Zo D'Axa - Life

Life

He was a sort of Socialist condottieri, a dandy, a rake, and a natural adventurer. Ernest La Jeunesse nicknamed him the Restaurant Recruit. —Jules Bertaut, Paris 1870-1935, 2007.

D'Axa was a cavalryman but deserted to Belgium and was exiled to Italy in 1889. There he ran an ultra-Catholic newspaper and seduced the native womenfolk. According to popular myth, d'Axa during his time in Italy was hesitating between becoming an anarchist or a religious missionary when he was accused (wrongfully, he contended) of insulting the Empress of Germany, and was made an anarchist by the subsequent legal proceedings against him. He spent the next few years being pursued from one country to the next by the police, before taking advantage of the general amnesty and returning to France.

At this point, having led (in the words of historian Jules Bertaut) "a most disreputable life", and being an agitator by temperament, d'Axa gravitated towards the anarchist movement. He founded the famous anarchist newspaper L'EnDehors in May 1891 in which numerous contributors such as Jean Grave, Louise Michel, Sébastien Faure, Octave Mirbeau, Tristan Bernard and Émile Verhaeren developed libertarian ideas. D'Axa and L'EnDehors rapidly became the target of the authorities after attacks by Ravachol and d'Axa was kept in jail in Mazas Prison. After his release, he wrote numerous pamphlets and met Camille Pissarro and James Whistler in London. He was again arrested in Italy, and transferred at Sainte Pelagie (Paris), where he spent ten years before his release in 1894. He visited Mexico, Canada and the United States, where he met the widow of Gaetano Bresci (the murderer of the Italian king Umberto I), before returning to Marseille, France, where he committed suicide on 30 August 1930.