Cerebral Revolt: French Anarchist-Individualism in Print,

1914–1922

Theresa Papanikolas

The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, Volume 4, Number 2, 2013, pp.

226-244 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/537639

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 cerebral revolt: french anarchist-individualism
in print, 1914–1922

Theresa Papanikolas

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 authori-
tarianism through individual and subversive intellectual pursuits—found par-
ticularly fertile ground.

keywords: France, Anarchism, Anarchist-individualism, Periodicals, Anti­

authoritarianism, Cerebral revolt

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.1 In this article I examine one

journal of modern periodical studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2013

Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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 theresa papanikolas    227

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 insurrec-
tion, but on active and nonviolent efforts to undermine authoritarianism
through individual and subversive intellectual pursuits—found particularly
fertile ground.
As early as 1915 clandestine anarchist pamphlets and tracts began to
emerge in France to give voice to antimilitarism, anti-authoritarianism, and
antistatism, circumventing the state censors adjudicating the contents of the
main anarchist-communist newspapers Les Temps nouveaux (1895–1915)
and Le Libertaire (1892 –1915; resumed publication in 1919), as well as
the demise of the anarchist-individualist newspaper L’Anarchie (1915).2
Recognizing no compromise between antiauthoritarianism and a funda-
mentally nationalist war, these publications and their authors called for a
hasty end to the conflict. “If it was not in our power to prevent the calamity,”
wrote Le Libertaire editor Sébastien Faure in the ephemeral La Trève des ­peuple
(1915), “let us push ourselves at least to stop its disastrous consequences as
early as possible”; to this end, he urged anarchists, syndicalists, socialists,
and pacifists worldwide to halt military operations with a general strike.3
Faure’s call for an international anarchist alliance was echoed by associates
of the defunct Les Temps nouveaux, who, in an open letter to all European
anarchists, called for a “worldwide congress of the proletariat whose first
[priority] will be to bring about the end of the hostilities and the immediate
disarmament of nations.”4 Their antinationalism was shared by anarchist-
individualists such as Emile Armand, who proclaimed himself “without
fatherland, without flag, without frontier, without religion, without ideals”
and systematically denounced both military and nationalist systems.5
Antinationalist and antibourgeois propaganda so energized the war-
time anarchist movement that, by 1916, the anarchist-communist Faure
perceived there was enough support for such a campaign to launch the
weekly Ce qu’il faut dire (1916 –17), and Armand had established his own
anarchist-individualist counterpart, Par delà de la mêlée (1916 –18).6 By the
war’s end, both Faure and Armand were in prison, but their anarchism
lived on when, in 1918, Pierre Chardon revived Par delà de la mêlée under
the shortened title La Mêlée; and Le Libertaire resumed publication the fol-
lowing year.7 No longer subject to wartime repression after the Armistice,
French anarchism split into factions, for while its communist, syndicalist,
and “Soviet” (taking inspiration from workers’ councils in Russia) branches

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were temporarily heartened by the example of the Russian Revolution of

1918, its individualist wing denounced revolution altogether and instead
charted a different course that grounded social change in the transforma-
tion of the human intellect.8
The anarchist-individualist movement had developed at the turn of
the century under the influence of Max Stirner’s radical and unapologetic
egoism, and it was later transformed in response to Friederich Nietzsche’s
critique of ideological institutions in the name of “will to power.”9 At its
core was an intense aversion to all authority—not only the official author-
ity of, as Armand put it, the “title and teaching furnished by the State and
that dispensed by the Church,” but also “of any regime, of any system of
social life, of any state of things implying domination of man or milieu
over the ­individual.”10 Far from directing their wrath exclusively at the des-
potic leaders of oppressive regimes, the anarchist-individualists believed
that all political and cultural systems compromised the uniqueness of
the individual; therefore, they denounced even “civilization itself,” which
“dresses all beings uniformly, enslaves them more and more, mechanizes
them, matriculates them to excess.”11 Efforts to end such homogenizing
“matriculation” led them to reject all social collectives in favor of voluntary
associations of ideologically unique beings, whose diversity, as the theorist
H. L. Follin explained, would be preserved in a harmonious “natural order”:
“Classes? There are no classes. There are categories, however unstable, of
individuals, whose conditions of existence vary . . . while holding to, in the
natural order, an always-lesser relative inequality and an absolute inequal-
ity, that is to say an always waxing diversity.”12
Before its wartime censure, the broadsheet L’Anarchie (1905–14) had
operated as the locus of a radical anarchist-individualist core that included
the journal’s founder, Albert Libertad, its future editors Armand and André
Lorulot, as well as Jean Marestan, “Mauricius” (Maurice Vandamme), and
Victor Serge,13 all of whom called for the empowerment of each individual
to, like the Stirnerist egoist, live a life of “ownness.”14 By 1913 this original
group had been joined by other anarchist theorists who, in a growing num-
ber of small and often ephemeral periodicals, likewise drew impetus from
Stirner’s philosophy. Among them were André Colomer, whose l’Action d’art
(1913) sought to merge anarchist-individualism with the Bergsonian concept
of artistic liberation; and Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers, who drew on anarchist-
individualism to envision a revolutionary “artistocratie.” During and after
the war, anarchist-individualism continued to proliferate in print. Among
its leading theorists were the Stirnerists Armand (a ­frequent ­contributor

