The Icarians were a 19th-century utopian society in France. The movement’s formation was inspired and encouraged by the writings of Etienne Cabet; a politician, writer, and irritator.
The 19th century was the peak era of people dreaming of Utopia putting their money where their mouth is. People fucking off to live weird is likely a tale as old as time, apparently, but the 19th century offered a more enticing canvas than any other era, and for one big reason: America. Not as in these United States, but as in the murky promise held in the vague term “the New World”. The shining place you never knew.
The Icarians were just this type. Terminally French in the 19th century, all hopped up on lofty optimism fed and nurtured by the writings of a man named Etienne Cabet; mid-wit politician, writer, and irritator extraordinaire. Before he became an odd-minded radical, Cabet was born in Dijon in 1788, to a family of middle-class artisans1.
Cabet grew up and got into politics after the fall of Napoleon in 1815. Agitated and itchy at the potential (as in, the fashionable things he decided to be mad about) of a restored theocratic monarchy, he moved his ass to Paris in 1820 and immersed himself in the secretive, revolutionary salon scene.
Ten years later, the grumblings of revolution hung thick in the air, specifically the July Revolution. Cabet was leading his so-called Insurrection Committee (literally the most retarded name a political subversive could have chosen) to aid in somehow, someway forcing the abdication of King Charles X, the last of the restored Bourbons. The combined efforts of several stuffy secret societies managed to pull it off.
For his role in helping to sow some chaos, the newly crowned “Citizen King”, the ill-fated Louis-Phillipe d’Orleans, son of the covetous bum “Phillipe Egalite” that I’ve previously slandered (shown below), rewarded Cabet with the title of Attorney-General of Cosica. A prestigious enough position that Cabet would lose in short order over his loud and unending bitching over the Orleans monarchy (not undeserved, the grasping fucks. I’ve talked this shit before.
Exile and Shouts Into the Void
After he lost his job, Cabet took some time to author a four volume history of the French Revolution (If you somehow don’t know what that is click here, otherwise this spiel is all extreme buffalo wings and no celery). After Cabet got bored with his staycation, he managed to wiggle his way into a lower deputy position at the National Assembly,2where he shouted his political grievances as loudly as before. The Assembly voted to label him as an agitator (France was and is just like this), and he was offered the choice of two years in prison or five years in exile.
As most Frenchmen given this choice chose, those Victor Hugos and Thomas Paines, Cabet chose exile and promptly followed the Frenchman’s tradition of boarding a boat for England. There he took up an obsessive study of philosophy and economics, devoting particular interest to the dynamics between political structures and economic welfare throughout time. One of his acolytes wrote this about him:
Studying, pondering the history of all ages and countries, he at length arrived at the conclusion that mere political reforms are powerless to give society the welfare which it obstinately seeks… He found at all epochs the same phenomena: society sundered in twain; on one side a minority, cruel, idle, arrogant, usurping exclusive enjoyment of the products of a majority, passive, toiling, ignorant, who remained wholly destitute… To change all this, to find the means of preventing one portion of humanity from being eternally the prey of the other — such was his desire, the goal of all his efforts.
Magnum Hopus
Cabet’s exile ended in 1839, and he returned to fair France and began working on a book all about the ideas he cultivated in his banishment. He wrote these out in the allegorical style of Thomas More’s Utopia. He named the book Voyage en Icarie, aka Voyage to Icaria, and got it published in 1840.
The book was made to read as a travel journal, which is something that was common before we of the West started going to places to spend a chunk of our expensive vacation time to take pictures to post on the internet for appreciation made numerical by way of like-share and some silly pennies from the Amazon Affiliates program.
Anyway, the narrator of this faux travelogue is a young English fancy man who had recently heard a thrilling ditty about a remote country known as Icaria. It was said that the way of life there, the culture, the government, was – get this – unlike anyyywhere else. Real groundbreaking shit. The young lord’s curiosity was so piqued, he couldn’t stand it. He took off for this wonderland and brought his trusty journal along to record all his outrageously perfect experiences in, tediously sectioned into three parts.
