Sex, Violence, and the Avant-Garde: Anarchism in Interwar France (review)

In 1923, a young anarchist named Germaine Berton shot the right-winger Marius Plateau five times at point blank range in his Paris office but was acquitted on the grounds of a "crime passionel." This extraordinary judgment sets up Richard Sonn's intricate study of interwar anarchism in France, which addresses the diffuse aftermath of the great wave of anarchist revolt that crested in the decade after the fin-de-siècle, the subject of his previous study.¹ In an opening section titled "Anarchist Bodies," Sonn uses Berton's unwitting exposure of France's paradoxically sentimental and repressive legal attitudes to women as a catalyst for a multi-faceted analysis of anarchist debates on the body, sexuality, and family relations. He examines the embodied relations of anarchists and the state through the Berton story and the contingent demise of Philippe Daudet, a teenage anarchist and son of her intended victim, Léon Daudet, the editor of Action-Française (officially a suicide, Daudet was possibly shot by police who subsequently placed his body in a taxi). In interpreting these violent events, Sonn amasses multiple primary sources, from press coverage of the trials to anarchist periodicals, and reveals a distinct gift for combining intelligent commentary and narrative clarity. At times, the text matches the bristling pace of crime reportage as we closely follow the protagonists through the fateful days of their respective acts. Sonn pitches Berton and Daudet's cases against a chorus of anarchist voices on the politics of the body, often finding that whilst celebrating free love and nudism and decrying marriage the, for the most part male, anarchists of the period were not necessarily generous towards feminism and sometimes proved their animosity to the bourgeois family model merely by abandoning their own children. In shaping this clamor into a coherent discursive analysis, Sonn is non-judgmental about these figures and, despite worrying in "Epilogue: the Renewal of Anarchism" that he is swayed by his own political sympathies, retains a commendable degree of objectivity in sifting through the myriad utterances of these assembled radicals, revolutionaries, pacifists, free-thinkers, cranks, and contrarians.

The second part of the book is somewhat shorter, but, conversely, takes a more expansive look at the increasingly antipathetic relationship of the anarchists with the Soviet Union and United States, the transnational shifts of anarchist ideas, and ideological changes in individual anarchist lives. In "Facing East," Sonn skillfully gathers together anarchist views on Russia, in general typified by growing disillusionment with the seeming turn of the Soviet experiment towards state capitalism, and the impact of the influx of Russians into France, to form a rich treatment of the racial determinates of interwar political discourse that tars members of the left and right alike with anti-Semitism. In "Facing West," Sonn moves on to a discussion of anarchist responses to the Sacco and Vanzetti affair—the controversial 1927 execution of two Italian-American anarchists convicted, on the basis of inconclusive evidence, of the murder of a paymaster and guard in Braintree, Massachusetts. Sonn makes the surprising juxtaposition of this case with the fanfare of "américanisme" surrounding Charles Lindbergh's epochal solo trans-Atlantic flight in May 1927, successfully drawing into a single account disparate topics such as the wave of bombings that followed the execution, anarchist abhorrence of America, the culture of early aviation, and the famous airman's later dramatic conversion to fascism. Race is the implicit theme of "Part II" as Sonn discusses how anarchists often walked a dangerous line with population control theories, such as "neo-Malthusianism," that overlapped dubiously with the Nazi espousal of eugenics.

Sonn is strongest when filleting primary sources to identify shifting ideological positions and detailing the splendidly diverse biographies of the anarchists. I find his analysis of the avant-garde less convincing. For avant-garde, Sonn primarily means the surrealists, who dallied with anarchism before attempting to graft their transgressive poetics onto the revolutionary praxis...