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to L’Anarchie [1905–14] and L’En dehors [1922 –39] who rejected the notion
of fighting for a future society in favor of a philosophy based on revolu-
tionizing the here and now) and Pierre Chardon (an extreme antimilitarist
who, with Armand, published the antiwar periodical Par delà de la mêlée
[1916 –18] and its post–World War I incarnation, La Mêlée [1918 –20]), and
the Nietzscheans Florent Fels (an art critic whose anarchist-­individualist
philosophy was solidified following his devastating experience in ­combat
and deployed in his review Action: Cahiers individualistes de philosophie
et d’art [1919 –22]) and Marcel Sauvage (editor of La Mêlée [1918 –20]).
Though their theories vary in subtle ways, they all sought to shatter not only
Statist authority, but all systems or dogmas that compromised the unique-
ness of the individual.
In their articles and polemics the anarchist-individualists framed their
philosophy in terms of the failure of anarchist-communism. For them, the
communitarian politics of Petr Kropotkin and his modern-day follower
Sébastien Faure amounted to little more than a dangerous authoritarian sys-
tem and a particularly sinister threat to individualism because its elevation
of “the economic question above the moral question, the problems of labor
above the circumstances of liberty,” amounted to little more than danger-
ous political dogma.15 “You Sébastien are still a politician,” wrote “Surval”
(André du Bief, editor of the “antidadaist” publication NON) of the anar-
chist-communist Faure, and he denounced this throwback to “anarchy’s
past heroic days” as “a citizen, a comrade [with] a fatherland and a dogma,
a faith and an ideal.”16 Seeking an alternative to the anarchist-communist
principles of shared labor and community property, Armand located “the
essential guarantee of the autonomy of the individual” in the private “own-
ership of the means of production and the free disposition of the product,”
thereby advocating the individual’s right to possess property and engage in
free economic exchange.17 Ultimately, the anarchist-­individualist economic
program was designed on the federalist—rather than on the communist—
model, because it “imposed no obligation on the contracting parties other
than what results from their personal promise” and therefore addressed
the needs of each individual much more effectively—and fairly—than any
“exterior authority.”18
As I have noted, the individualists’ opposition to the collectivist aspects
of anarchism extended beyond the cooperative nature of communism to
include even the principle of revolution. Of course, anarchist-individualists
would have been the first to admit that the very basis of anarchism was
its spirit of revolt, but they argued that organized mass-based revolutions

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are inevitably orchestrated by a handful of leaders and thus every bit as

­authoritarian as any militarist enterprise. “Let it be understood,” wrote
Chardon in La Mêlée:

We are not among those who oppose revolt. The anarchist . . . is dis-
satisfied, and the spirit of dissatisfaction, of social nonconformism
is the basis of the revolutionary spirit. But there is an enormous
difference between [this and] conscious, desired, reasoned revolt.
Moreover, if we know that “strength remains the great midwife of
societies,” the full story of terrible repressions, of implacable reac-
tions, of “white terrors,” of military dictatorships . . . invites us to
mistrust mass movements, which are driven to disaster by insuffi-
cient preparation.19

The inevitable “terrible repression” of all revolutions was confirmed, as far

as Chardon was concerned, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, in
which the “dictatorship of the proletariat” had proven to be little more than
a communist system that, for Chardon, inspired “no more confidence than
the dictatorship exercised by the bourgeoisie.”20
Yet despite Chardon’s insistence that the conclusion to the Russian
Revolution offered proof of the authoritarianism lurking in all mass-based
revolutionary programs, the anarchist-individualists were nevertheless dis-
mayed to discover that their fellow anarchists—syndicalist, “Sovietist,” and
communist—not only supported that revolution (to varying degrees) but
continued to uphold organized revolution as a viable means of eliminating
the state. Such a violent and destructive plan to “carry the Revolution into
the palaces, banks [and] factories,” was, for the anarchist-individualists,
unthinkable, and they therefore filled their journals, magazines, and tracts
with incitements against authority in terms of the radical transformation
of human consciousness at the level of the individual intellect.21 As André
Lorulot pointed out:

Exploitation and tyranny . . . can only disappear by the development

of conscience. If the masses remain stupefied and ignorant, they
will be the prey of oligarchies and aristocracies, under whatever
regime. . . . All evil can only disappear by an interior action of the
individual. Exterior intervention can only give ephemeral and insuf-
ficient results. True reform must come from the depths and must
be the work of the individual himself, of his will, of his reflections,

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of his studies and of his prolonged efforts. All the rest is chimera —
or politics.22

As a counterpoint to collective, revolutionary, anarchist, and individu-

alist philosophies in all of their forms, Lorulot and his fellow anarchist-
individualist theorists found it necessary to specify what made their view
uniquely “accessible to the most elevated brains.” This separatism was
expressed in an editorial statement for L’Un (1920), which, in 1920, had
replaced La Mêlée as the leading anarchist-individualist journal:

Our individualism—libertarian but eclectic—has until the present

kept its contours vague enough. Its entity is badly defined. It is all too
often confused with doctrines that have nothing to do with individu-
alism, nothing to do with anarchism. It will thus be necessary to . . .
delineate neatly the boundaries in such a way that they contain all that
is specifically ours, only that.23

According to Sauvage, this principled exclusivism was the only way to win
the “struggle with the milieu that oppresses [us and] with all authority that
[paralyzes individual] expansion,” for it allowed for the gradual propagation
of anarchist ideals through “the search for . . . interior harmony” and the
consistent cultivation of an individualist attitude:

I think that the propaganda of my ideas is, along with the education
of individuals, the best of arms. By propaganda I don’t mean a defor-
mation of our conceptions to the usage of brave people and of imbe-
ciles, I do not mean a section of scholarly manuals, nor a sacrifice to
a new idol, but . . . the sustained development . . . of our conscious
personalities, our tastes and our tendencies.24

