Radical Friendship and Early Feminism: Anna Doyle Wheeler and Charles Fourier

French socialist Charles Fourier, “the first of the early European socialists to put a thoughtful and rigorous analysis of the situation of women at the centre of a comprehensive critique of his society”, was admired and befriended by pioneers of feminism—including the Irishwoman Anna Doyle Wheeler. Wheeler, who co-authored the early feminist treatise Appeal of One Half the Human Race (1825) with her friend William Thompson, endeavoured to bring French and British socialism together, hoping that cross-border association would foster cooperation between the sexes. The Wheeler-Fourier friendship, forged in the salons of 1820s Paris and lasting over fourteen years, became a crucible for some of the most advanced ideas about gender and human emancipation in mid-nineteenth century Europe. Not only did their letters transcend restrictive gender norms and relations; over time, their friendship and emotional intimacy also led them to influence each other’s radical politics. Wheeler was born around 1785 into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family. At age fifteen, she had married an abusive landowner who resented her for not producing a male heir. In 1807, she fled Ireland with her two daughters, first to Guernsey, then to Caen, and finally to Paris in 1823. She was, by then, an atheist, a political radical, and a staunch defender of women’s rights. Born in Besançon in 1772, Fourier had worked as a clerk and tradesman in the textile sector, an experience that shaped his profound distaste for market capitalism. By the early 1820s, he had developed an elaborate theory of social reorganisation based on what he called phalanstères, cooperative communities organised around the natural “passions” of their members. Fourier met Wheeler at her Paris salon in 1823, probably through a mutual friend, Marc-Antoine Jullien, editor-in-chief of the Revue encyclopédique. Their correspondence, held in the French Archives Nationales and the Manx Museum, lasted until Fourier’s death in 1837. At first, it seems that Fourier was seeking Wheeler’s acquaintance out of self-interest. He had been seeking wealthy patrons, especially in Britain due to the country’s economic and industrial advancement. Wheeler, who had been disinherited after her husband’s death around 1820, could not bankroll him, but she made up for it in cross-Channel connections: her London network included Jeremy Bentham—her intellectual mentor—and Robert Owen, the British socialist leader. In 1824, she attempted to arrange a meeting between the latter and Fourier; fearing competition, Owen declined. Though deeply wounded, Fourier did not severe his connection to Wheeler. On the contrary, they became political confidantes. Writing on 30 July 1830, the day after the July Revolution toppled Charles X, Wheeler indicted the present times: humans had been so “individualised” by vicious laws that they could grasp no general truth, and the English were “morally more enslaved that anywhere else”, especially Englishwomen, whose “faculty of reasoning is destroyed from birth”. On 22 October 1830, she pleaded to abolish the death penalty, warning it risked turning popular legitimacy into a “bloodthirsty vengeance” betraying the moderation of the Trois Glorieuses. Scaffolds, she insisted, were the fragile foundation of a “barbarous civilisation”. Enlisting Fourier’s authority, she appealed to their shared aversion of political violence: “you must have some influence upon public opinion; save us, then, from the continuation of judicial murders.” Here Wheeler addressed Fourier as an equal, discussing with him matters deemed too radical for a woman to broach in public. Indeed, with the exception of a speech given in 1829 on the “Rights of Women”, her writings were either published pseudonymously or under Thompson’s name. It seems the feeling of respect and equality was mutual: in February 1826, Fourier had told his disciple Just Muiron that “the English […] lose their reckoning as soon as they have to explain themselves upon a new idea; […] I should have found more decision with such women as [Madame] Wheeler”. The Wheeler-Fourier friendship thus radically transcended gender hierarchies. In an era when women were excluded from parliamentary politics, learned societies, and much of the press, salons and correspondence were among the few venues where they could participate in intellectual life. Letters like theirs created an “alternative public sphere”, which enabled them to enact in miniature the gender relations they hoped to see generalised across society. Wheeler’s relocation to London in 1826, after the death of her daughter Henrietta, intensified