1914 Pierre Quiroule Map of the Utopian American Anarchist City w/ Book

Futuristic city of Anarchy, with a death ray.

This is a rare 1914 color-printed folding plan of French-Argentine Pierre Quiroule's Ciudad Anarquista Americana, a cartographic vision of an ideal anarchist city. Conceived as the physical setting for Quiroule's revolutionary utopian novel, La Ciudad Anarquista Americana: Obra de Construcción Revolucionaria, the plan translates radical political and social philosophy into a rigorously ordered urban landscape of monumental avenues, communal institutions, gardens, schools, and public gathering places.

A Closer Look

For a city of anarchy, the city, arranged on a symmetrical grid around broad intersecting boulevards, is a picture of structured order and harmony. Streets bear idealistic names such as the Avenida de la Libertad, Avenida de la Armonia, Avenida de la Amistad, and Avenida de la Humanidad. At its center is the Plaza de la Anarquía, a public square intended for performances, assemblies, and civic debate. Beyond the principal avenues, the city is divided into six districts incorporating woodland, gardens, community swimming pools, and schools, all connected by a winding network of paths. The precision of the design recalls both the regimented contemporary ideal cities and Charles Fourier's phalansteries, transforming an anarchist social order - paradoxically - into a meticulously planned urban environment.

An Anarchist Utopia

The plan accompanies Pierre Quiroule's futuristic novel La Ciudad Anarquista Americana: Obra de Construcción Revolucionaria. Quiroule, the pseudonym of the French-born Argentine anarchist Joaquín Alejo Falconnet, sets his anarchical paradise in a libertarian city constructed on the ruins of the legendary El Dorado. The novel combines anti-statist utopian themes with more unusual and futuristic elements, including a death ray intended for use against the 'enemies of anarchy.'

Quiroule devoted particular attention to restructuring domestic and sexual relations. Women occupy separate residences, freeing them from conventional marriage and the nuclear family, while relationships are founded on voluntary unions and a form of successive monogamy. This, he argued, would allow the 'superior feminine soul' to realize its natural inclination to men of great moral and intellectual qualities (like Quiroule). The city thus functions as a spatial expression of Quiroule's social philosophy: communal, rationally organized, politically participatory, and liberated from the institutions of the traditional state and family.

Publication History and Census

The plan was issued as the sole illustration in the first edition and first printing of Quiroule's La Ciudad Anarquista Americana, published in Buenos Aires by the anarchist newspaper and publishing house La Protesta in 1914. The 283-page Spanish-language volume was issued in printed wrappers, with the folding color plan inserted at page 72. Although apparently Quiroule's best-known work, it remains scarce; a Spanish academic publisher reprinted the text in 1991, and the novel has attracted renewed scholarly attention as an important example of Latin American anarchist and utopian literature. OCLC records only four physical holdings in North America and four additional examples elsewhere, although this census may underrepresent collections in South America.

Cartographer

Pierre Quiroule (Joachim Alexis Falconnet, Joaquín Alejo Falconnet; March 1, 1867 - November 30, 1938), the principal pseudonym of Joachim Alexis Falconnet, later Hispanicized as Joaquín Alejo Falconnet, was a French-born Argentine journalist, typographer, playwright, novelist, and anarchist social theorist. Born in Villefort, Lozère, into a family based in Lyon, Falconnet emigrated to Buenos Aires as a child and trained as a typographer. After briefly associating with the Unión Cívica Radical and participating in its unsuccessful 1893 uprising, he entered Argentina's anarchist circles, adopting the name Pierre Quiroule - a play on the French expression pierre qui roule [rolling stone]. From 1893 to 1894, he and Alexandre Sadier directed the French-language anarchist weekly La Liberté, which advanced a Kropotkin-inspired anarcho-communism and advocated direct revolutionary action. He subsequently contributed to such libertarian publications as El Perseguido, Le Cyclone, La Protesta, Sembrando Ideas, and Barcelona's La Revista Blanca, while lecturing at educational societies and rationalist schools. Beginning in 1904, he worked as a typographer at Argentina's Biblioteca Nacional under Paul Groussac, remaining there until 1926. Quiroule wrote plays, philosophical essays, political pamphlets, and three major works of utopian fiction: Sobre la ruta de la Anarquía (1912), La Ciudad Anarquista Americana (1914), and En la soñada tierra del Ideal (1924). The second, his best-known work, transformed anarchist principles into an elaborate futuristic city whose rational plan embodied communal ownership, participatory government, technological progress, sexual freedom, and the abolition of the traditional state and family. Disillusioned by factional divisions within the anarchist movement, Quiroule withdrew from active militancy around 1925. Following the death of his companion, Andrea Brasseur, in 1926, he left Buenos Aires. He spent several years in relative isolation at Posadas, Misiones, an experience that inspired Un Filósofo en Posadas (1931). He later returned to Buenos Aires, worked as a proofreader for La Nación, and contributed to the anarchist journal Nervio. Quiroule died in Buenos Aires in 1938, leaving an unusually broad body of work that joined political activism, futurism, speculative philosophy, literature, and urban planning into one of the most distinctive expressions of Argentine anarchist utopianism.   Further Details...

Source

Quiroule, P., La Ciudad Anarquista Americana: Obra de Construcción Revolucionaria, (Buenos Aires: La Protesta) 1914.    

Condition

Very good. Plan exhibits some wear and verso reinforcement along original fold lines. Book is uncut (and thus unread), but front paper cover is loose from binding at spine.

References

OCLC 1722965. Molina-Gavilán, Y., (et al), 'Chronology of Latin American Science Fiction 1775-2005' in Science Fiction Studies, v.34 no. 3, Nov. 2007.