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Memoirs of Louise Michel
EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY
Bullitt Lowry
and Elizabeth Ellington Gunter
The Red Virgin
Memoirs of Louise Michel
Louise Miche
The Red Virgin
Memoirs of
Louise Michel
edited and translated by
Bullitt Lowry
and
Elizabeth Ellington Gunter
The University of Alabama Press
University, Alabama
Publication of this book has been assisted by a
grant
from the National Endowment for the
Humanities.
Copyright © 1981 by
The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Michel, Louise, 1830-1905.
The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel
Translation of M£moires de Louise Michel, Merits par elle-meme.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Michel, Louise, 1830-1905. 2. Paris—History—Commune, 1871—Sources. 3.
Revolutionists—France—Biography. 4. New Caledonia—Description and travel. 5.
Political prisoners—France—Biography. I. Lowry, Bullitt, 1936- II. Gunter, Elizabeth
Ellington, 1942- III. Title
DC342.8.M64A313 944.081’2’0924 [B] 80-23073
ISBN 0-8173-0063-5 (alk. paper)
To Anne, Ross, and Sheila
Acknowledgments
The translators wish to express their appreciation to Stonecloud (1975),
which published an earlier version of Chapter 18, “Women’s Rights,”
and to The Phoenix (Summer and Fall, 1977), which published abridged
versions of Chapter 4, “The Making of a Revolutionary,” Chapter 10,
“After the Commune,” and Chapters 12-14 on New Caledonia.
Contents
Translators’ Introduction viii
1. Introduction 1
2. Vroncourt 4
3. The End of Childhood 15
4. The Making of a Revolutionary 24
5. Schoolmistress in the Haute-Marne 31
6. Schoolmistress in Paris 38
7. The Decaying Empire 45
8. The Siege of Paris 56
9. The Commune of Paris 63
10. After the Commune 69
11. The Trial of 1871 81
12. Voyage to Exile 89
13. Numbo, New Caledonia 95
14. The Bay of the West 104
15. Noumea and the Return 115
16. Speeches and Journalism, November 1880-January 1882 123
17. The Death of Marie Ferre 135
18. Women’s Rights 139
19. Speeches Abroad, 1882-1883 143
20. Speeches in France, 1882-1883 150
21. The Trial of 1883 158
22. Prison 172
23. My Mother’s Death 179
24. Final Thoughts 190
Epilogue 198
Bibliography 202
Translators’ Note 204
Appendix I. Chapter List Showing Source in Original Text 206
Appendix II. Table of Poems in Original Text 207
Index 209
Translators' Introduction
Even today, Louise Michel, who won fame as the “Red Virgin” during
the Paris Commune of 1871, remains a heroine to the French Left.
While Karl Marx sat in the British Museum writing tracts, Michel was
facing French government troops across the barricades of Paris. While
her contemporaries were just beginning to decry colonialism, she, as a
convict in New Caledonia, was involved in the Kanaka uprising of 1878.
Freed by the amnesty of 1880 from her exile at the other end of the
earth, she returned to France and the speaker’s platform, and except for
several periods in prison she continued her revolutionary exhortations
until her death in 1905.
Born illegitimately on 29 May 1830, Louise Michel was brought up by
her mother and paternal grandparents in a half-ruined, fortified manor
house in the Haute-Marne. Her paternal grandfather, Etienne-Charles
Demahis, was descended from nobility and had changed his name from
De Mahis to the less grand Demahis in republican sympathy with the
French Revolution of 1789. Although impoverished, he was serving as
mayor of the village of Vroncourt when Louise was born to a servant of
the household, Marie Anne (or Marianne) Michel, and his son Laurent,
of whom no further record exists. Louise was raised as if she had been a
legitimate Demahis granddaughter, and after her paternal grandpar¬
ents died, she became a schoolmistress, teaching first in the Haute-
Marne and later in Paris. She turned to revolutionary dreams and
became deeply involved in radical affairs during the twilight of France’s
Second Empire, the gaslit Paris of Louis Napoleon. During the Franco-
Prussian War of 1870 and the Prussian siege of Paris, she was a leading
member of the revolutionary groups controlling Montmartre, that
squalid and colorful district which has been inhabited by the disaffected
poor for centuries. During the Paris Commune of March to May 1871,
when the citizens of Paris rebelled against the government because they
believed it was trying to steal their republic, Michel became even more
deeply involved in events, emerging as one of the leaders of the
insurrection.
When the forces of the Versailles Government crushed the Commune
in May 1871, Michel was captured, tried, and sentenced to exile. She was
transported to New Caledonia on a prison ship in 1873. For six years she
lived under harsh conditions in the prison colony near the capital,
Noumea, and later she lived in the capital itself, with a limited amount of
freedom. Following the general amnesty of 1880, which the government
gave to the Communards in response to public pressure, she returned to
France and public acclaim.
Though massive public gatherings greeted Michel upon her return, it
was difficult for her to find a place in revolutionary circles. She was
ignorant of events that had taken place in France during the preceding
Translators’ Introduction
IX
decade, and the persons who had risen to power and influence in radical
circles had no great interest in relinquishing their position to any legend.
But her popular support from the working people of France remained
immense, and her speeches in Paris, the provinces, and abroad during
the next few years were heavily and tumultuously attended.
In 1882 Michel was arrested for disturbing the peace and spent two
weeks in jail. Then, in the spring of 1883, after a demonstration at les
Invalides, she led a crowd across Paris under the black flag of anarchism.
She was arrested and tried for rioting and for inciting her followers to
loot bakeries. Offering no real defense at her trial, she was sentenced to
six years in prison. Pardoned three years later, she resolutely continued
her speeches and writing, the radical public honoring her as “la grande
citoyenne.” From 1890 to 1905 she spent the greater part of her time in
England in self-imposed exile, although she made a number of speaking
tours in France and elsewhere. She was engaged in one of those
speaking tours in 1905 when she died, her funeral becoming an occasion
for a massive outpouring of sentiment from three generations of revolu¬
tionaries.
Louise Michel declares in her memoirs that she was an anarchist,
having come to the faith after she passed through her youthful, vague
sympathy for the downtrodden and her later ill-defined devotion to a
Utopian revolution. She claimed later that her transformation to anar¬
chism came on her voyage to New Caledonia aboard the prison ship
Virginie, during which time she was caged for four months with Natalie
Lemel, who converted her. In her memoirs Michel states that the
anarchist “Manifesto of Lyon” of January 1883 precisely expressed her
political beliefs. “I share all of the ideas written there,” she writes in her
memoirs, and she quotes the complete text of that document.
But Michel’s anarchism was emotional, not theoretical. In fact, she was
surprisingly ill read in contemporary and historical revolutionary writ¬
ings. That she had read Lamennais is certain; that she had read
Proudhon is likely. It is less probable that she had read either Blanqui or
Bakunin, although she certainly knew of their ideas, which were in the
air at the time. Marxism dismayed her, but played little part in her
memoirs because her full exposure to Marxism did not come until the
1890s, several years after her memoirs were published. What is remark¬
able are her omissions. For example, she never mentions Babeuf and his
“Manifesto of the Equals.” She writes about close friends and associates
who made theoretical and practical contributions to radical doctrine—
Kropotkin, Guesde, and Pouget, who was her codefendant in 1883—but
she never mentions their writings.
That her commitment to anarchism was emotional did not produce
intellectual inconsistency. Indeed, after her Utopian phase she was
entirely consistent in her view of property, her perception of exploita-
X
Translators’ Introduction
tion, her claims for the role of science, and her vision of the basic good in
mankind. Similarly, in her encomiums to the Social Revolution she was
consistent regarding its form and nature: It would be a spontaneous
rising of the people against injustice and exploitation.
That emphasis on the spontaneous uprising of the people kept her,
indirectly, from demanding the use of terror, a step many anarchists
took. Michel mentions assassination as a tool only occasionally. Once, she
discusses murdering Louis Napoleon Bonaparte; another time, she talks
about assassinating Adolphe Thiers. Yet she never made any concrete
preparations to carry out plans to murder the two. Similarly, her only
use of explosives was an abortive attempt to blow up a statue. “Tyran¬
nicide,” she writes, “is practical only when tyranny has a single head, or
at most a small number of heads. When it is a hydra, only the Revolution
can kill it.”
She was vague about what would happen the day after the Social
Revolution, other than offering images of dawns and fireworks. She
does comment that it would be better if all the leaders of the Revolution
should perish in achieving it, for then the people would not have to
contend with a surviving general staff. But somehow the anarchist
dream would be fulfilled.
Anarchism, “the logical conclusion of the romantic doctrine,” to use
E. H. Carr’s felicitous phrase, 1 is perilously difficult to define. Yet its
core—an insistence on the importance of the individual, a hatred of all
forms of political organization, a belief in the innate goodness of
man—fitted so providentially with Michel’s thinking that it is hard to
decide whether Michel found anarchism or anarchism found Michel. At
the time when she wrote her memoirs she believed implacably that
progress was inevitable, that people were innately good, and that gov¬
ernments, any governments, were evil. Her statement that “power is
evil” forms the nucleus of every anarchist system, but neither she nor
any other anarchist ever found a ready answer to George Bernard
Shaw’s irritating question. If man is so good, he asked, “how did the
corruption and oppression under which he groans ever arise?” 2
Michel avoided the question. She saw history as the story of free
people being somehow enslaved; the details were vague. But her interest
in the past was as great as her hope for the future. Romantic though her
vision of the past may have been, full of myth and monster, yet it was in
easy accord with her romantic dream for the future. To her, past and
future were indissolubly linked.
Unfortunately for Michel’s hopes—and historical reputation—the ro¬
mantic dream of anarchism was a waning force not the wave of the
future. While it is true that anarchism’s greatest influence in France,
numerically at least, followed the outrages of the 1890s and lasted until
the outbreak of the Great War, in those decades the simple and direct
Translators’ Introduction
xi
force of anarchism was absorbed into the Bourses de Travail, the
protean Confederation G6ndrale du Travail, and factional infighting.
The anarchism that Louise Michel dreamed of, the formless uprising
leading to the Social Revolution and the end of exploitation, disap¬
peared into irreconcilable bickering over detail and method. The dream
diffused, then disappeared like a wisp of smoke.
Michel was no more an organizer than she was a theorist. Not for
Michel the shabby, ill-lit rooms where intriguers and plotters put to¬
gether demonstrations and organizations. “All revolutions have been
insufficient because they have been political,” she said in a speech in
1882. She believed organization unnecessary because she was adamantly
of the opinion that at some near moment the poor and exploited would
rise up spontaneously, and through sheer numbers, force of will, and
the decency of their cause, they would force the old order to shrivel up
before them. In this vein, Michel’s most typical act was in 1883, when,
with no particular objective, she led the crowd of self-proclaimed anar¬
chists across Paris.
Neither theorist nor organizer, Michel filled another role for the
French radicals. “Nearly Joan of Arc,” Verlaine called her. 3 And Victor
Hugo, no anarchist, although surely a romantic, had named the first
draft of a poem “Louise Michel”; in this lengthy poem, retitled “More
Than a Man,” Hugo wrote,
Those who know . . .
Your days, your nights, your cares, your tears, given to everyone,
Your forgetfulness of yourself in helping others,
Your words like the flames of apostles,
Your long look of hatred to all those who are inhuman,
And the feet of children which you warm between your hands, . . .
He would realize Michel was incapable of anything not heroic or
virtuous. Michel had, Hugo concluded:
. . . two spirits intermingled
. . . the divine chaos of starlike things
Seen at the bottom of a great and stormy heart
... a radiance seen in a flame . 4
Every movement needs prophets and lawgivers, sinners and apostates,
martyrs and saints. For French anarchists, Michel was martyr and
saint—the Red Virgin.
Michel’s intellectual curiosity was immense, her thirst for knowledge
unquenchable. Throughout her memoirs runs an amazing assortment
of subjects: music, musical instruments, teaching techniques, cruelty to
animals, the status of women, the money used in the Canary Islands,
Translators’ Introduction
xii
insects, Kanakan anthropology, the weather, botany—the list is endless.
As a child she collected animal skeletons in her tower; as a schoolmistress
in Paris, in spite of her busy teaching schedule, she attended classes on
physics, chemistry, history, and even law; in prison she wrote books and
poetry; in New Caledonia she catalogued flora and fauna and experi¬
mented with vaccinating papaya trees against jaundice.
The inner life she reveals in her memoirs was surely a remarkable one.
Legends, beasts, and folk heroes mingled in her fantasies, and she never
distinguished between her fantasies and reality. Her early life, she says,
was “made up of dreams and study,” a preparation for the second part
of her life, “the period of struggle.” But according to her account, she
acted during the waking world of the Siege and Commune as she had
seen herself act in her dreams. Dream and action were the same, and, in
her mind, apparently indistinguishable. The gallows speeches she in¬
vented in her childhood she delivered to her judges in 1871.
People make their own dramas and then star in them, and Michel gave
the impression of playing herself. She saw herself as druidess, valkyrie,
vestal virgin, moving through a life that contained far more—strange
demons and mystic visions—than the eye could see. On one occasion in
the 1860s she walked with her friend Victorine through the deep woods
near her childhood home. Near the pair, padding along almost silently
through the forest, a wolf paced their steps, she claims. Was the wolf
really there? Probably not. In the 1860s the number of wolves, even in
the Haute-Marne, was small, but the beast existed in Michel’s mind
certainly and truly.
When Michel is narrating events of public record she is surprisingly
accurate, considering that the main preparation of the text took place in
prison cells. After her return from New Caledonia she was followed
daily by police agents when she was not in jail. Their reports have
survived, so her life from 1881 to 1883 and from 1886 to 1889 has a
corroborative record, if not an objective one. 5 But for her childhood and
her years as a schoolmistress almost the only record is her memory, and
some of the attitudes she describes do not ring true. Perhaps Michel
constructed her fantasy and then lived it out; it seems more likely that
she lived her life and then superimposed her fantasy onto it retrospec¬
tively. Few people other than memoirists have the chance to live their
lives over again.
Michel is astonishingly free of the self-aggrandizement memoirs are
prone to, even to the point of neglecting her own importance. She was,
after all, the chairman of the Women’s Vigilance Committee during the
Commune. During the Siege she had been responsible for the day-to-
day welfare of some two hundred children, a task which she did very
well, thanks to the assistance of Georges Clemenceau; no mention of her
Translators’ Introduction
xiii
effort appears in her memoirs, although it is obliquely referred to at one
of her trials. After her return from exile in New Caledonia, she repre¬
sented France at Kropotkin’s international gathering in London; she
mentions the trip, but says nothing of her role there.
From time to time misdirection, whether conscious or unconscious,
appears in her memoirs. She points with a grand gesture to an inviting
vision that is simply not true. Still, the misdirections of 1886 indicate
either the way that Louise Michel truly saw her own life or the way she
wanted others to see it. The effect is almost the same, and perhaps she
was unaware of the difference. The revolutionary, a fifty-six-year-old
woman, had sacrificed everything to the Revolution. Perhaps to justify
what she had become she had no choice other than to make her youthful
self into the revolutionary she was later.
Some of her misdirection is harmless. She subtracts five or six years
from her true age, and when she writes of her childhood adventures, she
paints herself as a mischievous hoyden. She was fifteen when her
grandfather died, and twenty when her paternal grandmother died and
the half-ruined manor house where she had grown up was sold. The
majority of the childhood stories concern the period while her grand¬
father was still living, and she says comparatively little that can be dated
with certainty to the period from his death until her grandmother’s,
although her stories of the ecregnes, the gatherings of village women,
probably belong to those years.
She was apparently a properly religious child, despite her attempt to
show herself as determinedly anticlerical from the first Voltairian teach¬
ings of her grandfather. Contradicting her attempts to don this mantle
are hints of her attraction to mystical Catholicism through the fervent
teachings of her devout aunt. Even Michel’s story of instructing her
pupils in Audeloncourt to boycott the mandated prayer for the Emperor
rings false in view of a strong recommendation by a local cure which
appears in her application to certify her school. 6 Even without that
document as proof, much of the verse she wrote in the 1850s—verse
which she does not quote in her memoirs—was ardently Christian.
Similarly, her memoirs would have the reader believe that she taught
in Audeloncourt for several years and then left for Paris. That is not
true. After a limited formal education she received her diploma in
September 1852, taught in Audeloncourt for a year, went to Paris for a
first and unmentioned period beginning in January 1854, and then
returned to the Haute-Marne the following fall because her mother was
ill. She tried to reopen her school at Audeloncourt, but failed because
her former pupils had gone elsewhere. Then she tried to open a school
at Clefmont; whether she succeeded is unclear, but in 1855 she and Julie
Longchamps opened a school at Milli^res, where Michel taught for two
XIV
Translators’ Introduction
years before going to Paris a second time. Possibly the reason for
Michel’s lack of clarity on this subject stems from embarrassment over
admitting a succession of failures or only partial successes.
Perhaps still fearing governmental reprisals, Michel lies about the
demonstration of 22 January 1871, suggesting that it was intended to be
a gentle and unarmed protest. In fact, it was planned as a direct
confrontation with the Government of National Defense. She also omits
the information that she was dressed in a National Guard uniform and
was carrying a rifle. Similarly, she minimizes her role in the councils of
the Commune and is a bit elliptical when she discusses what part she
played in military events. For example, she was a member of the 61st
Battalion of the National Guard, which was commanded by Eudes, the
husband of her friend, Victorine Louvet.
Her narrative of her arrest, confinement, and trial are straightfor¬
ward, as is her account of the voyage to New Caledonia in 1873. The
captain of the prison ship, the Virginie, was deeply concerned, his reports
show, with the well-being of the deportees aboard; and the trip, while
certainly unpleasant, was not unnecessarily arduous. 7
Michel makes light of the physical discomfort of the prison camps on
the Ducos Peninsula at Numbo and later at the Bay of the West.
Conditions there were far less easy than she suggests, but she reserves
her criticism for the jailers and their policy of repression, not the poor
food and inadequate medical facilities.
She was certainly involved peripherally in the Kanakan uprising of
1878 in New Caledonia, yet her comments on it are scanty. Indeed, her
account of these events, in which she hints broadly that she knows more
than she chooses to tell, is the only place in her memoirs where she is coy
with the reader. Certainly the authorities might have taken notice of an
open confession, but when she writes about the Siege and the Com¬
mune, she simply avoids indictable revelations.
Upon her return to France, Michel plunged into radical politics almost
without pausing. Her account of these events is anecdotal and episodic,
not systematic. Among the subjects on which she focuses is the incredible
effort of the Prefect of Police to establish a radical journal, his idea being
that such a publication would help him to keep track of revolutionaries
because they would congregate around it. 8 Michel also describes speak¬
ing tours she made to Belgium and England.
During those years her friend Marie Ferr£ died, but the climax of
events, for Michel, was the Trial of the Sixty-eight at Lyon, where the
government tried to break the anarchist movement by destroying many
of its leaders, among them Kropotkin and Gauthier. Michel had been in
England during the earlier part of the trial, but she was present at the
last phase, and she identified herself with the prisoners, although she
was not among those indicted. After the conviction of the Sixty-eight,
Translators’ Introduction
xv
she felt she had to do something: “I would have been an accessory to
cowardice if I did not use the liberty I was allowed—I don’t know
why—to call up a new and immense International which would stretch
from one end of the earth to the other.” She was searching for martyr¬
dom when she found it at les Invalides in April 1883; the government
reacted savagely and after a sham of a trial she was sentenced to six years
of solitary confinement, a sentence so incommensurate with the crime
that even conservative papers protested.
Her mother’s declining health worsened. Michel was given parole to
visit her while awaiting trial and at least twice after conviction. When she
was in the Centrale Prison at Clermont she was also allowed to go see her
mother, a most exceptional proceeding, although as Michel’s biographer
Edith Thomas notes when she discusses this episode, the nineteenth
century was “a much more humane epoch than ours.” 9 Michel gave
credit to the authorities for transferring her to a Paris prison at the
beginning of December 1884 so that she might be near her mother. Four
days later the Minister of the Interior gave permission for Michel,
guarded by two police inspectors, to stay at her mother’s bedside. From
Michel’s memoirs it is hard to tell that she stayed with her mother almost
a month, from 11 December 1884 until her mother’s death on 3 January
1885.
Michel’s emotions were always intense. The pages of her memoirs are
sprinkled throughout with affection for her mother, and when she
describes her childhood, she exhibits devotion to her older relatives.
Later, as a young woman, she formed a close friendship with Julie
Longchamps, who followed her to Paris. The two remained close into
the 1860s, drifting apart only when Longchamps failed to follow Michel
into radical politics.
Through the years Michel’s affection for her pupils remained un¬
dimmed. She is bitter when she rebuts the government’s claim, made at
her first trial, that she had no pupils, yet she let far greater falsehoods
stand unrefuted. She seems to have been a conscientious and imagina¬
tive teacher, and outside evidence corroborates that judgment. For
example, her devotion to teaching the Kanakas in Noumea earned a
letter of commendation, a letter she quotes with obvious pride.
Michel’s sympathies focused upon all who were helpless in society: the
poor, the elderly, prisoners, and women. She developed a protofemi¬
nism, but it quickly merged into a more general radicalism. Michel saw
the problems of society clearly, and she saw that many groups, not just
women, were being exploited. Thus, a chapter in her memoirs concern¬
ing women changes its tone until it becomes a plea for both women and
men “to move through life together as good companions” as they march
toward the Social Revolution. After it occurs, “men and women together
will gain the rights of all humanity.” They will not argue any longer
XVI
Translators’ Introduction
“about which sex is superior” any more than “races will argue about
which race is foremost.” Michel’s aversion to cruelty to animals is
connected with her sympathies for the helpless and exploited: “Every¬
thing fits together, from the bird whose brood is crushed to the humans
whose nests are destroyed by war.”
The most intense feelings in her memoirs, after those for her mother,
are reserved for Th£ophile Ferre. She frequently refers to him and his
execution, but it is hard to determine whether her feelings are for Ferre
as a person or as a symbol of what repression could lead to. Whether
Michel’s warm friendship for Ferre’s sister Marie was the product of her
feelings for Theophile or independent of them is unclear, but Michel’s
and Marie Ferry’s lives were permanently intertwined. Marie helped to
care for Michel’s mother while Michel was at meetings, exiled, traveling,
or in prison, and the two maintained a lively correspondence through
the years. It is to Marie that she owed her collection of poems and
clippings, many of which are included in the memoirs. Shortly after
Michel’s arrest for the demonstration following the anniversary of
Blanqui’s death Marie died, and in the memoirs Michel includes an
account of Marie’s funeral and a eulogistic letter from Henri Rochefort.
But Michel’s emotional life centered on her mother. Michel recog¬
nized that she had caused the greater part of her mother’s sufferings,
caused them because of opinions which her mother “didn’t share.”
Throughout her life, her mother struggled to pay her daughter’s debts
and showered her with affection and little presents. In return, Louise
tried to hide her misfortunes from her mother and to ease her last
moments. “We revolutionaries bring so little happiness to our families,”
Michel laments. To pay tribute to her mother, Michel prints the account
of her mother’s funeral in full. What she failed to realize was that the
many thousands who followed her mother’s body through Paris to the
graveyard at Levallois-Perret were honoring not only her mother but
Louise herself.
For all practical purposes, Michel’s memoirs end at the time of her
mother’s death, and with her spirit bleak from the loss she had suffered,
she completed them for publication the following year. Reality is malle¬
able, and to recall the processes of one’s mind, which a memoirist must
do, is to see past events through whatever sun or shadow exists at the
moment when the recollection is called forth. Though Michel’s devotion
to the revolutionary cause and her optimism for the future remained
steadfast, even under the shadow of the mother’s death, it is possible that
she would have shown less nostalgia and less sorrow for a lost past if she
had not written her memoirs under the immediate impact of her grief.
It was sometime during Michel’s third prison term, which began in
1883, that she started to write these memoirs, although documents for
them had been collected earlier. She also had some earlier pieces, like a
history of the Haute-Marne that she had begun during her childhood,
Translators’ Introduction
XVII
and she makes one tantalizing reference to a “journal” she kept of the
voyage to New Caledonia, which has disappeared.
In 1885, after her mother died, Michel suffered some sort of nervous
collapse, which certainly was among the reasons for her memoirs’ being
fragmented and disjointed. Although a very rough chronological outline
runs through the two parts, stories and anecdotes appear more through
word association than from step-by-step narrative. Nor are the memoirs
limited to factual accounts. They are filled with emotional descriptions
of her dreams, stirring calls to action, and a number of poems. She flits
from one idea to another “as they come to mind.” Occasionally she seems
aware of the problems she might be causing the reader. “Before speak¬
ing about my third arrest,” she writes in the original text, “I ought to
relate the first two.” The memoirs oscillate wildly among nostalgia,
exaltation, narrative, and prophecy.
As a consequence, the original memoirs are most difficult to follow,
and we, as translators, decided that a direct rendering into English
would be incomprehensible to modern readers. Therefore, we trans¬
lated the original text completely, and then transposed Michel’s words
into a chronological narrative of her life, being careful to stay as true as
possible to the thought and tone of the original.
Very little material has been eliminated. Frequently, there were sev¬
eral versions of one event, agreeing with each other in broad outline
always, which is unusual, but each adding new details. Those versions
were combined to make one account. Several poems were omitted
because they added nothing to the narrative; furthermore, Michel’s
poetry is mediocre—Edith Thomas noted that Michel’s “best poem is
surely her life”—and those poems that were retained were kept to add
information or color to the text. Parts of her long catalogue of the flora
and fauna of New Caledonia have also been excised; it is frequently
impossible to tell from her nonscientihc descriptions which of several
species she was writing about. A digression about a literary lawsuit
brought by Grippa de Winter, in which Michel was not involved, was also
omitted.
In the original text almost every chapter ends with a paean to the
coming Revolution. Reducing the number of chapters from thirty-three
(plus three appendices) to twenty-four left several extra paeans, and in
any event, it seemed a bit monotonous to follow Michel’s example, so
they have been included only where they seemed most appropriate.
Moreover, she frequently inserts parenthetical exclamations of grief at
her mother’s death; their number has been reduced, although enough
of them have been retained to remind the reader of the emotional strain
under which Michel was writing.
In summary, the words of these translated memoirs are Louise
Michel’s; the organization of those words is ours. The loss of the original
texture and the feeling for how ideas were associated with each other in
xviii Translators’ Introduction
Michel’s mind is compensated for, we believe, by having an orderly
memoir of her life to 1886.
We have added almost nothing to the narrative. In some places where
it was possible to establish definitely the identity of some person men¬
tioned, we have added a phrase identifying him, because persons who
were familiar to Michel’s readers in 1886 are now often obscure. We
have occasionally added dates established from documents like the
records of the prison ship that carried Michel to New Caledonia. On
matters which she could not check in prison, we felt accuracy served the
reader. Where she is inaccurate and we were uncertain whether that
inaccuracy was deliberate, we left the material as it was written, noting
major problems in italicized interpolations.
Michel clearly intended to write a continuation of these memoirs. A
decade after she published this volume she talked about doing so, but
nothing came of it. So, other than her poetry and letters, the volume
here, the Memoires de Louise Michel ecrits par elle-meme, is the main
autobiographical offering of a fascinating woman, revolutionary, poet,
and dreamer.
When she published these memoirs in 1886 she was fifty-six years old
and still had nineteen years to live, one-third of her adult life. It is a pity
she never wrote the second volume she spoke of, but the memoirs that
she did write stand as a monument to human dreams. Motivated by
compassion, not doctrine, Michel testified in her memoirs and by her life
that an unattractive, illegitimate child from the fringe of nowhere could
so love freedom that she was ready to sacrifice her own. There have been
worse lives.
Notes
1. E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (New York: Octagon Books, 1975), p. 434.
2. George Bernard Shaw, “The Impossibilities of Anarchism,” Fabian Tract 45
(1895): 14-15.
3. “Ballade en l’honneur de Louise Michel,” in Oeuvres completes de Paul Verlaine
(Paris: Albert Messein, 1911) 2:39-40.
4. “Viro Major,” in Oeuvres completes de Victor Hugo (Paris: Albin Michel /
Imprimerie Nationale, 1935) 12:82-83; notes, 12: 360-61, 404; and plate,
12:489.
5. Archives historiques de la prefecture de police, Ba 1183-87, Paris.
6. Edith Thomas, Louise Michel ou la Velleda de Vanarchie (Paris: Gallimard,
1971), p. 42.
7. Resume du 2 e voyage de circumnavigation de la Virginie, to Ministre de
Marine et Colonies, 4 May 1874, Ministdre de Marine, Paris.
8. L. Andrieux, Souvenirs d'un prefet de police (Paris: Jules Rouff, 1885), 1: 175,
337-41.
9. Thomas, Louise Michel , p. 265.
The Red Virgin
Memoirs of Louise Michel
Chapter 1
Introduction
People have often asked me to write my memoirs, but whenever I have
tried to speak about myself I have felt the same repugnance I would feel
about undressing in public. Today, in spite of these feelings, I have
decided to put together a few of my memories. My life is full of poignant
memories, and I will expose some very personal feelings. I will tell them
randomly as they come to mind; if I give my pen the right to wander, I
have paid very dearly for this right.
My life has been composed of two very distinct parts that form a
complete contrast. The first was made up of dreams and study; the
second of events, as if the aspirations of the calm period came alive
during the period of struggle. I will go to some lengths to avoid
mentioning the names of persons whom I lost sight of long ago, to spare
them the disagreeable surprise of being accused of conniving with
revolutionaries. It might become a crime for them to have known me,
and my old acquaintances might be treated like anarchists when they
don’t know exactly what anarchism is.
I shall write boldly and frankly regarding everything that concerns me
personally, leaving in the shadows they loved those people who brought
me up in the old ruin of Vroncourt in the Haute-Marne. The Military
Tribunals of 1871 investigated the very bottom of my cradle and still
respected the privacy of my relatives, and I won’t disturb their ashes.
Moss has worn their names off their tombstones in the cemetery and the
old chateau has fallen down, but once again I see the nest of my infancy,
and I see those who brought me up brooding over me. Their images will
appear often in this book. Alas, of the memories of the dead, of the
fleeting thought, of the hour which has passed, nothing remains.
If a little bitterness drops onto these pages, no venom will ever fall.
The human race as a whole is blameless if individuals waste away like
animals in the struggle for existence. When the obstacles that fetter
humanity finally are forced aside, humanity will pass beyond this an¬
guish.
In this unceasing battle the lone human being is not and cannot be
free. My life is not mine to live. I must fulfill my duty to the Revolution,
and lead my life harshly, without comfort, so that it will all be over more
quickly.
2
Memoirs of Louise Michel
Perhaps these memoirs will have a great number of volumes. To tell
all, one would write without end. In any case, I would do well to sketch
the history of my prisons. Many brave hearts are found among those
unfortunate prisoners whom people despise. People must see things as
they are, and only someone who has lived through such experiences
knows.
Some of these pages would be difficult to send out the gates of
Saint-Lazare prison, which is where I am now writing. But to rescue
these words from oblivion I intend to take advantage of an article in the
regulations that states: “Attorneys can receive sealed letters from prison¬
ers.” One attorney understands that because these memoirs are, in a
sense, my last will and testament, I have the right to say whatever I want
in them and send them to him.
In these memoirs I want to include accounts of my three trials. I have
taken reports of my first and third trial from the Gazette des tribunaux,
which no one could suspect of being too favorable to me. The second
trial took place only in a lower court, and so was not reported in the
Gazette; I have included a newspaper account of it. For the masses, the
great masses, my loves, I will add some observations that I didn’t think it
was proper to make to the judges at the time. For us revolutionaries,
every trial is an act of war over which our flag is waving. May that flag
cover my book, as it has covered my life, as it will wave over my coffin.
Detail of the Haute-Marne
Chapter 2
Vroncourt
My childhood nest was a tumbled-down chateau. At its corners, the same
height as the main building, were four square towers with roofs like
church steeples. The south side had no windows, only loopholes in the
towers, which made the building look like a tomb or a castle, depending
on the point of view. A long time ago, people called the place the
Fortress, but when I lived there it was usually called the Tomb.
To the east lay a vineyard, and we were separated from the little
village of Vroncourt by a grassy stretch as wide as a prairie. At the end of
it, a brook flowed down the only street in the village, and in the winter
the brook became so swollen that people in Vroncourt had to put
stepping stones in it to make it passable.
Further to the east there was a screen of poplars, and the wind
murmured sweetly as it blew through those trees; and then, rising
behind everything, were the blue mountains of Bourmont. Many years
later when I saw Sydney, Australia, surrounded by bluish peaks, I
recognized on a larger scale the crests of the mountains I had seen in my
childhood.
To the west were the hills and woods of Suzerin. When the snow was
deep, wolves would creep from the woods into the Tomb through gaps
in the wall, and they would howl in the courtyard. Our dogs would
answer them, and this concert would last until the frozen morning. All
was well at the Tomb, and I loved those nights.
I loved them especially when the north wind raged, and we read late,
the whole family gathered in the old Great Hall. I loved the wintry
setting and the frozen upper rooms. All of it—the white shroud of snow,
the chorus of the wind, the wolves and dogs—would have made me a
poet, even if all my family hadn’t been poets from the cradle.
It was glacially cold in the Tomb’s enormous rooms. Through that vast
ruin the wind whistled, as it does through the rigging of a sailing ship.
We huddled around the fire, my grandfather sitting in his easy chair
situated halfway between his bed and a stack of all kinds of guns. In
winter he threw a big cloak of white flannel over his clothes and wore
wooden shoes trimmed with fleece. Often I sat on those wooden shoes in
front of the fireplace, snuggling up to the cinders along with the dogs
and cats.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
5
Depending on the circumstances, my grandfather appeared like many
different men to me. When he told me of the old, great days, the epic
fights of the First Republic, he was passionate, so that he could relate to
me the war of the giants, the war when “whites” and “blues,” brave men
fighting brave men, showed history how heroes died. Sometimes when
he explained to me the various books we read together, he was ironic,
like Voltaire, the master of his youth. At other times he was gay and
witty, like Moliere. Still other times, when our minds traveled across
unknown worlds together, we spoke of things he saw stirring on the
horizon. We looked at past stages of human development, and we
discussed the future. Often I cried, touched in my heart by some quick
image of progress, art, or science, and my grandfather, with great tears
in his eyes, too, would put his hand on my head, which was more tousled
than one of our dogs.
Both my grandmothers lived with us, and how different they were!
One had a delicate, Gallic face framed by a headdress of white muslin
gathered into tiny pleats, under which her hair was arranged in a large
chignon on her neck. The other had eyes that were black like coal, and
short hair; she was enveloped in an eternal youth which made me think
of fairies in the old tales.
My mother was then a blonde, with soft and smiling blue eyes and
long, curly hair. She was so fresh and pretty that her friends used to say
to her laughingly, “It is impossible for this ugly child to be yours.” As for
me, I was tall, skinny, disheveled, wild, brazen, sunburned, and often
decorated with torn clothing held together with pins. I knew how I
looked, and I was amused at people finding me ugly, although my poor
mother sometimes took offense at it.
Many animals lived in the Tomb. We had a big Spanish hound with
long yellow hair, and two sheepdogs. All three dogs answered to the
name of Presta. We also had a black and white dog named Medor, and a
young bitch we named Doe in memory of an old mare named Doe that
had died just before we got the bitch. When I gave the old mare an
apronful of hay her manner would change remarkably. The thing I
remember best about her was her stealing my bouquets; she would take
them and then lick my face. When she died my grandfather and I
wrapped her head in a white cloth, so no dirt would touch it, and buried
her outside near the acacia.
We had legions of cats, too, especially male ones. We called all the
male cats Lion or Darling and all our female cats Galta. Sometimes the
cats would crowd us at the fire, and my grandfather would use the tongs
to pick a glowing coal from the fireplace and wave it at them. The whole
pack would run off, only to make a fresh assault soon after.
My mother, my aunt, and my grandmothers usually sat around the
table. One read aloud, and the other knitted or sewed. Beside me as I
write now is the sewing basket my mother kept her things in.
6
Memoirs of Louise Michel
Friends often came to visit us. When Bertrand or M. Laumont, the old
teacher from Ozi£res, came, the family sat up later than usual, reading
aloud. They tried to send me to bed so they could finish reading the
chapters they didn’t want to read in front of me. Sometimes I obstinately
refused, nearly always winning eventually, and other times when I was in
a hurry to hear what they wanted to hide from me, I obeyed quickly, and
then tiptoed back and hid behind the door to listen.
We called the schoolteacher Little Laumont to distinguish him from
his relative, another Laumont, the doctor at Bourmont, whom we called
Big Laumont. Big Laumont, the doctor, enveloped in a vast black coat
that made him look like an Egyptian scarab, came on a stocky horse to
spend every Tuesday with us. Little Laumont was always dressed in a
short, gray frock coat and carried an enormously long cane. When he
moved, his feet never seemed to touch the ground, and he was as
intelligent as he was strange. He used to spend the winters with us. Long
ago Little Laumont had given lessons to my aunt Agathe and my
mother, and I think he had taught the whole countryside to read.
Those were the good days. My grandmother or I was at the piano, and
my grandfather played his bass viol. Big Laumont sometimes carried a
flute in his pocket, and when he played it, he played perfectly. All of us
together would play music until we tired of it. Then in the dusk of the
evening the doctor would leave swiftly, with his capacious black cloak
floating around him. He looked like the black horseman of the legends.
Big Laumont asked me once, very seriously, the way he always spoke
to me, why I didn’t write some prose works. Following his suggestion, I
began a story, The Naughty Deeds of Helen , which began, “Helen was very
naughty and stubborn.” It was a collection of my own wicked deeds, each
of which I ended with an exemplary punishment for the sake of
morality. For example, I described one episode in which Helen stole a
small encyclopedia from an old doctor’s house, a leather-bound volume
in which were found the names of everything that could be learned. For
punishment, Helen was condemned to spend a month with no book
other than a huge grammar, which she certainly wouldn’t have bothered
to steal. “Oh, you little monster,” said Big Laumont when he read this
piece, “I thought it was you who had taken my book!”
That wasn’t the only thing I took as a child. Each of us is capable of all
the good or evil in his being. Without remorse I used to take money
(when there was any), fruits, vegetables, and so on, and gave them away
in my relatives’ names. That caused some great scenes when the recipi¬
ents tried to thank them. Incorrigible as I was, I laughed about it.
Once my grandfather offered me twenty sous a week if I would
promise not to steal anything again, but I found I lost too much money
on that deal and I refused. I had filed some skeleton keys to open the
cupboards where pears and other fruits were kept, and I used to leave
Memoirs of Louise Michel
7
little notes there in place of what I had taken. I remember one that read:
“You have the lock, but I have the key.”
In the summer the Tomb filled up with birds that flew in through the
broken windows. Swallows came back to their nests of former years,
sparrows flew in and out of the broken windows, occasionally knocking
on the unbroken panes, and the larks sang loudly with us. That is, they
sang with us when we sang in a major key; when we changed to a minor
key they would fall silent.
The birds weren’t the dogs’ and cats’ only fellow-boarders. We had
partridges, a tortoise, a roebuck, some wild boars, a wolf, barn-owls, bats,
several broods of orphaned hares that we had raised by spoon-feeding—
a whole menagerie. And of course, there was also the colt, Zephir, and
his grandmother Brouska. How old Brouska was I don’t know—she had
been with us so long that no one could remember her age. Brouska
walked in and out of the rooms in order to take bread and sugar from
the hands of people she liked. To people she didn’t like, she would pull
back her lips, showing all her huge yellow teeth as if she were laughing in
their faces. And there were cows, too, the great white Bion6 and the
young Bella and N£ra. I went to their stable to chat with them, and they
answered me in their own way by looking at me with their soft eyes.
All these beasts lived on good terms with each other. The cats would
lie curled up, following with a negligent eye the birds toddling about on
the ground. Even more strange, I never saw a cat bother about a mouse,
and mice lived in all the walls. In the Great Hall, behind the green
tapestry that covered the walls, the mice ran around rapidly but una¬
fraid, uttering little shrill cries as they went. The mice behaved perfectly,
and never gnawed on papers or books and never placed a tooth on the
violins, cellos, and guitars which were scattered about.
What peace there was in this place, and what peace there was in my life
at this time! Maybe I didn’t deserve it. How I love to dream of this little
corner of the earth. If my mother had been able to survive my prison
term, I would have liked to have spent some peaceful days near her, days
such as she needed, with me working near her armchair, and the old
Caledonian cats purring at the hearth.
Every time something important happened in my family, my grand¬
mother would write a verse account of it. My grandfather added some
pages of his own to that collection, which was kept in two large, looseleaf
books. I wrapped those books in black crepe when my grandmother
died.
The winds of adversity blow on things as well as people. Of all the
pages my grandfather wrote, I have only one left, “A des antiquaires,”
and I have only one piece my grandmother wrote, “La Mort,” which she
wrote after the death of her husband. They are all that remain to me.
Their sad tones are a feeble enough exhalation compared to the delicate
8
Memoirs of Louise Michel
verses that I no longer have. All has faded away, even my grandfather’s
guitar, which crumbled while I was in New Caledonia. My mother cried
over it a long time.
In autumn, my mother, my aunts, and I used to go far into the forest.
It was good to hear through the deep silence in our woods the heavy
hammer of the smithy, and the sharp blows of the axe that made the
branches shiver. Then, too, there were the songs of birds and the
buzzing of insects under the fallen leaves. Often we would hear the little
branches breaking where some old woman was gathering a pile of
faggots. Sometimes we would hear the snort of a wild boar in the thickest
woods, and other times it was a few poor roebucks flashing across our
vision. Maybe they sensed the autumn hunts, when men cut the throats
of animals to the sound of the hunting horn. Animals kill to live; the
hunter destroys only to destroy.
On the road to Bourmont was Uncle Georges’s old mill, which stood at
the foot of a hill where there was an uncultivated vineyard. The grass
was thick and cool in the meadow bordered by the millpond. The
rosebushes rustled as the ducks moved through them or the wind
pushed them. In the mill, the first room was dark even at midday, and it
was there that Uncle Georges used to read every evening. How much he
learned reading that way!
All those people, living and dead, here they are in this place of time
gone by. Here are my grandmother Marguerite’s sisters with their white
headdresses, pins fastening scarves at their necks, the square bodices—
the complete outfits of peasant women, which they wore coquettishly
from their youth, when people called them beautiful girls, until their
deaths. Like themselves, their names were simple: Marguerite, Cath¬
erine, Apolline.
One of my mother’s sisters, Aunt Victoire, was with us later at
Audeloncourt. She was very tall, with a thin face that had fine, regular
features. My mother’s other sister, my Aunt Catherine, lived in the
Lagny area. Like my mother, both had an absolute cleanliness, a luxury
of neatness, which allowed neither the shadow of a spot, nor a speck of
dust, from their headdresses to the tips of their feet.
In the first flush of my Aunt Victoire’s youth, some missionary
preaching at Audeloncourt left behind a religious fanaticism that led
many young girls into the convent. My aunt was one of them. She
became a novice, or lay sister, at the hospice of Langres, but she broke
her health by fasting and was forced to return to secular life. She came to
live with us at Vroncourt, where she stayed until my grandparents died.
I never heard a more ardent missionary than my Aunt Victoire. From
Christianity she had absorbed everything that sweeps a person away:
somber hymns, evening visits to churches drowned in shadow, the lives
of virgins, which recall druidesses or vestal virgins or valkyries. All her
nieces were swept into this mysticism, me more easily than the others.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
9
What a strange impression still remains with me. I used to listen at the
same time to my Voltairian grandparents and my exalted Catholic aunt.
Moved by strange dreams, I searched the way a bewildered compass-
needle looks for north in a fierce storm.
My north, where my compass finally pointed, was the Revolution. My
fanaticism changed from dream to reality; years later my friend Th6o-
phile Ferrd told me I was consecrated to the Revolution, and it was true.
All of us were its fanatics.
I read hungrily during those years, especially with Nanette and
Josephine, two remarkably intelligent young women who had never left
the district. We used to talk about everything. In good weather we
carried out magazines and books to read in the tall grass: Magasins
pittoresques, and Musees des families, Hugo, Lamartine, and others. I have
always wondered if Nanette and Josephine loved me better than their
own children. I certainly loved them. One day, when I was perhaps six
or seven years old, we drenched Lamennais’s Paroles d’un croyant with
our tears. From that day on, I belonged to the masses.
From that moment I climbed step by step from Lamennais to anarchy.
Is there further to go? Of course, because there is always more to come,
there is always further to go, always progress to make in light and liberty,
in the development of new sensitivities of which we now have only the
rudiments. There is a future which we imprisoned spirits cannot even
glimpse.
In front of me are a few handfuls of memorabilia from my childhood.
I take one at random, a description of Vroncourt my mother saved. How
many things this little piece of yellowed paper has survived!
Vroncourt
Vroncourt lies on the slope of a mountain between the forest and the
plain. You can hear the wolves howling, but you do not see the lambs’
throats being cut. At Vroncourt, you’re separated from the rest of the
world. The wind rattles the old church tower and the towers of the
chateau, and it bends the fields of ripe grain like ocean waves. All that you
can hear is the formidable noise of the storm. It is great and beautiful.
This work, as well as my Legendary Haute-Marne, was illustrated with
my own charcoal sketches. Responsible for a piece of that work was
Marie Verdet, who must have been more than a hundred years old.
“Say,” she said to me, “it won’t be worth the trouble to write your book
on Vroncourt if you don’t include the legend of the Three Washerwo¬
men.”
So I drew the Fountain of the Ladies. The shadow of willows lies on
the water, and from this shadow the pale washerwomen emerge, three
phantoms under the trees. According to Marie Verdet, one cries about
the past, another moans for the days of the present, and the last mourns
for tomorrow. They remind me of the legends of the Norns.
10
Memoirs of Louise Michel
Another charcoal sketch in the same work depicted another custom,
the Diableries of Chaumont, last held more than a century ago. My
sketches of the Diableries are impressionistic and try to reproduce the
feeling of the moonbeams, the forest, the snow, and the night.
Here is another fragment. It comes from my Legendary Haute-Marne
and describes these Diableries of Chaumont which took place every
seven years.
The Diableries of Chaumont are related to history, fancy, and legend.
The Diablerie is a dream which had a real existence, and traces of it were
still visible at the end of the eighteenth century. Many bizarre customs
disappeared at the end of the Middle Ages; the Diablerie of Chaumont was
one that survived. . . . Every seven years, say the chroniclers of Cham¬
pagne, twelve men would dress like devils, or as you would expect devils to
dress, in all the old torn-up clothes of hell, where there are all sorts of
disguises, even that of Jehovah. The devils of Chaumont got theirs at the
shop of old Anne Larousse, at the sign of Brae et Joie: an immense pair of
horns and a black hood. They accompanied the Palm Sunday procession to
honor heaven and to represent hell there. After they had danced in the
procession, for the love of God, our lords the devils spread out into the
countryside, which they had the right to pillage, for the love of the devil, to
their heart’s content.
Why did they choose the number twelve? The chroniclers say that it was
in honor of the twelve apostles, although this method of honoring them
wouldn’t have suited them. Some scholars claimed that they stood for the
twelve signs of the Zodiac, and others that they stood for the sons of Jacob.
None of these suppositions was generally accepted. At each Diablerie the
arguments arose anew among the scholars, clerks, and astrologers of the
good town of Chaumont, who exhausted themselves in writing tracts on
the question.
These men disguised as devils sang continuously “Quis ist iste rex
gloriae” with as much spirit as those whose costumes they were wearing,
but with less harmony, since the devil has an essentially musical ear.
The Diablerie of Chaumont lasted from Palm Sunday to the Nativity
of St. John, and it ended with a representation of the main acts of the life
of Saint John, presented on ten stages so that the faithful could watch.
The celebration was concluded with a ceremonial death by torture.
(There couldn’t be a good celebration without that, either in their time
or ours.) The torture and death were ordinarily just symbolic—an effigy
of Herod, representing his soul, was burned at the stake.
The last year these holy orgies took place, an event happened which
may have hastened their end. This event does not appear in the written
chronicles, but Marie Verdet did not have the slightest doubt that it
happened, for her grandfather had heard it from his grandfather, who
had heard it from his grandmother. At this particular torture and death,
Memoirs of Louise Michel
11
the effigy of Herod had gestured so beautifully that the audience
enjoying themselves at the “torture” had filled the valley of the Ecoliers.
Suddenly the effigy began to moan and people went into ecstasy. The
miracle was believed all the more easily since the people later found
charred bones in the ashes of the stake. But, if they found charred
bones, they no longer found the handsome singer Nicias Guy; it was he
who had been so terribly murdered out of love’s vengeance.
Let me add here a few notes on my native region, the Haute-Marne.
Plows bring to light the stone coffins of our fathers, the Gauls; the knife
for slitting victims’ throats; Roman incense. The plowman, accustomed
to these finds, turns them aside, sometimes making a watering trough
from a coffin, or using the incense to scent the enormous stump which
burns beneath his great chimney. He continues to sing to his oxen, while
behind him the birds gather worms in the open furrows.
Formerly, near a ruined fortress, the chdte paiot, people used to go to
conjure the spirits of the ruins with a silver piece, a lighted candle, a
white shirt, and a sharpened knife.
“Why the piece of silver?” I asked Marie Verdet, and lowering her
voice, she answered, “For the devil!”
“And the lit candle?” “It’s for the good Lord!” “And the white shirt?”
“For the dead!” “And the knife with the sharpened blade?” “For the
person carrying out the ceremony if he betrays his fealty.”
“His fealty to whom?”
“To the unknown, to the Ghost-in-Flames.”
Enough of these stories found in the stones that I walked over as a
child. Let me return to the events of my own early life. I never learned to
write script properly. For a long time as a child I wrote my poems in
letters I had invented myself, modeled after those in books. Finally, my
family realized it was time to teach me to write like the rest of the world.
The Naughty Deeds of Helen was the last work I wrote with my own letters
instead of writing in proper script. Because no one at the Tomb could
write script properly, and also because they thought it would be better if
I had less free time in which to occupy myself as I pleased, I was sent to
the village school every day.
In spite of the five styles of writing taught at Vroncourt, and the
beautiful English script I learned in teacher-training courses at
Chaumont, I returned later to the style I used at home. I rolled my
letters, disheveled my words, and let my handwriting change as my
thought changed. It makes my handwriting very difficult to imitate.
People have tried anyway. Two years ago, my poor mother got a fairly
well-forged letter—the signature was a masterpiece—saying that I was
sick and asking for her at the prison of Saint-Lazare. That was a terrible
thing to do. Another time someone sent the authorities a well-counter¬
feited request asking that I be allowed to see my mother; the forger
12
Memoirs of Louise Michel
didn’t know that, at that very moment, I had been with my mother for
several days.
Anyway, I was sent every day to school at Vroncourt to improve my
script and occupy my time. The teacher was named Michel, but he was
not related to me.
The school at Vroncourt was a dark house with only two rooms. The
larger, which looked out onto the street, was the classroom. The other,
which was never brightly lit, was where the teacher and his wife lived. It
looked out on a grass-covered slope through a window at ground level
which was like a vent in a cave. This window, like the window of the
classroom, was made of many tiny panes and bordered by red cotton
curtains.
By the light of the classroom window the schoolteacher’s wife, Mme
Michel, sewed all winter long. Her profile, a little severe under her great
white headdress, seemed very beautiful to me. On the days when we
recited catechism, my Aunt Victorine used to come in and sit near her,
so that she could hear if I had learned it well.
The tables in the classroom were arranged around three sides of the
room, the fourth side, where the front door was, being left empty. There
were two or three benches for the little ones who couldn’t write yet. A
few of the older ones who had what was called beautiful hands also sat
on those benches writing on their knees. They didn’t need to polish their
style any more, and they were proud of their status.
I put my mind to figuring out ways to make mischief, and I soon
discovered one way. Monsieur the teacher, as we called him, sat on a
high wooden chair we called the pulpit. He dictated passages to us,
telling us to write down the dictation precisely as he said it. I went to
some pains to write down everything he said, not just what he was
dictating. It would come out something like this:
The Romans were the masters of the world (Louise, don’t hold your pen
like a stick;—semicolon)—but Gaul resisted their domination for a long
time (You children from up on Queurot, you’re coming in very late;—a
period. Ferdinand, blow your nose.—You children from the mill, warm
your feet)—Caesar wrote the history of their resistance, etc.
Not losing a minute, I even added, scratching furiously, some things the
teacher didn’t say. He finally caught me. I would have been as unrespon¬
sive to his anger as I was to ordinary reproaches, if he hadn’t said to me
dispassionately, “If the inspector of schools saw that, you would get me
fired.”
A great sadness fell over me. I could think of nothing to reply, even
when he forbade me to bring him any more rose petals. Those rose
petals, dry in winter and fresh in summer, he liked to add to his
cherrywood snuff box, which he opened and closed with a little leather
thong.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
13
The next day my dictation was irreproachable. For more than a week,
under his severe eye, I kept twisting in the pocket of my pinafore a little
white paper full of dried roses that I had fixed for him without hope.
Finally, seeing that my heart was breaking, he asked me for them, and all
was well. After that, even though I played other tricks, they weren’t ones
the inspector could blame Monsieur the teacher for.
He earned so little that he did all sorts of odd jobs during the long
summers when the children in our village didn’t have classes, but the old
teacher was always cheerful. I never heard him say a bitter word.
Although books for children and even for grown-ups give the illusion
that merit is rewarded, merit is rarely recognized in this world. I first
realized that truth from observing the teacher, Michel. Like my hatred
of force, this perception comes from my earliest years. Since then I have
seen a thousand examples, so I was astonished only the first time I saw it.
Any mathematical calculation became easy when M. Michel explained
it. By nothing more than the way in which he asked the question,
Monsieur the teacher provoked the right answers. He put it under your
nose. When a student was at the blackboard working on some problem
under the eye of the outstanding old mathematician, the teacher showed
the position of the number with the end of his hazel rod. Your mind
kept the whole operation in view at the same time, and it seemed to me
that the questions he asked had a rhythm to them.
I told my grandfather about that. Monsieur the teacher was a frequent
visitor at the Tomb, and one evening I heard my grandfather and
Monsieur the teacher chatting about things far removed from my poor,
little problems. I could have stood listening to them forever. That
evening I discovered that Monsieur the teacher was simply a genius in
numbers, as well as a great astronomer and poet. I also found out that
algebra is easier than arithmetic.
“Why haven’t you written on mathematics?” my grandfather asked M.
Michel.
The old schoolteacher laughed sadly and ruefully. They exchanged
various remarks that I didn’t understand until I was much older, but the
teacher’s laugh stayed in my memory. Later, when I read in books about
merit being recognized and virtue being rewarded, I laughed the same
way.
In later years, I found artlessness like M. Michel’s in other people of
merit many times. I thought about him when the captain of the Virginie,
on which I was being sent to New Caledonia, told me about his trip to the
North Pole. The old seaman, keyed up by the day’s storm, the high seas
off the Cape, and the spume left after each wave crashed down on the
deck, relived for me his voyage to the North Pole and made it come alive,
“Why haven’t you written all that down?” I asked.
“I’m not a writer,” he answered. “Anyway, scholars have already
written about all those things.”
14
Memoirs of Louise Michel
How many scholars are as scholarly as the captain of the Virginie?
Have they seen things for themselves? Knowledge must be presented in
a manner that enlarges the horizon instead of restricting it. As long as
poverty, which shackles people like my old schoolteacher, is combined
with prejudice, which makes the unknown fearful and fetters people like
the captain of the Virginie, ignorance will continue to imprison the
world.
The development of the human race and the development of new
sensitivities are thwarted because people take their point of view from
the part, not the whole. Only when totality, completeness, is seen can
each person rummage in his own little corner in harmony with wisdom
and the development of the human race.
Chapter 3
The End of Childhood
As the seed contains the full-grown tree, all life from its very beginning
contains whatever it will be—whatever, despite everything, it must
become. Thus, I am trying to go back to the sources of the events in my
life. One piece of verse I found in my old papers sketched out the
pattern my life would take.
The Voyage
At the rim of the desert how immense is the sky.
On your new unknown path, child, where do you go?
What do you hope for, now hid in deep mystery?
—If only I knew. Toward beauty and goodness!
Child, what’s your choice? Peace, calm, and surrender?
You could live like a bird and build up your nest.
Hear, while there’s time; shun the hard brutal path,
Where your fate will be damned, and your life will be tears.
I don’t want to cry, or look backwards too much.
If it weren’t for my mother, I would go far indeed
Through chance-controlled life, where the tempest is blowing,
Go, as one follows the faraway horn.
From deepest concealment, I hear a loud fanfare.
Others have gone there whom I would meet.
Heavy steps on the land! I hear them! I hear them!
It’s humanity marching. With them I would go.
I look at the sand and the heaped-up grain.
In profoundly blue skies I see endless cloud-worlds.
Does it make any difference? One world’s like another.
Where those clouds disappear, it is there I must go.
Those years, the years of the Tomb, when all those so dear to me
surrounded my being, those years of my grandfather, of my Aunt
Victoire, of Nanette and Josephine, of M. Michel and the schoolroom of
Vroncourt—those years live for me still, though the Tomb is now a ruin
and those who people these pages died long ago.
16
Memoirs of Louise Michel
Deep down in the wellsprings of my life are the tales of old legends.
Today, I see those phantoms still: Corsican sorceresses, mermaids with
green eyes, medieval bandits, Jacques Bonhommes, red-haired Teutons,
tall, blue-eyed Gallic peasants. From Corsican bandit in his wild gorges
to judge of the High Court of Brittany, all of them are in love with the
unknown. All of them bequeath to their descendants, bastard or legiti¬
mate, the heritage of the bards.
My love lies in these atavistic legends. People are always taunting me
for never speaking of love. I have to go back to those hours when young
women are just learning to dream. From the pages of old books read in
the dawn of life many songs of love escape, and within those pages a
young woman can be in love with love as much as she wishes. I mean she
can look for an ideal person she could love if she were to meet him in
real life. Among the sons of Gaul, among the barbarians, she chooses the
bravest of the brave. She can look into the far past at men of the north,
the men of the Ghilde who fought for freedom and who used to pour
three cups of wine on the flagstones—one for the dead, another for their
ancestors, and a third for the brave. The Bagaudes, who died in their
flaming tower; the poets; the troubadors; the great leaders of robber
bands who stole from the rich bandit in the manor to give to the
miserable beggar in his thatched cottage—they are my loves.
I couldn’t be faithful to only one of those loves; there were too many
of them. From the devil to Mandrin, from Faust to Saint-Just, how many
phantoms made me dream when I was a child! I dreamed of the
Jacqueries and the peoples’ rebellions of the Middle Ages.
Many things float in children’s dreams. Some are red like blood and
some black like a night of mourning. Such were the banners of the rebels
who dwelt deep in my thoughts. The weddings of those who loved each
other were the red weddings of martyrs, and they signed their covenants
in blood.
I wasn’t the only young girl who loved stories of rebels. Often the
other girls of the village and I talked of the things which the old songs or
legends of the country spoke of. I remember part of one song:
He whom she loved,
Proud he was,
Helmet on head.
Hear the lark
That sings for him.
White she was;
Hands gathering
Mistletoe
From the dark oak,
And verbena
Deep in the woods.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
17
I created poems from these old legends. Even if there hadn’t been a
little atavism in my blood helping me to write poetry, no one could have
escaped being a poet in this country of Champagne and Lorraine, where
the very winds sang Germanic war chants and songs of love and
rebellion. Through the great snows of winter, past the sunken paths full
of hawthorn in the spring, pushing through the deep black woods of
enormous oaks and poplars with trunks like columns, you can still follow
the paved roads of the conquering Romans, and in many places see
where the unconquered, long-haired Gauls ripped up those paving
stones.
Everyone is a bit of a poet. Nanette and Josephine, those daughters of
the fields, were poets naturally. After many years and across many seas
in New Caledonia, one of their songs, “The Black Bird of the Fallow
Field,” came back to my mind during a cyclone. In my version of it you
can hear the same black chord which vibrates in the heart of nature, but
their version in dialect is sweeter and more mysterious. In theirs you can
smell the wild rosebush of the hedges, and at the same moment hear the
bird of the fallow field, who lets his melancholy notes trickle down like
someone telling his beads, and a deeper note like a tide grinding against
a reef.
In the patois of the Haute-Marne their song goes like this:
L’Age Na Deu Champ Fauve
1 .
Dans l’champ fanne c’etot
Un bel age chantot.
Teut na il etot
II fo y brachot.
Ka ki dijot l’age,
L’age deu champ fauve?
2 .
C’6tot pa les 6chos
Sous les abres du bos,
Li bise pleurut
Deven lu br&chot
Ce que dijot l’age
L’age deu champ fauv£?
My version, translated word for word [from the patois], is:
18
Memoirs of Louise Michel
The Black Bird of the Fallow Field
1 .
In the fallow field
A pretty bird sang.
Black, black it was,
And it sobbed strongly.
What was it saying,
The bird of the fallow field?
2 .
Through its echoes
From under the trees,
The north wind was crying,
Sobbing with the bird,
What the black bird was saying,
The bird of the fallow field.
How many memories I have. Is it irrelevant to put down all this
foolishness? Yesterday, I had trouble getting used to writing about
myself; today, searching the days that have disappeared, I can’t stop. I
see everything again.
