Étienne Cabet
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Étienne Cabet ( January 1, 1788 – November 9, 1856) was a French philosopher and utopian socialist.
In 1831, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, but due to his bitter attacks on the government he was sentenced for treason in 1834 and fled to England. Influenced by Robert Owen, he wrote the book Voyage et aventures de lord William Carisdall en Icarie ("Travel and Adventures of Lord William Carisdall in Icaria") (1840) which depicted an ideal society in which an elected government controlled all economic activity and supervised social affairs, the family remaining the only other independent unit. He was the founder of the Icarian movement, named after a utopian society described in his book.
In 1839, Cabet returned to France to advocate a communitarian social movement, for which he invented the term "communisme".[1] Cabet's notion of a communal society influenced other utopian writers and pholosophers, notably Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. Some of these other writers ignored the Cabet's Christian influences, as described in Cabet's book Vrai Christianisme.
In 1848, Cabet gave up on the notion of reforming French society. He led a group of followers from across France to the United States to organize an Icarian community. They came first to Texas, then moved to Nauvoo, Illinois to a site recently vacated by the Mormons. A new colony was established in "Icaria, Iowa" (near what is now Corning, Iowa). After disputes within the Nauvoo community, Cabet was expelled and he went to St. Louis, Missouri in 1855, where he died in 1856. The last Icarian colony at Corning disbanded in 1898.
