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With the dawn of the twentieth century a new current arose within French anarchism: self-conscious anarchist-individualism.
The main intellectual base for this new departure was the rediscovery of the works of the much maligned and neglected philosopher, Max Stirner.
Karl Marx himself had not underestimated the radical nature of Stirner's challenge, and in The German Ideology, directed a most vicious polemic against him and his affirmation of 'egoism'.
But Stirner's book, The Ego and Its Own, although causing a great stir at the time, was soon forgotten.
In France interest was only reawakened around the turn of the century due to a conjunction of two main factors: the current fad for all things German (rather ironic considering the relative proximity of the First World War), and the keen interest in individualist philosophy amongst artists, intellectuals and the well-read, urban middle classes in general.
One indigenous bourgeois individualist was Maurice Barrès, who wrote an acclaimed trilogy entitled Le Culte de Moi, in which, having observed that, "our malaise comes from our living in a social order inspired by the dead", depicted a new type of man who, in satisfying his ego, would help turn humanity into "a beautiful forest".
Despite such apparent sentimentality, his individualism was based upon the privileged material position of the bourgeoisie, whose self-realization was only made possible by the subjugation of the desires of the masses.
Barrès ended up in later years as an anti-semitic, Christian nationalist.
Individualism gained more radical currency through Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian writer, who produced critiques of contemporary morality in dramatic form.
He developed the theme of the strong individual standing alone against both the tyranny of the State, and the narrow-minded oppressive moralism of the masses.
Ibsen's appeal lay in the fact that personal longing for independence existed at all levels of society, so anybody, regardless of their class origin, could identify with the individual who was opposed to the mass.
But Ibsen's individualism addressed moral questions rather than economic ones.
In the fad for all things German, Friedrich Nietzsche was the most fashionable of the writers-cum-philosophers.
He railed against the prevailing culture and ethos of his time, and especially against attitudes of conformity, resignation or resentment; he willed the creation of the 'Superman', who would break through the constraints of bourgeois morality and the artificiality of social conventions towards a rediscovered humanity of more primitive virtues.
For the record, he was neither a nationalist nor an anti-semite.
Nietzsche regarded Stirner as one of the unrecognized seminal minds of the nineteenth century, a recommendation which, coupled with the aforementioned vogue for German philosophy, resulted in fin de siècle publication of extracts of his work in Le Mercure, and in the symbolists' 'organ of literary anarchism', Entretiens politiques et litteraires.[4]
In 1900, the year of Nietzsche's death, the libertarian publisher, Stock, printed the first complete French translation of Stirner-'s work, entitled L'Unique et sa Propriete.
[4] Symbolism was the avant-garde cultural movement of the time.
Young anarchists, in particular, quickly developed a fascination for the book, and it rapidly became the 'Bible' of anarcho-individualism.
Stirner's polemic was much more extreme than the well-worn ideas that had until then made up the stuff of revolutionary ideology.
Anarchist thinkers had tended, like Proudhon, to conceive of some absolute moral criterion to which people must subordinate their desires, in the name of 'Reason' or 'Justice'; or, like Kropotkin, they had assumed some innate urge which, once Authority was overthrown, would induce people to cooperate naturally in a society governed by invisible laws of mutual aid.
The 'anarchism' of Tolstoy and Godwin was also thoroughly grounded in moralism, a throw-back to their Christian backgrounds of, respectively, Russian Orthodoxy and English Dissent.
Even anarcho-syndicalists such as Jean Grave had a 'revolutionary morality' which viewed the class struggle as a 'Just War'.
Stirner saw all 'morality' as an ideological justification for the repression of individuals; he opposed those revolutionaries who wished to set up a new morality in place of the old, as this 'would still result in the triumph of the collectivity over the individual and lay the basis for another despotic State.
He denied that there was any real existence in concepts such as 'Natural Law', 'Common Humanity', 'Reason', 'Justice' or 'The People'; more than being simply absurd platitudes (which he derisively labelled 'sacred concepts'), they were some of a whole gamut of abstract ideas which unfortunately dominated the thinking of most individuals:
"Every higher essence, such as 'Truth', 'Mankind' and so on, is an essence OVER us".
Stirner perceived the repressive nature of ideologies, even so-called 'revolutionary' ones; he believed that all these 'sacred concepts' manufactured by the intellect actually resulted in practical despotism.
For Stirner the real force of life resided in the will of each individual, and this 'Ego', "the unbridled I", could not come to real self-fulfillment and self-realization so long as the State continued to exist.
Each individual was unique, with a uniqueness that should be cultivated:
the Egoist's own needs and desires provided the sole rule of conduct.
Differences with other individuals were to be recognized and accepted, and conscious egoists could combine with others into "unions of egoists", free to unite or separate as they pleased, rather than being held together in a Party under the weight of some ideological discipline.
Certain conflicts of the will might have to be settled by force, as they were already in present society, but these should be done without the need for moral justification.
Stirner saw desire as the prime motivating force of the will:
"My intercourse with the world consists in my enjoying it...my satisfaction decides about my relation to men, and I do not renounce, from an excess of humility, even the power over life and death…I no longer humble myself before any power".
