Marie Duclos Fretageot

Madame Fretageot, as nearly everyone called her, came to New Harmony as a teacher and became one of the most capable people in town. Over twelve years she wrote dozens of letters to William Maclure, and they are some of the best sources we have for daily life in the community after Robert Owen's experiment fell apart.

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A School in Paris

Marie Louise Duclos was born in France around 1783. She married a man named Joseph Fretageot, and their son, Achille Emery Fretageot, was her only child. By the late 1810s she was running a boarding school for girls in Paris that used Pestalozzi's teaching methods. Students learned from real objects, observation, and conversation instead of memorizing from books. It was there that she met William Maclure, a wealthy Scottish geologist who was spending his money on Pestalozzian schools wherever he could find them. They became friends and business partners, and their letters to each other are the backbone of her story.

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Philadelphia

In 1821 Maclure brought Madame Fretageot to Philadelphia, where she opened a Pestalozzian school for girls. Among her pupils were the Sistare sisters. One of them, Lucy, later married the naturalist Thomas Say. When Robert Owen arrived in America in 1824 and began promoting his plans for a new society in Indiana, Madame Fretageot was taken with the idea. She urged Maclure to join him, and he did. 

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The Boatload of Knowledge

In the winter of 1825–1826 Madame Fretageot traveled down the Ohio River aboard the keelboat Philanthropist, later called the "Boatload of Knowledge." With her were Achille, several of her Philadelphia students, Thomas Say, the naturalist and artist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, and other scientists and teachers. The boat was stuck in the ice for weeks. It reached Mount Vernon, Indiana in January 1826.

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Running Maclure's New Harmony

In New Harmony Madame Fretageot taught in the schools Maclure sponsored and ran a household that took in a steady stream of students, teachers, and visiting scientists. When Owen and Maclure split and the town's property was divided, she stayed with Maclure's side of the enterprise.

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Maclure's health did badly in Indiana's hot summers and cold winters, so he was often away. After he moved to Mexico in the late 1820s, Madame Fretageot became his agent in New Harmony. She collected rents, kept the accounts, oversaw his property and schools, and reported on all of it in long, frank letters. She made decisions on his behalf, and he usually trusted her to do so. 

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A Strong Personality

Not everyone in New Harmony liked Madame Fretageot. She was blunt, she held people to account over money and work, and she was a woman giving orders in a town full of men who thought of themselves as reformers. Some residents resented her influence over Maclure and his affairs. Her letters show someone practical, opinionated, and often impatient with people she thought were lazy or dishonest. They also show how much of Maclure's work in New Harmony depended on her.

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Final Years and Legacy

In the early 1830s Madame Fretageot left New Harmony to return to Paris and then later joined Maclure in Mexico. She died in Mexico City in 1833. Achille stayed in New Harmony, carried on with Maclure's business there, and raised his family in the town.

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Her story is easy to miss because she published nothing and never held a title. But the schools Maclure paid for needed someone to run them, and for most of a decade that person was Madame Fretageot. Her letters, edited and published twice in the twentieth century, keep her voice alive: sharp, funny at times, and always paying attention.​​