Charles Fourier

French social reformer

• Born: April 7, 1772
• Birthplace: Besançon, France
• Died: October 10, 1837
• Place of death: Paris, France

Fourier was one of the founders of nineteenth century utopian socialism. Although the few experiments in building a model community based upon his theories proved short-lived, his writings have continued to attract interest.

Early Life

Charles Fourier (few-ree-ay) was born François-Marie-Charles Fourrier; he dropped the second r in his surname around the time he turned eighteen. He was the fifth child and only son of a prosperous cloth merchant. In 1781, his father died, leaving him a substantial inheritance. He attended the local Collège de Besançon, where he received a solid if uninspiring classical education. His ambition appears to have been to study military engineering at the École de Génie Militaire, but he lacked the noble status requisite for admission. He was apprenticed to a cloth merchant around 1790, first at Rouen, then at Lyons. He was ill-suited for, and unhappy in, the world of business.

Fourier was involved in the savagely suppressed 1793 counterrevolutionary uprising in Lyons against the Convention (central government). As a result, he was imprisoned and narrowly escaped execution. In 1794, he was called for military service; he was discharged two years later. Although the details remain unclear, he lost the bulk of his inheritance. He thereafter worked as a traveling salesperson and then as an unlicensed broker.

Fourier also began writing short articles and poems, which appeared in the Lyons newspapers starting in 1801. He set forth an outline of his developing ideas in two papers written in late 1803, “Harmonie universelle” and “Lettre au Grand-Juge.” In 1808, he published—anonymously and with a false place of publication to protect himself against prosecution by the authorities—his first major work, Théorie des quatre mouvements and des destinées générales (The Social Destiny of Man: Or, Theory of the Four Movements , 1857).

In 1812, Fourier’s mother died, leaving him a modest lifetime annuity. The money allowed him to devote himself full time to elaborating his ideas in a projected Grand Traité (great treatise). Although he never finished this great treatise, he did publish in 1822 his two-volume Traité de l’association domestique-agricole (later retitled Théorie de l’unité universelle; Social Science: The Theory of Universal Unity , 185?). A briefer and more accessible statement of his position would appear in his Le Nouveau Monde industriel et sociétaire: Ou, Invention du procédé d’industrie attrayante et naturelle distribuée en series passionées (1829).

Fourier never married, appears to have had no lasting romantic attachment, and lived most of his life in cheap lodging houses and hotels. He was a deeply neurotic personality—what the French call a maniaque (crank). There is even evidence that he seriously thought himself to be the son of God. As he grew older, he became increasingly paranoid about his supposed persecution by his enemies. His jealousy of rival would-be saviors of humanity resulted in an 1831 pamphlet, Pièges et charlatanisme des deux sectes Saint-Simon et Owen, qui promettent l’association et le progrès (traps and charlatanism of the Saint-Simonian and Owen sects, who promise association and progress). The last of his major writings to be published during his lifetime was the two-volume La Fausse Industrie morcelée, répugnante, mensongère, et l’antidote, l’industrie naturelle, combinée, attrayante, veridique, donnant quadruple produit et perfection extrème en tous qualités (1835-1836). A manuscript entitled Le Nouveau Monde amoureux —written around 1817-1818 and demonstrating the central place in his thinking of his vision of a sexual revolution—was not published until 1967.

Life’s Work

Fourier’s starting point was his repudiation of the eighteenth century philosophes, who had enthroned reason as humankind’s guide. He dismissed reason as a weak force compared with the passions, or instinctual drives. He postulated the existence of twelve fundamental human passions. These in turn fell into three major categories. There were the so-called luxurious passions (the desires of the five senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch); the four group, or affective, passions (ambition, friendship, love, and family feeling or parenthood); and the serial, or distributive, passions (the “cabalist” desire for intrigue, the “butterfly” yearning for variety, and the “composite,” or desire for the simultaneous satisfaction of more than a single passion). Fourier held that because all the passions were created by God, they were naturally good and harmonious. Thus, they should be allowed the freest and fullest expression. He preached that humankind had achieved sufficient mastery over the forces of the natural world to make possible the satisfaction of all human wants.

