Readers of this blog and The Mutualist should already know the name Claude Pelletier from my in-progress translation of The Socialist Soirées of New York (1873) and some mentions of his Socialist Dictionary. (I’ve also started a translation of his 1848 Solution of the Problem of Poverty.) Pelletier was one of that small, but important group of French anarchists who published much of their work while in America, and, like Joseph Dejacque, he was a member of the International Association of 1855-59. He was essentially a mutualist anarchist in his politics, though he preferred a series of terms of his […]
SYLVAIN MARÉCHAL TRANSLATIONS: Dieu et les prêtres, Fragments d’un poème moral sur Dieu (1780) Le livre de tous les ages: ou, Le Pibrac moderne; quatrains moraux (1781) L’Âge d’Or (1782) Livre échappé au déluge (1784) Apologues modernes, à l’usage d’un dauphin (1788) Dame Nature à la barre de l’Assemblée nationale (1791) Jugement dernier des rois (théâtre, 1793) Corrective à la révolution (1793) Culte et lois d’une société d’hommes sans Dieu (1798) Pensées libres sur les prêtres (1798) Manifeste des Égaux (1801) Projet d’une loi portant défense d’apprendre à lire aux femmes (1801) De la Vertu (1807) I’ve found myself perhaps […]
John Cleves Symmes’ 1818 declaration that the earth is “hollow, and habitable within” was just the start of a long and fascinating episode in the annals of fringe science. But most accounts of Symmes’ work simply stop with the declaration, or perhaps note a few of the early memoirs or the novel Symmesonia, neglecting Symmes’ own decade-long development of the work. When I began to search for the texts of those initial memoirs, I was surprised to find that—just in the case of Emperor Norton’s declarations—not only was there a much more substantial literature to be explored, but there was […]