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Title: Bekken on Bantman Author: Jon Bekken Date: 2022, May Language: en Topics: France, Jean Grave, review Source: H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews. May, 2022. Accessed July 14, 2022 at https://networks.h-net.org/node/11717/reviews/10290088/bekken-bantman-jean-grave-and-networks-french-anarchism-1854-1939
a review of
Constance Bantman, Jean Grave and the Networks of French Anarchism,
1854-1939. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. xv + 243 pp. $89.00 (e-book),
ISBN 978-3-030-66618-7.
Reviewed by Jon Bekken (Albright College) Published on H-Socialisms
(May, 2022) Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark)
While Jean Grave is little known today (despite having been the subject
of previous biographies), he played a key role in the anarchist movement
a century ago, not only in France, where he edited the influential La
Révolte (1887-94) and Les Temps Nouveaux (1895-1914), but
internationally. There is a growing literature on the importance of
regional and other transnational networks in facilitating the spread of
anarchist ideas and publications. As Constance Bantman demonstrates in
Jean Grave and the Networks of French Anarchism, 1854-1939, Grave and
his publications were central to transnational networks of international
anarchism in the prewar era.
Like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Grave was a self-educated working-class
intellectual. While by no means as sedentary as the opening passages of
this important biography suggest (far from being confined to the attic
rooms from which he issued his newspapers, Grave spent some years in
exile in Switzerland, made regular trips to Wales in the 1890s while
courting his second wife, and fled to England with her in 1914 when war
broke out), Grave was a writer in a movement characterized, at least in
the popular imagination, by action. While he and his publications were a
central node for transnational anarchism, Grave’s reluctance to engage
in public speaking and in the organizing and meetings that sustained the
movement’s daily activity created an impression of aloofness and
prevented the cross-fertilization with movement activists that played
such a key role in the evolution of Peter Kropotkin’s ideas. Indeed,
Kropotkin urged Grave—the two had a long and close collaborative
relationship—to participate in movement life more actively, noting that
meetings offered as valuable an opportunity to spread ideas as did
pamphlets and the paper.
But despite his general absence from the movement’s physical spaces,
Grave’s publications gave extensive space to correspondence and reports
from anarchists around the world, building a community of shared debates
and identity and playing a central role in mobilizing international
solidarity campaigns. Importantly, Grave’s networks extended well beyond
the anarchist movement, including artists and writers who provided vital
support for his publications and even politicians like Georges
Clemenceau who offered some buffer against repression. As Bantman
writes, “the publications which [Grave] oversaw had a near-global reach
and shaped local movements in many ways. However, the French anarchist
movement was also shaped by foreign developments, debates and exchanges
and was engaged in multipolar, horizontal transnational discussions and
campaigns. From worldwide exchanges of printed material and money to
international networks of correspondents and translators as well as
tactical discussions on a transcontinental scale, Grave and his papers
illustrate all these entanglements, and sometimes pioneered them” (p.
6).
Born into a poor, working-class family, Grave attended a religious
school for a few years after his family moved to Paris. He apprenticed
as a shoemaker, attended Blanquist meetings with his father, and was
drafted into the marine infantry—a miserable experience from which he
was released following the death of his father (his mother and sister
had died of consumption two years earlier). His experiences during the
Commune and in the military left him with a lifelong revulsion for the
military, an antimilitarism that animated nearly the entire radical
movement of his day. After his release from the infantry, Grave attended
socialist meetings, breaking with parliamentarism in 1880 in a speech to
the Congrès Ouvrier du Centre: “all the money spent in appointing
deputies would be more wisely used to buy dynamite to blow them up” (p.
24). He began writing for the anarchist press and soon came under the
police surveillance that continued for most of his life. In 1882, Grave
published his first book, La Société au lendemain de la Révolution
(Society on the Morrow of Revolution), launching his reputation as an
anarchist theorist with a knack for presenting complex ideas in
accessible language. He also began distributing hundreds of copies of
the Geneva-based Le Révolté, meeting editor Peter Kropotkin when he
visited Paris. After Kropotkin’s expulsion from Switzerland, Grave moved
to Geneva to take up the editorship of Le Révolté, which had become the
leading French-language anarchist newspaper. Grave quit shoemaking,
learned typesetting, and dedicated the rest of his life to the anarchist
press.
Soon after Grave became editor, he called on readers to send in news of
anarchist activity in their area, launching the interactive, networking
model that would characterize his approach to anarchist publishing. He
worked with other activists to smuggle Le Révolté into France, a
necessity that continued even after the paper’s prohibition was
officially lifted as border guards and postal officials were prone to
seize copies of the paper (and sometimes the people distributing it). Le
Révolté was not only widely read throughout France, its readership and
support network included donors from Algeria, Argentina, Australia,
Belgium, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, South Africa,
Uruguay, and the United States. It exchanged publications with
newspapers everywhere there was an anarchist movement.
