The Reaction of Charles Fourier to the French Revolution

Abstract

The bitter disparagements of the French Revolution which are scattered through the voluminous writings of Charles Fourier reflect the reaction-of both participant and observer. Fourier's revolutionary baptism of fire at the age of twentyone was a tragic experience which left him bitter and resentful. The insurrectionary government of Lyons drafted him into its army to oppose the besieging troops of the Convention and commandeered the colonial commodities in which he had invested his entire patrimony. His life was thus frequently endangered and his worldly fortune irretrievably lost. When the city fell, he further endured the awful suspense of a period in prison awaiting his turn before the firing squad. Probationary release, escape, rearrest, and a second release then followed in succession before he finally attained legal acceptance as a draftee in the army. A seventeen months' tenure in the light cavalry confirmed and strengthened impressions already deeply rooted. When he was discharged in 1795 for reasons of ill health, his opposition to revolutionary violence was a firmly fixed tenet of his faith.' Internal upheavals and foreign war had taken their toll from the world to which Fourier returned. Parvenu capitalists manifested a vulgarity of taste in their display of wealth. Moral debauchery was commonplace. Intense competition and speculation had resulted in ruinous economic crises. The liquidation of large landed estates and the great increase of small proprietors also displeased Fourier, for his utopia envisaged the union of small, competing plots into large, cooperative units. All these torments caused him to believe that new scourges had been heaped upon civilization while old ones had been intensified. It was the miserable results