Page:The Conquest of Bread (1906).djvu/19

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PREFACE
xiii

finally the Napoleonian coup d'état followed. The Socialists were prosecuted with fury, and the weeding out was so terrible and so thorough that for the next twelve or fifteen years the very traces of Socialism disappeared; its literature vanished so completely that even names, once so familiar before 1848, were entirely forgotten; ideas which were then current—the stock ideas of the Socialists before 1848—were wiped out of the memories and were taken, later on, by the present generation, for new discoveries.

However, when a new revival came, about 1866, when Communism and Collectivism once more came forward, the conception as to the means of their realization had undergone a deep change. The old faith in Political Democracy was gone, and the first principles upon which the Paris working-men agreed with the British trade-unionists and Owenites, when they met in 1866 at London, was that "the emancipation of the working-men must be accomplished by the working-men themselves." Upon another point they also fell in. It was that the labour unions themselves would have to get hold of the instruments of production, and organize production themselves. The French idea of the Fourierist and Mutualist "Association" thus joined hands with Robert Owen's idea of "The Great Consolidated Trades' Union," which was extended now, so as to become an International Working-men's Association.

Again this new revival of Socialism lasted but a few years. Soon came the war of 1870–71, the