For the theorist J. L. Delvy, such an evolutionary development of unique

­personalities would be much more effective in bringing about social change
than revolutionary upheaval could ever hope to be. “I am an educationist
and thus antirevolutionary,” he proclaimed:

Abrupt transformations . . . only carry with them [superficial and

temporary] exterior transformations in individuals. . . . Let us trans-
form bodies, minds, wills in order to transform milieus; if the milieus
change in a rational sense, let us reinforce [this] through education

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[and] action on mentalities. But let us not forget that essential reform
is the reform of the self.25

In their effort to overcome dogma, educate the masses, and thus

empower all individuals, the anarchist-individualists necessarily steered
clear of the voting booths and legislative chambers of the mainstream
political arena. Again, they took up their pens, composing manifestoes
and polemics targeted at writers, artists, and intellectuals who for them
epitomized unwavering individualism. “Our call goes out to you [young
intellectuals],” exclaimed Sauvage in 1919, “you whose mission will be
truly civilizing insofar as you have been sincere, or you have been yourself,
disengaged from all lies and from all dogmas, you who must work freely
outside of any chapel.”26 For the anarchist-individualists, “creative” people
such as themselves were both entitled and obligated to operate exclusively
according to their own interior agendas. “Let artists live the revolution,”
wrote the critic Genold,

their hands full of beautiful works, their hearts full of love, no one
wishes for this more ardently than me. But do not demand from
them that they do anything other than what they are. Let the poet
sing, let the painter [and] the sculptor work, take their works but do
not demand that they work “for you” [as] it is for themselves that they
create, as it is for himself that the bird sings.27

The most coherent postwar articulation of the anarchist significance

of complete creative freedom came from the critic Florent Fels, who, in
his ­frequent writings for La Mêlée, L’Un, l’Action d’art, and numerous
other reviews, located intellectual anarchism in the personal liberation
implicit in artistic and poetic avant-gardism. “Parallel to the philosophi-
cal liberation from old idols,” observed Fels in the second number of
La Mêlée (1918), “literary youth withdrew abruptly from the coffers of a
restricted tradition.”28 Indeed, these poets, as he later explained, became
uncompromising enemies of narrative and structural conformity, and
they denounced descriptive representation in favor of direct and original
creation: “Modern poetry, in reaction against all attempts at the scien-
tific explanation of the world, affirms itself as antididactic, the enemy of
declamation, of description, of symbols, of the great imperatives and of
what is traditionally the poetic expression of the mind.”29 Their refusal
to “bow in servitude to rhyme, to the old clichés of meter and form,”

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led “modern poets” into the more “useful action . . . [of ] permitting the
direct ­evocation of images . . . of active energy [and] will to power” and
thus to attain the natural psychic state necessary for generating new
ideas and forms.30 “The true artist is always above nature, he goes higher,
he spiritualizes, and there is no true art without creation,” Fels wrote:

Any man who has the faculty to transport himself . . . from the sensi-
bility of the apparent world to the world of the dream is a poet. There
is no effect of will, but really a psychological phenomenon, whose
subject is, so to speak, irresponsible; it is a gift. Happy actions born
of enthusiasm, that possess neither rules nor laws. . . . the work of art
is in its turn a generator of ideas.31

While creative individualism would unleash the poet’s “lyric aptitude

(Dionysian drunkenness),” it also required clarity of expression.32 Indeed,
Fels explained, the literary “ensemble of happy dispositions” must form a
“harmony which is . . . the result of a sane temperament,” and uncompro-
mising individualism thus must be balanced by the rationalism necessary
for giving unbridled emotions tangible significance:

This sort of exaltation, which one can call the lyric state, has until
now only been placed in the service of the direct evocation of a plastic
vision, tending to evoke lines, contours, an atmosphere, but not to
create in the mind of the reader a precise emotion felt by the artist, at
the moment when, animated by this faculty, it is possible for him to
MAKE THE POINT.33

Fels’s theory of creative autonomy balanced by expressive rationalism

dovetailed with the anarchist-individualist ideal of a society based on “own-
ness”: by attaining and expressing particular “psychic and intellectual dis-
positions,” the poet would be able to recognize “the sensory differences that
create individualities” and thus respect the individualism of others even
while “being oneself.”34 His Stirnerist endorsement of literary innovation
gained in an anarchist focus is demonstrated in an open letter to Chardon
for La Mêlée, which equated the development of the artistic personality with
more “practical” economic and social concerns:

Your individualism is attached above all to economic and ethical

research. Mine, to the affirmation of my literary personality. Yours, of

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an immediately practical interest, since it works toward bringing about

a  solution to the problems troubling human evolution; mine, more
speculative, since it lingers over showing the vices and the errors of
­outdated gestures and of this society.35

Ultimately, vocational divisions were of little revolutionary consequence for

Fels; much more important was that poets and economists exemplify the
overarching goal of individualist social change:

If we want to construct, if we want tomorrow to be more beautiful

than today, everyone must be sincere and specialized. Those who are
devoted to being individualists and libertarian must set the example
of their integrity. It is especially necessary to appear generous, to love
life, to search for the effort, to take the labor of others into account
with sincerity, and in place of narrow individualism, which is only
disguised egoism, offer the superior spectacle of individualism which
is called the human being.36

Yet, even as Fels aligned formal innovation with anarchist-­individualist

cerebral revolt, he revised the unqualified hatred for all authority that
Armand and Chardon had espoused. For Fels, universal liberation would
only come when the “strength of the masses” was “coordinated with a view
to attaining a nobler goal than the temporal satisfaction of immediate appe-
tites,”37 and this required “leaders” capable of promoting human reason
over mass brute strength:

I am in contradiction with Armand [who wishes to] “destroy radi-

cally the faith in leaders . . .” Without leaders, liberation will come
in a thousand years, by the sole fact of the transformation of human
activity.

