to architects, musicians, artists and writers, who they saw as essential to giving birth to a new consciousness. In 1825, Saint-Simon's closest disciple, the mathematician Olinde Rodrigues, published a sixty-page tract on the subject, in which the term "avant-garde" was first been used in an essay--and from which some of the Romanticists took up the term to refer to themselves by 1829. By that time, their publications and lectures were attended to by many Romanticists, including Franz Liszt, George Sand, and several of the Bouzingo group.

 

In the interim, Rodrigues and Léon Halévy (Saint-Simon's personal secretaries before his death) had split away from the main branch of the movement, eschewing the (idiosyncratic) religious emphasis of its interpretation. I have not yet had time to examine Rodrigues' essay (I am only one person, after all), and I am not aware of any comprehensive paraphrase of his theory in English. However, the fact that the organisation felt the need to issue a new essay on radical art, even if by a writer who did not feel fully qualified for the task, seems to imply a doctrinal or strategic conflict with Rodrigues and Halévy. This inference is strengthened by the fact that Halévy was himself a Romanticist poet with strong connections to the avant-garde, was published in several volumes of the Annales Romantiques anthologies, and was a personal friend of Petrus Borel, and therefore probably of Philothée O'Neddy and Alphonse Brot--all co-founders of the Bouzingo group, the latter of whom had become in 1829 the first person to describe the group in print using Rodrigues' terminology, as "the avant-garde of Romanticism". 

 

Halévy's Romanticist activity thus seem distinctly at odds with this pamphlet, for after initially refusing to commit on the Romanticist-Classicist debate, Barrault goes on eventually to dismiss Romanticism--especially its Frenetic tendencies--which he considers too idiosyncratic to provide the basis for orderly social co-ordination, referring to its "bizarre monstrosities," its "profound sorrows, desolations, and desolation," its destructive "irony" and "horrors of doubt and anarchy". This seems--tentatively--to imply that the advent of radical Romanticism was bound up with a crisis in Saint-Simonist activism, the nature of which will be better revealed once Rodrigues' text is more thoroughly examined. When O'Neddy, for instance, recalled that the Bouzingo group were engaged with Saint-Simonism, it seems that their engagement must have been shaped in large part by these competing elements within the movement; this potentially clarifies the ambivalent attitude that their activity and writing reveals toward the larger, more publicly visible Saint-Simonist group who had published this pamphlet 

 

A hypothetical trajectory of Saint-Simonist/Romanticist relations from 1825-1830 might be sketched out thus:

• In 1825, Rodrigues publishes his Saint-Simonist tract on ""L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel" (The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist"), where the term 'avant-garde' is coined.
• In 1829 Alphonse Brot uses the term to refer to radical Romanticism and the group soon to become the Petit-Cénacle/Jeunes-France/Bouzingo, clearly implying that it exercised at least some influene over their thinking and practice. 
• By or around this time, Rodrigues and Halévy have split from the main Saint-Simonist group, and the latter is writing in the community that Brot had called 'the avant-garde of Romanticism'--indeed, is or will soon become close to some of the group's co-founders, likely including Brot himself.
• In Feb. 1830, the Romanticists fight the "Battle of Hernani" and begin their cultural revolution; in July, the Bourbon monarchy is overthrown but replaced by the Orleans Monarchy. The main Saint-Simonist group, disapproving of Rodrigues' ideas as they were being (at least to some degree) appropriated by the Romanticist avant-garde, feel the need to issue a new treatise on Saint-Simonist art to replace his, upon different doctrinal grounds.

Further research will confirm, disprove, or alter this hypothesis...