Charles Malato has gone down in posterity as the author of novels, memoirs and especially plays in which he castigates the excesses of power. Two events are at the origin of the birth of Malato’s vocation as an anarchist writer: the condemnation of his parents to banishment in New Caledonia and the meeting of the young Charles with Louise Michel. It is in this context that this article proposes to study the autobiographical text of the French author From the Commune to Anarchy which allows us to understand the inner evolution of the somewhat carefree adolescent towards destiny of a revolutionary able to use his pen as a formidable weapon. From then on, the analysis of the text accounts for Malato’s political awareness and his subsequent involvement in social issues, as well as highlighting the style of his language, as cruel as it is grotesque, which will upset the fragile minds of the bourgeois. In short, the exploration of the work constitutes a kind of propaedeutic to the subversive work of Malato whose universality attests to its undeniable topicality.

Charles Malato has gone down in posterity as the author of novels, memoirs and especially plays in which he castigates the excesses of power. Two events are at the origin of the birth of Malato’s vocation as an anarchist writer: the condemnation of his parents to banishment in New Caledonia and the meeting of the young Charles with Louise Michel. It is in this context that this article proposes to study the autobiographical text of the French author From the Commune to Anarchy which allows us to understand the inner evolution of the somewhat carefree adolescent towards destiny of a revolutionary able to use his pen as a formidable weapon. From then on, the analysis of the text accounts for Malato’s political awareness and his subsequent involvement in social issues, as well as highlighting the style of his language, as cruel as it is grotesque, which will upset the fragile minds of the bourgeois. In short, the exploration of the work constitutes a kind of propaedeutic to the subversive work of Malato whose universality attests to its undeniable topicality.