Léon Prouvost

French individualist anarchist, anti-militarist and anti-clericalist.

Born in Roubaix (North), September 28, 1856, in a bourgeois family of fabric manufacturers. After the war of 1870, his parents whose affairs had collapsed settled in Lille where they founded an insurance agency. He then attended high school and then worked with his father. After having made his business flourish until the age of 48, after two marriages and fortunes, he settled in 1904 in Saint-Raphaël (Var) and discovered libertarian ideas, focusing on "free circles". Deeply anticlerical (since his childhood spent in a religious college), he became in 1906 the secretary of the Emancipator (local section of the Free Thought). From 1912 to 1913, he published La Revue sociale, an organ of individual propaganda which, in addition to anti-militarism and anti-religious action, advocated vegetarianism, the suppression of tobacco and alcohol as a lifestyle. A friend of André Lorulot, he published an anti-religious supplement at L'Idée libre and organized a mobile library in 1917. Léon Prouvost also collaborates with La Feuille de Jules Vignes, the Awakening of the Slave and The Melee of Pierre Chardon. Worried repeatedly for “anti-militarist propaganda and military incitement to desertion or disobedience” (condemned to one year in prison in 1915), he was again raided on 27 July 1921. On 11 August, he ended his life by throwing himself into the well of his property, after bequeathing part of his wealth to Lorulot. Thus ends the one nicknamed “the libertarian philanthropist” or “the millionaire anarchist”.