Source
The Story Of The French Illegalists by Richard Parry
2. A new beginning
“Do with it what you will and can, that is your affair and does not trouble me.
You will perhaps have only trouble, combat and death from it, very few will draw joy from it.”
Max Stirner (1806-56) on his book The Ego and Its Own
Libertad
AROUND THE TURN of the century, anarchist-individualist propaganda was centred on Sébastien Faure's weekly journal Le Libertaire — still in existence today as the organ of the 'Fédération Anarchiste'.
This gave space to individualist ideas and was critical of syndicalism.
One anarchist who worked for the paper was Albert Joseph, habitually known as 'Libertad', who founded the milieu within which illegalism was to flourish.
Libertad was brought up in an orphan school, the abandoned son of a local Prefect and an unknown woman, and went to secondary school in Bordeaux.
A job was found for him, but he was soon dismissed and sent back to the Childrens' Home from which he absconded and took to the road as a trimardeur or tramp.
This probably brought him his first contact with anarchists, as tramps often lodged at anarchist-run labour exchanges — the Bourses du Travail, where they might be given popular revolutionary songsheets to sell on their travels at two centimes apiece.
Some tramps would have been unemployed workers on the viaticum (that is, given journey money and supplied with coupons for free meals and lodging in the hope that they would find work).
Many of them would have been workers sacked for syndicalist or revolutionary opinions.
Some tramps lived parasitically off the Bourses du Travail, while others were more devoted to spreading anarchist propaganda on their travels around France and neighbouring countries such as Switzerland and Belgium.
Many had decided to refuse regular waged work (or had it refused for them) and lived hand-to-mouth, doing part-time work, selling cheap trinkets at local markets and doing the odd bit of thieving.
Libertad made his way north from Bordeaux and arrived in Paris in 1897 at the age of twenty-two.
Marked down for his anarchist opinions, he had already been under surveillance for three years — over the next ten his police record was to accumulate paper to a thickness of three inches.
In the capital he stayed on the premises of Le Libertaire and worked on the paper for several years alongside Charles Malato and, occasionally, the syndicalists Pelloutier and Delesalle; he also collaborated on the pro-Dreyfusard daily Le Journal du Peuple launched by Sébastien Faure and Emile Pouget.
He was not yet of the individualist persuasion, although it was probably here that he encountered individualist ideas.
In 1900 Libertad found work with a regular publishing company as a proofreader (still a favourite job among Parisian anarchists, due to the high pay and flexible hours) and stayed there until 1905, joining the Union.
In the same year, after speaking at a public meeting in Nanterre just outside Paris, he met Paraf-Javal and in October of 1902 they set up the Causeries Populaires at 22 rue du Chevalier de la Barre in Montmartre, just behind the Sacré Coeur.
The location was somewhat appropriate, as this street was the old rue des Rosiers where two generals had been shot by Communards in 1871.
The Sacré Coeur itself had been built, quite deliberately, on the site of the old artillery park where the insurrection had begun; MacMahon, the Marshal in charge of the repression, had specifically ordered its construction, "in expiation for the crimes of the Commune".
The basilica was still incomplete, however, when the Causeries Populaires were founded.
The church was meant to stand evermore as a psychological and material expression of the victory of the bourgeoisie.
Dominating Paris, atop the working class neighbourhood of Montmartre, it was seen even by the esteemed novelist Emile Zola as "a declaration of war" and as a "citadel of the absurd".
As a Christian church, it proclaimed the continued reign of suffering, both ideologically and in reality, and demanded resignation to that suffering.
Libertad had already had dealings with the place.
Hungry, he had gone to receive Christian charity in the form of food doled out to the poor each evening, but first had to listen to the sermon.
After suffering in silence for several minutes he could finally bear it no longer and sprang to his feet to denounce the priest's hypocrisy.
A tumultuous scene ensued and Libertad was carted away and sentenced to two months' prison for insulting public morals.
Rapidly he accumulated further convictions — for vagrancy, insulting behaviour and shouting, "Down with the Army!", the latter deemed more serious than disturbing the Pax Dei, as he received three months in prison.
Now in his late twenties, bearded but already balding, Libertad began a dynamic proselytization in Montmartre that was an extraordinarily powerful affirmation of anarchist individualism.
Crippled in one leg, he carried two walking sticks (which he wielded very skilfully in fights) and habitually wore sandals and a large loose-fitting typographer's black shirt.
