Whitham, William - César de Paepe and The Ideas of The First International, 2017

Modern Intellectual History, page 1 of 29
C Cambridge University Press 2017

doi:10.1017/S1479244317000609
césar de paepe and the ideas of

the first international∗
william whitham
Department of History, Princeton University
E-mail: wmwhitham@gmail.com
This article explores the ideas of a key thinker of the International Working Men’s
Association in the 1860s and 1870s. César De Paepe, recognized by contemporaries
as a major advocate of “collectivism,” attempted to justify social property as the
logical consequence both of mutualist justice and of economic necessity. His theories
played a significant role in informing the programs of other socialists in the turbulent
1870s, and sustained the successes of the Belgian workers’ party into the twentieth
century. While historians focus on Marx and Bakunin or posit a break between “early”
and “late” socialism, the study of De Paepe’s writings in context draws attention to
neglected themes in the intellectual development of modern socialism, and suggests that
“utopianism” could underwrite practical politics. The article concludes by reflecting
on De Paepe’s significance for contemporary politics and the practice of intellectual
history.
“The greatest achievement of the IWMA [International Working Men’s

Association (1864–77)],” as Gareth Stedman Jones has recently written, “was to
forge and spread across Europe and the Americas a new and lasting language of
social democracy. European socialism was an invention of the 1860s.”1 Historians
have long seen the International as the first significant organization to originate
∗
The author thanks Aditya Balasubramanian, Jocelyn Betts, Joshua Gibson, Thomas
Hopkins, Charlotte Johann, Christopher Meckstroth, Philip Nord, Emma Rothschild,
and the journal editors and anonymous reviewers for their criticisms.
1 Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (London, 2016), 462. The date
of the International’s death is disputed, as the organization split in two in 1872. A writer
who cannot be accused of indulging the so-called “anarchists” justifies their later date
of 1877 because the Continental (as opposed to American) rump was larger and lasted
longer. See G. M. Stekloff, History of the First International, 3rd edn, trans. Eden and
Cedar Paul (London, 1928). The “First” International, a group of artisans, labor leaders,
and journalists committed to the fraternity of workers, would be followed by a “Second”
of social-democratic parties (estd 1889), a “Third” of communist parties (estd 1919), and
a forgettable “Fourth” of Trotskyists (estd 1938).
1
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2 william whitham
and spread distinctively “socialist” ideas, such as labor agitation, class struggle,
and international solidarity.2 Contemporaries would have agreed. “There is no
exaggeration in saying,” Kropotkin observed in 1899, “that all schemes of social
reconstruction which are now in vogue under the name of ‘scientific socialism’
or ‘anarchism’ had their origin in the discussions and reports of the different
congresses of the International Association.”3
The ideas of the International, however, are not well understood. Socialists have
usually slanted them to fit their own ideologies. Bolsheviks cast the International
as a Marxist anticipation of the Comintern; anarchists, as a federalist precursor
to anarcho-syndicalist unions; social democrats, as the embryo of their own
electoral parties and unions; contemporary leftists, as an organization pledged
to goals “today more vital than ever.”4 Such genealogies are ideologically potent
but misleading: terms such as “Marxist” and “anarchist,” for instance, were
little used as meaningful, conscious designations for militant groups of any
theoretical or organizational coherence during the 1860s and 1870s.5 By contrast,
labor and social historians tended to assume, with the positivist Edward Beesly,
that the International’s proposals were of “very little importance in comparison
with the practical work done by the association.”6 Such scholars put aside
“the far-too-exclusive study of ideas, the leaders which personified them and
the organizations” (mere “congress history,” in the words of one specialist) in
favor of the non-elitist, bottom-up study “of militants, workers, masses, their
mentalités.”7 In this research, ideas remained just as elusive. The theories of the
International have been discounted even by intellectual historians. They largely
prefer to conceive of socialist thought as Marxism and its permutations (such as
the Frankfurt school) than to study autodidact artisans.8
2 The best introduction to the International’s ideas remains G. D. H. Cole, A History of

Socialist Thought, 5 vols. (London, 1953–61), 2: chaps. 6, 8.
3 Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ed. Nicolas Walter (Mineola, 1999), 272.
4 Marcello Musto, “Introduction,” in Musto, ed., Workers Unite! The International 150 Years
Later (New York, 2014), 1–68, at 66.
5 See David Stafford, From Anarchism to Reformism: A Study of the Political Activities of
Paul Brousse 1870–1890 (Toronto, 1971); Georges Haupt, “Marx and Marxism,” in Eric J.
Hobsbawm, ed., Marxism in Marx’s Day (Brighton, 1982), 265–89.
6 Quoted in Stedman Jones, Karl Marx, 461.
7 Marc Vuilleumier, introduction to James Guillaume, L’Internationale: Documents et
souvenirs (1905–10), 4 vols. in 2 (Paris, 1985), 1(1): i–lvii, at ii, added emphasis.
8 Musto, exceptionally, tries to foreground workers’ voices. But his anthology focuses on
Marx in its epigraphs, introduction, and selection of texts. Marx’s role in the International,
while significant, is easy to exaggerate—he did not found the organization, lead it, or
attend many congresses—and his writings were little known among delegates. See Julian
P. W. Archer, The First International in France 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact
césar de paepe and the first international 3
This article examines an important but long-neglected theorist of the

International. Before the struggle between Marx and Bakunin tore apart the
International and bewitched generations of historians, a Flemish militant, César
De Paepe (1841–90), played a leading role in the organization’s discussions. It
was De Paepe who famously introduced and defended the idea of social property
at the Lausanne (1867), Brussels (1868), and Basle (1869) Congresses. Calling
his ideas collectivisme, “collectivism,” De Paepe convinced majorities of worker–
delegates that the individual ownership of land and key fixed capitals was both
unjust from a moral perspective and doomed given the concentration of farms
and industries.9 In several votes, Internationalists resolved that the earth (the soil,
subsoil, and forests), as well as the means of transport and exchange, should be
owned by a “regenerated state,” and leased to workers’ companies, which would
sell products at, or near, cost price.10 In militants’ discourse, in the public mind,
and in lexicons, socialism was from this period onwards more and more defined
as a system of government ownership or management.11
Though the idea of social property was not his alone, De Paepe was
recognized by many contemporaries as a great theorist of the International
and of collectivism. As the Saint-Simonian man of letters Guéroult observed
in 1872, De Paepe “seems to have studied the question [of collective property]
the most” among Internationalists. His first oration of 1867, reflected militants
of the Swiss Jura in 1873, “was an event [événement], in which, for the first time,
was set forth the collectivist theory that the International would soon inscribe
(Lanham, 1997), 25, 50 n. 17, 76 n. 6, 100, 109 n. 87, 134 n. 51, 169; Eric J. Hobsbawm, “The
Fortunes of Marx’s and Engels’s Writings,” in Hobsbawm, Marxism, 327–44.
9 “Collectivism” appears to have acquired currency and entered lexicons at this time.
The reader may (with appropriate skepticism) investigate French collectivisme, German
Kollektivismus, Spanish colectivismo, or Italian collettivismo on Google Ngram. Likely
coined by Pecqueur in the 1830s, the term figured in Colins’s writings, whence De Paepe
took it (more on this below). See Marc Angenot, Colins et le socialisme rationnel (Montreal,
1999).
10 Jacques Freymond, ed., La Première Internationale: Recueil de documents, 4 vols. (Geneva,
1962–71), 1: 405. For the various resolutions and votes see ibid., 1: 233, 1: 405–6, 2: 74–5.
11 Community of property (in land or capital, for moral or economic reasons) is an old idea
that many nineteenth-century political agents found acceptable in some form. Long before
socialists joined parliaments or cabinets, statesmen placed infrastructure and enterprises
(rails, canals, banks, armaments) under state ownership or management. See e.g. Ekaterina
Pravilova, A Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial
Russia (Princeton, 2014). Until c.1848, most socialists referred to cooperatives, small-
scale communities, or a vague “society” exercising ownership, rather than a “state.” For
background see Gregory Claeys, “Non-Marxian Socialism 1815–1914,” in Gareth Stedman
Jones and Gregory Claeys, eds., The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political
Thought (Cambridge, 2011), 521–55.
4 william whitham
on its program.” Decades later, French “possibilists” praised De Paepe as “the

