Creating Utopia: A French Industrialist’s Quest for a Perfect Society
François Marie Charles Fourier, born in France in 1772, was a utopian socialist philosopher with a very particular proposition. He believed that cooperation and community were pathways to peace and progress and — like many other utopian socialists — that humans were good by nature. With these ideals in mind, he proposed a new kind of community: a phalanstère. A phalanstère, a French word that joins “monsatère” and phalanx, is a small, integrated community comprised of around 1500 people ─ the largest amount of soldiers in a greek phalanx formation ─ living independently from the rest of society.
Phalanstères were not meant to be autonomous, but the mere idea was obviously a strike against society on a grander scale. Phalanstères were meant to be independent socially, even if they were still interdependent economically. While many phalansètres were failed projects, Fourier’s ideas lived on and influenced many thinkers who, in turn, attempted to implement successful phalanstères in France and the United States. One such thinker, Jean Baptiste André Godin, termporarily managed to create a phalanstère in France called Le Familistère de Guise. The Familistère had a long life: it lasted, in one form or another from 1880 to 1968 and housed over 1700 people at a time, many of whom worked inside it.
After becoming a businessman and briefly selling stoves, Jean-Baptiste Bodin became one of Fourier’s disciples in 1854 when he joined the “École Sociétaire,” a group of scholars who published and shared Fourier’s writing. The École Sociétaire organized multiple conferences where they passionately and eloquently shared the Fourierist vision. One particular passage, written by Romanian revolutionary Ion Ghica, said the following about one such conference:
I was emerging from these conferences amazed and exalted, convinced, one might say. It seemed to me that I traveled through Les Champs Elysées in a carriage pulled by two proud lions, turned into anti-lions, sweeter than lambs, only by the harmonic force; the dolphins and the whales, transformed into anti-dolphins and into anti-whales, made me sail gently on all the seas; the vultures, turned anti-vultures, carried me on their wings towards the heights of the heavens. Magnificent was the description of the beauties, the pleasures, and the delights of the spirit and the heart in the phalansterian city.
As many other Fourierists, Godin would attempt more than a single failed project. Notably, he spent a fortune to finance “La Réunion,” a phalanstère in Texas that was unsuccessful. However, after that failure, he decided to test his own luck designing and developing a phalanstère in his factory. In 1880, Le Familistère de Guise was born.
One of the most realistic phalanstères to be conceived, Le Familistère was designed and built for a close-knit and very independent society. It had schools that children had to attend up until they were 14; the minimum working age, by comparison, was 10 years. It also had living complexes for families, a laundry room, a theater, multiple parks and gardens, and workshops and stores that produced and sold items like food, drinks, and clothes. Godin also maintained his factory, right next to the Familistère, running and producing his semi-famous stoves.
Work and security, two very important factors in any society, were handled in a decidedly socialist way. Everything in Godin’s utopia was meant to be self-contained and as separate from the rest of society as possible. The inhabitants of the phalanstère usually worked at one of the stores, doing important jobs inside the buildings, teaching at the schools, or at Godin’s factory. The housing complexes were all very small and tight, with very visible interiors. Inhabitants were accommodated regardless of their work, race, gender, family, etc. to make sure a sense of fraternity was born. A very important factor in dealing with security was communal vigilance and social pressure. Detractors called it tyrannical and prison-like, but Godin was convinced this was the only way of policing his community without creating an exclusively powerful─and separate─security force inside it.
Work itself was compensated through payment in company shares. The whole phalanstère was one big company, and workers would be reimbursed according to how much work they put into the company during the year. This payment sometimes included cash, but more often than not it came in the form of vouchers for goods inside the phalanstère. There was also a multi-tiered system in place: the few who worked in the phalanstère or at the factory but didn’t actually live inside the community would receive a lesser payment, while those who had worked longer, attended Association meetings, and generally formed part of life inside the phalanstère received more.
Godin died in 1888, but his work lived on for years. Le Familistère de Guise continued to be a cooperative community, owned by the workers and its inhabitants. Over time, however, the underlying concept was lost, and the inheritance of the apartments inside the living complex, the change of social-political circumstances in France, the World Wars, and a lack of innovation lead to the stagnation of the community. Eventually, its own inhabitants lost interest in maintaining Godin’s phalanstère, and, beginning in the 1960s, the company and its properties were privatized and sold.
The familistère itself fell into disarray even after multiple buildings were sold and Godin’s factory was acquired by Cheminèes Philippe. A building was damaged during the World War, and the overall “sense of community” faded over time. Then, in 1991, the familistère was designated as a historic monument, and in 2000 efforts to renovate it began. Although multiple families still lived there, the familistère eventually became a museum, open to the public. On January 28, an event was organized to commemorate the birth of Jean-Baptiste André Godin.
The familistère was a very interesting experiment, an idealist vision, and an extremely modern project for its time. André Godin was but one of the multiple industrialists, thinkers, architects, and entrepreneurs which attempted — and to a point succeeded — in creating “ideal neighborhoods,” “ideal cities,” and “ideal societies.” However, the heavy socialist aspects of the familistère made the project difficult to see through to the end: when Godin died, even against his wife’s best efforts, the whole project died with him.
