Comte de Saint-Simon

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Henri de Saint-Simon, lithograph by L. Deymaru, 19th century (credit: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

(born Oct. 17, 1760, Paris, France — died May 19, 1825, Paris) French social theorist. He joined the French army at age 17 and was sent to aid the colonists in the American Revolution. After his return to France (1783), he made a fortune in land speculation but gradually dissipated it. He turned to the study of science and technology as the solution to society's problems and wrote "On the Reorganization of European Society" (1814) and (with Auguste Comte) "Industry" (1816 – 18), in which he envisioned an industrialized state directed by modern science. In New Christianity (1825), he stated that religion should guide society toward improving life for the poor. His disciples helped influence the rise of Christian socialism.

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The French social philosopher and reformer Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), was one of the founders of modern industrial socialism and evolutionary sociology.

The Comte de Saint-Simon was born in Paris to the poorer side of a prominent noble family. From childhood on he was filled with great ambitions that took him on many different paths. First commissioned into the army at 17, he served 4 years, during which he fought with some distinction in the American Revolution.

On his return to Europe, Saint-Simon tried a series of bold commercial ventures but had limited success before the French Revolution. During the Terror of 1793-1794 he was imprisoned for a year and barely escaped execution. This experience left him deeply opposed to revolutionary violence. After his release, for a short time he obtained a sizable fortune by speculating in confiscated properties, which he spent on a lavish Paris salon that attracted many intellectual and government leaders. But his funds were soon exhausted, and he lived his remaining years in constant financial difficulties.

In 1802 Saint-Simon turned to a new career as writer and reformer. In numerous essays and brochures written during the chaotic years of Napoleon's rule and the Bourbon restoration that followed, he developed a broad-ranging program for the reorganization of Europe. Although many of its ideas were commonplace, his program is distinctive for its blending of Enlightenment ideals, the more practical materialism of the rising bourgeoisie, and the emphasis on spiritual unity of restorationists.

All three strands are joined in Saint-Simon's evolutionary view of history - as a determined progression from one stable form of civilization to another - which gave his program a distinctive rationale. Each higher form was thought to be based on more advanced "spiritual" as well as "temporal" (that is, political-economic) principles, reflecting a more general process of cultural enlightenment. But each in turn also is destined to become obsolete as further cultural progress occurs.

Saint-Simon argued that all of Europe had been in a transitional crisis since the 15th century, when the established medieval order (based on feudalism and Catholicism) began to give way to a new system founded on industry and science. He wrote as the new system's advocate, urging influential leaders to hasten its inception as the only way to restore stability. In this he was one of the first ameliorators to argue for reform as an evolutionary necessity.

Saint-Simon's earlier writings, during Napoleon's reign (Introduction aux travaux scientifiques du XIX sie‧cle, 1807-1808; and Mémoire sur la science de l'homme, 1813), stress the spiritual side of the transitional crisis. He argued that disorder was rampant because theistic Roman Catholicism, the spiritual basis of medieval society, was being undermined by the rise of science and secular philosophies. Although the trend was inevitable, Saint-Simon was highly critical of many scientists and intellectuals for their "negativism" in breaking down an established creed without providing a replacement. Instead, he called for the creation of an integrative social science, grounded in biology, to help establish a new "positive" credo for secular man in the emerging social order. This "positivistic" notion was developed by his one-time disciple Auguste Comte.

After Napoleon's downfall Saint-Simon shifted his attention from the ideology of the new system to its temporal structure and policies in a series of periodicals: L'Industrie (1816-1818); La Politique (1819); L'Organisateur (1819-1820); and Du Syste‧me industriel (1821-1822). These contain his main socialist writings, but his doctrines often are closer to venture capitalism and technocracy than to Marxism or primitive communalism. Saint-Simon's future society is above all one of productive achievement in which poverty and war are eliminated through large-scale "industrialization" (a word he coined) under planned scientific guidance. It is an open-class society in which caste privileges are abolished, work is provided for all, and rewards are based on merit. Government also changes from a haphazard system of class domination and national rivalries to a planned welfare state run by scientific managers in the public interest.

Saint-Simon's final work, Le Nouveau Christianisme (1825), inspired a Christian socialist movement called the Saint-Simonians, who were devoted to a secular gospel of economic progress and human brotherhood. After his death, his ideas were reworked by followers into the famous Doctrine de Saint-Simon (1829). This was the first systematic exposition of industrial socialism, and it had great influence on the Social Democratic movement, Catholic reforms, and Marxism.