learned [savant] socialist writer who was the most remarkable theoretician of the
International” and “the principal and virtually sole theoretician” of collectivism.
Collectivism had triumphed in the International, wrote Villey of the Paris Revue
d’économie politique in the 1890s, “not by the German influence, but by that of
César De Paepe.” His colleague Gide agreed: De Paepe was “the most eminent of
[socialism’s] representatives,” who perhaps more than Marx and Lassalle deserved
to be named among “the founders of collectivism,” because, unlike them, he
used the word “with the meaning it has today” and endeavored “to describe
its organization.” Thus for a number of observers De Paepe was simply “the
most important man of the International, after Karl Marx,” in the words of the
communard Malon.12
If the ideas of the International in general have been misunderstood, the
particular significance of De Paepe and collectivism were almost ridiculed by
later generations. As socialists developed the indefinite ideas of the 1860s and
1870s into diametrical dogmas, many cast De Paepe as an idiosyncratic, even
heretical, intermediary between better-known terms: “utopian” and “scientific”
socialism, anarchism and Marxism, Bakunin and Marx. In the damning 1911
judgment of “neo-socialist” Hendrik De Man, De Paepe offered an unworkable
juste milieu, “a mishmash of tendencies . . . according to the tried-and-tested
Belgian principle of the golden mean.”13 Along with the other leaders of the Parti
ouvrier belge (POB)/Belgische Werkliedenpartij (BWP) (1885–1940), De Paepe
was relegated to the status of a transitional eclectic, not seen as an independent
theorist courted by both Marx and Bakunin.14
12 Georges Guéroult, Les théories de l’Internationale (Paris, 1872), 28; Mémoire présenté
par la Fédération jurassienne de l’Association internationale des travailleurs à toutes les
fédérations de l’Internationale (Sonvillier, 1873), 9; Gustave Perthuis, “Société républicaine
d’économie sociale,” La revue socialiste (Paris) 5/28 (1887), 377–81, at 381; Benoı̂t Malon,
“Le Congrès d’Erfurt,” La revue socialiste 14/83 (1891), 562–83, at 570 n. 1; Edmond Villey,
“Les transformations de l’idée socialiste,” Revue d’économie politique (Paris) 9/6 (1895),
548–64, at 555; Charles Gide, “Chronique,” Revue d’économie politique 5/1 (1891), 85–93, at
88; Malon, “Les collectivistes français,” La revue socialiste 5/28 (1887), 306–27, at 310 (all
translations are mine). The authoritative scholars Henry Collins and Chimen Abramsky,
Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement: Years of the First International (London,
1965), 108, called De Paepe “next to Marx the most outstandingly original thinker in the
International.”
13 Hendrik De Man, “Die Eigenart der belgischen Arbeiterbewegung,” in Hendrik De Man
and Louis De Brouckère, Die Arbeiterbewegung in Belgien, supplement to Die Neue Zeit,
vol. 9 (Stuttgart, 1910–11), 1–28, at 26.
14 This is partly true even of the most sensitive and sophisticated research. Dandois’s
meticulous 1974 collection ignores that De Paepe was little influenced by Marx and
probably not at all by Bakunin. Peiren’s well-rounded 1990 biography also clouds the
Bringing together articles, pamphlets, and oral arguments from the period, this
study reconstructs De Paepe’s thinking in the 1860s and 1870s in order to advance
a reinterpretation of the intellectual origins of modern European socialism. While
cognizant of the broader shift in socialist thinking between the 1840s and 1880s,
the paper suggests first of all that there was more continuity between these periods
than may be supposed. The collectivism of the International, insofar as it was
elaborated by De Paepe, was a self-conscious synthesis of mutualism and pre-
Marxian communism, not a rebuttal to archaic “Proudhonism” by “Marxism”
or “anarchism.” Attentive both to moral concerns and to the circumstances
of mass industrial society, De Paepe’s idea of social property—particularly as
embodied in the practice of the POB/BWP—shows that the “utopianism” of
the pre-1848 period could profitably inform the “science” of the 1880s and
beyond.15
Second, this article argues that De Paepe played an unacknowledged role in
dividing, not just uniting, the members of the International. While attention
has fixated on the struggle c.1869–72 between Marx and Bakunin as the starting
point of at least two different kinds of socialism, the discourse of the period
suggests that many Internationalists developed their new socialist ideas with
critical reference to De Paepe in the mid-1870s. Some cadres, particularly
the “antiauthoritarian” partisans of Bakunin, developed their understandings
of social property precisely by reading De Paepe and borrowing from
him.
Finally, the article argues that De Paepe’s story offers political and
methodological insights. In his writings, De Paepe struggled to combine an
extensive public-services state with individual freedom, personal desert, and
political decentralization in a national territory. Though his strategies and
solutions were generally faulty, De Paepe made unusual efforts to balance justice
and expediency: a conspicuous dilemma of modern politics. Taking this lesser-
known figure seriously thus allows intellectual historians to reassess the meaning
of modern socialism.
issue by its framing: in his final years, De Paepe was still “utopian.” A recent article ably
summarizes De Paepe’s 1874 Rapport but interprets it in French terms, understating its
author’s ambitions. See Bernard Dandois, ed., Entre Marx et Bakounine: César De Paepe
(Paris, 1974); Luc Peiren, César De Paepe: De l’utopie à la réalité (Ghent, 1990); Nathalie
Droin, “Aux origines du socialisme municipal: César de Paepe,” Revue française d’histoire
des idées politiques 42 (2015), 167–98.
15 That collectivism bested mutualism is perhaps the major misinterpretation about the
International’s ideas. It can be found in works from Jules-Louis Puech, Le Proudhonisme
dans l’Association internationale des travailleurs (Paris, 1907) to Musto’s 2014 anthology.
6 william whitham
the education of a collectivist

Unlike Marx, De Paepe was no philosopher. A “lack of time,” he complained,
prevented him from consolidating his mostly journalistic writings into “the
slightest book” of systematic social economy.16 He said this with some justice: his
life was busy and brief. Born to a father employed in the state bureaucracy and a
mother of remotely noble ancestry, De Paepe worked as a typographer in Brussels
after his father’s death in 1860, and studied medicine on the side. Meanwhile, he
involved himself in a wide variety of campaigns, from secular education and
civil burials to manhood suffrage, social and urban reforms, and Flemish rights.
From the 1870s until his death, this political agitation was combined with obstetric
practice from his office at 24 rue t’Kint. De Paepe left behind only articles and
pamphlets after a life of activism, writing, personal misfortune, and painful illness
(he succumbed at age forty-nine).17
His writings are difficult to analyze without perpetrating what Quentin
Skinner called “the mythology of coherence.”18 De Paepe’s own aim was to
collect, “among the materials assembled by the many builders of social theories,
some stones that it seems to us must be useful in the construction [l’édification]
of the future society.”19 As a result, his writings spanned ethics and expediency,
justice and necessity, conservative and liberal political economy, “mutualism,”
and “communism”; his strategy shifted over his lifetime. Physically, too, his
corpus was disparate, scattered across approximately forty publications in six
countries.20 Nevertheless, careful study of De Paepe’s writings across his life,
guided by attention to historical and linguistic contexts, can illuminate his
thought’s continuities and breaks in the 1860s and 1870s and his contributions to
the International’s debates.
De Paepe’s theories were based in large measure on his analysis of his native
Belgium. In this tiny and apparently trivial territory were starkly realized the
16 De Paepe to Malon, 8 Dec. 1878, in Dandois, De Paepe, 129–38, at 135, original emphasis.
17 For background see Peiren, De Paepe.
18 Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and
Theory 8/1 (1969), 3–53, at 16.
19 César De Paepe, De l’organisation des services publics dans la société future: Réponse aux
critiques (Brussels, 1874), 40.
20 De Paepe’s papers are housed at the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis
(Amsterdam). Most of his writings are articles in workers’ newspapers, not books and
manuscripts. (Note that he wrote almost entirely in French.) For partial bibliographies,
see Louis Bertrand, César De Paepe: Sa vie, son oeuvre (Brussels, 1909), 228–31; Dandois,
De Paepe, 291–4; L. Delsinne, “Paepe, César De,” in Biographie nationale de Belgique,
vol. 30 (Brussels, 1958), 647–53, at 653.
key tendencies of nineteenth-century European development.21 A “paradise

for the bourgeoisie” and “model state of continental constitutionalism,” as
Marx lampooned it, Belgium was in part a model of enlightened government
and industrial civilization, albeit one conditional on the fragile forbearance of
neighboring powers.22 State officials helped, rather than hindered, entrepreneurs
who utilized Belgium’s considerable coal reserves with British technology.
Constitutional monarchs permitted a limited suffrage, commercial liberties, and
powers of municipal self-government.23 The state partially funded and owned
an extensive waterway system and the densest railway network in Europe. The
Société générale, for its part, pioneered modern industrial credit, while Catholic
and Liberal statesmen encouraged the creation of joint-stock companies. Thanks
to this combination of public stewardship and private initiative, Belgium led the
Continent in industrial production and international trade throughout much of
the century: in the prewar years, its iron output per capita was even higher than
Britain’s.
Nineteenth-century Belgium was also a nonpareil of human misery and strife.
The potato blight and dislocation in cottage textiles led to widespread starvation
during the 1840s, particularly in Flanders. Afterwards, a labor-intensive growth
model kept wages lower and hours longer than elsewhere in northwestern
Europe, making living standards “probably the lowest of all the industrialized
countries at the time.”24 Reform was slow in coming. While Leopold II (r.
1865–1909) constructed among the cruelest colonial regimes in world history,
parliamentarians preoccupied themselves with debates on secular schools, whose
tardy resolution made prewar illiteracy rates the highest in northwestern Europe
21 The following overview is informed by E. H. Kossman, The Low Countries 1780–1940

