Daniel Guérin (French: [danjɛl ɡeʁɛ̃]; 19 May 1904 – 14 April 1988) was a French libertarian-communist author, best known for his work Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, as well as his collection No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism in which he collected writings on the idea and movement it inspired, from the first writings of Max Stirner in the mid-19th century through the first half of the 20th century.
He is also known for his opposition to Nazism, fascism, capitalism, imperialism and colonialism, in addition to his support for the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) during the Spanish Civil War.
[2] He felt distinctly out of place among the throngs of ambitious young students and did not enjoy the academics; he wrote in his Autobiographie de jeunesse: D’une dissidence sexuelle au socialisme, "For me, studies are idiocies that make life hardly worth living."
Future Nobel Prize winner François Mauriac said that Guérin’s poetry, published in a short book, was evidence of an "exceptional gift."
It was not pity, brotherhood overflowing from my heart, it was not the reading of theorists – undertaken much later, as enlightening as the removal of cataracts – it was no more than a social injustice felt in my very own flesh that had made me into a socialist.
He described his journeys through in particular Lebanon, French Indochina, and northern Vietnam, noting the barbarity of European colonialism in great detail.
[3] In Autobiographie de jeunesse he described colonists as: "'such human garbage, doleful men, engaged in an endless card game, or slandering one another'; '[t]hese little white men [petits Blancs], prison guards, police officers, customs officers, manille [a card game] players and absinthe drinkers, pot-bellied slavedrivers of coolies'.
It wasn’t in books, it was in me, first of all, through years of sexual frustration, and it was through contact with young oppressed people that I learned to hate the established order.
An extensive strike movement began in response, spanning the entire country and consisting of 2 million workers, who struck mainly in the workplace.
Guérin worked with the most radical faction of the Socialist Party, the Revolutionary Left tendency headed by Marceau Pivert.
Guérin hoped that it would become a strong party, but it was too small and divided to last through the beginning of the First World War and was outlawed by the Vichy regime in 1940.
He expressed strong mistrust of the United States but empathized with those who experienced discrimination within it: "I have an unshakeable faith in the future of the American people.
"[1] (His skepticism was noted; between 1950 and 1957 he was not allowed a visa to visit the U.S.[1]) Guérin documented his experiences and new knowledge in a 2-volume collected called Où va le peuple américain?
[3] Guérin found himself unhappy with the group, as he believed that it consisted of young gay liberationists who intended to "shock and provoke society instead of organizing effectively to change it."
To help them, this time, no longer as in some of my earlier books, through some developments that were of a scientific character, sociological, juridical, sexological, etcetera, but through the exposé of an individual case.
"[5] In Homosexualité et révolution, he wrote: "In order to omit nothing from my discourse of a whole life, that never, at no moment, in no manner whatsoever, has the intensity, the multiplicity, the frenetic nature of my homosexual affairs taken precedence over my militant activity which aims to change the world, nor has it disguised my determination, my revolutionary obstinacy.