La Bonne Louise – The Psychology of Louise Michel

LOUISE MICHEL (1836–1905)

Was kindness itself, knew only misery and prison.

— by the sculptor E. Derré

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I owe it to myself, at the moment when this book is about to appear, to pay here a public tribute and to offer a warm expression of thanks to my devoted friend, Michel Franssen.

His literary knowledge, his extreme erudition, his concern for every correction have been of the greatest use to me in the work presented here. Should this book achieve any success, it is to him that I would rightly attribute a good part of it, for his vigilant and selfless assistance would indeed deserve a truer name: collaboration.

E. Girault

INTRODUCTION

Three reasons prompted me to publish this book about the woman who was, for several years, my companion in struggle.

First, because Louise Michel was a character, a temperament that history imperatively demands;

second, because it is necessary to correct her reputation, which is almost entirely based on erroneous and misleading publicity;

finally, because she represents a type, a fine example of evolution.

In our age of decadence and opportunism, the life of Louise Michel is a lash across the backs of the younger generations of political men, as well as of all those who exploit the trust of the people.

Some wish to make her a symbol: that of Goodness; they are right, for she was indeed as good as one can be. But what matters above all is to see in her what she truly was, that is to say an example, a great example: that of revolutionary sincerity, eternally trampled, constantly betrayed and chained, like the Revolution itself. And then, is there not something deliberate in this exaggerated goodness attributed to her: for some, an interest in making her pass at times for a perfect Christian, at times even for an imbecile…

She was obviously neither one nor the other. This “good” woman did not wish to be a simpleton. Fully aware that her character was being deliberately distorted, she often expressed herself thus:

“Oh yes, people say: Louise Michel, she is so good – in other words: she is so stupid! Well then, my friends, do not be mistaken, I am not that good – go on!”

That is why I never shared the opinion of certain organisers of her funeral who carelessly proclaimed, in her memory, that Louise belonged to Humanity, to Everyone; that she hovered above parties in the struggle. That was perhaps not the greatest honour to pay her. One may aspire to an ideal sociability, be good, tolerant and just, without needing, for that, to be thrown as prey to an entire humanity of wretches, cowards, weaklings and fools. Louise, claimed by all, is Louise belonging to the modern stoics, to neo-Christians, to politicians and to red Jesuits, to bands of jealous hypocrites of the socio-bourgeois press. Thank you! Besides, I know well what esteem she held for all those categories, who hypocritically adored her because she was a popular woman.

Many stories circulate about her. I do not know how many anecdotes have been published about her private and militant life. Most of them are not true.

Many people knew her; few understood her. What was Louise Michel?

A saint, an inspired woman, a visionary, a madwoman, an incendiary criminal: these are the bourgeois accusations.

She was, first of all, a good woman. Then a revolutionary, perhaps mystical, but certainly a sincere revolutionary. A humanitarian, certainly somewhat dogmatic and paradoxical, but in any case putting her humanitarianism into action.

Can she be described as a scholar or a philosopher? I do not think so. Impulsive to the highest degree, she may be considered the most powerful of agitators. Finally, her sentimentality had something strange about it, even abnormal, and her will often appeared troubled; her obstinacy at times became a form of monomania; and her naivety gave rise to inconsistency and imprudence.

All this amounts to saying that she had, like the common run of mortals, her “qualities” and her “faults,” but with predominant qualities and faults that harmed no one.

What often seems sublime in her is that, despite her setbacks, despite her sufferings, her sorrows, her intimate disillusions and her resentments, she spread everywhere that eternal confidence which warms and revives. She knew how to gather her gleams of hope and turn them into a torch, with which she illuminated the crowds. And finally, this giant conviction was magnificently courageous; thus she never committed the basest of all crimes: that of preaching calm to the exploited and resignation to the starving.

“One day,” she told me, “while I was speaking at a meeting, a dreadful commotion broke out at the back of the hall. I stopped speaking. A comrade rushed over to me and informed me that anarchists had recognised a dangerous police officer and wanted to kill him. ‘Continue speaking,’ the activist told me, ‘so that the public’s attention is diverted from the quarrel; that way they will be able to execute the harmful beast…’ And I spoke as long as I could. As I left the meeting, I learned that the informant had just been executed… I was quite pleased: he had not stolen it; thus his victims were avenged.”

Oh! I can already hear the cries of outrage from moralists and the religious: what horror! what infamy!

Beauty! Greatness! – whether you like it or not, candidates for the Montyon Prize, prize-giving orators, panegyrists of “good servants,” and lackeys who wear the little tricolour ribbon on their left lapel! It is true that this beauty, this greatness of character—your minds, swollen and stuffed with secular prejudices, will never understand them, will never grasp them.

A woman, she was also an exceptional case of evolution. Emerging from a deeply Christian-republican era, raised in a milieu of well-meaning carbonarism, she knew, by her own means, how to follow the logical development of contemporary thought; to pass through the Dantonian patriotism whose echoes were still strongly affirmed with Leroux and Proudhon around 1848 and 1851; to sing the Christian socialism of a Saint-Simon and a Lamennais in 1863 and 1865; to commit sincerely to opportunist republicanism, though anti-Caesarian until 1870, and at that moment to become, like Blanqui, a patriot in good faith, before finally going to the Commune with the internationalism of Pottier, Ferré, and Dereure – disavowed today by the shopkeepers of the Social.

The defeat of the Commune made her an anarchist. “Since,” she said in her lecture titled How I Became an Anarchist, “the republicans, the socialists, the men of the Commune were able to do nothing with power, it is because power is worth nothing, that nothing can be done with it, and that it is dead.”

It will be said that events and circumstances favoured her; that is true—yet how many women, like her, have taken advantage of the storms of history to become someone?

Few, very few. Revolutions have had their artists, their dilettantes, their feminists, their intriguers, their nurses—I grant it; but it must be noted that they always appear in the background, whereas Louise – she emerges in the upheaval of 1871, beside those who forge history, beside the “sublime bandits.” She is more than Théroigne de Méricourt; she is almost Cornelia!

We also know that her actions were determined; that there were causes behind her magnanimous attitudes; but how much her self distinguished itself, rising in strength beyond what might be expected of her sex and even compared to many men of action.

If one takes Louise Michel’s life as a whole – with its impulses, its acts of violence, its sometimes disjointed writings, its poetic reveries, its incomplete art, its unfinished pedagogy, and its intimate originality – one might be tempted to regard her as extravagant and abnormal. That would be an error.

Her life, so chaotic and so little methodical, is the result of such loves, such sorrows, such adversities, such sufferings and such miseries, that the law of causality has perhaps never manifested itself with greater intensity than in her existence. of this woman. Which proves that if her aspirations, her desires, her passions and her faculties had not encountered so many obstacles – jealousy, vindictiveness, betrayal, cowardice – she would have been even greater and stronger than she was.

These are the reasons for her troubled existence, which she herself never revealed, but which it will be interesting to know, so that each may better understand this sister of Marat and of Babeuf.

It is neither the life nor the adventures of Louise that I wish to recount in this book. She has done that herself; consequently, who could do it better? My intention is rather to sketch, as faithfully as I can, her “psychology.”

I have been able to gather enough anecdotes, portraits, sketches, correspondence, and thoughts – whether in verse or prose – for the reader to form an accurate idea of the one who has been foolishly dubbed the “Red Virgin.”

Having lived and campaigned at her side during the last three years of her life, from 1902 to 1905, I believe I have understood her at least a little, and it is for that reason that I allow myself to bequeath her to future generations as she was; to mark her place – which she valiantly conquered, whatever the pure iconoclasts may say – in the Pantheon of Revolution and Anarchy.

The crowd of primitives and brutes prostrates itself and goes into ecstasies before the bronze statues of the Caesars and the Bonapartes… let the little children of a better City come to know the life of the “Good Louise.”

Paris, 27 November 1905.

E. G.

PSYCHOLOGY OF LOUISE MICHEL

Her temperament. – Her mentality.

Her ideas. – The last years of her life.

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FIRST PART

THE CHILD

Genealogy. – Heredity. – Influences.

Predispositions.

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I

The public has often been misled regarding Louise Michel’s age. Reporters, on the day of her funeral, attributed to her – some 67, others 70 years; others Some even generously went so far as to say 90 years. A highly comical and even more telling thing: some time before her death, certain feminists wanted to celebrate her centenary. This uncertainty about her age explains the remark many people made when speaking of her:

“How, Louise Michel? But I thought she was dead! She must be terribly old!”

In truth, she died in her seventy-fifth year, having been born on 29 May 1830. Here, moreover, is an extract from her birth certificate, which we obtained from the town hall of Vroncourt, where she was born:

Extract from the register of births of the commune of Vroncourt for the year 1830.

Year eighteen hundred and thirty, the twenty-ninth of the month of May, at six o’clock in the evening, before us Étienne-Charles Demahis, mayor of the commune of Vroncourt, canton of Bourmont, department of Haute-Marne, appeared Claude-Ambroise Laumond, aged forty, doctor of medicine, residing in Bourmont, who declared that on the twenty-ninth of May, at five o’clock in the evening, Mademoiselle Marie-Anne Michel, chambermaid residing at the château of Vroncourt, gave birth in said house to a female child, whom he presents to us and to whom he gives the first name Louise and the surname Michel; the said declaration and presentation made in the presence of Joseph-Benoît Girardin, aged thirty-four, cutler, residing in Vroncourt, and of Claude Desgranges, aged thirty-four, proprietor, residing in Vroncourt; and the declarant and the witnesses have signed with us the present birth certificate after it was read to them.

Signed: Laumond, Girardin, Desgranges and Demahis, mayor.

Certified true copy, issued on plain paper for information purposes.

At Vroncourt, 30 December 1905.

The Mayor, Trélut.

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Let us leave the imbeciles to blush at not having been officially and properly “legitimised,” and let us salute in her the bastard. Her father M. Demahis, a minor lord of Vroncourt, had quite naturally loved his servant Marianne Michel, and from this union came a lively and precocious little girl, “Louisette.”

As for the peculiarity of temperament that later emerged in the revolutionary, that fierce energy combined with dogmatism and mysticism, we shall explain it through her genealogy. Her great-grandfather and grandfather were Corsican. Exiled during the Revolution, they took refuge in Brittany. There, her grandfather married a Jewish woman. Her mother was from Lorraine.

The Demahis family was not very wealthy, and the dwelling referred to in Vroncourt as their château could quite simply have been called a “respectable ruin.” Moreover, in her Memoirs, Louise gives this description:

“The nest of my childhood had four square towers of the same height as the main building, with roofs shaped like bell towers. The southern side, completely without windows, and the arrow slits in the towers gave it the appearance of a mausoleum or a fortress, depending on one’s point of view. Formerly it was called the “Strong House”; in the time when we lived there, I often heard it referred to as “The Tomb.”

This vast ruin, where the wind blew as if on a ship, had to the east the slope of the vineyards and the village, from which it was separated by a strip of grass as wide as a meadow. At the end of this path, called Rioutte, the stream descended, forming the village’s only street. It swelled in winter; stones were placed to cross it.

To the east stood a curtain of poplars where the wind murmured softly, and beyond, the blue hills of Bourmont. To the west were the slopes and the woods of Suzerin, from which wolves, in times of heavy snow, would enter through breaches in the wall and come howling into the courtyard.

Louise was raised by her paternal grandfather and grandmother, who took her in affectionately even though she was not legally their granddaughter, which already shows a certain intelligence among her forebears. Old Demahis was a Voltairean and an intelligent republican, who took the trouble to explain to the child the first books she encountered.

These early influences in life are the most important, and for “young minds eager to learn,” like little Louise, early education often appears like the initial impulse given to the intellectual mechanism. This is so true that the memory remained vivid in the one who was struck by the generous ideas of her grandfather:

“My grandfather, depending on the moment, appeared to me under different aspects: sometimes, recounting the great days, the epic struggles of the First Republic, he had passionate tones to describe the war of giants where, brave against brave, the whites and the blues showed how heroes die; sometimes, ironic like Voltaire, the master of his age, cheerful and witty like Molière, he would explain to me the various books we read together.