rather than interrupted the emotional intimacy conveyed in their letter exchange. There she tracked Fourier’s attempt to realise his theories at Condé-sur-Vesgres, the phalanstery whose construction began in 1833, pressing him for “all details, as to the progress of your Operation”. Fourier made no secret of the difficulties he encountered and the hopes he nurtured: as he wrote to French feminist Désirée Véret, “despite a few setbacks and misunderstandings, the details of which I have explained to Mrs. Wheeler, we shall nevertheless continue to press on towards our goal”. When the building work stalled, Wheeler confessed herself “disappointed”; and by October 1836, with Condé long collapsed, the very idea of the phalanstery had become for her a refuge she longed to inhabit: “How I grieve that there is no Phalanstaire, which would enable me, to retire & die in France.” Meanwhile, she acted as Fourier’s publicist, distributing his periodical, La Phalange, to the Owenites, and introducing his work to Thompson, who translated excerpts of it into English under the title Political Economy made Easy (1828). For his part, Fourier commiserated on Wheeler’s health issues and tried to alleviate the despair she felt after her daughter’s death. In 1833, he pressed Véret, who saw Wheeler as her “second mother”, to help her “take her mind off things and look after her health, in the hope that the change she craves will come to pass”. This change rested significantly on Fourier’s theories, which shaped Wheeler’s feminism in fundamental ways. In 1825, Wheeler and Thompson’s Appeal had mentioned him ambivalently, dismissing his mysticism as “eccentricities of speculation” while praising his 1822 Traité as “the result of the observations and meditations of 30 years”. But her later writings bear the mark of a more Fourierite feminism. Fourier’s Théorie des quatre mouvements (1808) had declared that “the extension of the privilege of women is the fundamental cause of all social progress”. By collectivising domestic labour and admitting divorce, phalansteries promised to dismantle the institution of marriage, which he equated to “a mercantile calculation” in which the wife was “a piece of merchandise”. For Wheeler, these were not incidental features of his system but its very core: reporting on Véret in May 1833, she wrote to Fourier that the young seamstress looked, just like herself, to the phalanstery “as the Termination of all civilised degradation & misery, for her own sex—as well as the others”. Wheeler thus borrowed Fourier’s pejorative use of “civilisation”, extending it beyond his critique of economic exploitation. What “civilisation” meant, for her, was above all the organised enslavement of half the human race—through marriage without divorce, through education that destroyed “the faculty of reasoning” from birth, through political reforms, such as the 1832 Reform Bill, that restricted the franchise to “male persons”. In her 1829 lecture, she denounced “that state of society called civilized” as “nothing more than barbarism masked, playing off its brute absurdity under wisdom’s guise”. Whilst the emancipation of women was indeed the driving force behind human improvement, believing in the advancement of civilisation was an illusion. There Wheeler differed from feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft, who argued in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that only greater equality between the sexes would bring about the “establishment of true civilization”. On the contrary, in Wheeler’s eyes, the oppression suffered by women was by no means an anachronism in a so-called enlightened society, but its very foundation. Only radical change in the very literal sense of the word, an attack on the roots of oppression, would help pave the way towards genuine progress. By the late 1830s, the dream of phalansteries had faded in Europe. Fourier died in October 1837, leaving his movement bitterly divided. Suffering from neuralgia, Wheeler retreated from public life, only contributing occasionally to Fourierite periodicals, like the Morning Star and Phalansterian Gazette. She died at her Camden home on 7 May, 1848. While neither achieved the fame of Robert Owen or Jeremy Bentham in their lifetime, Wheeler and Fourier’s friendship is a reminder that intellectual history is made not only in libraries, political meetings and lecture halls, but in drawing rooms and private correspondence—in the intimate, radical spaces which outsiders carve for themselves to imagine a different world. My most sincere thanks to Thomas Bouchet (University of Dijon), Wendy Thirkettle (Manx Museum) and Frøydis Vangsøy (University of Oslo) for helping me track down this correspondence.