Author: VIGOUREUX, Clarisse.
Title: Parole de Providence et Melanges. [bound with Victor Considerant's Du Sens Vrai de la Doctrine de la Redemption. 3e edition].
Description: Paris, Librairie Phalanstherienne 1847 & 1849. 12mo (19x13cm) morocco backed cloth; [4],128pp & viii,90pp. Generally foxed. ¶ Second edition of the Parole de Providence with added writings including the 'Resurrection. Aux Femmes de France.' 1846. The first edition appeared in 1834. This was her only book - a Fourierist response to Lamennais' Parole d'une Croyant - but she was a busy journalist for the cause. Her book won a place in the Index and her censor, the Jesuit Zecchinelli, decided that Clarisse Vigoureux was a fictional front for Fourier himself. The book presented, Zecchinelli wrote (here in rough translation), 'An absurd, impious, carnal, diabolical system, which limits itself entirely to the present life and makes men lose hope of the future good to which they are destined in heaven'. He uses the pronoun 'he' for the author all the way through his critique. He is, Philippe Boutry tells us (The Roman Condemnation of the First French Socialism), silent on Clarisse's feminist claims: "I, a woman, have come to demand an account ... I demand an account from the stronger sex that rules the world, and for three thousand years has kept it chained in this inextricable maze." This from the prologue, and there is a chapter on women.Victor Considerant might have made the apocryphal claim to Fourier that Fourier having created a universe, he, Considerant, would populate it. And he did to an extent that few other utopian socialists of the time could. Considerant was a school chum of Clarisse's son Paul, from that he met Clarisse at the centre of the then small circle around Fourier, and from that he met Fourier's ideas, Fourier himself, and Clarisse's daughter Julie. I wonder how much the life long devotion and self sacrifice of Clarisse and Julie had to do with Considerant's retreat from Fourier's ideals of the emancipation of women. Was he a spoilt brat? And was God against her? She lost her husband and her first daughter young, lost her fortune when her brother's company went down, lost the revolution, lost the societaire settlement in Texas where she accompanied Considerant and her daughter after his exile and finally, Boutry tells us, the flower garden she planted in front of Considerant's home in San Antonio where she died was eaten by red ants.

Keywords: social sciences political economy economics socialism religion utopias feminism c19th France reform fourier