CHAPTER VII CHARLES FOURIER

CHARLES FOURIER occupies a singular position among the fathers of socialism; indeed, viewed from any angle, he is a unique and enigmatical phenomenon. He was born in Besançon in 1772, the son of a linen-draper in reasonably easy circumstances. On leaving school, he travelled for a time, somewhat extensively, for various firms, visiting Belgium, Germany and Holland. On his father's death, he inherited sufficient to enable him to start business in Lyons. In the troubles of 1793, Lyons, revolting against the Convention, was bombarded. Fourier narrowly escaped being shot, and he did lose his entire fortune. Thereafter for two years he served, an unwilling soldier, in the army. During the remainder of his life, nothing happened to Fourier, not even marriage. He travelled for various firms; he was a clerk; he served commerce intermittently, but always on the lowest rung of the ladder. On the strength of an exiguous legacy, at times he did nothing; and he wrote a number of extraordinary books in which he said the same things over and over again. He floated about between modest private hotels and furnished apartments, and in this depressing environment he died in 1837, being then 65 years of age.

Such is the outline. Yet two reasonably authenticated incidents deserve mention for their influence on the development of his mind. When a boy in his father's shop—indeed at the age of five, it is said—he received correction from his father for revealing to a customer some petty trick in the retail business; and the infant Fourier, realising that commerce was built on deceit, swore, like the infant Hannibal, that he would destroy the great enemy, which in this case was commerce. He complained that he was taught to tell the truth in church, and to tell lies in his father's shop. References to this ‘Hannibal oath’ occur throughout the literature of Fourier. Later, having attained man's estate and being at Marseilles, it was his duty to assist at dead of night in discharging into the harbour a cargo of rice, which the owners had allowed to spoil in expectation of a rise in price. Fourier, observing the stealthy destruction of what had once been food, and thinking of the hungry men sleeping uneasily all around, realised anew the shortcomings of civilisation and of commerce alike, and found occasion to renew his ‘Hannibal oath.’ Fourier did not succeed in destroying commerce; on the contrary, he spent a large part of his life as one of the least of its bondsmen. But the two legends are none the less significant.

As to the man himself, Fourier is almost the perfect example of furtive insignificance. Indeed he is worse than that. His was the insignificance, the timidity, the absurdity which inevitably provoke a smile even in recollection. An apostle of chaotic liberty, he nevertheless had a mania for orderliness, and was never happy unless things could be docketed and arranged in series. Even when he gained disciples, he never could be prevailed upon to speak, and throughout life had a great gift of silence. Old maidish in his habits, he had two passions, one for cats and the other for flowers. Perhaps music should be added as a third: he never could resist the impulse to march behind the band. Only very moderately educated in his youth, he belongs to the race of authors who have no desire to know what others have thought or said. Despite his modesty, he has accordingly no hesitation in proclaiming himself the first person for two thousand years to illumine the world's darkness. In a phrase which should give comfort to all, Emile Faguet has said of him that he has the disadvantages of ignorance which are great, and the advantages of ignorance which are enormous. ‘Moi seul’ and ‘moi le premier’ are recurrent motives in the writings of this unheroic commercial traveller who was cast for the part of Timorous rather than of Great-Heart. Take, as an example at random, one resonant blast of his goose-quill;

Moi seul j'aurai confondu vingt siècles d'imbécillité politique; et c'est à moi seul que les générations présentes et futures devront l'initiative de leur immense bonheur. Avant moi l'humanité a perdu plusieurs mille ans à lutter follement contre la nature; moi le premier...

and so on, rising to one of his few recurrent tags: ‘Exegi monumentum aere perennius.’¹

Fourier, moreover, has a childish, rather than a childlike, faith in God and the goodness of God. Indeed, in some respects, Fourier's ‘theology,’ to give it a somewhat pretentious name, provides the foundation-stone of all his theories, and will require to be noticed in somewhat greater detail presently. Lastly, and it is the point which distinguishes him from the rest of mankind, Fourier was blessed or cursed with a most riotous and unpruned imagination, so unrestrained indeed that it is doubtful how far he could have passed any of the ordinary tests of sanity. There is nothing which his disordered imagination cannot vividly conceive, either at the foundation of the world or in the days of Harmony yet to be realised, and he writes it all down in the minutest detail, with the calm assurance of a perpetual private secretary to Providence from whom nothing has been concealed. It would perhaps be unjust to suggest that no writer, living or dead, has ever produced a larger volume of outrageous nonsense than has Fourier. A much subtler diagnosis is required. In him the form is always much more grotesque than the substance; but undeniably he clothes all he has to say in a fantasy and an imagery which are so charged with the ludicrous that Fourier is scarcely to be read without, intermittently, loud guffaws of uproarious and irreverent laughter. Moreover, everything about Fourier is bizarre. A reader not accustomed to such things may be surprised to find a ‘Postface’ at the end of a volume, or to be confronted with an ‘extroduction,’ a ‘postienne’ or a ‘citerlogue.’ The diatonic scale turns up in unexpected places; there are strange symbols, K's, X's, and Y's, now lying on their back, now standing upside down. In at least one case (La Fausse Industrie), the pagination would defy an army of detectives to unravel. Fourier may at times be a hilarious farce: at times he is also an impenetrable mystification. Let no one, approaching Fourier, imagine that he is taking up a volume marked by the decorum, the austerity and the conventionality of John Stuart Mill.

Before attempting to give a more or less orderly account of that chaos that is Charles Fourier, it may be permissible to state briefly wherein lies his significance, and what is his place in the unfolding of socialist doctrine. Stated somewhat summarily, the importance of Fourier lies in the fact that, like Saint-Simon, he is a link, and a very interesting link, between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. They are indeed very different links, though they have this in common, that these two fathers of socialism are not in essence particularly socialistic; they are disfigured by strangely conservative features which do not appear in the child. They both cling to property; they are alike devotees of inequality. The essence of Fourier is that, as he looked round the world, he saw that everything was wrong, not merely a few things here and there, but the whole scheme of things. It was in a sense civilisation itself that was wrong—civilisation with all its attendant conventions and consequences. In this respect he is an echo, perhaps a caricaturing echo, of that greater voice from the eighteenth century, of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who also found that somehow the human race had taken the wrong turning. And if both found that our civilisation was a poor thing, a whited sepulchre, there is this to be said for the insignificant Fourier, as against his mightier predecessor, that he was at least constructive. Rousseau is after all little more than a wail of despair, an ineffective wringing of hands. But Fourier knew, with the utmost precision and definiteness he knew, what he wanted and what had to be done, and how in short the world could be put right in the brief space of two years. It is only necessary to abandon Morality, that evil legacy of civilisation, and to listen to our natural impulses, and we should straightway overcome all the trickery, the deceits, the hypocrisy, the divided interests, the parasitism which is what civilisation is. We shall in fact have established Harmony, and Harmony is the co-operation of men who sing at their work. Nothing could be simpler. It only requires a capitalist, and not even a very big one, to give the thing a start, and the rest is as easy as falling off a house.

