A-Infos (en) France, UCL AL #370 - History - Workers' Education: The People's University Movement and Anarchists (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The turn of the 20th century was a pivotal moment for workers' education 
in France. The People's Universities, the first of which was established 
in 1899, founded a genuine movement across the entire country. 
Anarchists found a new platform for their activism, and some became 
deeply involved. Though short-lived, this adventure remains rich in 
lessons for activists today. ---- On October 9, 1899, La Coopération des 
Idées (The Cooperation of Ideas), the first of the People's Universities 
(UP), was inaugurated in Paris. It promised to be a place of moral 
elevation and emancipation through knowledge. In practical terms, 
lectures, or rather talks, were given there; but the building also 
included a performance hall, an exhibition space, a library, and a games 
room. In short, it is a place to live, a true "center of social 
action"[1]aimed at largely meeting the moral needs of the worker.

A major movement
The Cooperation of Ideas is just one pioneer, and others soon follow. 
Throughout France, UPs (Union Populaires - Popular Universities) are 
founded, so that by 1901, 124 universities dot the landscape (230 were 
created in total between 1899 and 1914), with an estimated 50,000 
members: only half the number of the CGT (Confédération Générale du 
Travail - General Confederation of Labour) at the time! Important 
political, literary, and scholarly figures participate. The growth is 
therefore meteoric. How can this be explained?

It is the result of a particular era. Decades of socialism have shown 
the working class that its emancipation could only be achieved through 
essential educational work. But while the Third Republic established 
public education, it also fulfilled a broken promise: limited to primary 
school, it was deemed insufficient, even oppressive, given the crudely 
inculcated governmental dogmas instilled in children. Efforts were then 
made to fill this gap through the education of working men and women: 
labor exchanges, vocational courses, and study groups. The intellectual 
bourgeoisie also founded various "post-school" initiatives: evening 
classes, youth clubs, and educational societies; but these initiatives, 
still too closely resembling charity, met with understandable resistance.

"Song for All, at the People's University." A popular singing course 
created in 1912: one of the many initiatives taking place at the 
People's University.

Historical Library of Paris
The aim, therefore, was to educate or to be educated, but the means were 
still lacking. An event would act as a catalyst: the Dreyfus Affair. 
This unjust condemnation of a Jewish officer, which led to the 
establishment of a veritable state conspiracy, was exposed by the press 
to the entire nation. With this demonstration of the failure of the 
elites in power, it became clear that an urgent undertaking of social 
renewal was necessary. Endorsed by a large number of intellectuals, the 
Popular Unity (UP) arrived at the right moment; it was the idea that 
"responded to the needs of an era and a society"[2].

Deherme and Montreuil
A major movement thus took root in France. Behind it was a man entirely 
dedicated to its development: Georges Deherme. A former anarchist, he 
founded La Coopération des idées (The Cooperation of Ideas). Full of 
ambition, he envisioned it as a blueprint for the future society, the 
incubator of a "powerful proletarian elite" focused on social action and 
capable of reforming society. He also wanted to see social barriers 
dismantled there, fostering closer ties between classes[3].

These ideas were not entirely foreign to the activist's background. A 
pioneer of French anarchist individualism, Deherme was, in fact, one of 
the very first to defend, as early as 1886, the primacy of the 
individual over the collective, and above all to theorize his rejection 
of everything he considered "communist and revolutionary daydreams." 
This helps us better understand his abandonment of the class struggle 
and the emphasis he placed on individual effort within the Popular Unity 
(UP), deemed "superior to everything else"[4].

Free Love, a one-act social play by Véra Starkoff. The play, written by 
a libertarian sympathizer and dedicated to the Workers' Evenings of 
Montreuil, takes place in a Popular Unity gathering. Céline Renooz 
Collection, Marie-Louise Bouglé Library
However, it was with a mutual learning group founded by an anarchist 
communist that Deherme first put his ideas on education to the test. 
Émile Méreaux[5], an activist he had known for 15 years, had launched 
Study Evenings after work in Montreuil in November 1895: a few 
companions bought books together and met at a wine merchant's to discuss 
what they had understood from them. In February 1898, Deherme brought 
them intellectual speakers, and the venture took off: the concept of the 
UP (Unité Populaire - Popular Unity) was born. The Montreuil group would 
become the Soirées Ouvrières (Workers' Evenings), a UP of libertarian 
origin with a predominantly working-class focus, and one of the most 
enduring in the movement.

The Anarchists' Commitment
From 1899 onward, the main anarchist newspapers devoted space in their 
columns to announcing the UP conferences. Many activists became 
involved. Of a collection of approximately 33,000 recorded 
conferences[6], at least 2,300 were given by militant libertarians or 
sympathizers. Well-known names in anarchism were very active in the UP: 
Paraf-Javal, Emile Armand, Dubois-Desaulle, and many others gave 
hundreds of lectures there; Madeleine Pelletier, Louise Réville, Véra 
Starkoff, and Nelly Roussel engaged in extensive feminist propaganda 
there; Francis Delaisi participated in the founding of the Popular 
Universities (UP) in Rennes; Louis Grandidier was secretary of the 
Maison du Peuple (People's House) in Saint-Denis; Ernest Girault 
published the "Petite Bibliothèque des Universités Populaires" (Little 
Library of Popular Universities), a series of pamphlets...

Location of the Popular Talks in Paris.
Lesobscurs.com
Others, less well-known, were very active speakers and deserve to be 
studied: Leprince, Albert Bloch, Albert Laisant, Aristide Pratelle, etc. 
This anarchist presence within the movement is no secret and exerts an 
influence on certain intellectuals: such is the case, for example, of 
the writer Daniel Halévy, a keen observer of the workers' movement, in 
whose writings Popular Universities and libertarianism regularly resurface.