One comrade said of him that he was a one-man demonstration, a latent riot; he was quickly a popular figure throughout Paris.
His style of propaganda was summed up by Victor Serge as follows:
"Don't wait for the revolution.
Those who promise revolution are frauds just like the others.
Make your own revolution by being free men and living in comradeship".
His absolute commandment and rule of life was, "Let the old world go to blazes!".
He had children to whom he refused to give state registration.
"The State? Don't know it.
The name? I don't give a damn, they'll pick one that suits them.
The law?
To the devil with it!"
He sung the praises of anarchy as a liberating force, which people could find inside themselves.
Every Monday evening a causerie or discussion took place in the best room of the rue du Chevalier de la Barre.
It was a gloomy ground-floor room decorated in the 'modern style' with flower-patterned wallpaper; comrades would sit on the old decrepit benches or chairs pilfered from the local squares and bistros, the speaker (if there was one) would lean against an old rickety table while others would be flicking through the books and pamphlets piled up on a counter at the back of the room.[5]
[5] What the comrades didn't know was that the police surveillance was kept on all these meetings from their very inception; the Third Brigade, otherwise known as the 'Recherches' (Intelligence) followed one or two people home from every meeting, endeavouring to keep their list of subversives up to date.
By 1904, the causeries were proving successful enough in the working class quarters of the XVIIIth, XIVth and XIth arrondissements, in Courbevoie and the Quartier Latin, to enable a bookshop to be opened in the rue Dumeril and an annexe in the rue d'Angouleme in the XIth arrondissement.
Libertad's erstwhile cooperation with the syndicalist militants was now coming to an end.
In 1903 he and Paraf-Javal had formed the Antimilitarist League in association with some leading syndicalists, but this alliance fell apart during the Amsterdam Congress of the International Antimilitarist Association (AIA) in June 1904.
Libertad and Paraf-Javal saw desertion or draft-dodging as the best antimilitarist strategy, believing that if anarchists stayed in the army awaiting a revolutionary situation, they would very quickly all end up in military prisons or the African disciplinary battalions.
The Congress, however, saw such a strategy as too individualistic, preferring soldiers to remain disaffected within their units so as to make the army as a whole less reliable.
Despite the mutiny of the 17th Line Regiment in 1907 (when the Government rather stupidly sent local troops in to suppress the revolt by vineyard workers who were no more than their own kith and kin) the individualist strategy was probably more realistic, especially given the figures for the number of men rotting in the African hard labour prisons.
As a result, Libertad and Paraf-Javal left the Antimilitarist League and stepped up anti-syndicalist propaganda.
A whole series of articles appeared that year in Le Libertaire against participation in elections, unions and cooperatives: all participation in power structures, even 'alternative' ones, was seen to reinforce the hierarchical system of power as a whole.
Paraf-Javal put forward the individualist argument in an article entitled 'What is a Union?', and answered his question as follows:
"It is a grouping whereby the downtrodden masses class themselves by trade in order to try and make the relations between the bosses and workers less intolerable.
From the two propositions, one conclusion: where they don't succeed, then the union's task is useless, and where they do then the union's work is harmful, because a group of men will have made their situation less intolerable and will consequently have made present society more durable".
Further pamphlets rolled off the presses:
What I mean by Anarchic Individualism, Anarchist Individualism in Practice, pamphlets on Max Stirner, and Hans Ryner's Little Individualist Handbook.
Libertad, however, was less a writer than an orator, preferring to intervene verbally.
In January 1905 the veteran Communard, Louise Michel, died in Marseille, and the AIA called a meeting in Paris to organize a spectacular 'revolutionary' funeral.
Libertad went along, but his attitude clashed with that of the militants.
He told them that the whole ceremony was ridiculous, just as ridiculous as calling a woman well into her seventies 'the Red Virgin' — "She lost her virginity long ago", he proclaimed.
The crowd became hostile and he withdrew, muttering, "You're all idiots".
The funeral went ahead as planned, with tens of thousands lining the route and in the procession.
The city was swamped with police and regular army units, and many bourgeois apparently fled fearing that revolution was imminent; some Catholics even locked themselves in their churches ready to defend themselves against the crowd.