(Oxford, 1978); Daisy Devreese, “Belgium,” in Marcel van der Linden and Jürgen Rojan,
eds., The Formation of Labour Movements 1870–1914, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1990), 2: 25–55; Carl
Strikwerda, A House Divided: Catholics, Socialists, and Flemish Nationalists in Nineteenth-
Century Belgium (Oxford, 1997); Ivan Berend, An Economic History of Nineteenth-Century
Europe: Diversity and Industrialization (Cambridge, 2013). On the Congo see Adam
Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
(Boston, 1998).
22 Wilhelm Eichhoff and Karl Marx, The International Working Men’s Association (1868), in
Marx–Engels Collected Works (hereafter MECW), 50 vols. (London, 1975–2004), 21: 322–80,
at 353; Karl Marx, “The Belgian Massacres” (1869), in ibid., 21: 47–51, at 47.
23 The 1831 Constitution made Belgium “the most democratically governed state in Europe,”
with a franchise wide for the time of 46,000 men. Kossman, The Low Countries, 157. Further
gains were limited. Though the franchise was expanded nationally in 1848 (to 76,000) and
at the municipal level in 1871 (to 300,000), and in 1883 (to 500,000, some of whom held
primary education certificates or passed examinations), in 1892 only about 4 percent of
men could vote in national elections. See ibid., chaps. 4, 6; Devreese, “Belgium,” 26.
24 Devreese, “Belgium,” 33.
8 william whitham
(10 percent). Governmental inertia or incompetence fueled mass unrest, which

erupted every few years from the late 1860s, with special violence in Walloon
industrial areas. The threat of social cataclysm, combined with chance divisions
among Liberals and Catholics and general strikes by organized labor, led the
government to concede elementary and social legislation as well as plural
manhood suffrage (1893) in the 1890s. Such changes, however, satisfied few in
Belgian society.25
As a militant and a typesetter in Brussels in the 1860s, De Paepe supposed
that countries like Belgium could largely preserve the “good” and mitigate
the “bad” aspects of European civilization described above. To be sure, the
works of “communists” like Babeuf and Buonarroti provided De Paepe with
radical–republican convictions to see genuine égalité everywhere realized. But
many nineteenth-century “socialists” and political economists feared any new
revolution as much as they disliked the post-1815 settlement. More persuasive
was a careful synthesis or equilibrium that preserved modern commerce
and production, safeguarded science, and heightened public sentiment, while
minimizing (or even eliminating) economic dislocation, spiritual precariousness,
and disruptive social contestation.
To this end, Saint-Simon, a frequent object of study for the young De Paepe,
famously proposed that the poles of “anarchy and despotism” between which
Europe had swung for decades could be avoided by a reconciliation of individual
liberty and productive necessity. This future was to be envisioned by a political
or social science and established by a peculiar cross-class coalition (artistes,
savants, industriels) that peacefully did away with autocratic institutions and
mere idlers. The resulting government, composed of functional representatives
selected according to merit, would direct investment, modernize agriculture and
commerce, and balance production and consumption. At the same time, Saint-
Simon intended for this regime to secure to men “the highest degree of liberty
compatible with the state of society.” Industrialisme meant low taxes and the right
of producers “to exchange with each other directly and with complete freedom.”
Because political laws would be grounded “not in an arbitrary opinion established
in law by the mass, but in a principle derived from the very nature of things,”
organizing social life would in time become a simple “task shared by all citizens,
whether it be to contain trouble-makers or to settle disputes.”26
25 The suffrage reform of 1893 gave plural electors as many as three votes in national elections,
whereas 1895 reforms gave them up to four in municipal elections. This ensured the
dominance of the Catholics until postwar reforms. See ibid., 26.
26 Henri Saint-Simon, Selected Writings on Science, Industry, and Social Organization, ed.
Keith Taylor (London, 1975), 158, 210, 165, 210.
De Paepe was as impressed with Saint-Simon as with the ideas of his

interpreters. Comte, as is well known, dethroned metaphysical inquiry for
an inductive and predictive social science grounded in mathematics and the
natural sciences. Even more striking were the theories of Jean-Guillaume-César-
Alexandre Hippolyte, baron de Colins de Ham. For this Walloon Bonapartist
and his associates, “passive” wealth (derived from ownership of land, the subsoil,
fixed capitals, and infrastructure like canals) was the property of humanity as a
whole, as opposed to “active” wealth (derived from individual labor). A tutelary
state ought accordingly to lease passive wealth to persons and associations, which
would exploit it without transgressing against the rights of society at large.
Achieved by progressive levies on collateral inheritance, and combined with
commercial freedoms, low taxes on active wealth, integral education, compulsory
labor, and a national bank, Colins’s collectivisme struck a compromise between
economic development and social justice, bourgeois society and Babeuvist
communism.27
Most of all, De Paepe’s thinking on property was informed by Proudhon, who
in his own idiosyncratic fashion sought a middle term between “property” and
“community.” In his infamous 1840 work, Proudhon advocated usufructuary
“possession” (not “property”) of land and large capitals, and defended cost-price
exchanges as consistent with reason and science. As men consented to these
new economic institutions, not only would they enshrine equality and liberty
in positive community. In time, the free agreements of persons and groups
would (as in Saint-Simon’s vision) even replace political laws altogether. This
result, crucially, joined the good aspects of property (independence, diligence)
and community (equality, law) while minimizing their bad aspects (respectively
unjust exclusion and despotic leveling).28
It seemed doubtful that these schemes had much relevance when De Paepe
was studying them in the 1860s and 1870s. The conflicts of 1848–9 ended,
on the whole, in victories for the right. Afterwards, innovative conservatives
gained popular consent. In neighboring France (and, soon, in unified Germany),
statesmen combated poverty with social legislation, separated labor militants and
27 Colins defended direct inheritance (including intestate) as a spur to parents’ diligence,

and advised a tax of 25 percent on all other testaments, making his proposals more modest
than the Saint-Simonians’. Angenot, Colins, 121. On Colins and his followers (such as
De Potter père and De Potter fils) see Ivo Rens and William Ossipow, Histoire d’un autre
socialisme (Neuchâtel, 1979). On De Paepe’s Colinsianism and his relationship with the
De Potters see Dandois, De Paepe, passim.
28 See Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property?, trans. Benjamin Tucker (Princeton, 1876).
10 william whitham
middle-class republicans, and strengthened their rule with manhood suffrage.

This was very difficult to answer.29
Observers as sophisticated as John Stuart Mill nevertheless contended in the
1850s and 1860s that the “utopias” of the first half of the nineteenth century
might soon be instituted, albeit in modified, plebeian forms. An ambivalent
friend of commercial society (which, against its own pretensions, made “those
who receive the least, labor and abstain the most”), Mill argued that the sharp
divisions between rich and poor, employed and employer, were “neither fit for,
nor capable of, indefinite duration.”30 Artisans were creating new institutions of
production, consumption, credit, and exchange through democratic deliberation
and free contracts among themselves. Thankfully, insofar as workers’ “definite
political doctrines” were to exert the main influence on European society over
the coming decades, the tide of democracy would yield neither neo-Jacobinism
nor autocratic paternalism. Mill rather suspected that a new political economy,
based on social ownership of natural resources and on friendly competition
among cooperative enterprises run by workers themselves, would gradually and
experimentally be grafted onto what existed. In this way, “instead of a hostile
conflict, physical or only moral, between the old and the new, the best parts of
both may be combined in a renovated social fabric.”31
However, there were indications in De Paepe’s Belgium, as well as Mill’s
Britain, that this might not be the case. De Paepe was an ardent cooperator,
and hoped that “the free play of economic institutions” created by workers
themselves would deliver a brighter future without upheaval or the intervention
of capricious governments. But cooperatives alone were no panacea. His survey
of statistics suggested that cooperatives could not take up a far greater share of the
economy than they already did. State suppression, too, limited their extent, and
what De Paepe saw as their hypocritical practice (for instance, exacting profits
or interest) created a worse-off “fifth estate” of noncooperators. To De Paepe’s
eyes, affairs in northwestern Europe were therefore bleak. In agriculture as well
as manufactures, enterprises consolidated and competed pitilessly against small
producers, yielding a caste “of slaves, a starving and ragged multitude, resembling
brutes more than men.”32
29 See e.g. Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848–1851, 2nd edn (Cambridge,
2005).
30 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848), in Collected Works of John Stuart
Mill, ed. J. M. Robson, 33 vols. (Toronto, 1963–91), vols. 2–3, at 3: 714, 3: 896.
31 Mill, Chapters on Socialism (1879), in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 5: 703–56, at
707-8.
32 César De Paepe, “Questions sociales,” La rive gauche 2/30 (1865), 3–4, at 4; De Paepe,
Discours prononcé à Patignies (Namur) en 1863 (Brussels, 1898), 51. See De Paepe,
“Questions,” La rive gauche 2/27 (1865), 3–4, 2/29 (1865), 2–3, 2/30 (1865), 3–4, 2/31 (1865),
If this was the case, how could anyone hope to “unite the greatest individual
liberty of action with an equal ownership of all in the raw material of the globe and
an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour,” as observers like
Mill, as well as De Paepe, wished?33 De Paepe made his own attempt to reconcile
this problem of “small and large property, equality for all and bread for all.”
He reasoned that a cooperative commonwealth would result from the judicious
efforts of workers’ associations, communes, and states to challenge large-scale
capitalist property: the very thing that threatened mutualism. It was on these
grounds that De Paepe called for “the admission of land into the collective
property of society” at the Lausanne Congress of September 1867.34
ethics and expediency