I can see the round stones at the far end of the yard near the knoll and
the thicket of hazel trees close by. There, thousands of young toads
peacefully underwent their metamorphosis, if we didn’t kidnap them
and throw them against the legs of nasty people. Poor toads!
In the courtyard, behind the well, we children put bunches of twigs,
bundles that let us erect a scaffold with steps, a platform, two tall wooden
poles, everything. Then we depicted historical epochs and characters we
liked. We put the Terror of 1793 into dramatic form, and we climbed
one after the other up the steps of the scaffold, where we made ready for
our executions, crying out “Long live the Republic!” The public was
represented by my cousin Mathilde, and sometimes by chickens and
roosters gobbling and pecking and spreading their tails wide. We
searched history books for human cruelties. Our scaffold became the
stake of John Hus, or still further back in the past, the burning of the
rebel Bagaudes in their tower in the year 280.
One day, as we were climbing our scaffold singing, my grandfather
suggested to us that it would be better to climb the steps to the platform
in silence, and at the top to affirm the principle for which we were dying.
Afterwards, we modified our dramas to follow his advice.
Our play wasn’t always so serious. Sometimes we had mock hunts. Pigs
served as boars, and we lit brooms to serve as torches. We ran with the
dogs to the dreadful noise of shepherds’ horns, which we called the
Memoirs of Louise Michel
19
trumpets of the hunt. An old gamekeeper had taught us how to sound
something he called the “hallali.”
We observed all the rules of the art of venery in these disheveled
chases with our running dogs. They ended with our taking the pigs
home, whether they liked it or not, and several times the pigs fell in the
kitchen garden waterhole, where their fat supported them while they
made desperate “oufs” until someone pulled them out. Pulling them out
wasn’t easy. Men with ropes took charge of the operation, yelling at us.
They looked at me as if I were a runaway horse.
I have never met children who were, at the same time, as wild and as
serious, as naughty and as fearful of causing hurt, as lazy and as
industrious as my cousin Jules and me. Each year during vacation he
came to the Tomb with his mother, Agathe, whom I loved dearly and
who spoiled me very much.
The diversity of the questions that Jules and I discussed astonishes me
now. Sometimes we would stop to argue in the middle of a performance
of a drama by Victor Hugo, which we had arranged for two actors.
“They don’t respect anything,” people said. At other times we would
argue from the branches of apple trees, where we had chased our cats.
Why did we chat from one tree to another? I really don’t know. It was
pleasant up in the branches, and, too, we used to throw each other all the
apples we could reach, which gave Marie Verdet lots of good, fallen fruit
to pick up. Marie Verdet was the old, old woman who told me the story
of the Three Washerwomen; she always saw those things, and Jules and
I never did.
That we never saw the things she saw didn’t keep us from enjoying her
stories. Indeed, I enjoyed them so much that I fell in love with all that
was fantastic. Among haunted ruins I drew magical circles, and I
declared my love to Satan. Satan didn’t come, which led me to think he
didn’t exist.
One day, chatting from tree to tree with Jules, I told him of my
declaration of love to Satan and his failure to answer me. Jules confessed
to me that he had sent a declaration of love no less tender to the famous
woman of letters, George Sand, and she hadn’t answered any more than
the devil had.
After a performance of Hugo’s Burgraves or Hernani which we had
arranged for two actors, I gave Jules a lute, made like mine. In one
stormy discussion on the merits of the sexes, Jules maintained that if I
learned from the schoolbooks he had brought with him during the
vacation, and learned so that I was more or less on his level, it was only
because I was an anomaly. Our lutes served as projectiles, and broke our
discussion.
While still a child, I started writing a Universal History for inclusion in
the rows of redbound manuscript books my grandfather kept. I started
writing it because Bossuet’s History bored me and because Jules, one
20
Memoirs of Louise Michel
vacation, brought me the history he used in school. I documented the
main facts as well as I could, and went about my studying as if I were a
male.
A long time ago I recognized the superiority of the course of study in
boys’ preparatory schools to the education of girls in the provinces.
Some years after I studied my cousin’s textbook, I had the opportunity
to verify the difference in emphasis given the same subject between the
two courses of study—one for “the ladies” and the other for the “strong
sex”—and to examine the result of that difference.
I’m convinced that my first impressions were correct; adults give girls
a pile of nonsense supported by childlike logic, while at the same time
they make “our lords and masters” swallow little balls of science until
they choke. For both of us, it is a ridiculous education. A few hundred
years from now people will see it all as a heap of trash—even the
education of men.
The Universal History I started to write must have contained some
extraordinary mistakes. I consulted enough infallible books to assure
their presence. But after I had worked on it for a long time, someone
gave me several volumes of Voltaire, and I left my historical masterpiece
for a poem.
Then I deserted my poem for a mammoth’s tooth, of which even Big
Laumont spoke with enthusiasm. At the top of the north tower I set up a
small cell full of everything that looked like geological findings. I added
modern skeletons of dogs and cats, skulls of horses, crucibles, a stove,
and a tripod. The devil, if he exists, knows everything I tried there:
alchemy, astrology, the summoning of spirits. Every legend, from the
alchemist Nicholas Flamel to Faust, had a home in my tower.
Also in my tower I had a lute, a horrible instrument I made myself out
of a fir board and old guitar strings. I wrote verses that I addressed to
Victor Hugo, and in them I spoke pompously of my barbaric instru¬
ment. He never knew what this poet’s lute really looked like, this lyre
with which I sent him the sweetest greetings.
In my tower I also had a magnificent barn owl with phosphorescent
eyes, whom I called Olympe, and I had some darling bats who drank
milk like little cats. I stripped the grills out of the big winnowing basket
to make cages for them, because it was safer for them to be confined
during the day.
When I was twelve or thirteen I had two grown-up suitors. The
memory of those two ridiculous persons who followed each other like
geese and who asked my grandparents for my hand would have driven
me away from marriage even if I hadn’t already decided it was repulsive.
The first one, a true comic character, wished to “share his fortune”—he
made each word ring like a little bell—with a wife reared according to his
principles, that is to say, like Moliere’s Agnes.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
21
After all that I had read, it was too late to rear me this way. That
animal! He must have slept for a century or two, and when he woke up
he came to my grandparents to recite this nonsense.
My grandparents let me make up my own mind and answer for
myself. The very day that fool appeared my grandfather and I had just
been reading from an old edition of Moli£re. The suitor looked to me so
much like Agnes’s guardian in UEcole des femmes that I found a way to
slip into my answer a great part of the scene beginning, “The little cat is
dead,” when her guardian questions her about an unknown male visitor.
I gave him Agnes’s speech as an answer, word for word, and naturally he
didn’t understand. Then, driven to despair, I looked straight in his face,
and with the ingenuousness of Agnes, I said to him boldly, knowing he
had one glass eye, “Monsieur, is your other eye glass, too?” That seemed
to embarrass my relatives a little, and as for my suitor, he gave me a
venomous look from the eye that wasn’t glass, and made it clear he no
longer wanted to make me his fiancee.
At this time, I had been growing a lot, and my dress was very short. My
pinafore was torn, and in my pocket I had my net for catching toads. I
was only sorry that I hadn’t already caught a few so that I could slip them
into his pocket, but I didn’t need to. He never returned.
Moliere inspired me just as much when I dealt with the second of my
two suitors. I don’t think they knew each other, and yet they made a
good pair. So many persons seem to go in pairs or threesomes, like stars
that orbit around each other. They both had the idea of choosing a very
young fiancee and having her molded like soft wax for a few years
before offering her up to themselves as a sacrifice.
To my second suitor, I said, more or less: “You see plainly what’s
hanging on the wall over there.” It was a pair of stag antlers. “Well, I
don’t love you. I will never love you, and if I marry you I won’t restrain
myself any more than Mme Dandin did. If I marry you, you will wear
horns on your head a hundred thousand feet higher than those antlers.”
I suppose I convinced him I was telling him the truth, for he never
came back. My relatives advised me, however, to be a little more reserved
in quoting old authors in the future.
There have been unfortunate children who were forced to marry old
crocodiles like those. If it had been done to me, either he or I would have
had to jump out the window.
Not too long after that affair, my grandfather was returning from
Bourmont on the stagecoach. Seated next to him was a third maniac who
pointed out Vroncourt and the Tomb and said to him:
“You see that old rats’ nest.”
“Yes,” grandfather replied.
“An old fellow lives there who is raising his grandchildren for prison
and the scaffold.”
22
Memoirs of Louise Michel
“Oh, really?” said grandfather.
“Yes, monsieur. My friend X-recently proposed marrying one of
them, a little smart-aleck, in a few years, if her education were directed
as he wished.”
“Well?”
“The old fellow let her give her own answer. Whatever she wished.
She said such horrible things that my friend doesn’t even want to repeat
them. If I had a daughter like that, I’d put her in a reform school. And
her a little wench who doesn’t have a sou to her name. Hey, where are
you going?”
“I’m getting off at Vroncourt,” grandfather said. “I’m the old fellow
you’ve been discussing.”
So these were the days of my childhood. Now they are sketched out,
laid out on the table, the cadaver of my life. These days of former times
were so calm in events and so full of tormented dreams. Even then I
sensed my destiny. People do sense their destinies, as dogs sense a wolf,
and sometimes it comes true with a strange precision. If everybody told
of their prescient thoughts in minute detail, it would be like reading the
Tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
I must write things as they come to me. They are like pictures passing
from sight and going away endlessly into the shadows. Of my old
relatives, of my young and old friends, of my mother, nothing remains
today but the dreams of my childhood. I see those who disappeared
yesterday or a long time ago, just as they were, and I see all that
surrounded their lives, and the wound of their absence bleeds just as
much now as it did in the first few days. I have no real homesickness for
a country, but I am homesick for the dead. And the further along I get
in these memoirs, the more numerous are the images that press close to
me of those whom I shall never see again.
At the Tomb, near the hazel tree in a bastion of the wall, was a bench
where my mother and grandmother used to come during the summer
after the heat of the day. My mother, to make Grandmother happy, had
filled this corner of the garden with all kinds of rosebushes. While the
two women talked I leaned on the wall. The garden was cool in the dew
of the evening. The perfumes of all the flowers mingled and climbed up
to the sky. The honeysuckle, the reseda, the roses, all exhaled sweet
perfumes which joined each other. Bats flew gently in the twilight, and
their shadows soothed my thoughts. I used to recite the ballads that I
loved, without ever thinking that death was going to pass over us.
When these days of my dawning ended, so ended my songs that were
sad and dreamy. Death swooped down on the Tomb. The foyer was
empty and those old people who had reared me were laid to rest under
the pines in the cemetery.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
23
I inherited a small tract of land. I can only picture one piece of it now,
a small copse my mother planted on the hill near her little vineyard.
From the hill I could see the woods of Suzerin and the red roof of the
farm, the blue mountains of Bourmont, Vroncourt, the mill, and the
entire hill of wheat waving in the wind. In my mind I imagined that the
sea would look like that waving wheat, and I found out later I was right.
My mother took care of the copse during her long stay in the Haute-
Marne while I was an assistant schoolmistress in Paris.
There was so little time for living together. “Things have tears,” Virgil
wrote. I feel them when I think of the little woods and the vineyard
watered by Mother’s sweat. Years later, her own mother Marguerite
wanted to see the vineyard one last time before she died, and my uncle
carried here there in his arms.
During the Franco-Prussian War, Prussian soldiers went through like
victors. They cut down the woods and destroyed the vineyard. There
was a little hut in the middle, and I believe they burned it down while
making a fire to warm themselves out of the trees they cut down. When I
was sent to New Caledonia, people claimed payment for various debts I
had incurred during the Siege of Paris, and my mother had to sell the
land.
When my paternal grandparents died, I had to leave my calm retreat
in the Tomb. From this time until her own mother died, my mother
lived in Vroncourt near the cemetery. From there she could hear the
wind in the pines that shadowed the family’s cherished graves. I can still
see the tops of the pines, heavy with snow during the winter. Never have
I seen winters so long as in the Haute-Marne, and never have I felt such
cold, except in polar oceans.
Before I left the Tomb, I wrote a farewell verse and carved it in the
wall of the tower. The old ruins did not take good care of my farewell
very long, for not a stone of it remains today.
Farewell, my dreaming retreat in the manor.
Goodbye, my high and windy tower.
Only your old moss remains,
And I, a frail, storm-broken branch,
Shall follow the currents on.
Your swallows will circle without me
And sing summer days on the rooftop,
While I drift on, an outcast.
Won’t your turret be missing its mistress
When my voice is no longer its echo?
Chapter 4
The Making of a Revolutionary
Above everything else I am taken by the Revolution. It had to be that
way. The wind that blew through the ruin where I was born, the old
people who brought me up, the solitude and freedom of my childhood,
the legends of the Haute-Marne, the scraps of knowledge gleaned from
here and there—all that opened my ear to every harmony, my spirit to
every illumination, my heart to both love and hate. Everything intermin¬
gled in a single song, a single dream, a single love: the Revolution.
As far back as I can remember, the origin of my revolt against the
powerful was my horror at the tortures inflicted on animals. I used to
wish animals could get revenge, that the dog could bite the man who was
mercilessly beating him, that the horse bleeding under the whip could
throw off the man tormenting him. But mute animals always submit to
their fate.
In the Haute-Marne, the brooks and the lush fields shaded with
willows are filled with frogs during summer. You can hear them in the
beautiful evenings, sometimes an entire choir.
The peasants cut frogs in two, leaving the front part to creep along in
the sun, eyes horribly popping out, front legs trembling as they try to
flee under the ground. Able neither to live nor to die, the poor beasts try
to bury themselves beneath the dust or mud. In the bright sunlight their
soft, enormous eyes shine with reproach.
And geese being fattened: The peasants nail a goose’s webbed feet to
the floor to keep it from moving around. Or horses, which men gore
with bulls’ horns. Animals always submit, and the more ferocious a man
is toward animals, the more that man cringes before the people who
dominate him.
The peasants give little animals and birds to their children for play¬
things. In spring on the thresholds of peasants’ cottages you can see poor
little birds opening their beaks to two or three-year-old urchins who
stuff them innocently with dirt. They hold up fledglings by a foot to
watch them flap little featherless wings trying to fly, or they drag puppies
or kittens like wagons over stones and through brooks. When the beast
bites the child, the father crushes it under his shoe.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
25
When I was a child I saved many an animal. They filled up the
crumbling Tomb, but it didn’t matter if I added another to the menag¬
erie. At first I traded things with other children to get the nests of
nightingales or linnets, but then the children came to understand that I
raised the little creatures. Children are less cruel than people think;
people just don’t bother to make them understand.
And then there are dogs and cats that have grown too old: I have seen
them thrown live into crayfish holes. If the woman who was throwing the
beasts in had fallen into the hole herself, I wouldn’t have reached out my
hand to pull her out.
All of this happens without anyone really thinking about it. Labor
crushes the parents; their fate grips them the way their child grips an
animal. All around the globe people moan at the machine they are
caught in, and everywhere the strong overwhelm the weak.
The dominant idea of an entire life can come from some random
impression. When I was very small, I saw a decapitated goose. I was very
little, I know, because I remember Nanette holding me by the hand to
cross the hall. The goose was walking about stiffly, and where its head
had been its neck was a bruised and bloody wound. It was a white goose
with its feathers spattered with blood, and it walked like a drunkard
while its head, thrown into a corner, lay on the floor with its eyes closed.
The sight of the headless goose had many consequences. One result
was that the sight of meat thereafter nauseated me until I was eight or
ten, and I needed a strong will and my grandmother’s arguments to
overcome that nausea. The impression of the headless goose lies at the
base of my pity for animals, and it also lies at the base of my horror at the
death penalty. Some years after I saw the headless goose, a parricide was
guillotined in a neighboring village, and at the time he was to die, the
sensation of horror I felt for the man’s anguish was mixed with my
remembrance of the goose’s torment.
The impression I had gotten from seeing the decapitated goose was
kept vivid by stories of sufferings I heard at tcrdgnes. During the long
winter evenings of the Haute-Marne, the women of each village met in a
special house set aside for them known as the ecrdgne. In their sessions,
also called ecregnes, they would spin and knit and tell old stories like those
about the Ghost-in-Flames, who dances through the fields in his fiery
robe, and gossip about what was going on in various peoples’ homes.
I liked to hear those stories told against the whir of spinning wheels at
the ecregne on evenings when Nanette and I received permission to go
there. The clack of knitting needles cut through the drone with a little
dry noise. And outside, the snow, the great white snow falling, stretched
out over the ground like a shroud. We were supposed to return home at
ten o’clock, but we always stayed late. It was a beautiful time. Old Marie
26
Memoirs of Louise Michel
Verdet rested her knitting on her knees, and her eyes grew wide under
her headdress, which came forward over her face like a roof. In her
broken voice she told story after story about apparitions: about the
Ghost-in-Flames, the Three Washerwomen, and the Valley of the Sor¬
cerers. Her sister Franchette had seen it all, too, and she nodded her
head approvingly. When Nanette and I had to leave, we left regretfully,
skirting the walls of the cemetery, where we always saw, alas, only the
snow and heard only the north wind of winter.
My evenings at the village tcregnes added to the feeling of revolt that I
have felt time and time again. The peasants sow and harvest the grain,
but they do not always have bread. One woman told me how during a
bad year—that is what they call a year when the monopolists starve the
country—neither she, nor her husband, nor their four children were
able to eat every day. Owning only the clothes on their backs, they had
nothing more to sell. Merchants who had grain gave them no more
credit, not even a few oats to make a little bread, and two of their
children died—from hunger, they thought.
“You have to submit,” she said to me. “Everybody can’t eat bread every
day.”
Her husband had wanted to kill the man who had refused them credit
at 100 percent interest while their children were dying, but she stopped
him. The two children who managed to survive went to work ultimately
for the man whom her husband wanted to kill. The usurer hardly gave
them any wages, but poor people, she said, “should submit to that which
they cannot prevent.”
Her manner was calm when she told me that story. I had gone
hot-eyed with rage, and I said to her, “You should have let your husband
do what he wanted to do. He was right.”
I could imagine the poor little ones dying of hunger. She had made
that picture of misery so distressing that I could feel it myself. I saw the
husband in his torn shirt, his wooden shoes chafing his bare feet, going
to beg at the evil usurer’s and returning sadly over the frozen roads with
nothing. I saw him shaking his fists threateningly when his little ones
were lying dead on a handful of straw. I saw his wife stopping him from
avenging his own children and others. I saw the two surviving children
growing up with this memory, and then going off to work for that man:
the cowards.
I thought that if that usurer had come into the ecregne at that moment
I would have leaped at his throat to bite it, and I told her that. I was
indignant at her believing everybody couldn’t have food every day. Such
stupidity bewildered me.
“You mustn’t talk like that, little one,” the woman said. “It makes God
cry.”
Memoirs of Louise Michel
27
Have you ever seen sheep lift their throats to the knife? That woman
had the mind of a ewe.
I was thinking about that little story one day at catechism, and it
caused me to argue energetically for the opposite of the old proverb,
Charity begins at home. The old cure (a real believer, that one) had
placed a book, bound like the encyclopedia I had stolen from Big
Laumont, near his hand. I confess that from the instant the cure put it
down I was preoccupied by what could be inside its brown leather
covers. It couldn’t be a child’s book. I was afraid the old cure would
notice my preoccupation, and when he called on me, I was fearful of
being punished, but he was calling on me only to give me the book.
It contained meditations on the Psalms of Exile, and was all I needed
to give me a horror of conquerors to add to my horror of other human
vampires. Reading the book, I cursed those who crush peoples as much
as I cursed those who starve them, never suspecting how many times
later I would see that very crime in high places.
Meanwhile, the family property was bringing in so little that neither
we nor my uncle, who cultivated half of it, was succeeding in making
ends meet. Many similar years would follow, I felt. People couldn’t
always help others, and indeed something more than charity was neces¬
sary if each person was always to have something to eat. As for the rich, I
had little respect for them.
I know the full reality of heavy work on the land. I know the woes of
the peasant. He is incessantly bent over land that is as harsh as a
stepmother. For his labor all he gets is leftovers from his master, and he
can get even less comfort from thought and dreams than we can. Heavy
work bends both men and oxen over the furrows, keeping the slaughter¬
house for worn-out beasts and the beggar’s sack for worn-out humans.
The land. That word is at the very bottom of my life. It was in the
thick, illustrated Roman history from which my whole family on both
sides had learned how to read. My grandmother had taught me to read
from it, pointing out the letters with her large knitting needle. Reared in
the country, I understood the agrarian revolts of old Rome, and I shed
many tears on the pages of that book. The death of the Greeks op¬
pressed me then as much as the gallows of Russia did later.
How misleading are the Georgies and Eclogues about the happiness of
the fields. The descriptions of nature are true, but the description of the
happiness of workers in the fields is a lie. People who know no better
gaze at the flowers of the fields and the beautiful fresh grass and believe
that the children who watch over the livestock play there. The little ones
want grass only to stretch out in and sleep a little at noon. The shadow of
the woods, the yellowing crops that the wind moves like waves—the
peasant is too tired to find them beautiful. His work is heavy, his day is
28
Memoirs of Louise Michel
long, but he resigns himself, he always resigns himself, for his will is
broken. Man is overworked like a beast. He is half dead and works for
his exploiter without thinking. No peasants get rich by working the land;
they only make money for people who already have too much.
Many men have told me, in words that echoed what the woman told
me at the ecregne: ’’You must not say that, little one. It offends God.”
That’s what they said to me when I told them that everyone has a right to
everything there is on earth.
My pity for everything that suffers—more perhaps for the silent beast
than for man—went far, and my revolt against social inequalities went
still further. It grew, and it has continued to grow, through the battles
and across the carnage. It dominates my grief, and it dominates my life.
There was no way that I could have stopped myself from throwing my
life to the Revolution.
I have often been accused of having more solicitude for animals than
for people. It is certainly true that a sadness takes hold of me when men
must destroy a beast to whom mercy cannot be shown without endanger¬
ing others. You hold in your hands a being that wishes to live.
Once, near where I lived, on the hill down which vineyards sloped,
men had surrounded a poor she-wolf that howled as she tried to hide
her little ones within her paws. I begged mercy for her, but naturally it
wasn’t granted.
The mercy that as a child I asked for the wolf, I wouldn’t ask now for
the men who behave worse than wolves toward the human race. What¬
ever the pity that wrings the heart, harmful beings must disappear. At
the death of those who, like the Russian czars, represent the slavery and
death of a nation, I would now have no more emotion than I would have
about removing a dangerous trap from the road. Such persons can be
struck down without remorse. If the opportunity arose, I would always
feel that way, as I did yesterday, as I will tomorrow.
I was accused of allowing my concern for animals to outweigh the
problems of humans at the Perronnet barricade at Neuilly during the
Commune, when I ran to help a cat in peril. I did that, yes, but I did not
abandon my duty. The unfortunate beast was crouched in a corner that
was being scoured by shells, and it was crying out like a human being. I
went to find him, and it didn’t take a minute. I put him more or less in
safety, and later someone even picked him up.
Another incident happened more recently. Some mice had appeared
in my cell at Clermont. I had a pile of wool coverings my mother and
friends had sent me, and I immediately used them to stuff up all the
mouseholes. From behind one of my makeshift plugs during the night,
however, I heard a poor little cry, a cry so plaintive that it would have
taken a heart of stone not to open up the blocked hole. So I did, and the
beast came out.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
29
The mouse was either imprudent or a genius in knowing how to judge
her world. From that moment on she came boldly up on my bed,
carrying morsels of bread. She made fun of the gestures I made to get
her to leave, and she used the underside of my pillow as a pantry and
even worse.
She wasn’t in my cell when I was taken away, so I wasn’t able to put her
in my pocket. I asked my neighbors in nearby cells to care for her, but I
don’t know what happened to the poor beast.
Why should I be so sad over brutes, when reasoning beings are so
unhappy? The answer is that everything fits together, from the bird
whose brood is crushed to the humans whose nests are destroyed by war.
The beast dies of hunger in his hole; man dies of it far away from his
home. A beast’s heart is like a human heart, its brain like a human brain.
It feels and understands. The heat and spark will always rise up. It can’t
be crushed out.
Even in a gutter like a laboratory, a beast is sensitive both to caresses
and to brutalities. More often it feels brutalities. People find it interest¬
ing to torture a poor animal to study mechanisms which are already well
known and which fresh tortures cannot make known any better, because
the pain being inflicted causes the animal’s organs to function abnor¬
mally. When one of its sides is dug into, someone turns it over to dig into
the other. Sometimes, in spite of the bonds that immobilize it, the animal
in its pain moves the delicate flesh on which someone is working. Then a
threat or a blow teaches it that man is the king of animals. I have heard
that during an eloquent demonstration a professor stuck his scalpel into
the living animal as he would have into a pincushion, because he couldn’t
gesture holding the scalpel in his hand. The animal was already being
sacrificed, so additional pain made little difference. At Alfort, people
did sixty-some operations on the same horse, operations that did no
good, but made the beast suffer as it stood there trembling on its bloody
hooves with their torn-off shoes.
All this useless suffering perpetrated in the name of science must end.
It is as barren as the blood of the little children whose throats were cut by
Gilles de Retz and other madmen at the beginning of modern chemistry.
Ultimately, a science, not gold, came out of their crucibles and their
search for the philosopher’s stone, but science came from the nature of
the elements and not from the cruelties of experimenters.
New wonders will come from science, and change must come. Time
raises up volcanoes under old continents, and time allows new feelings to
grow. Soon there will be neither cruelty nor exploitation, and science will
provide all humanity with enough food, with nourishing food.
I dream of the time when science will give everyone enough to eat.
Instead of the putrefied flesh which we are accustomed to eating,
perhaps science will give us chemical mixtures containing more iron and
30
Memoirs of Louise Michel
nutrients than the blood and meat we now absorb. The first bite might
not flatter the palate as much as the food we now eat, but it will not be
trichinated or rotten, and it will build stronger and purer bodies for men
weakened by generations of famine or the excesses of their ancestors.
With the abundance of nourishing food in that future world, there
must be art, too. In that coming era, the arts will be for everyone. The
power of harmonious colors, the grandeur of sculpted marble—they will
belong to the entire human race. Genius will be developed, not snuffed
out. Ignorance has done enough harm. The privilege of knowledge is
worse than the privilege of wealth. The arts are a part of human rights,
and everybody needs them.
Neither music, nor marble, nor color, can by itself proclaim the
Marseillaise of the new world. Who will sing out the Marseillaise of art?
Who will tell of the thirst for knowledge, of the ecstasy of musical
harmonies, of marble made flesh, of canvas palpitating like life? Art, like
science and liberty, must be no less available than food.
Everyone must take up a torch to let the coming era walk in light. Art
for all! Science for all! Bread for all!
Chapter 5
Schoolmistress in the
Haute-Marne
When my grandparents died and I had to leave the Tomb, I began to
prepare for my examinations as a schoolmistress because I wanted to
make my mother happy. There was little money, but the arrangements
for my legal protection were complex. My mother served as one guard¬
ian and M. Voisin, a former magistrate, was another, just as if they were
administering a fortune. The attorney, Maitre Girault, notary at Bour-
mont, served as surrogate of the court. People said that all this wasn’t
enough to keep me from immediately wasting the eight or ten thousand
francs in land that I had inherited.
For the moment, however, I devoted myself to my education. Except
for three months at Lagny in 1851, my whole higher education came
from the teacher-training course under Mmes Beths and Royer at
Chaumont.
I see Chaumont now as it was then. I see the Boulingrin, the street of
Choignes with its sinister memories, for that was where the executioner
lived. I see the viaduct crossing the whole valley of the Ecoliers. Most of
all, I see Sucot’s bookstore, where first as a student and then as a
schoolmistress I always had debts. I see the large curly head of M. Sucot
looking out of the window in which he displayed his fanciest stationery,
newest books, and latest musical scores from Paris. As a child I had been
dazzled when I looked at the bookstore in Bourmont, and certain
displays of books still affect me.
I see Chaumont, and the old boarding house where I lodged, and my
teachers, and my friends, with whom I played practical jokes on nasty
people. With Clara, one of my friends, I remember causing a great
commotion at the homes of people who were bullying republicans. On
the doors of their houses, we made a mark—a mysterious mark, they
said—with red chalk. Some people saw the mark as an egalitarian
triangle (a little elongated); others saw an unknown instrument of
torture; those who were disinterested in the affair saw a big donkey’s
ear. The last were right.
The three months at Lagny came when my mother and I visited
relatives in the area. We stayed with my uncle, who was disturbed by my
constant writing, for he feared I would desert the teacher’s examination
to write poetry. To forestall this, he put me in Mme Duval’s private
32
Memoirs of Louise Michel
boarding school at Lagny, where his own daughter had been educated,
and I stayed there about three months.
At Mme Duval’s, as at my school in Chaumont, everybody lived for
books. The outside world stopped at the threshold, and I concentrated
all my enthusiasm on the crumbs and bits of science I was reading about.
The lack of time! You learn just enough to make you thirsty for the
rest, and there is never time for the rest. Before 1871 that was the
torture of every schoolmistress’s life. Before getting her diploma she was
faced with a program of study that kept growing boundlessly, and after
getting her diploma she saw that she knew nothing. To be sure, that
predicament was nothing new, and it was shared. All of us schoolmis¬
tresses were in the same position. The living springs where you could
quench your thirst for knowledge were not for those who had to fight
for existence.
At my boarding house at Chaumont I met my friend Julie. Sometimes
the destinies of different persons intertwine for a time and then take
opposite courses. Julie and I were both schoolmistresses, first in the
Haute-Marne and then in Paris, where we stayed together while we were
assistant schoolmistresses at Mme Vollier’s.
In Paris Julie kept busy at her studies, and the hatred I felt for
Napoleon’s Empire left her cold. It was music and poetry that swept her
away. Then the great events of 1870-71 came and Julie remained a
stranger to them. Our paths diverged completely. But before those
events, during our vacation, we had gone into the deep woods, and
under the oak tree traditional for such oaths we had sworn eternal
friendship for each other. Neither of us really broke that oath. Events
pulled us apart.
When I took my diploma at the end of 1852, I would have liked to
have taught in Paris and worked as a schoolmistress while I continued
my studies. Many people did just that. But at the time I did not want to
be separated from my mother, and I taught in the Haute-Marne so I
could live near her and my grandmother Marguerite. That is why I
began my career, in January 1853, as a schoolmistress at Audeloncourt.
The road from Chaumont to Audeloncourt is long. It turns and
spirals around Mont Chauve, comes down the slopes by the easiest
descents possible, and then shoots forward, straightening out its bends
through villages whose houses still have thatched roofs. Then the road
comes to the Sueur Woods, where, under the low branches of twisted
apple trees, sits the collapsed ruin of a little inn. The old people of the
area claim that the throats of travelers used to be slit in that inn. Only a
little over a century ago those who entered that inn rarely left it.
Travelers got on and off the coach that stopped at each relay station
from Chaumont to Audeloncourt. Some were dressed in ordinary blue
work shirts with cherrywood snuff boxes in their pockets, and they
Memoirs of Louise Michel
33
carried sticks hanging from their wrists by little leather straps. Others
were dressed in their very best, clothes worn so rarely that folds from the
cupboards where they had been packed were traced on them as if a
pressing iron had done it.
Part of my maternal family lived in Audeloncourt. My maternal
great-uncles—Simon, Michel, and Francis, who was called Uncle Franc-
fort—lived there. They were tall, handsome old men, with strong
shoulders, powerful judgments, and simple hearts. They all had red hair
with no silver threads in it, even as old as they were when I began
teaching. They had quick minds and, like my mother’s brothers, they
had somehow learned a great mass of information and spoke well.
Many years ago some ancestor had bought an entire library by the
kilogram. There were old texts illustrated with Homer calling down the
clouds on his characters; old chronicles from which legends flew so
strongly that my great-uncles had adopted some of them; volumes of
out-of-date science; novels of by-gone days—all published under the
king’s censorship. I heard all of those books spoken of so enthusiastically
that I deeply regretted the pages that were missing from some books,
and the other books that had been lost completely.
The women of Audeloncourt used to read my great-uncles’ novels in
their late-night ecregnes. The reader of the evening would lick her thumb
to turn the pages while her gentle eyes dropped tears over the misfor¬
tunes of the heroes. Some people read aloud so well that they charmed
their listeners, and the ecregne lasted until midnight. Then, still trem¬
bling from the emotional impact of the story, some of the women would
walk the others back to their homes. The snow spread over everything.
The hoarfrost, like flowers in May, covered the branches. The last
women, the ones who lived farthest away, ran through the snow to their
houses while their friends yelled after them to reassure them.
Perhaps my uncles’ library also gave my maternal family the habit of
studying alone, for none of them was rich enough to afford any formal
education. My mother’s brother, Uncle Georges, had an astounding
historical erudition. Uncle Michael had a passion for mechanical things,
which I abused when I was a child, making him descend to the construc¬
tion of a little chariot and a thousand other devices.
I loved my mother’s brothers a great deal, and I imprudently called
them Georges and Fanfan until one day when my grandmother told me
it was bad to treat one’s elders with so little respect. I had a third uncle
who died in Africa many years ago. He had been in military service and
either from that experience or from books had gotten a taste for travel.
He also had a sound appreciation of many things—above all, discipline,
which provided him with many reflections that he didn’t think I was
capable of understanding. Anarchy, I believe, germinates in the heart of
all discipline.
34
Memoirs of Louise Michel
My school in Audeloncourt, which I opened in January 1853, was
classed as a Free School, because for it to become a communal school I
would have had to have taken an oath to support the Empire. I was
optimistic; I even nourished the illusion of making a happy future for
my mother. But a month’s charge for a student could only be one franc,
which was a relatively large sum for farm-workers. Because I wasn’t old
enough to meet the age requirement for keeping boarders, I was obliged
to put my students from other villages into the homes of my Audelon¬
court pupils. Still, in spite of accusations some idiots made about that
and about my political opinions, my class went very well because I taught
with passion. I had the zeal of the very young.
When we were in my classroom at Audeloncourt we could hear the
incessant noise of water. During the summer a brook flowed downhill
murmuring to the listener. In the winter, the brook became a furious
torrent. Who listens to it now? Who listens from the dark school where I
was surrounded by attentive students? Students are always attentive in
the villages, where no harsh distractions come from outside.
I can still call all my students by name, from Little Rose, whom we
called Little Mole because of her lustrous black hair, to Big Rose, who is a
schoolmistress herself now. Claire also became a schoolmistress. Eudoxie
died in my arms during an epidemic. There was Tall Estelle who looked
like a vivacious shepherdess of Floridan, and poor Aricie, thin, lame,
weak, who could absorb a whole textbook in a few days. And Z6lie, the
sister of the public courier of Clefmont, I loved doubly because of her
vivid imagination and because she had the same name as a friend of
mine at Vroncourt, whom I mourned for a long time. The public courier
and his sister were orphans. He was the eldest of the family, and
although he was very young, he filled the place of their dead parents and
had wanted his sister to attend my school. In my trips between Audelon¬
court and Chaumont, he and I used to talk of all sorts of things, the way
people do who read a great deal.
In my class at Audeloncourt, we sang the Marseillaise before the
morning’s study began and after study ended in the evening. The stanza
especially for children:
We’ll take over this course
When our elders are no longer here
was sung kneeling; one of the youngest, the little brunette Rose, sang it
solo. When we picked up the chorus again, the children and I often had
tears flooding from our eyes.
I found that same feeling again at Noumea during the last year of my
exile in New Caledonia. It was July 14, Bastille Day. At this period I was
in charge of teaching drawing and singing in the girls’ schools in the city.
M. Simon, who was the interim mayor, wanted the children to stand in
Memoirs of Louise Michel
35
the open bandstand in the Place des Cocotiers and sing the Marseillaise
between the two customary evening cannon shots. Night had fallen
suddenly. In tropical areas like New Caledonia there is neither dusk nor
dawn. The palm trees were rustling gently, swayed by the evening
breeze. The lanterns lit the bandstand a little, but left the square in
shadow. We felt the pressure of the crowd—a black and white crowd. In
front of the bandstand was the military band. Mme Penand, the first lay
schoolmistress who had come to the colony, was standing near me, as was
an artilleryman who was going to sing with us. Arranged in a circle the
children surrounded us.
After the first cannon shot such a silence fell that our hearts stopped
beating. I felt our voices soaring into this silence, and it seemed as if we
were being carried off on wings. The penetrating voices of the children’s
choir and the thunder of the brass instruments between the stanzas
thrilled us beyond belief. That song had led our fathers; it was the living
Marseillaise and we loved it.
Upon my return from New Caledonia, I found the sacred hymn was
being used in all sorts of public spectacles. It had not really recovered
from the mire through which the last days of the Empire had dragged it,
and wounded once again, the Marseillaise was dead for us.
At Audeloncourt on Sundays, small black wooden shoes clicked hur¬
riedly toward the door of the church, in order to get out by the time the
priest intoned “Domine, salvum fac Napoleonem.” I had told the chil¬
dren that it was sacrilegious to take part in a prayer for that man. The
little black wooden shoes ran hurriedly out of the church, making a
gentle, dry noise like hail, the same little dry noise that the bullets made
on 22 January 1871, raining down from the windows of the Hdtel de
Ville upon the unarmed crowd. Later, I heard the sound of wooden
shoes again. Those were on the tired feet of the women prisoners at
Auberive, and they clumped sadly as the woman shuffled around the
prison.
In those years when I was teaching in the Haute-Marne, I often
thought of going to Paris. Paris, of which I had only an imperfect notion
and of which I had only glimpsed the marvels that people spoke about,
attracted me. Only there could people fight the Empire, and Paris called
so strongly that a person could feel its magnetism.
The self-proclaimed defenders of law and order around Audelon¬
court who deigned to bother about me at all, called me a “red,” meaning
a republican, and they accused me of wanting to go to Paris. I still don’t
see why my wanting to go there should have upset them. If my opinions
bothered them so much, they should have been happy to see me go.
Those denunciations did trouble my mother. They also got me a good
trip to Chaumont, the capital of the Haute-Marne. The business there
was supposed to occupy me for two days, but it ended as soon as I
36
Memoirs of Louise Michel
arrived. I went to the home of the rector of the departmental academy,
M. Fayet, and there I sat on his hearth as I used to sit talking to my
grandparents at the Tomb. I explained my actions in the light of the
accusations made against me. I said people claimed that I wanted to go
to Paris and that I was a republican. Both claims, I admitted, were
perfectly true. In speaking of my studies, of the passion that called me to
Paris, and of the Republic, I opened my heart.
The rector looked at me in silence a long time before answering. His
wife, who took my side, smiled, while their pet doves flew around the
room, which was full of sunlight and smelled like spring and like
morning the entire day. The rector ended the interview by chiding me
gently.
I drove back from Chaumont with the public courier, who was the
brother of my student Zelie. Never did we have a more serious conversa¬
tion than we had on that drive. In my pocket I had a piece of red chalk
similar to that with which Clara and I had drawn donkeys’ ears on the
doors of Bonapartists in Chaumont. On the trip I used it to make the
same drawing on the back of a traveler who was trying to praise
Bonaparte. I also made him tremble when I said: “The Republic must
come. We are many, and we are strong.”
Another time, the accusations against me were of a different nature.
From Audeloncourt I sent verses to Victor Hugo. My mother and I had
seen him in the summer of 1851. Later, he answered the letters I wrote
to him from my exile, as he had sent letters from Paris to my nest in
Vroncourt and to my boarding house at Chaumont. I also sent a few
articles to the Chaumont newspaper. I still have a few fragments of those
articles, which are less fragile than the cherished hands that saved them
for me. One of my articles contained a passage that got me accused of
insulting His Majesty, the Emperor. That accusation was correct, of
course, and could have been made on the basis of other pieces I wrote at
the time.
The article was a history of the martyrs and began:
Domitian was ruling. He had banished . . . philosophers and scholars
from Rome, increased the salary of the praetorians, reestablished the
Capitoline games, and everybody therefore adored the merciful emperor
while they waited for others to stab him. . . .
We are in Rome in the year 97 A.D.
The prefect summoned me to his office. There he told me I had
insulted His Majesty, the Emperor, by comparing him to Domitian and
that if I were not so young he would have the right to send me to the
prison colony at Cayenne.
I answered that anyone who saw M. Bonaparte in the portrait I had
painted insulted him just as much as I was accused of doing, but that it
was indeed M. Bonaparte that I had in mind. I added that, as for
Memoirs of Louise Michel
37
Cayenne, I would be perfectly happy to set up an educational establish¬
ment there, and since I could not afford to pay for the expense of the
trip myself, it would be very nice if the state sent me there. Things went
no further.
Some time after this interview a credulous man wanted to ask the
prefect for some favor; what, I’m not sure. He came to me saying that
since I had been at the prefect’s, I could recommend him there. In vain I
tried to tell him I had been called to the prefecture only to be accused
and threatened with Cayenne, and that my recommendation would be
worth very little. The good man wouldn’t give up, so in the end I wrote
him a letter of recommendation that read, more or less:
Monsieur le prefet,
The person to whom you were kind enough to promise a trip to
Cayenne is being tormented to give a letter of recommendation to you.
I have not been able to make this man understand that this would be the
way to have him kicked out of your office. He is as stubborn as a donkey.
Let him not learn to his sorrow that I was correct in my reluctance to
write a letter for him.
I beg you, dear sir, not to forget the trip you spoke to me about.
After he had made his expedition to Chaumont, the man came up to
me. I confess I was already laughing at the tale of woe he was going to
tell me, when to my great surprise he said: “I knew it. You’re lucky for
me. I got what I requested.” He, not I, was lucky.
My dear friend Julie taught nearby at Millteres, and two institutions
with no resources were barely able to subsist near each other. The
obvious thing was for us to get together, which we did at Milli£res. Julie
and I used to sing together in the spring evenings with a piano serving as
an organ. At that time she had a voice like the forest nightingales.
But always I dreamed of Paris. Throughout these years in the Haute-
Marne, Paris called me ever more strongly, for in Paris I would be at the
heart of affairs. In 1855 or 1856 I finally decided that there was no
alternative to my going there.
Chapter 6
Schoolmistress in Paris
When I left the Haute-Marne to become a schoolmistress in Paris, I had
to leave my mother and grandmother behind. Being separated from
them made me suffer deeply, but I hadn’t yet given up the hope of
making a happy future for them, and I held tightly to that illusion.
I became a teacher in Mme Vollier’s school at 14, rue du Chciteau-
d’Eau in Montmartre. From the time I went to Paris until Mme Vollier
died in my own school four years before the Siege, we never left each
other. Her portrait is among my most precious souvenirs that my
mother preserved carefully for me—half-faded portraits, worm-eaten
books, bunches of yew and pine, and withered red carnations and white
lilies. Today those souvenirs also include the white roses with drops of
blood on the petals which I sent my mother from Clermont.
I see the pupils at the rue du Chateau-d’Eau again in groups. There
were the seniors, two or three of whom were very tall—Leonie, Aline,
L£opoldine. There were the blondes, two of whom had wide foreheads
and steel-blue eyes—H61oise and Gabrielle. There was a group of pale
children: Josephine, little Noel, Marie. And others so brown they were
black: Elisa, who had the sharp features of someone from the Midi; little
Julie, whose voice was loud even though it wasn’t beautiful yet; Elisa,
who played her little piece in a prize competition at a younger age than
even Mozart had done. And so many more. What has become of them?
Julie joined me as a teacher at the school, and Mme Vollier was as
affectionate as a mother. She even found ways to dress Julie and me
stylishly. I remember hats made of white crepe with bouquets of daisies,
a dress of black silk, and mantelets of lace. Pawn shops and secondhand
stores helped, and we were fitted out for much less money than people
would have believed.
While Julie and I were at Mme Vollier’s we always dressed alike and
because both of us were tall and brunette, people used to think we were
sisters. In 1871, when the police took down detailed information about
me, I had to explain that misconception.
At this time, two of my cousins were also assistant schoolmistresses,
one in the Puteaux suburb of Paris, the other at La Chapelle. We all had
about the same income, the little that teaching earned in this period.
That lack of money didn’t depress us, for we realized that this poor
income would continue under the regime of His Majesty Napoleon III
Memoirs of Louise Michel
39
as it had under his predecessors. There is no profession in which people
have less money, and no trade in which people know so well how to do
without it. Some women of letters among our friends suffered far more.
We were all a little bohemian, even Mme Vollier. As much as any woman
who lives on her wages, and in spite of her age, she knew how to laugh at
the situation.
We used to joke about our troubles when we gathered every Thursday
evening and drank cups of steaming coffee. I kept from telling my
mother that I had great difficulty making my income equal my expendi¬
tures, however restrained they were.
Recognizing that we wouldn’t earn anything from teaching, but not
wishing to publicize that fact, Mme Vollier, Julie, and I drew up a formal
partnership. I was able to send my mother the act of partnership,
executed in good and proper form, which stopped people from saying
things to her like: “Your daughter will never earn anything”; or, “She
spends everything and you shouldn’t send her any more”; or, “A cook
earns ten times more than your daughter does.” We knew quite well that
teaching paid almost nothing, but any other trade open to women
offered less fulfillment when money wasn’t the only objective. Are
women’s professions any better today? Men’s aren’t.
My own dear mother found a way to send me a little money occasion¬
ally, which unhappily for my wardrobe I spent on books and music.
Because of the act of partnership, she was entirely at ease about my
financial position. The lamentations that imbeciles made about how
wrong she had been in not forcing me to marry had ceased.
I continued to reject all thought of marriage. There are enough
tortured women in the world without my becoming another one. True, I
can think like this since those people who asked to marry me, although
they are as dear to me as brothers, would be equally impossible as
husbands. Why I feel this I truthfully don’t know. Like all women, I set
my sights very high, and I believed in remaining free for the coming
Revolution. Anyway, I have always looked upon marriage without love
as a kind of prostitution.
After the partnership there was nothing those who had been taunting
my mother could say. I was a partner in a day school in Paris, even if it
was less grand than they assumed. None of us was lazy, but educational
establishments crowded the neighborhood, and our rent was very high.
In the evening after classes we gave lessons to supplement our income.
Even Mme Vollier, although she was very old, gave some. And to a lesser
degree she told her sons the same lies I had told my mother.
“If your daughter earns so much money,” people asked my mother,
“why doesn’t she ever send you any presents?” Moreover, I hadn’t been
able to go see her during our vacation. We had only a week’s vacation a
year in our day schools, because otherwise we would have lost our
students. Parents who had to look after their children only when they
40
Memoirs of Louise Michel
weren’t in class couldn’t or wouldn’t take complete charge of them for a
vacation of more than eight or ten days each year. Then, too, because we
were giving private lessons, we couldn’t get away for long. Besides, how
could we have made enough money to pay the terrible rent if there had
been no income for a month?
My mother came to Paris to see the situation for herself. A warm
friendship sprang up between her and Mme Vollier, who resembled my
grandmother. The two of them used to say bad things about me, but
what a good two weeks we spent during my mother’s first visit, with one
exception.
It was the evening of my mother’s arrival, and the three of us were
dining together. I was so happy that it seemed inevitable that this
happiness would be disturbed. I was right. A great lout of a man with
shifty eyes came to the door unexpectedly and demanded payment for a
promissory note I had completely forgotten about. He came just at the
moment when I was speaking warmly to my mother—not to deceive her
but to reassure her—about a resolution I had made not to spend
everything I had for books. The obvious silence of Mme Vollier while I
was saying this didn’t presage anything good, and the intrusion of that
jackass showed in the most absolute possible way that I was lying. Mme
Vollier, then, to put my mother at ease, took part of the rent money that
her sons had just finished getting together and gave it to the man. It was
just enough to pay off the note. My mother sent me the sum when she
returned to Vroncourt, and she gently drew my attention to how many
deprivations my purchasing books had already caused her. I didn’t buy
any more books for a long time, but it was hard to resist, for there were
so many that tempted me and to me books were everything.
Except for being unhappy over the struggle for existence, I have
never been unhappy as a teacher. When we played games during recess,
I had a magnificent time with the older students. We extemporized
dramas that we performed for the younger children. Through every¬
thing I stayed young.
One Sunday, alone at Mme Vollier’s, I was sitting at the piano trying to
write some music that I knew would never see the light of day. It was no
less than an opera, The Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath. I knew it would
never be presented, and I had resigned myself to that fact bravely. It is
impossible to find publishers when you’re unknown, and you can’t be
known until you find a publisher. You don’t waste your time dragging
your manuscripts into waiting rooms. You continue your regular trade,
whatever it is. If you don’t have a trade, I, at least, would rather become
a ragpicker than go looking for recommendations to influence publish¬
ers. I even feel a kind of pleasure in throwing stanzas and motifs and
sketches into the wind.
The plot I had written for The Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath was a simple
one. After the destruction of all life on our planet, hell was established
Memoirs of Louise Michel
41
here, where things were very suitable. In the first act, the end of life has
already been caused by a geological revolution. The stage looks like a
lunar landscape. Satan is seated on top of a Parisian building whose base
rests in molten lava.
The basis of all the action is the love that Satan and the other main
character, Don Juan, have for a druidess. Their love for her kindles an
infernal war. Every person in history, poetry, or legend who ever
inspired me had a role to suit his character in my drama.
The end comes when the globe itself crumbles. All the spirits are
absorbed in the forces of nature, whose chorus is heard in a night
crossed by flashes of lightning. The general clamor of the orchestra
diminishes little by little. First one instrument, then another, becomes
silent. Finally nothing is left but a chorus of harps, and one after the
other they too fall silent. Then only one remains, and it fades in a
pianissimo sweeter than water falling on leaves. At last these final notes
also fade away, and all is silent.
I scored this work for every instrument possible, from cannon to
harmonicas, lyres, flutes, bugles, and guitars. A choir of devils speaks
wordlessly-onstage with violins, twenty of them. To hold this monstrous
orchestra you’d need a valley in the mountains or some bay in the New
World.
As I was working at the piano that Sunday on the music for the scene
of the infernal hunt, someone rang the doorbell. It was an old Jewess,
the grandmother of one of my pupils. She stood as straight as the ghost
of Don Juan’s commander, and she was very beautiful. Her face looked
as if it had been carved from marble. She must have been listening to me
outside.
“Is it really you,” she asked, “who is responsible for that savagery I
have been hearing?”
“Yes,” I answered. “It is I.”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t dare to continue those horrors in front of me,”
she said. “To punish you, I want to hear the rest.”
Because of that challenge I started The Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath
over. The wild motifs made her indignant, but I kept going. She wasn’t
so hard on several parts, and she liked the love songs. She liked the
“Ballad of the Skeleton.”
Lady of the green turrets
Who sings to the evening stars,
Come down and open up my heart.
White are my hands before you
And faithful my love. Come:
Then I will have light
In my eyeless sockets
And I will see
The tournament’s queen of beauty.
42
Memoirs of Louise Michel
At the end of the ballad the girl, of course, has fallen in love with the
skeleton, and she follows him off into the unknown. They go off into a
valley of solitude to the accompaniment of only a lute solo.
The old lady also deigned to approve my “Lay of the Troubadour”:
The bird was singing
As it shivered
Beneath the falling leaves.
And in the wind,
The soul took wing,
And was crying,
Crying.
I went on through the finale, and after my grotesque imitation on the
piano of the last fading notes of the last harp, the Jewess looked at me
with amazament.
“Poor girl,” she said. “Those monstrosities really are yours.”
I didn’t answer.
“The most unfortunate thing about it is that there are some good parts
there.”
“If there weren’t any good parts,” I said, “I wouldn’t be stupid enough
to work on it.”
“You know very well,” she said, “that you have to be either rich or
famous to indulge in things like that.”
“I’m not simply indulging myself. I intend to stay on here as a teacher,
and as proof I shall leave this unproducible piece just the way it is now. It
really is a dream, you know, whether it is about covens or real life, and I
will throw it away as I have thrown away other dreams.”
She took my hand. Hers was cold.
“Your heart,” she said. “Where will you throw it?”
“To the Revolution,” I said.
She sat down at the piano and her icy hands glided over the keys. She
began to play some invocation to the God of Israel. In it you could feel
the desert and the calm of death, and this calm went straight to my heart.
Sometime later this lady took me to a synagogue, where the strangeness
of the rites and rhythms, a sort of Kyrie in a majestic place, took hold of
me. Seeing the tears in my eyes, she believed I had been touched by the
grace of Jehovah.
“No,” I told her. “It’s just that an impression has taken hold of me.
Perhaps everything is that way.”
I wrote out part of the score for The Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath to give
to my friend Charles de Sivry. From laziness I substituted a gradual
diminuendo for the final catastrophe, which saved me about ten leaves.
It’s so boring to write out a fair copy.
None of the part where the orchestra fades out and ends on the last
harp note appeared worth any great effort. The Revolution was rising,
Memoirs of Louise Michel
43
so what good were dramas? The true drama was in the streets, so what
good were orchestras? We had cannon.
Today the room where I lived in Montmartre is inhabited by people
whom I do not know, but like the house near the cemetery at Vroncourt,
I like to let my memory rest on it for an instant. It has been so very long.
The last time I saw Vroncourt was during the vacation of 1865. I went
there with Mme Eudes, then Victorine Louvet. She was very young then,
perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, and she was preparing for her
teacher’s examination.
During the illness from which she died so young, after her return
from exile, Victorine still talked to me about that autumn vacation in
Vroncourt. We had gone together into the woods, and I had shown her
the oak tree where oaths were exchanged. The Tomb was still standing
then, and I took her to see that, too. She went with my mother into the
vineyard, which was full of young trees my mother had planted. One
evening, as we went through the forest from Thol to Clefmont, going to
the home of “Uncle” Marchal, an old forester who had just married off
his daughter, the regular steps and luminous eyes of a wolf followed us
the whole way. That gave me the setting for “The Legend of the Oak.”
The Legend of the Oak
1 .
Beneath the oak the priestess stands,
Vines of verbena entwining her hair,
Silence seizes the shadowed forest,
Except for the bards and the mystical priests,
Spreading their tools for the rite.
The great songs end; the air holds their echo.
Wind-blown branches strum the strings of a lute.
From goblets of oak the white bull’s blood pours,
But the sacrificed beast cries out in his pain,
A sinister omen.
The priestess beseeches the fates and hears
The rumbling storm demand she give
A human sacrifice. He comes
To let his blood be poured on the earth,
Let out of his heart with a golden scythe.
His death-glow lighting the purpling sky,
He waits the ennobling martyr’s death.
She strikes his heart with her golden scythe
And trembling, strikes herself, to fall
Piercing her heart again.
44
Memoirs of Louise Michel
2 .
Fierce, proud men of Gaul long past
Wore over their hearts a talisman.
The furze that blooms above their bones
Allows them to wear their symbol still.
That was the time when every slave
Rose against bloody Caesar’s Rome.
That was the time when Gaul was brave
And gathered home her scattered sons.
Proud and ferocious great grand-sires,
How long and heavy is your sleep!
O Fathers, omens still occur today,
And your red blood flows in our veins.
You who arm yourselves, why live?
Liberty’s love is stronger than death.
A person must seek for freedom’s joy.
Happy are those who seize the chance!
Marriage fetters a hundredfold;
It gives new slaves to the tyranny
Of Tiberius with bloody eyes.
No, we’ll not be slaves in his games.
3.
My friends, beneath the oak is good.
Regardless, oaks keep oaths once sworn,
An oath of love, an oath of hate,
Sealed with blood on the mistletoe.
That vacation in the autumn of 1865 should have lasted forever. My
mother’s and grandmother’s joy in seeing me again was as great as my
own, but it was over far too soon. When Victorine and I left Vroncourt
and those two women, I didn’t dare to turn my head, for my heart was
breaking. I was never to see my grandmother Marguerite again. But it
was the moment when the struggle against the Empire was intensifying
and each person kept his place, as small as it was.
I am afraid to dwell too long on this first period of my life, the days of
calm with tormenting dreams. I have described puerile and childish
things; that is the way of every person’s earlier years, and sometimes it
lasts throughout whole lives. As I continue the narrative I will return to
moments and events from these early times, drawn by some association
or other; sometimes the pen, like spoken words, rushes off pursuing its
own goal.
Chapter 7
The Decaying Empire
The city of Paris condemned our school building on the rue du Ch&teau-
d’Eau. Mme Vollier hoped in vain that after its demolition we would get
an indemnity which would let us establish a day school in the suburbs.
Julie had received a small sum from her family, and she struck out on
her own. Relinquishing her share in the partnership to us, she bought a
day school in faubourg St. Antoine; I chose not to go with her, but on
holidays we got together, and on Thursday evenings I gave music
lessons at her school.
My mother sold all her remaining land except the vineyard to give me
enough money to buy a day school in Montmartre. The poor woman,
how little she got back for that money, and what sacrifices she and
Grandmother imposed on themselves to raise it! Mme Vollier and I lived
in the day school. Her sons gave her an annuity, and gradually the
number of our pupils increased, so that for schoolmistresses we were
nearly comfortable. What plans we made. Those were good times, when
my grandmother was still living, and I continually got good news about
her and my mother. For a few brief years, joy filled my heart.
But then Mme Vollier died. One evening Julie and Ad£le Esquiros
had come over to dine with us. It was a holiday, and all four of us were
very warm in our little room high up. We spoke gaily, especially Mme
Vollier. I had never seen her so cheerful. Slje had just received her
pension, so we were momentarily rich, and we; were even talking about
sending a little gift to the Haute-Marne. Julie had brought something to
eat from the country, and Adele was responsible for some dainties.
On the open piano, the fat, black cat paced back and forth on the keys,
listening to the tune which his paws produced. His head was raised, and
earlier he had lapped up a whole bowl of coffee cream.
I told the others how, the day before, I had pasted a republican poster
on the back of a policeman. I had been holding the poster, and there was
nowhere else to put it.
Mme Vollier told us that, in the best interests of the household, she
had collected all the keys and put them in her pocket. She made them
clink in her pocket with the same smile in her eyes I used to see in my
grandmother’s and that I had seen so many times in my mother’s when
she snatched something back from my little larcenies.
46
Memoirs of Louise Michel
Our friends applauded Mme Vollier, and we laughed still more when,
full of remorse, I gave her back the purse I had stolen from the chest of
drawers that morning. Almost nothing was missing from it. In the midst
of all this happiness some kind of terrible grief took hold of me. We were
so happy it couldn’t last, but I did my best to try to ignore that
foreboding.
Our friends left fairly late, and I walked with them as far as the
omnibus on the rue Marcadet. The night was black and sad, and in this
darkness a dog was howling. As I was returning, he began to follow me.
It was chance that put this sinister beast on my track; he was an evil
portent.
When I got back to school I was careful to avoid letting Mme Vollier
see the sadness sweeping over me. She was still gay, but not for long.
That night she had her second stroke.
Her portrait is near my bed, opposite a bouquet of red carnations. Her
sons gave me a share of memorabilia as if I were their sister. After her
death a great sadness forced its way into my heart, but there was no time
to indulge my suffering. The Empire became more threatening as it
neared its end, and we became more determined.
I kept my school going. Mile Caroline L’Homme, the first school¬
mistress who had established herself in Montmartre, and who had, she
rightly claimed, taught the whole neighborhood to read, had become
sick and old. She still had a few pupils, and one day she brought them to
me and established herself in my school. She was exhausted.
She was like one of the legends of the North. She appeared to be one
of the Nor ns, so quietly did she walk. Pale, her long white hair fastened
by a large needle, she exhaled a spirit of something prophetic and
fateful. There was no person more charming than Mile L’Homme. She
was so sweet and at the same time so proud, and now she too is dead.
Then my grandmother died. My poor mother had so few peaceful
days. Broken by the death of her mother, she came to Montmartre, but
when she came the Revolution was imminent, so I left her alone during
many long evenings. Afterwards it was days, then months, then years.
Can the mothers of revolutionaries be happy? I loved her so much that I
will be happy only when I go to meet her in the earth where we shall
sleep.
Of all the schoolmistresses I have known, one of the most keen to
collect all of the details of science was Mile Poulin in Montmartre.
Although her health had been undermined by consumption for a long
time, she no longer felt it. She kept busy piling up the greatest amount of
knowledge possible so that she could take it with her to her grave. At the
very end of the Empire, Mile Poulin and I united our two schools into a
new school at 24, rue Houdon. Mile Poulin lived for only a brief time,
Memoirs of Louise Michel
47
and by coincidence I saw her tomb one last time at the climax of the
fighting in May 1871.
I had met Mile Poulin at the rue Hautefeuille. Many of us schoolmis¬
tresses continued our educations at the center where various activities
took place. We had free courses in elementary teaching, professional
courses, readings to mothers of families, and a night course for young
people who had to work. I taught a great number of those poor children
there. Young as they were they had to work all day, and if it hadn’t been
for the center on the rue Hautefeuille, they would never have been in a
class. Instruction continued up to ten o’clock at night, and when I got
out even the bookstores were closed. Under the Empire those women
who were either young teachers or were preparing themselves to be¬
come teachers were eager for this learning. They had only what they had
been able to snatch here and there, and at the rue Hautefeuille they
became even more thirsty for knowledge and liberty. Many good friend¬
ships were born there.
