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His most favorable commentators, and even the most enthusiastic proponents of his socio-economic system, have been united in deploring the rovings of Fourier’s imagination. They have gone to great lengths to conceal the “extravagances” he indulged in, and have glossed over the “fantastic and rambling” aspects of his thought, which most often was so beautifully controlled. How can one explain the coexistence in a single mind of a preeminent gift of reason and a taste for vaticination taken to extremes? Marx and Engels, normally so harsh toward their predecessors, have paid homage to Fourier’s sociological genius. Marx observed, apropos the “Passionate Series” that form the cornerstone of Fourier’s work, that “it is possible to criticize such constructions (and this applies also to the Hegelian method) only by demonstrating how they are made and thereby proving oneself master of them.”* Engels presented him as “one of the greatest satirists of all time” and a consummate dialectician.† How could Fourier both satisfy such demanding men and disconcert almost everyone who has approached him with his dizzying ascents into things marvelous and uncontrollable? His theory of natural history—which held that the cherry was the product of the earth’s copulation with itself and the grape the product of the earth’s copulation with the sun—was deemed patently insane, and many say that his cosmology is no better. For in it, the Earth occupies only the insignificant place of a bee in a hive formed by a few hundred thousand starry universes, the totality of which constitute a biniverse, these biniverses being themselves grouped by the thousands into triniverses, and so on; creation proceeds by successive stages and gropings; our individual existence is subject to 1,260 avatars covering 54,000 years in the other world and 27,000 in this one, etc.

Nevertheless, Fourier’s cosmology, in which his most troublesome digressions are said to reside, had no small influence on the minds of certain nineteenth-century poets, in particular Victor Hugo. The latter became interested in it through contact with Victor Hennequin, and no doubt through his readings of the works of Eliphas Lévy (the former Abbé Constant), “who, on the road from divinity to magic, encountered the phalansterian library and put under Rabelais’s patronage the theory of series and that of attractions which are proportional to destinies.”* It is high time to establish precisely what this cosmology, as well as the other unusual theses Fourier propounded, owes or does not owe to hermetic philosophy—especially if we keep in mind that the Theory of the Four Movements is purportedly the “minutes” of lectures that its author gave in Masonic lodges under the Consulate. In any case, their constant intersection with the boldest plans for social transformation, whose rightness and viability have largely been demonstrated, throws them into extraordinary relief. Any attempt to segregate them from Fourier’s message, so as to make him more palatable, is a betrayal of this message, as is pretending not to know that in 1818 Fourier proclaimed the absolute need “to refashion human understanding and forget everything we have learned”† (which requires us first and foremost to break with universal assent and to do away with so-called “common sense”).

On two occasions, Baudelaire proved rather narrow-minded toward Fourier, by speaking of him without rendering him the honors he is due. “Fourier,” he writes in L’Art romantique

came along one fine day, far too pompously, to reveal to us the mysteries of analogy. I will not deny the value of some of his meticulous discoveries, though I think that his mind was too fond of material exactitude to avoid making mistakes and to reach the moral certainty of intuition directly …. Moreover, Swedenborg, whose soul was much greater [?], had already taught us that the sky is an enormous man; that everything—form, movement, number, scent, in the spiritual as well as the natural realm—is significant, reciprocal, converse, corresponding.

(We should reread the entire context.) In his letter of January 21, 1856, to Alphonse Toussenel, his bias goes so far as to make him deny, all evidence to the contrary, that the delightful author of Le Monde des oiseaux owes anything whatsoever to Fourier: “Even without Fourier, you would have been who you are. No reasonable man needed Fourier to arrive on this earth before he could understand that nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will. We know this, and not because of Fourier. We know it by ourselves, and through the poets.” (Given that Swedenborg and Claude de Saint-Martin are still more forgotten today than they were in Baudelaire’s time, the claim that their main ideas were usurped—assuming they didn’t inherit them—could just as falsely be turned against Baudelaire himself.)

Certainly, the forms in which these ideas were received and the ways in which they were diffused—by Fourier on the one hand, by Nerval and Baudelaire on the other—were very different. What for the latter two affects and reinforces their immutable concept of the sacred, unleashes in the fundamentally profane mind of the former a turbulent principle whose sole aim is the conquest of happiness. Contrast—which in Fourier’s system is the first “serial” condition, necessary to satisfy the “butterfly” passion—is the fully armed Minerva surging from a head in which, on the transcendental plane, hyperlucidity and extreme rigor in matters of social criticism are allied with total freedom of conjecture. Someone has suggested that “a good thesis topic might be Fourier as humorist and mystifier.” It is certain that a humor of very high tension, punctuated by sparks such as might be generated between the two Rousseaus (Jean-Jacques and Henri), crowns this lighthouse, one of the brightest I know of, whose base defies time and whose crest is thrust into the heavens.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Théorie des quatre Mouvements, 1806. Traité de l’association domestique-agricole, 1822. Le Nouveau Monde industriel et sociétaire, 1829. Pièges et Charlatanisme des deux sectes de Saint-Simon et d’Owen, 1831. La Fausse Industrie morcelée, 1835–1836. “Publication des manuscrits de Fourier,”* in La Phalange, etc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH: Theory of the Four Movements. Theory of the Function of the Human Passions. Design for Utopia: Selected Writings. The UtopianVision of Charles Fourier (selections). Harmonian Man (selections).

* “From an examination of the manuscripts that have already been printed, it is clear that everything concerning the relations between the sexes in Harmony or in other periods has been highly expurgated. Notebooks 50 through 54, class mark 9, of the listing established upon Fourier’s death remain unpublished, or almost entirely unpublished.” (Maurice Lansac, Les Conceptions méthodologiques et sociales de Charles Fourier.) At last word, these notebooks seem to have disappeared during the recent war, while being secretly transferred from the library of the Ecole Normale Supérieure as part of an effort to safeguard the most precious documents housed there.

* Karl Marx, The German Ideology.

† Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

* Auguste Viatte, Victor Hugo et les Illuminés de son temps.