At other times, as we ventured into the unknown, we spoke of things he saw rising on the horizon. We looked at the stages of humanity in the past; in the future as well; and often I wept, seized by some vivid image of progress of art or science, and he, with great tears in his eyes, would place his hand on my head, more dishevelled than that of old Presta…” (Louise Michel, Memoirs)

What emerges from Louise’s childhood is that she had very strong predispositions toward learning, and that these predispositions were fortunately developed by a man who knew how to combine the instruction he gave with a generosity that is, unfortunately, not the gift of all educators.

Alongside the intelligence of this grandfather, there was the excessive kindness of the mother and the two grandmothers. Louise described them as follows:

“How different my two grandmothers were! One with her fine Gallic face, her white muslin cap pleated in fine folds, beneath which her hair, arranged in a large bun, passed over her neck; the other with black eyes, like embers, short hair, enveloped in an eternal youth, who made me think of the fairies from old tales.

My mother was then a blonde, with smiling blue eyes and long curly hair, so fresh and pretty that her friends would say to her, laughing:

“It is not possible that this naughty child belongs to you!” (Louise Michel, Memoirs.)

So here is little “Louisette” placed in an excellent environment, one that would allow her to develop both intellectually and emotionally. Her predispositions would become more pronounced, her emerging qualities would develop rapidly, so rapidly that by the age of thirteen we are already dealing with a strong character. The following anecdote demonstrates this.

We noted above that her grandfather Demahis was an ardent republican. Around 1843, at the time when the liberal bourgeoisie was fighting against the ultramontane monarchy, Carbonarism was in full swing. The old Voltairean was affiliated with a secret society, and his granddaughter helped him to find bullets that were to be distributed to the conspirators of the region. One of them, hunted and pursued, even took refuge in the Maison forte. The Demahis, who had kept him hidden in a cellar, were denounced, and one day the authorities, accompanied by police officers, burst into the château of Vroncourt. Little Louisette is questioned; they try to make her speak; but she understands and keeps her guard.

— Who came to see grandfather?

— Mother Verdet.

— There was a man who dined with you yesterday?

— It was the priest.

— Yes, but those who came down to Vroncourt in a carriage last week, what are their names?

— Ah! it was the trickster who was walking with the pig merchant from Bourmont.

— No, listen, child: there is someone hidden here!

— Yes, this morning the pretty little thing came, and she slipped into the cupboard.”

And so, for nearly an hour, the child answers with all sorts of nonsense and foolishness, denouncing insignificant people, animals…. The police, discovering nothing, withdrew empty-handed.

Father Demahis was so pleased with his little Louisette that, in the evening, near the great fireplace, embracing her tightly, he gave her a copy of Words of a Believer by Lamennais. This book impressed her so deeply that it marked, for this little girl, the beginning of her enthusiasm.

“I was perhaps twelve or thirteen when the book by Lamennais, Words of a Believer, was soaked with my tears.

From that day on, I belonged to the crowd; from that day, I rose step by step through all the transformations of Thought, from Lamennais to Anarchy.”

Although she was mischievous, as children of her age often are, Louise Michel, from the very beginning of her life, was extraordinarily sensitive, deeply affected by all outward manifestations, by images, attitudes, actions, pain, suffering, and joy. Her mind is a marvellous kaleidoscope, recording with intense vividness the various impressions felt in her early youth.

So much so that, forty-two years later, she still retains a very precise memory of these distant impressions. Let us listen to her in her Memoirs, published in 1886:

“I have never met children at once so serious and so mad; so mischievous and yet so afraid of causing pain; so lazy and yet such dreamers, as my cousin Jules and I.

Each year, during the holidays, he would come with his mother, my Aunt Agathe, whom I loved deeply and who spoiled me greatly.

I am now astonished at the kinds of questions we stirred up, Jules and I; sometimes perched each in a tree where we watched the cats, sometimes stopping in the middle of a rehearsal of some drama by Hugo, which we staged for two characters.

This bore fruit from the tree for Marie Verdet (an old woman of nearly a hundred), who spoke so well of the apparitions of white washerwomen at the Fountain of the Ladies, or of the little red spirit, red as fire, beneath the willows of the mill.”

Marie Verdet always saw those things, and we never did! That did not prevent us from delighting in her stories, so much so that, from the little red spirit to Faust, I came to fall completely in love with the fantastic, and that, among the haunted ruins of the “mad castle,” I declared, in the midst of magic circles, my love for Satan- who did not come. That made me think he did not exist.

We decided to turn our lutes to other subjects; I had just given one, made like mine, to my cousin, after a rehearsal, I believe, of The Burgraves or Hernani, arranged by us for two actors! In a heated discussion about the equality of the sexes, Jules having claimed that if I learned from the books he brought during the holidays (in a way that nearly put me on his level), it was because I was an “anomaly,” our lutes, serving as projectiles, broke in our hands in the middle of the battle.

How much I read at that time, with Nanette and Joséphine, two young women of remarkable intelligence who had never left the district! We spoke of everything, we grew passionate, reading them, seated in the tall grass: the Magasin pittoresque, the Musée des familles, Hugo, Lamartine, the old Corneille, etc. I do not know whether Nanette and José did not love me any more than their own children. I loved them very much as well.

In the courtyard, behind the well, piles of bundles of sticks, twigs, and faggots were stacked; this served us to build a scaffold, with steps, a platform, two large uprights of wood – everything, in fact! We reenacted historical periods and the characters that pleased us. One after another, we climbed the steps of the scaffold, where our heads “fell” to the cry of “Long live the Republic!”

We searched the annals of human cruelty. The scaffold of faggots became the stake of Jan Hus; further still, the burning tower of the Bagaudae, etc.

As we were climbing the scaffold one day while singing, my grandfather pointed out to us that it was better to climb it in silence and, at the top, to affirm the principle for which one dies; this is what we did afterwards.

Current scientific knowledge forbids us to admit, even in psychology, the intervention of the supernatural, and consequently to see in anyone innate qualities, ideas, or feelings.

The laws of determinism now impose themselves for and against all considerations philosophical, political, or religious considerations. We must respect them. If we wish to explain and understand any individuality whatsoever – Nero, Caesar, Marat, Caserio, or Louise Michel – we must, on pain of falling into biased or self-interested judgments, rigorously take into account all influences, whether they are phylogenetic, ontogenetic, or educational.

This commonplace is constantly repeated: “Pierre and Paul have the same father and the same mother; they were raised under the same conditions; and yet Pierre has faults that Paul does not – how can that be?” Quite simply because impressions and predispositions have not been the same for Paul as for Pierre; because, if heredity is, broadly speaking, of the same value for both, the same is not true of atavism, which can manifest very differently in two individuals of the same direct lineage; because the intrauterine life (ontogeny) of one may have developed normally, whereas it may have been disturbed in the other.

It is therefore predispositions, impressions, education, and environment that shape and mould the individual.

What emerges from the very earliest youth of the future agitator?

1° That she has very strong predispositions toward knowledge;

2° That the need to learn drives her to read and to discuss; she moves through Lamennais, Corneille, Lamartine, and Hugo…

3° That the result is a desire for imitation. She wants to live, with her cousin, the heroes of Hernani or Bug-Jargal;

4° That the tales of Mother Verdet make her fall in love with the fantastic; that the literature of Lamennais and the poetry of Victor Hugo impel her toward generosity;

5° That the gentleness and the caresses of her family, and especially that of her grandfather, make her kind.

One may therefore affirm that Louise Michel entered life endowed with education, kindness, and generosity. Through heredity, and probably through atavism, these three great qualities will develop, even become exaggerated, later on. The latter two especially, combined with a suffering born of prejudice, will create in her a form of mysticism.

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II

Louise Michel always adored, venerated her mother. There is not a single one of her writings, not a page of her Memoirs, not a poem in which she does not speak of her, does not exalt her, does not raise her above everything else. Her grandparents come next, and she never has a word for the man who was her father.

Marianne Michel, however, was far from equal, in knowledge and in intellectual and emotional elevation, to the Demahis family. According to the biography written by her daughter (and from her portrait), one recognises in her the “good and simple peasant woman,” full of old-fashioned ideas, moralising and devout, imbued with all the common prejudices.

Some letters addressed by the good old woman to her terrible child, while she was imprisoned and awaiting her departure for “New Caledonia,” will indicate her state of mind:

Received and acknowledged 2 francs

The Director:

Illegible

Clermont, April 1st, 1873

My dear daughter,

I have received your letter in which you ask me when M. Foisey will go to Auberive; it will be for the Auberive fête which takes place today in a fortnight. You will thank very much the dear sister for me. I had not understood which picture she was speaking of; I thought it was the previous one she mentioned, for I was in Auberive when that one arrived in Clermont. I therefore found it upon my return; I thank her a thousand times, for she chose very well, it is exactly what is suitable.

If you wished to do what we wanted you to promise, the dear sister and I, what happiness that would be for us. You would be very kind to us, I beg you, act, do as I do, place your trust in God, for having done so myself, I have found it to be very good; for what is there, then, in the protection of men? I will not say little—but nothing, no, nothing; there is only the protection of God, which is good.

On arriving, I found a letter from Galès and one from your uncle Guillemin, who informed me that Mélanie had just given birth to a little girl and that she was doing very badly; it is very sad.

The letter from Galès was to send me a little money that Mlle Hahne, who is currently in Paris, had entrusted to him for me; and when you write to Marie, do not forget to include a little note for Mlle Hahne – you will thank her for me.

I am sending you a small lock of hair in the letter; it is very white, not because of the number of years I have already spent on this earth, but because of these last three years which have just passed, during which I have suffered so much on your account.

Despite the fatigue of my journey, I was very happy to see you. It did me a great deal of good; however, the journey you are undertaking torments me greatly. If you have not written to Marie, do so and send the letter.

Do not forget to let me know when you are about to depart, and your aunt and I will place you under the protection of the Holy Virgin and Saint Joseph. Also remember to do what the good sister recommends to you.

When you have errands, if you do not send them through Laure, send them through Bougrel, because they also know when the Foisseys come, for they go to their place. Mother Emmenat thanks you very much for her little basket. I am sending you two francs, because I prefer that you prepay your letters; they cost too much here, 40 centimes.

I have not yet written to Marie, thinking that you had written to her. Your uncle Georges and your aunt Victoire send you their regards. I embrace you with all my heart.

Your loving mother.

For Marianne Michel,

Émilie Gérard.

Thank well on my behalf all your companions for the little things they have done, which gave me great pleasure to receive. I listen to no malicious gossip; only, I do not like to receive reproaches from you, and I know what you are capable of doing or saying. I know your character and I know your conduct well; so if something is reported to me, I can see whether it is false or true, and I do not trouble myself when I see it is a lie.

You know that it is not today that I have had pain in my kidneys, that it has been a long time; but the vineyard discourages me, so I have not gone there. I am very glad that the good mother sometimes replaces me near you, to reprimand you when you deserve it. It gives me pleasure that she acts in this way. I embrace you again. Your aunt thanks you very much for her needle case. Émilie Gérard says many kind things to you.

Your mother,

Marianne Michel.

Received and acknowledged 25 centimes

The Director:

Illegible

Clermont, June 8, 1873

My dear daughter,

I saw M. Foissé, who told me he had not been able to see you; but another time, I repeat to you again: do not send your belongings in boxes, it costs too much in postage. You could easily have put the collar in a letter; nevertheless I thank you very much.

You always ask me what would give me pleasure: one single thing would give me great pleasure, that is if you were a little more obedient. When you were little, you went constantly to church; why do you not go to mass today? You were so obedient when Malvina made you do your lessons, and that caused me so much joy. Why are you not just as obedient in going to mass, since you have the time and it would give me such pleasure?

Since you listened to Malvina’s teachings, why do you not tell her about that dog she came to take? I am not sending you a stamp today because I have no money.

I embrace you with all my heart.

Your mother,

Marianne Michel.

P.S. — You will kindly say a few words on my behalf to your companions who put your things in order, since you are not orderly.

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Where does it come from that, from the age of reason, Louise thus sanctifies her mother, crowns her with every virtue, makes of her a great martyr?

