During the 1860s and early 1870s, anarchism emerged as an active political movement within the First International, especially among the Jura-based Swiss sections of the organisation, and went on to spread across Europe and far beyond. Like Italy or Belgium, from the late 1870s onwards, France harboured a large and active movement (relatively speaking, of course, since anarchism was always a minority, radical pursuit). Great Britain, which is frequently but inaccurately regarded as an inhospitable milieu for anarchist ideas, also counted a fair number of anarchist groupings, and between 1880 and 1914, the French anarchists formed and maintained close connections...

The late 1870s was a time of rebirth for the international labour movement, after a decade marked by muffled social tensions. The drastic repression which followed the 1871 Paris Commune decimated the First International, and in many countries the economic depression and widespread hostility drastically reduced labour militancy. In France, the contrast was stark with the social buoyancy of the last years of Napoleon III’s Second Empire: the Third Republic set up in 1871 was young and fragile, under the constant threat of monarchical restoration, and its leaders were anxious to silence any opposition which might jeopardise stability. However, as...

After 1892, anti-anarchist repression in France sent the movement into turmoil. Most of the companions’ political activities – their publications, their meetings – came to a sudden halt, as many of them were sent to penal colonies, jails, or forced into exile. However, anarchist militancy did not stop altogether: even in jails, imprisoned companions could still talk, exchange letters with the outside world, and write books.¹ The situation of exiles was relatively propitious to political pursuits, despite the burden of continuous political surveillance and ceaseless internal conflicts; exile allowed for both the continuation of militancy and a reinvention of the...

‘In theory, there is no such thing as exile for the anarchist, nor actually for any consistent internationalist’, theEncyclopédie anarchistestated in 1934.¹ Such claims have become a central line of investigation for transnational labour historians who tend to emphasise a central paradox: ‘If the lived experience of transnationality helps account for the appeal of internationalist ideas amongst mobile workers in the first globalisation, then, it does not follow that there was any simple linkage between transnational lives and internationalist politics’.² The very cosmopolitan London milieu provides an excellent testing ground for the perennial claim that anarchists have no...

Very early on, the London anarchist milieu and the French and Italian proscriptions in particular were regarded as the nodal point of the international anarchist conspiracy. In the words of Malato, parodying the rants of the British conservative press,

Four hundreddesperadoes, robbers, counterfeiters and killers, whom their crimes have marginalised from any society … have fled continental polices and landed upon our shores. As soon as they arrive, being as ungrateful as they are unjust and unpatriotic, they start by plotting a large, horrific conspiracy (adjectives always sound good) against their hosts … These wretched men have decided to...

In spite of their limited numbers and unproven participation in terrorist plots, Britain’s international anarchist groups came to play a significant role in the redefinition of the country’s immigration and asylum policy. The early 1890s witnessed the emergence of a broad ‘restrictionist’ party advocating stricter policing and limitations on immigration and asylum, based on fears of economic and racial decline which would follow the uncontrolled immigration of radical foreigners. The terrorist scandals involving foreign anarchists, the threat posed by anarchism in general and, crucially, mass immigration from Eastern Europe, formed the core of the restrictionists’ arguments. The risk of becoming...

‘Père peinardhas now left Islington for Montmartre, and the French anarchists here are but a few … The Anarchist movement has never been more than a very sickly plant in this country, and to-day it is almost moribund’,¹ a tabloid noted in 1897. It is true that the international anarchist movement in London was by then minimal in terms of numbers and activity, following the departure of the French comrades after the heady years of propaganda by the deed. But this was not so much a lull as a change in forms of action. The years leading to the...

‘The importance of the binominal’ in anarchism has been stressed by historians.¹ Carl Levy used the phrase to characterise Errico Malatesta’s oscillation between local patriotism and cosmopolitanism, but it also applies to the French exiles who were his contemporaries in London, and this was in fact just one of the many dual traits of their groups. Other examples include the tension between communitarian isolation and internationalisation in the French comrades’ social organisation and political mores, between individualism and organisationalism in their political outlook, between blind terrorist violence and more gradualist and educationalist militant endeavours, and also, more prosaically, between camaraderie...