The Jargon Libre Collections

As announced in the previous edition of the Bulletin, the CIRA Lausanne is one of the archival collections that inherited the wide-ranging collections from Le Jargon Libre, the library founded and run since 1973-1974 by Hellyette Bess. Some CIRA members made a number of trips to Paris for the purposes of carrying out an initial triage prior to completion of the transfer in May 2025.

Hellyette Bess was born in Paris in 1930 after her parents, brother and sister moved there from Algeria. From an early age she was an avid reader (both her father and her brother were travelling salesmen dealing in books). Her father, a Jew and a member of the resistance, was deported in 1941 and never seen again. For a time, the family moved away to Grenoble before making its way back to Paris. Hellyette learned what friendship was all about and what it was like to be part of a wider company through a variety of scouting organizations she mingled with in her childhood before she gradually drifted away from them. After the war, she studied Esperanto and joined the MIAJ (Independent Youth Hostelling Movement)[1] where she ran into lots of libertarians who made a lasting impression on her. She learned how to carry out abortions and practised that up until the MLAC (Movement for Abortion and Contraception Rights) was launched in the early 1970s. She was involved in organizing networks for vasectomy operations (which were illegal in France at the time), many involving travel to Switzerland. She joined the Anarchist Federation (FA) and other pretty much like-minded groups (such as the Libertarian Spontaneous Action Group or GLAS), where she took on positions of responsibility, handling organization and communications. For a time, she was a bookseller with Publico, the FA’s shop window in Paris. And she wrote for reviews, using a number of pen names (Hellyette, HB, Luna …) She had a hand in the setting up of the Libertarian Youth (Jeunesses Libertaires-JL) that spread to a number of towns (and who devised the circled A as a symbol for anarchism)[2] and Le Jargon Libre preserved those same initials.

She was involved in solidarity work with Algerian War refusers, in actions against the Vietnam war and compulsory military service (which was in effect in France up until 1997). In the fight against Franco, she identified from 1974 onwards with the GARI (Internationalist Revolutionary Anarchist Groups) before going on to join Action Directe, which earned her a six-year prison term for “criminal conspiracy”. For decades, she was a stalwart champion of support for women in prison, paying regular prison visits to activists like Georges Ibrahim Abdallah (the Lebanese communist imprisoned in France from 1984 to 2024), in spite of any political differences there may have been between them. In the 1990s Hellyette Bess was involved in, among other things, unemployed struggles and flirted with autonomist movements. In 2003, she received a one-year prison sentence (suspended) for possession of the counterfeit papers that she had been using to collect support funds for prisoners.

The Jargon Libre stock bears witness to all of these commitments.[3] Together with support for prisoners, the Jargon Libre is a red thread holding Hellyette’s life together. Initially, the Jargon Libre was a bookshop, based to begin with in Paris’s Rue de la Reine-Blanche. In 1984 it had to change tack after Hellyette was arrested and convicted. When she got out of prison, the Jargon Libre was relaunched in Avignon[4] as an association, publishing Front, revue de prisonniers révolutionnaires emprisonnés. Once back in Paris, the bookshop reopened in several addresses, one after another.  Denied a trading licence, she turned it into a reference library. That library changed addresses a few more times and then went quiet for a time before relocating in 2011 to Ménilmontant (20th arrondissement). 

The shelves at Le Jargon Libre reveal a non-dogmatic and “kaleidoscopic” outlook covering social and revolutionary struggles: sundry political currents (Anarchism, Situationism, Feminism, Marxism, Ultra-Leftism …) are represented, as are lots of campaigns (Prison and “justice”, the Far Right, Antifascism, Anti-militarism, Armed Struggle …), historical topics (French Revolution, the Paris Commune, the labour movement, the revolutionary movement, the 1914-1918 War, May ’68 …)  and some of the shelving was by geographical location (Russia, Algeria, Germany, Africa, North Africa, Italy), but there were also shelves devoted to Education, Proletarian Literature, Journalism, Town Planning, Surrealism, Poetry, Graphic Novels …

In one handbill advertising a support evening back in 2017, Le Jargon offered this description of itself (excerpts):

Everything holds some interest for us and allows us to push the boundaries that, above and beyond the vagaries of a present that sometimes drives us to despair, enable us to shield and sustain the fires that, through many detours and occasional derailments, will deliver us a society that lives in our gaze and in our hearts. A society that we try to act out in our dealings with one other and leaves the door ajar for those who identify with it, by fighting against everything that some would foist upon us day by day, violently or quietly, with their military bands or soft-shoe shuffling.

