Joseph Déjacque

Joseph Déjacque was born in Paris in late 1821. His father died when he was very young, and his mother, a washerwoman, paid for his schooling in Faubourg Saint-Antoine. He saw the July Revolution of 1830 as a child. At thirteen he left school to work as a paper hanger, later selling wallpaper on Boulevard des Capucines. Bored with the trade, he joined the French Navy in 1841 but quickly disliked the military discipline and hierarchy at sea. He returned to selling wallpaper in Paris and by 1847 was self-employed as a house painter. Around this time, he became involved with a radical workers’ group that published the Christian socialist paper *L’Atelier*, and he taught himself to write what he called “social poetry.”

Déjacque fought on the barricades during the June Days uprising of 1848, part of the French Revolution that overthrew the July Monarchy. After the revolution, he joined socialist feminist circles led by Jeanne Deroin and Pauline Roland, becoming a strong supporter of women’s rights and starting work as a revolutionary journalist. Unemployment and poverty remained severe, and the provisional government created National Workshops. Déjacque enrolled on 10 May. Within a month, the new Executive Commission shut down the workshops and arrested socialist leaders, sparking the June Days. Déjacque fought against the government but was arrested when the army crushed the uprising. He was imprisoned at Cherbourg, one of over 15,000 workers deported.

After Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was elected president in December 1848, his government suppressed freedom of association and banned socialist clubs. Déjacque was released in March 1849 but kept running into trouble with the authorities. When a conservative government was elected in June 1849, he and Ernest Cœurderoy joined The Mountain’s uprising against it. That too was suppressed, and Cœurderoy fled to Switzerland. Déjacque wrote a collection of romantic poetry, *Les Lazaréenes, Fables et Poesies Sociales*, published in August 1851, which addressed class conflict, social injustice, and the authoritarianism of religion and politics. In October 1851 he was charged with incitement over the book’s anti-authoritarian themes and sentenced to two years in prison.

During the reactionary period of the Second French Empire, the socialist press was banned, but French anarchist thought grew abroad. Déjacque became one of the most prominent French anarchist voices of the time, alongside Anselme Bellegarrigue, Claude Pelletier, and Ernest Cœurderoy, and helped popularize the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. After the 1851 coup d’état, he fled into exile, first to Brussels, then to London. In London he met fellow exile Gustave Lefrançais, who told him about the situation of other French exiles. Déjacque grew disillusioned with the republican exiles led by Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, complaining about their moral disengagement and the cult of personality around figures like Louis Auguste Blanqui. He saw no real connection between the rival émigré factions.

After time in London and Jersey, he emigrated to the United States. In New York City he gained a reputation as a controversial firebrand, organizing radical émigrés and helping to found the International Association in 1855. He then moved to New Orleans, where he campaigned for the abolition of slavery through social revolution and published essays criticizing Bonapartist figures and defending gender equality. Unable to find a publisher because of his abolitionist views, he returned to New York. There he started *Le Libertaire*, the first non-English-language anarchist newspaper in the United States, in which he serialized his utopian fiction novel *L’humanisphère*. When Bonaparte’s government offered amnesty to exiled radicals, Déjacque went back to France. He died in obscurity in the mid-1860s.

Today he is remembered as an early forerunner of anarchist communism and for coining the political definition of the word “libertarian” (*libertaire* in French).