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Title: Iconoclast Author: SĂ©bastien Faure Date: 1934 Language: en Topics: Anarchist Encyclopedia Source: Retrieved on November 15, 2011 from http://marxists.org/reference/archive/faure/1934/encyclopedia.htm
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 8^(th) 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 army of more or less miraculous
saints to propose to the veneration of the faithful. So the Council of
Trent (787) and those that followed pitilessly condemned the sect, which
disappeared at the beginning of the following century. Later the
Albigensians, the Hussites, the Vaudois and the Calvinists took up the
practices of the iconoclasts, for they didn’t recognize the “sanctity”
of the apostles.
Extending the meaning of the word, giving it a fuller meaning, the
anarchists call themselves iconoclasts. The Compagnon Percheron, in the
song La Ronde des briseurs d’images, very precisely explained the why of
such an affirmation. Wanting to destroy not only the images of saints,
but those of all false gods, of all idols, of all prejudices; bowing
before no moral or material authority, the anarchists want to destroy
from top to bottom the old society that rules over us. This is why with
all their disrespect for established things they are so attached to
smashing all images (state, religion, politics, property, bosses,
fatherlands, etc) with which the people are still today fooled, and
which make slavery last.
Recognizing the high moral import, the great beneficial value of the
lives of certain men devoted to science, philosophy, the Revolution, the
anarchists sometimes cite as an example and a teaching the works of
these precursors. But not wanting to see any kind of predestination in
any man, they rise up against any attempt, from wherever it comes, to
make legendary personalities of some of them. And they smash all the
images of all the secular or revolutionary gods that some- yearning for
adoration, and for not very reputable ends- propose to the veneration of
the crowd