American anarchist, Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912) had multiple commitments as an activist, writer or lover. His largely ignored journey resonates with today’s struggles.
On the cover, a beautiful young woman, photographed in a bust-up shot, her face surrounded by curls, casts her clear gaze, both serious and confident, towards the horizon. It is Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912), a brilliant and largely unknown American anarchist, to whom Alice Béja devotes this original biography, in constant dialogue with our present.
Strength and fragility of an activist
In five thematic chapters followed by letters written by the author to the one she calls in turn “Voltai”, “Airine”, “comrade” – and sometimes also addressed to Emma Goldman – Alice Béja paints the portrait of a tireless activist, although chronically ill and precarious, sometimes divisive, by exploring several activist issues, from “how one becomes an anarchist” to “suffering and emancipation”.
The book is a lively and stimulating portrait of an activist with multiple commitments, active in the cosmopolitan circles of American and international anarchism, during the turbulent decades during which anarchism experienced its first peak and went through the phase of political violence of “propaganda by deed”. Béja brings back the paradoxical charisma of Voltairine de Cleyre, personality and body in suffering, with “sacrificial romanticism” (p. 135), neglectful mother until her son’s adolescence, and remarkable activist, free lover, with scintillating intelligence and writing, with multiple, passionate and thoughtful commitments. Her activism is part of several currents (in particular free thought and the multiple trends of pre-war anarchism) and is embodied in poetic, literary, journalistic and theoretical writing, participation in meetings, multilingualism as a practice of otherness (she speaks Yiddish in particular), translation and teaching.
Gender is at the heart of Béja’s questions, who quickly distances herself from certain tropes of women’s history, starting with an approach which would consist of broadening the pantheon of known anarchist women by highlighting activists. De Cleyre would however have been well suited to this, since she died prematurely, active in a movement often misunderstood and caricatured, little commemorated and studied, also due to the disappearance of the majority of her archives, not rehabilitated by the feminist movement of the 1970s, and in fact little known, even actively denigrated.
The letter which closes chapter 3, “The dangers of the struggle”, turns any idea of irenic sisterhood on its head, recalling the unkind comments of Emma Goldman, icon of American anarchism, on De Cleyre’s absence of “physical charm”, his lack of celebrity and influence (p. 156), while examining what brings them together, including their theoretical commitment and their absence of concrete mobilization for the rights of black men and women. Béja equally repudiates the idea of celebrating a woman “ powerful “, even though De Cleyre’s sense of militant martyrdom had nothing to envy of that of Louise Michel, who refused in 1886 to incriminate the author of an assassination attempt against her. Thus, in 1902, the day after the assassination of President William McKinley by the anarchist Leon Czologsz, when a senator declared himself ready to pay 1,000 dollars to shoot an anarchist, De Cleyre offered himself as a target to donate this sum to propaganda, “for a free society where there are neither assassins nor presidents, neither beggars nor senators” (p. 131).
Rethinking the biographical pact
This lively story, rich in theoretical references, is teeming with comments and questions on activism, in the form of letters addressed by the author to De Cleyre after each of the five chapters, in an original biographical approach. These letters resonate with contemporary issues, around care, the body and ableism, solidarity (notably in the relationship to money and the material aspects of activism), the link between affects and activism. Because the story illustrates above all the vulnerability and duration in an environment like anarchism: the friendships which last or falter, the fellow fighters who leave the movement or become gentrified, death, prison, traumatic memories.
This format allows us to deepen the link between the author and De Cleyre, between her world, her activism and our present, through the themes of each chapter. Thus chapter 4, “Everyday anarchy”, is accompanied by a reflection on what it means to live as an activist and radical political practice. This letter, dated August 2024, bluntly announces: “You will undoubtedly laugh when reading this letter”, since the immediate context is that of the victory of the National Rally in the European elections of May 2024 and the surprise legislative elections of the summer of 2024. How, Béja wonders, to reconcile this electoral anxiety and the importance given to the State and its institutions, with the anarchism of De Cleyre ?
This epistolary process, which could end up appearing repetitive or artificial, remains a pleasure to read thanks to the varied questions and angles to which it lends itself. It also owes to the pen of Alice Beja, as well as a certain risk-taking in self-disclosure, whether political, intimate or intellectual. As the introduction explains, claiming an epistemological objectivity which would detach the author from her object of study is illusory, especially in a biography which implies a somewhat fusional relationship with its subject. This dialogue helps to circumvent any hagiographic or scientific temptation. The book also ends with the idea of “preserving the gray areas” (p. 257).
Anarchism and democratic crisis
If the subtitle of the book, “Anarchism, feminism and free love”, highlights its intimate themes, it is also the multiple resonances of anarchism with current political and social crises which are essential for reading. The United States of Voltairine de Cleyre is a society in xenophobic withdrawal, in which, “by constructing a polyglot and multicultural environment, it strives to create a community without borders, anchored in the daily life of the struggle, a refuge against social marginalization and police repression” (p. 189). Some will also find in his intransigence (also contested by Béja) an echo of contemporary political polarizations.
But it is above all the question of anarchist violence, “the cream pie of books on anarchism” (p. 159), which has once again regained its relevance with the assassination attempt on Donald Trump during the last presidential campaign, then with the assassination of CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione, and Trump activist Charlie Kirk by a student from Utah. However, William McKinley, president of the United States from 1897 to 1901, champion of economic protectionism, idolized by Donald Trump, ended up assassinated by an anarchist. The book also implicitly recounts the world in crisis that underlies this assassination, inspiring De Cleyre to observe that “the hell of capitalism creates desperate people, and desperate people act out of desperation !” (quoted p.119). A simplistic morality, perhaps, but whose force of attraction can still be observed in the enthusiasm aroused by Mangione’s gesture.
The radical contestation of the power of the State, its legitimacy and its “arbitrary and incommensurable” violence (p. 132) by anarchists resonates with the exhaustion of representative democracies. De Cleyre’s activist and intellectual journey sheds light on the questions and proposals of anarchists around these issues. Far from bombs and daggers, from his life as an anarchist made of idealism and precariousness emerges above all the effort to live anarchism “not as an abstract ideology which aims to build a utopian world, but as a liberation from suffering which allows everyone to freely enjoy their body and their mind”, and to “think an individual ethic which is not constructed at the expense of solidarity or collective action” (p. 7).
From the multiple activist communities in (or against) which it is part, we retain the ideal of a polished woven by daily commitments, the praxis action, but also writing, education and the collective. From this crucial and ignored journey, from its successes as well as its aporias, a little emerges from this “ melancholy » analyzed by Michelle Perrot about a worker who is also forgotten.