Gérard Hervé Coatmeur

French militant anarchist individualist propagandist, naturist, writer, docker, porter, bookseller and fairground showman.

Son of Corentin, carpenter (or fisherman) and Marie Françoise Kéraudren, housewife, living on rue Sainte Hélène, in Douarnenez.
It was at the age of 5 that his parents came to settle in Brest with his younger sister in order to escape the misery. However, they continued to live in great poverty living “in a stable, a cellar and then other mortal slums.”
At about 10 and a half years he rebelled against the school, the masters and the institution. It comes out without “no title even a certificate of studies.... "
Remaining young in charge of his mother, Hervé Coatmeur worked as a worker at the Arsenal. He was “in turn demolished by ships, sawmer of demolitions, mitron, clerk, ship foam and sailor.” But also docker, doorfaix to the station of Brest, delivery man of sawdust... For six years he was the services of the harbour of Brest and its surroundings in small vapors and tugs. He also took “44 months in the state navy.”

He was convicted several times and finally returned in 1910 and registered with Carnet B. An individualist anarchist, he had a newsstand, a book shop, a display among the fairgrounds, not wanting to be a trader, a civil servant, no exploiter, nor exploited. He propagated an individualism derived from Han Ryner's.

In 1905, Victor Pengam, a member of the anarchist group in Brest and the union of the workers of the port, was excluded from the arsenal for having held an anti-militarist conference on the occasion of an evening organized by the union. Coatmeur intervened at the major support meeting held in Brest on 2 November. He seemed excited to the point that the president of the session had to remind him of the order: for him, to the coercive force, army, judges and cops, it is necessary to oppose such a great force!
In 1905, still, following a strike by the dockers, all the union leaders were hunted down. He decided to rebuild the union. He immediately undertook a campaign to free the union members. What he did because they were released 6 months later.
In prison in turn, on ordinary law for 17 months, he organized a revolt where all the prisoners had material improvements in detention. He, on the other hand, found himself “at the dungeon and then [...] in isolation.”
Coatmeur suffered various convictions until 1911, before adopting non-violence.

During the First World War, Coatmeur was mobilized a month and a half in Brest. “I had been so thin, having almost never eaten during this time (and determined not to give a manly man to war, but a corpse only, if she wanted to), that my enemies believing me in dead advance, were “reassured” and I was reformed cleanly – otherwise I was going to refuse to take up arms: I had written it to Han Ryner.”

Head of the Naturian Foyer in Brest (85 rue E. Zola), he was the founder, host and principal editor of the newspaper Le Sphinx individualist (Brest) which had many series difficult to reconstruct: 5 n° in 1913, 8 n° in 1914 and then replaced by L’Echo naturian (n°1, 4 October at n°4, 5 November 1914), 3 n° from February to April 1915 and replaced by L’oeuvre naturiste (1 n°Contre le chaos – alias le Sphinx A new series, under the title The Post-War Sphinx, then appeared from August 1919 to August 1938 with countless variants of titles.

During the First World War, Coatmeur had collaborated in the individualist magazine Les Glâneurs (No. 1, March 1917 to n°19, September 1918) published in Lyon by Albin and Virginie Blanchard.

After the war, twice, he went to work in the devastated regions as a carpenter with his brother.
In the early 1920's, following his campaign for E.Armand and Gaston Rolland, he was expelled from his home.

A propagandist, he distributed leaflets and leaflets, founded a circle of studies, attached himself in the 1920’s to the diffusion of the En Dehors d’E. Armand to whom he collaborated, became a vegetarian, feeding on vegetables and raw fruits and rye bread. He also collaborated in the magazine Le Néo Naturien (Châtillon-sur-Thouet, n°1 November 1921 at n°29, August 1927). Coatmeur was registered in Carnet B and remained 1 rue Monge in Brest.

He married on 6 August 1931 "with a young peasant woman who, after being raped by her father, took refuge in Brest where she became the prey of the sailors", Emilienne Claudine Bars, thirty years old, her youngest. He wanted to make her a new being. But she left him and returned with a young baby “in a state of pitiful health.” She left it again by taking away “a stack of pieces of a hundred subconsciously saved in order to edit a number of the Sphinx” (E. Armand, L’Unique, op. cit.). The divorce was pronounced on June 15, 1935.

Hervé Coatmeur lived his last years in the most miserable conditions: he lived in a cabin where the rain fell and slept on a bed of straps: he was dressed in rags and put on spartans. On 9 September 1944, he died with several hundred people during the explosion of a civilian shelter in Brest, Sadi-Carnot Square, during a shelling of the city.