A-Infos (en) France, Monde Libertaire - "I can't work with madmen like you..." (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Unfairly overlooked, even unknown in French social history, Gustave 
Lefrançais, first president of the Executive Commission of the Paris 
Commune in 1871, nevertheless lived through the tumultuous 19th century 
of the emergence of socialism, rubbing shoulders with Joseph Déjacques, 
Michel Bakunin, Eugène Varlin, and Élisée Reclus. He was one of the 
handful that founded the anti-authoritarian International in Saint-Imier 
on September 15 and 16, 1872. Eugène Pottier dedicated his poem The 
International to him... ---- The man who called himself a communalist 
and not an anarchist is thus described by Kropotkin in Around a Life - 
Memoirs of a Revolutionary: "Pardon me, I am a communalist, not an 
anarchist," he said. "I cannot work with madmen like you; and he worked 
with no one but us, because," he said, "you madmen are still the men I 
love best. With you, one can work and remain oneself."

Dominique Sureau, historian, revisits Lefrançais's life through his 
writings. From his reflections on education, at the time when he was a 
student at the École Normale d'Institueurs de Versailles, he struggled 
to find a job and keep it because of his republican commitment, to his 
Souvenirs d'un révolutionnaire. De juin 1848 à la Commune, published a 
year after his death, in 1902 (and reissued in 2013 by La Fabrique). 
Thus, this work allows us to become familiar with the author, the 
activist, the theoretician and to measure how, little by little, his 
libertarian conscience was forged, which would lead him to oppose, for 
example, the Committee of Public Safety and the authoritarian excesses 
of the Commune and would therefore make him integrate the minority 
within the delegations. An activist for free unions and the recognition 
of women's social equality, a supporter of social revolution, direct 
democracy, mandatory mandates, and permanent revocability, castigating 
governments and wage labor, and considering political parties as "groups 
of simple fools led by shameless, unscrupulous, and unabashedly 
ambitious individuals," Gustave Lefrançais was thus a fierce 
"communalist" who devoted his life to his ideals, defending them even on 
the barricades against the Versailles supporters, eking out a living in 
poverty and exile, but always carrying within him these "social ideas" 
that, in his will, he would later deem "just and true."

"The entire scope of the revolutionary movement of the last century, it 
cannot be repeated too often, can be summed up in this brilliantly 
simple statement: society is made by and for the individual, and not the 
individual for society."

The Commune and the Revolution - Gustave Lefrançais

Dominique Sureau, Gustave Lefrançais, Story of an Encounter with an 
Angevin, Éditions du Petit Pavé, Dans les pas collection, 2021, 215 
pages, EUR20

Julien Caldironi, individual FA 49

https://monde-libertaire.fr/?articlen=8321
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