André Veidaux

André Veidaux (anagrammatic pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Adrien Devaux; b. 1868), French Symbolist writer, poet, critic and anarchist sympathiser.

Based in Paris as a young adult, André Veidaux quickly approached the magazine La Plume, to which he gave poems and articles from 1890 to 1899; he directed in particular the issue of this periodical on anarchy (n° 97, 1 May 1893).

He collaborated with numerous newspapers and magazines and libertarians from about 1890 to 1904, especially at the Libertaire from his first issue in 1895, and directed the publication of the Almanac of the Libertaire for 1903, “elegant volume ... filled with useful information” according to Ernest Vaughan in L’Aurore. His articles and poems earned him a certain notoriety in the anarchist and literary press.
He also tried his hand at the theatre, with La Chose filial, of which the New Humanity unfortunately wrote that “the thesis defended by M. Veidaux is as admirable as his play is ridiculous.”

In 1894 he lived 11 rue Leclerc, in Meudon, according to Sébastien Faure*’s address book.

He told Augustin Hamon*, for his investigation into the Psychology of the Socialist Anarchist (1895): “The bourgeois family environment was the generator of my spirit of revolt... The evolution of the anarchic form having teased me, I was one of the first propagandists of individualism, happy succeeding and as the only raison d’être of anarchism. »

In 1900, he protested with several other writers and activists against the ban on the anarchist congress that was to be held in Paris.

He collaborated, in 1906-1907, in the Revue littéraire de Paris et de Champagne, whose secretary was his friend Fernand Clerget and to which several other libertarians gave articles. Subsequently, he published some collections of poems but moved away from anarchism.