Victor Prosper Considérant

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Victor Prosper Considérant (October 12, 1808 – December 27, 1893) was a French utopian Socialist and disciple of Fourier.

Considérant was born in Salins and studied engineering at the École Polytechnique (1826 diploma). Subsequently working as an engineer, he collaborated with Fourier on newspapers. He edited the journals La Phalanstère and La Phalange.

Considérant wrote much in advocacy of his principles, of which the most important is La Destinée Sociale. He is also the writer of a Democracy Manifesto, which was very similar to the Communist Manifesto released five years later by Marx and Engels. Considérant 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.

The failure of an insurrection against Louis Napoléon obliged Considérant to go into exile in Belgium in June 1849. On an invitation by Albert Brisbane and helped by Jean-Baptiste Godin, between 1855-57 he founded the colony La Réunion in Texas on Fourier's principles.

He was a member of the First International, founded in 1864, and took part in the 1871 Paris Commune.

He died in Paris in 1893.

The historian Jonathan Beecher has written a biography of Considerant that was published in 2001 by the University of California Press. This article incorporates text from the public domain 1907 edition of The Nuttall Encyclopædia.