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The difficulty of pursuing micro-communism in a capitalist society also dogged Cabet’s American followers.

Mr Jennings writes about five exemplary communities: the devout Shakers, Robert Owen’s New Harmony, the Fourierist collective at Brook Farm, Massachusetts, the Icarians at Nauvoo, Illinois, inspired by a French proto-communist, Etienne Cabet, and the Oneida Community in New York state practising “Bible communism” and “complex marriage”.

The Communistic Journal, L'Humanitaire, is in favor of a community of wives proper, while Cabet leaves the question an open one.

He died in 1858.—Still more disastrous was the fate of the Icarian Colony, founded in Texas in 1848 by the Frenchman Stephen Cabet, author of “Voyage en Icarie, Roman philos. et social,” 1840, as an attempt to realize his communistic-philanthropic ideas on the other side of the Atlantic.

Cabet now hastened to France, and on appeal obtained reversion of his sentence in 1851.