After extreme individualism had permeated the thought of the first half of the nineteenth century, a tendency towards solidarity began to declare itself among certain bold thinkers. A feeling for association was in the air. Association of whom and with whom was perhaps not quite clear. But, however defined, association, or, as we should to-day describe it, human solidarity, seemed in many enlightened circles to offer the only possible remedy for the ills of society. Even such an ardent idealist as George Sand had been converted to this comparatively new point of view. “Are there not misfortunes that call more urgently for relief than the boredom of this or the whims of that individual?” she writes.[75] Louis Napoléon himself, before he became Emperor, had shown in certain of those pamphlets, for which he was famous, that he was not unaffected by this new current of opinion. The feeling of solidarity had declared itself definitely in the early months of the 1848 Revolution. But its germs must be sought much earlier. We must go back fifty years to the time when the French Revolution was shaking society to its foundations. Then there appeared a man, who, standing apart, aloof from the great scuffle of parties, entertained the daring thought of reconciling them all and making them all pull together in a new system. That man was François Marie Charles Fourier. Born at Besançon in 1772, the son of a tradesman from whom he inherited a small fortune, Fourier became a commercial traveller in the grocery line. Then he served for a while in Napoléon’s campaigns. But, returning to his original occupation, he found employment in a wholesale house at Marseilles. There his employers instructed him secretly to throw into the sea a whole cargo of rice which that firm, in order to send up the price, had stored until it had become useless.[76] This commission opened Fourier’s eyes to the iniquitous waste proceeding in modern industry. Henceforth one of the most wildly imaginative minds that has ever existed outside a lunatic asylum was concentrated on social problems. To the ideas that resulted Fourier gave expression in a whole library of voluminous works, of which the best known is his _Théorie des Quatre Mouvements_. In this welter of elaborate theorising, wild schemes and absurd prophecies, such as that the ocean may one day be replaced by a sea of lemonade, and that humanity may once more develop a tail, it is possible to discover certain sane and essentially practical suggestions for social reform.