The various forms of liberalism and socialism did not exhaust the range of responses to the economic and social problems created in industrial societies.
Nationalists reinvigorated old mercantilist ideas, not only advocating tariffs to protect agriculture and industry but also demanding empires abroad to provide new markets for surplus products, new fields for the investment of surplus capital, and new settlements for surplus citizens. Others advocated anarchy and violence, while nonviolent preachers of mutualism, goodwill, and good work sought to return to primitive Christianity.
Tradition assigns the honor of being the first modern socialists to Gracchus Babeuf and his fellow conspirators under the French Directory in 1796-1797. The equalitarianism of Babeuf was too loosely formulated to be called truly socialist, however; the only direct link between him and later socialist doctrines derives from his followers’ belief that human nature could change only through immediate violent action in the manner of the Reign of Terror.
The leader of these new terrorists was Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881), a professional revolutionary who participated in the Paris revolts of 1830,1848, and 1870-1871 (after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War).
Blanqui believed that the imposition of a dictatorial regime by an elite vanguard of conspirators would be the only way to deal with a bourgeois capitalist society. An inveterate plotter of violence, he spent forty of his seventy-six years in prison. When his movement died out in the 1870s, his followers tended to join the Marxian Socialists.
