Pierre Marie Le Meillour

Natural son of Marguerite Le Meillour, illiterate agricultural daily newspaper, Pierre Le Meillour won Paris where, on March 2, 1912, he co-founded the group of the Originals of Lorient, affiliated to the Revolutionary Communist Federation (FRC). On 16 March, he took part in the violent counter-protest that attempted to ban Belleville from the military parade that was to cross the neighborhood in music.

In 1914, living in Courbevoie, he was secretary of the local group of the Revolutionary Anarchist Communist Federation (FCAR), which met Mathieu Hall, 12, Place Victor-Hugo, or at Bories, 63, boulevard de Courbevoie. In May 1914, he was sentenced to four months in prison by the Versailles court for an intervention in an election rally in Rueil.

Registered in Booklet B, he was mobilized in 1914 to the 9th Regiment of Artillery on foot, but he received a reprieve of appeal and resumed his profession, as well as activism at the metals union of the Seine.

Le Meillour then joined the Committee for the Resumption of International Relations (CRRI), formed in January 1916, which brought together the pacifist minorities of the CGT and the PS. The trade unionist section of the CRRI, dominated by the libertarians, however, very quickly demonstrated desires for separation from the Socialist section. She gradually broke out of the CRRI and, in December 1916, took her autonomy and renamed herself the Trade Union Defense Committee (CDS, see Paul Veber).

At the meeting of the metals union on March 31, 1917, with Paul Veber and Jules Lepetit’s companion, Le Meillour passed a contribution of 100 francs to the CDS, and also pleaded – without success – for a payment to the L’Entraide relief fund. In May 1917, with his libertarian comrades of the minority of the CGT, Le Meillour encouraged the strikes of workers by trying to instill in them a pacifist content.

On 31 May 1917, Raymond Péricat became secretary of the CDS, with Boudoux as assistant secretary and Pierre Le Meillour as treasurer. A police report of June 3 called him and it was then considered desirable “that it be returned to his body or far from the capital.”

In June, he participated in an ambitious pacifist operation: the clandestine edition of an issue of the Libertaire (see Claude Content). He was arrested in the ensuing call and appeared in correctional with several comrades. On 11 October he was sentenced to fifteen months in prison.

After the CGT confederal congress in July 1918, Le Meillour denounced the reconciliation Jouhaux-Merrheim, whose “inconsistency” he criticized« inconséquence ». He was at that time administrator of the caisse L’Entraide with Léon Jahane*.

When, in December 1918, the Anarchist Federation was reconstituted, Pierre Le Meillour was the secretary, and he participated in the revival of the Libertaire whose first number appeared on January 26, 1919. He was able, said Sébastien Faure, to “expose our ideas very well.”

In March 1919 Le Meillour was a signatory, on behalf of the metals union, of a protest — also signed by Sirolle*, Boudoux, Remeringer, Massot*, Dondon, etc. — against the searches carried out at the headquarters of the Libertaire after the attack committed by Cottin against Clemenceau.

In June, he took a very active part in the great strike of the Parisian metals, going to speak in various assemblies of strikers. He called for revolution on the Russian model, and to drive out the reformist “manitus” who ran the CGT.

In September 1919, he was treasurer of the Anti-Parliamentary Bureau, organizer of the campaign of abstention in the November legislative elections. He was an abstentionist candidate in the 4th constituency of the Seine (Saint-Denis and Sceaux).

On 14 December, with Sirolle, he spoke on behalf of the Anarchist Federation in a major meeting of the Social Defense Committee at the Cirque de Paris for the amnesty of Jacques Sadul, the mutineers of 1917 and the Black Sea sailors, and in favor of the Russian Revolution.

While he supported the Russian Revolution, Le Meillour was hostile to the Bolshevik government. In Le Libertaire of 24 October 1920, he announced that the founding congress of the Anarchist Union (AU) would make a “necessary selection” between anarchists faithful to their convictions, and the “anarchist neo-communists (?) In support of the dictatorship.” In December, he was one of the speakers of the great meeting of the AU on “the anarchists and the dictatorship” rue de la Grange-aux-Belles, with Louis Lecoin, Sirolle, Veber, Boudoux and Sébastien Faure. In the weeks that followed, he participated in a protest action before L’Humanité, to force this daily to rectify information concerning the death of Jules Lepetit.

Within the Revolutionary Trade Unionist Committees (RSCs), he fought for membership in the Red Trade Union International. In May 1921, at a meeting of the Metals Union, he voted on a motion put forward by Paul Veber calling for the expansion of political prisoners in Soviet Russia. He lived on rue Normande in Vanves.

With the exception of the Congress of Pantin (31 October-2 November 1925), to which he could not attend, Pierre Le Meillour was, in the Inter-war period, delegated to all the congresses of the Anarchist Union. At the Villeurbanne Congress (26-27 November 1921), he advocated the abolition of trade union functionarism, saying that only technical permanents should be allowed, and that trade union responsibilities should be entrusted to volunteer activists. At the 4th Congress (Paris, August 12 and 13, 1923), he was elected a “replacement” collaborator of the LibertaireLibertaire. Elected member of the initiative committee at the Paris congress (1-3 November 1924), his mandate was renewed at that of Orleans (12-14 July 1926), where he represented the group of Bezons.

In 1926-1927, Pierre Le Meillour was one of the main supporters of the Platform (see Piotr Archinov), wishing to see “three speakers claiming to be anarchism dealing with the same subject and saying otherwise to each other.” At the Paris Congress, on 30 October and 1 November 1927, the Communist Anarchist Union adopted the Platform and transformed itself into a Revolutionary Communist Anarchist Union (UACR), resulting in the splitting of the synthesizers who formed the Association of Anarchist Federalists (AFA). Pierre Le Meillour became, with Chazoff*, head of the Western Federation.

At the Congress of Amiens, from 12 to 15 August 1928, he was elected a member of the administrative commission and treasurer of the UACR, Louis Lecoin and Pierre Odéon*, being elected respectively Secretary and Deputy Secretary. He kept a bitter memory of the anarchists rallied to the sacred union in 1914 and when Dr. Pierrot in More About wanted, in July 1928, to justify his position at the time, Le Meillour attacked in the Libertaire the “revenants” who “put it back”.

It seems that around 1932, the group of Bezons, of which Pierre Le Meillour was a member, left the UACR. Most of the members of the group were then members of the CGT-SR, and Pierre Le Meillour gave some articles at the time to La Voix libertaire, the newspaper of the AFA.

After the day of February 6, 1934, the anarchist movement gathered under the sign of anti-fascism. Pierre Le Meillour represented the group of Bezons at the so-called unity congress, held on 20 and 21 May 1934 in Paris, which reunited the UACR and the AFA. He was elected a member of the administrative commission of the organization, renamed UA.

During the Spanish Civil War, Pierre Le Meillour helped Louis Lecoin to form the Committee for Free Spain, which, at the AU congress of November 1937, was transformed into the French section of the International Anti-Fascist Solidarity (IAS). Lecoin was the secretary, Nicolas Faucier the Treasurer, and Le Meillour, a permanent member. The French section of the SIA, which would have counted up to 15 000 members, assured the Spanish anti-fascists support in silver, food, weapons, medicine, and maintained near the French border the colony Ascaso-Durruti which hosted 300 children.

After the Second World War, Pierre Le Meillour did not join the Anarchist Federation, but collaborated for some time on the newspaper launched by his old friend Louis Lecoin, Defense of Man. When he died, half-paralyzed, he lived in Sartrouville. At his funeral, Nicolas Faucier delivered an address reproduced by Contre-Courant of October 1954.