Talk:Victor d'Hupay

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Exaggerated claims about inventing communism

This article was created by Nicoflippe. Here's what it looked like when he finished with it. One reference (a book by Nicolas Flippe "to be published"), one external link (to Nicolas Flippe's website) and this gem in the body: He was totally forgotten. Nicolas Flippe discovered him at the end of the XXth century. The current state of the article isn't much better. We have one reference that actually mentions d'Hupay, a 1983 paper that spends 2 sentences on d'Hupay. Still Nicolas Flippe's "to be published" book is listed under Further reading. And still the same 1 external link to Nicolas Flippe's website. Which, incidentally, seems to be about 33% history, and 67% advertising for tourism around d'Hupay's hometown of La Tour-d'Aigues.

Projet de communauté philosophe and fr:Victor d'Hupay also have links to https://www.bastidepuget.com/, which advertises a very pretty manor which you can book now for marriages, brunches, or seminars. I guess it might be the former residence of d'Hupay, though I couldn't find any mention of him on the website.

Not only has Flippe's "discovery" been allowed to remain here, but we have the article on Communism calling d'Hupay the "founder and first theoretician of modern communism"! The source is this: https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb45058387v. Which is, wait for it... a tourism guide for Provence. This is the author's website. Book your guided tour now!

He was also listed as one of Marx's influences at Karl Marx (I removed him), and is listed at List of people considered father or mother of a scientific field (though he's made to share top billing with Marx and Engels).

This is not a full-blown hoax. He was a real person. Here are some of his writings. And the 1983 paper looks legit. But all it says (AFAICT - my French is a bit rusty) is that in 1785 Restif de la Bretonne published a letter from a gentleman named Joseph Alexandre Victor d'Hupay, in which d'Hupay describes himself as an auteur communiste. This is not the first recorded usage of the term, but the author of the paper notes it as a possibly unique example of a sort of transitional form between how the word was used in Latin by the Anabaptists of 1569, and its more modern usage by the egalitarian workers of 1839-1840. The author goes on to say that d'Hupay never described himself as communist again, but, a dozen years later, Restif began using the terms "communist" and "communism" frequently in his work, possibly inspired by having seen d'Hupay use it. In a 6-page paper specifically about the history of the word "communism", d'Hupay's one use in a letter merits 2 sentences. To go from there to "founder of modern communism" is a giant leap. He is an extremely marginal historical figure. His surname gets 46 results on Google scholar (5 in English, 1 being a Wiki mirror). The few papers or books that mention him do so in passing, in reference to his letter being an early instance of the word "communist". He probably passes WP:GNG, but just barely.

Anyways, I'm going to try to clean up this article (and Communism etc.) to get rid of the WP:FRINGE (at best) theory that he was some highly influential and seminal figure in the history of communist theory. I figured I'd write this down so I'd have something I could link to in edit summaries, and because this was a really funny/weird find, and I had to share. Colin M (talk) 02:53, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

One more fun find. Apparently d'Hupay's portrait was at one point at the top of fr:Communisme. Which prompted a user to write this comment, which is consistent with my findings above. It basically says that putting him in such a prominent position was wildly undue, that most accounts of the history of communism don't mention d'Hupay, that he has no credible claim to inventing the idea of communism, or even the word. It also introduced me to this delightful French turn of phrase: Il me semble donc inutile de vouloir réinventer l'eau chaude en.... Let's not reinvent hot water (i.e. do a stupid thing). Colin M (talk) 14:51, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

The irony is that even if d'Hupay can be described as part of the utopian socialist/communist tradition (which from the brief description of his views in James H. Billington's Fire in the Minds of Men seems reasonable enough), not only was he seemingly without influence on subsequent socialist/communist thought, but he can't even be considered the earliest exponent of communism in France. Jean Meslier, Morelly, and Mably all preceded him (and in fact Billington argues d'Hupay was partly influenced by Mably.) --Ismail (talk) 16:44, 2 February 2021 (UTC)