At the bottom of the stairs lay the mariners of the street cur-rent, the tramps who had fallen out of the crowd life, who refused to obey—they had abandoned time, possessions, labor, slavery. They walked and slept in counter-rhythm to the world.
—Anaïs Nin, “Houseboat,” 19411
Following the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871, successive Republican governments presided over an explosive expansion of French indus-trial capitalism which quickly eroded older, more rural forms of production and community life. The economic juggernaut was made possible thanks to a new infrastructure of rail lines and roads which spread through the countryside, bringing economic transformation to hitherto relatively untouched areas.2 It came with a price: in villages, towns, and hamlets throughout France, the products of local craftsmen were displaced by cheap goods mass-produced in factories, and small-scale farms geared to the material needs and ecological capaci-ties of the local community were undermined by imported produce from abroad and the reconfiguration of agricultural production on a large-scale, export-oriented basis. This process was augmented by a great economic depression that lasted from 1873 to 1896, a crisis which forced artisans and peasants into debt, and from there to the mines, factories, mills, and urban centers that fed the industrial capitalist monolith.3
Gustave Marissiaux, The Slag Heap, ca 1904. Photograph.
Roger Magraw writes that as the old skills and rural communities died, “uprooted, alienated, deskilled workers took refuge in consumerism, or, more often, in drink, crime, and domestic violence.”4 But many of the displaced refused to be victims; instead, they entered into a state of revolt against encroaching capitalist servitude, articulated in the form of an anarchist critique of marginalization and the cruel existence of the dispossessed.
Nowhere was this critique more clearly encapsulated than in the art of the neo-impressionists. The term “neo-impressionism” was coined in 1886 by the anarchist art critic Felix Feneon to characterize the stylistic evolution of a group of Paris-based painters whose ranks included Paul Signac, Camille Pissarro, Lucien Pissarro, Georges Seurat, Anna Bloch, Charles Angrand, Maximilien Luce, Albert Dubois-Pillet, and Henri Edmond Cross; shortly thereafter, the group expanded to include Théo Van Rysselberghe and a circle of artists based in Belgium. The difference between impressionism and neo-impressionism, Signac would later explain, was the neo-impressionists’ “scientific” application of color, as opposed to “instinctual”; a second difference was that, politically speaking, almost all of the neoimpressionists were avowed anarchists whose paintings and graphic contributions to journals such as Le Père Pinard, L’en dehors, La Plume, L’Assiette Au Beurre, and Les Temps Nouveaux played a key agitational role in the movement.5
Take, for example, Les Errants (The Wanderers) (1897) (see color plate 2), a lithograph produced by Théo Van Rysselberghe for an album of prints issued by Les Temps Nouveaux (see color plate 2). Van Rysselberghe’s title came from a poem of the same name by the anarchist playwright Emile Verhaeren. In the corner of the print is a passage from Verhaeren’s poem which reads: “Thus the poor people cart their misery for great distances over the plains of the earth ...” In the late 1880s and early 1890s, the workers of Belgium had repeatedly risen up in a series of mass strikes, riots, and violent clashes with the police and army. The first such incident erupted in the industrial city of Liege, where a commemoration of the Paris Commune led to full-scale rioting that spread throughout the country’s industrial mining region.6 We can better grasp the desperation of the region’s workers through photographs of their living hell—the prosperous (from a bourgeois perspective) towns where workers were reduced to combing slag heaps for bits of coal “after hours.” Men, women, and children worked ten- to thirteen-hour days, six days a week, in the mines and mills of Belgium; they were paid at or below subsistence level, and if there was no work, they starved.7
Van Rysselberghe’s Wanderers are refugees displaced by poverty, the police, and the army. In the 1890s, thousands of such families were forced to tramp the roads of Belgium by grinding unemployment, lock-outs, or brutal acts of government suppression; “They cart their misery for great distances,” Verhaeren wrote. Enraged at the injustice, Van Rysselberghe depicted these outcasts in their most abject moment of defeat, condemned to wandering without end in a world ruled by an economic system that “capitalizes everything, assimilates everything, and makes it its own.”8
But to where might they have wandered? Perhaps to the city, to join the multitudes of unemployed and underemployed. Henri Lebasque’s lithograph, Provocation (1900), distributed by Les Temps Nouveaux, bears testimony to the kind of marginalization awaiting them in the great marketplaces of capital. A stark critique of starvation in the face of capitalism’s bountiful plenitude, the provocation is the commodification of bread, humanity’s most basic sustenance. A child stands weak and listless, staring at loaves displayed in a brightly-lit shop window; business prospers while the child is hungry. Similar testimony to the inhumane nature of capitalism is captured in a drawing for Les Temps Nouveaux’s July 1907 issue by George Bradberry, depicting an emaciated tramp who pauses to stare at fat cows chewing their cud. “The starving man,” reads the caption, “envies the satiated beasts!” And so the rural outcast stands mute by the field—valueless, penniless, and “worthless.”
