His most favourable 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.’1 Engels presented him as ‘one of the greatest satirists of all time’ and a consummate dialectician.2 How could Fourier both satisfy such demanding men and disconcert almost everyone who has approached him with his dizzying ascents into things marvellous 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.’3 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’4 (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 honours 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 21 January 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 mould, 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 rigour 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 humour 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,’5 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 Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier (selections). Harmonian Man (selections).
When the human race has exploited the globe beyond 60 degrees north latitude, the temperature of the planet will grow noticeably milder and more stable; rutting activities will increase. The aurora borealis, which will occur very frequently, will attach itself to the North Pole and flare out in the form of a ring or corona. The fluid, which today is only luminous, will acquire a new property: the ability to distribute heat as well as light.
The corona will be of such dimensions that at least one of its points will always be in contact with the sun, whose rays will be needed to embrace the circumference of the ring: it should present the sun with an arc, even in the sharpest inclination of the earth’s axis.
The influence of the corona borealis will make itself strongly felt up through the first third of its hemisphere; it will be visible in St Petersburg, in Okuotsk, and in every region of the 60th parallel.
From the 60th degree to the Pole, the heat will increase in such a way that the polar crust will enjoy temperatures comparable to those in Andalusia and Sicily.
At that point, the entire globe can be cultivated, which will cause temperatures to rise by five or six and even twelve degrees in still uncultivated areas such as Siberia and Upper Canada.
• • •
While waiting for this future event to take place, let us note the various indicators that announce it. First, there is the contrast in shape between the lands neighbouring the South Pole and those neighbouring the North Pole. The three meridional continents are sharpened into a point, so as to distance themselves from the polar latitude. But we notice a completely different shape in the septentrional continents; they flare out as they near the Pole and group around it, to absorb rays from the ring that will one day crown it; they pour their great rivers toward it, as if to encourage relations with the glacial sea. Now, if God had not planned to give the fecundating corona to the North Pole, it would follow that the arrangements of continents surrounding this Pole would bespeak a monumental ineptitude. And God would be all the more ridiculous for having acted so very unwisely at the opposite point, on the southern continents; for he has given them dimensions perfectly suited to surrounding a pole that will never have a fecundating corona.
One can regret only that God pushed the tip of the Strait of Magellan too far down, which causes a momentary hindrance; but his intent is for the entire route to be abandoned, and for man to build canals in the isthmuses of Suez and Panama through which large craft can navigate. These projects and so many others, the very idea of which horrifies the Civilized, will be mere child’s play for the industrial armies of the Spheric hierarchy.
Another harbinger of the corona is the defective positioning of the earth’s axis. If we assume that the corona shall never be, then the axis, for the good of the two continents, should be reversed by one-twenty-fourth, or seven and one-half degrees, on the meridians of Sandwick and Constantinople; so that this capital would be located at the 32nd parallel. It follows that the Bering Strait and the two tips of Asia and America would sink by the same amount into the ice of the North Pole: it would mean sacrificing the most useless tip of the globe to benefit the other portions.
• • •
No one has ever made this observation on the inappropriateness of the axis, because the philosophical spirit makes us shy away from any rational critique of God’s works and adopt extreme positions, whether doubt of Providence or blind and stupid admiration – as is the case with a few scientists, who admire even the spider, even the toad and other such filth, in which we can see only the Creator’s shame, at least until we can learn the motives for this misdeed. It is the same with the earth’s axis, whose deviant position should induce us to disapprove of God, and divine the birth of the corona that will justify the Creator’s apparent blunder. But because our philosophical exaggeration, our mania for either atheism or admiration, has diverted us from any impartial judgment of God’s works, we have managed neither to determine the rectifications required of his work, nor to foresee the material and political revolutions by which he will effect these corrections.
– from Theory of the Four Movements
* * *
In the cuckolded world, we may distinguish nine degrees of Cuckoldry, either among men or among women, for women are much more frequently cuckolded than men; and if the man wears horns that rise as high as stag’s antlers, we can say that the woman’s rise to the height of tree branches.
I will limit myself to citing the three most distinct classes; namely, the Cuckold proper, the Short-Horn, and the Long-Horn.6
1. The Cuckold, properly speaking, is honourably jealous and unaware of his disgrace, believing himself to be the sole possessor of his wife. As long as the public maintains his illusion with laudable discretion, we have no reason to mock him: can he become irritated over an offence of which he knows nothing? The ridicule is all for the seducer who cajoles and bows before the man with whom he knowingly shares his beauty.
