Year: 2015

Working Translations

Ricardo Mella, “Spain” (1897)

July 30, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
Spain. Time passes and, far from improving, the situation in Spain grows worse and worse. The colonial wars go badly and the hope of a swift pacification is abandoned. The exceptional state of Barcelona has not changed; the hundreds of wretches arbitrarily detained in the prisons and at Montjuich only await a bit of belated justice to set them free or else to consummate that legal crime that, taking the lives of some, will cast the others forever into the penal institutions that the mother country reserves for the best of her children. Today, as yesterday, some ignorant proletarians march […]
Anarchist Beginnings

Max Nettlau, “The Attempted Murder of Hugo Bettauer” (1925)

July 28, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] [The Max Nettlau Papers include correspondence from Benzion Liber, editor Rational Living (New York.) Among the letters is the English-language manuscript of an article written by Nettlau, which was returned by Liber. ]   April 10 [1925] Dear Dr. Nettlau and Comrade: I am sorry not to be able to use your latest and unexpected correspondence, as my magazine is suspended and as I do not know when it will reappear. I have tried to publish it in The Nation—had no time to ask your permission fearing the article would lose its actuality—but, although they found it interesting, they […]
Bakunin Library

The International Movement of the Workers (1869)

July 27, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[published in L’Egalité, May 22, 1869] GENEVA, May 21. The International Movement of the Workers. If, today, there is one fact that strikes the minds of the most recalcitrant conservatives, it is the always more general and always more imposing movement of the working masses, not only in Europe, but in America as well. The men of state and the politicians of all countries, whether aristocratic or bourgeois, are worried, and we have the proof of it in every speech they make; they do not pass up any occasion to express their sympathies—so deep and above all so sincere—for that […]
Saint Ravachol

Why Vaillant Threw the Bomb! (1894)

July 11, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
PRICE ONE HALF-PENNY. Why Vaillant Threw the Bomb! FELLOW-WORKERS,— We feel it our duty, as English comrades, in the face of what has been said by the smug faced hirelings of the capitalist press concerning Vaillant, to say a few words about him and his actions before proceeding to his defence. Vaillant’s life, like the lives of even our own workpeople, may be summed up in a few words,—one of intense struggle and misery. He, like others, possessed the heritage of the “right of life,” with all its pleasures. These were denied! He protested! Will his co-sufferers blame him? Never; […]
Saint Ravachol

A Handwritten Manuscript by Ravachol (1892)

July 11, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
A HANDWRITTEN MANUSCRIPT BY RAVACHOL Since his condemnation to death, Ravachol has written a great deal in prison. Here is a long handwritten text that we have been able to obtain, not without great difficulties. We have confided the reproduction of this interesting document to the house of Sédard in Lyon. It is written on two pages, and in it Ravachol explains his theories. [The manuscript combines bad spelling, horrible penmanship, rotten grammar and nonexistent punctuation. Decoding it has been a long process. But here is a rough translation.] Society can only be improved by a complete transformation of its […]
Saint Ravachol

“Ravachol’s Experiment” (April 17, 1892)

July 11, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
RAVACHOL’S EXPERIMENT. He Felt the Revolutionary Pulse and Found It Does Not Beat. Paris, April 17. — In an interview with his brother today Ravachol said: “I am neither a visionary nor a firebrand. I wished to feel the pulse of the revolutionary movement. To be candid, I find it does not beat. If it did, my example would be followed by others. Instead of this, they call me a criminal. I have written my memoirs covering my whole life. Let me be judged by these.” The persons on the jury list likely to be empanelled for the Ravachol case […]
Saint Ravachol

The Voice of the Penal Colony (1893)

July 11, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE VOICE OF THE PENAL COLONY While the populations panic and cheer the hangman tsar, while the bourgeois and the governmentals congratulate themselves on the success of their stratagems and observe that human stupidity is always so great, a protest must come, proud and energetic, to remind the bourgeois that there are still free men, even, and especially, in their prisons and their penal colonies. We must remind our leaders, who, in the joy of their triumph, lick the boots of the hangman of nihilists and whipper of women, that in the French penal colonies are also found those whose […]
Saint Ravachol

“A Whisky Anarchist” (Cleveland, OH, 1887)

July 11, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
A WHISKY ANARCHIST A Young Man Excites People by Calling for Nitro-Glycerine to Make Bombs With. George A. Schroeder, who keeps a drug store at No. 423 St. Clair Street, telephoned the central police station about 7 o’clock saying that a man had just entered his place and asked for nitro-glycerine. He asked the druggist if he knew how to make a fuse, to which the latter replied that he did not. Then the fellow said that four ofhis brethren had been hanged in Chicago yesterday and he meant to avenge their death, for which he would be vindicated by […]