French Anarchists Research Articles

The Revue International Anarchiste's World Survey (1924–1925)

The Revue International Anarchiste's World Survey (1924–1925)

Reencountering The French Anarchists in London, 1880-1914: Archival and Historiographic Reassessments

This article follows up on the book The French Anarchists in London, 1880-1914 (2013), by exploring some primary material uncovered since this publication, and considering the ways in which research into the history of anarchism as a transnational movement has evolved. In the years since the publication of this book, a great deal of research has furthered or challenged its findings, especially in relation to print culture and the study of global anarchist networks. The mass digitisation of periodicals (both anarchist and mainstream) and archives in the last ten years offers new tools to find detailed information about the personal and political lives of these elusive anarchists in London – and further afield, thus rectifying the original study’s London-centric focus. These sources are also crucial in documenting the ways in which anarchists were perceived and portrayed in Britain, France and internationally, and constructed into a major public threat through media discourse.

Mit Klassenkämpfen ins Anthropozän

This article describes how French anarchists conceived of human relationships to non-human natural surroundings. In line with their criticisms of human-nature relations within capitalism, anarchists in France sketched an alternative society where humans had non-instrumental relationships to their natural environment that were based on solidary. Bringing this historical example into a dialogue with contemporary anthropological theories, I argue that class struggle can also be understood as a set of conflicts over the way humans relate to their environment.

David Porter, Eyes to the South. French Anarchists & Algeria

David Porter, Eyes to the South. French Anarchists & Algeria

Constance Bantman, The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation

Constance Bantman, <i>The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation</i>

French anarchists and the continuing power of May 1968

The social insurrection of May 1968 in France continues to provoke strong political debate. Compared to most French politicians and social commentators who dismiss or condemn it as an excessive adolescent rebellion, French anarchists contend that it was a substantial political rupture because participants challenged the legitimacy of all hierarchy and domination in every realm of society. Research into a wide range of French anarchist books and articles from 1988 to the present reveals several distinct approaches to May 68. Beyond narratives of the events themselves, anarchists emphasised the rapid spread and delight with horizontalist social relations of mutual aid and respect on campuses and in workplaces and neighbourhoods as 10 million French people went on strike for several weeks. This liberating experience, they contend, transformed the social consciousness of large numbers and led to the great surge of anarchic autonomous social movements in different realms in the 1970s. These writings also reveal important debate among anarchists themselves on whether May 68 was a revolution, whether revolution is even possible and how to organise a revolutionary movement.

Les exilés anarchistes espagnols en France. Un paradigme de militantisme transnational

This article will analyse, from a transnational history point of view, the actions of Spanish anarchists in France from 1945 onwards, especially the relationships and the projects that they developed with French anarchists. Moreover, it will study the difficulties of integration faced by the Spanish libertarian colony in France, the links built with their French comrades and the different actions carried out in the domains of trade unionism, culture, leisure and the armed struggle.

Constance BANTMAN, The French Anarchists in London, 1880-1914. Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation

L’ouvrage de Constance Bantman est la version remaniee de sa these, soutenue a l’universite Paris 13 sous la direction de Francois Poirier ; il constitue le premier tome de la serie « Studies in Labour History », proposee par Liverpool University Press. L’approche transnationale pour etudier les anarchistes francais qui s’exilerent a Londres a partir des annees 1880 s’impose en quelque sorte au regard de l’histoire du mouvement anarchiste des la Premiere Internationale, notamment au sein de s...

Worlds of Western Anarchism and Syndicalism: Class Struggle, Transnationalism, Violence and Anti-imperialism, 1870s–1940s

The French Anarchists in London, 1880-1914: Exile arid Transnationalism in the First Globalisation, by Constance Bantman. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2013. 256 pp. $99.95 US (cloth). The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880-1917), by Pietro Di Paola. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2013. 256 pp. $99.95 US (cloth). The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks, by Timothy Messer-Kruse. Urbana, Chicago, Springfield, University of Illinois Press, 2012. ix, 236 pp. $30.00 US (paper), $85.00 US (cloth). Black Flag Boricuas: Anarchism, Authoritarianism and the Left in Puerto Rico, 1897-1921, by K.R. Schaffer. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield, University of Illinois Press, 2013. 240 pp. $65.00 US (cloth). Many political movements--anarchism included--have draped themselves in the clothes of antiquity, by imagining a historical lineage fading back into the mists of history. Anarchism is, in fact, a younger movement than Marxism: an integral part of modern socialism, it as an active political movement within the First (or International Workingmen's Association), a coalition of unions, political groups and clubs, and cooperatives that ran from 1864-1877 (Bantman pp. 1, 7-8). From the 1890s into the 1920s, it was in many contexts the dominant force on the revolutionary left, with a substantial impact on unions, popular and anti-imperialist movements worldwide. Even outside of this glorious period, anarchism and its union offshoots, anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism, was (and is) an important current. (1) Its initial rise coincided, and not accidentally, with the first modern globalization of the 1880s to the 1910s, a period characterized by massive international flows of labour and capital, a transportation and telecommunications revolution, and the rapid spread of industrialization. Anarchism was a global movement not only in aspiration; in practice too, it was global and transnational. Migration--both voluntary and forced (due to persecutions)--and a widely circulating press facilitated the exchange of ideas, struggle repertoires and key militants, which in turn linked and created international activist communities. Stereotypes of an action-first outlook notwithstanding, the movement an intensely bookish culture stressing publication, theory, and debate (Bantman p. 20). Repression, aimed at suppressing radical ideas and formations, including the First International, often had the opposite effect, as exiles spread their ideas abroad and developed, debated and applied these ideas in different contexts on their travels. One effect was the massive dissemination of radical ideas in Europe and abroad: Italian anarchists, for example, were active in the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa, West Europe, and both Americas (Di Paolo p. 3). Exile enriched radicalism, and many ideas were developed, even forged, abroad. Thus exile exerted a remarkable influence on the development of socialist ideas in Italy and in other countries (Di Paola p. 2), and proved very fruitful despite the pressures and frustrations that exile inevitably brought (Bantman p. 73). A growing literature continues to shed new light on this historical and contemporary current that--despite its importance--remains strikingly under-researched. The four books under review are part of the welcome recent upsurge in research. A core part of three of the volumes under consideration centres on the operations of international anarchist and syndicalist networks as they emerged in the context of this increased radicalism. Di Paola and Bantman focus on anarchist exile communities--Italian and French respectively--in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London, where relatively tolerant British immigration and political asylum policies enabled the flourishing of a range of overlapping, polyglot radical milieus. …

