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Mediterranean Historical Review

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A nineteenth-century Mediterranean union:Michel Chevalier’s Système de la Méditerranée

Michael Drolet

To cite this article: Michael Drolet (2015) A nineteenth-century Mediterranean union: MichelChevalier’s Système de la Méditerranée, Mediterranean Historical Review, 30:2, 147-168, DOI:10.1080/09518967.2015.1117204

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2015.1117204

Published online: 09 Mar 2015.

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A nineteenth-century Mediterranean union: Michel Chevalier’sSystème de la Méditerranée

Michael Drolet*

Worcester College, University of Oxford, UK

This article examines one of the nineteenth-century’s most revolutionary schemesfor establishing a union of Mediterranean states. In 1832, Michel Chevalier set out astartling scheme that would bring to an end armed conflict in Europe through a con-federation of European states and a subsequent alliance between Europe and theOttoman Empire. His plan envisaged a vast infrastructure network of railways,canals, roads and shipping lanes that would link the major ports of the Mediter-ranean with Europe’s capital cities and those of the Ottoman and Russian Empires.The infrastructure network at the heart of Chevalier’s Système de la Méditerranéewas conceived by him as the basis for a system of economic integration that wouldfoster political harmony throughout Europe – anticipating by over one hundred yearsJean Monnet and Robert Schuman’s plans for a European Union – but also betweenEurope and the Ottoman world. Harboured within Chevalier’s infrastructure schemefor the Mediterranean was one of the earliest and most complex nineteenth-centurytheories of networks ever devised. This article examines the centrality of theMediterranean to Chevalier’s theory of networks, and explores the multiple dimen-sions of this complex theory, including the intimate connection he identified betweennetworks as expressions of human creativity and the kind of unalienated humanrelations that would result in the end of conflict both between and within nations.

Keywords: Mediterranean union; Europe; Ottoman; network; class conflict;alienation; labour; Saint-Simonianism

Nous poserons donc un pied sur le NIL,

l’autre sur JÉRUSALEM;

notre main droite s’étendra vers la MECQUE,

notre bras gauche couvrira ROME,

et s’appuiera encore sur PARIS.

Prospère Enfantin to Émile Barrault, 8 August 1833

At noon on Sunday, 15 January 1832, over a thousand people assembled in a Parisianamphitheatre at 9 rue Taitbout to hear a lecture given by the socialist and orator ÉmileBarrault. The audience was apprehensive. It was searching for concrete answers to oneof the severest economic crises in decades. The assembled crowd was also looking forsomething altogether less tangible but no less important: answers to what many of itsmembers experienced as a spiritual crisis. Barrault did not disappoint them. He was a

*Email: michael.drolet@history.ox.ac.uk

© 2016 Taylor & Francis

Mediterranean Historical Review, 2015

Vol. 30, No. 2, 147–168, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2015.1117204

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brilliant orator and oracle, one of the Saint-Simonians’ leading prédicateurs. He beganby seizing on what was most distressing to his audience, highlighting the impoverishedlives of so many French men and women. He then launched into an attack on the JulyMonarchy and the Catholic Church for doing nothing to improve the lot of the suffer-ing. Their lack of initiative – Barrault informed his audience – was not a question ofcallousness. Rather, it was symptomatic of a deeper spiritual crisis affecting French andEuropean society, which was manifested in the many divisions rife both in France andin Europe. Its source, however, lay in a schism that he located at the heart of humanity:this was the conflict between East and West. Having diagnosed humanity’s spiritualmalaise, Barrault then predicted how it could be brought to an end.1

For Barrault, the history of the civilizations of the East and West – from ‘Plato toChrist’, from ‘Moses to Mohammed’ – was intimately tied to the Mediterranean. Hestressed how the confrontation between East and West over the millennia saw theMediterranean as its crucible. The wars ‘on the edges of’ the ‘immense and magnificentchalice’ of the Mediterranean had – he declared in his typical purple prose – ‘reddenedit with their blood’. This ancient conflict, he predicted, would soon end, and with it theeconomic and spiritual crises that engulfed Europe. East and West were, in his words,on the verge of opening ‘their arms as friends, commun[ing] in peace and rais[ing] upin this sublime accord the symbol of universal association’.2 And with that associationa fundamental transformation of French and European society would occur: arevolution that would see the end of poverty, social injustice and conflict.

Barrault’s speech appeared the next day in the pages of the Saint-Simonian newspaperLe Globe. It was of immense importance to the movement and its followers, and one ofthe clearest statements of the Saint-Simonian belief that the age-old division between Eastand West was about to come to an end. His prediction held out the promise that Europe’sengagement with the Ottomans and their Mediterranean empire would undergo a dramatictransformation. It would cease to be antagonistic and conclude in peace and unity.Barrault foretold of these changes, but it was for others to spell out in detail how theywould come about – precisely the task that Michel Chevalier, Charles Duveryier,Stéphane Flachat and Henri Fournel undertook. Between 20 January and 20 April 1832they published thirteen articles under the heading Religion Saint-Simonienne: Politiqueindustrielle et Système de la Méditerranée. Chevalier, who was the Globe’s editor, wrotenine of these, and this article is about them.3

The mind behind the Système de la Méditerranée: the life and work of MichelChevalier (1806–1879)

Michel Chevalier was one of Saint-Simon’s leading disciples. As editor of Le Globe,he was widely viewed as one of the movement’s most brilliant and articulate spokes-men. Named by the movement’s leader, Prospère Enfantin, as ‘Cardinal de l’église del’industrie’, Chevalier occupied a position that made him Enfantin’s deputy andconfidant. Born 13 January 1806 into a modest middle-class family in French city ofLimoges, Chevalier was the second oldest of eight children. Though he came from amodest background, his education was anything but. His achievements were numerousand great; he was, in fact, one of the nineteenth-century’s most eminent figures. But hewas also a person whom time has now almost forgotten.4

Michel Chevalier’s rise to eminence began first at the Collège Royal de Limoges.He entered the school in 1818 at the age of twelve, excelled at his studies, impressedhis tutors, and won numerous prizes.5 At seventeen, he entered the portals of the

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world’s most prestigious engineering school, the École Polytechnique in Paris, andgraduated near the top of his class,6 after which he enrolled at the celebrated École desMines, where he was described as occupying ‘the highest rank in the classification inthe order of merit’, and from where he graduated in 1828.7 After writing a number ofimportant articles, he was nominated candidate engineer (aspirant) in the spring of1829, and made engineer second-class in July 1830. In the autumn of 1830, along witha significant number of other polytechniciens, he joined the ‘romantic’ socialist move-ment of the Saint-Simonians, for which he was imprisoned in 1832. In the spring of1833, he broke his ties with Enfantin and renounced his Saint-Simonian faith, and wasduly released from prison in July. In a spectacular change of personal fortune – whichcan only be described as a remarkable ‘rehabilitation’ – Chevalier was sent to NorthAmerica in November as an official representative of the French state. He travelledthroughout the United States, Canada, Mexico and Cuba, returning to France two yearslater toward the end of 1835, less than a year after the publication of Alexis deTocqueville’s famous Democracy in America.

