Étienne-Gabriel Morelly

Étienne-Gabriel Morelly (Vitry-le-François, 1717 – 1778 or 1782) was an eighteenth-century French writer whose work stands among the earliest origins of socialist thought. For much of the nineteenth century he was little read, and his most influential book, the Code of Nature, was at first attributed to Diderot and other philosophes. Today he is regarded as one of the first writers to place the abolition of private property at the centre of a model for a just society.

Little is documented about his life. He worked as a minor tax official and as a teacher, and he wrote books on education and a critique of Montesquieu. His first notable work was the utopian poem Shipwreck of the Floating Islands, or the Basiliad of the Famous Pilpai (1753), a satirical epic that denounces the state of human reason and the blindness of people to their true interests. Its setting, a fertile continent where no one owns anything in particular, draws on the Inca Garcilaso, Thomas More and other imaginary travel narratives. Because the poem attracted little attention, Morelly set out his ideas systematically in the Code of Nature (1755), published anonymously.

The Code has four parts. The first two criticise the usual principles of morality and politics, which he traces to the desire to possess. He argues that private property is the root of most social ills: as long as it exists, laws merely distribute unequally what the earth produces. The third part holds that property also generates moral conflict and violent passions, and that the most humane peoples have been those without established property. The fourth part sets out a detailed legal model: three fundamental laws, an economy based on need, the preservation of the family, common education and a federation of small, largely autonomous communities. Morelly acknowledged that his plan was utopian.

His influence has been considerable. His defence of abolishing property and of total equality makes him a forerunner of Babeuf, Fourier, Proudhon, Blanc and Marx, all of whom cited or discussed him. The principle of contributing according to ability and receiving according to need, which Soboul credits him with first formulating, anticipates one of the central maxims of nineteenth-century socialism. His book was controversial in its day: the Catholic Church condemned it in 1761, and it remained on the Index of Forbidden Books until 1948.