...socialists had a vital and productive relationship with religion. In the 1820s, the French Saint-Simonians, the first influential socialist movement, declared themselves the apostles of their "church" and preached a "New Christianity." The Fourierists, who succeeded the Saint-Simonians as the most dynamic socialist school, demanded the "return to the Christianity of Jesus Christ." In the 1840s, the leading communist Étienne Cabet identified communism with "the true Christianity according to Jesus Christ." Pierre Leroux, who had coined the term socialisme, explained its meaning with "religious democracy." Engels, in 1843, had marveled at the Frenchmen's "mysticism," but later observers, who had usually been shaped by Marxism, dismissed the religion of the early socialists as superficial rhetoric or childish enthusiasm. However, that is simply not the case. Many early socialists looked to religion for ways to define society according to principles both religious and socialist.
Early socialists sought to create a "synthesis" of religion, science, and philosophy to counter the excesses of the Enlightenment. They saw the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution, as needing correction against a tendency to materialism, atheism, and egoistic individualism. The Saint-Simonians declared that "the political order will be, in its entirety, a religious institution." In this perfect society, a class of priests would maintain social harmony. They even accepted the description of socialism as a "theocracy," as long as one "understands theocracy as the state in which the political and the religious laws are identical, and where the leaders of society are those who speak in the name of God."
Following the long-established example of Catholicism, socialists demanded "spiritual authority" and modeled their universal association after the structure of the Catholic Church. The borders to contemporary reformist Catholics were often blurred, most spectacularly in the case of Félicité de Lamennais, a priest who had founded the so-called neo-Catholic movement and had turned to a Christian socialism in the early 1830s. Lamennais's highly influential writings fuelled the socialist determination to establish the "true Christianity."
The February Revolution of 1848 failed to realize the socialist Kingdom of God on Earth. The coup of Louis-Napoléon in 1851 brought the demise of the Second Republic, and socialist activities were outlawed...