Chevalier’s diary of his North American travels appeared fortnightly as ‘Lettres surl’Amérique du Nord’ in the official Journal des débats. In 1836, Tocqueville’s pub-lisher André Gosselin issued a two-volume edition of Chevalier’s Lettres, whichreceived instant acclaim. A year later, Chevalier published one of his most impressiveand influential works, Des intérêts matériels en France: Travaux publics, routes,canaux, chemins de fer. This visionary work set out an ambitious programme of infras-tructure development, which – Chevalier convincingly argued – was crucial to the mod-ernization of the French economy. The work had a considerable impact on theeconomic policies of the July Monarchy, and in 1838 Chevalier was appointed as anadvisor to Louis-Philippe’s Council of State.8 The essay was followed by a number ofimportant books and pamphlets on a wide range of topics.9 In 1842, Chevalier wasappointed to the prestigious chair of political economy at the Collège de France inParis10 and, apart from a brief interruption in 1848/9, he held this post until his deathin 1879. Under the Second Empire, Chevalier was appointed to the Council of State,advising Napoleon III on economic matters, in particular on the development ofFrance’s railways, and on commercial relations with the United Kingdom and otherEuropean states. Together with Richard Cobden, the English radical and leader of theAnti-Corn Law League, in 1860 Chevalier negotiated the Anglo-French CommercialTreaty, which would serve as the model for a number of other commercial treaties thatFrance would later sign with Belgium and Sweden.11 In that same year, he wasappointed to the Imperial Senate, and years later was the only senator to vote againstwar with Prussia.

After the collapse of the Second Empire, Chevalier continued to lecture on politicaleconomy and became president of the Compagnie de Chemin de Fer Sous-Marin entrela France et l’Angleterre in 1875, overseeing the beginnings of works on the firstChannel tunnel – a project that was never completed. He died in 1879 at his estate atMontplaisir near the Mediterranean city of Montpellier.

More than just a French lake: the Saint-Simonians and the Mediterranean as asymbol of a new world order

When Chevalier and his fellow Saint-Simonians began composing their articlesReligion Saint-Simonienne: Politique industrielle et Système de la Méditerranée, theirintention was to lay the groundwork for an entirely new relationship between France,

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Europe and the Ottoman worlds, one that would transform longstanding Frenchperceptions of the Mediterranean.

For centuries, the Mediterranean basin had loomed large in the French imagination.The early- and mid-eighteenth-century fascination with the Mediterranean as a place ofscientific, historical and cultural investigation had evolved by the end of the centuryinto the altogether more purposeful fashioning of the Mediterranean as a new civiliza-tional geopolitical space.12 Like so many others both before and after him, the Marquisde Condorcet referred to the Mediterranean as ‘un lac français’, setting the course forthis re-fashioning of perceptions with his 1795 Esquisse d’un tableau historique desprogrès de l’esprit humain.13 Condorcet’s faith in the advancement of science as thecatalyst for the rational reorganization of society was bolted onto the altogether less sci-entific enterprise of Napoleon’s 1798 Egyptian campaign. The general’s Army of theOrient found itself accompanied by many of the Institut de France’s leading savants.14

Despite the campaign’s ultimate failure, the work of the expedition’s 160 scientists,engineers, physicians, antiquarians, artists and composers – and that of its institutionaloffspring, the Institut d’Egypte – generated significant French interest in the Mediter-ranean, and reinforced the belief that had motivated the campaign in the first place:namely, that France was destined to displace the Ottomans in the Mediterranean, and,in the words of Steven Englund, would ‘revive civilization in an area whence it hadsprung’.15

This ambition for France persisted after the fall of the Napoleonic Empire. In theBourbon years, it marked the military and scientific incursions into the Peloponnese,and culminated in the 1830 invasion of Algeria.16 At this time, French intellectuals’reinvention of the Mediterranean as a civilizational space continued to rely on Con-dorcet’s Esquisse. The theory of social evolution that it introduced, and the hierarchythat it established between more- and less-advanced civilizations, created, ‘a conceptualframework that legitimized European political and cultural hegemony’.17

Though the Saint-Simonians were highly critical of colonialism and the kinds ofscientific expeditions attached to colonial ambitions, they were nevertheless active par-ticipants in the dissemination of the theory of social evolution central to Condorcet’swork. In this, they were unwitting accomplices in the legitimization of European andcultural hegemony.18 But their participation in this process of legitimization was farfrom straightforward. On the one hand, the Saint-Simonians were fascinated by and felta keen sympathy for Islamic culture and the civilizational accomplishments of Islam.19

On the other, they saw European civilization as ultimately superior to Islam. As Enfan-tin wrote in his 1827 Note sur la civilisation de l’Asie, ‘The European peoples havebeen placed at the head of civilization since the eleventh century, that is to say sincethe Europeans had taken as their starting point the works of the Arabs.’20 Certainly, bythe time of the French invasion of Algeria, there was widespread belief among Saint-Simonians such as Enfantin and Olinde Rodrigues that the Turks were a people whosementality was primarily militaristic, and whose domination of the Mediterranean wasanimated by a spirit of conquest and usurpation, which could only result in thestagnation of the entire basin.21

The perception of the Turks as driven by military conquest fitted into a ready-madeand ideologically charged framework established by the late-eighteenth-century liberal-republican theorists known as the Idéologues.22 This intellectual cadre – who couldcount Condorcet as one of their own – painted a portrait of societies as being dividedbetween two classes: idlers and producers. The former were indicated as the aristocrats,who accumulated their power through conquest and contributed little to society. The

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latter, a rising industrial and commercial class, was by contrast industrious and addedsignificantly to a nation’s wealth and power. In the Idéologues’ view of European andworld history, the idlers were in decline and soon to be replaced by a new ‘producer’class. This outlook on the logical course of events gave rise to the early-nineteenth-century doctrine of industrialism, and fuelled Saint-Simon’s ideas.

Saint-Simon’s followers were keen exponents of industry and industrialism. Indus-trialism was a central element in their programme for the economic, political and socialtransformation of France, Europe and the Mediterranean at large. That same spiritwould define a good deal of their 1833 ‘mission’ in Egypt, whose many exploitsincluded the construction of an irrigation and navigation dam in the Nile delta, theestablishment of the École Polytechnique du Caire school of engineering, and ulti-mately the Suez Canal, some decades later.23 Whilst the Saint-Simonians were enthusi-asts of industry and industrialism, they also suspected that these emerged out of aEuropean mindset that favoured individuality, intellect and intellectual abstraction at theexpense of the ‘sensuousness’ of physical sensations, emotions and ‘emotional intelli-gence’. As they saw it, in contrast to Europeans, the Turks and Arabs were more sensu-ous and possessed greater emotional depth. For the Saint-Simonians, this represented alack of psychic balance and hence a disharmony between mind and body, which Euro-peans, Turks and Arabs experienced at many different levels, in a number of strikingforms. In their view, this epitomized the schism that Barrault so eloquently portrayed inhis 15 January 1832 speech, revealing itself culturally in the ‘individualism’ of theWest and the ‘collectivism’ of the East. And it depicted itself symbolically – and moreto the point, biologically – in the forms of male and female, with the West representedin the form of the male and the East in the form of the female. The harmonization ofmind and body, intellect and emotion, individualism and communalism, West and East,became the driving ambition of the Saint-Simonians. As Enfantin declared: ‘The law,which is continuously progressive, is the harmony of the body and the spirit, of indus-try and of science, of the Orient and the Occident, of the woman and the man.’24

The pursuit of harmony took on one particular dimension that had been outlined byEnfantin, namely the bizarre concept of uniting male and female, which became a questfor the female messiah in the East. In Enfantin’s and the other Saint-Simonians’ imagi-natively overactive minds, her marriage to her male counterpart Enfantin – the messiahof the West – would catalyse the forging of a union between East and West. In thespring of 1832, Enfantin entrusted Barrault with the task of leading a mission to Egyptin order to find the female messiah. The mission failed. Once Enfantin joined hisdisciples in Egypt in November 1833, the mission gradually shifted its priorities toachieving the harmonization ‘of industry and science’, and focused on the engineeringand scientific projects just mentioned. Whilst this reprioritization was distantly tetheredto Condorcet’s belief that the advancement of science would serve as the catalyst forthe rational reorganization of society, its more immediate pivot lay in what Chevalierhad set out in his Globe articles. This involved science and industry as the catalyst forcultural and political conciliation between East and West, and identified theMediterranean basin as the locus of that enterprise. It is to Chevalier’s vision for theMediterranean and Europe, for East and West, that we shall now turn.

