Escape to—and from—Utopia: Fourierist Philosophy and Musical Life in the Colony of La Réunion, Texas

Only within these communities has there been seen, in the wide borders of the United States, a social life where hunger and cold, prostitution, intemperance, poverty, slavery, crime, premature old age, and unnecessary mortality, panic and industrial terror, have been abolished. If they had done this for only a year, they would have deserved to be called the only successful “society” on this continent and some of them are generations old. All this has not been done by saints in heaven, but on earth by average men and women.

—Henry Demarest Lloyd (1847–1903), address to the Ruskin Community, 19 June 1897¹

I did not say to you: let us enrich ourselves and live happily and freely in Texas. I said: Let us create in Texas a haven for progressive thought which repels the Old World; let us there open a land of studies, of expansiveness, and of free experience for all ideas entailed in the search for the divine Law of humanity. And in this land, free and open to all, we, who believe we possess the intellectual key to the true Law, shall create our own experiences—all the while also strengthening our own affairs.

—Victor Considerant, Au Texas! (1854)²

On 29 December 1854, after a journey of nearly nine weeks from Le Havre, French engineer and architect François Cantagrel (1810–87) and a Belgian physician named Edmond Roger arrived in Texas and set about their task of purchasing land near the Trinity River in Dallas for a new community of Belgian, French, and Swiss settlers (see fig. 1). They were soon followed by a group of twelve workers and two shiploads of settlers who had left their European homeland for the colony on 12 and 28 January 1855. By June 1856 eight more groups of settlers had arrived, forming a European community of between three and four hundred that considerably outsized Dallas, which was then a village of about one hundred. This was the community of La Réunion, a bold socialist experiment inspired by the ideas of Charles Fourier (1772–1837) and Victor Prosper Considerant (1808–93). Their idea was to break away from the oppressive and reactionary politics of Restoration Europe and create in the “terre sacrée” (holy land) of the United States “un champ d’asile ouvert à toutes les formes de la pensée progressive du siècle” (a protected area open to all forms of progressive thought of our century).³

Figure 1.

George H. Santerre’s map (ca. 1955) of the La Réunion Lands in Relation to the Trinity River (folder 14, box 2, shelfmark GA 63–2, Santerre and Cretien Families Collections, Dallas Public Library).

Used by permission.

La Réunion as a civic entity would last only a few years, ceding its lands to the city of Dallas in June 1858. It was thus more short-lived than other utopian communities such as Brook Farm (Massachusetts), the Harmony Society (Pennsylvania), the Icarian colony (Illinois), New Harmony (Indiana), the North American Phalanx (New Jersey), the Oneida Community (New York), and Silkwood (Kansas). Nevertheless, anecdotal evidence and a previously unknown songbook held in the library of the University of Texas at Arlington vividly document not just the colony’s own musical life but also the role of music in the lives and cultures of many intentional communities that aspired to take advantage of the United States’ abundant space and relative lack of feudal or aristocratic traditions in order to create a world that would be free of the social ailments cited by Henry Demarest Lloyd in his 1897 address to the Ruskin Colony. In this sense, La Réunion’s musical life offers a snapshot of what Fourier had termed “the new industrial and societary world.”⁴

The Societary Theories of Charles Fourier

Fourier’s influence in the United States was extensive.⁵ Developed in nearly two hundred journal articles, six brochures, and five lengthy treatises, as well as dozens of posthumously...