Spatial Practices of Icarian Communism
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Brigham Young University BYU ScholarsArchive Theses and Dissertations 2008-03-25 Spatial Practices of Icarian Communism John Derek McCorquindale Brigham Young University - Provo Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd Part of the French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons, and the Italian Language and Literature Commons BYU ScholarsArchive Citation McCorquindale, John Derek, "Spatial Practices of Icarian Communism" (2008). Theses and Dissertations. 1364. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/1364 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. A SPATIAL HISTORY OF ICARIAN COMMUNISM by John Derek McCorquindale A thesis submitted to the faculty of Brigham Young University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of French & Italian Brigham Young University April 2008 ABSTRACT A SPATIAL HISTORY OF ICARIAN COMMUNISM John Derek McCorquindale Department of French and Italian Master of Arts Prior to the 1848 Revolution in France, a democrat and communist named Étienne Cabet organized one of the largest worker’s movements in Europe. Called “Icarians,” members of this party ascribed to the social philosophy and utopian vision outlined in Cabet’s 1840 novel, Voyage en Icarie , written while in exile. This thesis analyzes the conception of space developed in Cabet’s book, and tracks the group’s actual spatial practice over the next seventeen years. During this period, thousands of Icarians led by Cabet attempted to establish an actual colony in the wilderness of the United States. Eventually settling in the recently abandoned Mormon enclave of Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1849, Cabet and the Icarians struggled to find meaning in the existing architecture and design of the city. This work describes the spatial artifact that they inherited, and recounts how the Icarians modified and used the existing space for their purposes. The thesis concludes that they were not ultimately successful in reconciling their philosophy with the urban form of Nauvoo, and posits a spatial cause for the demise of their colony. v TABLE OF CONTENTS A SPATIAL HISTORY OF ICARIAN COMMUNISM by John Derek McCorquindale I n t r o d u c t i o n The Myth of Icarus as Flight from the City............................................................1 C h a p t e r 1 REVOLUTIONARY BEGINNINGS: Education & Early Years....................................................................................... 5 Conspiracy & Revolution ......................................................................................7 The Betrayal of July............................................................................................ .11 C h a p t e r 2 THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ICARIANISM: Exile & Transformation....................................................................................... 16 Pre-Marxist Communism and Utopian Socialism...............................................18 Voyage en Icarie ...................................................................................................21 C h a p t e r 3 TOPOGRAPHIES OF VOYAGE EN ICARIE : The Spatial Ambition of Utopian Socialism........................................................27 Voyage en Icarie as Travel Writing.....................................................................29 Hygiene and Idleness in the Model City..............................................................34 Of Museums and Slaughterhouses.......................................................................40 The Redemption of the Rural...............................................................................43 Icarus as Voyeur...................................................................................................46 The Shape of the City: Capital & Metropolis......................................................49 Return from the Labyrinth................................................................................... 53 vi C h a p t e r 4 ICARUS RISING: Return & Communist Debate...............................................................................55 The Heights of French Icarianism........................................................................62 “Allons en Icarie”.................................................................................................67 Au Texas...............................................................................................................77 C h a p t e r 5 AMERICAN ZION: The Origins of Mormon Urbanism..................................................................... .82 Mormon Communitarianism................................................................................91 The City as Ideogram...........................................................................................95 The Growth and Form of Nauvoo....................................................................... 99 Spatial Disconnect in Nauvoo............................................................................104 The Temple as a Spatial Fix...............................................................................109 The Fall of Mormon Nauvoo............................................................................. 112 C h a p t e r 6 THE NAUVOO PALIMPSEST: Icarian Acquisition & Transition........................................................................120 Overwriting Monuments.....................................................................................122 Overwriting the Center........................................................................................126 Overwriting the City............................................................................................131 C h a p t e r 7 THE SPATIAL FALL OF ICARIA: The Seeds of Discontent.....................................................................................136 The Panopticism of Icarian Nauvoo...................................................................139 The Tyranny of Intimacy....................................................................................142 C o n c l u s i o n The Spatial Incivility of Icaria............................................................................151 vii Introduction The Myth of Icarus as Flight from the City Poets and artists have often celebrated the flight of Icarus as a triumph of human spirit, representing man’s limitless imagination and soaring aspiration. Moralists, conversely, focus on the transgression of the boy, suggesting a cautionary tale of disobedience to the father, or ambition beyond one’s means. These common renderings of the myth, however, forget that when Icarus first flew with his father, it was not whimsy, nor teenage frolic; it was a frantic escape attempt. Icarus had been languishing in the Minoan daedal, a massive and twisting prison constructed by his father’s own hands; only wings and sudden flight could deliver him from the sacrificial Labyrinth. 1 Urbanists and anthropologists, therefore, might recognize a less airy and more weighty spatial interpretation for the fable, an interpretation that appreciates the principal motivation for an enterprise as desperate as flight: Emancipation from the City. Re-grounding the myth of Icarus in the city is not a huge conceptual leap. The Western tradition has long associated the labyrinth with its own European urban spaces, especially Paris. The kinship seems immediately obvious: even as a daedal is an overbearing, constructed environment of innumerable degenerate itineraries, so too, “[t]he true Paris is by nature a dark, miry, malodorous city, confined within narrow lanes, . swarming blind alleys, culs-de-sac, and mysterious passages, with labyrinths that lead you to the devil.” 2 1 See generally JENNY MARCH , CASSELL ’S DICTIONARY OF CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY 415 (Cassell 2001). 2 PAUL -ERNEST DE RATTIER , PARIS N’E XISTE PAS 12 (Paris 1857). 1 Authors have frequently appropriated this image to suggest the danger of being disoriented in the apparently irrational spaces of Paris. 3 But even beyond the obvious physical similarities, the metaphor can be richly extended to describe many other dimensions of citadin life. Indeed, cities also house a dizzying matrix of human connections, competing hierarchies, and symbolic systems constantly issuing from the social and cultural life of its inhabitants. The labyrinth, then, also serves as a spatial representation for the intense cognitive and emotional anxiety of navigating the dominant orders of the city, which often operate according to their own, internal logic. In the nineteenth century city, writers and philosophers saw these material and social conditions coming together in Paris as never before. In writing moral topographies of the city, they saw in its arcades, alleyways, and metro tunnels, 4 as well as in its “murders, rebellions and bloody knots,” 5 the very mythic construction of Paris. These manifold dimensions of the city are seamlessly merged in the figure of the labyrinth, wherein hapless victims are doomed to monotonous wanderings, both physical and psychological. 6 For 3 See, e.g., VICTOR HUGO , NOTRE DAME DE PARIS 65-66 (Bookking Int’l 1993) (“Comme il se préparait à traverser la place du Palais pour gagner le tortueux labyrinthe de la Cité . les rues cependant devenaient