The Arcades Project - Operi

Fourier's long-tailed men became the object of caricature, in 1849, with erotic
drawings by Emy in Le Rire. For the purpose of elucidating the Fourierist extravagances,
we may adduce the figure of Mickey Mouse, in which we find carried
out, entirely in the spirit of Fourier's conceptions, the moral ll10bilization of
nature. Humor, here, puts politics to the test. Mickey Mouse shows how right
Marx was to see in Fourier, above all else, a great humorist. The cracking open of
natural teleology proceeds in accordance with the plan of humor. [W8a,5]
Affiliation of anti-Semitism with Fourierism. In 1845, LeJ Juifi rois , by Toussenel, appears. Toussenel is, moreovel the partisan of a "demo
cratic royalty;' [W8a,6]
"The line . . . generally associated with the family group is the parabola. This
postulate is demonstrated in the work of the Old Masters, and above all in
Raphael. . .. From the approximation of this grouping to the parabolic type, there
results, in the oeuvre of Raphael, a hymn to the family, ... masterful and . . .
divine . . . . The master thinker, who determined the analogies of the four conic
sections, has recognized the correspondence of the parahola and of familyism.
And here we find the confirmation of this proposition in the prince of painters, in
Raphael." D. Laverdant, De la Mission de l'art et du role des artistes: Salon de
1845 (Paris, 1845), p. 64. [W9,1]
Delvau (Les Dessous de Paris , p. 27) sees connections between
Fourier and Restif de La Bretonne. [W9,2]
Highly characteristic of the relation of the Fourierists to the Saint-Simonians is
Considerant's polemic against the railroads. 1ms polemic relies, for the most
part, on Hoene Wronski, Sur la Barbarie deJ chemins de fir et Jur la reforme
Jcienti/ique de la locomotion. Wronski's first objection is directed against the system
of iron rails; Considerant indicts "the process operating under the name 'railway
system; that is to say, the construction of very long flat roads equipped with
metallic rails and requiring enormous amounts of money and labor-a process
'not only opposed to the actual progress of civilization, but contrasting all the
more strongly with this progress in that it presents something truly ridiculous:
the barbarous contemporary reproduction of the massive and inert roadways of
the Romans' (Petition aux ChambreJ, p. 11);' Considerant opposes the "barbarous
means;' which is "simplistic," to the "scientific means," which is "composite"
(pp. 40-41). At another point, he says explicitly: "For this JimpliJme has led, just
as one would expect, to a result that is completely barbarian: that of the ever
more ineluctable leveling of roads" (p. 44). By the same token: "Horizontality is a
proper condition when it is a question of communications over water. The system
of terrestrial locomotion, on the other hand, evidently ought to be capable of
putting ... different elevations in communication with one another" (p. 53). A
second and related objection of Wronski's is directed against travel on wheels,
which he describes as "a well-known and extremely vulgar process ... , in use