As a member of the International and as a journalist in the mid- to late 1860s,
De Paepe staked his collectivist position on a simple moral premise. If ownership
was only intelligible as a right “exercised by a producer in relation to his product,”
individual appropriation of land, minerals, and fixed capitals was inadmissible.
Proudhon had argued as much in 1840, when he distinguished an inclusive
“right to means” from an exclusive “right to product.” Whatever the apparent
apostasies of Idée générale de la Révolution au XIXme siècle (1851), De Paepe
read the posthumous Théorie de la propriété (1866) as sanctioning Proudhon’s
original proposals for immoveable property to be possessed and exploited by all,
though owned by commune or state. The status quo, by contrast, allowed a few
to monopolize what they could not exploit as individuals. Under this system of
“proprietary absolutism,” landlords and capitalists lived off others’ labor, and
owned the vast resources that were “indispensable to all of society.”35
3–4, 2/32 (1865), 2–4, 2/34 (1865), 3–4, 2/35 (1865), 3–4, 2/36 (1865), 2–3, 2/37 (1865), 3–4,
2/39 (1865), 2, 2/40 (1865), 1, 2/43 (1865), 3, 2/44 (1865), 2, 2/45 (1865), 2–3, 3/16 (1866),
2–3, 3/17 (1866), 2–3, 3/18 (1866), 3–4, 3/19 (1866), 2–3, 3/20 (1866), 3–4; see also De Paepe,
“Polémique au subjet des associations,” La tribune du peuple (Brussels) 2/35 (1863), 3–4,
2/36 (1863), 3–4, 2/37 (1863), 2, 3/39 (1864), 2, 3/40 (1864), 3–4, 3/41 (1864), 2–3, 3/42 (1864),
2–4.
33 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (1873), in Collected Works, 1: 1–290, at 240. De Paepe cited
Mill’s formula in his own proposals. See César De Paepe, Manifeste et programme électoral
(Brussels, 1884), 27.
34 Freymond, L’Internationale, 1: 372, 1: 128.
35 Ibid., 1: 129; Proudhon, What Is Property?, 109; Freymond, L’Internationale, 1: 129, 1: 366. See
ibid., 2: 82. Edward Castleton, “The Origins of ‘Collectivism’: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s
Contested Legacy and the Debate about Property in the International Workingmen’s
Association and the League of Peace and Freedom,” Global Intellectual History 2/2 (2017),
169–95, offers a meticulous study of Proudhon’s influence on the International and
12 william whitham
For De Paepe, social property was the only means to vindicate a notion of
commutative justice among cultivators and workers. First of all, a collectivist
society could separate the just from unjust elements of rent.36 In most cases,
land rent was due to factors independent of the cultivator(s): the natural fertility
of the land, the labors of past generations, and so forth. Because such “rent is
not the doing of the proprietor, but indeed a fact of nature and of society,” De
Paepe denied that individuals had any right to it. Ground rent was even more
illegitimate. It was a mere fee paid by the industrious to the idle, with a tenuous
relation to supply, demand, and productivity.37
The commune or state could collapse land and ground rents into a single rent–
tax that both preserved moral desert and permitted a clear-sighted agricultural
policy. Estimated according to the relative productivity of plots, the rent–tax
would be used to capture productivity gains arbitrary from the perspective of
individual exertions, and to set standard prices for agricultural commodities
based on the labor contained in them. Produce due to social and natural
advantages, so De Paepe reasoned, would hence go to the community, creating
“the safeguard of equality.” The rent–tax would also fund social insurance to
mitigate contingencies such as floods and epizootics, the improvement of less
fertile lands, and various public services necessary to the cultivator.38
Crucially, this structure of social property in land was intended to secure to
cultivators the right to reap the fruits of their own personal industry. Proudhon
had vindicated such a right, if acknowledging in Idée générale that its practical
realization was beset by “innumerable difficulties and complications.” The way
to institutionalize it, De Paepe believed, was by assessing the net change in the
productivity of plots at the end of their leases in light of social circumstances.
Whether this change was positive or negative (plus-value or moins-value), it
could be the result of individual labor (such as the farmer’s diligence or
negligence) or collective action (such as an infrastructure project that raised
or lowered the plot’s land rent). De Paepe argued that the cultivator ought, at the
termination of his lease, to be credited insofar as his plus-value was his own or his
“collectivism.” His argument and method are complementary to but distinct from my
own: I emphasize De Paepe’s independent reformulation and promotion of others’ ideas,
including those of Colins, rather than the deceased Proudhon’s influence.
36 Summarized here, De Paepe’s journalistic defense of collectivisme in late 1869 can be
found in César De Paepe, “Réponse à La Liberté du 17 octobre 1869 par un collectiviste de
l’Internationale,” La Liberté (Brussels) 3/123 (1869), 2–3, 3/124 (1869), 3, 3/125 (1869), 3, 3/126
(1869), 2–3, 3/127 (1869), 2–3, 3/128 (1869), 3, 3/129 (1869), 3; and in De Paepe, “Polémique
collectiviste,” in De Paepe, Les services publics, ed. Benoı̂t Malon, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1895),
1: 103–35.
37 Freymond, L’Internationale, 2: 83.
38 Ibid., 1: 401.
moins-value due to social factors, and debited insofar as his moins-value was his
own or his plus-value due to social factors. Such a model of taxation, together with
lifelong leases for individual farmers and long leases for agricultural companies,
would give farmers “nearly all the advantages of property, without presenting the
same dangers for society.” Collective property would allow cultivators to enjoy
the real gains of individual labor, but it would prevent the cumulative results
of legitimate exchange and production from resurrecting oppressive wage labor,
arbitrary rents, and unearned profits.39
This reform of commutative justice, so De Paepe outlined, could be
institutionalized by modified “Colinsian” means. Collateral inheritance could
be slowly but significantly curbed by greater and greater taxes, whereas direct
inheritance could remain as a stimulus to parents’ diligence. Progressive taxes or
annuities administered by communes and the nation could in time achieve social
ownership of land and the fixed capitals upon it, avoiding a situation wherein
cultivators flocked to the most fertile areas. The state would thus be tasked with
ensuring equity among cultivators by means of the rent–tax, cautiously leasing
land and fixed capitals to persons, associations, and communes for exploitation,
and working with federated companies to carry out the more demanding projects
of economic improvement, such as irrigation or reforestation.
If individual appropriation of the earth and its fruits violated justice, De Paepe
also argued that this mode of ownership was simply doomed. Private ownership
had likely originated, as Proudhon supposed, in the efforts of prehistoric
cultivators “to nourish the human race and let equality reign among men.”
De Paepe argued that the institution in modern times “leads to monopoly,
negation of competition,” and “the concentration of wealth.” In Belgium, the
share of small peasant property shrank and no rational attempts were made to
clear and cultivate wasteland in the interests of future generations. Meanwhile,
“a new landed feudality, analogous to the industrial feudality,” had arisen across
northwestern Europe.40
De Paepe imagined that social property in agriculture, and ultimately in most
fixed capitals, too, would actually arise from this movement. The only way the
relatively small, sterile parcel of the average farmer could be made competitive
was through improvements (such as plot reunion, clearing, the introduction of
machinery, crop rotation, or better transport infrastructure) that required large
inputs of capital and land. This meant forms of joint ownership and capital
pooling, as well as state intervention. To be sure, intensive cultivation by one
39 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, trans.
John Beverly Robinson (New York, 1969), 201 (cf. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 108); César
De Paepe, “Réponse,” La Liberté 3/127 (1869), 2–3, at 3.
40 Freymond, L’Internationale, 1: 368, 1: 372, 1: 374.
14 william whitham
person could achieve remarkable vegetable yields. But otherwise agricultural

production, such as livestock rearing, was not efficient on a small scale. And
unless the lonely mutualist gardener was to depend on exploitative merchants
and landlords, he had to acquire his own equipment and livestock via a “rent-to-
own” scheme, as outlined in Idée générale. Under such an arrangement, machines
and fixed capitals leased to cultivators would gradually become their property as
a group: collective property, in short. The logic of things in themselves would
compel cultivators to reject “the free disposition of one’s field” as an illusion, and
to favor corporate ownership of increasing extent.41
De Paepe believed that this essential development was under way in the prudent
organization of cultivators themselves (and, too, among artisans and industrial
workers), and would be backed by sympathetic but self-interested states. The
association of fellow workers tended to replace “capitalist centralization and
monopoly and the laissez-faire of the economists” with “mutualism, that is to say,
authentic competition, which intends that workers are equipped with the same
arms for the struggle.” Workers sought their freedom not in a fictive “complete
independence,” but in a “relative, mutual dependence” of individuals and groups
based on cooperation. Presumably, they would continue to pool their land and
capitals, and to incorporate themselves into companies with legal personhood,
whether in the field, factory, or workshop. But democratizing communes and
the state were likely to assist this development from above, by carrying out
improvements, regulating the sale of agricultural commodities according to cost
price, and mitigating the dangers of collusion among agricultural associations.
Workers seeking justice as well as their own survival, together with increasingly
popular governments concerned with productive cultivation and the national
weal, could together create efficient and responsible regimes of agricultural
management.42
Where peasants and agricultural workers were not able to divert the processes
at work, the results would still likely be sorts of “coproprietorship, collective
property.” Misery and injustice among disorganized, miserable farmers (as in
Britain or Russia, De Paepe supposed) would eventually compel nationalization
by the state, or a more violent redistribution in “the great social débâcle.” It was
unlikely that the collectivist regimes arising therefrom would just redistribute
small, sterile plots to the people. More plausibly, they would lease land to
individuals and agricultural associations, institute a rent–tax, and orchestrate
scientific and large-scale improvements of agriculture. A national and democratic
council, “elected by the diverse associations of cultivators,” could decide upon
41 Ibid., 1: 399, original emphasis. Compare with the views of Tolain and Longuet, in ibid., 1:
394–5, and of Proudhon, What Is Property?, 133, 285 n. 1; Proudhon, General Idea, 216–17.
42 Freymond, L’Internationale, 1: 373, 367.
such modernizing projects. Although it would follow different dynamics in