...

Without leaders this mass will trample you, because it is human,

because between two weapons (one: the voice of conscience and of
reason, the other: Strength) it will crush the weakest: its conscience
and its reason.38

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Thus, for Fels, the exemplary and “superior spectacle of individualism”

would result not in universal “ownness” but in the intellectual transforma-
tion of an initiated elite, a privileged group of anarchist-individualists suf-
ficiently capable to lead the way to widespread individualism by example.
In concluding that truly individualist anarchism was the unique
privilege of an enlightened few, Fels articulates a shift in the anarchist-­
individualist movement away from the egalitarian egoism envisioned by the
Stirnerists Armand and Chardon in favor of the more aristocratic version of
individualism inspired by the theories of Nietzsche.39 Drawing on Stirner,
Nietzsche defined the individual as “something absolute [whose] acts are
entirely his own, [who] creates new things [and] ultimately . . . derives the
values of his acts from himself.”40 Yet whereas “egoism,” as Stirner had
envisioned it, was ultimately accessible to all willing participants, Nietzsche
identified the true practitioner of “individualism” as a “superman” capable
of rising above even the most equitable of “herds.” He wrote:

As the consumption of man and mankind becomes more and more

economical and the “machinery” of interests and services is inte-
grated ever more intricately, a counter-movement is inevitable. I des-
ignate this as the secretion of a luxury surplus of mankind: it aims
to bring to light a stronger species, a higher type that arises and
preserves itself under different conditions from those of the average
man. My concept, my metaphor for this type is, as one knows, the
word “overman.”41

Though Nietzsche’s philosophy was known in fin-de-siècle France, his

influence acquired momentum thanks in large part to the periodical Le
Mercure de France (1890 –1965), which by 1910 had issued translations of
most of his works and boasted its own Nietzschean critic: the philosopher
and sociologist Georges Palante.42 From 1911 until 1923, Palante published
regular “Chroniques de Nietzsche” on the pages of Le Mercure de France,
and in these and other critical works, he merged the idea of the “super-
man” with his own extreme individualism to develop an “aristocratic”
theory influential on anarchists like Fels.43 Directly countering Emile
Durkheim’s philosophy that individuals were only capable of flourishing in
a social context, Palante painted a grim picture of individuals victimized by
a “complicated system of . . . social relations” that perpetually subordinated

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intellectual diversity to its own, homogenizing needs.44 “Individualist [theo-

ries] oppose individuality to sociability,” he explained:

From this point of view, intelligence will be regarded as originally

individualized by the psychology of the individual; truth will consist
not in the unanimous consent of intelligences, but in the evidence of
individual intuition; one will admit the possibility of a certain intel-
lectual unsociability [and] refuse to put his scientific or philosophical
curiosity in the service of social ends. . . . For those adept at intellec-
tual individualism truth can be a simple means of logical or aesthetic
satisfaction, without necessary rapport with social ends.45

Palante also parted ways with many anarchist-individualists when he

denounced the “radical [and] intransigent” egoism of Stirner,46 point-
ing out that Stirner, in allowing “all egos to affirm their individuality,”
amounted to little more than a “democratic . . . leveler [who sought to]
abolish all scales of intellectual values,” and who thus resisted establish-
ing individualism as “the privilege of a few.”47 Insisting that hierarchical
divisions were an essential replacement for social homogenization, Palante
rejected Stirner’s theory of egoism in favor of Nietzsche’s concept of will
to power, and he envisioned a coalition of “aristocratic” supermen who,
“privileged in thought,” would impose their “personal mark on culture [by]
summarizing it, surpassing it, adding to it, bringing something new to the
world. . . . Individualism thus understood is a theory of invention and of
superior originality; a theory of progress, of increasing knowledge, of the
ennoblement of culture.”48
Palante would have been the first to admit that individual “cultural
ennoblement” required a principled authoritarianism that departed radi-
cally from anarchism; yet his contemporaries still found a way to incor-
porate aristocratic individualism into anarchist-individualist theory. And
just as they had published their critiques of anarchist-communism and
revolution, as well as their support of unfiltered creative freedom, they
articulated their anarchist interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy in print.
While many of these anarchist-individualists admired Palante’s critique of
conventional moral values and his individualist interpretation of the will
to power, they reinterpreted Nietzsche’s authoritarianism in ways that the
ever-nationalist Palante never had. Palante, for example, was not notice-
ably bothered by the potential for the individualist aristocrat to become a

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 theresa papanikolas    237

power-abusing despot; the theorist M. L. Lefort, in contrast, demonstrated

how “dominating despotism” could be balanced in the human psyche by an
equal and opposite “will to harmony”:

Man divides in two. . . . From the two individuals that he carries in

himself, one commands, the other must obey. He exercises over him-
self powerful coercions. The appetite for domination that he turns
against the World and his fellows, he turns against himself. . . . Such
is the Will to Harmony.49

The poet André du Bief, who edited the anarchist-individualist review

Le Pal and collaborated on the “individualist and antidadist” pamphlet NON
(1920), drew an even firmer distinction between the despot and the indi-
vidualist hero. The “monstrous superman,” he explained, was little more
than a “weak hero” who “prepares . . . [a] formidable means of conserving
his power” by drawing impetus not from himself but from the mass:

