Joseph Déjacque

Joseph Déjacque (; 1821–1864) was a French political journalist and poet. A house painter by trade, during the 1840s, he became involved in the French labour movement and taught himself how to write poetry. He was an active participant in the French Revolution of 1848, fighting on the barricades during the June Days uprising, for which he was arrested and imprisoned. He quickly became a target for political repression by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's government, which imprisoned him for his poetry and forced him to flee into exile. His experiences radicalised him towards anarchism and he regularly criticised republican politicians for their anti-worker sentiment.

After spending time in London and Jersey, he emigrated to the United States, developing a reputation as a controversial firebrand in New York City. There he became active in organising radical émigrés, helping to establish the International Association in 1855. He then moved to New Orleans, where he agitated for the abolition of slavery through social revolution, while also publishing essays that criticised Bonapartist figures and defended gender equality. Unable to find a publisher due to his abolitionist remarks, he returned to New York. There he established ''Le Libertaire'', the first non-English-language anarchist newspaper in the United States, in which he printed his utopian fiction novel ''L'humanisphère''. After Bonaparte's government extended an amnesty to exiled radicals, he returned to France, where he died in obscurity in the mid-1860s.

Today he is remembered as an early forerunner of anarchist communism and particularly for coining the political definition of the word "libertarian" (). Provided by Wikipedia