Why do communities fail? As we find ourselves under quarantine and our civic institutions under assault, it is a question worthy of examination, and one to which our history can provide insight. The story of La Reunion, the utopian community established in Dallas in 1855, only to fall apart after little more than a year, is particularly instructive.
That one of the earliest settlements in archly conservative Dallas was an experimental socialist community of immigrants largely from — of all places — France, seems preposterous, although it is fact. That the enterprise collapsed has generally been understood as proof of its own folly.
The conventional wisdom tells us that the colonists who arrived on the Texas prairie with utopian dreams were confronted with a frontier life for which they were wholly unprepared; that they were naïve radical intellectuals who couldn’t farm or ranch, and suffered defeat for their hubris.
It has also been understood as prima facie evidence of the futility of socialist politics.
A new, compulsively researched book rewrites that history, turning it on its head. According to Sabotaged: Dreams of Utopia in Texas (Nebraska, $34.95), La Reunion was felled neither by its utopian vision nor the practical incapacity of its settlers, but by a complete failure of leadership — by “sabotage.”
The book’s author is the late architect James Pratt, and it is a story he was preternaturally suited to tell; his mother was the founder of the local history and genealogy department of the Dallas Public Library. In 1962, Pratt himself co-authored the first architectural guide to Dallas, The Prairie’s Yield, and was an influential and visionary urban planner until his death in 2018.
The impresario behind La Reunion, and the man who is Pratt’s principal villain, was Victor Prosper Considerant, a charismatic interpreter of the ideas of Charles Fourier, the French philosopher who spawned a movement of utopian cooperative communities. In 1853, after visiting the United States, Considerant published Au Texas (To Texas), a pamphlet advocating new Fourierist settlement on the prairie, an Eden where he promised free land and a new egalitarian society.
A “magnificent spectacle”
Considerant’s call found broad appeal. The rise of Napoleon III in France signaled a broader political reversal across Western Europe, with the revolutionary ideals of 1789 replaced by centralized state power. Considerant, like many of his republican adherents, was hounded by state security forces, and forced into exile in Belgium. Investors, including many future colonists, poured some $400,000 into a stock company to support the venture.
At La Reunion, colonists would work together on community-owned land. There would be rotating responsibilities, but also necessary professionals — an arrangement comparable to the Israeli kibbutz. There were also, to be sure, hypocrisies: Wages for women were set at 40% of men. And then there was the irony of establishing a colony based on equality in a slave state on land that had been forcibly cleared of natives.
Considerant hoped to establish his colony at the standing military encampment at Fort Worth, which he believed to be abandoned, but the emissary he sent ahead to lay claim to that property, Francois Cantagrel, found it already occupied. Worse, there did not appear to be any good free land in the vicinity.
With hundreds of colonists already en route to North Texas, Cantagrel was forced to purchase land: three sections to the south of Dallas, with the townsite adjacent to a creek on high land looking over the Trinity valley. Using hired labor and a few early arrivals, he began building in March of 1855. The first structure was unusual enough to become a local attraction: a large foursquare house with a center hall and verandahs on all sides. The only furniture was the dining table.
Meanwhile, the colonists began arriving in the United States in waves, sailing from European ports to New Orleans, and then paddle-steamer to Galveston, where they gathered for the trip north over land.
Provisions for that monthlong trip of 70 colonists included 10 half-barrels of beer brought along not for pleasure but because it was considered therapeutic. (Alas, I have been unable to convince my own physician of this belief.) Being French, the supplies also included 100 pounds of coffee, 50 pounds of chocolate, and 130 pounds of Gruyere cheese. All told, the colonists’ haul weighed in at 7,000 pounds, much of it the mills, tools, forges and farming equipment they would need upon arrival. The plant stock they had brought along from Europe, close to expiration, had to be left to recover on land purchased outside of Houston, for later retrieval.
It was a time before decent roads when travel was difficult, and Pratt is at his most lyrical in describing the landscape the colonists navigated and the challenges it presented. Reveille was at 2:30 in the morning, after which they would round up their fledgling herd and march for 5 to 6 hours. “Creeks were a new problem for Europeans used to bridges,” writes Pratt. In the evening, they hunted for firewood, and put up tents surrounded by trenches to keep away snakes.
When the group arrived they were both frustrated and elated; disappointed that the there were not homes waiting for them, as Considerant had promised, but also inspired by the epic Texas landscape they had discovered. Confronted with the “magnificent spectacle” of the prairie from the new town, one of the colonists wrote, “I don’t know what to compare it to because I have never seen nature such as this.”
Mastodons on the prairie
There was one man who was most assuredly not inspired by what he found at La Reunion: Victor Considerant. His reaction to the community that he had inspired was “scorn.” He had dreamed of tree-lined avenues and a square with formal gardens, a kind of Versailles for the everyman. What he found was a fledgling frontier outpost. He derided the buildings Cantagrel had conjured out of the wilderness (impressing even the locals) as “mastodons,” and behaved as if the encampment and its inhabitants were beneath his dignity.
Dissatisfied, he decamped to Austin, secretly acquiring an alternate site outside of San Antonio. When he did spend time at La Reunion, he was petty and pompous, dispensing orders while smoking in bed — hardly appropriate behavior in a community based on equality. He refused requests to open a school, an infirmary, or begin a critical irrigation project. He sold milling equipment the colony had imported from France at great expense.
Among locals, the settlers were received with relative goodwill; it helped that they were hiring labor for construction. Dallasites, business-oriented from the first, presumed the colony would be a boon to the nascent economy. The new arrivals also found sympathy among a group of French immigrants who had preceded them, refugees from an earlier utopian settlement in Denton County that failed in 1848.
The political mood in the state was not quite so amicable. The nativist Know Nothing party, recently formed and increasingly popular, was opposed to immigration on principle, and the fact that the settlers were avowedly abolitionists made them pariahs in a slave state.
The Texas State Gazette described them as “lawless and unprincipled,” which was hardly true. “Did we not believe that their wild theories would not long stand the test of experiment, and would soon be abandoned, we might urge our objections more seriously.”
Through it all, despite the hostility of the political class and their own founding leader, the settlers persevered. After their first winter, they had cleared 430 acres, fenced most of it, and built a herd of 600 cattle. There was a kitchen, a bakery, a tannery, a grocery, a smokehouse, and a community office, all under separate roofs. There was wood-frame housing for all, albeit much of it shared.
If there is a hero to Pratt’s story, it is Auguste Savardan, an aristocratic country doctor who turned his chateau into an orphanage before French authorities placed him under house arrest as a political subversive. Savardan was possessed of the combination of patience, empathy and leadership that Considerant so utterly lacked, and so it largely fell to him to manage the collective in the face of its ostensible leader’s undermining behavior.
It was an impossible task. The dream of La Reunion died not when its collective society crumbled of its own weight, but when Considerant skipped town in the dead of night with the community’s funds — the “sabotage” of Pratt’s title.
After his return to France, Savardan wrote a history of his experience at La Reunion, Shipwrecked in Texas. In it, he recalled how all progress at the colony was “unappreciated, impeded, unrecognized, or destroyed” by Considerant. The end, Savardan knew, was near when a frustrated Considerant proclaimed. “I, I alone, am everything.”
Soon enough, there was nothing at all.
