CABET, ÉTIENNE

CABET, ÉTIENNE (1788–1856), French left-wing political leader and writer.

The son of a Dijon cooper and one of the few left-wing political leaders of the era with roots in the working classes, Cabet's long career spanned the entire "age of revolution" as well as two continents. Although his place in the history of the Left was established rather pejoratively by the Marxist mainstream as the author of one of the archetypical texts of "utopian" socialism, Voyage en Icarie (1840), and the founder of a "little Icaria" in America, Cabet was in fact the creator, during the 1840s, of the largest "proletarian party" in Europe, a man whose name, as Karl Marx (1818–1883) remarked, was synonymous with communism.

Raised as a Jacobin, Cabet became a lawyer after a stellar school career, pleading cases during the early Restoration on behalf of the politically oppressed. Arriving in Paris in 1820, he was embraced in liberal circles, joined the anti-Bourbon Charbonnerie conspiracy, and became a protégé of the moderate republican leader Jacques-Charles Dupont de l'Eure (1767–1855). He dedicated himself to Republican politics thereafter, largely as a journalist and pamphleteer. As the Revolution of 1830 rapidly turned reactionary, Cabet resigned a judicial post in Corsica and won fame for his book on the "betrayal" of the recent revolution, as an indefatigable organizer of opposition associations, and then as editor of Le Populaire, which gained the largest circulation of any weekly in France before it was suppressed in 1834. As its editor, Cabet was convicted of lèse-majesté (crime against a sovereign power) and chose exile in London over prison in France.

To that point, Cabet's republicanism was of the moderate sort, with few hints of socialism. London (where his common-law wife and daughter joined him) proved transformative. Mixing with other Continental exiles while learning English and living by teaching French, Cabet read widely in both languages. In French, it was the history of the Revolution of 1789 and the texts of its leaders. He fell under the spell of Philippe Buonarotti's (1761–1837) notion that social and economic equality was the "last consequence" of Maxmilien Robespierre's (1758–1794) vision of the Republic and proceeded to write his own version of the Revolution to confirm it. At the same time he read Robert Owen (1771–1858) and Thomas More's (1478–1535) Utopia. Hence the Voyage en Icarie. Cabet's novel portrays a nation born in revolution led by a benevolent dictator (Icar) who speaks for the people during a fifty-year transition to a perfectly egalitarian society based on an idealized version of the extended family where everyone seems related—a gigantic cousinage. (It should be recalled that this was an age of frequent cousin marriage and deep sibling bonds, both romanticized in fiction.) Everyone worked, but their jobs were "pleasant and easy" and their workdays short, made that way by the triumph of modern technology. Leisure time would be the creative heart of existence. Administrative decisions were taken by consensus in a context where politics had effectively disappeared.

The format and the message proved enormously appealing to ordinary working people whose livelihoods were now increasingly threatened by uncontrolled capitalism. Returning to Paris in 1839, "Father" Cabet, as his followers soon called him, flew into action, publishing his two books, explaining his ideas in brochures aimed at specific audiences, including women, re-creating Le Populaire, and sending its salesmen to every nook and cranny of France. Local groups, forming around subscribers, met in cafés and homes to discuss La Communauté, Cabet's term for his communist society. Cabet combated not only the "heartless" system of economic and political "egotism" but also rival socialist "schools," sparing only fellow Jacobins like Louis Blanc (1811–1882). But in general, his vituperative pen and demand for ideological conformity seemed to pay off: by 1846 his following across France (and elsewhere) numbered perhaps one hundred thousand men and women. Cabet was particularly solicitous of the latter (though silent on their right to vote), stressing their dual oppression as domestic captives under the Napoleonic Code and as the most exploited of the exploited in the world of work, paid and unpaid. How different things would be in Icaria! Finally, he also sought the support of the upper classes, who should understand that their current status was becoming increasingly precarious, based as it was on the extreme degradation of "the people," whose patience would soon run out.

In 1847, believing that violent revolution was imminent, but unable to advocate it, Cabet combined a new line—that "communism was Christianity in its primitive purity"—with the notion that his people must now establish a New Jerusalem across the waters. Such escapism caused a wholesale turnover within his following, as Christian millenarians moved in and republican revolutionaries moved out. As Cabet prepared to establish the "promised land" in Texas, the actual Revolution of 1848 occurred, leaving him in a strange position. But he rallied, ignored the "avant garde" that had left for America two weeks before, and suddenly found himself the main scapegoat of the Revolution, as the Right accused the entire Left of being communists, a tactic that made Marx's "specter" seem all the more real. In the end, Cabet, though he continued to work with Louis Blanc and Alexandre-Auguste Ledru-Rollin (1807–1874) to build a stable neo-Jacobin Left in the Republic, revitalized the "emigration" to the "Icarian colony," which, after the disastrous collapse of the Texas venture, came to be established at Nauvoo, Illinois, recently abandoned by Brigham Young (1801–1877) and his persecuted Latter-Day Saints.

Cabet joined his "pioneers" permanently in 1849, being no longer welcome in France, and established Icar's dictatorship of the people. His idealistic "citizens" (few of whom came from the distraught poor Cabet had lamented in Le Populaire, given the 600-franc entry fee—a year's wages—required of recruits) cheerfully submitted but rapidly lost their zeal, as has been beautifully documented by Jacques Rancière and Robert Sutton. Principal among them were the women who, lo and behold, not only were denied the vote but also cooked the meals and did the laundry. Diana Garno argues that the egregious failure of the Nauvoo experiment, which ended with Cabet's expulsion, was largely due to the growing disenchantment of women, whose idealism had been no less vibrant than the men's. Cabet died of apoplexy in Saint Louis. Icarian communities struggled on in various rural areas of the United States, but Cabet's main legacy remained in France, where he contributed mightily to the vision among working people of a society where they counted.

See alsoBlanc, Louis; Jacobins; Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre-Auguste; Owen, Robert; Revolutions of 1848; Utopian Socialism; Working Class.

bibliography

Garno, Diana. Citoyennes and Icaria. Lanham, Md., 2005.

Johnson, Christopher H. Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and the Icarians, 1839–1851. Ithaca, N.Y., 1974.

Rancière, Jacques. The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France. Translated from the French by John Drury; with an introduction by Donald Reid. Philadelphia, 1989.

Sutton, Robert. Les Icariens: The Utopian Dream in Europe and America. Urbana, Ill., 1994.

Christopher H. Johnson