A very good copy of this appeal for a colony in Texas.
Prosecuted as an accomplice in the 13 June, 1849, radical uprising in Paris, Considerant escaped and was sentenced in absentia. He travelled to Belgium and then England. A leading disciple of Charles Fourier, he resolved to apply these ideas in America. Leaving Liverpool on 1 December, 1852, he travelled to the North-American Phalanx, another colony created according to Fourier’s principles (which was then in a deplorable state). He then travelled by horseback to Texas and decided to establish a colony there. He returned to Ostend in order to raise funds for the settlement, founding the European-American Colonization Society of Texas on 26, September, 1854, in Brussells.
Jenkins fills out the story: “This is an eminent philosopher’s account of Texas and his audacious plans for a socialist colony there, the direct result of which was the establishment of La Reunion Colony near Dallas… In 1853 Victor Considerant and Albert Brisbane journeyed by horseback through Texas, and then Considerant returned to Europe full of plans for creating a utopian socialist colony there. He raised over a million francs and purchased 47,000 acres in Texas. In 1855 he returned with colonists and established the settlement of La Reunion near Dallas. Subsequently, close to 500 colonists settled there. These included writers, musicians, artists, artisans, and free spirits, but only two farmers. As might be expected, a couple of years of utopian bickering and successive Texas droughts brought the experiment to a speedy collapse.”
The maps are titled “Texas d’aprés la Carte Publiée par J. H. Colton” and “États-Unis. Avril.”
Basic Texas Books, 33; Eberstadt Texas, 162:176; Howes, C679; Sabin, 15925.
