JOHN MORROW CONSIDÉRANT, VICTOR (1808–93)

JOHN MORROW CONSIDÉRANT, VICTOR (1808–93)

Victor Considérant created and led the Fourierist movement in France. He was a leading socialist radical in 1848, increasingly out of tune with the conservative trend of the Second Republic. Forced into exile in June 1849 to escape prosecution, he became involved in a number of utopian settlements in North America. Considérant made virtually no contribution to later socialism and was almost forgotten by historians until the end of the twentieth century.

Considérant, a native of the Franche-Comté, was first introduced to FOURIER’S ideas when, as a lycée pupil, he lodged with Clarisse Vigoureux in Besançon. He joined the army engineering corps in Metz after training in the Ecole Polytéchnique. He relieved the boredom of barracks life by reading Fourier, whom he first met in March 1830. At the end of 1831 when the Saint-Simonian movement began to implode, Considérant took the lead in attracting disillusioned acolytes to Fourier’s ideas. In early 1832, with the financial backing of Clarisse Vigoureux, he launched Le Phalanstère, a Fourierist journal committed to creating a phalange.

Although the experiment at Condé-sur-Vesgre, near Paris, failed, Considérant successfully developed a Fourierist movement. It attracted men and women, but soon drew away from Fourier’s more extreme ideas. Fourierists seem not to have believed that, once the shackles of conventional society were removed, people would be naturally good.

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Women had a notable influence in developing Fourierist morality. Many Fourierists had abandoned Saint-Simonianism because of ENFANTIN’S ideas on temporary sexual unions, and reverted to conventional notions of the family. Fourier rejected traditional religion, whereas many Fourierists drew close to Catholicism.

Considérant became the leader of the movement and married Clarisse Vigoureux’s daughter, Julie. His main contribution was to substitute the state for the phalange as the agent of social reform. In some respects he made Fourierism more practical, with closer links to current politics. He placed less emphasis than Fourier on the division of society into many human types and focused, before Louis Blanc, on the idea that society should recognize the right to work. In August 1843 he founded a daily, the Démocratie pacifique, which became a central part of his socialist publicity, together with public lectures and a library.

Considérant believed that his ideas, and those of his master, were based on rational observation and constituted a social science. In the year of Fourier’s death Considérant published his Destinée Sociale, which he dedicated to Louis-Philippe. He explained and justified Fourier’s theory of phalanges. Fourier’s plan was to make the country anew, a single community at a time. Fourierists were not a political party and at first did not envisage large-scale reform. The societary commune, the term Considerant tended to use rather than phalange, presumably because the commune was already the basic unit in France, would be the cornerstone of society, if its organization could be perfected. Work would be agreeable. The individual would be free, his faculties would be expanded, everyone would work in harmony, although class divisions would remain. Unlike Fourier, Considérant did not expect family structures to disappear, nor did he believe that harmony would exist instantly when a phalange was formed, Considérant thought that it would emerge gradually as society became more receptive to the benefits of co-operation.

Considérant analysed the present, where, he claimed, a great deal of effort was wasted; on military expenditure and defence, on evils such as gambling, whores, beggars and prisoners; on the legal system, police and prisons; on idlers ‘oisifs’; on the fiscal system; on metaphysicians and philosophers; and, finally, on commerce. Trade was parasitical. None of these would exist in his ideal world. Like Fourier, Considérant believed that humanity had developed according to a general law of nature in which society passed through stages, akin to those of the individual; hence, birth, infancy, youth, maturity give way to decline, decrepitude and death. Current notions of property, based, he asserted, in the right of conquest, were illegal. He thought equal subdivision was impractical and was entirely opposed to a revolutionary redistribution as Babeuf had suggested. He was not against hereditary rights as such but believed that ownership should be based on the right to work. As Considérant developed his concept of a right to work, he began to see the state as the initiator of reform. The government should make a scientific assessment of the economy from which it would create an industrial framework within which it would guarantee that there would be enough work for all. He claimed that such an endeavour could be achieved without political reform or legal changes. Such state-directed reform would have been anathema to Fourier.

Fourierist groups formed in Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Nantes, Metz, Orléans, Besançon and Dijon. Fourierism also gained sympathizers world-wide, in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, in Australia, but especially in North America. A substantial number of accounts

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of Fourierist ideas were published in English, although most of Fourier and Considérant’s own work was not translated.

The Revolution of 1848 seemed to offer Considerant the chance to promote his theories. However, although known as a journalist and a member of the Luxembourg Commission, he struggled to be elected to the new Constituent Assembly for the Loiret, and more on a democratic than a socialist ticket. He became a member of both the Labour and the National Workshops subcommittees. He argued the right to work vociferously and unsuccessfully, was entirely opposed to the June 1848 rising against the closure of the workshops and supported Cavaignac’s military repression. He was elected to the Legislative Assembly as a démocrat-social. On 13 June with Ledru-Rollin and others he urged violent resistance to Louis-Napoleon’s decision to send an expedition to Rome to restore papal authority. Following their failure, Considérant left for exile in Belgium and was condemned in his absence by the high court in Versailles.

He spent the next 20 years with Clarisse and Julie trying to help run utopian socialist communities in the USA. The group at La Réunion, Red River Texas, collapsed on the outbreak of the Civil War. Considérant returned to France in 1869, lived in poverty and never reentered politics. Fourierist socialism fizzled out in 1849, despite a brief attempt to revive its ideals of ‘solidarity’ in 1871.