The young poet and teacher who showed signs of being a revolutionary.
---- Louise Michel was born in May 1830 in a small town calledVroncourt-la-Côte, in the French region of Champagne-Ardenne. That same
summer, the Revolution of 1830 broke out in Paris, led by moderate
liberalism, which brought Louis Philippe of Orleans to the French
throne. Her childhood was marked by a class duality, as she was the
daughter of a servant, Marie Anne Michel, and the son of a French
landowner with a liberal background. Her paternal family always paid for
her education, and she was in contact with readings of Voltaire and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau from her teenage years. She also had an interest
in poetry and literature from a young age, writing numerous poems
throughout her life.
She decided to study to be a teacher, and from the age of seventeen she
moved to Paris for periods of time. The revolutionary atmosphere in
Paris in 1848 had a significant impact on her political formation, with
convictions critical of social injustice and a tendency towards popular
unrest. Louise Michel became involved in French political circles and
was led to revolutionary positions. She believed in education as a tool
for the emancipation of the oppressed classes.
After the death of her paternal grandfather in 1850, she received part
of his inheritance and, as she refused to take the civic oath to
Napoleon III, she was excluded from public education. For this reason,
during that decade she successively opened a few free schools in various
towns in her native region, promoting the education of the sons and
daughters of the most disadvantaged families. She defended the values of
education in freedom, without authoritarianism, promoting creative
education and personal and collective responsibility. She used to teach
natural sciences and wrote short plays for her students to perform in
class. Her innovative pedagogy and opposition to any kind of punishment
brought her into conflict with the educational authorities of her time.
In 1856, she moved permanently to Paris to teach in some Parisian
schools, dedicating herself to teaching without interruption for fifteen
years. At first, she was employed by a long-serving teacher, Professor
Vollier. Later, from 1865, she opened another school in Paris, in the
Montmartre district, where she lived with Mrs. Vollier, who had already
retired by then. In 1868 she opened a new school in association with
Professor Poulin, which eventually had seventy students, but
unfortunately her partner died of tuberculosis in 1871.
Her contact with literary and political circles led her to publish some
texts and poems under the pseudonym of 'Enjolras', one of the characters
in Victor Hugo's work "Les Misérables." and joined the «Union of Poets»
in 1862. She also continued her training in the circles of republican
pedagogy in the Parisian capital and, in particular, attended the
popular education classes organised on Hautefeuille Street by some
French socialists. Louise Michel also taught drawing, literature and
geography at a vocational school attended by some contributors to the
weekly «Le Droit des Femmes» ('The Rights of Women') such as Marie
Boissonnet, André Léo and Maria Deraismes.
The teacher who defended the Paris Commune on the front line of the
barricades.
The year 1871 shook the bourgeois world with the first revolutionary
workers' government in the heart of France, a crucial milestone in
Louise Michel's life. She participated directly in this popular uprising
that challenged French authority, both as a social organiser and as an
active defender of the barricades in the face of the military siege of
the French republican government. Her involvement with the Parisian
Communalist movement led her to defend social rights for the working
class and for women, arguing that a radical transformation of the world
would also have to include a change in the role of women in society. Her
courage and determination for social justice earned her the nickname
"the Red Virgin", but the Commune was brutally crushed by the French
government in May 1871.
Even before that year, Louise Michel was an active revolutionary
advocate, and above all, a follower of the socialist republican Louis
Auguste Blanqui. At the end of 1870, she had participated in popular
demonstrations against the Franco-Prussian imperialist war, and in
January 1871, when the troops of General Trochu, military governor of
Paris and commander-in-chief of the forces for the defence of the
capital, opened fire on the crowd in front of the Paris town hall,
Louise Michel responded by firing back dressed as a National Guardsman.
During the events of March 18, 1871, which marked the beginning of the
Paris Commune, Louise Michel was already president of the Vigilance
Committee of the 18th arrondissement, and as such she led a
demonstration of women that went to the hill of Montmartre. The
Versailles government had sent troops to seize the National Guard
cannons located at that point in the city of Paris, so, according to the
direct account of those events, numerous women, including Louise Michel,
launched themselves against the Versailles troops to prevent them from
taking those cannons that would serve to defend the people of Paris.
