Auguste-Richard Lahautière (May 21, 1813 – June 27, 1882) (also known as Richard de la Hautière) was a French socialist, journalist, poet and lawyer.

He is commonly grouped with Théodore Dézamy, Albert Laponneraye, Jean-Jacques Pillot and others as belonging to the Neo-Babouvist tendency in French nineteenth-century socialism, which formed a link from the utopian communism of Gracchus Babeuf to Marxism.

Auguste Richard de la Hautière, who dropped his aristocratic-sounding 'de' and went by 'Richard Lahautière', was born in Paris on 21 May 1813.

In 1828 he won second prize in Latin composition and on that occasion had his portrait painted by the famous Eugène Delacroix.

[1] In 1835 he obtained a law degree and was called to the bar in Paris, but he was by then already more interested in political journalism.

In the 1830s, Lahautière contributed to the journal L'Intelligence and to Albert Laponneraye's Égalité, both devoted to the propagation of socialist, communist and republican ideas.

In 1840 he collaborated with the famous utopian communist Étienne Cabet in writing the pamphlet Boulets Rouges.

His best-known work was probably De la Loi sociale (1841), dedicated to Pierre Leroux.

After the coup d'état of Louis Bonaparte in December 1851, Lahautière withdrew from politics and moved to Blois, where he practised law and published poetry.

In his writings Lahautière combined republicanism and communism with a kind of holistic metaphysical materialism and a rudimentary class analysis of history.