André Pierre Daunis

French railway worker, farmer, electrician, mason and militant libertarian communist.

The son of a fisherman, André Daunis joined for four years in 1915 and was called to the order of the regiment in 1918. Employed at the railways of the Midi in Narbonne (Aude) where he had married on November 15, 1919, he was dismissed – probably in 1920 – and remained in Narbonne where administrative reports will point him out in turn as an electrician (in 1924), farmer (in 1928) and mason (in 1936): he lived in the latter date in the Eglantines, route de Carcassonne.

Around 1925, he was considered one of the main animators of the small Narbonne anarchist group Élisée Reclus. He lived then 1 rue Sambre-et-Meuse and was the secretary of the Revolutionary Federation of Languedoc founded in Béziers on October 19, 1924, a post to which he was re-elected at the congress of August 15-16, 1925. In 1926, he worked very actively to prepare the anarchist congress, which was to be held in November in Toulouse and to study the formation of an anarchist Federation of the South. At the end of the year, he was delegated to Narbonne of the French Anarchist Group and leader of a “group of social studies”, in 1928 secretary of propaganda of the Libertarian Federation of Languedoc. He had in the meantime (1927) carried out a vast campaign of propaganda rallies throughout the South. The prefectural authority, which devoted quite frequent notations to it, considered that it reserved a significant part of its activity for the sale of anarchist brochures.

In the 1924 general election, Daunis appeared, with Justin Olive*, Albert Pech and Joseph Fournil—all residents of or around Narbonne—on a “libertarian” list that was tabled in the prefecture but which, astentionist, faded before the election. He also declared himself a candidate of the Revolutionary Communist Anarchist Union (UACR) in the 1928 elections in the constituency of Carcassonne, like his comrade Pierre Belot in that of Castelnaudary, then candidate of the “Group of Peace Fighters”, in 1936, in Narbonne: on these two occasions, he nevertheless retired before the election.

The government interned it from September 20, 1939 to October 10, 1941, at the same time as several other anarchists from the Narbonnaise region, in the camp of Saint-Sulpice-la-Pointe (Tarn), where were grouped the majority of opponents of the regime who remained in the Tarn or the Aude.

After the war André Daunis was with Louis Esteve* one of the main animators of the Narbonne group of the Anarchist Federation and then of the Libertarian Communist Federation (FCL) where both always defended the organizational theses of the So-called Archinov Platform*. André Daunis died in Narbonne on July 19, 1985.

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