ABSTRACT
Louis Blanc demanded universal suffrage to enable workers to compel the state to set up national workshops. The German workers’ leader Ferdinand Lassalle, influenced by Blanc, came to the same conclusion in the 1860s. The appearance of self-governing workshops in France, in association with the work of Louis Blanc, influenced a group of English Christian socialists who formed the Society for Promoting Working Men’s Associations and succeeded in establishing several workshops. Economic organization, based on free contracting, leads to mutuellisme: equitable exchange, equalization of business conditions, and equitable cooperation of individuals with personal freedoms preserved. Mutualism in the political sphere is federalism. A commune would be created through a contract among a certain number of family heads. Syndicalism developed in France from a rival trade union movement started in the late 1880s in opposition to the Federation national des syndicates, which fell under the influence of the Guests Parti ouvrier.
