Introduction
The life of Emile Armand (1872–1963) spanned the history of anarchism. He was influenced by Leo Tolstoy and Benjamin Tucker, and to a lesser extent by Whitman and Emerson. Later in life, Neitzsche and Stirner became important to his way of thinking. Previous to this, Armand had broken with Tucker and Tolstoy over the question of violence and illegalism. At the turn of the century many alleged anarchists were turning to crime and violence, At that time, stealing, counterfeiting, swindling and even pimping were justified in certain anarchist milieus as a means of liberating oneself economically.[1] Although Armand was himself neither criminal or violent, he felt he could not condemn such activities. However, by 1912,... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Translator’s note
Anarchy is a methodology and a means of individuation as well as an organizational strategy. Free association, autonomy — Emile Armand knew there was, between society and the individual, a veil of mystifying ideology that had to be torn.
So many anarchists today fear interacting with the world outside their circles; but they forget how many natural anarchists there are in the world, people opposed to profit and power without labeling themselves anything at all. Reading Emile Armand today is like peering at the present through lenses of the past that clarify everything suddenly, in flashes, a past with the same alienations, the same struggles, the same hang-ups.
The concern of some modern an... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The Machete
The machete is a long knife with a single edge, particularly intended for opening a way when you find yourself surrounded by a hostile environment that prevents you from going down your path, paralyzing all movement. The Machete isn’t elegant; it doesn’t have the discretion of the dagger or the precision of the scalpel. When it strikes, it doesn’t distinguish between the innocent flower and the noxious weed, and it destroys both without distinctions. Heavy and uncomfortable to carry, the Machete can prove indispensable in difficult situations, when there is no time to lose in scientific calculations, exploratory reconnaissance, diplomatic consultations. If need be, it can even be used as an offensive too... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) One should not be mistaken: individualist anarchists are negators, destroyers, demolishers. They are those who believe in nothing, respect nothing. Nothing in fact is exempt from their critique of disintegration, Nothing is sacred.
When do they make a critique?
At every moment. Not one event or one historical fact which can not be critiqued. Not one suffering, not one sorrow, not one mourning which can not give rise to a critique; not one human drama which does not suggest a critique.
Where does one criticize?
In every milieu
How does one criticize?
With enthusiasm. With courage. With sincerity, The individualist critiques if it depended on themselves for their entourage to become an entirely indivi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Introduction
It is perhaps ironic that France, the country of great mass revolutions, of 1789, of 1830, of 1848, of the Commune of 1871, of the Popular Front strikes of 1936 and the uprising of May 1968, gave birth to the most diverse and influential group of anarchist individualist thinkers, writers, and militants. Or perhaps it is precisely because of France’s revolutionary history that individualism took such firm root. If we examine the country’s revolutions and mass movements, what is abundantly clear is that for all its revolutionary fervor, for all the bloodshed and sacrifice, in every case the revolution either served the interests of people other than the workers who made them, or were bloody failures that set th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Introduction
Emile Armand (26th of March 1872–19th of February 1962) was the son of a former Communard, that is a participant in the revolution of 1871 that established the Commune of Paris, and was for a time a well-known French Anarchist who moved through many associations and publications, developing his own thoughts and beliefs. In his early days he was sympathetic to a form of Christian Humanism before becoming interested in France’s diverse Anarchist movement. He eventually settled on and was closely associated with what’s called Individual Anarchism. An Anarchistic philosophy that centers free individuals as the foundations of the new society, and as the source of the solutions to the evils of our current soc... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Friend, comrade:
It is now five years that our relations have been interrupted. And how much has happened since 1939! What has become of you? Will this communication reach you? Have you not had to seek refuge in a place quite distant from the locality where you received “l’en dehors”? Or perhaps you haven’t changed address and have passed through the troubled period we lived through without too much damage. Who knows, perhaps you are somewhere in Germany a prisoner, a deportee? Whatever the case, with this letter we are attempting to tie back together the broken thread of our relations with you.