Sketch of a Mediterranean vision

For Chevalier, the Mediterranean – which included the Black and Caspian seas – notonly represented the meeting point of East and West, North and South, but was also

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symbolic of how a divided past would become a united future. As he stated in his thirdarticle of 5 February 1832:

The Mediterranean was an arena, a closed field, where for over thirty centuries the Eastand the West have been locked in combat. Henceforth the Mediterranean must become avast forum where at all points the peoples who until now have been divided will com-mune. The Mediterranean will become the matrimonial bed of the East and the West.25

But how was this to come about? What practical steps might be taken to achieve thisunion? What Chevalier proposed in the Système de la Méditerranée was ambitious andsignificantly out of step with conventional opinion.26 It set out a vision for the eco-nomic, political and cultural integration of Europe and the Ottoman world, whichexplicitly entailed the abandonment of imperialism. This hinged on an imaginative sys-tem that he outlined in the fourth of his nine articles – the Mediterranean system –comprising a complex infrastructure network of railways, rivers, canals, roads and ship-ping routes linking the port cities of the Mediterranean to each other and to the majorcapitals of Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The colossal infrastructure network thathe envisaged involved over 60,000 kilometres of railways, with diverse sets of lineslinking Barcelona, Madrid and Lisbon; London, Paris and Marseille; Paris, Frankfurt,Moscow and Kamchatka; Madrid, Gibraltar, Alexandria and Cairo; Frankfurt, Vienna,Constantinople, Teheran, Bagdad and Basra. The scheme aimed to revolutionize thedistances and speed of travel for both individuals and goods. The resulting trade andhuman contact would, Chevalier believed, forge bonds between the divided peoples ofEurope, and between Europeans and non-Europeans: between Western Christians,Orthodox Christians, Muslims and Jews.27 It was a revolutionary proposal, but itvanished from public view not long after it appeared. Why?

A system eclipsed: the historiography of the Système de la Méditerranée

Chevalier’s Système de la Méditerranée was entirely out of step with conventionalnineteenth-century European opinion, which was determinedly imperialist. The workappealed to a minority of individuals. Little wonder, then, that the Système de laMéditerranée had a short life, falling into obscurity not long after publication. Through-out the nineteenth century, the work was ignored, and it only caught the attention ofhistorians in the first half of the twentieth when, in the 1930s, it was briefly describedby Henry-René d’Allemagne and later in the 1950s by Jean-Baptiste Duroselle. Thesedoyens of the history of romantic socialism never analysed the work itself, choosingonly to remark on its importance to the Saint-Simonian vision of the Orient. In 1963,the French historian Jean Walch rescued the work from near total obscurity when hepublished the fourth of Chevalier’s nine articles in La Revue philosophique de laFrance et de l’étranger. But Walch’s efforts at re-kindling interest in Chevalier’s workwere not successful. Almost forty years elapsed before the first article devoted exclu-sively to Chevalier’s Système was published. This was a short compte rendu by JéromeDebrune, which also focused narrowly on the fourth article. In 2008, the leading Saint-Simonian scholar Pierre Musso published an edition of the Système, which containedwhat he and other leading Saint-Simonian scholars thought to be the four most impor-tant articles, those written between 20 January and 12 February 1832.28 Musso’s editiondid much to spur interest in Chevalier’s Système, such that in 2012 Jean-François Fig-eac could write that the Système de la Méditerranée was ‘unsurpassed and unsurpass-able when it c[ame] to the Saint-Simonian analysis of the question of the Orient’.29

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Despite the importance of Musso’s edition and Figeac’s analysis – a survey of individ-ual Saint-Simonian views on the Mediterranean – a thorough examination of the workstill remains to be undertaken.

This gaping omission can be explained by several factors. First, although the Saint-Simonians judged the Système de la Méditerranée to be their major statement on theOrient, this ‘practical programme’, as they called it, was summarily dismissed by con-temporaries as naïve and fanciful. In truth, modern-day historians have not been muchkinder, describing the Système as utterly utopian,30 and it is easy to see why. Chevalierargued for the adoption of a complex programme of railway construction throughoutEurope and the Mediterranean, as well as the building of an elaborate system of roadsand canals, including a canal at Suez. As we have already seen, the scheme involvedbuilding over 60,000 kilometres of railway, and was proposed barely four years afterFrance constructed its very first railway line, which was a mere twenty-sevenkilometres long.31

Second, Chevalier himself appears to have abandoned the scheme barely a yearafter its publication and, by the time he set out on his mission to North America in theautumn of 1833, the project appears to have been eclipsed. Notably, in that same yearEnfantin declared to his remaining followers, ‘I think Michel has his eyes fixed onanother point, and that today his Système de la Méditerranée appears trifling to him.’32

Futhermore, this view appears to be confirmed by the publication three years later ofthe Lettres sur l’Amérique de Nord, a work that focused exclusively on the UnitedStates. In the year following the publication of the Lettres, Chevalier wrote a series ofarticles for the Journal des débats, which ostensibly abandon the vast railway infras-tructure for the Mediterranean basin in favour of the construction of a more modest –and altogether more feasible – network of canals for the west of France.33 Yet a goodmany of Chevalier’s later works, including his Isthme de Panama (1844), Le Mexiqueancien et moderne (1864), and his Tunnel sous-marin entre la France et l’Angleterresous le Pas-de-Calais (1874), stressed the importance of an infrastructure network forthe Mediterranean.34 Even the first of his Lettres sur l’Amérique de Nord stressed theimportance of the Mediterranean for the industrial development of France and Europe,and emphasized that this maritime basin was central to the conciliation of East andWest.

Third, leading Saint-Simonian scholars view the Système as the abandonment of themovement’s revolutionary course. For them, the publication of the Système was theclearest sign of the new direction Enfantin and Chevalier sought to chart for the move-ment, a different course marked by a spirit of compromise, which in their estimationinvolved jettisoning the crusade’s noble principles and arresting ideas. The ‘reformistprogramme’ that Enfantin and Chevalier devised, with the Système at its core, wasutterly impractical, and therefore not at all reformist. For Musso, it was a far-fetchedstatement of the ‘great Saint-Simonian myth’ that sought to substitute domination andwar with a ‘universal and pacific association of humanity’.35 For him, the introductionof the ‘reformist programme’ effectively killed off the movement – a criticism thatbetrays a jaundiced view without subtlety, and eschews any exploration andexamination of the legacy of Saint-Simonianism.

Modern scholars have certainly identified many problems with the Système, notleast the fact that, despite its avowedly cosmopolitan intent, it harboured a number ofnineteenth-century European cultural prejudices about the Orient, even though Cheva-lier and his co-authors did their best to repudiate many of them. The prejudices thateluded them, however, were those more deeply embedded in the nineteenth-century

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mind, and therefore less consciously apparent, such as Chevalier’s views on the mori-bund condition of Eastern and Slavic societies, which can appear glaringly obvious tous. And yet these views were actually subtler than they may at first appear, and schol-ars have largely failed to be sensitive to this. In Chevalier’s mind the East’s arresteddevelopment had less to do with culture than with the corrupting influence of an ancienrégime mentality – a ‘spirit of idlers’, in the language of the Idéologues – that hadspread well beyond Europe’s borders, infecting the Ottoman Empire itself. Other preju-dices were altogether less discernable, however, such as the way Chevalier’s narrowassessment of human creativity in terms of material production induced him – likeCondorcet before him – to rank societies according to their material output, a precon-ception that would impact the way he and his co-authors viewed the East in general.

