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 Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow 387.: LECHEVALIER'S DECLARATION SPECTATOR, 8 DEC., 1849, P. 1165 - The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV

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Subject Area: Political Theory
Collection: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill

387.: LECHEVALIER’S DECLARATION SPECTATOR, 8 DEC., 1849, P. 1165 - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV [1847]

Edition used:

The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.

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Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


387.

LECHEVALIER’S DECLARATION

SPECTATOR, 8 DEC., 1849, P. 1165

André Louis Jules Lechevalier (1800-50) was an economist and journalist, an ardent follower of Victor Considérant and the school of Charles Fourier. On the strength of his experiences in the French colonies, he became Colonial Secretary (1843). His ideas on the emancipation of the blacks were proposed in his Rapport sur les questions coloniales, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1843-44). On 13 June, 1849, Lechevalier had taken part in protests against armed intervention by French troops in the siege of Rome. The government imposed martial law; the offices of the Tribune des Peuples, of which Lechevalier was then an editor, were closed, and three of his fellow editors were arrested. Lechevalier thereupon addressed a letter (21 June, 1849) to the Minister of the Interior, M. Dufaure, which effected the release of the three men but resulted in his own arrest and subsequent trial and conviction by the Court at Versailles (November-December 1849). Anticipating these consequences, Lechevalier, along with others, exiled himself to London in July. It was from London that he wrote his Déclaration on 8 Oct., 1849. Lechevalier had the Déclaration translated by a friend as Declaration of Citizen Andre-Louis-Jules Lechevalier (London: n.p., 1849), and sent copies to a number of British papers, but, for his quotations in this notice, Mill is evidently using the French version (not located) in his own translation. The notice appears, in square brackets (like the other brief notices) in the “Publications Received” column, headed “Déclaration du Citoyen André-Louis-Jules Lechevalier junior, accusé, ex-membre du Comité de la Presse et du Comité Socialiste.” It is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A few words on M. Jules [Lechevalier’s] letter to [Dufaure] and [his Declaration]; in the Spectator of 8th December 1849”

(MacMinn, p. 72).

the manifesto of one of the condemned by default in the late political trial at Versailles; and containing a brief recital of the exertions of a life passed in labouring for the cause of philanthropy and social improvement. M. Jules Lechevalier is known to those who have attended to the course of public discussion in France, as one of the most enlightened and most reasonable of those Reformers who, with great variety of opinions and objects, are confounded under the name of Socialists. To the general public he is best known by his efforts during many years for the abolition of Negro slavery, and for replacing it by an “organization of labour”;1 for which no more favourable practical opportunity could possibly have presented itself, and which if tried in our Colonies would have had a chance of preventing their present difficulties. In this little brochure M. Lechevalier maintains, that “the protest on the 13th of June last was legitimate, legal, and constitutional; that in principle, insurrection would have been legitimate, but” (and of this, whoever has read the evidence on the trial must be already convinced) “in point of fact no insurrection took place, and none was desired or projected.”2 It is in itself almost a reductio ad absurdum of the alleged conspiracy, that one who is so essentially a man of peace as M. Jules Lechevalier should have been condemned and sentenced as of the number of its authors and contrivers.

[1 ]See No. 372, n15, for the source of the phrase.

[2 ]Déclaration, pp. 4-5.