Anarcho-naturism (also anarchist naturism and naturist anarchism) appeared in the late 19th century as the union of anarchist and naturist philosophies.
In many of the alternative communities established in Britain in the
early 1900s, "nudism, anarchism, vegetarianism and free love were
accepted as part of a politically radical way of life". In the 1920s,
the inhabitants of the anarchist community at Whiteway, near Stroud in
Gloucestershire, "shocked the conservative residents of the area with
their shameless nudity". Mainly, it had importance within individualist anarchist circles in Spain, France, Portugal and Cuba.
Anarcho-naturism advocates vegetarianism, free love, nudism, hiking and an ecological world view within anarchist groups and outside them. Anarcho-naturism also promotes an ecological worldview, small ecovillages, and most prominently nudism as a way to avoid the artificiality of the industrial mass society of modernity.
Naturist individualist anarchists see the individual in their
biological, physical and psychological aspects and try to eliminate
social determinations.
History
Early influences
An important early influence on anarchist naturism was the thought of Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy and Élisée Reclus.
Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Influential early eco-anarchist work
Thoreau was an American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience,
an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral
opposition to an unjust state. His thought is an early influence on
green anarchism, but with an emphasis on the individual experience of
the natural world, influencing later naturist currents. Simple living as a rejection of a materialist lifestyle and self-sufficiency
were Thoreau's goals, and the whole project was inspired by
transcendentalist philosophy. "Many have seen in Thoreau one of the
precursors of ecologism and anarcho-primitivism represented today in John Zerzan. For George Woodcock
this attitude can be also motivated by certain idea of resistance to
progress and of rejection of the growing materialism which is the nature
of American society in the mid-19th century." John Zerzan himself included the text "Excursions" (1863) by Thoreau in his edited compilation of anti-civilization writings called Against civilization: Readings and reflections from 1999.
France
For the influential French anarchist Élisée Reclus,
naturism "was at the same time a physical means of revitalization, a
rapport with the body completely different from the hypocrisy and taboos
which prevailed at the time, a more convivial way to see life in
society, and an incentive to respect the planet. Thus naturism develops
in France, in particular under the influence of Élisée Reclus, at the
end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century among
anarchistic communities resulting from utopian socialism."
In France, later important propagandists of anarcho-naturism include Henri Zisly and Émile Gravelle who collaborated in La Nouvelle Humanité, Le Naturien, Le Sauvage, L'Ordre Naturel, and La Vie Naturelle. Their ideas were important in individualist anarchist circles in France as well as Spain, where Federico Urales (pseudonym of Joan Montseny) promoted the ideas of Gravelle and Zisly in La Revista Blanca (1898–1905).
Zisly's political activity, "primarily aimed at supporting a return to
'natural life' through writing and practical involvement, stimulated
lively confrontations within and outside the anarchist environment.
Zisly vividly criticized progress and civilization, which he regarded as
'absurd, ignoble, and filthy.' He openly opposed industrialization,
arguing that machines were inherently authoritarian, defended nudism,
advocated a non-dogmatic and non-religious adherence to the 'laws of
nature,' recommended a lifestyle based on limited needs and
self-sufficiency, and disagreed with vegetarianism, which he considered
'anti-scientific.'"
