Icaria is a romantic sequel to the Owen and Fourier colonies. It antedated Brisbane's revival of Fourierism, was encouraged by Owenism, survived both, and formed a living link between the utopianism of the early nineteenth century and the utilitarian socialism of the twentieth. Étienne Cabet was one of those interesting Frenchmen whose fertile minds and instinct for rapid action made France during the nineteenth century kaleidoscopic with social and political events. Though educated for the bar, Cabet devoted himself to social and political reform. As a young man he was a director in that powerful secret order, the Carbonari, and was elected to the French chamber of deputies, but his violent attitude toward the Government was such that in 1834 he was obliged to flee to London to escape imprisonment. Here, unmolested, he devoted himself for five years to social and historical research. He returned to France in 1839 and in the following year published his _Voyage en Icarie_, a book that at once took its place by the side of Sir Thomas More's _Utopia_. Cabet pictured in his volume an ideal society where plenty should be a substitute for poverty and equality a remedy for class egoism. So great was the cogency of his writing that Icaria became more than a mere vision to hundreds of thousands in those years of social ferment and democratic aspirations. From a hundred sources the demand arose to translate the book into action. Cabet thereupon framed a constitution and sought the means of founding a real Icaria. After consulting Robert Owen, he unfortunately fell into the clutches of some Cincinnati land speculators and chose a site for his colony in the northeastern part of Texas. When the announcement was made in his paper, _Le Populaire_, the responses were so numerous that Cabet believed that "more than a million coöperators" were eager for the experiment.