A Few Words About Martial Desmoulins
Martial Desmoulins was born on 12 May 1890 in Limoges (Haute Vienne department). He attended the religious school of Sainte Marie des Jacobins and then the secular school in Pont St Marial (the district in which he was living).
After attaining his certificate of studies, his active life began at the age of 13 as an apprentice cutter in a small shoe factory:
He was to write in a letter dated 20 September 1977: “For me, it was to prove a harsh apprenticeship in turn-of-the-century worker’s life.”
Two years after that, he left that factory and was out of work for nearly a year. At the time he was hanging out with a gang of young jobless workers, the main activity of which was “picking fights with young shop employees who thought they were better than workers” and “beating up stuck-up male and female members of the petty bourgeoisie.” And then he found a job with a large porcelain factory: working 10 hours per day. “Hard labour under a martinet who never took his eyes off us…” It was at this point that he began to frequent the Limoges Libertarian Group, distributing one of its earliest handbills entitled “WORKERS HAVE NO HOMELAND”. But such activity did not go undetected by the factory management which ordered him to stop his propaganda activity. He then quit the factory and found a job in the shoe-making trade and became a member of the Leather and Hides Union, in which he was to remain active from then on.
From 1906 until 1910, he was therefore working for the firm of Sylvestre-Vincent, a committed trade unionist but also spent a lot of his time on the Shoemakers’ Mutual Aid Society (established in 1948). He was reader of Jean Grave’s Les Temps Nouveaux and Gustave Herve’s La Guerre Sociale.
In 1911 he was called upon to do his military service: serving 26 months in the Infantry. And in 1913, when he got back from the regiment, he found a job at a boot-making factory, followed by a different job at the Fougeras shoemaking factory. It was in November that year that he was elected treasurer of his union (at the age of just 23), but then the Great War broke out the following year. Martial Desmoulins was to serve three years in the front lines before deserting (while on leave) in late 1916 and seeking refuge initially in Marseilles and then in Barcelona. He reached Marseilles on 1 January 1917; other deserters and draft dodgers (such as Gaston Leval, Eugene Galand, etc.) were living under the radar there. Roumilhac’s partner found him a room and a job. At the time he was using phoney papers made out in the name of Deschamps; these had been deliberately prepared for him by an engraver from Chateauroux by the name of Moreau. In July 1918 he was on the move again, this time to Spain. In Barcelona, Martial ran into some other French draft-dodgers and deserters, some of whom he knew from Marseilles – Leval for one. He did not return to France until 1921 and that was thanks to the efforts made by Roumilhac and under his phoney identity, albeit that this time he had forged Spanish papers made out in the name Perez.
In 1923 he had some trouble with the authorities. Notably with the military authorities and this earned him a term in the St Nicolas Fort and a fairly slow-moving wait to be indicted before he was eventually set free.
Amnestied in 1926, he made his way back to Limoges after a 10-year exile. His mother had aged greatly. He re-established contact with his anarchist comrades and Henri Grand brought him along to the meeting of the Libertarian Group that was to lead to the launch of the newspaper La Voix Libertaire. There, he ran into Rene Darsouze, Andre Lansade, Adrien Perissaguet and some others.
Returning to Marseilles in 1927, he hung out at the Bourse du Travail (in the Rue de l’Academie), with the Marseilles anarchist groups and took a very active part in distributing La Voix Libertaire throughout the region up until 1939. (At the time, the paper had about fifty subscribers in Marseilles).
Having, in the interim, become a shoe industry VRP [travelling sales rep], he was also called upon to pay regular visits to all the departments around the Midi region, from the Spanish border across to the Italian border, plus Corsica, and this carried on until retirement age, which enabled him to keep up lots of contacts with anarchists across the region for a long time or, from time to time, to make “useful” acquaintances.
Thus, in 1940, in Toulouse, he bumped into a teacher trade unionist, an old hand from the CGT, and he put Desmoulins in touch with the team of “apolitical” trade unionists who at the time were publishing, out of Chambéry, a paper entitled Au Travail. By that point the CGT has been well and truly disbanded. The paper was campaigning for trade unionists to come together. And so it was that Martial came to take part in the Nimes Congress of the Friend of “Au Travail” (1 June 1941), which was attended also by Rene Belin, who at the time was [the Vichy regime’s] Secretary of State for Labour (and a former leading light of the CGT’s syndicalist minority). Martial then followed that organization, of which G. Dumonceaud (a printing worker) and Carrega were local leaders. It was especially thanks to Carrega that that Martial Desmoulins would successfully secure the release of about ten comrades from the Sisteron camp.
Naturally, this “engagement” was to be held against him, come the Liberation, by a number of anarchists, but Martial himself wrote in a brief biographical note drafted for our use:
“… A few dimwits take me to task for having had dealings there. But what I did back in 1941, I would do again today if it was for comrades on their way to prison.”
Between 1945 and his final relocation to Marseilles, Martial was to carry on dropping into the Bourse du Travail from time to time and attending public meetings whenever these coincided with his presence in Marseilles and, when it came time for him to retire, he was able to commit himself wholly to the CGT-FO-affiliated Elderly Workers’ Union.
In latter years, in Nice and Cannes alike, he carried on with his trade union activities insofar as his strength and means would allow: he was on his way to his union’s General Meeting (he being its president) that he had a fall on 12 January 1982 that laid him up for several weeks. Fortunately, as he wrote in one of his last letters, “I have a hard head.”
Let us just hope that he holds on to it for even longer.
Rene Bianco, April 1983
In CIRA Marseilles Bulletin Nos 19-20, “Souvenirs ou la fin d’une vie” par Martial Desmoulins”, May 1983.
Translated by: Paul Sharkey.