- Part One: A fawning account of the fabulous Icarian society with its cooperative industry, inconceivable accomplishments, inhumanly productive educational programs, the endless comforts, freedom, and perfect morality of the Icarian people. In essence, why the Icarian way of living is oh so very perfect.
- Part Two: The history of Icaria, which on a surface level is the exact same way every west European country operated. Then came the year 1782, when the hero, Icar, led a revolution and established a new communist government3.
- Part Three: The final section is spent on Cabet’s take on the history of communist and egalitarian thought trends. It was accompanies by comprehensive summaries of all every writing on the subject that Cabet could find, from Plato to his contemporaries.
Promiseland
Post-publication, the book was successful enough for Cabet to launch a monthly magazine, Le Populaire, as well as an annual Icarian Almanac, whatever the fuck that entailed. And just like that, a proto-Influencer was born. His most rabid fans started to see Cabet as a political messiah and were desperate to implement his ideas in the real world. Cabet ate it up like a neurotic comfort eater sucks up cake.
In the May 1847 edition of Le Populaire, Cabet put out an article titled (and translated) “Let’s Go to Icaria”. Here he detailed his dream of a real deal Icaria in the flashy new wildlands of semi-stable post-Revolution America. He called out for volunteers brave enough to pick up the torch of establishing an artisanal cooperative community with (really more like *for*) him. Side note, it’s goofy how many communists/communalists/socialists seem to want the lifestyle of their middle-class childhood back. The one where they couldn’t see the obvious symptoms of poor and rich, or any concept of money really, and could mostly spend their time privately fucking with whatever little hobby or pastime while their parent(s) funded such coziness with some vague occupation that didn’t blow their back out to the point of the gravy train coming to a screeching halt. Reading Marx’s biography is such a joke I could almost believe a clever enemy wrote it to mock him.
Cabet, according to his diary (Men of all walks used to keep these, and it was good. Far more useful than telling men it’s ok to cry when it’s subconsciously not or calling them toxic), Cabet expected that at least 10,000 strong shouldered men would enlist in the building of Icaria immediately, and that ONE WHOLE MILLION would follow the path forged. This magical million would, he assumed, consist of skilled workers and artisans of such a quality that they would be building multiple cities in no time. Huge cities bursting with industry and free education and the rich culture West Europe took how many centuries to ferment into symphonies capable of coaxing tears and inhumanly large statues made from marble by a man armed with only hammer and chisel to chase obsessive visions in the veins of cold stone.
His optimism wasn’t undeserved. His fans were stoked. He received a deluge of offers to enlist, or donate money, or seeds or tools or clothes or books. Anyone in any era would feel optimistic with so many gestures of gung-ho.
Settler? You Brought Her!
In February of 1848 a so-called “advance guard” of 69 (yes, the funny number) of brave Icarians set sail from France and made their way to New Orleans. Cabet had purchased a million acre parcel in Texas, and it was these pilgrims’ mission to claim the land title once they arrived at the Big Easy. And they did it. They bravely, boldly walked into the title office, and they likely walked out wearing the face of utterly fucked defeat commonly witnessed in casino lobbies.
One million acres ended up being three-hundred and twenty, and the parcel was not contiguous. Their piddly 320 was split up in a kind of checkerboard pattern than alternated with some federal land, some state land, and some private land. Whoopsie. If that deal didn’t already sound shit enough, it also included a sales contract that either no one read or a special someone in charge did read but didn’t want to be a wet blanket over. A contingency in the sales contract required 3,125 individuals or families to construct 3,125 log cabins and be living in them by no later than July 1st of the same year. So over 3k houses needing finished and furnished within five months. Early America was full of rascals making contracts like these, but then as now, you look like an idiot if you try to say you’ve been had when you’ve already signed your name on the line.
