Abstract

In the 1840s, groups of workers and intellectuals (i.e. Leroux, Buchez, Cabet), especially in Paris, began for the first time to use the term «socialism» to define themselves. Most of these socialists combined social and political resolutions with a genuinely religious discourse; in the wake of the Saint-Simonians, socialism most often coincided with a «religion of humanity». As this article contends, the religious dimension of early French socialism responded to different requirements: the naturalness of «religious feeling», the organization of moral reformation, and the guarantee of social unity. According to this early socialism, religion is also the form of humankind’s self-consciousness. Precisely because of this plurality of aspects, the «religion of humanity» constituted a tool for conceiving a self-transformation of society in historical time; in other terms, it was a religion of praxis