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Letter of Henri Rochefort on Louise Michel

December 26, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Letter of Henri Rochefort on Louise Michel (1) Dieppe, July 6, 1883. My Dear Citizen Argyriadès, I have only known our friend aboard the warship that transported us to New Caledonia. But I know that during the siege she had heroically fait le coup de l’eu against the Prussians, under whose guns she went to gather the wounded. It is likely that none of those who condemned her could have accomplished such exploits. I have recounted before the court of assizes her devotion for her fellow deportees, to whom she gave even her coat and her socks, keeping for herself […]
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1839: Proudhon on property and theft

December 23, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
EPISODES in another history: I. Over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time demonstrating how the very suggestive general observations in Proudhon’s What is Property? only really emerge as a property theory when we bring them together with developments in his later writings—and how, even then, we are arguably left to pick up his positive project, imagining a property that would not be theft, ourselves. As it turns out, there are also some clarifications to be made by looking back at Proudhon’s earlier work, from 1839, The Celebration of Sunday. The Celebration of Sunday is a peculiar […]
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A couple of historical gems

December 23, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Roderick Long has posted a translation of a chapter from Gustave de Molinari’s 1893 work on “Labor-Exchanges.” I doubt anyone not already interested in Molinari’s work will be won over, but it’s a very interesting bit of that particular puzzle—and it’s good to see more of Molinari’s work in translation. Our understanding of all the players in anarchist/libertarian circles is enhanced by making more works available to more readers. Readers of French may be interested in P.-J. Proudhon’s review of the “Essai sur l’analyse physique des langues, ou Alphabet méthodique,” by Paul Ackermann, which Woodcock cites as Proudhon’s first published […]
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M. Corbeau’s Gallery of Rogues

December 20, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
‎”M. CORBEAU’S Gallery of ROGUES” is the monthly miscellany of radical auto/biography that I’m hoping to launch about January 15, 2012. I’ve said that I won’t release an issue until I have three ready to print, so there are minimal hassles with subscriptions and standing orders. I’m just a couple of dozen pages of translation from that point, and feeling pretty good about how things are coming together. Here are tentative contents for those first three issues.   M. CORBEAU’S Gallery of ROGUES #1   1. Shawn P. Wilbur—“Who was Eliphalet Kimball?” (with texts and working bibliography)2. Charles Malato—“Some Anarchist […]
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An Index to “Mother Earth”—Phase One

December 20, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
My friend Barry Pateman, of the Kate Sharpley Library, recently provided me with the raw data for an index of Mother Earth magazine. I had a couple of very specific questions that I needed to answer, but looking through the listings reminded me that I had gone as far as copying the contents pages for the full run and starting to digitize them some years back. I set myself the task of at least typing in the listings for a handful of major figures—Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, C. L. James, etc. As it turns out, I managed to accomplish […]
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Mother Earth author listings

December 20, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Leonard D. Abbott, “Some Reminiscences of Ernest Crosby,” — 1, no. 12 (February 1907): 22-27. Leonard D. Abbott, “A Few Words about Ferdinand Earle,” — 2, no. 8 (October 1907): 344-347. Leonard D. Abbott, “An Impression of Maxim Gorky,” — 3, no. 1 (March 1908): 32-34. Leonard D. Abbott, J. William Lloyd and His Message, — 3, no. 10, p. 350. Leonard D. Abbott, Fornaro and His Book, — 4, no. 10, p. 158. Leonard D. Abbott, The Continuing American Interest in Francisco Ferrer, — 5, no. 4, p. 143. Leonard D. Abbott, The Idea of Libertarian Education, — 6, […]
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Henri Rochefort and Claude Pelletier in New York, 1874

December 17, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
–> ARRIVAL OF ROCHEFORT. A LECTURE IN PLACE OF A BANQUET—HIS PLANS. Henri Rochefort arrived in New-York at 7 p. m. on Saturday by the Hudson River Railroad, with Thomas Pain, a French political prisoner, who had escaped with him from New-Caledonia, end Ollivier Benedic, a French acquaintance whom he bad met at Sydney, New-South Wales. On reaching the Grand Central Hotel he took supper with his friends. After breakfasting yesterday he visited a photographer by invitation, and remained at the rooms until 4 p. m. This engagement caused him to miss an appointment with a committee of the French […]
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Proudhon’s “Celebration of Sunday,” and other works-in-progress

December 10, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
You can see parts of three ongoing projects, as they appear, over on From the Libertarian Library. The most interesting is probably Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s The Celebration of Sunday, the book he wrote just before What is Property? It’s a very interesting read, with something to tell us about a number of aspects of Proudhon’s thought, and it’s something I’ve been puttering away at for several months. I have posted a translation of the first quarter of the book, which is relatively short, and expect to have the second major section, which takes us up to about the halfway point, typed […]
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P.-J. Proudhon, The Celebration of Sunday — I

December 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE CELEBRATION OF SUNDAY  [continued] I It is rare that a law can be well understood and appreciated at its true value, if we limit ourselves to considering it separately, and independent of the system to which it is linked: that is a principle of legislative critique which no one contests, and suffers hardly any exceptions. How is it that this rule has been so badly followed with regard to the laws of Moses, that no one has yet thought to present them in their totality? I would not exempt from this criticism even Mr. Pastoret himself, whose work on […]
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P.-J. Proudhon, The Celebration of Sunday (continued)

December 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE CELEBRATION OF SUNDAY [Continued from Preface] _____ “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. “Six days shall thou labor, and do all thy work. “But the seventh day is the rest of the Lord: in it thou shall not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: That is why the Eternal has hallowed and blessed the […]