The trouble was that in capitalist society—which Fourier in his sixteen-stage scheme of human history termed Civilization—most people found their passions repressed or, even worse, so distorted as to become vices. What was required was a new social order that would channel the passions in salutary directions. His ideal world—which he called Harmony—was a paradise of sensuous enjoyments: a continuous round of eating, drinking, and lovemaking. The prerequisite for its attainment was a properly designed community, or phalanx, that would constitute the basic social unit. Each phalanx would consist of sixteen hundred to two thousand persons. This number would allow inclusion within the phalanx of the full range of different individual personality types and thus of potential combinations of passions. There were, he calculated, no more than 810 fundamentally different varieties of men and the same number for women. The perfect society required that each type interact with all other types.

All the members of the phalanx would live in one large building, known as the phalanstery. He even specified the architectural design: a building about six stories high, consisting of a long main body and two wings with inner courtyards and a parade ground immediately in front. Almost always, individuals would not engage in their occupations or pastimes alone or as part of a haphazard gathering, but rather as members of scientifically arranged groupings. Individuals with the same interests would voluntarily form a small group, and groups with like occupations would similarly combine naturally into what he termed a series. This organizational scheme would give full scope simultaneously to the cooperative and competitive impulses, because each group would consist of volunteers passionately devoted to the purpose of the group and the different groups would vie with one another to win the praise of the other members of the phalanx.

Boredom would be eliminated because of frequent changes in jobs and sex partners. Phalanx members would work at any given task typically only one hour per day, with two hours as the maximum. Leadership would be similarly rotated depending upon the activity. Most important, phalanx members would join only those groups and series that attracted them. Within each group, they would perform only that part of the work that appealed to them. Thus, for example, the would-be Nero would find an outlet for his bloodthirsty tastes by working as a butcher. This matching of job with personality was the fundamental difference between Civilization and Harmony. “In the former,” Fourier explained,

a man or a woman performs twenty different functions belonging to a single kind of work. In the latter a man performs a single function in twenty kinds of work, and he chooses the function which he likes while rejecting the other nineteen.

Fourier did not propose to abolish private property. He allowed differential rewards for those with superior creative abilities and, accordingly, differences in the degree of pleasures according to resources. Even the poorest in the phalanx would lead much richer and more pleasurable lives than was attainable by even the richest in the existing society. As for who would do society’s so-called dirty jobs, he had a simple answer: children. “God,” he explained,

gave children these strange tastes to provide for the execution of various repulsive tasks. If manure has to be spread over a field, youths will find it a repugnant job but groups of children will devote themselves to it with greater zeal than to clean work.

A revolutionary educational policy was at the heart of Fourier’s system. Whereas civilized education repressed the faculties of the child, the new education that he envisaged would be aimed at developing all the child’s physical and intellectual faculties, especially the capacities for pleasure and enjoyment. He most antagonized contemporary opinion—and dismayed even many of his disciples—by his advocacy of free love . He was convinced that the amorous desires of most people were polygamous. He thus attacked the family as the number one example of an unnatural institution, stifling both men and women. Marriage in contemporary society, he charged, was “pure brutality, a casual pairing off provoked by the domestic bond without any illusion of mind or heart.”

From 1822 on—except for a brief return to Lyons in 1825—Fourier lived in Paris. He was constantly appealing to would-be patrons to finance the establishment of an experimental phalanx to provide scientific proof of the correctness of his theories. Every day on the stroke of twelve noon, he would return to his lodgings to await the arrival of the hoped-for benefactor. He was the target of frequent newspaper ridicule, but he attracted a small but loyal band of disciples. In 1832, the first Fourierist journal, Le Phalanstère , was launched; the same year witnessed the first attempt to establish a model phalanx at Condé-sur-Vesgre. From 1833 on, Fourier suffered from worsening intestinal problems that sapped his health. For the last year of his life, he was an invalid confined to his apartment. On the morning of October 10, 1837, the building concierge found him dead, kneeling by his bed dressed in his frock coat.

Significance

Charles Fourier himself constitutes a fascinating psychological problem, given the contrast between his free-ranging, sensual imagination and the crabbed drabness of his personal life. Much of his writing is simply incoherent—rambling, repetitive, and filled with invented pseudoscientific jargon. He goes into flights of fantasy—such as his portrayal of the planets copulating, his prophecy of the oceans turning into lemonade, and his vision of the pests of man, such as fleas, rats, crocodiles, and lions, becoming transformed into more pleasant species, antifleas, antirats, anticrocodiles, and antilions—that raise questions about his sanity. However, his vision of a freer, happier, and more harmonious social order to replace the poverty, misery, and conflict of early industrial society exerted a strong attraction upon his sensitive-minded contemporaries, ranging from the young Fyodor Dostoevski to the New England Transcendentalists assembled at Brook Farm.