Connecting people, groups, and publications was a key focus; readers
used Le Révolté’s columns to make contact with each other, to let its
readers know about new publications and initiatives, and to request
information. The paper printed articles and letters from around the
world debating anarchist ideas and tactics and warning against
infiltrators. Readers in the United States relied on Le Révolté to build
a Francophone anarchist movement there, eventually launching their own
publication. And Grave repeatedly used its columns to coordinate
international campaigns, including several against Spain’s brutal
repression of the anarchist movement. As part of these campaigns, Grave
organized exchanges of information, funds, meeting announcements, and
reports between exile circles in France, Spain, Latin America, and
London. Later, he regularly published protests from the British-based
Spanish Atrocities Committee (whose membership included anarchists and
progressive members of Parliament), including calls for granting
complete autonomy to Cuba and the Philippines. In France, prominent
authors including Émile Zola (who had earlier refused to support Grave’s
defense) and republican politician and journalist Georges Clemenceau
joined the campaign to free Spain’s anarchist political prisoners.
In 1885, the police expelled Grave and his wife (who soon died in
childbirth) to France, where he and other comrades relaunched the paper.
Grave settled in the infamous attic in the Mouffetard neighborhood,
where he was to publish Révolté and its successors—the slightly retitled
La Révolte and Les Temps Nouveaux—for the next two decades. (Grave
himself moved to a separate apartment when the attic office became too
cluttered and too public). The neighborhood was ideally situated at the
intersection of Paris’s industrial and university districts. A steady
stream of visitors—activists and police alike—climbed the stairs to meet
Grave and to obtain copies of the newspapers and pamphlets issued from
the cramped rooms. Grave also traveled as far afield as London to meet
with contributors; his correspondence with artists is replete with
references to their encounters.
In 1887, La Révolte launched a literary supplement which drew the
participation of many leading artists and writers and helped cement the
paper’s (and Grave’s) reputation among intellectuals. The supplement
published a wide array of material: literary and scientific, reformist
and revolutionary. As Bantman notes, “the supplement made La Révolte the
most consistent and long-lasting French publication in fostering an
eclectic international artistic and literary anarchist canon, setting
out a highly ambitious pedagogical remit for anarchism, which redefined
the movement and broadened its appeal in France and globally” (p. 60).
Grave could be a contentious figure, often criticizing those whose ideas
or tactics violated his understanding of anarchist tenets. In principle,
he was a communist, but he was highly skeptical of efforts to build
anarchist organizations. He rejected not only individualism, but also
formal systems of accountability for his newspapers. He did not join the
campaign over the Dreyfus Affair until 1898, ostensibly because of
Dreyfus’s bourgeois origins and the campaign’s collaboration with
politicians (though he later did not hesitate to work with some of those
same politicians on behalf of Spanish anarchists). But Grave also
denounced the “Jewish money” behind the campaign and referred to one of
the judges involved in his own 1894 prosecutions as a “dirty Jew,”
suggesting that antisemitism also played a role (p. 138).
Grave criticized what he saw as the limitations of syndicalism and union
struggles in Les Temps Nouveaux. He believed that revolutionary unions
might help develop class consciousness and secure piecemeal improvements
but not revolutionary change, and by the early 1900s worried that
syndicalism would absorb anarchism. Grave repeated these arguments in
his 1908 pamphlet Le Syndicalisme dans l’évolution sociale. But he did
open the pages of Les Temps Nouveaux to syndicalists, and also wrote for
their papers. Grave was far more hostile toward the revived
individualism. His 1897 pamphlet L’Individu et la société reiterated
that “individual autonomy and initiative were the sources of anarchism
and the revolution but firmly rejected unfettered and intellectual
individualism at the expense of altruism and mankind’s social nature.…
The essay also rebutted Neo-Malthusianism with customary directness: ‘I
think they are sorely mistaken, those who claim to solve the social
question by limiting the birth rate’” (p. 130). His antipathy was so
strong that in 1905 he refused to allow the individualist paper
L’Anarchie to sell his pamphlets at their events. He was also dismissive
of emerging lifestyle currents, such as naturism and vegetarianism.
