André Colomer

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André Colomer

André Colomer (4 December 1886, Cerbère – 7 October 1931, Moscow) was a French poet, anarchist and later Communist activist.

Biography

André Colomer was born in Cerbère but was raised in Paris. From a young age he was introduced to radical literature and became an anarchist after he read the works of Émile Zola at the age of twelve.

He was called by the army about the military service he performed in Perpignan in 1906.

He was a teacher at Blois college , and tutor at Lakanal high school. He moved to Paris, began to write and became a journalist. He founded two art reviews with other writers.

In 1911, he refused to serve a military period of twenty days and was imprisoned. In 1914, he is summoned before a reform council to which he does not attend. He prefers to leave for Italy with his wife.

He begins to write À nous deux, Patrie! where he proclaims: “War or Revolution could break out. Neither would count me among its soldiers; neither would have my heroic blood among its ranks."

In 1915, Italy entered the war, which brought it underground. His illness only worsens, he is forced to take the risk of being discovered. He was arrested and transferred to Perpignan. Considering his critical state of health, he was granted a definitive reform which happened to be the day of the armistice.

From 1919 on, he wrote for the magazine Le Libertaire, in which he would be appointed editor-in-chief. At the Club des Insurgés ("Insurgent Club"), he collaborated as a speaker. One of his talks, entitled Qui est coupable? La Société ou le Bandit? ("Who is guilty? The Society or the Bandit?"), Took place in the House of Trade Unions, on Auguste-Blanqui Boulevard. He organized the intellectual workers creating the Union of Writers and the Union of Playwrights in 1920 and was elected secretary of the Inter-union Committee of the Spectacle. He was also co-founder of the Confédération générale du travail unitaire in 1921. Despite the fact that this union was close to the French Communist Party, Colomer was not impressed with the Russian Revolution of 1917; rather, he considered the Revolution to be a myth and an empty word.

In August 1922, he was appointed director of La Revue anarchiste. On November 24, 1923, the Daudet case took place, in which two years later, in L'Insurgé, Colomer revealed that Le Flaoutter was a police informant. In 1925, he traveled to Montpellier to give the lecture Deux monstres, Dieu et la Patrie, ravagent l'humanité ("Two monsters, God and the Fatherland, devastate humanity"). In the audience was Léo Malet, who was impressed with Colomer's speech and ended up in correspondence with him. In his memoirs he dedicated a chapter to the Bonnot Band . On December 12, he published a text in his newspaper under the title Choisir! ("Choose!"):

I will be with the proletarians when they rebel against the orders of the state, when they declare themselves insurgents - even if they carry out this insurrection under the red flags of Bolshevism

Following the "murder thesis" of Philippe Daudet of which he was accused, Colomer left Le Libertaire to create the weekly magazine L'Insurgé ("The Insurrectionist"), in which his wife Hauteclaire (Madeleine Colomer), Sébastien Faure, collaborated, Henry Poulaille, Maurice Wullens, Noël Letam (Léo Malet). Colomer was then living at 259 rue de Charenton in Paris. In February 1927, he fell seriously ill again. A few months later he converted to Bolshevism and joined the PCF. Welcomed with his family in Moscow, he died in 1931.

Works

• Roland Malmos (novel)
• Le Réfractaire (drama in three acts)
• Bonimini contre le fascisme
• Répression de l'anarchisme en Russie soviétique (1923),
• À nous deux, Patrie!: la conquête de soi-même (memoirs), 1925

Sources

• The information in this article is based on that in its French equivalent.