different countries, and seemed more urgent in agriculture than in industry,
De Paepe thus reasoned that the pan-European contest between large-scale
ownership per laissez-faire logics, and mutual guarantees among associated
cultivators and workers, would be forms of collective property.43
For some French, Belgian, and Swiss delegates of the International, De Paepe
contradicted a vision of freely associated producers. The bronze carver Tolain led
his fellow Frenchmen in an attack on De Paepe, objecting to the “hierarchical and
authoritarian organization” implicit in all schemes of common ownership. The
journalist Langlois agreed: “those who claim only to preach liberal communism
are led by the logic and very force of things to authoritarian communism.”
Murat, a mechanic, drew upon Idée générale to criticize De Paepe’s betrayal
of “commutative justice, which is born and develops itself in relationships
among individuals,” while the carpenter Fruneau objected that collectivism
“will be a bogeyman for les campagnards.” Some criticized De Paepe within
his own Belgian delegation, while the Jurassian physician Coullery went as far
as to locate collectivism in a Belgian confusion of Proudhon’s federalism and
Colins’s autocracy. De Paepe’s amalgam, argued Coullery, amounted to “collective
tyranny” and “the degeneration of the individual”: “I very much hope to be dead
before we reach it,” he opined.44
Yet De Paepe’s writings and activism in the 1860s indicate that he, and the
majority of Internationalists who backed him, saw no fundamental inconsistency
between equal exchange and social property. As De Paepe wrote, “mutualism and
collectivism on the contrary complement one another.” Mutualism envisioned
that cost-price exchanges would allow trucking individuals to expand their
fortunes through their own exertions and diligence alone. But its advocates
neglected natural and social resources (which belonged to all), disdained to
extend their principles to society at large (beyond a few stable cooperatives), and
professed a misguided faith in laissez-faire, laissez-passer alone (like bourgeois
economists). Mutualist conviction was, in any case, empirically misguided: the
(British) concentration or (French) parceling of property was the order of the
day. One could surely not attempt, “by a stroke of the pen, to abolish an economic
phenomenon,” De Paepe concluded.45
In turn, collectivism was at root a venerable program for equality of conditions
to be realized by proletarian agitation. In this sense, De Paepe saluted “the
eternal protest of humanity against the poverty of the people and the crimes
43 Ibid., 1: 399, 1: 372, 1: 377.

44 Ibid., 2: 64, 2: 66, 2: 68, 2: 73, 1: 153–4. See Mémoire, 13–16.
45 Freymond, L’Internationale, 2: 84; De Paepe, “Polémique collectiviste,” 116, original
emphasis. See Freymond, L’Internationale, 2: 104, 2: 108.
16 william whitham
of property, the eternal demand of the unrecognized rights of labor.” But as

he conceived of it, collectivism implied careful considerations of what should
be public and what private, unlike the more extensive term (communism) with
which it was associated. Total communism, after all, contradicted “the liberty and
full emancipation of the individual.” Without sufficient guarantees of personal
freedom and desert, communism would be as onerous and undesirable as a
strict mutualism. Fortunately, such a communism was, like total mutualism,
improbable, and “contrary to all the intellectual tendencies of the century.”46
De Paepe accordingly proposed a synthesis of “scientific socialism” (which he
associated with mutualism) and “popular communism” to balance “guarantees
for the individual and guarantees for the collectivity”—commutative justice
and egalitarianism. Despite the opposition of Mill and Proudhon to extensive
expropriations, De Paepe supposed that social property could be achieved
peaceably as workers distinguished (with Comte) the necessary arrangements
of present society from those susceptible to “the intelligent and judicious
intervention of men.” Collectivism thus became both a moral good and a
probable fact given workers’ own institutions and demands, the tendencies
of economic development, and the imperatives of competitive, democratizing
states. A “reorganizing state” could combine a democratic and federal politics
with a rational and just social ownership of concentrated enterprises, despite the
disappointments of 1848 and of cooperative production. Though their precise
motivations differed, British trade unionists, German social democrats, Italian
and Spanish insurrectionaries, and francophone mutualists all saw in De Paepe’s
capacious concept their own aspirations, and voted for the socialization of land
and key fixed capitals in the late 1860s.47
towards the public-services state

De Paepe’s compromise of 1867–9, as he later reflected, provided a “common
ground” upon which almost all militants could agree.48 However, theoretical
and practical unity were sorely tested by the transformations of the 1870s. Much
followed from infighting regarding the decisions of the executive in 1871–2 to
centralize the International’s powers and commit its membership to political
agitation. More important were the transformations in the broader context
wherein socialist politics were located. The simultaneous expansion of the
suffrage in Britain and the North German Confederation (1867), ongoing social
46 César De Paepe, “Questions sociales,” La rive gauche 2/30 (1865), 3–4, at 4. See De Paepe,
“Lettre au journal le Nord,” La rive gauche 2/25 (1865), 4.
47 Freymond, L’Internationale, 2: 104, 2: 80, 2: 106; see also 1: 129, 1: 153, 1: 284–5, 2: 85–6.
48 De Paepe to Malon, 9 June 1889, in Dandois, De Paepe, 171–6, at 174.
and economic dislocation across the Italian peninsula, and outright civil war in
Spain were compounded by likewise momentous events: the defeat of the Paris
Commune of March–May 1871, the creation of the Third Republic, pan-European
repression of radicals, and unified Germany’s definite ascendancy over France. If
this conjuncture were not serious enough, the international economy was soon
upended due to financial crisis, the flooding of markets with cheap cereals, and
the imposition of new tariffs. In short, European states were simultaneously and
dramatically transformed.
These geopolitical, social, and economic changes prompted militants to devise
appropriate strategies for their own national and regional contexts, lest their
movements be totally devastated. But if agreement had been difficult to reach
in the 1860s, it was positively elusive in the 1870s. In the shrinking Continental
rump of the International (the official organization was condemned on Engels’s
initiative to an even more agonizing death in the United States), delegates and
émigrés struggled to determine the transnational content of political concepts.
What seemed appropriate from an analytical, strategic, or tactical perspective
for Spanish artisans, whose society was wracked by coups and countercoups,
was absurd to British unionists, whose voting rights and legal protections had
just been expanded. Similar divisions lay between Italian and German radicals,
and, in fact, within each delegation. Figuring out what “the state” (an institution
undergoing pan-European flux) was, and how socialists ought to approach it,
could strengthen a group’s theoretical (and sometimes practical) coherency.
Paradoxically, this operation severed groups from one another, under more or
less acrimonious circumstances. Hence as international socialism retreated, local
or national strategies flourished.49
This was the background to De Paepe’s Rapport sur les services publics
(1874), a seventy-page sketch of a collectivist society that made a stir among
Internationalists.50 Like De Paepe’s earlier interventions and writings, it was a
credible interpretation of militants’ normative and organizational ideals, and it
also contained an account of the historical development of modern property
ownership. But now De Paepe specified socialist ends rather than leaving them
hazy (as invariably they were left), and clarified his means in light of them based
on an analysis of the prospects before Belgian labor. His Rapport thus addressed
49 For background see e.g. Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism
1872–1886 (Cambridge, 1989), chaps. 1–6.
50 The pamphlet was among the most sophisticated texts of the International. Cole, A
History of Socialist Thought, 3: 617, would call it “a serious attempt to formulate a plan
of organization resting on the two principles of functionalism and decentralisation.” A
Russian reprint was found in Lenin’s library. See Freymond, L’Internationale, 4: 653–4 n.
435, n. 437; Dandois, De Paepe, 35–6, 97 n. 76.
18 william whitham
the practical challenges before socialists, and rebutted rival solutions to these. As
a result, it spurred others to articulate their own diverging, critical visions. What
followed were lengthy enumerations of which resources and enterprises in the
future would be public, which would be private, and the reasons why. The irony
of determining “as clearly as possible the limits of what should be individual and
what should be collective”—the crux of a gradual and experimental collectivism,
in De Paepe’s view—was that the further this exercise was pursued, the more it
helped to divide socialists and to create new perspectives among them.51
De Paepe began the Rapport by asking an obvious question whose answer was
far from simple. What was likely to happen if a revolution actually took place
in a European country of economic significance? After reactionary institutions
like the church and standing army were done away with, the workers of a given
country would face grave responsibilities. Industrial civilization depended upon
many public services (institutions regarding which society was both subject and
object) that any reasonable person would want to preserve, and expand, in the
name of equity and efficiency. Beginning with a mundane office to set weights
and measures, De Paepe enumerated the care of natural resources (the soil and
subsoil, forests, lakes and ponds, fisheries); utilities (gas and water); hygiene
and health institutions (sanitation, hospitals, baths); social security (insurance
and provisions for those unable to work and the elderly); housing; the means of
communication (telegraphs and telephones); the means of transport (waterways,
roads, railways, ports); and institutions of science, art, and leisure (laboratories,
museums, libraries, parks, monuments). If workers themselves did not make sure
that these natural and social resources were superintended, the results would be
starvation, chaos, and spoliation—even if, somehow, dictatorship were avoided.52
However, the workers’ polity that would socialize the economy in the event of
such a crisis, De Paepe reasoned, would not organize all property or services from
the center. The nation or state, De Paepe maintained per his earlier arguments,
would have to act as a general owner of land and fixed capitals in order to
equilibrate unequal endowments among communes and regions, and to oversee
large-scale projects and economic processes. But smaller and medium capitals
could, and probably would, be left to artisans, tradesmen, and small groups, for
their exploitation did not impinge appreciably upon society. The larger capitals of
small and medium enterprises (concerned with non-monopolistic production,
local health services, commerce, or utilities), for their part, could be owned
and managed by workers’ associations or local political units, incorporated
with the rights of legal personhood. Only big or otherwise essential capitals
fell to state ownership. But again De Paepe introduced critical distinctions.

