Anarchist Beginnings

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

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. […]

Working Translations

Maurice Imbard, “O Anarchy!!!” (1928)

Ah! that word anarchy appeared to me for a long time, in the days of my youth, as a sort of myth.

The change that has occurred in my mindset has not changed my opinion on the grandeur of the word and the beauty of the thing. My aim is still and always to work, to struggle, to hasten the coming of the anarchist life—a life without authority, without obligation, without brutality; a gentle, tolerant, normal, natural life, where people will learn to understand one another. […]