Elsewhere

Want to know more about utopian socialism?

La Réunion was one experiment inside a movement that ran for half a century and crossed an ocean. The people who keep its records are still at it, and they are better at it than almost anything written about this colony in English. Most of it is free. Most of it is in French.

The movement and its archive

• Association d’études fouriéristes — the reference site on Fourier and those he inspired. Some 2,400 articles in open access: the association’s annual Cahiers Charles Fourier, a recension of the writing on Fourier, and the Dictionnaire biographique du fouriérisme — over a thousand biographical notices, a number of which are colonists indexed on this site.
• Les premiers socialismes (Université de Poitiers) — digitized editions of Fourier and the first socialists, read against each other.

The book that sold the colony

• Victor Considerant, Au Texas (Paris, Librairie phalanstérienne, 1854), scanned by the BnF — the prospectus that recruited the colonists, and the title this site borrows its name from. Read it knowing what the buyers did not.

What the movement built instead

• Le Familistère de Guise — Jean-Baptiste Godin subscribed $20,000 to the Society, watched the Texas venture come apart, and went home to build the thing La Réunion was chartered to be. His social palace is now a museum. It is the closest anyone came.