The question was evaded by his contemporaries, and had only been skimmed over by
historians. Was it police slander? Clues to the contrary existed, but no onebothered to dig. However, recent revelations leave no room for doubt: thisinternationally renowned anarchist activist, who fought courageously all his lifeagainst capitalists, anti-Semites, imperialisms... was also a sexual predator.---- As usual, there are crowds on the Clignancourt flea market on this Sunday inthe fall of 1917. We are right in the "zone", a space supposed to be unbuildable,but covered with slums, in a radius of 250 meters around the fortifications ofParis. The flea market attracts Parisians on the go, strolling in front of thesecond-hand goods stalls, as well as scruffy children who gather in front of thefairground attractions. But this miserable childhood attracts predators. For afew coins or a cone of fries, "satyrs" as they were called then, could buy thefavors of "children of the area" and, a little apart, indulge in sexual touching.Some, casual, imbued with impunity or possessed by their impulses, act almost inpublic.And that is what is happening today, September 23, 1917.Belted, he is led to the police station by an angry crowdSeveral onlookers notice the behavior of an individual between 55 and 60 yearsold. He prowls around girls from 8 to 12 years old, stares at them with delight,then rubs against them and feels their buttocks. Some move away; others let it.The individual goes so far as to unbutton a girl's petticoat to caress her, withthe fly open. In three hours of this carousel, the individual abuses sevenchildren, until a 24-year-old laundrywoman, Léontine Bonafoux, disgusted, rushesat him and slaps him: "Disgusting! If it's not shameful to put your hand betweenthe legs of little girls! The populo riots; several people have seen the samething as Léontine and vilify the satyr. He then tries to flee but, belted, is ledto the police station by an angry crowd.At the Clignancourt flea market (here in 1923), in the miserable "zone"surrounding the fortifications of Paris, sexual predators can hope to buy thefavors of children left to their own devices. This is where Sébastien Faure getscaught for the first time.There, the police immediately confront him with the witnesses. "If I like givingmoney to little girls, it's nobody's business," he tries to defend himself. Thepolice take everyone's identity. But that of the mis en cause will not havefailed to make them wince: they have there an anarchist militant of internationalrenown.This is the first time that pedophilia will bring down Sébastien Faure. It ishowever not his first attempt, but he had so far passed between the drops.A summit and its gray areasIn 1917, Sébastien Faure had more than thirty years of activism behind him. Inthe 1890s, a traveling lecturer, he did more than anyone to spread libertarianideas throughout the country. In 1894, during the great repression of anarchism,he was the headliner of the "trial of the thirty", a show trial which turned tothe benefit of the accused. In 1895, he founded the weekly Le Libertaire with thesponsorship of Louise Michel, and tried his hand - less convincingly - intheoretical work. In 1898-1899, during the Dreyfus Affair, he took the lead inthe anarchist fight against the anti-Semites. In 1905 he founded a libertarianfarm-school near Rambouillet, La Ruche, which over the years became a smallinstitution in the labor movement. With the Great War, he established himself asone of the figures of the pacifist opposition, whose main newspaper, Ce qu'ilfaut dire (CQFD), he co-founded.Sébastien Faure (1858-1942) was a major figure in French anarchism from the 1880sto the 1930s. Here photographed by Nadar around 1900, after his engagement in theDreyfusard ranks.In short, Sébastien Faure is an authority. But a luminary who also has his cursedpart.It was on September 9, 1903 that he was caught for the first time in the Squaredu Père-Lachaise in the process of "indulging in obscene fondling" and "kissingon the mouth" three little girls aged 8, 11 and 12 years old to whom he had givena few pennies. Denounced by a walker, Faure was taken to the police station but,the parents having not lodged a complaint, he was released[1].On November 19, 1907, it was the vice cops who, incidentally, came across him.While they had shadowed a woman who prostituted her 14-year-old daughter, theyidentified one of her clients as Sébastien Faure. The two women spent part of thenight at his house [2]. This observation was noted, but remained unaddressed." Kept " by the MinistryHe was again caught red-handed, this time in the middle of the war, on September28, 1916, in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. With another man, Sébastien Faureindulged in sexual touching of two girls aged 9 and 10 after giving them a fewcoins. Arrested, they were taken to the police station but, this time, if justicewas not seized, it is because the prefect of police