ABSTRACT
[Following the translation of A New View of Society in French (Owen 1816), Owen’s ideas started gathering support among Parisian radical circles. In 1823, Charles Fourier offered his assistance in establishing “Villages of Co-operation” but Owen refused, fearing competition from his French fellow socialist (Beecher 1990, 364–370; Mercklé 2001, 168–174). In spite of this rebuttal, many bridges were built from the mid-1820s onwards between Owenites, Fourierites and Saint-Simonians across the Channel. Membership between the three groups often overlapped in the name of international socialist solidarity, regardless of the personal enmity between Owen and Fourier. In 1826, the Owenite lawyer Joseph Rey founded a Parisian branch of the London Co-operative Society, which endured until the July Revolution of 1830 (Gans 1962, 36). Co-operative ideals and the defence of popular education attracted the likes of former Babouvist and Revue encyclopédique editor Marc-Antoine Jullien (1775–1858), radical author Jules Gay (1809–1883) and his future wife, the feminist Jeanne-Désirée Véret (1810–1891). In 1837, Gay and Anna Doyle Wheeler, who had resided in Paris between 1823 and 1826, arranged for Owen to travel to the French capital, where he met his foreign disciples. The Irish socialist Hugh Doherty was also a major go-between. A friend of Anna Doyle Wheeler’s, he settled in Paris during the early July Monarchy (1830-1848). As a disciple of both Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, he became the informal leader of a local group of socialist sympathisers. It was in this capacity that he was invited to attend the 1840 Socialist Congress, held in Leeds that year. On this occasion, Doherty presented a letter undersigned by various Parisian radicals (including Jules Gay and Flora Tristan) expressing their wish to further cross-Channel socialist co-operation. Doherty was officially confirmed as the Owenite representative in Paris, with the apparent intent of opening a branch of the Association of All Classes of All Nations (AACAN) in the French capital. In spite of support from the Central Board, the French Owenites remained but a small group, as the largely top-down, apolitical stance at the heart of British socialism clashed with French traditions of radical republicanism. Many ventures therefore collapsed, including the founding 458of the aforementioned AACAN branch, as well as various attempts to establish Owenite schools and publications (Desroche 1971; Baroteaux 2019). Hugh Doherty soon relocated to the United Kingdom, where he edited the London Phalanx (1841–1843), Britain’s first and only Fourierite periodical (Grandjonc 1989, 471–474).]
