Louise Michel

• Illustration — "A new feature, in umbrellas", satirizing Michel's political views Michel once joked, "We love to have agents provocateurs in the party, because they always propose the most revolutionary motions." Michel's political ideas evolved throughout her life. Once a teacher with progressive ideals, her activism saw her embrace revolutionary socialism, but the experience of a suppressed revolution turned her into a radical anarchist. Her political theory progressed from peaceful reform to violent revolution, because she came to believe that contemporary society had to be completely destroyed for a new egalitarian era to emerge. The many years she spent in prison and in the French penal colony New Caledonia were central to her change of heart. Michel's political theory had its roots in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which was followed by a series of monarchies. Two prevailing theories emerged. There were those who believed that the Reign of Terror that followed the revolution was proof that democracy was flawed. The ruling elites of the post-revolutionary monarchies believed that for the economy to succeed, it was necessary to control the labour market, wages and working conditions. Thus few labour reforms were enacted. In contrast, French romanticism reinterpreted the French Revolution as the tangible spirit of the French people. In the 1840s romanticism in France became politicised, because it became accepted that individual happiness could not be achieved in isolation. Romantics became preoccupied with social progress and reform. Writers embarked on a quest to realistically portray the lives of the working poor. Victor Hugo and Émile Zola emerged as key writers and political activists. Shortly after Michel was born in 1830 a short-lived revolt resulted in a constitutional monarchy being established. Louis Philippe I encouraged commercial interests and the enrichment of the upper-middle class through colonization and penal transportation, but at the same time practiced laissez-faire when the socio-economic plight of the working class was concerned. Michel first made a name for herself by publicly defending the poor and working-class women. In the 1860s she was noted as political activist for vehemently opposing the policies of Emperor Napoleon III. Michel signed a number of her published political writings with Enjolras, the name of the revolutionary in Hugo's Les Misérables. In 1865 she provocatively wrote a new Marseillaise, the call to arms during the French Revolution. In her Marseillaise, Michel called for a mass uprising of the people to defend the republic, arguing that martyrdom was preferable to defeat. This sentiment would be echoed in her subsequently published poetry, plays and novels. But unlike her contemporaries, Michel repeatedly lamented the violent treatment of children and the gory abuse of animals. Michel's political characters fought for justice, while the children and animals in her fictional works were too weak, sick and starved to resist or survive. When Emperor Napoleon III and his army were captured by the Prussians in 1870, the French Third Republic was proclaimed in Paris. But the provisional government continued the war against the Prussians and a four-month siege of Paris resulted in bleak hardship. Parisians starved and froze to death. Some managed to save themselves by eating cats, dogs and rats. The government surrendered, but Michel and other Parisians had taken up arms and organised themselves as a National Guard. When the Paris Commune was proclaimed Michel was named head of the Women's Vigilance Committee and played a key role in initiating economic and social reforms. Michel pushed through the separation of church and state, initiated educational reforms and codified rights for workers. The reforms were not carried out due to the short duration of the Commune. When Michel was tried, she demanded to be killed by firing squad and proclaimed "If you let me live, I shall never stop crying for vengeance, and I shall avenge my brothers by denouncing the murderers". The military court refused to make her a martyr. • Illustration — Louise-Michel in 1880, while in exile in New Caledonia Michel was imprisoned for two years before she was deported. While in prison she demanded to be treated just like the other prisoners and rejected efforts by her friends Hugo and Georges Clemenceau to have her sentence commuted. She considered preferential treatment a dishonour. During the four-month journey to New Caledonia Michel re-examined her belief in revolutionary socialism. She embraced anarchism and for the rest of her life rejected all forms of government. In 1896 she wrote about her change of mind: "I considered the things, events and people of the past. I thought about the behaviour of our friends of the Commune: they were scrupulous, so afraid of exceeding their authority, that they never threw their full energies into anything but the loss of their own lives. I quickly came to the conclusion that good men in power are incompetent, just as bad men are evil, and therefore it is impossible for liberty ever to be associated with any form of power whatsoever." Michel was introduced to the tenets of anarchism by a fellow prisoner Nathalie Lemel, with whom she was imprisoned in a large cage for several months. Michel became known for her selfless generosity and devotion to others. In the penal colony she lived in voluntary poverty, giving away her books, clothes and any money she acquired. Michel took up teaching again. She spent time with the indigenous Kanak people, teaching them French so that they could challenge the French authorities. Michel supported them in their revolt against the colonial power. • Illustration — An elderly Michel depicted as an animated speaker • Illustration — Louise Michel at home in France during her later years In 1875 the monarchist-dominated National Assembly passed a constitution that established a republican government with an upper and lower house of parliament. This republic was a compromise, as the