Richard D. Sonn comments on the influence of naturist views in the wider French anarchist movement:
In her memoir of her anarchist years that was serialized in Le Matin in 1913, Rirette Maîtrejean made much of the strange food regimens of some of the compagnons. [...] She described the "tragic bandits" of the Bonnot gang as refusing to eat meat or drink wine, preferring plain water. Her humorous comments reflected the practices of the "naturist" wing of individualist anarchists who favored a simpler, more "natural" lifestyle centered on a vegetarian diet. In the 1920s, this wing was expressed by the journal Le Néo-Naturien, Revue des Idées Philosophiques et Naturiennes. Contributors condemned the fashion of smoking cigarettes, especially by young women; a long article of 1927 actually connected cigarette smoking with cancer! Others distinguished between vegetarians, who foreswore the eating of meat, from the stricter "vegetalians," who ate nothing but vegetables. An anarchist named G. Butaud, who made this distinction, opened a restaurant called the Foyer Végétalien in the nineteenth arrondissement in 1923. Other issues of the journal included vegetarian recipes. In 1925, when the young anarchist and future detective novelist Léo Malet arrived in Paris from Montpellier, he initially lodged with anarchists who operated another vegetarian restaurant that served only vegetables, with neither fish nor eggs. Nutritional concerns coincided with other means of encouraging health bodies, such as nudism and gymnastics. For a while in the 1920s, after they were released from jail for antiwar and birth-control activities, Jeanne and Eugène Humbert retreated to the relative safety of the "integral living" movement that promoted nude sunbathing and physical fitness, which were seen as integral aspects of health in the Greek sense of gymnos, meaning nude. This back-to-nature, primitivist current was not a monopoly of the left; the same interests were echoed by right-wing Germans in the interwar era. In France, however, these proclivities were mostly associated with anarchists, insofar as they suggested an ideal of self-control and the rejection of social taboos and prejudices.
— Richard D. Sonn,
Henri Zisly
Henri Zisly (born in Paris, November 2, 1872; died in 1945) was a French individualist anarchist and naturist. He participated alongside Henri Beylie and Émile Gravelle in many journals such as La Nouvelle Humanité and La Vie Naturelle,
which promoted anarchist-naturism. In 1902, he was one of the main
initiators, alongside Georges Butaud and Sophie Zaïkowska, of the cooperative Colonie de Vaux established in Essômes-sur-Marne, in l'Aisne.
Zisly's political activity, "primarily aimed at supporting a
return to 'natural life' through writing and practical involvement,
stimulated lively confrontations within and outside the anarchist
environment. Zisly vividly criticized progress and civilization, which
he regarded as 'absurd, ignoble, and filthy.' He openly opposed
industrialization, arguing that machines were inherently authoritarian,
defended nudism, advocated a non-dogmatic and non-religious adherence to
the 'laws of nature,' recommended a lifestyle based on limited needs
and self-sufficiency, and disagreed with vegetarianism, which he
considered 'anti-scientific.'"
Spain
This relationship between anarchism and naturism was quite important at the end of the 1920s in Spain:
| “ | The linking role played by the Sol y Vida group was very important. The goal of this group was to take trips and enjoy the open air. The Naturist athenaeum, Ecléctico, in Barcelona, was the base from which the activities of the group were launched. First Etica and then Iniciales, which began in 1929, were the publications of the group, which lasted until the Spanish Civil War. We must be aware that the naturist ideas expressed in them matched the desires that the libertarian youth had of breaking up with the conventions of the bourgeoisie of the time. That is what a young worker explained in a letter to Iniciales. He writes it under the odd pseudonym of silvestre del campo (wild man in the country). "I find great pleasure in being naked in the woods, bathed in light and air, two natural elements we cannot do without. By shunning the humble garment of an exploited person, (garments which, in my opinion, are the result of all the laws devised to make our lives bitter), we feel there no others left but just the natural laws. Clothes mean slavery for some and tyranny for others. Only the naked man who rebels against all norms, stands for anarchism, devoid of the prejudices of outfit imposed by our money-oriented society." | ” |
Isaac Puente, an influential Spanish anarchist during the 1920s and 1930s and an important propagandist of anarcho-naturism, was a militant of both the CNT anarcho-syndicalist trade union and Iberian Anarchist Federation. He published the book El Comunismo Libertario y otras proclamas insurreccionales y naturistas (en:Libertarian Communism and other insurrectionary and naturist proclaims) in 1933, which sold around 100,000 copies,
and wrote the final document for the Extraordinary Confederal Congress
of Zaragoza of 1936 which established the main political line for the
CNT for that year. Puente was a doctor who approached his medical practice from a naturist point of view. He saw naturism as an integral solution for the working classes, alongside Neo-Malthusianism, and believed it concerned the living being while anarchism addressed the social being.
He believed capitalist societies endangered the well-being of humans
from both a socioeconomic and sanitary viewpoint, and promoted anarcho-communism alongside naturism as a solution.
