Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism
Jonathan Beecher · 2001 · English — secondary
Transcription: src/sources/beecher/notes.md (notes on Pt IV "Texas", chs 13–16, 255 ln)
We hold notes on Part IV, "Texas" (chs 13–16) only — the colony portion of a full-length intellectual biography. The rest of the book (Considerant's French career) is unnotated here.
What it is
The standard modern scholarly biography of Considerant (UC Press, 2001), by the leading English-language historian of Fourier and Fourierism. Part IV places the Texas venture inside Considerant's whole life and the intellectual history of American Fourierism.
Author's position
Academic intellectual historian. No stake in the colony's local reputation; stake is the definitive life of Considerant. Sympathetic but unsparing — portrays a brilliant writer and talker who was no man of action, who fell into "mental and moral collapse" at Reunion (admitting later he was taking morphine) and developed a "visceral repugnance" toward the colonists, Savardan above all.
Access
French archives and the Considerant papers; Simonin's accountant diary (a major source for the 1855–56 collapse), Wolski's journal, Savardan's book. Deepest of any source on Considerant's psychology and on the context — the champ-d'asile tradition, the exhaustion of American Fourierism, Know-Nothing hostility, the railroad land reserve.
Known distortions / how to weight
- Authoritative for Considerant the man, the project's intellectual origins, and the European/American political context. The interpretive frame — failure as Considerant's temperamental/personal collapse — is Beecher's lens; weight it as such alongside Pratt's (blame) and Savardan's (insider grievance).
- Considerant-centric: the colony is seen through his biography; thin on the colonists who stayed and the Dallas afterlife (where Sandell/Cordillot lead).
- Key structural claim: Au Texas designed a colonization company, not a phalanstery — "nowhere did Considerant use the terms 'Phalanx' or 'Phalanstery'"; the plan was pioneers-first, community later, and émigré enthusiasm made that "a dead letter." Converges with [[pratt]] → a cross-source finding for the dissolution node.
- Useful hard details: Bestor's "most complicated by-laws ever drafted"; the Aug 7 1855 Proprietors' Society (95 of 128 joined, ~33 left, a dozen founding Mutuelle); Cantagrel's July 1856 resignation.
Cross-references
[[pratt]] (converging colonization-society thesis), [[considerant-du-texas]] (Du Texas is the "extraordinary apology" Beecher reads as written from collapse), [[savardan]] (Beecher's antagonist-source), [[burkli]] (the Swiss who left within six months).
Reading notes
2024-10-30
IV. Texas
13. Discovering America
During the later 1840s, immigrants also arrived in unprecedented numbers from Ireland, England, and Germany...
...industrial output took off. Between the mid-1840s and mid-1850s, the Untied States underwent on eof the most remarkable periods of growth in its history.
...the rise of the railroad.
...Boston and Albany were connected by railroad in 1842, Boston and New York only in 1849. By 1850, however, there were already 10,000 miles of track in the United States.
In 1845 Chicago had been a muddy frontier station, smaller than Nauvoo...Ten years later it was the terminal for 2,200 miles of railroad track, a vast commercial center...
...transportation in America in 1854 was still largely based on water. This was in fact the golden age of steamboat travel...
In the America that Considerant first encountered, the river valleys were the great regions of growth, and the passenger list of a river boat was a microcosm of the nation...
The energy and the creativity of American society were so insistently evident on the streets of New York...that the newly arrived European had to recognize that he had "set foot in a new world."
[Brisbane] seemed to typify the restlessnesss and ceaseless movement that Considerant now saw as one of the Americans' most fundamental traits.
The two considered the possiblity of purchasing land in Ohio or Illinois and creating "rival agricultural squadrons"...
They apparently knew nothing about the disastrous eforts of Etienne Cabet's Icarians to establish a community in Texas in 1848.
He had become convinced that America was destined to become the source and center of the world's progress;
He raised the possibility of founding a "socialist state" in the West (analogous to the Mormons' Utah Territory)
On April 6, 1853, Considerant left New York City. He planned to meet Albert Brisbane at his home in Batavia, New York, and then to set out on a trip by train and steamboat as far as Little Rock.
...he wone everyone over with his exuberant curiosity, his capacity or wonder, and his sheer vitality.
Then they proceeded by train to Alliance, Ohio, and from there via newly laid track to Wellsville on the Ohio River.