It was comfortable there in the evenings, both in our little groups and
when a large meeting occurred. When big meetings took place, we left
the floor of the hall to the strangers, and our little group of enthusiasts
gathered near the instructor’s desk, where a skeleton and other things
we liked were kept. From that spot near the desk we could see and hear
much better than if we had tried to join the mob in the room.
The rue Hautefeuille overflowed with life and youth. We lived in the
future, in the time when people would be more than beasts of burden
whose work and blood other people made use of. At the rue Haute¬
feuille in the long night of the Empire we had glimpses of a better world.
Five or six years before the Siege, it provided an untainted refuge in the
middle of imperial Paris, a place impervious to the stench of the charnel
house, although sometimes our history courses roared out the Marsei¬
llaise and smelled of gunpowder.
Somehow we were always able to find the time to attend courses
several days a week. There were lectures on physics, chemistry, and even
law. People tried out new methods of teaching, too. In addition to
listening to others, we found time to give lectures ourselves. I had never
understood how time could be so elastic. We didn’t waste a minute, and
our days were stretched to fit so that midnight seemed early.
I remember a tall old man with white hair explaining how useful
stenography could be in teaching. Using stenographic techniques would
allow many things to be abbreviated. People have so little time for study,
and they waste so much of it.
Several of us began spasmodic studies for the baccalaureate again. My
former passion for algebra engrossed me once more. I was able to verify,
and this time with certainty, that if a person isn’t an idiot (at least all the
48
Memoirs of Louise Michel
time), he can get along in mathematics without a teacher. The trick is to
leave no formula behind without knowing it and no problem behind
without finding its answer.
A frenzy for knowledge possessed us. It was refreshing to sit two or
three times a week on student benches ourselves, side by side with our
own most advanced pupils, whom we sometimes brought with us. They
listened happily and proudly beside us, scarcely thinking about the time.
The more excited we got about all these things, the more we lapsed
into the high spirits of schoolchildren. We had good times, and often we
resembled students more than teachers.
When we were sad, we played jokes, for laughter cuts the shadows.
One vacation day, I went to an employment agency to get a job as a cook
at the home of some bourgeois family. After the first dinner I planned to
cook for them, they would have fired me pretty rapidly. The employ¬
ment agency was next to the Bastille on a fourth floor. Of course I had
no papers, so I told the employment agent I had forgotten them. When I
gave him the names of the imperial gangsters I claimed to have worked
for, he got giddy. He ended up making me feel sorry for him, and I gave
up the project; I flung it all in his face, laughing till my sides hurt.
Why are people so entranced with name-dropping? That was the
lesson I gave that poor devil, and it would have been worth the trouble to
go put pepper in the sugared dishes of some bourgeois soul used to
cordon bleu cooks. Once the employment agent understood what was
happening, he began to rail at me. Still laughing at him I left, after I
warned him against being too easily “bonaparted” with name-dropping.
I recall another incident. One evening at the rue Hautefeuille we had
been learning Danefs method of musical notation. As in England and
Germany the notes in Danel’s method are represented by letters of the
alphabet, but with the difference that they are written without a staff.
We left the rue Hautefeuille late, and because there were no more buses,
we were returning to our homes on foot. Some idiot began to follow me,
walking up on his toes with long heronlike legs. At first it amused me to
watch this shadow of a bird glide along under the streetlights.
He kept repeating the foolish remarks people use when they don’t
know if you will answer them. I became impatient, and that spoiled the
impression I got of his being some kind of fantastic bird running around
on his long legs. I looked him straight in the face, and in my loudest
voice I began to descend the Danel scale: D, B, L, S, F, M, R, D!
The effect was overwhelming.
Perhaps it was the somewhat masculine accent, or perhaps it was the
strange syllables formed by the letters. I never found out. The bird
disappeared.
Another time I was returning home on foot fairly late, and I had on a
long cloak which enveloped me completely. I was wearing a sort of wide
Memoirs of Louise Michel
49
hat made out of shaggy cloth which cast a lot of shadows on my face, and
brand-new ankle boots from the pawnshop. For some reason the heels
made a lot of noise. The newspapers recently had been writing a lot
about nocturnal attacks. Some good bourgeois heard my boots ringing,
and being unable to make out my exact form because of my cloak and
hat, he began to run with such fear that it gave me the idea of following
him for a bit to scare him properly.
He went along, looking around to see if anyone would come to help
him. With the black night and the deserted streets, the bourgeois was
scared witless, and I was having a really good time. He lengthened his
stride as much as he could. I kept to the shadows and made my heels
strike even louder, because that noise was what kept up his fright. I don’t
know what district we had come to when I let the bourgeois go, yelling at
him: “Must you be so stupid?”
That night I returned home very late, or rather very early in the
morning, and I was no longer laughing. In the same night, after I had
scared the bourgeois idiot, I had seen the people who live off victims,
and people who are the victims themselves. It was an ordinary night of
what people call civilized society.
Mme Vollier was still living then, and when I got home she scolded me
for my lateness, in spite of my daily precaution of setting back the clock.
The poor woman had been worrying about me as my mother would
have done, and she told me how tired I would feel the next day.
As she was talking to me I composed in my mind a few verses about
the bandits and girls I had spoken with that night, and with whom I have
often spoken since.
Criminals and Whores
Discerned in the dark of ill-lit streets,
The sublimely wretched shamble through the night,
Namelessly slide past and cast no shadow,
Past obscured doorways at the edge of light
For other phantoms to erase.
I have seen criminals and whores
And spoken with them. Now I inquire
If you believe them made as now they are
To drag their rags in blood and mire,
Preordained, an evil race?
You, to whom all men are prey,
Have made them what they are today.
No one comes into the world with a knife in his hand to stab others, or
with a card in her hand to sell herself. No one comes into the world with
50
Memoirs of Louise Michel
a club ready to be a cop, and no one comes into the world carrying a
minister’s portfolio, so that he may be captured by the dizziness of power
and drag nations down.
No bandit who could not have been an honest man. No honorable
man who is not capable of committing crimes.
Among the people associated with the rue Hautefeuille was Jules
Favre. At this time he was a true republican leader, but after the fall of
Napoleon III he became one of those who murdered Paris. Power would
poison him as it poisons all those who are clothed in that cloak of Nessus.
In those years during the twilight of the Empire that same Jules Favre
was like a father, and he treated us with a father’s kindness. Many times I
used his being a chairman of our association as a pretext for taking
people to him who needed a lawyer’s opinion and couldn’t pay for it.
One day, I remember I took him an old woman who thought she was
being persecuted, and he had to try to reassure her. Dealing with her
cost him a lot of time. I was with her in his office, and Favre came over to
tell me how annoyed he was with me. The obtuse angle made by his
forehead and his chin closed into a right angle, a bad sign.
“This is too much,” he muttered to me while the old woman kept
curtseying to him and telling him how she had been persecuted for
twenty years.
I can still see the spot where that took place; Favre and I were
whispering near a large vase his voters had given him. An uncontrollable
desire to laugh took hold of me, and I did. I laughed so heartily that the
right angle of Favre’s profile was transformed into its usual obtuse angle
again, and his eyes shone. He couldn’t stop himself from laughing, too.
Still curtseying, the old woman left saying, “Thank you very much.
Till another time. See you soon.”
Another chairman of our association was Eugene Pelletan, a republi¬
can member of Bonaparte’s assembly. His eyes, sunk under thick, gray
eyebrows, glowed like coals and gave him a strange appearance. He
reminded me of Nicolas Flamel or Cagliostro or some other alchemist
out of the legends. It was when he was speaking from the desk at the rue
Hautefeuille that we especially liked to huddle near the skeleton and
observe events from there, listening, caught up in the poetry of science,
caught up in his words on liberty, his love of the Republic, and his hatred
for the Caesars.
Under this inspiration we began to write many works that are lost
today. I wrote an enormous manuscript that I entitled The Wisdom of a
Madman. Pelletan was then our chairman, and I carried it to him so that
he could read it and give me his opinion. Since then I have come to
understand how patient he must have been to read that enormous,
unintelligible book and to annotate a few passages in it.
“This is not the wisdom of a madman,” he wrote. “One day it will be
the wisdom of peoples.”
Memoirs of Louise Michel
51
Bringing that manuscript home, I seemed to walk on air. I reread
much of it carefully, but I didn’t have time to revise it. I had to give more
and more lessons after class, and The Wisdom of a Madman was laid aside
with my other unpublished works. Perhaps I would have looked for a
publisher if I hadn’t been so busy.
The last two years before 1871, the rue Hautefeuille was a hotbed of
intellectual women. My friend Marie L-wrote page after page, and
Jeanne B-and possibly her sister were assumed to have manuscripts
in progress. Julie L-and Mile Poulin threw poems to the winds. But
prose and verse and music disappeared because we felt so near the
drama coming from the street, the true drama, the drama of humanity.
The songs of the new epoch were war songs, and there was no room for
anything else.
The professional schools, for which we had Jules Simon, an opposition
member of the Assembly, to thank, captured all-out enthusiasm. Those
schools saved a few handfuls of girls from apprenticeship, and provided
them with trades or diplomas.
In the last years of the Empire there was a free professional school on
the rue Thevenot. Each of us gave three evenings a week there. The
Society for Elementary Education took care of the rent, and it all worked
out. One of our professors, a man whom we called Doctor Francolinus,
displayed fiendish activity there. Sometimes the police of the Empire
gave us the pleasure of attending our classes, and then an hour of
lessons would go by quickly, because we put in occasional comments that
gave a good clawed swat at Napoleon Ill’s ugly hyena’s moustache.
I taught the literature and ancient geography courses twice a week
and Charles de Sivry taught them two other days. We taught them
exactly the same way, for Charles and I often had the same ideas. The
last idea we had was for a piano whose hammers had been replaced by
little bows to give a piano something of the passion that violins have. I
wrote an article about this, and it was published in the Progres musical
under the name of Louis Michel. I have often noticed that when I sent a
periodical material signed Louise Michel it was a hundred to one it
wouldn’t be printed, but if I signed it Louis Michel or Enjolras, a
pseudonym I used, the chances of publication were greater.
What Charles and I taught in the courses on literature was the utility
of examining cities and peoples in terms of childhood, youth, and decay.
That is the real way it happens, although people think it is a romanesque
approach. The lives of individuals and the history of humanity show a
parallel progression. In every individual’s life you can see the same
transformations that you can see in our history, in the story of our
collective existence that spans the centuries.
Nevertheless, however aware a person is of those centuries-long
rhythms of change, he still lives inside his own epoch. It is inside his own
epoch that he feels, suffers, and is happy; and all the love, all the hate, all
52
Memoirs of Louise Michel
the harmony, all the power that he possesses—he must throw all this into
his surroundings. One person is nothing and yet part of that which is
everything—the Revolution.
And so here is Louise Michel. She is a menace to society, for she has
declared a hundred times that everyone should take part in the banquet
of life. What would be the pleasure of riches if one were unable to
compare one’s own well-fed condition to that of people dying of hunger?
Where would the feeling of security come from if one were unable to
compare one’s good, solid position to that of people who must work in
poverty?
What is more, Louise Michel is a woman. If she could only be fooled
by the idea that women can get their rights by asking men for them. But
she has the villainy to insist that the strong sex is just as much a slave as
the weak sex, that it is unable to give what it does not have itself. All
inequalities, she claims, will collapse when men and women engage in
the common battle together.
Louise Michel is a monster who maintains that men and women are
not responsible for their situations and claims it is stupidity which causes
the evils around us. She claims that politics is a form of that stupidity and
is incapable of ennobling the race.
If Louise Michel were the only person saying all this, people could say
she is a pathological case. But there are thousands like her, millions,
none of whom gives a damn about authority. They all repeat the battle
cry of the Russian revolutionaries: land and freedom!
Yes, there are millions of us who don’t give a damn for any authority
because we have seen how little the many-edged tool of power accom¬
plishes. We have watched throats cut to gain it. It is supposed to be as
precious as the jade axe that travels from island to island in Oceania. No.
Power monopolized is evil.
Who would have thought that those men at the rue Hautefeuille who
spoke so forcefully of liberty and who denounced the tyrant Napoleon
so loudly would be among those in May 1871 who wanted to drown
liberty in blood? Power makes people dizzy and will always do so until
power belongs to all mankind.
During the twilight of the Empire the type of things I wrote changed.
When I was at Mme Vollier’s I sent some poems to the newspapers,
VUnion des poetes, La Jeunesse, and others. I just threw things out and I
barely paid any attention to them; I don’t even know which ones were
printed. I did send some of the best poems to Victor Hugo when I was in
exile.
The time was far removed from those days at Vroncourt when I had
sent him verses that the indulgent master had said were as sweet as my
youth.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
53
Me, I am the white dove
Of the black arch.
I had sent him that one from Vroncourt. Now, the verses I sent him
smelled of gunpowder:
Do you hear the brazen thunder
Behind the man who takes no side?
A reluctant man betrays tomorrow.
Up the mountains and over the cliffs
We go together to sow freedom.
That poem, “The Black Marseillaise,” I threw one July 14 into the
wicket at the Echelle along with some others addressed to Mme Bona¬
parte. These later poems, begun in collaboration with Vermorel, had
been reviewed and augmented by friends who had the same disdain for
rhyme; they added other phrases that were more appropriate to the
circumstances.
Under the Empire, literature was strange, as it always is when nations
are slaughterhouses. Books were filled with foolishness, but there were
forgotten corpses behind each page. All published writing smelled stale.
Adele Esquiros, the author of captivating works, remained silent
during those years as she waited for more propitious times. She contin¬
ued to write, but submitted nothing to a publisher. From time to time,
however, she would read us a few pages full of fresh lines and gracious
images that gave us the impression of spring mornings when dew covers
the flowers and the sun shines in the branches. There were also bitter
passages in her work, but she covered their sadness with some seeming
pleasantry. I wonder what has become of her manuscripts; I have never
seen any of them appear in print. Because of deportation and prison, I
haven’t had enough time to visit my old friends. Ad&le Esquiros has been
paralyzed for several years now, but she is submitting to her fate with the
same smile on her lips that she wore before.
At the end of the Empire our revolutionary meetings became more
numerous, and many of them were even held in daylight. Evening
meetings were more common, however, and one evening while my
mother was living with me, I had planned to go to a meeting. To keep
her from worrying, I had been claiming that I wasn’t actively involved in
anything. Two of our friends came by to take me to the meeting, but
stayed outside so she wouldn’t suspect what was going on. I told her I
was going out to give some lessons.
“Impossible,” said the poor woman. “You can’t be going out to give
lessons at this hour.”
“Julie sent for me,” I said.
She went to the window.
54
Memoirs of Louise Michel
“I knew it,” she said. “It is one of your meetings.”
And she laughed in spite of herself, as my friends and I left laughing,
too.
Most of our meetings took place outside Paris. Often as we were
returning to Paris by little paths through fields, we talked about many
things. At other times we were silent, dazzled by the idea of sweeping
away the shame of twenty years. We were all poets, a little. We have
suffered, but we have seen some beautiful things.
One holiday I was going to Julie’s when I encountered a vast multi¬
tude of people on the boulevard. With the hopes I held, I believed the
hour had come, but it was a carnival, in the midst of which the old
republican Miot was being taken to prison. Some people in the crowd
who were following the carnival performers left them to see the old man
dragged off by the varlets of the Empire. It was a joyous crowd on a day
of mourning, but they weren’t really the people. They were the same
crowd you see at public executions, but which you can never find when
you need to rip up paving stones to build barricades. They are the same
unthinking crowd that bolsters up tyrannies and cuts the throats of
people trying to save them. They are the great herd that bares its back
for the whip and holds out its neck to the knife.
For five years, from 1865 to 1870, we had believed that the end of the
Empire was imminent. For the cup to overflow, however, the defeat at
Sedan had to be added to the other crimes. People always wait for the
cup to overflow for the same reason that keeps them from ever being
upset by the approach of misfortunes they think they can prevent.
How strongly toward the end of the Empire the fearful stanza of
Victor Hugo came back to me. “Harmodius, it’s time! / You can strike
down this man without remorse,” Hugo wrote. Hugo’s words went into
my heart like a knife, and each syllable rang in my ears like the tolling of
a bell. Vengeance finally reached Harmodius, the Athenian murderer,
when the younger brother of his innocent victim cut him down.
I would have killed my tyrant without feeling any distress. Millions
would have been spared if he had died. Someone promised me an entree
to him; even to kill him I wouldn’t have requested a formal audience.
But I got that entree only after Bonaparte had left for the war and was
no longer in Paris.
Sedan could have been avoided if Bonaparte had been dead. People
are used to waiting for the annihilation of multitudes, and to stop
bandits like Bonaparte they will accept the annihilation of a nation
willingly. Perhaps Sedan will make things understood more quickly, and
the destruction of those legions will keep the human race from surren¬
dering itself any longer to those woodcutters of men who chop people
down like a forest for their own convenience.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
55
Far away in the forests of New Caledonia, I once saw a rotten tree
collapse suddenly. When the cloud of dust dispersed, there was only a
heap of trash, over which, like headstones in a graveyard, a few green
boughs stretched out, the last effort of the old tree dragged down by the
dead trunk. In that tree, myriads of insects had lived for centuries, and
they, too, were engulfed in the collapse. Some of them stirred painfully
in the dust, and startled and upset they stared at the daylight which was
going to kill them, for their kind, born in the shade, could not stand
light.
Like those insects, we live in an old tree, and we stubbornly believe it
still lives, but the least breath of wind will destroy it, and its debris will
blow across the earth. No one can escape change.
Chapter 8
The Siege of Paris
Despite overwhelming support given Napoleon III in a plebiscite held in May
1870, the emperor was coming under increasing political pressure, and his
government tried to win public support through an adventurous foreign policy.
Conflict with Prussia over the nomination of a German princeling to the empty
throne of Spain led the French government to decide for war against Germany on
14 July 1870. Two weeks later Napoleon left Paris to join the French military
forces. The Germans defeated the French army decisively at Sedan on 1 September
1870, and captured the emperor.
Crowds in Paris began to demonstrate two days later, and on September 4,
amidst severe disorder, the Paris mob proclaimed the Republic. A Government of
National Defense headed by Napoleon’s military governor of Paris, General
Trochu, took power in the name of the Republic. Two weeks later German forces
surrounded Paris.
During the terrible year of the war and the Siege, when I saw our
people die while they were so full of life, I suddenly recalled an
impression from my childhood. I saw an oak standing tall and solid with
its shadow falling over the long grass full of white daisies and buttercups.
It was the oak of my legend, and it had an axe embedded in its heart; in
its trunk was a wide gash, and the iron of the axe was damp with sap.
These impressions come back like dead leaves driven by the wind.
Paris was quivering from the Empire’s crimes. In spite of the blandish¬
ments of the imperial gang, we true republicans were not eager for the
war with Prussia. To befuddle the people, the Bonapartists had torn the
wings off the Marseillaise, and when we cheered for the Republic in
August, Paris should have risen in remembrance of its proud and heroic
tradition. The city should have cleansed itself by bathing in the blood of
the Empire. Instead, revolutionary Paris stood silent. I can still see the
city amid a quiet haze: Every shutter was closed, leaving the boulevard
La Villette deserted. Around the carriage in which Eudes and Brideau
were prisoners, people cried out: “Attack the Prussians!”
After September 4 there was too little change, for the people didn’t
insist on it. Some wanted to undertake desperate sorties to drive back the
Prussians, but they were forbidden to try. Even after the encirclement of
Paris, people waited for an army to liberate the city, for they claimed that
a city had never raised a siege without outside help. That something has
never happened before certainly does not mean it is impossible.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
57
When several of our friends were condemned to death for having
tried to proclaim the Republic in August before Bonaparte was over¬
thrown, Andr6 L€o, Ad£le Esquiros, and I were appointed to carry to
General Trochu a protest against their sentences signed by thousands of
people. Some people had signed that protest from momentary indigna¬
tion and then had become timid, and wanted their names taken off the
lists because of second thoughts. Our friends’ lives were at stake, and I
certainly did not want to erase a single name.
To get our protest to General Trochu was not easy. It took all my
feminine stubbornness to get into his office. By almost a direct assault,
we got to some kind of antechamber. The people there wanted us to
leave before we had seen the governor of Paris.
“We come on behalf of the people,” we said, and the words sounded
ominous to them in those surroundings. There was only one red sash of
the Revolution being worn at the H6tel de Ville, and that was worn by
Henri Rochefort. And yet the Parisians were saying to themselves, “The
people are now ruling.” We were invited to leave Trochu’s office, but we
went over and sat on a bench against the wall, declaring that we should
not leave without an answer.
Tired of seeing us wait, a secretary went to look for some personage
who was said to represent Trochu. That person came over to us, and
when we decided it was impossible to see the general personally, we
presented our protest to this aide. He weighed the voluminous petition
covered with thousands of signatures (which seemed to upset him) in his
hand, and he declared that the petition would be taken under consider¬
ation because of the number of signatures. That promise would have
meant little if the Empire hadn’t been collapsing. Rotten as the Empire
was, the hammer blow of Sedan killed it.
Shortly after the encirclement of Paris, I was arrested for the first
time. Because the city of Strasbourg was in great danger from the
Prussian armies, Mme Andr£ L6o and I had rounded up a large number
of volunteers, determined to make one last great effort or die with
Strasbourg. We were crossing Paris in long columns, crying out, “To
Strasbourg, to Strasbourg.” We were going to sign our names in the
register placed on the lap of the statue of Our Lady of Strasbourg in the
Place de la Concorde, and from there go to the Hotel de Ville and
demand arms. There we were arrested, Mme L6o, me, and a poor, little
old woman who had been crossing the square to get some kerosene while
the demonstration was going on. She kept clutching her oil can while she
was being accused of intending to commit arson. We testified in her
behalf, but the most eloquent witness for her innocence was the way she
continued to grip her can, and the authorities let her go. As she left, her
oil can dribbled oil on her dress because her hands were trembling so
badly.
58
Memoirs of Louise Michel
A fat old jackass came in later, egged on by his curiosity. I tried to tell
him what was going on. “What does Strasbourg matter to you?” this
insensitive, bedecked functionary asked. “Do you think that Strasbourg
will perish simply because you aren’t there?”
Finally a member of the Provisional Government got us released, but
at that very moment, September 27, Strasbourg surrendered to the
Prussians.
In Montmartre, in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, we organized the
Montmartre Vigilance Committee. Few of its members still survive, but
during the Siege the committee made the reactionaries tremble. Every
evening, we would burst out onto the streets from our headquarters at
41, chaussee Clignancourt, sometimes simply to talk up the Revolution,
because the time for duplicity had passed. We knew how little the
reactionary regime, in its death throes, valued its promises and the lives
of its citizens, and the people had to be warned.
Actually there were two vigilance committees in Montmartre, the
men’s and the women’s. Although I presided over the women’s commit¬
tee, I was always at the men’s, because its members included some
Russian revolutionaries. I still have an old map of Paris that hung on the
wall of our meeting room; I carried it back and forth across the ocean
with me as a souvenir. With ink we had blotted out the Empire’s coat of
arms, which desecrated it and which would have dirtied our headquar¬
ters.
The members of the men’s Montmartre Vigilance Committee were
remarkable persons. Never have I seen minds so direct, so unpreten¬
tious, and so elevated. Never have I seen individuals so clearheaded. I
don’t know how this group managed to do it. There were no weaknesses.
Something good and strong supported people.
The women were courageous also, and among them, too, there were
some remarkable minds. I belonged to both committees, and the lean¬
ings of the two groups were the same. Sometime in the future the
women’s committee should have its own history told. Or perhaps the two
should be mingled, because people didn’t worry about which sex they
were before they did their duty. That stupid question was settled.
In the evenings I often was able to be at meetings of both groups, since
the women’s, which met at the office of the Justice of the Peace on the
rue de la Chapelle, began an hour earlier than the men’s. Thus after the
women’s meeting was over I could go to the last half of the men’s
meeting, and sometimes other women and I could go to the entire men’s
meeting.
The Montmartre Vigilance Committees left no one without shelter
and no one without food. Anyone could eat at the meeting halls,
although as the Siege continued and food supplies became shorter, it
might only be one herring divided between five or six people. For people
Memoirs of Louise Michel
59
who were really in need we didn’t hesitate to dip into our resources or to
use revolutionary requisitioning. The Eighteenth Arrondissement was
the terror of profiteers. When the reactionaries heard the phrase,
“Montmartre is going to come down on you,” they hid in their holes; we
chased them down anyway, and like hunted beasts they fled, leaving
behind the hiding places where provisions were rotting while Paris
starved.
Ultimately the Montmartre Vigilance Committees were mowed down,
like all revolutionary groups. The rare members still alive know how
proud we were there and how fervently we flew the flag of the Revolu¬
tion. Little did it matter to those who were there whether they were
beaten to the ground unnoticed in battle or died alone in the sunlight. It
makes no difference how the millstone moves so long as the bread is
made.
Everything was beginning, or rather, beginning again, after the long
lethargy of the Empire. The first organization of the Rights of Women
had begun to meet on the rue Thevenot with Mmes Jules Simon, Andre
Leo, and Maria Deraismes. At the meetings of the Rights of Women
group, and at other meetings, the most advanced men applauded the
idea of equality. I noticed—I had seen it before, and I saw it later—that
men, their declarations notwithstanding, although they appeared to
help us, were always content with just the appearance. This was the
result of custom and the force of old prejudices, and it convinced me
that we women must simply take our place without begging for it. The
issue of political rights is dead. Equal education, equal trades, so that
prostitution would not be the only lucrative profession open to a
woman—that is what was real in our program. The Russian revolution¬
aries are right; evolution is ended and now revolution is necessary or the
butterfly will die in its cocoon.
Heroic women were found in all social positions. At the professional
school of Mme Poulin, women of all social levels organized the Society
for the Victims of the War. They would have preferred to die rather
than surrender, and dispensed their efforts the best way they could,
while demanding ceaselessly that Paris continue to resist the Prussian
siege.
Although I knew some of them well, I don’t know who is still living,
but during the Siege no one failed. They didn’t become like those
harpies the following May who dug out the eyes of our fallen comrades
with the tips of their parasols.
Later, when I was a prisoner, the first visitor I had was Mme Meurice
from the Society for the Victims of the War. At my last trial, behind the
hand-picked spectators, among those who had to wedge themselves in,
were two other former members of the Society, the large woman, Jeanne
B-and the petite Mme F-.
60
Memoirs of Louise Michel
I salute all those brave women of the vanguard who were drawn from
group to group: the Committee of Vigilance, the Society for the Victims
of the War, and later the League of Women. The old world ought to fear
the day when those women finally decide they have had enough. Those
women will not slack off. Strength finds refuge in them. Beware of
them! Beware of those who, like Paule Minck, go across Europe waving
the flag of liberty, and beware of the most peaceful daughter of Gaul
now asleep in the deep resignation of the fields. Beware of the women
when they are sickened by all that is around them and rise up against the
old world. On that day the new world will begin.
The Prussian siege continued; the days became dark and the trees lost
their leaves. Hunger and cold reached more deeply into the houses of
Paris.
On October 31, at the Hotel de Ville the people proclaimed the
Commune. The Committees of Vigilance from all over Paris organized
the demonstration, and the people no longer cried out “Long live the
Republic”; they cried out “Long live the Commune!” The Government
of National Defense promised to hold meetings and elections and
promised to take no reprisals against these demonstrators. It broke both
promises. The word Commune was hushed up as effectively as some
conjurer’s trick, but experiences like that are necessary, for they let you
see who the real enemy is. If we are implacable in the coming fight, who
is to blame?
Another month went by and conditions became increasingly bad. The
National Guard [best described as a half-trained Parisian popular mili¬
tia] could have saved the city, but the Government of National Defense
feared supporting the armed force of the people.
Early in December I was arrested a second time. That second arrest
came when several women who had more courage than clairvoyance
wanted to propose some unknown means of defense to the government.
Their zeal was so great that they came to the Women’s Vigilance
Committee in Montmartre, using the name of a woman and of a group
whom they had neglected to receive permission from, but if they had
come to us with no recommendation at all to introduce them, it would
not have mattered. We agreed to join them the next day in a demonstra¬
tion in front of the H6tel de Ville, but we made one reservation. We told
them we would go as women to share their danger; we would not go as
citizens because we no longer recognized the Government of National
Defense. It had proved itself incapable even of letting Paris defend itself.
The next day we went to the rendezvous at the H6tel de Ville, and we
expected what happened: I was arrested for having organized the
demonstration. I answered their charges by saying that I couldn’t have
organized any demonstration to speak to the government, because I no
longer recognized that government. I added that when I came on my
Memoirs of Louise Michel
61
own behalf to the Hotel de Ville, it would be with an armed uprising
behind me. That explanation appeared unsatisfactory to them, and they
locked me up.
The next day four citizens—Th6ophile Ferre, Avronsart, Christ, and
Burlot—came to claim me “in the name of the Eighteenth Arrondisse-
ment.” At this declaration, the reactionaries became frightened. “Mont¬
martre is going to descend on us,” they whispered to each other, and
they released me.
Mme Meurice also came to claim me in the name of the Society for the
Victims of the War, but she arrived after I had already left the prefec¬
ture.
It wasn’t until January 19, when the struggle was almost over, that the
Government of National Defense finally agreed to let the National
Guard effect a sortie to try to retake Montretout and Buzenval. At first
the National Guard swept the Prussians before them, but the mud
defeated the brave sons of the people. They sank into the wet earth up to
their ankles, and unable to get their artillery up on the hills, they had to
retreat.
Hundreds stayed behind, lying quietly in death; these men of the
National Guard—men of the people, artists, young persons—died with
no regrets for their lost lives. The earth drank the blood of this first
Parisian carnage; soon it would drink more.
Paris still did not wish to surrender to the Prussians. On January 22,
the people gathered in front of the Hotel de Ville, where General
Chaudey, who commanded the soldiers, now had his headquarters. The
people sensed that the members of the government were lying when
they declared they were not thinking of surrendering.
We prepared a peaceful demonstration, with Razoua commanding
our battalions from Montmartre. Because our friends who were armed
were determined for the demonstration to be peaceful, they withdrew
with their weapons, even though peaceful demonstrations are always
crushed.
When only a disarmed multitude remained, soldiers in the buildings
around the square opened fire on us. No shot was fired by the people
before the Breton Mobiles fired their volleys. We could see the pale faces
of the Bretons behind the windows, as a noise like hail sounded in our
ears. Yes, you fired on us, you untamed Celts, but at least it was your
faith that made you fanatics for the Counterrevolution. You weren’t
bought by the reactionaries. You killed us, but you believed you were
doing your duty, and some day we will convert you to our ideals of
liberty. You will bring to liberty the same fierce convictions you now are
bringing to the reaction, and with us you will assault the old world.
The Breton Mobiles fired first; the people around the square of the
Tour Saint Jacques became indignant as the bullets began to rain down
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
on them, and they began to throw up barricades. Mal6zieux, his cloak
riddled with bullet holes, took over as our leader. He was an old man
now, a hero of June 1848. He remembered bygone days and bravely
took command of the situation as if he had been draped in his June flag.
I stood in the middle of the square lost in thought. I looked at the
accursed windows from which the Bretons continued to fire on us and
thought, “One day you will be on our side, you brigands.”
The bullets continued to make their hail-like noise. The square
became deserted while the projectiles coming from the Hotel de Ville
dug into the ground haphazardly or killed people here and there.
Near me, a woman of my build, who was dressed in black and who
resembled me, was struck down by a bullet. A young man who had come
with her was also killed. We never found out who they were, but the
young man had the intrepid profile of the Midi.
Gradually the square emptied. Many people did not want it to end like
that, but we decided that this was not the time to attempt to overthrow
the government.
On this January 22, Sapia was killed along with many others. P-of
the Blanqui Group had his arm broken. Passersby were killed like our
own people, and over the fallen we swore an oath of vengeance and
liberty. As a token of defiance, I took off my red scarf and threw it on a
grave. A comrade picked it up and knotted it in the branches of a willow.
Six days after that January 22, the people having been raked by
machine-gun fire and then raked with assurances that the government
did not intend to surrender, the government surrendered to the Prus¬
sians. This time the shudder of anger that went through Paris did not
abate; it prepared Paris for the coming months.
Chapter 9
The Commune of Paris
After Paris surrendered to the Prussians in January 1871, the other French
forces agreed to an armistice, during which the Prussians allowed the French to
elect a national government, there being some doubt whether the self-proclaimed
Parisian government could speak for France as a whole. Expected to decide on the
terms of the peace, that new government met first at Bordeaux and then moved to
Versailles, just outside Paris. Monarchists dominated the new Versailles govern¬
ment, and until the divisions between those who supported rival pretenders to the
throne became evident, it seemed likely that the Versailles government would
reestablish a monarchy in which the dreams of republicans and revolutionaries
would dissolve.
On January [.sic; February] 22, the Committees of Vigilance were
closed down, and newspaper publication was suspended. The Versailles
reactionaries decided they had to disarm Paris. Napoleon III was still
alive, and with Montmartre disarmed, the entrance of a sovereign, either
Bonaparte or an Orleanist, would have favored the army, which was
either an accomplice of the reactionaries or was allowing itself to be
deceived. With Montmartre disarmed, the Prussian army, which was
sitting in the surrendered forts around Paris while the armistice contin¬
ued, would have been protected.
The cannon paid for by the National Guard had been left on some
vacant land in the middle of the zone abandoned by the Prussians. Paris
objected to that, and the cannon were taken to the Parc Wagram. The
idea was in the air that each battalion should recapture its own cannon.
A battalion of the National Guard from the Sixth Arrondissement gave
us our impetus. With the flag in front, men and women and children
hauled the cannon by hand down the boulevards, and although the
cannon were loaded, no accidents occurred. Montmartre, like Belleville
and Batignolles, had its own cannon. Those that had been placed in the
Place des Vosges were moved to the faubourg Saint Antoine. Some
sailors proposed our recapturing the Prussian-occupied forts around the
city by boarding them like ships, and this idea intoxicated us.
Then before dawn on March 18 the Versailles reactionaries sent in
troops to seize the cannon now held by the National Guard. One of the
points they moved toward was the Butte of Montmartre, where our
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
cannon had been taken. The soldiers of the reactionaries captured our
artillery by surprise, but they were unable to haul them away as they had
intended, because they had neglected to bring horses with them.
Learning that the Versailles soldiers were trying to seize the cannon,
men and women of Montmartre swarmed up the Butte in a surprise
maneuver. Those people who were climbing believed they would die,
but they were prepared to pay the price.
The Butte of Montmartre was bathed in the first light of day, through
which things were glimpsed as if they were hidden behind a thin veil of
water. Gradually the crowd increased. The other districts of Paris,
hearing of the events taking place on the Butte of Montmartre, came to
our assistance.
The women of Paris covered the cannon with their bodies. When their
officers ordered the soldiers to fire, the men refused. The same army
that would be used to crush Paris two months later decided now that it
did not want to be an accomplice of the reaction. They gave up their
attempt to seize the cannon from the National Guard. They understood
that the people were defending the Republic by defending the arms that
the royalists and imperialists would have turned on Paris in agreement
with the Prussians. When we had won our victory, I looked around and
noticed my poor mother, who had followed me to the Butte of Mont¬
martre, believing that I was going to die.
On this day, the eighteenth of March, the people wakened. If they had
not, it would have been the triumph of some king; instead it was a
triumph of the people. The eighteenth of March could have belonged to
the allies of kings, or to foreigners, or to the people. It was the people’s.
The people arrested General Lecomte, who commanded the soldiers
that had moved against Montmartre, as well as General Clement
Thomas, whose curiosity had led him to watch what he thought would be
the degradation of Paris. Their very acts had convicted both of them a
long time before. Clement Thomas’s crimes extended as far back as the
June Days of 1848, and he had reminded the people of his earlier
actions when he insulted the National Guard. Lecomte, like Clement
Thomas, owed an old debt he had to pay. His soldiers remembered, and
vengeance came out of the past. The hour struck for them.
It will strike for many others, without the Revolution pausing in its
course. The old world takes note of the reactionaries who die because of
popular reprisals. It does not count our side’s losses; it is not able to,
because the sons of the people who fall are only stubble under sickles,
only grass mowed in the summer sun.
Several of our side perished. Turpin, who was wounded near me on
the eighteenth in the predawn attack on 6, rue des Rosiers, died at
Lariboisi£re several days later. He told me to commend his wife to
Memoirs of Louise Michel
65
Georges Clemenceau, the mayor of the Eighteenth Arrondissement, and
I carried out his dying wish.
I have never heard Clemenceau’s testimony at the inquiry into the
events of March 18; we weren’t able to read newspapers when he gave
his evidence. Clemenceau’s indecisiveness, for which people reproach
him, comes from the illusion he holds that he should wait for parliamen-
tarianism to bring progress. But parliamentarianism is dead, and Cle¬
menceau’s illusion is some kind of infection he caught from the
Bordeaux Assembly. When that assembly became the Versailles govern¬
ment, he fled from it. Properly, his place is in the streets, and when his
anger is finally roused, he will go there. That is what remains of his
revolutionary temperament. His indignation at some infamy will bring
him out of his illusions, as he came out of the Bordeaux Assembly.
Wouldn’t it be better for the last parliamentarians who remain honest
to follow the example of the great Jacobin, Delescluze? The attempt to
work through parliaments has been going on for a long while, but
parliaments, standing as they do in the midst of rottenness, can no
longer produce anything worthwhile.
In the provinces people believed the stories Versailles spread about
the Commune. After all, statecraft requires a government to create
discord among the common people. The bosses give the common people
enough to allow them to work, but too little to revolt. And between each
periodic pruning they grow back as numerous and as strong as Gallic
oaks. At any rate, some of our most committed supporters went from
Paris to the provinces to explain the situation. Among those who went
were women like Paule Minck. They worked as hard as they could. If the
provinces had only understood the true situation, they would have sided
with us, but they listened to the lies of the Versailles government. We in
Paris even tried launching balloons filled with letters to the provinces.
Some of them came down in the right places, but they were not enough.
Nevertheless, not everyone was fooled by the lies of Versailles. Lyon,
Marseille, Narbonne, all had their own Communes, and like ours, theirs
too were drowned in the blood of revolutionaries. That is why our flags
are red. Why are our red banners so terribly frightening to those
persons who have caused them to be stained that color?
Some people say I’m brave. Not really. There is no heroism; people
are simply entranced by events. What happens is that in the face of
danger my perceptions are submerged in my artistic sense, which is
seized and charmed. Tableaux of the dangers overwhelm my thoughts,
and the horrors of the struggle become poetry.
It wasn’t bravery when, charmed by the sight, I looked at the disman¬
tled fort of Issy, all white against the shadows, and watched my comrades
filing out in night sallies, moving away over the little slopes of Clamart or
66
Memoirs of Louise Michel
toward the Hautes Bruy£res, with the red teeth of chattering machine
guns showing on the horizon against the night sky. It was beautiful,
that’s all. Barbarian that I am, I love cannon, the smell of powder,
machine-gun bullets in the air.
I am not the only person caught up by situations from which the
poetry of the unknown emerges. I remember a student who didn’t agree
with our ideas (although he agreed even less with the other side’s), who
came to shoot with us at Clamart and at the Moulin de Pierre. He had a
volume of Baudelaire in his pocket, and we read a few pages with great
pleasure—when we had time to read. What fate held for him I don’t
know, but we tested our luck together. It was interesting. We drank
some coffee in the teeth of death, choosing the same spot where three of
our people, one after another, had been killed. Our comrades, anxious
about seeing us there at what seemed to be a deadly place, made us
withdraw. Just after we left a shell fell, breaking the empty cups. Above
all else, our action was simply one of a poet’s nature, not bravery on
either his part or mine.
During the entire time of the Commune, I only spent one night at my
poor mother’s. I never really went to bed during that time; I just napped
a little whenever there was nothing better to do, and many other people
lived the same way. Everybody who wanted deliverance gave himself
totally to the cause.
During the Commune I went unhurt except for a bullet that grazed
my wrist, although my hat was literally riddled with bullet holes. I did
twist my ankle, which had been sprained for a long time, and because I
couldn’t walk for three or four days, I had to requisition a carriage.
It was a little two-wheeled buggy that looked fairly attractive. We
harnessed it to a horse which, unfortunately, was used to the whip. The
rotten beast refused to move when we treated him nicely. Everything
was all right when we were only following a funeral cortege to a
Montmartre cemetery at a walking pace, but after the funeral it was a
different story. That damned animal wouldn’t keep up even the slow jog
which allowed him practically to go to sleep standing up. He simply
stopped, which gave time for a group of imbeciles to gather around us
and begin whispering to each other, “Ah. Here are some people who
have a buggy. They’re filthy rich. The upkeep of that buggy must cost a
lot.”
“Wait,” said a friend who was riding with me. “Don’t get down. I’ll
make the horse move.” He gave a piece of bread and other encourage¬
ments to that monster, who began to munch on the bread while he rolled
back his lips as if he were laughing in our faces. And he didn’t budge an
inch. At that point, with all due respect to those who, like me, are slaves
to beasts, I applied the law of necessity and hit him with the whip, and he
took off, shaking his ears, for the Perronnet barricade at Neuilly.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
67
While I was going to Montmartre for the funeral, I hadn’t dared to
stop off at my mother’s, because she would have seen that I had a sprain.
Several days before the funeral, though, I had come face to face with her
in the trenches near the railroad station of Clamart. She had come to see
if all the lies I had written her to soothe her were true. Fortunately, she
always ended up believing me.
If the reaction had had as many enemies among women as it did
among men, the Versailles government would have had a more difficult
task subduing us. Our male friends are more susceptible to fainthearted¬
ness than we women are. A supposedly weak woman knows better than
any man how to say: “It must be done.” She may feel ripped open to her
very womb, but she remains unmoved. Without hate, without anger,
without pity for herself or others, whether her heart bleeds or not, she
can say, “It must be done.” Such were the women of the Commune.
During Bloody Week, women erected and defended the barricade at the
Place Blanche—and held it till they died.
In my mind I feel the soft darkness of a spring night. It is May 1871,
and I see the red reflection of flames. It is Paris afire. That fire is a dawn,
and I see it still as I sit here writing. Memory crowds in on me, and I
keep forgetting that I am writing my memoirs.
In the night of May 22 or 23, I believe, we were at the Montmartre
cemetery, which we were trying to defend with too few fighters. We had
crenelated the walls as best we could, and, except for the battery on the
Butte of Montmartre—now in the hands of the reactionaries, and whose
fire raked us—and the shells that were coming at regular intervals from
the side, where tall houses commanded our defenses, the position wasn’t
bad. Shells tore the air, marking time like a clock. It was magnificent in
the clear night, where the marble statues on the tombs seemed to be
alive.
When I went on reconnaissance it pleased me to walk in the solitude
that shells were scouring. In spite of my comrades’ advice, I chose to
walk there several times; always the shells arrived too early or too late for
me. One shell falling across the trees covered me with flowered
branches, which I divided up between two tombs, that of Mile Poulin
and that of Murget, whose spirit seemed to throw us flowers. My
comrades caught me, and one ordered me not to move about. They
made me sit down on a bench near the tomb of Cavaignac. But nothing
is as stubborn as a woman.
In the midst of all this Jaroslav Dombrowski passed in front of us sadly
on his way to be killed. “It’s over,” he told me.
“No, no,” I said to him, and he held out both his hands to me.
But he was right.
Three hundred thousand voices had elected the Commune. Fifteen
thousand stood up to the clash with the army during Bloody Week.
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
We’ve counted about thirty-five thousand people who were executed,
but how many were there that we know nothing of? From time to time
the earth disgorges its corpses. If we are implacable in the coming fight,
who is to blame?
The Commune, surrounded from every direction, had only death on
its horizon. It could only be brave, and it was. And in dying it opened
wide the door to the future. That was its destiny.
Chapter 10
After the Commune
Somehow I managed to escape from the soldiers trying to arrest me.
Finally the victorious reactionaries took my mother and threatened to
shoot her if I wasn’t found. To set her free I went to take her place,
although she didn’t want me to do it, the poor, dear woman. I had to tell
her a lot of lies to convince her, and as always she ended up believing me.
Thus I saw to it that she returned home.
They took me to the detention camp in the 37th [sic: 43rd] Bastion,
near the Montmartre railroad. Even that far out, fragments of paper ash
coming from the burning of Paris blew like black butterflies. Above us
the lights of the fire floated like red crepe. And always we could hear the
cannon. We heard them until May 28, and right up to that day we said to
each other:
“The Revolution will take its revenge.”
At the 37th Bastion, in front of the dust-filled square where we were
penned up, there are casemates under a mound of green lawn. There, as
soon as General de Gallifet arrived, the soldiers shot two unfortunate
people in front of us. They resembled each other and must have been
brothers. They both struggled until the shots rang out, for they did not
want to die. They hadn’t even been on our side. They had come out into
the street, perhaps to insult us, and had been arrested. Before they were
shot, they had said they weren’t worried, because they were sure they’d
be freed. Then General de Gallifet gave an order to shoot into the crowd
if anyone moved. The two brothers were terrified and tried to flee. We
cried out:
“We don’t know them. They’re not ours.”
But it did no good. They were shot anyway. They weren’t even able to
stand up for the volley. They were so frightened that all they could say
was that they were Montmartre merchants; they couldn’t even remem¬
ber their addresses so that they could commend their children to those
of us who remained. We didn’t think we could figure out who they were
either. People thought that one of them was saying “Alas.” I have always
guessed that he said “Anne,” and that she was his daughter. How many
people were seized like this, how many who really were enemies of the
Commune, like those two unfortunate men of Bastion 37?
70
Memoirs of Louise Michel
After this execution we were lined up and marched off toward
Versailles. As we arrived there, a bunch of bullies threw rocks at us as if
we were rabbits, and a member of the National Guard had his jaw
broken. One thing I owe to the cavalry who were guarding us: They
pushed back the ruffians and their girl friends who had come to the
prisoner-baiting. We didn’t stop at Versailles, however; we were led
beyond, south to Satory.
The prisoners filing past from Montmartre to Satory are present now
in my mind. We were marching between the lines of a cavalry escort. It
was night. Nothing could have been more horribly beautiful than the
place where they made us climb down into the ravines near the Chateau
de la Muette. The gloom, barely lit by the wan moon, transformed the
ravines into walls. The shadows of the horsemen on either side of our
long file formed a black fringe that made the path seem lighter. The sky,
hovering with the promise of heavy rains on the morrow, seemed to
press down on us. Everything became blurred and appeared dream¬
like—except for the horsemen who led the column and the first groups
of prisoners. A sudden flash of light filtered from below between the
hooves of the horses and lit them up; scattered red reflections seemed to
bleed on us and on the uniforms. The rest of the file stretched out in a
long trail of ink, ending in the murky depths of the night.
People said they were going to shoot us in those ravines, but the
soldiers had us climb out, although I didn’t know why. I felt no fear, for
I was wrapped up in the picture I saw and no longer thought of where
we were. Thrilled by my perceptions, I earned no merit at all for
despising a danger I wasn’t thinking about. Gripped by the tableau I
only looked, and now I remember.
Satory! As we got there during a downpour which made the slope
slippery, we were told: “Move! Climb as if you were charging up the
Butte of Montmartre.” And everybody climbed at full charge, and then
we had to walk in front of some machine guns that they rolled after us.
We told an old woman who was on the verge of hysterics, and who was in
our group only because her husband had been shot, that the machine
guns were only a formality they went through each time new prisoners
arrived. We weren’t so sure of this, but at least the woman fell silent. We
believed the soldiers were going to kill us, and there would only be time
enough for us to yell, “Long live the Commune” before we died. But
then they pulled back the machine guns.
Satory! In the middle of the night the soldiers would call out groups of
prisoners. They’d get up from the mud where they had lain down in the
rain, and follow the soldier’s lantern that led their way. They’d be given
a pick and shovel to dig their own graves, and then they’d be shot. The
echoes of volleys shattered the silence of the night.
Satory! The prisoners drank from their hands at the little pond when
they were too thirsty and when the heavy rain which was falling on them
Memoirs of Louise Michel
71
had swept away the pink foam. There the victors washed their hands,
which were often redder than those of butchers.
Who will record the crimes that power commits, and the monstrous
manner in which power transforms men? Those crimes can be ended
forever by spreading power out to the entire human race. To spread the
feeling of the homeland to the entire world, to extend well-being to all
people, to give science to all humanity—that will save humanity.
When I arrived at Satory the soldiers said they were going to shoot me
the next day, in the evening; then the next day they said they would
shoot me the day after. I don’t know why they didn’t, for I was insolent
to them, as insolent as one is in defeat to ferocious victors.
Shortly thereafter, a group of us was sent to the prison of Chantiers at
Versailles. As we were marching, a strange thing happened. A furious
woman dashed in front of us, crying out that we had killed her sister,
that she knew it, that there were witnesses. A cry rose up from our midst.
It was her sister, who had been arrested by the Versailles government.
When we arrived at the prison of Chantiers, we were kept in a huge
square room on the second floor, sitting on the floor by day and
stretching out any way we could at night. At the end of two weeks they
gave us bundles of straw, each of which had to do for two people. At
night two lamps lit our morgue, where we hung up our rags and tatters
on strings above our sleeping bodies. Above the room was a hole
through which we climbed to the interrogation room; another hole led
to the ground floor, where they kept the children who were prisoners,
the children whose fathers they couldn’t find. Some of those children,
like Ranvier, were courageous and we were proud of them.
For a long time I was forbidden to see my mother, who came often
from Montmartre without being able to speak to me. One day she was
pushed back while she was offering me a bottle of coffee, and I threw the
bottle at the gendarme who had pushed her. A nearby officer rebuked
me, and I told him my only regret was that I had thrown the bottle at a
tool of the government rather than at the head of it. They finally did
allow my mother to see me, but it was a long time later.
At the prison of Chantiers I saw grotesque things. . . .
A deaf and dumb woman spent several weeks there, charged with
having cried out, “Long live the Commune!” An old woman, both of
whose legs were paralyzed, was charged with having built barricades.
For three days, another woman just walked around the room, her basket
under one arm and her umbrella under the other. In her basket were
some poems that her employer had written in praise of the victors.
Ironically, the soldiers believed those poems were in praise of the
Commune, even one with a line that ran:
Good gentlemen of Versailles
Enter into Paris.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
Inside the Prison des Chantiers, Versailles, 15 August 1871. Louise
Michel is the third prisoner from the right, second row. (Photo. Bibl.
nat. Paris)
Memoirs of Louise Michel
73
But laughter quickly dies. The cries of the insane, uncertainty about
relatives and friends whose fate was unknown, mothers left alone—all
that I feel even now.
We were proud in defeat, and the ruffians and their girl friends who
came out to see the vanquished as if they were going to look at animals in
the Jardin des Plantes didn’t see our tears. Instead, we sneered at their
idiotic faces.
On the floor of our prison room there were so many lice they made
little silver nets as they meandered about, going to their nests that
resembled anthills. They were enormous lice, with bristling backs that
were a little bit round-shouldered, so many lice that you believed you
could hear the noise of their swarming.
Constantly guarded by soldiers, we women couldn’t change our un¬
derwear easily (those of us who had any to change into). I was finally able
to get some from my mother, who pushed it through the openwork gate
in the courtyard.
I spent my nights looking at the tableau of this morgue. I have always
been taken by views like that, so much so that I often forget people in the
face of the horrible eloquence of things. Sometimes this morgue looked
like dusk or dawn playing on a field where the crop had been harvested.
I could see the empty stalks, thin bundles of straw, gilded like wheat. At
other times, light mirrored off them. When daybreak paled the lamps, it
looked like a harvest of stars.
On 15 June 1871, the worst forty of us were sent from the prison to
the reformatory at Versailles. Mme Cadolle and Mme Hardouin have
related what happened at Chantiers after we left.
Of course I was one of the worst forty sent to Versailles. We had to
wait in the courtyard under a beating rain, and an officer said he was
sorry. I couldn’t keep myself from saying that making us stand in the
drenching rain fitted in with all their other acts, and anyway I liked it
better that way.
At the reformatory of Versailles, conditions for us forty were
strangely eased. To get ready for the trial of the members of the
Commune, the government tried a number of unfortunate women and
sentenced them to death, although they had only been ambulance
nurses. Because of her name, Eulalie Papavoine was sentenced to forced
labor and was sent to Cayenne, even though she was not related to the
legendary Papavoine. The Versailles government carefully kept from
sentencing the boldest women to death; they didn’t execute either
Elisabeth Retif or Marchais, although they proved the two had conspired
with each other, in spite of the fact that they had never met.
On the third of September, the eve of the first anniversary of the
proclamation of the Republic, the sentencing of the chief members of
the Commune was drawing to a close. By decree the governor general of
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
Paris had established the Third Military Court-Martial. Colonel Merlin
was president and the members were Major Gaulet, Captain de Guibert,
M. Mariguet, Lieutenant Caissaigne, Second Lieutenant Leger, Warrant
Officer Labbat, Major Gaveau, and Captain Senart. The Third Military
Court-Martial tried eighteen persons, among them Theophile Ferre.
Theophile Ferre, who once had been Clemenceau’s deputy mayor,
was the brother of my great friend Marie. In the Dossier [sic: Cahiers] de la
magistrature by Odysse Barot I found an account of Theophile Ferre’s
arrest, and I quote those pages which were written under the vivid
emotion of the horrible scene. People will understand why, when I am
discussing these terrible sorrows, I quote friends who have related the
events of those sad days instead of telling about them myself. Courage
has limits, and one doesn’t pass them unless duty demands it.
There is a detail about which people do not know and which has not
been written about until now: the manner in which Ferry’s arrest took
place and the way the authorities discovered his hiding place.
All enquiries had been fruitless. The authorities had arrested five or six
pseudo-Ferres, just as they had shot five or six pseudo-Billiorays and five
or six pseudo-Valles.
What did they do then? They went to the little house on the rue
Fazilleau in the suburb of Levallois-Perret, where the former member of
the Commune used to live with his parents.
Theophile Ferre was not at the house, but the authorities had known
when they went to Levallois-Perret that there was no chance of finding
Ferr£ at his parents’ home. Why did they go there? How naive you are! He
lived there with his family, and what good is a family if it does not inform
on and surrender its own?
Needless to say, the authorities pushed their way brutally into the little
cottage surrounded by its garden. Ah! Wait, I do not know if my pen will
have the courage to finish. The other day business took me to Levallois,
and when I passed down that street and came to that house, whose number
suddenly came back to mind, I was forced to stop for a few minutes. Blood
rushed to my head and sweat ran down my forehead; a simple memory
caused waves of anger and rage to overwhelm me. Please excuse me for
this involuntary emotion, but you will share that indignation, that anger,
and that rage.
The authorities entered the house. The father had left for his daily job,
and only two women were there, the old mother and the young sister of
the man they were looking for. The sister, Mile Marie Ferre, was in bed,
dangerously sick with a high fever.
The authorities fell on Mme Ferre and questioned her harshly. They
ordered her to reveal the hiding place of her son. She swore she didn’t
know it and that, if she did, it was terrible to tell a mother to betray her
own son.
They increased their pressure and used both gentleness and threats.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
75
“Arrest me if you want to,” Mme Ferre said, “but I can’t tell you what I
don’t know and you will not be so cruel as to tear me away from my
daughter’s sickbed.”
The poor woman trembled all over just thinking about that. One of the
men smiled fleetingly, for her words had given him a diabolical idea.
“Since you won’t tell us where your son is, we are going to take your
daughter away.”
Mme Ferre cried out in despair and anguish, but her prayers and tears
were unavailing. The men set about getting her sick daughter up and
dressing her, at the risk of killing her.
“Courage, mother,” said Mile Ferre. “Don’t worry, I’ll be strong. It will
be nothing. They will have to let me go.”
They were going to take her away.
Mme Ferre was faced with the horrible alternative of sending her son to
his death or killing her daughter by allowing her to be taken off. In spite of
desperate signs which the heroic Marie made to her, the hapless mother in
a frenzy of grief lost her head in her anguish, hesitated . . .
“Be silent, mother! Be silent!” murmured the sick girl.
The authorities were taking Marie off. . . .
It was too much for her mother to bear. She broke down. Her reason
became dark, and incoherent phrases escaped from her lips. The execu¬
tioners listened for a clue.
In her hysteria the tormented mother let the address “rue Saint-Sau-
veur” slip several times.
Alas! No more was needed. While two of the men kept the Ferre home
under observation, the others ran to finish the job. The rue Saint-Sauveur
was sealed off and searched, and Theophile Ferre was arrested.
A week after the horrible scene at the rue Fazilleau, the courageous
Marie was freed. But they didn’t free her mother, who had become insane,
and soon died in the asylum of Sainte-Anne.
At the court-martial, Th6ophile Ferre refused to have a defense
lawyer, but the president of the court, according to law, appointed
Maitre Marchand to defend him. Ferr6 explained the role of the
Commune, after having discussed the coup d’6tat prepared by the
enemies of the Republic, who had gone so far as to deny Paris the right
to elect its municipal council.
“Honest and sincere newspapers were suppressed,” Ferr6 said to the
court-martial. “The most patriotic among us were condemned to death
while Royalists were preparing to divide France. Finally, during the
night of March 18, they believed they were ready, and they tried to
disarm the National Guard and arrest all republicans. Their attempt
failed because it was faced with the complete opposition of Paris and
even the mutiny of their own soldiers. The royalists fled and took refuge
at Versailles.
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
“Paris was now free, and some vigorous and courageous citizens tried
to reestablish order and safety at the risk of their lives. A few days later
the population voted and created the Commune of Paris.
“It was the duty of the Versailles government to recognize the validity
of the vote of Paris and to confer with the Commune about restoring
tranquility. On the contrary, as if foreign war had not already given
France enough misery and ruin, the government added a civil war.
Breathing hate and vengeance against the people, the Versailles govern¬
ment attacked Paris and subjected it to a new siege.
“Paris resisted for two months, and then it was conquered. For ten
days, without making any pretense at legality, the Versailles government
authorized the massacre of citizens. Those terrible days remind us of St.
Bartholomew’s Massacre and surpassed the atrocities of June and De¬
cember. When will the machine-gunning of people stop?
“Because I am a member of the Paris Commune, I am in the hands of
the victors. They want my head. Let them take it. Free I have lived, and
free I expect to die.
“I add only one word: Fortune is capricious. I entrust to the future my
memory and my revenge.”
Ferre was condemned to death. Of the eighteen defendants at that
court-martial only he and Lullier were sentenced to death. Urbain and
Trinquet were sentenced to life at hard labor. Sentenced to deportation
to a fortification were Assi, Bilhoray, Champy, Reg£re, Ferrat, Verdure,
and Grousset. Jourde and Rastoul were sentenced to simple deportation.
Courbet was sentenced to six months and fined 500 francs, and Des-
champ, Parent, and Clement were acquitted.
Another murder took place, too. Flourens was killed in an outpost as
punishment for letting some men escape on October 31. They slipped
away through windows, doors, and water closets, and he didn’t join the
hunt for the vanquished.
The Board of Pardons reviewed the verdicts of the court-martial, and
that board is guilty of the volleys at the execution stakes. The fifteen
members of the Board of Pardons were only fifteen executioners. If the
soldiers were drunk with blood up to their ankles, the Board of Pardons
had blood up to its belly.
Theophile Ferre and I were able to exchange a few letters from our
prisons while we were both at Versailles. I still have some of them, and
some of the poetry I wrote for him. The year of seventy-one! I have a
notebook of black-bordered mourning paper in which Marie copied
down some of my poems, a number of which she copied in red ink, red
like blood. Marie had given this notebook to her brother Hippolyte, who
lent it to me, but he won’t get it back until I’m dead and the pages that
are now blank are written upon.
I think I still have Ferre’s last letter to me from his cell at Versailles.
None of the house searches took those papers away from me, and my
Memoirs of Louise Michel
77
friends didn’t want to disturb them because the people mentioned were
either dead or prisoners. It is too painful to quote his letter; I will say
only that Ferre, instead of being moved by his own fate, looked at liberty
rising on the faraway horizon across the blood of 1871.
I do have a copy of the last letter Ferre sent to my dear Marie. This
fragment came to me on May 24 of this year; I did not need to see the
accompanying letter to guess that it came from you, my dear Avronsart.
Prison of Versailles, no. 6
Tuesday, 28 November 1871, 5:30 a.m.
My beloved sister,
In a few moments I am going to die. At the last instant, thoughts of you
will be in my mind. I beg you to ask for my body so that it may be reunited
with that of our unfortunate mother. If you can, have the hour of my
burial put in the newspapers, so that friends can accompany me. Of
course, no religious ceremony: I die a materialist, as I have lived.
Place a wreath on the tomb of our mother.
Try to cure my brother and to console our father. Tell them both how
much I loved them.
I give you a thousand kisses and thank you for the attention you have
never ceased to lavish on me. You must overcome your sorrow and, as you
have often promised me, be equal to events. As for me, I am happy. I am
going away to be done with my sufferings, and there is no reason to feel
pity for me.
All yours,
Your devoted brother,
Th. Ferre
All my papers, my clothing, and other objects are to be returned, except
for the money in the clerk’s office which I leave to more unfortunate
prisoners.
