Étienne Cabet

• Étienne Cabet
• Born: January 1, 1788
• Died: November 8, 1856

Utopian communist, was born in Dijon, France, the youngest of the four sons of Claude Cabet and Francoise (Bertier) Cabet. His father was a master cooper, the practitioner of an honorable trade in the wine-making region of Burgundy, and the Cabets seem to have been at a somewhat higher social and economic level than the usual working-class family. Legend has it that Claude Cabet was a Jacobin “patriot,” and the son therefore would have spent his early childhood in a politically involved household.

Originally destined to follow his father’s trade, Etienne Cabet was led in a different direction because of his delicate constitution and weak eyesight and the intellectual promise he showed while still quite young. He entered the École Centrale at Dijon and at the age of fifteen was an instructor at the newly established lycée. He chose medicine as a profession but switched to law, receiving his licence in 1810 and his doctorate in 1812 from the law school at Dijon, where he studied under the socialist anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

After the fall of Napoleon in 1815, Cabet joined the group of revolutionary conspirators known as the Carbonari, became associated with the liberal opposition to the rule of the restored Bourbons, and was one of the leaders of the revolution of 1830. Barely reconciled to the July Monarchy, he did little to hide his republican sympathies from the new king, Louis Philippe. In 1834 the government prosecuted Cabet for two articles he had written, and he was forced into exile in England.

His exile was made more agreeable by the arrival of his mistress, Delphine Lesage, whom he subsequently married, and the couple’s daughter, Celine. Delphine Cabet, like her husband, was originally from Dijon and of humble origin. She seems to have participated in his political activities and is given credit for having some influence on his ideas. The birthdate of the daughter is uncertain.

Cabet’s communist beliefs developed while he was in England, where he met the utopian reformer Robert Owen. Returning to France in 1839, he published the first version of his most famous work, which was reissued the following year under its definitive title, Voyage en Icarie. In it he described a utopian community based on the principles of absolute equality, with all property held in common. Its members renounce their individuality in order to preserve social order: Everyone has identical houses, furniture, and clothes, receives an identical education, and lives according to an identical timetable. The only variation is a division of labor between the sexes: Women who do housework are exempted from work in the factories or fields. The family remains the basic unit of society, but a spirit of community and a sense of civic duty are instilled by means of education, propaganda, and carefully censored entertainment. Work is relatively light, money is banished, and full warehouses provide for the material needs of the Icarians.

The dominant impression, however, is of a deadening uniformity. If labor is painless, it is also unvarying and performed according to a rigid schedule. Simple dress is prescribed for all, and ornamentation that could inspire the destructive emotions of greed and envy is forbidden. Even the towns and farms are laid out symmetrically.

Some have seen the seeds of twentieth-century totalitarianism in Cabet’s vision of a regimented society in which each citizen is expected to serve as a policeman, with the solemn duty of reporting a neighbor’s infractions of the rules. However, Cabet entrusted central control of the community to a popularly elected national assembly and made provision for direct citizen participation in various lesser assemblies, so that democratic political forms are observed.

Most of Cabet’s ideas are highly derivative, and this lack of originality has consigned Voyage en Icarie to a minor place in the history of Utopian thought. Nevertheless, it achieved considerable popularity in its time; five editions were published between 1840 and 1848. Moreover, Cabet has been given credit for forming one of the first mass working-class movements in French history. His Icarian movement at one point may have numbered several hundred thousand followers and sympathizers.

By 1847, Cabet, increasingly pessimistic regarding the potential for reform in France along the lines of his ideas, issued an appeal for settlers for an Icarian community to be founded in the United States. In consultation with Robert Owen, he selected a site in Texas, on the Red River. An advance party of sixty-nine settlers left France on February 3, 1848, about three weeks before the revolution of 1848 broke out in Paris. After arriving in New Orleans, the small group journeyed to Texas, only to find that the prairie land assigned to them was in the form of scattered tracts and that it would be impossible to establish a successful community under those conditions.

Returning to New Orleans, the Icarian advance guard, depleted by yellow fever, joined a larger group of settlers who had begun arriving from France. Cabet himself, now past sixty, arrived in 1849. The group, numbering 15,000 (most of them former tradesmen), leased the land and houses of the abandoned Mormon community at Nauvoo, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi, and established themselves there.

Cabet, taking the role of dictator, organized Nauvoo according to Icarian principles. Initially settlers were required to give over all property to the community, with no right to restitution if they left. However, frequent departures by disappointed Icarians made this policy impractical and it was soon changed. Each family was assigned two spacious rooms in one of several large frame houses, and the entire community assembled for meals in a combination dining hall and meeting house that was adorned with Icarian slogans. A rigid schedule fixed hours of labor and mealtimes, with a trumpet blast announcing each change of activity. The community was pervaded by a monastic, barrackslike atmosphere. According to one visitor, the settlers, although well fed, were somber and joyless.

Hard work and outside contributions enabled the settlement to survive, if not flourish, but by 1855 resentment against Cabet had burst to the surface. Three years earlier he had had to face charges of fraud brought against him in Paris by the Red River contingent. His attempts to introduce a special diet and a rigid moral code met with resistance from the Icarians. Defeated in his campaign to regain total control over the community, Cabet left Nauvoo in 1856 with the minority of settlers who had remained faithful to him. The group proceeded to St. Louis, where Cabet, then sixty-eight, died of a stroke. He was buried in the Riddle Cemetery, later renamed the Holy Ghost Cemetery.

Icarian communities were later founded in Cheltenham, Missouri, about sixteen miles from St. Louis; in Corning, Iowa; and in the Sonoma Valley in California. The last surviving of these, the one at Corning, voted its dissolution in 1895, thereby ending a movement that had added a chapter to the rich history of American Utopian communities.

The two principal collections of Cabet’s personal papers are the Archief Cabet in the International Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis in Amsterdam and the Papiers Cabet in the Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris in Paris. Cabet was an extremely prolific writer, and the bibliography of his published works—including polemical pieces, theoretical expositions, reports on the Icarian community, historical works, almanacs, and summaries of various legal actions in which he was involved—is quite long.

Two of the more significant short expositions are Comment je suis communiste et mon credo communiste (1841) and Douze lettres d’un communiste à un réformiste sur la communauté (1841-42). The standard reference work for Cabet’s life and the Icarian communities is J. Prudhommeaux, Icarie et son fondateur, Étienne Cabet (1907), which also has a bibliography of Cabet’s published works. A brief study, somewhat superficial but containing a useful summary of Cabet’s Utopian thought, is S. A. Piotrowski, Étienne Cabet and the Voyage en Icarie: A Study in the History of Social Thought (1935). An early biography is H. Carle and J. P. Beluze, Biographie d’Étienne Cabet, la fondateur de l’École Icarienne (1861-62) (Beluze was Cabet’s son-in-law). A good analysis of the Icarian movement in France is C. H. Johnson, Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and the Icarians, 1839-1851 (1974). C. Nordhoff, Communistic Societies of the United States (1875), contains a sympathetic account of the Icarian community in Corning by a contemporary observer. See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1929).