Henri de Saint-Simon

French sociologist

• Born: October 17, 1760
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: May 19, 1825
• Place of death: Paris, France

Regarded as the founder of French socialism and a major early progenitor of the discipline of sociology, the influential Saint-Simon called attention to the value of society’s productive classes in the nineteenth century and the need for social reorganization with those natural leaders at the helm. Through his preachments and writings, he inspired practical developments in banking, engineering, feminism, and concern with the plight of the lower classes.

Early Life

Henri de Saint-Simon (sahn-see-mohn), the future comte de Saint-Simon, considered himself destined for glory because he was the grandnephew of the French king Louis XIV’s courtier, the duc de Saint-Simon. Henri’s parents, Balthazar-Henri and Blanche-Elizabeth, were cousins descended from different branches of the aristocratic Saint-Simon family.

After an early education provided by tutors, Henri followed his father in seeking a military career. By late 1779, when he was only nineteen years old, he had attained the rank of captain in an infantry regiment and was part of the French contingent supporting the North American colonists in their War of Independence against Great Britain. As a marine officer, he served admirably with the Marquis de Lafayette and General George Washington at the siege of Yorktown.

After the American Revolution ended, Saint-Simon spent several years participating in military campaigns in the Caribbean. At that time, he conceived one of his earliest schemes: a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans across the Isthmus of Panama. After returning to Europe in 1784, Saint-Simon continued his military career, adding to it minor diplomatic roles and another proposal for a fanciful engineering scheme: a canal connecting Madrid, Spain, with the Atlantic Ocean.

Saint-Simon’s role in the French Revolution, which began in 1789, was largely insignificant, but he seems to have supported the republican goals against the monarchy. Renouncing his aristocratic connections, he took advantage of the fluid political and social situation in France to speculate in national land purchases, finally achieving the affluence he had long sought. After briefly being imprisoned during the Revolution’s Reign of Terror, Saint-Simon resumed his business ventures during the ensuring Directory period and immersed himself in a society of indulgence and learning. While hosting a salon, he cultivated associations with scientists, bankers, and industrialists—all people who were essential to his plans to reorganize society.

Life’s Work

After the turn of the nineteenth century, Saint-Simon’s recently acquired fortune was diminishing, and he spent the remainder of his life in financial uncertainty. The years between 1807 and 1813 were beset with financial struggles with a former business partner. He continually sought recognition for his ideas and projects, but his entreaties to Emperor Napoleon I were ignored. His complex and mercurial life was punctuated by a nervous breakdown in 1813, and he attempted suicide in 1823.

Throughout his personal hardships, Saint-Simon remained committed to the dual goals of personal glory and society’s advancement, and he managed an outpouring of creative work. In 1803, he presented his first major work, Lettres d’un habitant de Genève à ses contemporains (letters of an inhabitant of Geneva to his contemporaries), in which he glorified the role of the new sciences that would be harnessed for social peace and progress. Influenced by physiology and its view of society as an organism, Saint-Simon believed that the methods of science would lead to the understanding of the structure and laws of society. He had imbibed the Enlightenment’s focus on unlimited progress, especially as outlined by the Marquis de Condorcet. He regarded the eighteenth century, with its Enlightenment and upheavals, as “critical and revolutionary” and expected the nineteenth century to focus on the “inventive and organizational.” He solicited patrons to support the scientific leaders who would join together to form a “Council of Newton,” to which he also welcomed women scientists.

The ten-year period that began in 1814 was especially productive for Saint-Simon. With the assistance of several astute collaborators, most importantly the historian Augustin Thierry and the philosopher Auguste Comte, he publicized his most seminal ideas. His prophetic De la réorganisation de la société européenne (1814; on the reorganization of European society) envisioned a European federation with a national parliament that would decide the common interests of Europe. Inspired by the Abbe de Saint-Pierre’s Project for Perpetual Peace (1713) and based on the “natural” alliance of England and France, this association would facilitate commercial intercourse and internal travel, provide European-wide public education, and have the power to adjudicate disputes among its members. In 1815, reacting to the increasing roles of bankers and industrial entrepreneurs in France’s Restoration period, Saint-Simon proposed the creation of a special national credit bank with headquarters in Paris and branches throughout the country.

