Anarchy – But it also takes action

For the French anarchist Alexandre Marius Jacob, the opportunities to make money legally were limited from the start. Born in 1879 in dire poverty at the port of Marseille, he boarded a ship early. While scrubbing on the railing, he is confronted with dirt and cold, and he also gets to know the dehumanizing side of the ship’s hierarchy below deck: drills and sexualized violence are on the agenda, and solidarity on the whaler, which later turns out to be a pirate ship, proves to be the case limited.

In a deterritorialized space on the high seas, Marius’ lifelong dream ends in his childhood – with the image of a sinking book on the first pages of the graphic novel “Marius Jacob” designed by Matz and Léonard Chemineau. “The Workers of the Night”: A lifelong dream? “But I quickly understood: The reality was exactly the opposite,” says the commentary when a special edition from Jules Vernes’ adventure series “Voyages Extraordinaires” sinks to the bottom of the sea.

In “The Workers of the Night” the framework consists of scenes in court, from the various trials against the French social revolutionary Marius Jacob. At the same time, his life story is told in flashbacks. As an alleged thief, he enters the stage of bourgeois jurisprudence, thwarted by recurring events from the past: there is the young Marius, who sees compulsory schooling as little more than training human monkeys in the service of capital, there is the young rebel, who trains himself to become a captain and wrecks other people’s ships during the day.

He learns and reads – and, back on land, becomes a typesetter and author. With the words “What he does outside the printing press is none of my business,” his boss defends him against any hostility; Nevertheless, Marius, also called Roque by his friends, is repeatedly denounced and soon has to make a living in other ways. “Writing is all well and good, but it also requires action” is the preliminary conclusion.

Sometimes the right mix of carbon, sulfur and saltpeter is enough, but more often it’s just a matter of studying safes. Jacob opens a hardware store near Paris and spreads his ideas through the magazine “L’Agitateur”. On site he founded the “Workers of the Night” collective – with around 20 anarchists who were committed to “individual expropriation”.

From 1899 onwards, the night workers committed around 150 burglaries, acting strictly according to ethical principles: all members of the group rejected the theft of property from the poor and exploited, and they abhorred armed violence as a matter of principle. As thieves with political sensitivity, they were particularly interested in other people’s property that had come about through illegitimate appropriation – such as usury, inheritance and speculation. In their own way, the “Sturdy Rogues” from Paris put a stop to the werewolf appetite of capital and relieved jewelers, bankers and priests of what does not belong to them.

Roque himself commits his first burglary in order to give his mother back what she had to leave with the pawnbroker due to poverty. Different rules also apply to him when it comes to his choice of object: the sex worker Maria, who is viewed with disdain in public, becomes his companion, because the “real prostitutes” are in control of power anyway.

“Society only gave me three means of existence: work, begging or theft,” says Marius’ plea shortly before the guilty verdict was announced. He in no way condemns wage work, but he does not like “sweating for a pittance wage”: he hates “submitting himself to the prostitution of work,” the defendant tells the judge unequivocally.

His self-defense is not without expressions of sympathy: the lay judges in the hall burst out laughing at a priest, next to whose stolen cash box Marius discovered a private collection of nude pictures. Nevertheless, Roque and his friends received harsh punishments. The leader of the “Workers of the Night” was sentenced to lifelong forced labor and spent 22 years in a prison colony in French Guiana.

In 1927 Jacob was pardoned and settled again in France. Because he doesn’t want to make a profit from selling fabric goods, he, the most honest of all anarchists, is accused of black trading. Its a few hours before the self-imposed end on August 28th The farewell letter written in 1954 reads as prosaically as a shopping list: “You will find two liters of rosé next to the lunch box. To your health!”

In the comic “Viva l’Anarchie” by Bruno and Corentin Loth, the anarchists also appear somewhat realistic, while the philistines appear blasé to the point of grotesque. The well-known anarchists Buenaventura Durruti and Nestor Machno are the main characters. The wheel of history continues to turn – page by page: from the first peasant uprisings as a result of land reforms in the Russian Empire to the Spanish Civil War.

Buenaventura Durruti, one of the leading figures of the anarchist resistance in the Spanish Republic, appears right at the beginning of the graphic novel. On the French national holiday in 1927, he appeared together with Francisco Ascaso, Antonio Jover and the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno set the stage of history. In the background, Sacco and Vanzetti say hello – from a picture within a picture with the inscription “Libérez-les”. What follows is a flashback to a Ukrainian village in 1908, marked with pale blue commentary text. Two deer heads on the wall of a farmhouse in the steppe of Hulyaypole communicate via a speech bubble what has already been decided among the insurgents: “So the country will be divided!”

The experience of tsarist violence – 14 of the insurgents were sentenced to death by hanging by a military court – shaped Nestor Makhno. He was able to escape and later founded the anarchist movement of Makhnovshchina in southern Ukraine.

In Moscow’s Butyrka prison he prepared himself theoretically for political practice, and the prisoner’s library ensured his intellectual survival. For Makhno, too, violence was only an intermediate step on the path to liberation, while anarchy was order without rule and property. “Equality in everything and everywhere – equal with equity – is anarchy itself,” wrote Pyotr A. Kropotkin in his 1889 essay on anarchist morality. Under the impression of these words, the diachronic space of history transforms into another place: realiter The four revolutionaries Durruti, Ascaso, Jover and Probably never met Makhno, but they are still together in the comic.

Bruno Loth/Corentin Loth: Long live Anarchy. A.d. Franz. v. Maria Rossi. Bahoe Books,
80 p., hardcover, €22.
Léonard Chemineau/Matz: Marius Jacob. The night workers. A. d. Francis. v. Anna Baer. Bahoe Books, 128 pp., hardcover, €25.

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