At the Familistère de Guise, a “rostrum” at the service of a utopia

From the outset, we tell you: “Here, there is no church, but a theatre”, when you call the Familistère de Guise. You take the train to Saint-Quentin, then, after a half-hour drive, you are in the small town in the Aisne where Camille Desmoulins was born, and a peaceful revolution: the adventure of the Familistère, created by Jean-Baptiste André Godin (1817-1888). Everyone knows his name, linked to cast iron pans. But today, it is above all his questioning of the social organization of work that attracts more and more visitors – 65,000 in 2019.

Jean-Baptiste André Godin hijacked Charles Fourier’s idea of ​​the phalanstery

Impossible not to be seized when you arrive on the large square where the statue of the founder is enthroned: on one side, three buildings in the shape of a “u”; opposite, a theater linked by courtyards to two schools. All in red brick. Imposing, almost princely in appearance. It is the Familistère, the embodied dream of a man who hijacked the utopia of phalanstery of Charles Fourier (1772-1837). Born in Esquéhéries, about fifteen kilometers from Guise (pronounced “gu-ise”), Jean-Baptiste André Godin, a locksmith like his father, started working at the age of 11 and a half. He is an inquisitive mind, who likes to read. From 1835 to 1837, he accompanied his cousin Jacques-Nicolas Moret (1809-1868) on his tour of France.

“I saw naked the miseries of the worker and his needs, and it was in the midst of the despair that I felt that, despite my lack of confidence in my own ability, I still said to myself: if one day I rise above the condition of the worker, I will seek the means to make his life more bearable and sweeter, and to raise the work of his abasement.he writes in his book Social solutions (1871). Two years after his marriage to Esther Lemaire and the birth of their only son, in 1840, Godin discovered Charles Fourier by reading an article in the Watchman of Saint-Quentin. He found his master.

Free and compulsory school

During his tour of France, he discovered the use of cast iron. In 1846, he set up a factory in Guise. He innovated in the manufacture of stoves, with success. In 1857, he bought land opposite his factory, which went from thirty workers at the start to more than one thousand three hundred in 1881. His goal: to build a Social Palace for the workers and employees of the factory. He does not want a workers’ city, unlike Zola, who saw social progress in it. He wants to change society. May everyone at the Familistère have a life “useful and productive”. That the workers can rise, not by wealth, but by its equivalent, health and education first.

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