Fourth, and most importantly, modern-day scholars have focused exclusively on thefour essays Chevalier wrote between 20 January and 12 February 1832, ignoring theother nine articles written between 8 March and 20 April.36 This omission may lie inthe fact that the latter articles focus on the internal situation in France, and only occa-sionally refer to the Mediterranean system itself. However, to detach these nine articlesfrom the first four is a mistake, because Chevalier and his collaborators conceived thesearticles as a unitary set piece. They were gathered under the title Politique industrielleet Système de la Méditerranée and were never viewed by their authors as independentof each other. Indeed, not long after they appeared in the pages of the Globe, they werere-assembled in a single volume under the same title, albeit in a slightly different order,whereby Chevalier’s January and February essays outlining the Mediterranean systemcomprised the last four articles of the book. The authors clearly saw the system as theculmination – concrete realization – of their vision of an industrial policy for Franceand Europe. In this, they deepened and furthered the institutional scope and geographicreach of De la réorganisation de la société Européenne (1814) written by their intellec-tual paragon Henri de Saint-Simon and his amanuensis Augustin Thierry. They zeroedin on the economic, social, intellectual and mental frameworks that fashioned institu-tions and dynamics.

What Chevalier and his co-authors proposed in Politique industrielle et Système dela Méditerranée was intellectually innovative and socially and politically far-reaching.They appropriated many of the most advanced developments in French philosophy,politics and economics, and used them in imaginative and transformative ways. Theysubverted major developments in the conventional political thought of the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries, and ultimately presented a new vision of politics and societythat was decades ahead of its time.

The Système de la Méditerranée defined

For Chevalier and the Saint-Simonians, France was in a perilous state. From before theRevolution, French society had been divided and the nation’s political class at war withitself. These divisions were not merely political, but were expressions of deeper socialrifts, themselves the outcome of the development of democracy or equality of conditionthat the elder statesman and liberal Pierre-Paul Royer Collard highlighted in the early1820s and which Alexis de Tocqueville would, a decade later, analyse with such acuityin Democracy in America.37 Discord was not merely confined to France, however; itwas apparent throughout Europe. Like many of their contemporaries, particularly themoderate liberals such as Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, Prosper de Barante, his close polit-ical ally François Guizot, or Henrion de Pansey – known as the ‘Doctrinaires’ because

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of their repeated references to ‘principles’, ‘theories’ and ‘doctrines’,– the Saint-Simoni-ans invested considerable effort in examining the historical roots of sovereign powerand foundations of political legitimacy, topics they considered crucial for making senseof a changing social and political order.38 But whereas liberals offered an answer to thedivisions of French society derived from a particular historical reading of medievalFrance that stressed its organic and cohesive nature, the Saint-Simonians – who alsoturned to the Middle Ages – directed their attention to the societies of the Middle East.They viewed these societies, as we have already seen, as materially ‘backward’ com-pared with Europe, but they also believed that in a crucial way they were in advanceof Europe inasmuch as they had retained a degree of medieval social and religiousorganization, a fundamental characteristic that apparently made them immune to thenarrow factionalism and particularism that divided Europe.39 For the authors, the stron-ger attachment to community in the Middle East stemmed from a more ‘sentimental’nature that entailed greater sensuousness and emotional depth. In the minds of theSaint-Simonians, Middle-Eastern societies offered a possible key to achieving socialharmony in Europe. The union of Europe and the Middle East would, they believed,result in social and international peace and the regeneration of humanity. How was thisto come about?

In the third and fourth of his articles, published on 5 and 20 February 1832, Cheva-lier outlined the main features of his Mediterranean system. The former laid out thecore issues: Europe’s conflicted and divided internal character defined its relations withthe civilizations of the East. For over thirty centuries, according to Chevalier, the Westand East had been locked in an ‘all-consuming’ conflict.40 This struggle would see itsresolution through the implementation of what he called a ‘peacemaking plan’ (planpacificateur). The theoretical core driving this plan was the concept of cosmopoli-tanism. Throughout this third article, Chevalier stressed that each people had its specificnature, particular character and form of vitality (mode de vitalité). European politicsand Europe’s relations with the Middle East, however, derided the specificity of indi-vidual peoples, and embraced policies that were driven by the barbaric impulses of ‘an-nihilation, extirpation and extermination’.41 Against this ‘backward’, ‘reprobate’ and‘damnable’ mindset, Chevalier’s peacemaking plan was explicitly cosmopolitan. At thecentre of his scheme was a progressive conception of humanity that was open andunrestrictive, and rested on a conception of human nature that was both creative andconstantly infolding. In freeing the ‘genius’ of each people and its particular destiny,his plan embraced the specificity of each one while at the same time uniting it with theparticular ‘genius’ of other peoples. The union of different peoples would strengthenthe associative bonds between them, deepening and solidifying the conditions forpeace, at the same time as contributing to the overall accumulation of human knowl-edge and adding to new and diverse forms of productive activity: to the fount of humancreativity itself. The peacemaking plan was central to social regeneration and peace.42

In the closing paragraphs of the third essay, Chevalier named the practicalprogramme integral to the peacemaking plan. It was the Mediterranean system.

For the new policy of the old continent – which must aim to establish an increasingly inti-mate communion between the Orient and the Occident – must have as its first objective,its immediate goal, the implementation of a system destined to regenerate the countriesbordering the Mediterranean, which in the majority resemble those sores on the faces overwhich one places a death shroud; so cruel has been for them the forced situation of strug-gle in which they have been held for several centuries.43

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In his fourth article, Chevalier began with a general history of the Mediterranean, reiter-ating what he had stressed in the earlier pieces, namely that West and East had been inperennial conflict: ‘The Mediterranean, along with her shores, has been the battlefieldon which East and West have ripped each other apart.’44 After enumerating a long listof conflicts dating back to the time of the ancients, Chevalier contended that the fre-quency and intensity of these wars had shown signs of progressively dwindling sincethe sixteenth-century Reformation. The long course of history – which did not diminishthe importance of the Greek war of independence for him and his fellow Saint-Simoni-ans – suggested to him that the future would be more peaceable. But this state of con-cord could not be secured without a fundamental transformation of politics, whichinvolved a repudiation of the politics of conquest and usurpation, and its replacementby a politics of accord, ‘la politique industrielle’, as he called it. The nature and formof this industrial politics was laid out systematically in the articles Chevalier wrotefrom 8 March to 20 April, in which he stated categorically that his peacemaking planand Mediterranean system would be incomplete without the aforesaid ‘industrial poli-tics’. Following his discussion of the transformation of politics, Chevalier spelled outone of the integral elements of his peacemaking plan, namely, an association involvingall the countries around the Mediterranean. He contended that this ‘union’ of Mediter-ranean states – or ‘confederation’, as he also referred to it – would be the first steptoward forging the ultimate goal of a union at a global level: a ‘universal association’of all the world’s nation states.45

Chevalier did not describe an institutional or political arrangement for the Mediter-ranean union; rather, he focused on the economic (or ‘industrial’, as he termed it)framework, whereby all the centres of production participated in a vast web of transportand communications infrastructure, and a network of banks and shared pool of financialcapital.46 Chevalier believed that linking the economies of all the states bordering theMediterranean through an infrastructure network of this kind would bring together thepeoples of the Mediterranean, and ensure peaceful coexistence. Despite the lack of anyinstitutional design, the underlying logic of this vision for the Mediterranean prefigureswhat Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman would propose (over one hundred years later)for post-1945 Europe, and what the French president Nicholas Sarkozy attempted in2008 with his scheme for a ‘Mediterranean Union’.