Th. Ferre
At seven o’clock on the morning of 28 November 1871, Ferr6 was
assassinated on the plain of Satory along with Rossel and Bourgeois, who
had been condemned to death in another trial. Here are the terms in
which a reactionary newspaper related the heroic death of Ferr£:
The condemned are very firm. Ferre, backed up to his post, throws his
hat on the ground. A sergeant comes forward to place a blindfold over his
eyes; Ferre takes the blindfold and throws it on his hat. . . . The three
condemned remain alone. The three firing squads, which have just ad¬
vanced, fire.
Rossel and Bourgeois fall immediately; as for Ferr6, he stays standing
for a moment and then falls on his right side. The surgeon-major of the
camp, M. D6jardin, hurries over to the cadavers. He signals that Rossel is
quite dead and calls the soldiers who are to give the coup de grace to Ferre
and to Bourgeois.
Finally the march past begins.
78
Memoirs of Louise Michel
Marie recovered somewhat, and being the only member of the family
who was free, she proved her courage by going from prison to prison as
long as her brothers and her father were locked up, and she came to
claim Theophile’s body for burial.
Because of the letters Theophile and I had exchanged, the Prefect of
Police sent me to Arras. By a maneuver of the prefect, a name was
crossed off the list of those who were being sent to wait in faraway
prisons, and mine was put in its place. I must say that the Military
Tribunal didn’t know about this, let alone approve it. I protested not
against the prison, where we found much better treatment than at
Satory or in the temporary prison camps, but against the squalid
maneuvering of this transfer. I was under the jurisdiction of the Military
Tribunal and not that of the Prefect of Police, who wanted to delay my
trial indefinitely, while insulting me by trying the other women, Retif
and Marchais, first.
On the day of Ferre’s execution I was recalled from Arras. At the
railroad station of Versailles I saw Marie, who had come to claim her
brother’s body. I was able to speak to her for only a moment. She was
dressed entirely in black, and her thick brown curls stood out as if her
skin was marble, for she was very pale. She showed neither tears nor
weakness, but she looked like a corpse, and she was so cold to the touch!
She was as cold as she was years later when I arranged her in her coffin.
The execution of Ferre prompted me to write to General Appert,
under whose authority the trials were taking place.
Prison of Versailles
2 December 1871
Sir:
I finally believe that the triple assassination of Tuesday morning really
happened.
If you don’t want to go through the legal formalities, you already know
enough about me to shoot me. I’m ready, and the plain of Satory is nearby.
You and all your accomplices know very well that if I get out of here
alive I will avenge the martyrs.
Long live the Commune.
Louise Michel
But they didn’t want to put me in front of a firing squad at Satory, and
I am still here, seeing death mow people down all around me. No one
who hasn’t experienced this kind of emptiness can know what courage it
took to live.
But no weakness! None! Long live the dead Commune! Long live the
living Revolution!
In May 1871 the streets of Paris were dappled white as if by apple
blossoms in the spring. But no trees had cast down that mantle of white;
it was chlorine that covered the corpses. Now, the ground was all white
Memoirs of Louise Michel
79
again, this time with snow. On 28 November 1871, six months after the
hot-blooded butchery had ended, the cold-blooded assassinations began.
The soldiers had become tired and perhaps their machine guns were
breaking down. Now there would be an end to scenes of limbs half-cov¬
ered with earth, an end to cries of agony coming from heaps of persons
who had been summarily executed, an end to swallows dying poisoned
by the flies that had been feeding in that enormous charnel house.
Henceforth, murder would be done cold-bloodedly, in an orderly fash¬
ion.
We do not know the names of all those who died in the hunt and after.
The enormous number of missing persons proves how minimal the
official figures of the slaughter are. Sometimes now, in the corners of
cellars, skeletons are found, and no one knows where they came from.
People claim it is mysterious, but every out-of-the-way spot became a
charnel house to the victory of the Versailles royalists.
And the plain of Satory. If it were excavated, corpses would be found
there too. The royalists covered them with quicklime in vain, because
plows will uncover them, and every stone upturned will reveal them.
As I write these pages, those places are only boneyards. Fifteen years
ago they were slaughterhouses. And down in the catacombs under Paris,
where the government chased the Communards with torches and dogs
as if they were animals, there must be many modern skeletons among
the ancient bones. Betrayals so numerous they were nauseating, stupid
fear, disgust, the horror—all this was the aftermath of the Commune.
The trial of the members of the Commune was riddled with errors,
but the main purpose of the appeal our lawyers filed with the Court of
Cassation had been to test Versailles’s justice to its end. None of the
condemned counted on it, although the legal flaws were numerous. The
prosecutor, Major Gaveau, insulted Ferre in the course of the trial by
saying “the memory of a murderer.” That same Gaveau twice vacated his
seat as public prosecutor, did not appear even for a moment at the
session of September 2, and did not attend the reading of the sentence, a
sentence in which false documents appeared.
The members of the Commune did not conceal their acts. It was not
easy to be found innocent, even when one had committed no crime,
when people felt responsible for their own actions. Ferre carried his acts
proudly and bore responsibility for them to the execution post at Satory.
The others carried theirs to prison or to exile. Yet in order to convict the
defendants, the authorities thought they needed to add forgeries that
were established as false, forgeries that were so patently false that some
were not even written in French.
By June 1872 the Versailles “justice” had delivered 32,905 verdicts.
They had already condemned 72 persons to death, and sentenced
another 33 to death in absentia. That made a total of 105 sentenced to
capital punishment, and the Versailles “justice” kept on operating.
80
Memoirs of Louise Michel
Forty-six children under the age of sixteen were put in reformatories.
No doubt it was to punish them for what their fathers had been shot for.
Small children, in the orgy of the fighting, had had their heads smashed
against walls.
In the summer of 1873 they were still shooting prisoners at Satory.
After a mockery of a trial in which I made no attempt to defend myself, I
was sentenced to deportation to a fortification for life.
Chapter 11
The Trial of 1871
This chapter consists of an account of the trial as reported in the Gazette des
Tribunaux that Louise Michel included as an appendix to her memoirs.
Sixth Court-Martial Board (Versailles)
President of the Court: Delaporte, Colonel, Twelfth
Cavalry
Session of 16 December 1871
The Background of the Case against Louise Michel
The Commune had an insufficient number of men for protection
against the loyal members of the National Guard, so it established
companies of children known as Wards of the Commune. It also tried to
organize a battalion of amazons. This group was never formed, but
women wearing fanciful uniforms and carrying carbines at their shoul¬
ders could be seen preceding the battalions that went to the ramparts.
Among those women who seem to have exercised considerable influence
in certain quarters was Louise Michel, ex-schoolmistress at Batignolles,
who never stopped displaying boundless devotion to the insurrectionary
government.
Louise Michel is thirty-six years old, petite, brunette, with a very
developed forehead which recedes abruptly. Her nose, mouth, and chin
are very prominent, and her features reveal an extreme severity. She
dresses entirely in black. Her temperament is as excitable as it was
during the first days of her captivity. When she was first brought in front
of the court-martial, she suddenly raised her veil and stared at her
judges fixedly.
Captain Dailly was the public prosecutor for the Sixth Court-Martial.
According to regulations, Maitre Haussman was appointed to assist the
accused in her defense, but she declared she would refuse the help of
any lawyer.
The clerk of the court-martial, M. Duplan, read the following report:
82
Memoirs of Louise Michel
Statement by the Clerk of the Court-Martial
In 1870, at the occasion of Victor Noir’s death, Louise Michel began to
display her revolutionary ideas. Because Michel was an obscure school¬
mistress with almost no pupils, it was not possible for our investigators to
find out what her previous revolutionary activity had been or what her
part was in the events leading up to the monstrous offense which
terrified our unfortunate country.
To retrace the incidents of 18 March 1871 in their entirety would be
useless, and this court, as its point of departure in the prosecution of
Mile Michel, will limit itself to determining precisely the part she took in
the bloody drama whose theater was the Butte of Montmartre and the
rue des Rosiers.
Louise Michel was an accomplice in the arrest of the two unfortunate
generals, Lecomte and Clement Thomas. She was fearful that the two
victims might escape. “Don’t let them go,” she cried out with all her
might to the scoundrels who surrounded the generals. Later, when the
murder had been committed, she showed her joy at the spilled blood,
and dared to exclaim in the presence of the mutilated bodies, “It serves
them right.” Then, radiant and satisfied with her good day, she went to
Belleville and La Villette to assure herself “that these neighborhoods
were still armed.”
On the nineteenth she returned home, after having taken the precau¬
tion of removing the National Guard uniform that could incriminate
her. She felt the need to talk a bit about the events with her concierge.
“Ah,” she cried. “If Clemenceau had gotten to the rue des Rosiers a few
instants sooner, they wouldn’t have shot the generals. He would have
been against it because he was on the side of the Versailles government.”
Paris, in the hands of foreigners and rascals who had come from every
corner of the world, proclaimed the Commune. Louise Michel, as
secretary of the society called Improvement of Working Women
through Their Work, organized the famous Central Committee of the
Union of Women, as well as the Committees of Vigilance charged with
recruiting stretcher-bearers—and, at the height of the struggle,
women—to serve on the barricades and perhaps even some to be
arsonists.
A copy of a manifesto found in the Town Hall of the Tenth Arron-
dissement indicates the role she played in the aforementioned commit¬
tees during the last days of the struggle. The text of that manifesto
reads:
In the name of the Social Revolution that we acclaim, in the name of the
demand for the right to work and the rights of equality and justice, the
Union of Women for the Defense of Paris and the Care of the Wounded
challenges with all its strength the shameful proclamation addressed to
women which a group of reactionaries posted the day before yesterday.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
83
That proclamation stated that the women of Paris are appealing to the
generosity of Versailles and are requesting peace at any price.
No. The women workers of Paris have come to demand not peace but
war to the death.
Today, reconciliation would be treason. It would be to deny all the
aspirations of women workers who acclaim complete social change, the
annihilation of all existing social and legal relations, the suppression of all
special privileges, the end of all exploitation, the substitution of the reign
of work for the reign of capital. In a word, they demand the emancipation
of the worker through his own efforts.
Six months of suffering and treason during the Siege, six weeks of
titanic fights against the united exploiters, waves of blood spilled for the
cause of liberty—these are our warrant for glory and vengeance.
The present struggle can have only one result—the triumph of the
popular cause. Paris will not pull back, for it carries the flag of the future.
The final hour has struck! Give way to the workers! Enough of their
executioners! Acts! Energy!
The tree of liberty grows tall, watered with the blood of its enemies! . . .
United and resolute, the women of Paris are matured and enlightened
by the suffering that social crises bring. The women of Paris are deeply
convinced that the Commune, representing the international and revolu¬
tionary principles of peoples, carries in itself the germ of Social Revolu¬
tion. When the moment of greatest danger comes, the women of Paris will
prove to France and to the world that they know how, at the barricades
and on the ramparts of Paris, if the reactionaries force the gates, to give
their blood like their brothers, to give their lives for the defense and
triumph of the Commune—for the people.
Then, victorious, able to unite and agree on their common interests,
working men and working women, interdependent and made one for a
final effort . . . [The last phrase is incomplete.]
Long live the Republic of all persons! Long live the Commune!
Holding the positions cited above, Louise Michel directed a school at
24, rue Oudot. There, from her lectern in her rare spare moments, she
professed the doctrines of free thought and made her young pupils sing
poems she had written, among which was the song entitled “The
Avengers.”
As President of the Club of the Revolution which met in the church of
Saint-Bernard, Louise Michel is responsible for the vote at the session on
May 18 (21 Floreal, year 79). That vote was for:
The suppression of magistrates and the annihilation of the legal Codes,
with their replacement by a commission of justice;
The suppression of religions, the immediate arrest of priests, and the
sale of their goods and the goods of those fugitives and traitors who
supported the scoundrels of Versailles;
The execution of an important hostage every twenty-four hours until
Citizen Blanqui, an appointed member of the Commune, is freed and
arrives in Paris.
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
It was not enough for this “passionate spirit,” as the author of an
imaginative account included in her dossier calls her, to stir up the
people, to applaud assassination, to corrupt children, to preach fratri¬
cide, and to encourage crime; she still had to set an example and commit
crimes herself.
Thus we find her at Issy, Clamart, and Montmartre fighting in the
front line, shooting at government forces or rallying retreating rebels.
The April 14 issue of the Cri dupeuple proves this charge. “Citizen Louise
Michel, who fought so valiantly at Moulineaux, was wounded at the fort
of Issy.” Fortunately for her, we add, the heroine of Jules Vall&s came
out of that notorious action with a simple sprain.
What was the motive that pushed Louise Michel down this irrevocable
path of politics and revolution?
Clearly, it was arrogance.
Louise Michel was an illegitimate child reared by charity. Instead of
thanking Providence for giving her the means to live happily with her
mother, she surrendered to her heated imagination and excitable char¬
acter. Breaking with her benefactors, she ran to Paris for adventure.
The wind of revolution began to blow. Victor Noir died. It was the
moment for Louise Michel to enter on stage, but an anonymous role was
repugnant to her. Her name had to draw public attention and be in the
headlines of false proclamations and posters.
In conclusion, we must give a legal classification to the acts this
devil-ridden fanatic committed during the period from the beginning of
the frightful crisis that France has just undergone to the end of the
blasphemous struggle in which the accused took part amid the tombs of
the Montmartre cemetery.
She assisted, knowingly, the persons who apprehended the generals
Lecomte and Clement Thomas. She assisted, knowingly, in the deeds
that followed their apprehension: the torture and death of those two
unlucky individuals.
Intimately linked with the members of the Commune, she knew all
their plans in advance. She helped them with all her might and will.
Moreover, she assisted them and even surpassed them when she volun¬
teered to go to Versailles and assassinate the President of the Republic
with the intention of terrifying the Assembly and, according to her,
ending the fighting.
She is as guilty as “Ferre, the proud republican,” whom she defended
in such a strange fashion and whose head, to use her own words, “is a
challenge thrown at your consciences—the answer to which is revolu¬
tion.”
She excited the passions of the crowd and preached war without
mercy or truce. A she-wolf eager for blood, she brought about the death
of hostages through her hellish plots.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
85
Therefore, it is our opinion that there is sufficient cause to bring
Louise Michel to trial for:
1. A crime, having the overthrow of the government as its goal.
2. A crime, having for its purpose the instigation of civil war through
encouraging citizens to arm themselves against each other.
3. For having, during an insurrection, carried visible weapons and
worn a military uniform and for having made use of those weapons.
4. Forgery of documents.
5. Use of a false document.
6. Complicity through provocation and planning in the assassination
of persons held as hostages by the Commune.
7. Complicity in illegal arrests, followed by torture and death, and
knowingly assisting the perpetrators of those deeds in the acts they
committed.
These crimes are provided for in articles 87, 91, 150, 151, 59, 60, 302,
341, and 344 of the Penal Code, and article 5 of the Law of 24 May 1834.
The Testimony of Louise Michel
President of the Court: You have heard the acts you are accused of.
What do you have to say in your defense?
The Accused: I don’t want to defend myself, nor do I want to be
defended. I belong completely to the Social Revolution, and I declare
that I accept responsibility for all my actions. I accept it entirely and
without reservations.
You accuse me of having participated in the assassination of Generals
Clement Thomas and Lecomte. To that charge, I would answer yes—if I
had been at Montmartre when those generals wanted to fire on the
people. I would have had no hesitation about shooting people who gave
orders like those. But once they were prisoners, I do not understand
why they were shot, and I look at that act as a villainous one.
As for the burning of Paris, yes, I participated in it. I wanted to block
the Versailles invaders with a barrier of flames. I had no accomplices in
that. I acted on my own.
I am also charged with being an accomplice of the Commune. That is
quite true, since above everything else the Commune wanted to bring
about the Social Revolution, and Social Revolution is my dearest wish.
Moreover, I am honored to be singled out as one of the promoters of the
Commune. It had absolutely nothing to do with assassinations or burn¬
ing. I attended all the sessions at the Hotel de Ville, and I affirm that
there never was any talk of assassinations or burnings.
Do you want to know who the real guilty parties are? The police.
Later, perhaps, the light of truth will fall on all those events. Now people
naturally place responsibility on the partisans of Social Revolution.
86
Memoirs of Louise Michel
One day I did propose to Th£ophile Ferre that I go to Versailles. I
wanted two victims: M. Thiers and myself, for I had already sacrificed
my life, and I had decided to kill him.
Question: Did you say in a proclamation that a hostage should be shot
every twenty-four hours?
Answer: No, I only wanted to threaten. But why should I defend myself?
I have already told you I refuse to do it. You are the men who are going
to judge me. You are in front of me publicly. You are men, and I, I am
only a woman. Nevertheless, I am looking you straight in the face. I
know quite well that anything I tell you will not change my sentence in
the slightest. Thus I have only one last word before I sit down.
We never wanted anything but the triumph of the great principles of
Revolution. I swear it by our martyrs who fell on the field of Satory, by
our martyrs I still acclaim here, by our martyrs who some day will find
their avenger.
I am in your power. Do whatever you please with me. Take my life if
you want it. I am not a woman who would dispute your wishes for a
moment.
Question: You claim you didn’t approve of the generals’ assassinations.
On the contrary, people say that when you were told about it, you cried
out: “They shot them. It serves them right.”
Answer: Yes, I said that. I admit it. In fact, I remember that I said it in the
presence of Citizens Le Moussu and Ferre.
Question: Then you do approve of the assassinations?
Answer: Let me point out that my statement is not proof. I said those
words with the intention of spurring on revolutionary zeal.
Question: You also wrote for newspapers, the Cri du peuple, for example.
Answer: Yes, I’ve made no effort to conceal that.
Question: In each issue, those newspapers demanded the confiscation of
the clergy’s property and suggested other similar revolutionary mea¬
sures. Were those opinions yours?
Answer: Indeed yes, but note that we never wanted to take those goods
for ourselves. We thought only of giving them to the people for their
well-being.
Question: You asked for the suppression of the court system?
Answer: Because I had in front of me examples of its errors. I remem¬
bered the Lesurques affair and so many more.
Question: Do you confess to having resolved to assassinate M. Thiers?
Answer: Of course. I have already said that, and I claim it now.
Question: It seems that you wore various uniforms during the Commune.
Answer: I was dressed as usual. I only added a red sash over my clothes.
Question: Didn’t you wear a man’s uniform several times?
Answer: Once. On March 18. I dressed as a National Guardsman so I
wouldn’t attract attention.
Few witnesses had been subpoenaed, because Louise Michel had not
disputed the acts she was charged with. . . .
Memoirs of Louise Michel
87
Summation
Captain Dailly, the prosecutor, spoke. He asked the court-martial to
excise the accused from society, because the accused was a continuing
danger to it. He withdrew all charges except that of carrying visible or
hidden arms in an insurrectionary movement.
Ma!tre Haussman, appointed to defend the accused, spoke. He de¬
clared that because of the formal wish of the accused not to be defended,
he would simply put his faith in the wisdom of the court-martial.
President of the Court: Accused, do you have anything to say in your
defense?
Louise Michel: What I demand from you, you who claim you are a
court-martial, you who pass yourselves off as my judges, you who don’t
hide the way the Board of Pardons behaves, you who are from the
military and who judge me publicly—what I call for is the field of Satory,
where our revolutionary brothers have already fallen.
1 must be cut off from society. You have been told that, and the
prosecutor is right. Since it seems that any heart which beats for liberty
has the right only to a small lump of lead, I demand my share. If you let
me live, I will not stop crying for vengeance, and I will denounce the
assassins on the Board of Pardons to the vegeance of my brothers.
President of the Court: I cannot allow you to continue speaking if you
continue in this tone.
Louise Michel: I have finished. ... If you are not cowards, kill me. . . .
The Sentence
After these words, which caused a great stir in the courtroom, the
court-martial withdrew to deliberate. After a time, it returned and
announced its sentence: that Louise Michel be sentenced to deportation
to a fortified place.
Louise Michel was brought back into the courtroom and informed of
the verdict. When the clerk told her she had twenty-four hours to
petition for reviews, she cried out: “No, there is nothing to appeal. But I
would have preferred death.”
[This speech ends the excerpt from the Gazette des tribunaux reprinted in
the Memoirs. Louise Michel later appended a short note.]
Observations
I shall limit myself to pointing out a few errors.
1. I was not reared by charity but by my grandparents, who thought it
proper to do so.
I left Vroncourt only after their deaths, and I left to prepare for my
schoolmistress’s diploma. I believed that in this fashion I could be useful
to my mother.
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2. The number of my pupils in Montmartre was 150. That was stated
by the authorities during the Siege.
3. Perhaps there is some use in noting that contrary to the description
of my person given at the beginning of the account in the Gazette des
tribunaux, I am tall, not short. In the times in which we live, it is proper to
pass only for oneself.
Chapter 12
Voyage to Exile
While I waited for deportation, I was kept in the Auberive prison. Once
again I can see that prison, with its enormous cell blocks and its narrow
white paths running under the pines. There a gale is blowing, and I can
see the lines of silent women prisoners with their scarves folded at their
necks and wearing white headdresses like peasants. In front of the pines
burdened with snow during the long winter of 1872-73, the tired
women prisoners passed slowly by, their wooden shoes ringing a sad
cadence on the frozen earth.
My mother was still strong then, and I waited for my deportation to
New Caledonia without seeing what I have seen since: the terrible and
silent anguish under her calm appearance. She was staying at her sister’s
in Clefmont, which was very near the Auberive prison, and I knew she
was well. She brought me packages of cakes and cookies the way she
used to do when I was a student at Chaumont.
How many little gifts her old hands sent me, even in the last year she
was alive. We revolutionaries bring so little happiness to our families, yet
the more they suffer, the more we love them. The rare moments we
have at home make us intensely happy, for we know that those moments
are transient and our loved ones will miss them in the future.
According to the few pages remaining from my journal of the trip to
New Caledonia, we left Auberive on Tuesday, [5] August 1873, between
six and seven in the morning. The night before we left my mother came
to say goodbye, and I noticed for the first time that her hair was turning
white.
When I left for exile I wasn’t bitter about deportation because it was
better to be somewhere else and so not see the collapse of our dreams.
After what the Versailles government had done, I expected to find the
savages in the South Pacific good, and perhaps I would find the New
Caledonian sun better than the French one.
We were put on a train and while we were crossing through Langres
on the way to Paris, five or six metalworkers with bare arms black up to
their elbows came out of their workshop. One white-haired worker
flourished his hammer and let out a yell that the noise of the railroad
carriage’s rolling wheels almost drowned out. “Long live the Com¬
mune!” he cried. Something like a promise to stay worthy of his salute
filled my heart.
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That evening we arrived in Paris in a prison carriage. As we were
being transported from the Gare de l’Est to the Gare d’Orl£ans, I peered
out and could see the little shop on the rue Saint-Honor6 where my
mother planned to live with a relative after my departure. We left almost
immediately from the Gare d’Orleans, and the next day around four in
the afternoon we arrived near the Atlantic coast at the prison of la
Rochelle.
On August 8 we were put aboard a vessel, the Comlte , to go the last
thirty kilometers to Rochefort. Aboard the Comtte we were treated like a
vanquished enemy, not like evildoers, and some friendly people in small
boats followed the Comete the entire way. We answered their salute from
afar. As my last farewell I wanted to wave a red scarf I had saved since
the Commune, but it was buried deep in my baggage, hidden from any
search, and on deck I had only my black veil.
In the harbor at Rochefort we were put aboard the old warship
Virginie. On Sunday, August 10, the crew let out the sails and weighed
anchor while they sang the old war songs of Brittany. The rhythm of
their songs multiplied their strength, and the cable rose while the men
sweated. Their harmony became a force without which it would have
been impossible to raise the anchor.
Until Monday we skirted the coasts of France. Then came the open
sea. At first two or three ships were in sight on the horizon; then only
one; then none at all. Two seabirds accompanied us for some time, but
toward the fourteenth the last large ones disappeared. On the sixteenth
the waves were strong. The wind blew a tempest, and the sun made a
thousand flashes on the water. Two rivers of diamonds seemed to slide
down the flanks of the ship.
It was really my ship then, alone under the heavens! Except for the
trip between Chaumont and Paris, I had never traveled. Now I was
taking a long voyage on a warship; I would never have dared to dream
of such a stroke of good luck, especially with the state paying the cost. It
was true that ultimately the cost was high: our people by the thousands
fallen in the slaughter and mothers who believed they would never see
us again. Still, to me, the sea was the most beautiful of spectacles, even
though from infancy pictures and tales and especially my imagination
had filled my mind with the ocean. I had dreamed of the ocean the way it
truly was, and now that the reality had appeared, I was charmed and
magnetized by its immensity. In my imagination I had loved the sea all
my life; now I loved it as I really saw it.
For my first toys my grandfather had made me boats, beautiful little
ones whose sails could be clewed up with cables of thick thread. In a
poem about my childhood, I wrote about those toy boats my grandfather
made.
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91
As my first toys, he made me some boats.
Ships of great beauty with real sails and masts,
And we floated them through the cool of the pond.
We sailed them through hazards of monstrous brown toads,
Which sometimes turned and leaped on their decks
Down near the old elm where honeybees swarmed
In the hot summer sun, midst the roses of Provins.
How many white sails I saw as a child.
They swooped o’er the waves in my dreams of the night,
There was one in the starlight that floated alone,
A soaring white bird against blackest horizon.
How great was its beauty! I painted it brightly,
And stood struck with awe at its forest of rigging.
My grandfather said: “I will build you a ship,
A ship of great beauty with its heart made of oak,
For it is a frigate.” . . .
But though he made me many lesser craft he never made that dream
frigate with its oaken heart, and we never set it afloat in the pond near
the red rosebushes with bees flying over its masts. He never built it, and
yet on the real waves, after the defeat of the Commune, I recognized my
dream frigate; it was the Virginie.
Anyone can try to explain this childhood dream. When I saw the ship
from my imagination appear in the real world, I had already seen too
many strange things to be moved by that new coincidence. I have seen
things that made me think of Edgar Allan Poe or Baudelaire or the
narrators of strange events; here I simply note that the Virginie breasting
the waves under full sail was the very ship I had seen in my dreams.
On August 19 a black ship like the legendary Naglfar , the spectral ship
of the North, came into view, sometimes crowding on sail and coming
nearer, sometimes slipping back. It began to look as if it were lying in
wait, and we wondered if its crew were liberators. It followed us in an
intermittent fashion for two days. On the evening of the second day our
vessel did some practice maneuvers and fired two blank cannon shots,
and the strange ship faded into the night. For a little while longer it
watched from a greater distance, its white sails shining like stars just over
the horizon against the depths of shadow. Then it returned no more.
On August 22 sea swallows perched on our yardarms. We were in
sight of Palma [sic: Las Palmas], Grand Canary Island, whose white
houses seemed to grow out of the water. From the ships we could see
mountains and more mountains, piled up and mixed with the clouds.
From the anchorage at Las Palmas we could see some savage rocks, two
forts, Luz and Santa Catarina [sic: Catalina], and some ruins which we
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were told were those of a customshouse. To the north, on a hill
overlooking the bay, was the citadel.
The inhabitants came out to the ship in barges laden with enormous
grapes, and they acquainted us with the monetary system of the Ca¬
naries. An ounce of gold or quadruple is eighty-four francs eighty
centimes, a quantity of money none of us needed to worry about. Then
there are quarters, eighths, and sixteenths of piastres and pincettes and
demi-piecettes. There is also the real, nine of which are equal to a five-franc
piece, and still others.
More interesting was the type of inhabitant. Two among them were
magnificent. May science forgive me, but after looking in a number of
scientific books, I don’t think I’m mistaken; the natives were the
Guanches, and their ancestors had lived in Atlantis. Perhaps the Ca¬
naries are the remains of Atlantis. Why not? The tormented ground
there still shakes.
On the twenty-fourth we raised anchor at 9 a.m. We followed the reef
and kept seeing mountain peaks without number and without end. In
the deep gorges between them were forests or plantations of a somber
green with delicate green spots. The bays lay open to the northwest
wind. To the west we could see Tenerife in the distance and farther still
we could see what appeared to be a blue summit lost in the sky, but we
decided it must be masses of clouds.
I can smell the bitter odor of the waves. I can hear the organlike sound
of the wind in the sails and the clatter of clearing for action and
maneuvers. I can hear the whistles trilling as the sailors heaved up the
anchor, snubbed it, and made it fast. I can hear the rough chafing of the
cable and metal being bumped and the chants of the sailors who pushed
at the capstan.
I see the ship tacking, and I see our ports of call, the Canaries and
then Santa Catarina in Brazil before we turned southeastward. The
sailors spread the topsails and hauled in the sheets to hoist them. Up on
the yards the sailors let out the reefs, the canvas caught the wind and
pulled away from the mast, and the land disappeared behind us.
We exchanged many letters and poems across the grates of the cages
in which we were confined. Such actions were forbidden, but the guards
did not enforce that rule. Because they treated us with consideration, we
did not break their other regulations.
Until after my return from exile I saved much of that shipboard
correspondence, but it has since been destroyed. The only fragments I
still have are a few scraps of poetry I wrote and a wonderful poem that
Henri Rochefort wrote to me, “To My Neighbor, Starboard Aft.” I miss
those scraps of paper on which the deportees wrote their simple letters
and verses. There was one very pretty dedication that a comrade, a
zealous Protestant, wrote on the flyleaf of some pious book that was
scented with myrrh and cinnamon. I tore out the dedication and kept it,
Memoirs of Louise Michel
93
but I threw the book overboard. Some letters—a great many of them—
were full of memories of those we left behind us. Those persons would
be less free under the surge of the triumphant reaction in France than
we would be in the Caledonian deserts.
The Virginie sailed on, ever southeastward. The sea was calm as an
oilcloth, peacefully reflecting the shadow of the high yards. Then came
the stormy seas of the Cape of Good Hope. On the mountains of waves
all white with foam, all black in their depths, the eastern sun rose. At
night millions of phosphorescent stars made constellations in the waves.
How magnificent it all was!
There were albatrosses, the poor albatrosses that beat their wings
against the ship or that the sailors caught with a hook. After snaring
them, the sailors hung them up by their beaks until they died; any other
method of killing them might let drops of blood spot the whiteness of
their valuable feathers. Sadly, the albatrosses would keep their heads up
as long as possible, rounding their swans’ necks, prolonging their pitiful
agony for a moment or two. Then with one last grimace of horror they
opened wide their great, black-lidded eyes and died.
I wrote a poem to them:
Soar high in brilliant whiteness, birds,
Fly high above the roaring waves,
And beat your shining wings around
The tiny ship that glides away.
Float in a dream on the foaming sea,
Float like a scattered, roving fleet,
Gleam in the light of the shining sun,
For soon our men will capture you.
Men to glut their petty vices,
Defiling beauty, want your feathers.
They mean to torture you to death.
Poor flying birds, be fearful!
That sort of death is not given only to an albatross. Some men kill
other men the same way, being very careful not to let the drops of blood
soil either them or their victims.
The Virginie sailed through polar seas far south of the Cape of Good
Hope, and the air itself was frozen under a black sky in which morning
mingled with evening. With every swell the vessel creaked. The sailors
sang old airs from Brittany as a magical chant to keep the cold from
overtaking them, so that in the midst of polar cold, I smelled the breath
of Brittany filled with the scent of genista in bloom.
Finally as we sailed across the Indian Ocean, the terrible cold slack¬
ened, and for week after week we sailed across the empty seas bound for
New Caledonia.
New Caledonia and the Ducos Peninsula
Chapter 13
Numbo, New Caledonia
Louise Michel was fortunate. Those persons sent to New Caledonia and sentenced
to the most rigorous deportation lived under conditions that were tolerable, if not
easy. Basically, the authorities restricted Louise Michel and her comrades to a
small territory near Noumea at the tip of the Ducos Peninsula. The issue of
rations was insufficient, but the deportees were allowed to supplement their diets
through their own efforts.
After Henri Rochefort’s successful escape in 1874, the tyrannical Governor
Aleyron replaced Governor de la Richerie, and the major problem of the deportees
was an arbitrary administration which harassed them and cut off information
about the world outside as much as possible. Medical care was minimal. Condi¬
tions, in fact, were more unpleasant than Michel suggests, but less severe than the
government had intended.
Four months after the Virginie left France, we sailed into Noumea
through one of the gaps in the double rampart of coral which surrounds
the island. Here, as at Rome, there are seven hills, which appeared blue
under an intensely blue sky. To the south was Mt. Dore, with red
crevasses of gold-bearing earth, and other mountain peaks were visible
in all directions. One mountain had split in two, forming a V, and where
the two arms of the V met, uprooted rocks had fallen backwards into
some internal cavity. Those arid summits, those gorges torn from a
cataclysm and still gaping wide, those volcanic cones from which flames
spurted long ago and may erupt again—all that wilderness pleased me.
As usual, the authorities tried to separate the men from the women.
At first they tried to send us women up the coast to Bourail while the
men stayed on the Ducos Peninsula just outside Noumea. The excuse
they used was that conditions at Bourail were better, and for that very
reason we protested bitterly. If our male comrades were going to suffer
more on the Ducos Peninsula, we wanted to be there with them. The
captain of the Virginie understood that we were right, and he made the
authorities understand, too. Finally, on the captain’s orders, the V*r-
ginie’s launch ferried us ashore.
I can still see all the details of the site. On the Ducos Peninsula we lived
on the edge of the sea near the Western Forest. Noumea was on the
other side of the hills from Numbo, which was composed of earthen huts
over which creepers formed arabesques. From a distance their random
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groupings among the trees were lovely. We heard the waves beating
eternally on the reefs, and above us we saw the cracked mountain peaks
from which torrents of water poured noisily down to the sea during the
frequent great rains. At sunset we watched the sun disappear into the
sea, and in the valley the twisted white trunks of the niaoulis glowed with
a silver phosphorescence.
The men who had sailed with us had disembarked several days before
we women did. When we were rowed ashore, they were waiting for us on
the beach with other comrades who had come on earlier ships, and for
more than a week we were honored guests, feted from hut to hut.
Our first meal was with Pere Malezieux, that old man of the June Days
whose coat had been riddled by bullets on January 22. He had escaped
from the slaughter without having any idea how he had survived, nor
did we. I believe that the less you value your life, the more chance there
is that you will keep it.
Lacour cooked a roast in a hole, the way the Kanakas do. Lacour was
the comrade who had heard the Protestant organ playing one night at
Neuilly near the Perronnet barricade. The organ had been answering
the Versailles artillery, sometimes like a challenge, sometimes by imitat¬
ing the diabolical thunder of the cannons. Lacour, along with five or six
National Guardsmen, had pushed his way into the church oratory to
threaten the person whose playing was attracting shells to the barricade.
It was I, of course. Ordered to rest, I had gone into the oratory, which
was close to the barricade; the organ was a good one—at that time only a
few notes were broken—and I had never felt in greater form. Everyone
rests in his own way. In my memory I could hear a few measures of that
dance of the bombs, so Lacour was an old friend.
At another feast in our honor, one given by Henri Rochefort, I met a
Kanaka for the first time. It was Daoumi, from Sifou. On Balzenq’s
advice, Daoumi had come dressed like a European in a high hat, which
marred the effect of his wild man’s head, and he was wearing kid gloves.
With his hands thus imprisoned, Daoumi could not help Olivier Pain
with the roast, nor could he help with the other preparations. That is
how I was able to get him alone and have him sing a war chant to me
while I fed leaves to a she-goat tethered to a castor oil plant.
Daoumi sang that war chant in the soft voice of the Kanakas. A threat
howled through its tune in quarter tones, and the farewell at the end
came out as a true cry; the Kanakas get those quarter tones from the
cyclones, just as the Arabs draw theirs from the hot and violent wind of
the desert.
Within the prison area on the Ducos Peninsula, the town of Numbo
grew up little by little, each new arrival adding his own earthen hut
covered with grass. Numbo, in the valley, was crescent-shaped, the
eastern end being the top of the crescent and containing the prison, the
Memoirs of Louise Michel
97
post office, and the canteen. The other end, the western one, lay in a
forest on low hills covered with salt-resistant plants. The middle of the
crescent, running along the whole length of the bays from east to west,
was where we built our huts.
Each person built his nest or dug his lair according to his own
impulses. From a distance Bauer’s hut was a beautiful villa. He had hung
a basket in front of it filled with euphorbia that was sometimes cared for.
Pere Croiset had built a chimney for his hut, and with luck you could
almost make coffee there to celebrate the anniversary of March 18
without making the roof go up in flames. G-had ploughed up half
the mountainside to plant crops; an onlooker would have thought he
was watching the Swiss Family Robinson. In G-’s storehouse under a
rock he kept a whole menagerie, in the midst of which his cat reigned
supreme. At the very top of the mountain Burlot dwelt like a lookout.
You could hear the sonorous cackle of his hen, which sang out like a
donkey warning him of anyone entering his place.
Champy’s hut on the western coast was so small that when several
people sat down there it was like being in a basket. When the wind blew,
as it did strongly enough to tear the horns off cattle in the forest and on
Nou Island southwest of us in the bay, it made Champy’s little basket
dance.
Provins had a stupendous voice and would yell across from one bay to
another, trying to chat with us across four hundred meters of water. We
could hear him, but our responses couldn’t reach him. He was the only
one among us with such a powerful voice.
Pere Malezieux had built his hut with his smithy at the edge of a large
forest, which we called P£re Mal6zieux’s Forest. Near him lived Balzenq,
a former staff member of Blanqui’s newspaper, and in his hole full of
crucibles, Balzenq distilled an essence of niaouli from the trees. At his
hut you could almost believe you were visiting some alchemist. Bunant
lived nearby and went into the woods with his hatchet in his belt; he and
his wife both dressed like bandits.
All our operations were as primitive as the Stone Age. We had to make
our own tools, improvising as best we could for the things we lacked or
that weren’t allowed in the camp.
When I was living at Numbo in a hut below the infirmary, I partially
demolished an uninhabited hut to make it into a greenhouse. The
guards were appalled at my audacity in daring to touch a building
owned by the state. Even the deportees found my action a little brash,
and speculated on what the governor—at that time de la Richerie—
would do when he inspected the area and found out about it.
As it turned out, I was able to get his sympathy for my experiment
when he came. I took him inside the greenhouse and showed him some
trees standing in the best-lit corner. They were papayas which I had
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vaccinated with the sap of other papayas afflicted with plant jaundice,
and I wanted to keep them hidden until my experiment was completed.
Governor de la Richerie understood my experiment and gave orders
that I be allowed to continue using the greenhouse.
I wanted to succeed with twenty trees before I talked about my
experiment. That was important to me because even among the depor¬
tees, where all of us were suffering for having loved liberty, prejudice
still remained. What would my comrades have said if I had talked openly
about using vaccines on vegetables? Even when only very few persons
knew what I was doing I kept hearing things like, “If it were true that
vaccines could be used against all illnesses, professors of medicine would
already have done it. Are you some sort of scientist that you are so busy
on projects like this?”
Since that time scientists have tried vaccines for rabies and cholera,
just as I tried it for plant jaundice in New Caledonia. Sap is like blood,
and the same principles that govern diseases of the blood apply to the
illnesses of plants. If boldness is useful to experimenters, it is most useful
when it is employed to reason about the analogies that exist among all
living things.
My four vaccinated papayas contracted jaundice, but they recovered.
Perhaps they were the only ones which did not die of plant jaundice that
year, especially on the peninsula. Before my experiment was complete,
however, a new governor, the brutal and grotesque Aleyron, sent us
women to the Bay of the West, and I don’t know what became of my
trees.
Governor Aleyron took over in 1874, following Henri Rochefort’s
escape, and the situation of the deportees worsened greatly. Governor
Aleyron’s time in office was a time of desperate madness. On one side of
the area to which we were confined was the prison itself, and under
Governor Aleyron the prison was always full. Many of our friends were
locked up there for long periods. Odious things happened. The guards
shot at any deportee who returned to his cabin after curfew, even if he
was only a few minutes late. One unfortunate man who didn’t have all
his wits about him was shot at, the way somebody would have taken aim
at a rabbit, because he came back a little late to his plot. At roll calls there
were similar insults, and as punishment the deportees were deprived of
bread.
The comical thing—there is always something comical—was that
Aleyron set sentries around Numbo at night, and their calls in the midst
of silence created an operatic effect. The sentries cast black shadows as
they stood under the full moonlight which came over the peaks. Down
from the top of the mountains we heard the clear night echo to,
“Sentinels, take care.” It was almost as if I were at a performance of the
Tour deNesles on an immensely enlarged stage, and I admit I enjoyed the
Memoirs of Louise Michel
99
spectacle greatly. Some of the sentries had beautiful, deep voices, and
chance picked them to begin. But then their voices grew hoarse and the
effect palled.
Even under Aleyron and Admiral Ribourt, who was on the island
investigating Rochefort’s escape, I was able to smuggle a few letters out.
They described the illegal actions of Governor Aleyron, and they tell the
story of our transfer from Numbo to the Bay of the West.
Numbo, New Caledonia
18 April 1875
Dear friends:
From the publicity given the revelations made by those who have
escaped recently, you ought to know, more or less, the situation of the
deportees. You ought to know about the abuses of authority which
Messieurs Ribourt, Aleyron, and their consorts are guilty of.
Under Admiral Ribourt our letters were opened and read, as if the few
persons who had survived the slaughter of 1871 still struck fear into the
assassins across the ocean.
Under Colonel Aleyron, the hero of the Lobau barracks, a guard fired at
a deportee sitting in his own hut. That deportee had unknowingly crossed
the boundary to look for firewood. Earlier another guard had shot at
Croiset’s dog, which was lying between the legs of his master, and I don’t
know whether the guard was aiming at the man or the dog.
So many things have happened since then. It seems to me that I’m going
to forget something, because there is so much to tell, but I’ll remember
sooner or later.
You have already learned that the guards cut off the bread ration of the
deportees who showed up for roll call but did not line up in two rows in a
military fashion. The deportation laws do not require them to line up that
way, and their protest was vigorous but peaceful. It showed that the
deportees had not forgotten solidarity, in spite of the divisions brought
about among us by people foreign to our cause, whom the administrators
have deliberately mixed with us. Since then, the guards have cut off
supplies to forty-five deportees, allowing them to receive only bread, salt,
and dried vegetables. Their only crime was showing their hostility to a job
that existed solely in the officials’ imagination.
Four women have also been deprived of supplies on the charge that
their conduct and morality left something to be desired. That charge is
false. The husband of one of those women, the deportee Langlois, re¬
sponded vehemently because his wife had given him no grounds for
discontent. For defending his wife against those slanders, he was sen¬
tenced to eighteen months in prison and fined 3000 francs.
Verlet says that the deportee Henry Place also spoke up for the woman
who is his companion, the conduct of whom merits the respect of all the
deportees. Place nevertheless was sentenced to six months in prison and
fined 500 francs. Even worse, nothing can bring his child back to life. The
child was born while Place was imprisoned awaiting trial, and it died as a
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
consequence of the torments suffered by its mother, who was nursing it.
Place was never allowed to see his child alive.
The courageous and dignified Cipriani was sentenced to eighteen
months in prison and fined 3000 francs. Nourny was treated the same way
for writing insolent letters to the authorities, letters that they clearly
deserved.
Recently, Citizen Malezieux, the dean of the deportees, was seated one
evening in front of his hut chatting with several deportees who work with
him. A drunken guard accused him of disturbing the peace at night and
struck him, whereupon Malezieux was put in prison.
Our beloved conquerors mix the droll with the harsh. They have drawn
up lists to give deportees rewards for hard work or to cut off provisions
from persons being disciplined. It turns out that the people who have
worked the hardest since their arrival have been put on the list to be cut off
from provisions. One deportee is on both lists at the same time: the list of
those being punished for refusing to work and the list of those to receive
rewards for special diligence, both lists being printed in the official Journal
de Noumea.
At the evening roll call a few days before Captain de Pritzbuer took over
from Aleyron as governor, a guard with a bad reputation threatened the
deportees with his revolver in his hand. That challenge and many others
since merit the deepest scorn.
It is very probable that in the future there will be new lists of persons cut
off from provisions. Work doesn’t really exist because communications
have been cut off for too long for anyone to try anything. Moreover, for
some of the deportees to continue their old professions would require
some basic expenditures which it is impossible for them to make.
Telling all these things will serve to tear the veil completely away from
the events in New Caledonia. It will show just where the hatred of the
victors can descend, and that is useful to know. But not to imitate them, for
we are neither butchers nor jailers. We need to know and publicize the
exploits of the party of order so that its defeat will be complete.
Farewell. I’ll see you soon, perhaps, if the situation requires those of us
who don’t value our lives highly to risk them to escape, so that we can tell
people about the crimes our lords and masters are committing here in New
Caledonia.
Louise Michel, number 1
At the end of this letter of 18 April 1875 I went on to talk about an
escape plan Mme Rastoul and I had worked out. Mme Rastoul lived in
Australia, and we developed our plan through letters we smuggled from
the Ducos Peninsula to Sydney and back hidden in the bottom of a box
of sewing materials.
The plan was that one night after roll call I was to climb over the
mountain and get to the Northern Forest. There I would get on the road
that ran through the Northern Forest, and if I observed three or four
risky precautions as I followed it, I would finally enter Noumea through
the cemetery. Meanwhile, Mme Rastoul would arrange for someone to
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101
smuggle me aboard the mail packet to Sydney. When I arrived in Sydney
I would tell about the actions of Aleyron and Ribourt, inspiring the
English, I hoped, to send a brig crewed by bold sailors. I would return
on the brig to rescue the other deportees, or if I failed to move the
English, I would return alone.
It was the sewing box containing the plan which failed to return.
When I finally came through Sydney after I was legally repatriated, I
learned from Mme Rastoul (now Mme Henry) that at the moment when
I was supposed to receive the message to carry out our escape plan,
someone handed our sewing box over to the authorities.
I have no idea why the New Caledonian administration never spoke to
me about those plans for escape they had intercepted, but it may have
been one motive behind sending us women from Numbo to the Bay of
the West.
A month after I wrote the letter to my friends about the evil acts of
Governor Aleyron and his guards, we women were ordered to move
from Numbo to the Bay of the West, which is also on the Ducos
Peninsula, and I wrote another letter describing those events.
Ducos Peninsula
9 June 1875
Dear friends,
Here are the official transfer papers I have spoken to you about. We
consented to the transfer only after our protests had been satisfied. We
protested two points: first, the way the transfer was ordered; and second,
the manner in which we were to live in the new huts.
Whether we occupied this corner or that corner of the peninsula made
no difference to us, but we couldn’t endure the insolence of the first order
the administration posted, and we had the right to set our conditions and
not consent to change residence until those conditions were met.
That is what we did.
Here is a copy of the first order, dated 19 May 1875 and posted at
Numbo. That was the way we got the government’s orders—by proclama¬
tion.
19 May 1875
By order of the government the deported
WOMEN WHOSE NAMES FOLLOW WILL LEAVE THE
camp of Numbo on the twentieth of the current month
TO GO TO LIVE ON THE BAY OF THE WEST IN THE
LODGINGS ASSIGNED TO THEM
Louise Michel, number 1
Marie Schmit, number 3
Marie Cailleux, number 4
Ad£:le Desfoss£s, number 5
Nathalie Lemel, number 2
Mme Dupr£, number 6
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
We protested. Here are our two letters of protest, the first from
Mme Lemel.
Numbo, 20 May 1875
The deportee Nathalie Duval (Mme Lemel) does
not refuse to live in the hut to which the administration
assigns her, but she wishes to call attention to the
following points.
First, she cannot move herself;
Second, she cannot procure the wood necessary for
cooking her food and saw it up herself;
Third, she has already built two hen houses
and cultivated a garden;
Fourth, through the authority of the law on
deportation which reads, “The deportees will be
able to live in groups or in families,” the depor¬
tees have the right to choose the persons with whom
they wish to establish relationships. The said
deportee Nathalie Duval (Mme Lemel) refuses communal
life except under those conditions.
(signed) Nathalie Duval (Mme Lemel), number 2
I sent the authorities my protest, too.
Numbo, 20 May 1875
The deportee Louise Michel, number 1, protests
the measure which assigns a domicile far from the
camp to the women deportees, as if their presence in
the camp was a scandal. The same law governs both
male and female deportees; no unmerited insult should
be added.
I cannot go to this new domicile unless the
administration publicly posts its motives for sending
us there.
The deportee Louise Michel declares that if those
motives are insulting, she will be obliged to protest
to the end, no matter what happens to her.
Louise Michel, number 1
The day after our protests, we were warned to be ready to move during
the day, an order we hastened not to obey. We were firmly resolved not to
leave Numbo until the authorities acceded to our just protests. We de¬
clared we were ready to go to the prison if they wished, but we would
certainly not bother to move as they had ordered. We affirmed, however,
that once the insolent proclamation was corrected and our lodgings
arranged in such a way that we wouldn’t disturb each other, we had no
reason to prefer one place to another.
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103
The head guard was very annoyed with us. Toward evening he came on
horseback so he would appear more imposing, but his horse kept breaking
wind, which spoiled the effect. And then, bored with the long pause his
master made in front of our huts, the horse ran back to the military camp
more swiftly than his rider wished.
Three or four days later, the governor and the territorial commanding
officer came to our huts. They promised to accede to our demands by
putting up a second proclamation, and they agreed to separate us in little
huts where we would be able to live in twos and threes as we wished. Thus
at the Bay of the West we would be allowed to group ourselves according
to our trades.
They fulfilled a part of their commitments immediately, but so long as
they weren’t met totally, it was impossible for them to make us leave
Numbo. Their problem was that there were no places for us in the prison,
so they decided to meet our demands completely. Now we are at the Bay of
the West. It is sad for Mme Lemel, who is so sick she can scarcely walk.
That’s why I’m not rejoicing in the nearness of the forest I love so much.
Without passion or anger, that is the story of our transfer.
Louise Michel, number 1
Bay of the West, 9 June 1875
The administration gave in to our rebellion because it would have had
greater problems if it had not; there was no special prison in which to
keep a half-dozen women. But in June 1875 I made a new beginning at
the Bay of the West.
Chapter 14
The Bay of the West
When I was forced to go to the Bay of the West, I had a greater
opportunity to observe the countryside that I loved. Between the West¬
ern Forest and the sea, there is a band of volcanic rocks, some standing
like the menhirs at Karnak, others affecting monstrous poses, one even
looking like an enormous rose with a few broken petals. At high tide the
sea prevents people who are fearful of the water from prowling around.
Dominating the Western Forest is the signal post. Covered with swallows
resting on its supports, the signal post appears from afar to be a gigantic
tree with spreading branches, and from their resting places the talkative
swallows gossip with each other.
The forest was beautiful. Lianas cover it with creepers twice a year,
their branches floating in the air or thrown in mad arabesques. Almost
all of them have white or yellow flowers, but different varieties of liana
have differently shaped leaves. Some are like arrowheads in the tarot,
others like lanceheads, and still others like grape leaves. Others have
leaves that look like cut glass.
There is another creeper with grape leaves which are fragile and
transparent and covered with a sort of down, like a French plum. It has
flat, checkered seeds covered with a vermillion fruit, like the jellyfish that
cyclones scrape up from the bottom of the sea and throw on the beach.
The woods are red with indigenous tomatoes about the size of French
cherries. They climb high up through the shade, and, like strawberries,
they put out fruit where the sun reaches through. There are figs which
smell like ashes, fat mulberries covered with an odorless white coating
like sugar, and yellow plums with an enormous round pit. Most people
said the fruits weren’t fit to eat, but I liked them; indeed, I preferred
them to European fruit. I particularly liked gathering them from bushes
between the rocks in the profound silence of the forest. Then all I
needed was a light breeze from the sea and some good letter from my
mother or Marie in my pocket.
There are berries which look like black currants. They have a fragrant
aroma, although each cluster of fruit yields scarcely half a drop of juice.
It has the bouquet of a very strong madeira, and I believe it could be
fermented to make a liquor that would comfort the sick.
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105
When I walked in the Western Forest, I saw few niaoulis, which are
uncommon there but plentiful on the high slopes that crown the Ducos
Peninsula. On dark nights the niaoulis give off a phosphorescence, and
in the light of the full moon their branches rise up weeping like the arms
of giants crying over the enslavement of the earth.
In the midst of the Western Forest, deep in a gorge between little
knolls still impregnated with the bitter odor of the sea, there is an
immense tree very like a European olive tree, and its branches stretch
out horizontally, like a larch. No insect ever lands on its bitter-tasting
black leaves, and no matter what the time of day or season, there is a
grottolike coolness in its shadow, refreshing to thought as well as body.
Above it, enveloping a whole rock with its archings, was a banyan tree,
which was cut down in the last year of our exile. Never have I seen
stranger insects than those that lived in the clefts of worn-away rock
under the shadow of that banyan tree. If we hadn’t been forbidden to
have alcohol, I would have been able to preserve some of them.
Once and sometimes twice a year a gray snow enveloped the penin¬
sula, sometimes ankle deep and whirling around. It was locusts. Noise
scared them away temporarily, but they always returned, and eventually
they devoured the forests and the cultivated lands alike. Leaves, vegeta¬
bles, tender grass, old bushes—everything except the trunks of the trees
was eaten.
If they appeared a second time, it was because the eggs of the first
wave had hatched in the bushes. They remained there wingless for a
time before flying out to devour the second crop and then to go off
elsewhere to destroy the vegetation of some other area, lay eggs, and die.
Perhaps men could sweep the locusts into deep trenches, and cover them
with enough earth to blanket the smell; then the locusts would become a
rich fertilizer.
Nothing was as beautiful as the gray and turbulent snow of the locusts.
Their uniform color filled the whole sky, and the insects filtered the
sun’s rays, making it look as if the sunlight were coming through a sieve.
From the sky, gray flakes fell in a strangely blurred chiaroscuro.
Only as a last resort did the locusts attack the castor oil plants that
grew everywhere; and often they left those plants completely un¬
touched. So castor oil silkworms could be raised in New Caledonia, and
they are esteemed in the Indies almost as highly as the mulberry
silkworms. For ten years I wrote asking scholars to send me castor oil
silkworm eggs. In telling this story I beg the pardon of those savants who
sent them to me, but they always sent the eggs first to Paris. From there
they came through the mail to me half across the world, and they always
died in transit. Yet ships came to Noumea which had just stopped at the
very places from which those eggs had been sent to France. During the
last year of my exile, after thoroughly cursing the manners and customs
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of scholars who do nothing the simple way, I found some castor oil
plants covered with worms that looked like silkworm moths. Perhaps
silkworms exist in the wild in New Caledonia, and I will know someday.
New Caledonia is the paradise of spiders, too, among them a silk-spin¬
ning spider. It spins a tent of gauze and might be useful for mankind.
The natives respect spiders because they think spiders destroy
cockroaches. They even allow an enormous, black, hairy-legged variety
to run free in their houses for that purpose. The Kanakas also esteem a
fat white spider, which looks like a giant hazelnut, for its fine taste; they
esteem it as highly as the locusts, which they eat like shrimp.
Another spider is a real monster. It exploits the work of little spiders
who live in its web and repair it. Does the big spider eat them eventually?
Probably, unless their work is more profitable than the nourishment
they provide.
At the top of the high knolls in the Western Forest, enormous rocks
have collapsed like the ruins of fortresses and have been covered over
with pink heather, fragile creepers, and fragrant flowers. Among those
ruined rocks lives a brown spider, as hairy as a bear. The female attaches
the male to her web, and when he no longer pleases her, she devours
him. That is the opposite of the human species.
No New Caledonian insect has a venom that affects humans yet; they
have known man for too short a time. Even the animals that use poisons
against each other cannot harm man.
Even the water serpents pose no threat to man. Their fangs are too
short, and their species is disappearing everywhere. Those serpents are
large and very beautiful. Some have white and black rings; others have
patches of white and black. Some of us tamed them, and for a long time I
kept one in a water hole I dug, but I had to let it go free because my old
cat was terrified by it and constantly provoked it by spitting in its face.
The serpent might have ended up by smothering her in its coils;
certainly it followed her movements with its little reptile eyes filled with
an expression that held very little sympathy.
On the mountain slope near the prison was the post office, its veranda
covered with creepers. To send a letter to France and have it answered
took six to eight months. At the end of my stay in New Caledonia, it
regularly took only six months. On mail days, we climbed that hill
anxiously at the exact hour set. Oh dear, beloved letters! With what
ecstasy I received them. My mother wrote me the longest letters, and I
awaited news from her with great joy.
Another frequent correspondent was M. de Fleurville, the inspector
of the Montmartre schools, who had taken charge of my affairs in
Paris—mostly a certain number of debts. At his own expense he got my
Contes d’enfants published; I had written it while I was in the Auberive
prison. M. de Fleurville wrote to me in New Caledonia about new
discoveries because he knew we were not allowed newspapers.
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107
I am reliving those days. I am walking down the hill with my letters in
my hands: Marie’s, full of flowers; M. de Fleurville’s, a good half of
which he devoted to scolding me the way he had in Montmartre; my
mother’s, in which she assured me she was still strong. At the beginning
of last December she was still telling me she was well, just as she had
during those years in New Caledonia, and forbidding anyone to tell me
about her illness.
Coming back from the post office to the Bay of the West, I am
following the edge of the sea. The pungent and powerful odor of the sea
fills the air and smells good. Walking on the path, I hear guitar music
coming from L-’s hut played on the guitar Pere Croiset has made
here in Numbo. It is so nice on shore, but I cannot keep from thinking
about the prisoners on Nou Island only two kilometers away across the
water. They are forced to live under the most severe conditions and are
far more afflicted than we are. It is there that the best of us are locked
up. We are hungry for news of them, but news is difficult to get through
a thousand obstacles.
I see those silent beaches at the edge of the sea, where suddenly a fight
between crabs splashes the water under the mangroves. Nothing but
wild nature and deserted waves exists any more.
And the cyclones. Once you’ve seen them you are sated with the
terrible splendors brought by the fury of the elements. It is the wind, the
waves, the sea, which the old songs sang about. A cyclone seems to carry
you away amidst the howling of a terrible choir; wings carry you, and
they beat between the dark of the sky and the black of the waves.
Sometimes an immense red fork of lightning tears the shadows and
leaves a glimmer of purple against which the blackness of the waves
floats like a mourning band. Thunder, the harsh sounds of the waves,
the alarm gun firing in warning, the noise of water pouring in torrents,
the enormous blast of the wind—all that is only one sound, immense and
superb, the orchestra of frenzied nature.
Our first cyclone took place at night. Those are the most beautiful
ones. On the Ducos Peninsula the barometer had fallen to its lowest
point. No single refreshing breeze stirred, and the air had announced
the coming cyclone since morning. The animals became uneasy, and
everybody took his beasts into his own house. Having taken in my goat
and my cats, I got an idea which I wanted to tell to Perusset, a former
ship captain. There was no time to lose.
With some difficulty I followed the path to Numbo. Evening was
falling, and the storm was beginning. I got to his house, one of the first
houses on the side of the Western Forest where I used to live, and
knocked.
“Who’s there in this weather? Idiot,” came from within. “Who’s
there?” Still grumbling, Perusset opened his door.
“I came to look for you,” I said.
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“Why?”
“The boat that guards the harbor isn’t rowing around any more. It
won’t be in the harbor the rest of the night. On a raft we could float off
with the cyclone and be carried to the next landfall. Sydney, probably.
To an old sea dog like you they would give a brig to sail back and get the
others.”
But I flattered Perusset in vain. I called him an old salt, an old pirate,
and so forth, but my vocabulary was soon exhausted. Perusset simply
looked at me silently. He was a scholar, and knowledge makes you think;
it is a bar to action, for it prevents you from surrendering yourself gladly
to the unknown.
Finally, very gravely, he said, “In the first place we have nothing to
make a raft with.”
“There are some old barrels,” I said. “We could fasten them together.”
“Where do we get them?” he asked.
“Wherever we find them,” I said. “At the canteen. Wherever.”
“Even if we had them, how do we know where we’ll land?”
“Luck,” I said. “We must take our chances.”
“A thousand to none we’d die.”
“Well,” I said, “we’ll take the one chance you call ‘none.’ ”
Thus we argued while the storm unfolded and the rain began.
“Do you want me to escort you back?” Perusset asked. He was uneasy
about the path.
“No,” I yelled. “I don’t need you.” I slammed his door shut in his face.
I heard his lamp fall, poor old man. He opened the door, but I had
already moved away, and I cried from afar, “I’m with many others.” I
told him five or six names. “Go back. Eight of us are leaving.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course, I wouldn’t lie.”
But it wasn’t true. I was all alone, and when you’re angry it’s better to
be alone. Keeping to the rocks, I returned to the Bay of the West. How
beautiful it was. I no longer thought about Perusset or anything else. I
looked not only with my eyes, but with all my heart.
Like night grabbing day the sea rose up on the rocks where I stood.
Enormous claws of foam, completely white, stretched out toward me.
From the waves came a sound like a death rattle deep in someone’s chest.
I finally returned to my hut and changed clothes because mine were
soaked.
The young people who were my students gradually gathered at my
hut as the storm increased its intensity. They were afraid something
would happen to me, so they came.
“We almost got bowled over by the wind,” they said.
“I know,” I answered.
And, I reflected, if only I had thought of those young people to crew
my raft. If only Perusset’s title of sea captain hadn’t dazzled me. For
Memoirs of Louise Michel
109
there certainly was no question of navigating during a cyclone; you only
surrender to it. Those young people would have found what we needed
to make a raft, and then we would have tempted fate. Now there was no
longer time to do it.
