III.

No doubt some of the men who signed this document only half believed that the experiment would be successful, and after its failure declared that they knew all along that it was hopeless. No one, however, who reads the records of the Revolution of 1848, and notes how greatly charged the air was with Socialism, can doubt that the Government as a whole were genuinely determined to give the Socialistic principle a fair trial, and that many of them, and especially those charged with the conduct of the workshops, at whose head was Louis Blanc, a convinced Socialist, entertained the highest hopes of success. Even Lamartine, who in 1844 wrote that the best governments were those that did not interfere with liberty of action in industrial affairs, signed the Decree, and for the time plunged deep into Collectivism. That the experiment was Edition: current; Page: [90] fairly made, and that there was no determination, conscious or unconscious, to show that the national workshops were a piece of Utopia, is clear from the account of the undertaking written by M. Émile Thomas, their director and president, and published only a month or two after the collapse. M. Émile Thomas was a practical man of business, who was entrusted with the superintendence of the work by the Government. Though not a Socialist by conviction, it is clear that he did everything in his power to 'run' the workshops successfully, and that if any one could have organized them into efficiency it was he. That, at any rate, is the impression which I believe will be produced upon any one who reads the Histoire des Ateliers Nationaux considérés sous le double point de vue politique et social; des causes de leur formation et de leur existence; et de l'influence qu'ils ont exercée sur les événements des quatres premiers mois de la Republique suivi des pièces justificatives. Par Émile Thomas. Paris: Michel Levy Frères, 1848. The proof that Thomas did his best for the workshops is to be found in the fact that Louis Blanc, armed with virtually absolute powers, superintended the undertaking, and could, if he had thought the work was being mismanaged, have dismissed Thomas. Perhaps, however, the best way of showing the bona fide character of the experiment is to describe the actual organization of the workshops and to note what they accomplished. In doing so I shall adopt, with some slight alterations, dictated by the desire to economize space, the account given by Mr. Nassau Senior in an essay in the Edinburgh Review, since republished by his daughter, Mrs. Simpson ('Journals kept in France and Italy:' H. S. King and Co., 1871). It must be remembered that Senior visited Paris directly after the Revolution, that he was on terms of intimacy with many of the men who were responsible for the Ateliers Nationaux, and that he had talked with those who had seen the workshops in full swing. In a word, he is a firsthand authority on a subject in which he took a profound interest. The actual details of his account are drawn directly from Thomas's book, which is primarily a reprint of the official documents.

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