Sebastien Faure

Sébastien Faure (6 January 1858 – 14 July 1942) was a major French anarchist figure, freethought/secular activist, and a principal proponent of synthesis anarchism. Of relevance to MAPs, Faure was advocated for sexual/economic/political liberation, founding a libertarian school and having multiple sexual experiences with pre-pubescent females during his life. We discuss this in "Faure as an MAP?" below.

Biography

In 1894, he was prosecuted in "The Trial of the thirty" ("Procès des trente"), and was acquitted. That same year, he became the guardian of Sidonie Vaillant after the execution of her father, Auguste Vaillant, who had bombed the French parliament. In 1895, he cofounded "Le Libertaire" with Louise Michel, taking the name of the earlier journal by Joseph Déjacque. At the time of the Dreyfus affair, which rocked France, he was one of the leading supporters of Alfred Dreyfus. In 1904, he created a libertarian school, La Ruche ("The Hive"), close to Rambouillet, which closed in February 1917. In 1916, he launched the periodical "Ce qu'il faut dire". Faure also co-founded (with Volin) the Synthesis, also known as synthesis anarchism, which was an influential form of conceiving anarchist federation.

Thought and writings

An archive of selected writings in English can be found here. In Libertarian Communism (1903), he wrote:

I make war on war; this is why, worker for life and not for death, I am an internationalist and call for the dismissal of armies and preach universal peace.

I said:

Love is, by its very nature subject to whims; it’s capricious, electric. It is madness to want to submit it to fixed rules applicable to all. Philosophically, liberty is the sole regime to which it can adapt itself.

In practice marriage gives deplorable results. Far from being a guarantee of concord and happiness, it gives birth to the worst forms of hypocrisy and the most sorrowful situations.

A chain always useless and dangerous; a chain always intolerable, it must be smashed.

All children suffer because of the family, some because they have one, others because they don’t.

For these reasons I stigmatize marriage and the vain formalities that surround it. I swear by the imminent and necessary destruction of the juridical family based on cupidity and which must be replaced by the great human family, resting on the solid arising of all individual interests.

He is recognized for his teaching and qualities as a speaker, and is the author of several books:

• The universal pain (1895)
• My Communism (1921)
• The Forces Of The Revolution (1921)
• Religious imposture (1923)
• Subversive remarks
• Twelve Proofs of God's Inexistence (1908)

He was also the founder of the Anarchist encyclopedia, as well as the namesake of the Sébastien Faure Century, the French-speaking contingent of the Durruti Column during the Spanish civil war.