60

"‪From January 1835 to February 1837, the Roman congregation of the Index condemned Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire (1829) by Charles Fourier as well as seven works by disciples of Saint-Simon and Fourier. The opening of the archives of the Index allows us to understand why and how the Papacy examined and condemned the first French socialism. If Saint-Simonianism was the object of an immediate reprobation, the system proposed by Fourier and his disciples provoked in the Roman censors amazement and indignation. They were upset by its cosmogony, its model of social organization, its rehabilitation of passions and its project of a perfect society carried out on this earth. They condemned a reversal of meaning in the interpretation of Scripture and considered the phalanstery “a monastery upside down.” Rome became aware, for the first time, of the deep “desire for renewal” ( cose nuove, rerum novarum) spreading through the new industrial society of the nineteenth century."