Episode

Short Suck #53: Icaria!: France’s Failed Communist Utopia in America

Podcast: Timesuck with Dan Cummins
Published: Mar 13, 2026
Duration seconds: 3691
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Canonical source: https://www.badmagicproductions.com/pages/timesuck-podcast-2024
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Summary

In the mid-1800s, long before the Soviet Union or Maoist China, a French political dreamer named Étienne Cabet tried to build a communist utopia... in the heart of America. What followed was a bizarre, ambitious, and often comically disastrous experiment involving disease, deception, authoritarian hypocrisy, failed frontier settlements, buying an abandoned Mormon town, and one of the strangest forgotten social movements in U.S. history.