[On May 1, 1891, after a Labor Day demonstration, police attacked protesters in Clichy. A violent battle ensued and gunfire was exchanged. Three anarchists were arrested. Henri Louis Decamps was sentenced to five years in prison, Charles Auguste Dardare to three and Louis Léveillé (who was wounded in the fight) was acquitted. Ravachol would later take revenge for the injustice in March the following year.]
* * * * *
Members of the Jury,
I asked my comrade and friend, Sébastien Faure, to present my defense. Even though the law, by special arrangement, allows the accused to choose his defender, either a relative or friend outside the profession of lawyers, Your Honor has clearly refuse... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This is, we believe, the first English translation of Faure’s article on the “anarchist synthesis”, the response by a certain sector of anarchism to the theories set out in the “Draft Organization Platform for a General Union of Anarchists” published by the “Delo Truda” group in France in 1926. We are unsure as to the exact publiction details of this text (some sources say 1927, others 1928), but this has been translated using the text given in “Volonté Anarchiste”, No. 12, 1980, Edition du Groupe Fresnes-Antony de la Fédération Anarchiste.
* * *
The three anarchist currents
In France, as in most other countries, three main anarchist currents... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) ANARCHY n. (from the Greek: a privative and archè, command, power, authority)
Preliminary observation. The object of this Anarchist Encyclopedia being to make known the full range of conceptions—political, economic, philosophical, moral, etc.—that arise from the anarchist idea or lead there, it is in the course of this work and in the very place that each of them must occupy within it, that the multiples theses contained in the exact and complete study of this subject will be explained. So it is only by drawing and joining together, methodically and with continuity, the various parts of this Encyclopedia that it will be possible for the reader to achieve the complete understanding of Anarchy, Anarchism and the Anar... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Deify: verb. Put at the rank of a god. Attribute to an animal or an object a supernatural power. Deification is a sign of ignorance and it is understandable only in the backward ages of humanity, when man had not yet pierced the mysteries of nature and was inclined to deify that which he didn’t understand. It is thus that through ignorance or terror the first men adored the thunder and in order to demonstrate their joy or their recognition they glorified the sun and the stars that brought them light.
Afterwards, when humanity had left the darkness into which it had been plunged and when man, through seeking, arrived at determining the causes of certain phenomena, it elevated itself from the deification of objects, of things to ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) There are two ways of studying and trying to solve the problem of the inexistence of God. One way is that of eliminating the hypothesis God from the field of plausible and necessary conjectures by a clear precise explanation through the exposition of a positive system of the universe, its origin, its successive evolutions and its final scope. But such an exposition would make the idea of God useless and would destroy beforehand the whole metaphysical edifice upon which it has been placed by spiritual philosophers and theologians.
However, taking in consideration the present status of human knowledge and duly confining ourselves to that which is demonstrable and has been demonstrated, verifiable and has been verified, we have to admit that ... (From: Anarchy Archives.) Heresy: (from the Greek hairesis; from hairen to choose.) Doctrine condemned by the Catholic Church
As soon as it was in possession of a certain power thanks to its recognition by kings and emperors, the Roman church forgot all of the persecutions suffered by its founders.
As soon as it was armed with its redoubtable influence over monarchs and lords, it delivered a pitiless and bloody war against those men who didn’t bow to its commands. The fifteen centuries during which it reigned as the uncontested master in Europe are nothing but a long series of crimes that it perpetrated and committed in the name of religion. There were veritable massacres of entire populations.
The most famous are: the massacre of the Albi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Iconoclast: Means breaker of images (the name image in antiquity applied to all figures, either painted or sculpted). It particularly designates those persons or sects opposed to the adoration of images and pursuing their destruction. Due to this iconoclasm belongs to the history of those religions which admitted and practiced the cult of images.
Around the first quarter of the 8th Century a religious sect was founded which had as its objective the smashing of all the images of saints and the banning of the their cult, This sect of “iconoclasts” was at first approved by the Council of Constantinople in 754.
Approving these acts meant making in large part impossible the task of the Roman church, which has a whole ar... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.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.) Your heart is filled with pity and sadness by the spectacle of the miseries that overwhelm humanity, by the perplexities and vicissitudes that torment it.
Mine is as well. What, then, are you doing about it, Mademoiselle?
Like all those who believe in the necessity and the fatedness of the institutions that rule us, you don’t think of questioning whether or not this collection of evils under the weight of which humans groan can be imputed to these same institutions. And without reflecting you doubtless address yourself to those who combat them, who condemn them and work to substitute other social arrangements, and you call on them to renounce the evil work they are accomplishing. I am, Mademoiselle, one of these evil wor... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) When it comes into the world, when its existence is like a blank sheet upon which nothing has yet be written, the child is neither good nor bad. He is both. The heir to all preceding generations, he carries within himself, in germ, all the qualities and all the shortcomings of his ancestors; all their virtues and all their vices, all their strengths and all their weaknesses, all their ignorance and all their learning, all their savagery and all their indulgence, all their defeats and all their victories, all their greatness and all their pettiness, all their courage and all their cowardice, all their rebelliousness and all their subservience, all their advances and all their set-backs, all their sublimity and all their wretchedness.
... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Reformism: “Reformism” is the doctrine of those who, while saying they are in favor of a social transformation having as it objective establishing society on principles and foundations opposed to that which exist, propose to arrive at this result by a more or less considerable series of more or less important partial reforms realized within the framework of legality.
“Reformist” is the name that serves to designate a person, group, organization or party that considers the whole of these successive and legal reforms as the best, if not the only means of transforming the social milieu, let us more precisely say, for substituting the collectivist or communist world for the capitalist world.
Those political... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Translated by Larry Gambone
Comrades, I explained - quickly, but in a sufficient way - the first part of libertarian Communism, the critical, negative part and, I hope that I managed to convince you that misery, ignorance, hatred, repression, suffering in all its forms, is the fatal result of the social background in which we live.
If, as I hope, you arrived at this conviction, you must also be convinced of the need and the urgency to put an end to a social system which generates such pains. It is precisely what we will begin to study this evening. It is necessary to destroy the established social order since it is generating sufferings, inequalities, injustices and miseries. It should be destroyed at all costs; it should be destro... (From: Anarchy Archives.) Violence: The anarchists are tender, affectionate, sensitive. As such, they hate violence. If it were possible for them to hope that they would realize through gentleness and persuasion their concept of universal peace, mutual aid and free agreement, they would repudiate all recourse to violence and would energetically combat even the idea of having recourse to it.
But being practical and realistic — whatever their interested or ignorant detractors might say — the anarchists don’t believe in the magical virtue, the miraculous power of persuasion and gentleness. They have the well thought out certainty that in order to make a living reality of their admirable dream, they must before anything else have done with the w... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