In a sense Fourier's religion provides the starting-point of all his observations and of all his criticisms. It pervades all his thoughts, and it will constantly recur in almost every paragraph of this chapter; for this reason it may be as well to seek at the outset the dominant idées mères of Fourier on this subject. The old truth that man created God in his own image, that ‘thou thoughtest I was altogether such an one as thyself,’ is nowhere more startingly illustrated than in the case of Fourier. That God is good, that God has done well in all that he has done, that he has done nothing without a meaning and a purpose, sum up in general terms the essence of Fourier's religion; but with the acute logic of a somewhat unbalanced mind, he pushes this body of doctrine to conclusions which are much less orthodox than are usually drawn from these premises. He is severe on those who ‘half believe’ in God.¹ Belief in the goodness of God implies belief in the goodness of all that God has done; it is therefore inconsistent with a belief that a good God could make man with evil impulses and passions against which men have to wage incessant war. This, which is the line of the moralist and the theologian, is to establish war between God and man; indeed it is to set God at war with himself. We should seek for the laws of God in the impulses that come from God²; he foresaw, for example, that we should wish to eat three times a day. Those who write facetiously about ‘la galanterie et la gourmandise’ are ignorant of the importance which God attaches to our pleasures; for it is by ‘Attraction’—by pleasure—and not by constraint, that God governs the universe. It is thus that he governs planets and insects; it is thus that he intended to govern Man.

Moreover, in creating this unhappy world of ours, God was not engaged, as Burns would have put it, in trying out his ‘prentice hand.’ He has created milliards of globes before ours, and has thus acquired vast experience ‘pendant l'Eternité passée.’³ Elsewhere, even more patronisingly, he explains that God has had ample time to learn by experience in creating men in milliards of other worlds. In short, he knew what he was doing when he made men as they are; and instead of correcting the work of God, we should endeavour to find out how he meant his works to be used.⁴

And, primarily, God's intentions were that we should enjoy ourselves. Not only so, it would be an insult to God to expect him to provide merely mediocre pleasures.¹ To ask merely for our daily bread—le misérable pain, says Fourier, who never could abide bread—is to misconceive the magnanimity of God. In a phrase which comes with a certain shock by reason of its reversal of Christian ideas,² ‘Dieu nous doit beaucoup, puisqu'il peut beaucoup’; he owes us infinite happiness in this life and in the life to come. It is God who is our debtor. He hath made us, and not we ourselves; in fact (though Fourier does not stress the point) we were not consulted. He gave us a yearning for happiness; and as (by definition) his power is infinite, he owes us happiness pressed down and running over, a perpetual and unconditional pouring out of a blessing from the windows of heaven, so that there shall not be room enough to receive it.

Fourier, as has been hinted above, presents his criticisms of life and his social theories in a fantastic and indeed grotesque framework. It would be easy, by appropriate selections, to present him as a figure of farce and low comedy; but it would probably be equally wrong, again by appropriately different selections, to present him as a sober-minded and austere critic, adding his ponderous brick of thought to the construction of the socialist edifice. Many writers in their references to Fourier give the reader no hint, or but the merest hint, that Fourier was most emphatically not as other men: indeed in some respects he is a unique phenomenon in the world's literature. This designedly tactful drawing of a veil over Fourier's peculiarities is mistaken, if only because it gives a wrong and one-sided view of the man he was. After all, there is nothing to be ashamed of in being slightly deranged. For all we know, it may be the condition of the bulk of humanity: it all depends on the standards we choose to apply. But in the case of Fourier, there is this further most decisive reason against suppressing any acknowledgment of his eccentricities that his sanity and his apparent deviations from normal sanity are strangely intermingled. Indeed his whole criticism of civilisation to a certain extent postulates as a background his fantastic cosmogony and his views regarding the stages through which humanity must pass.

With this semi-apology for an apparent departure from accustomed austerity, we may endeavour to illustrate some of the more unexpected ideas which may surprise a reader embarking, unwarned, upon the turbulent waters of Fourier. Most intimately interwoven with the essence of his thought are his theories regarding the Cosmos. This world has been granted a life of 80,000 years; there are 40,000 of ascending vibrations and 40,000 of descending vibrations. The arithmetic may seem weak, since there is also a period of 8,000 years of complete happiness, the Apogée du Bonheur.¹ Doubtless this minor discrepancy is covered by Fourier's general reservation that everything he says is subject to an exception of an eighth or a ninth. In all there are 32 periods, 16 in the upward and 16 in the downward ladder. We are at present in the fifth of the first eight stages, having passed through what Fourier calls the Sectes Confuses, Sauvagerie, Patriarchat and Barbarie. Ahead of us lies Garantisme, a stage in which human rights will be effectively guaranteed to us; at times, however, it is rather suggested that we may by-pass Garantisme. These eight stages take up 5,000 years, and we shall then find ourselves in Harmony—indeed more and more delirious grades of Harmony, for 35,000 years. Thereafter for 8,000 years we shall have that lofty table-land of perfect bliss, after which the world will go downhill again through precisely the same stages in the inverse order; and at the end, if any of us are left, we shall be transported to another planet.

It is when we approach Harmony that things will begin to hum. A Northern Crown (after the manner of Saturn's rings) will encircle the Pole, shedding a beneficent aromatic dew on the earth. The sea will cease to be briny, and, greatest of delights, will be transformed into lemonade, for which unsatisfying beverage Fourier seems to have had a marked partiality. Six moons of a new and superior quality will replace our present inefficient satellite. A new race of animals will emerge. In place of the lion, there will be the anti-lion, all that a lion is not, docile and serviceable; there will be anti-wolves and anti-bears, and a whole race of really nice beasts. If things are only taken in hand at once, telescoping various stages, the anti-bug may be looked for in 1829, along with the anti-rat. This is indeed good news for ‘le beau Paris, si richement meublé de punaises,’ of which incidentally there are 42 varieties.² Our argosies, knitting land to land, will be drawn by anti-whales. After these marvels, it is perhaps rather a disappointment to know that we shall then live only 144 years, of which, however, 120 will be spent in the active exercise of love.³

It is perhaps a corollary to this lively interest in the history of the globe that Fourier is also so much concerned with the stars and the planets, which in so many ways influence our lives now and hereafter. The stars and planets are animated beings like ourselves, only perhaps more so. They also have their passions, and from their passions spring other stars and planets, but also plants and animals. The planets seem to be androgynous, like plants self-contained for purposes of reproduction; but they also have intercourse with other planets. Unless Fourier is more confused than usual, the Aurora Borealis merely betokens that the Earth is holding out lonely hands of love to Venus. Fourier tabulates at considerable length the various animals and plants we owe to Jupiter, the Sun, Venus and so on. The death of Phoebe (otherwise known as the Moon) plays a large part in this astronomical fantasy. Phoebe, whom he rather rudely calls a cadavre blafard, died of a putrid fever, contracted from the Earth fifty years before the Flood: it was indeed the death of Phoebe that caused the Flood. The absence of her contribution to the last creation caused some strange omissions in the animals and plants we ought to have had. In particular, the world has been the poorer by the absence of a very special gooseberry, of which it was robbed by the untimely decease of Phoebe. The discriminating reader will have begun to discern dimly how the anti-lion and the anti-bug are to be generated: another creation, under more favourable conditions and therefore consisting predominantly of good beasts, is pending, and will mark the transition to Harmony.¹

Fourier's concern for human happiness is not limited to what happens in this transitory life. He believes not merely in immortality; he believes also in metempsychosis. We shall return again and again, and keep on returning; and that is one reason why we should be so intensely interested in what is going to happen. It is important that this should be a world worth returning to. On all this, Fourier is as extensively and as exactly informed as he is regarding the death of Phoebe. He knows exactly how long we shall be away, when and how we shall return. He knows how what we do now influences the lives of those waiting to come back, and again it is all told with a wealth of ludicrous detail which may not be so exciting as his account of the passionate drama of the love affairs of the planets, but is equally full of information which, as the reviewers say, is not readily available elsewhere.

