A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917-1945

by David Berry, Barry Pateman (Introduction)

“An impressive work, attentive to detail, abundantly well-documented and clearly addressing some key dilemmas of anarchist organizations.”— Anarchist Studies “Berry has done an amazing job of poring through the speeches, the newspapers, the reports of meetings of all the various strands of the anarchist movement to develop a coherent story of changing anarchist ideology in the 1920s and 1930s.”— H-France Review “We should applaud a study which has no equivalent in French and which does not fear bringing to light the hesitations and the U-turns, but also the lucidity and the courage of many militants.”— Réfractions “Highly recommended.”— Choice David Berry’s study is the first English-language evaluation of the development of the French anarchist movement between the great wars. Using an impressive array of archival sources and personal interviews, his original research explores the debates and growing pains of a large, working-class movement facing great obstacles. Focusing on the organized wings of the movement—the anarcho-communist and syndicalist groups—it offers a ringside seat to the legacy of the First International, the upheaval of the Russian Revolution and subsequent Bolshevik treachery, as well as the fight against fascism. Includes an introduction by archivist and historian Barry Pateman. David Berry teaches French and politics at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom. He is the reviews editor of Anarchist Studies and on the editorial committee of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies . He is a member of the Centre International de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme and the Association for the Study of Modern & Contemporary France.

Genres: History, France

348 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Michael Schmidt · Rating 5 out of 5]

To an English-speaking outsider, the French anarchist movement - as distinct from the Francophone anarchist movement in North Africa, Vietnam, etc - is often viewed as the "mother" movement because of the massive CGT union federation which, under anarchist sway, amalgamated with the local Bourses du Travail in 1895, establishing an "apolitical" model of mass anarchosyndicalism that was replicated in Fracophile countries such as Poland and most of Europe and lands as far away as Brazil, Egypt and Senegal.

The French movement proved to be one of the largest, most influential and most durable of all anarchist movements; and apart from its suppression for four years during the Vichy era, it has operated uninterrupted from its rise in the trade unions of the First International in 1868 until today, where it still maintains a 24-hour radio station, several small anarchosyndicalist unions, research institutes, publishing houses, and a significant interlocking set of counter-cultural networks.

So for a French-speaker, seen from within, the movement while no longer hegemonic in the French labour movement as it was from 1895-1920, can even today provide a totally immersive socio-political experience. Which for a researcher often makes it difficult to see the wood for the trees. What makes the task more difficult is that the movement fragmented in 1920 and subsequently, faced with the prestige of post-1917 Bolshevism, so keeping an eye on *all* the different factional organisational responses to that is rare.

Berry's huge achievement is to provide a really holistic view of the fragmenting movement as it met the triple threat of reformism (the CGT at its peak in 1920 had 2,46-million members, larger than the famous Spanish CNT during the Spanish Revolution - but it was largely white-collar, very removed from its blue-collar origins), Bolshevism, and French fascism and Nazism.

While a majority of "pragmatic" apolitical syndicalists were happy to form an opposition within the reformist (including Bolshevik) union centres, in a self-defeating strategy, the explicitly revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist minority kept splitting away from these centres to form ever smaller purist federations, while alongside this, the "political" anarchist organisations grappled with the erosion of the mass movement's industrial base, resulting in some bitter schisms, especially between the tightly-organised "platformists" and the pluralistic "synthesists", a lively division that continues to this day.

The fragmentation of the movement also meant very different responses to crucial issues such as how to engage with the French ultra-right, the Spanish Revolution, and the Algerian liberation movement, with the platformists being for direct combat and the synthesists largely for critical support. Berry also does not shy away from the troubling question of those few anarchist individuals who collaborated with or were compromised by Vichy.

But Berry's greatest contribution to our understanding of French revolutionary politics of the interwar years regards the forgotten tradition of French Sovietism, a mass movement that tends to be overlooked by students of sovietism (council communism) in other areas such as Italy, Germany, Hungary, and even Britain. The movement had its roots in the hardline anarchocommunist and anarchosyndicalist resistance to the militarism of WWI, and flowered in May 1919 with the establishment of an anarchocommunist Parti Comuniste (PC). If this seems strange, bear in mind that similar anti-statist, anti-parliamentary, anti-authoritarian (and thus non-Bolshevik) PCs were established in the same period in Britain, Brazil, Portugal, South Africa, and arguably in Czechoslovakia and Vietnam, in each instance predating the "official" PCs.

