“Darnton traces how the antecedents to revolution circulated among the Parisian public in the decades before the storming of the Bastille, through their everyday oppositions to the rising price of bread, the overreaches of the monarchy, and the policing of poor neighborhoods. Through their growing sense that the powerful in their society were not governing as they should,…
Category: revolt
Thomas Meaney: “You Can’t Trust Elites. Just Ask a 500-Year-Old German Peasant.”
In “Summer of Fire and Blood,” Lyndal Roper tells the story of the serfs who fought for a better life and the elites who co-opted their movement.
“April 1964-April 2024: The origins of a symbol”
“Furthermore, the intent behind recounting the circumstances which surround its genesis is twofold: to debunk fanciful tales circulating about its origins and to reaffirm the concept of anarchism embodied by the circled A. From its inception, the aim was for the symbol to be owned by no one so it could belong to all. And…
Sahar Delijani on the Legacies of the Arab Spring
“The revolution in Tunisia was born on the ashes of Mohammad Bouazizi’s body. The revolution in Egypt on the broken face of the 28-year-old Khaleh Said beaten to death by security forces for posting a photo on social media. The revolts in Syria erupted when little boys were arrested and tortured by the police for…
Jean Vioulac: “Revolution and Destruction: The Fascist Obstacle”
“The revolution is not an ideal or a utopia; it is the fundamental movement of our time. For two centuries, private life and society, art and religion, technology and science, everything has been revolutionised.”
Tyler McBrien: The Struggle Continues: On Vincent Bevins’s “If We Burn”
“Bevins chronicles the protest movements that made the 2010s the most politically active in history, considering why such unprecedented mass protests so often had the opposite effect from what the protesters intended. Still, rather than focusing solely on these losses, he tracks the small wins, as well as the lessons learned and edifying counterfactuals disseminated…
Carlo Greppi: “Happy Birthday, Toussaint Louverture”
The French Revolution, “confronted with the colonial question,” had to “confront itself,” and “the principles from which it had sprung,” Aimé Césaire writes. It hesitated, wavered, and ended up engulfing itself. But it also learned, thanks to the determination of Toussaint Louverture and his slave army, that freedom is not a force you can stop…
Rodrigo Karmy Bolton: “The ashes of the Republic”
[] the French situation shows us the global situation of which we are witnesses: unlike modern revolutions, contemporary revolts are not guided by the horizon of “progress” but, rather, by that of its destitution. In this sense, they are both more radical and labile than modern revolutions: “radical” because they call into question the modern…
Julius Gavroche: “In praise of riots”
The riot, the revolt, however ephemeral, urgently unmasks this reality by sabotaging the time and space of order, the temporalities and geographies of control, creating, (self)-generating, what can be called “a people”. The riot is an end in-itself; halting time, transgressing borders and limits, it tears away at the envelope of “normality”, thereby becoming a…
Erwan Sommerer: “The riot against State-forms: An anarcho-workerist hypothesis”
“Nicola Massimo De Feo’s thesis is that the pamphlets resulting from the ephemeral collaboration between Bakunin and Nechayev, in particular the Revolutionary Catechism, deserve to be brought back to the forefront of anti-capitalist reflection after a long period of discredit: the primitive and brutal anarchism that we discover there, far from being the mark of a bygone…