Louise Michel had an outstanding social and political work in the scant
two months that the Paris Commune lasted, a time in which consciousness
was accelerated and revolutionary action took on such a sense that in
such a limited time frame measures of a political significance were
carried out that were profoundly unattainable except in situations of
fully revolutionary experience. Michel organised the "Club de la
Revolution" at its headquarters in the church of Saint-Bernard de la
Chapelle, which had been taken over by the revolutionaries in the
Montmartre district. Due to her oratory and ability to make political
decisions, she managed to get the mayor of the district, George
Clemenceau, to approve the creation of soup kitchens for boys and girls
in the neighbourhood, as well as the organisation of a childcare service
throughout the Parisian capital. She supported the idea of the creation
of vocational schools and secular orphanages, all with the aim of
training those who would be destined to defend the revolutionary
achievements in human and professional terms.
In May 1871, the fatal events of the "Bloody Week" took place when
troops loyal to the government of the French Third Republic attacked
Paris. According to witnesses of those events, Louise Michel fought with
rifle in hand on the barricades in different municipalities of the Paris
metropolitan area to stop the advance of the French army. She went to
fight in Clamart, Neuilly and Issy-Les-Moulineaux, working as a nurse to
treat the wounded and recruiting women to help transport medical
vehicles. She also led a group of women in the defence of the Montmartre
district, fighting until the end of the conflict on the barricades of
the cemetery in the district and in the Clignancourt neighbourhood. Many
of her companions lost their lives and, although she initially managed
to escape and hide, she gave herself up to the Versailles troops a few
days later to obtain the release of her mother, who had been arrested in
her place and threatened with being shot.
More than a thousand women Communards were arrested, and in total
fifteen thousand Communards were tried by military courts martial, with
Louise Michel being tried in December 1871. She was initially interned
in the military camp of Satory, and transferred in June along with
dozens of other Communards to the Chantiers prison, also in the
municipality of Versailles. In November of that year she saw the death
of some of her Communard friends such as Théophile Ferré, to whom she
dedicated the farewell poem "Red Carnations". She was brought before the
sixth Court Martial accused of attempting to overthrow the government
and inciting citizens to take up arms. Her statement prior to the trial
was clear and forceful with the ideas she defended:
"I do not want to defend myself. I belong entirely to the social
revolution. I declare that I accept responsibility for my
actions[...]Since, it seems, every heart that fights for freedom only
has the right to a little lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I
will not cease to cry out for vengeance and to denounce, in revenge for
my brothers, the murderers of this Commission.»
Louise Michel was accused of being a dangerous hysteric, and, unable to
ignore a gender issue in the final sentence, knowing that women were
treated differently from male Communards despite equal acts defending
the Parisian barricades, Louise Michel was finally sentenced to ten
years of exile in New Caledonia.
New Caledonia: Deportation and deepening of their anarchist ideas.
The Commune had represented the first revolution of women as a leading
subject, and a determining social action having been created unions of
women for the defense and care of the wounded, participating in
committees, debates and political decisions; and in the fight against
the army positioning themselves on the barricades. They were accused of
double treason, of their country and of their sex: the women of the
Communards were portrayed as depraved, violent and libertine, failing to
fulfil their social role as good citizens.
Louise Michel was saved from her death, but was sentenced to forced
labour in New Caledonia in the South Pacific, where she spent seven
years. Initially imprisoned since her court sentence in the Abbey of
Auberive, she was taken to exile on a ship in August 1873 and spent
twenty months in prison in New Caledonia, where she quickly established
relations with the groups fighting for political independence in the
French colony. She made good friends with other deportees such as Henri
Rochefort, a journalist sympathetic to the Commune who escaped from the
island a year later; and with Nathalie Lemel, a communard who was very
active in the First International (AIT) since 1866, and with whom she
exchanged important ideas that brought her closer to Michel even more
towards anarchism.
During her deportation, Louise Michel refused to benefit from any
favours as a woman, nor from any kind of pardon. She kept her
revolutionary spirit alive, continued to write and reflect on her
experiences, as well as on the future of the anarchist and feminist
movement. She studied works of philosophy, politics and history in
greater depth and her commitment led her to maintain correspondence with
anarchists and revolutionaries of her time, as an unconditional means of
deepening her knowledge of the most advanced ideas. She founded the
newspaper called «Petites Affiches de la Nouvellle-Calédonie», also
publishing a text entitled «Légendes et chansons de gestes canaques».
She became interested in meeting the Kanaks, a Melanesian people, from
whom she learned their language and carried out educational and
cooperative work, supporting them in an important revolt in 1878 against
French authority. However, a year later she was allowed to settle in the
city of Noumea, where she resumed her activity as a teacher of the
children of French deportees, and later in girls' schools.
