Boyve, Edouard de

Born 1840; died 1925. Representative of the French and international cooperative movement.

Boyve was one of the founders of the Society for the People’s Economy. This later became the basis for the Nîmes cooperative school, which left a strong imprint on the history of the French and international cooperative movement. Boyve was a cofounder and prominent member of the International Cooperative Alliance in 1895. He considered the cooperative movement a method for getting rid of capitalist exploitation and for transforming capitalism into a new social and economic system—the Federation of Independent Cooperatives. He assigned a special role to the consumers’ cooperatives, which he felt could unite the interests of the different strata of the population. From 1886 to 1920, Boyve edited La Délivrance, the journal of the French cooperatives.