I began to look around to see as much as I had eyes for, to absorb this
night in which everything collapsed, moaned, howled. Whatever you see
at any given moment has its usefulness and beauty. Across the torrents
of rain, as if across a crystal veil, the lightning bolts showed splendid with
horror.
How silent it was the next day! Thrown together in the river mouth
were flotsam torn from the bowels of the sea and pieces of wreckage
from the peninsula and Nou Island. And the chance for escape during
the cyclone had passed, for the guard boat had resumed its monotonous
patrol.
On a branch torn from the forest a female bird sat on a nest above her
little ones. The cyclone had carried them away without destroying their
nest, and the little birds had not fallen out during their terrible voyage;
the mother bird must have held them pressed down under her body.
Among humans during fires or other disasters, some terrified parents
forget their children while fleeing. I picked up the branch and fastened
it to a gum tree as well as I could. The birds would be better off there
than on the ground.
Month by month, deportees kept arriving at the Ducos Peninsula.
When I first got there, few of the condemned of the Commune had yet
been sent out. They continued to arrive until just before the amnesty
which the people forced the government to grant.
From the time we first arrived, each mail brought illusions to the
homesick and those hopes pushed them into their graves. Those exiles
could have mastered their yearning to return if only they hadn’t nur¬
tured premature hopes which disillusionment later crushed. In vain we
cautioned them that the average deportation lasts ten years. We told
them too much blood had flowed for the government to allow us to
return. But they preferred to dream those fallacious dreams that killed
them rather than to listen to the voice of reason. Too many times I
walked in funeral corteges dressed in a clean white frock, the flower of a
wild cotton plant in my buttonhole, mourning some father of a family of
little children, for during the first days of exile it was the fathers of small
children who were most likely to leave for the deliverance of death.
When I had disembarked on the Ducos Peninsula the first person I
had asked about was Verdure. I had seen him only once since 4
September 1870, when we had gathered saplings for liberty trees from
the garden of the Tuileries. My mother kept one of them alive for
several years, but it perished in the glacial winter just before my return.
During the days of the fighting, we hadn’t had enough time to see our
friends, and I had hoped to find Verdure in New Caledonia and help
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him to teach the young people. But just before my arrival Verdure had
died of grief at receiving no news from home. Only a few days after his
death a bundle of letters arrived for him. Poor Verdure! Now he sleeps
over there, and I took over his pupils alone.
Many of the best of us have stayed on in New Caledonia because they
fell into the great sleep. Some of those ghosts are good, others terrifying.
Muriot, the suicide, sleeps under a niaouli which twists its white, desolate
branches like the limbs of some specter. Blanche Arnold, who lived like
the sweet flowers on the liana, died on the voyage home. She does not lie
in the ground; instead she sleeps under the waves. In the earth of New
Caledonia little Th6ophile Place lies in his coffin, his tiny hands folded
around the stanzas written in honor of his birth. Over his tomb, a
eucalyptus grows. There lies Eugenie Tiffault, a beautiful girl with dark
blue eyes who died at the age of sixteen. For her tomb Henri Lucien
made a terra cotta statue which survived the cyclones until after our
departure. The comrades on New Caledonia cultivated flowers on all the
graves.
Down the hill from the cemetery, mangroves intertwine, sometimes
beating back the ocean, sometimes being recaptured by the waves.
Above the cemetery is a rock of rose marble on which I would have liked
someone to have inscribed the names of those buried there.
Wreaths from France still cover the grave of Passedouet, the journal¬
ist. Passedouet died a little before I returned; he had been sick a long
time, and his memory had failed. In spite of all his wife’s care, it seemed
that his last moments were approaching and that he would never leave
his bed again, so I was astonished when I encountered him at the Bay of
the West, when only the evening before I had seen him look very ill.
Now his mind was clear. He stopped to rest at the women’s huts in the
forest, and he chatted almost the way he used to do, but he was very pale,
and his legs were trembling.
I didn’t dare to tax him with explaining how he had undertaken this
trip alone, but I suspected his wife must be very uneasy over his absence.
So I proposed that I return with him to Numbo, where he lived, and he
accepted.
Leaning rather heavily on my arm, he walked very well. When we
reached the heights between the Ndie Bay and the Bay of the West, from
where we could see the buildings of the convict prison on Nou Island,
reddish on the horizon, Passedouet drew himself up to his full height.
He stretched out his long, gaunt arm toward the prison, and said to me,
biting off each syllable:
“Proudhon was right. Every reform we’ve ever tried to make keeps the
same causes for disasters, the same inequalities, the same antagonisms.
Proudhon said it: ‘The men who produce everything get only poverty
and death in return.’ The best commercial treaties of a nation only
Memoirs of Louise Michel
111
protect exploiters. People will end all that. But how much pain, how
much evil. ...”
Now reciting Proudhon word for word, now developing ideas in short
phrases separated by rather long intervals, Passedouet remained stand¬
ing there with his arm stretched out toward Nou Island. It was the
Passedouet of the old days. But he was a phantom getting ready to rejoin
the slaughtered of ’71. Several times he repeated: “Proudhon. Proud¬
hon.”
Then he became silent, and said almost no word after that. We walked
on to Numbo where, as I had expected, they were looking for him. He
lived only a few more days, and we never knew why he had come to the
Bay of the West.
But that is the way I remember him now: standing on the heights, his
arm outstretched toward Nou Island and giving the last light of his
reason, the last breath of his body, to the day of deliverance.
And it will come.
That same hope for liberty and bread was in the hearts of the
Kanakas. They rebelled in 1878, seeking liberty and dignity. Not all of
my comrades approved of their rebellion as strongly as I did. One day
Bauer and I were talking about the revolt of the Kanakas, a burning
question on the Ducos Peninsula. We started speaking so loudly that a
guard ran over from the post office thinking that a riot had broken out.
He withdrew, very disconcerted, when he saw there were only two of us.
As a general statement, Michel’s explanation for the Kanaka rebellion is
sufficient, but more specifically, the French settlers were displacing the natives
from the land; the introduction of a large number of cattle caused serious
problems. The natives felt that French labor practices were, at best, deceptive, and
the French males were casual in carrying off native women. Precipitating the
insurrection was a serious drought in some areas in 1877, which caused French
cattle to destroy native crops.
That argument was about not only the Kanakas, but also about a
Kanaka play. Bauer accused me of wanting to put on a Kanaka play, and
I didn’t deny it. We deportees had a real theater on the hill above
Numbo. It had its directors, its actors, its stagehands, its sets, and its
board of directors. This theater was a masterpiece, given the conditions
under which we were living. Every Sunday we used to go to the theater.
We put on everything there: dramas, vaudeville, operettas. We even
sang fragments of an opera, Robert the Devil, although we didn’t have all
the score.
True, the leading women usually had deep, booming voices, and their
hands kept searching in their skirt pockets as if they were looking for a
cigar. Even my court-martial dress, which was very long, left their feet
uncovered to the ankles, for some of our leading ladies were tall. They
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lengthened their skirts finally, and then nothing was lacking in their
costumes.
Wolowski trained the chorus. They were talking about an orchestra
when I left the peninsula for Noumea. I had my own ideas for an
orchestra: I wanted to shake palm branches, strike bamboo, create a
horn from shells, and use the tones produced by a leaf pressed against
the lips. In short, I wanted a Kanaka orchestra, complete with quarter
tones. Thanks to knowledge I had gotten from Daoumi and the Kanakas
who brought supplies, I believed I knew enough to try. But my plan was
blocked by the Committee of Light Classical Theater. Indeed, they
accused me of being a savage.
To some comrades I seemed to be more Kanaka than the Kanakas.
They argued a bit, so to make the situation a little more interesting, I
spoke of putting on a Kanaka play whose text was wearing out my
pocket. I even talked about performing the play dressed in black tights,
and I added a few more details designed to exasperate those people.
The incident took its normal course, rousing my adversaries and amus¬
ing me deep within.
The revolt of the tribes was deadly serious, but it is better if I say little
about it. The Kanakas were seeking the same liberty we had sought in
the Commune. Let me say only that my red scarf, the red scarf of the
Commune that I had hidden from every search, was divided in two
pieces one night. Two Kanakas, before going to join the insurgents
against the whites, had come to say goodbye to me.
They slipped into the ocean. The sea was bad, and they may never
have arrived across the bay, or perhaps they were killed in the fighting. I
never saw either of them again, and I don’t know which of the two
deaths took them, but they were brave with the bravery that black and
white both have.
There is the legend—perhaps it is a story—of Andia, the bard with
long hair, Andia the Takala, who sang his songs and was killed in combat
by the side of Atai' [a historical figure, the leader of the insurrection of
1878]. Andia had an olive complexion, and the build of a dwarf with an
enormous head and crooked legs; his body was as crooked as a niaouli,
but his heart was brave. In his blue eyes the light sparkled, and he died
for liberty at the hands of a traitor, when Atai, too, was struck down.
May traitors everywhere be cursed!
From the traditions of the Kanakas or from the resources of his
musical ear, Andia discovered, or rediscovered, the lute. The Kanakas
have their bamboo and shell instruments, and they also have a bagpipe;
the legends say it was first made by Naina from the skin of a traitor. In
this tradition, Andia made a lute, with strings of catgut taken from one
of the degenerate, wild descendants of the cats Captain Cook abandoned
in the forests here.
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113
It took a traitor and a white military expedition to kill Atai and Andia.
Under Kanaka practice a chief can be struck only by a chief or by
someone appointed by another chief. One chief had sold out to the
whites and appointed Segou to kill Atai, even giving him the weapon
with which to kill him. Segou went out with the white militia columns
and spotted Atai between the huts and Amboa; Atai was returning to his
own encampment with some of his people. Segou ran out from amidst
the white soldiers and pointed out the great chief Atai, who was
recognizable because of his snow-white hair. Atai had his sling wrapped
around his forehead and carried a gendarmarie saber in his right hand
and a small axe in his left. Around him were his three sons and the bard
Andia, who was armed with a short spear.
Atai turned to face the column of whites and noticed Segou.
“There you are,” he cried out.
The traitor Segou faltered for a moment under the look of the old
chief, but then, wanting it all to be over, he threw his short spear at Atai
and it pierced the old chief’s right arm. Atai raised his axe in his left
hand as his sons were shot down around him, one killed and the others
wounded.
Andia lunged forward crying out, “A curse on you. A curse on you,”
but he was shot dead instantly.
Then Segou moved in against the wounded Atai, and with his own axe
struck blow after blow, the way he would have chopped at a tree.
Atai fell, and Segou grabbed at his partially severed head. He struck
him several more blows, and Atai was finally dead. Seeing Atai fall at
Segou’s hands, the Kanakas unleashed their death cry in an echo to the
mountains. The Kanakas love the brave.
Atai’s head was sent to Paris, but I don’t know what happened to the
bard Andia’s.
To keep memory alive, I have translated one of Andia’s war chants.
The Takata
Gathered adoueke in the forest,
Adoueke, the shield herb,
In the moonlight, adoueke,
The war herb,
The spirit plant.
The warriors
Divided adoueke.
It makes them fierce
And charms their wounds.
The spirits
Of their fathers
Make a storm.
They are waiting
For the brave.
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The brave
Are welcome.
Friends or enemies,
They are welcome
Beyond this life.
Those who wish to live
Go back.
War is come.
Blood will flow
Over the earth
Like water.
The adouSke
Must be blood.
The Kanakan Insurrection of 1878 failed. The strength and longing
of human hearts was shown once again, but the whites shot down the
rebels as we were mowed down in front of Bastion 37 and on the plains
of Satory. When they sent the head of Atai to Paris, I wondered who the
real headhunters were; as Henri Rochefort had once written to me, “the
Versailles government could give the natives lessons in cannibalism.”
After I had stayed on the Ducos Peninsula for five years, first at
Numbo and then at the Bay of the West, I was allowed to go to Noumea
as a schoolmistress. There it was easier for me to study the country, and I
was able to see Kanakas of various tribes. I even had some in my Sunday
classes, a whole horde of them at my house in Noumea.
Shortly after I left the peninsula, some of my friends who had been at
Nou Island arrived there, and I went back to welcome them. It was a
joyful occasion for the deportees. We loved them more than the others
because they had suffered more. That made them as proud as they had
been during the May Days. We sat at the edge of the sea on rocks, and
events came back to us, rising like the waves.
After the human beehive of Paris, any crowd looked small to us. After
we had crossed the entire world to New Caledonia, any voyage seemed
short to us. Days became crowded together without our really thinking
about them, as if we turned the hourglass each year. Days fell upon days
in the silence, and all the past swirled around us like the gray snow of
locusts.
Chapter 15
Noumea and the Return
During my exile I used to let my mind return to France. From time to
time down there in New Caledonia, with my gaze fixed on the sea and
my thoughts free in space, I used to see the years gone by. I inhaled
again the odor of roses in the yard, the hay just mown and lying in the
summer sun, and the bitter reek of hemp. I saw it all again: thousands of
details which had made no impression on me when they had occurred
floated up from the depths of my memory. I discovered the sacrifices my
mother had uncomplainingly made for me. She would have given me
her very blood as piece by piece she had let me take everything we
possessed so that I could promote ideas she didn’t share. All she ever
wanted was to live near me in some quiet corner, in some village school
lost in the woods.
Now that I have returned to France I let my thoughts roam free in
space to New Caledonia. After the cyclones I witnessed there, I no
longer gaze at the European storms I used to love so much. I had seen
my first cyclone at night while I was on the Ducos Peninsula. I saw my
second cyclone by day at Noumea. It was beautiful, but less grand than
the cyclone at night had been, even though sheet-metal roofs went flying
about like immense butterflies. The sea clamored with rage. The rain
soaked us; it didn’t fall so much as pour down like an ocean. The needle
of the compass went wild and searched for north with anguish. Great
gusts of wind struck in the midst of the roar of sea and rain, and yet the
dramatic effect was less awesome; perhaps I was becoming as sated with
storms as I was with other things.
I had pardoned Perusset a long time before for failing to help me
escape during the first cyclone, and while I was living in Noumea he
died. Although he had done many other bold things, he had refused to
help me escape, perhaps because he felt he had trusted his luck too
often, and to have put blindly to sea would have been to provoke fate.
Men, like beasts, have an instinct that warns them of danger, and when
we think too much, we lose that ability. A horse has no hesitation in
surrendering to instinct and can find the road hidden beneath the snow
when its lost rider loosens the reins in desperation. Perhaps if Perusset
had listened to me, we would have arrived in Sydney the way other waifs
have dropped anchor there.
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The authorities allowed me to leave the Ducos Peninsula and move to
Noumea early in 1879. Those who had a profession and could be
self-supporting were given a measure of freedom; so I went to Noumea
to teach. There I taught not only the children of the white colonists, but
also the Kanakas, and among those I taught was Daoumi’s brother.
It was fitting that I should teach him, because Daoumi was the first
Kanaka I had met in New Caledonia, when he had come to Rochefort’s
banquet. After that first meeting with Daoumi, I saw him again many
times. To practice European life he got a job at the canteen on the Ducos
Peninsula, and when I talked to him I got him to tell me the legends of
the Kanakas, and he gave me vocabulary lists. For my part, I tried to tell
him the things I believed it was most important for him to know.
Daoumi himself, though he was the son of a chief of Lifon, was almost
European through living with whites. He knew how to read perfectly, his
writing wasn’t any worse than many others, and even under the miser¬
able stovepipe hat which he had had the naivete to burden himself with,
he had the air of Othello.
He introduced his brother to me, a magnificent wild man with
glittering teeth and wide phosphorescent pupils. He was dressed in the
Kanakan manner, which is in nothing at all, and he spoke French, which
is harsher than Kanakan dialects, with difficulty.
There is a story that a certain white woman loved Daoumi and nearly
died of grief when her parents refused her permission to marry him.
When I went to Noumea, I found that the white girl who had loved
Daoumi was still living, but that Daoumi had died, and Daoumi’s brother
had taken over the project of learning about European life. It is he who
will return to his tribe with knowledge, and he who will derive the
benefits from it.
That handsome wild man had begun to dress in a strange costume he
believed was European. He had already learned how to read, and he
came to my house to learn to write. There we used to speak about
Daoumi and of the long-shadowed past of his tribe.
I do not know if the traditions which say that another race lived where
their own was established are founded in fact or not, but the legends that
are connected with them are too numerous for there to be no truth in
them, all things considered. I don’t know the evidence for the argument
that people make about some mainland Asian tribes being the same type
as some Oceanic ones. But I believe that the so-called albinos seen by
Cook and others in this part of the world were not albinos, but the last
representatives of an Aryan branch, having long hair and, most of all,
blue eyes, which are not albino characteristics. These Aryans, lost in
some migration or in some geological revolution, lived on, marrying
among themselves and among the Oceanic tribes. That inbreeding and
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117
intermarriage together are what explains their extinction and the rickety
forms of their last representatives.
There were many legends that I learned from Daoumi and his
brother. Daoumi’s brother and I also spoke of the short future that
loomed before his race, when untutored and unarmed men faced our
greed and our innumerable means of destruction. Seeing the lofty,
resolute mind and the courageous and kind heart of Daoumi’s brother, I
wondered which of us was the superior being: the one who assimilates
foreign knowledge through a thousand difficulties for the sake of his
race, or the well-armed white who annihilates those who are less well
armed. Other races giving way before our arms is no proof of our
superiority. If tigers and elephants and lions suddenly covered Europe
and attacked us, they would triumph in a storm of destruction and
would seem superior to us.
At my school in Noumea on Sundays, I got to know the Kanakas
firsthand. They are neither stupid nor cowardly, two characteristics
common in the present century. Curiosity about the unknown is as
strong for them as it is for us, perhaps even more so, and their
perseverance is great. It isn’t rare for a Kanaka to puzzle for days—I’ve
even seen them spend years—over something that interests him, trying
to understand something, and finally come and tell you, “Me understand
what you say other day.” Time for them is always measured the same:
‘other day.’
In their minds, like blank pages, many new things could be inscribed,
perhaps better than in ours. Ours are confused by doctrines and blurred
by erasures.
Lively methods must be used to teach the Kanakas; they’re necessary
for any young mind. Even educated persons learn more quickly if their
teachers use dramatic colors rather than arid lists. In any case, the
Kanakas don’t have the time or the facilities to wear out their pants on
schoolbenches. For one thing, they have no pants.
Reading, mathematics, and the elements of music can be taught with a
pointer against wall charts. With the pointer the teacher can single out
letters or numbers, or using a pencil tip, can draw notes on a staff. This
technique produces a spirited atmosphere, which facilitates understand¬
ing.
The Kanakas learn writing almost intuitively. If the teacher makes the
words with movable letters, the blacks will write the words in an accept¬
able way very quickly. I say ‘acceptable’ with assurance, because the
Kanakas have a marvelous dexterity for writing as well as for drawing.
Their sense of numbers is unlike ours. Ours has been shaped by our
voyages and our crowds which have accustomed us to large numbers.
Their sense of numbers is of small ones only. It is impossible for them to
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put a specific number on a large quantity—even one that is still small to
us. Their word is ‘numerous’—that which can no longer be numbered
precisely.
At Noumea I had a piano. Some of the keys were silent, and unless
someone sang constantly to cover up the gaps in the melody, you
couldn’t use it. Boeuf finally rebuilt the piano for me as a true instru¬
ment, and at the very end of my stay I was able to use it properly. But
before it was repaired the piano served me as a teaching method that
produced good results. With this piano whose broken hammers or
strings made some notes in a run silent, the pupils realized there were
gaps, and filled them in with their own notes. Sometimes they sang notes
from the piece they were studying, and at other times they searched out
their own musical phrases to fill the gap. Thus they created motifs which
were often strange and sometimes beautiful. Since I’m on the subject, let
me add that I tried out this method on my regular schoolchildren as well
as in my Sunday class for the Kanakas.
From time to time on Sundays, when I was teaching my Kanaka
classes, I noticed the head of M. Simon outside my window. Then I
could be sure that shortly I would receive the white paper, boards for
wood carving, notebooks, and everything else we lacked. In addition M,
Simon would see to it that I got tobacco, firecrackers, and other treats for
the Tayos.
At my Sunday classes there were tall Tayos, whose protruding ears
had been lulled by the wind from the sea blowing through the palm trees
and filled with the noise of storms. After they have reflected for five or
six years over the little we have taught them, perhaps they will find from
that little bit the wherewithal to astonish us. Leave them alone and let
them dream about what they’ve learned. If, instead of civilizing childlike
peoples with muskets, we sent schoolmasters to the tribes—as M. Simon,
the mayor of Noumea, wanted to do—the tribes would have buried the
warstone a long time ago.
Throughout the world there are too many minds left uncultivated,
just as good land lies fallow while much of the old cultivated land is
exhausted. It is the same for human races. Between those who know
nothing and those who have a great deal of false knowledge—those
warped for thousands of generations by infallible knowledge that is
incorrect—the difference is less great than it appears at first glance. The
same breath of science will pass over both.
When I returned to Europe from New Caledonia, the pen-wielding
crows attacked me with various calumnies. Some hate-maddened idiot
arranged for a newspaper (I forget which one) to print infamous things
about my work in Noumea. Those enemies had already tried to put their
lies across in a gathering where, purely by chance, some former depor-
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119
tees from the Commune who knew better were present, so the attack was
without success, or without the sort of success they had anticipated.
Now they hoped for better luck through the publication of their lies.
They did not dream that thousands of persons had watched my life day
by day in New Caledonia. It was another Caledonian, M. Locamus, a
lawyer and former town councilor and officer at Noumea, who answered
those charges against me. Because my anonymous slanderers have been
so persistent, I am obliged to reprint M. Locamus’s letter, even though it
is flattering. Is it worth the trouble? Yes, because all the witnesses will
soon be dead, and we ought to keep our reputations pure for the sake of
the Revolution, which will live eternally. Shaking off specks of mud is
not useless, so here is a clipping that prints M. Locamus’s letter:
Citizen Locamus, formerly a town councilor at Noumea, sends us the
following letter. We believe we must publish it, even though our friend
Louise Michel needs no testimonial to protect herself against the foul
vilifications against which her whole life stands in evidence.
Paris, February 27
Dear Editors:
I have just read in the Intransigeant a few lines from Louise Michel’s
response to her slanderers. I have not read the calumny, but I am
convinced, as you are, that it should only be scorned. Nevertheless,
because Louise Michel has deigned to answer it, I feel it is my duty to
discuss the subject; also, Noumea is far away, and the response to those
slanderers would come too late from there.
Happily, there are some former Noum^ans in Paris. I am one, and as
town councilor of Noumea, with responsibility over public education in
1879 and 1880, I must now give a certificate of esteem and satisfaction to
our former town schoolmistress.
The Board of Municipal Public Education was composed of three
persons: M. Puech, an important merchant; M. Armand, a pardoned
deportee, and me. The lay schools we inaugurated in the colony produced
excellent results. By virtue of a governmental decree issued by the interim
mayor, M. Simon, Louise Michel was invited to assist us, and she dis¬
charged her duties with unfailing devotion. Her assistance was most useful
for us.
I shall add that Louise Michel’s conduct and attitude at Noumea in¬
spired respect and admiration even from her political enemies.
Sincerely,
P. Locamus
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In 1880, after I had spent a year and a half in Noumea, the govern¬
ment granted a general amnesty to us Communards. At the same time
that I heard the news of the amnesty, I received word that my mother
had had her first attack. Weariness had overcome her, and she was
fearful she wouldn’t live to see me again. I, too, was afraid that I would
arrive too late. My voyage home, therefore, was sad, and I came on deck
only rarely. But the voyage was beautiful.
We were landed at Sydney and there, thanks to the lessons I had given
and to help from a few friends, I was able to request passage on a mail
packet rather than a slow sailing ship. That way I would get to my
mother’s side more quickly. The French consul at Sydney had not yet
made up his mind to repatriate me with some others scheduled to go on
the mail packet. I told him that, in that case, I would be obliged to give
lectures on the Commune for several days, so that I could use the fees
for my trip. He preferred to send me with twenty others on the John
Helder, which was leaving for London.
I don’t know the inward nature of the consul at Sydney, but in
Holland I have seen a painting of a Flemish burgomaster, peaceably
seated in front of a beer mug. It is exactly the consul’s portrait: his
coloring, his pose, his profound calm. Standing in front of that portrait I
understood him better than I had in front of his person in Sydney. I
understood how our ideas appeared subversive to him, and the good¬
ness which was hidden deep in his face would have made him prefer to
allow me to leave as quickly as possible, so that I could see my mother
again.
With Mme Henry as my guide I was able to see a bit of the territory
surrounding Sydney before I sailed. There are great expanses of soli¬
tude cut by wide roads. Only the forest can be seen, the forest full of
gum trees and eucalyptus. They say the whip-snake and others are
common there, but we saw none, perhaps because it was the end of the
southern winter and those animals feared the cold. I saw no kangaroos
either, and they would have interested me much more. Those wide,
beautiful roads cutting through the forests must keep wild animals away.
Sydney is already an old city; when the John Helder put into Melbourne
even that place seemed like a European town, one washed by waves. I
still have a notebook on which Mme Henry and her children, Lucien
Henry, and other friends wrote inscriptions to me. When I stopped in
Melbourne, some strangers came to visit us, and they wrote their names
there, too. My twenty traveling companions on the John Helder also
inscribed their names in that notebook, and those are the only pages left
in it. The other pages were plucked out on the John Helder for sketches
of my fellow passengers.
A large proportion of those sketches were ones I made of the frail and
darling English babies, of which the third-class passengers had a great
collection. The poor always have swarms of children; nature makes up in
Memoirs of Louise Michel
121
advance for young shoots mowed down by death. The mothers, English¬
women as blonde as the children, asked me for the sketches, and it was
only proper for me to give them away. A few sketches of sailors with
enormously wide shoulders met the same fate. I have only one sketch
left, one I made near the Isthmus of Suez, looking over a sandy desert
where the rocks seem like a sleeping Isis. In my sketch is the eternal
sand, and then rocks whose corrugated surface looked like the bark of a
niaouli. They form walls against which there is a caravan at rest, and
camels stretch their necks out on the sand.
On that trip there was one English lady who took special care of some
unfortunate girls who had been turned into prostitutes. People heaped
shame on them because they were prostitutes, as if the victims and not
the assassins deserved that shame.
I brought five of my oldest cats with me from Noumea, giving three
others that were younger and more beautiful to friends. They had made
the crossing from Noumea to Sydney on the bare deck, sheltering from
the cold in a crate. As we sailed into cold regions where the wind blew
harsh and icy—it was winter in the antipodes—they rubbed up against
each other, probably missing the warm sun of their homeland. They had
some sort of comprehension that they had to abstain from loud demon¬
strations either there or aboard the John Helder, onto which I smuggled
all five of them, crowded into a parrot cage. They spent the whole
crossing attached like ornaments to the shelf that formed my bed. They
never cried out, and were satisfied with fussing over me sadly.
Once in London, in front of a fire, with an enormous bowl of milk my
friends brought them, they began to stretch out, yawning. Only then did
the large red tom and the old black female express their unfavorable
impression of the Dutch ship. As for the three little cats, they looked at
the fire with adoration.
The Figaro and other ludicrous newspapers, instead of taking as much
trouble as they did to add burlesque episodes to my return, would have
done better if they’d opened their eyes wide enough to see that when we
came down the gangplank in London, my friends and I each had
something under our arms disguised to look like briefcases. Well hidden
in our coats were five cats.
Three of them are still alive, the old black female and two of the little
ones. Let anybody laugh who wants to; they are something alive left
from home. For me they have become a cherished souvenir—as much as
anything could be to the heart of someone who has before him only a
solitary life and a destroyed home. But perhaps it’s better that it is so,
because when there is nothing, you don’t look back anymore.
The exiles in London welcomed us warmly. We hadn’t seen each other
for ten years, and meeting that way, it seemed as if we were reliving the
days of the Commune.
While en route I had gotten a letter from Marie that my mother had
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recovered somewhat when my return was announced. I was happy to be
among my friends again, but I was in too much of a hurry to see my
mother again to linger in London, and I left immediately for Paris.
With my tickets paid for and ten francs in my pocket, my London
friends took me to the railroad station, from where we were to take the
train that connected with the boat to Dieppe. The London railroad
station had been set ringing by our singing of the Marseillaise. We
continued to hear its echo as our train left, and English sensibilities
weren’t offended by it. So long as we could hear it we responded, and no
one reproached us for our song. At Dieppe friends were waiting for us
at the station, and at the first stop after Dieppe my dear Marie and Mme
Camille B-joined us.
I have a few documents concerning my return that Marie kept for me.
Here is a letter I sent to Rochefort and Olivier Pain, which describes my
arrival in Paris:
Dear Citizens Rochefort and Pain,
I have received a telegram from Pain asking for some details concerning
my arrival [on November 9].
I don’t remember much of my arrival at Paris. I do remember that I
embraced all of you, but because I was disoriented at the prospect of
seeing my mother again, I didn’t wait to listen to any speeches, and I didn’t
really understand anything of what was going on before we came to the
Saint-Lazare station. I saw only that great rumbling crowd that I used to
love so much and which I love even more now that I have returned to
civilization. I heard only the Marseillaise, and a new and strange idea came
to me: that instead of sending this beloved crowd to another slaughter it
would be better to risk only one person. The nihilists were right.
I also hasten to express my gratitude and to say that, with the ten other
deportees who also returned yesterday, we had a similar welcome in
London from the exiles there which nearly prepared us for yesterday. It
proves what good friends we are and how well we remember each other
across time, exile, and death.
I’m writing to Joffrin about the meeting in Montmartre at the same time
that I’m writing you. I can attend no other meeting before that one. It was
in Montmartre that I marched before; it is with Montmartre that I march
today. But you know very well that if I agree to be the object of one of
those receptions—which really isn’t a high reward for a whole lifetime—I
don’t want it all addressed to me personally. I want it in honor of the Social
Revolution and all the women of the Revolution.
I embrace you with all my heart.
Louise Michel
I had come home.
Chapter 16
Speeches and Journalism
November 1880 — January 1882
I stayed in Lagny with my mother for almost two weeks, and then I
returned to Paris to my first formal meeting. When I had come back to
France the Social Revolution had been strangled. It was a France whose
rulers mendaciously called themselves republicans, and they betrayed
our every dream through their “opportunism.”
It had begun ten years before in the drawing rooms of the Elys6e,
when Foutriquet [President Adolphe Thiers] went in front with the
Duke de Nemours. In the course of the evening the Count and Countess
of Paris, the Duke of Alengon, and the Prince and Princess of Saxe-Co-
burg-Gotha all came. The presence of these princes of Orleans was the
occasion for that reception, the third dinner party that M. Thiers, the
Orleanist President of the Republic, had given. After him as president
came MacMahon, Marshal of the Empire. The more things change, the
more they remain the same.
That was the situation after my return, when I made my first speech. I
gave it in the early afternoon of November 21 at the Elys6e-Montmartre.
Today at one o’clock, the first meeting in honor of Louise Michel took
place.
At one-thirty, Louise Michel went to the rostrum and cried out: “Long
live the Social Revolution!” Then she added: “The Revolution was killed,
but now it is reborn.” The audience responded with “Long live Louise
Michel!” and “Long live the Revolution!” and people brought several
bouquets to the heroine.
Citizen Gambon declared that the Commune was more alive today than
ever, and that France would always be at the head of revolutions. Joan of
Arc, he said, was a victim of the ingratitude of a king, and Louise Michel
had been the victim of the ingratitude of the Republic.
Louise Michel then spoke again. “Let us hope that we will never again
see Paris transformed into a river of blood. When all those people who
maligned the Commune are no longer here, we will have been avenged.
When the Gallifets and all the others have fallen from power, we will have
served the people well. No longer do we wish vengeance through blood.
To shame those men will suffice.
“Religions vanish in the blowing wind, and when they do we become
masters of our own destinies. We accept the ovations given us, but not for
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ourselves. We accept these ovations for the Commune and those who
DEFENDED IT. . . .
“So that the Revolution will triumph, we will accept into our ranks all
those people who want to march with us, even if they opposed us in the
past.
“Long live the Social Revolution!
“Long live the nihilists!”
Those cries were repeated by the audience, and people added:
“Long live Trinquet!”
“Long live Pyat!”
“Long live the Commune!”
I remained, and will always remain, faithful to my principles. Here is
the report of another speech ten days later.
1 December 1880. Yesterday a private lecture to benefit those persons
who had received amnesty took place in the Graffard hall.
Citizen Gerard thanked Louise Michel for the assistance she had given
in organizing this meeting. He saluted the “principle of hate” in her
“which alone makes great revolutionaries and great events,” and presented
her with two bouquets.
Louise Michel responded that she accepted the bouquets in the name of
the Social Revolution and for the women who had fought for their
freedom. “It is the people that I salute here,” continued Citizen Michel,
“and in the people, the Social Revolution.”
Applause and cries of “Long live the Commune!” interrupted her.
“The time when they machine-gunned people at Satory is now in front
of our eyes. We still see the men who judged us, as well as the murderer of
Transnonain, the Bazaines, and the Cisseys.
“At the end of the road those men whom we believed lost forever are
now coming back, holding their heads higher than ever. The Reaction is
no more than a corpse the government lifts up, and we will crush it like a
snake when it tries to pass among us.
“Today it is destiny that is advancing. It is the people, still convicts
dragging their chains, who will deliver us from the men who have been
corrupting us, and the people themselves will win their liberty.”
In 1881 a general election took place. Paule Mink and I were pro¬
posed as candidates, though as mere women we were forbidden to vote
or hold office. Even if men had voted for us, we would have been
ineligible to take office and our candidacy, therefore, was a dead
candidacy. I wrote about that subject.
The Illegal Candidacy
Citizens, you ask Paule Mink and me what we think of dead candidacies.
Here is my answer, and I think Citizen Mink will agree with me.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
125
Dead candidacies are both a flag and a demand. They are pure idea, the
idea of the Social Revolution soaring without individuality, an idea that can
be neither struck at nor destroyed, an idea as invincible and implacable as
death.
Illegal candidacies are just. Dead candidacies are great, like the Revolu¬
tion itself. As for women being candidates, that is a claim, a demand that
comes from the eternal slavery of the mother who must raise men and
make them what they are. But what does that matter? We are all part of the
same slavery, and we fight the same enemy.
For my part, I do not bother with particularist questions. I stand with all
groups which attack the cursed edifice of the old society, whether with
pick-axe, land mine, or fire.
I salute the awakening of the people, and I salute those who by dying
have opened wide the gates of the future so that the Revolution can pass
whole through those gates.
Louise Michel
Here is a second article on my being a candidate.
Seeing my name among those proposed as candidates, I feel obligated to
respond. I cannot oppose the candidacy of women, because for women to
be candidates affirms the equality of men and women. But, faced with the
seriousness of the situation, I must repeat that women ought not to
separate their cause from that of the rest of humanity; instead, they must
take a militant part in the great revolutionary army.
We are combatants, not candidates. We are brave and implacable
combatants—that’s all there is to it.
To propose the candidacy of women is enough to do in support of the
principle. But because those candidacies won’t come to anything—and
even if they should come to something, they would change nothing in the
situation —I must ask our friends to withdraw my name.
What we want is not a few scattered outcries asking for a justice that will
never be accorded without force. We want the entire people and all
peoples to stand up for the freeing of all the slaves, whether they call those
slaves women or workers.
There are three possible courses of action. Those who still hope for a
favorable outcome through the ballot can vote for workers. Or they can
abstain. But those whose heart is full of a seething disgust for this
empire-in-miniature, this government that is called a republic, should
acclaim the sacred principle of the Social Revolution. They should revive
the names of their representatives who were assassinated in 1871.
It is still a question of waking from sleep. It is a sinister sleep, in which
we will not allow the people to remain, because when the people sleep,
empires are created and opportunism increases. Certain persons find it
expedient that the daughter of the people should be in the street, exposed
to rain and shame, so that the daughter of the rich is safeguarded; it
pleases them to lead men in herds to the slaughterhouse and women in
herds to the brothel. We want no more buying and selling of human flesh
that is to be stuffed into the mouths of cannon or used to sate the appetites
of parasites.
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
We proclaim very clearly: no more questions of personalities, not even
questions of sex; no more egotism; no more fear.
The brave must go to the front of our march, and the faint-hearted, when
they realize where we are going, can fall away.
Louise Michel
I had no interest in cooperating with the opportunist republicans,
even when their motives were good. Shortly after my return from New
Caledonia, the Chamber of Deputies requested me to give testimony on
conditions there, and I refused.
Paris, 2 February 1881
Chairman, Board of Inquiry into the System of Convict Deportation in
New Caledonia
Chamber of Deputies, Tenth Committee
Dear Sir:
Thank you for the honor you do me in calling me as a witness concern¬
ing prison conditions in New Caledonia.
While I approve of shedding light on those faraway torturers, I will not
go to the Chamber of Deputies to testify against those bandits Aleyron and
Ribourt as long as M. de Gallifet, whom I saw shoot prisoners, dines with
the President of the Republic at the Palais-Bourbon.
In New Caledonia, if the jailers deprived the deportees of bread, if
overseers with drawn revolvers insulted them at roll call, if guards shot at a
deportee returning to his garden plot in the evening, still, those officials
were not sent over there to put us on beds of roses.
But at this time when Barthelemy-Saint-Hilaire is a cabinet minister and
Maxime du Camp is in the Academy; when Cipriani and young Morphy
are expelled and so many other iniquities are being committed; when M.
de Gallifet can draw his sword over Paris again; when the same voice that
called for every severity of the law against the “bandits of la Villette” asks
for the absolution and glorification of Aleyron and Ribourt—I’ll wait for
true justice to come first.
Sincerely,
Louise Michel
In January 1881 I wrote a letter to Le Citoyen which they published on
January 28. The problem was that the amnestied, heroic defenders of
the Commune could find no work, and no work meant that they were
starving. I helped with efforts to relieve their terrible suffering. The first
part of my letter, however, did not talk about soup kitchens for the
exiles.
The first part of my letter talked of a paltry thing, but it might amuse
the reader. Various newspapers were repeating a stupid phrase they
attributed to me: “When the pigs are fattened, you kill them.”
Memoirs of Louise Michel
127
Amidst several other images, I had said that when a wild boar is
degraded by being fattened, it becomes a domestic porker. That’s all I
said. But now every time that anyone made an allusion to pigs, the
reactionaries claimed that a personage in the government was being
insulted. It was forbidden to name anything fat. I couldn’t even mention
Vitellius, and sometimes I wasn’t even thinking of the personage in
question. If he were alive, I wouldn’t say so little about him.
Anyway, here is my letter to Le Citoyen:
It has now become an historic phrase: “The pigs shouldn’t get fat.” At
least that was how the newspaper Le Gaulois quoted me. They did not get
their money’s worth, because when they reported what I said—although
they got more than half, I admit—they made it almost polite, while my
intention was to be worse than the original offense. That offense is
committed by the friends of a certain high personage who say that their
master is attacked each time the name of the animal in question is
pronounced. They express themselves crudely, while we are giving them a
good example by using the proper word for a domesticated wild boar.
That was the first part of my letter. The second part became more
serious.
Let us not forget those who are hungry and cold, the brave people who
prevented the return of the Empire in 1871 and who are walking the
ice-cold pavement without work and without shelter.
Some devoted citizens are talking about establishing a soup kitchen to be
kept in operation until next March. There every amnestied person could
find one meal daily to keep from dying of hunger. The project would be
financed by a speech at which an enormous audience would raise the
money.
In addition, if a hundred or two hundred families or men by themselves
could each give an unemployed amnestied person a place to sleep until
next March, then the people themselves would save the lives of their
brothers returning from prison or exile.
That would be a first step in the people’s learning to act for themselves.
Louise Michel
This second part of my letter, the part about founding a soup kitchen
for the exiles, put on paper a dream we hoped to make real even though
we had no money. All we had were speeches and the devotion of those
who had work and would help those who were not working. And then
from among those people who would find in our midst the few crumbs
that occasionally save a life, some might have helped others in their turn.
I had no money myself. A few idiots invented lies about my having
horses and carriages, or that I got income from lands and so forth. I had
to put up with that sort of nonsense during the entire three years I was
free after my return from New Caledonia. My mother and I would get
insulting letters after people had asked me, futilely, for three or four
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
hundred francs, or even for several thousand francs—when there
weren’t even a hundred sous in the house. My mother often cried about
it. But my account book is open, and it has always been open.
To make money, I would have had to sell my writings, and I had no
time to run from publisher to publisher. I was dividing my time between
staying near my sick mother and going to meetings. That is why I used to
collaborate with people who had the time to find a publisher.
I wrote a letter alluding to these matters to M. Fayet: “As for the fears
you express about my future, don’t worry. I won’t need charity.”
Then I continued my letter with a comment on how tyranny might
come to an end at last. “You have enough of my verses from the old days
to recognize that I have always thought that it was better for one person
to perish instead of a whole people.”
The last few lines of this excerpt are and always will be true. As for
thinking that one person is nothing compared to all the people, I have
always believed that way. Tyrannicide is practical only when tyranny has
a single head, or at most a small number of heads. When it is a hydra,
only the Revolution can kill it.
Perhaps ‘practical’ is the wrong word to use. We are nothing more
than bullets more or less well adapted to the struggle and are not worth
the trouble of being considered as anything more. There is no prohibi¬
tion against wanting to live only as long as one is useful and to prefer
dying upright rather than in bed.
Although we are still savages ourselves, we are nevertheless trying to
make the world clean for those who are coming. The Revolution will be
the flowering of humanity, as love is the flowering of the heart.
Those who will be alive then will march in the epic, and they alone will
know how to tell it, because they will have done it; and they will have the
artistic skill to tell it, because the sense of the arts which is now
rudimentary will have developed in everybody.
In those years just after my return from New Caledonia I was
concerned with more than indicting opportunist politicians and trying to
ease the destitution of returned deportees; I also speculated about the
power of strikes. I wrote a series of articles on strikes and what their
effects would be. Among my favorites was a piece I wrote on conscripts
going into the army. I have always dreamed of sheep refusing to become
wolves, and in this article I wrote of conscripts who would refuse to
become assassins.
The Strike of the Conscripts
As if there weren’t a social question here! Little children are born in the
same beds where their fathers are dying, and to relieve that horrible
misery Public Assistance sends one franc per person. To print up and
Memoirs of Louise Michel
129
display one single speech costs the people thirty-four thousand francs. It is
the people who pay, always the people.
The people should be satisfied, however, because they are told they are
“sovereign,” an opportunistic word in which to hide the other phrase that
is really being spoken no less opportunistically, “the vile multitude.”
Trick election laws are applied when it is a matter of getting the herd to
elect Badinguet the Third or Opportunist the First, and not used when the
question concerns some right by which the “sovereign” multitude could
solve social questions.
If “majority rule” were applied properly there would be a way to resolve
social questions other than by selling the daughters of the people to
brothels or by slitting the throats of the sons of the people on some
battlefield to satisfy some opportunistic pleasure. There would be a better
way to resolve social questions than by starving old workers as if they were
worn-out horses at Montfaucon.
As if there weren’t a social question here! Now the people are enchained
through having been made to believe that they are free. The social
question could be summed up in one single act of will by the people. That
act need be no more than a passive one, and would bring no repression,
for although an army can be shot, or all the inhabitants of a city can have
their throats cut, no one would dare to attack an entire nation.
If every one of a heroic people were to use his full authority to shut
down the vice squad lists, the lists that make certain girls commit suicide—
properly!—rather than have their names put down. . . .
If an entire people were to refuse to send its sons into hazardous
undertakings that might end up as future Sedans; if the conscripts were to
strike, it would silence the potentates who claim they are fertilizing the soil
with blood. It makes the land fertile only for them. If the conscripts were
to strike, they would force kings and dictators to take Boulogne’s flag,
Membrin’s helmet, and Marlborough’s saber and go off to war by them¬
selves.
Rather than do that, those potentates would solve the problems they had
hoped to exploit to maintain themselves in power. The authorities would
solve them so they would not have to leave their peace and quiet and their
lives at the trough.
Now that the wind is at war, if the authorities, using the new law on
“freedom of the press,” came to arrest me at the bedside of my sick
mother—to arrest me when I have seen the Franco-Prussian War, in which
generals were bought and sold and in which great battalions had their
spirit broken by forced marches—I would still scream out the cry that fills
my soul:
Conscripts, strike!
Louise Michel
Marie Ferr6 stayed with my mother when I went to meetings, and in
the spring of 1881 I was able to travel through France to speak to the
various revolutionary groups that had invited me. On April 211 spoke to
the Workers’ Union of Amiens, and one newspaper reported it this way:
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
The Workers’ Union of Amiens had delegated fifty of its members, led
by Citizen Delambre, to welcome Citizen Louise Michel at the railroad
station. More than five hundred persons joined the delegation. The
Workers’ Union had organized a meeting at the Longueville Circus for
that afternoon, and fifteen hundred persons attended.
Louise Michel went to the speaker’s platform after a few words from
Citizen Hamet, who was presiding over the meeting. She described the
sufferings of the working class, and condemned the conduct of those who
govern us.
“The men in power today,” she said, “are Jesuits masquerading as
republicans. They send soldiers to Tunis to kill them, as was done at
Sedan.
“I claim the rights of women and not of men’s servants. If some day our
enemies catch me, they must not let me slip away, for I don’t fight like an
amateur. I’m fighting as people do when they are absolutely determined
that it is time for social crimes to end. That is why I will be pitiless during
the struggle and why I wish no mercy for myself. I am fooled by neither
the lies about universal suffrage, nor the lies about the concessions they
appear to be giving to women.
“We women are half of all humanity. We fight on the side of all the
oppressed, and we will keep our share of equality, which is only just.
“The earth belongs to the peasant who cultivates it; the mine to those
who dig it; all belongs to all—bread, work, science. The freer the human
race is, the more it will draw riches and power from nature.
“The ‘vile multitude’ has the numbers, and when it decides to do it, it will
be the force which sets people free instead of overburdening them.”
Following Louise Michel’s speech Citizen Gauthier explained his ideas
on the question of capital and labor.
During that same spring I went through the Midi. At Bordeaux, I was
with Cournet, and I remember that at one small meeting where various
groups were represented, someone raised the question of death.
“We shall die standing,” Cournet cried out. He alluded to the commo¬
tion that would ensue when the Revolution attacked the old, empty shell
from all sides. The day when that happens, everyone will give of
himself—the young, those returning from the slaughter, probably the
last Blanquistes. These persons bound together will all support the
revolutionary forces like an army. At the head of their march, those of
1871 will take their place along with the anarchist groups. “We,” said
Cournet, “have the right to die standing, too.”
Those who were mown down on the red anniversary at P&re Lachaise
should not complain. They were following the blood-speckled flags, and
they died without ever stopping the struggle. They died standing.
I knew only vaguely what had happened at P£re Lachaise on May 26,
because I hadn’t read the newspapers for two years. Nothing other than
what happened was possible. The prohibition against displaying the
forbidden flags foreshadowed what was to come.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
131
O my friends, I hope that none of you is crazy enough to dream of
having any power whatever after the people are victorious. Every time
someone possesses power, every single time, it leads to events like those
at Pere Lachaise. When authority has been dressed in the cloak of
Nessus, you smell the stench of Charenton.
This time the people must be the masters. The feeling for liberty will
develop. Perhaps it would be better for the people if all of us who lead
the fight now should fall in battle, so that after the victory, there will be
no more general staffs. Then the people could understand that when
everyone together shares power, then power is just and splendid; but
unshared it drives some people mad.
A friend quoted a newspaper passage to me that he wanted me to
know about. Savages, drunk with wine and blood, are applauded just as
the assassins were applauded in 1871. People egg them on because not
enough murders have been committed yet.
I hope that our side, the day after our victory, or even at the very
moment when we attain it, will have other things to do than to duplicate
those shameful acts.
The Revolution is terrifying, but its purpose is to win happiness for
humanity. It has intrepid combatants, pitiless fighters, and it needs
them. The Revolution is pulling humanity from an ocean of mud and
blood, an ocean in which thousands of unknown persons serve as feasts
for a few sharks, and if the Revolution has to cause pain to achieve its
victory, it is necessary. To pull a drowning person from the water, you
do not choose whether you are pulling him by the hair or in some way he
finds more comfortable.
One item deserves prominent notice in my memoirs: the affair of the
newspaper La Revolution sociale. Because of the revelations people have
made, it is a matter of honor for me to bring up the matter.
What none of us knew at the time was that the Prefect of Police, Louis
Andrieux, had financed a revolutionary newspaper by supplying funds
to a Belgian named Serraux. Andrieux did this to give himself a way to
watch over revolutionary groups more closely. His idea was stupid. His
plan to destroy us by founding La Revolution sociale destroyed him as
much as us. It was a strange thing for an intelligent man to do, to fight us
this way. If we followed his example and established a reactionary
newspaper the way he established a radical one, people would think we
should be sent to the madhouse at Charenton.
I knew the ostensible program of La Revolution sociale from the
editorial printed in its first issue, and it was most attractive. Anarchy is
not a new idea; writers long before Saint-Just believed that a person who
makes himself a leader commits a crime.
Here is a fragment from the editorial statement printed in the first
issue of La Revolution sociale. Who would have believed that the Prefect of
Police, M. Andrieux, was on the paper’s editorial committee?
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
The Revolutionary party ought to organize itself solidly on its own
ground, with its own arms, without borrowing anything from its enemies’
institutions, sophistries, or procedures. It ought to prepare itself so that
once the “heroic times” have returned, it can lay siege to the State, lay siege
to the fortress which defends and protects the avenues of privilege, and
not leave one stone upon another.
From each according to his strength, to each according to his
needs. We believe that society is neither innate nor immanent, but is a
human invention whose purpose is to struggle against the deaths that
nature brings otherwise. Above all, society ought to benefit the weak and
surround them with a special solicitude to compensate for their inferiority.
Consequently, the goal we propose and hope for is the creation of a social
order in which the individual, so long as he gives all he can give of devotion
and work, will receive all he needs.
Let the table be set for everyone, and let each person have the right and
the means to sit down to the social banquet. Let everyone eat at that
banquet as his choice and appetite direct without anyone measuring out
his serving according to the amount he can pay.
Before the Congress at London in July 1881, Emile Gautier and I got
some anonymous warnings about agents of M. Andrieux, but who
believes anonymous letters? To be sure, I had asked some of my London
friends to go to see a woman who, they said, had advanced money to M.
Serraux. Our friends found the lady in an apartment that gave them the
impression of having just been furnished, but with only that impression
and no other proof, they could not support the accusation. The lady
gave them some reasonable explanation, and neither my London friends
nor I were led to believe she represented M. Andrieux. But it doesn’t
matter; the trap he set for us did more harm to those who set it than it
did to us.
Now, even though M. Andrieux has confessed his deception publicly,
I still need to clear the air. When I found an anarchist paper after my
return, I blindly accepted an invitation to participate in writing it. M.
Serraux offered me the chance to write for La Revolution sociale, but if he
had not, I might have tried to submit my material to the paper anyway.
I admit I had great confidence in M. Serraux, and it was only recently
that I learned of the trap. I must say, however, that M. Andrieux could
have lied and accused my friends and me, but he did not do it. He was
far less opportunistic than many others in his party.
Let me quote from one article published in La Revolution sociale. My
original title was “To M. Andrieux.” I did not know that it was unneces¬
sary to publish it for him to read it. Someone, perhaps Andrieux
himself, retitled it “Silence the Villain.”
Silence the Villain
The traiter Andrieux, when he named me at the inquest that took place
at Arbresles, has inspired a rejoinder. The villain made some costly
Memoirs of Louise Michel
133
admissions. He admitted that he let my companions and me return to
France so that he could have us under his butcher’s paw. He wanted to
dishonor us with degrading charges so he could murder us an inch at a
time.
Noumea is too far away for Andrieux to be able to satisfy his hatred
against the wrecks of the Commune. On his own authority at Lyon he had
people arrested or murdered by his soldiers. But he ran out of victims and
he had to get some new flesh for his club-wielding helpers. That was the
reason he voted for the amnesty. He said so. He prides himself on it.
We must have justice against the one who is kept as a public executioner,
the one who serves as the butchers’ valet for all sorts of repression. Does
anyone believe that the French people will put up with what the Russian
peasants refuse to accept? No. Like the Russian peasant we know how to
die, but not how to live under the whip. It is a question of wounds that men
who call themselves political realists do not feel; otherwise, that gallows
salesman would have been hit as many times as there are fists on the city
council. Because it is impossible for the men who work for the government
to do anything about him, it is up to those of us who are independent to get
justice done.
Louise Michel
I do not have the last issue of La Revolution sociale. I would like to have
the last two or three articles I did, especially the last one. That one I did
with the intention of having the authorities break up the newspaper. I
told M. Serraux that was my idea, and now 1 understand why they did
not want to. Who the devil could have guessed that the Prefect of Police
was behind it all?
I have said enough to make it clear that I was above questions of
personality. The affair of Foutriquet’s statue left me completely indiffer¬
ent, also. [Andrieux was aware of, or instigated, a plot to blow up a new
statue of President Thiers; the plan came to nothing when the explosives
failed to go off.] To keep the misfire from being blamed on a man, I
wanted to attribute it to a child. At that age, if the hand is unsure, the
child is corrected, and then it doesn’t matter. If Andrieux deceived us,
our frankness will break the trap, and it will not sully the Revolution.
The most perfidious part of Andrieux’s plan failed. Like other com¬
rades, I had inserted in the newspaper several letters in which I declared
I would write insults only against the government and I would refuse to
deal with any insults stupidly addressed to other groups scattered along
the path of revolution.
I have always made war against bad principles. As for particular men,
they do not count. Andrieux and his lackeys who tried to set traps for us
are having the trap turned on them.
Only this morning did I become aware of a little maneuver they had.
When there were articles that especially attacked personalities instead of
ideas (which is completely opposed to the way I see things), they would
put a few adroitly cut words of mine in an epigraph. Then people were
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
led to attribute the rest of the article to me. Personal hatreds were
generated by that technique.
The rest of 1881 I spent making speeches, attending an international
meeting in London, and writing for various newspapers. In January
1882 the silent poor spoke out on the anniversary of the great Blanqui’s
death, and I was arrested. I have copied the story of the trial from
L’Intransigeant of 7 January 1882, because the affair was not reported in
the Gazette des tribunaux.
Police Court
Louise Michel was the first accused called. The valiant citizen was
entirely self-possessed, and in her own voice she answered the judge’s
questions in a very precise manner.
“You are charged with insulting policemen,” said M. Puget, the judge.
“On the contrary, it is we who should bring charges concerning brutality
and insults,” Louise Michel said, “because we were very peaceful. What
happened, and doubtless the reason I am here, is this: I went to the
headquarters of the police commissioner and when I got there, I looked
out a window and saw several policemen beating a man. I did not want to
say anything to those policemen because they were very overexcited, so I
went up to the next floor and found two other policemen who were
calmer. I said to them, ‘Go down quickly. Someone is being murdered.’ ”
The judge said, “That story does not agree with the depositions of
witnesses we’re about to hear.”
Louise Michel answered, “What I’ve said is the truth. When accusations
against me have been true, I’ve admitted things far more serious than
this.”
The first witness called was a police constable named Conar. He said that
when he got to the police commissioner’s he found two women, one of
whom was Louise Michel. He testified that she said to him, “You are hoods
and deadbeats.”
“That’s a lie,” said Louise Michel. The police constable persisted in
claiming his account was true. Louise Michel repeated that she was telling
the truth and could say nothing more.
Regardless of the police constable’s story being a lie, the court sentenced
Louise Michel to two weeks in prison for violating Article 224 of the Penal
Code.
My friends were right to believe that I could not have said the words
attributed to me. I said, “Someone is being murdered,” not some slang
phrase, and the word “deadbeat” isn’t in my vocabulary. Nevertheless, I
spent two weeks in the middle of January 1882 in jail, while my mother
waited for me.
Chapter 17
The Death of Marie Ferre
Marie Ferre had lived for a decade after the horrible events surrounding
the arrest of Theophile. Persons whose brothers or fathers were sent to
New Caledonia or to exile elsewhere know her devotion and indefatiga¬
ble courage. At London the refugees had spoken to me about a few days
she had spent there as if, by seeing her, they saw friends again who had
disappeared during the slaughter. I believe they loved Marie more than
I did, but none of us has her any longer.
After I was arrested for the incident on Blanqui’s anniversary, Marie
Ferre fell ill. Her heart had been weak for ten years, any emotion was
dangerous for her, and after she suffered a short illness, death came for
her on the night of 23-24 February 1882.
At 47, rue Condorcet in Paris, there is a red room shaped like a
lantern. Marie, when Mme Bias rented the room, told me about it. “It’s a
real nest,” Marie said. “You’ll see how peaceful it is there.” It was a
nest—the nest of her death.
Her illness had not seemed serious at first. We did not suspect it was
going to have such a terrible conclusion, but it was in that little red room
shaped like a lantern that we lost her.
After I had served my two-week sentence, I was released. When I
found that Marie was ill, I was a little upset that she didn’t come to stay
with me until she recovered, but she told me, “I shall be well in my little
red room. After a few days it will all be over.”
It was indeed all over. If God existed, he would be truly a monster to
strike such a blow.
Her bed was opposite the door, with its head against the wall. During
the two days while her body was laid out there, someone across the hall
who didn’t know what was happening never stopped playing the violin.
That’s the way it is in cities where each building is a city in itself. The
sound of that violin sank into my heart.
In front of her bed we laid Marie in her coffin, well wrapped in my
large red shawl, which she used to like. Someone had given it to me in
case I needed to make a banner, and it made her shroud. It’s the same
thing now.
Here is the way the newspapers of 28 June [sic: February] 1882
described the funeral of Marie Ferre.
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Yesterday morning at 9 o’clock, the funeral of the courageous Citizen
Marie Ferre took place. She was the sister of Theophile Ferr6, who was
murdered by the reactionary bourgeoisie for his participation in the
Commune.
The life of Marie Ferre was one of self-abnegation and devotion to the
cause for which her brother died. Thus it was with respectful admiration
that a great number of friends yesterday followed this martyr to the
revolutionary faith to her last resting place. . . .
The cortege was made up of a thousand persons, among whom were
Henri Rochefort, Clovis Hughes, Hubertine Auclert, Camille Bias, Ca-
dolle, and Louise Michel. . . .
When the funeral procession reached the cemetery at Levallois-Perret,
several persons made speeches: delegates from revolutionary groups,
social studies circles, free thought associations, and the Committee of
Vigilance of the Eighteenth Arrondissement. . . .
“History,” Jules Allix said, “will associate the memory of Theophile
Ferre with the great and sublime devotion of his sister Marie, and it is her
simple and great life that we salute here.
“Frail and gentle like all women, she was as strong as the most coura¬
geous man.
“We salute you, Marie Ferre. Your memory will live in spite of the care
you took to hide yourself. We the tortured, we the banished and exiled,
form a procession here for you. It will last until the day when we will
glorify our martyrs who died to make liberty grow for those who remain.
“The crowd that is pressing around your tomb, dear citizen with the
wonderful spirit, is making a greater eulogy to your life than all the
speeches today. May you be honored, Marie Ferre. We ask that we may
imitate your example, so that instead of martyrdoms alone, we will win the
final triumph. Long live the Republic! Long live the Revolution!”
The sad moment ended with a few words from Emile Gautier and me.
I said to the crowd: “Citizens, we place this tombstone over the very
heart of the Revolution. Let us remember. Let us always remember!”
Gautier concluded the ceremony: “You have said it very well, Louise.
Let us remember. May memory come back to life and make us glimpse
the dawn of the days when liberty, equality, and justice will reign.”
When Marie Ferre died, the revolutionary women of Lyon who had
been calling themselves the Louise Michel Association took the name
Marie Ferre Association. Thank you, just and valiant women of Lyon.
Among the fragments of 28 February 1882 there are many touching
pages written about the heroic and impressive friend whom we had lost.
Henri Rochefort reminisced about her at length.
When I saw Marie again after my return from exile, I had been keeping
in my mind an ineradicable memory of the young girl from my days in
prison, and her unexpected death brought it back to my attention.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
137
I see her again, gliding like a shadow in her black clothing along the
corridor that led to the visiting room in the jail. Rossel, Th£ophile Ferr£,
and I were usually all together in a set of cubicles which were arranged like
a sort of prison wagon. Because all three of us were marked for execution,
we were locked up next to each other on the first floor of the prison with
two guards who had uneasy eyes staring curiously at us through open
spy-holes.
In the visiting room Mile Rossel, Mile Ferre, and my children waited,
sharing their common anxiety. When they found out I had been sentenced
only to deportation for life, I shall never forget the look of sympathetic
longing the two young girls gave my children. It seemed to say, “Your
father is only going to have to end his days six thousand leagues from here
among man-eating savages. You’re fortunate!”
Like Delescluze’s sister, Ferre’s sister struggled bravely against the
bitterness of regrets, and then she fell, vanquished.
When the clerical calendar that the mailman brings us each year is
replaced by the republican calendar, the name of this martyr will shine
there among the most memorable. If ever civil baptism replaces religious
baptism, decent women will honor her virtue and her memory by dedicat¬
ing their children to her.
The last fragment I want to give is a poem I wrote to Marie’s memory
just after her death.
