Jura Federation

The Canton of Jura, a Swiss area, was known for its watchmaker artisans in La Chaux-de-Fonds, who shared anti-state, egalitarian views on work and social emancipation.

The 1872 St. Imier Congress disavowed the General Council's authoritarian consolidation of power and planning as an affront to the International's loose, federalist founding to support workers' emancipation.

The Jura became the geographic center of the First International's anarchist coalition under luminary Mikhail Bakunin in the late 1860s and early 1870s, assisted by the Swiss government's laxity toward political agitators.

Their founding treatise, the Sonvilier Circular, held positions against the state and against the General Council, which the Jura charged with turning free and autonomous parts of the International into an authoritarian hierarchy.

The Bakuninists from Jura, France, Italy, Spain, and the United States reaffirmed their Sonvilier Circular position and charged the General Council with violating the premises of their partnership: the autonomy of the federations and their ultimate cause: workers' emancipation.

The St. Imier coalition agreed to a solidarity pact to ensure the member federations' independent autonomy and their common union against the General Council.

The coalition would become the Anti-authoritarian International, as formalized at the 1873 Congress of Geneva, and it held that only the proletariat masses could seek social emancipation for themselves through free, spontaneous action and egalitarian economic federation: It could not be imposed from hierarchy.

[12] Major figures at Jura included James Guillaume, Adhémar Schwitzguébel, Severino Albarracín, Carlo Cafiero, Errico Malatesta, and Élisée Reclus.