...forty years earlier, after the restoration of the Bourbons, his father had spoken of quitting France and settling with a group of friends on the banks of the Ohio.
...they arrived in Cincinnati, where they were again welcomed by long-standing Fourierists. One of them, Benjamin Urner, "who frequently conversed with the souls of the dead,"
...Colombe Gengembre. Twenty years earlier Gengebre had been involved in the first communal venture at Conde-sur-Vesgre.
'Get all our friends to come to America,' he kept telling me. 'Here we can and will easily accomplish great things.'"
...taste the local wine, the famous Catawba...
What impressed Considerant was something more specific. This was the way the economic life of the city was organized around supplying and outfitting settlers on their way west. To his eyes, Cincinnati was an "arsenal for interior colonization."
This was important to Considerant because it suggested to him that the material problems confronting community builders in America might be less overwhelming than he had initially feared.
Napoleon, Arkansas
They were disappointed to find that a stagecoach now made regular runsalong their planned route.
Considerant asserted that the crucial part of the trip...began when he and Brisbane set out on horseback from Fort Smith on the long trek through Indian Territory to the Red River.
...lugubrious... [looking or sounding sad and dismal, lugere -> to mourn]
Considerant wrote Allyre Bureau from Fort Smith on May 18: "Tomorrow: passage from Civilization to Savagery."
To Considerant, it was inviting, even edenic, country - not at all the "sad and monotonous" prairie that he had expected to find in the American West.
...rough river town of Preston. A contemporary described Preston as a town of "bad repute...a collection of low groggeries and a few stores, lining the high bluff bank of the river."
Accused of treason by Cabet when his attempt to establish a settlement in Texas failed, Gouhenant had been left behind when Cabet led his followers to Nauvoo, Illinois.
(This was not a bar but an art gallery and photography studio, which also served as a "combination church, Masonic lodge, dance hall, and law court.")
...cottonwood tree...
"We have two years at most to take possession of the land we need here."
He wrote that he looked forward to the day, not far distant, when they would all be together in Texas, "living in liberty and breathing the joy that must emanate from the cradle of a society which is just, worthy, radiant, and liberating."
Between September 1853 and March 1854, he worked hard at the book...
(One of the arguments Considerant used was that his current activities were hardly threatening to the Belgian or French state since his goal was now to promote an exodus of radicals from Europe.)
He also gave informal nightly English lessons to a few emigres...
...it is clear that many of the mundane aspects of the venture in Texas did not interest him.
Considerant was not going to involve himself in civilized transactions.
In particular, [Godin] insisted on the need to minimize the conflict between labor and capital so as to avoid creating "a new Ireland in Texas."
* From a different perspective, Au Texas can also be seen as a piece of promotional literature in an emerging tradition of American boosterism. *
What is striking about this plan, however, is how little it owed to the ideas of Charles Fourier. Nowhere in the book did Considerant use the terms "Phalanx" or "Phalanstery."
What considerant proposed was the creation of a colonizing company - an "agence de colonization" - which would initiate and supervise the initial phases of settlement.
These settlers would purchase improved land from the company, and it would arrange their transportation to Texas. Once they arrived, they would be free to organize their collective life as they pleased.
Why was Considerant so reluctant to call for an immediate effort to build a Fourierist community in Texas? Presumably because he did not think it would work under frontier conditions and in a strange country.
Considerant had reawakened the hopes that they had long ago placed in him and in their cause. Within a few weeks it was clear that the response would exceed Considerant's wildest hopes.
...a larger number of prospective colonists were clerks, functionaries, and professional people with little experience of physical labor.
...attracted by Considerant's idea of creating a "champ d'asile" for radicals of all persuasions.
Considerant had so eloquently (not to say extravagantly) described the opportunities awaiting settlers in Texas that his warnings about the difficulties of the task and the need to avoid sectarian dogmatism were simply not heard. The enthusiasm of the response to Au Texas took Considerant by surprise.
Once he had this support, he was not exactly sure what to do next. He found himself unable to answer his readers' queries; and for more than a month he even stopped writing to Bureau and the other Fourierists in Paris.
He also began meeting with Francois Cantagrel to work at drawing up a set of statutes for what they were soon calling the "Societe de Colonisation."
Considerant was not about to become a man of action in Godin's sense. Writing - and talking - had always been, and would remain, the ways Considerant was best able to influence the world.