The realization of individual desires was to be the basis for the elimination of the State, for what was the State ultimately but the alienated power of the mass of individuals?
If people re-appropriated their power, habitually surrendered to the State, then established society would start to disintegrate.
In the struggle against the State, which every conscious egoist would be forced to engage in, Stirner distinguished between a 'Revolution', which aimed at setting up an immutable new social order, and 'rebellion' or insurrection, a continuous state of permanent revolution, which set "no glittering hopes on 'institutions"'.
Stirner's rebellion was not so much a political or social act, but an egoistic one.
Furthermore, in this battle with the State, Stirner felt that, "an ego who is his own cannot desist from being a criminal", but this did not mean that a moral justification for crime, was necessary.
Discussing Proudhon's famous dictum "Property is theft", he asks why, "put the fault on others as if they were robbing us, while we ourselves do bear the fault in leaving the others unrobbed?
The poor are to blame for there being rich men...".
He suggested that Proudhon should have phrased himself as follows:
"There are some things that only belong to a few, and to which we others will from now on lay claim or siege.
Let us take them, for one only comes into property by taking, and the property of which for the present we are still deprived came to the proprietors likewise only by taking.
It can be utilized better if it is in the hands of us all than if the few control.
Let us therefore associate ourselves for the purpose of this robbery".
He summed up: "To what property am I entitled?
To every property to which I empower myself...I do not demand any 'Right', therefore I need not recognize any either.
What I can get by force, I get by force, and what I can not get by force I have no right to, nor do I give myself airs or consolations with my imprescriptable 'Right'...Liberty belongs to him who takes it".
Stirner proposed 'expropriation' not as the 'legitimate' response of a victim of society, but as a way of self-realization:
"Pauperism can be removed only when I as an ego realize value from myself, when I give my own self value, and make my price myself.
I must rise in revolt to rise in this world".
Yet he seemed unsure as to whether a rebellious crime should be glorified or superseded:
"In crime the egoist has hitherto asserted himself and mocked the sacred; the break with the sacred, or rather of the sacred may become general.
A revolution never returns, but a mighty, reckless, shameless, conscienceless, proud CRIME, does it not rumble in distant thunder, and do you not see how the sky grows presciently silent and gloomy?".
Elsewhere, in his less poetic moments, Stirner was more pensive:
"Talk with the so-called criminal as with an egoist, and he will be ashamed, not that he transgressed against your laws, but that he considered your laws worth evading, your goods worth desiring; he will be ashamed that he did not despise you and yours altogether, that he was too little an egoist".
These seemingly contradictory attitudes were later to be keenly felt by some of the illegalists.
The Ego and Its Own was a startling work, written from a point of view that might be called 'radical subjectivity', a work of an all-consuming passion best summed up in the egoist's battlecry:
"Take hold and take what you require!
With this the war of all against all is declared.
I alone decide what I will have!".
If socialists continually ignored the question of individual desires and the subjective element of revolt, then it must be said that Stirner made little effort to direct his attention to basic socio-economic questions and the need for a collective struggle of the dispossessed, which would realize each individual's desires.
He saw 'the masses' as "full of police sentiments through and through", and reduced the social question of how to eliminate the State and class society, to an individual one to be resolved by any means.
Still, he had at last made it possible for rebels to admit that their revolt was being made primarily for their own self-realization: there was no need to justify it with reference to an abstract idea.
Those who claimed to be acting in the name of 'The People' were often sentimental butchers.
Stirner stripped away the dead weight of ideology and located the revolution where it always had been — in the hearts and minds of individuals.
The force and vigour of Stirner's ideas appealed to many anarchistic spirits determined to live the revolution there and then.
The long association of French anarchism with theoretical voluntarism and practical illegality, sympathy for working class criminality, and hostility to bourgeois morals and socialist politics, meant that Stirner's ideas were easily accessible to many anarchists not yet blinded by an ideologically 'pure' anarchism.
In contrast to the latter, the new generation of anarchists felt it necessary to call themselves 'anarchist-individualists', although they saw themselves as upholding the banner of anarchism pure and simple.
This milieu, which emerged after 1900, and which was largely Libertad's creation, was one that had already assimilated Stirner's basic ideas into the body of its theory by the time of the Bonnot Gang.
It is quite possible that none of the gang had ever actually read The Ego and Its Own, but their actions and Stirner's theories were to have striking similarities.
Comrades en plein air.
A forerunner of the renowned 'anarchist picnic' — a gathering of the Causeries Populaires sometime between 1905 and 1908.
LIBERTAD, on the left of the picture with walking stick and beard is flanked by his lovers, the MAHE sisters, ANNA and AMANDINE.
This series of posts will insure that these anarchists' works live on in living memory.
If only a few.
Don't lose hope now, dear reader.
We've made it this far.
At some point the ride gets easier.
Rule by force has had it's day.
When everybody sees the iron fist in the velvet glove we win.
We just have to survive its death throes.
There is a reason these facts are not in the modern curriculums.
Setting rewards to burn only burns the author portion of the payout.
The crowd isn't silenced.
Please cheer loudly, if that is your thing.