Enough perhaps of the fantastic side of Fourier; yet perhaps so much is necessary, firstly because these extravagances may not be dismissed as idle weeds that grow in the sustaining corn; they are, as has been suggested above, an integral part of Fourier; and secondly, because it is as well that the reader should know in advance that there are moments of wild surprise in the perusal of our author.¹ Yet it will be conceded that a writer with pretensions to seriousness who buries his message under such a superstructure of airy imaginings, imposes upon himself a very considerable handicap. Discarding, so far as one may, these outpourings of an unduly exuberant imagination, is it possible to detach the essentials of Fourier, and restate them, as they might have been stated by John Stuart Mill?

In rationalising Fourier, one may, in the first place, distinguish between a critical and destructive exposition of what is, and a constructive part designed to produce a happier world. On the former aspect—and to a large extent it explains the significance and the influence of Fourier—there never has been a more acute, a more uncompromising and unsparing critic of civilisation; his criticism is doubtless expressed with a Fourieresque exaggeration and bizarrerie, yet there are few honest men who can read Fourier without being made at times slightly uncomfortable, just as the virtuous may be disconcerted by the innocent prattling of a child. To borrow the words of Polonius, referring to another case where the question of sanity has been much debated, Fourier's barbs have a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.

As Fourier sees this world, it is not a question of things here and there being wrong: it is the whole scheme of things that stands condemned. In civilisation, every human relationship is warped by deceit, intrigue and falsehood. Repeatedly and rather plaintively, with the hurt cry of a disillusioned child, he laments that virtue and truth, which ought to lead to prosperity and wealth, in fact lead merely to poverty and disgrace. Virtue is less lucrative than vice; in this world you will get nowhere if you rely on la Vérité. If you want to succeed, you must swindle your way to success. La fourberie au plus haut degré²—there you find the chief mark of civilisation. The least desirable elements always come out on the top; honesty and integrity merely provide a short-cut to failure.

Is it necessary to say anything with regard to marriage, that bulwark of civilisation? Perhaps it would be wiser to refer the curious reader to the pages of Fourier for enlightenment. On this school of hypocrisy and deceit, Godwin's views are tepid and insipid compared to those of Fourier, who, at any moment, in contrast to the mediaeval ‘quinze joies de mariage,’ will provide the reader with a complete ‘Gamme des disgrâces de l'état conjugal.’¹ Fundamentally, what is wrong here is that ‘la fidélité perpétuelle en amour est contraire à la nature humaine’; and an institution resting on a wholly contrary false assumption must necessarily engender hypocrisy and falsehood. Fourier, holding the views he did, showed wisdom in dying a bachelor.

But to get back to safer ground and the items of the indictment against civilisation, it is further to be observed that civilisation rests on the mutual enmity of each against all, so that each indeed is forced by his own interests to desire the misfortunes of all the rest. In short, we each make our living out of the mishaps that befall our neighbours. On this characteristic point, it may, however, be as well to quote the words of Fourier:

Every person engaged in an industry is at war with the mass, and malevolent toward it from personal interest. A physician wishes his fellow citizens good, genuine cases of fevers, and an attorney good lawsuits in every family. An architect has need of a good conflagration which should reduce a quarter of the city to ashes, and a glazier desires a good hailstorm which should break all the panes of glass. A tailor, a shoemaker, wishes the public to use only poorly-dyed stuffs and shoes made of bad leather, so that a triple amount may be consumed—for the benefit of trade; that is their refrain. A court of justice regards it as opportune that France continues to commit a hundred and twenty thousand crimes and actionable offences, that number being necessary to maintain the criminal courts. It is thus that in civilised industry every individual is in intentional war against the mass.²

In civilisation, however, we are not only natural enemies of each other; if we be candid, we will admit that most of us are parasites. Take four men at random, and probably three are doing useless work that would not need to be done in a sane world. We set four children to look after five cows; and even so the grain is nibbled. Fourier, with his usual gusto, gives an appalling list of twelve classes of parasites, and few there be who escape his net. There are first of all three classes of domestic parasites which in all conscience are sufficiently sweeping. There are three-fourths of the women in the cities, and a half of the women in the country; there are likewise three-fourths of the children, condemned as entirely useless in the towns and of negligible use in the country; there are three-fourths of household domestics. Passing to social parasites, at one sweep there are the armies of the land and sea; there are the legions of administration (now known as the hordes of civil servants); half the manufactures are in effect useless; nine-tenths of merchants no better. And so we advance through absenteeism, the devotees of St. Monday, a most ruinous saint who is fêted fifty-two days in the year, and workers who lean on their spades to see a cat pass, ending with what he calls the seceders,? miscellaneous collection of sharpers, vagrants and beggars—now more politely called the unsocial elements.¹

Moreover, whatever we do, we do inefficiently. Everywhere civilisation is marked by gaspillages. The root evil on this side is our industrial incoherence. Industry, in his favourite word, is morcelée; it ought to be combinée. When Fourier, with a lordly sweep, consigns three-fourths of all women to a status of uselessness, he is not in any way denying the worth of women, or underestimating their afflictions. Anything but: Fourier is in fact almost the first, as he is certainly the most valiant, defender of Women's Cause. But he is maddened by the sight of 300 women, in 300 little houses, lighting 300 little fires, and cooking 300 little dinners in 300 little pots for 300 little men returning from their work; when three or four women, with the help of one large pot and one large fire, could produce better results. Possibly, as he says, three families could not be associated successfully; but 300 could. His illustrations, it is true, chiefly concern domestic arrangements and agriculture; he has little to say of industry, which indeed he habitually regarded with a certain repugnance. On the main point, however, he is clear: it takes 40 civilised people to do the work of five Harmonians, because of our absurd addiction to small units, because we refuse to associate.