Despite police provocations, including the banning of songs and unauthorized flags, there were very few 'incidents'; by contrast, in Russia, the same day was to go down in history as 'Bloody Sunday' — the start of the 1905 Revolution.
The Causeries Populaires now had a regular audience, but it was still of minimal size, and the only hope of reaching a wider public lay in publishing a regular paper that could continue in print the discussions of the ideas of Stirner, Nietzsche, Bakunin, Georges Sorel (the theorist of revolutionary syndicalism) and others, as well as arguing for a new revolutionary practice based on the self-realization of the individual.
Libertad and his two lovers, the schoolteacher sisters Anna and Amandine Mahé, and Paraf-Javal, now put their combined energies into founding an anarchist-individualist weekly, so they wouldn't have to rely on Le Libertaire to voice their opinions.
The first issue of l'anarchie appeared on 13th April 1905, and continued to appear every Thursday, without interruption, until it was suppressed with all the other revolutionary papers at the outbreak of war in 1914.
Its title harked back to the first paper ever to adopt the anarchist label: Anselm Bellegarrigue's L'Anarchie: journal d'Ordre, of which only two issue's were produced (in 1850).
His slogan had been, "I deny everything, I affirm only myself'.
Libertad ended his first article with the battle-cry, "Resignation is death.
Revolt is life".
There was a print run of 4000, although perhaps only half that number were sold (at ten centimes a copy, like the other anarchist papers); readership figures are unknown.
Financially it was maintained by voluntary donations to supplement the small income from street and bookshop sales; it probably also benefited from the occasional reprise individuelle — thefts carried out by comrades.
The main contributors besides Libertad, Paraf-Javal and the Mahé sisters were René Hemme (aka 'Mauricius' or 'Vandamme'), André Roulot (aka 'Lorulot'), Juin-Lucien Ernest (aka 'Armand'), and Jeanne Morand (one of another pair of sisters with whom Libertad had intimate relations).
Anna Mahé was the nominal manageress of the paper.
L'anarchie declared itself against resignation and conformity to the existing state of affairs, and particularly opposed vices, habits and prejudices such as work, marriage, military service, voting, smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol and the eating of meat.
It exalted l'endehors, the outsider, and the hors-la-loi, outlaws.
According to Lorulot its purpose was to work sincerely for 'individual regeneration' and the 'revolution of the self.
L'anarchie's view of society was essentially as follows: firstly there were not two opposed classes, bourgeois and proletarian, but only individuals (although there were those who were for, and those who were against, society as it was presently constituted).
The Master and the Slave were equally part of the system and mutually dependent, but the Rebel or Révolté could come originally from either category: their propaganda was addressed to anybody prepared to rise in revolt against existing society.
The syndicats or unions were seen simply as capitalist organizations which defended workers as workers; thus keeping them in a social role which it should have been the anarchist aim to destroy.
To invest them with value only so long as they were workers had nothing to do with their own realization as individuals.
The syndicalists were seen as unwitting tools of capitalism, whose practical reformism was only kept going by the myth of 'The Revolution', an ideology which furnished the unions with militants for their present-day battles.
Only Georges Sorel had been shrewd enough to accept that the idea of 'The Revolution' was indeed a myth.
But not only was such a myth necessary, it was in fact the whole essence of socialism, without which the struggle for the working class might collapse into despair.
For Sorel, the present-day struggle was everything, and in this he had something in common with the politics of l'anarchie, though he was a believer in the mass rather than in the individual.
Sorel's realism was seen by the anarchist-individualists as further evidence of the bankruptcy of syndicalism; especially nauseating to them was the dry academic moralizing of Jean Grave, the 'Anarchist Pope', in Temps Nouveaux, while the Mayday celebrations were regarded contemptuously, as nothing more than theatrical role-playing, mirroring the absurdity of the bourgeoisie's 14th of July (Bastille Day): it changed nothing.
The individualists' ideal was to live their lives as neither exploiter nor exploited — but how to do that in a society divided in this way?
Their answer was for people to take direct action through the reprise individuelle, or in slang, la reprise au tas — taking back the whole heap.
A good part of 1906 was spent campaigning against the elections.
Previously Libertad had stood as the 'abstentionist' candidate in the XIth arrondissement, but this time they relied on 'interventions', posters and the paper.
At one large socialist gathering in Nanterre the Socialist Deputy (MP) was almost thrown out of the window: many of the interventions by the anarchists ended up in fighting.
