Abstract
Reviewed by: Rachel G. Hoffman, University of Cambridge, UK
Across Europe, the late nineteenth century was marked by the peak not only of anarchist attacks, but also of anarchist migration. From as early as the 1870s, anarchists were frequently on the move. As governments and police – inspired by incidents of anarchist violence at home and abroad, in particular in the aftermath of the Paris Commune, and rumours of anarchist conspiracies as well as domestic debates about radical political opposition and political asylum – clamped down on their activities, intensifying surveillance, censoring publications, prohibiting meetings, and persecuting, arresting and imprisoning adherents, anarchists departed for safer shores. They left both individually and in waves. They travelled to countries with relatively liberal immigration policies, especially Switzerland and Britain, and places where large groups of Europe’s political emigrants had congregated since the mid-nineteenth century, such as France, Italy and America, and moved on when the political winds shifted. While since the 1950s historians have dedicated their attention to the history of anarchism – studying prominent anarchists, philosophies of anarchism, incidents of anarchist violence, and the anarchist movements in individual countries – only recently have they begun to examine these transnational anarchist migrations. Over the past decade, influenced by global and transnational history, scholars have traced the movements, the sociological make-ups, activities, networks and ideologies of particular anarchist groups in exile and their relationship to and influence on their host countries as well as on the development of anarchism more widely.
Constance Bantman adds an important contribution to the growing literature on transnational anarchism with The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation. From the 1880s, small groups of exiled French ‘companions’, ‘the nickname adopted by the French anarchists’ (1) (as Bantman tells us), gathered in London. Over the course of the next decade, their numbers increased, spurred on by the surge of anarchist-inspired terrorist attacks in France in the early 1890s and the Third Republic’s retaliatory crackdown on anarchist activities, especially after 1892; thereafter hundreds of exiles joined those already abroad. Britain, given its liberal immigration and asylum policy, was a natural destination for many of them. Bantman examines the 450 or so French-speaking individuals who lived in exile in London between 1880 and 1914. For these anarchists, the London years bridged the gap between their political exile from France in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the amnesty that allowed their return in 1895. Their story is also part of the broader history of the rapid decline of Victorian liberalism with the immigration control Acts of 1905, 1914 and 1919, which transformed nineteenth-century Britain’s ‘open’ into to an increasingly ‘closed door’ policy. Bantman argues that political scaremongering about anarchism contributed to these developments around immigration and asylum in Britain, in particular to the passing of 1905 Act – despite the relative actual inactiveness of the French anarchists in London.
This book provides a detailed overview of the sociological characteristics of the group, their social and political interactions, disputes and organization. The French anarchist exiles in Britain ‘were mostly men in their thirties and forties, employed in both skilled and unskilled manual occupations, and coming predominantly from Greater Paris’ (45). There were also ‘dubious individuals’ who had recently had close run-ins with the French police, draft-dodgers and deserters. They made their way in London as tailors, shoemakers, mechanics, cabinet markers, engravers, hairdressers, joiners and typographers. A small number were employed as professionals, such as lawyers or engineers, while others worked in the restaurant industry, language teaching or journalism. Some resorted to robbery and other illicit activities such as counterfeiting, international cigar trafficking, stamp forgery and prostitution, or acted as police informers. It was not unusual for them to take on more than one job to get by.
Bantman’s focus on this transnational group helps to disentangle the realities and myths surrounding the rumoured violent conspiracies and activities of anarchists in exile in London. In general, financial hardship hindered their political pursuits. As one spy wrote to Paris in 1894, ‘They are busy trying to face material needs rather than conspiring against society’ (63). Any robust organization was further frustrated by political divisions among the anarchists. The chief debates split the anti-organizationalist and ‘illegaliste’ anarchists from the figureheads of French anarchist communism, who increasingly favoured organization over the use of violence as a revolutionary strategy. Nevertheless, politicians involved in contemporary debates about political asylum used anxieties about anarchism to justify passing the 1905 Aliens Act in Britain. Bantman also examines the ways in which the legislation affected international anarchist and syndicalist labour movements from the mid-1890s onwards, contributing to the formation of small transnational networks that spread the ideology before 1914. All of this goes a long way in supporting the author’s claim that French groups in London played a role in the reinvention of anarchism. There are, however, some problems here.
At times, the promises laid out are not entirely fulfilled. Early on, the author invokes a stream of wider historical themes and fields to which the study contributes, but without situating the research within the existing literature. Absent, for instance, in the claim that the French anarchists in London triggered a ‘moral panic’ in France, Britain and beyond is reference to the key text on moral panic by Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (1972), or any of the excellent, more recent publications that touch on moral panic in London and elsewhere. More problematic is the use of ‘globalization’ as an adequate category for explanation of the topic and as a subtitle for the study. Also missing is any of the literature that deals with the history of globalization, which would seemingly support some of the conclusions drawn.
These points aside, Bantman has written an engaging account of French anarchists in Victorian London. The study offers another crucial piece of the puzzle of the story of anarchist groups, their political exile and migration, and the fears they inspired in Britain and beyond. It will be of interest to those concerned with the history of anarchism and the history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European immigration and asylum policies.