CHAPTER XVII

In 1812 Fourier’s mother died and left him some property, and he retired into the country to write his Treatise on the Association of Domesticity and Agriculture. Afterwards he came to Paris again, became a clerk in an American firm, and composed in 1830 his New Industrial World. It is lamentable to have to relate that in 1831 he wrote attacking both Owen and Saint Simon as charlatans, in spite of the curious points of resemblance he had to both of them. He died in 1837, but not till he had founded a school, of which Victor Considérant, author of the Destinée Sociale, was the most distinguished member. The Fourierists started a paper in 1832, which expired in two years, but was revived in 1836, and finally suppressed by Government in 1850. A scheme for realising the phalanstery experimentally was set on foot in 1832 by a deputy of France, but it failed for lack of funds; so that of the three great Utopists, Owen was the only one who had the fortune, good 217 or bad as it may be considered, of seeing his schemes tried