SOURCE: Shryock, Richard. “Anarchism at the Dawn of the Symbolist Movement.” French Forum 25, no. 3 (September 2000): 291-307.

In the following essay, Shryock investigates links between the Symbolist poets and late nineteenth-century revolutionary politics.

“Le Symbolisme … fut un mouvement libertaire en littérature” wrote Stuart Merrill in 1901.¹ For Merrill, whose own ties to French anarchism date from at least 1887, “libertaire” was a synonym of “anarchist.” The Symbolists' involvement with anarchism has been recognized and studied by several critics.² However, one problem faced by writers of the Symbolist movement was having the socio-political dimension of their works taken seriously. In part, this is because their writing is at some distance from usual forms of littérature engagée which may come to mind. Critics doubted then, and still today, that any socio-political dimension motivated Symbolist literature, arguing that many Symbolists openly embraced anarchist ideas only in the 1890s when anarchism had...