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CABET,kȧ′bā̇′,Etienne (1788-1856). AFrench Communist, born January 1, 1788, atDijon. Cabet was a true product of theintellectual and social reconstructionists of theera of the Revolution. He was educated as alawyer, became an efficient Government official asProcureur-Général in Corsica, representing theGovernment of Louis Philippe, after havingheaded an insurrectionary committee andparticipated actively in the July Revolution of 1830.In 1831 he took his seat with the extreme Radicalsin the Chamber of Deputies as representativefrom Côte d'Or. His Radicalism and hisrevolutionary denunciations aroused the activeopposition of the Government, which gave himthe choice between two years' imprisonment andlive years of exile. He chose the latter, andlived in England studying and thinking out hissocial philosophy, and finally accepting communismas the only solution of the problemspresented by excessive wealth and excessive povertyside by side in modern society. He returned toFrance in 1839, and publishedVoyage en Icarie, apopular romance, setting forth his new communisticideas, which won followers by the thousandsand drove its author to take steps to realize hisUtopia. In 1841 he revived thePopulaire (originally founded by him in 1833), which waswidely read by French workingmen, and from1843 to 1847 he printed an Icarian almanac,a number of controversial pamphlets, a bookon Christianity (Le vrai christianisme suivantJésus Christ), which makes out Christ'smission to be to establish social equality, andcontrasts primitive Christianity with modernecclesiasticism to the disparagement of the latter,and a popular history of the French Revolutionsfrom 1789 to 1830, in five volumes. In 1847there were probably 400,000 adherents of theIcarian school, and Cabet turned his attention toa project for a real Icarian colony in America.Influenced by Owen he took a large tract of landin Texas, and sixty-nine men entered into a socialcontract, making Cabet the director-in-chief forthe first ten years, and embarked from Havre,February 3, 1848, to take up land on the RedRiver in Texas. Cabet came later at the headof a second and smaller band. Texas did notprove to be the Utopia looked for, and, ravagedby disease, about one-third of the colonistsreturned to France, while the remainder wentto Nauvoo in Hancock County, Ill., on a beautifulbend of the Mississippi River, where theMormons had made a prosperous town beforepublic opinion had driven them to Utah. Thenew community at Nauvoo prospered, but thelocation was regarded only as a temporaryabiding-place, and Government land was acquired asearly as 1852 in southwestern Iowa with a viewto removing the community thither, whichremoval was finally accomplished in 1860 after asplit in the community at Nauvoo, part going toCheltenham, near Saint Louis. Cabet diedsuddenly of apoplexy in Saint Louis, November 8,1856, a broken-hearted and disappointed man.He was the inspirer of modern communism at itsbest, and a writer of more literary merit andmoral worth than the calumny whichcontemporaneous writers in France succeeded in weavingabout his name would lead us to believe.
The failure of the Cheltenham colony, to whichfaction Cabet belonged, and which therefore wasrecognized in France as the true Icaria, camequickly, and the subsequent history of theIcarian community in Adams County, Iowa, was arecord of struggle with debt until 1863, when warprices gave their agricultural productsexceptional values. This temporary relief wasfollowed by years of privation, declining numbers,and vanishing hopes. Another split occurred in1879 between the younger and older members ofthe community, resulting in a division of theproperty, the younger element retaining the titleand old habitat, while the ‘party of the elders’accepted, with a bonus of $1500, the eastern divisionof the land, and organized a ‘New IcarianCommunity’ about one mile distant from theoriginal village. Consult Shaw,Icaria: A Studyin Communistic History (New York, 1884). SeeCommunism.
