Although revolutionary socialism is so ill represented in the French Legislature, there is a special parliamentary party, known as the Socialist Group, which was founded by nineteen deputies in 1887, and returned thirty candidates to the Chamber at the election of 1889. They are for communal autonomy; for the transformation of industrial monopolies into public services, to be directed by the respective companies under the control of the public administration; and for the progressive nationalization of property, so as to make the individual employment of it accessible to free labourers; and they have no lack of other planks in their platform: international federation and arbitration; abolition of standing armies; abolition of capital punishment; universal suffrage; minority representation; sexual equality; free education, primary, secondary, and technical; suppression of the budget of public worship; separation of Church and State; absolute liberty to think, speak, write, meet, associate, and contract; abolition of indirect taxes and customs, and introduction of a progressive income tax, and a progressive succession duty; public _crêches_; establishment of superannuation, sick and accident insurance at public expense. Among the deputies who signed the programme in 1887 were the two Boulangists, MM. Laisant and Laur, and MM. Clovis Hughes, Basley, Bower, etc. The idea of the party seems to be what M. Laisant recommends in his "L'Anarchie Bourgeoise," published in the same year 1887, a Republican Socialist party, which, accepting the good works of socialism, without caring for its political or economic theory, shall do its best to abolish misery by any means open to it under the existing republican form of government. Republican socialism corresponds therefore to what is called State socialism in Germany--the abolition of poverty by means of the power of the present State; and the question between socialists and other reformers is narrowing in France, as elsewhere, into a question of the justice and the suitability of the individual measures proposed. There is also a body of Christian Socialists in France, of whom, however, I shall have more to say in a subsequent chapter on the Christian Socialists.