Revolutionary activities (1848–1851)

Jeanne Deroin, depicted as leading the French Revolution of 1848, in The Uprising (L'Emeute) by Honoré Daumier

Together with Ernest Cœurderoy,^[7] Déjacque was an active participant in the French Revolution of 1848.^[8] Following the establishment of the French Second Republic, Déjacque joined the socialist feminist circles of Jeanne Deroin and Pauline Roland, becoming a keen supporter of women's rights and beginning his career as a revolutionary journalist.^[9]

Despite the revolutionary changes, unemployment and poverty was still rife, forcing the conservative government to make concessions to Louis Blanc's socialist faction.^[10] National Workshops were established to employ Parisian workers, with Déjacque himself enrolling in the programme on 10 May. But within the month, the Workshops were shut down by the government and a number of socialist leaders were arrested, which brought thousands of workers out into the streets in what became the June Days uprising.^[11] Déjacque fought on the barricades against the government,^[12] but the uprising was violently suppressed by the French Army and Déjacque was among the thousands that were arrested.^[13] He was taken to Cherbourg, where he was imprisoned and where over 15,000 workers were deported.^[11]

When Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was elected as President of France, his government suppressed freedom of association and banned the remaining socialist clubs.^[14] Déjacque was released from prison in March 1849,^[15] but he continued to find himself in trouble with the authorities.^[16] Following the election of a conservative government in June 1849,^[17] he and Cœurderoy joined The Mountain's uprising against the administration.^[18] When this too was suppressed, Cœurderoy fled to Switzerland.^[18] Déjacque himself was charged with incitement over the anti-authoritarian themes expressed in his romantic poetry book Les Lazaréenes,^[19] for which he was sentenced to two years in prison.^[20]

Exile and radicalisation (1851–1854)

During the "reactionary period" of the Second French Empire, the socialist press was suppressed, but French anarchist thought continued to develop abroad.^[21] Together with Anselme Bellegarrigue and Ernest Cœurderoy,^[22] Déjacque became one of the period's most prominent French anarchist voices,^[23] helping to popularise the works of the anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.^[24]

Gustave Lefrançais, a French anarchist with whom Déjacque lived during their exile in London

By the time of the 1851 French coup d'état,^[25] Déjacque had fled into exile,^[26] making his way to Brussels and then on to London.^[27] Upon arrival in the British capital, he was reunited with fellow French anarchist Gustave Lefrançais, who informed him of the situation of their exiled compatriots.^[28] Déjacque complained to Lefrançais about the moral disengagement of the republican exiles led by Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin and the cult of personality around factional leaders such as Louis Auguste Blanqui, finding himself disillusioned by the complete lack of rapport between the rival émigré factions.^[29]

At the funeral of an exiled French worker, when Republican leaders turned to leave prematurely, Déjacque forced himself to the front, demanding to speak and be heard.^[30] He fiercely criticised the "bourgeois republicans" and declared himself an enemy of "all who, in London and Paris, dream of governing to better guarantee their social privileges against proletarian demands, one in the name of Empire, the other in the name of the Republic."^[31] Some of the exiled French workers, including Déjacque and Lefrançais, found themselves living in poverty in Soho, subsisting only on meager rations.^[32] They were sent relief funds by sympathetic workers in France, but the distribution of this money was controlled by the exiled political leaders, with their mutual aid societies sitting on much of the money that they collected.^[33]

By 1853, Déjacque had moved to the Channel island of Jersey.^[34] There he started to vocally advocate for violence against the state,^[35] inspired by the example of Armand Barbès,^[36] and began penning an essay on The Revolutionary Question.^[37] He also attended the funeral of the French revolutionary poet Louise Julien, where he protested the appointment of Victor Hugo as the "sole speaker" at the burial.^[38] Such continued radical outbursts ended up isolating Déjacque from the rest of the French exiles, spurring him to move to the United States the following year.^[39]

Émigré organising in New York (1854–1855)

Karl Marx, whose German communist followers would make up the largest part of Déjacque's International Association

Upon arrival in New York City, Déjacque returned to work painting houses and became involved with the French radical emigres in the city. Having earned fame for his romantic poetry, in June 1854, he was invited to speak at a republican society, where he presented his essay on The Revolutionary Question for the first time.^[40] In his speech, he called for a "war on civilization by criminal means",^[37] advocating for small revolutionary cells to carry out direct action against traditional institutions,^[41] such as the church, state, private property and even the family.^[42] Although it was largely poorly received by its audience,^[43] he gained enough support in order to publish the essay the following month.^[44]

