Antoinette Cazal

The Kate Sharpley Library is keen to recover the stories of ‘unknown anarchists’: there’s a lot of them (and plenty of questions even when we do know their names and the rough outline of their lives).

Constance Bantman has just published a short piece on French anarchist Antoinette Cazal (1862-1902) who was acquitted in the ‘Trial of the Thirty’ (1894) and had ‘complicated romantic entanglements with Léon Ortiz’, who was convicted. ‘I expect that many labour historians and biographers share the wish to know how the protagonists of our histories would feel about becoming academic subjects; indifference or annoyance would be my guess. And then of course, my focus would be on the questions I would ask her. The main one relates to the anarchist activism which is glaringly absent from her biography: did she think of herself as an anarchist, and if so, what did she mean by it?’

It’s good to see someone who has done so much research reach out to the past thoughtfully. See https://sslh.org.uk/2024/12/18/class-encounters-antoinette-cazal-anarchist/ [Photo https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/306716 ]