After 1892, anti-anarchist repression in France sent the movement into turmoil. Most of the companions’ political activities – their publications, their meetings – came to a sudden halt, as many of them were sent to penal colonies, jails, or forced into exile. However, anarchist militancy did not stop altogether: even in jails, imprisoned companions could still talk, exchange letters with the outside world, and write books. The situation of exiles was relatively propitious to political pursuits, despite the burden of continuous political surveillance and ceaseless internal conflicts; exile allowed for both the continuation of militancy and a reinvention of the companions’ political ideas and practices through sustained foreign influences. It provided a haven where French anarchism could subsist in a context of fierce repression, but also a purgatory where the companions fought one another bitterly for several years. A social history of the London groups is required before their political endeavours can be examined. Who were the exiles? Where did they come from, where did they live, with whom? Conflict and isolation were the hallmarks of their personal experience in London. Open arguments and mutual suspicions brought on by political and personal enmities pervaded the refugees’ daily existence. The French comrades tended to stay within Francophone groups and were isolated from the wider exile circles, but also, more radically, from British society. Like many political exiles before them, the anarchists ‘formed a colourful microcosm of the larger society to which they came as uninvited guests’. Nonetheless, a few individuals broke out of these small cliques, discovering the country, becoming involved in its politics, and forming transnational networks, primarily with British, Italian, and German militants.

Who were the exiles?

The 450 or so Francophone anarchist refugees known to have stayed in London between 1880 and 1914, with a peak between 1890 and 1895, were mostly men in their thirties and forties, employed in both skilled and unskilled manual occupations, and coming predominantly from Greater Paris. This apparently simple description is problematic because of the constant mobility into and out of the groups, the lack of information about most of these exiles, as well as the great uncertainty concerning the presence and political role of women.