Anselme Bellegarrigue was a French individualist anarchist, born between 1820 and 1825 in Toulouse and presumed dead around the end of the 19th century in Central America. He participated in the French Revolution of 1848, was author and editor of Anarchie, Journal de l'Ordre and Au fait ! Au fait ! Interprétation de l'idée démocratique.

Biography

Early life

Not much is known about the childhood and young adulthood of Anselme Bellegarrigue. According to his close friend Ulysse Pic, he went to the Lycée d'Auch for some time, then traveled in order to make his own education: between 1846 and 1848, he visited North America, via New York, Boston, New Orléans and the West Indies. These travels convinced him of the advantages of democracy and individual liberties^[1].

Participation in the 1848 French Revolution

Anselme Bellegarrigue came back to France on 21 February 1848, the day before the events that would end the reign of Louis-Philippe the 1st. He participated in the revolt but never ceased criticising the direction taken by the movement from the day following the end of the July Monarchy: as a young worker passes by saying « This time, we won't be robbed of our victory! » (a reference to the July Revolution that had failed to instaurate a regime satisfying workers' demands), he responds : « Ah, my friend, the victory has already been robbed: hasn't a temporary government been declared ? ».

He also participated in the Société Républicaine Centrale (also called Club Blanqui), where he accused all of the political parties of the French Second Republic of having hijacked the popular revolt into more authoritarianism and central concentration of power, calling them "the pox of nations". He refused to call the historical period a revolution, instead saying of it that "the evolution of 1848 has only been a consolidation of what was meant to be abolished" because "a Revolution must be the ruin not of a government, but of all government." While he was participating in a society composed mostly of socialist thinkers, he opposed all authoritarian measures and all social measures because he considered that any governmental intervention can be shown to be slavery of some by some others, or a violent conflict between men: "Anarchy is order, government is civil war."

He even mentioned concepts of civil disobedience and voluntary servitude:

A democrat is not one who commands, but one who disobeys.

You thought to this day that there were tyrants? Well ! You were in error, as there only are slaves: where no one obeys, no one commands.

In 1849 he founded the Association des Libres Penseurs in Meulan with some childhood friends, including Ulysse Pic (who then called himself Pic Dugers), in order to publish anarchist pamphlets; but the arrests of several members slowed and finally put an end to these activities.

Anarchist publications

Anselme Bellegarrigue published, edited and authored several anarchist texts. In 1848, between October and December he published Au fait ! Au fait ! Interprétation de l'idée démocratique in Toulouse. With Ulysse Pic he edited Le Dieu des riches et le Dieu des pauvres and Jean Mouton et le percepteur.

He was also an editor for the daily La Civilisation from March 1849, a local newspaper selling about 2000 copies^[2]. For his friends of the Association des Libres Penseurs, he wrote an article titled « L'anarchie, c'est l'ordre » (Anarchy is order) in the 3 April 1850 issue of La Voix du Peuple, but this issue's publication was interrupted.

Later he wrote, edited and self-published his Anarchie, Journal de l'Ordre of which two issues appeared due to low readership: the third issue, containing a study on the origin of wealth, was never published. According to Sharif Gemie, this journal constitutes the very first anarchist manifesto in the world^[3]

In 1851 he started writing a novel: "Le Baron de Camebrac, en tournée sur le Mississipi", published episodically until 1854, and an essay: "Les femmes d'Amérique" describing his observations on American society.

He participated in the writing of the Almanach de la Vile Multitude in 1851 and prepared an Almanach de l'Anarchisme for the year 1852, which was never published due to the French coup of 1851.

Return to America

By the establishment of the French Second Empire, Anselme Bellegarrigue went back to America, in Honduras, where, according to Max Nettlau, he was a professor, then in San Salvador where he is said to have participated in the government.

According to his son (as reported by André Rault), after spending three years in San Salvador he decided to go back to natural life and settled on the Pacific Coast.

Bellegarrigue's anarchism

Anselme Bellegarrigue's anarchism is closer philosophically to that of Gustave de Molinari than Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (whose ideas he lambasted in his writings) or Max Stirner, because he refused, in the name of individualism and subjectivist appreciation of moral values, those two's opinions on the value of things and private property. His defense of egotism as a virtue can be likened to that of Ayn Rand :

Every man is an egoist; whoever stops being so is but a thing. Whoever says he's not, is a liar.

Self-sacrifice is slavery, self-degradation, abjection ; it's the king, it's the government, it's tyranny, it's conflict, it's civil war. Individualism, on the other hand, is liberation, grandeur, noblety; it's man, it's people, it's freedom, it's brotherhood, it's order.

In his texts, he defended a form of democracy without central power and no ultimate ruling institution, where citizens would enjoy maximal individual sovereignty and would only voluntarily participate in an optional local administration. He also supported the idea, already established by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, that common good is always the sum of everyone's self-interest:

The collective interest cannot be complete except when private interest stays complete, just as the common good is everyone's good, there only needs be that, in a society, the individual interest of just one citizen be damaged for the collective interest to immediately cease being the interest of everyone and therefore to cease existing.

Quotes

• There are, in truth, no worse counter-revolutionaries than revolutionaries ; because there are no worse citizens than the envious.
• Power only possesses what it takes from the people, and for the citizens to believe that they have to give what they have in order to get welfare, their common sense must have been deeply distorted.
• It is only when everyone's authority is equal among everyone, that social equilibrium is obviously attained.
• A people that runs its own affairs is a self-governing people, and a self-governing people abolishes, by this very fact, and makes obsolete all the bazar of legislation that popular agitation, more than the genius of the State's men, had engendered.
• Revolution is the flux of interests: no one can represent interests, they represent themselves. The intense force of these interests' persevering and calm manifestation is the only revolutionary force that is both reasonable and possible.
• One cannot redistribute wealth without first becoming master of all wealth; redistribution is first and foremost monopoly.
• If governing is called a job, I ask to examine the products of this job, and if those products don't suit me, I declare that forcing me to consume them would be the strangest abuse of power a man could exerce on another man. It is true that this abuse is done by force and that I am the one who supports, on my own coins, this force I am complaining about. That said, I'm coiling back on myself and recognize that though I am a victim, I am also an idiot. But my idiocy only stems from my isolation, which is why I say to my fellow citizens: Let's rise up; let's only trust in ourselves; let's say: let freedom be, and freedom shall be.
• So I hear that liberty without brakes is menacing. Who is she menacing ? Who shall fear the untamed horse, but one who would tame it ? Who shall fear an avalanche, but one who would stop it ? Who trembles in front of liberty, but tyranny ? A menacing liberty... one ought to say it's the opposite. What is frightening in her is the sound of her irons. Once those are shattered, she is no more tumultuous; but calm and wise.
• Government is not a fact, but a fiction. The only permanent and eternal fact is people.

Notes

See also

• Anarchist Manifesto

External links

• Biography of Anselme Bellegarrigue by George Woodcock.
• Journal de l'ordre, issue #1
• Journal de l'Ordre, issue 2
• Anselme Bellegarrigue, Manifeste de l'Anarchie (1850)

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