The child understood that she was illegitimate, and from this she sees in her dear mother a woman diminished, dishonoured, a victim, an unfortunate, a suffering being.

Her affection for the one who bore her in suffering and reproach grows to such proportions that her filial love borders on mysticism.

This will be for her the source of an eternal sorrow, of a mortal weariness that will never leave her.

Her first verses, which she must have written very young, since they bear the mention “château de Vroncourt,” the home she left in January 1853, are addressed to her dear mother. One can judge from them the mysticism with which they are imbued; and, while quoting them, it is necessary to draw the reader’s attention to the first impressions of little “Louisette”; otherwise, one might determine that one day some “simpleton,” or some journalist short of copy, might fabricate a legend and turn the Good Louise into a second Joan of Arc, a Maid of the Barricades, or even something like a Bernadette of Vroncourt.

TO MADAME MARIANNE MICHEL

Mother, why tremble when I tell you my dream?
The sleeping fisherman sees the shore in his sleep…
As for me, I see I know not what distant mirage
That mingles with dawn, with night, with morning.
I am all storm, and nothing troubles me.
Oh no, do not tremble: the poet’s laurel
Is often a cypress; but cypresses are beautiful,
The vision shines through their branches.
And then nothing would stop it, you see; I have in my head,
In my soul, in my heart, an immense tempest.
Do you remember that as a child I heard a voice
Call me in the night for the very first time?
A troubadour’s dream that sees pass in the shadow
The deceptive mirage of countless visions…
Perhaps! And yet, a second time,—
Such is my belief,—I shall hear that voice.
Strengthen then your heart, O mother, I beg you.
What matter fortune, and what matter life,
To the one whose love lies beyond the heavens,
In the immense infinite filled with radiant stars!
Ah yes, it is madness for the poor human soul,
A firefly casting its uncertain glow,
To love the universes scattered through space,
While here on earth it scarcely has a place.
But it is made thus, ever hungry for love,
Seeking eternity in its rapid course…
Why weep, when alone, before that vast infinite,
Could anyone dispute with you, mother, your blessed name?

— Château de Vroncourt

Here is another piece, dated August 25, 1861. At that time, Louise was still a patriot, and the love of the fatherland, joining itself to filial love, pours her even further into mysticism.

THE MOTHER AND THE FATHERLAND
To Madame Marianne Michel

There are sacred names that vibrate within souls,
Mysterious altars of eternal flames,
Divine tabernacles;
When the world trembles under gusts of storm,
When rising progress invades the shores,
They guide destinies.

Yes, these are the two names that fill the earth
With an immense love: my Fatherland and my Mother.
Alas, in speaking them,
Let us think of those who have neither mother nor country,
And who find, having no one who smiles upon them,
The world sad and vast!

My mother, you know it, I love you without limits!
I adore you, O fatherland with such narrow shores
Yet one that sees the infinite!
I would give everything to see your brave men victorious,
To see your peoples great and your slaves free,
Beneath every blessed sky!

Louise was never a Catholic, nor an orthodox deist; but to claim that she always professed an absolute atheism and materialism would perhaps be to attribute to her a scientific outlook she did not possess, to grant her ideas she never truly developed.

Many times I noticed that her reflections contained something of that mystical pantheism that begins with Spinoza and does not even dare go as far as Haeckel’s monism. In any case, almost all the acts of her life are imbued with a kind of religiosity.

An anecdote will show to what extent our heroine was impressionable, even to matters of worship.

She was about eight years old, and her mother and some friends had taken her to a veiling ceremony. The chants, the ceremony, the spectacle, the incense, the music moved her so deeply that she felt unwell, and had to be carried out of the chapel to be revived.

When she told us this episode of her life, she would add:

“I had been poisoned!”

By how many things was this “disgusted enthusiast” not poisoned throughout her life! I saw her weep when she evoked the arrival of the women of Montmartre at the fort of Issy, with the red flag snapping in the wind;

— when she recounted her voyage on the Virginie and the vision of the polar seas beyond the Cape;

— when she spoke of the great international meetings at Trafalgar Square where the voice of a new world resounded;

— when she mentioned the Bretons who “were coming to the Revolution.”

Very little was needed, often, to set her aflame; for her idealism to soar toward paradisiacal visions, toward the imaginary cities she built out of simple and naïve reveries, toward future Canaans so delightful and so full of bliss that they could only have appeared as if she had been a fairy, and her magic wand had brought them forth in a single stroke out of social chaos.

And, strangely enough, this enthusiast was nothing other, as I have just said, than a despairing woman, a disillusioned one. One senses it in her poetry, her correspondence, her Memoirs. And it is above all because of her mother, her mother whom she believed to be “dishonoured,” that she would take revenge upon Society! Prejudice is intense in the young Louise; she suffers from it to the point of anguish. Very early on, this bitterness shows itself in a marked disdain for the male sex.

Proposed to in marriage around the age of fifteen, and by several people from Vroncourt, she receives them rather insolently; and when, later, she addresses the question of marriage, she expresses herself thus:

“For my part, I did not wish to be the man’s stew, and I went through life among the vile multitude, without giving slaves to the Caesars.”

However, the disgust with life, the deep revulsion that leads to active suicide and to the revolt of despair, would only come to her after the defeat of the Commune, and later, after her return from Caledonia, when she would write:

“…If by chance my activity produces any good, do not thank me for it, you who judge by facts; I only daze myself, that is all… A great weariness holds me. Having nothing to hope for, nothing to fear, I hasten toward the end like those who throw away the cup along with the dregs.”

For one day, Louise’s heart would beat for a revolutionary, worthy of a woman’s love; for one of those figures that frame so well the formidable events of a historical period… Unfortunately, the man she loved, madly, the only man she ever loved in her life, gave her nothing but a warm friendship. From this came her despair; from this her heroic stance at the barricades; from this her vengeful and cutting speeches before the Versailles court-martial, where the over-excitation of disappointed love abolished the instinct of self-preservation.

Louise, out of disappointment, wanted to kill herself; that is why she asked her judges for “a little lead.”

“No,” some ideologues will say, “she did it out of conviction.”

An error, for if conviction had predominated over love, she would have tried to escape her executioners in order to continue her mission.

Thus collapses the legend of the agitator incapable of ever having loved. Louise was, on the contrary, a great lover.

III

In certain individuals, the mind settles, crystallises at a given moment of adolescence; they acquire no further, in the course of their life, the upward-driving force of ideas: these are conservative spirits. Louise Michel was the complete opposite of such temperaments.

She possessed, to the highest degree, the gift of change in ideas; not that erratic or dishonest change which makes an individual drift toward all political camps and leads them to defend any programme so long as they find personal advantage in it — and we know well if such opportunists lack grace! — but this rising duel of thought in which the mind, stripping itself of its prejudices and routines, of its false folds and ignorances, abandons everything that is outworn, everything that has lived and is now dead; all those aging “truths” that have become errors. Louise was, to the highest degree, an evolving being.

After an early youth during which she already did not think like everyone else and carried out acts which, to be accomplished, required that she exist, our young schoolteacher found herself relegated to a small commune in Haute-Marne, where she was bored to death.

Thus she sought every means to flee toward the capital, toward that Paris which once lived for Liberty and Justice, toward those faubourgs which alone propelled the people into the path of revolutions.

From a very young age, Louise had made herself a thief for the poor and for her studies: she would steal her grandmothers’ dresses, which she gave to the poor, and the encyclopedias of old notaries, which she hid under her pillow in order to read at night.

Very early there was born in her that monomania which would drive her all her life:

“One may commit any action whatsoever in order to do good.”

This idea never left her and often made her act in strange ways.

Naturally, moralists will once again throw up their hands:

“So Louise Michel had a justice of her own; she was an infallible being who could proclaim that a bad action finds its justification in the intention to do good.”

My faith, yes! I consider that the conscience of certain individuals is a more equitable tribunal than that of men in robes, and certainly worth a hundred times more than public opinion.

“You have no right to do justice yourself!” Who says so? The law?…

It is a monstrosity, a labyrinth in which only rogues and schemers possess the key. It is a forest, a thicket where justice has gone astray, and Magnaud will not bring it back.

Thus my old friend liked to remind me that she had lied; that she had made herself a thief, a forger, a burglar, an accomplice to murder many times over the course of her life, in order to serve unfortunate comrades or to save friends.

According to her, stealing in order to give to the poor was good, and as a child, she stole.

Lying to save a comrade, to snatch him from the claws of “bourgeois justice”, was good; and she lied before the judges of the Council of War at Versailles, hoping to save Ferré, by claiming that he had not been present at the execution of the hostages.

“And he was there, I assure you,” she told me, showing him to me in the small photograph she always kept with her. Ferré is the second-to-last figure on the left, with one hand in his pocket and the other arm, armed with a revolver, extended toward the hostages.

Forging documents to save friends was good, and she filled out several thousand false signatures on a petition which she herself brought to Trochu in an attempt to save Eudes and Brideau, condemned to death in the affair of the Fireman of La Villette.

Once, in London, she scratched out a signature at the bottom of a letter and replaced it with another, with the aim of saving a militant implicated in a propaganda-by-deed case. Sent to the examining magistrate, the letter had its effect.

Henri Rochefort, who had, as was his habit, made false accusations against Marinoni, was summoned by the latter before the courts. A false testimony alone could save Rochefort from, if not a conviction — which mattered little — at least the ridicule of the situation into which he had placed himself. He turned to Louise Michel, who did not hesitate, out of friendship for this man, to lie in court to get him out of trouble.

At the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair, some enthusiasts, despairing of legal justice and wanting to free the innocent captain as quickly as possible, shared their plan with Louise: a ship would be chartered, armed, the guards bribed if possible — but in any case the “great victim” would be torn from his prison.

She welcomed this proposal with enthusiasm and even wanted to be part of the expedition. Only, money was needed — a great deal, an enormous amount of money. And as the famous syndicate did not yet have an established office, the conspirators informed Louise of their intention to find money where it existed: in the pockets and safes of the more fortunate.

“It makes no difference to me,” she said, “steal, burgle, so long as Dreyfus is saved. Since Justice needs us to act this way in order to be justice, then let us steal and burgle.”

She pushed this need, this necessity to do what she believed to be good, so far that sacrifice was entirely natural to her.

Some time before the war, an officer in the active army had fallen in love with Louise. He asked her to marry him. Here, in a moment of intimacy, is the language she used to him:

“Listen, sir, I have sworn never to marry. Domestic life horrifies me, and however tempting your position may be, I have no ambition whatsoever to become one day ‘Madame la générale’. However, if you wish to make a sacrifice, I will make another, and I will become your…”

— “Speak, tell me, I am ready to obey you.”

— “Risk your life; I will risk my freedom.”

— “Tomorrow, if necessary, my dear friend.”

— “Very well, then go and kill the Emperor!”

The officer never returned to ask for her hand again.

Thus it was with this idea, this conception, this will, this stubbornness to do “good” despite everything, that she entered into life.

She began as a free schoolteacher at Audeloncourt (Haute-Marne) in 1853. Refusing to swear allegiance to the Empire, she declined to belong to the commune. She was only twenty-three, but already she hated Caesarism.

Instead of prayer, she had her pupils sing the Marseillaise before the morning lesson and after the evening lesson. Our young schoolmistress was in her full republican phase — but a republicanism of the ideal kind, where action joins principles, in the hope that the State will truly be what the word indicates: the res publica. Louise, moreover, even after becoming an anarchist, remained at heart a republican. She believed in the republican ideal, in a just and good democracy.

In a piece of verse entitled Curtius, she shows her enthusiasm:

“Why grow pale, Romans? It is sweet to die
In saving one’s country; it is good to fall asleep
Beneath the civic cypress.”
And on his white horse, neighing in terror,
Curtius, trembling, cried out with ardour:
“Long live the Republic!”

Although she often campaigned alongside Jules Guesde, I do not know whether she fully grasped the economic side of the Revolution. The form of government was, in her view, the essential condition of social transformation. She belonged to the school of Blanqui, of Eudes, of Benoît Malon.

