Revolution and the Mass Marketplace

In France, the revolution of 1848 witnessed the advent and rapid transformation of theories of social stability and progress as well as socialism writ large. Issues, such as mass unemployment and hunger, shaped such master sciences as political economy and sociology prompting methods and policies that might adapt workers to the new epoch of free trade and mass markets. Such a social project was apparent in the mid nineteenth-century Universal Exposition movement that helped to inaugurate the mass marketplace under the rubric of law and order: the revolution of 1848 also led to the rise of an authoritarian French Regime, the Second Empire, under whose auspices France underwent rapid modernization. French political economists and sociologists melded free markets and socialism, linking together workers and their patrons more narrowly and harmoniously. They worked to propagandize for the "reform of society" where the mass marketplace would loom large. This monograph details this project from the crisis in the discipline of political economy in 1848 to the fully worked out social program offered in the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867.