Whilst some anarchist artists focused on the dispossessed’s plight, others chose to portray the oppression of work under capitalism. In 1889, Camille Pissarro created a small booklet entitled Social Turpitudes, which depicted the drudgery of emergent forms of urban wage labor. Among them is an image of seamstresses subject to the watchful eye of a supervisor. They hunch over piecework in a debtor’s prison where they have been condemned by their poverty to endless, repetitious tasks such as this. Pissarro also depicted the brutalization of day-laborers; an illustration for the May 1893 issue of La Plume, for example, shows the back-breaking drudgery of stevedores who spent their lives—when they could obtain work—shoveling and hauling coal.
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Henri Lebasque, Provocation, 1900. © Estate of Henri Lebasque / SODRAC (2006) Lithograph from Album Les Temps Nouveau. Private collection.
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Maximilien Luce, The Factory Chimneys: Couillet Near Charleroi, 1898-1899. Oil on canvas. © Estate of Maximilien Luce / SODRAC (2006)
Thus far I have discussed the neo-impressionists’ damning criticism of industrial capitalist labor and the injustice of working-class destitution. However, this was not the sum total of their viewpoint; they also pointed to different possibilities lying dormant in Europe’s besieged pre-capitalist ways of life. Here, critique was wed to utopia, and the condition of wandering took on new meaning.
The latter theme emerges in a painting by Maximilien Luce en-titled The Factory Chimneys: Couillet Near Charleroi (1898-1899). Luce was an uncompromising working-class militant who was briefly imprisoned for his anarchist activities in 1894. Toward the end of the 1890s, he traveled through northern France and Belgium, recording his impressions of the mining towns and factories.9 An exhibition of his paintings held in 1891 led one anarchist art critic to note that he found in Luce’s work “the bleeding soul of the people, the life of the multitudes anguished and inflamed by suffering and bitterness.”10
Factory Chimneys is dominated by the grim industrial capitalist inferno of Couillet, where treeless streets of rooming houses disgorged workers daily into the mills. But in the corner of the painting, a man and boy walk away from the entrapment of this inferno. Their destination is unnamed; their pur-pose, undetermined. They might be setting out on a journey, or perhaps they seek momentary respite from the grey, polluted environment they leave behind. In any event, they are passing from one world to another—the rhythm of capital gives way to the rhythm of nature.
Peter Kropokin, 1899. Photograph.
