Michel Onfray - Agent provocateur

The Toronto Star has an article on one Michel Onfray, a French philosopher anarchist, dude:

He is a self-described hedonist, atheist, libertarian, and left-wing anarchist. He is also France's best-selling philosopher.

At a time when a French high school teacher was forced into hiding after death threats for writing an article in Le Figaro in September calling Islam a violent, hateful religion and Christianity and Judaism non-violent, loving religions, Michel Onfray has already gone a step further: in Atheist Manifesto he dismantles and condemns as dangerous and archaic not only Islam, but Christianity and Judaism as well.

The reason why Michel Onfray is important, besides the fact that he's a very high profile anarchist, is that his work might speak to the connection between atheism and anarchism. I don't know the details of that link, but it definitely seems like something worth considering. See more on that link here.

Onfray's first book to be translated into English is called Atheist Manifesto.

Also interesting from the anarchist point of view is that Onfray founded the Université Populaire de Caen, a free university:

Onfray founded the university as a reaction to the arrival of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front party, into the second round of the 2002 presidential elections against Jacques Chirac. The idea, he said, was to fight against that happening again by "promoting and publicizing intelligence," and to try to "analyze and understand how the world functions in order to put forward alternative solutions to the contemporary negativity."

Open to anyone, with free tuition and requiring no registration, prior education, tests or other course work, the concept, like his books, is also spreading beyond his home. There are now five other Popular Universities in France and one in Belgium, all of which acknowledge Caen as their model.

Yet despite his stance on free education for all and his anarchic political ideas, Onfray is not against private property — he owns homes in both Chambois and nearby Argentan — and has a pragmatic mind for business.

That final paragraph of this section strikes me as kind of a hit job, though it may not be. It seems like the typical 'hypocrite' smear used against all activists. You can't be an environmentalist, so the argument goes, if you drive a gasoline-powered (as opposed to solar-powered) car. Ridiculous argument to make, but typical of smear jobs. The paragraph might be completely true - I don't know Onfray - but I'm raising the 'beware' flag, just in case.

Onfray's home page (french).

Caen is about three hours west of Paris.