In Memory of Marie Ferre
We have to admit that she is dead.
From the gates of jail, we’ll see her no more.
The door to cold nothing will never reopen.
These words shall go where tears can’t reach.
To speak her name will take us back
To all those we have lost.
Marie was modest, brave, and proud,
A contrast of charm we often admired.
It’s over now; and in her tomb
She sleeps forever; our last smile
Held in her heart; and beneath the stone
My heart is buried alive.
Betwixt bleak skies and stony earth
A few rare treasures are fleetingly ours
Before pale death swoops in to steal.
We stand beneath our crimson flags
And mourn the loss of those we love,
Too soon taken to the tomb.
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Revolution; beloved mother who devours us
Giving equality, take our broken destinies
And make of them a dawning. Make liberty
Fly above our cherished dead. When the bells
Of ominous May ring out again, wake us
To your luminescent clarity.
Louise Michel
February 1882
After the terrible blow of Marie’s death, I thought I would die. My
mother still remained alive then, my mother and the Revolution. As I
write these lines, I have only the Revolution.
Chapter 18
Women's Rights
All the women reading these memoirs must remember that we women
are not judged the same way men are. When men accuse some other
man of a crime, they do not accuse him of such a stupid one that an
observer wonders if they are serious. But that is how they deal with a
woman; she is accused of things so stupid they defy belief. If she is not
duped by the claims of popular sovereignty put forth to delude people,
or if she is not fooled by the hypocritical concessions which hoodwink
most women, she will be indicted. Then, if a woman is courageous, or if
she grasps some bit of knowledge easily, men claim she is only a
“pathological” case.
At this moment man is master, and women are intermediate beings,
standing between man and beast. It is painful for me to admit that we
are a separate caste, made one across the ages.
For many years the human race has been lying in its cocoon with its
wings folded; now it is time for humanity to unfold its wings. The
human race that is emerging from its cocoon will not understand why we
lay supine so long.
The first thing that must change is the relationship between the sexes.
Humanity has two parts, men and women, and we ought to be walking
hand in hand; instead there is antagonism, and it will last as long as the
“stronger” half controls, or thinks it controls, the “weaker” half.
How marvelous it would be if only the equality of the sexes were
recognized, but while we wait, women are still, as Moli6re said, “the soup
of man.” The strong sex condescends to soothe us by defining us as the
beautiful sex. Nonsense! It’s been a damned long time since we women
have had any justice from the “strong” sex.
We women are not bad revolutionaries. Without begging anyone, we
are taking our place in the struggle; otherwise, we could go ahead and
pass motions until the world ends and gain nothing. For my part,
comrades, I have refused to be any man’s “soup,” and I’ve gone through
life with the masses without giving any slaves to the Caesars.
Let me tell men a few truths. They claim man’s strength is derived
from woman’s cowardice, but his strength is less than it appears to be.
Men rule with a lot of uproar, while it is women who govern without
noise.
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But governing from the shadows is valueless. If women’s mysterious
power were transformed into equality, all the pitiful vanities and con¬
temptible deceptions would disappear. Never again would there be
either a master’s brutality or a slave’s perfidy.
The worship of force which exists today reminds me of savages and
dawn-age peoples. In New Caledonia I saw warriors loading their
women as if they were mules. Whenever someone might see them, they
posed haughtily, carrying only their warrior’s spear. But if the gorges
and mountains closed up and hid them from view, or if the path were
deserted, then the warrior, moved by pity, would unload some of the
burden from his human mule and carry it himself. Thus lightened, the
woman breathed deeply; now she had no more than one child hanging
on her back and one or two others hanging on her legs. But if a shadow
appeared on the horizon—even if only a cow or a horse—quickly the
load went back on the woman’s back, and the warrior made a great
pretense of adjusting it. Oh dear, if someone had seen him—a warrior
who thinks women are worth something! But most women after a
lifetime of being treated like this no longer wanted anything more.
Is it not the same everywhere? Human stupidity throws old prejudices
over us like a winding-sheet over a corpse. Are there not stupid argu¬
ments about the inferiority of women? Maternity or other circumstances
are supposed to keep women from being good fighters. That argument
assumes people are always going to be stupid enough to butcher each
other. Anyway, when a thing is worth the pain, women are not the last to
join the struggle. The yeast of rebellion which lies at the bottom of every
woman’s heart rises quickly when combat stirs it up, particularly when
combat promises to lessen squalor and stinks less than a charnel house.
Calm down, men. We are not stupid enough to want to run things.
Our taking power would only make some kind of authority last longer;
you men keep the power instead, so that authority may wither away
more quickly. I must add that even “more quickly” will still be too long.
We women are disgusted, and further villainies only inspire us to act.
We jeer a little also. We jeer at the incredible sight of big shots, cheap
punks, hoods, old men, young men, scoundrels—all turned into idiots by
accepting as truth a whole heap of nonsensical ideas which have domi¬
nated the thinking of the human race. We jeer at the sight of those male
creatures judging women’s intellects by weighing the brains of women in
their dirty paws.
Do men sense the rising tide of us women, famished for learning? We
ask only this of the old world: the little knowledge that it has. All those
men who wish to do nothing are jealous of us. They are jealous of us
because we want to take from the world what is sweetest: knowledge and
learning.
I have never understood why there was a sex whose intelligence
people tried to cripple as if there were already too much intelligence in
Memoirs of Louise Michel
141
the world. Little girls are brought up in foolishness and are expressly
disarmed so that men can deceive them more easily. That is what men
want. It is precisely as if someone threw you into the water after having
forbidden you to learn to swim or even after having tied your arms and
legs. It is all done under the pretext of preserving the innocence of little
girls.
Men are happy to let a girl dream. And most of those dreams would
not disturb her as they do now if she knew them as simple questions of
science. She would be in fact more truly innocent then, for she could
move calmly through visions which now trouble her. Nothing that comes
from science or nature would bother her. Does a corpse disturb people
who are used to the dissecting room? When nature, living or dead,
appears to an educated woman, she does not blush. There is no mystery,
for mystery is destroyed when the cadaver is dissected. Nature and
science are clean; the veils that men throw over them are not.
Englishmen have created a race of animals for slaughter. “Civilized”
men prepare young girls to be deceived, and then make it a crime for
them to fall, but also make it almost an honor for the seducer. What an
uproar when men find an unruly animal in the flock! I wonder what
would happen if the lamb no longer wanted to be slaughtered. Most
likely, men would slaughter them just the same, whether or not they
stretched their necks out for the knife. What difference does it make?
The difference is that it is better not to stretch your neck out to your
murderer.
There is a roadside market where men sell the daughters of the
people. The daughter of the rich is sold for her dowry and is given to
whomever her family wishes. The daughter of the poor is taken by
whoever wants her. Neither girl is ever asked her own wishes.
In our world, the proletarian is a slave; the wife of a proletarian is
even more a slave. Women’s wages are simply a snare because they are so
meager that they are illusory. Why do so many women not work? There
are two reasons. Some women cannot find work, and others would
rather die of hunger, living in a cave, than do a job which gives them
back less than enough to live on and which enriches the entrepreneur at
the same time.
Prostitution is the same. We practice Caledonian morality, and men
don’t count women for much here either. There are some women who
hold tight to life. But then, forced on by hunger, cold, and misery, they
are lured into shame by the pimps and whores who live from that kind of
work. In every rotten thing, there are maggots. Those unfortunate
women let themselves be formed into battalions in the mournful army
that marches from the hospital to the charnel house.
When I hear of one of these miserable creatures taking from a man’s
pocket more than he would have given her, I think, “So much the
better.” Why should we close our eyes? If there were not so many buyers,
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that sordid market would not exist. And when some honest woman,
insulted and pursued, kills the scoundrel who is chasing her, I think,
“Bravo, she has rid others of the danger and avenged her sisters.” But
too few women do it.
If women, these accursed—even the socialist Proudhon said they can
only be housewives and courtesans, and indeed they cannot be anything
else in the present world—if, as I say, these women are often dangerous,
to whom does the blame belong? Who has, for his pleasure, developed
their coquetry and all the other vices agreeable to men? Men have
selected these vices through the ages.
We women have weapons now, the weapons of slaves, silent and
terrible. No one has to put them into our hands. It is done.
I admit that a man, too, suffers in this accursed society, but no sadness
can compare to a woman’s. In the street, she is merchandise. In the
convents, where she hides as if in a tomb, ignorance binds her, and rules
take her up in their machinelike gears and pulverize her heart and
brain. In the world, she bends under mortification. In her home, her
burdens crush her. And men want to keep her that way. They do not
want her to encroach upon either their functions or their titles.
Be reassured, “gentlemen.” We do not need any of your titles to take
over your functions when it pleases us to do so. Your titles. Bah! We do
not want rubbish. Do what you want to with them. They are too flawed
and limited for women. The time is not far off when you will come and
offer them to us in order to try to dress them up a little by dividing them
with us.
Keep those rags and tatters. We want none of them. What we do want
is knowledge and education and liberty. We know what our rights are,
and we demand them. Are we not standing next to you fighting the
supreme fight? Are you not strong enough, men, to make part of that
supreme fight a struggle for the rights of women? And then men and
women together will gain the rights of all humanity.
Beyond our tormented epoch will come the time when men and
women will move through life together as good companions, and they
will no more argue about which sex is superior than races will argue
about which race is foremost in the world. It is good to look to the
future.
This chapter is by no means a digression. As a woman, I have the right
to speak for women.
Chapter 19
Speeches Abroad,
1882 -1883
During the year after Marie’s death, I made speeches not only in France
but also in Belgium, Holland, and England. More or less true accounts
exist of the speeches I gave in Brussels in October 1882. They went very
well except for the third or fourth speech. At that one some young fool
who claimed his name was Fallou caused a disturbance. To explain why
no one knew him in Brussels, he declared ingenuously that he had come
from Paris the same time I did. To the crowd he stated that I had written
an article in La Revolution sociale proposing the erection of a statue to M.
Thiers!!! He claimed he had the issue that proved his allegations, and a
large number of people believed his nonsense, even though the only
article I had ever written about Thiers was one that began, “The little
squirt has been castrated.”
In spite of the objects that “friends of order” threw at the rostrum, I
finished my speech. The incident showed by the very example people
had before their eyes that those “friends of order” understood “order”
to mean their right to knock down people like myself who claim that bees
should not have to work forever for hornets.
Reactionaries have raised two questions about my foreign speeches
which would be laughable if our principles were not involved. One
question is, Where did I get the money for my trips? and the other was,
What did I do with the money I made?
The money for the trips came from Henri Rochefort when whatever
group that invited me did not furnish it. He lent me the money, which I
have never paid back, and any money I received over my expenses I
gave to the sponsoring group. Other friends bought my railroad tickets.
Receipts? Both in New Caledonia and since my return, I have made it a
practice to keep receipts or documents which would establish, if neces¬
sary, what I have done with the various sums I have been given to
dispense, but the revolutionary groups know what was done with the
money. They know I kept nothing for myself.
I’d like to quote a piece from L’Intransigeant .
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We’ve seen a report in the magazine Voltaire which reads: “Revolu¬
tionary propaganda brings in a great deal of money. Mile Louise Michel’s
three speeches at Brussels each got her 500 francs, or 1500 francs for all
three. At prices like those, calls for revolt have become a pretty good deal.”
Not only have we seen that report, but one of our kind readers,
astonished at the princely gifts Citizen Louise Michel is giving to Chagot’s
victims through us, has asked us for information about her means of
support. That gentleman feels Louise Michel has a knack for uttering
“charming bits of nonsense” and making “pleasure trips at the expense of
fools exploited by a committee of scoundrels.” . . .
To this gentle reader we shall limit ourselves to submitting a few figures
which the Voltaire is also at liberty to use for its own purposes.
Over and above the cost of the first speech and independently of what
was earmarked for the work of revolutionary propaganda, Ulntransigeant
received a hundred francs to give to the exiles of 1871.
Over and above the cost of the second speech, a hundred francs were
given to the Barinage miners. Another hundred francs went to the socialist
press in Antwerp, and the remainder, three hundred francs, the “princely
gift,” was featured yesterday at the head of the list of contributors for the
accused of Chalon-sur-Saone and their families.
There certainly was no less democratic or worthwhile use made of the
proceeds of the third speech.
Is our gentle reader satisfied?
I’m obliged to get quotations from friends because I can find the truth
nowhere else. I delete things that are too flattering to me when I can;
they are only exaggerations in response to the exaggerated hatred my
enemies express, and I do not deserve that flattery—although I’m not a
monster. I just follow my own inclinations, the way everybody and
everything does.
We are the product of our own times, that’s all, and each of us has his
good side and his bad. It does not matter what we are so long as our
work is great and covers us with its glory. In the midst of the things we
begin, what our own lives are does not matter. What counts is what will
be left for humanity when we have disappeared.
Two weeks after my speeches in Brussels, I spoke at Ghent. Our
friend Deneuvillers has told the story of what happened that day in
Ghent. I’m going to quote his account from revolutionary pride, not
personal pride. It shows the conduct of the people compared to the
conduct of those who are their exploiters, consciously or unconsciously.
Louise Michel at Ghent
Louise Michel gave a speech Wednesday at the Mont-Parnasse hall, the
proceeds from which were earmarked for the socialist cause. Three
thousand comrades were present and gave an enthusiastic welcome to the
speaker, who talked on “Revolutionary Proselyting.”
Memoirs of Louise Michel
145
Then she left to go to deliver a speech at the Hippodrome in a bourgeois
and reactionary setting. The brave and courteous people of Ghent wanted
to form a procession around her to protect her from hecklers, but Louise
Michel told them: “We must not allow the enemies of the people to believe
that any one person from our ranks is an idol. We should form processions
only for the Revolution. That’s why I ask you to let me go on by myself.”
The workers who heard her at Mont-Parnasse were composed and
enthusiastic, but the reactionaries at the Hippodrome were wild and
furious. For three days the delirious Catholic clerics had been preparing
howling choristers to prevent people from hearing her. Only wide open
mouths yelling out furious cries could be seen, along with enough raised
clubs to make Pietri envious.
There was a comic side to the Hippodrome speech; as a souvenir of the
clerical arguments the speaker was able to keep a two-kilogram piece of a
bench which had been thrown at her head.
The Catholic packs gathered in the streets where they bayed after the
trail of socialists. They tried to murder the person the Catholics thought
was their leader, the courageous Anseele, and he escaped from their hands
only because we intervened in the fight. . . .
Deneuvillers
In Ghent after I had witnessed the magnificent spectacle of the guilds
marching, I saw during the night, which added to the setting, a medieval
scene in a medieval city. It came after my speech that caused so much
furor. One part of the hall in which I was speaking was occupied by
policemen sent from Paris, and a person, like the conductor of an
orchestra, signaled them when to make a racket. Students from Catholic
universities occupied the upper parts of the hall, and with their ears
conspicuous against the shadows, they howled out in unison every time
the conductor raised his baton. If only there had been some real
bellowing at that concert, but all the police and students did was yelp.
My friends forced me to leave that concert, and their decision was
wrong. Those raucous little fellows would finally have lost their voices,
and the reasonable parts of the room would have been able to judge
their conduct at the end. To my regret, I obeyed the wishes of my
friends and left, but it was painful.
They pushed me into a cab which immediately pulled away, but
Jeanne, a friend who was accompanying me, had been separated from
me in the turmoil. I kept trying to make the cab driver turn back for her,
but for half an hour he whipped on his horses without answering me or
admitting he heard me or even felt me pulling on his arm.
I finally prevailed upon the driver, and he turned back, driving
through “Messieurs the scholars,” who were throwing stones at the
meeting hall. The windows of the cab were broken, the horse was hardly
able to move, and now and again outlined against the black night, a
young head, flushed with the drunkenness of the chase, pushed its way
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
through the fragments of the carriage’s windows and howled out some
insult. The old phantom city behind them opened out dead black to my
view.
Amidst my concern for my friend Jeanne, I thought about the old
Ghent of the fourteenth century, the days of the van Arteveldes, when
the guilds used the axe to kill those they believed were seeking power,
and I looked out at the somber banks of the canal. It all made a
magnificent spectacle, framed between the water and the night. In front
of the meeting hall were the students and those who kept watch over
them, all of them milling around. The Middle Ages were alive still.
Very worried about Jeanne, I got down from the cab to ask them if
they had seen the tall brunette who had been with me and to ask what
they had done with her, because I was the one they wanted to kill. A few
of them became serious and began to make inquiries. Then a police
superintendent helped me to search for Jeanne.
He was a police superintendent from Ghent, and not at all like the
policemen who had migrated from Paris to bellow at my speech. He told
me not to get involved in any way with what was going on other than to
look for Jeanne, and in fact it was he who located her. I remember that
when he found that the students were acting improperly he placed
himself in front of me, to my great astonishment, and he helped me
move through the packed mass. That surprised me, because I fully
expected to be led off to prison for having been insulted. That’s what the
police would have done in Paris.
The newspapers recognized the evenhanded honesty of those Belgian
police.
The spectacle of fevered madness lasted until evening. The mob
thought that by stifling a speech they had saved religion and society.
Without the protection of the burgomaster and the police chief, who
proved they had truly heroic devotion to principle by intervening in the
fight at the Circus and even up to the railroad station, we do not know
what might have happened to our friend, Louise Michel.
I traveled to Holland, also. Besides our friends, of whom I have such
good memories, there were scholars who were curious to see close up
what species of animal we revolutionaries are.. They undertook their
studies in good faith. I also met enemies who were sincere because they
knew about us only through gossip in reactionary newspapers. They
were astonished at having been deceived and ended up by understand¬
ing revolutionaries.
In Holland, the motherland of the brave, I also saw Freemasons, and
it seemed to me that Freemasonry had undergone a rejuvenation.
During the courageous proceedings of the Freemasons in 1871 I had
gotten the impression of an assembly of specters drawing themselves up
Memoirs of Louise Michel
147
on the ramparts in front of the royalists who were butchering the
Revolution. It was grand and coldly beautiful. Later in New Caledonia I
saw the Freemasons again; there they had been revitalized by the
influence of the tropics. They seemed to be moved by a great desire for
progress and were going to a lot of pains to take part in it, there where
the sun was warm.
But more and more, it is clear that societies based on rites, or
hampered by any rites whatever, will not last until the emergence of the
only viable fellowship—that of revolutionary humanity. Rite-bound so¬
cieties will assist that birth only as ghosts.
An isolated life can be interesting only as it relates to the multitude of
lives that surrounds it. Only crowds, with each person free in the
immense harmony, are worthwhile now.
Two months after this northern trip, just after the beginning of 1883,
I went to London to give a series of speeches. The travel expenses were
paid by Citizens Otterbein of Brussels and Mas of Anvers, and I have not
paid them back yet.
At London, I lived with our friends Varlet, Armand Morceau, and
Viard the way I had done during the conference of 1881, and as always
they spoiled me a bit. It is impossible for me to spend money when I go
to London; they spend it. As for the proceeds from the speech, our
friends know what was to be done with them. For a gathering of
revolutionary groups, the hall we rented was very expensive, and what
we came up with had to be supplemented. L’Intransigeant added more
yet, because we had promised our friends of ’71 who had become infirm
that there would be a small remembrance for them.
The proceeds were small. Some time ago we made a plan to create a
very modest refuge where old and starving former exiles could find a
little bread and a few drops of broth. With no qualification other than
destitution, those poor people who had become unable to work or to
whom people had refused work could receive food and find shelter.
Many of the Communards are proud, and some of them had already
taken the path of Pere Malezieux. With the proceeds from our meetings,
we hoped to support a home for these exiles, owned by the exiles
themselves, and if we had received sufficient funds, perhaps we could
have saved a few desperate persons.
Even the most aristocratic and reactionary English newspapers re¬
ported my London speeches quite impartially. Perhaps that relative
kindness was owed to the bad faith of the bourgeois gutter press of
France. Nothing puts people in a better light than to say too many bad
things about them. After a good round of violent criticism, exaggera¬
tions are immediately noticeable.
As for the accounts of my London speeches in the opportunistic press
of Paris, they were all based on the same stereotype. They did not need
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to send reporters. It was enough for them to know the name of the
meeting hall where I was speaking, the subject treated, and the group
that had organized the meeting to permit them to fix up their accounts
of the “revolutionary craze” in their good old-fashioned way.
Because my London lectures were given in rich neighborhoods where
people knew about me only through the legend my enemies had
invented, my British audience was quite astonished at finding me neither
so ill-mannered nor so ridiculous as it had heard. Those who saw me in
England did not recognize in the slightest the horrible portrait of me
they had been given. Also, all the newspapers, even the aristocratic Pall
Mall Gazette, were extremely courteous to me.
One thing that surprised them was that I did not share the current
British ideas on workhouses, but they were incorrect when they thought
they saw me contradict myself on on this point. They thought I was
enthusiastic about the workhouses, and that’s not what I think of them. I
only stated the pleasure I felt over England’s considering it a duty to be
concerned about people who have neither food nor shelter. The thing
that struck me—and I immediately said so—was the care with which in
some workhouses, Lambeth for example, they soften the refuge where
old Albion piles its poverty.
The English will wait on their own little island until the rest of Europe
has had its revolution, and then, not imitating the stupid mistakes others
have committed, England will do everything at once. Albion will rise
suddenly and light the sacred fire. The winds from abroad will cause the
sacred fire to burn more brightly and will make it a dawning.
So that their antiquated institutions will last longer, the English warm
them up with the enthusiasm of women. Women direct the workhouses
now, and in the future there will be women in Parliament. But the green
branches on the old tree cannot rejuvenate the rotten trunk.
There is one workhouse where the old and the poor are happy; it is
one in which the woman who directs it feels that liberty is necessary if the
destitute are to stay alive like other people. “There are no rules” is
written in big letters on the wall, and the place is more orderly than
anywhere else. The clock directs people. At the time for meals or work
or a walk, everybody goes freely where he must, the same way a person
in his own house goes to his own meal or his own work.
I will not name the people in England who showed me their sympathy.
They will remember that evening of the black London winter on which a
cloud of fog floated. Raindrops condensed in an unceasing mist and now
and again came in broad sheets. They will remember a frozen evening in
the large, cold meeting hail in front of a cold and correct audience
drawn from a grand neighborhood of immense palaces under which the
wretches have holes like animals. But despite that, I felt an impression of
human honesty persisting regardless of the accursed chains that people
interminably fasten on each other.
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149
The audience did not share my beliefs, but they were sincere. I do not
know why, but they seemed like a family to me, even as serious and cold
as they were. Then, as I had done long ago during my childhood at
Vroncourt, as I had done when I was a young schoolmistress and sat on
the hearth-stone at Mme Fayet’s while I let everything in my heart break
free, I began to talk unrestrainedly. In this large, cold meeting hall in
London, I spoke freely about the scenes of my life which came to
mind—from Vroncourt to New Caledonia, and at that moment those
past things were truly present.
My English friends, Miss M-, Miss X-, Miss F-, do not
believe for a minute that I have forgotten you. Do you really believe,
Miss M-, that the book in which you wrote the words of the old
Jacobins—“neither God nor master”—could ever have been destroyed?
I certainly still have it. I also have “The Song of the Shirt” translated into
French so well by you, Sir T. S-.
London! I love London, where my exiled friends have always been
welcomed, London, where old England, standing in the shadow of the
gallows, is still more liberal than the French bourgeois republicans are.
Maybe those French opportunists really think they are liberal. Do you
suppose that everybody who commits crimes against the people is
conscious of what he is doing? Among them are persons who are
deluding themselves and who wish to reward themselves for virtue and
intelligence. Intelligence, nonsense! Wisdom is found in the people.
It is quite true that today the people do not know any science, but
considering the mess science is in now, that’s all right. Science today is
only opening its buds. Tomorrow it will be wonderful, and tomorrow
science will belong to everybody. Today, if the people do not know this
or that little bit of information, at least they are not stubborn about
believing, for example, that glowworms are stars. That’s something.
Chapter 20
Speeches in France,
1882 -1883
In the summer of 1882 I made a lecture tour through northern France
with Jules Guesde, in connection with a strike. The trip had some merry
moments. In one cafe a dozen men came over and made a circle around
us, looking at us the way curious animals do. I took out my sketch pad
and began to draw their mugs. I wrote underneath the sketches “Skillful
Stool-pigeon,” “Fool,” and “Spiteful Stool-pigeon.” They weren’t in¬
formers any more than we were, but they were so stupid, looking at us
the way they did. One of them came and peeked over my shoulder; the
others did too, and then we were rid of them.
During the journey, there was another moment of comedy when one
fellow went on and on telling another man about the burials of famous
men he had seen; nobody could have been as complete a fool as this
fellow was. I wondered if he was in earnest. When I realized he was, I
became fearful that Guesde would find a way to disturb the bird, but he
didn’t, and the fellow ended his recital of hopes for funeral processions
with the wish that Victor Hugo, whose age he worked out, would soon
give him another spectacle.
After having stirred that prospect around for a long time he began on
another subject: Thiers. That mournful crow certainly had a gift for
conversation. He was talking to a man who had a neck as red as a
turkey’s and who was watching him admiringly, and so was a young
woman with big, round eyes. Then a traveling salesman who was neither
affected nor boastful straightened him out by telling some truths to the
fellow who was deploring the miseries of the “poor bosses.”
At the meeting we had come to attend, the chief of police, all dressed
up with his sash of office, placed himself near Guesde and me. Clearly
believing the tales the reactionaries were telling about us, he seemed
astonished at how calm our friends kept the meeting. It is true that the
four sergeants-at-arms appointed to keep order in the hall were all the
size of Hercules, and one of them picked up a lower-middle-class
troublemaker and put him under his arm the way you carry a cat. That
Memoirs of Louise Michel
151
troublemaker was giving a signal for the start of a racket, but the
Hercules carried him out before anyone did anything. The other reac¬
tionaries calmed down magically.
In September 1882 there was a meeting at Versailles. Quite a group of
us anarchists went there together. We were prepared for the worst, but
we thought it was our duty to go to Versailles and memorialize there the
execution grounds at Satory and the wall at Pdre Lachaise. I still have a
letter I wrote about this meeting which was published in Llntransigeant.
[24] September 1882
Concerning the incidents which occured at the meeting organized last
Sunday at Versailles by a revolutionary socialist group, Louise Michel
sends us the following note:
Did our friends expect us to get a different reception? We don’t need to
talk about the Revolution to people who are revolutionaries; we need to
tell people who aren’t revolutionaries about it.
Since we began at Versailles, I don’t see any obstacle to our ending up in
some place like Brittany, which is even more reactionary. Soon we will go
to all the royal provinces. Maybe some of the people there will greet us
with pitchforks, but our publicity will win others over to the Social
Revolution. All their Breton obstinacy will turn toward the truth, and all
their fanaticism will be directed toward the future instead of the past.
I’ve thought about conquering Brittany for a long time, ever since 22
January 1871, when I stood in the courtyard of the Hotel de Ville. That
day, more than ten years ago, I looked up indignantly at the broad, pale
faces of the Breton boys glued against the windows of the building which
once had been and again would be the home of the democratic Commune.
In accordance with Trochu’s plan, they fired at us then from those
windows with great conviction, but we will recruit those Bretons too, like
all the others, for the Revolution. We will recruit the king’s faithful, just
like all other proletarians.
Louise Michel
That article in Llntransigeant went on to print another of my letters:
Yesterday our friend, Citizen Louise Michel, addressed a letter to the
editor-in-chief of Llntransigeant, commenting on an article entitled “Mem¬
ories of Satory.”
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To Citizen Rochefort.
My dear traveling companion,
I congratulate you for your article today. How could those people
imagine that the pursuit and cries of an ignorant pack of dogs could alarm
me when I have the image of Satory in my mind? It would be just like
amusing myself by grumbling when I was on the Ducos Peninsula, as I
looked at Nou Island visible at the horizon.
Once again we are able to declare that our adversaries have no serious
arguments. They use shouts, which is an admission that they have lost.
Still, the crowd was picturesque. The most striking figure was a limping
beggar who stretched himself out on his crutches like a spider and
screeched against the enemies of property. You’ve seen Callot’s painting
“The Beggars,” haven’t you? You would have thought that the fellow had
been pulled out of the frame. There were also a few big, funny-looking
creatures that looked like the monsters that form the retinue of the
goddess of the sea, and some street urchins, among whom there was more
than one future insurgent. All in all, they made up the whole tableau of
human stupidity.
No matter. This scene will have made its contribution by bringing us
more than one listener. Things have an eloquence that words lack.
Louise Michel
At another meeting, this one at the de la Perle meeting hall, I believe,
someone managed to break a window and throw a smoke-bomb behind
the speaker’s rostrum. If we had not dealt with it immediately and told
the audience it was a trick of the police or of idiots, it would have caused
the crowd to rush toward the one very small exit, and there would have
been some accidents. It turned out to have been the work of idiots.
Ashamed of what they’d done, they later sent me their apologies, which I
read publicly, of course without mentioning their names.
There were many other meetings; accounts of them are in one of
Marie’s notebooks. Among them was one at the Graffard meeting hall.
Speaking of that, there is a painting of me in the Gr6vin Museum
entitled “Louise Michel at the Graffard Meeting Hall.” Why the Graf¬
fard, I don’t know; that title is given to other portraits and caricatures. I
certainly have been at the Graffard hall, as I have been at almost every
other meeting hall in Paris, but it seems to me that your face does not
change from one speaker’s platform to another.
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153
“Louise Michel at the Graffard Meeting Hall” is again the inscription,
I believe, under the portrait that a very young painter, the son of Mme
Tynaire, stubbornly persisted in doing for the Salon. I let him do it in
spite of the distress I felt at posing during that time, for it was immedi¬
ately after Marie’s death. I did not want to thwart a child who had talent,
and I was sure the Salon would accept it for two reasons. The first and
foremost was that he painted very well. The second, and the one on
which I counted, was that his portrait of me resembled, feature for
feature and especially expression for expression, not me, but an old
prisoner named Mme Dumollard whom I had seen in 72 at the Au-
berive prison.
I’m aware of my own ugliness, but between my ugliness and the
portrait I’m speaking of—a portrait which was magnificently painted
and which doesn’t resemble me at all—there is a difference that can be
checked simply by comparing it to any of my photographs.
The reactionaries must have rubbed their paws together and said,
“What a fright.” It made me laugh until someone was stupid enough to
tell my mother about several incidents, the knowledge of which pained
her, but her distress was relieved when a simple-minded man, absolutely
dressed to the teeth, a stupid man as stiff as a wooden doll, appeared at
the door of 45, boulevard Ornano, where my mother and I were living.
“Mile Michel?” he asked, forgetting to take off his stove-pipe hat and
beating his right hand with a small stick.
“I am she,” I said.
“No, you aren’t her.”
“I’m not me?”
“Well! I know Louise Michel. I saw her portrait in the Salon.”
“So?”
“So! Try not to make fun of me. A woman who has horses and
carriages doesn’t open her own door. Go and get her for me. I repeat: It
isn’t her who is opening this door.”
“It’s she who is closing it,” I said. Whereupon, as this stupid man
wasn’t all the way inside, I pushed him completely outside and slammed
the door in his face. He blustered a little from the other side of the door,
and then I heard him going down the steps, still shouting insults.
People did say that I had horses and carriages, and people appeared
to believe that I made money from my speeches. Because the persons
who organized the meetings know what was done with the profits, I
confess that I spent hardly any time worrying about that spiteful, stupid
talk.
In October 1882 I went to Lille to speak in connection with the strike
of the women spinners there. They were all around us at the speaker’s
platform, all those female workers from the cellars of Lille, whose cheap
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shoes protect their feet so little from the water, and who are killed by
work before their time. They were asking for only ten or fifteen
centimes more a day to continue their horrible life. Those ten or fifteen
centimes for bread would be sufficient for those who work so hard to
support the rich.
Those poor workers are just like the silkworm, which is boiled when it
has spun its cocoon. When their labor is finished, those workers, too,
must die. Like the silkworms, their lives must stop with the thread. How
will they exist in their old age? Won’t their daughters be chained to the
same torture before they are scarcely out of their cradles?
The rich must use and abuse their flocks. Both the silkworms and the
daughters of the people are made for spinning; the worm will be boiled,
and the girl will die or become twisted like green wood that has been
bent. All they wanted was ten or fifteen centimes for a little bread, and
they earned billions for others.
All the strikers had to do was hold out for one week more and the
exploiters would have given in, but to last a week longer the strikers
needed two thousand francs. That was why I went to Lille to make a
speech. Thanks to the reactionaries who paid for their seats so that they
could come to insult me, we made the two thousand francs in one lecture
alone. I asked the organizers of the speech to put that money away
safely, and then I was able to announce to the gentlemen who had
bought tickets that we had what we needed. Thus, they were free either
to listen to me or to spend their time howling, either of which was
perfectly all right with me because we already had the two thousand
francs that we needed.
That frank explanation calmed them down, and the speech took place
without further incident. Around one in the morning I was able to take
the train and return to my mother. For the tomb of Marie Ferre I
brought back a sacred souvenir—a bouquet the workers of Lille had
given me.
Unfortunately, at the end of the week a few evil persons made some
gullible workers believe that others had gone back to their workshops,
and they believed it was their duty to do the same. Once back in their
capitalist prison, they saw they had been fooled, and then it was too late
for them, but the lesson will not be lost.
Just after the turn of the year, in January 1883, was the trial of the
sixty-eight anarchists in Lyon, fifty-four of whom were prisoners, the
other fourteen being tried in absentia. Because the reactionaries could
not figure out a crime to accuse them of, they were indicted for being
affiliated with the International, which had been dissolved in 1876. The
trial was a travesty.
It began on January 9 and Prince Kropotkin, Emile Gautier, Bordat,
Bernard, and forty-three others of the accused issued a manifesto which
Gautier had written.
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155
Manifesto of the Anarchists
What is anarchy and what are anarchists?
Anarchists are citizens who, in a century where freedom of opinion is
preached everywhere, have believed it to be their right and duty to appeal
for unlimited liberty.
Throughout the world there are a few thousand of us, maybe a few
million, for we have no merit other than saying out loud what the crowd is
thinking. We are a few million workers who claim absolute liberty, nothing
but liberty, every liberty.
We want liberty; we claim for every human being the right to do
whatever he pleases and the means to do it with. A person has the right to
satisfy all his needs completely, with no limit other than natural impossibi¬
lities and the needs of his neighbors, which must be respected equally with
his.
We want freedom, and we believe its existence incompatible with the
existence of any power whatsoever, no matter what its origin and form, no
matter whether it be elected or imposed, monarchist or republican, in¬
spired by divine right, popular right, holy oil, or universal suffrage.
History teaches us that every government is like every other government
and that all are worth the same. The best are the worst. In some there is
more cynicism, in others more hypocrisy, but at bottom there are always
the same procedures, always the same intolerance. There is no govern¬
ment, including even the ones that appear the most liberal, which does not
have in the dust of its legislative arsenals some good little law about the
International to use against inconvenient opposition.
Evil, in the eyes of anarchists, does not dwell in one form of government
more than any other. Evil lies in the idea of government itself. The
principle of authority is evil.
Our ideal for human relations is to substitute a free contract, perpetually
open to revision or cancellation, in place of administrative and legal
guardianship and imposed discipline.
Anarchists propose teaching people to get along without government as
they are already learning to get along without God.
Anarchists will also teach people to get along without private ownership.
Indeed, the worst tyrant is not the one who locks you up; it is the one who
starves you. The worst tyrant is not the one who takes you by the collar; it is
the one who takes you by the belly.
No liberty without equality! There is no liberty in a society where capital
is monopolized in the hands of an increasingly smaller minority, in a
society where nothing is divided equally, not even public education, which
is paid for by everyone’s money.
We believe that capital is the common patrimony of mankind because it
is the fruit of the collaboration between past and present generations, and
that it ought to be put at the disposal of everyone in such a way that no one
is excluded and in such a way that no one can hoard one part of it to the
detriment of other people.
In one word, what we want is equality. We want factual equality as the
corollary of liberty, indeed as its essential preliminary condition.
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To each according to his rights; to each according to his needs.
That is what we want; that is what our energies are devoted to. It is what
shall be, because no limitation can prevail against claims that are both
legitimate and necessary. That is why the government wishes to discredit
us.
Villains that we are, we claim bread for all, knowledge for all, work for
all, independence and justice for all.
That was the manifesto of the anarchists. I was in London when the
trial began, but I arrived in time to go to several of the last sessions and
to see the prosecutor, M. Fabreguettes. When I looked at his angular
profile, with his arm raised and the wide sleeve of his robe rolled up, and
heard his biting words, I thought of an engraving I had dreamed in
front of during my childhood, an engraving of the Grand Inquisitor,
Tomas de Torquemada.
I have only one account of the speeches I gave at Lyon during the
trial, and I no longer remember which newspaper it was taken from:
Telegraphed from Lyon, 19 January 1883
Yesterday evening in the Elysee meeting hall, Louise Michel gave a
lecture for the benefit of the families of the detained anarchists.
The meeting proclaimed Kropotkin and Bernard as honorary chair¬
men.
When Louise Michel started her speech, she stated that only force can
transform society, since force is being used to destroy it.
At Lyon, she said, anarchists are in the dock. In England they are
members of the House of Commons,
Louise Michel said she had brought back a resolution signed by the
French refugees in London protesting against the trial at Lyon and
declaring their solidarity with the accused and their theories. But because
she knew she was under police surveillance, she had destroyed the piece so
as not to compromise anyone.
Louise Michel developed at length her ideas on the situation of women
in present society.
The chairman put the order of the day—the taking up of arms to
defend oneself against the bourgeoisie—to a vote. It was adopted.
At this point a person named Besson requested that the journalists
present be expelled. Louise Michel protested, saying that liberty must be
equal for everyone.
Another speaker requested the assembly to pass a motion in favor of
acquitting the anarchists. The chairman answered that that matter was the
business of the court and not of the assembly. Such a resolution could not
be passed without the consent of the persons accused.
The meeting adjourned in the midst of cheering by those present.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
157
Of course, the court found Kropotkin and all the others guilty. The
idiocy of the charge was no defense, and Kropotkin and the main
defendants were sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.
With all this in my mind I returned to Paris at the end of January
1883.
Chapter 21
The Trial of 1883
Several weeks after the trial at Lyon, it seemed to me that I would have
been an accessory to cowardice if I did not use the liberty I was
allowed—I don’t know why—to call up a new and immense Interna¬
tional which would stretch from one end of the earth to the other.
On 9 March 1883 there was a mass demonstration at the Esplanade of les
Invalides, after which Louise Michel led a number of demonstrators across Paris.
For that, she was accused of rioting and looting. A massive police hunt for her in
Paris and throughout Europe ensued while she remained comfortably hidden at
the home of the editor of L’Intransigeant, M. Vaughan. On March 30 she
surrendered herself in a farce designed to make the police look as foolish as
possible.
I stayed in hiding for three weeks. While certain reporters claimed
they were chatting with me in a house where I wasn’t present, others saw
me at a pleasure party in the Bois de Boulogne, where I wasn’t either. I
was living with the families of my friends Vaughan and Meusy, from
where I made my way to my mother’s, dressed as a man. In those clothes
I would have been able either to stay hidden in Paris or take my mother
abroad. I would even have been able to continue to publicize the
Revolution. Wearing men’s clothing, I had often gone to meetings from
which women were excluded. Dressed in a National Guard’s or soldier’s
uniform during the Commune, I went many times to places where
people hardly expected to have to deal with a woman.
You, my friends, who gave me hospitality after the demonstration at
les Invalides as if I were a family member, when you read this, remem¬
ber that I was sorry to cause you so much trouble. Your true spirit was
revealed when you sheltered me from the searchers, but I had to face
trial. We must be implacable, especially concerning ourselves. Lies are
too shameful.
Louise and Augustine, remember that you agreed, and you told me
that I was right. I haven’t forgotten, and I know you will feel that same
way always. If your brothers will need courage for the things they’ll see,
you will need a hundred times more. Women must have dry eyes today
where men might cry.
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159
And you, you other little boys and girls, do you really believe I have
forgotten you? If Paul and Marius one day become what I believe they
will, they, too, will need courage. May the one who is a poet and the one
who is a musician go their way in sunlight.
And you, Marie and Marguerite, you, too, my little ones, you are
coming to that great moment when humanity is on the march, and you
must not weaken. It will be so much the worse for you, but the better for
humanity.
Let me get back to my trial. Several of our friends offered to defend
me, but each one of us must explain his own thought himself. Then, too,
it was impossible for me to choose between those who had already
defended our friends the way free men should be defended, and
Locamus, who had defended the deportees called before the colonial
courts at Noumea.
So many times we saw Locamus pass by us, going away to prison in
handcuffs, with his clients having been acquitted at the cost of his being
sentenced for insulting the judiciary. He prized those theatrics and
made the courts do it to him so that the whole process would look
ridiculous. As he was being taken away, Locamus used to laugh in a way
that made you laugh, too. He swaggered, just like Lisbonne in his
convict’s uniform. The only difference was that Locamus, standing
straight, used to shake his great curly head, and Lisbonne, striking out
with his crutch, raised his head under his mane. Both of them looked
like lions.
As the trial progressed, I was conscious of how bothersome it was to
speak to a court when you are only one of several persons accused. You
have to be very careful, because the prosecutors wait in ambush over
your sentences to get them to serve, when possible, as ammunition for
prosecuting the others. I hope I avoided that trap.
There were a number of young people disguised as lawyers—perhaps
they were newly created lawyers—who gathered together like a classical
chorus to stare at me and laugh or do other things like that. I hope that
the three or four who stopped shouting insults themselves have not
allowed themselves to be reenlisted in the band that insults the dead. I
hope that they won’t look at things through the wrong end of their
opera-glasses again, and that the names of Valles, Rigault, Vermorel, de
Milliere, Delescluze, and so many others who have been students just like
them will sometimes come to their minds.
At my trial I used to think of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly. The scepters of
fools were missing, but the sound of the little bells that dangle from
them tinkled in your ears. The obtuse jurors were bewildered by the
indictment, in which they had been told that if they did not convict me
their shops would not be safe. I was accused of the burlesque charge that
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I had laughed on their doorsteps. Youngsters came to insult me, but
some of them were pacified and left—perhaps captured by the Revolu¬
tion, which blows through the courts.
It is not me, messieurs, whom you condemned. You know very well
that I was not acting from motives of personal gain. It is my old mother
whom you condemned to death—and she is dead now.
Let me give myself justice here. The accusation that I laughed was
only a decoy. They did not want to accuse me of anything else because a
woman is killed more quickly by ridicule. Let’s get the facts straight.
What people prosecute me for is my ideas. That is why I quoted the
complete Manifesto of Lyon in the last chapter. I share all of the ideas
written there.
This is justice. Now that I have quoted that manifesto and confessed
that the ideas in it are the same as my beliefs, justice is done. I therefore
have no need to worry any more about commenting on the details of my
trial, although I will quote the transcript.
At my trial it was agreed that I laughed on a doorstep one day when
people were asking those inside for work. I did this, although my mother
had begged me to wait until she was dead before I took part in any more
demonstrations.
Here is the record of the trial taken from the Gazette des tribunaux.
Superior Court of the Seine District
M. Ram£, Presiding Judge
Session of 21 June 1883
Louise Michel, Jean-Joseph-Emile Pouget, and Eugene Mareuil are
charged:
1. With having been the leaders and instigators of looting committed
by a band in Paris in March 1883, the said looting having been commit¬
ted by force and the loot consisting of loaves of bread belonging to the
married couple Augereau, who are bakers;
2. With having been, at the said time and place, the leaders and
instigators of forceful looting committed by a band, the loot consisting of
loaves of bread belonging to the married couple Bouche, who are
bakers;
3. With the similar looting, the loot consisting of loaves of bread
belonging to the married couple Moricet, who are bakers.
The Questioning of Louise Michel
Question: Have you ever been prosecuted?
Louise Michel: Yes, in 1871.
Question : That can’t be mentioned any more. Those deeds were covered
by the amnesty. Have you been convicted since then?
Memoirs of Louise Michel
161
Michel: I was sentenced to two weeks in prison for the Blanqui
demonstration.
Question: Do you take part in every demonstration that occurs?
Michel: Unfortunately, yes. I am always on the side of the wretched.
Question: Because of that habit you went to the demonstration at the
Esplanade of les Invalides. What result did you hope for?
Michel: A peaceful demonstration never produces results, but I
thought the government would follow its usual policy and sweep the
crowd with cannon fire, so it would have been cowardly of me not to go.
Question: You recruited your followers for that demonstration. Did you
know Pouget?
Michel: I had met Pouget at some meetings.
Question: Pouget was your secretary. He was supposed to distribute
brochures propagating your ideas in the provinces. He acquired a name
as one of your followers.
Michel: They are not, properly speaking, followers. Some people are
curious about our ideas.
Question: You were the leader of a small demonstration that followed the
general demonstration, but let’s take care of your participation in the
general demonstration first. You went to les Invalides and you met
Pouget there?
Michel: Yes, monsieur.
Question: Had you planned with Pouget and Mareuil to go to the
Esplanade?
Michel: No, monsieur. We met by chance.
Question: Wasn’t the demonstration only for unemployed workers?
Michel: Yes, monsieur.
Question: Did you think that this demonstration could provide work?
Michel: I’ve already told you, no. I went there out of duty.
Question: The demonstration was dispersed. Isn’t it true that at that
moment you decided to make your own little demonstration?
Michel: It wasn’t a demonstration. I wanted to make people hear the
cry of the workers.
Question: You asked for a black flag?
Michel: Yes, and someone brought me a black rag.
Question: Who gave it to you?
Michel: A person I didn’t know.
Question: You don’t find a flag so easily and accidentally on the Espla¬
nade of les Invalides.
Michel: All you need to do is find a broomstick and a black rag.
Question: It was easy to find because the demonstration had been
prepared in advance. Who had prepared that flag?
Michel: No one. Even if somebody had, you know quite well that I
wouldn’t point him out.
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
Question: Didn’t you leave the Esplanade with the intention of making a
disturbance?
Michel: I simply put myself at the head of a group.
Question: Were Pouget and Mareuil part of it?
Michel: Yes, they were determined to protect me.
Question: What was your purpose in crossing Paris with a black flag? Did
you believe you could get bread for the workers that way?
Michel: No, but I wanted to make people see that the workers didn’t
have any and that they were hungry. The black flag is the flag of strikes
and the flag of famines.
The judge ordered the bailiff to go to the table of exhibits and pick up
a black flag, which Louise Michel identified as the one she carried on
March 9.
Question: You came to the boulevard Saint-Germain. Why did you stop in
front of Bouche’s bakery?
Michel: I kept on walking. The kids told me that someone was giving
them bread. I didn’t bother with the details.
Question: You claim that the bakers were voluntarily giving bread away?
Michel: Yes, monsieur. The kids told me they were being given bread
and some small change. I was very humbled by that.
Question: And the men who were armed with clubs. Was anyone giving
them bread voluntarily?
Michel: We didn’t have anyone with us armed with a club. They are not
among the accused.
Question: You can’t challenge the facts. The witness Bouch6 saw you
arriving at the head of a mob, and fifteen or twenty individuals moved
away from it to pillage his shop. They were chanting, “Bread and work
or lead.”
Michel: They weren’t with us. That was something the police staged.
Question: You said during one interrogation that you didn’t look on
taking bread as a crime.
Michel: Yes, I said that, but I have never taken any, and I never shall
take any, even if I were dying of hunger.
Question: When you were stopped on the place Maubert, did you say to
the police officer, “Don’t hurt me. We are only asking for bread”?
Michel: I didn’t say, “Don’t hurt me.” Perhaps I said, “We are only
asking for bread. You won’t be hurt.”
Question: In short, M. Bouchd’s bakery was completely looted.
Michel: I did not see the bakery, nor do I know M. Bouch6.
Question: The shop sticks out into the street and stares you in the face.
Michel: I was thinking only about poverty; I wasn’t thinking about
bakers’ shops.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
163
Question: You then arrived in front of M. Augereau’s shop?
Michel: I don’t know M. Augereau.
Question: Did you raise your flag in front of that shop?
Michel: I could have raised and lowered it many times.
Question: Did you say “Go”?
Michel: I could have said it. I must have said “Let’s go”: or “Let’s move”
many times. I don’t remember it.
Question: How many persons did you see around you?
Michel: I don’t know.
Question: To be brief, the shop of M. Augereau was completely wrecked.
Michel: I didn’t know that, and I am astonished that M. Augereau is
concerned with trifles like that. I have seen something else plundered
and killed.
Question: Then you are absolutely indifferent to the looting of his shop?
Michel: Yes, absolutely indifferent.
Question: Then you moved out into the boulevard Saint-Germain and
stopped in front of Moricet’s shop?
Michel: I don’t know, and I don’t understand why you’re asking me
such a question.
Question: Did you start to laugh in front of Moricet’s shop?
Michel: What could have made me laugh? Would it have been the
distress of the people around me? Would it have been the sad state of
things which takes us back before 1789?
Question: In short, you claim to be unacquainted with all those events I’ve
mentioned.
Michel: Yes, monsieur.
Question: But those three merchants who were robbed assert that the
crowd was obeying a signal.
Michel: That’s absurd. To obey a signal, it would have to be agreed
upon in advance. Therefore, it would have been necessary to make it
known throughout Paris that I would raise or lower a flag in front of the
bakeries.
Question: Then the looting was an instinctive movement of the populace?
Michel: It was the work of a few children. The reasonable people
around me did not bother with it.
Question: You left the demonstration at the Place Maubert, leaving
Pouget and Mareuil, who had gotten themselves arrested to save you, in
the hands of the police. Then you disappeared.
Michel: My friends demanded that I not let myself be arrested at that
time.
Question: Did you know about Pouget’s having distributed a brochure
entitled To the People’s Army in the provinces?
Michel: At the time when the Orleanists were openly inciting people
against the Republic, I wanted to incite people to support the Republic,
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
and that brochure was distributed at my suggestion. It was a cry of
anguish.
Question: Did you know about the special studies of incendiary materials
to which Pouget devoted himself?
Michel: Today, everybody is interested in science. Everybody reads the
Revue scientifique and tries to better the lot of the workers through the
information there.
Question: We aren’t here to make theories. Were you informed about the
studies Pouget was making?
Michel: I do not pay any attention to whether someone reads or does
not read scientific journals.
The court then proceeded to question M. Pouget. [The account of his
questioning is not included in the Gazette des tribunaux. The other
witnesses were examined next.]
The Witnesses
Jules Bouch£, baker, rue de Canettes: On March 9, around one o’clock
in the afternoon, a score of people invaded my bakery. They were
armed with leaded canes and demanded “bread or work.” I told them,
“If you want bread, take some, but don’t break anything.”
Question: Do you recognize the accused?
Bouch£: No, monsieur.
Question: Did you let them take your bread because you couldn’t do
otherwise?
Bouch£: There was no way to do anything; any resistance was impossi¬
ble.
Question: Was it children who came into your shop?
Bouch£: No, sir. They were of the age of reason. (Laughter)
Louise Michel: The persons armed with leaded canes weren’t ours. I
know where they came from.
Question: Where?
Michel: The police. (Laughter)
Mme Augereau, wife, baker, rue du Four-Saint-Germain: During the
afternoon of March 9 Mme Louise Michel stopped in front of my door.
Someone yelled, “Bread, bread!” These men entered my store and stole
some bread and baked goods. They broke a platter and two window
panes.
Question: Was it youngsters who plundered your shop?
Mme Augereau: Oh, there were more grown-ups than youngsters.
Question: Where was Louise Michel while they were plundering your
shop?
Mme Augereau: She was stationed exactly in the middle of the street.
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165
Question: Did you give your bread away voluntarily?
Mme Augereau: Oh, no, monsieur.
The Wife of Moricet, baker, 125, boulevard Saint Germain: Last
March 9, a crowd gathered in front of my shop. At its head was Louise
Michel. She stopped in front of my shop, struck the ground with her
flag, and started to laugh. The crowd was asking for bread or work. I
began to give them bread, but they didn’t wait for it. They took it
themselves and broke up everything.
Question (to Louise Michel): What do you think of that testimony? Is it
clear enough?
Louise Michel: So clear I have never seen anything like it. (Laughter)
How was I able to laugh in front of her store? She dreamed all of it.
Mme Moricet: I’m here to say what I saw.
Louise Michel: You are free to say what you want, but I’m free to say
that you dreamed it.
Question (to the witness): You didn’t give your bread to those people
freely?
Mme Moricet: No, monsieur, I did it because they were making such
frightful gestures when they came in; they were yelling, “Work and
bread!”
Louise Michel: Oh, they were very frightful. I, too, was frightful. These
women were hallucinating from fear. They saw Louise Michel as a
monster.
Cornat, a municipal police officer of the VI e Arrondissement: On last
March 9 when I learned that a gang was crossing the arrondissement
yelling out seditious slogans, I went in pursuit and caught up with it at
the Place Maubert. The gang was led by Louise Michel, with Pouget and
Mareuil at her side. I arrested the latter two, and Pouget called me a
coward and a scoundrel. As for Louise Michel, she was able to slip away.
All those people were yelling, “Long live the Revolution! Down with the
police!”
Question: Did not Louise Michel say something to you?
Policeman Cornat: She said to me: “Don’t hurt me.”
Blanc, a policeman in the VI e Arrondissement: Last March 9 a police¬
man came to inform the municipal police officer that a bakery on the rue
de Canettes was being plundered. We set off in pursuit of the gang, and
we caught up with it at the Place Maubert. The municipal police officer
stopped Louise Michel, who said to him, “Don’t hurt us; we’re only
asking for bread.” Pouget called the municipal police officer a coward
and a scoundrel. Mareuil yelled out, “Down with the police! Down with
Vidocq! Long live the Social Revolution!” The assailants had leaded
canes, revolvers, and knives.
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
Louise Michel: I never said, “Don’t hurt us,” but only, “You won’t be
hurt.” Both those men were very disturbed.
Question (to Louise Michel): No one but you was showing any self-con¬
trol?
Louise Michel: We have seen so much of it! For the sake of the honor
of the Revolution, I protest. I surely have the right to point out
discrepancies in the witnesses’ testimony. I have never prostrated myself
in front of anyone, and I have never asked for mercy. You can say
anything you want to about us, you can sentence us to prison, but I do
not want you to dishonor us.
Session of June 22
Witnesses for the Prosecution (Continued)
Young Mlle Moricet: Last March 9, I was in the shop with my sister
and mother when I saw a gang stop in front. They were led by a woman
armed with a black flag. That woman stopped in front of the shop,
struck the ground with her flag, and began to laugh.
Immediately the gang rushed into the shop, and took all the bread
and cakes there; then they broke the platters and windows. I went
quickly to get my father.
Question: You are very sure you saw Louise Michel stop in front of the
shop and laugh while she struck the ground with her flag?
Young Mlle Moricet: Yes, monsieur.
Louise Michel: I would be ashamed to respond to testimony like that. If
little Mile Moricet brings in her sister, her cousin, her little brother—
whomever she wants—I will not hold matters up to answer charges as
frivolous as those. I shall wait for the prosecution’s summation before I
answer them.
Young Mlle Moricet, the sister of the preceding one: I was in the shop
with my mother. Suddenly I saw a whole gang headed by a woman. It
was madame. She began to laugh as she looked at the shop, and I even
said to my mother, “Hey, she knows you?” At that moment all those
people rushed into the shop and started to take everything.
Louise Michel: I will repeat what I said a moment ago: It is shameful to
see children reciting in this court the lessons that their parents have
taught them.
[Witnesses for the Defense]
Chaussadat, a painter, quai de Louvre, was heard at the request of the
defense: On March 9, I was at the corner of the rue de Seine opposite
the Moricet bakery. From a distance I saw the crowd arrive. Mile Louise
Michel went by without stopping. Later I heard talk about the looting of
the bakery, or rather I saw bread thrown about.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
167
Question: You don’t call that plundering?
Chaussadat: I saw that bread was being thrown about, and some poor
people were gathering it up.
Louise Michel: I must thank the witness for rendering homage to the
truth.
[Three witnesses, Rochefort, Vaughan, and Meusy, testified concern¬
ing a sum of money in Pouget’s possession, declaring that it came from a
collection taken up at the demonstration. That testimony is irrelevant to
Louise Michel’s trial, and it has been omitted.]
Rouillon, a neighbor of Louise Michel’s mother: Citizen Louise Michel
had absolutely no faith in the result of the demonstration. She told me
that before she went to it. The citizen went only out of duty.
The witness Rouillon then went into lengthy details about the violence
and threats to which Louise Michel and her family have been subjected.
Louise Michel: You can see very clearly that our families are being
murdered in our homes, and the authorities are allowing it to happen.
That was the last witness for the defense. Then Avocat-g£neral
Quesnay de Beaurepaire was called on. Then Maitre Balandreau, the
counsel appointed for Louise Michel, declared that she intended to
defend herself.
Louise Michel’s Statement
What is being done to us here is a political proceeding. It isn’t we who
are being prosecuted, but the anarchist party through us. For that
reason I had to refuse Maitre Balandreau’s offer to defend me and also
the offer made by our friend Laguerre, who, not long ago, undertook to
defend our comrades at Lyon so warmly.
M. l’Avocat-g^neral has invoked the Law of 1871 against us. I won’t
bother to find out whether this Law of 1871 wasn’t made by the victors
against the vanquished, made against those whom they were crushing as
a millstone crushed grain. Eighteen seventy-one was the time when the
National Guard was being hunted on the plains, when Gallifet was
pursuing us in the catacombs, when the streets of Paris had heaps of
corpses piled on either side.
What is surprising you, what is appalling you, is that a woman is
daring to defend herself. People aren’t accustomed to seeing a woman
who dares to think. People would rather, as Proudhon put it, see a
woman as either a housewife or a courtesan.
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
We carried the black flag because the demonstration was to be abso¬
lutely peaceful, and the black flag is the flag of strikes and the flag of
those who are hungry. Could we have carried any other flag? The red
flag is nailed up in the cemeteries, and we should take it up only when we
can protect it. Well, we couldn’t do that. I have told you before and now
I repeat: It was an essentially peaceful demonstration.
I went to the demonstration. I had to go. Why was I arrested?
I’ve gone throughout Europe saying that I recognize no frontiers,
saying that all humanity has the right to the heritage of humanity. That
inheritance will not belong to us, because we are accustomed to living in
slavery; it will belong to those persons in the future who will have liberty
and who will know how to enjoy it.
When we are told that we are the enemies of the Republic, we have
only one answer: We founded it upon thirty-five thousand of our
corpses. That is how we defended the Republic.
You speak of discipline, of soldiers who fired on their officers. Do you
believe, M. l’Avocat-gen6ral, that if at Sedan the soldiers had fired at
their leaders, who were betraying them, they would not have been doing
the right thing? If they had done that, we wouldn’t have had the filth of
Sedan.
M. l’Avocat-general has talked a lot about soldiers. He has boasted
about those who carried the anarchist manifestos to their superiors. How
many officers, how many generals reported back the bribes of Chantilly
and the manifestos of M. Bonaparte? I’m not putting [the Due d’]
Orleans or M. Bonaparte on trial; we’re putting their ideas on trial. M.
Bonaparte has been acquitted, and we are being prosecuted. I pardon
those who commit the crime, although I do not pardon the crime. Isn’t it
simply a law of might makes right which is dominating us? We want to
replace it with the idea that right makes right. That is the extent of our
crime.
Above the courts, beyond the twenty years in prison you can sentence
us to—beyond even a life sentence—I see the dawn of liberty and
equality breaking.
Knowing what is going on around you, you too are tired of it,
disgusted by it. How can you remain calm when you see the proletariat
constantly suffering from hunger while others are gorging themselves?
We knew that the demonstration at les Invalides would come to
nothing, and yet it was necessary to go there. At this time in history we
are very badly off. We do not call the regime that rules us a republic. A
republic is a form of government which makes progress, where there is
justice, where there is bread for all. How does the republic you have
made differ from the Empire? What is this talk about liberty in the
courts when five years of prison waits at the end?
Memoirs of Louise Michel
169
I do not want the cry of the workers to be lost. You will do with me
what you wish, but it’s a question of more than me alone. It’s a matter
that concerns a large part of France, a large part of the world, for people
are becoming more and more anarchistic. People are sickened when
they see power used the way it was under M. Bonaparte. The people
have already led many revolutions. Sedan relieved us of M. Bonaparte
and the people revolted again on the eighteenth of March.
There is no doubt that you will see still more revolutions, and for that
we will march confidently toward the future.
When one person alone no longer has authority, there will be light,
truth, and justice. Authority vested in one person is a crime. What we
want is authority vested in everyone. M. l’Advocat-g6neral has accused
me of wanting to be a leader; I have too much pride for that, for to be a
leader is to lower oneself, and I do not know how to lower myself that
way.
Here we are very far from M. Moricet’s bakery, and it is difficult for
me to return to those details. Do we have to talk about the breadcrumbs
distributed to children? It wasn’t bread that we needed; it was work that
we were asking for. How can you think that reasonable men trifled by
taking a few loaves of bread? Some youngsters were gathering up
crumbs, yes, but it is difficult for me to discuss things that are so trivial. I
would prefer to return to serious ideas. Young persons should work
instead of going to cafes, and they will learn to fight to ease the plight of
the unfortunate and to prepare for the future.