...the statutes for the Colonization Society have been described by Arthur Bestor as "the most complicated set of by-laws ever drafted for a communitarian experiment."
Specifically, the society undertook to purchase land, prepare it for settlement, buy livestock and tools, and provide transportation to America for groups of colonists.
Th executive agent was, of course, Considerant. Receiving an annual salary of $1,200, he was to direct operations in Texas.
Fourierists criticized the abuses of capital, he wrote, but their goal, unlike that of communists, was the creation of a form of association in which capital and labor could be reconciled.
By the end of 1854, 1,291,446 francs had been pledged, and Allyre Bureau could announce that a total of 7 million or 8 million francs was expected and that the number of would-be colonists now reached "at least 2,500."
Savardan presented himself as someone who could lead the first cohort of settlers. His group would perform the functions of the pioneers...
The response to the publication of the by-laws was so emphatically favorable to some sort of experiment in association, however, that Considerant was obliged to reconsider his position on the role a Fourierist association might play in the initial phases of settlement.
...possibility of a massive migration of Swiss watchmakers to America.
"All by itself," he wrote, "our Swiss contingent would make up a good core group for colonization."
According to the provisional agreement drawn up in late December, the new Phalansterian Society would serve two functions. First, it would contribute to the work of colonization by providing a center in which arriving colonists might find "temporary lodging, information, provisions, a friendly population, and everything necessary to facilitate the definitive establishment of a settlement..."
One other issue considered at the meeting in Brussels was the timetable for emigration and the composition of the departing groups. In Au Texas Considerant had been adamant about the dangers of impatience.
His original proposal had in fact called for an advanced guard of about 150 pioneers - most of them Americans - to spend as much as a year preparing the site prior to the arrival of groups of settlers.
The whole situation was further complicated by the fact that some Europeans, notably a group from Louvain, were determined to leave as soon as possible for Texas, regardless of the instructions of Considerant and the directors.
In the end, close to 150 French, Swiss, and Belgian emigrants were to depart for Texas during the winter of 1855. If the question of who authorized these departures is hard to resolve, one thing is clear: Considerant's original plan to separate the tasks of the pioneer and the community builder was now a dead letter. Jean-Baptiste Godin wrote to Cantagrel on February 3: "Plans have changed. It is no longer with American pioneers that the preparation of the terrain will take place. The colonizing wave is pushing us here, and Europe is going to furnish the first colonists needed to get things started."
Above all, he took his most prized books - his vellum-bound copy of Fourier's Traite, and his inscribed copy of the Introduction a la science sociale by Amedee Paget
"A military ship is, after all, only a floating prison."
14.
In fact, by 1854 Texas had long been a focal point for the hopes and dreams of restless, dissatisfied, or simply ambitious Europeans. There was nothing new about the extravagance of Considerant's language or his paeans to the soil and climate of Texas.
In 1817 the Napoleonic general Charles Lallemand brought two boatloads of retired soldiers to Galveston Island...
"Le Champ d'Asile"
Adelsverein
Alongside the political refugees, idealistic noblemen, and capitalist entrepreneurs, there was another group of Europeans for whom Texas was the object of rich and alluring fantasies. These were the utopian socialists. In 1828, after disappointments at New Harmony, Indiana, Robert Owen negotiated with the Mexican government for the grant of an immense domain located in the provinces of Coahuila and Texas. In the end, the Mexican Congress failed to approve the land concession, but Owen continued to nurse the dream of a Texas community and apparently communicated it to Etienne Cabet later.
The land acquired by Cabet in signing a spectacularly unfavorable contract with the Peters Company of Cincinnati turned out to be arid and far from any navigable river.
When they docked at New York on February 4, Considerant's hopes were as high as ever, but he soon made a series fo discoveries that left him sick and demoralized. First, the Texas state legislature had closed off a large amount of land to settlement and development. A railroad line was to be built through North Texas, and until the route was determined a wide strip of land was being placed in reserve.
Another disappointment for Considerant was the project's failure to attract significant American support...It turned out, however, that the American Fourierist movement, so vigorous in the 1840s, had exhausted itself.
Apparently, no more than two dozen Americans actually joined the community in Texas, adn the attempt to raise money from American Fourierists was a dismal failure. Even Brisbane contributed only seven thousand of the twenty thousand dollars he had initially pledged. Worse yet, in June 1855 he was already circulating plans for a rival Fourierist community to be composed exclusively of wealthy Americans.