Perhaps you want news of me? After the banning of “l’en dehors,” and following a short stay... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I am asked to write an article for Mother Earth for its tenth anniversary. I do it gladly, for since it first appeared I have followed its career with a lively interest. I do not write this as a compliment, such as one makes a person one wishes to please. The proof of my interest in Mother Earth is shown by the articles and extracts I have translated and published from it. I have before me, at this moment, a collection of the most recent numbers of the French publications which I have been editing the past fifteen years. I need only glance through them to find these articles. Here, taken at hazard, are “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation,” by Emma Goldman; “The Dominant Idea,” by Voltarine de Cleyre — tw... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) All the societies of the vanguard — Social Democrats, revolutionaries of all shades, various communists — say that the individual is a “product of his environment.” It would be more exact to say that individuals are products of their environment, adding that the individual person, more especially, is the end of an ancestral line, which traces its origin back into animal darkness, holding this fact accountable for certain individuals in whom essentially predominate the characteristics of temperament and disposition of a particular ancestry. All societies — religious, lay, collectivist revolutionaries or not — say that the individual is a composite, therefore a dependent upon his environment. The anarchist ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) We know that the State can perpetuate everything it wants to, because it has behind itself the armed force. The Soviet-state doesn’t in the least differentiate itself in this respect from the Fascist one, or from any other powerful dictatorial State. The differentiation lies only in the interests that they represent. Any kind of forceful dictatorship, any sort of a stringent built-up State can , when it wants to, attain the same results as Fascism and Bolshevism. It only needs to have sufficient power in its hands and create an appropriate atmosphere, in order to be enabled to suppress oppositional interests and strangle the protests of those who disagree with it.
In the development-history of human beings since the world war, ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The anarchist individualists do not present themselves as proletarians, absorbed only in the search for material amelioration, tied to a class determined to transform the world and to substitute a new society for the actual one. They place themselves in the present; they disdain to orient the coming generations towards a form of society allegedly destined to assure their happiness, for the simple reason that from the individualist point of view happiness is a conquest, an individuals internal realization.
Even if I believed in the efficacy of a universal social transformation, according to a well-defined system, without direction, sanction, or obligation, I do not see by what right I could persuade others that it is the best. For example,... (From: Marxists.org.) OUR SURVEYS
In the first issue, the “Revue Anarchiste” had announced the opening of a survey on the following subject: Is the Anarchist Ideal Achievable? Can man live without authority, at present and in the future? Will the elimination of all coercion ever be anything but the prerogative of minuscule minorities?
We called upon individuals having quite different philosophical ideas and political opinions. Today, we reproduce the responses, in the order that they reached us, refraining — as we had agreed — from all commentary, allowing ourselves only to express our thanks to the authors.
The Editors.
Henri Barbusse.
Dear comrades,
I very willingly defer to the friendly invitation ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) When we consider the thief as such we can’t say that we find him less human than other classes of society. The members of the great criminal gangs have mutual relations that are strongly marked with communism. If they represent a survival from a prior age, we can also consider them as the precursors of a better age in the future. In all cities they know where to address themselves so they’ll be received and hidden. Up to a certain point they show themselves to be generous and prodigal towards those of their milieu. If they consider the rich as their natural enemies, as a legitimate prey — a point of view quite difficult to contradict — a large number of them are animated by the spirit of Robin Hood; when it comes to ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Orleans, France, November 8th.
Dear Comrade:
I read in The Spur your few lines to Guy Aldred. A large number of our comrades, especially the Individualist Anarchists, have withstood the jingo contagion.
Others have enlisted as volunteers, it is true, but they are a small minority. On the other hand, I am literally terrified by the ideas revealed by the communists and the syndicalists.
As an Individualist Anarchist, I am against war, ever and forever. First of all, because, in a country at war, what few liberties an individual possessed are taken from him. Everything under the arbitrary control of the military administration; every plan of meeting, all literature, every newspaper, must pass the military censor. Yo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I consider life as an experience—or, to be honest, as a series of experiences—that are to be rendered as rich, as abundant and as varied as possible. I think that individuals attains the state of consciousness, of intelligent reaction to the environment, to the degree that we analyze and renew the experiences of life, as we run the gamut of emotions or sensations, sometimes because we encounter them inevitably on the keyboard of our existence, and sometimes because, knowing this and wishing it, we provoke them.