The Man who returns to the City incarnates with a dangerous supe-
riority the worst instincts of the mass, makes them his own, he is
the head of the mass incarnate whose every unit is no more than a
member interesting only for services rendered to the Chief. These
are the Caesarists, the Napoleons, the Bismarks, the Great Peril of
humanity.50

In contrast, the anarchist-individualist “hero . . . fights and dies” in the

name of personal views; “and from [this] struggle and [this] solitary death
sprouts a little bit of progress,” since “weaker” beings invariably become
transformed by the individualist example:

The Man, the Poet, the Hero is no longer for me a [colossal, mon-
strous] superman. It is a man [multiplied] to his naturally superior
degree . . . where he can see the other inferior men and, affected by
their weakness and by his solitude, form the generous desire to make
them similar to him.51

Fels, moreover, came right out and insisted that the “will to power” was
not a despotic trait at all but the privilege of any individual possessing
the strength to formulate a personal set of rules: “It has been said that

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Nietzsche’s doctrine was imperialist. This is false. Nietzsche did not want
one superman, but supermen. . . . One more time, there are no labels, no
‘classes.’ There are common interests.”52
Thus, even as Fels maintained that he and his colleagues identified “less
with what the world calls anarchy, than with [their own] will to more beauty
and order,” his reading of Nietzsche enabled him to claim that his prin-
cipled elitism was still “anarchist-individualism.”53 Like du Bief, he argued
that the individualist intellect—though necessarily willful—must never be
coercively imposed or enforced; indeed, the “hero” was only responsible for
demonstrating how an individualist existence could be achieved:

First, you must identify yourself. When you are certain of being able
to carry the word, take a man, enlighten him, then another. You are
no longer a unit, you are a force, but you remain individualist because
you are elevated by elevating your fellow. Do not say—Marx said—
Stirner said—say, I am certain of that. . . . Labels have no value.54

In his review for the 1920 Salon d’Automne, Fels spelled out how
his theory of creative heroism converged with anarchist-individualism.
Reminding his readers that the “true pioneers of future ages and of the
progress of the hero” were “philosophers and artists” like “Picasso, Derain,
and Braque,” he explained that this was so only because these “anarchists”
were able to “overturn our most definitive gifts of . . . aesthetics” and live by
laws of their own making.55 Drawing on Diderot, he elaborated:

To those who praise the antique tradition Diderot said: “and if antiq-
uity did not exist,” [thus] opposing to the dry affirmation of con-
tinuers, to those who copy copies, [his preference for] insurgents,
revolutionaries and anarchists, at least those who see with their eyes
and not by those of the masters. From their disorder comes order,
from these anarchists, new laws.56

“Alas,” lamented a disappointed Fels, “I saw no such anarchists at the

Grand Palais.”57
In February 1920 Sauvage and Fels launched the artistic and literary
review Action (1919 –22), thus bringing “artistocratic” anarchist activities
definitively into the cultural realm.58 Calling for “the collaboration of who-
ever desires to express his thought freely . . . [with the purpose of remain-
ing] outside of schools, tendencies and opinions,” Action published a broad

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 theresa papanikolas    239

range of poetry, fiction, criticism, and art.59 As a result, such Cubist ­critics
and poets as André Salmon, Albert Gleizes, Blaise Cendrars, and Jean
Cocteau rubbed literary elbows on Action’s pages with such Dadaists as
Benjamin Péret, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Philippe Soupault.
Moreover, treatises by the anarchist writers Renée Dunan and Han Ryner
appeared alongside articles on the Romantic novelist Stendhal.
Yet Action was far more than a free forum for writers and artists. Much
of the criticism published there promoted a wide range of individual-
ist ideas. Thus, the critic Gabriel Brunet denounced collectivity when he
praised the Stendhalien “hero” Julien Sorel for his principled “exaltation
of the personality . . . [in resistance to] the expropriation of the milieu” and
his dedication to being an “artisan of his own destiny” capable of separation
from the homogenous mass:

In [Stendhal’s] eyes [Julien Sorel] was the Hero, that is to say the man
who differentiates himself from the multitude, incarnating in himself
an exceptional and superior type of humanity, marches audaciously
towards life in order to conquer by high struggle the great destiny
dreamed of in the secret of his heart.60

Other contributors to Action formed a link between Brunet’s arguably

aristocratic interpretation of Stendhal and Fels’s anarchist-individualist
­theory of exemplary intellectual integrity by devoting particular attention to
the development of the artistic personality and its potential for societal trans-
formation. The critic Pol Michel, for example, describes German expres-
sionism as more than just a “bitter reaction” to the “blurred vague ether of
the prewar period [and] the mechanization . . . which . . . facilitated the erup-
tion of August 4, 1914”; for him, expressionism epitomized the unwavering
intellect necessary for the wholesale construction of a new society:

In the Trinitarian principle that . . . directs the tragic destiny of the

world, [the Expressionists] have played the part of the Holy Spirit. We
are witnessing an apotheosis of the brain, of intelligence that cre-
ates and produces, pushes and bears fruit, [and] from which springs,
incendiary and constructive, the elan vital.61

Like Michel, the British Stirnerist and suffragist Dora Marsden also
pointed out the societal importance of extreme individualism; for her, art-
ists and intellectuals could only bring about change by transcending “the

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 240      french anarchist-individualism in print, 1914 –1922

protective clichés of their circle” and giving “form and life to . . . ways of
being” through clear creative expression:

[If ] . . . art and philosophy [are to] . . . be recognized as the forces that
will fashion and mold the ensemble of human interests, there must
[first be] a movement in the ranks of philosophers and artists them-
selves. There must be a criterion that separates the real from appear-
ances. According to us, this proof is clarity.62

