Jean Grave and French Anarchism

About this book

Jean Grave and The Anarchist Tradition in France focuses on the anarchist activity of an outstanding French anarchist, flourishing in the 1880-1920 period, whose theoretical works place him alongside the foremost anarchist thinkers: William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Michael Bakunin. But he was also a journalist, best known as the leading editor of Les Temps Nouveaux, in which he enlisted many of his painter and writer friends, such as Camille and Lucien Pissarro, Paul Signac, and Lucien Descaves, to aid the anarchist cause. The leading French collaborator of Peter Kropotkin, Grave was involved in several of the major happenings of the Third Republic: the wave of fear occasioned by anarchist terrorism, the Dreyfus Case, and the rise of anarcho-syndicalism whose chief spokeperson was Georges Sorel. The work ends with and examination of the French anarchist tradition after Grave, with Simone Weil, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the 1968 French Revolution.