Soup conferences

The Favier hall, located at 13 rue de Belleville, was a gathering place for the French workers' and anarchist movements. In 1890, Louise Michel organized a conference there where she opposed the 1890 Berlin Conference, denouncing it as a bourgeois manipulation to enslave the proletariat.{{Cite news |date=29 March 1890 |title=Marseille |work=Le Sémaphore de Marseile |pages=1 |language=fr}}

File:Convocation soup conference.png (6 December 1892)]]

Those gatherings were closely linked with the life of the individualist anarchist tendency within anarchism.{{Cite thesis |last=Frayne |first=Carl Tobias |date=2022-01-20 |title=Individualist Anarchism in France and Its Legacy |url=https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/420321aa-73ce-4083-91f4-736d7d727fed |journal=Cambridge (CUP) (PHD Thesis) |pages=78 |doi=10.17863/CAM.80240}} In November 1891, Pierre Martinet began organizing these lectures.{{Cite news |date=17 November 1891 |title=Les soupes-conférences |work=La France |pages=3 |language=fr}} He started by arranging paid talks aimed at a wealthier audience and used the proceeds from these events to fund the soup conferences, where he planned and promised to distribute 4,000 bowls of soup. Despite his ambitious project, he only raised a modest amount and had to provide the remaining funds himself, which he did. Martinet sought to invite poor people, women, and sex workers, as reflected in his appeal:{{Cite journal |last=Maitron |first=Jean |date=1973 |title=Un "anar", qu'est-ce que c'est? |trans-title=An 'anar', what is it? |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3807386 |journal=Le Mouvement Social |language=fr |issue=83 |pages=23–45 |doi=10.2307/3807386 |jstor=3807386 |issn=0027-2671}}

{{Citation bloc|text=To the vagrants, to the beggars, to the ex-convicts, to those labeled as pimps, to the women insulted with the name of 'public women,' to all the wretched, to all the suffering.}}

File:Henri Varenne's article on the soup-conferences.png's article on the soup conferences in Le Libertaire, giving the list of the main financial backers of the events.]]

He spoke the following day at the first soup conference on 15 November 1891. The event drew around a thousand people, mostly poor, who came to be served, and distributed more than three thousand meals and as many anarchist newspapers, as some people returned for seconds.{{Cite news |date=16 November 1891 |title=Les 'soupes-conférences' |work=Le Petit Républicain de l'Aube |pages=1}} About a dozen "companions, both men and women", served the crowd, with the women wearing white aprons and the men rolling up their shirt sleeves. Séverine joined the organization of the soup conferences the following month, in December 1891, because she wanted to support her comrades.{{Cite news |date=7 December 1891 |title=La soupe anarchiste |work=Le Petit Journal |pages=2}} Le Père Peinard described her in very positive terms in that context.{{Cite news |date=13 December 1893 |title=Soup-conferences |url=https://www.archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/anarchismes/avant-1914/leperepeinard/1891/pere-peinard-an3-n143.pdf |work=Le Père peinard |pages=3 |language=fr}} On the eve of these gatherings, anarchists went to makeshift dormitories, cafés, and night shelters around the Paris region to invite the people staying there to attend the next day.

From the following year, the organization of the soup conferences was managed by a Comité féminin, not to be confused with the later anarchist group also called the Comité féminin.{{Sfn|Tardif|2021|p=42}} This committee included activists such as Livernois, Piffet, Dupont, Job, Petitjean, and Eugénie Collot, according to Dominique Petit in Le Maitron.{{Sfn|Tardif|2021|p=42}}{{Cite web |title=COLLOT Marie, Eugénie [Dictionnaire des anarchistes] – Maitron |url=https://maitron.fr/collot-marie-eugenie-dictionnaire-des-anarchistes/ |access-date=2025-04-27 |language=fr-FR}} Collot left the organization of the soup conferences the following year, in 1893.{{Sfn|Tardif|2021|p=42}}

Male militants still participated in the organization of the soup conferences, such as Jules Rousset, who set up a number of these events in 1892.{{Cite news |date=13 February 1894 |title=Les soupes-conférences |work=Journal des débats politiques et littéraires |location=Paris |pages=3 |language=fr}}{{Cite news |date=14 December 1936 |title=L'affaire Jean Grave et les soupes-conférences |work=Le Petit Journal |pages=2 |language=fr}} He was supported in these efforts by Alphonse Daudet, Émile Zola, Adrien Scholl, Clovis Hugues, Henri Becque, Paul de Cassagnac, Léon Say, Maurice Barrès, Édouard Detaille, Stéphane Mallarmé, Félicien Champsaur, Georges Olmet, Meilhac, Mr. Veil-Picard, Paulus, Anatole France, Louis Lagasse, and Sarah Bernhardt.{{Cite news |last=Varenne |first=Henri |author-link= |date=15 September 1922 |title=De Ravachol à Caserio : Les soupes-conférences |trans-title=From Ravachol to Caserio : The soup-conferences |url=https://argonnaute.parisnanterre.fr/media/67981c9b-d4ad-4bf3-b1b1-2c161f69c2dc.pdf |work=Le Libertaire |pages=2 |language=fr}} He was particularly well received by Bernhardt, who gave him 100 francs and four tickets to attend her play The Kings. When Rousset presented himself at Mallarmé's house, Mallarmé was not there. Instead, he sent Rousset this note along with some money:{{Cite news |date=22 September 1922 |title=Les soupes conférences (suite) |work=Le Libertaire |pages=2 |language=fr}}

I have regretted a thousand times that I was not at home when you came to visit. Will you accept the gift of a man who is not wealthy?
Heartfelt support for your work.

File:The New York Herald - Soup-conferences suppressed.png, discussing the suppression of the soup conferences]]

After the National Assembly bombing and during the repression of January and February 1894, Rousset was arrested and initially accused of “criminal conspiracy”. However, when the authorities realized the extent of the funding, which came from a significant part of the French intellectual and artistic world at the time, they stopped pursuing him for that charge — as it would have forced them to arrest the artists themselves. Instead, he was prosecuted for fraud and begging, because he had not used the collected funds for new soup conferences. Rousset defended himself by stating that he had not spent the money, had fed up to 5,000 people by soup conference in 1891 and 1892, but that the 400 francs raised would have been insufficient at that time to organize such an event again yet. Nonetheless, the anarchist was sentenced to six months in prison for breach of trust, a decision that Le Petit Journal later described as incomprehensible when it revisited the event in 1936.

During this period, the soup conferences as a whole were targeted, other anarchists were arrested, and the events were temporarily suspended.{{Cite news |date=27 December 1893 |title=Zola and the anarchist : Soup-conferences suppressed |work=The New York Herald |pages=1}}

The historian of the French anarchist movement, Jean Maitron, used the example of the soup conferences to illustrate the anarchist movement’s openness to the “marginalized elements” of society — a point he noted in contrast to the Marxists, an opposing ideological movement that criticized the anarchists for these political choices.

• Food Not Bombs
• Soup kitchen

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• {{Citation |last=Tardif |first=Marie-Pier |title=Ni ménagères, ni courtisanes. Les femmes de lettres dans la presse anarchiste française (1885-1905) (PhD thesis) |date=2021 |trans-title=Neither housewives nor courtesans. Women writers in the French anarchist press (1885-1905) |url=https://archipel.uqam.ca/15188/1/D4055.pdf}}

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