Blackwell Reference Online

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Charles Malato was one of the best-known publicists of pre-World War I anarchism. He left an important legacy as an anarchist essayist ( Philosophie de l'anarchie ), a newspaper editor ( La Révolution Cosmopolite, Le Tocsin ), a journalist ( Les Temps nouveaux, L'Intransigeant … ), and a chronicler of the movement in its heyday ( De la Commune à l'anarchie, Les Joyeusetés de l'exil). He was also an activist who was involved in protest campaigns and possibly a few revolutionary “interventions.” The son of a Sicilian who had fought in the 1848 Italian revolution and the Commune, Malato experienced exile at an early age, following his parents in Caledonia where his father was deported. Malato returned to France in 1881 and in 1886 he founded La Révolution cosmopolite , a revolutionary paper that was not decidedly anarchist, although Malato did become an anarchist in the following years. In 1890 he was included in the sentence against the anarchist paper L'Attaque , of which he was a contributor; he spent 15 months in prison and an expulsion order was passed against him. In 1892 he was in London, along with hundreds of French and Italian anarchists seeking to escape repression in their own countries. He lived in Hampstead, acted as a go-between linking the French, Italian, and British militants, but also frequented well-to-do circles, working as the private secretary of the controversial ... log in or subscribe to read full text