See Chéruel, Mémoires sur la vie publique et privée de Fouquet ... d’après ses lettres et des pièces inédites (2 vols., Paris, 1864); J. Lair, Nicolas Foucquet, procureur général, surintendant des finances, ministre d’État de Louis XIV (2 vols., Paris, 1890); U. V. Châtelain, Le Surintendant Nicolas Fouquet, protecteur des lettres, des arts et des sciences (Paris, 1905); R. Pfnor et A. France, Le Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte dessiné et gravé (Paris, 1888).
FOUQUIER-TINVILLE, ANTOINE QUENTIN (1746–1795),
French revolutionist, was born at Hérouel, a village in the
department of the Aisne. Originally a procureur attached to
the Châtelet at Paris, he sold his office in 1783, and became a
clerk under the lieutenant-general of police. He seems to have
early adopted revolutionary ideas, but little is known of the part
he played at the outbreak of the Revolution. When the Revolutionary
Tribunal of Paris was established on the 10th of March
1793, he was appointed public prosecutor to it, an office which
he filled until the 28th of July 1794. His activity during this
time earned him the reputation of one of the most terrible and
sinister figures of the Revolution. His function as public
prosecutor was not so much to convict the guilty as to see that
the proscriptions ordered by the faction for the time being in
power were carried out with a due regard to a show of legality.
He was as ruthless and as incorrupt as Robespierre himself; he
could be moved from his purpose neither by pity nor by bribes;
nor was there in his cruelty any of that quality which made the
ordinary Jacobin enragé by turns ferocious and sentimental. It
was this very quality of passionless detachment that made him
so effective an instrument of the Terror. He had no forensic
eloquence; but the cold obstinacy with which he pressed his
charges was more convincing than any rhetoric, and he seldom
failed to secure a conviction.
His horrible career ended with the fall of Robespierre and the terrorists on the 9th Thermidor. On the 1st of August 1794 he was imprisoned by order of the Convention and brought to trial. His defence was that he had only obeyed the orders of the Committee of Public Safety; but, after a trial which lasted forty-one days, he was condemned to death, and guillotined on the 7th of May 1795.
See Mémoire pour A. Q. Fouquier ex-accusateur public près le tribunal révolutionnaire, &c. (Paris, 1794); Domenget, Fouquier-Tinville et le tribunal révolutionnaire (Paris, 1878); H. Wallon, Histoire du tribunal révolutionnaire de Paris (1880–1882) (a work of general interest, but not always exact); George Lecocq, Notes et documents sur Fouquier-Tinville (Paris, 1885). See also the documents relating to his trial enumerated by M. Tourneux in Bibliographie de l’histoire de Paris pendant la Révolution Française, vol. i. Nos. 4445-4454 (1890).
FOURCHAMBAULT, a town of central France in the department
of Nièvre, on the right bank of the Loire, 412 m. N.W. of
Nevers, on the Paris-Lyon railway. Pop. (1906) 4591. It owes
its importance to its extensive iron-works, established in 1821,
which give employment to 2000 workmen and produce engineering
material for railway, military and other purposes. Among
the more remarkable chefs-d’œuvre which have been produced at
Fourchambault are the metal portions of the Pont du Carrousel,
the iron beams of the roof of the cathedral at Chartres, and the
vast spans of the bridge over the Dordogne at Cubzac. A small
canal unites the works to the Lateral canal of the Loire.
FOURCROY, ANTOINE FRANÇOIS, Comte de (1755–1809),
French chemist, the son of an apothecary in the household of
the duke of Orleans, was born at Paris on the 15th of June 1755.
He took up medical studies by the advice of the anatomist
Félix Vicq d’Azyr (1748–1794), and after many difficulties
caused by lack of means finally in 1780 obtained his doctor’s
diploma. His attention was specially turned to chemistry by
J. B. M. Bucquet (1746–1780), the professor of chemistry at the
Medical School of Paris, and in 1784 he was chosen to succeed P. J. Macquer (1718–1784) as lecturer in chemistry at the college of the Jardin du Roi, where his lectures attained great popularity.
He was one of the earliest converts to the views of Lavoisier, which he helped to promulgate by his voluminous writings,
but though his name appears on a large number of chemical and also physiological and pathological memoirs, either alone or
with others, he was rather a teacher and an organizer than an original investigator. A member of the committees for public
instruction and public safety, and later, under Napoleon, director general of instruction, he took a leading part in the
establishment of schools for both primary and secondary education,
scientific studies being especially provided for. Fourcroy
died at Paris on the 16th of December 1809, the very day on
which he had been created a count of the French empire. By
his conduct as a member of the Convention he has been accused
of contributing to the death of Lavoisier. Baron Cuvier in his
Éloge historique of Fourcroy repels the charge, but he can
scarcely be acquitted of time-serving indifference, if indeed
active, though secret, participation be not proved against him.
The Royal Society’s Catalogue of Scientific Papers enumerates 59 memoirs by Fourcroy himself, and 58 written jointly by him and others, mostly L. N. Vauquelin.
FOURIER, FRANÇOIS CHARLES MARIE (1772–1837),
French socialist writer, was born at Besançon in Franche-Comté
on the 7th of April 1772. His father was a draper in good
circumstances, and Fourier received an excellent education at
the college in his native town. After completing his studies
there he travelled for some time in France, Germany and Holland.
On the death of his father he inherited a considerable amount of
property, which, however, was lost when Lyons was besieged
by the troops of the Convention. Being thus deprived of his
means of livelihood Fourier entered the army, but after two
years’ service as a chasseur was discharged on account of ill-health.
In 1803 he published a remarkable article on European
politics which attracted the notice of Napoleon, some of whose
ideas were foreshadowed in it. Inquiries were made after the
author, but nothing seems to have come of them. After leaving
the army Fourier entered a merchant’s office in Lyons, and
some years later undertook on his own account a small business
as broker. He obtained in this way just sufficient to supply his
wants, and devoted all his leisure time to the elaboration of his
first work on the organization of society.
During the early part of his life, and while engaged in commerce, he had become deeply impressed with the conviction that social arrangements resulting from the principles of individualism and competition were essentially imperfect and immoral. He proposed to substitute for these principles co-operation or united effort, by means of which full and harmonious development might be given to human nature. The scheme, worked out in detail in his first work, Théorie des quatre mouvements (2 vols., Lyons, 1808, published anonymously), has for foundation a particular psychological proposition and a special economical doctrine. Psychologically Fourier held what may with some laxity of language be called natural optimism,—the view that the full, free development of human nature or the unrestrained indulgence of human passion is the only possible way to happiness and virtue, and that misery and vice spring from the unnatural restraints imposed by society on the gratification of desire. This principle of harmony among the passions he regarded as his grandest discovery—a discovery which did more than set him on a level with Newton, the discoverer of the principle of attraction or harmony among material bodies. Throughout his works, in uncouth, obscure and often unintelligible language, he endeavours to show that the same fundamental fact of harmony is to be found in the four great departments,—society, animal life, organic life and the material universe. In order to give effect to this principle and obtain the resulting social harmony, it was needful that society should be reconstructed; for, as the social organism is at present constituted, innumerable restrictions are imposed upon the free development of human desire. As practical principle for such a reconstruction Fourier advocated co-operative or united industry. In many respects what he says of co-operation, in particular as to the enormous waste of economic force which the actual arrangements of society entail, still deserves attention, and some of the most recent efforts towards extension of the co-operative method, e.g. to house-keeping, were in essentials anticipated by him. But the full realization of his scheme demanded much more than the mere admission that co-operation is economically more
