Abstract

World War I was a time of acute crisis for the French anarchist movement. At its outset, a number of prominent anarchists turned their backs on the movement’s revolutionary politics and advocated for the defense of France against foreign invasion. Once the war was over, the rapid growth of the Partie Communiste Française installed Marxism Leninism as the dominant political discourse on the Left. In this article I examine one response to these developments: the small-run periodicals issued during and immediately following the war, where anarchist-individualist notions of “cerebral revolt”—that is, revolutionary actions founded not on insurrection, but on active and nonviolent efforts to undermine authoritarianism through individual and subversive intellectual pursuits—found particularly fertile ground.

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