Introduction: A Networking Anarchist

Abstract

The anarchist journalist, editor, writer, theorist, campaigner and educator Jean Grave (1854–1939) was a complicated, almost paradoxical, figure, somewhat at odds with his times. A selflessly dedicated thinker and activist, in a period shaken by anarchist violence and criminality, Grave was a working-class intellectual known for his gentle manners and surly temper. He commanded one of the largest networks in the global anarchist movement at the time, yet barely ever left the 5th arrondissement attic with which he was so closely associated for most of his career. He was also a man of the written word, at a time when the anarchist movement thrived through meetings, conferences, street agitation and direct action and when charismatic orators held centre stage. Above all, he was a sedentary activist, in the very years when anarchism became intensely diasporic, as a result of labour migration and the waves of exile triggered by the relentless repression of the movement’s terrorist and revolutionary pursuits. Grave was also a well-known and respected—albeit occasionally polemic—figure within and beyond anarchist circles, who has since sunk into almost complete oblivion, a theorist whose writings were considered by many contemporaries to be as influential as those of his close friend and collaborator Peter Kropotkin, and who triggered an important mobilisation during his two trials in 1894—yet whose name nowadays is hardly remembered beyond small academic and activist circles. These defining tensions account for Grave’s unique place as a leading figure within the French and international anarchist movement in its pre-1914 heyday; they form the core of this book.