La Littérature de l’anarchisme: anarchistes de lettres et lettrés face à l’anarchisme by Vittorio Frigerio (review)

It is a well-worn cliché that Stéphane Mallarmé subscribed to the anarchist journal Les Temps nouveaux and that his abstruse poems could be construed as ‘bombs’ thrown at the literary establishment. However, in this admirable book Vittorio Frigerio points out that Mallarmé’s libertarian contemporaries attacked him precisely because of his ivory-tower poetics. Frigerio then turns his attention to much more important matters, painting a rich fresco of both anarchist literature and literary representations of anarchists. Anarchist writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took many forms: poetry, short story, novel. It was published in book and feuilleton form, and adopted realism and naturalism as well as science fiction. It was both anti- and pro-intellectual, violent and pacifist, promoted l’amour libre, and, it must be said, a rather idealized image of women. The fears and fantasies provoked by la terreur noire explain the disparaging representations of anarchists in the work of Henry de Montherlant, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, and Anatole France. In Le Château des brouillards Roland Dorgelès, by imagining the deflowering of la vierge rouge, Louise Michel, seems to conquer his attraction to a libertarian philosophy he finds sympathetic but doomed. A common motif on both sides of the divide is that of the anarchist as savage or prehistoric man. Jean Grave happily assumes his ‘barbaric’ status, while Emilio Salgari, in his remarkable novel Les Merveilles de l’an deux mille, imagines his characters meeting a colony of indomitable anarchists at the North Pole; these ‘savages’ are in fact superior to the decadent, violent, and cowed human beings they have encountered elsewhere on the planet. But the ‘prehistoric’ nature of the anarchists implies their ultimate and inevitable defeat at the hands of capitalist modernity. As Frigerio points out with undisguised melancholy, who today has heard of Henri Rainaldy or Brutus Mercereau or Fernand Kolney? This excellent exhumation of anarchist literature is a reminder of the ephemeral nature of many movements and writers.