This deeply seated movement lasted till July, 1794, when the bourgeois reaction of the Girondists, combining with the Monarchists, to@k the upper hand. But it was this movement which gave to the nineteenth century its specific character—the Communist and Socialist tendency of its advanced elements.
So long as that movement lasted, it found several spokesmen from among the people. But amongst the writers of the period there was none who would have been able to give a literary expression to its aspirations and foundations, and to advocate it in such a way as to produce a lasting impression upon the minds of his contemporaries.
It was only in 1793, in England, that William Godwin brought out his truly remarkable work: "An Enquiry into Political Justice and its Influence on Public Morality," which made him the first theoriser of Socialism without government—that is to say, of Anarchism; while Babeuf, aided and perhaps inspired by Buonarotti, came forward, in 1796, as the first theoriser of centralised Socialism, i.e., of State Socialism.
Later on, developing the principles already put forth at the end of the preceding century by the people of France, came Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen—the three founders of modern Socialism, representing its three principal schools; and later on, in the "forties," we have Proudhon, who, without knowing Godwin's work, laid anew the foundations of Anarchism.
The scientific basis of Socialism under both aspects, governmental and anti-governmental, was thus elaborated from the beginning of the nineteenth century with a wonderful richness of development. Unfortunately, this is too much ignored by our contemporaries. But the reality is that modern Socialism, which dates from the International Working Men's Association, founded in 1864, has outdistanced its founders by two points only—both, no doubt, quite essential. Modern Socialism has declared that its aims can only be brought into life by a social revolution—which Fourier, Saint-Simon and Robert Owen did not wish or dare to say; and it has completely broken with the conception of "Christ being a Socialist and revolutionist," which was so often paraded before 1848.
Modern Socialism has understood that to realise its aspirations a social revolution is absolutely necessary, not in the sense in which the word "revolution" is made use of when an "industrial revolution" or a "revolution in science" is spoken of, but in its exact concrete meaning: that of a general and sudden reconstruction of the foundations themselves of society. Moreover,
