page_title: Icarians
section_title: Nauvoo, Illinois
hierarchical_section_title: Icarians / Icarian settlements / Nauvoo, Illinois
caption_attribution_description: English: Historic Nauvoo marker near the Nauvoo Temple.
context_page_description: The Icarians were a French-based utopian socialist movement, established by the followers of politician, journalist, and author Étienne Cabet. In an attempt to put his economic and social theories into practice, Cabet led his followers to the United States of America in 1848, where the Icarians established a series of egalitarian communes in the states of Texas, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and California. The movement split several times due to factional disagreements.
  The last community of Icarians, located a few miles outside Corning, Iowa, disbanded voluntarily in 1898. The 46 years of tenure at this location made the Corning Icarian Colony one of the longest-lived non-religious communal living experiments in US history.
context_section_description: Nauvoo was founded in 1839 for the gathering of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Even though Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, was killed in 1844, by 1845 Nauvoo had grown to a community of about 15,000 people – dwarfing the city of Chicago, which had only about 8,000 inhabitants at that time. Under threat of continuing violence from the surrounding communities and following a succession crisis, most of the Latter-day Saints, under Brigham Young left in 1846 for Salt Lake City, Utah, the current headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Latter-day Saints later sold their land to the Icarians in 1849.
  Nauvoo would become the first permanent Icarian Community, the Icarians immediately adopting the charter and structure described in Cabet's Voyage en Icarie. The structure included an annually elected president and one officer each to administrate finance, farming, industry, and education. New members were admitted by a majority approval vote by the adult males, after living in the commune for four months, forfeiting all personal property, and pledging $80. Nonetheless, visitors were welcome to stay as long as they wished in a hotel.
  Every family used the same amount of space (two rooms in an apartment building), and were allowed the same amount of furniture. After the age of four, children lived apart from their parents at a boarding school, and visited families only on Sundays. This was done to foster a love for the community "without developing special affection for parents" from a young age, theoretically instrumental to the smooth working of a Utopian society. Sundays were not what would be a typical religious Sunday; the Icarians practiced no religion, but there were days people voluntarily gathered in a fellowship called "Cours icarien" to discuss Cabet's writings and Christian morals and ethics.
  Because long-term celibacy was viewed askance by the community, marriage was the norm. Divorce was acceptable under the assumption individuals would remarry soon.
  With the basic need of shelter immediately settled, a short period of energetic growth and relative prosperity followed. Farmland was rented, a saw mill and flour mill opened, workshops established, and schools and a theater founded. A periodical press was launched, publishing in French, English, and German, and an office was established in Paris to recruit adherents for the American colony. The Nauvoo cultural life thrived. The Icarians held regular band concerts and theatre productions. Their library consisted of an extensive collection, ranging from reference works to applied science to popular novels, all in English and French, and totaling over 4,000 volumes. By 1855 there would be more than 500 participants in the Icarian project.
  Political disagreements and personal animosities would lead to the second major split of the Icarians in America. Étienne Cabet began in America in 1849 with the authority of the sect's unquestioned leader, status which was freely granted to him by those inspired to action by the man's writings. This individual status as supreme decision-maker stood in marked contradiction to the democratic ideals of the community, however. Cabet himself realized as much and in 1850 he proposed a constitution which provided for an elected President and an elected board of directors, which would supplant the absolute, personal authority of the unitary leader. This system functioned effectively for a time.
  In 1852, a lawsuit was filed in Paris against Cabet by a number of dissident former Icarians, who claimed their property was obtained by him by means of fraud. Cabet returned to France for 18 months to fight these charges. When he returned to America, Cabet began to push through a series of restrictive rules, including the prohibition of talking in workshops, banning the use of tobacco or alcohol, and other regulations which were unpopular with some members of the community. He also moved to reestablish his own personal decision-making authority over the entire community, proposing 
caption: Historic Nauvoo marker near the Nauvoo Temple
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