Concept

Joseph Déjacque

Overview

Joseph Déjacque (French: [deʒak]; 27 December 1821 – 18 November 1865) was a French political journalist and poet. A house painter by trade, during the 1840s, he became involved in the French labour movement and taught himself how to write poetry. He was an active participant in the French Revolution of 1848, fighting on the barricades during the June Days uprising, for which he was arrested and imprisoned. He quickly became a target for political repression by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's government, which imprisoned him for his poetry and forced him to flee into exile. His experiences radicalised him towards anarchism and he regularly criticised republican politicians for their anti-worker sentiment.

After spending time in London and Jersey, he emigrated to the United States, developing a reputation as a controversial firebrand in New York City. There he became active in organising radical émigrés, helping to establish the International Association in 1855. He then moved to New Orleans, where he agitated for the abolition of slavery through social revolution, while also publishing essays that criticised Bonapartist figures and defended gender equality. Unable to find a publisher due to his abolitionist remarks, he returned to New York. There he established Le Libertaire, the first non-English-language anarchist newspaper in the United States, in which he printed his utopian fiction novel L'humanisphère. After Bonaparte's government extended an amnesty to exiled radicals, he returned to France, where he died in obscurity in the mid-1860s.

Today he is remembered as an early forerunner of anarchist communism and particularly for coining the political definition of the word "libertarian" (French: libertaire).

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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But when a man besides taking away the money of the citizens has made slaves of them, then, instead of these names of reproach, he is termed happy and blessed, not only by the citizens but by all who hear of his having achieved the consummation of injustice. For mankind censure injustice, fearing that they may be the victims of it and not because they shrink from committing it.
Plato, The Republic
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The poet who celebrates the victors should be fifty years old at least, and himself a man who has done great deeds. Of such an one the poems may be sung, even though he is not the best of poets.
Plato, Laws
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The demands of the Parisian proletariat are utopian tom-fooleries that have to be done away with. To this declaration of the constitutional national assembly, the Paris proletariat answers with the June insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic won.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
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Philosophers who discussed Joseph Déjacque

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Libertarianism.

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