Hi! I’m a historian of anarchism, mainly in France at the turn of the twentieth century. I use your database a lot. It’s an invaluable resource, and I often wish French had something like it, because it’s extremely rich and genuinely valuable. Someday, perhaps.
Anyway, I was recently reading your entry on “propaganda”, which I found very interesting. I wanted to ask you about it, and perhaps go over the subject with you (or not). The site currently says, and I quote verbatim:
Hence, “any movement or organization to propagate some practice or ideology” (1790). The modern political sense (“dissemination of information intended to promote a political point of view”) dates from World War I, originally not pejorative or implying bias or deliberate deception. Meaning “material or information propagated to advance a cause, etc.” is from 1929.
In this linguistic and semantic evolution, there are three successive definitions. The first, dating from 1790, is “any movement or organization to propagate some practice or ideology”. An intermediate one, from World War I onwards (supposedly; I’ll come back to this below), is “dissemination of information intended to promote a political point of view”. And a third, from 1929 (so about fifteen years later), is “material or information propagated to advance a cause, etc.”
A few things are worth noting. First, and you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, since this is the weakest point of my reasoning: it doesn’t seem to me that the modern/current sense corresponds to the one given for 1929 (or at least not exclusively anymore). The modern sense seems to me to be rather a pejorative one, associated with the idea of a campaign (often run by a state, but not only) to manipulate people and advance a cause or point of view. The entry does touch on this when it says that during WWI the word was not yet pejorative, but it doesn’t come back to this pejorative sense, which seems central to me today (although maybe not the only one).
Anyway, let me get to the heart of my questions. I’m mostly familiar with French-language anarchist literature, of course, where the term “propagande” is extremely common from the nineteenth century onwards, and in fact covers at least the sense you give in the entry for WWI. For example, the term appears 172 times with this meaning in Bakunin’s complete works, and hundreds of times in Kropotkin.
These are, of course, French-language texts, so one could object that this isn’t very relevant for an English-language database. However, after a bit of searching, I believe I’ve come across several anarchist texts that predate WWI by a long way and use the word “propaganda” in a sense similar to the French one at the time (a sense that therefore corresponds to the definition you give for WWI).
I haven’t carried out an exhaustive survey, as unfortunately I don’t have the time. But simply by searching the most prestigious English-language anarchist newspaper, Freedom, you find the term used in this sense from 1887, almost forty years before WWI. I’m sending you the occurrences I was able to note in a few issues, but it seems significant to me.
English Socialism is becoming a distinctly national movement, taking a definite national shape. It is localising itself and moving by spontaneous popular initiative. It is passing, with characteristic English practicality, from propaganda by word to propaganda by action. (Freedom, February 1887) (very interesting quote where we see an early translation of ‘propagande par le fait’ in ‘propaganda by action’, today it’s rather translated by ‘propaganda of/by the deed’) (note also that ‘propaganda of the word/action’ already relates to the nature of the dissemination of information, with a much more specific meaning than the one given for 1790)
Our comrade Edward Carpenter, who was well known in the town as one of the most popular lecturers of the Cambridge University Extension Scheme, has succeeded during the last year in drawing together a knot of workers, both men and women, animated by a like love of man and hatred of oppression with himself. The Society is rapidly increasing in size, and is engaged in energetic propaganda. (Freedom, March 1887)
To this our Socialist friends will probably answer that their work will not be lost; that by the time when some modification in the present system of property grows ripe, their propaganda will also bear its fruits; and that it will result as well in a nationalisation of the mines, the manufactures, and the means of communication. (Freedom, July 1887)
It is a thousand pities that our comrades of the Socialist League, with their thoroughly Socialistic and revolutionary economic programme, content themselves with a merely negative position with regard to politics. The simple non-parliamentarianism upon which they decided at their last Conference paralyses their activity in propaganda. (Freedom, September 1887) (there are other occurrences in this specific issue)
I don’t know whether this English sense comes from anarchism specifically, or whether the term was more commonly used in this sense outside the anarchist movement in England and in English-speaking areas and countries - I would assume it rather came at least from the First International. But in any case, it seems clear to me that the term is used in this sense from at least the second half of the 1880s. In fact, the term is particularly important for anarchists, as it refers to their way of spreading ideas and information. One could even argue that “propaganda by the deed”, although it is a specific anarchist theoretical concept, already encompasses this sense: that of transmitting ideas and information to advance a (political) cause.
So, without going beyond what I know (I don’t know whether this sense really enters English through the anarchists or whether it’s more general), and without having surveyed English-language anarchist literature other than Freedom (though the term “propagande” was already widely used in this sense in French since at least 1877, with the famous article “La propagande par le fait” in the Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne), I would say that both senses can already be attested from the second half of the 1880s. My intuition, which I haven’t checked because I don’t know English anarchist literature well (at that time it was often translations or copies of French-language anarchist literature - today the dynamic is inverted and it’s rather the opposite), is that translations of these texts were already using this sense from the early 1880s. In any case, it can probably be attested from the second half of the 1880s.
Second, I think it would be worth clarifying when exactly the term becomes truly pejorative, and what the specific definition of that pejorative sense is. Is the pejorative sense the only one today or do we keep parts of the 19th century meanings, for example in political theory publications, historical ones, etc ?
My broad feeling is that the word probably already had the sense used by anarchists in those 1880s sources at least from the First International (1864-1872) onwards. But it’s worth checking.
Best,