Constantin Pecqueur

Charles Constantin Pecqueur was born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family in the Department du Nord; his town of birth is variously given as Arleux or Douai.

In the 1820s, he entered the Military Teaching Hospital in Lille, where he completed a treatise on education and became interested in utopian socialist theories.

In contrast to these theorists, Pecqueur was one of the earliest French socialists to advocate collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

In contrast to many of his utopian socialist contemporaries, and again anticipating Marx' view, Pecqueur did not see the development of industrial production as predominantly negative.

In 1844, Pecqueur became a regular contributor to the leading democratic newspaper, La Réforme, edited by the left-wing republican Alexandre Ledru-Rollin.

This gave him a wider platform for his ideas and put him in contact with other major republican socialist figures of the period, including the economist Louis Blanc.

Among his colleagues at the Luxembourg Commission were the orthodox liberal economist Pierre Le Play and the Fourierist socialist Victor Considerant.

Pecqueur and Considerant collaborated quite closely and tried unsuccessfully to introduce several reforms, such as collective bargaining and government funding for agricultural colonies, social housing and co-operative workshops.

In 1848–1849, Pecqueur edited the journal Le Salut du People he had founded, devoted to social science and socialist politics.

Proudhon had sharply criticised the work of the Luxembourg Commission and Louis Blanc's role in the bourgeois Provisional Government.

Pecqueur remained a member of the National Assembly until 1852, but after the coup d'état of Louis Bonaparte he largely withdrew from political activity.