his utopian socialist contemporaries, and again anticipating Marx' view, Pecqueur did not see the development of industrial production as predominantly negative. He welcomed the greater productive capacity of industry but thought that capitalist relations of ownership prevented the full productive potential of industrial technology from being realised. Industry should therefore be nationalised and organised for the common benefit. (However, Pecqueur's materialism was confined to economics, sociology and historical analysis. Metaphysically he was not a materialist but shared the deistic religiosity of many French republicans.) In 1839, Pecqueur was commissioned by the French government to make a study of the Belgian railway system, which was more advanced than that of France. He recommended government investment in railway construction. In 1844, Pecqueur became a regular contributor to the leading democratic newspaper, La Réforme, edited by the left-wing republican Alexandre Ledru-Rollin. This gave him a wider platform for his ideas and put him in contact with other major republican socialist figures of the period, including the economist Louis Blanc. In 1848, Pecqueur supported the February Revolution. When Blanc became Minister of Labour in the new Provisional Government of the Second Republic, he set up the Luxembourg Commission on the question of 'the organisation of labour' and appointed Pecqueur to its panel. Among his colleagues at the Luxembourg Commission were the orthodox liberal economist Pierre Le Play and the Fourierist socialist Victor Considerant. Pecqueur and Considerant collaborated quite closely and tried unsuccessfully to introduce several reforms, such as collective bargaining and government funding for agricultural colonies, social housing and co-operative workshops. Pecqueur was also nominated to the position of assistant director of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Under the nom de plume 'Greppo', he published a popular book called Catéchisme social (1848) to popularise his ideas. He also maintained contact with republican communists like Jean-Jacques Pillot. In 1848–1849, Pecqueur edited the journal Le Salut du People he had founded, devoted to social science and socialist politics. In its pages he carried on a polemic against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the famous anarchist social theorist and economist. Proudhon had sharply criticised the work of the Luxembourg Commission and Louis Blanc's role in the bourgeois Provisional Government. In turn, Pecqueur accused Proudhon of plagiarising Fourier's ideas; in particular, he charged that Proudhon's project of a 'People's Bank' of mutual exchange was an idea taken from Fourier. Pecqueur was also notable for his efforts on behalf of international understanding. At a