Early years Described by one authority as "the son and grandson of militant socialists", Georges Louis Albert Fontenis was born into a working-class family in
Paris and grew up in the city's suburbs. As a young teenager he devoured his father's revolutionary socialist and trades union journals and newspapers and other Trotskyist and pacifist literature. He became involved with the
libertarian movement during the strikes of June 1936. When he was 17 he joined the Anarchist Union, "discovered"
Bakunin and
Kropotkin, and started selling
Le Libertaire on street corners. Over the next few years his life was closely aligned with that of the libertarian movement till 1957. That was the year in which he was arrested by the
security services because of his support for
Algerian separatists. In 1946 he was elected secretary general of the
Anarchist Federation. For many in the movement his was a relatively new face which made it easier for him to find consensus because he was not a member of any existing faction. In reality, however,
Anarcho-communist and
Individualist anarchist tendencies did not sit comfortably with the federation's priorities. The individualist anarchists, led by the
Lapeyre brothers and
Jean-René Saulière, organised a "letter-writing lobby". As
Maurice Joyeux put it, "It was not really a structured group intended to exclude those who thought differently from them from the
Anarchist Federation, but a network of letter-writing across the country which led to an identical set of results. Which is to say they pre-primed the congress in respect of the proposals they set out, outside the congress meeting". In 1948 George Fontenis teamed up with a group of exiled
CNT and
FAI militants to attempt the assassination of
General Franco. The plan involved purchasing an aircraft, which could not be done successfully by a Spanish passport holder. Fontenis provided his name and nationality for the purchase of a small aeroplane, intended to be used to bomb a pleasure boat occupied by
the "Caudillo" in
San Sebastián Bay. The attempt failed. In February 1951 Fontenis was briefly arrested in connection with the affair, but soon released because alleged (but fictitious) links to the plotters could not be demonstrated.
Libertarian Communist Federation ("Fédération communiste libertaire") At the start of 1950 a group of militants around
Serge Ninn and Georges Fontenis set about establishing a communist libertarian group - described by
Maurice Joyeux as a "clandestine party inside the Anarchist Federation", and by another commenter as "a kind of secret ginger group" - which they called the
Organisation of Battle Planning (
"Organisation Pensée Bataille" / OPB), as a tribute to
Camillo Berneri and his 1936 book "Pensée et bataille". OPB members decided to keep their organisation's existence secret. "avant gardist" and/or "Bolschevist". In August 1954 the "Kronstadt" libertarian-communist group published a memorandum condemning the secretive structure and the Leninism of the wider "Libertarian Communist Federation", and were, in 1955, expelled. During 1954 Fontenis himself had increasingly diverted his focus and that of the federation to political and "logistical" support for the
"Algerian insurrection". In January 1956 the Libertarian Communist Federation submitted a list of ten "revolutionary candidates" for the
national legislative elections. Georges Fontenis was one. The next year the Libertarian Communist Federation was destroyed by state authorities. Several leading figures in it were arrested and detained as part of an attack on the survival of the "Poujadist Movement". Georges Fontenis was one. The next year he was released as part of a wider amnesty enacted by
President de Gaulle. There followed a dozen years during which very little was heard either of the libertarian communist movement or of Georges Fontenis. === After the
"May '68 events" === In 1968 Fontenis was a co-founder of the Libertarian Communist Movement (''
, MCL) which shortly afterwards became the Libertarian Communist Organisation (Organisation communiste libertaire'', OCL) but then, in the words of one source, "with the growth of a widespread social apathy in the years following 1974", was dissolved in 1976. In 1979 he joined the
Union of Libertarian Communist Workers (, UTCL). Georges Fontenis remained a member of the successor organisation, "
Alternative libertaire", but in his later years he wrote less and less. He died at his home in
Reignac-sur-Indre (a little to the south-east of
Tours) on 9 August 2010. In 1990 he issued his memoirs under the title ''L'Autre communisme, histoire subversive du
mouvement libertaire (The other communism: a subversive history of the
Libertarian Movement). An expanded and re-edited version appeared in 2000, something that happened again in 2008. The title changed, too, becoming Changer le monde, histoire du
mouvement communiste libertaire (1945-1997)
(Changing the world: A history of the
Communist Libertarian Movement (1945-1997)''). == Works (selection) ==