If such be the views of Fourier with regard to the harmless necessary housewife, he cannot, in view of his youthful Hannibal oath, be expected to be tolerant of commerce. He quotes with approval the saying of St. Chrysostom that a merchant cannot be agreeable to God: ‘accordingly merchants are excluded from the Kingdom of Heaven, although the elect of all other professions are admitted, even a lawyer in the case of Saint-Ives.’ In a sense commerce represents in an extreme form the vices which mark civilisation; but apart from this general ground, it is condemned by Fourier in the main for two reasons which, however, intermingle. In the first place, commerce is the natural home of deceit and falsehood. What is commerce, he asks? The answer is: ‘C'est le mensonge avec tout son attirail, banqueroute, agiotage, usure et fourberies de toute espèce.’² Commerce, in a state of complete liberty, is a sewer of infamy, a cloaque d'infamies. It is a sphere of life from which truth is banished. In antiquity merchants were called little thieves, but they are no longer ‘des petits voleurs.’³ In one of his marvellous synoptic tables, Fourier arranges the crimes of commerce under 36 headings, over which the leisurely reader may ponder awestruck.¹ Moreover, the misdeeds of commerce operate in the direction of a universal worsening of the conditions of life:

One would have augured a reform of this sink of corruption, of this inept mechanism, which, by the concurrence of sixty malevolent characteristics,—makes industry a trap for the nations, and aggravates at once their wretchedness and their depravity. It is maintained that people are not more deceitful than they were formerly; nevertheless one could, half a century ago, obtain at a reasonable rate goods of a durable colour, and natural foods; to-day adulteration, knavery, prevail everywhere. The cultivator has become as great a defrauder as the merchant used to be. Dairy products, oils, wines, brandy, sugar, coffee, flour, everything is shamelessly debased. The masses can no longer procure natural foods; only slow poisons are sold them, such progress has the spirit of commerce made even in the smallest villages.²

This, though it savours somewhat of the folly of saying that the former times were better than these, against which we have been officially warned, is sufficiently clear. Commerce, leading to cut-throat competition and to la manie d'écraser, is a provocation to all the vices. Moreover, the frauds and other crimes of commerce are contagious.³

The second line of criticism is that commerce has usurped a place in society to which it is not entitled. Commerce should be subordinate; freedom of commerce should be subject to restrictions according to the needs of the social body.⁴ On the contrary, the merchant has become an industrial pirate, living at the expense of the manufacturer and producer, whose servant he ought to be. Indeed, the mercantile power tends to pass beyond this and to keep the governments themselves in tutelage.⁵ Perhaps, however, enough has been said to indicate the nature of Fourier's criticism of civilisation. We are all natural enemies, prospering on, and praying for, each other's misfortunes; most of us are parasites. Even those of us who do anything, do it badly. In different ways, marriage and commerce are fruitful nurseries of all the vices of hypocrisy and deceit. Civilisation, in short, is an endless morass of mess, inefficiency, swindling and lying—a sewer in which every human relationship is poisoned and warped.

Such is the diagnosis; and it will be conceded that if Fourier is even, as the saying is, substantially correct, it would be as well to seek for a remedy. As it happens, the remedy is of an astonishing simplicity. It is to put your trust in God and not in men, least of all in philosophers and theologians; it is to believe with childish simplicity in the goodness of God, and abolish the evil thing we call Morality. We are confronted once more, it will be observed, with Fourier's religion, from which indeed Fourier himself seldom escapes for more than a few pages, and of which something has already been said in anticipation. Not always without producing an absurd effect, Fourier likes to compare himself with Newton—sometimes, indeed, to Newton's disadvantage. Newton discovered the Law of Attraction; but, be it added, he confined himself to the useless side which ministers to mere curiosity. For in what way are we advantaged if we do know the weight of each of the planets?¹ Fourier regarded himself as the Newton of the spiritual and moral world. The great Law of Attraction governs the planets: so also God, the Governor of the Universe, governs men by attraction. Men may rely on compulsion and restraint; but not God. If he had meant to constrain us, he would have created a race of giants with the object of bullying us. He has, on the contrary, elected to give us attraction and repulsion impelling us in various directions, and he has distributed these in such proportions as are adequate for the achievement of his designs. This ‘attraction’ is, in the hands of God, a magic ring, transforming into pleasures functions which are in themselves repugnant. What could be more repugnant than the care of an infant—puking and muling, and worse? But God transforms this soin si déplaisant into a pleasure by giving the mother attraction passionnée pour ces travaux immondes.² This also explains the somewhat cryptic statement inscribed on Fourier's tombstone as a convenient summary of his gospel: ‘Les Attractions sont proportionelles aux Destinées.’ God, the great economist, distributes attractions just in the amount required to enable (and compel) us to fulfil our destined task.

There then, in Fourier's own view, is his great discovery, placing him, if anything, slightly above Newton. The Law of Attraction is manifested in the play of the human passions, by which we are impelled in one direction or another. All that is required is that we should respond to these promptings, that we should in fact obey this law of passional attraction. Humanity has lost two thousand years, because it has been on a false scent, blinded and misled by philosophers. Fourier has very decided opinions about philosophers. They are sophists, a more hateful race of men, if that be possible, even than merchants. For it is under their malign influence that men have plagued themselves with ideas of morality and of duties. If God be good, and if he implanted these passions in our hearts, he meant us to follow these passions. He does not despise the works of his hands. Humanity has been taught that these passions are things of evil, to be fought against and subdued. But this is a delusion. Fourier's premises will not allow him to admit that God could spoil his own work and be at enmity with himself.

Would that your Causer, ere knoll your knell
For this riot of passion, might deign to tell
Why, since It made you
Good in the germ,
It sent a worm,
To madden Its handiwork, when It might well
Not have assayed you.

Thus Thomas Hardy, facing the same problem, as he contemplates the portrait of a woman about to be hanged—speaking, Fourier would say, like a sophist in his assumption that God could mar what he had made, and that he could lay snares and gins for his creatures.¹ There is no passion that does not come from God, and there is therefore not one, not a single one—and Fourier's voice seems to rise—which is not good. It is neither God nor the passions that are evil; if in civilisation our passions are baneful, it is the environment that makes them so, and it is therefore men's environment and not men's passions that must be altered. And that for Fourier is indeed the whole problem. Assuming that men's passions are good, and this assumption is forced on us by their divine origin, how are we to modify men's environment so that these passions may, all and without exception, have free play? How can we arrange things so that Nero, following his passions, will be as useful a citizen as Marcus Aurelius?

Before this, it ought perhaps to have been hinted that the word ‘passion’ in its Fourieresque context may be ambiguous and misleading. It may be due to these philosophers and sophists whom Fourier could not abide, but indubitably ‘passion’ conveys the impression of something peculiarly purple in hue, an avenue at the end of which looms a crime passionel. In Fourier the ‘passions’ are little more than the various ways in which pleasure may be experienced or heightened; or putting it in other words, which Fourier would have said amount to the same thing, they are the various channels whereby God exercises attraction. Inevitably, much of Fourier's attention is devoted to an analysis of these human passions, and in fact vast tracts of incomprehensibility are devoted to this subject. There are in all twelve ‘passions’—or avenues along which we are lured to pleasure at the promptings of God; fortunately it is only with three, perhaps primarily only with two, that we are here concerned in this restricted study of Fourier. There are, firstly, the five passions corresponding to the five senses of taste, smell, hearing, sight and touch. These, among other things, account for the pleasures of gluttony and the opera, which occupy an altogether peculiar position in Fourier's scheme of things. Then there are, further, four passions of the soul, arising from men's need of sympathy and sociability; and these are represented by friendship, ambition, love and family affection. Of these it is significant that friendship and ambition are classified as ‘major,’ whereas love and ‘le famillisme’ appear subordinately as minor. As distinguished from the passions of the senses, which are concerned with ‘luxe,’ these four passions lead to the formation of groups. Then above these, there are three distributive or governing passions which, though perhaps not immediately comprehensible, lie at the core of Fourierism. To these three passions he gives the names of la Papillonne, la Cabaliste and la Composite. What are these so mysterious passions to which we are subject, and which are so important that they govern all the rest?

