“I speak again, after almost three years silence, a silence compared to which death would have been sweet.”
An excellent copy of this rare work. A pencilled note on the title-page indicates that this copy came from the library of Dr. Augustine Savardan (1822-1893) who practised medicine at La Réunion from 1855 to 1857. He also published an account of the colony, Un naufrage au Texas, which extremely critical of the founder, Victor Considerant (1808-1893).
Considerant published his first appeal for the colony - Au Texas - in 1854. Later, expanded editions appeared the same year, as well as in German in 1855. Dated San Antonio, August 8, 1857, this is the last of these valuable reports. Here he announces - with much bitterness - the dissolution of the colony, but nonetheless calls for its continuation.
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.
Considerant returned to America and La Réunion was built on the south bank of the Trinity River, within the current city limits of Dallas. “Considerant planned for the colony to be a loosely structured communal experiment administered by a system of direct democracy. The participants would share in the profits according to a formula based on the amount of capital investment and the quantity and quality of labor performed” (Davidson). Roughly two hundred colonists arrived in Galveston in 1855, reaching Dallas on 16 June. La Réunion was conducted as envisaged for about eighteen months before becoing insolvent. Factors such as poor soil, harsh winters, opposition from locals and infighting all contributed to its demise which was officially announced on 28 January, 1857. Some of the colonists remained in Texas while others moved south to New Orleans.
Discouraged, ill, abandoned, Considerant turned to intellectual work and study. He returned to France in 1869 and died in obscurity in 1893.
“Considerant’s work on Texas has caused some bibliographic confusion. Au Texas appeared in Paris in 1854 and was followed in the same year with Au Texas: Quatriéme partie, a supplement printed in Brussels containing the regulations for the colony. This supplement is frequently bound with the original volume. Some time later Au Texas: Appendice, Chapitre Final appeared, it being a final supplement also printed in Brussels, usually found bound with the second edition, which was printed in Brussels in 1855 … Considerant’s Du Texas was published in 1857 in Paris; it announces the failure of the La Reunion colony” (Jenkins).
Jenkins, cf 33; Monaghan, 476; not in Sabin; Davidson, R.V., “The History of La Reunion: A Failed Utopian Colony in Texas” in Texas Historical Association accessed online 10 June, 2025.