Having recognised the international character of the Revolutions of 1848 and that the counterrevolutionary repression had brought together revolutionaries of different nationalities, Déjacque began to advocate for workers to set aside bourgeois nationalism and instead practice proletarian internationalism.^[45] In February 1855, Déjacque participated in the establishment of the International Association (IA).^[46] The organisation was formed by a coalition of: British Chartists; French socialists of the Revolutionary Commune;^[46] German communists, veterans of Wilhelm Weitling's League of the Just and Karl Marx's Communist League;^[47] and Americans of the National Reform Association.^[48] Despite the international character of the organisation, Déjacque mostly kept to the French community, with no evidence of him ever speaking the English language during his time in the United States.^[49] By the time Déjacque returned to New York in 1858, the IA had dissolved due to internal differences over revolutionary nationalism.^[50]

Activism in New Orleans (1855–1858)

John Brown, a radical abolitionist who Déjacque praised during his time in New Orleans

Not long after founding the IA, Déjacque moved to New Orleans, a relatively cosmopolitan southern city where French radicalism had taken already root, although its followers largely upheld socialism whilst ignoring the pressing issue of slavery.^[51] While his fellow émigrés respected these boundaries of American republicanism, Déjacque himself made no pretence towards respectability,^[52] becoming a prominent activist for the abolitionist movement.^[53]

In 1856, he gave a public address calling on slaves to arm themselves and rise up against the United States.^[52] He praised the actions of the radical abolitionist John Brown^[54] and advocated for a united front between the white working class and black slaves, which he believed could together overthrow the United States in a social revolution and bring about a post-racial America.^[55] This time, he was not able to find a publisher for his abolitionist remarks.^[56]

He nevertheless continued to publish his radical writings, including a polemic against the Bonapartist Pierre-Jean de Béranger and an open letter on gender equality addressed to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the latter of which he included in an expanded second edition of Les Lazaréenes.^[57] In the open letter, he criticised Proudhon for his antifeminism, which he saw as inconsistent with anarchism;^[58] Déjacque declared that he refused to "establish hierarchic distinctions between the sexes and races," saying that to him "humanity is humanity".^[59] He also became the first person to use the term "libertarian" (French: libertaire) in a political sense,^[60] defining it synonymously with "anarchist".^[61]

He also attempted to publish a work of utopian fiction, but was not able to secure the required number of subscriptions.^[62] By February 1858, the failure of Déjacque's publishing efforts left him disillusioned with New Orleans and he returned to New York.^[63]

Publishing in New York (1858–1861)

Front page of Le Libertaire, the newspaper established by Déjacque in New York

Upon returning to New York,^[64] Déjacque found himself living in poverty;^[65] in order to fund his publishing efforts, he returned to work painting houses and solicited donations from sympathisers.^[66] In June 1858, he established the newspaper Le Libertaire, journal d'un mouvement social.^[67] Publishing it on a shoestring budget and editing it as its main contributor,^[66] the paper ran 27 issues between 1858 and 1861.^[68] With this, he became the first publisher of a non-English language anarchist newspaper in the United States,^[69] although this limited its reach to French émigrés.^[70]

During this period, he finally published his utopian fiction novel L'Humanisphere,^[37] serialised in Le Libertaire.^[71] Set in the year 2858,^[72] L'Humanisphere depicted the kind of society that Déjacque hoped would eventually arise after the abolition of capitalism.^[73] Inspired by the work of Charles Fourier,^[74] Déjacque formulated a radical form of communism distinct from the authoritarian models advocated by many of his peers.^[75] His society had no government or religion;^[76] instead sovereign individuals governed themselves and participated directly in all group decision-making.^[77]

In an attempt to go further than any previous works of utopian fiction, he depicted L'Humanisphere as a world in which every individual was able to achieve their potential, as they lived in conditions of post-scarcity, without any form of poverty.^[78] In this future society, "commerce, [the] scourge of the 19th century," had been eliminated; nothing was being bought or sold. In order to achieve this, Déjacque proposed the abolition of all private property, exchange values and states, and their replacement with anarchy.^[79] He considered a worker's right to be to the satisfaction of their needs, rather than to keep the product of their own labour, as he felt the latter would inevitably lead to capital accumulation.^[80] He thus advocated for "unlimited freedom of production and consumption",^[81] subordinated only to the authority of the "statistics book".^[82] In order to guarantee the universal satisfaction of needs, Déjacque saw the need for the abolition of forced labour through workers' self-management, which he figured would replace "arduous work" with "attractive work".^[83]

