Gustave Lefrançais: A Link to The Past

The text below is an article in the book by Nick Heath, The Idea: Anarchist Communism, Past, Present and Future.

Gustave Adolphe Lefrançais was born in 1826 in Angers. He became a teacher, was sacked for his progressive views in 1847 and took part in the 1848 events in France. He was subsequently sentenced to several months’ imprisonment for his activities with two different sentences. A communist influenced by Fourier and Pierre Leroux, he fled to England with the coup d’état by Louis Napoleon in 1851. Here he met with Déjacque “an old acquaintance of the 1848 clubs” who showed him around the London of the French exiles. This encounter was to radicalise his ideas considerably. Together with Déjacque and a dozen other exiles he set up a mutual aid association, La Sociale. As he wrote: 'All in the same precarious situation, with so thin resources, so thin that remaining isolated, we would surely die of hunger, and by associating our miseries, perhaps they will be less insupportable for each one'. He lived in poverty, teaching when he could, but also weaving baskets and selling tobacco at theatres during the Christmas season.

Returning to Paris in 1853, he associated with Proudhonists like Alfred Darimon and Georges Duchene and took part in militant activity with Alfred Briosne who advanced a theory of collectivism as a synthesis of individualism and communism. Lefrançais was critical of the mystical communists like Cabet and his followers, and the latter day Babouvists and Blanquists. According to police reports, he developed his ideas on collective property and the suppression of inheritance, as well as attacking marriage and advocating free union.

An active participant in the Paris Commune of 1871, he fought on some of the last barricades at the Bastille and Arsenal. He managed to escape and was condemned to death in his absence.

In exile in Switzerland, he immediately joined the Central Section of the International in Geneva, and found himself in the midst of a war between the Marxists and Bakuninists there. It did not take long for him to take sides. He attended the Sonvillier congress and took part in the “anti-authoritarian International. He chaired the Internal Congress of the Anti-Authoritarian International at St Imier on September 15th, 1872. He contributed to various anti-authoritarian Swiss papers and helped Reclus with his geographical work.

Returning to France with the amnesty, he stayed outside of the different political groupings, whilst speaking at many political meetings. He consistently criticised universal suffrage, and when he ran as a candidate in the 1889 elections this was just a protest against Boulangism and not a move towards electoralism.

Speaking of himself in the third person, he wrote: “He is very convinced that the future is with communism, that is to say with the complete disappearance of any individual property as instrument of production [...]. Only, while admitting as exact the communist formula: "To each according to his needs and each according to his abilities", he recognizes that the applications proposed by Gracchus Babeuf, Étienne Cabet and Louis Blanc do not respond sufficiently to the legitimate demands of individual liberty.” Memoirs, p318-319).

In an article written in the paper La Commune in 1874 he wrote that the revolution” can be nothing else than the incessant demand for the individual of his autonomy, that is to say, the absolute government of his faculties." In order for this to come about, it was necessary for "The suppression of government - of power - in the political order; that of wage labour, in the economic order. Now this double suppression can only be accomplished by the triumph of the communalist idea which is incarnated in the social revolution - the only legitimate one, the only one that interests us ".

Nettlau, in his Bibliography of Anarchy, describes the text by Lefrançais “Where are The Anarchists Going” of 1887, as one of the authoritarian critiques of anarchism. But in fact, Lefrançais, like Saverio Merlino after him in his Individualism in Anarchism, criticises both selfish individualism, in terms of anti-organisationalism and the dangers of illegalism and individual propaganda by deed. He remained a libertarian communist, who defended the ideas of the Paris Commune to the end, and who rejected “the evolution of a movement which privileged both philosophical individualism and ideological communism to the detriment of revolutionary anti-authoritarian socialism which had been its origin” (Frejaville).

References

Biographical notice on Lefrançais: http://maitron-en-ligne.univ-paris1.fr/spip.php?article33693

Frejaville, Claude. Gustave Lefrançais et les malentendues de l’histoire. In Le Monde Libertaire, 30th May-5th June 2013.