News From Nowhere Radical & Community Bookshop

• home
• browse books
• book details:

The History of the French Anarchist Movement 1917 - 1945

by David Berry - £15.00  AK Press (2009)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9781904859826 | ISBN 10: 1904859828

David Berry's study is the first English-language evaluation of the development and lessons of the French anarchist movement between the wars. Using an impressive array of archival sources and personal interviews, Berry's original research explores the debates and growing pains of a massive, working-class, revolutionary movement facing great obstacles and uncertainty.
 
Focusing on the organized wings of the movement—the anarcho-communist and syndicalist groups—it offers a ringside seat to the legacy of the First International, the upheaval of the Russian Revolution and subsequent Bolshevik treachery, and the fight against fascism.
 
Includes an introduction from archivist and historian Barry Pateman.

"I think Berry's book deals with two constant and re-occurring questions in the history of anarchist practice; are anarchists ever able to create organizations that are supple and nuanced enough to be faithful to the complexities of anarchist practices and relationships, and who should or can anarchists work with in order to dismantle capitalism and replace it with a society predicated on voluntary agreement, equality, and mutual aid? ... Research of this high quality reminds us that we have much more to do before we start throwing around too many generalizations about where we are now as anarchists and what needs to be done to allow anarchy to flourish and grow. There is still much for us all to learn. Time to get on with it."
(Barry Pateman, from the Introduction)

"Berry has done an amazing job of poring through the speeches, the newspapers, the reports of meetings of all the various strands of the anarchist movement to develop a coherent story of changing anarchist ideology in the 1920s and 1930s."
(H-France)

(Price & availability last checked: October 2018)