On November 14, 1847, the front page of Le Populaire, a communist weekly printed in Paris, bore a peculiar headline: c’est au texas! (it’s in texas!). Ten weeks later, before dawn at the piers of Le Havre, sixty-nine Frenchmen filed aboard the Rome, an American-built steamer with three masts of large, square-rigged sails. As the ship pulled away, thousands waved from the shore, cheering au revoir.

These solemn pilgrims were the handpicked avant-garde of an immense exodus of French communists to the New World. Icaria, as they called the “holy community” they were going to establish on American shores, was to be modeled on a make-believe place, the happy island nation described in Voyage en Icarie (Travels in Icaria), a bestselling utopian romance published in 1840 by Étienne Cabet, a communist parliamentarian and the publisher of Le Populaire.

After a seven-week crossing, the Rome docked in the Port of New Orleans. From there, the communists traveled upriver by steamboat to Shreveport, where they set out on foot toward the Trinity River valley. It was there, not far from the village of Dallas, that they intended to build their utopia. Tens of thousands of self-styled “Icarians” remained behind in France, poised to make the crossing once ground had been broken. At least that was the plan.

Voyage en Icarie, describes life in the fictional land of Icaria. If the novel had not had such a powerful influence on so many lives, it would be easy to dismiss. Cabet uses the loose, ambling structure of a travelogue. But Voyage is a slog—humorless, dense with cliché, and very long. The book purports to be the diary of an Englishman named Lord William Carisdall, “one of the wealthiest lords” and “handsomest men” to ever grace the British Isles with his “noble character.” Carisdall travels to a remote island off the western coast of Africa, where he discovers Icaria, a techno-communist paradise with the combined population of France and England.

In Icaria, there is no private property or money. Food, shelter, clothing, and all of life’s comforts are produced and distributed by the state. Men and women are considered equal and receive the same comprehensive public education, although women do not vote. When an Icarian family runs low on food, they place a specially designed container into a specially designed niche outside of their specially designed apartment. When they return home after a day working in collective workshops, they find their bin topped off with healthful victuals. The sources of Icarian abundance are technological innovation and the fact that everyone works for the wealth of the republic. There are no idle rich or landed aristocracy to draw off the wealth of the nation. As a result of these reforms, many old occupations have been rendered obsolete. In Icaria there are no domestic servants, cops, informants, middlemen, soldiers, gunsmiths, or bankers.