Abstract

Joseph Déjacque was a sailor a mere nineteen years of age when he heard for the first time the gentle, “feminine” tone of anarchy: The voice was not of a woman; it was an odd officer’s soft words, not even “four words,”1 which did not command anything but instead permitted the things to be done and the sailors to do things their own way. Anarchy is not the absence of orders; it is the absence of butch command. And this absence, gently maneuvered, produces “harmony”. This efficient and enthusiastic maneuver of anarchy was to be discovered by the young Parisian proletarian Joseph Déjacque far away from his native Faubourg Saint-Antoine, amid “the Oriental seas,” aboard a frigate of war, in 1841. It..