ABSTRACT
One might expect to find a like approach in earlier studies of Fourier and his followers. This is P. Collard, for example, in the course of defending Victor Considérant, his heir-apparent, over the rift between leader and disciple: ‘Fourier, already old and ill, was a somewhat difficult character; his touchiness and irritability were extreme, and his old boy’s unsociability had only increased with age. Brought up in a house in the Grande Rue of Besançon, his father a prosperous cloth-merchant, Fourier was born into a wealthy and privileged stratum of society. Interpreters are keen to argue that it was the symbolic murder of the father with the execution during the Revolution of the King that was to release in Fourier the ability to express his highly revolutionary new theories on sexual morality. Following his return to Besançon in 1812, Fourier retired in 1816 to Bugey, to the Rubat family house in the small village of Talissieu.
