| This dissertation explores French attempts to overcome tensions between democracy and capitalism in the early twentieth century. Based on extensive research in organizational records, personal papers and rare publications, the study examines an overlapping network of social scientists, reformers and critics involved in the French Association for Social Progress; the Nimes School of consumer cooperation; and the Centre de Documentation Sociale, a social research center affiliated with the University of Paris from the early 1920s until the collaborationist Vichy regime shut it down during the Second World War. Unlike many of their contemporaries whose faith in progress collapsed in the trenches of the Western Front, the figures explored here remained buoyant about the prospects for "social progress," I argue, because of their attachment to traditions of French thought dating back to the Enlightenment and the post-revolutionary writings of social thinkers long derided as utopian, including Saint-Simon, Fourier and Proudhon.; Because the project of social progress explored here encompassed much more than the social insurance and family policies that would later become institutionalized in the postwar system of social security, this study departs from the dominant historiography of the last quarter century, which has viewed the history of social reform within a narrative about the "origins" and "rise of the welfare state." Rather than reducing these actors to players in a drama whose end has been written in advance, I interpret them as contributors to a much longer history of modern democracy's unfinished elaboration and as the "servants of social progress" they believed themselves to have been, within the cultural and social worlds they concretely inhabited. Although the crisis decade of the 1930s, with the Great Depression and the coming of the Second World War, would divide and disillusion these French reformers, disrupt their associations, and ultimately shake their faith in progress, recovering their lost world of social reform provides a useful historical perspective on persisting antagonisms between democratic politics and competitive market relations, both in France and beyond. |