National Assembly could not agree on who should be king. The brutal crackdown on the Paris Commune would influence French politics for years to come. Conservatives and moderates in the new government avoided anything that could trigger another uprising. This fear delayed the amnesty for those who had participated in the Paris Commune for years. Eventually an amnesty was granted and when Michel returned to Paris in November 1880 she was greeted by Henri Rochefort, Clemenceau, a crowd of 20,000 and the police. But she had no patience for Clemenceau's "illustration... that he should wait for parliamentarianism to bring progress". Michel soon began her career as a public speaker and found an audience all over Europe. In 1882 she staged her first anarchist play Nadine. As a public speaker Michel became skilled in advancing pragmatic arguments to attack capitalism and the authoritarian state, while holding open the possibility of a positive outcome. When she was put on trial in 1883 for leading a group of unemployed workers, she attacked shortcomings in the implementation of the French republican constitution, saying: "They keep talking to us about liberty: There is the liberty of speech with five years of prison at the end. In England, the meeting would have taken place; in France, they have not even made a legal admonition in order to let the crowd retreat, which would have left without resistance. People are dying from hunger, and they do not even have the right to say that they are dying from hunger." Michel frequently spoke on women's rights from an anarchist perspective. She not only advocated education for women, but also that marriage should be free and that men should hold no property rights over women. In the late 1880s she authored several works in which she revisited the themes of her earlier works, but also portrayed the demise of the old order and its replacement with a society of equals. Michel embarked on a journey towards a new political philosophy. The revolutionary characters in The Strike expected to die, but instead they gave life to a new age and Michel discussed the rights and responsibilities of the people who lived in the aftermath of a revolution. She staged her plays in accordance with Jean Grave's theory on audience participation. The audience was integrated through a political and artistic program of lectures, poems and songs. The audience was encouraged to react and re-enact the conflicts of the plays. In her plays The Human Microbes (1886), Crimes of the Times (1888) and The Bordello (1890) an agricultural utopia emerges from a devastated Europe. Michel's political ideals owed much to the French romanticism of Hugo and are described at length in The New Era, Last Thought, Memories of Caledonia (1887): "It is indeed time that this old world die since no one is safe any longer... We can no longer live like our Stone Age ancestors, nor as in the past century, since the series of inventions, since the discoveries of science have brought the certainty that all production will increase a hundredfold when these innovations will be used for the general good, instead of letting just a handful of vultures help themselves in order to starve the rest." Michel lived at a time when hunger was widespread among the working poor of Europe. She believed that technological progress would replace physical labour with machines. In combination with anarchist politics, she argued, this could lead to equal distribution of wealth. In 1890 she reasoned that "the attractive power of progress will demonstrate itself all the more as daily bread will be assured, and a few hours of work which will have become attractive and voluntary will be enough to produce more than what is necessary for consumption." Like other anarchists of her time she did not believe that history was a record of constant improvement, but that it could become so. However, constant economic growth was not an improvement in itself. Michel argued instead, that progress came through intellectual development, social evolution and liberation. Her vision of the future was shaped by a supreme confidence. "Science will bring forth harvests in the desert; the energy of the tempests and whirlpools will carve paths through the mountains. Undersea boats will discover lost continents. Electricity will carry ships of the air above the icy poles. The ideas of Liberty, Equality and Justice will finally burst into flame. Each individual will live his integral part within humankind as a whole. Progress being infinite, transformations will be perpetual." • Illustration — Michel's tomb at the Levallois-Perret cemetery Michel did not only bemoan the poverty in which people across Europe lived, she also advanced a detailed critique of 19th century capitalism. She lamented the deficiencies of the capitalist banking system and predicted that the concentration of capital would result in the ruin of small enterprises and the middle class. In her memoirs Michel said that the Anarchist Manifesto of Lyon (1883) precisely expressed her views. The Manifesto had been signed by Peter Kropotkin, Émile Gautier, Joseph Bernard, Pierre Martin (anarchist) and Toussaint Bordat. Kropotkin, like Jules Guesde and Émile Pouget would become close friends and associates of hers. Instead of focusing on violent revolution, as she had done in her earlier works, Michel in her later works emphasised the spontaneous uprising of the people. She came to reject terror as a means of bringing about a new era. She wrote "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". She took the view that it is best if the leaders of such a revolution would perish, so that the people would not be burdened with surviving general staff. Michel thought that "power is evil" and in her mind history was the story of free people being enslaved. In an 1882 speech she said "All revolutions have been insufficient because they have been political". Organisation was, in her mind, not necessary because the poor and exploited would rise up and, through their sheer numbers, would force the old order to shrivel up.

