Contenu du sommaire : Morale sexuelle et communisme

The international communist women's movement founded in 1920 fought for the full political, economic and social equality between men and women which was to be achieved through the revolutionary transformation of the capitalist system. It also aspired to create a society based on a new morality. The bourgeois family had to give way to a proletarian unit where two individuals would be free and independent. The movement urged to grant women freedom of choice in matters of reproduction where moral judgment would no longer play a primary role. Prostitution was also seen as a social phenomenon linked to the economic inequality of sexes present in a capitalist system and not as a sin. In contrast, the discourse on sexual freedom was quite complex. Supported by the youth of the Soviet Komsomol, sexual liberation was, however, viewed with caution (and sometimes suspicion) by some communist women.

Associated with the communist movement from the beginning of the 1920s, the French proletarian freethinkers (Libre pensée d'action sociale 1921-1924, libre pensée révolutionnaire 1926-1932, Association des travailleurs sans dieu 1933-1936) anchored their anti-religious critique in the class struggle. They also regularly emphasized sexual issues from different angles, ranging from vigorous denunciation of clerical pedophilia to defense of neo-Malthusianism, feminism, and the Soviet achievements on divorce and abortion legislation. This article, focusing on the printed sources of the proletarian freethinkers, illustrates a little-known aspect of these cultural organizations linked to the communist movement, thus opening perspectives on communist sexual morality and its relationship to the then dominant bourgeois and Christian model.

Based on a series of interviews with communists, communist archives, and a wide range of other sources, this article explores Dutch Communist Party's stances on sexual health and sexuality, and discusses its affiliation with the Nieuw Malthusiaanse Bond (NMB, New-Malthusian League) in the period 1909-1940. It argues that Dutch communist views and practice deviated significantly from Soviet policy and guidelines in matters concerning sexuality and can be traced back to a powerful radical tradition rooted in anarchism and home-grown orthodox Marxism.

This article examines the construction of biomedical discourses regarding the libido, in Greece during the interwar period. We argue that the libido was perceived as the primary indicator of degeneracy in people, an idea which became an integral part of the Greek state's public political discourse against the communists from 1917 to 1940. As a matter of fact, in Greece, the sexual instinct served as the arena of a political dispute in which scientists, communists, and various liberal governments were involved, using the dominant socio-psychological theories of normativity at the time. Thus, the struggle against the libido gained pivotal significance also in the social imaginary of the communists which in turn enhanced the development of the concept of a « communist libido » that had to comply with bourgeois norms.

The Sex-Pol movement (Sexualpolitik) was founded in 1927 in Vienna by Wilhelm Reich. A Communist politicized by the July Revolt of 1927 in Vienna, Reich—a biologist and psychoanalyst by training—believed that political violence resulted from the repression of sexual appetites. According to Reich, sexual repression was one of the main causes of reactionary politics. Sexual liberation was therefore not so much an end of the communist movement as a means to achieve a more just and less violent society. In this context, during the 1930s the Sex-Pol movement saw sexual morality as a real weapon in the fight against fascism. But Reich's work also reveals contradictions in the sexual morality of communism and the labour movement in the interwar period, especially on the issue of homosexuality. For Reich, homosexuality was a diversion of « normal » sexual energy associated with repressed personalities apt to be seduced by authoritarian tendencies.

The Belle-Epoque anarchists' use of theatre is often overlooked. Yet this literature offers rich perspectives to understand theories of libertarian aesthetic or the way activism and art were articulated in the anarchist political project of that period. This article intends to present arguments that were made in favour of theatre in one the most widely read anarchist newspapers between 1895 and 1914, namely Les Temps Nouveaux. It will show how theatrical activities organized by anarchist activists would create an anarchist evolutionary praxis.

‌Can the early modern society be understood as the first information society? The worlds of the written word have been considerably transformed historiographically in the last thirty years. This paper proposes a synthesis of the main advances in this field. It focuses mainly on three contemporaneous aspects, or debates. The first, which is the oldest, concerns the so-called 'revolutionary' dimension of printing, and questions in a new way this material, social and cognitive disruption. The second aspect departs from the classical perspectives on the history of publishing, and aims to show how the history of the printed book, first, and then that of reading, were based on successive paradigm shifts that have contributed to the growth of the interest in 'information'. Recent works on the dissemination of news and the information infrastructures that support these flows confirm the hypothesis of the emergence of a first information society during the early modern age. We will insist in particular on their methods, which invite to decompartmentalize in a profitable way several fields of historical research. The third and last debate concerns the finest scriptural materials, examined from the most discrete markers of thought as well as the process, modern, of progressive diversification of the supports during the period. Their study allows us to better understand the way in which early modern documents were included in the labile structures of a society great consumer of information under its various forms: handwritten or printed books, handwritten or printed newsheets, correspondences, etc.; a society great consumer of documents, and paper.