NationStates Jolt Archive

"Icarie is a great country, like France, and was originally organized like it; but when it regenerated itself, it transformed its former social organization into a Community..."

Well, this certainly merits at least a moment's attention. Icarie, by today's standards, may be fairly considered a small nation, but, in the C18th, its several million residents constituted the populace of a colonial power with holdings sprawled across hundreds of thousands of square miles, a regional force familiar to the people's of several continents. So, when, for the first time since a still-mysterious revolution of 1840, Icarie opened her borders, several major media organisations hastened to report on the new conditions and to discover the truth of Icarie's upheaval.

What have the Icariens been doing for the last hundred and sixty-seven years?

Ikor in the 1700s was amongst the more powerful non-European nations and appeared to be going from strength to strength until France turned on its dark-haired and oh-so-slightly browned people and made a colony of the place, imposing the French language and the modified name Icarie.

Yes, Ikor was militarily and culturally defeated by France.

Before long, however, Icarie's Gallic masters would see to their own demise. The 1840 publications of P.-J. Proudhon's What is property? and Louis Blanc's Organisation of Labour received great attention in the colony and the works were widely read. Etienne Cabet's Moreesque utopian novel Voyage en Icarie, produced the same year, was set in an Icarie of the future, and still-superstitious citizens took its vision to heart.

A mutiny by colonial troops triggered full-scale revolution and the French were compelled to abandon the outpost, which promptly closed its borders. They have remained shut since 1840, and Icariens today know little more about the world than the world knows of them.



(Double score for that alliterative tongue-twister, too!)