AnarWiki/markdown/Antoinette_Cauvin.md

**Antoinette Cauvin** or '''Madame Sorgue '''(1864 - 1924) was an
[anarcho-syndicalist](Anarcho-Syndicalism "wikilink") activist and
organizer, considered the 'the most dangerous woman in Europe'.\[1\]

## Life

### Family

Antoinette's family was very wealthy and members of the aristocracy, her
grandfather was the Russian general Piotr Chripcov, military attaché to
the Russian embassy in Washington DC, and her father was a
[Fourierist](Charles_Fourier "wikilink") doctor named Joseph-Pierre
Durand de Gros.

She had a key role in founding several socialist groups in the
department of the Aveyron, where she was brought up (her name Madame
Sorgue derives from the name of the river that runs through the
department but may also involve an anagram of her surname Gros and
sorge, ta German word for trouble)). A gifted orator, she was also a
journalist, working first on the daily the Journal des Débats. She
married a journalist Auguste Cauvin, another journalist ( who also used
a pseudonym-D’Arsac- after the estate owned by the Durand de Gros
family) who also had similar ideas to her. In 1884 they attempted to set
up a Fourierist colony in Brazil but this turned out to be a total
failure and they were forced to return to France after several months.
She tried, like her grandfather and father, to put her ideas into
practice at Arsac, but again this proved to be a failure and the land
had to be sold. Local inhabitants recalled her haranguing the workers of
the estate on socialism during their breaks and singing the
International. She was known by local peasants as the “femno del diaples
( local dialect for the devil’s woman).

She joined the Blanquist Parti Socialiste Revolutionnaire (PSR) of
Edouard Vaillant and represented three of its Aveyron groups at the
general socialist congresses of Paris in 1889 and 1900. She took most of
the Aveyron groups with her into the Parti Socialiste de France after
the Millerand affair (Millerand was a socialist who had joined a
non-socialist government). She represented them at the socialist unity
congress of Paris in April 1905 which led to the formation of the SFIO
(French Section of the Workers International) . She was a delegate to
the congress at Nancy in 1907. Here she supported Madeline Pelletier
over the right to the vote for women. Pelletier agreed that the working
class would gain nothing from the ballot box, but working class women
should be accorded the same rights as their male counterparts, having
then the choice of rejecting the vote. Sorgue declared : “ I do not
believe that woman can emancipate herself by voting slip. I believe that
the woman who interests us, which is the proletarian woman, can only
emancipate herself through the syndical struggle, that is to say the
economic struggle”. She allied herself with the “insurrectionalist” wing
of the SFIO around Gustav Hervé, which was strongly anti-electoral,
anti-parliamentarian and anti-militarist, and influenced by the ideas of
syndicalism and anarchism.

In 1905 she supported the strike of textile workers in Limoges where the
droit de cuissage ( sexual harassment of women workers by bosses and
foremen) was one of the main causes of the strike. It was only she and
the anarchists who really highlighted the problems this posed. She
praised the courage of the women workers, adding that “Wherever I go, in
the North, in the Midi, in the East,in the West, in the Centre, in
France and abroad, it is the same indignant protest I gather from the
mouths of the wives and daughters of workers: we are the victims of the
lubricity of the males of the bourgeoisie and of the foremen”.

Breaking with bourgeois feminism, she attacked the institutions of
marriage and the family. In March 1906 the Courrieres Colliery disaster
in northern France claimed the lives of one thousand, one hundred and
one miners. In the outbreak of protest and the strike that followed,
2,000 anarchists and syndicalists led by the anarchist miner Benoit
Broutchoux and by Sorgue converged on the town hall and attempted to
storm it, but were beaten back by the police.

In 1907 she was deeply involved in the strike of the women cheesemakers
at Roquefort. This not only involved the appalling conditions that these
women had to suffer, but the same sexual harassment that the women
workers of Limoges had protested against.

In 1908 she remained seated when King Carlos of Portugal entered the
Lisbon International Peace Conference. He had her imprisoned at Oporto
as a result. Thousands of workers demonstrated in Lisbon against this
and the authorities then decided to expel her, sending her down the
Tagus accompanied by a gunboat because a demonstration in her support
was taking place in Lisbon. In 1907 and 1908 she took part in the mass
movements in Northern Italy in Genoa, Milan, and Turin. She was invited
to speak to a demonstration to be followed by a party for children of
strikers in Milan. As a result of this she was arrested for apologising
for regicide for calling for the assassination of Victor Emmanuel (
which she denied). She was acquitted but still had to serve a long
prison sentence on the charge of anti-militarism\!

