The age of the Internationals and empires 51

Scholarship and theory 1760–1825

French thinker who held that society should be led by its productive “industrials”

Chapter III of the Communist Manifesto names him, with Fourier and Owen, among the founders of critical-utopian socialist systems born before the class struggle had developed.

Born in Paris to an aristocratic family, Saint-Simon fought in the American War of Independence and took part in the siege of Yorktown. During the Revolution he made money speculating in national property and was imprisoned under the Terror. In L’Industrie, L’Organisateur and the Catéchisme des industriels he argued that the productive “industrials” — scientists, entrepreneurs and workers alike — rather than the idle classes should direct society; his last work, Nouveau Christianisme, made the improvement of the poorest class society’s aim. The Communist Manifesto’s classification of him as a critical-utopian socialist who saw no independent political movement of the proletariat is Marx and Engels’ assessment, not his own self-understanding.

Scholarship and theory 1771–1858

Social reformer who emphasized education and cooperation

In A New View of Society (1816) Owen argued that “any general character may be given to any community by the application of proper means,” a principle he later tested at New Lanark and New Harmony.

A Welsh-born British manufacturer and social reformer, Owen sought to improve working, living and educational conditions at New Lanark. In A New View of Society he argued that environment and education form human character. He later pursued cooperative and communal experiments. Marx and Engels’ classification of Owen as a utopian socialist is a later, polemical interpretation. His early reform proposals should be distinguished from the International Working Men’s Association’s emphasis on workers’ self-emancipation.

Scholarship and theory 1772–1837

French social thinker who designed the cooperative phalanstery

He attacked commercial civilization and designed the phalanstery, a cooperative community where people would work according to their passions; the Communist Manifesto counts him among the critical-utopian socialists.

Born into a merchant family in Besançon, Fourier worked from 1791 to 1816 as a travelling salesman and correspondence clerk in several cities. After publishing his Théorie des quatre mouvements anonymously in 1808, he attacked commerce as a source of fraud and misery and designed the phalanstery, a cooperative community organized around “attractive labour” matched to each person’s passions. Followers such as Victor Considerant spread his ideas, and community experiments were attempted in several countries. Chapter III of the Communist Manifesto names him, with Saint-Simon and Owen, among the founders of critical-utopian socialism and criticizes his disciples for clinging to experiments such as phalansteries and opposing workers’ political movements; this is Marx and Engels’ assessment.

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed 1788–1856 ○ Stroke

Founder of the Icarian movement who coined the term 'communism'

On February 3, 1848, sixty-nine of Cabet's followers boarded a ship at Le Havre. 'To Icaria!' They set sail to build a communist paradise in the New World.

French utopian socialist and founder of the Icarian movement. In 1840 he published Voyage en Icarie, laying out a blueprint for a communist society based on workers' cooperatives, and was the first to establish 'communism' (communisme) as a political term. The most popular socialist advocate of his day, with some 400,000 adherents in France, he fused Christianity and communism in Le Vrai Christianisme, recasting Jesus's teachings as a gospel of social equality. In 1848 he led followers to America, founding Icarian communities in Texas and Illinois that lasted until 1898, the longest-running non-religious communal experiment in U.S. history. A bridge between Enlightenment utopianism and the workers' movement.

Scholarship and theory Independent activity 1797–1877 ○ Stroke

July Monarchy premier who as chief executive in 1871 crushed the Paris Commune and became the Third Republic’s first president

After ordering the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, Thiers secured the early departure of German troops from French territory, then resigned in 1873 amid monarchist opposition.

A lawyer and journalist from Marseille who made his name with a History of the French Revolution, he helped bring Louis-Philippe to the throne in 1830 and served the July Monarchy as interior minister and premier, putting down the Lyon silk workers’ and Paris risings of 1834. Under the Second Empire he led the liberal opposition. The National Assembly made him chief executive in February 1871; when the seizure of the Montmartre cannon failed on 18 March he moved the government to Versailles and crushed the Commune in Bloody Week. President from August 1871, he paid off the German indemnity early but was forced out by the monarchist Assembly in 1873.

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed 1805–1881 ○ Stroke

Insurrectionary strategist who spent 37 years in prison; Blanquism paved the road to Leninism

"I am accused of having told thirty million French people, proletarians like me, that they had the right to live." — defence speech at the 'Trial of the Fifteen', 12 January 1832

French revolutionary socialist. He systematised Blanquism (armed insurrection by a disciplined vanguard followed by revolutionary dictatorship) which influenced Marxist theory and the Bolshevik party concept. He spent 37 years in prison and was known as L'Enfermé ('The Prisoner').