At that final address in Ménilmontant, the ground floor housed the library, whilst the basement was stuffed with newspapers, documents, posters and archives. The shelves of the library were impeccably catalogued, whereas, down in the basement,  the documents are often bundled together by topic into multi-coloured folders that Hellyette made out of recycled materials. Down in the basement we also found an old filing card catalogue of the collections stashed in a small freezer.

More recent arrivals were piled up over time in a less methodical manner. A few bedrolls in the corners bore witness to the fact that on occasion some comrades stayed over there outside of opening hours.

When it came to sifting through the books, the CIRA naturally focused on the “Anarchism” shelf, so in relatively short order we were able to ferret out stuff that we did not have (although it took a few days on site to check for duplicates on our on-line catalogue). We also made off with some anarchism-related books shelved in different sections. In the end, therefore, only a relatively small number of books was shipped off to Lausanne.

The basement was a rather more daunting task. Certain of the collections or dossiers were readily identifiable, but there was also a lot of jumble, with, sometimes, multiple copies or copies in dire condition. Besides, the piles of documents left us no room to work in, making a thorough check unrealistic, given the time we had allowed ourselves. Therefore, we chose to pack boxes for triage once back in Lausanne. All the same, some of the bundles (on Chinese Revolution, general literature, mainstream reviews, et.) that were of no relevance to the CIRA were discarded as soon as they could be readily identified.  Due to lack of space at the CIRA, we had to rent a small premises in town as temporary housing for the new shipment and deal with it there until it can be added to our own collections. Right now, the work of sorting and describing is not yet done, but we have already catalogued nearly 200 books and a similar number of pamphlets from Le Jargon Libre, most of them in French, with smaller numbers in Italian, English and Greek. As agreed with Hellyette and the small team around her, arrangements were made for such documents – aside from the periodicals, archives and documentation – to be stamped with a Jargon Libre hedgehog (or Jargisson) logo. We have also stamped any “doubles” in order to make their provenance plain outside of inter-library swaps. 

As for periodicals, only around 10% of what was retrieved was of any use to us in filling the gaps in the collections of titles we already were storing, with the occasional fresh entry being recorded for titles that we did not already have, the remainder proving to be “doubles” or of no particular relevance to the CIRA.  The batch of posters and above all the archival materials which will require more detailed description and, when the time comes,  fresh entries in the catalogue, have still to be dealt with.

Just as we have seen before with other bequests, such legacies are obviously welcome when it comes to completing our own collections, but often these things are done in a hurry, creating logistical issues (relocation, haulage, etc.) and require an enormous amount of work in terms of authentication for minimal return, since it is often the case that we frequently already possess a lot of what we are being offered (and, by the way, allow us to remark upon the extraordinary richness of the CIRA’s holdings!) Even so, it gives us the chance to check and complete our catalogue entries, replace lost copies or bedraggled copies and sometimes replace the copy we had with one carrying a dedication and also to circulate any “doubles” to other libraries by way of sharing the memory and relevance of struggles. Thanks for the trust placed in us!

Chri

Bulletin du CIRA No 82 (Spring 2026) pp. 11-15

Notes

1, Launched in 1951 by libertarians and revolutionaries in order to keep alive the counter-cultural aspect of the earliest youth hostels and, as the name suggests, to steer clear of the paternalistic-statist- managerial approach that had emerged during the 1940s. Politically, the MIAJ was part of many young people’s lives right up into the 1970s. 

2, See CIRA Bulletin No 58, 2002 and No 62, 2006.

3, For further details, see the entry for Hellyette in the Dictionnaire international des militant-es anarchistes  (at militant-anarchistes.info) or Nadia Genet’s film, Aimer la vie. 

4, Hellyette’s release was contingent upon her being banned from living in the Paris, Lyon or Marseilles areas. 

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.