in person kept the reportwith him. As he later explained, " I thought[...] I had a dangerousrevolutionary propagandist and that I could use this room to stem his propaganda. " And indeed, on October 5, 1916, he summoned Faure to threaten him.Covering up the Buttes-Chaumont affair in order to better keep it under controlwas entirely in the spirit of the Minister of the Interior at the time, LouisMalvy, whose policy consisted not in blindly repressing pacifists, but in keepthem under control, like Sébastien Faure, " held " by his affairs of morals.In militant circles, it is the shockHowever, a year later, at the Clignancourt flea market, the scandal was too big.And Malvy, who left Place Beauvau, is no longer there to protect Faure. Thelatter, fearing legal wrath, flees and hides in Marseille under a false identity.In his absence, the criminal court sentenced him to two years in prison for "public indecency " [4]. Finally recognized and arrested, he appealed against thejudgment and, on January 28, 1918, his sentence was reduced to six months.At the end of 1917, Sébastien Faure hid in Marseilles under the false identity ofLouis Picard, a member of the International Fairground Industry Union, for whichhe had been issued a false card, with an identity photo in which he appeared withunusual glasses and beard.In militant circles, it's a shock. Is this a police manipulation ? As soon as heleft Health at the end of May 1918, Faure circulated a leaflet in militantcircles denouncing an " odious plot " . This tract will be extended by apamphlet titled An Infamy , claiming that the whole affair was fabricated withfalse witnesses. But the libertarian milieu is only half convinced and sticks,for the most part, to an embarrassed silence. Held in suspicion, Faure preferredto go into exile for several months in Vichy.He waited until December 1919 to make his big comeback. On that date, a majorityof activists agreed, it seems, to give him the benefit of the doubt, and toclassify his case as a set-up. During the explosive year 1920, Sébastien Faureeven became the great revolutionary speaker of the moment, beating attendancerecords at his conferences, with thousands of listeners.Known to children as " Monsieur Fontaine "It is then that pedophilia will bring him down for the second time. On March 15,1921, he was arrested with two other men in the Lesage-Bullourde housing estate,an unsanitary island in the 11th arrondissement of Paris where they paid twogirls aged 11 and 12 to commit sexual touching. The police investigation revealsthat five other girls aged 13-14 have previously been their victims at LaVillette. Sébastien Faure was known to children in the neighborhood as " MonsieurFontaine ".All three were imprisoned in the Health Department and charged with " indecentassault committed without violence " and " habitual incitement of minors todebauchery " [5]. On June 15, 1921, they were tried in corrections behind closeddoors, and it was finally for " public indecency " that they were sentenced[6]. Faure was fined 500 francs and eight months in prison. When he left, hepublished a letter in Le Libertaire in which he claimed to be the victim of a "trap " , and minimized the facts: " It was one of those trifles for which no one- except me - would have been bothered for five minutes " [7]. Seriously damagedin morale, he will consider retiring from political life for a time. Butultimately the libertarian movement will choose, once again, to believe in theset-up, and Faure will continue to play a role in it. Obviously, from L'Actionfrançaise to L'Humanité , we will not fail to gloss over the " satyr " todiscredit the libertarian movement.And the Hive in all this ?At this point, it is inevitable to ask the question of La Ruche, this libertarianfarm-school where Sébastien Faure welcomed, from 1905 to 1917, 20 to 30 children"orphans, abandoned, belonging to needy families " . Was it a place of sexualpredation for him ? This is plausible, given his proven pedophile inclinations,the authority figure he embodied, and the availability of a " captive audience "of very vulnerable boarders - orphans or children from poor families beholden tothe great man.In a letter dated January 8, 1918, the anarchist Second Casteu reported thetestimony of his daughter-in-law Marguerite, who had lived at La Ruche fromNovember 1913 until the establishment closed in February 1917. According to her,Sébastien Faure " took little ones in his bed at night and taught them obscenecaresses " ; she thought that " it had existed since the founding of the Hive "because other young girls affirmed to her to have been of the number [8].After 1921, there is no longer any mention of " indecent assault " on the partof Sébastien Faure, either in the press or in the police archives. During theinter-war period, the old militant devoted his energy to his conferences ; at hisprinting press, La Fraternelle, which he had founded in 1917 ; to opposeplatformism by writing La