Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon lived a life of unexpected
turns. Born an aristocrat, he risked his status to come to America and
fight in the Revolutionary War, then amassed a fortune in the French
Revolution - which he lost during the dissolution of a year-long
marriage.
Saint-Simon's growing utopian-socialist views led him
to announce that he was the Messiah, and to ask Lady Hester
Stanhope - an English mystic and orientalist (see coming entry of June
23) to join him as a female Messianic counterpoint. Lady Stanhope
declined, moving instead to the Holy Land to await the return of Jesus.
Saint-Simon's admirers included Napoleon III, and he exerted a
wide influence over utopian movements of the 19th century. In 1823 he
made a failed suicide attempt by shooting himself six times in the head,
and merely blinding himself in one eye. His final work, "Nouveau
Christianisme", was completed shortly before he died on this date in
1825.
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