Born in 1797 into a modest Parisian family, Pierre Leroux's brilliant studies opened the door to the Ecole Polytechnique. However, he gave it up to support his family. He became a bricklayer and then head typographer at a printing works. In 1822, he even designed the linotype, the first typewriter to use a keyboard.

Pierre Leroux was an early socialist thinker and utopian socialist. In his day, he was more famous than Joseph Proudhon. He is credited with inventing the word Socialism. In 1831, he wrote: "I was the first to use the word socialism. I coined this word in opposition to individualism, which was beginning to take hold".

Pierre Leroux's thinking was essentially religious, a religion of humanity based on the idea that socialism and Christianity were very closely related. He proposed a solidarism that placed equality at the heart of his concerns.

However, Pierre Leroux saw class relations in terms of "the struggle of those who do not possess the instruments of labour against those who do" and considered that working-class misery was not the result of a law of nature, but of a specific state of affairs: capitalist production.

He exerted his influence mainly in literary circles. There he met George Sand, who became his friend and invited him to the Creuse. He moved to Boussac to set up a printing works in 1845. At the same time, he founded a socialist community, a sort of phalanstery, with eighty members. They worked in the printing works, but also in the school and on a farm that applied the principles we now call permaculture.

The social magazine they printed was distributed throughout Europe. Women were paid the same as men and had the same right to write and speak. They believed in this pioneering experiment, despite the monarchy, to achieve their Republic and their socialism.

Pierre Leroux was elected mayor of Boussac following the 1848 Revolution, and then deputy for the Creuse. A staunch republican, he opposed the policies of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, whose authoritarian drift he foresaw. After the coup d'état of 1851, he went into exile in London and then on the island of Jersey, where he met Victor Hugo.

He died on 12 April 1871, and the Commune decided to pay tribute to him with an official funeral. The minutes of the meeting of 13 April state that " the Commune decided to send two of its members to Pierre Leroux's funeral, after declaring that it was paying this tribute not to the philosopher, a supporter of the mystical school whose sorrow we now bear, but to the politician who, in the aftermath of the days of 1848, had courageously defended the defeated".

In the procession came first the women and then the guild of typographers. A fine tribute.

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