An often overlooked piece of Europe's anarchist history. Includes writings from Victor Serge and members of the Bonnot Gang. Mitch Abidor is a well-established translator of books related to French social history.

“Superb … A vivid account of one of the most compelling lives in modern revolutionary history” Maurice Casey, author of Hotel Lux“Abidor captures Serge in all his complexity” Bruce Baugh, Professor Emeritus, Thompson Rivers University“A fascinating and provocative biography” Geoffrey Kurtz, Associate Professor, Borough of Manhattan Community CollegeIdeological schisms have always been a feature of the left,...

On July 12, 1917, in the mining town of Bisbee Arizona, twelve hundred striking miners and their supporters were rounded up by forces organized by the town sheriff and the mining companies, marched through the town, parked in the town’s baseball field, and then put in boxcars and shipped into the New Mexican desert. The deportees were largely members or supporters of the radical IWW labor union and mostly foreign-born. The roundup and deportation was part of a xenophobic and anti-radical c...

When the Bastille was stormed on July 14, 1789, it wasn’t a crowd of breeches-wearing professionals that attacked the prison, freed the internees, and killed its superintendent, carrying off his head on a pike. It was the working people of Paris, who didn’t wear breeches, the sans-culottes. In the course of the French Revolution the sans-culottes questioned the economic system, the nature of property, the role and even the legitimacy of religion, and for the first time placed class relatio...

The Paris Commune of 1871, the first instance of a working-class seizure of power, has been subject to countless interpretations; reviled by its enemies as a murderous bacchanalia of the unwashed while praised by supporters as an exemplar of proletarian anarchism in action. As both a successful model to be imitated and as a devastating failure to be avoided. All of the interpretations are tendentious. Historians view the working class’s three-month rule through their own prism, distant in ...

Perhaps no period has so marked, so deformed, or so defined the anarchist movement as the three years in France from 1892 to 1894, the years known as the Age of Attentats, the years dominated by the Propagandists of the Deed.Death to Bourgeois Society tells the story of four young anarchists who were guillotined in France in the 1890s. Their courage was motivated by noble ideals whose realization they saw their bombs and assassinations as hastening. In a time of cynicism a...

When the Bastille was stormed on July 14, 1789, it wasn't a crowd of breeches-wearing professionals that attacked the prison, freed the internees, and killed its superintendent, carrying off his head on a pike. It was the working people of Paris, men who didn't wear breeches, the sans-culottes, who carried this out. In the course of the French Revolution the sans-culottes questioned the economic system, the nature of property, the role and even the existence of religion, and for the first ...

The mass protests that shook France in May 1968 were exciting, dangerous, creative and influential, changing European politics to this day. Students demonstrated, workers went on general strike, factories and universities were occupied. At the height of its fervour, it brought the entire national economy to a halt. The protests reached such a point that political leaders feared civil war or revolution.Fifty years later, here are the eye-opening oral testimonies of those young rebel...

“Men speak freely of the women they’ve had, and we’re condemned to silence. Why? Aren’t we as free as you? Don’t we, like you, have the right to take pleasure wherever we find it? . . . They praise seducers in art, poetry, and literature and put a mask of infamy on any woman who’s had many lovers. This is the point where the fight must be fought. Women’s morality must triumph, and that’s what I’m working at . . .”Thus Ariane, unconventional, irrepressible, and irre-sistible, at sev...

'Tantalizing prose' - TLSJean Jaurès was the celebrated French Socialist Party leader, assassinated in 1914 for trying to use diplomacy and industrial action to prevent the outbreak of war. Published just a few years before his death, his magisterial A Socialist History of the French Revolution has endured for over a century as one of the most influential accounts of the French Revolution ever to be published.Written in the midst of his activities as leade...

This is an abridged version of the Anarchist Encyclopedia. The original was a four-volume compendium of anarchist thought and analysis compiled by the great anarchist activist and writer Sébastien Faure. Within its pages can be found articles on political, social, and philosophical questions written from every point of view within the anarchist movement and by many of the most important figures of anarchism, like Faure, Max Nettlau, Emile Armand, Voline, and Errico Malatesta. It i...

“Serpents and reptiles reach the heights of mountains and rocks, while the most fiery of steeds can never climb there.”Baron d’Holbach’s 1776 Essay on the Art of Crawling is a delicious satire on the sycophancy and self-abasement rife in the courts of Europe. A penetrating account of the workings of power that applies as much to today’s courtiers as it did to those of the eighteenth century, it also makes a compelling case for the value of moral independence and personal d...