We are in a corner of Montreuil where the town begins to feel like a village, with little houses that are sheltered by trees and vines. The road ascends, parents are walking their children back from school, and at a street corner, there is La conquête du pain, the “Conquest of Bread” in English. A bakery that gives off the exquisite smell of hot, crunchy bread.

You could just buy a baguette, yet curious details grab your attention. Like a poster with a list of available sandwiches: you have a choice between the Bakunin (bacon mayonnaise), the Angela Davis (chicken salad), and the Louise Michel (goat cheese pesto). There is a little counter along the wall where you can help yourself to a cup of coffee from a thermos jug and read some tracts and magazines, starting with the Le Monde Libertaire. Close to the shop window, a couch covered in a white sheet invites clients to take a little break. You could sit down and remember that Peter Kropotkin — one of the great anarchist thinkers of the nineteenth century — wrote the Conquest of Bread, among many other books, of which Mutual Aid remains the most fundamental one.

But we are in a bakery, after all, as evidenced by the heat rising from the bread oven in the basement as well as the fine aroma of flour. “People don’t come here because we are self-governed anarchists but because our bread is good,” says Pierre Pavin. “They find the rest amusing.” Yet this bakery would not exist if Pierre and his comrades weren’t anarchists.

From hierarchy to self-government, from monotony to quality

Pierre has worked as a baker before. He liked his work, but he was fed up with repetitive tasks, often performed under the yoke of a supervisor. He is a member of the Federation of Anarchists, and in the spring of 2010, while he was out of work, he had the idea to deliver bread to AMAPs, community-supported farming associations. He shared his idea with Thomas Arnestoy, IT specialist and member of SCALP (the “absolutely anti-Le Pen group”), and with Matthieu, a former classmate from hotel management school. The project thus began through friendship and political affinity. The idea was to set up a bakery as a cooperative production society, a Scop: “self-governed, with a social mission and a regard for the environment, making quality bread and generating a profit.”

They found a site rather quickly, and by the fall the friends were ready to start kneading and baking. “At the outset, it was very hard. This place was a mess,” says Pierre. And they had to deliver 300 loaves of bread every day from the start. “It was hell, we plodded away 20 hours a day. One time, I had a breakdown, I passed out.”