Déjacque's imaginative writing in L'Humanisphere has been likened to a "series of anarchic dreams", going beyond rationality and constructing an entirely alternate reality.^[84] It has been cited as a literary form of Neo-Impressionism, with art historian Robyn Roslack highlighting the following passage: "Just as orbs [atoms and molecules] circulate anarchically in universality, so men must circulate anarchically in humanity, under the sole impulse of sympathies and aversions, of reciprocal attractions and repulsions. Harmony can only exist through anarchy. There is the whole solution to the social problem."^[85] Although it anticipated the utopian society depicted by H. G. Wells in Men Like Gods,^[42] L'Humanisphere is often overlooked in studies of utopian fiction, which neglect it in favour of focusing on Plato's Republic, Thomas More's Utopia and Étienne Cabet's The Voyage to Icaria.^[73]

Final years (1861–c.1864)

With the outbreak of the Franco-Austrian War in 1859, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte moved to mend ties with the previously repressed French secularists and offered amnesty to all exiled radicals.^[86] Shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War,^[86] in February 1861, Le Libertaire ran its final issue^[87] and Déjacque finally returned to Paris.^[88]

Déjacque lived out his final years in obscurity, which has led to differing accounts over the cause and time of his death.^[18] According to Gustave Lefrançais,^[89] Déjacque died in 1864,^[90] reportedly having succumbed to mental illness.^[91] According to hospital records, he was admitted to Bicêtre Hospital on 22 April 1864 and died from paralysis on 18 November 1865.^[92] Other sources allege that he committed suicide in 1867, or died much later of natural causes after experiencing a religious conversion.^[93]

Anarchist communism

Luigi Galleani, an insurrectionary anarchist communist, who took up Déjacque's advocacy of "propaganda of the deed"

The same year that Déjacque died, the socialist movement experienced a revival with the foundation of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA),^[94] established by a coalition of British Owenites and French mutualists.^[95] As time went on, anarchists in the international increasingly gravitated away from Proudhon's mutualism and towards the anarchist communism favoured by Déjacque.^[96] Parts of his programme were later implemented, during the uprising of the Paris Commune in 1871.^[97]

Déjacque's advocacy of violence also anticipated later insurrectionary anarchists' conception of "propaganda of the deed",^[98] as well as the nihilism of Sergey Nechayev.^[43] Embarrassed by this violent temperament, when Jean Grave re-published L'Humanisphere in 1899, he cut out parts that could have been read as incitement.^[42] Nevertheless, this reprint gave new light to Déjacque's conception of communism, exposing his work to a new generation of anarchist communists.^[99] Déjacque's "iconoclastic" anarchist communism, with both its utopian and insurrectionary dimensions, was soon taken up by Peter Kropotkin and Luigi Galleani.^[100] By the turn of the 20th century, anarchist historians Max Nettlau and Gustav Landauer were beginning to characterise Déjacque as a "vital forerunner" of anarchist communism.^[101]

Libertarianism

Benjamin Tucker, one of the first people to adopt the term "libertarian" from Déjacque

Before Déjacque, "libertarianism" had referred to a metaphysical philosophy that upheld the notion of free will.^[102] But over time, Déjacque's libertarianism was developed into a political philosophy that upholds liberty.^[103] It was first adopted in the 1880s by American individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker;^[104] and then in the 1890s by French anarchists such as Sébastien Faure,^[105] in order to distinguish anarchism from authoritarian socialism.^[102]

During the 20th century, figures of the New Left began to refer to themselves as "libertarian socialists"; with anarchists such as Daniel Guérin using the term to avoid the negative connotations of "anarchism", while Marxists such as E. P. Thompson used it to distance themselves from Marxism-Leninism.^[102] By this time, the term also gained popularity among proponents of laissez-faire and free market economics,^[106] such as Robert Nozick, David Friedman and Murray Rothbard.^[107] In the contemporary French language, this latter form is today referred to by the word "libertarien", while the term "libertaire" has retained its left-wing anarchist definition.^[104]

Over one hundred years after his death, Déjacque's work has been slowly rediscovered, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union spurring fresh interest in his vision of libertarian socialism.^[108] His works have recently developed an "underground reputation", due in part to the English language translations carried out by Shawn Wilbur.^[109]