Did you know that one of the thinkers of socialism lived in Creuse? More precisely in Boussac in the 19th century. His name is Pierre Leroux and his name is much less known than that of Jean Jaurès for example. Yet he was also a great man: philosopher, then mayor of Boussac and deputy for Creuse. Boussac paid tribute to him this Saturday, December 11 for the 150 years of his death.
Come to Creuse thanks to George Sand
Born in 1797 into a modest Parisian family, Pierre Leroux completed brilliant studies which opened the door to the Ecole Polytechnique. He gave it up, however, in order to provide for his family. He became a mason then a typographer in a printing house. In 1830, he joined the Saint-Simonian movement and invented the term “socialism”, which reconciles freedom and equality.
He met George Sand in 1835 and she invited him to Creuse. He moved to Boussac to create a printing house in 1845. At the same time, he founded a socialist community, a sort of phalanstery, which numbered eighty people. They work in the printing press but also at school and on a farm that applies the principles that are now called permaculture.
An avant-garde thinker
“The social magazine they printed was distributed all over Europe, underlines Laurent Beaufils, actor from Boussac and passionate about history. We know that they were braced for equal pay. Women had the same salaries and writing or speaking rights as men, while at the time women did not have the right to vote. They had faith in this pioneering experience, despite the monarchy, of achieving their Republic and their socialism. “
The 150th anniversary of his death was the opportunity to bring it out of oblivion for the mayor of Boussac Franck Foulon: “It’s a way of rehabilitating him and showing that he was avant-garde. He had already anticipated equality between men and women.” Pierre Leroux was also an ecologist … original, says Armelle Le Bras-Chopard, professor emeritus of political science and author of numerous books on him: “He is against what today we would call waste. He invents the circulus, that is, the use of human fertilizer to fertilize soils. “ At the time, everyone laughed at this idea, but the word circulus would become decades later … the circular economy!
Pierre Leroux is elected mayor of Boussac following the Revolution of 1848, then deputy for Creuse. Fiercely republican, he opposes the policy of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte whose authoritarian drift he senses. He went into exile after the 1851 coup d’état in London and then on the island of Jersey. He returned to France in 1860 after the amnesty law. He died in 1871.