What Ifs

Counterfactuals, which are not findings either — but unlike the other myth, each of these turns on something the record actually says happened.

What if Godin had come. When Considerant collapsed into discouragement and delegated his powers away, the management had an opening to replace the man of letters with a man of business. Godin — managing partner, proven, in Savardan’s phrase, “in the creation of a great industry and in the government of men and things” — twice offered to come and take charge in America. Bureau and Guillon, the artist and the political writer, refused. Godin went home and built the Familistère de Guise, which ran as a working Fourierist association for more than a century. The standard story says the model could not work. It has to explain why the one partner who later proved it could was the one kept out, by the colony’s own leadership. (A source tension worth leaving open: elsewhere Godin’s absence is put down to illness. Both may hold — offer refused, then illness.)

What if Texas had granted the land. In December 1855 Considerant petitioned the House and Senate for a grant of roughly two hundred sections. On 19 July 1856 the Committee on Public Lands reported against it and recommended an incorporation bill instead. The colony got a charter where it had asked for ground — the legislature’s judgment being, in effect, that these people could be a company but not landholders.

What if the railroad had been on time. The 1858 plan sheet draws a projected corridor running west past the colony, and a railroad was in fact eventually built along it — the Texas & Pacific, which reached Dallas in 1873 and stopped at Eagle Ford, a few hundred yards from colony ground. The placement was right. It was early by about eighteen years, which for a land-resale company is the whole difference between a fortune and a liquidation. The 1875 map is that near miss, drawn.

And it will be a movie within a few years, because of course it will, and the titles write themselves. Reverchon’s Revenge, which has at least the merit of being a real park. Au Texas, lifted from Considerant’s own book and pitched straight at the Academy. Godin Never Came, which is the sad one and also the true one. Article Three, the legal thriller about a company forbidden by its own charter to work its own land. And Naufrage — Savardan’s word for the whole business, meaning shipwreck — which nobody will green-light because nobody can pronounce it.