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Tuesday May 07, 2019 00:54 by KSL - Kate Sharpley Library
This is your chance to meet Antoine Gimenez who, by anybody’s standards, led an interesting life. In Italy, back around 1922 (when he was still Bruno Salvadori), he defended a classmate from bullying fascists. ‘It wasn’t chivalry or political beliefs – I was about twelve years old – but was quite simply that the girl was a student in the same class as us. […] When I came to […] I had been rescued from the Blackshirts’ clutches by some anarchists.’ [p551] So young Bruno became a subversive and set off down the path which would lead him into exile in France and later Spain. Antoine doesn’t set himself up as any sort of revolutionary superhero: ‘In 1936 I was what is conventionally referred to nowadays as a “marginal”: someone living on the edge of society and of the penal code. I thought of myself as an anarchist. Actually, I was only a rebel. My militant activity was restricted to smuggling certain pamphlets printed in France and Belgium over the border without ever trying to find out how a new society could be built.’ [p1] The Giménologues (who are bringing you his story) call him ‘a bit of a hobo’ [p1] and his troubles with the French police were more about trying to survive than politics, like the time he was arrested with some boiler suits and had to claim ‘that he had been given them by an unknown person to sell.’ [p554]
Looking back
Antoine, having survived everything that the twentieth century could throw at him, drafted his memoirs between 1974 and 1976, when he was in his mid-sixties. It feels like the book of an older person. I don’t mean to suggest there’s any disillusionment. His epilogue ends with a clear statement of anarchist belief: ‘I see the earth, my home, I see humankind, my family, slowly being entrapped by the profit motive, by the sordid interests of the few on the march toward death and utter destruction, and as my thoughts turn to you, my friends, who perished fighting for an ideal of absolute equality and total freedom, I say to myself that you had it right: only a libertarian society can save humankind and the world.’ [p198] But inevitably, telling of the deaths of many of his comrades gives parts of the book a real sorrow. |
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