Out of the original sixty-nine Icarians formerly mentioned, only twenty-seven of them went on to their Texan utopia. It took them until June. So they arrived with 3,098 people less than the sale contract required and had to build over three thousand cabins on a patchwork land holding within a couple of weeks. A brave new world, but not one that middle-class Frenchmen were built for. The rest of them had either jumped right back on the boat for France as soon as they learned how fucked they were, or they started to make the way to Texas only to have their wagons break down in Denton, a hundred miles away from their sugarland. This luckless set mostly wandered back to New Orleans to drink away their sorrows.
The ones who made it immediately jumped into a frenzied effort to get the legally required cabins built in time to stake their land claim and to try to get some food crops going before winter came to the bone dry prairie. The houses were, of course, shit. The crops were also, of course, shit. Malnourishment under the hot Texan sun became the way of life in early Icaria. Soon came the inevitable demons of cholera and malaria. The colony had only one doctor, who had a nervous breakdown and fled the colony like a poisoned rat.
But maybe hope was not lost (it was, but not in the way you’d think), for 1,500 settlers had registered to be part of the second migration wave to the colony. The first migrants clung to this promise of reinforcements. Alas, only nineteen of those 1,500 showed up in New Orleans and half of them just stayed there to booze and gamble and fuck prostitutes.
Where did all those big swollen dreams go?
The deflation of Icarian enthusiasm may be explained by the events in France that year (again, 1848 was a wild time). Around the time the first wave of settlers were arriving in New Orleans to learn the bad news, the February Revolution was already well under way in France. Before the month was over, the Citizen King’s July Monarchy had gone to pieces and France’s Second Republic was born out of those ashes. The Assembly got rid of the title of king once and for all, opting to elect a third Napoleon4.
When the Icarians in Texas learned about this dismal turnout, they finally gave up on hoping. The colony was abandoned, and the failed settlers took their balls and stumbled their way back to New Orleans. After they got there, though, they were surprised by several hundred Icarian enthusiasts from France who had been gathering there like water in a clogged drain, eagerly waiting for news from the Texas colony. When those Texas settlers turned up bearing the rotten fruit of their efforts, the fair-weather Icarians wrote raging letters to Cabet, who immediately booked a boat ticket that would get him to New Orleans by mid-winter. He was, after all, one of the dupees, not the duper.
By the time Cabet showed up, there were around five hundred Icarians loitering around the Creole capital. A good chunk of these were pissed and wanted to return to France immediately. Others wanted to get back on the horse and find a better location. For any weird little scene that gets just enough momentum, there will always be true believers and power users that pour more sweat and feelings into an obviously stupid goal than it deserves.
Facing schism, and terminally French, Cabet organized a General Meeting where all Icarians could vote on their fate. Two-hundred voted for going home to fair France. Two-hundred-eighty voted to stay and chase their American dream. The two-hundred quitters were given some amount of money from the Icarian treasury to cover their travel expenses, while the remainers followed after Cabet happily on the way to the abyss.
Strangeland Reloaded: Nauvoo, Illinois
Nauvoo is a name you know if you are either Mormon or wasted some hours under the wandering yoke of the devil’s lettuce that sends you ever deeper into a Wikipedia hole over neo-Protestantism. Do not bother correcting me on this, I don’t care if they’re not technically protestant. I was raised East Ortho, it is in my deepest marrow to be lazy and insular about this.
For the gentle lambs among us that know nothing beyond nice, young Mormon men offering to do your grandpa’s yard work for him without even changing out of their slacks and boy-blouses, Nauvoo is the setting of a big part in Mormon history. At least, I think it is, (you can correct me for this one because I hate to be wrong in public about some things). Anyway, Joseph Smith and his gang of believers founded the town of Nauvoo on the Illinois side of the banks of the Mississippi in 1839. A short six years later, they’d grown the flock to 15,000. Over this time of Mormon rule, the town actually dwarfed Chicago with its pathetic population of 8,000.
