Socialist vicissitudes on the right to work in France, 1848–1851

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the different meanings given to the ‘right to work’ during the French Second Republic (1848–51). Although liberals painted all demands for this right with the same ‘socialist’ brush, denouncing them as vague and dangerously utopian, calls for this right were neither vague nor exclusively socialist. Those espousing the right to work held concrete, if differing, views about what duties it entailed and what its relation was to private property, political rights and the role of the state. This essay examines the views of socialists, non-socialist and labour associations on the right to work, examining how they changed in the course of the Revolution of 1848. As faith waned in the state’s willingness and ability to secure it, so, too, did preoccupations with the right to work, which gave way increasingly to associationalism. The right would not become constitutional until the Fourth Republic.