What must be noted is that, above all at the beginning, there was in her nothing but enthusiasm, mysticism, symbolism, and idealism. This woman would overturn the world with supporters and admirers; she would have been incapable of building another with disciples.

The Empire was her bête noire; she detested it to the highest degree, and anything that could harm it, she did. The rector was disturbed by her propaganda at school and summoned her.

Instead of trying to conceal her feelings, she exaggerated them, on the contrary, proclaiming that she wanted the fall of the regime.

Then she sent verses to Victor Hugo, and the poet’s replies caused her to be noted as dangerous. The newspapers of Chaumont published her writings, and a phrase from one of them earned her the charge of insulting His Majesty the Emperor.

Domitian reigned; he had banished philosophers and scholars from Rome, increased the pay of the praetorians, restored the Capitoline games, and people adored the merciful emperor while waiting to stab him. For some, apotheosis comes before; for others, it comes after. There you have it.

We are in Rome, in the year 95 after Jesus Christ.

The prefect had her summoned and burst out: “You have insulted His Majesty the Emperor by comparing him to Domitian. If you were not so young, you could be sent to Cayenne.”

Laughing, she replied that she would be very happy to go and establish a school in Cayenne, but that, since she could not pay for the journey herself, the government would be doing her a service by sending her there.

There was therefore no fear in her. Fiery, bold, impetuous, she would not hesitate to hide, like Harmodius, a sword beneath myrtle leaves and to go to the Tuileries one day of the Panathenaea in order to kill the tyrant.

It was with this mentality of a rebellious republican, with a deep hatred in her heart for despotism and imperialism, that Louise Michel left in 1856 her small commune of Audeloncourt to go to Paris, 14 rue du Château-d’Eau, to the home of Madame Vollier, headmistress of an institution.

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SECOND PART: THE WOMAN

I

What will this life as an assistant schoolteacher be until 1869? A life, in truth, rather monotonous and obscure. Outside of class hours, Louise contributes to a few minor publications, such as L’Union des poètes or La Jeunesse. She continues to send verses to the exiled Victor Hugo…

And, toward the end of the Empire, she is the enthusiast and the impatient one who senses the coming storm.

Do you hear the tocsin ringing?
Down with the one who wavers!
The coward will betray tomorrow!
On the mountains and on the cliff,
Let us go, sowing liberty;
Carried away by the storm,
Let us pass, living Marseillaise!
Let us pass, let us cross the seas, let us cross the dark valleys,
Let us pass: let the ripe wheat fall into the furrows.

If Louise Michel was truly a poet, it is indeed at this time that her muse inspired her most. She left heaps of notebooks filled with verses from before the Commune. In all her poetry, the idea of Equality and Justice predominates. She addresses Saint-Just, Paul de Flotte; she evokes the gallows of John Brown, and invokes the spirits of Curtius, of Brutus, of Aristogiton, and of those of ’93; she dedicates [her verses] to Gracchus Babeuf, to Garibaldi, to Blanqui…

Each morning, upon rising, she writes a stanza, then opens her window to listen for whether the Revolution is rumbling. She wrote that, around 1869, she clearly felt the fall of Caesar and the popular apotheosis approaching; thus she misses no meeting, no demonstration; she frequents the clubs of the Latin Quarter, especially those of the young. In the evening, she attends classes on the rue Hautefeuille where she completes her education. In short, she is active, restless, a militant. Women who act in this way under a despotic regime are rather rare; thus she quickly becomes noticed.

Louise, it must be admitted, takes advantage of this to cultivate her popularity: she wants, in the coming revolution, a role — an important role — and, to that end, she neglects no opportunity to associate herself with already well-known agitators.

But how many reputations, on the other hand, have been built from a skilful exploitation of events: reputations built from carefully maintained publicity, skilful connections, and not from long and patient work, from a true externalisation of value. Thus, apart from a few great intelligences, the syndicalist and revolutionary movement of these last thirty years has produced notorieties only among people who are, at bottom, the most incapable, the most ignorant, but also the most scheming.

It would be an excess of sympathy, an additional historical falsehood, to claim that Louise Michel entered the formidable agitation of 1870–71 with scientific understanding, philosophical capacity, economic awareness, and the indispensable political strategy required by events. She simply gave herself over to the insurrection with her feelings of justice and goodness, with her mysticism and her symbolism, and that is all.

During the courses on the rue Hautefeuille, Louise became acquainted with Jules Favre and Eugène Pelletan, who presided there. They introduced her into relations with Jules Simon, who was then in charge of vocational schools, and her overflowing activity led her to participate in this social work.

The vocational schools, for which we admired Monsieur Jules Simon, then had all our enthusiasm. A few handfuls of young girls were barely saved… artists emerged from them and we said: “Here comes the Republic! this handful — it will become all!” Alas!…

Day and night, she had only one thought: the Republic; it became a passion; at the same time, a messianic vision and an obsession. The Empire and the Republic! the nightmare and the dream; terror and liberty; crime and justice; suffering and joy; misery and opulence. Moving in a half-light of life, she had the intuition that before long a formidable drama would unfold, and that the actors in this drama would be heroes, figures of history, writing once again, with the blood of the proletarians…

Of these heroes, she would be one — she wanted to be one.

We could feel very near the breath of the drama in the street, the true drama, that of humanity; the bards were singing the new epic; there was no longer room for anything else.

Especially five or six years before the siege, the rue Hautefeuille formed, in the midst of imperial Paris, a kind of retreat where the smell of the charnel house did not yet reach; sometimes the history classes would swell into the Marseillaise, and the air smelled of powder.

Madame Vollier having died toward the end of 1865, Louise joined forces with Mademoiselle Caroline L’Homme and brought her mother to live with her. This arrangement allowed her to concern herself less with the school. She no longer had a minute for her pupils, her inner life, nor her mother: “The Revolution is coming!”

In the fermentation of the end of the Empire, the idea was germinating, growing, shaken in showers of sparks, setting fire like a torch. We had had enough of unclean things. War had not yet been seen; it rose up to support Bonaparte with heaps of corpses.

Meetings were being held more and more in broad daylight; revolt, rising from underground, was reaching the full sun.

Her vindictiveness and her enthusiasm rise to lyricism:

In those times, at night, people gathered in the shadows,
Indignant, shaking off the sinister black yoke
Of the man of December, and one shuddered, sombre,
Like a beast at the slaughterhouse.
The Empire was ending. It killed at ease;
In its lair, where the threshold smelled of blood,
It reigned, but in the air the Marseillaise was blowing;
Red was the rising sun.
It often happened that a bardic effusion,
Enveloping us all, made our hearts vibrate.
To the one who sang the heroic funeral song
Flowers were sometimes thrown,
Those red carnations by which, to recognise one another,
Each of us had them. Be reborn, red flowers!
Others will spread you in the times to come,
And those will be the victors.

Such was the mentality, such the exaltation, such the desire for revolt and for popularity with which Louise then entered the political movement of 1869–70, and then the Commune.

One can easily explain, then, the influence she was able to exert, and the grandeur, the magnanimity of her actions.

Above all this, love intervened. She was then carried to the very edge of the bloody trench, where the man she adored fell, struck down by Versailles bullets. She wanted to be bound to his execution post and follow him in death. This unfulfilled love made her provocative even before the Council of War. On the day after the triple execution of Rossel, Bourgeois, and Ferré, she wrote the following letter to General Appert:

Prison of Versailles, 2 December 1871.

Sir,

I begin to believe in the triple assassination of Tuesday morning.

If one does not wish to judge me, enough is known about me: I am ready, and the plain of Satory is not far.

You all know very well that if I were to leave here alive, I would avenge the martyrs!

Long live the Commune!

Louise Michel.

The man, the only one, I believe, who made the heart of Louise Michel tremble, was Théophile Ferré. She had made his acquaintance some time before the war, at the Montmartre cemetery, on the anniversary of Murger’s death.

When, after the first defeats of the Franco-Prussian War, the clubs began to organise, Louise attended almost all of them. She went especially to the Vigilance Committee of Montmartre, which had its headquarters at No. 41 Chaussée Clignancourt. Maria Ferré, the sister of the young revolutionary, often accompanied her. She became her most intimate friend and even allowed her to understand the intense love she felt for her brother, Théophile.

He is indeed for her the most beautiful type of man she could dream of. Courageous and proud, she loves him above all because he held his head high before the High Court of Blois; he promises much — he is a tempered character, an intelligence. Louise listens to him and follows him almost everywhere. When the hour of the lions comes, the hour when one must conquer or die, the revolutionary will go to the barricade with a hope: the Republic; a thought: her mother; a guide: Théophile Ferré.

And this woman, who cared for so many wounded, who took care of so many small children, who stripped herself for others — this great charitable soul was to become implacable in the struggle, to set up — in her own words — “a barrier of fire against the invaders of Paris.” It is precisely at this moment that there appears in her this striking contradiction of absolute revolutionism and total humanitarianism, this emotional dualism of the great social struggle which was, almost always, the cause of the crushing of the people.

She would not so much as brush the hair of her defeated enemies; and yet, when on 22 January the Breton mobiles of the Hôtel de Ville fired on the demonstrators, while the National Guards hesitated to respond, she shouldered her rifle and aimed at the sons of Armor, shouting: “Bandits, we shall have you one day for the Revolution!”

Later, when the social movement became more clearly defined, when the struggle on the economic terrain took on the character of class struggle excluding all sentimentalism and all false generosity, Louise often found herself placed between her humanitarianism and her revolutionism. She managed it with a certain skill, and no one thought of reproaching her for her illogicalities and inconsistencies.

From the moment someone came to her, she would not turn them away; she would extend her hand. Many tried to compromise her by becoming her friends, and this anticlerical, this pagan, had comrades among militant Catholics; this condemned woman of Versailles had military medals awarded to her; this sister of the poor was received and adored by millionaire courtesans. One can say that everything was forgiven her, that everything was pardoned.

She had tenacious friendship, indefatigable love. But what was most extraordinary in her was this perseverance in goodness and friendship, even though she was so deeply disillusioned, so profoundly saddened. Ferré assassinated, her mother dead, Maria Ferré gone — that is to say, her only love and her two deepest attachments vanished — she nevertheless continued to be good, compassionate, and gentle.

One may ask whether it is not sometimes the greatest sorrows, the most terrible pains, that make a person better and refine them. Her suffering, in any case, was so acute that she would henceforth tremble constantly at the suffering of others.

There is a curious fact, especially in Louise’s life: it is that disgust, like ardour, can become the same driving force, lead to similar actions, give rise to the same sacrifices. Thus, before the events of the Commune, the young schoolteacher is driven by the generous idea of a political and social renewal: she throws herself into the fray with the hope that a new sun will rise upon the oppressed and the dispossessed.

She struggles, she fights, she risks her life in the hope of obtaining something for herself and her brothers, with the aim of seeing the Revolution fulfilled. Then, when defeat has come; when the people, crushed and massacred, can no longer make a single gesture; when her friends are taken and shot; when she sees herself separated, perhaps forever, from her mother and from her dearest friend — then disgust will seize her and never leave her again.

“What is courage to be spoken of? Do I not long to go and rejoin my companion Maria and my mother?

I expect neither pain nor joy; I am made for combat.”

What contributed above all to her disgust with life — to which she herself gave little weight — was the non-reciprocation of her love for Théophile Ferré, and then his death. The deputy of the Commune had, in fact, a great admiration for the woman, for the citizen that Louise was, he had regard — but he did not add love to it. To the verses she dedicated to him, to the tender letters she sent him, he replied only with compliments, encouragement, and gestures of friendship; never a word of a lover.

Yet Louise, like all women, continued to hope: one day would come when, by force, he would understand, when he would respond. Until the very last breath of her friend, Louise retained a glimmer of hope — hope always disappointed.

Imprisoned at the same time as Ferré, they were able to correspond together, thanks to a laundress who became their accomplice. The poor woman — had she been caught! The letters were sewn into shirt cuffs and could thus evade any search.

Here is one of the poems that Louise addressed to Théophile Ferré:

Versailles prison, 4 September 1871.

To Th. Ferré.

