Victor Prosper Considerant

Victor Prosper Considerant
File:Considerant, Victor (A. Collette).jpg
Born	(1808-10-12)12 October 1808 Salins-les-Bains, France
Died	Paris, France
Era	19th century philosophy
Region	French philosophy
School	Humanism
Notable ideas	Feminism, socialism
Influenced Charles Fourier

Victor Prosper Considerant (12 October 1808 – 27 December 1893) was a French utopian socialist philosopher and economist who was a disciple of Charles Fourier.

Biography

Considerant was born in Salins-les-Bains, Jura and studied at the École Polytechnique (1826 diploma). Subsequently, working as a musician, he collaborated with Fourier on newspapers. He edited the journals La Phalanstère and La Phalange.

Considerant wrote much in advocacy of his principles, of which the most important is La Destinée Sociale. He authored Democracy Manifesto, which preceded by five years the similar Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. Considerant defined the notion of a "right to (have) work", which would be one of the main ideas of French socialists in the 1848 Revolutions. He is also known for having devised the proportional representation system. He also advocated such measures of 'direct democracy' (a term he coined) as referendum and recall.

The failure of an insurrection against Louis Napoléon obliged Considerant to go into exile in Belgium in June 1849. On an invitation by Albert Brisbane and helped by Jean-Baptiste Godin, between 1855 and 1857 he founded the colony La Réunion in Texas on Fourier's principles.

He was a member of the First International, founded in 1864, and took part in the 1871 Paris Commune.

He died in Paris in 1893.

Contrary to a common error, his name is not written Considérant as he explained: ("… there is no acute accent on my e. I have fought in vain for more than sixty years ever since my name was printed to defend it [from the accent]! ")

References

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Further reading

• Jonathan Beecher, Victor Considérant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.
• Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.
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