Victor Prosper Considerant (12 October 1808 – 27 December 1893) was a French
utopian socialist philosopher and economist who was a disciple of
Charles Fourier.
Biography
Considerant was born in
Salins-les-Bains, Jura and studied at the
École Polytechnique (1826 diploma). He entered the French army as an engineer, rising to the rank of captain. However, he resigned his commission in 1831, in order to devote himself to advancing the doctrines of Fourier.
Subsequently, working as a musician, he collaborated with Fourier on newspapers. He edited the journals ''La Phalanstère'' and ''La Phalange''. On the death of Fourier in 1837, Considerant became the acknowledged head of the movement, and took charge of ''La Phalange''.
Considerant wrote much in advocacy of his principles, of which the most important is ''La Destinée Sociale''. He authored ''Democracy Manifesto'', which preceded by five years the similar
Communist Manifesto
''The Communist Manifesto'', originally the ''Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (german: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei), is a political pamphlet written by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Comm ...
by
Marx and
Engels. Considerant defined the notion of a "right to (have) work", which would be one of the main ideas of French socialists in the
1848 Revolution
The Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Springtime of the Peoples or the Springtime of Nations, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe starting in 1848. It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in Europea ...
s. He is also known for having devised the
proportional representation system. He also advocated such measures of "
direct democracy
Direct democracy or pure democracy is a form of democracy in which the Election#Electorate, electorate decides on policy initiatives without legislator, elected representatives as proxies. This differs from the majority of currently establishe ...
" (a term he coined) as referendum and recall.
The failure of an insurrection against
Louis Napoléon obliged Considerant to go into exile in Belgium in June 1849. On an invitation by
Albert Brisbane
Albert Brisbane (August 22, 1809 – May 1, 1890) was an American utopian socialist and is remembered as the chief popularizer of the theories of Charles Fourier in the United States. Brisbane was the author of several books, notably ''Social ...
and helped by
Jean-Baptiste Godin, between 1855 and 1857, with his wife, Julie, and his mother-in-law,
Clarisse Vigoureux
Claire Charlotte Dorothée Gauthier, known as Clarisse Vigoureux, (11 June 1789 in Montagney – 13 January 1865 in San Antonio) was a French Fourierist journalist and writer.
Biography
The daughter of a blacksmith, Clarisse Vigoureux was born in ...
, he founded the colony
La Réunion in Texas on Fourier's principles.
He was a member of the
First International, founded in 1864, and took part in the 1871
Paris Commune.
He died in Paris in 1893.
Contrary to a common error, his name is not written Considérant as he explained: "... there is no acute accent on my e. I have fought in vain for more than sixty years ever since my name was printed to defend it
rom the accent
Rom, or ROM may refer to:
Biomechanics and medicine
* Risk of mortality, a medical classification to estimate the likelihood of death for a patient
* Rupture of membranes, a term used during pregnancy to describe a rupture of the amniotic sac
* ...
"
[Louis Bertrand, ''Histoire de la démocratie et du socialisme en Belgique depuis 1830'', Brussels, éd. Dechenne, t. 1, p. 280, 1906]
Citations
Further reading
* Jonathan Beecher, ''Victor Considérant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism''. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.
* Carl J. Guarneri, ''The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America''. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.
External links
*
*
Principles of Socialism: Manifesto of Nineteenth Century Democracy' by Considerant in
PDF
Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
format
{{DEFAULTSORT:Considerant, Victor Prosper
1808 births
1893 deaths
Forty-Eighters
Fourierists
French socialists
Members of the 1848 Constituent Assembly
Members of the International Workingmen's Association
Members of the National Legislative Assembly of the French Second Republic
People from Jura (department)
Politicians from Bourgogne-Franche-Comté
Utopian socialists