Zo d'Axa

Zo d'Axa
Born	Alphonse Gallaud de la Pérouse 28 May 1864 Paris, France
Died	30 August 1930 Marseille, France
Cause of death	Suicide
Nationality	French

Alphonse Gallaud de la Pérouse (28 May 1864, Paris – 30 August 1930), better known as Zo d'Axa (French pronunciation: ​[zo daksa]), was an adventurer, anti-militarist, satirist, journalist, and founder of two of the most legendary French magazines, L'EnDehors and La Feuille. A descendant of the famous French navigator Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse, he was one of the most prominent French individualist anarchists at the turn of the 20th century.

Life

He was a sort of Socialist condottieri, a dandy, a rake, and a natural adventurer. Ernest La Jeunesse nicknamed him the Restaurant Recruit.

— Jules Bertaut, Paris 1870-1935, 2007.

D'Axa was a cavalryman but deserted to Belgium and was exiled to Italy in 1889. There he ran an ultra-Catholic newspaper and seduced the native womenfolk. According to popular myth, d'Axa during his time in Italy was hesitating between becoming an anarchist or a religious missionary when he was accused (wrongfully, he contended) of insulting the Empress of Germany, and was made an anarchist by the subsequent legal proceedings against him. He spent the next few years being pursued from one country to the next by the police, before taking advantage of the general amnesty and returning to France.

At this point, having led (in the words of historian Jules Bertaut) "a most disreputable life", and being an agitator by temperament, d'Axa gravitated towards the anarchist movement. He founded the famous anarchist newspaper L'EnDehors in May 1891 in which numerous contributors such as Jean Grave, Louise Michel, Sébastien Faure, Octave Mirbeau, Tristan Bernard and Émile Verhaeren developed libertarian ideas. D'Axa and L'EnDehors rapidly became the target of the authorities after attacks by Ravachol and d'Axa was kept in jail in Mazas Prison. After his release, he wrote numerous pamphlets and met Camille Pissarro and James Whistler in London. He was again arrested in Italy, and transferred at Sainte Pelagie (Paris), where he spent ten years before his release in 1894. He visited Mexico, Canada and the United States, where he met the widow of Gaetano Bresci (the murderer of the Italian king Umberto I), before returning to Marseille, France, where he committed suicide on 30 August 1930.

Philosophy

An individualist and aesthete, d'Axa justified the use of violence as an anarchist, seeing propaganda of the deed as akin to works of art. Anarchists, he wrote, "had no need to hope for distant better futures, they know a sure means of plucking the joy immediately: destroy passionately!" "It is simple enough.", d'Axa proclaimed of his contemporaries, "If our extraordinary flights (nos fugues inattendues) throw people out a little, the reason is that we speak of everyday things as the primitive barbarian would, were he brought across them." D'Axa was a bohemian who "exulted in his outsider status", and praised the anti-capitalist lifestyle of itinerant anarchist bandit precursors of the French illegalists. He expressed contempt for the masses and hatred for their rulers. He was an important anarchist interpreter of the philosophy of individualist anarchist Max Stirner, defender of Alfred Dreyfus and opponent of prisons and penitentiaries. D'Axa remains an influential anarchist theorist for anti-work sentiment.

Publications

• From Mazas to Jerusalem (De Mazas à Jérusalem) (1895). Illustrations by Lucien Pissarro, Steinlen and Félix Vallotton.
• L'EnDehors (1891–1893)
• La Feuille (1897–1899)

See also

• Individualist anarchism in Europe

External links

• Zo d'Axa archive at the anarchist library
• The Zo d'Axa Internet Archive at Marxists.org
• Zo d'Axa at the Daily Bleed's Anarchist Encyclopedia
• Works by or about Zo d'Axa in libraries (WorldCat catalog)