Icaria: The French Utopia That Moved Into the Mormons' Abandoned City
Near Nauvoo, Illinois
When the Latter Day Saints departed Nauvoo in eighteen forty-six they left behind a partially built city with houses, workshops, printing offices, and a temple standing on the bluff. Into this near-empty space came a French philosopher's dream. Etienne Cabet, a novelist and political theorist, had published a novel in eighteen thirty-nine describing an ideal communist society where property was held in common, labor shared equally, and social hierarchy abolished.
The book inspired a real movement. Hundreds of French workers committed themselves to building the society Cabet had imagined in fiction. In March of eighteen forty-nine, Cabet arrived in Nauvoo with approximately two hundred eighty followers.
They had secured the partially built Mormon city for, as one account put it, pennies on the dollar. The community at its peak counted about five hundred people, who farmed collectively, operated mills and workshops, and dined together each evening in a common hall. A periodical press published in French, English, and German.
The reality, however, did not match the novel. Cabet's leadership grew increasingly authoritarian. He banned dissent, imposed silence in the workshops, and restricted tobacco and alcohol.
A cholera outbreak in eighteen fifty-one killed more than fifty residents. Legal disputes multiplied. In eighteen fifty-six the community voted to remove Cabet as leader.
Unable to accept the loss of control over his own utopia, Cabet departed with a group of loyal followers to start a new colony outside Saint Louis. He died two days after arriving, of a stroke. The Nauvoo Icarian community dissolved that same year.
A different kind of settler was already moving in.