She headed the women's hunger march on Tower Hill in London during the
1912 dockers' strike. She also took part in the agitation during the
Tonypandy strike. Many times she had to escape from hostile mobs. She
was the only woman present at the 1910 Seamen's conference in Antwerp,
speaking there for the French dockers. In 1911 she spent some time in
Hull, during and perhaps after the June dockers’ strike, where she did
much agitational work, endearing herself to many workers in Hull. There
she was under considerable pressure from the ship-owners, merchants and
the authorities. In this period she did much to popularise the new ideas
of French syndicalism, speaking in Scotland, England and south Wales and
supplementing the work of Tom Mann and the Industrial Syndicalist
Education League. She visited Glasgow on several occasions where she
addressed mass meetings.

In 1914 she spoke at Ardrossan in Scotland alongside Ben Tillett and Joe
Houghton during the dockers’ strike. With the outbreak of the First
World War, she rejected internationalist positions and took one of
“national defence”. In fact , from ferociously denouncing capitalist
wars just a few months before, she like most of the insurrectionalists,
including her husband and Hervé, transformed themselves into the worst
ultra-patriots. This ruined her revolutionary reputation in the long
run. The “Louise Michel Aveyronnaise” ( another of her nicknames) gave a
speech on 18th June 1921 calling for the need to rebuild a bloc of the
Left at Rodez in the Aveyron. The audience was not impressed. As one of
them wrote, “Alas, everyone remarked that this was not our Louise. She
much wanted to declare herself a socialist and syndicalist, very proud
of carrying the flag of the miners’ federation but dropped a depth
charge against the Russian Revolution”.

She now spent most of her time in London and died there on 18th February
1924. She was found dead in bed at the Bonnington Hotel on Southampton
Row, apparently of a heart attack. She had come on behalf of the Belgian
paper L'Indépendance Belge to interview J. R. Clynes and Lloyd George.

Antoinette Cauvin (1864 - 18 February 1924), known by the pseudonym of
Madame Sorgue and Madame Trouble1, was a French anarcho-syndicalist. The
name of Sorgue comes from the German "Sorge" meaning "worries, problem",
being the one that brings them1, this explaining its anglicized version:
Madame Trouble. Another interpretation as to the origin of her name
comes from the Sorgues, an Aveyron river to which she borrowed her
name2. Having participated in a large number of strikes in Europe, she
traveled extensively in France, Portugal, Italy, Wales, England3 and
Scotland (notably during the dockers' strike in Leith in 1913 4).
Biography

Madame Sorgue was born in 1864, daughter of the Fourierist physician and
philosopher Joseph-Pierre Durand de Gros, whose name comes from the
domain of Gros, located in Arsac, now in the agglomeration ruthénoise,
in the Aveyron where she is from2 .

After having played a predominant role in the creation of several
socialist groups in Aveyron, and joining the Blanquist Party of
Revolutionary Socialist Party, she represented three of these groups in
1889 and 1890 at the International Socialist Congress in Paris2. She is
still their representative in 1905, at the Congress of the Globe, in
Paris, which will see the appearance of the SFIO2.

In 1905, she participated in the strike of textile workers in Limoges,
whose main claim was against the right of cuissage in force for women
workers2. In 1907, it is in Roquefort, beside the workers of the cheese
factories of the city that she is present. They protested less for
better working conditions than for the sexual abuse they suffered2.

She was reputed to be "the most dangerous woman in Europe" 1, because of
her role in spreading French syndicalist ideas and methods in Britain.
Feminist, Ms. Sorgue is in opposition to anti-parliamentarians and
anarchists on the issue of the right to vote of women, and is strongly
critical of the dominant family model and marriage. Speaker and
journalist, she wrote for the Journal des débats.

In 1914, during the First World War, she was one of the few anarchists
to be in favor of war.

She died of a heart attack on February 18, 1924 in London, at the
Bonnington Hotel on Southamton Row2,1,5,6.

<https://libcom.org/history/cauvin-nee-durand-de-gros-antoinette-aka-madame-sorgue-1864-1924>

<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_Sorgue>

1.  <https://libcom.org/history/cauvin-nee-durand-de-gros-antoinette-aka-madame-sorgue-1864-1924>