Marsden originally published her essay in the British periodical The Egoist;
that it was translated and reprinted in Action speaks to the close ties and
lines of communication that existed between anarchist-individualist groups
in England and in France at this time, as well as to Fels’s awareness that
he and his circle were part of an international network of likeminded expo-
nents of cerebral revolt.
Thus, anarchist-individualism emerged in turn-of-the-century France
as a wing of the broader anarchist movement, and it developed in the rhe-
torical domain of the numerous reviews, periodicals, newspapers, and
tracts that proliferated both publicly and underground in France during
and following World War I. As an antistatist alternative to Marxism and
a radically anti-authoritarian answer to anarchist-communism, anarchist-
individualism was rooted philosophically in the individualist component
that existed, in some form or another, in all anarchist theory, and it was
unique in offering a noncollective and anti-authoritarian version of anar-
chism based on Stirner’s extreme egoism and, later, Nietzsche’s concept of
will to power. Rejecting social change through violent mass revolution in
favor of intellectual development and education, anarchist-individualism,
as articulated in the writings of Fels, Chardon, Sauvage, Armand, and oth-
ers, located revolution in artistic innovation, and, inspired by Nietzsche,
mobilized artistic and poetic “supermen” to mold the nebulous, unenlight-
ened masses into a new, heroic humanity.

notes

1. Historians of anarchism for the most part conclude that these events spelled
a­ narchism’s demise in France. See especially George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of
Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1962), 324 –25; and
James Joll, The Anarchists (London: Eyre and Sppottiswoode, 1964). Jean Maitron offers sta-
tistical evidence for the decline in anarchist activity in wartime and postwar France by com-
paring the vast number of anarchist periodicals in existence before the war to the relative few

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 theresa papanikolas    241

that remained when the war ended; see Jean Maitron, Le Mouvement anarchiste en France: De
1914 à nos jours, vol. 2 of Le Mouvement anarchiste en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 125–28.
Richard Sonn argues that, while anarchism did provide a feasible alternative to socialism
on the eve of the war, by 1917, “the anarchists themselves had colluded with the French
state” and anarchism was thus obsolete; see Richard D. Sonn, Anarchism (New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1992), 62 – 64.
2. Nicolas Faucier, Pacifisme et antimilitarisme dans l’entre-deux-guerres (1919–1939)
(Paris : Spartacus, 1983), 38.
3. Sébastien Faure, La Trève des peuples (July 1915), cited in Faucier, Pacifisme et antimili-
tarisme, 39. This strike was to take place on the first anniversary of the outbreak of the war,
but it was not the first time Faure had called for a general strike. Faure also called for a gen-
eral strike in his earlier pamphlet, Vers la paix (January 1915), cited in Faucier, Pacifisme et
antimilitarisme, 39. For a brief account of Faure’s wartime activities, see Maitron, Mouvement
anarchiste, 2:10 –18.
4. From an open letter from the Les Temps nouveaux group to all European anarchists, 1915.
Cited in Faucier, Pacifisme et antimilitarisme, 38.
5. Emile Armand, L’Authéntique embusqué (1915), and La Guerre (August 1916), cited in
Emile Armand, Initiation anarchiste-individualiste (Paris: Editions de L’En dehors, 1923).
6. According to Faucier, Ce qu’il faut dire had two thousand subscribers and 22,000 copies
in circulation by its second year. See Faucier, Pacifisme et antimilitarisme, 38.
7. Chardon’s own antiwar tract, Les Anarchistes et la guerre: Deux attitudes, appeared in anar-
chist newspapers worldwide in 1915. See Maitron, Mouvement anarchiste, 2:12.
8. For a discussion of sovietism and its relationship to anarchism, see David Berry,
A  History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945, vol. 97 of Contributions to the Study
of History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002), esp. chap. 3, “‘Sovietism’ as Council
Anarchism.” Berry discusses the mainstream and “marginal” anarchist engagement with
sovietism in chaps. 4 and 5; in chap. 6, Berry elaborates on revolutionary critiques of soviet-
ism. For primary sources documenting anarchist-communist opposition to “Sovietism,” see
Peter Kropotkin, “Une Lettre de Pierre Kropotkin,” Les Temps Nouveaux, August 15, 1920,
trans. in Berry, History of the French Anarchist Movement, 97. In fact, many contributors to
Le Libertaire argued that a “sacred union” of all revolutionary tendencies—including the
French Communist Party—would be a formidable opponent to capitalism. See E. Haussard,
“L’Entente pour l’action,” Le Libertaire, February 1919, 1. The anarchists in France were espe-
cially disillusioned with the syndicalist alliance with Bolshevism since, during the prewar
period, most radical French syndicalists were sympathetic toward anarchism, if not self-
declared anarchist-syndicalists. The postwar rift played itself out on the pages of La Vie ouvrière
and Le Libertaire, where the Libertaire anarchists made known their opposition to Merrheim
and his support for Bolshevism and denounced both in an angry letter with twenty signatures,
which Monatte published in La Vie ouvrière; see Pierre Monatte, “Un paquet de linge salle,”
La Vie ouvrière, August 20, 1919, 1. The anarchist-individualists had always been outspoken
against syndicalism, but their critique came to include even the anarchist-communist Jean
Grave, for they felt that his newspaper, Les Temps nouveaux, had become positively biased
toward Marxism when it resumed publication in 1916; see Pierre Chardon, “Anarchisme
et Marxisme,” La Mêlée, October 1, 1918, 1. In Russia the conflict between anarchists and
the Communist Party in power went beyond the realm of heated debate. The activities of
such anarchists as Nestor Mahkno, who led a guerilla peasant movement against the tsar,
were essential to the success of the revolution. Afterward, however, the Communist govern-
ment systematically wiped out anarchism; see Joll, The Anarchists, 184. See also Michael Palij,
The Anarchism of Nestor Makhno, 1918–1921: An Aspect of the Ukrainian Revolution (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1976).
9. Nietzsche, in fact, drew upon Stirner for his own philosophy, and his popularity in
the 1890s revitalized interest in Stirner, who had fallen into obscurity after the first pub-
lication of Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum in 1844. For Stirner’s writings, see Max Stirner,
Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (1845), trans. Stephen T. Byington as The Ego and His Own
(New York: Boni and Liveright, Inc., 1918), all citations are from this translation unless
­otherwise noted; Woodcock, Anarchism, 94 –105; and Victor Basch, L’Individualist anarchiste:
Max Stirner (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1904). Byington, incidentally, was an American anarchist-
individualist whose views were highly influential in the French branch of the movement.
For Nietzsche, see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans.