People recognize homelands only to make them a foyer for war.
People recognize frontiers only to make them an object of intrigue. We
conceive homelands and family in a much broader sense. There are our
crimes.
We live in an age of anxiety. Everybody is trying to find his own way,
but we say anyhow that whatever happens, if liberty is realized and
equality achieved, we shall be happy.
The session adjourned at five o’clock and the proceedings were
continued the next day.
Session of June 23
The presiding judge asked the accused if they had anything to add in
their defense.
Louise Michel spoke as follows:
I wish to say only a word. This trial is a political trial. It is a political
trial you are going to have to judge.
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
As for me, you have given me the role of the primary person accused.
I accept it. Yes, I am the only person responsible. I sacrificed myself a
long time ago, and what is pleasant or unpleasant to me is no longer a
standard to judge by. I see nothing more than the Revolution, and it is
the ideal I shall always serve. It is the Revolution I salute. May it rise up
over men instead of rising up over ruins.
At two forty-five, the jury withdrew into a room for its deliberations. It
came back at four-fifteen.
The foreman of the jury read the verdict. It was ‘guilty,’ but mitigated
by extenuating circumstances as far as Louise Michel, Pouget, and
Moreau (alias Gareau) were concerned. The other accused were found
‘not guilty.’
After deliberating half an hour, the court passed a sentence by which
the two accused who had been tried in absentia, Gourget and Thierry,
were condemned to two years in prison. Louise Michel was sentenced to
six years of solitary confinement, Pouget to eight years of solitary
confinement, and Moreau (alias Gareau) to one year in prison.
Louise Michel and Pouget were also to be placed under police supervi¬
sion for ten years.
The Judge: Those of you found guilty have three days to petition for
reversal of the sentences just passed.
Louise Michel: Never! You are too good an imitator of the Empire’s
magistrates.
From the back of the room violent protests greeted the sentencing of
the accused. A few cries of “Long live Louise Michel!” were heard, and
the session was adjourned in the midst of noise and the most varied
outcries.
The tumult continued outside the courtroom and citizen Lisbonne,
who called attention to himself by the vehemence of his protests, was
expelled from the Palais de Justice. The crowd continued to stand for
some time on the Place Dauphine. [Here ends the account taken from
the Gazette des tribunaux .]
Note
Since I am speaking to the crowd today, I shall say what I did not think
was necessary to say in front of the prosecutor because we were not
trying to move our judges. It would have been a useless effort because
we were judged in advance.
I did not start laughing stupidly in front of some door—and having
just left my mother who was begging me to wait until she was no longer
alive before going to demonstrations, I did not feel much like laughing.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
171
As for choosing Moricet’s bakery to be the target of a revolutionary
movement, I do not need to defend myself against such an absurdity.
It is not a question of breadcrumbs. What is at stake is the harvest of
an entire world, a harvest necessary to the whole future human race, one
without exploiters and without exploited.
Chapter 22
Prison
There’s no party without a morning after. Two years ago on July 14, I
was taken to the Centrale Prison at Clermont. Women’s prisons are less
harsh than men’s. I did not suffer from cold or hunger or any of the
vexations our male friends underwent.
As far as I am concerned, my stay in prison was as easy as it would be
for any other schoolmistress. Solitude is restful, especially for a person
who has spent a great part of her life always needing an hour of silence
and never finding it, except at night. That is the case with a great
number of schoolmistresses.
In those silent hours of the night, she hurries to think, to feel alive, to
read, to write, to be just a little free. At the end of the day, at the last
lesson, she feels herself becoming an overworked beast of the fields, but
a beast that is still proud, still lifting its head to go to the end of the hour
without breaking down. When the hour is ended, silence surrounds her,
fatigue has disappeared, and she lives and thinks and is free. In prison, I
found those few hours of rest laboriously paid for over long years.
I’m going to write a book on prisons. I have a lot of pages for it
already, and all I have to do is gather them up. The first pages will be
dedicated to the poor gallant ambulance attendants of the Commune,
the women condemned to death who instead were sent to Cayenne,
where the climate is the murderer. They were convicted because they
had cared for the wounded of the Commune and, in passing, for
wounded men of the Versailles forces. Wounded men belonged to
neither side, and those brave women dressed the wounds of anyone they
found, whereas the leaders of the Versailles forces often opportunisti¬
cally abandoned their wounded soldiers so they could snipe at us better.
Victor Hugo got pardons for those unpretentious and gallant women,
Retif and Marchais. Following them were Su£tens, Papavoine, and
Lachaise, who had been condemned to forced labor for the same deeds.
After my first pages on the ambulance attendants, the chapters that
followed would belong to the friends met in prison. I would begin with
my own. At Satory the wives of my prisoner friends were not afraid to
embrace me, although I warned them that the authorities were going to
“treat me as I deserved.” By embracing me they risked their lives. At
Chantiers in the great morgue of the living, it was the same, under the
Memoirs of Louise Michel
173
rags hung at night along the walls. I must thank those brave souls for
their friendship.
Many, alas, are now dead. The first to die was Mme Dereure; already
ill, she could not survive the harsh ordeals to which she had to submit. In
the full view of conquered Paris, the colors of the Commune followed
her coffin. Without doubt, others are dead; we have not seen them
again.
How many prisons! Have I said that already? Yes, how many prisons.
From Bastion 37 to New Caledonia, stopping at Satory, Chantiers, la
Rochelle, Clermont, Saint-Lazare . . .
When my book on prisons appears, grass will have grown up over still
more unknown corpses, but the idea will remain the same. It will still be
on the same subject: that human beings suffering through destitution,
poverty, and ignorance are not responsible for acts against each other.
The old nations are the murderers, the old nations, where the struggle
for existence is so terrible that people turn on each other incessantly,
clamoring for their prey. The only noise that can be heard is the cries of
crows and the flapping of their wings above people who have been
beaten to the earth.
A trap is set all around us, and poor, wretched women get caught in it.
Is it the fault of those poor women that there is a place for some of them
only in the streets or on display? Is it their fault if they have stolen a few
sous to live on or to keep their children alive? Rich people can spend
millions of francs and thousands of living beings on their whims. I can’t
stop myself from speaking about those things with such bitterness.
Everything weighs so heavily on women. I’m well placed to judge that
here at Saint-Lazare prison, this general warehouse from which women
leave in all directions—even to liberty. Someone who stays here only a
few days cannot see things clearly, but after being here for a long time, a
person can sense how many generous hearts beat under the shame that
stifles them.
You know the lines from Hugo:
Lazarus, Lazarus, Lazarus
Rise up.
Yes, like Lazarus, rise up, you poor women. You have fought so long
and you are crying over your shame, and it isn’t you who are guilty. Was
it you who gave the fat, scrofulous, swollen bourgeois their hunger for
fresh flesh? Was it you who gave pretty girls, who owned nothing, the
idea of making themselves into merchandise?
And the others, the female thieves, how guilty are they? When women
are thrown into the street, it is certain that they will go wherever the man
they call their pimp sends them, because he beats them and exploits
them. They will also go into the streets alone. People keep walking when
174
Memoirs of Louise Michel
they are lost. There are also seamstresses who steal. They have kept little
remnants of the cloth they were stitching. Do the great dress designers
carry those remnants home? Other women deceive their husbands.
Haven’t their husbands ever deceived them? If only we let people choose
each other instead of making marriages by matching up fortunes, that
would happen less often.
Still other people, old women most often, when they are dying of
hunger and want to live a little longer, insult a policeman to get some
bread in prison. I saw one old woman who had eaten nothing for such a
long time that after she had a little soup she sank down as if she were
drunk. A few days later she died. Her stomach could no longer accustom
itself to receiving nourishment.
When I was in my cell at Clermont, I was unable to see anybody, but I
heard some scraps of conversations. From a cell you can understand
everything best. Every cell looks out on some kind of courtyard and
voices rise up to it. All you have to do is follow a few of the parts of this
horrible choir of misery. Here are some fragments. I am choosing ones
that tell the sadness at the bottom of misery. Listen to them.
“You’re getting out tomorrow. You’re lucky.”
“Hell, no. It’s too cold and hungry outside.”
“But your mother has a nice place.”
“She was thrown out because I was in prison.”
“Where is she?”
“In the street.”
“Where are you going to go?”
“Big Chiffe made me ask to go back to tricking on the streets. I’ll give
my mother however much the prison sends me out with, and I’ll go back
to Big Chiffe.”
“You’ll be back here again, I bet.”
“What could I do so I wouldn’t be? There’s no work for girls who have
worn-out work permits. People with prison numbers can’t get one.”
Here are some others.
“Where are you from?”
“From Saint-Lazare, naturally, because I’m from Paris.”
“What did you do?”
“How should I know? My pimp stole somebody’s stash, and it looked
like I was his partner.”
“You didn’t know anything about it?”
“Do you think he tells me where he’s going to work his fingers to the
bone?”
“Maybe he gives you something.”
Memoirs of Louise Michel
175
“Him? Give to me? He takes my stuff. He has to get fifteen francs a
day off me.”
“What does he do with it?”
“Lady, he isn’t rich. He’s got to pay off a buddy who knows what he
does. If he doesn’t pay him off, his buddy will split on him to the cops.”
“What do you do to make him his fifteen francs?”
“I did the window bit. That’s better than tricking on the streets. You’ve
got to live. When I went looking for real work, I got sent away from the
stores because I wasn’t dressed well enough. One time somebody lent me
a dress, and then it was the other side: I was too well dressed. Then this
john picked me up, and that was that. I had to get a card, and on top of
that, a pimp.”
“Where’d you do the window?”
“At Relingue’s place—you know her, the one that gets herself arrested
so she can recruit for her crib in the prison.”
“That Relingue woman! If you ask me, I’ll take this crib over hers. She
makes too many francs out of our poor carcasses.”
“So where else would I go? Prison grain takes root only on sidewalks.”
And here are some others.
“Hey, you look sad, snub-nose.”
“That’s because I’m just going out to meet up with my bad luck.”
“What’s your bad luck?”
“He’s the father of my children.”
“Are you married?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you leave him?”
“Because he’s the father of my children. The poor dog got upset about
the first ones, but men stand pain less easily than women. When ill winds
blow, they have to lie down.”
And after women prisoners are released, there isn’t any place for
them to seek refuge. There are some asylums for women who get out of
prison, but they don’t have room for everybody. It’s only holding out a
cup to catch a waterfall.
If the women in prisons horrify you, it is society that disgusts me. Let’s
take away the sewer first. When the place is clean with the sunlight
shining on it, then nobody will have to roll around in the sewer any
more. You young girls with sweet, pure voices, here are some girls your
own age with rough, broken voices. Your voices are clear because you do
not live the way they do, drinking to divert your mind, drinking to forget
that you’re alive.
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Saint-Lazare. Listen, you young girls who have never left your moth¬
ers, there are some children here like you, children sixteen years old.
But the ones here either don’t have mothers, or their mothers didn’t
have the spare time to watch over them. The poor cannot watch over
their little ones; they cannot even take the time to watch over their dead.
The young girls in Saint-Lazare are pale and blighted. Idiots claim it
has to be that way to protect you nice girls from men hungering for fresh
flesh. If they weren’t able to glut themselves on the daughters of the
people, they would attack you. We no longer eat each other’s flesh the
way our cave-dwelling ancestors did—we aren’t strong enough—but we
eat each other’s lives.
That is equality and justice.
Let’s glance at one of the most terrible human misfortunes. I want the
reader to revolt against the crimes of society instead of only having him
lament the woes of one person.
Bordello-keepers trade women with each other, just as farmers trade
horses or cattle. Women are just herds of livestock, and this human
livestock makes more profit.
When the johns of some city in the provinces decide that some weak
woman is too worn out or they get tired of her, the bordello-keeper
arranges it so the girl owes the house a sum she can never pay off. That
makes her a slave. Then she can be swapped in any horse-trade possible.
The animal has to go into whatever stable will make the most profit for
the swappers.
For other girls it is an enlistment. They come from their provinces too
naive to know any better, or if they are Parisians and aware that there
are ogres for fresh flesh and appetites to feed, poverty makes them
tractable. Then, too, there is false finery to lure them; when they are
once in the lion’s den, they will be charged six times its worth to get them
in debt.
There is also recruiting. Despicable old women find ways to get
themselves imprisoned for a few months, and then they recruit and
entice all the pretty girls who are stranded in prison. They tell the girls
they don’t have to fear being hungry. When they leave there will be a
drinking spree—enough of a spree for the girls to die from it. Their
voices will get hoarse, and their bodies will fall to pieces. It’ll be a
spree—a spree for the hungry bourgeois.
The women on the street are still the least unhappy; those in closed
houses have a life so horrible that it would surprise people who no
longer feel surprise. What I know about it I will write sometime, because
it is so terrible, so shameful, that people must learn about it.
But for the moment I’ll stay with the pathetic stories of the street¬
walkers. Won’t anyone ever understand that to allow prostitution is to
support every crime? Once a woman becomes a prostitute, she becomes
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177
numb while she obtains money from idiots; and men thereby become
murderers. Everybody should know that, so why does prostitution
continue to exist?
If the great merchants of the trade in women who crisscross Europe
canvassing orders for their business were each hanging on the end of a
hangman’s rope, I wouldn’t go cut it.
And when a poor girl who believes she has entered an honest house
(there are some) realizes where she is and finds it impossible to leave,
and then with her own hands she strangles one of the despicable persons
who keeps her there, or she sets the cursed place on fire, I believe it is
better to do those things than to wait for court action. So long as
circumstances are as they are, there will be no change.
Will the owls who bite the paws off mice to keep them in their nests
ever stop acting so cruelly? If the captive mouse, instead of uttering his
little plaintive cry from the owl’s nest between earth and heaven, which
are equally deaf, tried to gnaw the throat of the owl that was eating him,
the first mouse to do so would certainly die. But eventually the owl
would become fearful, and as every being wishes to continue living, the
owl would end up keeping itself alive on grain rather than risking death.
That’s the way the poor human livestock must proceed. A woman
should not waste her time demanding illusory rights. The people who
promise them to her have no such rights themselves. She ought to take
her place at the head of the group which is struggling and at the same
time free herself from prostitution. No other person can free her from
it. When she no longer wants to be the prey of appetites and lusts, she
will know that death is preferable to that life, and she will not be so
stupid as to die uselessly.
Here is what I am hearing while I am writing this. It is the story of a
sale.
“There was a fellow who made me sell it on the boul’ de Batignolles.
He wanted to give me only twenty sous, but I was hungry, and then I had
a pimp who had a deal with the cops. I had to pay him or he would have
beaten me up, and I sure didn’t want that.”
“What did you do with the forty sous from the old goat who was so
drunk?”
“I gave twenty to my pimp and twenty to a poor little kid.”
“Why didn’t you try to get away when the cops grabbed you?”
“Because, I told you, I had nothing to drink. Might as well be in
prison. Shit, might as well be dead.”
Yes, those poor girls speaking from the bottom of the pit are right. It
would be better to die than to continue a life where you have to drink so
as not to feel being alive.
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I don’t want to believe that a man has to feed himself by gorging
himself with all sorts of orgies. Even if he does, however, a woman,
whoever she is, must not be dirtied by these indecent brutalities.
But let’s look forward, because in the midst of these tortures, the new
humanity will be born. Ferr£ at the execution post at Satory, the nihilists
from the czar’s gallows, the German socialists with their heads under the
axe salute that newborn humanity as I salute it while I look at life, which
now is more horrible than death.
Chapter 23
My Mother's Death
For a while during my deportation my mother lived with a relative she
had always been very fond of, at a little woolens shop opposite the
Louvre stores in Paris. After a time she went to live with other relatives
in Lagny, and she was living there when I returned from New Cale¬
donia. Four months after my return she moved back to Paris where we
lived at 24 [sic: 36], rue Polonceau, and at that place we had fleeting
moments of joy. With my mother and Marie near me, I was almost
afraid, because happiness is such a fragile branch, and we break it when
we rest on it. Two old women, friends of my mother, came to see her
every day, and they gave her those little attentions old people love so
much; my dear Marie stayed with her while I was away at meetings.
My mother’s last home was at 45, boulevard Ornano on the fifth floor.
There she underwent the long torture of two years without me before
her death. In the middle room her bed was placed parallel to the hall,
and above the chest of drawers hung a large portrait of me that Mme
Jacqueline had painted. How many times my poor mother must have
had her eyes on it during those two years! In her last moments when it
was difficult for her to speak, it seemed to me that she wanted me to give
that painting to Rochefort, and he has kept it for me ever since.
On sunny days, so long as we could make her believe that I would be in
prison for only one year, she stayed at her window for hours at a time. It
was there where she had waited for me so often, Mme Bias waiting with
her, when I was expected home from my last lecture tours. Each time a
group of prisoners was released my mother would rally because of the
hope I would be among them. Finally it was necessary to admit that
instead of my being sentenced to only one year, I had been sentenced to
six years, and instead of being near her at Saint-Lazare, I was at
Clermont. Personal hatreds unleashed by unscrupulous persons had
contributed to my being sentenced to six years in prison, and from
Bastille Day of 1884 on, when my mother had to be told the truth, she no
longer went to the window. From the moment she learned that news, she
got up from her easy chair only to lie down on her bed, and from her
bed she went only to her coffin.
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I could have fled abroad and taken her with me instead of submitting
to trial, but I allowed myself to be put on trial because that is our custom.
I could also have baffled the people who questioned me. They were
trying to find out if I was responsible, and I could have made fun of their
heavy-handed tricks, but we revolutionaries do not avoid responsibility.
I answered the worthy investigators as if I suspected nothing, though I
knew very well where their vengeance came from.
In prison I was well treated. Anybody who believes that simply being
well nourished is enough to make a person happy would have believed
me far happier than I was. Even if I had been poorly treated, I would
have felt nothing but my mother’s affliction.
From prison I wrote several letters to the authorities, some at the
moment when cholera was rife in Paris, and then I had a twofold right:
to be near my mother and to be in the city that I had never deserted in its
days of trial. I wrote other letters when my mother was in her last days,
and I asked to be taken to her. These letters should be in a Book of
Memorial, for they contain two death agonies—my mother’s and my
own.
Here is one letter:
Prison of Clermont (Oise)
Number 1327
Sunday, 15 November 1884
(Personal)
Monsieur le president de la Republique
Here is the truth. If no man’s heart understands it, may it stand alone as
my witness.
For eighteen months I haven’t read one line from a newspaper. But
across the prison wall which separates us from the world a scrap of a
sentence has reached me. Cholera is in Paris. It has been going on for a
long time, and all the denials in the world won’t convince me otherwise.
Not one person has called to mind that in those circumstances my place
is in Paris, even if it be in an underground cell. It is to you, therefore, that I
say: If I am treated like a criminal of the State, remember that I came
forward openly to place myself in the hands of my judges. May they act
similarly towards me.
Louise Michel
A week later I wrote:
Prison of Clermont (Oise)
Number 1327
21 November 1884
Monsieur le ministre de l’lnterieur
I have only my mother left in this world. My crudest enemies would ask
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181
for my immediate transfer to a prison in Paris if I could speak out, because
under the present circumstances either her illness or cholera could take
my mother from me.
I am not asking for visits or letters in the prison you might put me in. If
you want, I won’t be eligible for release. But I shall be in Paris breathing
the same air that my mother breathes, and my mother will know that I am
there. She can experience that happiness while she is alive and not after
she is dead.
Sincerely,
Louise Michel
Here are some fragments of letters I wrote asking to be brought near
my mother:
I shall be absolutely straightforward. In exchange for a release or transfer
to another prison, just so it be in Paris near my mother, I will go to New
Caledonia when she is no longer with us. I have already been useful there,
and I can be so again by founding schools in the midst of the tribes.
The beginning of that letter is missing, but undoubtedly it also was
sent to the Minister of the Interior. Still another fragment contains these
words:
I have not had an answer to my letters and shall probably never have
one. But considering the times we live in, who knows whether one of your
grandsons caught in the same situation won’t be sorry you didn’t answer
me.
It is not a political question. It is a question concerning mothers, and
unfortunately, I shall not be the last prisoner.
Louise Michel
I do not believe that this sorrow inflicted on my poor old mother
increased anyone’s happiness very much, but no one can do anything
about it any longer. You cannot awaken the dead.
For a long time I had no response to the letters I had written to all
those officials. Finally, I was transferred to Saint-Lazare. If the author¬
ities had only brought me near my mother sooner! Her powerful
constitution immediately rallied at each of my visits, and she would not
be dead.
Even at this point my anonymous enemies threatened to trouble her
last days by claiming that her paralysis was some contagious disease.
Although the public is always credulous in times of cholera, my enemies
failed. Those vipers are consoling themselves now by writing false letters
over my name. I envy the happiness of people who bother with this sort
of thing. I no longer feel them. All the venom in the world could fall on
my head without my noticing it, and those letters are only a few drops of
water where a whole ocean has passed.
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The authorities acted very well at the last, and allowed me to go to my
dying mother’s bedside. As always, the rulers were less evil than their
laws, and they allowed me several days near her. Policemen, instead of
tormenting me, helped me move my mother smoothly from one bed to
another each time she wanted. Those policemen were not like the ones
who take care of politicians, and they weren’t among the ones who
savagely beat down the people on May 24 this year at the P£re Lachaise
cemetery. My mother thanked the policemen who helped me to move
her, and I remember it, too.
At 4:57 in the morning of 3 January 1885 my mother died. When I
came down the stairs at 45, boulevard Ornano on the morning of her
burial, I left her lying in her coffin, which had not yet been nailed shut,
and I thought of all her sorrow during the past two years. In my heart I
felt everything she had suffered. Poor mother! How happy she would
have been to spend a few days with me.
I must say that the authorities acted well here, for I had been able to
stay with her until the end. Then, before I left her house forever, I was
able to lay her out on her bed as she used to like to lie down. She no
longer suffered. Let justice be done to everyone in the world, even the
least important person.
Because my mother was no longer suffering, I didn’t ask the author¬
ities for permission to attend the funeral; with her death I had nothing
more to ask for. Her funeral on 5 January 1885 became the occasion for
a massive outpouring of public sentiment. Here is how it was reported:
At the Home of the Deceased
The working-class districts of the city emptied their dark alleys as they
had done during the great days of the popular awakening. From every
direction came the great mass of the people, the true people, from their
dank dens and from their workshops.
In front of 45, boulevard Ornano in the XVIII e Arrondissement the
crowd was such that no traffic could move.
The coffin was placed on the hearse at 11:00 a.m. precisely—too pre¬
cisely, because thousands of people arrived in the half hour that followed
the departure of the hearse.
Louise Michel, before her return to Saint-Lazare prison, had placed a
few mementos near the body of her mother: a red-framed photograph of
herself leaning on a rock; a lock of her hair tied with a black ribbon; a
bouquet of red immortelles which she had brought back from the burial of
her friend, Marie Ferre; a portrait of Marie; and finally, some of the
flowers which had been brought to her sick mother during her last days.
Citizen Clemenceau had come to offer his condolences to the family and
to apologize for not being able to be in the funeral procession.
Numerous wreaths had been placed on the coffin and at the rear of the
hearse. Many bouquets of real flowers were mingled with the wreaths.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
183
There was one wreath inscribed: “To the mother of Louise Michel from
L’Intransigeant staff’; one from the Libre-Pensee; one from the Bataille; and
many others. Louise Michel placed a wreath made of black beads; it bore
only the words, “To my mother.”
The funeral procession began. Immediately after the hearse came an
old man with white hair. He was M. Michel, the nearest relative of the
deceased, and he was accompanied by his two daughters, the cousins of the
imprisoned Louise.
Behind them Citizen Henri Rochefort walked with his eldest son,
Vaughn, and the entire staff of L’Intransigeant.
Then came Citizen Louise Michel’s comrades in the struggle, those who
followed her in becoming enemies of the state and who were continuing
the revolutionary fight in the press or in the courts. Notable among them
were: Alphonse Humbert; Joffrin; Eudes; Vaillant; Granger; Lissagaray;
Champy; Henri Maret; Lucipia; Odysse Barot; S. Pichon, who is a munici¬
pal counsellor of Paris; Antonio de la Calle, a former member of the
revolutionary government of Cartagena; Moi'se, a councilman in his arron-
dissement; Frederic Cournet; Victor Simond and Titard of the Radical;
and still more—many former deportees from the Ducos Peninsula and
convicts from Nou Island.
We must note also the presence of Citizen Deneuvillers, a former exile
of 1871 and now L’Intransigeant correspondent at Brussels; Citizen Th£-
leni, the representative of the Radical des Alpes; Bariol, the delegate from
the Club of the Rights of Man in Vaucluse; P. Arnal, the delegate from the
Fraternal Association of Republicans of the Basses-Alpes, Vaucluse, and
Var; and many delegates representing groups in the provinces and Paris,
but we regret we are not able to give all their names.
Mingled with this funeral procession of persons who had fought in 1871
and persons who had been tested at other times were fervent young people
from recently founded revolutionary groups. Among them were a hun¬
dred anarchists. As soon as the funeral procession began to move, these
young people unfurled three red flags, one of which bore the inscription:
“The Revolutionary Sentinel of the XVIIP Arrondissement.”
Behind, filling the entire width of the street, came an immense crowd
bringing the tribute of its respect and gratitude to Louise Michel in these
sorrowful circumstances.
On the Way
Not since the burial of Blanqui has such an imposing spectacle of a
popular demonstration occurred—nothing so grand and majestic as yes¬
terday.
The funeral procession headed towards the cemetery of Levallois-Perret
by way of the boulevards of Ornano, Ney, Bessieres, Berthier, and the
Porte de Courcelles. The slope of the ramparts on the right of the
procession was occupied by numerous spectators who rose in tiers up the
incline. On the other side, the walls, roofs, and windows were also filled
with the curious.
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From every street opening on the main road, a new crowd of workers
and the poor either lined up respectfully for the passing of the cortege or
joined it, making the procession even larger.
The police remained hidden, and thus calm continued to reign and no
clashes occurred. Order was kept by only two constables under the
direction of a corporal, but the authorities had taken extraordinary
measures to throw a hidden army against the demonstrators if the need
arose. The Garde republicaine was to the left of the marchers on the rue
Ordone, and policemen had been put inside all the police stations along
the route. In the courtyard of the La Pepiniere Barracks in the Place
Saint-Augustine near the Etoile a battalion of infantry was drawn up with
their packs ready to march.
When the funeral procession reached the Porte Ornano, it was esti¬
mated at over twelve thousand persons. From time to time the cry of
“Long live the Commune!” or “Long live the Social Revolution!” came
from the midst of that immense crowd.
As the cortege crossed the bridge over the Western Line Railroad, two
despatch riders appeared. Because the going and coming of official
messengers is never a good omen, shouts of “Long live the Revolution!”
multiplied. The two riders hurried to withdraw as soon as their task was
done.
At the boulevard Berthier, in front of Bastion 49, a couple of dozen
policemen were drawn up. They were under the command of Florentin,
the municipal police chief of the XVIII e Arrondissement, who had just
been given a medal for having protected the police spy and agitator,
Pottery. This Florentin was doubtless looking forward to working wonders
here and winning new stripes and new medals.
The moment the hearse passed in front of the police station, Florentin,
followed by his men, blocked the boulevard and ordered the red flag to be
taken down.
Resounding cries of “Long live the Revolution!” and “Long live the
Commune!” answered him. The demonstrators, keeping a close watch on
their flags, seemed ready to defy this savior of informers. At this tense
moment Citizen Rochefort moved towards the police officer and said to
him: “Your attitude is the real provocation. Up to now, everything has
happened in the most perfect order, and your intervention is completely
improper.”
Visibly intimidated, Florentin answered, “M. Caubet sent me the express
order to stop the parading of the red flag.”
“Those red flags you are speaking of,” Rochefort said, “are the banners
of societies which have the perfect right to choose whatever color suits
them. There were also red banners following Gambetta’s coffin, and no
one dared to oppose their being unfurled.”
These words and the forceful attitude of the citizens present made
Florentin pause. He relented and went with his two dozen men to the head
of the funeral procession in front of the hearse.
But when the police are not ferocious, they are treacherous. They
planned their actions, and at the Porte d’Asnieres, as soon as the hearse
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185
crossed the iron bars in front of the tollbooth, they tried to close the gates
quickly. The police intended to cut the hearse off from the funeral
procession and thus prevent the exhibition of red flags, which they had
their hearts set on doing.
They failed to count on the determination of the revolutionaries. The
gates gave way before the pressure of the crowd. A few carriages returning
to Paris while this was happening owed their not being inspected at the
tollbooth to these events.
One last incident occurred while the funeral procession was going along
beside the tracks of the Inner Circle Railroad. A train passed by with all the
passengers at the side doors. Recognizing the funeral procession of Louise
Michel’s mother, a great number of them began to wave their hats and
hankerchiefs.
So the funeral procession arrived at Levallois-Perret, just outside the city
walls.
At the Cemetery
The little city of Levallois-Perret was in a state of great excitement; so
many people had not been seen for a long time. Many carriages were
parked at the approaches to the cemetery, and all the residents of Leval¬
lois-Perret were standing, forming a hedge along the road where the
funeral cortege was to pass.
The little cemetery had been tidied up. The gates were wide open, and
the more eager citizens had already taken their places around the spot
chosen for the burial.
It was Ferry’s tomb, Th£ophile Ferr£, whom the Versailles forces had
murdered at Satory. He is buried there with his sister Marie Ferr6, who
was the close friend and devoted companion of Louise Michel. The
memorial statue is modest. The plot is surrounded by an iron fence, and
the graves are covered by a large flat stone. A marker bears the name of
the martyr and his sister.
The bell at the cemetery rang to announce the arrival of the funeral
procession. In a second, the crowd had invaded the field of the dead. It
was only with great difficulty that the pallbearers brought the body to the
tomb, and the only way the wreaths could be gotten from the hearse to the
coffin was to pass them from hand to hand.
The red flags were unfurled, and the tombs disappeared under a living
tide that rose over them from the ground up to the top of the memorial
statues. The spectacle was one of grandeur and majesty.
The Speeches
After a moment of silence and contemplation, the first speaker was our
contributor, Ernest Roche. Here is a summary of his speech, which was
interrupted frequently with cheers and applause from the crowd.
“Who are we, standing here around the coffin of this simple and good
woman who never dreamed of being famous?
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Memoirs of Louise Michel
“Why is there such a mixture here of so many different sorts of
republicans and socialists?
“What feeling moves all of us?
“What attraction draws us here?
“What unity of spirit inspires in each of us the same respect and gives
each of us the same feeling of indignation in front of this dead woman?
“Let me tell you.
“There is one flag sacred to all of us, the flag that people fly only at
certain solemn times, the flag that inflames us more than any gorgeous
fabric. It is the flag of our martyrs, the flag of our heroes.
“The corpse of Lucrecia overturned the Tarquins and founded the
Roman Republic. The bodies of unknown men who were struck down on
23 February 1848 by Louis Philippe’s soldiers brought on the collapse of
his throne. The corpse of Victor Noir in the spring of 1870 caused the
weakening of Louis Napoleon’s Empire and precipitated its fall.
“The body of Louise Michel’s poor mother is our common bond, for in
each of our spirits it causes the same feeling of horror against the criminals
who have murdered her.
“Don’t take shelter behind the age of your victim, you hypocrites. Her
age doesn’t mitigate the odiousness of your terrible crime.
“Certainly, we know very well it wasn’t she you meant to reach, any more
than the Empire had any particular hatred for Victor Noir. What differ¬
ence does it make to us whether your ferocity strikes down a simple
person, or an unknown one, or a famous one from our ranks? The
martyrdom with which you crown the person is enough to ignite our anger
and is enough to explain it.
“Those two poor women, Louise Michel and her mother! Those who
have known them know how indispensible they were to each other. The
mother survived on the atmosphere of filial love with which her daughter
surrounded her. By taking away her daughter, you killed her, and her
death, perhaps, will drag along a second victim.
“After her, it will be Peter Kropotkin’s turn; he is dying in prison. Then
will come others, more obscure, but no less unfortunate.
“And you don’t want us to get hold of these corpses, nor for us to rally
around them with the idea of legitimate defense against those thieves who
are stealing billions of francs and ruining our country until they can
auction it off.
“We have come here to sign a compact for danger, vengeance, and
justice. We have come to sign it in front of the tomb of Ferre, who was
assassinated by the bullets of Versailles, and in front of the coffin of this
woman poisoned by sorrow.
“I have one last thing to say: On behalf of our friends and colleagues at
L’Intransigeant in whose name I am speaking, on behalf of those who
fought beside our valiant citizen, Louise, on behalf of those who shared
her agonies at being exiled and her joys upon returning—on behalf of all
these, I must say how much we are moved by the sorrow that afflicts our
friend Louise Michel and how much we would like to lighten its weight, if
friendship and esteem can be any compensation for such a loss.”
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187
Citizen Chabert expressed his feelings in these words:
“Here there is unanimity among the socialists as there will be on the day
of battle, when everyone marches to the battlefield arm in arm.
“All of us agree on the goal we seek; we differ only on our choice of
means. Already we can see the day dawning when we shall claim our
rights, because the bourgeois opportunists are no longer satisfied with
killing only men; now they kill women.
“Let us unite and declare first of all that if we become the masters we will
no longer want any form of government at all. It is necessary for the
people themselves finally to be the masters. Our elected officials who try to
deceive us and set themselves up as governments, we will punish with
death.
“The battle drawing us in foreshadows our victory because the situation
is such that everyone will be involved. The opportunists are letting
themselves slip into inactivity; they are counting on parliamentarism, but
we are battering at parliamentarism, and we are on the verge of breaking
down its door.”
Citizen Digeon spoke next:
“In the name of the anarchist groups, we have come to glorify the
heroine of the demonstration at les Invalides two years ago.
“In front of this tomb, let us bring about the alliance of all revolution¬
aries. I am willing to bring all revolutionaries into one alliance on the
foundation of absolute liberty and without any hidden motives.
“I do not wish to end without expressing all the hate I have built up for
the pleasure-seekers who are oppressing us. We are the disinherited of the
social order, which is why we are rushing to see justice come.”
Then Citizen Champy came to give homage to Louise Michel, and he
associated himself with her sorrow.
“The revolution for which she was the apostle must give the people
equality, well-being, and the inviolable rights they have earned through
their work.”
Citizens Tortelier and Oddin spoke, and then the crowd broke up and
streamed out of the cemetery with the utmost calm. It is easy to explain
why they were orderly: no policemen were present.
That is how the newspapers reported the burial of my poor mother.
Thank you, friends, all of you who were there. I shall always picture you
that way around my poor dead mother, united and with no distinctions
between factions, united in a common sorrow and with a common hope.
Your hope is that after our generation, no one will suffer the way a
mother suffered when she was separated from her daughter for two
years of agony.
I want to say a few words about my mother’s life. People who knew her
know how simple and good she was and know that she was intelligent
and even had a certain gaiety in her conversation.
My grandmother used to speak to me about all the troubles my
mother endured so courageously. I saw for myself her inexhaustible
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devotion and the horrible sorrows that she bore from 1870 to 1885. I
knew very well that I loved her, but I did not realize the immense scope
of this affection. Death made me feel it when it ended her existence.
Because her mother, Marguerite Michel, was a widow with six chil¬
dren, my mother was reared in the chateau at Vroncourt. She often told
me about her fearful life as a little girl after she was transported from
her nest. But how she loved those two persons who reared her with their
own son and daughter! Perhaps some time in the future I will be able to
relate her laborious and unassuming life.
She helped to keep those kind persons who reared her from knowing
that easy circumstances no longer existed in the house, and she softened
the sadness of death which struck freely around them.
I am what people call a bastard. But the two people who gave me the
poor gift of life were free. They loved each other, and none of the
wretched tales told of my birth is true, nor can they reach my mother
now. Never have I seen a more decent woman.
And never have I seen more modesty and refinement, nor have I ever
seen more courage. She never complained, although her life was one of
sorrow.
Two days before her death she told me, “I have been very unhappy
not to see you any more and to cost my friends so much.” That was the
only time that she spoke to me in such a sad way. Her voice had a small
wail in it and was no more than a breath.
Our friends realized how witty my mother was and how well she
chatted in her simple way. Only I know, in spite of the pains she took to
hide it, how good she was. She liked to appear brusque, and she laughed
about it like a child.
In the last letter to me that my mother dictated, 27 November 1884,
she told me:
My dear daughter,
Don’t be troubled; I’m not getting any worse. What hurts me is that you
are always worrying.
I’m sending you some silk thread for your needlework. Make your
crewel-work. Make me the views of the sea I talked to you about.
Your most recent needlework was not as good as the others. I see that
you are sad and you’re wrong to be.
Don’t make any sweaters for me. I have enough. I need nothing any
more. Too much has already been spent on me.
Above all else, don’t torment yourself. I embrace you with all my heart.
She was lying when she said she wasn’t any worse. She was already in
bed, and she would never get up again. As for the crewel-work, the one
of the sea she spoke about is not done yet. The “most recent” one which
was “not as good as the others” was that way because I sensed that she
Memoirs of Louise Michel
189
was dying. It portrayed a great oak struck to its heart with an axe, and
the axe was left in the wound from whence the sap flowed. It is a sad
souvenir. I have kept the needles my mother sent me. I use them no
longer, but one day I shall obey her and on my mother’s behalf make
those views of the sea.
Chapter 24
Final Thoughts
I come to the end. Now that the black bird of the fallow field has sung
for me, I want to explain what it means when a person no longer has
anything to fear, when a person no longer has anything to suffer from.
From the other side of sorrow, I can watch events coldly, feeling nothing
more than the indifference a trash man feels as he turns over rags and
tatters with his spiked stick.
People wonder how all these things could have happened during the
fifteen years which have just passed. When we are crushed, it only
removes the last obstacle to our being useful in the revolutionary
struggle. When we are beaten down, we become free. When we are no
longer suffering because of what happens to us, we are invincible.
I have reached that point, and it is better for the cause. What does it
matter now to my heart, which has already been torn bleeding from my
chest, if pen nibs dig into it like the beaks of crows? With my mother
dead, no one remains to suffer calumnies. If I had been able to spend
these last two years near my mother and feel her happiness, I, too, would
have been happy. But there is no reason now for my enemies to fear that
I will ever find happiness, for she is dead.
My mother’s death was the signal for both my friends and enemies to
seek my release, as if her death was some sort of certificate. Freedom—as
if they could pay me for her corpse. I’m grateful to the present
government for having understood how odious an insult was the pardon
they would have inflicted on me. The government behaved properly
when it allowed me to go to my dying mother, and it must not tarnish
this generosity by a pardon after her death. Why do I merit a pardon
more than other people?
I don’t have a copy of the letter I wrote to refuse that insulting offer of
a pardon, but I do have a few lines summarizing my feelings in a letter
that I wrote to Lissagaray, who had protested against the government’s
plan to pardon me. I seems that other friends had also protested. Not
being allowed to read the newspapers, I was unaware of their efforts,
and I take the opportunity here to thank them.
4 May 1885
Citizen Lissagaray,
I thank you. It seems that you felt I wasn’t able, without being disgraced,
to accept a pardon to which I have no more right than others.
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191
All or nothing.
I don’t want them to pay me for the corpse of my mother. May the
friends who warned me in time be thanked also.
I accept completely the responsibility for refusing the pardon. If my
friends think about it, they will come to feel that if they can’t do anything
more for me, at least they shouldn’t insult me.
My adversaries felt that way.
I clasp your hand.
Louise Michel
P.S. If the government hadn’t listened to me and refused the pardon, I
would have left France immediately and gone to Russia or Germany. In
those countries they kill revolutionaries; they don’t besmirch them.
May I just be left alone.
L.M.
“All or nothing.” That’s the way I hope I always feel. I also hope that
they won’t repeat the insult that I didn’t merit and which they were kind
enough to take away.
A man who is a prisoner has to fight only against the situation which
his adversaries make for him. A woman who is a prisoner has not only
that same struggle but also the complications caused by her friends
intervening in her behalf. They come to aid her because they attribute to
her every weakness, every stupidity, every folly.
A woman must be a thousand times calmer than a man, even facing
the most horrible events. Although pain may be digging into her heart,
she cannot let one word that is not “normal” escape her. If she does, her
friends, fooled by pity, and her enemies, motivated by hate, will push
her into a mental institution where, with all her faculties intact, she will
be buried near madwomen, madwomen who perhaps weren’t mad when
they were locked up.
Comrades, you have been very good to my poor mother and me. My
dear friends, you have to get used to not passing it off as madness if the
thought of my mother’s death rushes up in front of me and bewilders
me. Remember that once the poor woman was no longer suffering, I
buried her without shedding a tear. Returning to Saint-Lazare, I started
back to work the day after her death without anyone ever seeing me cry
or stop being calm, even for an instant. What more does anyone want? I
shall live for the fight, but I do not wish to live under shameful
circumstances.
During the May Days of 1885 the dead went quickly: Hugo, Cournet,
Amouroux. All three remind us of 1871. Amouroux dragged the ball of
penal servitude in New Caledonia. Cournet was exiled, and exile was the
unhappiest fate of the vanquished. Victor Hugo offered his house at
Brussels to the fugitives from the slaughterhouse.
Three others were mowed down along with the century that is
ending—Louis Blanc, P&re Malezieux, and Louis Auguste Blanqui. I
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remember Blanqui’s last speech. The hall was bedecked with the Tri¬
color. The brave old man stood up to curse the colors of Sedan and
Versailles waving in front of him, the symbols of surrender and murder.
The howls of the reactionaries often covered the words of the old man,
but then his dying chest filled up with the immense breath of the future
and dominated the hall in its turn. After the meeting he went to bed and
never got up again.
Mal^zieux was a man of both June and of Seventy-one, and when,
upon his return from exile, the bosses found him too old to work, he lost
the will to live. The facial resemblance between him and Victor Hugo
was striking and complete. Their faces had the same nobility, proud in
the old fighter’s, gentle in the poet’s. Their nobility lit up those two old
Homers, and they looked like two old lions lying down observing you.
Hugo was the last of the old bards who sang alone, like Homer. The
new bards will sing from one end of the earth to the other when we
finally drag down the wreck of the old world, and they will have us as
their chorus.
In New Caledonia on an enormous rock that opened its petals of
granite like a rose, a granite rose that was spotted with little black
streams of cold lava like trickles of black blood, I engraved one of Hugo’s
poems for the cyclones:
To the People
Paris bleeding by moonlight
Dreams over the common grave.
Give honor to mass murderers.
More conscription, more tribunes:
Eighty-nine is wearing a gag.
The Revolution, terrible to those it touches,
Is buried, a robber-chief doing
What no Titan could do,
And a Jesuit logician laughs crookedly.
Unsheathed against the great Republic
Are all the Lilliputian sabers.
The judge, a merchant clothed
In legal vestments, sells the law.
Lazarus, Lazarus, Lazarus
Rise up.
—Victor Hugo
As a child and all through my later life I kept sending poetry to Victor
Hugo. But I sent him none after I returned from New Caledonia,
Memoirs of Louise Michel
193
because then it was unnecessary to do anything more to honor him.
Everyone was celebrating the master, even those who had been far from
feting him in the past, and there was no need for me to assist in those
joyful days. That is why I was so horrified to learn that Maxime du Camp
planned to speak to the crowd from the top of Hugo’s tomb.
It was Maxime du Camp—du Camp of Satory—who betrayed himself
and us to the Versailles criminals. He was a purveyor of hot and cold
massacres, besliming all those he pointed out. His forehead is marked
with blood from the six years he spent flushing out citizens for the
courts-martial, and he did it for pleasure. For him to speak under the
blooming trees on the red anniversary would insult our sleeping dead.
Master Hugo, on you shall fall no single word of his voice, nor any noise
of his steps.
We revolutionaries aren’t just chasing a scarlet flag. What we pursue is
an awakening of liberty, old or new. It is the ancient communes of
France; it is 1793; it is June 1848; it is 1871. Most especially it is the next
revolution, which is advancing under this dawn. That is all that we are
defending.
We wish that all the people of the world might be revenged for all the
Sedans to which despots and fools have dragged humanity. Revenge is
the Revolution, which will sow liberty and peace over the entire earth.
When the people gain their full vigor, every person will have to line up
on one side or the other. People will have to choose either to crowd with
their castes into the ruts that moving wheels have left behind or to shake
off the absurd limitations of class and take their places on the human
stage under the light of the rising sun.
At the burial of Vallfcs there was an emotional multitude over which
the red and black banners waved. Was that the whole revolutionary
army? The advance guard? It was hardly a battalion. When the hour
comes, which ferocious and stupid governments are pushing forward, it
will not be a boulevard that quivers under the steps of a crowd. It will be
the entire earth trembling under the march of the human race.
In the meantime, the wider the river of blood flowing from the
scaffold where our people are being assassinated, the more crowded the
prisons, the greater the poverty, the more tyrannical the governments,
the more quickly the hour will come and the more numerous the
combatants will be. How many wrathful people, young people, will be
with us when the red and black banners wave in the wind of anger! What
a tidal wave it will be when the red and black banners rise around the old
wreck!
The red banner, which has always stood for liberty, frightens the
executioners because it is so red with our blood. The black flag, with
layers of blood upon it from those who wanted to live by working or die
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by fighting, frightens those who want to live off the work of others.
Those red and black banners wave over us mourning our dead and wave
over our hopes for the dawn that is breaking.
If we were free to fly our banners wherever we wanted in some
country, it would show better than any vote can show on which side the
crowd was lining up. No longer could men be put in the pockets of the
authorities the way fistfuls of bulletins are stuffed there now. It would be
a good way to assure each other of our unfalsified true majority, which
this time would be that of the people. But we are allowed to fly our flags
only over our dead.
People must continue to fight against the masters who oppress them.
In England, the gallows will probably greet them, but that does not spoil
the vision. They should fight anyway. There was a time when I found
the idea of some poor person grimacing at the end of a rope disagree¬
able. Since than I have learned that in Russia they put you in a sack first.
Germany had the headsman’s block, as Reinsdorff and others saw.
These various techniques are only different forms of the same death,
and the more mournful the setting, the more it is wrapped in the red
light of dawn.
At the time when I had a preference, I imagined a scaffold from
which I could address the crowd. Then I saw the execution post on the
plain of Satory, and as far as the manner of my execution was con¬
cerned, the white wall of P&re Lachaise cemetery or even some angle of
the walls of Paris would have suited me. Today I don’t care. I don’t care
how, and I don’t care where. What does it matter to me whether I’m
killed in broad daylight or in a woods at night?
A decade and a half have elapsed since the struggle of the Commune.
Of the living I say nothing. They are fighting hard in the struggle for
life. They have days without work, which means days without food.
When I speak of the survivors of the battle and the exile and the
deportation to New Caledonia, I must speak of the courage of Mme
Nathalie Lemel during all those events. It won’t hurt her, for where she
is working now, all the employees are criminals of the Commune and
convicts returned from the “justice” of Versailles. I shall name only those
to whom an employer won’t say: “Ah, you come from being imprisoned
for the Commune. Well, get out of here. There is no longer any work in
my place for you.” That happened and still happens often.
The court, just for the sake of variety, had sentenced some of us to
hard labor. Some were deemed too weak to stand the trip to New
Caledonia, and several of them are now dead: Poirier, so courageous
during the Siege and the Commune; Marie Boire; and many others who
were no longer alive when we returned from New Caledonia. Mme
Louise was sent to New Caledonia in spite of her age, and she died there
calling for her children, whom she could not see one more time in he
Memoirs of Louise Michel
195
last hours. Of those who were sent to Cayenne, two are dead. One was
Elisabeth Retif, a poor and simple girl, who did a magnificent job of
carrying out the wounded under fire and who never understood how
anyone could find her actions evil. Elisabeth de Ghi, who had married
and become Mme Langlais, died on the ship during the voyage home
from New Caledonia. She would have loved to see Paris again, but we
were still far away from it when, between two cannon shots, her body was
slid through a cargo port into the depths of the sea. Marie Schmidt, one
of the bravest, died last year in the home for the destitute on the rue de
Sevres. In 1871 she had been a stretcher bearer and a soldier, but work
was hard to find upon our return and poverty kills quickly.
Sleep in peace, valiant ones, whether you be under the storms and
waves, or lying in a common grave. You are the happy ones. Let us
honor the obscure dead who suffered to aid those who will come after
us. Let us honor the obscure dead who sensed only indistinctly the
far-off horizon that will raise up their shades in sprays of stars and let
them see the dazzling light of dawn.
As for the executioners, retribution wasn’t long in coming. The
prosecutor, Major Gaveau, whose passionate indictments were known to
everyone, died insane. It had been necessary to lock him up for some
time before his death, and according to the newspapers of the time, he
had the most terrible death agonies imaginable. During the whole day
before his death he believed that he saw fantastic creatures tumble
around in front of his eyes, and it seemed to him that someone was
beating a hammer on his skull. The expert Delarue, who had testified to
a falsehood against Ferre, was himself later condemned for giving false
expert testimony that sent a man to prison for five years. The cost of
sending one of our comrades to the execution post at Satory wasn’t as
great. The farm of Donjeu, which belonged to M. Feltereau of Ville-
neuve, was burned by accident. I don’t know if any accident befell
Colonel Merlin, who had been a judge in the trial of the members of the
Commune and who had commanded the troops which oversaw the
assassinations of November 28. Why do criminals escape the conse¬
quences of their acts more easily than other people? Doesn’t each act
prepare its own destiny?
After the amnesty, I came home from ten years of exile in New
Caledonia only to see my poor mother die. With my own hands I laid my
mother down in her coffin, as I did Marie Ferr6, the one in my red
shawl, the other in a soft red coverlet which she liked. So they are for the
eternal winter of the tomb, and people ask me if now I am turning my
attention to liberty and the spring which makes the branches blossom
out again. Am I giving up, now that I have shut my heart under the
earth? No! I shall remain standing until the last moment. I returned
from deportation faithful to the principles for which I shall die.
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Yesterday was May 24. From a distance, I heard some kind of rapid
bugle call whose brazen notes sent a chill through my heart. That call
was like an echo of the May Days of 1871. Do they still lead soldiers
against the people?
See the grains of sand and the piled-up hay and in the highest heavens
the crowded stars. Where all that is seen is where we’re going. And here
comes the great harvest, grown in the blood of our hearts. The heads of
the wheat will be heavier because of that, and the harvest will be greater.
In this somber life, cradling sad days, some refrains come back again
and again. They catch at your emotions and rip you apart at the same
time.
Flow, flow, blood of the captive.
The Baguades, the Jacques, all of you who wear an iron collar, let’s talk
while we wait for the hour to strike. The dream emerges from the scents
of spring. It is the morning come of the new legend. Do you hear,
peasant, the winds that pass in the air? They are the songs of your
fathers, the old Gallic songs.
Flow, flow, blood of the captive.
See this red dew on the earth. It’s blood. The grass over the dead grows
higher and greener. On this earth, the charnel house of the people’s
dreams, the grass ought to grow thickly. As long as it pleases you to be
the beef of the slaughterhouse, to be the ox that pulls the plow or the
one dragged to the carnival, people will repeat the terrible refrain:
Flow, flow, blood of the captive.
I don’t know where the final struggle between the old world and the
new will take place, but it doesn’t matter, because wherever it is—Rome,
Berlin, Moscow—I’ll be there. And other revolutionaries will be there,
too. Wherever it begins, the spark will unite the whole world. Every¬
where the crowds will rise up. Meanwhile we wait and while we wait,
speeches continue. Those speeches are the rumblings of a volcano, and
when everybody least expects it, the lava will spill out.
The evening will come. They will still be dancing in the palace.
Parliaments will say that discontent has been building up for a long time,
but that the grumbling will go on without anyone being able to do
anything about it.
Then the great uprising will come. The rising of the people will
happen at its appointed moment, the same way that continents develop.
It will happen because the human race is ready for it.
That uprising will come, and those whom I have loved will see it. O my
beloved dead. I began this book when one of you was still living. Now I
end it bent over the ground where you both are sleeping.
Memoirs of Louise Michel
197
Dead, both of them. The stones of my home overturned. I’m alone in
the room where my mother spent her last years. Friends have arranged
my mother’s furniture and bed as it was when she was still alive. A little
bird has slipped between the slats of the blinds to make its nest in the
window, and the room is less forlorn because of it. My mother’s poor old
furniture, which was like part of her clothing, has the wings of an
innocent bird beating over it, and that bird alone hears the ticking of the
old clock which marked her death.
Soon, my beloved mother, Myriam!
If she had lived a few more years, even a few more months, I would
have spent all that time near her. Today, what do prisons, lies, all the rest
matter? What could death do to me? It would be a deliverance because
I’m already dead. Why do people speak of courage? I’m in a hurry to
join Marie and my mother.
Memory crowds in on me. The cemetery at Vroncourt in the upper
turning of the road under the pines. Audeloncourt. Clefmont. And my
uncles’ little, low, dark houses. The little house of Aunt Apolline, dug
into the ground. Uncle Georges’s up on top of the hill. The schoolhouse.
Who hears the noise of the brook there now? Through the open window
comes the smell of roses, of stubble, of hay in the summer sunlight. They
all come to me now more than ever. I smell the bitter odor of the niaoulis
mixed with the sharp freshness of the Pacific waves. Everything reap¬
pears in front of my eyes. Everything lives again, the dead and all those
things that have vanished.
Who am I, Louise Michel? Don’t make me out to be better than I
am—or than you are. I am capable of anything, love or hate, as you are.
When the Revolution comes, you and I and all humanity will be
transformed. Everything will be changed and better times will have joys
that the people of today aren’t able to understand. Feeling for the arts
and for liberty will surely become greater, and the harvest of that
development will be marvelous. Beyond this cursed time will come a day
when humanity, free and conscious of its powers, will no longer torture
either man or beast. That hope is worth all the suffering we undergo as
we move through the horrors of life.
Epilogue
Much against her wishes, Louise Michel was pardoned and expelled—
there is no other word for it—from prison in January 1886. By now, she
was legendary. Or as Paul Verlaine put it in his “Ballade en l’honneur de
Louise Michel,” she was “nearly Joan of Arc.” She was “Saint Cecilia /
And the harsh and slender Muse / Of the Poor, as well as their guardian
angel.” Now in her late fifties, Michel was indefatigable; she produced
poetry, wrote several involuted novels, and marched incessantly to the
speaker’s platform. And the summer following her release she was
indicted once again, this time in company with Jules Guesde, Paul
Lafargue, and Susini, for “instigating murder and looting.”
She was accused of saying that the government was composed of
“thieves and murderers. Thieves are arrested and murderers are killed.
Throw them in the water!” Although Michel denied saying those exact
words, she admitted that the tone was correct—which seems likely. The
jury found her guilty, but despite their convicting her, it would have
caused the government grave embarrassment to send her to jail again,
and ultimately she was pardoned without going back to prison.
In January 1888, while Michel was delivering a speech at Le Havre, a
fanatical Catholic Breton shot her. Her injury, a bullet that lodged
behind her left ear, did not heal well, and for a time her health was
precarious. True to her principles, however, Michel entered the trial of
her assailant to plead for him, arguing that he was misled by an evil
society, and he was acquitted.
This period of Michel’s life coincided with the peak of the Boulangist
movement, a political phenomenon that began on the left and moved
over the years to the right, uniting at one time or another all those who
opposed the Third Republic and particularly, at the end, those who
wanted revenge against Germany. Although Michel’s general principles
would seem to dictate her opposing the final stages of the movement, she
avoided involvement, perhaps because her friend Henri Rochefort was a
staunch Boulangist. It is also possible that Michel, like the Marxist
Guesde, saw Boulangism as only a bourgeois struggle and, as such,
irrelevant.
Michel did take the lead in a temporary alliance of anarchists and
monarchists who found a common enemy in the Third Republic.
Through her, the royalists funneled funds to support anarchist activi¬
ties. Some of the monarchists certainly were using Michel as the Ger¬
mans would use Lenin in 1917; any trouble the anarchists fomented
would serve the monarchist cause. But Michel, if she was aware she was
being used, was entirely happy with the situation. Her main enemies
now were not monarchists but “Possibilist” socialists, who in her eyes
were no better than the “Opportunist” republicans she loathed.
Epilogue
199
The Possibilists, usually classified today as evolutionary socialists,
hoped to alleviate the misery of the poor through small reforms and to
work within the system to win power. Michel believed that, in fact, the
Possibilists had no greater aim than to replace the bourgeoisie with
themselves. Moreover, the minor reforms they supported would only
postpone the Social Revolution.
In 1889 the problems in founding the Second International illustrated
these theoretical distinctions. The First International had perished offi¬
cially in 1876, although it had been moribund for several years prior to
that date, the victim of repression from without and schism from within.
Posthumously, the First International was gaining a reputation for
effectiveness it had not earned during its life, and in 1889, the centenary
of the first French Revolution, there were two international meetings
held simultaneously in Paris to revive it, one of Possibilists and the other
of Marxists, with delegates drifting from one meeting to the other.
Michel played little role in either of those meetings, perhaps because of
her lack of interest in organizations and organizational politics.
But from that chaotic founding of the Second International came the
idea of using May Day demonstrations to show solidarity. By the late
1880s Michel had come to focus on the general strike, la grande grlve, as
the means by which the poor would achieve the Social Revolution. It
would “interrupt ... all industries and all branches of commerce and
would finally carry the Social Revolution along.” Despite Michel’s
dreams of la grande greve, her enthusiasm for the May Day demonstra¬
tions was limited; the demonstrations were not intended to incite the
people to rebel but only to publicize the Left. Perhaps Michel was no
longer so sure of crowds, and clearly she was inclining more and more
simply to belief in “propaganda by the deed” and faith in direct action
inspired and led by a small elite.
But Michel believed, as she always had, that it was her duty to
participate in demonstrations, and she was preparing to participate in
the 1890 May Day demonstration when she was arrested the day before
its scheduled occurrence. In a fit of rage and frustration she destroyed
the furnishings of her cell, and officials rushed to use that behavior to
have her certified insane. For reasons that remain unclear, the Minister
of the Interior, Constans, intervened directly to stop the committal
proceedings and to have her released.
Michel immediately left for England, and from 1890 until her death
she spent the greater part of her time there. Perhaps the near-successful
committal proceeding had frightened her; being committed was a fear
she had carried for years. Perhaps she was simply tired. In any event,
England was the traditional home of foreign exiles, and Rochefort,
himself a refugee after the collapse of Boulangism, was there. Rochefort
200
Epilogue
gave her money to live on, and Prince Kropotkin gave her what aid he
could. During the following years she tried through personal contact to
help the English poor—as always, whatever money she had at any
moment she gave away on request—and she became known in the worst
slums of London as “the good woman.”
She returned to France only once, briefly, during the five years from
1890 to 1895, which were the years of anarchism’s greatest notoriety in
France. It was during those years that France lived in daily fear of
bombings, the most savage period being the months from Ravachol’s
bombings in the spring of 1892 to the explosions in the Chamber of
Deputies in December 1893 and the Caf6 Terminus in February 1894.
Although Michel objected to bombs because they indiscriminately killed
women and children, she continued to approve the use of force. Rava-
chol was, she said, “the hero of modern legend,” and later she approved
the bombing of the Chamber of Deputies.
In 1895 Michel returned to France and for the next seven months
made speeches and wrote poetry. The following summer she returned
to England, presumably so she could attend the scheduled meeting of
the International, the one which confirmed the expulsion of the anar¬
chists. Michel was horrified at the proceedings and the enforcement of
Marxist orthodoxy. The meeting proved, she said, that even the best,
most intelligent, and most devoted Marxist revolutionary “will be worse
than anyone he replaces because the Marxists claim infallibility and
practice excommunication.” The rupture between Michel and the Marx¬
ist socialists, like the one with the Possibilists before them, was complete.
In the spring of 1897 Michel, now in her sixty-seventh year, made an
extensive speaking tour throughout France. In France, the Dreyfus
Affair was reaching its height, but Michel took no active part in it,
although she did speak out against secret trials and anti-Semitism.
Maybe her faith temporarily was burning low. She had, after all, been
preaching revolution, or been imprisoned for preaching it, for forty
years. Moreover, her audiences were dwindling.
In spite of her increasingly frail health she began a new series of
speeches in France in May 1902, which continued into 1903 with one
break in London. By then, Russia, which had fascinated her for years,
seemed on the verge of revolution, and events there were rekindling her
enthusiasm, particularly after the outbreak of war in 1904 between
Russia and Japan. A determined antimilitarist, Michel was nonetheless
delighted at the opportunity an unpopular war provided for the onset of
the Social Revolution. She made more speeches in France during Febru¬
ary and early March 1904, but then fell gravely ill.
She recovered, and after her well-publicized illness, which the public
had supposed would be mortal, the enormous crowds as of old came to
hear her speak. Perhaps now people were only coming to view a legend,
Epilogue
201
but come they did in great numbers, and they applauded her. At the end
of the year she went to Algeria; upon her return to France she fell ill in
Marseille. This illness was her last. On 9 January 1905 she died in that
city at the Hotel de l’Oasis.