The Know-Nothing movement enjoyed only a brief period of influence in American political life, but Considerant's arrival happened to coincide with the height of the movement's popularity.
Not all Texas newspapers were hostile to Considerant's project. The Dallas Herald, the Northern Standard, and the Galveston News were all relatively sympathetic. Nonetheless, before leaving New York Considerant felt obliged to write a thirty-eight-page pamphlet....the pamphlet did nothing to mollify the critics...
It was only later, when he learned that two groups of emigrants led by Savardan and Burkli and including women, children, and old men, had sailed for America without waiting for his authorization, that he fell to the ground, "beaten, crushed, a living cadaver."
...the still unknown young journalist Frederick Law Olmsted...
A week later he traveled to Washington to seek help from Texas congressmen in obtaining a land concession or at least in circumventing the newly imposed restrictions on settlement. There he was joined by his friend, the architect Cesar Daly, whose English was fluent and who had come to America to help get the colony established.
In mid-February [Cantagrel] returend to Dallas, where he had already seen some attractive land. Shortly thereafter, while Considerant was in Washington taking to Texas congressmen, Cantagrel purchased 2436 acres of land located along the bluffs overlooking the West Fork of the Trinity River just three miles southwest of the village of Dallas.
...and although the quality of the soil was poor, small trees, vines, and buffalo grass grew abundantly, creating an illusion of fertility.
By that time, and even though they had no fixed destination, over a hundred would-bee colonists were en route to Texas.
It is true, however, that Considerant did eventually come to feel an almost visceral repugnance toward most of the colonists. The first and strongest object of his dislike was Savardan himself, who emerges from his own book as a self-important, punctilious, and splenetic busybody who clearly came to symbolize for Considerant a kind of narrowness and conventionality that he hoped he was leaving behind when he came to the United States.
He then went on to describe in glowing terms the contribution his group could make to the life of Texas. Their aim was not merely to engage in farming but to "perfect agriculture," "establish factories," and collaborate on the improvement of roads and rivers and on "the construction of the railroads that will one day cross the whole country." In the slightly more distant future, Considerant predicted, his compatriots would establish a university in Texas, "a university in which English and French literature, the arts, physics, mechanics, and the sciences will be taught by men of recognized learning."
There was no market for even the most basic of manufactured goods.
...tanning and distilling were the only industries that could amount to anything. It was clear that once roads were built and a railroad line established across North Texas, economic growth would be rapid. (For this reason speculators had already bought up much of the available land in the area.)
Until the arrival of Savardan's group, morale remained high, and most of the colonists accepted the routine uncomplainingly.
By the middle of July 1855, with the arrival of the groups led by Savardan and Burkli, the population of Reunion reached about 130. At this point serious problems began to emerge within the community. One of the chief problems was simply that the newcomers were exhausted and in many cases bitterly disappointed from the moment of their arrival. After an ocean voyage of at least six weeks and an arduous three- or four-week trip in covered wagons through dry creek beds, burned forests, and waterless prairies, they arrived at Reunion to find primitive accommodations, bad food, oppressive heat, springs running dry, and rattlesnakes.
Since the planting at Reunion had gotten under way late, and since the colonists had in any case planted many crops not native to the area, Reunion was especially hard hit by the drought.
Not surprisingly, with food and water running short and the new arrivals exhausted by the rigors of the trip, a number of colonists fell sick. In early August two people died: Vezian, an ex-army officer of just twenty-five; and Rupert, a journalist of Swiss origin. In the last two weeks of August there were two more deaths; and Kalikst Wolski noted in his journal that a tailor named Maguet was "busy stirring up our colonists against Dr. Savardan, claiming that it is he who is hte chief cause of our misfortunes, that he does nto know how to treat disease."
Dr. Savardan's group of forty-three colonists began, immediately after their arrival in mid-June, to complain loudly about the food, the quality of their accommodations, and the chaotic organization of work within the community. By Savardan's account, his group soon fell "almost completely into disgrace," serving as the target of a "running fire of slanderous taunts" from the Belgians. On the other hand, the smaller group of Swiss under Karl Burkli, who arrived on July 5, were highly respected by the rest of the community, but they were so dissatisfied with Considerant's leadership that, within six months, most of them had left.
...far from being self-supporting, the community was living off its capital.