If I were to go to the dark cemetery,
Brother, cast upon your sister,
Like a final hope,
Red carnations all in bloom.
In the final days of the Empire,
When the people were awakening,
Red carnation, it was your smile
That told us all was being reborn.
Today, go bloom in the shadows
Of dark and sorrowful prisons.
Go bloom beside the somber captive,
And tell him well that we love him.
Tell him that, through the swift passage of time,
All belongs to the future;
That the victor, with his livid brow,
More than the vanquished, may die!

In return, Ferré managed to have sent to his friend the admirable letter that follows:

Cellular prison of Versailles, no. 6.
Sunday, 8 October 1871.

To Citizen Louise Michel, state prisoner,
Versailles.

Dear Citizen,

“You are our lords and our masters;
Our lives are in your hands;
But the days have their tomorrows,
And among you are traitors.”

— Louise Michel, Eternity

I thank you for having sent me the account of the funeral events you witnessed, and of the fortunate circumstances that allowed you to escape the immense slaughter; for if the victors had known, indeed, that they were holding Citizen Louise Michel — a woman all the more dangerous because she has convictions and, until her final breath, will hold to them firmly — I would not have had the satisfaction of corresponding with you, and it would only remain for me to join your name to those of all my noble friends who have died for the cause of the people.

But, fortunately, the men of order spared you; and I even add — and I am certain of it — that, far from bringing you great consolation, their work has not been well carried out; a sufficient number of intelligent and courageous men are at this moment beyond the reach of any search.

You must be somewhat fixed in your way of viewing situations, and you will no doubt not be surprised if I tell you that I have an ever-growing confidence in the final triumph of our ideas. We have been defeated — very well! we shall take our revenge, if not we ourselves, then our brothers; and what does it matter that I, for example, shall not witness it? I know the worth and the energy of my companions in struggle, and my death will only increase their zeal and make justice more necessary.

I therefore beg you: in your forthcoming writings, banish the melancholy and the sensibility that have taken hold of your spirit; instead of dwelling on our disasters, examine rather their effects — and you will observe with me that socialism has never been more necessary than it is today. In France, there are too many republicans for it to be possible now to re-establish any monarchy on a solid footing; and if my forecasts are correct, in a few years those who live will witness great changes. I wish that you may be among them.

I keep with pleasure your two poems entitled Eternity and The Red Carnations; I will add them to the verse To my brothers which I received earlier, and, before entering into nothingness, my family will become their custodian. I return to the red carnations, to thank you also for the gracious flower you created; this gesture has touched me deeply. I send you, in exchange, my head, and I ask you to keep it in memory of a citizen who loves the Republic and the people above all.

All to you and to Equality,

Th. Ferré.

You will readily understand that courts-martial are not in haste to concern themselves with serious women; however, as far as you are concerned, if you are not released, there will come a day when you must be judged; I am not worried about your attitude, but I still wish to make a few observations: arrange yourself so as to remain calm enough to thwart their plans; above all, not too much generosity — it is a quality that has greatly lost its value in our time, and you would simply be its dupe; the interest of our cause requires the freedom of its defenders, and one may be worthy without being naïve; I therefore advise you to take careful note of my observations and to get yourself out of this infamous trap as quickly as possible.

To the person who handed me Thucydides, I gave a letter for you; has it reached you?

Th. F.

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There is, as one can observe, in this noble letter, not the slightest sentimental allusion; it contains nothing except for the cause and in favour of the people. It is very likely that Louise, while admiring the clarity of style and the purity of thought, must have been somewhat hurt by it.

On 3 September 1871, Théophile Ferré concluded his defence before the court-martial at Versailles as follows:

“Member of the Paris Commune, I am in the hands of its victors; they want my head — let them take it! I have lived free; I intend to die the same.

I will add only one word: the future is capricious; I entrust to the future the care of my memory and of my vengeance.”

Colonel Merlin, in the name of the court-martial, pronounced the death sentence against Lullier and Ferré. On the 28th of November following, at seven o’clock in the morning, Sergeant Bourgeois, Rossel, and Ferré were, on the plain of Satory, tied to the execution post.

Now all was over, the last hope had vanished, and Ferré’s words still echoed in Louise’s ears.

On 16 December 1871, she in turn appeared before the court-martial.

It will not be unnecessary for readers to reproduce the account of our heroine’s trial. The report of this famous hearing before the court-martial of Versailles is the finest psychological portrait one can give of Louise Michel. At her in her answers, in her attitude, one senses the full desire of the woman, of the sensitive and impulsive being who wants to disappear, to sacrifice herself for a sublime cause, for an unfailing love.

Report from the Gazette des tribunaux.

6th COURT-MARTIAL (sitting at Versailles)

Presided over by M. Delaporte,

Colonel of the 12th mounted chasseurs.

Hearing of 16 December 1871.

The Commune did not have enough devoted men to defend itself to form the National Guard; it created companies of children under the name of ‘Pupils of the Commune’; it wanted to organise a battalion of Amazons; and although this corps was not actually formed, one could nevertheless see women wearing military dress, more or less fanciful, with a rifle on their shoulder, preceding the battalions heading toward the ramparts. Among those who seemed to have exercised considerable influence in certain districts, one noted Louise Michel, former schoolteacher at Batignolles, who never ceased to show boundless devotion to the insurrectionary government.”

“Louise Michel is thirty-six years old: small, brunette, with a very developed forehead, then receding sharply; the nose and lower part of the face very prominent; her features reveal an extreme harshness. She is entirely dressed in black. Her exaltation is the same as in the first days of her captivity, and when she is brought before the court, abruptly lifting her veil, she fixes her judges with a steady gaze.

Captain Dailly occupies the seat of the public prosecutor. Maître Haussmann, appointed by the court, assists the accused, who has, however, declared that she refuses the assistance of any lawyer.

The clerk Duplan reads the following report:

“It was in 1870, on the occasion of the death of Victor Noir, that Louise Michel began to display her revolutionary ideas. A modest schoolteacher, almost without pupils, it has not been possible for us to determine what her connections were at that time, nor the part to attribute to her in the events preceding the monstrous attack that terrified our unfortunate country.

It is no doubt unnecessary to retrace in full the events of March 18, and, as the starting point of the accusation, we will limit ourselves to specifying the part played by Louise Michel in the bloody drama of which Montmartre hill and the rue des Rosiers were the scene.

An accomplice in the arrests of the unfortunate generals Lecomte and Clément Thomas, fearing that the two victims might escape her, ‘Don’t let them go!’ she cries at the top of her voice to the wretches surrounding them.

And later, when the murder is accomplished, in the presence, so to speak, of mutilated corpses, she testifies to her joy at the blood that has been shed and dares to proclaim that ‘it is well done’; then, radiant and satisfied with the good day’s work, she goes to Belleville and La Villette to make sure that those districts have remained armed.

On the 19th, she returns home, after taking the precaution of removing the fédéré uniform that might compromise her; but she felt the need to reflect a little on events with her conscience.

— ‘Ah!’ she cries, ‘if Clemenceau had arrived a few moments earlier in the rue des Rosiers, the generals would not have been shot, because he would have opposed it, being on the side of Versailles.’”

“Finally, ‘the hour of the advent of the people has struck’; Paris, under the power of foreigners and ruffians who have come from all corners of the world, proclaims the Commune.

Secretary of the Society for the ‘Moralisation of workers through labour,’ Louise Michel organises the famous Central Committee of the Union of Women, as well as the vigilance committees, tasked with recruiting ambulance workers and, at the supreme moment, female workers for the barricades, perhaps even incendiaries.

A copy of a manifesto found at the town hall of the 10th arrondissement indicates the role she played in these committees in the final days of the struggle. We reproduce this document verbatim:

‘In the name of the social Revolution that we acclaim, in the name of the revendication of workers’ rights, of equality and of justice, the Union of Women for the defence of Paris and the care of the wounded protests with all its strength against the unworthy “Proclamation to the women citizens,” posted the day before yesterday and emanating from a group of reactionaries.

The said proclamation claims that the women of Paris appeal to the generosity of Versailles and demand peace at any price.

No, it is not peace, but rather a war to the bitter end that the working women of Paris have come to demand.

Today, reconciliation would be a betrayal. It would mean renouncing all the workers’ aspirations calling for absolute social renewal: the annihilation of all existing legal and social relations, the suppression of all privileges, of all exploitation, the substitution of the reign of labour for that of capital; in a word, the emancipation of labour by itself!

Six months of suffering and of betrayal during the siege, six weeks of gigantic struggles against the coalition of exploiters, the streams of blood shed for the cause of liberty are our titles to glory and to vengeance!

The present struggle can have no outcome but the triumph of the popular cause… Paris will not retreat, for it carries the banner of the future. The supreme hour has struck! Make way for the workers! Away with the executioners! Action! Energy!

The tree of liberty grows, watered by the blood of its enemies!…

All united and resolute, strengthened and enlightened by the sufferings that social crises bring in their wake, deeply convinced that the Commune, representing the international and revolutionary principles of the peoples, carries within it the seeds of the social revolution, the women of Paris will prove to France and to the world that they too, at the moment of supreme danger, at the barricades, on the ramparts of Paris, if reaction forces the gates, can give, like their brothers, their blood and their lives for the defence and triumph of the Commune, that is to say of the people! Then victorious, capable of uniting and agreeing upon common interests, workers and working women, all united in one final effort…’ (This last sentence remained unfinished.) ‘Long live the Universal Republic! Long live the Commune!’

Holding multiple roles, she directed a school at 24 rue Audot. There, from the height of her desk, she taught, and in her rare leisure moments, she expounded the doctrines of free thought and had her pupils sing the poems that flowed from her pen, among others the song entitled: The Avengers.

President of the Club of the Revolution, held at the church of Saint-Bernard, Louise Michel was responsible for a vote passed at the session of May 18 (21 Floréal, Year LXXIX), whose aim was:

‘The abolition of the magistracy, the annihilation of legal codes, their replacement by a commission of justice;

The abolition of religions, the immediate arrest of priests, the sale of their property and that of fugitives and traitors who supported the wretched Versaillais;

‘The execution of a serious hostage every twenty-four hours, until the release and arrival in Paris of citizen Blanqui, appointed member of the Commune.’

This was not enough, however, for this ardent soul, as the author of a fanciful report included in the file is pleased to describe her: to incite the populace, to applaud assassination, to corrupt childhood, to preach fratricidal struggle, in a word to push toward all crimes, it was still necessary to set the example and pay with her own person!

Thus we find her at Issy, at Clamart, and at Montmartre, fighting in the front rank, firing shots or rallying the fugitives.

Le Cri du Peuple attests to this in its issue of 14 April:

‘The citizen Louise Michel, who fought so bravely at Moulineaux, was wounded at the fort of Issy.’

Very fortunately for her, we hasten to acknowledge, the heroine of Jules Vallès emerged from this brilliant affair with only a simple sprain.

What motive drove Louise Michel into the fatal path of politics and revolution?

It is evidently pride. An illegitimate daughter raised by charity, instead of thanking Providence which had given her a superior education and the means to live happily with her mother, she gives herself over to her exalted imagination, to her irascible character, and, after breaking with her benefactors, runs off to seek adventure in Paris.

The wind of Revolution begins to blow, Victor Noir has just died. It is the moment to enter the stage; but the role of extra repels Louise Michel, her name must attract public attention and appear in the front line in proclamations and misleading appeals.

We need only assign the legal qualification to the acts committed by this virago from the beginning of the dreadful crisis through which France has just passed, up to the end of the impious struggle in which she took part amid the tombs of the Montmartre cemetery.

She witnessed, knowingly, the perpetrators of the arrest of Generals Lecomte and Clément Thomas in the acts that led to it, and this arrest was followed by physical torture and the death of these two unfortunate men.

Closely linked with the members of the Commune, she knew in advance all their plans. She aided them with all her strength, with all her will; more than that, she assisted them and often surpassed them. She offered to go to Versailles and assassinate the President of the Republic, in order to terrify the Assembly and, according to her, bring the struggle to an end.

She is as guilty as ‘Ferré the proud republican,’ whom she defends in so strange a manner and whose head, to use her own expression, ‘is a challenge thrown to consciences and demands, in response, a revolution.’

