Henri Tolain

Henri Tolain (1828, Paris – 1897, Paris), was a leading member of the French trade union and socialist movement and a founding member of the First International and follower of Proudhon.

He was the son of Antoine Tolain, dancing master and Jeanne Louise Adelaide Pouplan. Henry Tolain apprenticed to a sculptor in bronze. A profession he practised for most of his working life, first in a workshop and in later years, at his own home.

He followed closely the teaching of the Republican Jules Andrieu and read Proudhon studiously. After the Act of March 1852 of the new Second French Empire of Louis Napoleon, he participated in the revival of mutual societies. His dream is that of an economy of production cooperatives operating with funding by credit unions. In the 1860s, through the more liberal turn of Louis Napoleon's regime, the labour movement is reborn. In October 1861, he proposed the election of representatives of the main trades in all the large cities. He was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Commission on the rue du Temple. The committee elected the representatives for Paris. He enters the legislative elections of May 1863 but withdraws. He then stood in the by-election for the Seine in March 1864. On 18 June 1865 he published an article in La Tribune Ouvrière (The Workers Tribune) in which he demonstrated his opposition to cabarets and the writers of novels (a new cultural phenomenon at the time).

In 1864, with the help of Republican journalist Henri Lefort, Henri Tolain wrote a text that was signed by sixty workers. It was published in L'Opinion Nationale. This manifesto is a program of social demands to support candidates standing in a byelection that year. This text calls for a genuine democracy, political, economic and social. He protested against the exclusion of workers from political life. He also expressed the desire that the place of the world of work in society is finally recognized. His call for strikes to be legalized was partially met by the Ollivier act of May 25, 1864, but only under strict limitations of not causing violence, and not infringing the 'freedom to work'.

The Manifesto of the Sixty raises seven immediate demands:

Although moderate in tone, the significance of the manifesto in defending interests specific to workers was recognised both by Marx and later historians as a milestone in the French workers movement. It was in reaction to this text that Proudhon composed one of his last texts, De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières (The Political Capacity of the Working Class), published posthumously in 1865.

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