Charles
Fourier, a businessman from Lyons, put forward some even more extravagant
notions. He predicted the ideal world he was creating would last 80,000 years,
8,000 of them an era of Perfect Harmony, during which the North Pole would be
milder than the shores of the Mediterranean, the sea, no longer salt, would
turn into lemonade, and the world would contain 37 million poets equal to
Homer, 37 mathematicians equal to Newton, and 37 million dramatists equal to
Molière, though he modestly added, “These are approximate estimates.”