Over at the Anarchist FAQ blog, Iain has a post recognizing the sesquicentennial of the term libertaire, used in 1858 by Joseph Déjacque as the title of his journal, La Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social. Déjacque is generally credited with the first use of the term “libertarian” as a synonym for “anarchist.” We’ve learned, as the digital archives grow, to be skeptical of first-use claims, but I’m happy to take a moment to recognize the importance of Déjacque’s contribution. His fascinating mix of anarchism, communism, egoism, and feminism, drawing on the thought of Fourier, Proudhon, Pierre Leroux and others, is deserving of much more attention that it has generally received.
Working Translations
The trial of Joseph Déjacque, October 23, 1851
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Courts and Tribunals COURT OF ASSIZE OF THE SEINE. M. d’Esparbès de Lussan, presiding. Offense involving the press. The Lazarenes. Mr. Joseph Déjacque, a paper hanger, thirty years of age, author of a work entitled The Lazarenes, Social Fables and Poems is arraigned before the jury and accused of the crimes of: l) exciting hate and contempt for the government of the republic; 2) having sought to disturb the public peace by exciting the contempt or hatred of the citizens against one another; 3) justifying acts described as criminal […]
A Good Word
Joseph Déjacque and the First Emergence of “Anarchism”
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] [From Contr’un, July 25, 2016] One of this week’s tasks was to finally go back and take a closer look at how Joseph Déjacque used the language of anarchy in his writings. I finally assembled a couple of text files of all the articles from Le Libertaire and worked through the required keyword searches. That process led me to focus on some pieces that I admit I had never read, or read closely, before and produce some new translations. I think the results are interesting and pose some new […]
Anarchist Beginnings
Joseph Déjacque, “The Universal Circulus” (revised translation)(1858)
[This remarkable bit of libertarian philosophy by Joseph Déjacque poses all sorts of difficulties for the modern reader, not the least of which is it borrowings from, and reworkings of, the works of Charles Fourier and Pierre Leroux. And there are places where it ha been necessary to translate things rather literally, since terms are used suggestively, according to the established uses of none of the writers or schools that they were drawn from. There are also a couple of times when Déjacque’s enthusiasm clearly ran away with the syntax: where catalogs of conditionals come to abrupt stops, without ever […]