As noted above, the centrepiece of Chevalier’s Mediterranean System was a vastrailway network that involved linking the main Mediterranean ports to the inland citiesof Europe. Along with railways, Chevalier also envisaged the construction of a compre-hensive system of interstate roads and canals, including one at Suez. This inland net-work was to be complemented by a complex network of steamship lines criss-crossingthe Mediterranean, linking all of its major ports and connecting them to other ports onthe Black and Caspian seas, and even the Arabian and Persian gulfs.47

While the vast scope of Chevalier’s proposals was captivating, there were other rea-sons that made them particularly significant. Although roads, canals and waterwayswere vital to his system, Chevalier had, as a mining engineer, witnessed first-hand justhow prone these modes of travel were to the vagaries of the weather: harsh freezingwinters, heavy rains (or droughts) often made travel by canal and river difficult, if notimpossible; consequently his scheme included the thorough dredging and re-engineeringof many of the existing waterways.48 Railways were less vulnerable, however, andoffered other advantages, one being speed. Chevalier highlighted that a journey offifty-two kilometres from Liverpool to Manchester took only seventy-five minutes, andconcluded from that it would ‘be possible to transform Rouen and Le Havre into

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suburbs of Paris’.49 What captured Chevalier’s imagination was how speed had thedirect effect of contracting space, and it was thus that his Mediterranean System wouldultimately evolve into a single, vast Mediterranean union.

By this means, and with the help of other modern discoveries, such as the telegraph, it willbecome easy to govern the major part of the continents that border the Mediterranean withthe same consistency, the same instantaneousness that exists today in France.50

How this compression of space was to come about and how the peoples of Europewere to be united was dealt with in sub-sections of the fourth article, devoted to Spain,Britain and France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Asia and Africa. Here Chevalier detailedhow railway lines, such as the one linking Barcelona and Madrid with Lisbon, and theone linking Bordeaux with Madrid and Cadiz, would unify divided countries and ulti-mately bring about their internal regeneration. These lines would be ‘like a system ofveins and arteries through which civilization circulated, awakening weary nations bybringing together disjointed limbs and causing them to move from a state of torpor toone of intoxicating activity’.51

More than an ambitious project of public works

It would be a mistake to view Chevalier’s proposed Mediterranean system merely as anelaborate and ambitious programme of public works designed to revitalize moribundnations. His outlook was far broader in scope, and in this he differed from hisco-authors Flachat, Fournel and Duveryier, whose language would probably soundfamiliar to the modern reader. Though Chevalier used the term ‘public works’ in hisarticles of 8 March and 9 April, it is notable that he employed it sparingly, given that itwas widely used at the time, particularly in those institutions where he had received hiseducation: the École Polytechnique and École des Mines. His cautious use of theexpression ‘public works’ may well be because he felt it failed to convey adequatelythe complex and far-reaching aims of his Mediterranean system, which contained dis-tinct ideas about culture and society that went far beyond the bounds of conception anddesign that defined public works and the language of political economy.

Chevalier’s remarks about ‘veins and arteries’ and ‘disjointed limbs’ rested on ametaphor about bodily circulation. This metaphor was not novel, and was rooted ineighteenth-century physiocracy, which itself was concerned with public works.Though Chevalier employed the metaphor in a way familiar to anyone with a passingknowledge of physiocracy, he also used it in novel ways. When he stressed that theMediterranean system would hasten the development of industry by accelerating theflow of capital, goods and labour within and beyond the national economy – andspur the development of industry (its modernization) through the dissemination of dif-ferent manufacturing and organizational techniques by introducing competition – Che-valier was employing the metaphor canonically. His innovation was to stress how thesystem would create the conditions for more rational, more efficient, less wastefuland more environmentally sustainable production, strikingly exemplified in his com-ment in the fourth essay on the deforestation of the Pyrenees and his proposal toreforest them.52

The ‘circulation’ metaphor Chevalier employed in his Mediterranean system wasversatile: it applied to the economic sphere when the lack of interaction between indus-try and finance – poor financial and physical capital circulation, as he saw it – wassymptomatic of an unhealthy economy and of the rigid class barriers that characterized

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ancien régime society, rendering them sclerotic. The construction of the infrastructureof roads, canals and railways was an important instance of a project in which financialcapital and industrial capital could meet. But the circulation metaphor also applied tothe spheres of politics, society, culture and knowledge.

Roads, canals and, above all, railways, were – as Chevalier was eager toassert – also the sites where different classes were brought together. The communica-tions system was central to social integration, and was therefore the mirror oppositeto ancien régime society with its rigid caste structure. As he declared three yearslater in his twenty-first Letter on North America (8 January 1835), ‘Improving com-munications is working for real liberty, positive and practical … it is making equalityand democracy. The perfection of the means of transport reduces the distance notonly between one point and another but also between one class and another.’53 Thesystem he proposed was pivotal to cultural integration too: the fact that an individualcould, in Chevalier’s words, ‘breakfast in Le Havre, lunch in Paris, dine in Lyon,and by bedtime be on board a ship in Toulon bound for Algiers or Alexandria’,made it possible to free individuals from insular mentalities and parochial mindsets.54

The system would

guide a course for all spontaneities […] give expression to and normalize characteristicsand idiosyncrasies that when restrained or suppressed shatter or splinter into division. [Thesystem] will cause to flourish every individuality, race, people, class or man … in teachingeach one to rely on the other, and to aid others in joining together in alliance.55

It would forge an inclusive union of peoples, and foster a cosmopolitan outlook.The second principle embedded in the Mediterranean system sprang from the ideas

about vitality and the inner life of the individual theorized in the work of the eigh-teenth-century physiologists François Bichat and Félix Vicq d’Azyr, concepts that fil-tered their way into the reflections of Saint-Simon – and moderate liberals such asFrançois Guizot – on the relationship between selfhood and society. What these authorsdid was to posit a dialectical relation between the inner life of the individual and theouter life of society.56 Chevalier incorporated these notions into his description of thesystem, and added a third dimension, extending their reach beyond individual and soci-ety to include nations and peoples or ‘races’, as he sometimes labelled them. The‘infrastructure network’ (an expression he employed often) would alter the internaldynamic of each nation. Integrating the national network within a wider geographic net-work affected the internal dynamics both of the nation and of the larger geographicentity of which it was a part.

The third idea rested on a straightforward appropriation of a number of culturalstereotypes common in Chevalier’s day, which reached their most high-profile intellec-tual expression in Mme de Staël’s 1814 De l’Allemagne. The industriousness of theEnglish, combined with the vitality, élan and conviviality of the French, and the spiri-tual and intellectual temperament of the Germans, would all be brought together withinthe Mediterranean system.57 The combination of these cultural traits would subtly alterthe quality of each people, and also unleash the creativity within them. This release ofcreative energies in Europe would lead to the ‘awakening’ of Slavic peoples and thepopulations of the Ottoman and Arab worlds.58

This view of Europe as the catalyst for the development of other peoples was typi-cal of the kind of ethnocentrism that dominated eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryEuropean thought. Chevalier echoed the belief of Saint-Simon and Thierry thatEurope’s destiny required an alliance between France and Britain. Though he glossed

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over his forerunners’ proposal for a parliament that united these countries, emphasizinginstead an economic alliance, Chevalier’s account attached the same kind of culturalpremium to France – the nation that eclipsed its European partners in his description ofthe Mediterranean confederation. In Chevalier’s mind, France was at the centre of theMediterranean system.59 In this, he never really diverged from Condorcet and otherFrench intellectuals who saw the Mediterranean as a ‘un lac français’.

