Between Wrath and Harmony: A Biolyrical Journey Through L’Humanisphère, Joseph Déjacque’s “Anarchic Utopia” (1857)

Joseph Déjacque (1821–1865) wrote L’Humanisphère, the first ever anarchist utopia in French, while he was exiled to New Orleans in 1857. One can read his utopia as a transatlantic log, recording in an oblique and literary fashion the main ports of call of his journey as a political exile from 1848 revolutionary France. His stays in London, Jersey, New York, and New Orleans, between 1852 and 1861, as both a revolutionary socialist and a destitute paperhanger, shaped his “anarchic utopia.” It is suffused with avenging wrath and built on the violence of insurrection; but it is set among luxurious furnishings, which adorn its gentle-mannered parlors. I will show how Fourier’s harmonious world of passional attraction was reshaped across the Atlantic by a revolutionary proletarian.