Joseph Dejacque - looking for writings

"The 1848 upsurge produced other currents. Anselme Bellegarrigue published a pamphlet and series of articles followed by the first periodical that termed itself anarchist: L’Anarchie: journal de l’ordre which was first published in 1850. He was one of the first of that period to offer any criticisms of the dominant centralising and Statist trends within the radical movement. However, his rejection of communistic concepts meant that he put himself outside of that current, in his forthright statement that the free person: “ works and therefore he speculates; he speculates and therefore he gains; he gains and therefore he possesses; he possesses and therefore he is free. By possession he sets himself up in an opposition of principle to the State, for the logic of the State rigorously excludes individual possession.”
Joseph Dejacque also participated in the 1848 events as well as in the insurrection the following year. In often extremely violent and poetic language, he attacked religion, property, the family and the State, and advocated action by small groups who would hasten the end of the old hierarchical order. The massacres of June 1848 brought him not only to a rejection of exploitation and economic privilege, but equally to a rejection of all forms of authority. In exile in the States he produced a journal in French, Le Libertaire, the first recorded use of the term libertarian as an alternative to that of anarchist. He continued the trailblazing work of the Humanitaire Group in his development of a kind of anarchist communism –“the anarchist community”. Unlike Proudhon, he was able to reject the idea of the family. Indeed, he was able to offer fraternal criticisms of Proudhon himself, for his failure to carry his thoughts through to their ultimate conclusion. He rejects Proudhon’s mutualism as much as he rejects the Statism of the inheritors of the Jacobin tradition. It is true that he owed a great debt to Fourier, - and this becomes apparent in his pamphlet L’Humanisphere:utopie anarchique- but his Fourierism is one stripped of all its reformist and authoritarian traits and he often makes criticisms of the prophet of social harmony. Whilst he may be correctly cited as one of the grandfathers of anarchist communism, his project of collective class emancipation was linked to complete liberty for the individual, in some ways prefiguring the best within the individualist anarchist current, the elements that did not reject the establishment of an anarchist communist society.
Like Dejacque, Ernest Couerderoy died in appalling conditions of poverty. Again one of those moving from radical Jacobinism into Blanquism, he ended up rejecting the secret societies and conspiracies of these currents, and called for collective and mass insurrection as the means of bringing about a new civilisation.
The libertarian outlook of quarantehuitards like Bellegarrigue, Dejacque and Couerderoy owe a lot to the desperation and depression of the failed 1848 revolutions and the long and gloomy period of reaction that set in. At the same time just as after the defeat of the Enrages, the reversals of uprisings and insurrections of the 1830s, the collapse of 1848 engendered new waves of thinking.
But as Skirda points out: “To best measure the merit and the interest of these libertarian convictions, let us remember the context of the moment; the reaction of Louis Napoleon raged in France; black slavery continued in the United States; that of the Russian “white blacks” was not suppressed until 1861 in the Empire of the tsars; industrial mechanisation developed at a great pace, the prison of the factory too; the flattest academicism, and among the most advanced social doctrines, the church party and state socialism predominated.”(My translation- see Paul Sharkey’s translation of Skirda, Facing the Enemy)."
working text from a forthcoming book (subject to revision)

There is an essay by Alain Pengam called "Anarcho-Communism" that appeared in the collection Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries edited by Rubel and Crump, which talks about Dejacque quite a bit. It is online here as a pamphlet (lacking endnotes): http://www.zabalaza.net/pdfs/varpams/anarcho_comm_ap.pdf

It would be really useful to have more of Dejacque's writings translated, particularly those dealing directly with US affairs. Amateur historians of abolitionism and the early workers movement would be highly appreciative

Greetings all,

Sorry for the late addition to this conversation, but I am very interested in Dejacque, as well. Unfortunately, I can't read French, and there seems to be hardly anything of his is English. I've been working with a few people to get some of his stuff translated. The first result of this is a letter he wrote while in the United States - very interesting! I'm trying to get an archive of his stuff (in English) going, and the letter, to Pierre Vésinier, can be viewed here: (an)archive - Joseph Dejacque.

Regards!