Dupuy, Rolf (1946-2025)

I was shocked to hear news of the death of Rolf Dupuy two days after his death. Rolf was one of the founders of the French ORA, and later animator of the Dictionnaire International des Militants Anarchistes, a huge online resource in the French language, on biographies of libertarian militants around the world. I had first met his acquaintance whilst attending congresses of the ORA in the 1970s. I communicated with him on and off, offering biographies, corrections, and additions over the last decade or so, and he solicited my own biography from me, which duly appeared online in 2010. As well as the Dictionnaire, he also was behind another online endeavour, Dictionnaire des guérilleros et résistants antifranquistes (Dictionary of Anti-Francoist guerillas and resisters), which he jointly initiated with Antonio Tellez Sola.
N.H.

Daniel Pierre Alexandre Dupuy was born on June 26th, 1946 in the 7th arrondissement Paris (he preferred to use the first name Rolf throughout his life). His parents were unknown, and he was raised by a nurse in Versailles.

In 1961 he attended the Lycée ( high school) Louis-le-Grand in Paris. This was during the Algerian war, and soon Rolf joined the Front of Solidarity with the Algerian Revolution-Front de solidarité avec la Révolution Algérienne (FSRA). He was involved in almost daily clashes with fascist groups. He associated with young anti-fascists from the Anti-Fascist University Front, among them Alain Krivine, later to become an important student activist during May-June 1968 and subsequently a famous Trotskyist leader.
On the day when he and others went to defend the building of the Union of Communist Students, near the Sorbonne that he met Maurice Joyeux, the leading light of the Fédération Anarchiste (FA) who came with other anarchists to reinforce the defenders. Dupuy thought this was soon after the FA headquarters on Rue Ternaux had been bombed by the Secret Army Organisation (OAS).

Around this time, he created an informal anarchist group with three friends from high school, as well as a group of the Movement Against Atomic Rearmament (Mouvement Contre l’Armement Atomique). He started to drop out of high school, and frequented the beatnik scene, taking to the road like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy, hitchhiking around Europe. He maintained contact with his high school anarchist friends, taking part in the ceaseless turmoil in the Latin Quarter.

He met regularly with others at the Café L'Écritoire, Place de la Sorbonne, with, among others, Étienne Roda-Gill and Michel Frantz who were trying to build the group Jeunesses Anarchistes Communistes (JAC- Anarchist Communist Youth). This was now the time of the Vietnam War, and in the local Vietnam Committee, with two other anarchists, and young Maoists who would later become members of Gauche Prolétarienne (Proletarian Left) he helped create a short-lived Bakunin-Lin Biao group (!).

Rolf was not impressed by the FA, who seemed tuned out of the unrest in the Latin Quarter. He hung out at the CNT in exile office and started to learn Spanish. He was not impressed by the Situationists, who, during, a miners’ strike in Asturias produced a text with the slogan: " You stupid worker, why are you going down the mine ?" illustrated with naked women . He remarked: “That was definitely not my idea of class struggle!”

He became a father and restarted his studies at the School of Oriental Languages. He was also working as a teacher for the blind. Along came May ’68 and Rolf went to the Sorbonne occupation on the night of the barricades.

Rolf’s work contract was not renewed following a strike by some of the teaching staff and students in spring 1972. He then worked as a librarian for the City of Paris between 1974 and 2005.

After 1968 Rolf defined himself as an anarchist communist. He sympathised with the tendency within the FA around the veteran Maurice Fayolle, around whom young militants like Guy Malouvier, Ramon Finster, Michel Cavallier, and Richard Perez had gathered. This started producing a bulletin, L’Organisation Libertaire, for the construction of a revolutionary anarchist organisation. This coalesced into the Organisation Révolutionnaire Anarchiste (ORA), inside the FA.

Rolf joined the ORA via the Jules Vallès group in the 13th arrondissement of Paris (1969-1976), then the one in the 5th arrondissement (1976-1977). Within the ORA, he was a member of the National Collective as secretary for international relations from 1971 to 1975 and participated in most of the national meetings held by the organisation, as well as the international congress in Paris in the summer of 1971. During this same period, he staffed an ORA press table at the Censier University (1969-1972) and sold the ORA newspaper Front Libertaire at the market on Rue Mouffetard (5th arrondissement). In 1971, he participated alongside Finster and Cavallier in the Cercle Front Libertaire Chiens de Garde (Guard Dogs) , a group of libertarian educators which published two issues of a bulletin of the same name.

In the winter of 1973, while unemployed, he participated in daily support of the picket line at the post office in the 5th arrondissement where the branch of the CFDT union was led by libertarians. He helped set up a neighbourhood group in the Rue Mouffetard quarter, as part of the ORA strategy of outreach. This included other ORA militants like Gérard Mélinand (see his biography here at libcom)Geneviève Pauly, and Michel Ravelli (biography at libcom). This group had its base at the Maison pour Tous (House for All) on the Rue Mouffetard. It grouped together other libertarian activists and sympathisers at the post office and at the National Museum of Natural History, or who lived in the neighbourhood, ex-Maoists from Gauche Prolétarienne and many users of the cultural activities offered by the Maison. It published the bulletin Le Cri du Ve (5 issues from February 1976 to March 1977, printed in runs of 500 to 800 copies and sold by street vendors in the neighbourhood markets).

Between 1973 and 1976, Rolf was also responsible for work with the Chinese anarchist communist group, l’Association communiste anarchiste chinoise (ACAC), in Paris. This had been founded by Choy Hak Kin, a student from Hong Kong studying in Paris, and in liaison with the libertarians back in his home city. It included former Red Guards and other principal members were Woo Che and Sze To Lap. Together with them Rolf organised a speaking tour of France with two former Red Guards from Canton. ACAC published several bulletins in Chinese and then took part in the bilingual magazine Outlook(only one issue, 15th January 1977) edited by Ki Chee Leung and Rolf Dupuy.

Rolf thoroughly disapproved of the support for the Parisian autonomist movement that the organisation, now transformed into the Organisation Communiste Libertaire (OCL) now supported, and whose chief partisan was Gérard Mélinand . He resigned from the OCL in 1977 and turned towards historical research of the anarchist movement. He collaborated with René Bianco of the Centre International de Recherches sur l’anarchisme (CIRA) at Marseille, and with Antonio Tellez Sola.

From 1985 to 2000, he was active in the communication union of the Confédération Nationale du Travail-France (CNT-F).
He died on October 25th, 2025.

Nick Heath

Sources:

https://maitron.fr/dupuy-daniel-pierre-alexandre-dit-rolf-dictionnaire-des-anarchistes/
Interview with Dupuy and Cavallier, 2008 in Alternative Libertaire:
https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/Dossier-68-Rolf-Dupuy-et-Guy-Malouvier-Chacun-de-ces-mots-comptait-organisation