The PC established rank-and-file networks within the CGT which lead to an Autonomous Regional Soviet appearing in Paris and holding a congress in December 1919 at which 35 such soviets from the capital and other parts of France were represented, defeating the Leninist line and reaffirming libertarian sovietism. This resulted in the formation of the Communist Federation of Soviets (FCS), with le Soviet (The Soviet) as its fortnightly mouthpiece. As Berry explains, the FCS was structured on workplace workers’ councils, which together with communities were represented in local soviets, which in turn were represented at regional soviets, with the overarching policy-making body being a congress of soviets to which only workers’ councils and local soviets sent delegations. Sadly, the FCS declined in 1921 with the founding of the official PC, whose members were mostly drawn from organisations to the right of the FCS such as the Socialist Party. Favourable revolutionary conditions would not appear in France again until 1968, by which time anarchism/syndicalism was a still-virile, yet fringe movement.

Berry's book is a crucial text for students not just of the anarchist / syndicalist / council communist movements, but of interwar French politics and unionism more broadly. I hope he follows it up with a book on the denouement of the post-war French anarchist movement to the current day.

[Dimitrii Ivanov · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is based on a dissertation analysing French anarchist movement's reaction to the Russian and Spanish revolutions. This means that the arguments and evidence are presented in a systematic and clear way. But that also means that the text, heavy on abbreviated names of organisations and figures of newspaper circulation, is a little dry. Also, the emphasis means that the period of 1924-1934 is covered in a single 11-page chapter. But there is a wealth of material culled from a variety of periodical and archival sources, even interviews with eyewitnesses. The author clearly knows much more than the book contains (some of the more interesting stories, like the death of Daudet, are relegated to footnotes) but had to select to adhere to the study's focus. Informative and reliable.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Berry focuses on the interplay between the French Anarchists and the labor movement, which helped form the Anarchosyndicalist fusion that spread beyond its borders rapidly. Beforehand, Berry argues, you were a syndicalist and/or an anarchist, but the two ideologies were largely seen as separate focuses and strategies, though not necessarily separate ideologies. While Berry looks to the overall involvement of Anarchists and Revolutionary Syndicalists in the CGT (the largest French labor federation), he focuses on the interwar period, when Anarchosyndicalists competed with Bolsheviks and Social Democrats for leadership of the French labor movement. Following the leadership of the CGT embracing the war mobilization and the failure of Anarchists to oppose the war effort in any realistic manner, the Anarchists and Revolutionary Syndicalist sought to capture control of the CGT. While Anarchists had initially been supportive of the Bolsheviks in Russia, they quickly became fiercely opposed as news leaked of executions and jailings of Russian Anarchists and council communists (whose French supporters were Sovietists). After a series of splits in the CGT, Berry details the constant infighting between the left in the 1920s, which hurt the ability of the broader socialist left to organize. It was only with the Popular Front did the left unite in common struggle, though with tensions boiling below the surface. The Spanish Civil War also quickly led to boiling points as Anarchists believed that the CGT moved too slowly to help their comrades in the CNT-FAI, and they sought to organize relief supplies as well as sending volunteers to fight, even as the Blum government sought to shut down aid into Republican Spain. The split further caused fissions as the Stalinist betrayal of their anarchist allies in Spain became apparent and was played out within the Popular Front in France. When the Nazis took over France, the anarchists went underground and were key figures in the resistance (though a few collaborated.) The book is a fascinating look at the battles of the Old Left that seemed to take an even more heavily factional/sectarian character in the French left than it did elsewhere.
Key Themes and Concepts
-Berry argues that Marxist-Leninist rivals have largely slandered Anarchist history as a result of the Anarchist critiques of their crimes, written off as “excesses”.
-France is where revolutionary syndicalism and anarchism first develop as distinct ideologies, which later fuses. The term Anarcho-syndicalist was meant as an insult by Bolshevik supporter since Syndicalists and Anarchists seemed to be close allies, but it became embraced as a term.
-The Russian and Spanish Revolutions caused crises within the French left.