Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's Guerre sociale: Art, Anarchism and Anti-Militarism in Paris and London, 1910–1915

In his recent biography of the modernist sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska [Fig. 1], Paul O'Keeffe points to a puzzle that continues to baffle historians: what compelling change in perspective would cause a self-declared anti-militarist—whose principled opposition to the French army remained steadfast at least until Spring 1913—to enthusiastically volunteer for service when war broke out in early August 1914?¹ Having moved to London from Paris in January 1911, Gaudier-Brzeska rose to prominence after exhibiting his sculpture at the July 1913 Allied Artists Association exhibition; he then befriended the poet Ezra Pound and, in 1914, became a founding member of the English Vorticists. Gaudier contributed a manifesto to the Vorticist's journal Blast in June 1914 and following his voluntary enlistment in the French army he published a second manifesto written while in the trenches in the July 1915 issue of Blast. The second edition of Blast also included a brief notice, titled "Mort pour la patrie," stating that Gaudier-Brzeska had been killed on June 5, 1915 "after a month of fighting and two promotions for gallantry."²

Gaudier-Brzeska's dramatic shift from ardent anti-militarist to an enthusiastic wartime combatant seems all the more perplexing given his pre-war commitment to anarchism and the role played by the anti-militarist, anarchist-oriented journals La Guerre sociale (1906–1915) and Les Hommes du jour (1908–1923) in his ideological development from Spring 1910 onward.³ Of these two journals it is La Guerre sociale that has attracted the attention of Gaudier-Brzeska's biographers: for instance, O'Keeffe, Evelyn Silber, and Roger Secrétain describe the anti-militarism espoused by La Guerre sociale's founder Gustave Hervé (1871–1944) as the cornerstone for Gaudier's anarchist beliefs and for his refusal, in October 1912, to fulfill his military service, which was mandatory for all French males upon their 21st birthday.⁴

Fig. 1.

Henri-Gaudier Brzeska in his Studio, mid-1914. Photograph by Walter Benington.

In this essay, I will study Gaudier-Brzeska's French activist roots in greater detail to examine how various types of violence, culled from the spheres of politics, ideology, and popular culture, helped shape Gaudier's life and art from 1910 to his death in 1915. In so doing, I will show how Gaudier's political formation in France and England was filtered through his ongoing exposure to La Guerre sociale and Les Hommes du jour. In contrast to O'Keeffe, who reduces Gaudier-Brzeska's ideological development to a series of fragmented episodes without internal coherence, or Secrétain, who attributes Gaudier-Brzeska's abrupt transition from French anarchist to French patriot to the pernicious influence, in 1913–14, of the English triumvirate T.E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound, I would argue that the sculptor's ideological transformation in England was the legacy of his French radicalism.⁵ While the scholarship on the cultural 137 politics of the Vorticists Hulme, Lewis, and Pound is substantial, that on Gaudier-Brzeska remains scant aside from the writing of his biographers. Literary scholars have tended to consider only Gaudier's Vorticist phase, and even then he has been treated as a kind of passive muse for the politicized art criticism of his Vorticist colleagues.⁶ By considering the profound impact of French anarchism on Gaudier-Brzeska's art and activism, I hope to rectify this situation and to further enrich our understanding of Gaudier's unique role in the cultural politics of English modernism.

Gaudier's ongoing interest in anarchism led him to endorse aestheticized violence as a form of resistance to the punitive force of the State, whether in the guise of judicial sentencing, police repression, or compulsory service in the French military. In the artistic realm, Gaudier explored the medium of caricature as well as highly sexualized imagery as a visual counterpart to his oppositional politics, and self-styled status as a working-class bohemian who mocked the moral codes and values...