Madame Marie Fretageot: Communitarian Educator

OF ALL THE PERSONS who crossed the New Harmony threshold during the Owen-Maclure Community period, none played a more notable role than did Madame Marie Louise Duclos Fretageot.There would have been an Owen-Maclure Community without Madame Fretageot, but without her our most significant contemporary record-the 480 or so letters exchanged between her and William Maclure-about what happened in New Harmony, would not exist.The details of Fretageot's early life remain fragmentary.The bulk of our information comes from manuscript collections, the most important being the New Harmony Workingmen's Institute's 415 original items of Maclure-Fretageot correspondence dating from January 1820 until her death in 1833. 1 Little of consequence is to be found in print with one outstanding exception: Arthur Bestor's Education and Reform at New Harmony: Correspondence of William Maclure and Marie Duclos Fretageot 1820-1833, published by the Indiana Historical Society in 1948.This work excerpts only fifty-two of the original 415 letters.Why, one may rightly ask, with the Fretageot family in continuous residence in New Harmony from 1826 on, has nothing beyond Bestor's work been attempted?The answer seems to lie in the nature of the source material.Since Madame Fretageot's life-for the years of