Though it may be a little harsh to criticize Chevalier for this – after all, he and hisco-authors were appealing to a French audience – the logic of the cosmopolitan intentof the system necessitated a more thoroughgoing effort to break with this kind of Gal-locentrism. One of the most glaring examples of cultural lapses of this sort is seen inthe way Chevalier and his co-authors glossed over the French invasion of Algeria, withthe exception of one passing remark that appeared in the third article, of 5 February1832, suggesting that the population of Algeria ‘thirsty for progress’ welcomed theFrench army on its soil. 60 There was certainly a strong political incentive not to alien-ate readers who, for the most part, supported the French invasion of Algeria, but theavowedly cosmopolitan character and intent of the Mediterranean System satawkwardly with this strategy, even if we concede that, within a nineteenth-centurymindset, to be cosmopolitan did not mean to rise above cultural prejudices. One maylegitimately ask how strong this commitment to cosmopolitanism was, and how long itwould last. The Saint-Simonians’ participation in various scientific commissions – suchas Enfantin’s work in the 1840s for the Algerian Scientific Commission, andChevalier’s own significant contributions to 1862–1867 Mexican ScientificCommission61 – contrasted with their youthful opposition to scientific enquiries thatattempted to legitimize imperialism.

Where the System stood in opposition to a narrow nationalism was in the first ofChevalier’s politique industrielle articles, entitled ‘Organisation industrielle de l’armée’(8 March 1832). This article called for the radical transformation of the French armyfrom a military force into an ‘industrial force’. Chevalier highlighted the expendituresentailed in maintaining regiments and engaging in war, and argued that if those sumswere directed toward peaceful pursuits, such as public works projects, internal peacewould arise in France and the nation itself would attain a new and progressivegrandeur.

Throughout this article, Chevalier contrasted the inefficient and wasteful expendi-ture of ancien régime monarchies with the kind of efficient and sustainable outlays thatdefined industrial politics. He highlighted events in Lyon as an example of this kind ofwaste: the French government had spent over four million francs on mobilizing troopsto crush riots that erupted in Lyon in 1831/2. Had that money been spent on schools,factories and banks, Chevalier argued, the economic activity generated would haveimproved dramatically the prospects of the poor and underprivileged, thereby removingthe very causes of the social discontent behind the uprisings.62 Lyon, which had beensuch a crisis for the government and a rallying cause for the Saint-Simonians, servedas a microcosm of the rest of France. Chevalier condemned the annual 200 millionfranc French military budget. It was, in his estimation, entirely wasteful. ‘With a similarsum well spent to the advantage of industry, incredible results would be achieved forFrance.’63 He contended that less than half that sum could finance the construction of arailway between Le Havre and Marseille, linking these two great ports of the Mediter-ranean and the Atlantic. By underwriting the initial investment and guaranteeing privatecompanies an annual income from it, the French government would be in a position tospur industrial development, and thereby increase national employment and aggregate

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demand, which in turn would further stimulate industry. It was this kind of imaginativereasoning that underpinned Chevalier and his co-authors’ thinking on industrial policy.

Chevalier went further when he argued for the transformation of the French military– ‘four-hundred thousand regimented and barracked men’ whose youth was wasted in‘learning manoeuvres which give nothing to society’ – into a united force working forthe cause of industry. In this way, the professional education and training received bythose destined to be military engineers – an education Chevalier himself had receivedat the École Polytechnique – would be put to productive purposes. In carrying out pub-lic works, this corps industriel would provide an example of a purposeful and orga-nized workforce whose technical education and knowhow would serve as a positiveexample to the working class, instilling within it the habits of industry and practicalknowledge of technology.64 The transformation of the army into a corps industrielwould furthermore bring domestic tranquillity to France, a nation divided since wellbefore 1789.65 The international implications of this radical proposal were not lost onChevalier, either. By removing the spectre of a French armed force from Europe andNorth Africa, with its new corps industriel directed to building the French sections ofthe Mediterranean system, France would spur other nations to co-operate in this colos-sal enterprise. Chevalier and his co-authors clearly believed that the mere initiation bythe French of the proposed system would fire the imagination of Europeans, inspiringand galvanizing them to participate. While this may seem naïve to us, the idea was byno means ludicrous.

As we have already seen, Chevalier envisaged industrial politics in terms that werenot limited to public works, and though the 8 March article on the ‘industrial organiza-tion of the army’ stressed the pivotal role of the corps industriel in public works, thisarticle was written after Chevalier had outlined the Mediterranean system itself. The 8March article and those that followed stressed the economic, social and political bene-fits of public works, employing the idea in its conventional sense. But when Chevalierreferred to the Mediterranean system, he deviated from the usual understanding of‘public works’, and incorporated it into something far more complex and holistic: a net-work. Chevalier saw the Mediterranean system as a network that stimulated the move-ment of goods and individuals and disseminated scientific and technical knowledge, thesalutary habits of industry, sociability, and cultural knowledge and sensitivity. As a net-work, the Mediterranean system performed as a circulatory mechanism that unleashedthe power of human creativity. It was also, in the minds of its authors, endowed withstrong appeal, because once the vitality it generated became evident, other nationswould wish to be part of it. What lent the Mediterranean system this mesmeric quality?

At the core of Chevalier’s system was a deep-rooted cultural attachment to theMediterranean. It was the birthplace of Graeco-Roman thought and culture, of Chris-tianity, of Western civilization itself. It was therefore invested with immense and pow-erful symbolic value. Achieving the full potential of that symbolism was not possiblemerely through scholarly studies that strove to locate various European peoples’ cul-tural, philological or ethnographic origins in the Mediterranean world. According to theSaint-Simonians, what was really necessary was a tangible plan. To their way of think-ing, the plan’s very tangibility lent it considerable symbolic power. Its concrete naturewas further amplified by the fact that it could be situated within an historical narrativeabout Western civilization, which was experiencing a phase in which the boundariesthat distinguished it would dissolve, and divided societies would be united, andEuropean society as a whole would be brought back to and united with its point oforigin. This was the phase of organic unity expounded by Saint-Simon in Le nouveau

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christianisme,66 deep within which was harboured another idea, whose appeal wasobvious, but whose revolutionary potential was not yet fully understood.

The promise of unity: Le système méditerranée, creativity and unalienated labour

At the core of Chevalier’s system lay his firm belief in human creativity. In design andscale, the system he devised was a visible expression of it. But it was also a frameworkthrough which human creativity would find its freest and fullest affirmation. As wehave seen, Chevalier drew on physiological ideas about circulation, vitality and innerlife when he set out his reflections on peoples. But in his 20 April article ‘Aux hommespolitiques’, he went one step further, subverting the moderate liberal idea of capacity oraptitude. Liberals had introduced the idea as a response to the perceived excesses ofthe French Revolution. Tied to the concept of the sovereignty of reason, the idea ofcapacity served as the theoretical justification to limiting the size of franchise.67 Theliberal preoccupation with human capacity and its association with political sovereigntywas part and parcel of what Chevalier dubbed the ‘fantasmagorie parlementaire’.Although the Saint-Simonians believed this kind of politics was at a dead-end, the ideaof capacity expressed something real. It was just that liberals wrongly identified what itexpressed, and this was because they confused ‘metaphysical rights’ with real ones;they confused a ‘mystical equality’ with real equality.68 Chevalier identified their confu-sion and sought to correct it by detaching the notion of capacity from the whole issueof political participation, and linked it instead to labour and the creative transformationof nature and society by industry. As he stated: ‘It will be possible to move from thepresent situation to a new organization based on our principles of labour and capac-ity.’69 His critique of the French liberals anticipated by over a decade Marx’s critiqueof the young Hegelians, who, Marx contended, ‘never left the realm of philosophy’and were therefore unable to shift their viewpoint and ‘interpret’ the world in a‘different way’.70 La politique industrielle would replace the ‘phantasmagoria’ ofparliamentary politics.71

In linking labour and capacity in this way, Chevalier realized that the whole of poli-tics and administration would be radically transformed. No longer would they be preoc-cupied with ‘metaphysical’ rights; their efforts would be directed toward real ones: thereal ‘needs of labour and the betterment of workers’. Their energies would be directedtoward ‘production’ and ‘creation’.72 Capacity gave depth and form to labour andhuman creativity. And labour was, within his new vision of reality, a perfect andunalienated expression of this creativity. What Chevalier captured from physiologicalreflections on the self, and liberal adaptations of them, was the idea of the divided self,the alienated individual.