Amnesty and return to France: the orator of the French working class and
of European anarchism.
In 1880 she was released in a partial amnesty to the Parisian
communards, and Louise Michel returned by boat to France again with
conviction and energy to continue her fight for the working class.
Received at the train station with great affection by the Parisian
people, she became an important orator and public figure in the European
anarchist movement. In her lectures throughout France she spoke of free
education, labour rights and the emancipation of women. She no longer
merely mentioned legal equality between men and women, but her speeches
included proposals for profound transformation of the social and gender
structures that perpetuated oppression. For Louise Michel, the
emancipation of women had to be directly related to the emancipation of
humanity that anarchism proposed. For her, women's liberation could not
be achieved without a broader social revolution that would dismantle all
forms of oppressive authority. And this could only be achieved through
the active and leading participation of women in the revolutionary struggle.
Likewise, Louise Michel continued her work as a writer and published her
work "La Miserie" in installments, which was quite successful in French
reading circles. At a conference in Paris in 1882, distancing herself
from the positions of authoritarian socialism, Louise Michel raised the
black flag, later a symbol of anarchism, saying the following words:
"No more red flags soaked in the blood of our soldiers. I will raise the
black flag, mourning our deaths and our illusions.»
However, the French newspaper «Le Drapeau Noir» ('The Black Flag')
already existed, which was an anarchist publication published until
1882; and in London in 1881 an anarchist group called «Black
International» had emerged. In fact, there is speculation as to whether
the black flag means mourning for the dead of the exploited class and
their illusions, a metaphor for the fertile land that represents the
life of the anarchist ideal, and even internationalism that rejects any
border limits.
Louise Michel actively participated in 1883 in a demonstration of
unemployed people in Paris that ended with the looting of three bakeries
and a confrontation with the Parisian police and, although she was able
to flee, a few weeks later she was arrested and sentenced to several
years in prison. In the women's prison of Saint-Lazare she defended her
fellow prostitutes who were in prison, and denounced their condition of
being exploited beyond social moralisms. She spoke out at several
rallies against the death penalty to which Clément Duval, a French
illegalist anarchist who attacked the mansion of a high society lady and
executed a policeman, was initially sentenced. In her writings she also
denounced animal cruelty and exploitation, concluding that any fight
against human exploitation would also have to address animal
exploitation. Louise Michel was pardoned from her prison three years
later in 1886, and while on probation, after a public lecture in Le
Havre, she suffered an attempt on her life, being wounded in the earlobe
and head by shots fired by a royalist. After recovering from her
convalescence from these wounds, in the 1890s she was arrested on
further occasions by the French government for inciting rebellion. On
one occasion, after refusing provisional release and destroying her cell
in response, they wanted to commit her to a psychiatric hospital, but
she ended up exiling herself for five years to London where she managed
a libertarian school. When she returned to France in 1895 she founded
the newspaper «Le Libertaire» with Sébastien Faure.
In the last decade of her life she lived between London and Paris,
giving lectures as a figure of French anarchism; and being constantly
watched by the police and even arrested on other occasions for
participating in protest actions despite her advanced age. However,
already at the beginning of the 20th century she began to suffer from
frequent pneumonia, as well as exhaustion, finally dying on January 9,
1905 in room number 11 of the Hotel Oasis in Marseille, where she had
gone to give lectures to workers in the Alpine region.
She had two burials, since she was initially buried in the Saint-Pierre
cemetery in Marseille; But, fulfilling her wish to rest in Paris next to
her mother, on January 22 of that same year her coffin arrived in Paris,
being buried again in a multitudinous demonstration in the
Levallois-Perret cemetery, where the police prefecture deployed a large
device that would harass the thousands of people gathered at a rally.
Louise Michel was not only a theorist of revolutionary organization; she
was also an active militant who participated in strikes and
demonstrations, organized support groups for working women and promoted
educational initiatives that sought to empower the working class.
That Sunday, January 22, while Paris said goodbye forever to a
revolutionary communard like Louise Michel, in St. Petersburg thousands
of workers marched on the Winter Palace and were attacked by Tsarist
troops, thus beginning the 1905 Revolution in Russia. Louise Michel
lived in a time of revolutions from the beginning to the end of her
life, and she embodied that indelible consciousness like no one else.
The red thread of our history is tied tightly to the conviction that the
exploited class will ultimately win. Let us not take a stitch without
thread, and let us continue to weave here and now.
Ángel, Liza activist.
https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/01/09/louise-michel-de-las-aulas-a-las-barricadas-parisinas/
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