52 See De Paepe, Des services publics, esp. 9–13.
A great many public services could be organized by municipal and regional

governments, not the central government as such: for instance, registering births
and deaths; organizing stints in juries and the police; preserving public amenities;
and maintaining bazaars, warehouses, and public transport.
In the case of larger-scale services, De Paepe still drew a clear line with
Saint-Simon and Colins between ownership and execution. The vast majority
of large-scale concerns and services, and the property upon which they relied,
would in fact be leased to individuals, associations, and federated associations, or
exploited by these jointly with the state. The state’s role was above all to prevent
the antisocial abuse of particular resources by granting “enterprise” rights, not
simple “concession.” The first, akin to Proudhon’s “possession,” was a contract
between society, which enjoyed the inalienable ownership of some resource, and
the individual or group, charged with the exploitation of the resource under
stipulated conditions. De Paepe associated the second term, “concession,” with
giving free reign to companies to defraud society and despoil the earth for their
own benefit.
With “enterprise,” not “concession,” however, the dangers of private, as well
as overextended public, monopolies could be avoided. Railways, for instance,
could depend on joint management, whereby state administrators worked with
the train workers and engineers of federated companies. Agriculture, too, was
a realm for state oversight and initiative, but De Paepe believed that farming
would be carried out in cooperation with agricultural associations, in order for
individual and society, corporation and state, to balance the rights of the other.
Mineral wealth like coal and iron also required state ownership to protect the
birthright of humanity and to make sure industry had the right amount of its
lifeblood. But here mine workers would take the primary role, while the state
concerned itself with regulating the production and sale of mineral commodities
and determining an equitable remuneration for workers.
Politically, the Rapport desacralized the state without dismissing it. The state
could not be ignored in the present: this sacrificed the real prospect of improving
the well-being of workers through legislation. Neither could it be done away
with per se. A socialist future without a state would lack a central mechanism to
equalize fortunes, enforce contracts, and share natural resources. In such a future,
workers would enjoy “the perverse pleasure of substituting a labor aristocracy
for a bourgeois aristocracy.” At the same time, De Paepe was skeptical of a priori
statists, whether neo-Jacobins or Lassallean-cum-Bismarckians. It was not the
case that the state was “the entire social body.” The dangers of such authoritarian
misapprehensions had been documented since the 1790s.53
53 Ibid., 16, 72.
20 william whitham
De Paepe rather conceived of the state in progressive terms. It was no more

than the historical apparatus responsible for protecting its citizens’ interests. If
De Paepe’s Latin interlocutors were right to emphasize the state’s oppressive vices
across time and space, they neglected its social and productive virtues. As De
Paepe pointed out in the 1870s, even Louis XIV—for whom “l’état, c’est moi”—
dug canals, maintained a postal service, and took steps to curb deforestation.
This was hardly “authoritarian.” Moreover, public services and infrastructure
development had been decisively expanded in modern states. The ideal state of
the future might be no more than a functional administration of these productive
institutions, with its coercive powers gradually reduced over time.54
As De Paepe argued, this state was consistent with “libertarian” demands.
Proudhon’s writings, he showed, sometimes endorsed a “state” insofar as
workers, organized on federal and democratic lines, made it up. Consistent
with this vision, De Paepe described a two-tiered polity of the future, which
combined a relatively decentralized “political” or consuming administration
of federated geographical units (such as communes and departments), and
a relatively centralized “economic” or producing apparatus of federated trade
associations (such as cooperatives, unions, and mutual-aid societies). Attacked
as an “authoritarian” for endorsing a state of any kind, De Paepe defended himself.
He labeled the Rapport’s ideal “a federative state, a state formed from the bottom
up,” and even ventured a “nonauthoritarian” or “an-archic” state.55
The inductive and provisional, though detailed, theory that De Paepe offered
in the Rapport sketched the basic arrangements of collectivist society in an idiom
intelligible to most militants of the International. However, De Paepe relied
implicitly upon a particular strategic assessment of the 1870s. The “parliament of
the proletariat” or “parliament of labor” under construction in Belgium could
in time fulfill the revolutionary responsibilities as outlined in the Rapport, and
as partially shouldered by the Commune. But this would only be possible, De
Paepe suspected, if the workers’ movement navigated the specific constraints and
opportunities of Belgian political life. Above all, Belgian labor would have to
avoid a self-defeating, immature insurrection favored by its enragés on the model
of the Commune. It would have to build stronger unions and cooperatives, as
well as a party, based on British and German models respectively. And it would
need to secure suffrage rights and electoral alliances with social liberals in order
to wring collectivist concessions from the constitutional government.
This strategy was consistent with De Paepe’s earlier thought, but it emphasized
an evolutionary, gradual, and experimental course of action based on new
circumstances. It was not, De Paepe recognized, applicable everywhere. For all

55 De Paepe, Des services publics, 23–4.
his discussions in the 1870s of a revolutionary future, De Paepe thus shrank from
prescribing (or proscribing) any particular strategy to cosmopolitan radicals. He
simply acknowledged that revolutionary upheaval and socialist agitation would
differ from country to country.56
Here was a problem, however. De Paepe did not always distinguish between
“nationalization, communism, collectivism, socialization of property” because
he believed that all these concepts referred to the same basic calculation: how
the fruits of industrial civilization would be owned, managed, and distributed
according to the criteria of ethics and expediency.57 But if the outcome of this
determination differed due to the moral and cultural development of peoples, the
economic organization of their society, the structure of states, and the ideological
and organizational form of labor movements, then socialism was if anything more
national than international.
De Paepe’s circumspect conclusions, as a result, antagonized socialists abroad
as well as at home, most of all enragés. At the meetings of the “St Imier
International” during the mid-1870s, the Jurassian watchmaker Schwitzguébel,
the Belgian baker Verrycken, and the Spanish student Garcia-Viñas charged De
Paepe with “statism.” As Schwitzguébel argued, there was a clear choice before
European socialists: authority or liberty, “the state or an-archie.”58 Whereas
federalist radicals favored “the complete autonomy of the individual and the
group” to settle contracts among themselves and build a polity from the bottom
up, De Paepe preferred a state that bound its citizens coercively and arbitrarily, by
majority decrees. He contradicted Proudhon’s radical reformulation of Rousseau,
which debunked the sovereignty of mere “number” for that of “reason.” As
Proudhon had written in Idée générale: if “[n]o one should obey a law to which
he has not consented,” majority rule violated my right to “agree with one or
more of my fellow citizens for any object whatever” and hence be “my own
government.” De Paepe’s state of the future, Schwitzguébel elaborated, would
be even worse than bourgeois governments, because its rulers “will believe they
have realized the most perfect ideal.”59
Such antistate socialists drew on De Paepe’s theories, but dropped the
political analysis integral to them. As is well known, Bakunin declared himself
a “collectivist,” not a “communist,” before the League of Peace and Freedom
at Berne in September 1868. But Bakunin explicitly did so “with the Congress
of the workers of Brussels” earlier that month, precisely where De Paepe’s

57 De Paepe to Malon, 4 Nov. 1880, in Dandois, De Paepe, 151–3, at 152.
58 Guillaume, L’Internationale, 2(3): 223, added emphasis.
59 Adhémar Schwitzguébel, Quelques écrits (Paris, 1908), 123; Proudhon, General Idea, 205;
Schwitzguébel, Quelques écrits, 122.
22 william whitham
proposals had carried the day.60 Bakunin’s Jurassian lieutenant Guillaume

borrowed from De Paepe even more directly. His Idées sur l’organisation sociale
(1876) rehashed and quoted from the Rapport, depicting a regime of workers’
corporations, local services, and democratic contracts that differed from De
Paepe’s principally in being called a “federation of communes.” To call the future
socialist polity a “state,” Guillaume’s newspaper declared, would produce “the
most disastrous confusion.” If one rounded a square, it became a circle: “a new
name is necessary.”61 Principle as much as semantic prevarication informed
the view that socialism could be realized without governance. While De Paepe
helped to originate the “revolutionary collectivism . . . which is today called
collectivist anarchism,” wrote the “Herodotus” of anarchism Max Nettlau in
1897, his Rapport was “no longer anarchist.” Much of anarchist “collectivism” and
political economy was, in fact, a derivative and undigested version of De Paepe’s
thought.62
Among “political” socialists, De Paepe was similarly a frequent, but often vague
or critical, point of reference. His admirers adopted his ideas while sometimes
missing his distinctive argument. The POB/BWP leader Bertrand called simply for
state property in all land and capitals, without reference to workers’ companies.
In France, the possibilist Brousse dismissed considerations of justice as artifacts of
the pre-1848 period and envisioned “complete production by the state,” while his
60 Guillaume, L’Internationale, 1(1): 74, added emphasis. Not only “anarchists” attributed
collectivism to Bakunin. An initial volume of Larousse’s Dictionnaire stated that Bakunin
originated the term in his 1868 speech. For his part, the embittered Parisian engraver
Fribourg denounced the “Russo-German collectivism” of the late 1860s, an enduring
interpretation. Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle de Pierre Larousse, 17 vols. (Paris,
1866–79), 16: suppl. 1, 556; E. E. Fribourg, L’Association internationale des travailleurs (Paris,
1871), 140. It was Malon who in 1878 noticed that Bakunin’s speech implicitly referred to De
Paepe’s collectivism, itself a concept developed among earlier socialists (such as Colins).
See Malon, “Réponse à M. Limousin sur le Collectivisme,” Le socialisme progressif 1/6
(1878), 105–8, esp. 107.
61 Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne de l’Association internationale des travailleurs (Le
Locle) 3/38 (1874), 2–4, at 3. See James Guillaume, Idées sur l’organisation sociale
(Chaux-de-Fonds, 1876). Guillaume might later have regretted his metaphor. Assuming
(according to some contemporary definitions) that a circle was a polygon with
an infinite number of sides, De Paepe’s incremental view—that the circular “state”
could be shorn of its coercive sides over time and still called a polygon—was
correct. See Guillaume, L’Internationale, 2(3): 231 n. 3; Freymond, L’Internationale, 4:
473–8.
62 Max Nettlau, Bibliographie de l’anarchie (Geneva, 1978), 54. Guillaume framed the history
of the International and of collectivism in “antiauthoritarian” terms in his Le collectivisme
de l’Internationale (Chaux-de-Fonds, 1904) besides in his 4-volume memoir.
companion Fournière glossed De Paepe’s ideas as a “theory of the transformation