Liberals such as Royer-Collard and Guizot furnished a narrative about the dividedself that drew on an ancient and longstanding critique of democracy that went back toPlato. The narrative was both sociological and political, but it was not economic.According to liberals, the drive for equality – the chief characteristic of democracy –created the conditions for the emergence of agitated and fractured individuals. Andfractured selves were mirrored in a fractured polity. While this narrative was indis-putably elitist, it nevertheless located the problem of divided individuals – like that ofcapacity – at the centre of considerations on sovereignty and political stability.73 Onceagain, Chevalier shifted the focus of reflections on the divided self in a new direction,stressing the centrality of labour and creativity to the constitution of an unalienatedindividual. Here, too, he anticipated by over a decade Marx’s thinking on alienated

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labour as laid out in the first of his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.Chevalier’s reflections, however, were neither systematically set out nor rigorouslydeveloped, and fell short of what Marx wrote. They were also deficient when comparedwith Marx’s analysis, because they tended to view human creativity in the narrow termsof material output, a deficiency that is not easily reconciled with the Saint-Simonians’own efforts to cultivate within themselves art, music and poetry.74

Conclusion

It would be easy to follow modern-day scholars and Chevalier’s contemporaries in theirharsh assessments of his Système de la Méditerranée. The 60,000 kilometres of rail-ways he proposed appear nothing short of the fantasies of a frenzied railway enthusiast.The system itself, as we have seen, was marked by numerous deficiencies. But despitethese shortcomings, Chevalier and his co-authors wrote a work that was original, imagi-native and innovative. It was well ahead of its time in anticipating many of the themescentral to contemporary network theory. One of the outstanding features of Politiqueindustrielle et Système de la Méditerranée was Chevalier’s vision of the network as thecrucible in which human capacity and vitality were developed and could flourish. Manyof his reflections demonstrate an imaginative adaptation of scientific ideas to a new andrapidly changing social reality. His thoughts on the network can be traced back to histime at the École des Mines and the lectures he attended there by Brochant de Villiers.Brochant’s courses on geology and mineralogy presented a holistic view of the planetby stressing the place, order and organizational relation of the geological strata as beinglayered both vertical and horizontal. The geologist’s classifications and holisticapproach to his subject marked Chevalier’s thinking, which he revealed for the firsttime in unpublished mining reports of 1827 that outlined in detail the way in which, inareas of geological transition, the meeting of moving strata yielded immense energy,and produced rich mineral wealth.75

Chevalier’s Mediterranean system integrated those reflections on geological phe-nomena into a holistic concept of the network, into which he wove ideas about circula-tion, interaction, vitality and growth whereby human creativity was unleashed, just asthe interaction of strata unleashed powerful geological forces that yielded rich mineralwealth. For Chevalier, the network served as the catalyst for creative forces, theoutcome of unalienated labour.

It was upon the link between unalienated labour as an expression of humancreativity and the undivided self that Chevalier could build the ideal of a united France,Europe and Mediterranean: a confédération méditerranéenne. The ideal promised more,for the prospect of a united humanity held out too the additional possibility of theunion of humanity with nature. In Chevalier’s mind, the complex infrastructure networkthat defined the Mediterranean system was an example of, and would serve as aprelude to, ‘the best stewardship of the planet’.76

Rather than view Chevalier and his co-authors’ as naïve utopians, we might pauseto reflect on Politique industrielle et Système de la Méditerranée in a different light.We should consider it as a sketch, much like Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau his-torique des progrès de l’esprit humain, of what the human spirit can achieve when itfinds itself unalienated from the very expression of its creativity – the essence of itsspecies. For Chevalier and his co-authors, the Mediterranean confederation was asupreme expression of those unalienated human relations. Modern scholarship’s detach-ment of Politique industrielle from the Système de la Méditerranée has rendered us

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blind to the revolutionary character of this work, so pregnant with symbolic and realvalue. Like its authors, it deserves a greater appreciation.

AcknowledgmentsI owe a debt of gratitude to the archivists of the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris,who were exceptionally obliging in assisting me with my research. M. Olivier Azola, archivist,of the École Polytechnique was extraordinarily helpful in assisting me in navigating the École’sarchives. An early version of this article was presented to the conference on ‘Re-imagining Politi-cal Communities in the Mediterranean: Peoples, Nations, and Empires in the Age of DemocraticRevolution’, held at the European Institute, Columbia University, New York, in 2013. I wouldlike to thank Joanna Innes and Mark Philp for inviting me to present my ideas there and for fur-nishing, through the Re-Imagining Democracy in the Mediterranean network, a wonderfully openand enlightening forum for discussion and reflection.

Funding

Funding has been provided by the British Academy (Grant number SG101903) and theFaculty of History, University of Oxford. In these times of budget constraints, theirassistance was warmly welcomed and made research for this article possible.

Notes1. Barrault’s prediction highlighted what Henri de Saint-Simon had repeatedly stressed from

the first of his 1802 Lettres d’un habitant de Gèneve, and further developed in his 1813Mémoire sur la science de l’homme and his Travail sur la gravitation universelle (1813), ashistory’s progressive driving force, the dynamic tension and principle of antagonism, thatpropelled it forward, and that was subsumed under what Saint-Simon first called ‘la loi dela pesanteur universelle’ – later described as ‘la loi de la gravitation universelle’ – a lawthat, once understood, made possible ‘the prediction of all successive changes that willarrive in the universe’. Saint-Simon, Lettres d’un habitant de Genève. Seconde Lettre, 128.All translations are my own.

2. Barrault, “L’Orient et l’Occident,” 94.3. Musso’s edition of the Système de la Méditerranée includes only those four articles. Walch’s

re-issuing of the Système merely reprinted the fourth of those articles. See Musso, Le Saint-Simonisme; Walch, “Problèmes Saint-Simoniens.”

4. Only two books have been written about him: Walch, Michel Chevalier; Taricone, Il Sansi-moniano Michel Chevalier. The number of articles that treat his life and work can becounted on the fingers of two hands: Blanchard, “Le Journal”; Dunham, “Michel Cheva-lier”; Duroselle, “Michel Chevalier”; Schuhl, “Michel Chevalier”; Walch, “Michel Chevalieret la puissance productive”; Jennings, “Democracy before Tocqueville”; Drolet, “Industry,Class and Society”; Todd, “Transnational Projects.”

5. In 1820, he was awarded the sole prize for the course in mathematics. Two years later, hewas awarded the only prize in the sciences, and three first prizes of letters in the class ofphilosophy. Orabona, “Michel Chevalier.” See also Hugon, “L’économiste limousin,” 144;and Leroy-Beaulieu, “Les propriétaires de Monplaisir.”

