Featured articles

E. Armand, “Noel! Noel! Noel!” (1900-1935)

The anarchist Christmas story is, perhaps, a somewhat unexpected genre, although the opportunities for propaganda are not hard to see. Certainly, it has made sense for anarchist newspapers to mark the holiday season in their own particular way. The result has been tales with names like “Jesus and Bonnot” (linked at the end of this post) — and, come to think of it, perhaps the real surprise is that there doesn’t seem to be a Ravachol Christmas story out there… […]

Anarchist Beginnings

Benjamin Colin (1818-1884)

There are a handful of very early anarchist or at least anarchistic writings identified by Max Nettlau that have remained elusive in my searches. One in particular — “Plus de gouvernement!” by Benjamin Colin — has nagged at me a bit, since I have known that the paper it was published in, L’Homme, journal de la démocratie universelle, was accessible in various forms and included some other anarchism-related content. But I have never got around the making the extra effort or financial outlay necessary to get my hands on it. […]

Featured articles

P.-J. Proudhon, Proposal for a Society of the Perpetual Exhibition (1855)

The newest draft translation added to the New Proudhon Library project is the proposal for a Society of the Perpetual Exhibition, in answer to a call by Emperor Napoleon III for uses for the Palais de l’Industrie built in Paris for the 1855 World Fair. The project resembles Proudhon’s mutual credit proposals, as well as the various schemes for association proposed by Bellegarrigue in the 1850s. […]

Featured articles

Emile Gautier, “Social Darwinism” (1877 / 1880)

Emile Gautier’s 1880 pamphlet, Le Darwinisme sociale, is often cited as the first French use of the term “social Darwinism,” three years after the term was first used in English. Gautier was an anarchist, the a political prisoner, and finally a popular science writer and novelist. He was tried alongside Kropotkin in the “Trial of the 66,” collaborated with Louise Michel, and provided the preface for Sébastien Faure’s La douleur universelle. Drawn into a debate about the application of Darwin’s theories to the solution of social problems, he championed a pro-socialist interpretation of the science, anticipating Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid in some ways. A translation of the pamphlet can be found in the pdf linked in the sidebar, but the research for that task also turned up an earlier essay, with the same name and much the same argument, in a periodical, Le Mot d’Ordre, in which Gautier was one of the principal contributors. That essay (also included in the pdf) is presented below. […]