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In the archives of the Ministry of War in Paris, any one who looks may read that in the subsequent trial of Général Marchand for high treason after the Hundred Days and Napoleon's second abdication préfet Fourier during the course of his evidence gave a detailed account of this same interview which he had with M. le Comte de Cambray and Mme. la Duchesse douairière d'Agen on Sunday, March the 5th.
Thus I might say that in the very same apartment wherein Fourier knew how to excite the honourable sentiments which I have with pleasure recalled to mind, he had on another occasion to contend with a certain orator, perhaps of good intentions, but assuredly a bad astronomer, who, wishing to escape, said he, from the good pleasure of municipal rulers, proposed that the names of the north, east, south, and west quarters should be assigned by lot to the different parts of the town of Auxerre.
Thence came the extraordinary muddle of the present hour; Bache with Saint-Simon and Fourier, and Morin with Proudhon and Comte, utterly failing to understand Mege, the Collectivist deputy, whom they held up to execration, him and his State Collectivism, in the same way, moreover, as they thundered against all the other present-time Socialist sects, without realising that these also, whatever their nature, had more or less sprung from the same masters as themselves.
And as for Fourier, let him make a Paradise, if he can, of Gehenna, where, as I conscientiously believe, he is floundering at this moment!" "And bellowing, I suppose," said I, not that I felt any ill-will towards Fourier, but merely wanted to give the finishing touch to Hollingsworth's image, "bellowing for the least drop of his beloved limonade a cedre!"
Fourier, the socialist dreamer, dreamed of making work attractive in his phalansteries by the free choice of vocations and in other ways. There is no other way than that of liberty. Wherein consists the charm of the game of chance, which is a kind of work, if not in the voluntary submission of the player to the liberty of Nature that is, to chance?
The lectures of Fourier have not been collected together. The Journal of the Polytechnic School contains only one paper by him, a memoir upon the "principle of virtual velocities."
There was a celebrated Fourier at the Academy of Science, whom posterity has forgotten; and in some garret an obscure Fourier, whom the future will recall. Lord Byron was beginning to make his mark; a note to a poem by Millevoye introduced him to France in these terms: a certain Lord Baron. David d'Angers was trying to work in marble.
However that may be, the theory of man's innocence, corresponding to that of the depravity of society, has at last got the upper hand. The immense majority of socialists Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, and their disciples; communists, democrats, progressives of all sorts have solemnly repudiated the Christian myth of the fall to substitute there for the system of an aberration on the part of society.
It was as if one of the spirits in the metempsychosis imagined by Fourier, had returned to the brilliant sphere from which death had driven him in temporary exile. I was at first enchanted, intoxicated.
Bache gently shrugged his shoulders: "Liberty, liberty, of course," said he; "only it is worth nothing if it is not organised." Thereupon their everlasting discussion began afresh, with Saint-Simon and Fourier on one side and Proudhon and Auguste Comte on the other.
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