Grave faced a series of legal challenges in the 1890s, beginning with a
six-month prison term for an article condemning the army’s brutal
repression of a labor demonstration and a long-standing conflict with
the Société des Gens de Lettres over his practice of excerpting material
in La Révolte’s literary supplement, often without permission. Octave
Mirbeau published a defense, pointing to the paper’s quality and
lamenting the practice of reducing ideas to commodities to be bought and
sold. Several authors ultimately withdrew their complaints, and the case
was quietly dropped. La Révolte closed amid a wave of repression in
1894, which saw Grave (and many others) charged with criminal
conspiracy. Anarchist propaganda was outlawed. Grave was sentenced to
two years in prison in one trial but acquitted (along with all but three
of his codefendants) a few months later in the trial of thirty prominent
anarchists.
Grave was released as part of a general amnesty in 1895, quickly
released two books written in prison, and launched Les Temps Nouveaux.
The new paper was similarly embedded in transnational networks and aided
by a contribution of three hundred francs from Argentina. Unlike his
previous ventures, articles were signed, highlighting its many
prestigious contributors. But extensive space was devoted to networking,
with dozens of short items from around the world appearing in each
issue. Les Temps Nouveaux also issued a stream of illustrated pamphlets,
broadening its reach both domestically and internationally. Grave’s ties
to radical artists were also reflected in the newspaper, which after
1905 regularly featured their artwork. And the new paper continued to
play a central role in coordinating international campaigns against
political repression of anarchists. Grave’s international network was
essential to the success of these campaigns, but locally his work was
often overshadowed by publications with significantly larger
circulations—in Grave’s view undermining the anarchist character of the
effort. Indeed, this tension spoke to a larger issue: Grave and Les
Temps Nouveaux remained as well regarded as ever abroad, but were
increasingly eclipsed in France by more action-oriented anarchist and
syndicalist papers on the one side, and more respectable radical
publications on the other.
There were contradictions in Grave’s anarchism. His early newspapers
largely ignored anticolonial struggles (though he condemned
colonialism’s racism, looting, and violence in Moribund Society, English
translation, 1899), and when they addressed such issues tended to
address them in terms of their impact on the conscripted workers who
were sent to fight in imperialism’s wars. Later, Les Temps Nouveaux
featured extended articles questioning colonialism, reflecting increased
interest in the broader anarchist movement. In 1900, he published a
pamphlet, La Colonisation, denouncing state collusion with the army,
assimilation, the plunder of natural resources, use of a “civilizing”
rhetoric and the spreading of diseases along with colonization. In 1903,
Patriotisme et colonization denounced both. But his sympathies with
colonial subjects did not extend to the Irish, perhaps because of the
circles he and his wife moved in in Britain.
Women’s rights were also largely ignored in the pages of Grave’s
publications. Bantman notes that there were few women in the movement at
the time, though earlier anarchists (including Bakunin) had stressed the
importance of women’s rights. In 1895, Grave wrote that men and women
would have equal rights in the future anarchist society. But this goal
was subordinated to the larger struggle for emancipation, and Grave
published articles by other French anarchists attacking feminism. For
Grave, class was the paramount issue, even as he kept his distance from
the emerging syndicalist movement.
Bantman gives substantial attention to the material conditions in which
Grave struggled to keep his publications afloat. This was a public
struggle, one openly discussed in his papers’ pages as he appealed to
readers and to the broader networks in which he was immersed for
support. Grave experimented with formats and features to attract new
readers, and with a range of fundraising strategies, from raffles (the
paper changed its name to La Révolte to escape prosecution for an
illegal lottery) to selling paintings donated by artists sympathetic to
the anarchist movement. His “personal and political connections …
allowed him to produce one of the longest-lived publications in the
history of global anarchism[;] … when these networks collapsed, so did
his influence within the movement” (p. 11).
Bantman argues that Grave’s influence was gradually declining after
1905, in large part because his print-centric focus “increasingly failed
the test of action. The revolutionary climate of the pre-war years,
characterised by antimilitarist agitation, intense strike activity
(repressed with exceptional violence), the rise of new insurrectionary
anarchist currents, and finally the quandaries of the war demanded more
creative and radical responses, making both Grave’s anarchism and his
strategic vision for the paper seem outdated—although this only appeared
fully once the war broke out” (p. 146). Looking back in his memoirs,
Grave admitted that it had been the time to act, not talk, and that the
circle around his newspaper should have been out in the streets.
Grave had gradually adopted a more gradualist perspective, increasingly
seeing the revolution as a process. He was further from the day-to-day
movement life, having moved to a small town outside Paris and married
his longtime partner, Mabel Holland, in 1909. The paper now had a small
staff, and several respected writers regularly contributed articles on
culture, economics, labor, and anarchist theory. A steady flow of
pamphlets emanated from its offices. The paper’s finances were
increasingly tenuous, as more action-oriented papers drew more readers.
