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Title: Obituary: Roland Biard Author: Anarchist Communist Federation Date: 1999 Language: en Topics: obituary, Organise! Source: Retrieved on May 13, 2013 from https://web.archive.org/web/20130513022626/http://www.afed.org.uk/org/issue50/obit.html Notes: Published in Organise! Issue 50 — Winter 1998/99.
Roland Biard, active militant in the French anarchist movement and then
historian of the movement, has died at the age of 56, 3 weeks after
being diagnosed with cancer. He co-founded the Groupe d’Etudes et Action
Anarchiste with Alexandre Skirda (who is also a noted historian of
anarchism) when they were both 19. The son of high-up officials in the
Stalinist apparatus of the French Communist Party, he broke with his
parents’ ideas at a very young age.
His placid and benign appearance belied his great physical courage. He
was at all the anarchist demonstrations against the Algerian war in
1961–2, including the Charonne demo, which ended in the mass lynching of
Algerians by the police. He was also present at the famous night of the
barricades on 10^(th) May 1968 in Paris. A partisan of a specifically
anarchist communist organisation, he served as secretary of the Union
des Groupes Anarchistes Communistes (UGAC) from 1964 to 1966, was
co-founder of the Kronstadt group, (which included Daniel Guerin in its
ranks) of the Mouvement Communiste Libertaire (MCL), and then joined the
Organisation Revolutionnaire Anarchiste in 1971. He left the ORA in
1974, over what he saw as the manoeuvres of certain “charismatic
leaders” and the lack of political and organisational maturity of the
mass of membership. He devoted himself to writing a series of books
including Histoire du Mouvement anarchiste en France 1945–1975 ( History
of the Anarchist Movement 1945–1975) La Commune de Budapest (the
Budapest Commune) and his monumental and exhaustive Dictionnaire de
l’extreme gauche (Dictionary of the Extreme Left). He published numerous
articles, under the pseudonym Julien Stern ,or anonymously, in the
libertarian press. Teacher, then history professor, he returned to his
native and beloved Charente region in 1975. A bon viveur, he welcomed
visiting comrades with great fraternity. Faithful to his ideas, he was
cremated wrapped in the Black Flag of Anarchy.
Roland Biard. Anarchist, Historian. Born 1942, died October 4^(th) 1998.