A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

The Origins of European Socialism 565

A drawing of a phalanstery contemplated by Charles Fourier.

ing the wealthy man who would come, he hoped, to finance the first pha­
lanstery. No one ever showed up.
While Fourier dreamed and waited, the wealthy British industrialist and
philanthropist Robert Owen acted. Believing that education and environ­
ment could shape a spirit of cooperation, Owen built a mill in New Lanark,
Scotland. He provided decent housing for his workers and established
schools for their children. Like Fourier, for whom human progress demanded
the emancipation of women, Owen espoused the equality of women,
although he emphasized not political rights but rather the special qualities of
motherhood. Likewise, an Englishman named William Thompson penned in
1825 the Appeal of One Half of the Human Racey Women, Against the Pre­
tentions of the Other; Men.
No utopian socialist had a greater popular following than Etienne Cabet
(1788-1856) in France. Cabet, too, sought to apply the principles of Chris­
tianity to the extreme social problems of the day. His novel Voyage to Icaria
(1840) described an imaginary city of wide streets, clean urinals, and social
harmony, a vision of organized economic and social life so attractive that
even the bourgeoisie would be converted peacefully to the principles of
cooperation and association. Cabet’s “communist” newspaper had 4,500
subscribers in the early 1840s, and almost certainly reached twenty times
that number. Artisans, their livelihoods threatened by the abolition of the
guilds and mechanization, were particularly intrigued by Cabet’s ideas. A
few of them set sail with Cabet for the New World, founding several utopian
colonies in Texas and Iowa.

Another group of utopian socialists represented the scientific, or tech­

nocratic and even authoritarian tendencies inherent in Saint-Simon’s over­

whelming respect for science and insistence that the state lead the way
toward material progress. Prosper Enfantin (1796-1864)—called “Father”
by his followers—left Paris for Egypt with a small group in search of the
Female Messiah; one of the traveling party, Michel Chevalier, came back