July 22, 2018
Professor Joan Roelofs (jroelofs@keene.edu) has posted her translation of Victor Considerant’s Manifesto of Democracy on the Marxist Internet Archives (www.marxists.org) . Considerant (1808-1893) was an important Utopian Socialist influence on the Communist Manifesto. Considerant collaborated with fellow Utopian Socialist Fourier.
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 credited with 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.
