Émile Armand

“ I think it is necessary to define liberty itself. We all know that liberty could not be an end, for there is no absolute liberty; just as there is no general truth, practically speaking, but what exists in particular verities, there is no general liberty; there are only particular, individual liberties. It is not possible to escape certain contingencies; one cannot be free, for example, to not breathe or digest... Liberty is only a abstraction like Truth, Purity, Goodness, Equality, etc. ”

“ We address ourselves to those not satisfied with the current society, to those who are thirsty for real life, for real activity and find only the artificial and the unreal around them. There are those who are thirsty for harmony and ask themselves why disorder and fratricidal struggles abound around them...
Let us conclude: the sprit that reflects and attentively considers men and things encounters in the complex of things we call society a nearly insurmountable barrier to truly free, independent, individual life. ”

“ It is not an exaggeration to say that any anarchist who accepts being exploited for the profit of a private boss or the state-boss is committing an act of treason towards anarchist ideas. He is, in effect, reinforcing domination and exploitation, is contributing to maintaining the existence of archism. It is doubtless true that becoming aware of his inconsistency he strives to redeem or repair his conduct by making propaganda. ”

“ We know very well that life is a continual selection, in which only the most able and gifted triumph.
What causes our hatred for war, i. e., for the state of war and all that follows in its train, is that while it reigns self-assertion and individual determinism are more than ordinarily restrained, constrained, repressed, not to say reduced to naught. It substitutes in place of the individual struggle for existence and happiness a collective struggle profitable to a small number of the governing and the large exploiters of all countries. ”

“ I am convinced that that only logical attitude that the enemy of authority and exploitation can adopt — practiced by one like the other — is an attitude of resistance, of objection and of opposition to all that threatens him — environment, institutions, individuals — that limit his development, and crush his personality. I think it is because the communist, revolutionist, or individualist propaganda neglected to insist on this essential attitude that we are the witnesses of the great debacle which is saddening all of us. ”

“ To feel alive is to vibrate, thrill, shudder with the perfume of flowers, the songs of birds, the crashing of the waves, the howling of the wind, the silence of solitude, the feverish voice of crowds. To feel alive is to be as sensible to the plaintive chant of the shepherd as to the harmonies of great operas, to the radiant influence of a poem as to the pleasures of love.
To feel alive is to render exciting those details of one’s life that are worth the trouble: to make of the latter a fleeting experiment, and of the first an experiment that succeeds. ”

“ In all places individualists of our tendency wish to establish — now and at all times — a human milieu founded on the individual act and in which, without any control, intervention, intrusion of the State, all individuals can, whether isolated or associated, govern their affairs among themselves, by means of free agreements, voidable on notice, no matter what the activity, whether the association be the work of a personage or of a collectivity. ”

“ As an Individualist Anarchist, I am against war, ever and forever. First of all, because, in a country at war, what few liberties an individual possessed are taken from him. Everything under the arbitary control of the military administration; every plan of meeting, all literature, every newspaper, must pass the military censor. You no longer belong to yourself, neither your person nor your property. ”

“ The anarchist has for enemy the State and all its institutions which tend to maintain or to perpetuate its stranglehold on the individual. There is no possibility of conciliation between the anarchist and any form whatever of society resting on authority, whether it emanates from an autocrat, from an aristocracy, or from a democracy. No common ground between the anarchist and any environment regulated by the decisions of a majority or the wishes of an elite. The anarchist combats for the same reason the teaching furnished by the State and that dispensed by the Church. ”

“ We affirm that the number of human beings who work disinterestedly is quite limited. Right or wrong, I have more respect for the individual who cynically admits to wanting to enjoy life by profiting from others than for the liberal and philanthropic bourgeois whose lips resound with grandiose words, but whose fortune is built on the concealed exploitation of the unfortunate. ”

“ But with this caveat, it must still be pointed out that in order to be seriously practiced illegalism demands a strongly tempered temperament, a sureness of oneself that doesn’t belong to everyone. As with all experiences in anarchist life that don’t march in step with the routines of daily existence, it is to be feared that the practices of illegalist anarchism take over the will and the thought of the illegalist to such an extent that it renders him incapable of any other activity, any other attitude. ”

“ I am absolutely convinced that only a small minority, a very small minority, among men, are seriously reached and profoundly moved by our propaganda of criticism, of doubt, of rebellion, of free investigation, of independent research. ”

“ All societies — religious, lay, collectivist revolutionaries or not — say that the individual is a composite, therefore a dependent upon his environment. The anarchist individualists wish to make the individual person an independent, therefore a decomposite of his environment. The societies see in the individual a stone of the structure, a member of the body. The anarchists aim to make each individual person a distinct organism, a unified freeman. ”