This ecological tendency in Spanish anarchism was strong enough as to call the attention of the CNT–FAI in Spain. Daniel Guérin in Anarchism: From Theory to Practice reports:
Spanish anarcho-syndicalism had long been concerned to safeguard the autonomy of what it called "affinity groups." There were many adepts of naturism and vegetarianism among its members, especially among the poor peasants of the south. Both these ways of living were considered suitable for the transformation of the human being in preparation for a libertarian society. At the Saragossa congress the members did not forget to consider the fate of groups of naturists and nudists, "unsuited to industrialization." As these groups would be unable to supply all their own needs, the congress anticipated that their delegates to the meetings of the confederation of communes would be able to negotiate special economic agreements with the other agricultural and industrial communes. On the eve of a vast, bloody, social transformation, the CNT did not think it foolish to try to meet the infinitely varied aspirations of individual human beings.
Cuba
The historian Kirwin R. Schaffer in his study of Cuban anarchism reports anarcho-naturism as "[a] third strand within the island's anarchist movement" alongside anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism.[11]
Naturism offered a global alternative health and lifestyle movement.
Naturists focused on redefining one's life to live simply, to eat cheap
but nutritious vegetarian diets, and to raise one's own food if
possible. The countryside was posited as a romantic alternative to urban
living, and some naturists even promoted what they saw as the healthful
benefits of nudism. Globally, the naturist movement counted anarchists,
liberals, and socialists as its followers. However, in Cuba a
particular "anarchist" dimension evolved led by people like Adrián del
Valle, who spearheaded the Cuban effort to shift naturism's focus away
from only individual health to naturism having a "social emancipatory"
function."
Schaffer reports the influence that anarcho-naturism had outside
naturist circles. So "[f]or instance, nothing inherently prevented an
anarcho-syndicalist in the Havana restaurant workers' union from
supporting the alternative health care programs of the anarcho-naturists
and seeing those alternative practices as 'revolutionary.'"
"Anarcho-naturists promoted a rural ideal, simple living, and being in
harmony with Nature as ways to save the laborers from the increasingly
industrialized character of Cuba. Besides promoting an early
twentieth-century "back-to-the-land"
movement, they used these romantic images of Nature to illustrate how
far removed a capitalist industrialized Cuba had departed from an
anarchist view of natural harmony." The main propagandizer in Cuba of anarcho-naturism was the Catalonia
born "Adrián del Valle (aka Palmiro de Lidia)...Over the following
decades, Del Valle became a constant presence in not only the anarchist
press that proliferated in Cuba but also mainstream literary
publications...From 1912 to 1913 he edited the freethinking journal El Audaz.
Then he began his largest publishing job by helping to found and edit
the monthly alternative health magazine that followed the
anarcho-naturist line Pro-Vida.
Other countries
Naturism also met anarchism in the United Kingdom.
"In many of the alternative communities established in Britain in the
early 1900s nudism, anarchism, vegetarianism and free love were accepted
as part of a politically radical way of life. In the 1920s the
inhabitants of the anarchist community at Whiteway, near Stroud in
Gloucestershire, shocked the conservative residents of the area with
their shameless nudity."
In Italy, during the IX Congress of the Italian Anarchist Federation in Carrara in 1965, a group decided to split off from this organization and created the Gruppi di Iniziativa Anarchica. In the seventies it mostly comprised "veteran individualist anarchists with a pacifism orientation, naturism, etc,...".
Criticisms
American anarcho-syndicalist Sam Dolgoff
shows some of the criticism that some people on the other anarchist
currents at the time had for anarcho-naturist tendencies. "Speaking of
life at the Stelton Colony of New York in the 1930s, noted with disdain
that it, "like other colonies, was infested by vegetarians, naturists,
nudists, and other cultists, who sidetracked true anarchist goals." One
resident "always went barefoot, ate raw food, mostly nuts and raisins,
and refused to use a tractor, being opposed to machinery, and he didn't
want to abuse horses, so he dug the earth himself." Such self-proclaimed
anarchists were in reality "ox-cart anarchists," Dolgoff said, "who
opposed organization and wanted to return to a simpler life." In an
interview with Paul Avrich before his death, Dolgoff also grumbled, "I
am sick and tired of these half-assed artists and poets who object to
organization and want only to play with their belly buttons".