Further Reading

F. M. H. Markham edited and translated Selected Writings of Saint-Simon (1952). The best account of Saint-Simon's life and work is Frank E. Manuel, The New World of Henri Saint-Simon (1956). Other accounts include Mathurin M. Dondo, The French Faust: Henri de Saint-Simon (1955), and the section on Saint-Simon in Manuel's The Prophets of Paris (1962). For his place in socialist thought see volume 1 of G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought (1953).

(1760-1825) A founding father of both modern social science and socialism, and an important figure in nineteenth-century utopianism. He was concerned mainly with the causes and consequences of social and political upheaval in the age of the French Revolution, and sought to address the complex questions of the future direction of European society in the aftermath of the collapse of feudalism and the old monarchical, aristocratic, and Roman Catholic structures of the eighteenth century. His originality lay in his emphasis on the modernizing forces of science, industry, and technological innovation, and he spent the last twenty-five years of his life trying to convince his contemporaries of the need to adapt social and political systems to those new forces.

Saint-Simon's disciples, after his death, used the idea of ‘socialism’ to denote the collectivist orientation of his mature thought. Most nineteenth-century socialist thinkers—including Marx—drew inspiration from his teachings.

Saint-Simon's attempts to found a scientific study of man and society were rooted in the rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment, and led towards positivism through the link with Auguste Comte, who worked as Saint-Simon's assistant in the early 1820s. Both Saint-Simon and Comte emphasized the importance of religion as a source of social integration, and tended—in the manner of many French social theorists of the nineteenth century—to work towards a reconciliation of modern scientific-rational thought and the religious order. Thus, in Saint-Simon's last and most influential work, Nouveau Christianisme (New Christianity, 1825), the emphasis was on the ethical and essentially Christian principles of social reform in the name of greater equality and social justice for the working classes.

— Keith Taylor

Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de (1760-1825). French social thinker. Of a collateral branch of the family of the 17th-c. duke [see below], Saint-Simon fought in the American War of Independence. He made money during the Revolution by speculation, but experienced real poverty during much of his later life. His Lettres d'un habitant de Genève (1802-3) contain in germ many of his later ideas, but between 1802 and 1814 his mental health was not of the best. Under the Restoration he published extensively, often in periodicals, and only in his last days produced his two major works, Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles and Le Nouveau Christianisme (both 1825). Augustin Thierry and later Auguste Comte served as his secretaries.

Saint-Simon turned the triad of human faculties described by the anatomist Bichat (thought, action, feeling) into a triple categorization of men: scientists, industrialists-workers, and artists-priests. If at first he gave pre-eminence to the scientists, later he proposed that it was the artists who created social unity and initiated progress; the scientists evaluated and criticized, the worker-industrialists executed. Rejecting both egotism and egalitarianism, he proposed rather that all should be able to express their aptitudes to the fullest, thus increasing productivity. Nature, rather than fellow man, was to become the object of aggression and conquest. He read history as an alternation between synthetic (or organic) and particular (or analytic) phases, and thought that his theories would lead mankind to a new organic age based on the full realization of the eternal Christian moral principle of fraternity, all the while emphasizing the importance of technical progress and of governmental encouragement of science and indistry.

His disciples were known as Saint-Simonians, the more extreme of whom pursued a picturesque evolution. Led by Prosper (Père) Enfantin, they demanded the emancipation of women and the rehabilitation of matter and of the flesh, creating a new religion including an androgynous definition of God and a quest for the female Messiah, and forming a Utopian community at Ménilmontant [see Feminism, 2]. In 1832 they were tried for immorality, and successfully turned the trial into a major public event. In later years various members of the group, including Michel Chevalier, exercised considerable influence, and Napoleon III shared many of their convictions.

[Frank Paul Bowman]

Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy (1760-1825) French social philosopher and founding father of socialism. After considerable political activity during the French revolution, Saint-Simon founded the journal L'Industrie. His experience in the revolution led him to perceive that the general optimism of the Enlightenment needed a deeper understanding of the historical and social conditions of society if durable change for the better was to be produced. Saint-Simon was the first to see that it was the economically based conflict of classes that led to the ruin of the feudal system of government, and of the ecclesiastical world view. His particular target was the class of useless bureaucrats, idlers and wastrels whom he contrasted unfavourably with the men of industry in whose hands the future would and should lie. Saint-Simon was a seminal influence on Comte (who was his secretary) and above all on Marx.

One of the most celebrated mystic adventurers in history. Like Cagliostro and others of his kind, little is known concerning Saint Germain's origin, but there is reason to believe that he was a Portuguese Jew. There were claims that he was of royal birth, but these have never been substantiated.

It is fairly certain that he was an accomplished spy, for he resided at many European courts, spoke and wrote various languages, including Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, English, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, and was even sent upon diplomatic missions by Louis XV. Horace Walpole mentioned him being in London about 1743 and being arrested as a Jacobite spy, but later being released.

