"It is true that women love revolt. We are no more worthy than men, but power has not yet corrupted us." ---- Louise Michel was born in 1830 and died in 1905. She was a teacher, writer, Communard, and French revolutionary who became an anarchist, by her own admission, during her forced exile in New Caledonia: "Power is cursed, and that is why I am an anarchist." A Communard, because in that Paris that in 1871 witnessed the realization of the first great experiment in contemporary self-government, the Commune, Michel played a leading role that would ultimately cost her a trial, a conviction, and then a seven-year exile.
Michel arrived in Paris in 1856, after an early youth spent in the provinces, educated by her Catholic aunt and her liberal Enlightenment grandparents, studying as a governess, and developing an increasingly independent mind. In Paris, she found a city in crisis, yet still grappling with the defeat of Sedan and the subsequent transition-or rather, return-from Empire to Republic. After further historical and political events and upheavals, after some hopes had proven to be illusions, the experience of libertarian-socialist self-management that was the Commune materialized. In this context, Michel was in the company of many other women, equally active and militant, often overshadowed by the male power of the Commune itself: "Women didn't ask themselves if something was impossible; it was enough that it was useful, and they managed to carry it through."
Action as a priority, then. Action as a political practice. But also the ability to look beyond the horizon of the possible. Michel writes of herself: "My existence is composed of two very distinct parts. They form a complete contrast: the first, all dream and study, the second, full of events, as if the aspirations of the period of calm had come to life in the period of struggle." Upon closer inspection, her struggle also contains her dream.
Louise Michel was an anti-speciesist anarchist whom today we would call intersectional, and to give a measure of the magnitude of her dream and her struggle, I reproduce a conversation with Pietro Gori, transcribed by Gori himself in the preface to The Commune, Michel's celebrated work.
The two met for the first time at a meeting of political dissidents held in London in the winter of 1894-1895. Gori had arrived at that meeting, accompanied by Kropotkin and others, while Michel was speaking. In the aforementioned preface, Gori describes Michel's appearance (...) and temperament in detail: "I have never forgotten her attitude that evening, nor that apparent contradiction between her rebellious pride and her nun's piety[...], an apparent contradiction,[...]since every outburst of revolt in her was nothing but an exacerbation of her spirit of universal charity, offended by an injustice she had witnessed.[...]She hated only out of too much love."
A few pages later, after recounting some anecdotes from everyday life in which Michel defends non-human animals from the bullying of some humans, Gori brings the confrontation between himself and Michel back to the theme of the difference (which becomes abuse) between species.
"Ah, inferior beings, that's the pretext for all domination!... Inferior why? Why did others, more violent or more cunning, succeed in subjugating or killing them?... Or aren't those who build their own happiness on the unhappiness of others by devouring, exploiting, enslaving, morally inferior?... You will answer me with the harsh law of selection, with the triumph of the fittest, with the empire of the strongest. But I know another law, which is not of oppression or death-but of freedom and life: that of solidarity... You delight in spit-roasted birds, and I prefer the trill of the goldfinch, singing there, on that tree, to all the orations of you lawyers... Different, yes, inferior, no..."
"But between humanity and other zoological species..." I ventured.[Gori]
"Well[...]it is precisely because humanity wanted to trample on other beings, which you call inferior, that it found itself trained to rage and tear itself apart. The inferior races, the inferior classes, the inferior sex, which you mockingly call gentile-this is the same classification transferred from the animal realm to the human one... But struggle, you will say, was the condition of all progress... Yes, but I don't love struggle for struggle's sake; I only want it so that from it, instead of antagonism, the brotherhood of all beings may arise..."
There it is, intersectionality.
If.
https://umanitanova.org/il-potere-non-ci-ha-ancora-corrotte-louse-michel-una-filosofa-al-mese/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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