Considérant, Victor Prosper (1808-1893). Victor Considérant, founder
of La Réunion, a colony near Dallas, was born in Salins, France, on
October 12, 1808. After a short service in the French army he resigned
to devote his energies to popularizing and applying the utopian ideas
of Charles Fourier. Considérant was one of the leading democratic
socialist figures in France during the volatile revolutionary period
of 1830 to 1850 and functioned as the international leader of the
Fourierist movement.
Because of his participation in the abortive
insurrection of June 13, 1849, against Louis Napoleon Bonaparte,
Considérant was forced to flee to Brussels.
Because of his participation in the abortive
insurrection of June 13, 1849, against Louis Napoleon Bonaparte,
Considérant was forced to flee to Brussels. There he was contacted
by Albert Brisbane,qv an American Fourierist, who interested him in
colonization efforts in Texas. Considérant visited the United States
in 1852-53 and accompanied Brisbane on a trek that eventually took him
through North and Central Texas. His enthusiasm for the land, climate,
and people of Texas induced him to establish the European Society for
the Colonization of Texas upon his return to Belgium. He set forth
elaborate plans for a Texas colony in Au Texas, published in Paris in
1854, and in The Great West, published the same year in New York. In
these two books he called for a joint European-American venture at
La Réunion and proposed the ultimate establishment of a network of
colonies throughout the Southwest connected by commercial, cultural,
and educational ties to the original commune. Early in 1855 agents sent
by Considérant bought about 2,500 acres of land on the banks of the
Trinity River near Dallas. Before adequate provision had been made for
them, however, nearly 200 colonists made their way to La Réunion; when
Considérant and his wife, Julie, and mother-in-law, Clarisse Vigoureux,
arrived with more colonists in June 1855, the settlement was completely
disorganized. It never fully recovered from that state.
Considérant deviated from pure Fourierism
and came to advocate republican political activism, direct democracy,
and the voluntary association of capital and labor in various types
of cooperatives.
Fourier had advocated societal reform through communal societies
that he called phalansteries. During his politically active period,
from 1843 to 1849, however, Considérant deviated from pure Fourierism
and came to advocate republican political activism, direct democracy,
and the voluntary association of capital and labor in various types
of cooperatives, rather than rigid communalism. He thus planned for La
Réunion to be a loosely structured experimental commune administered by a
system of direct democracy. The participants would share in the profits
according to a formula based on the amount of capital investment and
the quantity and quality of labor performed. When La Réunion collapsed
in 1859 due to financial insolvency, Considérant, discouraged but not
disillusioned, moved to San Antonio, where he unsuccessfully attempted
to raise funds for another commune. Unable to fulfill his dreams in
Texas and still under a ban of deportation from France, he became an
American citizen and farmed in Bexar County until 1869, when he and his
wife returned to Paris. There he lived as a teacher and socialist sage
of the Latin Quarter and died on December 27, 1893.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His
World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Clarisse Coignet,
Victor Considérant: sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1895).
Victor Prosper Considérant, Au Texas (Paris: Librairie
Phalanstérienne, 1854;
ed., with additions, by Rondel V. Davidson, Philadelphia: Porcupine,
1975). Victor Prosper Considérant, Du Texas: Premier Rapport a` mes
amis (Paris: Librarie Sociétaire, 1857). Rondel V. Davidson, Did We
Think Victory Great? The Life and Ideas of Victor Considérant (New
York: University Press of America, 1988). Rondel V. Davidson, "Victor
Considérant and the Failure of La Réunion," Southwestern Historical
Quarterly 76 (January 1973). Betje Black Klier, "Des Fouriéristes au
Texas: la famille Considérant a` San Antonio," French Review 68 (May 1995).
Rondel V. Davidson
