But it was on the virgin soil of America, in the light of the New World’s sanguine hopefulness and fervent enthusiasm for social progress that the phalansterians were most confident of success. In America Fourierism had aroused intense interest. There it had met with its most ardent advocates and its bitterest opponents.[78] Victor Considérant, who after Fourier’s death became the chief apostle of Fourierism, had founded a newspaper _La Démocratie Pacifique_ for the advocacy of his doctrines. In the columns of this paper in the year 1853, he sketched the outline of an ideal community, La Réunion, to be founded in Texas on the banks of the Red River. Subscriptions to the experiment flowed in from all parts of the world. The chief subscriber was a rich American, Albert Brisbane. He had sat at Fourier’s feet in Paris. Fascinated by this new gospel, he was spending his life translating the reformer’s colossal and for the most part incoherent works, vainly endeavouring to introduce into them something like order. But, despite its brilliant prospects, La Réunion too was a failure. Victor Considérant, though a clever organiser, possessed neither legislative nor administrative gifts. He was an apostle, nothing more. And when adherents from all parts of the world flocked to the Red River, they found this anticipated ideal community, not, as they had fondly hoped, the embodiment of perfect harmony, but a chaos of hopeless confusion. Warned by Brisbane’s experience and much to his disappointment, George Ripley, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others, when they were organising the comparatively successful socialist community of Brook Farm, at West Roxbury (Mass.), carefully kept off phalansterian lines.[79] Thus by the time Juliette came to live in Paris the Phalansterian Movement had been tried and found wanting. Nevertheless it was not dead. Its spirit still breathed in the numerous co-operative experiments, which were being tried on every hand; and one of these, the famous foundry at Guise, run on something approaching phalansterian lines, met with considerable success, owing to the organising genius of the founder, the Fourierist Godin. It endured until shortly before the Great War. Fourier’s disciples, when in 1858 Juliette first came into personal contact with them, had grouped themselves into what was called l’École Sociétaire, which numbered some four thousand adherents. The school had its headquarters in the Rue de Beaune, in a shop for the sale of Fourierist literature, kept by a certain Mlle. Aimé Beuque.