Victor Considerant

Vocation

Notable

Traits

French Utopian socialist and follower of C. Fourier. Considérant entered the French army as an engineer and rose to the rank of captain. He resigned his commission in 1831 to devote himself to advancing Fourierism. After the revolution of 1848, Considérant was elected to the Constituent Assembly. In 1849, however, his political activity made it necessary for him to leave France. He settled in Brussels and visited the United States on several occasions. On his second visit to the U.S., he founded, near Dallas, Texas, the short-lived communistic colony of La Réunion (1855–57). He returned to Paris in 1869. In his works Considérant attempted to study such aspects of the development of capitalism as the concentration of capital, the supplanting of small-scale by large-scale production, the growing exploitation of labor, and the exacerbation of class contradictions. 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 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. He died 27 December 1893, in Paris. Link to Wikipedia biography