Icaria: An Aborted Utopia on the Texas Frontier

In an era of cheap American land, Etienne Cabet would be drawn to Texas, a former Mexican province that constituted one of the largest sources of available territory in North America at the time. Though born into a petit bourgeois household in Dijon in 1788, Cabet spent most of his life advocating on behalf of the proletariat. Even after earning a law degree, Cabet passed his life as "a veritable political ascetic" who focused on the alteration of society. The second line of Cabet's thought, a clear and optimistic view of the world to come, was encapsulated in his popular novel, Voyage en Icarie (1839). Though presented in the form of a novel, this work, loosely based on Thomas More's Utopia, was a didactic instrument for the dissemination of Cabet's ideas. The story followed the journey o a young English nobleman through Icaria, the kind of society many nineteenth-century intellectuals longed to bring into being. Here, Kagay talks about how Cabet fought for his Icarian dream.