Buchez

Buchez, Philippe Joseph Benjamin (1796-1865), French author and politician, was born in the Ardennes, and after a course of general education at Paris, devoted himself to natural philosophy and medicine. To his studies he united a hankering after politics and social science. He became mixed up with a secret society and was concerned in a plot against the reigning family which came near costing him his life. About 1825 he joined the St. Simonian society, and contributed to its journal, Le Producteur. Leaving this society, he started a periodical called L'Europeen, to advocate a system of Christian socialism, and he collaborated in the production of a Parliamentary History of the French Revolution, a work of considerable historical value. After the revolution of 1848 he was for a time president of the National Assembly, but soon showed that he was not fitted for an active life, and returned to his studies. Beyond taking a share in writing a treatise on hygiene, he seems to have had little to do with strictly medical questions. In 1839 he published a treatise dealing with philosophy from a Catholic and progressive point of view, and seems to have aimed at a unification of the different branches of science. One of his earliest works was an attempt to elaborate a science of history, and one of his latest, a treatise on politics, which may be regarded as the complement of the philosophical treatise above-mentioned.