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"Humanitarian" (humanitaire) came into use in French contemporaneously with the emergence of romantic socialism, and in the context of the rebuilding of post-revolutionary French society and its overseas empire beginning in the 1830s. This article excavates this early idea of humanitarianism, documenting an alternative genealogy for the term and its significance that has been overlooked by scholars of both socialism and humanitarianism. This humanitarianism identified a collective humanity as the source of its own salvation, rather than an external, well-meaning benefactor. Unlike liberal models of advocacy, which invoked individualized actors and recipients of their care, socialists privileged solidarity within their community and rejected the foundational logic of liberal individualism. In tracing this history, this article considers its importance for contemporary debates about humanitarianism's imperial power dynamics.

During the 1830s and 1840s, romantic socialists in France wrote about three subjugated groups in the French empire: metropolitan workers, slaves in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean colonies, and Algerian civilians. Although these three groups ostensibly shared similar conditions of deprivation and violent treatment at the hands of the French state, socialists depicted them in importantly different terms, with the effect of humanizing workers and slaves, while dehumanizing the Algerians suffering French conquest and colonization. This article explores these presentations and examines the way they worked together to champion the socialist priority, the emergent working classes of the July Monarchy, and to indirectly endorse the settler colonial project in Algeria.

In 1846, the romantic socialist Désiré Laverdant observed that although Great Britain had rightly broken the ties binding masters and slaves, "in delivering the slave from the yoke, it has thrown him, poor brute, into isolation and abandonment. Liberal Europe thinks it has finished its work because it has divided everyone." Freeing the slaves, he thus suggested, was only the beginning of emancipation. Laverdant's comment reflects a broader political conversation about the individual and society that was ongoing in France during the 1830s and 1840s in which the issues of colonial slavery, metropolitan wage labor, and imperial expansion in Algeria were intertwined.

The disappointment of feminist aspirations in 1848 nevertheless demands more thoroughgoing explanation than its impracticality in politically charged times. We must not lose track of the fact that during the July Monarchy a truly remarkable intellectual revolution took place. For the shy twenty years of Louis Philippe's reign the formerly unthinkable became relatively commonplace: women's equality came to be a central tenet of the most avant-garde intellectual and political movement of the day, romantic socialism. Given its integral importance to the earliest pronouncements of socialist philosophy, the totality of feminism's neglect during the moment of political opportunity afforded to socialism by the events of 1848 is, indeed, surprising. In fact, there are two phenomena that require explication: Before it could be neglected in 1848, feminism had to be seen as a possibility in the first place. Addressing these issues begins with questions: what made feminism thinkable in the early days of the 1830s, and what forces then rendered it untenable in 1848? 11 This book begins addressing these questions by looking not at the feminism of the socialist movement, but at the terms in which romantic socialist doctrine itself was defined. It is my argument that both the possibility and the disavowal of women's social and political equality were rooted in the gendered understanding of the individual and of society through which socialism launched its critique. Beginning from this perspective, I argue that the feminism that emerged within the socialist world view was made plausible not by any special adherence to women's equality, but rather by the deployment of an idealized notion of womanhood itself, one that was intimately connected to the vision of the good society espoused. 12 Socialists rejected a world in which the struggle for existence was engaged by atomized, isolated creatures, "rapacious wolves" in Pierre Leroux's language, and embraced a more harmonious vision of human reality, one rooted in cooperation and in common sense purpose and identity. 13 Women in early socialism came to stand as the antithesis of all that socialists despised in their contemporary world, and as the symbol of that to which they aspired. By definition an outsider to the corrupt realm of the public sphere, woman came to symbolize an alternative to that competitive terrain. Socialists exalted this alternative in quasi-religious terms, and in the process came to espouse something that looked very like feminism to both contemporary and retrospective eyes. But of course all of this was taking place during the July Monarchy, a period during which socialists increasingly saw the political realm as sterile and inaccessible. Woman's place in a republican political order was not particularly relevant to the socialist critics of the prevailing bourgeois one. It was only when socialists and republicans redefined the political realm on their own terms, in the spring of 1948, that women's political rights really came to be a possibility and thus a point of contention.

In a certain respect, nineteenth-century intellectual and political history is the story of the liberal individual and his foes. From conservative Christian thinkers to Socialists to Communists, French intellectuals of the first part of the century were engaged in one long conversation about the individual and his (and later, her) rights, responsibilities, and relationship to society. This conversation was not narrow or singular, as it engaged questions of economic equality, political rights and participation, and gender equity and equality. Socialists of the pre-Marx generation in particular articulated their critique of capitalism and the politics it spawned through their analysis of individualism. These critiques were both explicit and metaphorical. One theme in particular stands out as both puzzling and recurring in the writings of French thinkers throughout the century: androgyny.

Among the many strands of political and intellectual dissidence during the July Monarchy, socialism and feminism must be counted as two of the most ephemeral and, paradoxically, the most enduring. Romantic socialism of the 1830s and 1840s saw a profusion of fantastical aspirations crushed by the failure of the revolution of 1848, and the brief flowering of feminism during the period was cut short by the social and political repression of the Second Empire. Their influence is still felt, though these original incarnations were short lived. For the duration of the July Monarchy and the Second Republic, however, both socialism in its romantic or "utopian" form and the feminism that it helped to produce engaged in a collaborative project to remake French society, and indeed, if their propagandists are to be believed, to remake all of human reality.

It was during the July Monarchy in France, in the era immediately preceding the Revolution of 1848, that the ideology we call socialism became more than an abstraction held by isolated intellectuals and conspirators. A series of individuals, loose-knit associations, and more formal écoles were active during the 1830s and 1840s, developing a varied agenda of social reform, economic cooperation, or association, mystical Christianity, and women's liberation. Roughly lumped under the pejorative rubric of utopian socialism, and perhaps more accurately called romantic socialism, this movement was ultimately unsuccessful in achieving its diverse goals, but contributed significantly to the political discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Gavin Murray-Miller, The Cult of the Modern: Trans-Mediterranean France
and the Construction of French Modernity (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2017).John Murphy, Yearning to Labor: Youth, Unemployment, and Social Destiny in
Urban France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).

Silyane Larcher, L'Autre Citoyen: L'idéal républicain et les Antilles après l'esclavage (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014).Elizabeth Heath, Wine, Sugar, and the Making of Modern France: Global Economic Crisis and the Racialization of French Citizenship, 1870–1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).Rebecca Scales, Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).Claire Zalc, Dénaturalisés: Les retraits de nationalité sous Vichy (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2016).Bertram M. Gordon, War Tourism: Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018).Shannon L. Fogg, Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).Sarah Fishman, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).Jessica Lynne Pearson, The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). Darcie Fontaine, Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).