Fernand Pelloutier

Fernand Pelloutier (born Oct. 1, 1867, Paris, Fr.—died March 13, 1901, Paris) was a leading organizer and theoretician of the French labour movement who deeply influenced the philosophy and methods of anarcho-syndicalist labour unionism.

As a young journalist in the town of Saint-Nazaire, Pelloutier became a member of the Parti Ouvrier, the largest Marxist Socialist party in France at the time; but he left it in 1892 after the party’s leader repudiated the idea of the general strike as romantic and impractical. Disillusioned by leftist party politics, he turned to anarchism and in 1895 became secretary of the Fédération des Bourses du Travail, an institution combining the functions of workers’ clubs, employment exchanges, and local labour-union federations. He criticized orthodox Marxists for relying upon the apparatus of the state, a bourgeois institution, as a means of changing society and asserted that the state would be replaced by a “voluntary and free association of producers.” This association would be based upon the Bourses du Travail. Through them, Pelloutier believed, the workers would evolve communistic forms of production and create “a socialist state within the bourgeois state.”

Pelloutier was a gifted organizer as well as a theoretician, and under his guidance the bourses grew in number until he claimed more than 250,000 members throughout France. In 1900 he founded the Office Nationale de la Statistique et de la Placement, for the purpose of getting satisfactory employment for workers and reducing job competition.

In his Histoire des bourses du travail (1902), Pelloutier defined the theory and practice of anarcho-syndicalism.