What I say of life in this sense must be understood of the inward or intellectual life, that of the sensations or the affections. Life considered in terms of the accomplishment of organic functions — however ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I
To be an anarchist is to deny authority and reject its economic corollary: exploitation — and that in all the domains where human activity is exerted. The anarchist wishes to live without gods or masters; without patrons or directors; a-legal, without laws as without prejudices; amoral, without obligations as without collective morals. He wants to live freely, to live his own idea of life. In his interior conscience, he is always asocial, a refractory, an outsider, marginal, an exception, a misfit. And obliged as he is to live in a society the constitution of which is repugnant to his temperament, it is in a foreign land that he is camped. If he grants to his environment unavoidable concessions — always with the intenti... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Before explaining our notion of “sexual liberty,” I think it is necessary to define liberty itself. We all know that liberty could not be an end, for there is no absolute liberty; just as there is no general truth, practically speaking, but what exists in particular verities, there is no general liberty; there are only particular, individual liberties. It is not possible to escape certain contingencies; one cannot be free, for example, to not breathe or digest... Liberty is only a abstraction like Truth, Purity, Goodness, Equality, etc. And an abstraction cannot be an end.
Considered instead, from the particular point of view, ceasing to be an abstraction, and becoming a way, a means, liberty is understood. It is thus tha... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The individualist anarchists in the meaning of the UNIQUE (of Stirner’s The Ego and His Own) do advocate a “society without coercion”. This implies the following demands, which are unqualified and without reservations. It is self-evident that these demands are to be realized, completely or partly, as far as is possible.
Individualists of our kind recognize every society as a “Society without Coercion” in which the State and any other aggressive power is eliminated, in which there is no longer any domination of man over man or over a sphere of society (and vise versa) and in which an exploitation of man by man or of man through social institutions (and vise versa) is impossible.
Thereupon the follo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In all places individualists of our tendency wish to establish — now and at all times — a human milieu founded on the individual act and in which, without any control, intervention, intrusion of the State, all individuals can, whether isolated or associated, govern their affairs among themselves, by means of free agreements, voidable on notice, no matter what the activity, whether the association be the work of a personage or of a collectivity. Their voluntary associations are unions of comrades, based on the exercise of reciprocity or “equal liberty.”
The individualists of our sort consider as their adversaries all the institutions and all the individualities that, directly or by intermediaries, wish to subje... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In the first place, anarchy for the anarchists and not for the syndicalists, the free thinkers or others, who are big enough boys to manage their own affairs. In the second place, concrete realization, logical consequence of the fact that, if we are asocial, we are eminently sociable: Formation of an Anarchist Individualist International based, to begin with, on the following relations:
A) Of the intellectual order: Groups for anarchist education based on free inquiry and the free discussion of the methods and systems addressed to the intellect. Consolidation and selection of minds resistant to all unilateral, dogmatic or class-based education.
Creation of schools (Thursday schools, vacation schools and night schools, if we ca... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) ANTIQUITY
Certainly, it is not easy to know exactly, and what documents could tell us? – when the governmental or state authority began. No few explanations have been given as to the foundation and establishment of authority. Are we to believe that groups of men, as they became more and more numerous, were compelled to entrust the administration of their affairs and the settlement of their disputes to the more intelligent or the more feared: the sorcerers or the priests? Or that the primitive groupings, showing themselves in general more and more hostile to each other, were obliged to concentrate the defense of the place and of things in the hands of the bravest or most skilled warriors – or women warriors -? Be that as it ma... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Individual culture and education
Life as will and responsibility
Violence (the ideology of domination, imposition, exploitation, etc) as the origin of wars.
Reciprocity as the ethic of sociability
While waiting for a world where suffering will have been reduced to a tiny minimum, its elimination from relations conditioned by friendship and camaraderie.
Fidelity to the word given and to the clauses of pacts freely consented to, and this in all domains
Voluntary and contractual associationism, cooperatism, and mutualism in all branches of human activity.
Liberation from prejudices concerning race, external appearance, inequality of sexes and social conditions, etc.