Anarchists were also behind certain Popular Universities (UPs): Calais, 
Grenoble, Roanne, Montreuil, Saint-Denis, Idée libre du XXe siècle (Free 
Idea of the 20th Century); they appeared as the most frequent speakers 
in others: Asnières, Nanterre, Puteaux, Argenteuil, Voltaire du XIe 
(Voltaire of the 11th Century), Aube sociale du XVIIe siècle (Social 
Dawn of the 17th Century). But they did not only fuel the movement: they 
extended it and reshaped it in their own image. The teaching, deemed too 
formal, led the anarchists Libertad and Paraf-Javal to found, in October 
1902, more informal "Popular Talks," where "the formalism of teaching 
would be replaced by frank camaraderie"[7]. "Libertarian Libraries" were 
also founded as early as 1896, and their development accelerated from 
1899 onward; Their more political objective was "libertarian education 
preparing for the libertarian revolution"[8]. These two parallel 
currents within the Popular Unity (UP) emerged throughout France. The 
movement would experience a decline as rapid as its rise.

What was the militant outcome?
By 1904, there was already talk of a "crisis within the Popular Unity." 
In fact, it was a fad fading: the Dreyfus Affair was over, and the young 
ambitions had faded. Workers rarely had the energy to attend lectures 
after a hard day's work. Furthermore, the gamble of reaching an 
understanding between workers and the bourgeoisie rarely worked; and 
when the latter withdrew, financial support often disappeared as well, 
causing the bankruptcy of many Popular Unity groups. Nevertheless, the 
movement was not dead: it had simply been whittled down.

Graph showing the number of interventions by anarchists within the 
Popular Unity groups.

Elie Oriol
The viewpoint of certain activists allows us to draw some lessons. For 
some, "the influence of the Popular Unity (PU) on anarchists was 
disastrous"[9]: as places for the dissemination of bourgeois 
individualism, they diverted workers from the struggle and risked 
"neutralizing the revolutionary movement for a long time"[10]. This goal 
of social pacification, explicit in Deherme's work, was also clearly 
formulated in the inaugural speech of La Coopération des idées by the 
academic Gabriel Séailles: "We don't need an hour of impetuosity, we 
need centuries of energy"[11].

Yet, if it took a Fernand Pelloutier to make the labor exchanges a true 
organ of struggle, a Pouget and a Griffuelhes to equip the CGT with a 
revolutionary project, couldn't a sincere effort make the PU a powerful 
tool in the hands of the proletariat? Could it not be "the intellectual 
equivalent of the trade union in the economic sphere"[12]? Some 
anarchists believe so, provided that the leadership of the Popular Unity 
(PU) returns to the hands of the workers, who themselves freely 
establish a curriculum in line with their interests, "attacking the very 
causes of intellectual oppression"[13].

October and November 1900 program of the Libertarian Education Library, 
rue Titon, Paris.

International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
This dynamic already existed in some universities, and the "crisis of 
the UP" may have accelerated it in others. However, were these places 
able to foster working-class emancipation, or did they merely contribute 
to forging an elite, separated from the masses by a "culture" that had 
become a "diabolically corrupting privilege"[14]? In the conclusion of a 
fine short story by Daniel Halévy, an old libertarian takes stock of a 
now-fading UP in which he had once believed: "We did too much literature 
at the Foyer...[...]We should have always been talking about work, about 
action..."[15].

If the anarchist idea was indeed propagated in the UP, perhaps a bit of 
the spirit of revolt was lost along the way, perhaps not enough effort 
was made to make it a space for preparing social transformation. Should 
we have therefore overlooked a movement where it seemed possible to 
instill the ideas of justice and freedom among the masses? On these 
still-relevant activist questions, the history of the Popular 
Universities offers us a new example to consider.

Elie Oriol, Museum of Living History, Montreuil

Submit

[1]Georges Deherme, *The Cooperation of Ideas: An Attempt at Popular 
Education and Organization*, Union for Moral Action, 1901.

[2]Gabriel Séailles, quoted in Lucien Mercier, *Popular Universities: 
1899-1914. Popular Education and the Labor Movement at the Beginning of 
the Century*, Les Éditions Ouvrières, 1986.

[3]Georges Deherme, ibid.

[4]Georges Deherme, ibid.

[5]Elie Oriol, "One Hundred and Thirty Years Ago: The Anarchist Commune 
of Montreuil," Alternative libertaire no. 348, April 2024.

[6]Lucien Mercier, "People's Universities in Everyday Life (1899-1939). 
Activities," Georgesdeherme.fr.

[7]Gaetano Manfredonia, "Libertad and the Popular Talks Movement," La 
Question sociale, no. 8, 1998.

[8]Le Libertaire, August 27, 1899.

[9]Karacol, "The Bear's Skin," L'Anarchie, July 8, 1909.

[10]Paul Delesalle, "Explanations," Le Libertaire, April 29, 1900.

[11]Gabriel Séailles, "Education and Revolution," La Coopération des 
idées, 1899.

[12]André Girard, "On the Social Role of Popular Universities II," Les 
Temps Nouveaux, June 17, 1905.

[13]André Girard, "On the Social Role of Popular Universities III," Les 
Temps Nouveaux, July 1 1905.

[14]Marcel Martinet, Proletarian Culture, Librairie du Travail, 1935.

[15]Daniel Halévy, "An Episode," Cahiers de la Quinzaine, July 1, 1907.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Education-ouvriere-Le-mouvement-des-Universites-populaires-et-les-anarchistes
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