By 1817 Saint-Simon’s earlier focus on the centrality of science had shifted to a preoccupation with the benefits of the new industrial age. In line with France’s accelerating industrialization, his writings ennobled industry as the source of all wealth and power. In The Organizer (1819), Saint-Simon condemned the parasitic roles of the aristocrats who then held power and advocated their replacement by the “industrials,” members of what he considered productive groups, such as bankers, artisans, engineers, scientists, industrialists, civil servants, and agriculturists, who contributed to the actual richness of society. With this reorganization of society, the exploitation of humans by other humans would be superseded by humankind’s exploitation of nature: “The administration of things will replace the government of man.”

Saint-Simon conceded that nobles and priests had provided material and moral guidance in earlier stages of historical development, particularly in the theological and feudal era. However, he regarded them as having become anachronistic in a positive age when the productivity and superior intelligence of industrialists gave the latter the human and divine mandate to lead.

In Industrial System (1821-1822) and Catechism of the Industrialists (1823), Saint-Simon added to the advantages of industrial leadership. Naturally inclined to commanding people in daily tasks, they would maintain order and prevent violence and ensure the greatest good for the greatest number. This model was indeed a hierarchical structure without pretensions to egalitarianism or democracy, which would be unnecessary with proper reorganization and administration. Manual workers would not be placed in leadership roles, but their interests would be secured. Interestingly, Saint-Simon predicted that his theories would eventually spread through France and Europe, then to other parts of the world.

Although Saint-Simon had earlier sought to abandon metaphysical speculation in favor of positive knowledge, in Nouveau Christianisme (1825; new Christianity), his goal was to harmonize a this-worldly, nondogmatic religion with a society based on science and industry. Continuing a theme established earlier in Lettres, and revisited in Industrial System, Saint-Simon attacked the papacy and clergy for their betrayal of the moral interests of the people, calling for a renewed morality based on brotherhood, social salvation, and attention to society’s neediest groups, “the amelioration of the moral and physical existence of the poorest class.” In numerous works Saint-Simon emphasized the role of public education in establishing these ideas in society but believed that the schools must be oriented toward positive science.

After his death in 1825, Saint-Simon’s followers distilled his views in the Exposition of the Doctrine of Saint-Simon (1828-1830) and in many other writings and preachments. The so-called Saint-Simonians further popularized their master’s theories by denouncing the eighteenth century’s critical approaches and “egotism” in favor of cooperation, love and brotherhood, and order and progress. They promoted at once society’s material and spiritual interests, seeing Saint-Simon’s ideas as the fulfillment of Jesus’ teachings in an industrial world. With their assault on private property and rights of inheritance, and their call for the emancipation of woman and the equality of the sexes, Saint-Simon’s followers had a profound impact on European socialist and feminist movements during the 1830’s and 1840’s. As bankers and engineers they were to have influential careers, even designing such projects as the Suez Canal.

Significance

Saint-Simon was the first major European theorist to grasp not only the potential but also the contradictions of industrial society in the nineteenth century, even to the point of analyzing disparate class interests. He tirelessly championed a reorganization of French and European society that would at once maximize the talents of its naturally productive individuals while also addressing the needs of the less fortunate, and in this he influenced Marxism and other later socialist movements. His proto-socialist, technocratic vision of society emphasized the role of proper administration rather than governance in polities of the future.

A pioneering figure in the positivistic movement that extolled science and laws applicable to human society, Saint-Simon inspired many bankers, engineers, and social thinkers who helped to transform Europe and the world in the late modern era. His social theories have earned him a unique position in the development of French socialism and the discipline of sociology, and he was an early exponent of European federation and public education. As a Romantic personality he was perhaps equally inspirational, and he and his followers captured the imagination of belles-lettrists, musicians, and artists.

Bibliography

Dondo, Mathurin. The French Faust: Henri de Saint-Simon. New York: Philosophical Library, 1955. This is a solid summary of the life and ideas of Saint-Simon with numerous enlightening passages from the master’s works.

Manuel, Frank. The New World of Henri Saint-Simon. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956. Although somewhat dated, this is still the best and most comprehensive study of Saint-Simon, by an intellectual historian who situates him culturally and politically.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Prophets of Paris. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962. This minor classic has separate chapters juxtaposing Saint-Simon and his followers with other major French social thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as the Marquis de Condorcet, who influenced Saint-Simon, and Auguste Comte, Saint-Simon’s collaborator who developed positivism into a system.

Musso, Pierre, ed. L’actualité du Saint-Simonisme. Paris: Press Universitaires de France, 2004. Based on a 2003 colloquium, this collection of French-language essays offers twenty-first century interpretations and also traces the international influence of Saint-Simon and the Saint-Simonians.