Worlds of Western Anarchism and Syndicalism: Class Struggle, Transnationalism, Violence and Anti-imperialism, 1870s–1940sThe French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation, by Constance Bantman. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2013. 256 pp. $99.95 US (cloth).The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880–1917), by Pietro Di Paola. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2013. 256 pp.

Worlds of Western Anarchism and Syndicalism: Class Struggle, Transnationalism, Violence and Anti-imperialism, 1870s–1940s<i>The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation</i>, by Constance Bantman. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2013. 256 pp. $99.95 US (cloth).<i>The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880–1917)</i>, by Pietro Di Paola. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2013. 256 pp.

Constance Bantman. The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation.

Constance Bantman. The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation.

Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria

Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria

Bantman Constance. The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914. Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation. [Studies in Labour History, Vol. 1.] Liverpool University Press, Liverpool [etc.] 2013. xii, 219 pp. £70.00.

Bantman Constance. The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914. Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation. [Studies in Labour History, Vol. 1.] Liverpool University Press, Liverpool [etc.] 2013. xii, 219 pp. £70.00.

Eyes to the South: French anarchists and Algeria

Eyes to the South: French anarchists and Algeria

Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria by David Porter

Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria by David Porter

&lt;em&gt;David Porter. Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria&lt;/em&gt;. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011.

&lt;em&gt;David Porter. Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria&lt;/em&gt;. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011.

How to Make an Anarchist-Terrorist: An Essay on the Political Imaginary in Fin-De-Siecle France

This essay centers on the debate that surrounded the anarchist-terrorists of France in the 1890s. As a wave of bombings washed over Paris, commentators argued over the source of terrorism. With an eye toward a handful of notorious French anarchists—Ravachol, Auguste Vaillant, Emile Henry—they asked: How do you make an anarchist-terrorist? The debate that followed offers a window on the political imaginary of the French Third Republic in the years before the Dreyfus Affair. At times, the response to the anarchist bombings took the shape of a proxy war over the issues that moved French politics in the 1890s. But it was more than just this. For all of its variety, the debate centered on the problem of intellectual responsibility and gave form to the specter of the dangerous, rootless intellectual. There is a larger lesson in this tale, for the debate over the anarchist-terrorists of fin-de-siecle France makes for a revealing case study in the ways in which democratic societies respond to the threat of homegrown terrorism. It demonstrates the difficult challenge that terrorism poses to democratic societies and shows just how easily political-cultural interests can hijack discussions of terrorism.

Rhetorical Situations and the Straits of Inappropriateness: Teaching Feminist Activism

This essay argues that the rhetorical strategies of radical activist groups can complicate our theoretical understanding of rhetorical situation. It first examines the textual practices of the Situationist International (SI), a group of French anarchists who in the 1950s and 1960s purported to make accessible to non-elites modernist experimentation in art, literature, architecture, and urban design. It then describes and reflects on what happens when these practices are utilized in a women's studies classroom with an explicit activist orientation.

‘Fascism or Revolution!’ Anarchism and Antifascism in France, 1933–39

French anarchists were careful to distinguish between the Popular Front's leaders - the politicians - and its working-class supporters. They enthused over ‘the fraternity, the solidarity and the strength of the working class’ manifested in the extra-parliamentary antifascist movement of 1934–35. They took an active, and in some respects a leading part, in that movement. This article assesses the French anarchists' contribution to the antifascist movement and their critique of ‘Popular Frontism’. It also asks to what extent the anarchist movement can be said to have succeeded or failed in its objectives, and examines the ideological debates which the experiences of 1936–39 provoked between different anarchist currents over revolutionary strategy and tactics.

The “Social Revolution” in America? European Reactions to the “Great Upheaval” and to the Haymarket Affair

When the Statue of Liberty, a gift of the French government to the American Republic, was inaugurated in the New York harbor on October 28, 1886, the French radical press felt that the ceremony, held as it was on the eve of the executions of the Chicago martyrs, was more of an insult to labor than a tribute to freedom. Indeed, the French anarchists suggested that this statue should be renamed “the Goddess of Murder.” Was this just an outburst of anarchist rhetoric or does it tell us something about the depth of feeling created in the European radical movement by the dramatic events that marked the year 1886?