She stirred up the passions of the crowd, preached war without mercy or truce, and, like a she-wolf greedy for blood, she provoked the death of the hostages through her infernal machinations.

We therefore charge her with:

1° Attempt with the aim of changing the government;
2° Attempt with the aim of inciting civil war by urging citizens to arm themselves against one another;
3° Having, in an insurrectionary movement, openly borne arms and worn a military uniform, and made use of them;
4° Forgery in private writing by impersonation;
5° Use of a forged document;”
6° Complicity by provocation and plotting in the assassination of persons held as so-called hostages by the Commune;
7° Complicity in illegal arrests, followed by physical torture and death, by knowingly assisting the perpetrators of the acts that brought them about;

Crimes provided for under articles 87, 91, 150, 151, 59, 60, 302, 34, 344 of the Penal Code and 5 of the law of 24 May 1834.

Interrogation of the accused

The President — You have heard the charges brought against you; what have you to say in your defence?

The Accused — I do not wish to defend myself, I do not wish to be defended; I belong entirely to the social revolution, and I declare that I accept responsibility for all my acts. I accept it fully and without restriction. You reproach me with having taken part in the assassination of the generals? To that I reply: yes; if I had been at Montmartre when they wanted to fire on the people, I would not have hesitated to fire myself on those who gave such orders; but when they were captured prisoners; I do not understand why they were shot, and I regard that act as a disgraceful cowardice!

As for the burning of Paris, yes, I took part in it. I wanted to raise a barrier of flames against the invaders from Versailles. I had no accomplices in this act; I acted on my own initiative.

I am also told that I am an accomplice of the Commune! Certainly yes, since the Commune wanted above all the social revolution, and since the social revolution is dearest to my wishes; more than that, I take pride in being one of the promoters of the Commune, which, let it be clearly known, had nothing to do with assassinations or fires for their own sake: I, who attended all the sessions at the Hôtel de Ville, declare that there was never any question of assassination or arson. Do you want to know the real culprits? They are the police, and later perhaps the truth will come to light on all these events, for which it is today so convenient to hold all supporters of the social revolution responsible.

One day, I proposed to Ferré to invade the Assembly; I wanted two victims, M. Thiers and myself, for I had already sacrificed my life and was resolved to strike him.”

The President — In a proclamation, you said that every twenty-four hours a hostage should be shot?

She — No, I only meant to threaten. But why should I defend myself? I have already told you, I refuse to do so. You are men who are going to judge me; you stand before me with your faces uncovered; you are men, and yet I look you straight in the face. I know well that everything I might say will change nothing in your sentence.

So one last word before I sit down. We have never wanted anything but the triumph of the great principles of the Revolution; I swear it by our martyrs fallen on the field of Satory, by our martyrs whom I still acclaim here and who, one day, will surely find an avenger.

Once again, I belong to you; do with me what you will. Take my life if you wish; I am not a woman to dispute it with you for a single instant.

The President — You declare that you did not approve the assassination of the generals, and yet it is said that, when it was reported to you, you exclaimed: ‘They have been shot — it is well done!’”

(Respondent) R. — Yes, I said that, I admit it. I even remember that it was in the presence of the citizens Le Moussu and Ferré.

(Interrogator) D. — So you approved the assassination?

R. — Allow me, that was not proof; the words I spoke were meant not to halt the revolutionary momentum.

D. — You also wrote in the newspapers; in Le Cri du Peuple, for example?

R. — Yes, I do not deny it.

D. — Those newspapers called each day for the confiscation of the clergy’s property and other similar revolutionary measures. Were those then your opinions?

R. — Indeed; but note well that we never wished to take those goods for ourselves; we only intended to give them to the people for their well-being.

D. — You demanded the abolition of the magistracy?

R. — That is because I always had before my eyes the examples of its errors. I remembered the Lesurques affair and so many others.

D. — You acknowledge having wanted to assassinate M. Thiers?

R. — Perfectly… I have already said so and I repeat it.

D. — It appears that you wore various costumes during the Commune?

R. — I dressed as usual; I only added a red sash to my clothing.

D. — Did you not on several occasions wear men’s clothing?

R. — Only once: it was on March 18; I dressed as a national guardsman so as not to attract attention.

Few witnesses were called, the facts alleged against Louise Michel not being disputed by her.

They first hear the woman Poulain, a shopkeeper.

The President. — You know the accused? Do you know what her political ideas were?

(Responder; this time Mme Poulain, Shopkeeper) R. — Yes, Mr President, and she did not hide them. Very exalted, she was seen only in the clubs; she also wrote in the newspapers.

D. — Did you hear her say, regarding the assassination of the generals: “It is well done!”?

R. — Yes, Mr President.

Louise Michel. — But I have admitted the fact; it is useless for witnesses to come and certify it.

Femme Bottin, painter.

The President. — Did Louise Michel not denounce one of your brothers to force him to serve in the National Guard?

(Responder Femme Bottin) R. — Yes, Mr President.

Louise Michel. — The witness had a brother; I believed him to be brave and I wanted him to serve the Commune.

The President (to the witness). — Did you see the accused one day in a carriage, moving about among the National Guards and making queenly gestures, according to your expression?

R. — Yes, Mr President.

Louise Michel. — But that cannot be true, for I could not have wanted to imitate those queens of whom people speak and whom I would like to see all beheaded like Marie-Antoinette.

The truth is that I was simply in a carriage because I was suffering from a sprain that followed a fall at Issy.

The woman Pompon, concierge, repeats everything that is said about the accused. She was known as very exalted.

Cécile Déneziat, without profession, knew the accused well.

The President. — Did you see her dressed as a National Guard?

(Respondent Cécile Déneziat) R. — Yes, once, around March 17.

D. — Was she carrying a rifle?

R. — I said so, but I do not clearly remember that fact.

D. — You saw her walking in a carriage, among the National Guards?

R. — Yes, Mr President, but I do not remember the details of that event exactly.

D. — You also said that you thought she had been in the front rank when the generals Clément Thomas and Lecomte were killed?

R. — I was only repeating what was said around me.

Captain Dailly then speaks. He asks the court to remove the accused from society, as she represents a continuing danger. He abandons most of the charges, except that of carrying weapons, openly or concealed, in an insurrectional movement.

Maître Haussmann, who is then given the floor, declares that, given the formal refusal of the accused to defend herself, he simply defers to the wisdom of the court.

The President. — Accused, do you have anything to say in your defence?

Louise Michel. — What I ask of you, you who call yourselves a council of war, who judge me, who do not hide like the commission of pardons, you who are soldiers and judge in full view of all, is the field of Satory, where our brothers have fallen. I must be removed from society; you are told to do so; very well! the commissioner of the Republic is right.

Since it seems that every heart that beats for liberty has a right only to a little lead, I claim my share! If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance, and I shall denounce to the vengeance of my brothers the assassins of the commission of pardons…

The President. — I cannot let you continue if you go on in that tone.

Louise Michel. — I have finished… If you are not cowards, kill me!…”

After these words, which caused deep emotion in the audience, the council withdrew to deliberate. After a few moments, it returned to the courtroom, and by its verdict, Louise Michel was unanimously condemned to deportation to a fortified enclosure.

The accused is brought back and informed of the judgment. When the clerk tells her that she has twenty-four hours to appeal, she cries out: “No! There is no appeal; I would prefer death!”

Let one compare her defence with that of Théophile Ferré, and one will understand.

This act, and that of surrendering herself to the Versaillais, who wanted to shoot her mother if she did not reveal her daughter’s whereabouts, sufficiently demonstrate what were the energy and courage of this woman, but — as I have already shown — an energy and courage born of bitterness, disgust, and grief.

Now she will depart, the poor Louise, for distant lands, for the penal colony where one suffers, where one dies of misery, torture, and boredom.

The executioners of Versailles did not wish to take the life she offered them, which she flung in their faces like a final insult; what, now, would dangers and physical suffering matter to her? Nothing… And in the hold of the Virginie, which carries her to the penal colony, she will not fear sacrificing herself once more for others, stripping herself for her abandoned companions, protesting on behalf of those who are mistreated.

It is terribly cold beyond the Cape; the women shiver and weep with pain; Louise takes off part of her clothing and covers the unfortunate ones. It is true that she is robust as few are: tall, with broad shoulders and powerful limbs, Louise was built to endure a century of battles. Physical privations had little effect on her body, and going several days without eating or sleeping caused her no discomfort. Moreover, she never felt seasick, even in the midst of the fiercest storms.

She finally disembarked at Nouméa in excellent health, unlike all the other deportees.

Seeking death, mocking illness and distance, ill-treatment and deprivation, she is constantly spared and passes through everything, while the unfortunate ones, clinging to the slightest hope, straining in a final effort to live, taking every precaution, avoiding every danger, dreaming of deliverance or escape, are mercilessly cut down by the jailers, fever, spleen, or consumption.

When she sees that Death does not want her, the deportee, faithful to the sentiments that have always animated her, will devote her existence to making that of the other prisoners more bearable. On the Ducos peninsula, Louise consoles everyone, revives the most dejected, cares for one, then another, and whenever there is a protest to be made, it is she who she takes the initiative and the responsibility.

As soon as she set foot on the large island, Louise wanted to get to know the Kanaks. She was quick to appreciate them and immediately became their friend. When she left the peninsula to go to Nouméa to run a small school, she had a certain number of them attending her Sunday classes, and who, she said, “were more attentive than the French and learned much better.”

On this subject, she did not always agree with the other prisoners, who saw in the Kanaks people dangerous to their safety. “Be kind to them,” Louise would say, “and they will be your friends; I am quite sure they will never harm me.”

It is certain that a great number of deportees of the Commune, who had all more or less turned out badly, became for the most part greedy politicians or submissive and arrogant officials; they did not go so far as to freely extend a hand to these “inferiors.” And when the Kanak uprising of 1878 suddenly broke out, there was only one cry among the political prisoners: “Exterminate them!”

Louise Michel is outraged, loses her temper, and argues with all her companions:

“How! You are not with them, you who are the victims of reaction, you who suffer from oppression and injustice! Are they not your brothers? They too fight for their independence, for their lives, for their freedom. As for me, I am with them, just as I was with the people of Paris, risen up, crushed, and defeated!”

A violent altercation took place on this subject between her and Henri Bauer, an altercation that nearly ended tragically.

When she spoke of these events, Louise expressed herself in such a way that one could feel, in the strongest possible manner, her sense of justice asserting itself.

“I held the Communards in great esteem; but that time, they disgusted me. So I took my revenge. One evening, the Kanaks, who were fond of me, came knocking at my hut. They told me they were going to ‘fight the whites.’ I congratulated them and showed them how to cut the telegraph wires. The next day, all communications were interrupted.

What the deportees shouted!… but as for me, I was quite pleased.”

There was nothing in her that in any way resembled the way the “industrialists” of the press or the many petty shopkeepers of contemporary socialism and anarchism behaved; no calculated protest, no studied movement, no self-interested impulse toward justice; she was entirely instinctive, natural, impulsive, spontaneous. The Kanaks appeared to her as the most unfortunate; as the dispossessed and the victims that they were, moreover; they were mistreated, hunted down, starved, shot; well then, the pretexts of “civilisation” mattered little to her, she was with the Kanaks! What could be greater and more beautiful than this feeling in which not the slightest trace of calculation appears?

Alongside the deportees of the Commune, there were also the defeated of Islam, the Muslim prisoners, expiating, like and with the men of March 18, the crime of having fought for independence. Naturally, Louise also turned toward them; El Mokrani, the great caïd of the Hachem, the leader of the Kabyle revolt, became her closest friend.

During the five years she remained on the Ducos peninsula, Louise tried to make herself useful from a scientific point of view, but unfortunately never succeeded. Not that she lacked the ability to learn or the means of investigation, but simply because her scientific training was entirely incomplete. In this respect, she resembled all the unfortunate schoolmistresses of the Empire, of that accursed period when knowledge was not a recommendation, but rather a crime.