Grave turned to raffles, stamp selling (making use of stamps from the
letters and publications arriving from around the world), art sales, and
incessant fundraising appeals to cover the mounting deficits.
While long a controversial figure in the anarchist movement, Grave was
widely respected as a propagandist and an intellectual until World War
I. When war broke out, Grave suspended publication of Les Temps Nouveaux
and moved to England. The February 1915 “International Anarchist
Manifesto on the War,” published in Freedom, in New York’s
Spanish-language Cultura Obrera, the Italian paper Volontà, and Mother
Earth, among many others, called on anarchists to spread “the spirit of
revolt” and “discontent in peoples and armies” (p. 174). Pro-Entente
anarchists led by Kropotkin and Grave responded with the March 1916
“Manifesto of the Sixteen,” declaring themselves in support of the
allies—tearing apart the international anarchist movement which remained
overwhelmingly opposed to militarism in general and to that war in
particular.
It took Grave some time to abandon his antimilitarist convictions. He
saw no prospect for preventing the war in the face of a divided
anarchist movement, the capitulation of the General Confederation of
Labour (CGT) in France to war fever, and the socialists’ embrace of
patriotism. Grave still shared the anarchist belief that a general
strike or revolution was the correct response to war, but “it was all
too clear that no one was moving and … I could not do the revolution
just by myself” (p. 166). Kropotkin’s approach was different. He had
long been concerned about German militarism and believed that a
defensive war could be justified, whereas “Grave’s starting point in
1914 was much closer to the dominant anarchist antimilitarist and
internationalist discourse.… [H]e openly criticised the analogy with the
French revolutionary patriotism of 1792 used by Kropotkin and other
supporters of the war” (p. 167).
Grave initially expected the war to be brief and worked with groups such
as the UK-based Union of Democratic Control to press for a just peace.
He unsuccessfully tried to encourage a similar movement in France,
though his letters urging this may have been intercepted by censors. The
now-censored press remained Grave’s primary site for political action.
Well into 1915, Grave continued to criticize French nationalism and
militarism while also advocating self-defense; he called for mutual
disarmament and grassroots reconciliation as the way forward. Kropotkin
rejected these efforts as an illusion and pressed his longtime friend to
reconsider. In the debates that followed, Grave argued that German
workers might be inspired to rebel by such an effort, and that its
military defeat threatened resurgent nationalism on both sides, laying
the foundation for future wars.
Les Temps Nouveaux’s contributors remaining in France were also divided;
they began publication of a bulletin between 1914 and 1916, gradually
drifting toward pacifism even as Grave was becoming supportive of what
he increasingly saw as a defensive war. Grave challenged the right of
the Paris group to the Temps Nouveaux name and had them locked out of
its offices, which his supporters then used to issue an irregular
Bulletin as the war dragged on. In August 1915, the group issued a
manifesto stating that peace was more important than any of Germany’s
wrongs; in December, they joined the international socialist pacifist
movement launched at the Zimmerwald conference.
Grave returned to France but never recovered his position in a badly
shaken movement. When Le Libertaire was relaunched in 1919, its first
issue featured a scathing denunciation of Grave and the other supporters
of the war. Grave attempted to revive Les Temps Nouveaux but withdrew
after several months, as neither his collaborators nor the antiwar
majority showed any interest in his ideas about rebuilding the movement.
He followed with a series of ninety-nine pamphlets, the “Publications de
La Révolte et des Temps Nouveaux” (1920-1936), which showed his
continued engagement with a range of new subjects and his continued
international focus. But by then, even the police had decided he was no
longer important enough to spy on. In his final years, Grave also
published a memoir, which received respectful attention in the
mainstream political press but was reviled by his fellow anarchists.
While there are places where one could wish for more detail, this
important book documents the central role of networks in the anarchist
movement and the central role that Grave and his publications played in
those networks at the turn of the century. It also adds to our
understanding of how Grave ended up endorsing the war despite what had
been a lifetime of antimilitarist propaganda—an apostasy that undermined
his legacy, but which it is now clear he undertook only reluctantly
after the failure of his earlier efforts to build a movement to end the
war through negotiations for a just peace.
Grave died on December 8, 1939. One of his last pamphlets had looked to
the Spanish Revolution, which he greeted with great enthusiasm but also
the knowledge that it was beyond the scope of his diminished publication
to address. The revolution had been crushed several months before his
death, and the authoritarianism and war he had long feared were
ascendant. But Grave remained an anarchist to the end, albeit one whose
activity was increasingly limited to correspondence with comrades around
the world and to documenting the history of the movement at whose center
he had once stood.