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 242      french anarchist-individualism in print, 1914 –1922

Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968), and Thus Spake
Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1954). For Nietzsche’s
influence in France, see Douglas Smith, Transvaluations: Nietzsche in France, 1872–1972
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
10. Emile Armand, “Les idées de E. Armand,” “Enquête sur l’orientation du mouvement
anarchiste,” La Mêlée, March 15, 1919, 1. Though this statement comes from the postwar
period, it is really a compendium of excerpts from Armand’s prewar writings, since he was in
prison in 1919. His views changed little from the prewar to the postwar period. See especially
Petit manuel anarchiste-individualiste (Paris, 1911), Initiation anarchiste-individualiste, and Les
Ouvriers, les syndicats et les anarchistes (Verviers: Éditions de Germinal, 1910) where he formu-
lates an anarchist-individualist alternative to syndicalism aimed at the working class.
11. Pierre Chardon, “Libertaires, individualistes, éclectiques,” La Mêlée, March 15, 1919, 1.
Chardon, though he rose to prominence in the anarchist-individualist movement mainly in
the postwar period, was a devoted “follower” of Armand’s theories.
12. H. L. Follin, “Pourquoi nous ne sommes pas socialistes,” L’Ordre naturel, September 28,
1918, 1. See also “Contre quoi nous sommes: Tous les desordres politiques, anti-économiques,
intellectuels et moraux,” L’Ordre naturel, July 16, 1919, 1. Follin almost singlehandedly gener-
ated L’Ordre naturel. Although it was the so-called organ of the “Ligue de l’ordre naturel,”
which nominally included Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse, Follin wrote virtually all of
the articles for the newspaper himself. Though he shared the views of Armand, Lorulot, and
Chardon, his position in the anarchist-individualist movement is problematic since he sup-
ported American president Woodrow Wilson’s “peaceful” agenda for a postwar settlement,
believed a “dictator” could oversee the logistical aspects of the natural order, and drew inspira-
tion from liberal, laissez-faire economists like Herbert Spencer. His views are nonetheless
anarchist-individualist after a fashion, and, despite his idiosyncrasies, he was part of the
movement.
13. L’Anarchie was published from 1905 to 1914, and Victor Serge, who switched his alle-
giances to communism during the Russian Revolution, was an anarchist-individualist at
that time. For pre–World War I anarchist-individualism, see Woodcock, Anarchism; Maitron,
Mouvement anarchiste; and Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian
Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. chap. 5, “From Bergson to
Bonnot: Bergsonian Anarchism, Futurism and the Action d’Art group,” 135– 67.
14. Stirner, The Ego and His Own, 5. The “artistocracy” was elaborated in such reviews as
La Foire aux chimères (1907– 8), Les Actes des poètes (1908 –11), La Forge (1911), and Le Rhythme
(1911–12). For anarchist-individualism’s Bergsonian inflections, see Antliff, Inventing
Bergson, 135ff.
15. “Communisme et individualisme,” El Ombre, July 1918, reprinted in La Mêlée, October 1,
1918, 1.
16. Surval, “Lettre Ouverte à Sébastien Faure,” Le Pal, November 25, 1920, 1. That du Bief
identified NON as antidadaist speaks to the intense debates that existed at this time even
within individualist anarchist circles. As I argue in my book, Anarchism and the Advent of Paris
Dada: Art and Politics, 1914–1924 (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010), Dadaism in Paris operated
as one of many exponents of cerebral revolt: indirect conflict with du Bief, who found their
antics too scattershot, is indicative of this pluralism.
17. Emile Armand, “Idées.” See also Armand, Initiation anarchiste individualiste.
18. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, “Proudhon et l’idée de contract,” La Mêlée, April 1, 1918, 1
(excerpt from Proudhon, L’Idée générale de la révolution aux XIX siècle (Paris, 1951) [The General
Idea of Revolution]). In fact, though the anarchist-individualists had little to say about the mutu-
alist aspects of Proudhon’s theories, they did admire the individualist aspects of his economic
program. “What Is Property?” was translated by the American anarchist Benjamin Tucker,
who looked to Proudhon for his own economic solutions to capitalism; see also Benjamin
Tucker, Instead of a Book: From a Man too Busy to Write One (New York: Benjamin Tucker,
1893). Moreover, Proudhon’s “individualism” was analyzed extensively in La Mêlée. See John
Henry Mackay, “Les idées de Proudhon,” La Mêlée, March 15, 1918, 2; “Proudhon et l’idée
de contract,” La Mêlée, April 1, 1918; and Pierre Chardon, “Les Exploiteurs de Proudhon,”
La Mêlée, October 1, 1918, 1–2.
19. Pierre Chardon, “Sur la tactique révolutionnaire,” La Mêlée, April 15, 1919, 1.
20. Ibid.
21. Genold, “Et Demain . . . ,” Le Pal, October 1, 1920, 1.