After Joseph Smith, king of the Mormons, was killed by an angry mob in a Carthage (Illinois delenda est?) jail in 1844, a succession crisis split the Mormons between those who followed Brigham Young to the great Salt Lake and those who hung back and settled in Independence, Missouruh with Smith’s wife5due to being thoroughly creeped out by the pro-polygamy essay that Joseph tried to sneak in under a pen name. Of those who stayed on Team Missus, they forsook Illinois and moved on to establish themselves in west Missouri while putting the whole town of Nauvoo up for sale.
The Icarians bought this second-hand haven in 1849.
Nauvoo was meant to be the first permanent Icarian community. Its governance and social rules were modeled after those presented in all their wistful glory in Cabet’s Voyage to Icaria. Every year a new president would be elected and there would be one officer each to manage the community’s finances, farming, education, and industries. New members would be admitted by a majority vote among the boys, and only after satisfying the prerequisites of a four-month residency, a forfeiting of all personal property to the community, and the payment of eighty bucks (apparently over $3000 in 2025 according to some web1.0 inflation calculators, I don’t and won’t fuck with math beyond basic survival and comedic needs, so take your grains of salt).
In Icarian Nauvoo, everyone’s house was exactly the same. Two rooms per and the same allotment of furniture. Children were moved to an Icarian boarding school some acres away after they turned four. They were allowed family visits for a couple hours of Sunday. This sounds meanly oppressive and no doubt was, but the justification was that this segregation would encourage a greater love for the community as a whole, rather than getting all goo goo eyed for their parents alone.
Unlike proto-hippie peers like the Oneidans (kitchenware cult) people could get married, they were expected to, no sluts allowed. The only odd bit out is that the Icarians were cool with no-fault divorce so long as the unhappy couple found someone else to marry and soon.
These people had no religion, and the goal of building Icarian utopia wasn’t supposed to be some binding philosophical code. And yet they gathered in one place every Sunday to discuss Cabet’s writing and general ethics. Like, while he was living there among them. They just got together to have pep rallies for a guy who was essentially a bargain bin political agitator that self-published a trendy genre piece. I got hung up on this when I was first reading about these people. Something about it reminded me too much of the so-called ~rationalist~ scene6.
Once the Icarians were settled in they did indeed have a nice enough time, for a moment. The grew quick and started making fat American money. In spite of a flimsy foundation, a clumsy beginning, and being French, they were pretty smart about how they handled the whole commune thing. Realizing they only used so much of their land, they rented out the unneeded excess. They built a saw mill and a flour mill and a bunch of workshops and schools. After this was all built, only after things were quite stable, did they build a theater. A shocking bit of delayed gratification for anyone born in the most theater kid nation on earth.
In what was probably their first flush quarter, the Icarians globalized 19th century style. They starting up a printing press to put out a periodical spreading the good news of Icaria in French, English, and German. An office was rented and employed in Paris to recruit new members to the colony. Now that they had that fucking theater, their cultural life was thriving through the roof. Weekly concerts, melodramatic three-acts and tear stained monologues galore. They even built a big ass library stocked with over 4,000 books, many of them donated and shipped at the doner’s expense.
By 1855, the Icarian project recorded just over five hundred participants. Nowadays we don’t blink at these numbers, but picture this: It’s 1990 (or 80 or 60, whatever, pick one; I was a tad drunk when I first wrote this) and you live somewhere in North America. You’re sick of this life you’ve ended up with, but not sick of living. You go into politics as high as you can, which is a few feet off ground level. So you get your name by making an outsized fuss during a time of weak public trust in institutions. That works in your favor sometimes, but other times it works against you and you have only so many doors that can close in your face before you are super no longer welcome in this sphere. So you use your inheritance to buy everything you need to do a radio show and you start doing that. Your family, your friends, and your old college acquaintances listen to you. People in your hometown listen to you. They put it on at work and explain what they’re listening to when their coworkers ask. For half a year you’ve been talking about building a compound in Idaho to get away from all this annoying shit of life and a day comes where you say you’re really going to do it in this place at that time.