Military command France state institutions 1808–1893 ○ Natural causes

Marshal captured at Sedan who led the Versailles army against the Paris Commune and became the president of “Moral Order”

As commander of the Versailles army, he led the suppression of the Paris Commune in May 1871. Elected president in 1873, he headed a “Moral Order” government; after Republicans won a parliamentary majority in 1877, he resigned in 1879.

A soldier from a family of Irish descent, he won his marshal’s baton and dukedom in the conquest of Algeria, the storming of the Malakoff in the Crimea and at Magenta in 1859. In 1870 he led the Army of Châlons to relieve Metz and was wounded and captured with the emperor at Sedan. Released by Germany, he commanded Thiers’s Versailles army, entered Paris in May 1871 and directed the repression and mass executions of Bloody Week. Succeeding Thiers as president in 1873, he led a “Moral Order” government awaiting a restoration, lost the 1877 confrontation with parliament and resigned in 1879.

Ideology and propaganda International Workingmen's Association (First International) 1809–1871 ✕ Killed in action

Jacobin journalist of 1830 and 1848 who became the Commune’s war delegate and walked to his death on a barricade

On 25 May 1871, the final day of Bloody Week, Commune war delegate Delescluze walked unarmed to the barricade at the Place du Château-d’Eau and was shot dead amid the fighting.

Born in Dreux, he fought in the July Revolution of 1830, published republican papers after February 1848 and went into exile. Arrested under the Second Empire, he served time in the penal colony of Cayenne in Guiana, and in 1868 founded the newspaper Le Réveil. Elected to the National Assembly in February 1871, he resigned to join the Commune. A Jacobin “independent revolutionary”, he sat on the Committee of Public Safety and on 11 May became war delegate as a civilian. On 25 May, with defeat certain, he climbed onto the barricade at the Château-d’Eau and was shot dead.

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed 1814–1876 ○ Illness

Marx's greatest rival: founder of collectivist anarchism, at the center of the First International's great split

At the 1869 Basel Congress: 'Take the most fervent revolutionary and give him absolute power — within a year he'll be worse than the Tsar' — cited in Statism and Anarchy

A Tver nobleman, founder of collectivist anarchism. He opposed Marx's statism in the First International, was expelled at the 1872 Hague Congress, and codified stateless federalism in Statism and Anarchy (1873).

Literature and arts International Workingmen's Association (First International) 1816–1887 ○ Natural causes

Textile designer and poet, a member of the Commune, who wrote the words of “The Internationale” in hiding after Bloody Week

After the Paris Commune's defeat, he wrote the words of “The Internationale” while hiding in Paris in June 1871. In exile in the United States, he organized solidarity for deported Communards.

Born to a Paris box-maker, he worked as a textile designer and wrote songs and poems from the 1830s, taking part in the June Days of 1848. He founded a designers’ union and joined the International. Elected to the Commune in an April 1871 by-election for the 2nd arrondissement, he wrote “The Internationale” in hiding in June after Bloody Week. Condemned to death in absentia, he fled to the United States and returned under the 1880 amnesty. He died poor in 1887; the next year Pierre De Geyter set “The Internationale” to music and it became the anthem of the world labour movement.

Scholarship and theory 1818–1883 ○ Natural causes

Author of Capital and leader of the First International

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" — Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)

Born into a lawyer's family in Trier, he began as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. He renounced his Prussian citizenship in 1845 and remained stateless for the rest of his life, living in London exile from 1849. Over forty years with Engels he wrote the Communist Manifesto and Capital and led the First International. The late Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) takes apart, line by line, the Lassallean thinking lodged in the German workers' party's unity programme, his last answer to the idea of the state as the instrument of socialism.

Literature and arts Independent activity 1819–1877 → Died in exile

Realist painter who led the Commune’s Federation of Artists and went into Swiss exile blamed for the Vendôme Column

In the 1871 Paris Commune, Courbet chaired the Federation of Artists and served as a councillor, advocating the opening of museums. After its defeat, he was imprisoned for six months over the Vendôme Column’s destruction; a later order to pay reconstruction costs led him into exile in Switzerland.

Born to prosperous farmers in Ornans in the Jura, he launched Realism with A Burial at Ornans and The Stone Breakers and was close to Proudhon; in 1870 he refused the Legion of Honour. As president of the Commune’s Federation of Artists in 1871 he demanded self-government for museums and an end to censorship, and after winning a by-election in the 6th arrondissement he sided with the minority against the Committee of Public Safety. For proposing to remove the Vendôme Column he was sentenced to six months after Bloody Week; ordered in 1873 to pay for its rebuilding, he fled to Switzerland and died at La Tour-de-Peilz.

