Anarchist Beginnings

Anarchist Beginnings

Manifesto of the Dynamiters (1893)

February 12, 2026 Shawn P. Wilbur
Manifesto of the Dynamiters (1893) A lot of the material that we have explaining the strategy of the attentateurs of the 1890s comes from trial statements, but there were some other documents written in support of the various attacks. In the sidebar, you’ll find a link to a brief “Manifesto of the Dynamiters,” originally published in French, in London, apparently early in 1893, since it refers to Ravachol’s bombing of “the buildings of the magistrates” as “yesterday.” In tone, this is very much in line with Emile Henry’s “there are no innocent bourgeois.” Whether or not this is good theory, […]
Anarchist Beginnings

“What Anarchy Is” (Le Monde Libertaire, 1967)

April 18, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur
Anarchists, precisely because of the positive spirit that makes them reject the moral authority of all clergy, the economic authority of all forms of capitalism, the political authority of all states, are the most resolute supporters and defenders of the construction of a society with full responsibility for everyone, a society based on the constant relationship between producers and consumers, at the level that concerns them, and any centralization can only have a coordinating character.

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Anarchist Beginnings

Benjamin Colin (1818-1884)

October 21, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur
There are a handful of very early anarchist or at least anarchistic writings identified by Max Nettlau that have remained elusive in my searches. One in particular — “Plus de gouvernement!” by Benjamin Colin — has nagged at me a bit, since I have known that the paper it was published in, L’Homme, journal de la démocratie universelle, was accessible in various forms and included some other anarchism-related content. But I have never got around the making the extra effort or financial outlay necessary to get my hands on it.

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Anarchist Beginnings

The Three Eras (May 22, 1848)

April 15, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur
What does anarchy mean in the streets, if not the absence of informers and armed police? But if, without armed police, without informers, without gendarmes, order reigns in the streets; if no one is robbed there, if no one is murdered there, if no one is insulted there, will the population not have proven that it can do without this power called gendarmes, police and municipal guards? Will it not have proven that it knows how to guard, protect and govern itself?

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Anarchist Beginnings

Pierre Mualdes, “Etre anarchiste / To Be an Anarchist” (1924)

July 14, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur
To be an anarchist is to be individualist, first of all. It is oneself that one is most keen to liberate, but as one’s total emancipation is intimately linked to that of one’s neighbors, one is communist by force of circumstance. No offense to the most affirmative anti-societarists: I also believe that man is an animal that instinct drives to live in society. A kind of human feeling is thus created that goes from the individual to the species, a feeling that the rabble of the rulers strives to channel to its own profit within the limits of a fatherland, but which has manifested even during the last butchery between “enemies” a feeling that knows no borders.

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Anarchist Beginnings

P. W. Grayson, “Vice Unmasked” (1830)

April 3, 2021 Shawn P. Wilbur
VICE UNMASKED, AN ESSAY: BEING A CONSIDERATION OF THE INFLUENCE OF LAW UPON THE MORAL ESSENCE OF MAN, WITH OTHER REFLECTIONS. BY P. W. GRAYSON. Est autem Virtus nihil alind, quam in se perfecta, et ad summum perfecta Natura. — Cicero. NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY GEORGE H. EVANS, FOR THE AUTHOR. 1830. Notes on the Author According to Wikipedia: Peter Wagener Grayson (1788–1838) was an attorney, diplomat, cabinet officer, and presidential candidate in the Republic of Texas. He was the son of Benjamin and Caroline (Taylor) Grayson, and was born in Bardstown, Virginia (later Kentucky), in 1788. He owned a […]