Walpole wrote: "He is called an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole, a somebody who married a great fortune in Mexico and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople, a priest, a fiddler, a vast nobleman. The Prince of Wales has had unsatiated curiosity about him, but in vain. However, nothing has been made out against him; he is released, and, what convinces me he is not a gentleman, stays here, and talks of his being taken up as a spy."

Saint Germain claimed to have lived for centuries and to have known Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, and many other persons of antiquity. Although regarded as a charlatan, the accomplishments upon which he based his reputation were in many ways real and considerable. He was alluded to by Baron Friedrich Melchior Grimm as the most capable and able man he had ever known. He was a composer of music and a capable performer on the violin.

This was especially the case regarding chemistry (or alchemy), a science in which he was certainly adept. He claimed to have a secret for removing the flaws from diamonds, to be able to transmute metals, and to possess the secret of the elixir of life.

Five years after this London experience, Saint Germain attached himself to the court of Louis XV, where he exercised considerable influence over the monarch and was employed on several secret missions. He was much sought after and discussed, since at this time Europe was fascinated by the occult, and Saint Germain combined mystical conversation with a pleasing, flippant character, he was extremely popular. But he ruined his chances at the French court by interfering in a dispute between Austria and France, and he was forced to leave for England.

He resided in London for one or two years, but in 1762 was in St. Petersburg, where he is said to have assisted in the conspiracy that placed Catherine II on the Russian throne. After this he traveled in Germany, where he was reported in the Memoirs of Cagliostro to have become the founder of Freemasonry, and to have initiated Cagliostro into that rite. If Cagliostro's account can be credited, Saint Germain set about the business with remarkable splendor and bombast, posing as a "deity" and behaving in a manner calculated to delight pseudo-mystics of the age.

Saint Germain died at Schleswig, Germany, somewhere between the years 1780 and 1785, but the exact date of his death and its circumstances are unknown.

Assessing Saint Germain's Career

It would be difficult to say whether Saint Germain really possessed genuine occult power. A great many people of his own time thoroughly believed in him, but we must also remember the credulous nature of the age in which he flourished. It has been said that eighteenth-century Europe was skeptical regarding everything except occultism and its professors.

Saint Germain possessed a magnificent collection of precious stones, which some considered to be artificial, but others believed to be genuine. He presented Louis XV with a diamond worth 10,000 livres (a livre is an old French monetary unit).

All sorts of stories were in circulation concerning Saint Germain. One old lady professed to have encountered him at Venice fifty years before, posing as a man of sixty, and even his valet was supposed to have discovered the secret of immortality. On one occasion a visitor teased this man, asking if he had been present at the marriage of Cana in Galilee. "You forget, sir," was the reply, "I have only been in the Comte's service a century."

Legend has it that Saint Germain made various appearances after his death. He is said to have appeared to Marie Antoinette and to other individuals during the French Revolution. He was also believed to have been one of the Rosicrucians, from whom he obtained his occult knowledge.

The deathless count was also resurrected in modern times by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky as one of the masters of the Great White Brotherhood, and he thus became an important figure in all of the more than a hundred theosophical splinter groups now active. Guy W. Ballard claimed that Saint Germain had appeared to him at Mt. Shasta, California, and from Saint Germain's teachings, Ballard built the I Am Movement. The centrality of Saint Germain has been common to all "I Am"related groups such as the Bridge to Spiritual Freedom and the Church Universal and Triumphant. Within the New Age movement, a number of psychics have emerged channeling an entity called Saint Germain. In the 1970s, author Chelsea Quinn Yarbro drew on the Saint Germain story to begin production of a series of novels and short stories that describe the mysterious count as a vampire. The novels helped begin the current popular interest in the vampire as hero.

Sources:

Cooper-Oakley, Isabel. The Comte de Saint-Germain. New York: S. Weiser, 1970.

King, Godfre Ray [Guy Ballard]. Unveiled Mysteries. Chicago: Saint Germain Press, 1934.

Lang, Andrew. Historical Mysteries. London: Smith, Elder, 1904.

Prophet, Elizabeth Clare. Saint Germain on Prophecy. Livingston, Mont.: Summit University Press, 1986.

Prophet, Mark L., and Elizabeth Clare Prophet. Saint Germain on Alchemy. Livingston, N.Y.: Summit University Press, 1962.

Seligmann, Kurt. Magic, Supernaturalism, and Religion. New York: Pantheon Press, 1971.

Wraxall, Lascelles. Remarkable Adventurers and Unrevealed Mysteries. 2 vols. London, 1863.

Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn. The Vampire Stories of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. White Rock, BC: Transylvania Press, 1994.