Luce and the neo-impressionists were fully aware of the violence that emergent capitalism did to nature’s rhythms, and the crippling contortions its industries imposed on humanity. They read the critiques of Elisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, both of whom condemned the disequilibrium of industrial capitalism as a violation of harmonious social relations and, ultimately, of humanity’s relationship to the earth.11 Writing in 1864, Reclus observed:
The barbarian pillages the earth; he exploits it violently and fails to restore its riches, in the end rendering it uninhabitable. The truly civilized man understands that his interest is bound up with the interest of everyone and with that of nature.12
Nineteenth-century anarchists sought to end this barbarism in the name of a social order in which property would be held in common and social and ecological devastation would come to an end. Harmony entailed a freedom that respected and nurtured differences while sustaining the good of the whole. Just as mutual aid undergirded the diverse interrelatedness of plants, insects, and animals, so humanity could realize a greater diversity through cooperation.13 However, for many, this farsighted and demanding vision seemed to run against the grain of history.14
Where, then, could anarchism find a sure footing in society? In the first instance, among other anarchists. Reclus wrote of anarchists’ obligation “to free ourselves personally from all preconceived or im-posed ideas, and gradually group around ourselves comrades who live and act in the same fashion.” Such “small and intelligent societies,” he argued, could form the basis of a greater harmonious social order.15
However, communities of anarchists were not the sole social force working against the industrial capitalist leviathan. Reclus and others looked to the surviving patterns of communal existence among the peasantry, where the traces of a different social rhythm still prevailed. Camille Pissarro’s great neo-impressionist paintings, such as Apple Picking at Eragmy-sur-Epte (1888) (see color plate 3), capture the cadence of this life, where work was relatively untouched by the regula-tory regime of capitalized production. These workers take their time; they pause to chat amongst themselves, and their activity is voluntary and cooperative. Here, humanity transforms the world through cultivation rather than destruction.
Thus, everyday life approaches a condition of harmony akin to anarchism—or so the anarchist writer and critic Octave Mirbeau thought. For him, Pissarro’s canvases depict a world animated by “the ideal,” where the cities of capital, “booming as they may be, are no more perceptible, having no more planetary importance, behind the fold of terrain that hides them, than the lark’s nest in the bottom of a furrow.”16 Without a doubt, these paintings verge on utopian. We know that Pissarro and other anarchist artists also depicted the brutalization of landless peasant laborers on the large capitalized farms of rural France. However, the neo-impressionists were equally enthralled by the lifecycle they encountered in Europe’s small hamlets and land-holdings, where self-sufficiency and pre-capitalist ways still persisted.
In fact, the technique of the neo-impressionists was suffused with anarchist politics. Their application of unique and discrete colors on the canvas—the small dots of paint that give their paintings their soft glow and shimmering radiance—accorded to scientific principles of vision, so as to produce an overall harmonious effect. This painterly technique was their analogue for the harmony in freedom that could unite humanity and, in turn, reconcile us with nature. In her masterful study of the movement, Robyn Roslak writes that the visual syn-thesis of the neo-impressionist canvas represented:
... the progressive process through which harmony and variety in unity (terms which defined the ideal anarchist social structure) were achieved. These, of course, were the very terms which the neo-impressionists and their critics used to describe neo-impressionist painting. There, individual spots of paint, akin to the human individuals in anarcho-communist social theory, are amassed to form unified, harmonious, synthetic compositions, which appear as such because of the way in which the discrete colors are scientifically applied to compliment one another while preserving their own, unique character.17
Thus, the neo-impressionists fused politics with reality, giving their ideals a material presence in the form of social critiques on canvas that pointed toward an anarchic future.
Of course, this future could not be achieved without revolution. And the anarchists knew that among the masses of displaced and dispossessed workers, the memory of revolts and the hope of revolution remained intact. In fact, many anarchist militants came from the ranks of these working-class itinerants, who played a key role in the movement as they traveled from place to place spreading revolutionary ideas through pamphlets, songs, and conversations.18 In 1896, HenriEdmond Cross paid homage to one such anarchist in an illustration, The Wanderer, issued by Les Temps Nouveaux. Copies of this print may well have circulated the length and breadth of France and beyond.
In it, the “Wanderer” sits alone, caught up by a visionary revelry, which is depicted behind him. The revolution has been won, and workers are throwing the insignia of capitalist oppression—flags and other symbols of authority—into a raging bonfire. These workers, and the wanderer himself, are surrounded by a beautiful neo-impressionist landscape: harmony in freedom has banished tyranny.
