2011 / n° 22

There is something striking about le Nouveau Monde Amoureux : its focus on amorous purity (« céladonisme »). And yet, it is combined with sexuality so as to create a new and attractive cast : l’angélicat ou noblesse d’amour. One becomes an « angel » at the end of a mathematical process, which reveals the originality of Fourier’s sexual imagination : the union of maths and magic.

Fourierist scholars started questioning very early the place occupied by Fourier in the field of philosophy. His contribution as a philosopher has been studied, and his relationship to philosophical thought analysed. If the cartesian paradigm is now well identified as the paradigm of absolute doubt, it is quite surprising that Leibnitz’s conception of harmony has never been compared with Fourier’s. Upon examination, Fourier’s thought clearly appears to have been an offshoot of the modern thought structured after Descartes and Leibnitz.

In order to investigate Charles Fourier’s political economy, one should both investigate his contribution to the history of economics and the influence this discipline exerted on him. Fourier’s claim to the right to work is humorously coupled with his claim to the right to rob. His social minimum includes the guarantee of love. Lastly, his economic theory is described as the economics of abundance, according to which scarcity refers to the intensity of passions.

Like most socialist leaders (Proudhon, Leroux, Cabet...), Victor Considerant was the target of the illustrated press during the Second Republic : three newspapers, Le Charivari, Le Journal pour rire and La Silhouette, showed a great originality when publicly ridiculing the Fourierist social doctrines through many cartoons and vengeful epigrams. However nothing allows us to affirm that Considerant suffered from this vilification campaign which ended in the spring of 1849.

When the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 in New-York, was established in France, it relied as shown by the historians of this occultist movement, on several networks including spiritualism. It also attracted the interest of some neo-fourierists and socialists. We shall examine this connection and try to place it in the history of French socialist movement, around La Revue socialiste which in 1885 opened its pages to this current under the influence of one of its contributors, Louis Dramard.