• Anarchie, poetry and political philosophy, La Vengeance Anarchiste, 6 March 1883 • À travers la vie, poetry, Paris, 1894. • Le Bâtard impérial, by L. Michel and J. Winter, Paris, 1883. • Le claque-dents, Paris. • La Commune, Paris, 1898. • Contes et légendes, Paris, 1884. Translated into English by Jade Maître as 'Fairy Tales and Legends' • Les Crimes de l'époque, nouvelles inédites, Paris, 1888. • Défense de Louise Michel, Bordeaux, 1883. • Grèves et révoltes ('Strikes and Revolts') in Le Droit social, Lyon, 1882. (in French) • L'Ère nouvelle, pensée dernière, souvenirs de Calédonie (prisoners' songs), Paris, 1887 • La Fille du peuple par L. Michel et A. Grippa, Paris (1883) • Le Gars Yvon, légende bretonne, Paris, 1882. • Légendes et Chants des Gestes Canaques, Paris, 1885. Translated into English by Mitch Abidor as 'Legends and Chants des Gestes' 2005. • Lectures encyclopédiques par cycles attractifs, Paris, 1888. • Ligue internationale des femmes révolutionnaires, Appel à une réunion. Signed "Louise Michel", Paris, 1882. • Le livre du jour de l'an: historiettes, contes et légendes pour les enfants, Paris, 1872. • Lueurs dans l'ombre. Plus d'idiots, plus de fous. L'âme intelligente. L'idée libre. L'esprit lucide de la terre à Dieu... Paris, 1861. • Manifeste et proclamation de Louise Michel aux citoyennes de Paris, Signed "Louise Maboul", Paris, 1883. • Mémoires, Paris, 1886 (edited and translated by Bullitt Lowry and Elizabeth Ellington Gunter as The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel, The University of Alabama Press University, 1981) • Les Méprises, grand roman de mœurs parisiennes, par Louise Michel et Jean Guêtré, Paris, 1882. Note that this is traditionally attributed to Louise Michel but in her memoirs she says that she did not contribute “a single line” to Les Méprisées, having maintained the collaboration only “to remain on good terms (with the co-author) rather than resorting to disputes.” • Les Microbes humains, Paris, 1886. (translated by Brian Stableford as The Human Microbes) • La Misère by Louise Michel, 2nd part, and Jean Guêtré 1st part, Paris, 1882. • Le Monde nouveau, Paris, 1888 (translated by Brian Stableford as The New World) • "Nous reviendrons foule sans nombre": Louise Michel à Victor Hugo, lettres de prison et du bagne (1871–1879), ed. by Virginie Berling, coll. Scènes intempestives à Grignan, ed. TriArtis, Paris 2016,. • Today or Tomorrow (Aujourd'hui ou demain), 10–17 July 1892 • Posthumous • Vol. I. Avant la Commune. Preface by Laurent Tailhade, Alfortville, 1905. • Les Paysans by Louise Michel et Émile Gautier, Paris, Incomplete. • Prise de possession, Saint-Denis, 1890. • Le Rêve (in a work by Constant Martin), Paris, 1898. • Je vous écris de ma nuit, correspondance générale, 1850-1904, edition established by Xavière Gauthier, Édition de Paris-Max Chaleil, 1999.

• Illustration — Anarchist graffiti during the demonstration of 1st May 2026 in Paris asking for Louise Michel for 2027, a reference to the 2027 French presidential election Michel was among the more influential French political figures in the second half of the 19th century. She was also one of the more powerful women political theorists of her day. Her publications on social justice for the poor and the cause of the working classes were read in France and all over Europe. When she died in 1905 she was mourned by thousands. Memorial services were held all over France and in London. Although her writings are today forgotten, her name is remembered in the names of French streets, schools and parks. Michel became a national heroine in France and was revered as the "great citizen". A cultish image of Michel emerged. Shortly before her death, when returning from her exile in London, Michel had been dubbed "the angel of petrol", "the virago of the rabble" and "queen of the scum" by the conservative French press. In turn, Charles Ferdinand Gambon compared her to Jeanne d'Arc in reference to her role in the Paris Commune. This imagery was further propagandized by Edmond Lepelletier in 1911. The image of Michel as vierge rouge (red virgin) came to be used by conservative and liberal historians alike when recounting the story of the Paris Commune. Michel is regarded as a founder of anarcha-feminism. Despite the anti-authoritarian rhetoric, early anarchist thinkers maintained cultural orthodoxy when it came to the division of domestic labour and their personal relationships with women. The founder of French anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was notorious for his sexist views. Michel, Teresa Claramunt, Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman became prominent figures in the late 19th century pan-European and American anarchist movement. With the formation of the First International anarchist sections in various European countries under the leadership of Mikhail Bakunin, anarchism became noted for not only encouraging female participation in the political movement but also for espousing the ideal of female emancipation. In 1913-1914, the anarchist cooperative Le Cinéma du Peuple chose her first name to name the main character of its first film, Les Misères de l'aiguille. This is also likely the first feminist film in history. A movie by the French filmmaker Sarah Maldoror, The Commune, Louise Michel and Us (1971), now lost, was commissioned by the city of Saint-Denis. Michel was rediscovered by French feminists in the 1970s through the works of Xavière Gauthier. Michel is the subject of Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot's graphic work, The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia (2016). In 2020, street artist Banksy was credited for sending a rescue ship in the Mediterranean Sea and naming it after Michel. Academic interest in Michel's life and political writings was prompted in the 1970s by Édith Thomas's comprehensively researched biography.