A couple months later you get a fax message saying people are there and ready to build the ark and you go out to meet them in your field of dreams. You did want to do this and apparently twenty of your most devoted, and possibly most unhinged or lonely listeners, wanted to help you realize this destiny. You actually really wanted this place to happen, you maybe just doubted it ever could. So you approach it earnestly, honestly, and within a year there’s buildings where there used to be dirt and smiling workers where there used to be long-faced bitches. You’ve got people here because they liked the cut of your jib and they’re all running around growing food, building furniture, and teaching children. In less than 10 years, twenty has multiplied to five-hundred because these happy people following along with your ideas go to the market and talk to people, or they write postcards to their worried mothers at home, or they’re just visibly the most clean and well-fed people one can see in this stretch of the North American hinterlands. Five hundred and growing, living in line with your daydreams, and every sacred Sunday they are nerding out over that stuff you self-published when you were still living in your parents house.
Of course Cabet lost his marbles.
The Rise and Fall of the Icarian Empire
Sitting pretty in Nauvoo, Cabet was the de facto authority of the Icarians despite being a bad leader who didn’t want to lead. At least, initially. Icarian ideals had no room for philosopher kings. A single individual operating as the supreme decision maker was a major contradiction to the model laid out in Voyage en Icarie. It was Cabet’s followers who draped him in the king’s velvet, and Cabet spent half his time apologetic and bashful over it. In 1850, he tried to offload the responsibility by proposing the drafting of a constitution that would provide for elections, presidents, and a board of directors. Cabet, to his despair, was the first elected president.
It was the forsaken motherland that would provide Cabet a brief respite from the weight of his crown. France called him back in 1852 to face a class-action lawsuit, petitioned by those former Icarians who had voted to go home after the big fat failure to launch in Texas. Their claim was the usual one brought against leaders of cults and communes, that Cabet had deceived them into voluntarily giving him money and stuff with empty promises and misrepresentation. He spent eighteen months fighting off these apostates, but in the end he won.
He returned to America a very changed man.
Cabet came back pissed, like super pissed, like no more Monsieur Bon Homme. He introduced a brave new concept to the Icarians: rules, and strict ones. From then on, Icarians were forbidden to:
- Drink booze or smoke.
- Chat in the workshops.
- Hang out with more than two people at a time.
And he threw out that elected president malarkey and reinstated himself with his old, autocratic authority. He insisted that all of this was necessary to preserve the moral fabric of the community.
Much like the restoration kings he’d spent his youth raging against, he had a strong minority of supporters. And so divisive politics bloomed in the once pure garden of Icaria, the Dissidents on one side, Cabetists on the other. The result was a schism, with the outnumbered Cabetists following their leader into exile in 1856. With 170 people, this reduced the population of Nauvoo by 40%.
The Dissidents won the battle, but lost the war. Followers that they were, no new charismatic leader emerged, and they couldn’t raise financial support in France without Cabet. They managed to eke out another four years until they went broke and defaulted on the town’s mortgage.
Cabet walked his flock of loyalists two hundred miles south to St. Louis. Two days after their arrival, Cabet had a stroke and died. Leadership was handed over to a 32-year-old lawyer named Benjamin. They used what was left of Cabet’s money to make a $500 ($18,619 in 2025) down payment on a $25,000 ($930,965 in 2025) mortgage. That 2% down payment bought them thirty-nine acres and three buildings in Cheltenham, Missouri.
Despite the loss of their darling leader, the Icarians continued to use the same constitution they had in Nauvoo, “which lays down with great care the equality and brotherhood of mankind, and the duty of holding all things in common; abolishes servitude and service; commands marriage, under penalties; provides for education; and requires that the majority shall rule.”
For this round, they didn’t bother with community industries. Icarians commuted to work in St. Louis and sent their kids to the local public schools. They were on their way to being a regular small town enclave with some goofy ideas, but young America was also hit with the curse of divisive politics. The Civil War broke out and took most of Icarias men. By 1864, only twenty residents were left. Unable to make the mortgage payments, they abandoned the keys to the kingdom and fled.