Synthèse anarchiste ; and to his great editorial work:The Anarchist Encyclopedia .It will be necessary to wait until 2021 (see box below) for the judicial file tobe exhumed which dismisses the thesis of police manipulation.Guillaume Davranche (UCL Montreuil)A TIME WHEN WE CLOSED OUR EYESDuring the two arrests of Sébastien Faure, in 1917 and 1921, the first,instinctive reaction of the anarchist movement was to shout at theinstrumentalization of the police... without, however, formally denying thefacts. Behind the scenes, we were indeed quite suspicious of Faure's actions.But, in hindsight ? After the death of Sébastien Faure in 1942, his pedophiliawas eluded by his contemporaries, who admittedly ignored the facts of 1903, 1907and 1916, but could not deny those of 1917 and 1921.Thus, in the hagiography she devoted to him in 1949, Sébastien Faure. The man,the apostle, for a time, the libertarian feminist Jeanne Humbert found him allthe most contradictory excuses, mixing denial ( " police lies " ), denigrationof the victims (their " precocious viciousness " ), biologism (his " desirestyrannical " ), intellectualism ( " very close link between sexuality andcerebrality " ) and relativism ( " What's so bad about that ? " ).In the 1965 edition of his Memoirs, Le Cours d'une vie , the famous anarchistLouis Lecoin only commented on the 1921 affair . 'she had placed in her way ' , a' young lady who solicited men and appeared to be at least 18 years old ' . Inhis 1988 study Sébastien Faure et la Ruche , Roland Lewin blamed the 1917 casefor pure police manipulation, but his only source was the pro domo pamphlet Uneinfamie . He was more embarrassed by the 1921 affair.The judicial file of the 1917 case, kept in the Paris Archives under the symbolD2U6/199, was made available for free in February 2018.In 2021, Dominique Petit, contributor to the Maitron dictionary, published theentirety on his blog Archives anarchistes , definitively ruling out the thesis ofpolice manipulation. Most of the testimonies and documents quoted in this articlecome from it. The judicial file of 1921 has not been preserved, but the officialreports of the arrest can be found in the Archives of the police headquarters,under the reference BA/1704.CASES WITHOUT ACTION AND CONVICTION1903 First documented sexual assault on minors, in the Square du Père-Lachaise.Arrest without legal action.1907 Sébastien Faure is identified among the clients of a woman prostituting her14-year-old daughter.1916 Arrested with another man in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, for sexualassault on minors. Without legal consequences because the prefect keeps theminutes to put pressure on Faure.The 1917 AffairSeptember 23 Public scandal at the Clignancourt flea market. Sébastien Faure isarrested. The police record 7 testimonies against him.September 24 Goes to the editorial staff of CQFD where he takes a large sum ofmoney from the cash box, then flees. Hides in Libourne, then in Marseilles, undera false name.October 5 In a letter to his bewildered CQFD comrades , he claims he fled becausethe police wanted to arrest him for a pacifist speech he had been banned from.November 13 The investigating judge hears five witnesses.November 23 An arrest warrant is issued against Faure.December 5 Sentenced by default in correctional to two years in prison for "public indecency " .January 11, 1918 Recognized and arrested in Marseilles.January 28 On opposition, new trial in Paris and sentence reduced to six months.End of May 1918 Released from prison.June 1918 Spreads a leaflet denouncing a plot.The 1921 AffairMarch 15 Arrest of Faure and two associates of the city of Lesage-Bullourde, inParis, for having abused two girls aged 11 and 12. The investigation reveals thathe had already abused five other girls in the neighborhood.June 15 Sentenced to eight months in prison and a fine of 500 francs for " publicindecency " .mid-September Released from prison.To validate[1] Synthesis of Sub-Brigadier Gondouin of December 1 , 1917.[2]Ibidem.[3] Statement by Émile Laurent on July 24, 1918 at the Malvy trial, Revue descauses celebrated , August 1918.[4] With the 1994 reform of the Penal Code, " public indecency " became theoffense of sexual exhibition. Sébastien Faure was therefore not condemned forhaving abused children... but for having done so in public ![5] In the Penal Code reformed in 1994, these offenses became " sexual attack ona minor " and " corruption of a minor " . In 1920, the sexual majority was setat 13 years.[6] Why this reclassification ? We ignore it. The trial was behind closed doorsand the legal file is missing from the Paris Archives.[7] " I rise from the tomb ", Le Libertaire , September 23, 1921.[8] Letter to Alfred Mignon, January 8, 1918.https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?1917-1921-Et-la-pedophilie-fit-chuter-Sebastien-Faure_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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