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Author: Cabet, Étienne
Title: Voyage en Icarie
Place Published: Paris
Publisher:Bureau du populaire
Date Published: 1848
Description:

vii, 600 pp. (12mo) 17x11 cm (6¾x4½"), half calf and brown cloth, spine lettered in gilt. Fifth Edition.

Bookplate of H.D. Seymour. The fifth edition as usual. One of the most influential of all works of 19th-century Utopian thought. First published in 1842, this novel had attracted nearly four hundred thousand adherents by 1848 to the principles it expounded: fraternity, equal rights for women, and prohibition of slavery and domestic servitude. In 1848, a detachment of Icarians settled in Texas about twenty miles north of Fort Worth, where they set about attempting to bring principle into conciliation with practice. They met a fate similar to that of most communal societies in Texas - fever, bad crops, etc. - and the members decamped for more hospitable places: Illinois, New Orleans, Dallas, or France. Oddly, this fifth edition is the one most often seen, and the fifth edition alone is cited by Sabin and Adams. The title page is graced by the now famous motto translated as "To each according to his needs, from each according to his ability," later adopted by a somewhat more long-lived, if not more successful, attempt at a communist society. Sabin 9787. Adams, p.45. Negley 175.

Wear and soiling to binding, rubbing to extremities, chip at head of spine; front hinge cracked, some pencil marks on preliminary pages, light toning to pages; very good.