Where is the homeless utopist to go in a fugly fucked up world? Iowa, of course. The corn empire. And where in Iowa? Corning, of course. “Why Corning?” you may ask, and the answer requires some backtracking.
Rewind to 1852, when Nauvoo was happy and whole and Cabet had to go back to France to face the music of his first bitter dissidents. Nauvoo was going so well, the Icarians thought it was time to set up a second location. Four thousand acres of land were purchased in southwest Iowa for this purpose. It turned out to be an incredible bit of foresight for a group so luckless you’d think all the gods of man hated them. After Nauvoo and Cheltenham crumbled to debt and dust, the Iowa colony became the primary destination for the remaining believers. They came in waves to Corning, carrying little besides their skill sets and whatever diseases they may have picked up along the way.
The Icarian utopia in Iowa consisted mostly of mud hovels. Some lucky few got to sleep in badly built log cabins. They managed to stabilize by selling low-priced food during the war. Earning enough to pay off their collective debt from the Nauvoo and Missouri fuckups, and to build a two-story structure that held a dining hall, washroom, and school, along with a dozen cheap frame houses. Around sixty-five people had to live off of this income. Over time, the community added more revenue streams like livestock sales and wool.
And they went on like that for a solid TWENTY YEARS. The dream was coming true! Then came the next crazy kerfuffle.
The trouble started because of, to no one’s surprise, women. Them voting, specifically, not the big national argument, just in community matters. The dispute led to ruin. On one side, the Young Icarians; on the other, the Old Icarians. When the issue of women voting was voted on by the men, the Olds won decisively. The fuming Youngs moved a mile away (within the property) and took eight of the frame houses with them.
The Olds, despite their win, did not fair well. Their corner of the community soon became unviable. They declared bankruptcy in 1878. The Youngs would last another twenty years until they found themselves tits up in debt for similar reasons.
With a final total of 46 years, the Corning branch of the Icarians was the longest running non-religious commune in American history. In spite of this record, the story of Icaria reeks of loss. Bright eyed, they sought paradise in the Midwestern wilds and found only mud and a massive pile of debt. A bold leap, but not one that was rewarded and not one that could have succeeded had more careful choices been made. Some ideas are just strange and unscalable, and if you’re fun enough to get a bunch of bored people to go along with it, you’d do well to remember that your shit is a niche interest before you go walking those silly people into the jungle.
“Artisan” was a broad term that pretty much meant “trade” or “blue-collar”. They were mild wizards who used their hands to create textiles, clothes, furniture, clocks, carriages, locks, and any other good anyone ever uses. A few operated their own business, but most worked for large firms. Before jumping into such a life, an artisan had to obtain membership with the guild that regulated their particular industry. ↩︎- Basically the parliament or congress of post-Revolutionary France. A bunch of jerk off nerds arguing for the sake of arguing instead of saying what they really feel. ↩︎
- For the time period, it may be fair to call it “communalist”, but it’s not like this shit wasn’t stirring up the pretentiously minded already. ↩︎
- Who, of course, orchestrated an auto-coup three years later that functionally made him president for life. He was the third and last to call himself Emperor, and he got away with it for twenty years before Otto von Bismarck slapped the snot out of him and sent him crying his way to exile in Britain, the land of overcast skies and beans galore. ↩︎
- There is a gigantic silly slide mounted on top of a church in Independence that is directly connected to this string of sad events. It was built to catch Jesus when he comes back. My guess is that they assume he will literally fall out of the sky and if the slide is not there to catch and deliver him, he’ll hit the parking lot like Wile E. Coyote. ↩︎
- Probably something to do with lead dweeb dropping out of high school and writing a shitty Harry Potter fan-fiction that managed to lure a lot of smart and awkward sorts to Bay Area parties full of discussion groups about how we’re all going to be murdered by language model bots lest they succeed in building their version of a thing, and orgies full of tubby people heavy breathing over Excel sheets. ↩︎
The Normal Times 
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