Jean Frédéric Henry Barrué

Jean’s family (the only first name on his civil status certificate) Barrué was of peasant and occitanean strain (Béarn, Gers, Aveyron); his father, Henry Barrué, was a commercial employee, and his mother, born Jeanne Durand, had no profession.

Jean Barrué completed his secondary studies at the Lycée Michel-Montaigne in Bordeaux, where he obtained the baccalaureate in 1919, and remained there as a student in scientific preparatory classes until 1922. Then, from 1922 to 1926, he pursued graduate studies in mathematics in Paris, obtained the bachelor’s degree in 1924, the graduate degree in 1925 and was received at the aggregation of mathematics in 1926.

On July 14, 1919, in Paris, he took part in a demonstration of the Republican Association of Veterans and Revolutionary Groups, to protest against the so-called “Victoire” military parade. In October, he joined the Socialist Students Group and the Socialist Party SFIO in Bordeaux; he then inclined to the theses of the Third International. After the congress of Tours, at the end of December 1920, which saw the birth of the Communist Party, the French section of the Communist International, he campaigned against the Communist Youth and then the new party, in Bordeaux, while being a member of the “Claré” group.

From November 1922 to the spring of 1926, he was a member in Paris, of the 5th section of the PC alongside Georges Cogniot, Jean Bruhat, François Chasseigne and Paul Marion and, for several months, was the secretary. Refusing the corporalism of Albert Treint – Suzanne Girault and the “Bolshevisation”, he defended the Communist Bulletin of Souvarine. In January 1926, he was on the editorial board of the Communist Bulletin. In October 1925, he was one of the opposition communists who signed the letter to the EC of the IC, known as the “Letter of the 250” — cf. Fernand Loriot and Introduction Dictionary t. 16 — then he broke with the Party and turned to anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism. From the first issue (1 January 1925), he subscribed to La Révolution Proletarienne, founded by Pierre Monatte and to which he remained attached.

After having carried out his military service in 1926-1927, which he finished as a second lieutenant at the Military Artillery School in Poitiers, where he taught, Jean Barrué taught in several high schools, (Mont-de-Marsan (Landes) from 1927 to 1929, Angoulême (Charente) from 1929 to 1931, before being appointed professor of higher mathematics class at the Lycée de Bordeaux.

From November 1927, he devoted himself to trade union action in the Unitary Federation of Education affiliated to the CGTU, in the trade unions of the Basses-Pyrénées-Landes and then the Charente, finally of the Gironde. He took part in all the congresses of the Federation, defending with Josette Cornec and Jean Cornec, Georges Thomas and Marie Guillot among others, the theses of the revolutionary syndicalist tendency whose organ was L’Action syndicaliste (n° 1, February 1925). He also collaborated with the Cree of the People, a revolutionary trade unionist weekly, organ of the “22” (see Chambelland), and intervened at the Conference which they organized at the Paris Labour Exchange on January 11, 1931. He also campaigned for the “Cine-Arts” group in 1931-1932, which organized the screening of Soviet films, and was an animator of the group “Culture and Action”.

Jean Barrué fought the “illusions” sown by the Popular Front and participation in the 1936 elections, but campaigned in the League of Peacefighters and the Committee of Vigilance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. In addition, he participated, on November 15, 1934, in the meeting of the merger commission between the departmental section of the National Union of Teachers (CGT) and the departmental union of the FU, which decided to start in Gironde the march towards union unity. In 1937, a member of the Union of Staff of Secondary Education, he became secretary of the Girondine section of the General Federation of Education and belonged to the executive committee of the CGT Departmental Union. At a general assembly of the FGE on 27 October 1938, he spoke against the participation of members of the teaching in the ceremonies of the armistice.

During the Spanish War, he collaborated with L’Espagne Antifasciste (Bordeaux, 9 issues from 1 September to 31 December 1937) published by Aristide Lapeyre. At the same time, close to the activists of the CGT-SR, he was in charge in 1937-1938 of the courses of political economy at the school founded by the Young Anarchists of Bordeaux where Charles Boussinot taught French.

Mobilized from September 1939, Jean Barrué was taken prisoner on 20 June 1940 and sent to captivity in Germany (Oflag XD). He resumed his teaching in Bordeaux at the Liberation. But in 1947, the academic council and the Higher Board of Inquiry of the Ministry of National Education examined its activity within the framework of the “Bruneton mission”. On 3 May, he was blamed, with the demotion of a class and a lifetime ban on administrative office because he had “received permission for France” and then returned to Germany. Six years later, a ministerial order overturned the decision. He was then able to become an educational advisor in 1953, then to return to a teaching position in the preparatory class for the ENSI from the beginning of the year 1957 until his retirement in 1966.

After the Second World War, disappointed in the hopes he had founded during the 1948 trade union split on a rise of the National Confederation of Labour (CNTF) — he was secretary of his 8th Regional Union — he devoted himself definitively to the anarchist movement and actively campaigned at the reconstituted Anarchist Federation (AF) in 1954. A member of the Sébastien Faure group in Bordeaux, he took care of international relations with German-speaking groups and also with the Dutch Federation and Swiss and Belgian groups from 1970. He regularly collaborated with the Libertarian World, the organ of the FA whose No. 1 appeared in October 1954, in La Rue, a quarterly magazine published from May 1968 by the libertarian group Louise Michel de Paris, as well as at the German anarchist magazine Befreiung in Cologne. He also translated from German several works by Bakunin, Arthur Lehning and Max Stirner (see work).

In 1980, on the initiative of Jean Barrué and Gilles Durou, a majority of the Sébastien Faure group left the Anarchist Federation to create the Anarchist Group of Bordeaux (GAB) which had as its organ Le Dégel in which he participated until the dissolution of the group around 1985; the newspaper, (6 issues from February 1983 to August 1984), distributed mainly in the Bordeaux region, was printed in 1,000 copies and had 60 subscribers in December 1983.

Jean Barrué regularly collaborated on other titles of the libertarian press including Les Cahiers de l’humanisme libertaire (Paris, 1963-1976) by Gaston Leval, Le Libertaire (Le Havre, number 1 in May 1978) by Maurice Laisant, Interrogations (Paris-Turin, 1974-1979) by Louis Mercier, La Libre Pensée des Bouches-du-Rhône published by André Arru and Iz

Jean Barrué was buried in the cemetery of Talence alongside his wife, Anita, (born Arocela on April 14, 1905 in Vieux Boucau and died on July 27, 1989). Maurice Laisant wrote of him: “Like almost all beings of value, he combined with his knowledge a modesty and affability that touched those who approached him. »
A group of the Anarchist Federation named Cercle Jean Barrué existed in 2016 in Bordeaux.