Personal life as a wor... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Nudism may be considered “a kind of sport, in which individuals get naked in groups to take a bath of air and light, as one bathes in the sea” (Dr. Toulouse), that is, from a purely therapeutic point of view; it may be considered, as the gymnomystics do (gymnos means nude in Greek), as a return to an Edenic state, restoring humans to a primitive and “natural” state of innocence (the thesis of the Adamites of yesteryear). These two points of view give way to a third, ours: that nudism is, individually and collectively, among the most potent means of emancipation. It seems to us to be something else entirely than a hygienic fitness exercise or a “naturist” renewal. For us, nudism is a revolutionary demand.... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I. As I write these lines, election season is in full swing. The walls are plastered with posters of every color where people claim to be of every flag, every “color” of opinion. Who doesn’t have his party, his program, his profession of faith? Who is not either a socialist, a radical, a progressive, a liberal, or a “proportionalist” — the newest fad? This abnegation of the self is the great malady of the century. One belongs to an association, a union, a party; one shares the opinions, the convictions, the rule of conduct of another. One is led, a follower, a disciple, a slave, never oneself.
It’s true that this is less taxing. To belong to a party, adopting someone else’s program, adj... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I know that sensual pleasure is a subject about which you do not like people to speak or to write. Dealing with it shocks you. Or provokes a joke in bad taste among you. You have books in your libraries which embrace nearly all the branches of human activity. You possess some dictionaries and encyclopedias. You count perhaps a hundred volumes on one specialty of manual production. And I do not speak of political or sociological books. But there is not on your shelves a single work consecrated to sensual pleasure. There are some journals concerned with numismatics, philately, heraldry, angling or lawn bowling. The least poetic or artistic tendency has its organ. The tiniest chapel of an ism has its bulletin. The novels of love abound. And we... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) É. Armand assumed the editorship of L’Anarchie from April 4th, 1912 to September of the same year.
These dates are inscribed in his own handwriting on a questionnaire which he had filled out at the request of Alain Sergent (André Mahe) at the time when Sergent was gathering documentation to write his “Historie de ‘Anarchie”, of which one volume has so far appeared.
Here is a picturesque public report by the “Temps” of May, 1912, where this brief period in É. Armand’s life is captured. It is not without interest to see how the anarchists of 1912 are depicted in one of the best-known journals of the time.
* * *
A Visit to L’Anarchie
&ld... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) A chaos of beings, of acts and ideas; a disordered, bitter, merciless struggle; a perpetual lie, a blindly spinning wheel, one day placing someone at the pinnacle, and the next day crushing him: these are just a few of the images that depict current society, if it were possible for it to be depicted. The brush of the greatest of painters and the pen of the greatest of writers would splinter like glass if we were to employ them to express even a distant echo of the tumult and melee that the is depicted by the clash of appetites, aspirations, hatreds and devotions that collide and mix together the different categories among which men are parceled out.
Who will ever precisely express the unfinished battle between private interests and c... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) It is not from a vague humanitarian sensibility, nor from a hazy and mystic pity that we are proclaiming our horror of war. We know very well that life is a continual selection, in which only the most able and gifted triumph.
What causes our hatred for war, i. e., for the state of war and all that follows in its train, is that while it reigns self-assertion and individual determinism are more than ordinarily restrained, constrained, repressed, not to say reduced to naught. It substitutes in place of the individual struggle for existence and happiness a collective struggle profitable to a small number of the governing and the large exploiters of all countries. It places the individual in a humiliating position of subordination and dep... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I
At times Liberty takes the form of a hateful reptile. She grovels, she hisses, she stings. But woe to those who in disgust shall venture to crush her! And happy are those who, having dared to receive her in her degraded and frightful shape, shall at length be rewarded by her in her time of her beauty and her glory.
Macaulay: Essay on Milton.
The men of order, those we call “honest folk,” demand nothing but gunfire and shellfire.
Renan: Nouvelles lettres intimes.
I read and hear it claimed that anarchism is beset by a crisis. This is not precisely correct. In truth, there is a conflict between the static and dynamic conceptions of anarchism, between those who want to gregarize and stab... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)