REINVENTED IN TEXAS

In the Cross Timbers of north Texas on a late summer evening in 1848 François Ignace “Adolphe” Gouhenant listened in horror as the men around him debated his fate. Some wanted to kill him outright. Others suggested they cinch a rope around his neck and force him to walk behind a wagon the 500 miles back to New Orleans. That evening Gouhenant, realizing his life hung in the balance, strolled down to a nearby creek under the pretense of bathing. Leaving his clothes and belongings behind, he ran for his life.

Two decades earlier Gouhenant had started his working life in the artistic community of Lyon, France. Newly married, he worked in an apothecary, selling drugs and mixing pigments for local artists. He also dabbled in painting himself. In 1830, with no formal education but a keenly focused vision and his wife’s dowry as seed money, Gouhenant embarked on a wildly ambitious project—the construction of a 100-foot tower atop Lyon’s Fourvière Hill to serve as an astronomical observatory, a natural history gallery and a workshop for artists. Dubbing it a “temple to the arts and sciences,” he furnished it with telescopes and other scientific instruments, paintings and elegant décor. The project proved more expensive and complicated than he had anticipated, however, and Gouhenant ultimately filed for bankruptcy. Broke and disheartened, he soon left Lyon.

Gouhenant turned up next in southern France, where he took up the banner for workers’ rights, advocating for fair pay and universal education for artists and craftsmen. By the 1840s he’d become a devotee of prominent utopian socialist Étienne Cabet. Gouhenant championed Cabet’s “Icarian” philosophy throughout southern France. However, while Cabet promoted political change through peaceful means, Gouhenant became increasingly involved with revolutionaries who