Henri-Edmond Cross, The Wanderer, 1896. Lithograph from Les Temps Nouveaux. Private Collection.
Anarchists such as those in Cross’s The Wanderer were outcasts, but they also were free. Their freedom resided in a day-to-day life apart from capital, as well as the revolutionary vision they propagated to those encountered along the way. Like Nin’s tramps, they too abandoned time, possessions, labor, and slavery in a refusal to obey. And, like them, they existed in counter-rhythm to a society in which their ideals were deemed valueless. But they also struggled for a better world.
1 Anaïs Nin, Under a Glass Bell (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1946): 111.
2 Roger Magraw, A History of the French Working Class: Workers and the Bourgeois Republic, 1871-1939 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992): 5-7.
3 Magraw, ibid., 5.
4 Ibid., 11.
5 On the neo-impressionists’ politics, see Robyn Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-siècle France: Painting, Politics and Landscape (London: Ashgate, 2007) and John Hutton, Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground: Art, Science and Anarchism in Fin-de Siècle France (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State Press, 1994). Signac outlines the difference between impressionism and neoimpressionism in Paul Signac, D’Eugène Delacroix au néoimpressionisme (Paris: 1899): 100, 102. Le Père Pinard was founded in 1889 by Emile Pouget as a weekly targeting Parisian workers. In the early 1890s its readership approached 100,000, according to police estimates. L’en debors began in 1891 and was edited by the anarchist-individualist Zo d’Ax. La Plume, edited by Léon Deschamps, was launched in 1891 and combined essays on art and poetry with anarchist theory. L’Assiette Au Beurre (founded 1901) was an illustrated publication edited by Samuel Schwartz and André de Joncières that featured contributions from anarchist artists of various orientations. Les Temps Nouveaux, edited by Jean Grave, was the flagship journal of French anarchist communism from its founding in 1895. On Le Père Pinard, L’en debors, and La Plume, see Richard D. Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989): 17-36. On L’Assiette au Beurre and Les Temps Nouveaux, see Patricia Leighten, “Réveil anarchiste: Salon Painting, Political Satire, Modernist Art,” Modernism/Modernity 2 no. 2 (1995): 26-27.
6 Stephen H. Goddard, Les XX and the Belgium Avant-Garde (Lawrence, KS: Spencer Museum of Art, 1992): 24.
7 Ibid., 56, 69-70, notes 6,7.
8 Jacques Camatte, The World We Must Leave (New York: Autonomedia, 1995): 39.
9 Sonn, 145.
10 Georges Darien, “Maximilien Luce,” La Plume LVII (1891): 300.
11 John Clark and Camille Martin outline the ecological foundations of anarchist communism in Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of Elisée Reclus, john Clark and Camille Martin, eds. and trans. (Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2004): 3-113.
12 Elisée Reclus, “Du Sentiment de la nature dans les societes modernes,” La Revue des deux mondes 1 (December, 1864) quoted in Marie Fleming, The Geography of Freedom (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1988): 114.
13 Peter Kropotkin outlines this thesis in Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1988).
14 As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Marxism, which argued the spread of industrial capitalism was the necessary precursor to socialism, drew millions into its fold. On Marxism and industrial capitalism, see Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975).
15 Reclus to Clara Koettlitz, April 12, 1895 quoted in Fleming, 175.
16 Octave Mirbeau, “Camille Pissarro,” L’Art dans les deux mondes 8 (January 10, 1891), quoted in Martha Ward Pissarro, Neo-impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996): 181.
17 Robyn Sue Roslak, Scientific Aesthetics and the Aestheticized Earth: the Parallel Vision of the Neo-Impressionist Landscape and Anarcho-Communist Social Theory (PhD diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1987): 204.
18 For a period discussion of itinerant anarchists and their role in the movement, see Felix Dubois, The Anarchist Peril (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894).