Early French Socialism and the Politics of Public Credit

Public credit, its uses and its perils, was the subject of intense debate among French reformers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While historians have traced the origins and development of this debate in the lead up to, and during, the French Revolution, there are still relatively few studies of the politics of public credit in the post-revolutionary era. This project will fill this gap in existing scholarship by exploring the different evaluations of public credit made by socialist reformers during the period of the July Monarchy and Second Republic (1830-52). It will do so by examining the many important, but understudied, French socialist periodicals in the Gustave Gimon Collection, including Écho des travailleurs (1833-34), Revue Nationale (1847), and Le Nouveau Monde (1849). This project will contribute vital research to the book project I am currently working on the history of early French social science.