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Title: The Red Flag of Anarchy Author: Anarcho Date: April 5, 2011 Language: en Topics: symbols Source: Retrieved on 5th February 2021 from https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=513 Notes: (This article is an updated version to a entry on An Anarchist FAQ‘s blog).
As discussed in “The Symbols of Anarchy” in An Anarchist FAQ [AK Press,
2008] anarchists at first used the red flag as their symbol of choice,
with the Black Flag slowly replacing it over a period of many decades
from the 1880s. Both flags, however, had their roots in working class
struggle and protest, both were anti-capitalist symbols raised by
working class people in revolt against exploitation and oppression. As
the person who first raised the Black Flag as an explicitly anarchist
symbol in Paris on March 9^(th) 1883, Louise Michel, put it the “black
flag is the flag of strikes and the flag of those who are hungry.” (The
Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel [The University of Alabama Press,
1981], p. 168)
Given that the Black Flag only became the preferred anarchist symbol in
the 20^(th) century, it comes as no surprise to see that both Proudhon
and Bakunin praised the use of the red flag. Bakunin wrote of “the flag
of theoretical materialism, the red flag of economic equality and social
justice, is raised by the practical idealism of the oppressed and
famishing masses, tending to realise the greatest liberty and the human
right of each in the fraternity of all men on the earth.” (God and the
State [Dover, 1970], p. 47) Proudhon wrote in his notebooks that the red
flag was “the federal standard of humanity, the symbol of universal
fraternity” signifying the “Abolition of the proletariat and of
servitude” and “Equality of political rights: universal suffrage.”
(Carnets [Marcel Riviere, 1968] vol. 3, p. 289) Publically he
proclaimed:
“The Revolution, one cannot deny it, has been made by the red flag: the
provisional Government, however, has decided to keep the tricolour ...
To deny the red flag, the crimson! — but it is the social question you
are getting rid of. Every time the People, defeated by suffering, wanted
to express its wishes and its complaints outside the law that kills it,
it has walked under a red banner ... Poor red flag. Everyone is
abandoning you! Me, I embrace you; I clutch you to my breast. Long live
fraternity!
“Let us keep, if you wish, the tricolour, symbol of our nationality. But
remember that the red flag is the sign of a revolution that will be the
last. The red flag! It is the federal standard of humanity.” (Property
is Theft! [AK Press, 2011], pp. 257–8)
So, as historian Jack Hayward notes, a few weeks after helping to build
barricades in Paris at the start of the 1848 Revolution “predicted in
March 1848 the internationalism of the Red Flag.” Originally, as Hayward
reports, the Red Flag was flown from the Paris town hall “to signal the
proclamation of martial law to deal with food riots in 1789 and in July
1791 it was used at the massacre of anti-royalist demonstrators. In
1792, the republican revolutionaries turned it into a symbol of defiance
by inscribing on red flags: ‘Martial law of the sovereign people against
the rebellion of the executive power.’” After that “the Red Flag went
into eclipse. The tricolore carried all before it for the rest of the
Revolution and under Napoleon, being readopted at the 1830 Revolution as
the emblem of the July Monarchy. The Left sought an alternative and at
first it was the Black Flag symbolising a fight to the death that
appeared in the 1831 Lyons riots, with its slogan: ‘Work or Death.’”
(After the French Revolution [Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991], pp. 245–6)
So the Black Flag was a recognised symbol of the Left, so it was
unsurprising that when the Red Flag became too associated with Marxist
social democracy in France, the likes of Louise Michel urged anarchists
to raise the Black Flag in the 1880s and onwards. Yet both are symbols
of working class protest, both are flags raised by striking workers:
“The red banner, which has always stood for liberty, frightens the
executioners because it is so red with our blood. The black flag, with
layers of blood upon it from those who wanted to live by working or die
by fighting, frightens those who want to live off the work of others.
Those red and black banners wave over us mourning our dead and wave over
our hopes for the dawn that is breaking.” (Michel, pp. 193–4)
Michel, it must be noted, is referring to a workers revolt in Lyon in
1831 when “Vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant!” (“Live working
or die by fighting!”) was painted onto a Black Flag carried by
protesters. Interestingly, Proudhon stayed in Lyon in the early 1840s
was deeply influenced by these workers, going so far as to call his own
ideas mutuelisme after the word they used to describe their associative
socialism.
Why did the Red Flag become the symbol of choice for the socialist
movement, Proudhon and Bakunin included? For this, we need to look at
the 1848 Revolution in France and, in particular, the activities of that
perennial state-communist revolutionary, Louis Auguste Blanqui. It was
in February 1848 that the Red Flag “appeared during the insurrection for
the first time as a workers’ banner on a large scale, alongside the
tricolore. It symbolised their wish for break with the Orleanist past.”
Blanqui’s first symbolic act of that revolt was to issue a manifesto
“deploring the decision to retain the tricolore as the national flag
instead of replacing it with the Red Flag.” The 25^(th) of February saw
a demonstration of armed citizens carrying red flags. (Hayward, p. 245)
As with the use of the Black Flag by anarchists, the use of the Red Flag
by socialists of all tendencies spread from France. In Britain, the Red
Flag was adopted as a Chartist symbol on 31^(st) of December, 1849. On
10^(th) November 1850 European Socialists in exile in London adopted it
in place of their national flags, “a prelude to it becoming the emblem
of the First International in 1866.” (Hayward, p. 246) Its adoption by
the International Workers Association should come as no surprise given
the key role the French followers of Proudhon played in setting it up.
It comes, therefore, as no surprise that the newspapers in the 19^(th)
century denounced “the Red Flag of anarchy”, given that anarchists (like
others in the revolutionary workers movement) raised it in their
struggles and revolts. Both Proudhon and Bakunin associated themselves
with that symbol, just as they both proclaimed themselves socialists.
However, after their deaths state socialism came to dominate most labour
movements in the world and the Red Flag became associated with Marxian
social democracy and anarchists sought other symbols. With Communard and
indefatigable revolutionary Louise Michel taking the initiative, that
other flag of French working class revolt, the Black Flag, was taken up
as a replacement.