Firstly, be it observed that these distributive passions are wholly misunderstood in the civilised order, where, as they only lead to confusion and disaster, they are regarded as vices. The first of them, the Papillonne, represents man's love of variety and change: it is the butterfly in the heart of each of us. If God had meant us to spend fifteen hours a day in stupefying work, he would have given us a taste for monotony, an abhorrence of variety.¹ On the contrary he has placed a whispering butterfly close to our ear. God did not make man for monotony, any more than for monogamy. Fourier would have held that man is not made for mono-anything. Whatever we may be doing, we are presently hankering after something else. An hour and a half of any occupation is about as much as any of us can stand, without falling a victim to the roving eye and the wandering thought. There then is the Papillonne, the butterfly passion. Man is so made (and is so made deliberately and intentionally by God) that he desires, and his nature demands, constant change, not merely in work, but in all things. Who are we that we should stifle the voice of the butterfly, the prophet of God?

Secondly among the governing passions is La Cabaliste, which denotes men's love of intrigue and emulation, the passion that makes men take sides and work for their side. It is, we are told, a favourite passion among women: ‘elles aiment à l'excès l'intrigue.’² This is by no means a denigration: it merely proves their pre-eminent fitness for the new social order. Also in all deliberative assemblies, men tend to become pronounced Cabalists: having prayed that unity and concord may prevail, they at once rush into the lobbies in order to ‘cabaler et intriguer de plus belle.’ Fourier quotes the Almighty in reply to those who would have no rivalry among men:

The Deity mocks at them when they address a stupid prayer to him to make them all brothers, all united in opinion, according to the wish of Plato and Seneca. God answers them: ‘Milliards of years ago I created the passions such as the unity of the universe demanded; I am not going to change them to please the philosophers of an imperceptible globule, which must continue, like all the others, subject to the twelve passions, and particularly to the tenth, the Cabalist.’¹

This may be a somewhat unnecessarily crushing and undeserved retort to Plato and Seneca, who meant well and who are not accustomed to being called the philosophers of an imperceptible globule. Yet Fourier is right. A world in which every one agreed would be of a heartrending insipidity. It is, moreover, curious how Fourier is justified in strange places. Schools, which by nature have no ‘houses,’ have taken to the creation of fictional and notional houses, in order to stimulate the tumult and the shouting on sports day; in so doing, they are paying a distant tribute to Fourier. During the execution of the Soviet Five Years Plan, the frequent challenge of one factory to another in the matter of the time required to do a job would have been hailed by Fourier as a notable example of the Cabalist in action.

Of the Composite, ‘the most beautiful of the twelve passions,’² little need be said. We are told that it is incompatible with civilised labour, and for this reason it may be found somewhat elusive by those who have not advanced beyond civilisation. It is described as the blind enthusiasm which springs from the combination of two kinds of pleasure, a pleasure of the sense and a pleasure of the soul. It is perhaps possible to realise dimly what the Composite passion is, if we reflect how little pleasure there is in sharing a bottle with a surly man; how, even in the most delightful conversation, there is a sense of something lacking until our host ventures to ask: the question for which we have been waiting. Pleasures are more than proportionately heightened by the addition of pleasures of a different character; and this is the doing of the Composite passion. In the words of a knowledgable authority: ‘A concert of musick in a banquet of wine is as a signet of carbuncle set in gold.’ Fortunately, a comprehension of Fourier does not call for an exact appreciation of what precisely the Composite passion is.

So far we have been concerned with Fourier's analysis of this present evil world, his views on the nature of God and the psychological make-up of man, which in all things embodies the intentions of God. It remains to consider the constructive side of Fourier. How are we to transform the society we know into Harmony, where those we now call evil men will become virtuous citizens, precisely because they will then be able to satisfy those God-given instincts which now are so charged with evil consequences? Harmony will be a world where men will be governed by passional attraction, urging them in constantly changing directions, a world where monotony will be unknown, in which also men will be governed by the Cabalist passion, inciting them to rivalry and intrigue.

It is here that we come to what, if not the most characteristic, is at least the most celebrated of Fourier's contributions to speculation. Even if little else of Fourier's is remembered, it is at least generally known that he devised in imagination the Phalanx, that associative self-contained unit of co-operative workers on which Harmony will be built. ‘Theory’—though do not ask too curiously in what way—indicates that to start a Phalanx, 1,620 people will be required, or approximately 1,800 to allow for a margin; it is also desirable to find a pleasant situation, a valley with a broad river and fertile land, set in something of the mystery and the charm of forests. After all, we are raising the curtain on Fairyland, and some latitude may be allowed the dreamer. The Phalanx is to be self-supporting, although in a world of phalanxes, different units would necessarily specialise in different directions.

It would, however, be an error to assume that the Phalanx is a communistic body. It most emphatically is not. In certain respects this father of socialism is incorrigibly conservative in sentiment. It is true that all the members of the Phalanx live in one building, called the Phalanstère, a very sumptuous building with dining-halls, dancing-halls, pleasing colonnades and much more than West-end luxury can devise. But the Phalanstère does not destroy the individuality of those who dwell there. Anyone who chooses and who cares to pay extra may have his meals in his own room in preference to the larger dining-room. There are at least three tariffs, so that it is possible to dine cheaply or expensively; there are luxurious rooms and rooms which the race of landladies would call moderate. In fact there are wealthy and not-so-astonishingly wealthy Harmonians. There are, of course, no poor Harmonians: compared to anyone in civilisation, the eyes of the poorest Harmonian bulge out with fatness. According to his substance, each pays his money and takes his choice. In short, the Phalanstère is a conglomeration of service-flats to suit all purses. It is perhaps anticipating what may come later, and indeed discretion should perhaps suggest the omission of further discussion, but it may be mentioned that life in the Phalanstère is enormously simplified by the fact that all—fathers and mothers alike—are privileged to lead a bachelor existence.

It may be as well to emphasise on the threshold of the Phalanx, how pronouncedly inegalitarian Fourier is, how far removed he is from any attack on property as such. They accuse me of attacking property! he says with indignation—‘moi, inventeur du bouclier de la propriété.’¹ He constantly emphasises that the régime sociétaire is incompatible with equality: it calls for contrasts.² The Phalanx must therefore be composed of ‘gens très-inégaux en fortunes’³; in fact it is the extreme inequality prevailing in Harmony that makes the wheels go round. In short, Harmony is a place where ‘toute égalité est poison politique.’¹ Clearly there is not much of the leveller about Fourier.²

When we turn to the internal organisation of the Phalanx, the first question to be considered is the eternal problem of work. In this life, as we know it, for most of humanity work is something that is loathsome and repugnant. This is indeed part of Fourier's indictment of civilisation. In one of those strangely penetrating flashes which periodically stab through the Fourieresque phantasmagoria, he observes that ‘Morality ordains that we should love our work; let it then know how to make work lovable.’³ It is a just and profound observation. In Fourier's scheme of things, work is to be made attractive: le travail attrayant, indeed, becomes one of the watchwords of the school, and in a sense is accepted as a legacy in the anarchist tradition, which holds that men will do something rather than be completely idle, and that therefore the world's work may be accomplished by people fleeing from the boredom of standing with folded arms.