Scholarship and theory 1820–1895 ○ Natural causes

Marx's co-author and patron; author of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

"The State is not 'abolished'. It dies out." — Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)

Born to a Barmen mill-owning family, he managed the family firm in Manchester and wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). After the 1848 revolution and the Baden rising he returned to the office for twenty years to keep the Marx household in London. From Anti-Dühring (1878) he drew three chapters into the pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), which was translated into ten languages and became the introduction to Marxism. After Marx's death he edited Capital vols. II and III, and in 1891 he published the Critique of the Gotha Programme (buried for fifteen years) over the objections of the party leadership.

Military command France state institutions 1823–1900 ○ Natural causes

French soldier who served as the Paris Commune’s Delegate for War

As the Commune’s Delegate for War, he sought to reorganize the National Guard but was arrested amid conflicts with its leaders.

Cluseret served in the French army, Garibaldi’s volunteers and the Union Army during the American Civil War. As Delegate for War of the Paris Commune in 1871, he sought to reorganize the National Guard but clashed with Commune leaders and was arrested on a charge of betrayal; an ad hoc court acquitted him. He escaped France after the Commune’s defeat, returned under the 1880 amnesty, and was elected a socialist deputy for Toulon in 1888, 1889, 1893 and 1898. He later moved away from socialism and joined the anti-Dreyfus camp.

Scholarship and theory 1825–1864 ✕ Shot in a duel

Founder of the ADAV, Germany's first workers' party

"Das eiserne und grausame Gesetz" — the iron and cruel law Lassalle said held wages down to bare subsistence (1863)

A lawyer and agitator from a Jewish merchant family in Breslau. In May 1863 he founded the General German Workers' Association (ADAV) at Leipzig and was elected its president for five years, arguing that universal suffrage would turn the state toward funding producers' co-operatives and so toward socialism. That same year he met Bismarck in secret to sound out an alliance between the workers and the Prussian monarchy, which drew Marx's deep suspicion. In 1864 he was shot in a duel over a marriage and died three days later outside Geneva. Eleven years afterwards his programme supplied the frame of the Gotha unity programme.

Political and party leadership Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) 1826–1900 ○ Natural causes

Co-founder of the Eisenach party and drafter of the Gotha Programme

"Nobody has combatted State Socialism more than we German Socialists, nobody has shown more distinctively than I, that State Socialism is really State capitalism!" — 'Our Recent Congress' (1896)

Born in Giessen, he joined the risings of 1848 and fled by way of Switzerland to London, where he spent twelve years as a close associate of Marx and Engels. In 1869 he founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party with August Bebel at Eisenach; arrested for opposing war credits, he was convicted at the Leipzig treason trial of 1872. He was the man who brought off the Gotha unity congress of 1875 and drafted its programme, the document Marx took apart line by line. From 1890 until his death he edited the party paper Vorwärts. He was the father of Karl Liebknecht.

Social movements and organizing International Workingmen's Association (First International) 1826–1921

French bookbinder and activist in the Women's Union of the Paris Commune

Born in Brest in Brittany, Le Mel worked as a bookbinder in Paris and joined the workers' movement. In 1865 she helped win equal pay for women and men in bookbinding, joined the International Workingmen's Association, and ran the cooperative restaurant La Marmite with Eugène Varlin. During the 1871 Paris Commune she was a leading activist in the Women's Union and fought on the barricades. Arrested after the Commune's defeat, she was deported to New Caledonia with Louise Michel and returned to Paris under the 1880 amnesty.

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed 1830–1905 ○ Pneumonia

Montmartre teacher who fought on the Commune’s barricades, was deported to New Caledonia and became the anarchist “Red Virgin”

Louise Michel led Montmartre’s Women’s Vigilance Committee and fought in the Paris Commune. Deported to New Caledonia after its defeat, she returned to France in 1880 and devoted herself to workers’ meetings and anarchist activism.

Born in a château in Haute-Marne to a servant, she became a teacher, opened a school in Montmartre in the 1850s and frequented republican and socialist clubs. On 18 March 1871 she turned out to defend the cannon on Montmartre, and during the Commune she served on the vigilance committee, in ambulance work and with a Guard battalion. After Bloody Week she surrendered in place of her mother, demanded death in court and was sentenced to deportation to New Caledonia, where she supported the Kanak revolt of 1878. Amnestied in 1880, she spoke and was jailed again and again as an anarchist, dying on a lecture tour in Marseille in 1905.