of private monopolies into public services.”63
For their part, “Marxists” had little use for De Paepe’s project. Though for years
Marx courted De Paepe and Engels praised him, they ultimately attacked him in
their correspondence (“not very active,” “indolent,” a “bombastic chatterbox”)
for his aloofness during the power struggle in the International. His theories
they dismissed as misunderstood. As Engels observed, “anyone who ventures to
criticize [Marx’s] discoveries is more likely to burn his fingers than anything
else”: it was laughable “to find or impute other progenitors (Lassalle, Schäffle,
and actually De Paepe!) on whom to father Marx’s discoveries.” The attitude
of Marx and Engels’s successors towards Belgian socialist thinkers was equally
straightforward. “They have nothing to revise,” Kautsky wrote of the POB/BWP
leadership in 1902, “for they have no theory.”64
Self-conscious French Marxists kept pace with their allies in Germany. Primers
began by warning readers about “Belgian counterfeits” of collectivism. Guesde
invoked the “producer and distributor state” of the future, condemning all efforts
to scale up corporate or communal ownership, institute cost-price exchanges, or
halt the immiserating and centralizing logics of modern production and class
struggle. For his part, Lafargue ridiculed profit-sharing, cooperative production,
and free credit as “philanthropic cataplasms.”65
In the mid-1870s, many socialists had agreed on the plausibility and desirability
of social property. But as this survey suggests, militants went their own way as they
engaged with, adopted aspects of, or simply rejected De Paepe’s ideas. Further
agreement was improbable amid a general transformation of contemporary
institutions and a reconfiguration of activist practice across Europe. Though
they all took social property for granted, members of the dying International
were splitting up into “social-democratic,” “anarchist,” and other camps. They
went as far as to reject a simple pact of socialist unity proposed by De Paepe in
63 Paul Brousse, La propriété collective et les services publics (Paris, 1910), 35; quoted
in Adrien Veber, “Mouvement social en France et à l’étranger,” La revue socialiste
13/73 (1891), 91–113, at 111. See Louis Bertrand, Qu’est-ce que le socialisme? (Brussels,
1887).
64 Friedrich Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht, 18 Jan. 1872, in MECW, 44: 296–9, at 296; Engels
to Theodor Cuno, 5 July 1872, in ibid., 44: 407–9, at 407; Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge,
27 Sept. 1877, in ibid., 45: 275–9, at 277; Engels to Eduard Bernstein, 25 Oct. 1881, in ibid.,
46: 144–51, at 146; quoted in George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study
(New York, 1964), 279.
65 Gabriel Deville, Le Capital de Karl Marx (Paris, 1897), 10; Jules Guesde, Services publics et
le socialisme (Paris, 1884), 3, original emphasis; Paul Lafargue, Le socialisme et la conquête
des pouvoirs publics (Lille, 1899), 32.
24 william whitham
September 1877. With the failure of the Ghent Congress, De Paepe’s last attempt
at conciliation, the era of the International closed.66
the significance of de paepe

Nineteenth-century socialist demands for “the state” or “society” to administer
property raised mystifying practical and conceptual problems.67 De Paepe
struggled with them. His definition of the state was incoherent: it was the
outgrowth of workers’ free contracts in the present, the future arbiter of a socialist
society, the modifiable government of contemporary Belgium. Once it was clear
that these would not overlap, and economic utility would not coincide with what
moral right demanded, social property was far from assured. De Paepe was forced,
over his lifetime, to emphasize democratic policy rather than the immanent justice
of economic exchanges as the legitimate mechanism of property ownership and
distribution. This only accomplished so much. Fraught deliberations on strategy
and tactics facilitated by geopolitical changes fractured the socialist movement
into irreconcilable camps. Meanwhile, rural European populations remained
suspicious of collectivism, a principle formulated by metropolitan anticlericals
with little understanding of peasant life.68 Pragmatic officials, social liberals,
and innovative conservatives, too, were an obstacle: they showed that public
services and democracy did not have to be as “revolutionary” as De Paepe
hoped.
Important in the reorientation of European socialism in the 1860s and 1870s, De
Paepe seemed anachronistic as the twentieth century approached. Collectivism,
as he theorized it, was more a synthesis of the socialist thought and political
economy of the first half of the nineteenth century than an “anticipation” of
fin de siècle social democracy or Soviet communism. His concerns were those of
justice, the farmer and the artisan, and the cooperative; his writings were marked
by a skepticism of the state and by an emphasis on the individual. As the 1880s and
1890s arrived, European socialists usually shifted their preoccupations to those
set forth by Marxism, and they found new or different justifications for social
property.
At the same time, social democracy came naturally to De Paepe. In the 1880s, he
and his Belgian colleagues created what scholars have called the “most solidified,
disciplined and serious of the European Socialist parties,” equipped with “a
66 On Ghent see Stekloff, The First International, chap. 11.

