Zo d'Axa

Alphonse Gallaud de la Pérouse (28 May 1864 – 30 August 1930), better known as Zo d'Axa , was a French adventurer, anti-militarist, satirist, and journalist. He founded two highly influential French magazines, L'Endehors and . A descendant of the famous French navigator Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse, he was one of the most prominent French individualist anarchists at the turn of the 20th century.

Life Alphonse Gallaud de la Pérouse was born on 28 May 1864 in Paris, France. He was a cavalryman but deserted to Belgium and was exiled to Italy in 1889. There he ran an ultra-Catholic newspaper and seduced the native womenfolk. He spent the next few years being pursued from one country to the next by the police, before taking advantage of the general amnesty and returning to France. He died by suicide on 30 August 1930, burning most of his papers the previous night.

Philosophy An individualist and aesthete, d'Axa justified the use of violence as an anarchist, seeing propaganda of the deed as akin to works of art. "It is simple enough.", d'Axa proclaimed of his contemporaries, "If our extraordinary flights (nos fugues inattendues) throw people out a little, the reason is that we speak of everyday things as the primitive barbarian would, were he brought across them." D'Axa was a bohemian who "exulted in his outsider status", and praised the anti-capitalist lifestyle of itinerant anarchist bandit precursors of the French illegalists. He expressed contempt for the masses and hatred for their rulers. He was an important anarchist interpreter of the philosophy of individualist anarchist Max Stirner, defender of Alfred Dreyfus during the Dreyfus affair and opponent of prisons and penitentiaries.

Publications From Mazas to Jerusalem (De Mazas à Jérusalem) (1895). Illustrations by Lucien Pissarro, Steinlen and Félix Vallotton. L'Endehors (1891–1893) (1897–1899)