Georges Renard

Georges Renard, professor of the history of literature and socialist intellectual, led the Revue socialiste after Malon’s death and was at the very heart of intellectual socialism in the 1890s. But his early experience in the Paris Commune and his career in Switzerland often gave him the experience of feeling ‘out of the flow of time’ in his socialist militancy. In the first major study of his intellectual contribution, this chapter sets out his approach to understanding the flow of time in modern society and the processes of social transformation, part of his ‘idealist’ socialism. It emphasizes the intimate world he built with his wife, Louise, and the nature of their hospitable and compassionate socialist activity. At the end of his life, Renard was an intellectual godfather for an important socialist dissident movement and founded an independent party.