United States or Saint Lucia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Pere Enfantin was his disciple. The "mystic mother" was a female Messiah, expected to become the parent of a new Saviour. "Wonderful likeness," said the friend, "it gives the very quiver of the mouth." "Yes," said Sir Robert, "and the arrow coming out of it."
These and many others were in the sect; whose chiefs, after the death of its founder, were Bazard, a Liberal and a practical man, who killed himself; and Enfantin, who after the dissolution of the sect sought employment in the service of the Viceroy of Egypt, and occupies now some important post in connection with the French railways.
Most of the politicians abandoned the association; and Père Enfantin, almost in despair, dispatched twelve apostles to Constantinople to find in the Turkish harems the Supreme Mother. After a year they returned and reported that they were unable to find her; and the society, condemned by the French courts as immoral, broke up, and broke up because no woman could be found to be its mother.
Bazard was about marrying his daughter, and he proposed to place her marriage under the protection of the existing French laws. Enfantin opposed his doing so, and called it a sinful compliance with the prejudices of the world.
The Saint-Simonians, therefore, proposed to place by the side of their sovereign Father at the summit of their hierarchy a sovereign Mother. The man to be sovereign Father they found; but a woman to be sovereign Mother, Mère Suprême, they found not. This caused great embarrassment, and a split between Bazard and Enfantin.
I was introduced to their chiefs, Bazard and Enfantin, in 1830; and as long as their public teachings and proselytism continued, I read nearly everything they wrote.
Occupons nous de ce qui est eternel," one would have expected better satire upon cant than the words that follow. We are not in a condition to say whether the subjects chosen are those that had been selected by Pere Enfantin, or Chatel, or Lacordaire; but the words are curious, we think, for the very reason that the satire is so poor.
We find in their doctrine, and in their legal and religious codes, not only the idea of multiple union claimed by Enfantin and his forty disciples of Ménilmontant, but also the theories of Buchez, who desired to free labour from the servitude of wages, to bring about solidarity of production, and to communalise capital, after first setting aside an inalienable reserve.
Bazard charged Enfantin with denying Christian marriage, and with holding loose notions on the subject. Enfantin replied that he neither denied nor affirmed Christian marriage; that in enacting the existing law on the subject man alone had been consulted, and he could not recognize it as law till woman had given her consent to it.
The brilliant suggestions of Saint-Simon, the writings of Bazard and Enfantin, the vagaries of Fourier, might be dismissed as curious rather than serious propositions, but the massive system wrought out by Comte's speculative genius his organic scheme of human knowledge, his elaborate analysis of history, his new science of sociology was a great fact with which European thought was forced to reckon.
Word Of The Day