Victor Prosper Considerant

Victor Prosper Considerant (October 12, 1808 – December 27, 1893) was a French utopian Socialist and disciple of Fourier. Contrary to a common error, his name is not written Considérant as he explained: ("… there is no acute accent on my e. I have fought in vain for more than sixty years ever since my name was printed to defend it [from the accent]! ")^[1]

Considerant was born in Salins-les-Bains, Jura and studied art and music at the École Polytechnique (1826 diploma). Subsequently working as a musician , he collaborated with Fourier on newspapers. He edited the journals La Phalanstère and La Phalange.

Considerant 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. 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.

The failure of an insurrection against Louis Napoléon obliged Considerant 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,(ISBN 0520222970) ^[2].

This article incorporates text from the public domain 1907 edition of The Nuttall Encyclopædia.

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