It is not easy today to appreciate the immense stir which the Saint-Simonian movement caused for a couple of years, not only in France, but throughout Europe, or to gauge the extent of the influence which the doctrine has exercised. But there can be little doubt that this influence was far greater than is commonly realized. If one were to judge that influence by the frequency with which the Saint-Simonians were mentioned in the literature of the time, it would seem that their celebrity was as short-lived as it was great. We must not forget, however, that in its later years the school had covered itself with ridicule by its pseudoreligious harlequinades and its various escapades and follies, and that in consequence many men who had absorbed most of its social and philosophical teaching might well have been ashamed to admit their association with the cranks of Ménilmontant and the men who went to the East in search of the femme libre. It was only natural that people should come to treat their Saint-Simonian period as a youthful folly of which they did not wish to boast. But that did not mean that the ideas they had then absorbed did not continue to operate in and through them, and a careful investigation, which has yet to be undertaken, would probably show how surprisingly wide that influence has extended.
Here we are not primarily interested in tracing the influence of persons or groups. From our point of view it would be even more significant if it could be shown that a similar situation has produced similar ideas elsewhere without any direct influence from the Saint-Simonians. Yet any study of similar contemporaneous movements elsewhere soon reveals a close connection with the French prototypes. Even if it is doubtful whether in all these cases we are really entitled to speak of influence, and whether we should not rather say that all those who happened to have similar ideas soon found their way to Saint-Simonism, it will be worthwhile to cast a rapid glance over the variety of channels through which this influence acted, since the extent of it is yet so little understood, and particularly because the spreading of Saint-Simonism also meant a spreading of Comtian positivism in its early form.
The first point which it is important to realize is that this influence was by no means confined to people mainly interested in social and political speculation, but that it was even stronger in literary and artistic circles, which often became almost unconsciously the medium of spreading Saint-Simonian conceptions on other matters. In France the Saint-Simonian ideas about the social function of art made a deep impression on some of the greatest writers of the time, and are held responsible for the profound change in the literary atmosphere which then took place.15.1 The demand that all art should be tendentious, that it should serve social criticism and for this purpose represent life as it is in all its ugliness, led to a veritable revolution in letters.15.2 Not only authors who like George Sand or Béranger had been closely associated with the Saint-Simonians, but some of the greatest writers of the period such as H. de Balzac,15.3 V. Hugo, and Eugène Sue absorbed and practiced much of the Saint-Simonian teaching. Among composers Franz Liszt had been a frequent visitor to their meetings and Berlioz with a Chant d'inauguration des chemins de fer applied Saint-Simonian precepts to music.