Juliette’s energy was crowding her life with a variety of interests and occupations: literary work, plays, parties, picture shows and two distinct sets of acquaintances: Mme. d’Agoult’s rather aristocratic and elegant republican friends, and a much less fashionable circle. While Mme. d’Agoult and her associates concentrated on political reform, coming more and more into prominence in Parisian society was another group of reformers, the collectivists, who were followers of Fourier and Saint-Simon. They, placing little faith in politics, were working for a social revolution. With the latter’s schemes for humanity’s regeneration, her father’s enthusiasm had already made Juliette familiar. But we, too, if we would enter into her life at this time, must take note of these somewhat Bohemian reformers and of their Utopian aspirations, which, stimulating many of Juliette’s most intimate friends, could not fail to affect her own mind and character.
After extreme individualism had permeated the thought of the first half of the nineteenth century, a tendency towards solidarity began to declare itself among certain bold thinkers. A feeling for association was in the air. Association of whom and with whom was perhaps not quite clear. But, however defined, association, or, as we should to-day describe it, human solidarity, seemed in many enlightened circles to offer the only possible remedy for the ills of society. Even such an ardent idealist as George Sand had been converted to this comparatively new point of view. “Are there not misfortunes that call more urgently for relief than the boredom of this or the whims of that individual?” she writes.[75] Louis Napoléon himself, before he became Emperor, had shown in certain of those pamphlets, for which he was famous, that he was not unaffected by this new current of opinion. The feeling of solidarity had declared itself definitely in the early months of the 1848 Revolution. But its germs must be sought much earlier. We must go back fifty years to the time when the French Revolution was shaking society to its foundations. Then there appeared a man, who, standing apart, aloof from the great scuffle of parties, entertained the daring thought of reconciling them all and making them all pull together in a new system. That man was François Marie Charles Fourier. Born at Besançon in 1772, the son of a tradesman from whom he inherited a small fortune, Fourier became a commercial traveller in the grocery line. Then he served for a while in Napoléon’s campaigns. But, returning to his original occupation, he found employment in a wholesale house at Marseilles. There his employers instructed him secretly to throw into the sea a whole cargo of rice which that firm, in order to send up the price, had stored until it had become useless.[76] This commission opened Fourier’s eyes to the iniquitous waste proceeding in modern industry. Henceforth one of the most wildly imaginative minds that has ever existed outside a lunatic asylum was concentrated on social problems. To the ideas that resulted Fourier gave expression in a whole library of voluminous works, of which the best known is his Théorie des Quatre Mouvements. In this welter of elaborate theorising, wild schemes and absurd prophecies, such as that the ocean may one day be replaced by a sea of lemonade, and that humanity may once more develop a tail, it is possible to discover certain sane and essentially practical suggestions for social reform.
It seems incredible that this commercial traveller, who on one side of his brain was so completely unreasonable, should have produced a scheme which has in many respects now come to be regarded as fundamentally right. Fourierism, divested of its absurd extravagance, contains the germ of much modern socialism. For Fourier was one of the first to realise “that social organisation should rest on a comprehensive conception of human nature.” The first task of a reformer, he held, is to analyse human passions and to study their combinations. But Fourier’s psychology, as one might expect, is extremely fanciful. He discovered twelve major passions which can be combined into eight hundred and ten characteristic types. No one of these types can be fully himself, nor reap the greatest benefit from his labour in a state of isolation or in the state of permanent warfare, which we call competition. In our present inorganic condition, legitimate desires clash and may often be called vices. In the free and communistic régime of the future they will all be harmonised. Production will be increased a thousandfold by the association of efforts. Labour will be no longer a curse, for it will become attractive through the free choice and constant change of occupation.
The part of Fourier’s scheme which most appealed to his contemporaries was his ideal community, in which he hoped to embody his ideas in concrete form. This community he called the Phalanstery.
Juliette well remembered how, when she was a child, a fervent Fourierist had visited her father at Blérancourt. He had talked in such glowing terms of this ideal community that she forthwith resolved that on her return to Chauny she and her schoolfellows would lose no time in establishing a phalanstery. She was, however, reluctantly compelled to admit the justice of her father’s remark that at the age of nine and a half she was rather young to launch out on so complicated an experiment. For, indeed, simplicity was no part of the root idea of the phalanstery. This may be seen from the following enunciation of his principle by the master himself.
“Since there are only eight hundred and ten characters,” argued Fourier, “a phalanx of that number (or rather one thousand eight hundred with old men over one hundred and twenty and children under four) will be sufficient to realise Harmony on about a square league of ground. This phalanx would live in a handsome and comfortable building—farm, workshop and palace combined—called the Phalanstery. In this association capital and talent as well as labour would have their proper reward.”
Few of the various attempts to establish phalansteries met with any success. Fourier himself, aided by one of his most eminent disciples, Victor Considérant, and financed by a French Député, endeavoured in vain to apply his theories at Condé sur Vesgres.[77] After Fourier’s death in 1837, another vain attempt at a phalanstery was made at Citeaux.
But it was on the virgin soil of America, in the light of the New World’s sanguine hopefulness and fervent enthusiasm for social progress that the phalansterians were most confident of success. In America Fourierism had aroused intense interest. There it had met with its most ardent advocates and its bitterest opponents.[78] Victor Considérant, who after Fourier’s death became the chief apostle of Fourierism, had founded a newspaper La Démocratie Pacifique for the advocacy of his doctrines. In the columns of this paper in the year 1853, he sketched the outline of an ideal community, La Réunion, to be founded in Texas on the banks of the Red River. Subscriptions to the experiment flowed in from all parts of the world. The chief subscriber was a rich American, Albert Brisbane. He had sat at Fourier’s feet in Paris. Fascinated by this new gospel, he was spending his life translating the reformer’s colossal and for the most part incoherent works, vainly endeavouring to introduce into them something like order.
But, despite its brilliant prospects, La Réunion too was a failure. Victor Considérant, though a clever organiser, possessed neither legislative nor administrative gifts. He was an apostle, nothing more. And when adherents from all parts of the world flocked to the Red River, they found this anticipated ideal community, not, as they had fondly hoped, the embodiment of perfect harmony, but a chaos of hopeless confusion.