Dézamy, Théodore

Born Mar. 4, 1803, in Lucç,on; died there July 24, 1850. French Utopian communist, prominent figure in the Revolution of 1848, a follower of G. Babeuf.

In the 1830’s, Dézamy joined the Society of the Seasons, which had a Blanquist orientation. He published the newspaper Les droits de I’homme: Tribune des proletaires in 1848. Dézamy’s criticism of capitalism was profound for his time. He viewed private capitalist property as the cause of the exploitation and oppression of the working masses and of class antagonism; therefore, in his opinion, private property had to be abolished. Dézamy’s main work, Code of the Community (1842), was devoted to a description of the society of the future and of the revolutionary means for its realization. Dézamy placed the “commune,” a union of approximately 10,000 working people, combining the advantages of the city and the countryside and of industrial and agricultural labor, at the base of the socioeconomic organization of the “system of community.” Each member of the community would be obligated to labor according to his strengths and abilities and would be allowed to consume in accord with the size and nature of his needs. Dezamy considered a social revolution brought about by the working people and the poor to be a necessary condition for the transition to this system. However, he did not succeed in distinguishing the industrial proletariat from the general mass of working people, nor did he come to an understanding of the proletariat’s historical role.