A very curious thing, however, is that, although Louise was not a scholar, she had remarkable intuitions. Thus many people — not to say all — would be very surprised to learn, for example, that the famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, published by Jules Verne, is hers — not, of course, the novel as it appeared, but the fundamental idea; what she had conceived was the submarine, the universally known Nautilus. Her manuscript ran to about 200 pages, and one day, when she was in need of money, she sold it for one hundred francs to the famous populariser.

In 1888, during lectures given at the Salle des Capucines, she was already anticipating X-rays while speaking about the transmission of thought.

Often, during our lecture tours, she would assert to me that one day aerial navigation would have made such progress that one could build aerial cities. Louise perhaps went a little far. Ah, who knows?…

However, although she made no remarkable discovery in New Caledonia, she nevertheless contributed to certain acclimatisation experiments which later proved to be of very great importance. M. Drouin de Lhuys, president of the Acclimatisation Society, had kindly arranged to send her, to the central prison of Auberive where she was awaiting her departure for New Caledonia, a large quantity of seeds intended to be used by the revolutionary for plantation experiments. Louise carried out her agronomic mission very well and was very happy to learn, about twenty years after her deportation, that numerous botanical species had been acclimatised in Algeria thanks to the stay she had given them in New Caledonia.

After having remained five years on the Ducos peninsula, the “terrible woman,” as certain officials called her, was authorised to open a school in Nouméa.

There she taught about fifteen children, almost all daughters of deportees, who soon came to love her. In the evening, not a minute was wasted by Louise. She ran in all directions in search of the Kanaks, spoke with them, concerned herself with their health and their situation, and finally encouraged them to come to the school on Sundays.

Hundreds passed before her blackboards, where she taught them to read and count. Among those who were her pupils, some continued their studies and passed their baccalaureate successfully. And those “less advanced,” to whom the Homais of politics and colonisation deny all intelligence and all feeling, became admirers and devoted followers of the Good Louise. So much so that, when she embarked to return to France, there were thousands of Kanaks on the harbour quays who came to bid her farewell, for she had promised them she would return, after the death of her mother, to the midst of their tribes. The revolutionary movement took her away from her “dear primitives,” but I often saw her weep when she spoke to me of them: “How many tears they shed, those dear children, on the day of my departure!”

Here is a curious, even strange aspect of Louise Michel’s sentimentality: she would give herself over to a pity, an excessive tenderness toward beings, in proportion as they seemed marked by an apparent inferiority. This sentimentality almost borders on deviation, on abnormality. Thus she loved the Kanaks not only because they were oppressed — which would be easy enough to explain — but above all because they appeared to her as inferiors; indeed, she loved animals even more: dogs, cats, birds. And if someone killed an insect in front of her, she would be revolted or feel unwell. As for small children, well, she did not even look at them; I never saw her embrace one warmly.

An anecdote will show how deeply she felt pity and gentleness, especially toward those whom a pretentious civilisation crushes insolently.

We were travelling from Algiers to Tizi-Ouzou (Kabylia). From Ménerville onward, the compartments were overcrowded. There was a market the next day at Tizi-Ouzou. Burnous-clad men came and went all along the train, opening and closing the doors, looking for places. There was still one in our compartment, although we were already tightly packed, for the natives never travel without carrying with them an enormous bundle, which usually takes up more space than its owner. I admit that on trains they are cumbersome, and that it is not always pleasant to travel in their company.

Near the entrance door, on one side, there was a very properly dressed gentleman and, on the other, a woman with a sour face: probably a minor official and some sort of clerk.

For a while they had done nothing but grumble. Each time an indigenous person opened the door to see if there might be room to squeeze in, they pushed him back roughly and insolently.

— “It’s full!… Go away!…” the woman would say to them.

— “Barka!… Barka!…” added the well-dressed man.

At last all the doors were shut. The stationmaster blew his whistle, the locomotive answered, and the train began to move.

Suddenly a hooded figure appeared at the window, very pale and frightened: the beardless face of an adolescent. A young Arab, having found no place, had remained on the step, clinging to the brass bar on the outside of the carriage.

An Algerian Jew who was travelling with us, of colossal strength, rushed toward the door with the intention of opening it. The gentleman made a gesture to prevent him. The poor man!… What had he done? The giant, with one hand, seized him by the neck and with the other opened the door. The young “bico” had stepped aside so as not to be thrown onto the tracks by the half-open door.

— “Get in!… Get in!… quickly!…” they shouted to him.

The train was speeding along.

The poor child approached, trembling, the entrance to the compartment.

Our companion stepped back to let him climb in; but he still did not release the well-dressed gentleman, who was beginning to stick out his tongue.

The woman gesticulated and protested.

Meanwhile, Louise had pressed herself against Charlotte and had seated beside her the little “bico,” who was sobbing.

— “Come now, come now,” said the good Louise to him, “don’t cry like that!”

He perhaps did not understand the language, but he felt the gesture of friendship. I read astonishment on his face. He had probably never received a caress from a Frenchwoman.

As tears streamed down his cheeks, Louise took her handkerchief, gently wiped the brown face of this tall boy of about fifteen, and kissed him on the forehead.

Then it was no longer mere astonishment that we saw on the face of the young Kabyle, but genuine stupefaction. He looked at Louise from head to toe, without understanding. There were three other natives with us. One of them, speaking French correctly, leaned toward Louise and, offering his hand, said to her:

— “Thank you, madam, on behalf of all the Kabyles.”

The affected young woman in the corner and the officious-looking man shrugged their shoulders. The Algerian Jew was about to leap at them again… Louise stopped him:

— “Come now!… Come now!… comrade, keep calm.”

And, addressing those who were mocking her:

— “Good heavens, how nasty you are!”

Not only did she feel pity for the weak and the oppressed; she also showed them deep respect. However unworthy an individual might be, Louise would never have violated his freedom; she would have preferred to be deceived and to be the victim. This other anecdote proves it again:

One day, we were obliged to eat in a waiting room at the station of Ménerville (Algeria), on the benches, next to Arabs stretched out in their burnous and sleeping while waiting for departure. Well, there was, in the originality of the meal, one small inconvenience: our neighbours did not smell pleasant. One of them especially gave off a repulsive odour.

Someone showed the intention of pushing him away.

— “I strongly forbid it,” cried Louise, “you would wake him.”

Humanitarian in the fullest sense of the word, she contradicted her own humanism when it concerned those whom the law of evolution has placed outside humanity. There is no doubt: if a child and an animal had been surrounded by flames, Louise would first have saved the animal. As this singular, almost monstrous side of her goodness shocked me, and I did not hide it from her, she explained it to me like this:

“The stronger beings, the better endowed, are men; they can defend themselves much more easily than animals; consequently, I believe that animals, being the weaker, are the more deserving. Yet I have pity for everything that suffers, but more for the voiceless creature than for man.”

If I happened to object that sometimes one must defend oneself against harmful or dangerous animals, she would reply with this little aside:

— “Ah! leave me in peace! Are there really harmful animals? If there were, they would be humans.”

In defending herself like this, the Good Louise forgot Thiers, Galliffet, Trépoff and other Weylers of the planet.

Her excessive love of animals led her to truly surprising acts. Thus, one tells this story of her devotion to a horse:

One winter in London, a carter had abandoned his draught horse, which had slipped on the pavement and broken its front legs. The animal’s head, covered in blood, lay on the edge of the pavement. Louise, despite the intense cold and the heavy falling snow, sat down on the soaking stone, took the drooling, blood-stained head of the poor horse, wiped it as best she could, and kept it on her knees until dawn.

When the first policeman passed by and, seeing her soaked and shivering, asked what she was doing there, she replied:

“I comfort him while waiting for his last breath.”

How many times, in Algeria, did she become indignant on seeing Arabs offering travellers bunches of living birds, tied by the feet. Her outrage was so great that she would shake her fist at the sellers, calling them barbarians.

In this, she resembled very much the Tolstoyans and the vegetarians. To kill an animal, even out of necessity, became an act of cruelty. However, since the laws of nutrition are above sentimental considerations, she consumed as little meat as possible. And even then, for that, it was necessary that she had not seen the animal being killed.

The deep horror Louise felt at seeing even the smallest drop of blood flow came from the fact that, when she was very young, she witnessed the instantaneous decapitation of a goose, whose headless neck splashed her violently with blood. She was so frightened that, all her life, the painful impression of blood returned to her.

Thus, she never gave a lecture without including some reference to the blood of the people, to the blood of the martyrs, to the blood of battles.

At her first lecture after returning from the penal colony, she expressed herself as follows:

“Let us hope that we shall no longer see Paris turned into a river of blood… We no longer want vengeance through blood… etc.”

And, in a poem entitled The Roses, one can still see this hallucination of blood:

“At Clermont, before my window,
A great white rosebush was in bloom.
When the flower opens, one sees appear
On its flesh a thread of blood.”

Further on, in her Memoirs:

In the sombre rhythm of life’s return, nursing the sad days, refrains tear at you and burden you all at once:

“Flow, flow, blood of the captive!
See this red dew on the earth, it is blood!”

And so, throughout her speeches, songs, poems, and novels, the question of blood constantly reappears. During our last lecture tour, the Russo-Japanese war was in full swing. She never gave a talk without mentioning the siege of Port Arthur. If listeners did not return home with a disgust for blood, it was because they were all true butchers.

Moreover, she admitted to me one day: “The social question will be resolved when not a drop of blood flows on the earth.”

— “Very well! But how will we feed ourselves?”

— “We will consume chemical pellets.”

— “Agreed; but if animals must be killed in order to produce these pellets?”

— “No, the plant kingdom will suffice.”

— “Then you will deprive animals of certain plants; they will devour one another or attack men; blood will flow all the same.”

— “Well then, we will find something other than these chemical pellets.”

In everything and for everything, Louise Michel was paradoxical. Thus, alongside her excessive sensitivity toward animals and her obsession with blood, she had a love of battle.

“They say I am brave; it is because, in imagination, in the staging of danger, my artistic senses are stirred and charmed; these scenes remain in my mind; the horrors of struggle sing like bardic chants.

Yes, I love the cannon, the smell of powder, grapeshot in the air, but above all I am in love with the Revolution.”

She mixed into this a certain measure of cruelty:

“For me, tiger, panther or cat, I love the feline race; I especially love the great beasts; that is why, if I am ever free, I will go where the great beasts of the West are, and I will speak of the Revolution.

Those men too, the brigands, sometimes feel within themselves the revival of a savage ancestral lineage; they believe, but they believe without selling themselves. Among fanatics, we shall see!”

Louise was also a fervent contemplative, an admirer of nature. The smallest scenes that presented themselves to her view filled her with the greatest wonder.

During our journey in Algeria, I was able to observe her love for such things:

We had just passed the station of Agha and, as it was evening, from the rear platform of the carriage, we watched Algiers receding, like a ring of fire, into the deep night which, at those latitudes, falls quickly upon the world. The lighthouse of Matifou cast its coloured beams in all directions, and far off, toward the sea’s horizon, a few points of light flickered in the unfathomable darkness. Ships were moving away from the port. We followed the shore of the gulf, and the waves broke right up to the edge of the railway embankment. The roar of the sea drowned out the noise of the moving express train. A strong breeze, with a penetrating freshness, could be felt.

Despite the wind and the cold, Louise wanted to enjoy the view. She came closer to us.

— “How beautiful it is!” she said.

— “Are you happy,” I asked her, “to be travelling through Algeria?”

— “Indeed I am; when I tell you that we are the happiest people in the world, the most favoured.”

— “Not always; for instance, your ten years in the penal colony… That is quite a ‘favour’!”

— “You may believe that I do not regret them, for they allowed me to see, after rounding the Cape, the beginnings of the polar regions, Australia, and New Caledonia. Many people would gladly give ten years of their life to make such a journey.”

— “Without the chain-gang, for example.”

— “Well, when that is the only way…”

— “You are good! And the suffering you endured?”

— “I hardly even paid attention to it.”

She had, in fact, faced all dangers to see the unknown, to contemplate the wonders of nature. If she had taken that direction in her life — and what kept her from doing so? — Louise, as an explorer, would have astonished the world as much as, as a revolutionary, she stunned it.

