Icarian Movement / Etienne Cabet

The Icarian movement enters Kyle’s wiki through The Life of John Taylor as the foil in a recorded debate between Taylor and the French communist M. Krolokoski in Paris. Étienne Cabet’s Icarians had taken over the Latter-day Saints’ deserted city at Nauvoo after the Mormon exodus — “all the advantages of our deserted fields and homes—that they had only to move into.” Taylor’s argument turns on a head-to-head comparison of outcomes: Cabet’s colony, starting from every material advantage and a “select company of colonists,” produced “a continued cry for help… money, money!”, while the Saints, “stripped of their all and banished from civilized society into the valleys of the Rocky Mountains,” built houses, schools, gardens, and a functioning government, and still sent money back to Europe to help the poor emigrate.

Taylor frames the contrast as religion-with-God versus a secular system “independent of God”: “you, with your philosophy… have been seeking to build up a system of communism and a government which is, according to your own accounts, the way to introduce the Millennial reign. Now, which is the best, our religion, or your philosophy?” He records the punchline as prophecy fulfilled — “A year or two after this conversation, the Icarian society at Nauvoo miserably failed. It also failed in France.” For Kyle’s reading, the episode is a clean case study in the wiki’s recurring tension: faith-grounded colonization succeeding where secular utopian communism failed.

Context: Étienne Cabet (1788–1856) was a French utopian socialist whose 1840 novel Voyage en Icarie inspired a real-world communitarian movement. Icarian colonists settled at Nauvoo, Illinois in 1849 after the Mormons abandoned it, but the community fractured over leadership disputes and dissolved by the late 1850s, with remnant colonies in Iowa and California lasting into the 1890s.

Where this appears

• The Life of John Taylor — Cabet’s Nauvoo Icarian colony is the secular-communist foil in Taylor’s Paris debate with M. Krolokoski, used to contrast faith-grounded Mormon colonization against utopian socialism.