The French socialist writer François Charles Marie Fourier (1772-1837) was the prophet of a utopian human society.

Charles Fourier was born at Besançon on April 7, 1772. He studied at the local Jesuit high school, after which his family apprenticed him to various commercial concerns. During the early years of the Revolution, Fourier lived at Lyons, where he fought on the counterrevolutionary side and lost his inheritance in a series of business failures. Drafted in 1794, he was discharged for illness in 1796. He spent the remainder of his life in Lyons and Paris, earning a livelihood at odd jobs, living in cheap rooming houses, preaching his "universal harmony," and waiting for the financier who would subsidize his utopian community, but who never appeared.

Fourier first set forth his ideas in an article entitled "Universal Harmony," published in the Bulletin de Lyon (1803). For the next 34 years he expounded...