6. École Royale Polytechnique, année scolaire 1823–1824 and année scolaire 1824–1825,“Registre de l’instruction,” Archives de Ecole Polytechnique X IIc 7; and École RoyalePolytechnique, “Registre des notes,” Année Scolaire 1823–1824 and Année Scolaire1824–1825, X IIc 8.

7. Archives de École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, Registre matricule, 1825. Seealso Archives Nationales de France, F/14/2718/1, Folio 99.

8. He held the title Conseiller d’État en Service Extraordinaire. ANF F/14/2718/1, Folio 99.9. See, for example, Chevalier, “Note sur les richesses de la Bohéme”; Chevalier, La Républi-

que d’Andorre; Chevalier, La science; Chevalier, L’Isthme de Panama; Chevalier, Tunnelsous-marin.

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10. Chevalier, Cours d’économie politique.11. The definitive work on this treaty is Dunham, Anglo-French Treaty. See too the important

correspondence between Chevalier and Richard Cobden, especially Howe and Morgan,Letters of Richard Cobden, vols 3 and 4.

12. On early- to mid-eighteenth-century French scientific and cultural representations of theMediterranean, see Armstrong, “Travel and Experience.”

13. See Baker, Condorcet.14. Laissus, L’Egypte.15. Englund, Napoleon, 127.16. Bourguet, et al., Enquêtes en Méditerranée; Sessions, By Sword and Plow.17. Isabella, “Liberalism and Empires,” 235.18. Régnier, Les Saint-Simoniens en Egypte, 9.19. Some converted to Islam, most notably Thomas-Ismayl Urban. On Urban, see ibid., 133–4.20. Fonds Enfantin, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 7643. Cited in Picon, “L’Orient Saint-Simo-

nien,” 229.21. Picon, “L’Orient Saint-Simonien,” 230. It was for this reason that a number of Saint-Simo-

nians and many other romantic socialists, including Charles Fourier and his followers, wererelatively unperturbed by the French invasion of Algeria. Fourier positively welcomed it.Margot, “Les premiers socialistes.”

22. Welch, Liberty and Utility; Whatmore, Republicanism.23. Régnier, Les Saint-Simoniens en Egypte, vii; Pilbeam, Saint-Simonianism, ch. 6.24. Cited in Régnier, Les Saint-Simoniens en Egypte, 10.25. Chevalier, ‘Politique générale’, 126.26. Chevalier’s vision for the Mediterranean – and of France and Europe’s position in relation

to it – was poles apart from much of European opinion. It departed radically from a shortessay that appeared in 1833 by one of Chevalier’s exact contemporaries, Alexis de Toc-queville. His Some Ideas About What Prevents the French from Having Good Coloniesmade a Smithian case for France to follow a British commercial model in the establishmentand governance of her colonies. Tocqueville never repudiated colonialism as such, and hisviews were expressed in numerous pamphlets and reports on Algeria, which appeared inthe late 1830s and early 1840s. Tocqueville, Oeuvres, vol. 3, pt. 1.

27. The significance of this was highlighted by Gustave d’Eichtal in an unpublished assessmentthat he wrote sometime around 1837 of Chevalier’s system. MST IV S, Fonds Gustaved’Eichtal, Bibliothèque Thiers.

28. It leaves out five others by Chevalier, and the four by Flachat, Duveyrier and Fournel.29. Figeac, “La géopolitique.”30. Walch, “Problèmes Saint-Simoniens,” 421.31. This was the line between Andrézieux to St Etienne. Chevalier visited it sometime in Octo-

ber or November 1829, and described it in “Observations sur les mines de Mons.”32. Cited in d’Allemagne, Les Saint-Simoniens, 340.33. Chevalier, “Canalisation du Nord-Ouest.”34. Chevalier, Le Mexique ancien et moderne; Chevalier, Tunnel sous-marin; Chevalier,

L’Isthme de Panama.35. Musso, “Introduction,” Le Saint-Simonisme, 9. Musso also stresses that ‘at the moment

when the government accused the Saint-Simonians of having fomented uprisings in Novem-ber in Lyon, Chevalier, with Enfantin’s approval, chose to publish the Système de laMéditerranée. He argues that this work represented a public declaration of a new reformistorientation of the Saint-Simonians, 79.

36. A fourteenth article was promised but never written. See Chevalier, “Politique générale: ‘Lapaix’,” in Musso, Le Saint-Simonisme, 133.

37. Royer-Collard, “22 janvier 1822,” 133. See Innes and Philp, Re-Imagining Democracy.38. See Dijn, French Political Thought, ch. 5.39. Picon, “L’Orient Saint-Simonien,” 231.40. Chevalier, “Politique générale” (5 February), 123.41. Ibid., 120.42. Ibid.43. Ibid., 126–7.44. Chevalier, “Politique générale” (12 February), 129.

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45. For his use of the term ‘Mediterranean confederation’, see ibid., 148.46. Ibid., 131.47. Ibid., 145.48. Ibid. Chevalier discussed these problems at length in his “Observations sur les mines de

Mons.”49. Chevalier, “Politique générale” (12 February), 132.50. Ibid., 133.51. Ibid., 136.52. Chevalier, “Politique d’association”; Chevalier, “Aux hommes politiques,” 34–5, 94.53. Chevalier, Lettres sur l’Amérique, 3.54. Chevalier, “Politique générale” (12 February), 132–3.55. Chevalier, “Politique générale” (5 February), 122.56. Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self; Drolet, “Carrying the Banner of the Bourgeoisie.”57. Chevalier, “Notre politique,” 16.58. Chevalier, “Politique générale” (5 February), 122–3.59. Chevalier maintained this position for the rest of his life. He would be a keen advocate of

Pan-Latinism, seeing France as the centre of an alliance of Latin speaking nations. SeeChevalier, Le Mexique ancien et moderne.

60. Chevalier, “Politique générale” (5 February), 123.61. On the Saint-Simonians in Algeria, see Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity. On

Chevalier’s participation in the Scientific Commission on Mexico, see ANF F/17/2909, andEdison, “Conquest Unrequited.”

62. Chevalier, “Organisation de l’armée industrielle,” 10.63. Ibid., 11.64. Ibid., 12–13. Chevalier witnessed first-hand backward and wasteful industrial practices in

French mining and metallurgy. Unpublished mining reports he wrote as a student in 1827–1828 emphasize just how out of date and dangerous much of French mining and metallurgywas. Chevalier, Journal de voyage 1827; Chevalier Journal de Voyage 1828.

65. Chevalier, “Organisation de l’armée industrielle,” 13.66. This point was highlighted by d’Eichtal. Fonds Gustave d’Eichtal, MST IV S. Bibliothèque

Thiers.67. The idea of capacity, or aptitude, is analysed in detail by Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot,

parts 3 and 4.68. Chevalier, “Notre politique,” 16.69. Chevalier, “Aux hommes politiques,”, 85.70. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 28, 30.71. .Chevalier, “Aux hommes politiques,” 83.72. Ibid., 91–2.73. See Drolet, “Democracy,” 72–6.74. Some of these poems can be found in Régnier, Le livre nouveau, 237–63.75. Chevalier, Mémoire sur le Gisement.76. Chevalier, “Politique générale” (12 February), 131.

Notes on contributorMichael Drolet teaches the History of Political Thought and Political Theory at WorcesterCollege. His areas of research include 19th and 20th century French political thought. He haswritten extensively on nineteenth-century French liberalism, socialism, and democracy. His bookTocqueville, Democracy and Social Reform (Palgrave, 2003) was a Choice OutstandingAcademic Title for 2004. He has also written on 20th century French philosophy and politicaltheory, and edited The Postmodernism Reader: Foundational Texts (Routledge, 2004).

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