The secret of making work attractive is found by having appropriate regard to the passions, and in particular to the Papillonne and the Cabaliste. People should work at what attracts them, and no one should work at anything for more than an hour or an hour-and-a-half, or at the outside two hours. A spirit of rivalry and emulation should be infused into all labour, and accordingly the workers should be associated in series and groups in active but friendly competition. In a passage which is marked by an unaccustomed degree of orderliness, Fourier in one place enumerates seven essential conditions on which the attractiveness of societary work will depend. The first has a peculiarly modern ring about it. It is that every worker is to be a partner, remunerated by dividends and not by a salary. Here it is possible to see the Guild Socialist horror of wage-slavery. The third embodies the principle of short sessions, two hours being the utmost limit of human enthusiasm in any direction. The fourth, suggested by the Cabaliste, is that work should be carried on by companies of friends, spontaneously united and stimulated by active rivalries. The sixth requires that division of labour (as Fourier understood it) should be carried to the last possible point, in order to give to everyone his appropriate opening. Underlying all these is the ‘pivotal’ condition of the guarantee of a minimum sufficient to free everyone from anxiety.¹

These principles may give a sufficient indication of the nature of the industrial organisation in Harmony. Work is carried on by groups united by a common interest and inspired by passion for their work. The groups are united together in series, and the principle of division of labour (always remembering that the phrase has here a rather special significance) is carried to the utmost degree possible in each group. Thus you may have competing groups devoted to the cultivation of white hyacinths, blue hyacinths and red hyacinths, the whole of these groups forming the series of hyacinth growers. There is an inordinate amount of discussion in Fourier regarding the proper grading of the groups. Inside the series there is the ascending and descending wing, as well as the centre, and these require to be carefully balanced. Normally the two wings will compete against the centre. There is one pleasant picture of 32 groups of pear-growers, ranging from the bâtardes dures to the bâtardes molles, through all degrees of hardness and softness, and showing how their rivalries may be stimulated. And indeed, with a little ingenuity, there need be no limit. Soft-pear growers compete against hard-pear growers; pear-growers compete against apple-growers; women pear-growers compete against men pear-growers. And each group has its banner under which it marches out to its task. It will be observed that when Fourier speaks of division of labour, his mind is not moving in the grooves of Adam Smith. It will also be apparent that when we pass the portals of the Phalanx, we move as in Fairyland, and our earthly cares do not extend beyond blue hyacinths and soft pears. It should be added that each worker joins as many groups as he wishes, normally from 30 to 50. In whatever directions his tastes lie, he will be able to work an occasional hour with the appropriate group.

It has already been remarked above that Fourier is no egalitarian. It is not merely that he regards inequality as something designed by God, and as a healthy influence in the life of Harmony; in other ways he is throughout extremely tender in his treatment of Capital. There is indeed something which would be slightly repulsive, if it were not wholly grotesque, in his attempts to wheedle Capital into acceptance of his scheme. He looked for a capitalist to launch his first Phalanx, and he kept a list of 4,000 ‘candidates,’ who might be persuaded to save humanity. Before these he dangled the whole gamut of hereditary sceptres. For the merest paltry sum anyone might have been Emperor, Calif, King, Duke or anything else. But apart from such adventitious rewards, Capital will be generously treated in Harmony. It is unnecessary to say that the economies of association and the zeal of enthusiastic workers spurred on by the Cabalist passion will result in a world bursting with prosperity. This surplus Fourier proposed to divide in the ratio of four-twelfths to Capital, five-twelfths to Labour and three-twelfths to Talent, a proportion which, giving less than a half to Labour, need certainly alarm no capitalist. It is here that we encounter one of the most characteristic ideas of Fourier. Prosperity will be so outrageous in the Phalanx that there is no reason why all should not be capitalists. To encourage this desirable end, he adopts a childish device whereby the rate of interest will vary inversely with the number of shares held in the Phalanx. The poor Harmonian (if a contradiction in terms may be permitted) will be able to look for a 30 per cent. or even a 40 per cent. return. The object of this is to convert him ‘d'emblée à l'esprit de propriété et de conservation, d'où naissent les bonnes mœurs,’¹ a horribly bourgeois sentiment. The medium Harmonian will get a modest 15 per cent. The wealthy Harmonian will have to put up with a beggarly 5 per cent. Thus there is no one in Harmony who need be without a share. Looking round him, he may say with complacency: ‘My library; my dining-hall; my fields’²—just as the worker in the South Metropolitan Gas Company may say: ‘My gas tanks, my railway trucks, my directors.’

But indeed Fourier goes much deeper than this. To all talk about the class struggle and about class consciousness, his answer is simple. It is, in effect, to confound the classes. If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? As a result there will be no battle. This ultimately is one reason why each one attaches himself to some thirty or more groups. In Harmony, each one will certainly be a capitalist. He may have shown talent (either in supervision or in invention) in the merino group or the street-paving group. In addition he may be entitled to remuneration as a worker in two dozen other groups. Under these circumstances he ceases to be exclusively a capitalist, a manager or a wage-earner. Each man becomes a microcosm, and such conflicting interests as might emerge are harmoniously resolved in the breasts of each. All realise in fact that if they push their interest too far in one direction, they will only damage themselves in another. There will be no conflicts, since each one will know that what he loses on the swings he will make up on the roundabouts.

The reward given to each series does not depend on the product of its work, but is professedly based on the necessity and usefulness of its task, and inversely on the agreeableness of the occupation. The application of this general principle reflects Fourier's own tastes. The cultivation of fruit ranks low, because no place is so delectable as an orchard. The opera, oddly enough to those who do not know Fourier, ranks first in the order of necessity. It has been indicated that a ‘pivotal’ condition of labour being made attractive is that a minimum be guaranteed. Fourier never fails to underline that society owes the individual a living, whether he earns it or not. In places, this takes the moderate form of a guarantee of work in health, and of assistance, a social minimum in case of infirmity; and indeed he speaks of an extension of assurance as one way of escaping from civilisation into the next state, le régime garantiste.¹ But elsewhere the guaranteed minimum rather suggests what in another quarter has been called the vagabond's wage. The reason for the minimum is of some interest. It is that civilisation has deprived us of certain rights which primitive man enjoyed—the chase, fishing, gathering’ and pasturage.² In another place he gives a more lengthy list of rights, with a pleasing addition in the form of l'insouciance, of which civilisation most certainly has deprived us.³ For these losses we are due compensation. Fourier, who is always precise, tells us exactly what the minimum should be:

Board at tables of the third class, five meals a day;

A decent suit, and uniforms for work and for ‘parade,’ as well as all the instruments for husbandry and manufacture;

Individual lodgings, consisting of a room with a cabinet, and admission to the public halls, to fêtes of the third class, and to plays in third-class logess.⁴

Work then is to be done under the influence of attraction. What is to happen in the case of work that is positively and of necessity disagreeable and even repulsive? It is a question on which there has been much discussion, sometimes rather puerile, in socialist literature. Fourier's solution is so characteristic, and in a sense so logical on his premises, that it deserves to be mentioned, even at the risk of straying into the field of education and the upbringing of the youth. The problem, expressed crudely, is that of scavenging in an ideal world where all follow their natural bent in competing in the cultivation of white and blue hyacinths. Applying Fourier's doctrine of passions, it is possible to get the solution at the first guess. Who are those among us who positively enjoy being dirty? Is not Fourier right in saying that at a certain age most boys and some girls are vrais maniaques de saleté, little devils for dirt, to translate freely. Parents daily reproach their offspring for what they foolishly regard as their unnatural dislike of cleanliness. They forget that all our passions are good, and given us for a purpose. Children have their defects; but this love of dirt is socially their salvation; they are in fact ‘passionately attracted’ to the work of scavenging, and this work is therefore entrusted to them, grouped together in the corporation known as ‘Little Hordes.’ But Fourier is here too Fourieresque to escape quotation:

The madness for dirt which prevails among children is merely an uncultivated germ, like wild fruit; it must be refined by applying to it the two forces of the religious unitary spirit, and of corporative honour. Supported by these two motives, repugnant occupations will become games, having indirect composite attraction....