2. The Short-Horn is a husband who has had his fill of domestic love and who, wishing to seek his love-making elsewhere, turns a blind eye to his wife’s conduct and freely leaves her to her admirers, it being understood that he will accept no child from her. Such a husband is not to be ridiculed; on the contrary, he has the right to comment on the horns of others as boldly as if he wore none himself.
3. The Long-Horn is ridiculously jealous, bothersome for his wife and quite aware of her infidelity. He is a wild man who wishes to rebel against the decrees of fate, but who, resisting clumsily, becomes an object of mockery by his useless precautions, his anger, his outbursts. When it comes to long-horns, Molière’s George Dandin is a perfect example.
– from Theory of the Four Movements
* * *
For us, a familiarity with nature’s system would be quite useless if it did not give us the means to right existing wrongs and replace divisive products, the creatures harmful to man, with countermoulded and useful servants. What good does it do us to know in what order each star entered the ranks of creation; to know that the horse and the donkey were created by Saturn in such-and-such a modulation; that the zebra and the quagga were created by Proteus (a star that is as yet undiscovered but very real, as we see its effects in every domain); that in this modulation Jupiter begat the ox and the bison; and Mars the camel and the dromedary? After these peculiar notions, we would be left with the bothersome certainty that these stars, normally branded idle strollers, have on the contrary performed on our planet sevenfold too many works, by providing us with creatures seven-eighths of which are nefarious.
What we will find precious is the art of bringing them back to the scene of creation through an effort of countermoulding, by which he who gave us the lion will give us as countermould a superb and docile quadruped, an elastic carrier, the anti-lion: the kind of post animal that would allow a rider, who leaves Calais or Brussels in the morning, to lunch in Paris, dine in Lyons, and sup in Marseilles, less worn out by his journey than one of our mailmen at full gallop. For the horse is a rude and simple carrier (soliped), which will be to the anti-lion what the springless carriage is to the vehicle with suspension. The horse will be left for harnessing and parades, once we possess the family of elastic carriers: the anti-lion, anti-tiger, and anti-leopard will be thrice the size of the current versions. Thus an anti-lion will easily cover eight yards with each bound, and the rider, on the back of his charger, will be as comfortably installed as if in a well-suspended berlin. It will truly be a pleasure to inhabit this world once we have such servants to enjoy.
The new creatures that will start arriving five years from now will give us a profusion of such riches in every domain, on sea as on land. Instead of creating whales and sharks, hippopotamuses and crocodiles, would it have cost any more to make these precious servants?
Anti-whales that tow vessels through calm waters
Anti-sharks that help track down fish
Anti-hippopotamuses that tug our boats up river
Anti-crocodiles or river collaborators
Anti-seals or sea-steeds
All these brilliant products will necessarily result from a creation in countermoulded aromas, which will begin with a spheric aromal bath that will purge the seas of their bitumen.
Let us skip over the portrait of these forthcoming marvels: rather than satisfying the reader, the prospect bores a generation that has been raised in impiety and doubts in Providence, a generation that, in its mental indigence, imagines that God does not have as much power to do good as he uses to do evil, for which he must have organized a sevenfold majority in subversive creations, as he will organize a sevenfold majority of good in harmonian creations.
– from Treatise of the Domestic-Agricultural Association
* * *
In harmony, one of the first operations will be to assemble a congress of grammarians and naturalists to compose a unified language, whose system will be regulated based on analogy, with the cries of animals and other natural documents. This work will barely be completed after a century; to finish it, they will have a certain compass that it is not yet time to reveal.
• • •
In addition to the alphabet of letters, we will have to create one for punctuation, which must contain the same number of signs. So little is known of punctuation that French has only seven signs for it; to wit , ; : . ! ?). The bracket, which was the eighth, is no longer in use. As for accents (é, è, ê, ë), they belong to the various vowels and are not punctuation marks. It is the same for the apostrophe, which would require a mark of its own, rather than just a raised comma. Our language is so poor in this regard that we are obliged to use either the period or the colon, which causes confusion.
I had undertaken to write a work on the full range of punctuation, and had gotten as far as twenty-five marks, illustrated by examples that proved the ambiguity of our current marks: I lost this work before it was finished and I have not returned to it since. Let us note in this regard that the first of all marks, the lowest, called the comma, should be differentiated into at least four distinct marks, to allow us to appreciate its many meanings, its different and infinitely varied senses, which now are expressed by means of a single mark: this is the height of confusion. It is the same for the other marks: they accumulate three or four meanings. Civilized punctuation is in real chaos, much like spelling, which varies with every printer in Paris. The Academy, with its obscurantist principle of not allowing even the most blatant vices to be corrected, has alienated people’s minds to such a degree that it has resulted in widespread rebellion, a universal anarchy in grammar.
