[1][2] 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.
When he was 17 he joined the Anarchist Union, "discovered" Bakunin and Kropotkin, and started selling Le Libertaire on street corners.
He was also involved after the war with Marcel Pennetier and Maurice Dommanget in a relaunch of another sort of school, the École émancipée, a revolutionary syndicalist grouping of (sometimes) like-minded activists.
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.
[4] In 1948 George Fontenis teamed up with a group of exiled CNT and FAI militants to attempt the assassination of General Franco.
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.
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.
The bitterness engendered and Georges Fontenis' centrality to the acrimonious affair meant that for many years afterwards he would be singled out for demonisation in the speeches and writings of traditionally more mainstream anarchists.
[5] It was also in 1953 that George Fontenis wrote "Manifesto of libertarian communism - essential problems", which has been described variously as "Leninist",[6] "avant gardist"[7] and/or "Bolschevist".
[8] 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.