Working Translations

drama

Claude Pelletier, Preface to “The Revolutionary Socialist Heretics of the 15th Century”

March 20, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Claude Pelletier was in exile in the United States in 1867, when he wrote The Revolutionary Socialist Heretics of the 15th Century, a five-act play that transplanted the concerns of the French revolution of 1848, and the thought of some familiar figures, onto the events of the Hussite rebellion. Here is his explanation of the work, which I will probably translate in full at some point: [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] PREFACE As the 19th century is called to resolve the problem of the proletariat by putting into practice the ideas of the modern Revolutionaries […]
Proudhon Library

From the “Sixty” to the International

March 1, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  One of the tasks of this phase of the exploration here is to fill in some of the details about the period of transition, during which the anarchist movement began to take on collectivism in the realms of production and property as one of its key principles. Given all of the historical attention given to the First International, that might seem like a fairly simple project, but the truth is that the currents that it is necessary to trace on the mutualist/proudhonist side of things often just appear in the accounts of the International as the opposition to the […]
Working Translations

Charles Keller, “A Memory of the ‘Marmite’” (1913)

February 13, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  A Memory of the “Marmite” ___             My dear Guillaume, You asked me for a few lines about Eugène Varlin, for the Vie Ouvrière. No one is my ready to honor the memory of that noble champion of the International; but in order to speak of him in a way that will interest the readers, I would have had to know him as a close friend. That was not the case with me. My friend Aristide Rey introduced me to him, toward the end of 1869, as a member of the Marmite, the cooperative restaurant that Varlin had just […]
Bakunin Library

Adhémar Schwitzguébel, “Collectivism” (First Letter) (1872)

February 12, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”]   [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] COLLECTIVISM[1] Adhémar Schwitzguébel First article. Socialism first presented itself to the laboring classes in the form of different systems, each having its more or less numerous adepts, and each presenting itself as the infallible Gospel which must save society. These different socialist systems, hatched in the offices of speculative thinkers, have been succeeded by a much more popular socialism, which has been embodied in the International Workingmen’s Association. When we study the different socialist authors, we perceive straightaway that fantasy plays a considerable role in their writings; while the […]
Working Translations

From Proudhon’s “Political Capacity of the Working Classes”

February 12, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
The Political Capacity of the Working Classes was the last work prepared for publication by Proudhon prior to his death. It was written in large part as a response to the workers responsible for the “Manifesto of the Sixty,” and contains one of the most programmatic of his treatments of mutualism, as well as his last treatment of the question of electoral change. I’m working on a translation of the work, and here are two sections from that work, both by Gustave Chaudey, one of the group of friends who prepared Proudhon’s manuscripts for posthumous publication. The Preface explains the […]
fiction

André Léo, “The Young Girl and the Bird” (1850)

February 8, 2014 anarchisms_w4l2ii
It’s certainly no surprise to find work by André Léo in Pierre Leroux’s journal La Revue Sociale. The prolific writer, whose real name was Victoire Léodile Béra, was married to the editor, Grégoire Champseix. But much of her literary output was later, after Champseix’s death, and despite all the very interesting material that I have pulled from La Revue Sociale, I’ll admit that I have never been able to steal the time to give the journal all the attention I’m sure it deserves. So it was nice to find that members of L’Association André Léo have identified a number of […]
Working Translations

Charles Malato’s Tales of New Caledonia

February 2, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] At the age of seventeen, Charles Malato, the son of Paris communards, was exiled to New Caledonia with his parents. That’s perhaps a natural start for a life that would be largely dedicated to anarchism. Malato was an activist and a prolific writer, producing journalism, autobiography, anarchist theory, drama and fiction for both adults and children. It’s probably no surprise that New Caledonia features in a number of his writings, or that those writings bear the mark of a youth in the region. I’ve started to collect and translate some of Malato’s writings on New Caledonia, beginning with an […]
fiction

Charles Malato, “New Caledonian Tales” (1897)

February 1, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  New Caledonian Tales TALAMO [CHARLES MALATO] —— CHAPTER I A MYSTERIOUS CAPTAIN Old Martinot was a fine old man, and when he walked the streets of Saint-Ouen, straight as an “I” and smiling in his white beard, the housewives greeted him with deference and the gamins ran after him, shouting: “Hi, Captain Martinot! How are you, captain?” From whence came this nickname of “captain,” by which they had all come to call him? The good man had none of the slightly rigid appearance of old soldiers: he never wore a top hat, nor a straight collar clasped by a […]
Bakunin Library

Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis (1870)

January 19, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis (September 1-8, 1870, Locarno, Switzerland) Letter to a Frenchman ___________ My dear friend, The latest events have placed France in such a position, that it can no longer be saved from a long and terrible slavery, from ruin, poverty, and annihilation, except by a rising en masse of the armed people. Your principal army being destroyed, — and that is no longer in doubt today, — there remains to France only two outcomes: either to submit sheepishly, shamefully, to the insolent yoke of the Prussians, to bow beneath the staff of […]
correspondence

Jenny P. d’Héricourt, “A letter from America” (1868)

January 17, 2014
[I’ve been working on the remaining untranslated portions of Jenny d’Héricourt’s Woman Affranchised, which has included a number of pleasant surprises, including some borrowings from her adversary Proudhon that suggest she was a close and careful reader of much of his work. I also made another search through the online archives for material I hadn’t seen and ran across this letter to La Solidarité: journal des principes, a journal published by Charles Fauvety, who was both a friend of Héricourt and an old collaborator of Proudhon’s. Fauvety was also indirectly connected, through association with Alphonse-Louis Constant, aka Eliphas Lévi, with […]