Two faces, two lives (anarchist mugshots of the 1890s)

We have just posted two biographies illustrated by mugshots by Alphonse Bertillon. Both anarchists, both involved in the ‘trial of the thirty’. Elisée Bastard was (according to Rudolf Rocker) ‘one of the best known orators’ in Paris; while Maria Zanini seems to have stuck to ‘no comment’. The papers summed up her trial testimony as ‘Knows nothing and never as much as saw the faces of people who arrived to doss in her home.’

There are many more anarchist mugshots in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search#!?q=anarchist%20bertillon You might also want to see the ‘Special surveillance album’ https://criminocorpus.org/fr/bibliotheque/doc/1781/ French-speakers might like to chase down some of their stories at the dictionnaire des militants anarchistes site: http://militants-anarchistes.info/ For English-speakers, there’s an article about Émile Pouget (another one from the ‘trial of the thirty’) by Constance Bantman in the third issue of Black Flag Anarchist Review https://www.blackflag.org.uk/. Bantman has also recently written Jean Grave and the networks of French anarchism, 1854-1939 (Grave was in the same trial).