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Greeley's prophetic vision did not quite anticipate the modern apartment-house, which perhaps is a transitional expedient, moving toward the phalanstery, but he quoted Thoreau by saying, "A woman enslaved by her housekeeping is just as much a chattel as if owned by a man." This was in Eighteen Hundred Forty-five, and Thoreau was now twenty-eight years of age.
Among the good men he discovered and hired to teach his people was John Tyndall, one of the world's great scientists. Owen seized upon Fourier's plan of the "phalanstery" five hundred or a thousand people living in one great palace, built in the form of a hollow square.
The large, loosely modelled head with its fleshy curves, its super-subtle mouth of orator, the gaze veiled, the bland, pontifical expression, the expression of the man who spoke of "the mania of certitude" here is Ernest Renan, voluptuous disdainer of democracies, and planner of a phalanstery of superior men years before Nietzsche's superman appeared.
If he has this courage, this is what I would say to him: "Before writing your reply, consider well your plan of action; do not scour the country; have recourse to none of your ordinary expedients; no complaints of civilization; no sarcasms upon equality; no glorification of the phalanstery. Leave Fourier and the departed in peace, and endeavor only to re-adjust the pieces of your syllogism.
During the whole time of the old man's conversation I was in continual admiration. I was among people who had the reputation of living in the greatest licentiousness as thieves and robbers. Their character was altogether misunderstood. It was a real, great phalanstery, composed of brothers, almost all worthy of the name.
The busts, portraits, and relics of such noble Franc-Comtois as have won a European reputation George Cuvier, for instance, whose brain weighed more than that of any human being ever known; Victor Hugo, whose works are familiar to readers in all languages; Charles Fourier, who saw in the Phalanstery, or, Associated Home, a remedy for the crying social evils of the age, and who, in spite of many aberrations, is entitled to the gratitude of mankind for his efforts on behalf of education, and the elevation of the laborious classes; Proudhon, whose famous dictum, "La propriete c'est le vol," has become the watchword of a certain school of Socialists, which even the iron despotism of Russia and Germany cannot keep down; Charles Nodier, charming litterateur, who, at the age of twenty-one, was the author of the first satire ever published against the first Napoleon, "La Napoleone," which formulated the indignation of the Republican party, and a noble roll-call of artists, authors, savants, soldiers, and men of science.
The passage from the letter of George Sand dated September 1, 1846, which I quoted earlier in this chapter, justifies us, I think, in assuming that, although she was still keeping on her apartments in the Square d'Orleans, the phalanstery had ceased to exist. It is much to be regretted that no letters are forthcoming to tell us of Chopin's feelings and doings at this time.
All through the spring the talk was of the new building, the "Phalanstery," as we called it. Everybody was thinking what great progress could be made when we should live in it. One day, passing by, I found the carpenters had resumed work, and from thenceforth it progressed until it assumed the resemblance of a mammoth house.
The scheme was not easy to apprehend; it was essentially different from anything then known, though superficially like several bankrupt Utopias. Ruskin did not want to found a phalanstery, or to imitate Robert Owen or the Shakers. That would have been practicable and useless. He wanted much more.
He saw the full- blown phalanstery coming like a comet and expected every moment. We shortly would be in a blaze of glory! He loved to talk of the good things to be of social problems worked out by science and by harmonic modes; to flatter himself that without great self-sacrifice, devotion and untiring industry, the world was to be regenerated.