Sylvain Maréchal (French: [silvɛ̃ maʁeʃal]; 15 August 1750 – 18 January 1803) was a French essayist, poet, philosopher and political theorist, whose views presaged utopian socialism and communism. His views on a future golden age are occasionally described as utopian anarchism. He was editor of the newspaper Révolutions de Paris.
Early life
Born in Paris as the son of a wine merchant, he studied jurisprudence and became a lawyer in the capital. At the age of 20, he published Bergeries, a collection of idylls, successful enough to ensure his employment at the Collège Mazarin as an aide-librarian.
Maréchal was an admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Claude Adrien Helvétius, and Denis Diderot, and associated with deist and atheist authors.
Vision
He developed his own views of an agrarian socialism where all goods would be shared. In Fragments d'un poème moral sur Dieu ("Fragments of a Moral Poem on God"), he aimed to replace elements of practiced religion with a cult of Virtue and faith with Reason (see Cult of Reason).
His critique of both religion and political absolutism Book Salvaged from the Flood – Livre échappé du déluge, a parody of the Bible) and his atheism caused him to lose his position at the college; Maréchal was forced to live off his literary output.
In 1788, he was sentenced to four months in prison for publishing the Almanach des Honnêtes Gens ("Honest Man's Almanac"). The months were given names numbered one through twelve (for example, March is the first month, listed as "mars ou princeps", while February is "février ou duodécembre". The calendar also replaced the usual figures of a calendars of saints with famous characters (such as Blaise Pascal). Later editions of the Almanach used the French Republican Calendar.
