Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Count of Saint-Simon (1760-1825), was a great thinker and author of important books at the turn of two centuries. This gentleman of the Ancien Régime was very early on reluctant to pursue a classical education and was drawn to "new ideas" and a spirit of adventure. He left for the United States at the age of 17 to join Lafayette's liberation army. Back in Europe, he developed a passion for hydraulics and communication routes, and at the time of the French Revolution, he acquired the national assets of the Orne department; from a penniless man, he became a wealthy landowner.
He began to develop his theories, nourished by an eclectic intellectual life, whose basis was the progress of humanity through science, industry, and the development of educated social elites (including engineers), then called "capacitaires." Inspired by Société Générale and Crédit Lyonnais, admired by the École Polytechnique students, he advocated that the feudal and theological age give way to the positive and industrial age. This transition would allow for solidarity, peace, fraternity, and the development of "talents." With his successor, Prosper Enfantin, this movement became a true Church, if not a sect, whose communal living spaces, known as phalansteries, would worry public authorities. Saint-Simon is considered one of the founders of French-style socialism, before Karl Marx.
The idea of God was replaced by that of science, and the new value became society, a society organized by links between beings, thanks to railways; this idea of "circulation" took its example from the circulation of blood in the human body. Saint-Simon also believed that the place of women in society must evolve, and he conceived that they should be able to dispose of their bodies more freely. A name sometimes forgotten, his influence over two centuries in France was nevertheless considerable.
