Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism Hardcover - 2001

First line

Although Victor Considerant became a Parisian by adoption and later an American citizen, he never forgot that he was a native of Franche-Comte.

From the jacket flap

Jonathan Beecher's accomplished study is both a lively life story of one of the most engaging figures among the French romantic intellectuals of the 1840s and a compelling chronicle of early French socialism. Victor Considerant (1808-1893), a follower of the great utopian thinker Charles Fourier, played an important role in the creation of a Fourierist movement and the development of socialist journalism. In the process of conveying a rich understanding of Considerant's life, Beecher traces the rise and fall of French romantic socialism and demonstrates how the utopian visions of thinkers such as Fourier came to inspire a generation of young radicals and reformers not only in France but also in Dostoyevsky's Russia and in the America of Horace Greeley and Margaret Fuller.

A leader of the democratic socialist left during the Second Republic, Considerant was forced into exile after the abortive insurrection of June 13, 1849. Emigrating to the United States, he eventually became an American citizen and spent most of the next two decades in Texas, where he attempted to establish utopian communities near Dallas and, later, in the hill country west of San Antonio. He returned to France in 1869, where he joined the Worker's International and supported the Paris Commune. Although he never publicly disavowed Fourier's doctrine, the unpublished writings and private correspondence of his later years show a growing disenchantment with all those aspects of Fourierism that could not, in his view, be scientifically verified.

In presenting the life, times, and writings of this significant historical figure, Beecher paints a vivid portrait of an important period of European intellectual history andgives his readers insight into the experience of a generation of thinkers and political activists. This comprehensive history will become the definitive work on Victor Considerant and -- along with Beecher's classic study of Fourier -- a major contribution to the history of French socialism in the nineteenth century.

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Citations

• Choice, 09/01/2001, Page 194