Lorry, Anthony (1972-2014)

Anthony Lorry was born on 4th December 1972 at Clichy la Garenne in France.

He moved towards the anarchist movement in the 1990s. He applied to join the libertarian organisation Alternative Libertaire in the mid-90s but failed to follow this through. He subsequently joined the French CNT (Vignoles) and was heavily involved in contributing to the launching of its magazine Les Temps Maudits, in 1997 alongside alongside Jacky Toublet, Frank Mintz, and Raphael Romnée, being involved in this until 2004.

In 1995, under the supervision of Jacques Girault, he wrote a paper on the anarchists in the unions in the northern suburbs of Paris between 1880 and 1912. As a conscientious objector in 1998, he ended up with alternative work as a librarian at the Centre d'Etudes, de Documentation, d'Information et d'Action Sociales-CEDIAS/Social Museum (originally founded in 1894 and an archive of the French social and labour movements).Here he worked for eighteen months under the supervision of a leading social historian, Colette Chambelland.

He then continued employment there in tandem with Michel Prat. He took an important part in the digitisation of the CEDIAS archives and the scanning of many collections. He created an important website devoted to the works of the important anarcho-syndicalist Fernand Pelloutier- http://www.pelloutier.net/. In 2008 he collaborated with Patrice Spadoni of Alternative Libertaire on a documentary on Pelloutier.

He died suddenly on January 5th, 2014. Five days later, over a hundred people attended his funeral. The important biographical dictionary, Maitron des Anarchistes (named after the anarchist historian Jean Maitron, with 3,200 biographies, and both online and in printed form which has recently appeared in April 2014) to which Anthony provided some important contributions is dedicated to him.

Nick Heath

Sources:

http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?L-histoire-sociale-perd-Anthony
http://www.autrefutur.net/Deces-d-Anthony-Lorry