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Up until a few months ago, I had never thought of myself as a historian of France. My initial PhD research proposal focused on mapping the triangular intellectual relationships amongst leftist French and German political exiles with British radicals in London after the 1848 revolutions. However, the more I read about this dynamic period in the history of political thought, the more fascinated I become with one specific strand of ideology visible in London in the 1850s and 1860s, represented by the French exile Félix Pyat and his followers. His name cropped up in almost every major piece of scholarship on radical political exiles in this era, but I soon realised that no in-depth study of his ideological trajectory in exile existed. A great deal has been written about his years as a Parisian playwright in the 1830s and 1840s, as well as his radical stance in the National Assemblies of 1848-49 and his brief role in the Paris Commune of 1871; I hope to knit these disjointed periods together through an analysis of his changing political thought whilst in exile from France between 1849-1869. In doing so, I hope to uncover the impact of other doctrinal traditions upon his thinking, and reveal a new facet of transnational history through this microhistorical approach to the political exiles’ activities in London. Pyat’s thinking remained very much centred on France’s politics and the uncertain future of its people in this period; thus I spent most of my second year getting up to speed on French events of the mid-nineteenth century and associated historiographical debates.
As I continue to analyse Pyat’s writings in this period, I become increasingly aware of the fact that his political thought remained focused on France, and my central research questions have been recalibrated to reflect this. I hope to provide a fresh take on how the experience of exile shaped revolutionary French political thought in a period traditionally associated with stasis, after the failures of the revolutionary moment of 1848. I also seek to place Pyat within a starkly delineated political landscape, one in which political thinkers are commonly defined within major radical ‘schools’ of nineteenth century French thought such as republicanism, socialism, communism, (nascent) trade unionism, or Blanquism; one of my key aims then is to determine whether Pyat represents an alternative to these schools or (as I already suspect), a syncretic blend of multiple elements from each.
In terms of methodology, I am working directly with Pyat’s political writings of this period. Such documents include published manifestoes, newspaper articles, speeches, manuscripts for longer pieces, and letters. I was lucky enough to receive funding both from Queen Mary and the Society for the Study of French History to carry out an extended archival trip to Paris and Amsterdam this past May, where I visited no fewer than eight different archives to collect as many of his works as I could. Since then, I’ve been collating the nearly three thousand photos I took of documents and (very slowly) working my way through them. An unexpected obstacle here has been the fact that Pyat’s writing is exceedingly difficult to decipher – luckily most of his writings were eventually published.
As a serious political thinker, Pyat has largely been ignored by historians and political theorists alike, particularly within English scholarship. Whilst there have been some attempts to rescue Pyat’s legacy in France – see the works of Guy Sabatier and the Vierzon History Group – his absence from analyses of radical political thought in this period is striking, as is his near-erasure from the pantheon of French leftists. Anyone who is familiar with Paris will know that a large proportion of its metro stations and streets are named after great political figures of the nineteenth century. Pyat is invisible within the Parisian cityscape as well as its collective memory; his grave in Père Lachaise is hardly marked. It is my hope that this inventive and fascinating individual soon receives the recognition he is due.