In the seventh of our series on meetings with figures from labour history, Constance Bantman encounters the French anarchist Antoinette Cazal.

Was Antoinette ‘Trognette’ Cazal (1862-1902) even a figure of the labour movement? Her entry in the biographic dictionary of the French labour movement, Le Maitron, describes her as ‘a seamstress; a brewery girl; an anarchist; a defendant in the [1894 anti-anarchist] Trial of the Thirty’; however, the text largely focuses on her complicated romantic entanglements with Léon Ortiz, a notorious practitioner of anarchism-inspired ‘illegalism’. Her own anarchism transpires only in her sociability and in the intense repression and hardship which defined her tragically brief existence. What would I say to Antoinette Cazal? First, that she has not been forgotten, that her life is fascinating for historians and readers who care increasingly about the role of women in the anarchist movement – beyond Louise Michel. Trying to connect through scholarship may be sentimentalism on my part, and I would be curious to see how Antoinette would respond to this. I expect that many labour historians and biographers share the wish to know how the protagonists of our histories would feel about becoming academic subjects; indifference or annoyance would be my guess. And then of course, my focus would be on the questions I would ask her. The main one relates to the anarchist activism which is glaringly absent from her biography: did she think of herself as an anarchist, and if so, what did she mean by it? Did she go to meetings, read the anarchist press – or had it read to her? Was she even aware of prominent figures whom we consider as highly influential anarchists, such as Peter Kropotkin or Emile Pouget? And did she ever consider going into exile in London, or know any anarchists who went.

Dr Constance Bantman is Associate Professor in French at the University of Surrey, and a specialist in the history of the anarchist movement.

You can read all the Class Encounters in this series here.