They still had to buy almost all their food, except for meat, at Dallas. Even though they now had a sawmill, lumber and other building materials had to be purchased at Dallas, or else carted in at great expense from Houston.
For six months after his arrival at Reunion he did not send a single letter to the directors at Paris, allowing Cantagrel and Savardan to handle all communications.
* The Proprietors' Society was formally constituted on August 7, 1855, with Cantagrel as director and a council of administration hand-picked by Considerant. At that time there were 128 colonists at Reunion, but only 95 oof them joined the new association. The other 33 chose to leave. A dozen bought land and set about creating a village of their own, Mutuelle, to the west of Dallas on the road to Fort Worth. Some of the defectors were quick to let the directors in Paris know what they thought about the ineptitude and "unbelievable incapacity" of Considerant's leadership. * Considerant apparently replied: "No, not at all, I won't consent to that, because I set the rate on purpose to force them to leave if they don't know how to live on it." Considerant's rapid disenchantment with the whole venture, his exhaustion, and his inability to exercise real leadership are evident in most of the existing descriptions of life at Reunion during its first year. *
"loafansterians" [faineansteriens] that someone had created for them in a moment of spite.
The general impression one gets, however, is that he had completely lost control of the situation, that he had fallen into a state of mental and moral collapse. He said as much himself in the extraordinary apology he wrote two years later under the title Du Texas.
In October 1855 Considerant abruptly left Reunion to go to Austin.
In December Considerant was joined in Austin by the architect Cesar Daly and the accountant Amedee Simonin. Simonin had been sent to Texas by the directors to keep an eye on Considerant and to find out what was going wrong with Reunion. He kept a diary during that period, and the picture of Considerant that emerges from this diary is of a sullen, uncommunicative, deeply depressed individual.
At other times Simonin tried to explain Considerant's gloom and inertia in terms of the influence on him of his Belgian friends, those "two icicles" Roger and Cousin.
Others who met Considerant in Texas were less understanding. To an American named Renshaw, for example, whose son James had come to Reunion from the North American Phalanx, Considerant was not only an incompetent leader; he was also guilty of bad faith in his dealings with his associates in Europe. He was not only "incapable of running an undertaking"; he was also "morally sick."
Considerant's main concern now was, in fact, to relieve the Colonization Society of the burden of maintaining the community at Reunion. Once this goal had been achieved, then the resources of the parent society could be used to promote a new effort of colonization elsewhere, presumably in Uvalde Canyon.
...against the strong objections of Dr. Savardan and the half-hearted resistance of Cantagrel, the council of administration of the Proprietors' Society voted to allow its members to exchange their shares for land.
Although Considerant had given up on Reunion by the spring of 1856, the material situation in the community was actually in some ways more promising than it had been the previous fall.
New building ahad also been built - a smokehouse, a bakery, and new workshops and storage buildings - and a general store had been established; the herd of cattle had been enlarged; and by the end of March the plowing and planting were well under way. Hunting parties brought in wild game, which, with the addition of a few winter vegetables, made savory hot soups that colonists remembered long afterward.
But in early May disaster struck. A bitter north wind brought a severe frost that ruined the growing crops and gardens.
To complicate the situation still further, six new groups of colonists arrived during the first six months of 1856, bringing the total at Reunion to almost three hundred.
What [the new colonists] could not have been prepared for was the total lack of direction at Reunion and the pervasive atmosphere of acrimony and discouragement. The restaurant and store were still relatively well run, but among the work groups discipline had collapsed. Woodcutters and artisans now spent their days fishing and hunting for their dinner; groups of workers quarreled interminably over the use of a team of horses; and tools, sacks, and saddles lay abandoned in the fields.
And Amedee Simonin, the accountant whose diary is a major source for this period, had become convinced that Considerant was no longer in possession of his faculties.
Matters finally came to a head in July. Cantagrel, who had been particularly upset by Considerant's reluctance to remunerate colonists leaving the community, at last made good on his threats to quit. On July 6 he resigned as director, announcing his intention to return to Europe. The next day Consideratn took over negotiations with the unhappy colonists and reached an agreement that gave them half of the wages previously withheld. This agrement was to be drawn up and signed on the morning of July 8, 1856, but that morning Considerant was nowhere to be found.
The charge of drug dependency was not gratuitious; Considerant himself later admitted that he had been taking morphine as a sedative.