Clarisse Vigoureux

Claire Charlotte Dorothée Gauthier, known as Clarisse Vigoureux, (11 June 1789 in Montagney – 13 January 1865 in San Antonio) was a French Fourierist journalist and writer. Biography The daughter of a blacksmith, Clarisse Vigoureux was born in Montagney (Doubs) in 1789. She married François Vigoureux, a cloth merchant in Besançon, who committed suicide in 1817 by poisoning himself because he was accused by public rumour of being the cause of the famine that was then raging in Besançon. From 1822, she was introduced to Fourierism by , who was a friend of her brother, and she was to be one of its most active followers. A friend and correspondent of the founder of the movement, Charles Fourier, she became a journalist, wrote for “La Phalange” and introduced Victor Considerant, who had come to prepare for Polytechnique at Besançon College, to Fourierism in 1824. In 1834, following a "religious emotion" provoked by Lamennais' book “Paroles d'un Croyant” (“Words of a Believer”), she published “Parole de Providence”, a Fourierist response to the theories of Lamennais, “in which she sees an apology for class struggle and violence that are the antithesis of the Fourierist conception of universal harmony.”