For long I made the mistake of censuring this odd peculiarity in children, and of trying to make it disappear in the mechanism of the ‘passionate series’; that was to act like a Titan, wishing to change the work of God. I achieved no success until I decided to speculate in accordance with attraction, and to make use of the inclinations of childhood, as they have been created by Nature....

... There is nothing, therefore, left for children to do but to take over the field of unclean work,—charity of high statesmanship, since it saves from contempt the last industrial classes, and in consequence the intermediate classes also.¹

These Little Hordes ‘are always on foot at 3 o'clock in the morning, even in the depth of winter, attending to the animals, working in the slaughter-houses.’ The Little Hordes also repair the highways, turn out in any emergency, kill reptiles and vipers, and do all the other things Boy Scouts dream of doing.

There are two large questions on which Fourier has much to say, but as they lie somewhat off our main path, a brief notice may be sufficient. The first relates to education in general, and the second is the large question of the place of women in society, with the allied problems of marriage and feminism. The civilised child Fourier holds in complete detestation, and the tone of his voice, when he refers to them, suggests that he must have suffered at their hands: a man of somewhat eccentric habits, who talks loudly to himself as he walks the streets, frequently does. Children move him to a bitterness of irony which is unusual in Fourier. He speaks of ‘la société des tendres enfants hurlant, brisant, souillant, etc.,’² and of ‘le doux plaisir d'entendre un marmot hurler jour et nuit.’³ With an admirable right-and-left, he refers to ‘les tendres enfants, si dignes de leurs vertueux pères, petits vandales, bien dignes de grands vandales.’⁴ In short, they are a ‘race demoniaque,’ little anti-Christs.⁴

This is the product of civilisation, where we make the mistake of beginning education too late. The child is kept inactive until the age of six or seven, and then turned on to theory, whereas it has been for many years before that striving to express itself actively. The instincts of early childhood are to rummage, to make a noise and to imitate (singerie),¹ and these elementary instincts should be used to find out in what directions a child's tastes lie. From the age of two children will therefore be taken about by their nurses to places where people are working, and there will everywhere be small hammers and small tools so that the instinct to imitate will make even very young children useful workers before, with us, education begins at all.² At the age of 25 months, they will be proudly shelling peas, increasing the dividends payable to shareholders in the Phalanx. The great defect in our system is that one method is applied to all. In Harmony, relying on the imitative instinct and a child's readiness to learn from those a few months older, education will pursue a different course for each child, who will quite naturally reveal in what direction ‘passionate attraction’ draws him. And for further education, the two great instruments are cookery, to cultivate the active sense of taste and smell, and the opera, to cultivate the passive ones of sight and hearing. ‘Children and cats,’ as he tells us, ‘would be for ever nosing about the kitchen, if they were not chased away. As for the magic of the opera and of Fairyland made visible, there is nothing more captivating for a child.’³

Fourier would not be Fourier if he did not arrange his children into Nourissons (up to 15 months), Poupons (from 16 months to 33 months) and Bambins (from 34 to 54 months). Indeed there are subdivisions, for are there not Pouponnains, who are doucereux in disposition; Pouponnards, who are mutins; and Pouponnâtres, who are démoniaques?⁴ Of the later stages we have already met the ‘Little Hordes,’ whose duty it is to clean the streets and kill the reptiles. But these are the ‘bad’ children, who are passionately attracted to personal uncleanliness, that is to say, two-thirds of all boys and one-third of all girls. On the other hand, two-thirds of the girls and one-third of the boys are drawn in the direction of personal cleanliness and neatness. These are incorporated in the ‘Little Bands,’ who are the gentle element in life, and form the necessary counterpart to the Little Hordes. They give examples in good manners; they design costumes for ceremonials; they correct their parents' bad pronunciation—the little prigs. They look after the pigeons and the flowers.⁵

It is when we come to the next stage in the development of the young that Fourier caused most embarrassment to his followers, and indeed caused not a little embarrassment to himself. Despite distinctions and subtleties there is nothing remotely resembling marriage in Harmony, and at a certain stage the education of the young prepares him for what is to follow. Women at a certain age may select one of three grades of what we should call infidelity in these matters, enrolling themselves in the appropriate Corporation amoureuse; but as they may vary their option at any time, they might as well opt forthwith for the corporation that gives the greatest liberty. Even in the most binding union there is nothing wrong with inconstancy, provided it is a matter of reciprocal agreement; indeed short ‘truces’ (an unhappy word) for a few days will not be regarded as inconstancy, provided they are registered in the Chancellory of the Court of Love.¹ Such ‘truces’ are frequent, above all when there are ceremonial visits to the Phalanx: presumably something must be allowed in the sacred name of hospitality. Fourier was careful to explain that this transition to a state of completely free love would not take place until the third generation of Harmony, and further that it would be effected only with the unanimous consent of all concerned. As if this were not sufficient safeguard, he indicated that in the interval God would doubtless give a new revelation and expressly authorise the new code. After all, as he contrives to hint, the God of the Book of Genesis can scarcely be regarded as a bigoted advocate of monogamy. Finally, as he points out, the customs he advocates are those in force in the planet Herschel.

Waiving Jehovah and the planet Herschel, who on this question may not cut much ice, the interesting fact is that here again, as in Plato and Campanella and so many others, we have socialist thought passing condemnation on the family; and it is interesting to note what in this case are the underlying reasons. The first takes us straight back to Plato. It is that marriage and the family, inasmuch as they create special interests, are anti-social and prevent a man from doing his duties by his fellows. It is more or less the view of the Apostle Paul, with whom otherwise Fourier has little affinity: ‘He that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife.’ Marriage, says Fourier, binds two people in a league against all that surrounds them, and makes them indifferent to public misfortunes; the highest praise that can be given to anyone is to say that marriage has not changed him.² When a man marries, it is a notice of dismissal to all his friends (and perhaps there is here a pathetic fragment of autobiography).³ In a hundred families there are a hundred egotists: not one is a citizen. Each considers himself justified in any swindle because he is working for his wife and children. Plato himself could not have expressed more forcibly the danger of worldly entanglements.¹

