From The Transmetropolitan Review
In the interests of fostering physical print media, the full pamphlet is print only.
Introduction
Between the years 1909 and 1912, a French anarchist named Aristide Pratelle wrote several dispatches on the Mexican Revolution for Les Temps Nouveaux, the main anarchist newspaper in France. Aristide was a steadfast supporter of the Mexican Revolution, even when some of his French comrades began to criticize it along with the Italian anarchists, and he never abandoned his solidarity with the Mexican Liberal Party, or PLM, a front group for the Mexican anarchists.
Aristide was writing articles in support of the Mexican rebels even before the revolution broke out, starting with the August 1907 arrest of Ricardo Flores Magón, Antonio Villareal, and Librado Rivera in Los Angeles. These anarchists were thrown in the local prison and then transferred to Tucson, forcing their family and supporters to travel vast distances to visit them.
In the June 30, 1909 issue of Les Temps Nouveaux, Aristide wrote an article entitled ‘The Mexican Martyrs’ which explained the plight of the Mexican prisoners and warned the reader of Magón likely succumbing to a recent illness. At the end of this article, Aristide assured the reader that Magón was likely dead, with the rest of prisoners soon to follow, although this wasn’t true. Aristide only had copies of Regeneración and the words of his comrades to inform him of events in Tucson, and while Aristide might have simply received faulty intelligence from these sources, he also might have been trying to build support for the PLM cause by intentionally exaggerating rumors of Magón’s death, thereby generating not only outrage, but also a desire to help the surviving prisoners.
A year later, in 1910, the Mexican prisoners were released and their long awaited revolution broken out across the country from Chihuahua in the north all the way down to the Yucatan. The year before, the anarchist author and PLM supporter John Kenneth Turner published his Barbarous Mexico articles, exposing the chattel slavery imposed on the indigenous by the now deposed dictator Porfirio Díaz. These articles caused a diplomatic incident between the dictatorship and the US, but the book version was eventually published, thereby exposing the English-reading public to the horrors practiced during the 1900s in the Mexican slave plantations.
This book caused a sensation among the US reading public and helped the Mexican Revolution find support among the average gringo. A copy of Barbarous Mexico made its way to Paris where Aristide was able to read it, and he wrote a long review of one of its chapters entitled “The Mayan Revolt,” which summed up the horrors on the Yucatan henequen plantations, where indigenous Yaqui and Maya were kept confined in concentration camps and forced to work from dawn to dusk for zero pay. The rope made from the processed henequen cactus was bought up by JD Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company, a fact highlighted in Barbarous Mexico, and Aristide made sure to point out that most of the wealth extracted from the Yucatan was sent out of Mexico.
Aristide ended his article by catching the reader up on the 1910 revolts in the Yucatan, which broke out autonomously from the PLM and Maderista efforts in the north. As he summarized for the reader, the insurgents seized the city of Valladolid and the villages of Uyama Tinum and Tunkas; 1,300 people belonging to the army or holding civil positions fell into their hands. They refrained from harming the inhabitants of the said localities, but executed the chiefs and officials. In Valladolid, they killed, among others, the city’s political chief and the police prefect.
One year later, in 1911, many of his French comrades had joined the Italian anarchists in critiquing the PLM and their failed invasion of Baja, California, but rather than fuel one side of the debate over another, Aristide decided to write an Italian-language article entitled ‘The Real Díaz,’ a brief study of the deposed dictator and a reminder of all that the revolution had abolished.
While much of the conflict between the Italian and Mexican anarchists was being stirred up in the pages of the Cronaca Sovversiva newspaper, the Cronaca published Aristide’s study on the now crumbled dictatorship in its July 1, 1911 issue, perhaps in an effort to show they didn’t just publish criticism of the Mexican Revolution, but also praise for what had been accomplished.
A year later, Aristide wrote a extended article about the current state of the Mexican Revolution, with the first installment entitled ‘The Instinct of the Race’ and the second ‘The Failure of Maderismo,’ printed in the June 8 and June 15, 1912 issues of Les Temps Nouveaux. Like many of his time, Aristide clearly held some spurious racial beliefs, although he used them to denigrate the Spanish, belittle the colonizers, and champion the indigenous race of Mexico, or the raza. Several of his statements about the indigenous are factually incorrect, with many bordering on the noble savage trope beloved by the French, but they are worth preserving as a testament to the times in which they were written.
Allies of distant struggles have always had difficulty truly comprehending what they are aiding, and the same goes for critics of distant struggles, a truth played out even today in 2026. Aristide Pratelle was just one distant voice commenting on the Mexican Revolution at its inception, and he championed its cause to the best of his ability using whatever intelligence was available. Limited by the speed of trans-oceanic mail ships and the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, Aristide tried to let his French comrades know there was a revolution happening in Mexico, and that it was worth fighting for.



Comments
Further reading
Petter Nordal (not verified) Sat, 05/09/2026 - 16:44
This is a great article. I knew nothing about Pratelle.
I strongly recommend John Hart's history of anarchists in the Mexican Revolution, which shows the various alliances and internal conflicts.
https://utpress.utexas.edu/9780292704008/
So how well did this …
anonymous (not verified) Sun, 05/10/2026 - 08:31
In reply to Further reading by Petter Nordal (not verified)
So how well did this "revolution" pay off, historically?
80+ years of PRI control of politics, that fucked up the country and the environment.
Then... have you ever heard about the drug cartels, and the latter failed state that is Mexico?
And the state of Mexico as its own colonial force?
Of course feel free to not burden yourself answering to all these complexities!
But here's a suggested simple answer: national liberation is shit.
The Mexican Revolution wasn…
anonymous (not verified) Sun, 05/10/2026 - 16:59
In reply to So how well did this … by anonymous (not verified)
The Mexican Revolution wasn't a national liberation struggle you absolute dumbass. Too fucking stupid to even know what you're against.
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