– from The New Industrial and Societal World
* * *
Let us first define real and false virtue, by comparing the elephant with the dog, one of whom is the emblem of noble friendship and the other of false friendship.
1. Friendship. – It is noble in the elephant, and always compatible with honour. The elephant has none of the baseness of the dog, who, having been beaten for no reason, retains no memory of it. The elephant will endure just punishment, but he will not let himself be mistreated for no reason; he does not forgive offences. Moreover, his friendship is as constant and devoted as the dog’s. This noble friendship is the kind that leads to collective and corporate bonds, while the servile friendship of the dog favours only despotism, the Civilized and barbarian regime that would hardly allow noble passions to flourish, as they do in the elephant. Despots prefer the friendship of the dog, who, unjustly mistreated and debased, still loves and serves the man who wronged him.
2. Love. – It is decent and faithful in the elephant; it is scandalous and criminal in the dog, who in love is the most ignoble of quadrupeds, uniting all vices in this passion; like the loves of the Civilized, in which wiles, fraud, and oppression hold sway.
3. Paternity. – It is judicious and honourable in the elephant. He does not wish to sire offspring who would be born to misery, and he will not procreate in slavery. It is a lesson for the Civilized, who murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell themselves out of poverty. This improvident paternity is a false virtue, the selfishness of pleasure. Thus has nature preserved the elephant from this vice, making him the very model of the four affective passions taken in their truly social sense, passions that are suited to general relations. The dog, emblem of false virtues, embodies the kind of false paternity that engenders anthills, litters of eleven (the first of the anti-harmonic numbers), veritable heaps, three-quarters of which will perish by the knife, the tooth, or starvation.
4. Honour. – This is the fourth moulded virtue in the elephant; but it is not the kind of moral honour that claims to disdain riches and recommends that one drink from cupped hands, like Diogenes. The elephant wants not only good food (eighty pounds of rice per day); he also appreciates luxurious clothing, edibles, dishware, and libation. He is humiliated when one switches from silverware to earthenware.
If the elephant is the model of the four social virtues, we must, for the fidelity of our portrait, take him as representative of the fate ridiculed virtue suffers in Civilization. Thus nature has covered him in mud. He himself likes to be covered in dust, in the image of the virtuous man who chooses the path of poverty rather than seeking out a fortune that he can attain only by practising every vice, plunder, baseness, venality, injustice, trafficking, speculation, monopoly, and usury. Nature could have provided this noble animal with a rich coat like the tiger’s; but this would have been absurd and inaccurate, for in our societies real and truly honourable virtue leads only to poverty. I say real virtue and not philosophical virtues, such as the wisdom of the chameleon who lends himself to any infamy that will bear fortune.
• • •
Nature has given the elephant ivory defences, very rich weapons, by analogy with our social status that allots luxury to force, to the unproductive dominant class. Thus his trunk, which is simultaneously a weapon and a machine, is poorly dressed because it is productive, and the elephant must represent the state of industry and virtue falling victim to injustice and mockery. As an emblem of virtue’s fate, he is laughable behind by the contrast between his rump and his scrawny, graceless tail.
• • •
The extreme smallness of his eyes makes for a shocking contrast with the huge dimensions of his body. It depicts the narrow views of the virtuous man … His ears are the opposite of his eyes. Their immense mass and flattened form figure the suffering of the man of good will who hears only the language of hypocrisy and perversity in our societies, in which some preach virtue without practising it and others brazenly preach joyful vice. The just man is overwhelmed and offended by this double language of debasement; his ear is flattened from hearing only falseness: this ill-being is externalized in the elephant’s ear.
– from Final Analogies
1. Karl Marx, The German Ideology.
2. Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
3. Auguste Viatte, Victor Hugo et les Illuminés de son temps.
4. ‘Publication des manuscrits de Fourier,’ vol. 4.
5. ‘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.
6. The complete table contains sixty-four types progressively distributed into classes, orders, and genera, from the cuckold in the bud to the posthumous cuckold. I have described only three types here, wishing, on this subject as on so many others, to gauge just how far I should develop this Treatise. [Fourier’s note]