Military command Affiliation unconfirmed 1836–1871 ✕ Killed in action

Organiser of the Polish rising of 1863 who became a general of the Commune and fell at Montmartre in Bloody Week

Arrested while preparing the 1863 uprising and sentenced to Siberian hard labour, Dąbrowski escaped. As a general of the Paris Commune, he fought Versailles forces and was mortally wounded on 23 May 1871.

Born into a Polish noble family in Zhytomyr, he became a Russian staff officer but was arrested in Warsaw while preparing the January Uprising of 1863, just before it broke out. Escaping on the way to Siberian exile, he reached Paris in 1865. In 1871 the Commune made him a general and gave him the western front at Neuilly and Asnières, where he was reckoned its ablest commander; on 21 May it was he who first reported that the Versailles army was inside the walls. He was mortally wounded on a barricade in the rue Myrha near Montmartre on 23 May.

Scholarship and theory Independent activity 1838–1901 ○ Natural causes

Journalist who fought on the Commune’s last barricade and wrote the History of the Paris Commune of 1871 in exile

French revolutionary socialist journalist Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray took part in the Paris Commune and wrote its history from survivor testimony and documents.

Born in Toulouse to a Basque family, he was a republican lecturer and journalist under the Second Empire and was prosecuted several times. During the 1870 war he joined the military organisation of the provincial government of National Defence, and during the Commune he published the papers L’Action and Le Tribun du peuple in Paris. He fought to the last barricade in Belleville in Bloody Week, escaped to London, grew close to the Marx family and was engaged to Eleanor Marx. He published his History of the Paris Commune of 1871 in Brussels in 1876 and, after the 1880 amnesty, returned to edit La Bataille.

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed 1839–1871 ✕ Shot

Bookbinder who led the Paris International, ran the Commune’s finances and was shot on the last day of Bloody Week

He linked the bookbinders’ union to the First International and helped build a Paris federation of workers’ associations, then organised the Commune’s finances and labour relations. Captured by Versailles forces, he was shot with other prisoners at Montmartre on 28 May 1871.

A peasant’s son who became a bookbinder in Paris, he led the bookbinders’ strike of 1864 and founded mutual-aid societies and the cooperative restaurant La Marmite. The central figure of the International’s Paris section, he was tried twice in 1868 and organised a federation of trade unions. In 1871 he joined the Central Committee of the National Guard and, as a member of the Commune, handled finance and supplies; he belonged to the minority that opposed the Committee of Public Safety. Captured on 28 May, he was dragged to Montmartre, beaten by a crowd and shot.

Political and party leadership Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) 1840–1913 ○ Natural causes

Co-founder of the SPD who led the German workers' movement for over 40 years, the 'shadow emperor' of the working class

"The struggle in Paris is only a small outpost skirmish; the main affair in Europe is still ahead of us. Before a few decades have passed, 'War on the palaces, peace to the cottages' will become the battle cry of the entire European proletariat." — Reichstag, 25 May 1871

A woodturner's apprentice who co-founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party with Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1869 and, through the Gotha unity congress of 1875, built the SPD into the world's largest socialist party. Under the Anti-Socialist Laws (1878–1890) he ran the illegal party paper from Zurich exile and held the underground organisation together; he steered the adoption of the Erfurt Programme (1891), which became the Marxist benchmark for European social democracy, and led the orthodox defence against Eduard Bernstein's revisionism. His Woman and Socialism (1879) ran through over fifty editions as the founding text of socialist feminism, and his funeral in 1913 drew the leaders of the Second International.

Political and party leadership French Workers' Party (POF) 1842–1911 ✕ Suicide

Marx's son-in-law, author of The Right to Be Lazy, first socialist deputy in the French parliament

"Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one by one." — Suicide letter, 25 November 1911

French Marxist theorist born in Cuba. Co-founded the French Workers' Party (POF) with Jules Guesde and systematized economic determinism as a historical method. In his later years, defended revolutionary Marxism against Jean Jaurès's reformism.

Scholarship and theory 1842–1921 ○ Illness

Rurikid prince, founder of anarcho-communism, geographer of Mutual Aid: escaped the Peter and Paul Fortress

When Kerensky offered him any cabinet post in 1917, Kropotkin replied he considered 'the trade of a bootblack more honest and useful' — Emma Goldman.

A Rurikid prince and geographer who founded anarcho-communism. Escaped a tsarist prison and spent 41 years in European exile writing The Conquest of Bread and Mutual Aid. After returning in 1917, openly criticized the Bolshevik Red Terror.