Solidarism is a philosophy of thought initiated by Leon Bourgeois at the beginning of the 19th century. The term is resulting from the word Solidarité. Solidarism is the " mutual responsibility which is established between two or several people " or a " fraternal bond which obliges all the human beings the ones towards the others, making us a duty assist those of our similar which are in misfortune ".

Solidaristic philosophy

The solidarism will be the response at the same time to the Libéralisme and the Socialisme but an answer as modern as the Marxism. These two theories propose one like the other to think the change against the tradition incarnated by the thought monarchist and against this other transcendence which is liberalism. Here it is neither God nor the king who organizes the relation of the men between them but this other force occults which is the invisible hand of the market. But initially why the republican middle-class of this end of XIXe century does it need doctrines? First of all because the revolution of 1848 and its collapse in the presidentialism of the second Empire, put an end to the great illusion opened by the revolution of 1789. After 1848 and more still after bloody repression of the Commune of Paris, the republic cannot claim any more to be able to offer a total answer to all the problems encountered by the life in society.

The generation of 1789 had still been able to leave behind it the illusion that all the virtualities opened by the republican freedom, equality and fraternity, had been opposed by the hand of the enneni and not by the limits specific to the republic. 1848 see dying this illusion that it would be enough to establish freedom by the male vote for all, to establish the equality and fraternity between the men. In 1848 emerges not a spectrum which will haunt Europe, but a question left without answer by the men of IIe République: the social question. Consequently, the republican ideal will be fought by another levelling ideal: the socialist ideal carried by men like Barbs, Blanqui or Raspail.

The social question, that the continuous progress of public freedoms will not be enough to extinguish, poses with the political democracy this equation which it still did not solve today. How the conquest of political sovereignty, how can a company which in right poses the equal men between, one like the other, to very concretely modify the living conditions, to reduce the variations of fortune or conditions between free citizens? In other words, for the men of IIIe République - but those of Ve seem still more disarmed theoretically -, can the social question be other than insoluble? 1848, with the intauration of the male vote for all, are indeed a date hinge. From now on as Jacques Donzelot in notes it the Invention of social the : “While meeting for the first time, the republican ideal of equality, freedom and fraternity and the democratic form drawn by contours of the vote being asserted like universal led to the bursting of the right like privileged instrument of the republican organization of the company. The gathering right of the equal citizens against the privileges of some does not gather any more but divides and it will divide on this question of the right to work. ” The men of IIIe République will be then confronted with a new problem which will be to legitimate the intervention of the State, like expression of the general will but in the respect of the freedom of each one.

Impact of solidarism on Reciprocity

The Mutualité, returned to its freedom by the charter of 1898 and unified by the creation of the National federation of French reciprocity in 1902, must more with the action of the Republican left and builds that with that of the labor movement when well even still in this reciprocity the echo of the revolutionary ideals continued by Blanqui, Proudhon and some others resounds. The founding fathers, Hippolyte Refines, Jules Arboux, Léopold Mabilleau, Leon Bourgeois, all are worried to give to this new incipient republic the theoretical bases which will enable him to be essential durably vis-a-vis its liberal and Marxist competitors.