67 See e.g. K. Steven Vincent, Between Marxism and Anarchism: Benoı̂t Malon and French
Reformist Socialism (Berkeley, 1992), 19–20.
68 Not a single peasant attended the Congresses of the International. Archer, The International
in France, 101.
structure more complete in its economic and cultural scope than that of any
other socialist party.” Besides helping to build a dense “pillar” subsociety of
cooperatives, trade unions, and clubs, De Paepe campaigned for all the well-
known reforms of the democratic, regulatory welfare state. His 1884 electoral
manifesto, for instance, endorsed everything from universal suffrage, press
freedom, and free compulsory education to child labor laws, health and safety
regulations, a fixed working day, and pensions.69
This was no passage from “utopianism” to the “science” of electoral socialism,
as most scholars have supposed. Besides the above measures, “more or less
immediate, to be realized at the present time,” De Paepe continued to advocate
long-term reforms for “a society gradually and experimentally making its way
towards collectivism.” These included a national bank offering cheap credit, the
right of farmers to their plus-value, and a social property regime combining state
ownership and workers’ companies. The concepts, thinkers (such as Proudhon
and the Colinsians), and even the very proposals of De Paepe’s earlier life pervaded
his writings of the 1880s and even the charter of the POB/BWP, adopted in 1894 at
Quaregnon. Guided by the criteria of justice and utility, De Paepe hence combined
his “partial and relative, progressive and experimental communism” (not an
“absolute and purely utopian communism”) with social-democratic practice.
His emphases shifted across his life—he had become “both more communist
and less revolutionary,” as he reflected in 1889—but his final writings suggest
continuity far more than a break with the past.70
Belgium, to be sure, is no proxy for Europe as a whole. Yet De Paepe’s story and
the POB/BWP’s successes into the twentieth century suggest that the line between
early and late socialism can be overdrawn, not only in the International but also
69 Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890–
1914 (New York, 1966), 466; Carl Landauer, European Socialism: A History of Ideas and
Movements, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959), 1: 469. See Strikwerda, A House
Divided, esp. 109–11; César De Paepe, Manifeste et programme electoral: Élections législatives
du 10 Juin 1884 (Brussels, 1884).
70 De Paepe, Manifeste, 27, 23; César De Paepe, “Le communisme relatif,” La revue socialiste
11/65 (1890), 547–53, at 552; De Paepe to Malon, 15 March 1889, in Dandois, De Paepe,
169–71, at 170, original emphasis. His 1890 defense of universal suffrage, e.g., was titled
with a nod to Proudhon’s 1865 classic. It stressed the need for minority rights, accepted
the partial validity of critiques of suffrage, and anticipated the universal recognition of
social laws in a post-political future. See De Paepe, Le suffrage universel et la capacité de
la classe ouvrière: Appel aux travailleurs belges à l’occasion de la Manifestation du 10 Août
(Ghent, 1890). See also De Paepe, “Le Parti ouvrier belge aux dernières élections,” La revue
socialiste 6/36 (1887), 561–6; De Paepe, “Silhouette d’une société collectiviste,” La revue
socialiste 8/46 (1888), 383–91; De Paepe, “Le communisme relatif”; and see “Programme
du Parti ouvrier belge,” in Jules Destrée and Emile Vandervelde, Le socialisme en Belgique
(Paris, 1903), 421–30.
26 william whitham
perhaps at the turn of the century. Just as mutualism and other early creeds
informed collectivism in the 1860s and 1870s, De Paepe’s ideas of the 1880s owed
to his positivist formation and the speculative method of early socialists. One
may well label them an “eclectic Marxist–Proudhonist–anarchist–sentimental
socialism,” in the words of De Man. But just as scholars have argued that
Bernstein was “not revising Marx,” but “was advocating a completely different
point of view,” it may be more enlightening to view De Paepe as the author
of an independent position, which was no less unique or legitimate for having
drawn upon earlier radical traditions. De Paepe and the Belgian case show that
an apparent heresy around the year 1900 could have historical precedents as well
as broad purchase among contemporary militants.71 “Utopianism” sustained
pragmatic parliamentarism and reformism in Belgium and elsewhere.72
De Paepe’s ultimate political and methodological significance becomes clear
by comparing Belgian socialism to its better-known German counterpart.
Notoriously, Marx said little about politics that was not negative or oblique.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) dismissed social democracy’s
pursuit of a “petit bourgeois” harmony of capital, labor, and peasant
proprietorship. The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) included pedantic
marginalia and hazy reflections about “communism” and “dictatorship.” The
Civil War in France (1871) contained imperatives so vague that it “equally
satisfied all parties—Blanquists, Proudhonists, and Communists,” as Jenny Marx
reported. (The straightforward strategy of the youthful Manifesto, by contrast,
was abandoned: “no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed
at the end of Section II,” he and Engels wrote in 1872.) As he set aside the drafts
of Capital to meditate on a Russian commune that was more myth than reality,
Marx hinted only “that the moment a truly proletarian revolution breaks out,
the conditions for its immediate initial (if certainly not idyllic) modus operandi
will also be there.” Preoccupations with how this would actually occur, “in so
far as they do not relate to the immediate, actual conditions obtaining in this or
71 De Man, “Die Eigenart,” 26; H. Tudor and J. M. Tudor, Marxism and Social Democracy: The
Revisionist Debate 1896–1898 (Cambridge, 1988), 37. De Paepe’s successor, Vandervelde,
and the POB/BWP were effective mediators between Marxian orthodoxy and revisionism,
earning support at home and respect abroad whatever their presumed theoretical
confusion. See Janet Polasky, The Democratic Socialism of Emile Vandervelde: Between
Reform and Revolution (Oxford, 1995).
72 For an analogous argument about the radical origins of supposedly lackluster
republicanism see Philip Nord, The Republic Moment: Struggles for Democracy in
Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1995).
that specific nation . . . will invariably fizzle out in a host of rehashed generalised
banalities.”73
This distaste for “writing recipes (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the
future” became an axiom of Marxian orthodoxy in Germany and elsewhere.
Kautsky prognosticated about the collapse of capitalism, but eschewed detailed
reflections on the future society, printing only a single article on the topic
in Die Neue Zeit in 1882–1914. The 1891 Erfurt program which he helped to
draft departed from the inevitable movement of bourgeois society, predicting
intensified class struggle and the ruin of small producers. It tersely demanded
“common property” and “socialist production,” besides calling for workers to
take political power. In an 1892 exegesis, Kautsky criticized those who would
describe the institutions of the future in greater detail, as well as those who
thought the state would nationalize industries “further than the interests of the
ruling classes demanded.” The collapse of capitalism was “only a matter of time”:
only once the working class “has become the ruling class” could the state become
“a co-operative commonwealth.”74
Led by De Paepe, the Belgians took a different approach. Whereas the Erfurt
program emphasized classes and historical necessity, the Quaregnon charter
foregrounded individual rights and a moral ideal in Millian fashion, assuring
“every human being” of “the greatest possible amount of liberty and of well-
being” consistent with “social utility” in the enjoyment of common resources.
The former program was cryptic about the structure of social property; the
latter enumerated what should be public and how it should be administered in
comprehensive appendices. One was the product of historical materialism and
political experience under a substantially autocratic regime; the other was rooted
in the ideals of the French Revolution and anticipated the possibilities for reform
in a fundamentally liberal system. Both were social-democratic, but they were
not the same.75
73 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Writings on the Paris Commune, ed. Hal Draper (London,
1971), 16; Marx and Engels, “Preface to the German Edition of 1872,” in Marx and Engels,
The Manifesto of the Communist Party, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones (London, 2002), 193–4,
at 194; Marx to Domela Nieuwenhuis, 22 Feb. 1881, in MECW, 46: 65–7, at 67. See Stedman
Jones, Karl Marx, chaps. 7–9, 11–12.
74 Marx, “Postface to the Second [German] Edition” (1873), in Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben
Fowkes (London, 1990), 94–103, at 99; “Programme of the Social Democratic Party of
Germany,” in Bertrand Russell, German Social Democracy (London, 1896), 137–41, at 138;
Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program), trans. William E. Bohn (Chicago, 1910),
110. See Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The Western European Left in
the Twentieth Century (London, 1996), 20.
75 “Programme du Parti ouvrier belge,” 421. My comparison between the SPD and POB/BWP
is indebted to that of Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, 2: chap. 15.
28 william whitham
To be sure, the twentieth century demonstrated the piousness, and peril, of

the idea that modern democratic freedoms are possible without private property
rights. It is difficult indeed to read De Paepe’s proposals without Soviet political
economy coming to mind. Nevertheless, limited forms of social ownership, public
services, and state subsidy and oversight have become globally ubiquitous. It is
not hard to see why. As in nineteenth-century Europe, the advantages of modest
forms of socialization are obvious: safeguarding society and nature, maintaining
a stable and productive economy, subsidizing vital though unprofitable services.
Though the public-services state may grow or shrink in size, some measure of
social property or management of common resources, instituted by peaceful and
democratic means, is now virtually everywhere taken for granted. De Paepe’s
theory of how states would progressively and partially socialize property was not
as far off the mark as it may at first appear.
Some of his categories, not his strategies or precise predictions, may also
resonate. De Paepe conceived of socialism as an experimental, democratic, and
reformist mediation between right and utility. The proper political stewardship of
the economy seems to require such an equilibrium of opposed terms, whether one
calls them commutative and distributive justice, efficiency and justice, or liberty
and equality. Seen in this light, socialism appears less like a set of doctrines of
revolution and class struggle and more like the projects of many state officials and
political agents in the twentieth century, liberal and conservative. More than some
better-known socialists, De Paepe thus directed his readers towards a mundane
but fundamental problem of modernity: how to secure both individual freedom
and social justice practically.
As his story and modern history suggest, there is little reason to believe that
this problem admits of an easy or satisfying solution. Crafting effective public
policy and property reforms is as demanding and divisive as ever, to say nothing
of the sheer obscurity of creating decent institutions between a “public” state and
“private” individuals and associations (“the grueling work of constituting the
people as a body,” for one scholar). Panaceas have been tenacious but unworkable,
from those of interwar Catholic corporatists to postwar Keynesians, from Western
European ’68ers to Eastern European communist “reformers.” Nevertheless, the
dilemma remains a legitimate preoccupation of the postcommunist age.76
Finally, to put aside politics for methodology, De Paepe challenges conventions
among intellectual historians. Dismissing the ideas of the International as
76 David C. Williams, “Civic Constitutionalism, the Second Amendment, and the Right of
Revolution,” Indiana Law Journal 79/2 (2004), 379–92, at 391. See John Dunn, “Property,
justice and common good after socialism,” in Dunn, The History of Political Thought and
Other Essays (Cambridge, 1995), 121–35; Dunn, ed., The Economic Limits to Modern Politics
(Cambridge, 1990).
unsophisticated, or forcing them to serve one’s own political agenda in spite

of the documentary record, hardly brings scholars nearer to an understanding of
the ideas and language of socialism after 1848. What intellectual historians take
to be philosophically unimpressive or “bad” ideas, too, may be just as historically
significant as “good” ideas. It is in the writings of minor theorists, of popularizers,
and of supposedly transitional figures, placed within broader contexts, that the
relationship between thought and action—and, indeed, individuals’ persistent
inability to make these two things coincide just as they would like—can be most
keenly appreciated.

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Modern Intellectual History, page 1 of 29

C Cambridge University Press 2017

césar de paepe and the ideas of

“The greatest achievement of the IWMA [International Working Men’s

2 The best introduction to the International’s ideas remains G. D. H. Cole, A History of

This article examines an important but long-neglected theorist of the

on its program.” Decades later, French “possibilists” praised De Paepe as “the

the education of a collectivist

key tendencies of nineteenth-century European development.21 A “paradise

21 The following overview is informed by E. H. Kossman, The Low Countries 1780–1940

(10 percent). Governmental inertia or incompetence fueled mass unrest, which

De Paepe was as impressed with Saint-Simon as with the ideas of his

27 Colins defended direct inheritance (including intestate) as a spur to parents’ diligence,

middle-class republicans, and strengthened their rule with manhood suffrage.

ethics and expediency

person could achieve remarkable vegetable yields. But otherwise agricultural

such modernizing projects. Although it would follow different dynamics in

43 Ibid., 1: 399, 1: 372, 1: 377.

of property, the eternal demand of the unrecognized rights of labor.” But as

towards the public-services state

51 Freymond, L’Internationale, 2: 104.

A great many public services could be organized by municipal and regional

53 Ibid., 16, 72.

De Paepe rather conceived of the state in progressive terms. It was no more

54 Freymond, L’Internationale, 4: 473.

56 Freymond, L’Internationale, 4: 478.

proposals had carried the day.60 Bakunin’s Jurassian lieutenant Guillaume

companion Fournière glossed De Paepe’s ideas as a “theory of the transformation

the significance of de paepe

66 On Ghent see Stekloff, The First International, chap. 11.

To be sure, the twentieth century demonstrated the piousness, and peril, of

unsophisticated, or forcing them to serve one’s own political agenda in spite

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