Zoé de Gamond

Who was Zoé de Gamond?

Zoé Charlotte de Gamond was a Belgian educator and feminist who wrote under the pseudonym Marie de G***.

Zoé de Gamond was born in Brussels into a wealthy liberal family. Her father had been governor of the province of Antwerp in the time of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, and was a lawyer and professor after 1830 in the independent Kingdom of Belgium. Her mother was of noble origin and held regular salons through which Zoé became active in politics.

Originally a partisan of Saint-Simon, she abandoned his ideas for those of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. In the early 1830s she was active in supporting Italian and Polish political exiles. It was at this time that she met Polish nationalist Jan Czyński, with whom she wrote Le Roi des Paysans. She also produced writings on feminism in the middle of the 1830s, at which time she married Italian artist Jean-Baptiste Gatti.

In the late 1830s the Gattis left Brussels for Paris, where Zoé wrote a successful work, reprinted five times and translated into English, on Fourier's philosophy. With the support of a wealthy English Fourierist, the Gattis established a phalanstère at Cîteaux in 1842. This venture proved to be a financial disaster for them, and they returned to Brussels and a life of relative poverty.