‘Père peinard has now left Islington for Montmartre, and the French anarchists here are but a few … The Anarchist movement has never been more than a very sickly plant in this country, and to-day it is almost moribund’, a tabloid noted in 1897. It is true that the international anarchist movement in London was by then minimal in terms of numbers and activity, following the departure of the French comrades after the heady years of propaganda by the deed. But this was not so much a lull as a change in forms of action. The years leading to the First World War were a period of intense international militancy for many anarcho-communists, marked by a double shift – from direct contact to network-based activity, and from anarchism to syndicalism. The importance of the exile years must be understood in this broader historical and geographical context: the direct legacy of the 1880s and 1890s lasted at least until the First World War, notably through the activism of individuals operating within informal networks, at a time when ideological internationalism was an important driving force. These networks partly made up for the enduring failure to set up formal international organisations, a running theme from the 1881 London congress through to the 1913 London revolutionary syndicalist congress. They also testify to the gradual replacement of the ‘heroic’ generation with a syndicalist young guard for whom Franco-British entanglements remained strategically very important. Examining Franco-British syndicalist militancy provides insights into the transnational dissemination of ideas through these personal networks largely created through exile. They show that syndicalism was developed transnationally, with a constant interplay of cross-influences, where the supposedly conservative principles of British trade unionism were reinterpreted in a revolutionary perspective.

Organisational conundrums

The failure to set up a permanent international anarchist organisation, an anarchist International, was a constant theme of the years 1881–1913. The idea that working-class internationalism ought to materialise into a formal organisation was a legacy of the First International, as well as the consequence of a highly repressive context: ‘UNION MAKES US STRONG. Well then, let's unite!’ Le Révolté exclaimed in 1881. And yet, this organisational drive was paradoxical and highly problematic considering the anti-authoritarian and anti-centralisation tenets of anarchism.