“ Morals, sensations, rules of behavior, emotions, knowledges, faculties, opinions, passions, meaning, the brain, etc. — so many means that can allow us to approach our life. So many servants at the command of the “self” for it to develop and expand. Mastering them all, the conscious “negator of authority” does not allow himself to be mastered by any of them. When he succumbs, it is from lack of education of the will. This is not irreparable. The studied “one-beyond-domination” is not fearful; he enjoys everything, bites into everything, within the limits of individual appreciation. ”

“ Sexual liberty is exclusively individual order. It presupposes an education of the will which permits each to determine for themselves the point where they will cease to be master of their passions or penchants, and education perhaps much more instinctive than it appears at first look. Like all liberties, that of the sexual life involves an effort, not of abstinence — (in fact, abstention from the experiences of life is a mark of moral insufficiency, as debauchery is a sign of moral weakness) — but of judgment, discernment, and classification. ”

“ He is not a coward, but he does not want to diminish himself. And he knows well he who allows himself to be led by his passions or dominated by his penchants is a slave. He wants to maintain “the mastery of the self” in order to drive towards the adventures to which independent research and free study lead him. He will recommend willingly a simple life, the renunciation of false, enslaving, useless needs ”

“ We know that no society is superior to the sum of those composing it, and if, by chance, a popular movement were successful, it would only effect a change of rulers. It is for a more profound task that you are to prepare henceforth, to sap and undermine all vestiges of respect for Society, State, rules, and rulers. We are so few in number that we can- not afford to have even a single one misled by the dialectics of the fossils of the International. ”

“ This is why it is not exact to say that the anarchist “who works,” who submits to the system of domination and exploitation in place, is a victim. He is an accomplice as much as he is a victim. All of the exploited, legal or illegal, cooperate in the state of domination. There is no difference between the anarchist worker who earned 175,000 or 200,000 francs in thirty years of labor and who , with his savings, has purchased a hut in the country, and the illegalist anarchist who grabs a safe containing 200,000 francs and with this sum acquires a house by the seaside. ”

“ We demand for the research and practice of sexual liberty the same broad daylight as for those of other liberties, persuaded that to its development and evolution are linked not only the increase of individual and collective happiness, but also in large part the disappearance of the present state of things.
Moreover, we do not declare ourselves more in favor of unicity or plurality in love than we do against either; and it could well be that in a given couple, one of the constituents will practice unicity while the other practices plurality. ”

“ The social conception, which regards the individual as a wheelwork of society, and in its most audacious dreams does not go beyond the idea of the tremendous final transformation or revolution of the environment. ”

“ Only the anarchist can feel himself living, for he is the unique one among men, the only one whose appreciation of life has its source in himself, without the impure inmixing of an authority imposed from without. ”

“ But we will not be able to keep alive a vigorous spirit of revolt in this small minority, if we give our propaganda a purely negative tendency, a tendency frankly destructive. Too often we do not stop to inquire where their preconceived ideas have disappeared when we give them a social morality of “a future society,” a mature economic system — all of which is more than remote. ”

“ He agrees first to rid brains of preconceived ideas, to put at liberty temperaments enchained by fear, to give rise to mindsets free from popular opinion and social conventions; it is thus that the anarchist will push all comers to make route with him to rebel practically against the determinism of the social environment, to affirm themselves individually, to sculpt his internal statue, to render themselves, as much as possible, independent of the moral, intellectual and economic environment. ”

“ But the question I propose to study is not that of asking whether or not an illegal trade is perilous or not, but if the anarchist who earns his daily bread by resorting to trades condemned by the police and tribunals is right or wrong to expect that an anarchist who accepts working for a boss treat him as a comrade, a comrade whose point of view we defend in broad daylight and who we don’t deny when he falls into the grips of the police or the decisions of judges. ”

“ It is this handful of men that will be attacked by the mass escaped from bullets and shrapnel, urged on by the masters, exploiters and servile press, avenging their long absence from their firesides. Moreover, only one gesture can interest us — that which recoils directly and personally upon the guilty ones.
Doubtless, the war, no matter who triumphs, will produce numerous causes of discontent. They are already fermenting. These germs of dissatisfaction our propaganda ought to utilize. ”

“ In calling for sexual liberty, we simply demand the possibility for every individual to dispose, as they wish and in all the circumstances of their sexual life — according to the qualifications of temperament, sentiment, and reason which are peculiar to them. ”

“ I confess that I would like to write at greater length, and put more of joy into this contribution. I know the struggles and difficulties and opposition that a publication like Mother Earth encounters. To have resisted and existed so long in a country like the United States is a victory to be acclaimed by songs of triumph. But my mind is too preoccupied and my heart too torn to express the joy this anniversary calls forth. One subject only haunts me and torments me: the unquestionable bankruptcy of the movement of advanced ideas in our old Europe. ”