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The “charter of Amiens” is the foundation myth of French syndicalism. But does the sense that it has since come to have in the collective memory conform to the intentions of the authors for whom in October 1906 it was part of an “agenda” for a conference that was full of developments? This study seeks to explore the fascinating mutation of this agenda item into a “Charter” that was almost constitutive of the movement itself, specifically the progressive slippage of a document which sought perhaps above all to be a sketch of a society relevant to the syndicalist avant-garde into a document that did exclude the political parties. That this reduction should be the outcome of the battle against the communist takeover of the CGT should not be surprising. That it should be a convenient scapegoat for those who lamented the depressing state of the French left should likewise not surprise. But that the “Charter” today should receive unanimous interpretation from the distant inheritors of Bolshevism as well as from those who have succeeded in bringing about the “deconfessionalisation” of Christian syndicalism is one of the paradoxes of which the social history of ideas is more familiar than one might think.