Spirus Gay, the anarchist acrobat who turned his life and body into a political work of art
Spirus Gay (1865-1938), circus artist and anarchist activist, embodies a rare figure of the early 20th century: that of total commitment, combining art, the body, ethics and politics. Contrary to rigid categories, his life sketches out a joyful, coherent radicalism, where acrobatics rhymes with pedagogy, naturism with trade unionism, pamphlet with solidarity.
Sylvain Wagnon, University of Montpellier
How to define Spirus Gay? Acrobat, juggler, tightrope walker, anarchist, trade unionist, freethinker, pamphleteer, naturist, freemason and teacher... Joseph Jean Auguste Gay, known as Spirus Gay (1865-1938), eludes all attempts at classification. His prolific career is a rare example of total commitment, where body, mind, art and political thought intertwine to question and subvert established norms.
This coherent combination of physical action, intellectual commitment and radical militancy is the hallmark of a truly singular itinerary.
Does our compartmentalized, fragmented society still leave room for a Gay Spirus?
Why write about Spirus Gay?
For a historian, writing about such a character is a challenge. At first glance, there are few traces. He left no major work or famous manifesto. He did not direct an influential journal or found a theoretical current. And yet, there he is, in the margins and interstices of French anarchist history. As an activist, he took part in the struggles, battles, experiments and utopias of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
His trajectory embodies a way of living anarchism: in bodies, in gestures, in the harmony between personal life and individual and collective commitment. Because he illustrates the rare coherence between the ideas one defends and the life one leads. Because it forces us to rethink our categories: artist or activist? Intellectual or manual worker? Thinker or teacher?
As with biographical work on women's history, the challenge is to break away from a conventional genre, and avoid the temptation to simplify, linearize and betray this abundant life. On the contrary, the aim is not to build a legend, but to understand, through sources and historical rigor, what this singular life can tell us today. To reconstitute a puzzle from scattered archives and forgotten diaries, from aphorisms and articles by Spirus Gay, from tenuous traces (more than 600 mentions in the press of the time, but only fifteen or so signed texts). To write without erasing contradictions, grey areas and silences.
An accomplished artist
A figure of Parisian music hall at the end of the 19th century, Spirus Gay embodied a form of multi-talented artist: tightrope walker, juggler of strength, illusionist, ventriloquist and prestidigitator, he graced Parisian stages from the Folies-Belleville to the Folies Bergère in Paris. Between marginality and mass culture, behind the prestige of the posters and the titles of "king of the tightrope walkers" or "world bodybuilding champion", lies a much harsher reality.
Like many variety artists, Spirus Gay lives in constant instability, suspended on fees, exposed to injuries, stage accidents and life's hard knocks. On several occasions, the activist and artistic community has to organize collections to support him, repair his destroyed tools, or help him cope with illness.
This precariousness does not prevent him from fighting for the recognition of "living art" artists. Spirus Gay is fervently committed to defending the rights of artists, whom he sees as fully integrated into the working-class condition.
In 1893, he took a seat on the union council of the Syndicat des artistes dramatiques, and in 1898 became secretary of the Union artistique de la scène, de l'orchestre et du cirque. This role enabled him to organize collective actions, combining concerts and militant solidarity. As a spokesman, he defended lyric artists and advocated direct action in the face of management abuses.
Self-taught, Spirus Gay also published in the newspaper le Parti ouvrieran organ of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, a dozen articles outlining his vision of society and the world. These writings, most of them aphorisms, are a singular literary genre that questions his own education and training. The apparent astonishment at this union of body and mind is based, even today, on deep-rooted prejudices that establish a boundary between the entertainer and the deep, ongoing political commitment, as well as a hierarchy between intellectual and manual functions.
Integral education as a revolutionary project
Spirus Gay was also a pedagogue, a direct heir to the educational principles championed by the libertarian pedagogue Paul Robin from 1869 onwards. For the latter, integral education rests on a simple yet profoundly subversive principle: reject the dissociation between the intellect, the body and the emotions. Developing "head, hand and heart" in harmony would free the individual from the alienation produced by a school deemed authoritarian, by the factory, by the Church or by the State.
Spirus Gay applied this principle to his life as well as to his educational practices. His gymnasium, the Végétarium, which he founded in Paris in 1903, became a space for pedagogical experimentation and freedom training, where physical culture, vegetarianism, "cerebro-corporal" education and healthy living were articulated as tools for emancipation. For him, acrobatics becomes a political act, movement a philosophy of resistance. Education, seen as an ongoing, lifelong process, is as much about developing the mind as the body. As a militant naturist libertarian, he helped found the first naturist community at Brières-les-Scellés, in what is now the Essonne department, and campaigned against the ravages of alcohol.
A thinker of political altruism
A freethinker, anticlerical, atheist and Freemason, Spirus Gay also embodied a humanist intellectual commitment, nurtured by the ideals of freedom of conscience and individual and collective emancipation. " I believe in divine equality in a society without religion or master", he wrote in 1894.
His writings outline an ethical, committed and radical philosophy. He defends a society based on equality, justice, the rejection of authority and a relentless struggle against capitalist egoism.
For him, altruism is not a moral posture, but a political weapon: a way of disarming the violence of a world based on exploitation and competition. A notion echoed in the concept of " effective altruism ", defined by philosopher Peter Singer.
The subversive power of a life
Spirus Gay can't be summed up. He eludes classification, rejects frameworks. So much the better, because pantheons are not to be trusted: they freeze what they celebrate.
His trajectory is ultimately a proposal: that of an incarnated and coherent radicality. His life is one of constant resistance to compartmentalization, hierarchies and assigned identities. It articulates aesthetic gesture, intellectual rigor and commitment.
Spirus Gay takes an in-depth look at how we live our ideas: how we can't dissociate our convictions from our daily lives, our politics from the way we live, eat and breathe. His journey is an invitation to think, fight and live.
Sylvain Wagnon, Professor of Education, Faculty of Education, University of Montpellier
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.