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 theresa papanikolas    243

22. André Lorulot, L’Idole patrie et la guerre (Seine-et-Oise: Editions d’Idée libre, 1925), unpag.
Lorulot articulated his theory of cerebral revolt in his prewar tract L’Idole patrie; the postwar
version, cited here, was written in light of World War I and its aftermath.
23. “Aux Camarades,” L’Un, August 1920, 1. L’Un was a new, Nietzsche-inspired name
given to La Mêlée in 1920, and it reflects a transformation in this branch of the anarchist-­
individualist movement.
24. Ibid.
25. J.-L. Delvy, “Réponse de J.-L. Delvy,” La Mêlée, March 1–15, 1918, 1.
26. Marcel Sauvage, “Aux jeunes intellectuels,” La Mêlée, April 1, 1919, 1.
27. Genold, “Et demain . . . ,” 1. The emphasis is Genold’s.
28. Florent Fels, “L’Evolution de la jeune littéraire,” La Mêlée, April 1, 1918: 2.
29. Fels, “Une littérature d’avant-garde; l’esprit nouveau,” La Mêlée, November 1, 1919: 1.
30. Fels, “L’Evolution de la jeune littéraire,” 2.
31. Ibid.
32. Fels, “Littérature d’avant-garde,” 1.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Florent Fels, “Littérature et individualisme,” La Mêlée, July 1918, 1.
36. Ibid.
37. Florent Fels, “Notre enquête: Réponse de Florent Fels,” La Mêlée, June 1, 1919, 1.
38. Florent Fels, “Les Cahiers individualistes,” La Mêlée, August 15, 1919, 4. In this article,
Fels announced his plan to start an anarchist-individualist literary review, to be called Les
Cahiers individualistes. In February 1920, in collaboration with Sauvage, he published the first
issue of this review, now called Action.
39. As Antliff has demonstrated, this “artistocratie” developed in the prewar period among
avant-garde artists and writers associated with the anarchist-individualist review Action d’Art.
See Antliff, “Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism.” Christopher Forth also discusses the French lit-
erary avant-garde’s adoption of Nietzschean anarchist-individualism to lend credence to their
creative elitism in the prewar period; however, his focus is on the prewar period and he argues
that Nietzsche’s influence in anarchist circles diminished after the war. See Christopher Forth,
Zarathustra in Paris: The Nietzsche Vogue in France, 1891–1918 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 2001), 102 –7.
40. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Individual,” in The Will to Power, 403.
41. Nietzsche, “The Strong and the Weak, in ibid., 463.
42. In his introduction to Zarathustra in Paris, “Nietzsche and Cultural Reception,” 3–14,
Forth pinpoints how Nietzsche’s theories began circulating in France. He discusses Nietzsche
and Le Mercure de France in chap. 1, “The Avant-Garde Nietzsche Project,” 15– 44.
43. Palante’s “Chroniques” have been compiled and published as Combat pour l’individu, ed.
Michel Onfray (Paris: Editions Folle Avoine, 1989). For a study of Palante’s Nietzschean out-
look—particularly during his association with Le Mercure de France, see Michel Onfray, Georges
Palante: Essai sur un nietzschéen du gauche (Paris: Editions Folle Avoine, 1989).
44. Georges Palante, Les Antinomies entre l’individu et le société, ed. Michel Onfray (Paris:
Editions Folle Avoine, 1994), 13.
45. Ibid., 16.
46. For Palante’s views on anarchism, see “Anarchisme et individualisme,” in Georges
Palante, La Sensibilité individualiste, ed. Michel Onfray (Paris: Felix Alcan, Editeur, 1909).
47. Palante, Antinomies, 42, 46.
48. Ibid., 46 – 47.
49. M. L. Lefort, “Volonté de puissance et volonté d’harmonie,” L’Un, July 1920, 1.
50. André du Bief, “L’Heros et la cité,” L’Un, June 2 1920, 1. In du Bief’s view, the writer
Maurice Barrès was the “monstrous superman” incarnate. Though Barrès demonstrated
Stirnerist egoism in his early novels, his later works and political activities were increasingly
nationalistic and authoritarian. The Paris Dadaists shared Du Bief’s dismay at Barrès’s trajec-
tory, and they demonstrated this by charging him with “attacks on the security of the spirit”
and placing him on mock trial in 1921.
51. Ibid. The emphasis is du Bief’s.
52. Fels, “Notre enquête.”
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.

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55. Florent Fels, “La Peinture au salon d’automne,” Action 1 (October 1920): 62.
56. Ibid., 62.
57. Ibid., 65.
58. Action was the postwar incarnation of Action d’Art. For useful discussion of that journal
and the avant-garde artists who contributed to it and were associated with it, as well as of the
rise of anarchoindividualism in the pre–World War I period as an alternative to anarchist-
communism, see Antliff, “Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism.”
59. [Florent Fels], “A nos lecteurs,” Action 1 (April 1920): 53.
60. Gabriel Brunet, “La conception stendhalienne du heros: Julien Sorel,” Action 1 (February
1920): 1. All emphasis is Brunet’s.
61. Pol Michel, “Lettres allemands,” Action 1 (July 1920): 50 –51.
62. Dora Marsden, “Art et philosophie,” Action 1 (April 1920): 1–2, reprinted from The Egoist
(1920). On Dora Marsden’s anarchism, see Bruce Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism:
Gender, Individualism, Science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).

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