Although all the attempts to establish a model phalanx proved failures, Fourier has received renewed attention as the prophet of what have become the animating values for much of Western society—liberation of the senses from the repressions of middle-class life, exaltation of the instincts, and an all-pervading impulse toward self-gratification. He has attracted perhaps most interest as the precursor of the sexual revolution because of his calls for freedom from sexual taboos, his attacks on the barrenness of the marriage relationship, and his implicit assumption that there was no such thing as a sexual norm. He anticipated Sigmund Freud in key respects, particularly in his recognition of the importance of the sexual drive and the mechanisms for its repression and sublimation. Fourier’s direct contribution to these later developments was minor, if not nil. However, he was a more astute reader of human nature—and thus of the future—than the eighteenth century philosophes whom he so strongly attacked.

Bibliography

Altman, Elizabeth C. “The Philosophical Bases of Feminism: The Feminist Doctrines of the Saint-Simonians and Charles Fourier.” Philosophical Forum 7 (Spring/Summer, 1974): 277-293. A laudatory examination of Fourier’s advanced (at least from a present-day feminist perspective) ideas concerning the stifling effects of middle-class marriage upon women and his egalitarian views about the role of women in the phalanx.

Beecher, Jonathan. Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. An impressive piece of research into the extant published and manuscript materials on Fourier, this work should remain for the foreseeable future the definitive biography. The book is divided into three major parts: Part 1 details Fourier’s life up to 1822, part 2 is a penetrating explication of his ideas, and part 3 traces his efforts to publicize and implement his program.

Blaug, Mark, ed. Dissenters: Charles Fourier (1772-1837), Henri de St. Simon (1760-1825), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), John A. Hobson (1858-1940). Brookfield, Vt.: E. Elgar, 1992. Examines the economic theories of Fourier and three other philosophers with alternative social visions.

Fourier, Charles. The Theory of the Four Movements. Edited by Gareth Stedman Jones and Ian Patterson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. An English translation of Fourier’s first book, in which he describes some of his utopian ideas.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction. Edited and translated by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. As the subtitle indicates, the book contains English translations of selections from Fourier’s writings. The editor-translators have avoided the temptation of pruning the nonsense and even gibberish with which Fourier filled so many of his pages; students without a knowledge of French thus can get at least a taste of Fourier’s style. The seventy-five-page introduction provides an excellent, relatively brief introduction to Fourier’s thinking.

Guarneri, Carl J. The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. Explores Fourier’s influence in the United States, where the religious, social, and economic turmoil of the 1830’s led some Americans to create communal living arrangements and other utopian experiments in the years before the Civil War.

Manuel, Frank E. The Prophets of Paris. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962. The author has written a perceptive account of five late eighteenth/early nineteenth century French prophets of a transformed social order—Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Marquis de Condorcet, and Comte de Saint-Simon, and Auguste Comte, along with Fourier. Manuel explains the similarities and differences in their ideas. He gives a sympathetic appraisal of Fourier as Freud’s precursor in his psychological insights.

Poster, Mark, ed. Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971. Although Poster’s introduction is short, the volume offers a handy selection of translated excerpts from Fourier’s writings. Approximately half of the selections are nineteenth century translations, mostly by Arthur Brisbane. The rest—including excerpts from Le Nouveau Monde amoureux—were translated for this volume by Susan Ann Hanson.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. The Teaching of Charles Fourier. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. A lucidly written, comprehensive, and systematic analysis of the major themes in Fourier’s thinking that should be the starting point for any serious examination of his ideas. An admirer of Fourier, Riasanovsky makes him appear too sensible and perhaps too modern by downplaying the fantastic and bizarre elements in his writings.

Spencer, M. C. Charles Fourier. Boston: Twayne, 1981. The volume includes a brief biographical sketch along with a summary of the major points in Fourier’s thinking. Spencer’s interest lies on the aesthetic side, and he has suggestive comments about Fourier’s influence on French literature from Charles Baudelaire to the Surrealists.