John McCorquindale and Dr. Daryl Lee, French and Italian

While many of the definitively American utopian groups have received a good deal of curious attention in the past century, the Icarian colonies are relatively unknown. Maybe it is because of their less accessible French background, or because their iconoclastic leader Etienne Cabet (who once garnered 95, 000 votes in the French presidential elections), died in total obscurity, that this mysterious community has disappeared almost entirely from the American consciousness and social tapestry. Whatever the reason, a unique cultural collision that provides insight into the effects of location on beliefs and practices is often overlooked, by both historians and sociologists alike. This communitarian colony, however short-lived, provides an interesting case study of an established utopian dogma, completely juxtaposed onto a foreign spatial and cultural framework.

The early nineteenth century witnessed the rise of many groups practicing communitarian social arrangements. These ‘utopian’ experiments occurred on both sides of the Atlantic in diverse forms, and all pre-dated Marx’s communist ideology by several decades. The essential impetus for these movements was not class struggle, but rather class cooperation in an era of fledgling industry and urban development. While their goals of equity and brotherhood may have been similar, French utopianism, a product of the French Revolution and socially conscious elites, was fundamentally different from American utopian instantiations. New World communal efforts were often rooted in basic frontier survival needs, though they often aspired to equality as a deeply religious and spiritual experience. Mormon consecration attempts from this early period have some of these basic characteristics.

When Etienne Cabet transplanted his quintessentially French Icarian movement to the United States in the 1840s, he was invariably confronted with a new system of laws, cultural mores and traditions, mostly outgrowths of a larger Protestant ethic. This study examines the changes in Icarianism provoked by this new context, especially as they relate to their possession of the city of Nauvoo. Cabet saw the abandoned Mormon enclave as a providential find, easily adaptable to his purposes, and already reflecting certain communitarian ideals espoused by his group. “Space and actions within that space are like the container and the contained: the container shapes that which is contained, but the container is chosen for the appropriateness to that which is to be contained.”¹

The former Mormon space was therefore re-fitted to accommodate Icarian measurements, but the opposite question also emerges: what did the Icarians privilege, ignore, or even change in order to fit their new home, somewhere in the middle of America?

For example, not wanting to fragment the community across non-contiguous plots of farmland purchased in Texas, Cabet relocated the entire colony to the urban setting of Nauvoo, thus emphasizing their communitarian tendencies, as well as the group’s pre-disposition to merchant activities and craftsmanship. Another example involves the Nauvoo temple, the centerpiece of the Mormon experience in the region. Cabet was in the process of restoring this large structure, not as a religious edifice, but as a place for common instruction, consistent with his radical views on universal education and free schooling.

Like the Latter-day Saints who preceded them in the city, Icarians were hard working, education oriented with a highly developed sense of community. Unlike the Mormons, they lacked basic farming skills and rugged frontier savvy, and found it difficult to prosper in the manner they had envisioned. Their rigid colony constitution, financial dealings and community administration reflect various changes as they sought to redefine their priorities while facing challenges in their new environment. This retooling in order to correspond to the political and physical exigencies of Hancock County led to inner turmoil, and within a decade the group had splintered into various factions.

Research on this topic is primarily archival, analyzing original documents from the period. Many of these documents are found in Brigham Young University Special Collections and church history sources. Among them, early editions of Cabet’s constitution text, Voyages en Icarie, as well as later personal papers, statistical almanacs, recruiting pamphlets and legal instruments, all chronicle the depth and scope of the Icarian experience in Nauvoo. These sources provide a very detailed account of private life in the colony, alongside public matters of formal administration. Because of the range of materials (functional and temporal), it is possible to assess the evolution of Icarian doctrine in practice.

The city of Nauvoo was the stunning geographic crossroads between these two groups in the 1840s, but many less obvious connections surfaced in the initial research. Among the very first members of the Mormon Church in France were prominent Icarians, such as Louis Bertrand, who had been publishing an Icarian newspaper in Paris. Such repeated proximity and interweaving is an interesting subtext to the history of both movements. As this early dynamic exchange is uncovered in detail, further questions of compatibility and comparative ideology are raised.

This study is rich with expansive possibilities, and lends itself to extensive examination as the basis for my Master’s thesis in French Studies. I intend to pursue this research topic, and believe that there are further factors to consider in the Icarian use of space in Nauvoo, and the implications of environment on the implementation of their peculiar system in America.

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¹ Kamau, Lucy. The Anthropology of Space in Harmonist and Owenite New Harmony. Communal Societies. Pg 68-69. Amana, Iowa.