Her death became the occasion of one of those spectacles she would
have loved. With red flags, masses of flowers, and two thousand mourn¬
ers—representatives of labor unions, socialist groups, anarchists, and
antireligious organizations—the funeral procession was a kilometer long
as it wound through Marseille to the cemetery. Memorial services took
place throughout France and in London and elsewhere. On January 20
her body was disinterred, taken to Paris, and two days later buried at her
mother’s side in Levallois-Perret to the accompaniment of another
spectacle, the largest, said the press, since the death of Victor Hugo. Not
only would Michel have approved the spectacle, she would have noted
how strange it was that on that very day a crowd of Russians in St.
Petersburg attempted to deliver a petition to their czar, and the ensuing
massacre marked the day forever as Bloody Sunday.
Today, Michel’s birthplace of Vroncourt has a statue to her, and the
street going through town bears her name. Her grave in Levallois-Per¬
ret—not the one in which she was buried in 1905, but a new one to which
she was moved during the Popular Front days of 1936—still has flowers
placed on it by anonymous hands. The authorities have even named a
metro station and a street for her, but both are just barely outside the
city limits of Paris.
She is now a legend. That she invented part of it herself is irrelevant.
Louise Michel was heroic, but as she herself said: “There is no heroism;
people are simply entranced by events.”
Bibliography
Louise Michel discussed her own writings briefly in her memoirs.
Let me record a balance sheet of my writings. I have spoken of the various bits
of poetry from the years before the events of 1870—71 inserted in different
newspapers, in the Journal de lajeunesse, in the Union despoetes, in Addle Esquiros’
newspaper, in Addle Caldelar’s La Raison, and other places. Of the verses I sent
to Victor Hugo in my childhood and youth, of which I have cited a few here and
there, two or three pieces which were in the papers that Marie Ferrd and my
mother arranged during my deportation will be found in my volume of verse. I
used the name Enjolras on a certain number of pieces of verse, Louis Michel on
others, and my own name on still more. I don’t know what has become of them.
I’ve mentioned an article signed Louis Michel in Le Progres musical in which I
discussed an instrument I dreamed up, a piano with bows instead of mallets.
They make them now in Germany.
There are a large number of signed articles in the Revolution sociale, the
Etendard, and a number of other signed articles are scattered. The first part of
my Encyclopedie enfantine, which I wrote in New Caledonia, appeared in Mile
Cheminat’s Journal d’education.
During my last trip to Lyon I left a drama, Le Coq rouge, at the Nouvelliste. The
masses of drama for children have all vanished after each awarding of prizes
during so many years.
All my life I have kept working on La Legende du barde; there are fragments of
it everywhere. I have some fragments of other prose manuscripts, the Livre
d’Hermann, the Sagesse d’un fou, Litterature au crochet, the Diableries de Chaumont,
and so forth. Perhaps I will put them together some day to search in them, as in
my poetry, for the changes of my ideas across life.
Of the works done at Auberive I have a few pages remaining from the book Le
Bagne. La Conscience and Le Livre des morts are completely lost. The first part of La
Femme & travers les ages was published in H. Place’s LExcommunie. That newspaper
had announced it would publish Memoires d’Hanna la nihiliste, but the paper died.
Under that title I had gathered a great many episodes of my life, along with
Russian episodes. The Oceaniennes and the Legendes canaques have appeared in
fragments in Noumea and here upon my return.
When I collaborate with someone, I keep the papers which establish the facts
of my collaboration so as to be free not to take part in the profits or losses in any
lawsuits my collaborators attempt. They are at liberty to do as they wish. I
collaborated with Grippa de Winter in a novel, Le Bdtard imperial, and took a
play, Nadine, from it. Since my return from New Caledonia I have had two
collaborators, one of whom was Mme Tynaire, Jean Guetr£. She wrote almost all
the first part of La Misere, while the second part, from the chapter on Toulon on,
is completely mine. In a Lille magazine, Le Format, I had begun to publish this
second part in installments which would form a complete work with the addition
of a few lines of introduction. Mme Tynaire could also make a complete work
out of the first part by adding a few pages.
Mme Tynaire can be my friend, but it turned out that she could not be my
collaborator because we see things differently. Those differences are perfectly
Bibliography
203
visible in LaMisere, and the two distinct parts are easily discernible. Mme Tynaire
expects to promote general well-being through means in which I see no effec¬
tiveness. I see general well-being promoted only by successive revolutions cutting
through the series of social transformations.
To remain good friends with Mme Tynaire instead of quarreling with our
pens, I gave up a second collaboration with her, the second part of Les Meprisees.
If I had taken it on, I would have been obliged to make the remaining characters
undergo changes in character and circumstances which would have been incom¬
patible with the way they were introduced to the reader in the first part. The
novel Les Meprisees thus contains only one line I wrote.
I can’t list the sketches in progress, novels begun everywhere which I never
had the time to finish owing to events. Let me end by noting that the complete
text of the Encyclopedie enfantine will be published at Mme Keva’s and that the
Legendes canaques has already been published by the same publisher.
Translators' note
The debts that Louise Michel’s translators owe are legion. First and foremost is
their great debt to the painstaking biography of Louise Michel prepared by the
late Edith Thomas, Louise Michel ou la VelUda de Vanarchie (Paris, Gallimard,
1971).
Other biographies of Michel include: Irma Boyer, Louise Michel (Paris: Andr6
Delpeuch, 1927); Charles Chincholle, Les Survivants de la Commune (Paris: L.
Boulanger, 1885); Dominique Desanti, Visages de femmes (Paris: Editions Sociales,
1955); Ernest Girault, La bonne Louise: Psychologie de Louise Michel (Paris: Biblio¬
theque des auteurs modernes, 1906); and Carl, Freiherr von Letetzow, Louise
Michel (la Vierge Rouge): eine Charakterskisse (Leipzig: F. Rothbarth, 1906).
Louise Michel wrote a later work specifically on the Commune, La Commune
(Paris: P.-V. Stock, 1898), and although we have resisted the temptation to add
material to the text of her memoirs from that source, it was helpful in estab¬
lishing the sequence of events, which is unclear in the memoirs. In addition, for
the period of the Siege and the Commune, Alistaire Horne’s The Fall of Paris
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), Michael Howard’s The Franco-Prussian War
(New York: Macmillan, 1962), and Stewart Edward’s The Paris Commune, 1871
(London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1971) were useful. The work of the Associa¬
tion pour la Conservation et Reproduction Photographique de la Presse in
preserving Communard newspapers was invaluable.
Michel’s account of her trials was checked against the Gazette des tribunaux; she
was accurate. The Gazette des tribunaux also furnished the account of the trial of
1886 referred to in the Epilogue (13 August 1886, pp. 764-65).
On New Caledonia, we found a school text by Jean le Borgne, Geographie de la
Nouvelle-Caledonie et des lies Loyaute (Noumea: Ministere de l’6ducation, de la
jeunesse et des sports, 1964), most useful for its descriptions of the flora and
fauna of that island. On the Kanaka rebellion we found Roselene Dousset,
Colonialisme et Contradictions: Etude sur les causes socio-historiques de ITnsurrection de
1878 en Nouvelle-Caledonie (Paris: Mouton, 1970), instructive.
Her voyage out, her early years in New Caledonia and her relationship with
Henri Rochefort were made more comprehensible by Rochefort’s memoirs, Les
Aventures de ma vie (5 vols.; Paris: Paul Dupont, 1896); and his L’Evade (2d ed.;
Paris: Bibliotheque Charpentier, 1895); see also Roger L. Williams, Henri Roche¬
fort: Prince of the Gutter Press (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966).
The memoirs of L. Andrieux, Souvenirs d’un Prefet de Police (2 vols.; Paris: Jules
Rouff, 1885) allowed us to comprehend Louise Michel’s comments about police
involvement in La Revolution sociale.
Standard works on the Third Republic, including Brogan, Chastenet, Thom¬
son, and Cobban, were all useful, as were standard studies of anarchism,
particularly George Woodcock’s. Our translation of the Anarchist Manifesto of
Lyon differs from the usual translation; Michel attributes it to Gautier, not
Kropotkin. Daniel Ligou’s Histoire du Socialisme en France: 1871-1961 (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1962) was useful.
We must also note our debt to the French Ministry of Marine, which found for
us the manuscript report of the Virginie’s voyage to New Caledonia. In France
the staffs of the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Archives Nationales both sought
exotic publications for us with customary courtesy.
Translators’ Note
205
The Public Record Office in London furnished the Admiralty charts of the
vicinity of Noumea which enabled us to untangle Michel’s description of the
convict encampment on the Ducos Peninsula. The Library of Congress provided
charts of the harbor of Las Palmas, Gran Canaria.
For a list of some of Louise Michel’s published writings, an extraordinarily
varied assortment, see Edith Thomas, Louise Michel, pp. 459-60.
Finally, the translators wish to express their gratitude to Hilde L. Robinson for
her extraordinarily thorough job of copyediting; she saved us from ourselves
many times. We also owe thanks to Eloise Green, Cindy Carrell, Karen Yount,
and Beth Broyles for their assistance in typing the final manuscript.
Appendix I
Chapter List Showing Source in Original Text
Chapter 1, “Introduction,” Part 1, Chapter 1; with minor additions from Part 2,
Chapters 11, 13.
Chapter 2, “Vroncourt,” Part 1, Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11; Part 2, Chapter 1.
Chapter 3, “The End of Childhood,” Part 1, Chapters 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10; Part 2,
Chapter 1; with minor additions from Part 1, Chapter 5.
Chapter 4, “The Making of a Revolutionary,” Part 1, Chapter 11; Part 2,
Chapter 1; with minor additions from Part 1, Chapter 6; Part 2, Chapter 2.
Chapter 5, “Schoolmistress in the Haute Marne,” Part 1, Chapters 6, 7.
Chapter 6, “Schoolmistress in Paris,” Part 1, Chapters 7, 8; with minor additions
from Part 1, Chapter 4.
Chapter 7, “The Decaying Empire,” Part 1, Chapters 7, 8, 9, 12, 13.
Chapter 8, “The Siege of Paris,” Part 1, Chapters 12, 13, 14, 15; with minor
additions from Part 1, Chapter 10.
Chapter 9, “The Commune,” Part 1, Chapters 12, 14, 15; Part 2, Chapter 2.
Chapter 10, “After the Commune,” Part 1, Chapters 15, 16; Part 2, Chapters 2,
4, 15.
Chapter 11, “The Trial of 1871,” Appendix.
Chapter 12, “Voyage to Exile,” Part 1, Chapter 16; Part 2, Chapter 6; with minor
additions from Part 1, Chapters 1, 6.
Chapter 13, “Numbo, New Caledonia,” Part 1, Chapter 16; Part 2, Chapter 6.
Chapter 14, “The Bay of the West,” Part 1, Chapters 10, 16; Part 2, Chapters 6,
8, 9.
Chapter 15, “Noumea and the Return,” Part 2, Chapters 6, 10, 11; with minor
additions from Part 2, Chapter 8.
Chapter 16, “Speeches and Journalism, November 1880-January 1882,” Part 1,
Chapter 17; Part 2, Chapters 5, 6, 11, 12; Appendix; with minor additions
from Part 1, Chapter 16; Part 2, Chapter 3.
Chapter 17, “The Death of Marie Ferre,” Part 2, Chapters 11, 15.
Chapter 18, “Women’s Rights,” Part 1, Chapter 9; Part 2, Chapter 13.
Chapter 19, “Speeches Abroad, 1882-1883,” Part 2, Chapters 2, 3, 11; with
minor additions from Part 2, Chapter 12.
Chapter 20, “Speeches in France, 1882-1883,” Part 2, Chapters 11, 12, 13.
Chapter 21, “The Trial of 1883,” Part 2, Chapter 13; Appendix.
Chapter 22, “Prison,” Part 2, Chapters 6, 14.
Chapter 23, “My Mother’s Death,” Part 2, Chapters 5, 15, 16.
Chapter 24, “Final Thoughts,” Part 1, Chapters 14, 16, 17; Part 2, Chapters 3, 4,
6, 9, 13, 15, 16; with minor additions from Part 1, Chapter 15; Part 2,
Chapters 10, 12.
“Bibliography,” Part 2, Chapter 7.
Appendix II
Table of Poems in Original Text
Poems by Louise Michel
“A bord de la Virginie,” Part 2, Chapter 6
“Adieux a ma tourelle,” Part 1, Chapter 2. Translated as “Farewell, my dreaming
retreat in the manor,” p. 23.
“A Th. Ferre,” Part 1, Chapter 13.
“A mes freres,” Part 2, Chapter 4.
“Au bord des flots,” Part 1, Chapter 4.
“Au 3 e Conseil de Guerre,” Part 2, Chapter 4.
“Aux manes de Victor Hugo,” Part 2, Chapter 9.
“Ballade du squelette,” Part 1, Chapter 8. Translated as “Ballad of the Skeleton,”
p. 41.
“La Chanson des poires,” Part 1, Chapter 3.
“Chanson du chanvre,” Part 1, Chapter 15.
“Chanson de guerre” (Kanakan), translated into French by Louise Michel, Part
2, Chapter 6.
“Le Chene,” Part 1, Chapter 7. Translated as “The Legend of the Oak,” pp.
43-14.
“La coupe est rougie,” Part 1, Chapter 8.
“Dans les mers polaires,” Part 2, Chapter 6. Prose translation, p. 93.
“Entendex-vous tonner l’airain?” Part 1, Chapter 8. Translated as “Do you hear
the brazen thunder,” p. 53.
“La Grilla rapita,” Part 1, Chapter 2.
“Le Lai du troubadour,” Part 1, Chapter 8. Translated as “Lay of the Trouba¬
dour,” p. 42.
“La Manifestation de la paix,” Part 1, Chapter 13.
“Marie Ferre,” Part 2, Chapter 11. Translated as “In Memory of Marie Ferr£,”
pp. 137-38.
“Moi, je suis la blanche colombe,” Part 1, Chapter 8. Translated as “Me, I am the
white dove,” p. 53.
“Les Oeillets rouges,” Part 1, Chapter 13.
“L’Oiseau noir du champ fauve,” translation into French by Louise Michel of
patois poem, “L’Age na deu champ fauv6,” Part 1, Chapter 4. Translated as
“The Black Bird of the Fallow Field,” p. 18.
“Pour mes premiers jouets . . . ,” Part 2, Chapter 6. Translated as “As my first
toys,” p. 91.
“Les Roses,” Part 1, Chapter 17.
“Le Takata, dans la foret,” Kanakan chant of Andia, translated into French by
Louise Michel, Part 2, Chapter 9. Translated as “The Takata pp. 113-14.
“Toute l’ombre a verse ses tenebreuses urnes,” Part 1, Chapter 12. Last two
stanzas translated as “Criminals and Whores,” p. 49.
“Les Veilleurs de nuit,” Part 1, Chapter 13.
“Vent du soir . . . ,” Part 1, Chapter 3.
“Volez, oiseaux . . . ,” Part 2, Chapter 6. Translated as “Soar high in brilliant
whiteness, birds,” p. 93.
208 Appendix II
“Le Voyage,” Part 2, Chapter 1. Translated, with stanzas rearranged, as “The
Voyage,” p. 15.
Poems by Other Persons
“A des antiquaires,” by Etienne-Charles Demahis, Louise Michel’s grandfather,
Part 1, Chapter 3.
“L’Age na deu champ fauv£,” patois poem translated into French by Louise
Michel as “L’Oiseau noir du champ fauve,” Part 1, Chapter 4. Translated as
“The Black Bird of the Fallow Field,” p. 18.
“Air de ‘Malbrough [sic],’ ” by friends of Louise Michel in collaboration, Part 1,
Chapter 8.
“A ma voisine de tribord arri&re,” by Henri Rochefort, Part 2, Chapter 6.
“Eut qu’elle aimot,” traditional folksong, Part 1, Chapter 10. Translated as “He
whom she loved,” p. 16.
“La Mort,” by Louise Porcquet Demahis, Louise Michel’s grandmother, Part 1,
Chapter 3.
“Paris sanglant, au clair de lune,” [“Au peuple,” second stanza], by Victor Hugo,
Part 2, Chapter 9. Second stanza translated as “To the People,” p. 192.
Index
The first names of minor figures, when given, must be treated as only tentative, unless the name also
appears in the Memoirs.
Adoueke (New Caledonian herb), 113-14
“Age Na Deu Champ Fauv£, L’ ” (patois
folksong): text, 17; translated into
French by Louise Michel, text, 18
Alchemy, 20, 29, 97
Alcohol, use of, 104, 105, 175, 177
Alengon, Duke of, 123
Aleyron, Colonel and Governor of New
Caledonia, 95, 98, 99, 101, 126
Allix, Jules, 136
Amiens, Workers’ Union of, 129-30
Amnesty of 1880, viii, 120
Amouroux, 191
Anarchism and Anarchists, ix-xi, 1, 33,
130, 131, 132, 140, 148, 151, 154-57,
160, 161, 162, 167, 169, 183, 187, 198,
200
“Anarchists, Manifesto of the,” ix; text,
155-56, 160
Anarchists, Trial of the Sixty-eight, at
Lyon, 1883, xiv, 154-57, 158
Andia the Takala (Kanakan), 112-13
Andrieux, Louis, xiv, 131, 132, 133
Animals, cruelty toward, xvi, 24-25, 28,
29, 93, 195, See also Oppression and
exploitation
Antwerp, socialist press in, 144
Anvers, Belgium, 147
Appert, General, 78
Arras, prison at, 78
Armand (pardoned deportee at
Noumea), 119
Arnal, P., 183
Arnold, Blanche, 110
Arson(ists), 57, 67, 85
Aryans, in Oceana, 116
“As my first toys,” poem by Louise
Michel, text, 91
Assi (Communard), 76
Atai (Kanakan leader), 112-14
Atavism, 16, 17. See also Legends and
history
Atlantis (legend), 92
Auberive prison, 35, 89, 153, 202
Auclert, Hubertine, 136
Audeloncourt, Haute-Marne, xiii, 8, 32,
33, 34, 35
“Avengers, The,” song by Louise Michel,
83
Avronsart, 61
Babeuf, “Gracchus,” ix
Bagne, Le, lost manuscript by Louise
Michel, 202
Bakhunin, Mikhail, ix
Balandreau, Maitre, 167
“Ballad of the Skeleton,” from The Dream
of the Witches’ Sabbath by Louise Michel,
text, 41
“Ballade en l’honneur de Louise Michel,”
by Paul Verlaine: cited, xi; quoted
from, 198
Balloons, 65
Balzenq (deportee), 96
Barinage, miners of, 144
Bariol, 183
Barot, Odysse, 74-75, 183
Barthdemy-Saint-Hilaire, Jules, 126
Bataille, La (periodical), 183
Batard imperial, Le, by Louise Michel and
Grippa de Winter, 202
Batignolles, Seventeenth Arrondissement,
Paris, 63, 81
Baudelaire, Charles, 66, 91
Bauer, Henry, 97, 111
Belleville, Nineteenth Arrondissement,
Paris, 63, 82
Bernard (defendant, Trial of the
Sixty-eight Anarchists), 154
Besson (at Lyon), 156
Beths, Mme (educator at Chaumont), 31
Bias, Mme Camille, 135, 136, 179
Bilhoray (Communard), 76
“Black Bird of the Fallow Field, The”
(patois folksong), translated into
French by Louise Michel, text, 18
“Black Marseillaise, The,” poem by
Louise Michel and Vermorel, 53
Blanc, Louis, 191
Blanche, Place, women’s barricade at, 67
Blanqui, Louis-Auguste (and Blanquists),
ix, 62, 83, 97, 130; last speech of,
191-92; funeral, 183; anniversary of
death, demonstration on, xvi, 134
Bloody Sunday, Russia (1905), 201
Bloody Week, Commune of Paris, 67
Boeuf, 118
Boire, Marie, 194
Bonaparte (and Bonapartism), x, 32, 36,
38, 46, 48, 51, 52, 56, 57, 63, 168, 169,
186; Louise Michel instructs pupils to
210
Index
boycott prayer for, xiii, 35; Louise
Michel plans assassination of, x, 54. See
also Empire, Second
Bonaparte, Eugenie, 53
Bordat (defendant, Trial of the
Sixty-eight Anarchists), 154
Bordeaux, France, 130
Bordeaux Assembly, 63, 65
Bossuet, Jacques Bdnigne, 19
Botanical experiments, xii, 97-98, 105-06
Boulanger, General Georges (and
Boulangism), 198, 199
Bourail, New Caledonia, 95
Bourgeois (executed with Ferr6), 77
Breton. See Brittany
Brideau, Gabriel, 56
Brittany (and Bretons), 90, 93, 151, 198;
Breton mobiles, 61
Brussels, Belgium, 143, 147, 191
Bunant (deportee), 97
Burgraves, by Victor Hugo, 19
Burlot (deportee), 61, 97
Butte de Montmartre. See Montmartre,
Butte de
Buzenval, battle at (19 Jan. 1871), 61
Cadolle, Mme, 73, 136
Caf£ Terminus Bombing (1894), Paris,
200
Cailleux, Marie, 101
Caissaigne, Lieutenant, 74
Caldelar, Ad£le, 202
Calle, Antonio de la, 183
Callot, “The Beggars” (painting), 152
Canary Islands, 91-92
Cannon, 63, 67
Cape of Good Hope, 93
Carr, E. H., x
Cartegena, Spain, 183
Cassation, Court of, 79
Caubet (socialist), 184
Cayenne (prison colony), 36, 37, 73, 172,
195
Centrale Prison, Clermont, xv, 28-29,
172, 174, 179, 180
Chabert, 187
Chagot, victims of, 144
Chalon-sur-Saone, 144
Champy (Communard), 76, 97, 183, 187
Chantiers Prison, Versailles, 71, 172-73
Chatd paiot, 11
ChSteau-d’Eau, rue de (Mme Vollier’s
school in Montmartre), 38
Chaudey, General, 61
Chaumont, Haute-Marne, 10-11, 31, 32,
35, 36
Cheminat, Mile (of Journal d’Education),
202
Cholera, 180, 181
Christ (Communard), 61
Cipriani (Communard), 100, 126
Citoyen, Le, 126, 127
Clamart, town southwest of Paris, 65, 66,
84
Clefmont, Haute-Marne, xiii
Clemenceau, Georges, xii, 65, 74, 82, 182
Clement (Communard), 76
Clermont, France. See Centrale Prison,
Clermont
Comite (ship), 90
Commune of Lyons, 65
Commune of Marseille, 65
Commune of Narbonne, 65
Commune (and Communards) of Paris,
viii, xii, xiv, 28, 52; first proclaimed,
60; Chapter 9, “The Commune of
Paris,” 63-68; Chapter 10, “After the
Commune,” 69-80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86,
89, 90, 109, 112, 120, 121, 123, 124,
126, 136, 158, 168, 169, 172, 184, 194
Commune, Wards of the, 81
Conscience, La, lost manuscript by Louise
Michel, 202
Constans (Minister of Interior), 199
Contes d’enfants, by Louise Michel, 106
Convict Deportation in New Caledonia,
Inquiry into the System of, by
Chamber of Deputies, 126
Coq rouge, Le, drama by Louise Michel in
Nouvelliste, 202
Courbet (Communard), 76
Cournet, Fr6d6ric, 130, 183, 191
Court-martial(s), 74-76, 79-80, 81-87,
194
Cri du peuple, 84, 86
Criminals, women, 173, 174
“Criminals and Whores,” poem by Louise
Michel, text, 49
Croiset, Pere (Communard), 97, 99, 107
Cyclones (in New Caledonia), 107-09,
115
Dailly, Captain, 81, 87
Danel’s musical notation, 48
Daoumi (Kanakan), 96, 112, 116; brother
of, 116
Index
211
D£jardin, Surgeon-Major, 77
Delambre (of Amiens), 130
Delaporte, Colonel, 81
Delarue (prosecution witness, 1871), 195
Delescluze, Charles, 65, 159; sister of,
137
Demahis, Etienne-Charles, viii, xiii, 4-5,
7, 13, 15, 21-22, 23, 90
Demahis, Laurent, viii, 188
Demahis, Louise Porcquet, xiii, 5, 7
Demahis family papers, 19
Demonstration(s): in Dec. 1870, 60; on
22 Jan. 1871, xiv, 35, 61-62, 151; on
Blanqui Anniversary, 1882, xvi, 134; at
Versailles, September 1882, 151; at les
Invalides, 9 March 1883, xi, xv, 158;
Chapter 21, “The Trial of 1883,”
158-71; at Pere Lachaise, 130, 182; on
May Day, 1890, 199
Deneuvillers (journalist), 144, 183
Deportees, xiv, 95-123, 126-27, 147
Deputies, Chamber of, bombing (1893),
200
Deraismes, Maria, 58
Dereure, Mme, 173
Deschamp (Communard), 76
Desfosses, Adele, 101
Diableries of Chaumont, 202. See also
Legendary Haute-Mame; Diabolism
Diabolism, 10, 11, 19, 20
Dieppe, France, 122
Digeon (anarchist), 187
Discours sur Vhistoire universelle, by Jacques
Benigne Bossuet, 19
Dombrowski, Jaroslav, 67
Dreyfus Affair, 200
Du Camp, Maxime, 126, 193
Ducos Peninsula, New Caledonia, xiv,
115, 183. See also Numbo; West, Bay
of the
Dumollard, Mme (prisoner), 153
Dupre, Mme (deportee), 101
Duval, Mme (of Lagny), 31-32
Duval, Nathalie. See Lemel, Nathalie
Ecole des femmes, L\ by Moliere, 21
Ecregne(s), xviii, 25, 26, 28, 33
Education, 20, 30, 33, 34, 47, 48, 117,
118, 142, 155; of schoolmistresses, 31,
32, 38, 39, 40, 46, 51, 172
Eighteenth Arrondissement,
Butte-Montmartre, Paris. See
Montmartre
Eighteenth Arrondissement,
Revolutionary Sentinel of
(organization), 183
Elementary Education, Society for, 51
Elys6e-Montmartre, 123
Empire, Second, 34, 53, 54, 56, 57. See
also Bonaparte
Encyclopidie enfantine, by Louise Michel in
Journal d’education, 202, 203
England, 148, 194, 199. See also London,
England
Enjolras (pseudonym of Louise Michel),
51, 202
Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 159
Esquiros, Adele, 45, 53, 57, 202
Etendard, L’, 202
Eudes, Emile, xiv, 56
Eudes, Mme. See Louvet, Victorine
Evolutionary socialists. See Possibilist
socialists
Excommunie, L’, (periodical), 202
Fabreguettes (prosecutor, Trial of the
Sixty-eight Anarchists), 156
“Farewell, my dreaming retreat in the
manor,” poem by Louise Michel, text,
23
Favre, Jules, 50
Fayet (Rector, departmental academy,
Haute-Marne), 36, 128
Feltereau (of Villeneuve), 195
Feminism, xv, 20, 39, 52, 58, 59, 60, 64,
67, 73, 83, 122, 124, 130; Chapter 18,
“Women’s Rights,” 139-42; 148, 172,
173, 177, 191. See also Prostitution
Femme a travers les ages, La, by Louise
Michel, 202
Ferrat (Communard), 76
Ferre, Mme (mother of Marie and
Th^ophile), 74-75
Ferre, Marie, xiv, xvi, 74-75, 76, 77, 78,
104, 107, 121, 122, 129; Chapter 17,
“The Death of Marie Ferr£,” 135-38;
153, 182, 185, 195; Louise Michel’s
poem on, text of, 137-38
Ferr6, Marie, Association (Lyon), 136
Ferre, Theophile, xvi, 9, 61, 74-77, 79,
84, 86, 135, 136, 137, 178, 185, 195
Figaro, Le, 121
Flags: black, of anarchy or of
demonstrations, 161, 162, 193, 194;
red, of revolution, 57, 62, 65, 90, 112,
168, 183, 184, 185, 186, 193, 194, 195
212
Index
Fleurville, de (inspector of Montmartre
schools), 106-07
Florentin (police chief, Eighteenth
Arrondissement), 184
Flourens, Gustave, 76
Forqat, Le (Lille), 202
Forty-third bastion. See Thirty-seventh
bastion
Fountain of the Ladies. See Three
Washerwomen, legend of
Foutriquet (“Little Squirt”). See Thiers,
Adolphe
Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), 23;
Chapter 8, “The Siege of Paris,” 56-62,
63
Free School, 34
Freemasons, 146^47
Gallifet, General Gaston Gabriel Auguste
de, 69, 123, 126, 167
Gambetta, Leon, 184
Garde republicaine, 184
Gaulet, Major, 74
Gaulois, Le, 127
Gauthier (at Amiens), 130
Gauthier de la Richerie, Governor of
New Caledonia, 95, 97, 98
Gautier, Emile, xiv, 132, 136, 154; author
of “Manifesto of the Anarchists,”
quoted, 154-56
Gaveau, Major, 74, 79, 195
General strike, the, 129, 199
Gerard, 124
German (and Germany), 178, 191, 194.
See also Franco-Prussian War
Ghent, Belgium, 144
Ghi, Elisabeth de, 195
Ghost-in-Flames, legend of, 11, 25, 26
Gourget (co-defendant, 1883), 170
Government of National Defense, xiv, 56,
58, 60, 61
Grafford Hall, Paris, 124, 152
Granger, 183
Grevin Museum, 152
Grousset (Communard), 76
Guanches, 92
Guesde, Jules, ix, 150, 198
Guetr£, Jean. See Tynaire, Mme
Guibert, Capt. de, 74
Hamet (of Amiens), 130
Hardouin, Mme Celeste, 73
Harmodius of Athens, 54
Haussman, Maitre, 81, 87
Haute-Marne, xvi, 23, 24, 25; legends
and history of, 9-11, 17, 32; patois of,
poem in, 17. See also Audeloncourt;
Chaumont; Ecr£gne(s); Vroncourt;
Milli£res
Hautefeuille, rue, Paris (site of center for
education), 47, 48, 50, 51, 52
Haute-Marne, Prefect of, 36, 57
Hautes Bruyeres, attack at, 66
Henry, Lucien, 120
Henry, Mme (Mme Rastoul), 100, 101,
120
Hemani, by Victor Hugo, 19
“He whom she loved,” folksong, text, 16
Holland, 146
Houdon, rue de, school on, 46
Hughes, Clovis, 136
Hugo, Victor, xi, 9, 19, 20, 36, 52, 54,
172, 173, 191, 192, 193; Burgraves,
drama, 19; Hemani, drama, 19;
“Harmodius,” poem, quoted from, 54;
“Louise Michel,” poem published as
“Viro Major” (“More than a Man”),
quoted from, xi; “To the People,”
poem, quoted from, 173, text, 192
Humbert, Alphonse, 183
“Illegal Candidacy, The,” article by
Louise Michel, text, 124-25
Imperialism, 111-13, 117, 118, 130
Improvement of Working Women
Through Their Work (organization),
82
Indian Ocean, 93
“In Memory of Marie Ferr6,” poem by
Louise Michel, text, 137-38
Interior, Minister(s) of, xv, 180-81, 199
International, First, 154, 158, 199
International, Second, 199, 200
Intransigeant, L\ 119, 134, 143, 144, 147,
151, 158, 183, 186
Invalides, les, demonstration at, 1883, xv;
Chapter 21, “The Trial of 1883,”
158-71
Issy, fort of, 65, 84
Jacobins, 149
Jacqueline, Mme (painter), 179
Jaundice, plant, 98
Jeunesse, La (periodical), 52
Joffrin, 122, 183
John Helder (ship), 120
Index
213
Jourde (Communard), 76
Journal de la Jeunesse, 202
Kanaka, xv, 96, 111-14, 116-18, 140;
Kanakan Rebellion, 1878, xiv, 111-14;
Kanakan war chant, “The Takata,”
translated into French by Louise
Michel, text, 113-14. See also Andia the
Takala; Atai'; Daoumi; Naina; Segou
Keva, Mme (publisher), 203
Kropotkin, Prince Peter, ix, xiii, xiv, 154,
157, 186, 200
Labbat, Warrant Officer, 74
Lacour (deportee), 96
Lafargue, Paul, 198
Lagny, France, 8, 31, 123
Laguerre, Maitre, 167
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 9
Lambeth (district of London), 148
Lamennais, F£licit6 Robert de, ix, 9
Langlais. See Ghi, Elisabeth de
Langlois (deportee), 99
Laumont of Bourmont (physician), called
Big Laumont, 6, 20
Laumont of Ozidres (schoolteacher),
called Little Laumont, 6
La Villette, Nineteenth Arrondissement,
Paris, 82
“Lay of the Troubadour,” from The
Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath, by Louise
Michel, text, 42
League of Women, 60
Lecomte, General, 64, 82, 84, 85
“Legend of the Oak, The,” poem by
Louise Michel, text, 43-44
Legendary Haute-Mame, by Louise Michel,
xvi; quoted from, 9-11
Legende du barde, La, by Louise Michel,
202
Legendes canaques, by Louise Michel, 202,
203
Legends and history, x, xii, 16, 17, 26,
44, 45, 50, 146, 196; at Ecrdgnes,
25-26; Diableries of Chaumont, 10-11;
Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath, 41;
folksongs showing, 16, 17-18;
Ghost-in-Flames, 11, 25, 26; Kanakan,
112-13, 116; of the Naglfar (ship), 91;
of the Haute-Marne, 9-11, 16, 24, 32;
of the oath of the oak tree, 32, 43; of
the Three Washerwomen, 9, 19, 26.
See also Atavism
Leger, Second Lieutenant, 74
Lemel, Nathalie (Duval), ix, 101, 102,
103, 194
L£o, Andr£, 57
L6o, Andr6, Mme, 57
Lesurques affair, 86
Levallois-Perret (suburb of Paris), 74;
cemetery of, xvi, 136, 183, 185-87, 201
L’Homme, Caroline, 46
Libre-PensSe (periodical), 183
Lille, France, 153
Lisbonne, Maxime, 159, 170
Lissagaray, Hippolyte-Prosper-Olivier,
183, 190
Literacy, rural, 6, 8, 27, 33; urban, 46
Literature au crochet, by Louise Michel,
202
Lime des morts, Le, lost manuscript by
Louise Michel, 202
Livre d’Hermann, Le, by Louise Michel,
202
Locamus (town councilor, Noumea, and
attorney), 119, 159
London, England, 121, 122, 132, 135,
149, 156, 200. See also Lambeth
London, (Kropotkin’s) Congress of, July,
1881, xiii, 132, 134
Longchamps, Julie, xiii, xv, 32, 37, 38,
39, 45
Louise, Mme, 195
“Louise Michel,” poem by Victor Hugo,
retitled “Viro Major” (“More Than a
Man”), quoted from, xi
Louise Michel Association (Lyon), 136
“Louise Michel at the Graffard Meeting
Hall” (painting by unknown artist),
152; (painting with same title by
Tynaire [sic Tinayre]), 153
Louvet, Victorine (Mme Eudes), xii, xiv,
43, 44
Lucien, Henri, 110
Lucipia, 183
Lullier (Communard), 76
Lyon, France, 154, 156
Lyon, France, Commune of, 65
“Lyon, Manifesto of,” 1883. See
“Anarchists, Manifesto of the”
Lyon, Trial of the Sixty-eight Anarchists
at, 1883. See Anarchists, Trial of the
Sixty-eight
MacMahon, Marshal Patrice de, 123
Magasins pittoresques, 9
214
Index
Mahis, de. See Demahis
Mal6zieux, “P£re,” 62, 96, 97, 100, 147,
191, 192
“Manifesto of Lyon.” See “Anarchists,
Manifesto of the”
“Manifesto of the Anarchists.” See
“Anarchists, Manifesto of the”
Marchais, Josephine, 73, 78, 172
Marchand, Maitre, 75
Maret, Henri, 183
Mareuil, Eugene, 160, 161, 162, 163,
165, 170
Marie Ferr6 Association (Lyon), 136
Mariguet (member of court-martial
board), 74
Marseille, France, 200; Commune of, 65
Marseillaise, 30, 34-35, 56, 122
Marxism, ix, 199, 200
Mas (of Anvers), 147
Masons. See Freemasons
“Me, I am the white dove,” poem by
Louise Michel, fragment quoted, 53
Memoires d’Hanna la nihiliste, by Louise
Michel, 202
Memoirs of Louise Michel, The Red Virgin,
xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, 1, 18, 22, 74; editors’
system for reorganization of, xvii-xviii,
Appendix I; second volume of, never
written, xviii; smuggled from prison, 2;
sources used in, xvi-xvii, 2, 7, 76-77,
89, 122, 152
Meprisees, Les, by Jean Guetr6, Mme
Tynaire [sic Tinayre], 203
Merlin, Colonel, 74, 195
Meurice, Mme Paul, 59, 61
Meusy, 158, 167
Michel (a schoolteacher not related to
Louise Michel), 12-13
Michel, Louis (pseudonym of Louise
Michel), 51, 202
Michel, Louise
—described, xi-xii, 5, 11, 21, 38, 52, 62,
81, 88, 144, 153, 179, 197, 200
—life (chronologically): born illegitimate,
29 May 1830, vii, 84, 188; begins
school at Vroncourt, 11; has suitors,
20-21; inherits land, 23; meets Victor
Hugo, 36; receives teacher training, 31;
teaches at Audeloncourt, xiii, 32, 34;
teaches at Paris, xiii; tries to start
schools in Audeloncourt and Clefmont,
but fails, xiii; joins with Julie
Longchamps in Milli6res, 37; goes to
Paris, xiii, 37; becomes schoolmistress
at Mme Vollier’s, 38; gets partnership
in school, rue du Chateau d’Eau, 39;
buys day school in Montmartre, 45;
begins studies for baccalaureate, 47;
unites school with Mile Poulin’s on rue
Houdon, 46; first arrest, 57; presides
over Women’s Vigilance Committee,
58; responsible for schoolchildren,
xii-xiii; second arrest, 60-61;
Demonstration of 22 Jan. 1871, 61-62;
school on rue Oudot, 83; climbs Butte
of Montmartre 18 March 1871, 64;
member, National Guard, xiv;
President, Club of the Revolution, 83;
surrenders, 69; confined, Bastion 37
[sec 43], 69; moved to Satory, 70;
moved to Chantiers prison, Versailles,
71; moved to Versailles reformatory,
73; moved to Arras, 78; trial, 81-88;
sentenced on 16 Dec. 1871 to
deportation to a fortified place, 87;
moved to Auberive prison, 89; sails to
New Caledonia on Virginie, xiv, 90;
converted to anarchism, ix; lands at
Numbo, 96; moved to the Bay of the
West, 103; involved in Kanakan
Rebellion, xiv, 112; goes to Noumea,
1879, and teaches, 114; Amnesty of
1880, 120; sails to Europe via Sydney,
120-21; arrives Paris, 9 Nov. 1880,
122; first speech after return, 123-24;
refuses to testify to Chamber of
Deputies, 126; London Conference,
143; candidate, Chamber of Deputies,
124; writes for La Revolution sociale,
131-33; arrested after Blanqui
demonstration, 1882, tried, convicted,
134-35; death of Marie Ferr6, 23-24
Feb. 1882, 135; travels and speeches in
France and abroad, 143-54; attends
Trial of the Sixty-eight Anarchists, Jan.
1883, Lyon, 154—56; accepts “Manifesto
of the Anarchists,” ix, 160;
Demonstration at Les Invalides, 9
March 1883, 158; tried, 160-70;
convicted, 170; Centrale Prison,
Clermont, 172; transferred to
Saint-Lazare prison, Dec. 1884, xv,
181; mother dies 3 Jan. 1885, 182;
pardoned, Jan. 1886, 198; arrested,
convicted, and pardoned, summer
1886, 198; attempt to assassinate her,
Index
215
Michel, Louise, continued
198; arrested 1890, 199; goes to
England, 199; dies, Marseille, 9 Jan.
1905, 200
—and feminism, xv, 20, 39, 52, 58, 59,
60, 67, 83, 122, 125, 130, Chapter 18,
“Women’s Rights,” 139-42, 148, 173,
191
—finances of, 23, 27, 31, 38, 39, 40, 45,
106, 127-28, 143, 147, 153, 199-200
—and music, 6, 19, 20, 37, 40-42, 48, 51,
83, 93, 96, 111-12, 118
—opinions on various subjects not
indexed otherwise (alphabetically):
antisemitism, 200; art, 30; battle, love
of, 66; books, 31, 32, 40; capital
punishment, 25, 27; children, 25;
courts and legal codes, 83, 86;
discipline, 33; freedom, 190; heroism,
65, 66, 139; history, x, 5, 16, 17, 18,
20, 51; honor, 166; justice, 168, 182;
marriage, 16, 20-21, 39, 44, 139;
mental institutions, 191, 199; merit, 13;
militarism, 200; nationalism, 168, 169,
173; politics, 52; prescience, 22, 91;
racism, xvi; religion, xiii, 8, 9, 12, 19,
27, 28, 31, 35, 42, 83, 86, 135;
revenge, 26, 142; scholars, 14, 105;
science, x, 29, 98, 118, 141, 149;
slanders, 119; suffrage, 125, 129, 130;
treason, 112
—and prostitution, 49, 121, 141, 142,
173-77
—and revolution: general, 1, 14, 28, 42,
48, 52, 54, 55, 59, 60, 64, 128-29, 130,
133-34, 139; origins of her
revolutionary feeling, 5, 9, 16, 18, 24,
25, 28; revolutionary theory, ix-xi, xv,
xvi, 9, 29, 51, 55, 122, 123, 128-29,
139, 140, 147, 155, 160, 169, 198, 203;
revolutionary acts of, x, xiv, 31, 36, 45,
54, 58, 82-85, 86, 128, 151, 163;
revolutionary dreams of, 30, 54, 71,
128, 131, 171, 193, 196, 197
—as a teacher: in Haute-Marne, xiii, 34,
35, 47; in Paris, 51, 83; in Noumea,
34-35, 114, 116-19; education and
training of, 31-32, 47, 51; of Kanakas,
xv, 114, 116-19; methods and theories
of, 14, 20, 51, 117-18; pupils of, xiii,
xv, 34, 38, 40, 48, 88, 108-09; personal
satisfaction of, 40. See also Education
—trials and arrests of: gallows speeches,
xii, 18; arrests (1870), 57, 60; Trial of
1871, xii, xiv, 1, 38, 80, 158, 160; Trial
of 1871, transcript of, 81-87; Trial of
1871, observations upon, 87-88;
Second Trial (1882), xv, 134, 161;
Trial of 1883, ix, 59, 159-60, 179;
Trial of 1883, transcript of, 160-70;
Trial of 1883, observations upon,
170-71; Trial of 1886, 198; arrest
(1890), 199
—writing of, xiii, xvi, xvii, 4, 17, 36, 40,
52, 198; in collaboration with others,
53, 128, 202-03; under pseudonyms,
51, 202
—writings of, mentioned or quoted in
text (alphabetically): “As my first toys,”
poem, text, 91; “The Avengers,” song,
83; Le Bagne, lost manuscript, 172-73,
202; “Ballad of the Skeleton,” poem,
text, 41; Le Batard imperial, with Grippa
de Winter, 202; “The Black Bird of
the Fallow Field,” poem, text, 18; “The
Black Marseillaise,” poem with
Vermorel, quoted from, 53;
[“Candidacy”], article, text, 125-26; La
Conscience, lost manuscript, 202; Contes
d’enfants, 106; Le Coq rouge, drama,
202; “Criminals and Whores,” poem,
text, 49; Diableries de Chaumont, 202. See
also Legendary Haute-Mame. Dream of the
Witches' Sabbath, opera, 40-42;
Encyclopedic enfantine, 202, 203;
“Farewell, my dreaming retreat in the
manor,” poem, text, 23; La Femme a
travers les ages, 202; “In Memory of
Marie Ferr£,” poem, text, 137-38;
“The Illegal Candidacy,” article, text,
124-25; “Lay of the Troubadour,”
poem, text, 41; “The Legend of the
Oak,” poem, text, 43-44; Legendary
Haute-Mame, xvi, quoted from, 9-10;
La Legende du barde, 202; Legendes
canaques, 202, 203; Litterature au crochet,
202; Le Livre des morts, lost manuscript,
202 ; Le Livre d’Hermann, 202;
[“Manifesto”], text, 82-83; “Me, I am
the white dove,” quoted from, 53;
Memoires d’Hanna la nihiliste, 202; La
Misere, with Mme Tynaire [sic Tinayre],
202; Nadine, drama, with Grippa de
Winter, 202; Naughty Deeds of Helen, 6,
11; Oceaniennes, 202; [“Piano with
bows”], article, 51, 202; “Silence the
216
Index
Michel, Louise, continued
Villain,” article, text, 132-33; “Soar
high in brilliant whiteness, birds,”
poem, text, 93; “The Strike of the
Conscripts,” article, text, 128-29; “The
Takata,” translated Kanakan war chant,
text, 113-14; “To M. Andrieux.” See
“Silence the Villain.” Universal History,
20; Vroncourt, quoted from, 9; “The
Voyage,” poem, text, 15; The Wisdom of
a Madman, 50-51, 202. See also
Appendix II, 207
Michel, Louise, Association (Lyon), 136
Michel, Louise, extended family of, 5, 6,
8, 15, 18, 19, 31, 32, 33, 38, 88, 90,
183
Michel, Louise, Memoirs of. See Memoirs of
Louise Michel
Michel, Marguerite (maternal
grandmother of Louise Michel), 5, 23,
44, 46, 188
Michel, Marie Anne, also Marianne, also
Myriam (mother of Louise Michel):
described, 5, 187-88; emotional life of
Louise Michel connected to, xvi, 89,
115, 138, 195, 197; life of
(chronologically): childhood, 188; gives
birth to Louise, viii, 188; guardianship
over Louise, 31; accompanies Louise to
Lagny, 1851, 31; vacation of 1856, 44;
stays in Haute-Marne when Louise
goes to Paris, 38; sends Louise money,
39; visits Louise, 40; sells land to
finance school, 45; moves to
Montmartre after death of Marguerite
Michel, 23, 46; lives with Louise,
53-54; period of Commune, 64, 66,
67; government threatens to shoot, 69;
visits Louise at Chantiers prison, 71;
lives near Auberive prison, visits
Louise, 89; lives in Paris during
Louise’s exile, 90; writes letters to
Louise in New Caledonia, 104, 106,
107; health declines, 107, 120; after
return, 121-22, 127, 128, 129, 134,
153; threats against, 167; forgery sent
to, 11; Chapter 23, “My Mother’s
Death,” 179-89 (dies 3 January 1885,
xv, 182; funeral described, 182-87);
not revolutionary, 115
Milliere, de (revolutionary), 159
Millieres, Haute-Marne, school at, xiii, 37
Minck (or Mink), Paule, 60, 65, 124
Miot (Republican), 54
Misire, La, by Mme Tynaire [sic Tinayre]
and Louise Michel, 202
Moi'se, Charles, 183
Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 5, 21,
139
Montmartre (Paris), viii, 38, 45, 58, 61,
63, 64, 84, 136, 182, 184
Montmartre, Butte de, 63, 67, 82
Montmartre, National Guard, battalions
of, 61
Montmartre Vigilance Committee (men’s),
Chaussee Clignancourt, 58; (women’s),
rue de la Chapelle, xii, 58; work of,
58-59, 136
Montretout, battle at (19 Jan. 1871), 61
Morceau, Armand, 147
Moreau (alias Gareau), 170
“More Than a Man” (“Viro Major”), by
Victor Hugo, quoted from, xi
Morphy, 126
Moulin de Pierre, fighting at, 66
Moulineaux, fighting at, 84
Muette, Chateau de la, 70
Murget (or Murger), grave of, 67
Muriot (deportee), 110
Musees des families, 9
Music, 6, 20; Arab, 96; Danel’s notation
for, 48; Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath,
The, opera by Louise Michel, 40-42;
Jewish, 42; Kanakan, 96, 112, 118;
methods of instruction in, 118; of
Brittany, 90, 93; by piano with bows,
51, 202; Robert the Devil, opera
performed in New Caledonia, 111-12;
scoring in, 41-42
Nadine, drama by Louise Michel and
Grippa de Winter, 202
Naglfar (legendary ship), 91
Naina (Kanakan), 112
Napoleon III. See Bonaparte
Narbonne, France, Commune of, 65
National Guard, xiv, 60, 61, 63, 64, 75,
81, 82, 86, 167
Naughty Deeds of Helen, The, by Louise
Michel, 6, 11
Ndie Bay, New Caledonia, 110
Nemours, Duke de, 123
Netherlands. See Holland
New Caledonia, viii; Chapter 13,
“Numbo, New Caledonia,” 95-103;
Chapter 14, “The Bay of the West,”
Index
217
104-14; Chapter 15, “Noumea and the
Return,” 115-18; 181, 192. See also
Aleyron; Cyclones; Ducos Peninsula;
Gauthier de la Richerie; Kanakas; Nou
Island; Noumea; Numbo; Ribourt,
Admiral; Rochefort; West, Bay of;
Western Forest
Newspapers, 63, 75, 121, 147-48. See also
newspapers under titles
Nihilists, 122, 124, 178
Noir, Victor, 82, 84, 186
Northern Forest, Ducos Peninsula, New
Caledonia, 100
Nou Island, New Caledonia, 107, 109,
110, 111, 114, 152, 183
Noumea, New Caledonia, xv, 35, 95, 100,
114; Chapter 15, “Noumea and the
Return,” 115-20
Noumea, Board of Municipal Public
Instruction, 119
Noumea, Journal de, 100
Nourny (deportee), 100
Numbo, New Caledonia, xiv; Chapter 13,
“Numbo, New Caledonia,” 95-103;
107, 110
Oak tree, oath of, 32, 43-44
Oceana, jade axe of, 52
Oceanic tribes, Aryanism in, 116
Oceaniennes, by Louise Michel, 202
Oddin, 187
Opportunists (properly “Opportunist
Republicans,” a political faction) and
Opportunism, 123, 125, 128, 129, 149,
187, 198
Oppression and exploitation: of animals,
xvi, 24-25, 29; by Bonaparte and
under Second Empire, 54, 186; in
Bible, 27; not eased by charity, 27; of
children, 47; at night in city, 49; in
dramas, 18; of Greeks, 27; of Kanakas,
111; of peasants, 25, 26, 28; of people,
13, 196; of the poor, 27; when power
not shared, 131; of powerless, xv; of
prisoners, 98-99; of prostitutes, 173;
through rent, 39, 40; will bring
revolution, 29, 171, 193; by rich, 155;
by Rome, 27; in Russia, 28; symbolized
by spider, 106; in statecraft, 65; of
women, 125, 139^2, 153-54, 176-77;
of workers, 125. See also Animals,
cruelty toward; Bonaparte; Feminism;
Kanaka; Prisons; Prostitutes;
Revolution; Social Revolution
Orleanists, 163
Orleans, House of, 123, 168
Otterbein (of Brussels), 147
Oudot, rue, school on, 83
Pain, Olivier, 96, 122
Pall Mall Gazette, 148
Palmas, Las, Grand Canary Island, 91
Papavoine, Eulalie, 73, 172
Papayas, vaccination of, xii, 97
Pardons, Board of, 76, 87
Parent (Communard), 76
Paris: attraction of, 35, 37; condemns
school, 45; Hotel de Ville of, 57, 60,
61, 62; Siege of, xiv, 35, Chapter 8,
“The Siege of Paris,” 56-62. See also
Commune of Paris
Paris, Count and Countess of, 123
Parliamentarianism, 65, 187, 196
Paroles d’un croyant, by F^licitb Robert de
Lamennais, 9
Passedouet (deportee), 110-11
Peasants, 24, 26, 27, 28
Pelletan, Eugene, 50
Penand, Mme (schoolmistress, New
Caledonia), 35
Pepiniere Barracks, Le, Paris, 184
P6re Lachaise Cemetery (properly
Cimetidre de l’Est), 151, 182
Perle, de la, Meeting Hall, 152
Perronet barricade, Neuilly, 28, 66, 96
Perusset (deportee), 107-08, 115
Pichon, S., 183
Place, Henry, 99, 202
Place, Th^ophile (infant), 99, 110
Plebiscite, May 1870, 56
Poe, Edgar Allan, 22, 91
Poirier (Communard), 194
Police, xii, 51, 77, 85, 145, 146, 150, 164,
165, 182, 184. See also Andrieux, Louis
Popular Front, 201
“Possibilist” Socialists, 198, 199, 200
Pottery (police spy), 184
Pouget, Jean-Joseph-Emile, ix, 160-65,
167, 170
Poulin, Malvina, 46, 47, 51, 59, 67
Power, nature of, x, 49, 50, 52, 71, 131,
155, 169
Prisons (and prisoners), xiv-xv, 2, 28-29,
71, 73, 88, 95, 96-97, 98, 102, 126,
Chapter 22, “Prison,” 172-78, 193. See
also Arras; Auberive prison; Bagne, Le;
218
Index
Centrale Prison; Chantiers Prison;
Saint-Lazare prison; Satory, detention
area at; Thirty-seventh Bastion;
Versailles, reformatory of
Pritzbuer, Captain de, 100
Progrfo musical, Le, 51, 202
Prostitution, 39, 49, 59, 121, 125, 129,
141-42, 173-78
Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, ix, 110-11,
142, 167
Provins (deportee), 97
Provisional Government. See Government
of National Defense
Prussia. See Franco-Prussian War
Publishers, 40, 128
Puech (merchant, Noumea), 119
Pyat, F61ix, 124
Quesnay de Beaurepaire, Avocat-g6n£ral,
167
Racism, xvi
Radical, Le, 183
Radical des Alpes, Le, 183
Raison, La, 202
Ramd*, Judge, 160
Ranvier (child), 71
Rastoul (Communard), 76
Rastoul, Mme. See Henry, Mme
Ravanchol (anarchist), 200
Razoua, Eug&ne, 61
Reg£re (Communard), 76
Reinsdorff (German), 194
Religion, 8, 12, 42, 145
Relingue’s house of prostitution, 175
Republic (and Republicans), 31, 35, 36,
45, 50, 56, 57, 63, 64, 73, 75, 123, 168.
See also Commune of Paris;
Opportunists; Revolution
Republicans, Fraternal Association of, of
the Basses-Alpes, Vaucluse, and Var,
183
Retif(fe), Elisabeth, 73, 78, 172, 195
Retz, Gilles de, 29
Revolution (and Revolutionaries), ix, 1, 9,
24, 28, 39, 42, 46, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58,
59, 63, 64, 65, 69, 86, 125, 128, 130,
131, 133, 136, 138, 147, 148, 151, 158,
160, 165, 166, 170, 193, 197
Revolution, Club of, 83
Revolutionary Sentinel of the Eighteenth
Arrondissement (organization), 183
Revolution sociale, La, xiv, 131, 132, 133,
143, 202. See also Andrieux, Louis
Revue scientifique , 164
Ribourt, Admiral, 99, 101, 126
Richerie, de la. See Gauthier de la
Richerie, Governor of New Caledonia
Rigault, Raoul, 159
Rights of Man, Club of, Vaucluse, 183
Rights of Women (organization), rue
Th6venot, 59
Robert the Devil (opera), 111
Roche, Ernest, 185
Rochefort (city), 90
Rochefort, Henri, xvi, 57, 92, 95, 96, 98,
114, 116, 122, 136-37, 143, 152, 167,
179, 183, 184, 198, 199-200
Rosiers, rue de, 64, 82
Rossel, Louis-Nathaniel, 77, 137
Rossel, Mile, 137
Rouillon, 167
Royer, Mme (educator at Chaumont), 31
Russia (and Russian Revolutionaries), 27,
28, 52, 58, 59, 178, 191, 194, 200
Russo-Japanese War, 200
Sagesse d’un fou. See Wisdom of a Madman,
The
Saint Antoine, faubourg, Paris, 45, 63
Saint-Just, Louis de, 131
Saint-Lazare prison, xv, 2, 11, 173, 179,
181, 191
Sand, George, 19
Santa Catarina, Brazil, 92
Sapia (demonstrator), 62
Satory, detention area at, 70-71, 77, 78,
79, 80, 86, 87, 124, 151, 152, 172, 193,
194
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Prince and Princess
of, 123
Schmi(d)t, Marie, 101, 195
Second Empire. See Empire, Second;
Bonaparte
Sedan, Battle of, 54, 56, 57, 168, 169,
192, 193
Segou (Kanakan traitor), 113
Seine District, Superior Court of, 160-70
Senart, Captain, 74
Serr(e)aux (pseudonym of Egide
Spilleux), 131, 132, 133
Shaw, George Bernard, x
Siege of Paris. See Paris, Siege of
Sifou, New Caledonia, 96
Index
219
“Silence the Villain,” article in La
Revolution sociale by Louise Michel, text,
132
Silkworms, 105-06
Simon (acting mayor, Noumea), 118, 119
Simon, Jules, 51
Simon, Mme Jules, 59
Simond, Victor, 183
Sivry, Charles de, 42, 51
Sixth Arrondissement, Luxembourg,
Paris, 63, 165
Sixth Court-martial Board, 81-87
“Soar high in brilliant whiteness, birds,”
poem by Louise Michel, text, 93
Socialists, German, 178
Socialists, plea for unity among, 187
Socialists, “Possibilist.” See “Possibilist”
Socialists
Social Revolution, x, xi, xv, 82, 85, 122,
123, 124, 151, 165, 184, 199, 200
Soldiers, 61, 70, 73, 74, 75, 128-29, 184.
See also Commune of Paris;
Franco-Prussian War; Paris, Siege of
“Song of the Shirt, The,” by Thomas
Hood, 149
Stenography, 47
Strasbourg, France, 57, 58
Strasbourg, Statue of Our Lady of
(Paris), 57
“Strike of the Conscripts, The,” article by
Louise Michel, text, 128-29
Strike(s), 128, 150, 153-54. See also
General strike
Su^tens, L^ontine, 172
Suez, Isthmus of, 121
Suffrage, 129, 130, 194
Susini, 198
Sydney, Australia, 100, 101, 108, 115,
120
“Takata, The,” Kanakan war chant of
Andia, translated by Louise Michel,
text, 113-14
Tenth Arrondissement, Entrepdt, Paris,
82
Terrorism, x, 200
Th<§leni, 183
Thevenot, rue, school on, 51
Thierry (co-defendant, 1883), 170
Thiers, Adolphe, x, 84, 86, 123, 143;
statue of, 133
Third Military Court-martial, 74-76
Thirty-seventh [«c] Bastion, properly the
Forty-third, 69
Thomas, Clement, General, 64, 82, 84,
85
Thomas, Edith, xv, xvi
Three Washerwomen, legend of, 9, 19,
26
Tiffault, Eugenie, 110
Tinayre. See Tynaire, Mme
Titard, 183
“To M. Andrieux,” original title of
“Silence the Villain,” article by Louise
Michel, text, 132-33
“To My Neighbor, Starboard Aft,” poem
by Henri Rochefort, cited, 92
“To the People,” poem by Victor Hugo:
cited, 173; text, 192
“To the People’s Army” (pamphlet),
163-64
Tomb, name of Demahis chateau,
Vroncourt, 4, 5, 7, 15, 18, 22, 23
Tortelier, Joseph, 187
Tour Saint Jacques, square of, 61
Transnonain, 124
Trials. See Michel, Louise, trials of;
Anarchists, Trial of the Sixty-eight
Trinquet (Communard), 76, 124
Trochu, General Louis Jules, 56, 57, 151
Turpin, 64-65
Tynaire [sic Tinayre], Mme (pseudonym
of Jean Guetre), 202-03; son of, 128
Tyrannicide, x, 128
Union des poetes , L\ 52, 202
Union of Women, Central Committee of,
82
Union of Women for the Defense of
Paris and the Care of the Wounded,
82
Universal History, by Louise Michel, 19, 20
Urbain, Raoul, 76
Usury, 26
Vaccination, xii, 98
Vaillant, Edouard, 183
Vallfcs, Jules, 84, 159, 193
Valley of the Sorcerers, legend of, 26
Var, France, 183
Varlet, 147
Vaucluse, France, 183
Vaughan, Ernest, 158, 167, 183
Verdet, Marie, 9, 10, 11, 19, 26
220
Index
Verdure (Communard), 76, 109-10
Verlaine, Paul, xi, 198
Verlet, 99
Vermorel, 53, 159
Versailles, Demonstration at, September
1882, 151
Versailles, reformatory of, 73
Versailles Government, 63, 64, 65, 76, 89
Viard, 147
Victims of the War, Society for, 59, 60,
61
Vigilance, Committees of, 60, 63, 82. See
also Montmartre Vigilance Committees
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 23, 27
Virginie (ship), ix, xiv, 13-14, 90, 91, 93,
95
“Viro Major,” by Victor Hugo, quoted
from, xi
Vitellius, 127
Vollier, Mme, 32, 38, 39, 40, 45-^6
Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet), 5, 20
Voltaire, Le, 144
Vosges, Place des, 63
“Voyage, The,” poem by Louise Michel,
text, 15
Vroncourt, by Louise Michel, quoted from,
9
Vroncourt, Haute-Marne, viii, 4, 9, 12,
43
Wagram, Parc, 63
West, Bay of the, xiv, 98, 101, 103;
Chapter 14, “The Bay of the West,”
104-14
Western Forest, New Caledonia, 95,
104-05, 106
Winter, Grippa de (pseudonym of Jean
Winter), xvii, 202
Wisdom of a Madman, The, manuscript by
Louise Michel, 50-51, 202
Wolowski (deportee), 112
Women. See Feminism
Women, League of, 60
Workers’ Union of Amiens, 129, 130
Workhouses, 148
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