UNE ÉLECTION À TIGRE –SUR-MER. de GYP (SIBYLLE RIQUETI DE MIRABEAU) - 1890

RIGHT WING WOMAN ANARCHIST

Red pebbled cloth with large paste-down color pictorial illustration on front cover. About fine.

With the appearance of a children's book, the setting is a schoolroom with an abbot instructing a child. Actually it is a record of an 1899 campaign for a Boulangiste candidate in the Norman village where Gyp summered, told in a childish narrative and 36 full-page cartoonish drawings in color and black and white by "Bob".

The Countess was a fanatical anti-Semite and anti-Dreyfusard who denounced populist democracy and the parliamentary French Republic in numerous sketches and novels. She identified Boulanger, who vowed to save France in a time of crisis, with Napoleon I, whom she idolized.

Georges Boulanger was a conservative French general and politician who threatened a coup d'état and the establishment of a dictatorship advocating revenge on Germany and a return to the monarchy. According to the newspaper Le Temps, Gyp harangued the peasants and fishermen of the peaceful coastal town, bribed the children with candy and distributed posters insulting the government, for which she was fined.

See "The Notorious Life of Gyp-Right-Wing Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle France" by Willa Silverman, Oxford University Press, 1995.