The annual birthday celebrations honoring the French communitarian socialist, Charles Fourier, were held each April in cities throughout Europe, the United States and even into Algeria during the 1840s and 1850s. These celebrations provided distinctive points of contact between Fourierist sympathizers on both sides of the Atlantic, thus extending and solidifying friendships and the exchange of information, while also increasing connectivity between the dozens of Fourierist communities that dotted the American landscape from upstate New York to Dallas, Texas. My paper will explore the ways these celebrations facilitated the construction of a dynamic transnational reform network in the mid-nineteenth century.
Each April 7th Fourierist sympathizers gathered to fete their deceased master. The April 1842 celebration in New York City brought together European revolutionaries, women’s rights advocates, abolitionists, and key members of the American Fourierist leadership, providing a vivid example of the cross pollination between radical reformers that these celebrations engendered. Fourierist birthday festivals also strengthened the network tying Fourierists in Europe with those in the United States and Algeria. These celebrations were the occasion for official communication between European, American and North African groups--they sent written toasts to one another, published accounts of their celebrations in their respective newspapers, and made certain to frame their festival as part of a worldwide focus on universal progress and the overthrow of oppressive ruling structures. The celebrations also helped connect the over two dozen model communities committed to Fourierism within the United States, thus keeping a Fourierist community in Wisconsin from feeling ideologically isolated from the Fourierist leadership in New York City.
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