Charles Fourier

Charles Fourier appears in Simone de Beauvoir’s account as a socialist critic of marriage whose vision of freedom was both suggestive and limited. His demand that individuals follow their passionate attractions challenged conventional marital arrangements, but Beauvoir argues that his account still defined women through love rather than recognizing them fully as independent persons.

Place in the Socialist Debate

Beauvoir sets Fourier within a broader nineteenth-century socialist current that imagined women’s emancipation alongside the transformation of society. She notes that socialism could help free women from confinement within the family, and recalls that Plato’s proposed communal order had promised women an autonomy comparable to that of women in Sparta. Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Cabet each contributed to the utopian idea of the “free woman,” while the Saint-Simonian principle of universal association called for the abolition of both workers’ and women’s forms of subordination.

In this account, the argument for women’s freedom had a clear humanist basis: Saint-Simon and later Leroux, Pecqueur, and Carnot demanded women’s liberty because women, like men, are human beings. Fourier’s position belongs to this emancipatory horizon, but Beauvoir distinguishes the general case for women’s freedom from theories that grant women value mainly through a special, supposedly feminine role.

Passion, Marriage, and the Limits of Liberation

Fourier sought to replace marriage with love and defended the right of all individuals to follow their passionate attractions. Beauvoir presents this as a challenge to marriage as a social institution, but also identifies a limit in its conception of women: Fourier regarded woman not as a person in her own right, but in her amorous functions. Liberation thus remained entangled with a definition of woman through her relation to love and to men.

That tension is central to Beauvoir’s broader analysis of women’s social position. Her existentialist account holds that each subject is an autonomous freedom, able to realize itself through projects and movement toward an open future. Women, however, are made to assume the position of the Other, treated as objects and confined to immanence. Read against this framework, a program that frees women only by celebrating their femininity or amorous role does not fully resolve the problem of their independence.

The Difference Between Freedom and Idealization

Beauvoir contrasts a demand for equal human freedom with the idealization of women as a distinctive force capable of regenerating society. In her account of the Saint-Simonian movement, this idealizing tendency becomes especially clear: Enfantin sought a woman messiah, while the Compagnons de la Femme went east in search of a female savior. Beauvoir argues that such exaltation could disserve women by opposing them to men and emphasizing intuition and emotion rather than reason.

Fourier’s association of women’s liberation with the restoration of the flesh belongs to the same contested terrain. The issue is not simply whether conventional marriage should give way to passion, but whether women emerge as subjects with their own projects or remain defined by a prescribed feminine function. Beauvoir’s treatment therefore preserves the radical force of Fourier’s critique of marriage while questioning whether romantic freedom, on its own, amounts to women’s emancipation.

Significance in Beauvoir’s Argument

Fourier serves as an example of how a movement can advocate freedom and still reproduce a restricted image of women. Social transformation may loosen the family’s hold, and the pursuit of passion may challenge marital convention; neither change guarantees that women will be treated as autonomous persons. Beauvoir’s distinction between transcendence and immanence makes the measure of liberation more demanding: it must open real possibilities for women to act and pursue futures of their own, rather than merely granting them a celebrated place within a male-defined ideal of love.