Philippe Buchez

He was the founder of the newspaper L'Atelier, and he served briefly, in 1848, as the president of the Constituent National Assembly, which was then meeting at the Palais Bourbon in Paris.

In 1821, he co-operated with Amand Bazard, Jacques-Thomas Flotard, and others to found a secret association, La Charbonnerie, modeled on the Italian Carbonari, with the object of launching an armed insurrection against the French government.

About the same time, he became a member of the Saint-Simonian Society, presided over by Bazard, Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin, and Olinde Rodrigues.

Buchez also contributed to its organ, the Producteur, but he left this group because of the strange religious ideas of its "Supreme Father," Enfantin.

The part that describes the aim, foundation, and methods of the science of history is valuable; but what is most distinctive in Buchez's theory is the division of historical development into four great epochs originated by four universal revelations, of each epoch into three periods corresponding to desire, reasoning, and performance — and of each of these periods into a theoretical and practical age — is merely ingenious (see Flint's Philosophy of History in Europe, i.

In the same fashion, Buchez had assisted, in September 1840, in the appropriation of the worker-owned and worker-operated newspaper, L'Atelier ("The Workshop"), a publication that was, at once, utopian, socialist, and Christian.

Partly owing to the reputation he acquired by these publications but more to his connection with the National newspaper and secret societies hostile to the government of Louis-Philippe, the French Revolution of 1848 raised him to the presidency of the Constituent Assembly.

[2] When the revolution of 1848 began on 24 February, Buchez, as a captain in the National Guard, took his unit to the Tuileries, where they witnessed the flight of Louis-Philippe.

Tocqueville in his Recollections described this day, disdainfully recalling Buchez's conduct: "Buchez" he wrote, "the president, whom some would make out to be a rascal and others a saint, but who, on that day, was a great blockhead, rang his bell with all his might to obtain silence, as though the silence of that multitude was not, under the circumstances, more to be dreaded than its cries."