The Arcades Project - Operi

een), which last would have the right to take a lover and bear illegitimate children;
a man who . .. maintains that unmarried young women who give themselves up to
pleasure possess qualities superior to those of married women, ... and describes
in great detail how an entire army of women should enter into prostitution under
the supervision of matrons-such a man does not understand the eternal bases of
humanity." Sigmund EngHinder, Geschichte de,. franzosischen Arbeiter-Associationen
(Hamburg, 1864), vol. 1, pp. 245, 261-262.-In the same vein: '''What are
we to say of a system in whichfilles publiques are given the name bacchantes and in
which it is argued that they are just as necessary as vestal virgins, and that they
. . . exercise the virtue of fellowship? A system which describes in what manner
innocent young people are supposed to lose their innocence?" (ibid., pp. 245-24,6).
[WI,3]
"Around 1803 or 1804, Fourier, who practiced the profession of commercial traveler-or
'shop-sergeant,' as he preferred to call it-found himself in Paris. Having
before him a four-month wait for a position he had been promised, he looked
around for some means of occupying Iris time and hit upon the idea of searching
for a way to make all men happy. It was not with the expectation of obtaining any
practical results that he entered on this project, but purely as a jeu d'esprit."
Charles-M. Limousin, Le Fourierisme (Paris, 1898), p. 3. [Wl,4]
"Fourier is so prodigal in his invention and his crazy descriptions that Lerminier
justifiably compares him to Swedenborg . ... Fourier, too, was at home in all skies
and on all planets. After all, he calculated mathematically the transmigration of
the soul, and went on to prove that the human soul must assume 810 different
forms until it completes the circuit of the planets and returns to earth, and that, in
the course of these existences, 720 years must be happy, 45 years favorable, and 45
years unfavorable or unhappy. And has he not described what will happen to the
soul after the demise of our planet, and prophesied, in fact, that certain privileged
souls will retire to the sun? He reckons further that our souls will come to inhabit
all other planets and worlds, after spending 80,000 years on planet Earth. He
calculates, in addition, that this termination of the human race will occur only
after it has enjoyed the benefits of the boreal light: for 70,000 years. He proves that
by the influence, not of the boreal light, to be sure, hut of the gravitational force of
labor, ... the climate of Senegal will become as moderate as summers in France
are now. He describes how, once the sea has turned to lemonade, men will transport
fish from the great ocean to t.he inland seas, the Caspian, Aral, and Black
Seas, given that the horeal light reacts less potenlly with these salty seas; and so, in
this way, saltwater fish will accustom themselves gradually to the lemonade, until
finally they can be restored to the ocean. Fourier also says that, in its eighth
ascending period, humanity will acquire the capacity to live like fish in the water
and to fly like hirds in the air, and that, by then, humans will have reached a
height of seven feet and a life span of at least 144 years. Everyone, at that point,
will be able to transform himself into an amphibian; for the individual will have
the power of opening or closing at will the valve that connects the two chambers of