[1] In 1895, Le Libertaire was relaunched as a weekly publication in France by Sébastien Faure and in the socially and politically turbulent years that accompanied rapid economic change during the run up to 1914 it became a leading title in a growing field of anarchist newspapers and journals.
Subtitled Journal du Mouvement Social, it was produced by Joseph Déjacque, a noted writer and anarchist journalist who had arrived in the United States as a political refugee in 1854 in order to escape a prison sentence handed out on 22 October 1851 by a Paris court.
Prosecuted originally for "inciting hatred and disrespect for the government, stirring up mutual hatred and contempt between citizens, and for actions defined as crimes under the criminal law" by the government of the short-lived Second Republic, Déjacque had been faced by a tribunal decision to destroy his poetry Les Lazaréennes: fables et poésies sociales, along with two years in prison and a 2,000 franc fine.
[3] In order to escape the fate determined for him by the court, he had initially taken refuge in Brussels and then in London before moving on to Jersey and finally the United States.
He published La question révolutionnaire in 1854, a book in which he attacked religion, the family, property rights and government, to set out to demonstrate their "devastating impacts" (effets dévastateurs).
[4] In the first edition, he detailed the libertarian programme as such: "It starts with a single supreme principal: liberty in everything for everyone [la liberté et en tout et pour tous].
Vaillant's crime had involved throwing a rather ineffective bomb into the French parliament chamber from its public gallery.
Willems and Herkelboeck were found guilty by the court of the "press crimes" for which they sere charged and condemned to spend four years in prison and pay a 1,000 franc fine.
In France as in Germany, the aftermath of war was accompanied by a splintering of the political left and the emergence of a substantial communist party.
Within the French trades union movement, there was a corresponding split with the creation in 1922 of the Confédération générale du travail unitaire (CGTU), a grouping of pro-libertarian, pro-communist factions formerly within the mainstream General Confederation of Labour (CGT).
The French Anarchist Federation, whose members were well represented among contributors to Le Libertaire, underwent a breakup of its own during the early 1950s.
Starting with issue 378, dated 3 December 1953, the newspaper's front page featured the subtitle Organe de la Fédération Communiste Libertaire.
Weekly editions of Le Libertaire disappeared in July 1956, three years after the anarchist schism that had given birth to the FCL and its control of the newspaper.
In 1979, Jean-Pierre Jacquinot, the editor of Le Libertaire, left this organization and founded with Maurice Laisant and other groups the Union of Anarchists at the Congress of Nevers (November 1979).
At the Congress of Saint Léger-les-Vignes (1994), the break is official and the group Jules Durand withdraws from the Union of Anarchists, carrying Le Libertaire with it.