One reporter's notebook
Cabet -- and Joseph
Etienne Cabet was a radical of the first order. He once stood for president of France. He published a revolutionary paper, Le Populaire. At one point, estimates put his readership over 100,000 an issue, making it the most popular radical paper in France. He was sentenced to two years in prison for some of his work and fined, but chose exile to England, instead. As a member of the French parliament, he'd espoused such radical views that he was charged with crimes against the government. While in England, he encountered the earliest Socialists: Thomas More, through his writing in the book Utopia, and Richard Owen. They shaped his thinking. And his thinking laid the groundwork for others, especially Karl Marx. It is a clear that you can say Cabet's ideas became progeny to the modern Socialist and Communist movements. At the heart of that accomplishment was his book, the Voyage en Icarie, which he produced in 1840. It sold thousands of copies -- perhaps 400,000.
The ideal of Icaria was, to quote one biographer, "the perfect representative and direct democracy. The rights of the community took complete precedence over the individual."
As such, it brought with it true believers. Some say it had more than 100,000 followers in only a few, short years, though numbers fluctuated wildly. After Cabet lost his bid for election, he sailed to the United States to join with a small group who had settled in Texas. Things had gone badly. They had contractual disputes; Cabet himself was accused of trying to take people's money, so Cabet and his group needed a new home.
They picked one in the north, along the Mississippi River. Cabet and his followers found an abandoned town with plowed fields and a soaring white building that could serve as their school.
They chose Nauvoo, Illinois.
Nauvoo had recently been abandoned by the followers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons. It soaring temple was barely finished. Over the next six or seven years, a few hundred people settled along the great bend of the Mississippi and tried to make Icarianism work. With Brook Farm in Massachusetts, it ranks among the great Utopian experiments in American history.
That it ended badly is also a significant fact. The great Nauvoo Temple was destroyed by fire and tornado. The Icarian replacement, crafted from the Temple's stones, was a plain building. Division and financial problems hampered development. Cabet himself was criticized and rejected by some of his followers and forced from Nauvoo, only to die a few weeks later of a stroke. Icarianism continued on in one form or another in communities in the United States until the 1890s before finally snuffing out as a unique movement. Marxism, of course, ultimately replaced these earlier approaches.
The great Mormon Apostle John Taylor, serving a mission in France, as the Icarian movement tried to sputter along in his old town, asked those philosophers on the Left Bank of Paris why it was that, despite fertile fields, finished buildings and sophisticated industrial tools, the Icarians were constantly asking for money. Meanwhile the the Mormons, having left all behind, were slowly flourishing, without help, in the dramatic, trying deserts of the West.
It is a contrast that stirs my soul. Joseph Smith, whose 200th birthday we celebrated recently, founded a religion that quietly grows in influence. Adherents find not just a set of religious niceties, but a full way of life, filled with all the great ideas the world needs, and plenty to chew on in scholarly conversation. These adherents are quietly building their ideal community still, Zion. Many I know live close to the ideal.
It is no secret that socialist thought, of which Cabet is an important progenitor, has gained a great stronghold in Western universities. I wouldn't throw out all of the concepts. Many are sophisticated and sincere. (Indeed, the important communication conception of encoding and decoding comes from an openly socialist point of view.) It is, however, no secret that communism failed in forced experiments in Russia and the Eastern Bloc. And it failed in a voluntary experiment at Nauvoo, even though Joseph Smith gave them a running start.
Joseph Smith, the great prophet, the martyr, probably didn't care too much about such things as academic trends or the history of ideas, but the thing Cabet's forgotten failures have taught me is that far from being just a religous movement, the growing success of Mormonism as taught by Joseph Smith is a powerful, wonderful, living experiment. The teachings of Mormonism are worth a hearty place at the table of scholarly ideas and at the table of brotherhood, not just at some philosophical cardtable in the corner, merely a set religious dogmas seperate from career and daily life. Given that Joseph Smith has been more successful than Cabet, and Nauvoo demonstrates this, his ideas deserve wider notice among the world's scholars.
Try a few of these ideas on: God communicates with man today. There is purpose and meaning in life. Families and love can be eternal. Jesus is the Messiah. Through these ideas, the world has hope, not through some false, messianic, if socialistic, view like the distant island of Icaria.
So, two hundred years after his birth, I say, loudly, praise to the man who communed with Jehovah! Millions shall know -- and more should know -- Brother Joseph again.
Sources, as of Feb. 28, 2006: http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/~Chastain/ac/cabet.htm
Francis Gibbons' biography of John Taylor
answers.com entry on Cabet.
http://www.oup.co.uk/pdf/0-19-280431-6.pdf
The National Icarian Heritage Society ... http://nihs.info/history.html
Encyclopedia Brittanica on Cabet.
Mabel Schweer's Story of Icaria from Reflections on Icaria. http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/dogtown/icarian/schweers-overview.html
Of course, my views should not be construed to represent anything other than my own views. They are NOT necessarily the views of my department, my university or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the sponsoring institution of my university.