However, trouble was also brewing internally: Libertad and Paraf-Javal had argued, and the latter had taken control of the bookshop in rue Duméril, setting up a ' Scientific Studies Group' which announced itself for a 'reasoned social organization obtained by scientific camaraderie, methodically and logically obtained outside all coercion'.
What this actually meant was not quite clear, except that Paraf-Javal was obsessed with science and logic, synonymous as they were in those times with the idea of 'Progress'.
In February 1907 a police report noted that the two groups had fallen out and foresaw trouble in the future; the police were not to be disappointed.
For the time being, however, there was only trouble with the authorities.
On Mayday Libertad, Jeanne Morand and another comrade called Millet were arrested for evading fares on the Metro and assaulting a ticket collector and a policeman; Millet was also charged with carrying a knuckleduster.
Libertad spent a month in prison, but within two weeks of his release there was more serious trouble when it was decided to hold a Sunday evening causerie en plein air.
It was a warm summer night and soon a reported two hundred people had gathered in the rue de la Barre on the heights of Montmartre.
Some local traders complained about the noise and obstruction, and the police ordered the crowd to disperse.
The anarchists refused and when police reinforcements were called, a pitched battle ensued leaving several wounded.
The street was left littered with broken chairs, bottles and the usual strange debris of a crowd suddenly dispersed.
After that affair things seem to have remained comparatively quiet for the next year, until the summer season of interventions got under way.
Syndicalist meetings were often the target this time, and the anarchist-individualists were definitely persona non grata.
On one occasion, Libertad asked for the right to speak, but was refused and told that his group was not welcome.
Fights broke out with the stewards and lasted for half an hour, until finally Libertad's group stormed onto the platform and sent the syndicalists fleeing; the meeting broke up in disorder without Libertad being heard.
The conflict between Paraf-Javal's group of 'scientists' and the Causeries Populaires comrades now came to a head.
Paraf-Javal was already angry that his pamphlets were being sold at causeries and were not being paid for, when one of Libertad's group, Henri Martin (alias 'Japonet'), Amandine Mahé's new lover, stole some money from the bookstall at a meeting of the 'Scientific Studies Group'.
At a subsequent meeting a brawl ensued between partisans of the two groups in which knives, knuckledusters and spiked wristbands were used.
After this incident Paraf-Javal would only go out armed with a revolver and a dagger, but he preferred to stay at home writing a diatribe against Libertad's group.
The pamphlet Evolution of a group under a bad influence was greeted with anger and derision by anarchists everywhere, and effectively isolated his small clique.
At the rue de la Barre, however, Libertad was also on his own, having fallen out with both the Mahé sisters, Jeanne Morand and Henri Martin.
The DeBlasius brothers, who ran the print shop, had also had enough of the rue de la Barre, and at the instigation of Paraf-Javal they departed with some of the printing material and most of the pamphlets.
Just over two weeks later, on 29th September 1908, a detective of the Third Brigade included in his report the following: "...a few days ago there was a fight between a well-known comrade, 'Bernard', and Libertad inside the Causeries Populaires in the rue de la Barre.
Libertad gave Bernard a serious blow to the head, and, covered in blood, the latter ran out towards rue Ramey.
During the fight, one of the Mahé sisters kicked Libertad in the stomach to try and put a stop to it".
A week later he was taken seriously ill to the nearby hospital of Lariboisière, and eventually died in the early hours of the morning of 12th November.
There were rumours that he had died at the hands of the police on the steps of Montmartre, or that his death was due to 'natural causes', but it seems (and this is substantiated by a later editor of l'anarchie) that the true cause was that kick in the stomach by his one-time lover.
He had fallen out with his erstwhile comrades to such an extent that they refused to view the body or claim it for burial.
After the statutory seventy-two hours it was taken to the Ecole de Clamart medical school to be used in the furtherance of scientific research.
This series of posts will insure that these anarchists' works live on in living memory.
If only a few.
Don't lose hope now, dear reader.
We've made it this far.
At some point the ride gets easier.
Rule by force has had it's day.
When everybody sees the iron fist in the velvet glove we win.
We just have to survive its death throes.
There is a reason these facts are not in the modern curriculums.
Setting rewards to burn only burns the author portion of the payout.
The crowd isn't silenced.
Please cheer loudly, if that is your thing.