Continuing our series on places in labour history, Constance Bantman explains why the back pages of French anarchist newspapers are her happy place.

Much of my work focuses on piecing back together often elusive anarchist networks and understanding how they operated in the decades preceding the First World War, and so my happy place is the correspondence sections of anarchist periodicals, where groups and individuals could trade views and propaganda material, network and organise for many different purposes and across multiple scales. Alongside the police archives which document – extensively, in the French case which is my main area of interest – both the daily lives of anarchist groups and the oppressive surveillance imposed on them, the press is a key source for those studying anarchist circles, their functioning, often fleeting affiliations, and the way they interacted with one another. Anarchist periodicals famously fulfilled many of the roles of a structured party for this political movement which had none and were an essential site for community-building and the (re-)making of anarchism.

I have spent many joyful hours peering at the coded lists of initials, locations and sums of money in the papers’ back pages, where editors chased or acknowledged the funds they received from subscribers, where groups and individuals discussed doctrinal points, traded information about meetings, events and the circulation of printed texts. This is where I observed, for instance, that Paris’s influential weekly La Révolte (1887-1894) was sent to Milwaukee and ‘Spring-Walley’ [sic],[1] which brings substance and detail to the fact that anarchist periodicals from France were read by French-speaking communities in the US. Down the same page, coincidentally, one finds several reports on local commemorations of the 1887 Chicago executions, shedding light on another aspect of transatlantic anarchist culture. The mass digitisation of anarchist periodicals now makes it much easier to document both sides of these print networks; for instance, when I was researching the biography of the prolific anarchist editor Jean Grave (1854-1939), being able to browse through major Latin American periodicals allowed me to chart his extensive presence in Argentina, Brazil and Peru, and to highlight the Hispanosphere as his main area of connection.

For their vast and still partly untapped potential for mapping out anarchist networks and understanding their activities, what makes this place – and this source – so special for me is still that it is filled with the life of anarchism and the very fabric of politics: the solidarity, the bickering, the meetings, the culture, and a great deal of wit and colourful writing.

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

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[1] La Révolte, 12 November 1893

Read more articles in the series ‘A Place in Labour History’.