The other motive that urges Fourier to abolish the family and establish the reign of free love is, rather oddly, his championship of women. There has never been a more zealous, if perhaps injudicious, defender of women than Fourier. No one has emphasised so strongly that in civilisation woman is ‘made for slavery,’ and that, given a chance, she is fit for better things.² Of eight queens who have reigned ‘libres et sans époux,’ seven have reigned with glory; of eight kings, seven are usually accounted as duds. No one has more emphatically stated that the position assigned to woman is the acid test of any society.³ Women then must receive a larger freedom. The first and most fundamental wrong done to woman lies in the quiet assumption that all women were meant to be housekeepers. At most Nature has made only one woman in eight a ménagère.⁴ The result is that seven-eighths of women are misfits, in a perpetual state of irritation which affects the remaining eighth. So far are women from being naturally domesticated that not one woman in a hundred at the age of 30 knows how to set a fire.⁵ Women in fact were not intended for marriage.⁶ It is a recurrent thought in Fourier that God has given us our passions and instincts, not with reference to the 5,000 years of misery through which we are now passing, but to fit us for the 70,000 years of bliss that await us; and the ratio of one natural ménagère in eight indicates what proportion will be required domestically in these happier days. The situation might of course have been met by altering the ‘passions’ of women, as we draw near to Harmony; but apparently it is easier for God to create an anti-whale than to alter the disposition of a woman. Those women whom civilisation looks upon as vicious, because undomesticated, will find their place in Harmony; and that they may have freedom, domesticity is replaced by an unending succession of fleeting lovers, and any incidental children are entrusted to groups and series of nurses. It is a chastening reflection: with a great sum obtained they this freedom.

Perhaps we may take a last glance round the Phalanx before passing through the turnstile into the light of common day. In the construction of his Utopia, Fourier reveals himself as a man rent by two entirely contradictory and inconsistent passions. On the one hand it is a world of license, not to say licentiousness, of liberty in excess, of pleasure pursued to a point where the discussion becomes almost nauseating. His is a heaven, securely based on copulation and cookery. The joy of eating is almost converted into the central point in the machinery of God's providence. There are five meals a day, and these of such extent and quality as beggar all description. If the finest roast fowl from the table of the first gourmand of France were offered to the Harmonians, the official ‘tasters’ would overwhelm it with such a flood of criticism that a black ribbon of disgrace would be attached to the banner of the poulterers.¹ But Fourier is not content with pleasures coming as single spies: he will have what he calls a parcours of pleasures, seven or eight pleasures piled on each other, and—believe it or not—the rich Harmonian has two or three such parcours each day.²

On the other hand there is in Fourier the instinct of the subordinate clerk, the orderly book-keeper, and this requires that everything in the Phalanx should be docketed and tabulated, that everything should march like clockwork. In every one of the 2,985,984 phalanxes which will ultimately cover the globe, matters will move according to plan, with something of the rigidity of the military parade-ground. Punctuality in everything is the rule in Harmony—tout à minute fixe et sans attendre qui que ce soit.¹ Each day begins with a hymn and with fanfares, and with banners flying the groups and the series march off to their appointed tasks. And how comely it is and how reviving to observe how colourful a life we may lead, when once we have cast aside the sophists and the philosophers, and the nightmare of morality! The Bandes Roses, arriving from Persia, are followed by the Bandes Lilas from Japan, displaying their prowess against all comers in drama and in poetry²; there are pleasant reunions of the true friends of the turnip and of the equally true friends of the onion; there are perpetual meetings in the afternoon in the orchards, charged with intrigue and rivalry; and everyone is as agreeable and charming as the charming and agreeable people whom somehow we seem to meet only when we are on holiday.

The peculiarity of Fourier is that his terrible imagination compels him to see every general proposition in concrete form in the lives of individuals directly affected. Thus the arrangements in Harmony are always discussed by reference to events in the lives of Harmonians who, somewhat incongruously, usually bear classical names. Perhaps it would be truer to say that Fourier himself lived in Harmony as a way of escape from his drab life. The spacious Phalanstère was a refuge from his cramped lodgings; the five meals a day (and such meals!) reflected his bare table; the women who might be loved, and loved so excessively, in Harmony were all his landlady was not. Yet this curious habit of giving concrete shape to his argument is largely responsible for the aroma of absurdity which is never long absent from Fourier. For even when he is making a good point, the incident by which it is illustrated is frequently not far from buffoonery. Thus, to illustrate how happy is the father of undowered daughters in Harmony compared with one similarly placed in civilisation, he gives a full length biography of each of the six daughters of Damon—and rather scandalous biographies they are.³ So with Lunarius, who had a passion for eating spiders, but who nevertheless thereby fulfilled the intentions of the Almighty,⁴ and with countless other burlesque figures who pass through his pages, the effect is rather to delight the scoffer than to edify the humble.⁵

What is there of substance and of permanence to be derived from this strange farrago of mixed feeding? More perhaps than might be imagined, for Fourier, pruned of his exuberant excesses, has been a strangely abiding influence, above all in France. Following for once Fourier's excellent habit of enumeration, let us indicate some points in his legacy. In the first place, there has never been a more acute critic of the lack of organisation and the waste resulting from unrestrained individualism. Then, secondly, his influence has been very great in the development of the co-operative movement. The elimination of waste by co-operation has its greatest exponent in Fourier. It is perhaps not irrelevant to observe that in London, Paris, New York, and indeed all great cities, people are drifting to that hotel life which at least represents an approach to some of the aspects of the Phalanstère. It may be that the home will go down increasingly before the service flat. Thirdly, it is to Fourier's credit that he saw deep into the meaning of the conflicts of Labour and Capital, and in substance what he says on the desirability of confusion of the classes still merits our attention. The South Metropolitan Gas Company, with its harmonious history, is in its way a monument to Fourier. Then, fourthly, viewed in essence and apart from its embroideries, the Phalanx itself embodies a certain ideal. Fourier was no enemy of Capital, but he certainly detested industrialism. He was in fact an advocate of a ‘Back-to-the-land’ policy, and moreover, back-to-the-land with an emphasis on market gardening and fruit, with the population living in something that we should now call Garden Cities. Fifthly, we must allow him an abiding influence, above all on the anarchists, in connection with his doctrine of ‘attractive labour’; his emphasis on the autonomy of the Phalanx also ranges him with those opposed to centralisation.

Such was Fourier, a strange mixture of a child and of one hovering perilously near the thin line which divides sanity from insanity, with all the directness of a child and the strange intuitions of a madman. He is a figure never far removed from absurdity. Yet when we have finished smiling, it is a strangely pathetic, wistful, lonely figure that our unheroic hero presents. There are few things more moving in human biography than the ageing of Fourier. He had persuaded himself that a capitalist with lavish hands would come to him, and provide the means for the regeneration of the world. And like the timid, deferential gentleman that he was, he had made it known that he would be at home daily at a certain hour, in order that his expected patron might not be inconvenienced. For would it not be a terrible thing if the opportunity of saving the world should be thrown away by such a mischance as Fourier's absence when the benefactor of humanity arrived? So, for the last years of his life, whatever else might happen, Fourier was punctually at his post when the clocks chimed the appointed hour, waiting, attentively listening—doubtless each day, a new hope; each day, a fresh disappointment. And then one morning he was found dead in the little furnished room which he occupied, kneeling by the bedside. A greater than the unknown capitalist had called, and Fourier had slipped out of life as furtively as he had passed through it.