It was therefore with all these exaggerated, so to speak distorted feelings, with this hypertrophied sensitivity, these contradictions, these dualities, this constant paradox, that Louise Michel appeared a second time in the public arena, where she captivated many different temperaments, many opposing consciences, many contradictory opinions.

Alas, she was only a spark of goodness, and her voice merely calmed for a moment the howling herd of a cruel and wicked humanity. How many applauded her who remained foul brutes, steeped in religion, militarism, and morality!

Whatever one may say, she knew herself to be misunderstood in the domain of goodness, and she was not as optimistic as one might be tempted to believe.

When I allowed myself to point out to her that humanitarianism could not logically go as far as foolishness, naïveté, or inconsistency; that one could not truly love a mixture of scoundrels, rogues, honest people and worthy men; and that, in this modern world in full decay, it would be far more logical, before offering one’s sympathy, friendship or love, to distinguish individuals, categories or groups according to their actions, their mentality and their feelings (I called this camaraderie), Louise did not want to depart from Humanitarianism, even though, deep down, she did not entirely believe in it.

“I know well that they will not be better tomorrow; but if they are in a thousand years, it will be in a thousand years. I am not selfish, you see, whether it pleases you or not; what I have said will always have served some purpose.”

She smiled mischievously as she said this, rubbed her hands together, and added with a slightly mocking air:

— “Do the same, my ‘little friends’!”

Poor Louise, good Louise, how many times have we told you that you were right, and indeed you alone were right, alone, quite alone, all alone!

---

II

It is a fact that excessive kindness almost always borders on naïveté; it is even rarer that this naïveté does not lead one to be deceived, given that strange trait of intelligent naïve people: a touch of vanity prevents them from admitting that they have been fooled.

In Louise, this trait took on remarkable proportions. One could even say that her naïveté approached childishness. She did, in fact, experience the worst adventures of this kind: yet she never admitted to having been deceived.

The first thing she did, upon her return from New Caledonia, was to fall into the clutches of the rather unremarkable police prefect of the time, Andrieux. The man with the grey gloves had, through one of his agents named Serreaux, created the newspaper La Révolution Sociale, which was nothing more nor less than a trap for revolutionary writers. Louise, of course, rushed to it; the title alone fascinated her: just think, a newspaper called The Social Revolution!

So I had to, on our return, finding an anarchist paper, bow my head and accept the first invitation to collaborate. The wind was blowing furiously and I was thinking of the thunder rumbling underground when M. Serreaux offered me the chance to contribute to La Révolution Sociale. I would have been capable of offering myself. I admit that I had great confidence in this Serreaux, and it was not long before I was certain of the ambush.

What a degree of trust for a woman who had already taken part in so many struggles, for an agitator whom the police never let out of their sight! What magical power words, formulas, symbols, appearances and labels had over her!

Her ideology and her idealism sometimes became disconcerting, and these two psychological states – of metaphysics and of superficiality – remained with her until her death.

During our last lecture tour in Algeria, we passed through a town in the Oran region where our “organisers,” whom we only knew by correspondence, were nothing but shady press agents. They saw in our presence only an opportunity for advertising, publicity for their newspaper; vulgar showmen, they were about as anarchist as a bishop. I realised this, moreover, as soon as we arrived at the station, where they were waiting for us with a carriage. After having paraded us before the population, they made us visit their printing press. While Louise seemed delighted, I was furious, because I sensed the kind of people they were. That evening, upon returning to the hotel, she confessed to me that she needed to write an article.

“For whom?” I asked her.

“For the comrades.”

“Which comrades?”

“Well, those who welcomed us!”

“You take those people for comrades?”

“Yes.”

“I tell you they are charlatans.”

“Come now, they have a printing press; could they still belong to the old world?”

This simple reply reveals well the mystical side of Louise Michel. For her, printing having been the greatest driver of revolution in the world, the people of that profession did not seem capable of being reactionaries. The first impression, the immediate deduction from historical facts, was for her that printing types themselves contained a certain revolutionary power, just as microscopes and telescopes can only be used by materialists and atheists.

And, despite everything we could say to her, she wrote her article with as much enthusiasm as when she was writing those for La Révolution sociale.

During this same tour of Algeria, we arrived in Sétif five hours late. No one was waiting at the station.

Not far from the railway line, we spotted, at the entrance to the first street, a café-restaurant. I headed towards it. I had barely gone about twenty metres when I heard myself being called from behind:

“Girault!… Girault!… don’t go so fast. Come quickly,” Charlotte shouted to me, “they’re taking Louise away.”

Indeed, our friend was calmly walking off in another direction, accompanied by about half a dozen individuals who were saying to her:

“Come!… Come!… we will take you there!…”

Louise replied to them kindly:

“That’s fine, comrades!… come on, let’s go!…”

I ran towards her.

“But where are you going, Louise?”

“I’m going with the comrades, by thunder!”

“Good Lord! please don’t leave us.”

She understood and let go of her guides, who had been a little too eager.

“You won’t be caught like that again,” Charlotte shouted to her.

“Ah! leave me alone! I thought they were ‘comrades.’”

“So you take everyone for comrades?”

“What’s the harm?”

There was nothing left to reply in the face of such disconcerting trust.

For the very symbol of goodness, evil simply could not exist.

Here is another glimpse of it. From the moment of her return from New Caledonia, she devoted herself entirely to giving lectures, but under what conditions! Repulsive fairground showmen of the “social” scene, or simply captains of industry, theatre directors, competed for her like a sensational attraction, to offer to gawkers, to simpletons and to the hysterics of the “world.”

Just think: a woman “who burned half of Paris,” a schoolteacher “who has returned from the penal colony” — that is what will draw a crowd! Dangerous curiosity, morbid curiosity. The good Louise never wanted to admit that there were circumstances in which she was regarded as a phenomenon that could “fill the hall.” She marched for the Revolution and never concerned herself with anything else; so much so that, at times, she brought in small fortunes for certain organisers of public meetings, while she herself did not even have shoes to wear. Someone would come to fetch her saying it was “for the Revolution” or “for Anarchy”; she would not need to be asked twice. Without worrying whether it might be a trap, a compromise, or an exploitation, she would rush there — and naturally, without ever setting conditions.

“Very well, comrade. You’re there? Come on, let’s go.”

They would pay for her journey to get there; sometimes she was given supper, and very often she had to walk back on foot.

The travel money, when it was not provided by the group that invited me, was lent to me by friends, and I never repaid them. I returned at the expense of the groups, drawn from the conference takings. Friends would go and buy my train ticket.

The proceeds? Revolutionary groups know what became of them; I therefore did not concern myself with that question — I kept nothing.

And Louise always remained convinced that the profits from her lectures went to revolutionary propaganda.

It was a few anarchist militants who, in the last years of her life, denounced the ignoble exploitation of which she had been the victim throughout that quarter-century of militant activity. So many scoundrels had made use of her that sincere people could no longer approach her without being accused of exploiting her… How many times did I say to her, when she was distressed by certain newspaper articles:

“You see that an excess of goodness can harm even the most generous of causes. Today, a certain part of the public sees in your speaking tours only a way to make big money. If you had not so obediently followed these ‘peddlers of revolutionary words,’ it would not have happened.”

“Ah, you bore me! And besides, after all, perhaps they needed it.”

It was indeed the feeling of kindness that wandered, faltered, went astray in the course of this struggle, of this contemporary social mêlée — a feeling without logic, without justice, without examination, a lost and ineffective feeling because it had no rational or useful application. Louise had the illusion of having “worked for the cause” and the certainty of having rendered service to some people: that was enough for her; she was satisfied.

Fortunately, she was not, as many believed — without taking the trouble to judge or to listen — a feminist. Some ignorant people nevertheless claimed this and mocked her for it. It was not so, and there was no woman more anti-feminist than she.

On this point, she showed the greatest common sense:

“Why would woman seek to establish a duality of the sexes, when males and females have such a need to unite, to understand one another, to love one another?”

With this simple reasoning, she railed against the female politicians of the press, who claim — aspire — to participate in government and dream of becoming leaders of peoples.

“The men who sit in Parliaments already do enough foolish things; must women also aspire to become even more ridiculous than they? If there were women deputies in the Chamber, how many comic scenes would we not witness? Why would women want to establish still more authority, by taking part in the exercise of power, when they are constantly — even more than men — the victims of authority?”

These reflections of the Good Louise, moreover, made her despised by the “rebellious ladies,” who believed they were taking revenge in a refined way by calling her a “poor old woman.” And yet, how much more skilful, more intelligent, more sincere and more courageous she was — this “poor old woman” — than all those affected “candidates.”

Her unfortunate collaboration with La Révolution Sociale did not serve as a lesson to her. During a stay in London, she again fell into the nets of the international police.

An individual named Coulon had encouraged her to found an international school, where the children of refugees and political exiles would be educated. It was obviously the best way to identify and monitor the parents. Louise Michel was far from suspecting the police scheme: what she had already accomplished in Nouméa, she was going to undertake again in London. A single motive drove her: to educate and develop the children of comrades was a good deed; she immediately gave her support.

And then one day, a bomb affair suddenly emerged. Coulon was the agent provocateur; he denounced the conspirators, and it was only by chance that his imprudent and trusting collaborator was not implicated and did not share the fate of Batola, Caille and Charles, who were sentenced to ten years of hard labour.

Of course, the school closed. Well then, Louise did not want to believe in Coulon’s villainy; she was only convinced of his disgraceful conduct some time later, when friends showed her twenty proofs that he was affiliated with the international police. It is that, as I have already said, she possessed a tenacious loyalty.

Truly, the police could have done whatever they wanted with her, and if friends had not constantly watched over her safety, she would certainly not have died in Marseille, in a bed, but rather penal colony, so many were the attempts to compromise her. One day, Miss Charlotte V…, her friend who was travelling with her, found on the work table a rather bulky parcel.

“What is this?” she asked her.

“I don’t really know,” Louise replied; “some comrades came to ask me to keep this package for a few days; you can well imagine I wasn’t going to refuse them that service.”

“Who are these comrades? Do you know them?”

“Not at all, not even their names; they told me they were ‘comrades’; what more did you want me to ask them?”

They opened the parcel. What did it contain? A whole set of counterfeiters’ tools, which Miss Charlotte quickly hurried off to throw into the fields. The unknown “comrades” never came back to retrieve their deposit; but the very next day, police agents were prowling around Louise’s residence, staring at everyone who entered and left.

Her naïve goodness led her into all sorts of unpleasant adventures. Among others, this one: one day, in the rue Montmartre, she met a swindler who, claiming to have spoken with her at some meeting, addressed her roughly in these terms:

“My good Louise, my dear friend, I am in a sad, very sad situation… I am about to be sold off if by this evening I haven’t found at least a hundred francs. I beg you, do me this favour.”

“Wait, comrade, I don’t have any money, but I will go and make a small loan for you.”

She went up to L’Intransigeant, collected about fifty francs, and brought them to the “sharper” who was waiting for her in the street.

Did he thank her? No, on the contrary, he insulted her handsomely:

“It’s not fifty francs I asked you for, but a hundred; you’re making fun of me; you deserve that I slap you in the face, you and your two and a half louis.”

Louise went back up to the newspaper office to try to find a few more coins; but her friends had been watching her from the window and had seen the whole affair; while one of them went down with a stick, the others carefully washed the head of the charitable collector.

During our agitation tour in Brittany, I was able to admire, at the same time as her naïve goodness, her great courage. She who went to the people, for the people, could not accept that this same people might wish her harm. She offered herself to the crowd with such sincerity, with such a sense of her humanitarian and revolutionary mission, that taking precautions seemed ridiculous to her.

We were in Chartres and were to head to Rennes. Before taking the train, I received a letter in which the organisers of our lectures warned me to take the greatest precautions, as reactionaries had sworn to kill us upon our arrival.

We took a night train, and I recommended that Louise carefully follow my instructions so as not to fall into a trap:

“As we get off the train, we are the Gérard family, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” she replied; “that’s understood; I listen to you and follow you.”

Although it was three in the morning, a band of fierce Vendéens was already waiting for us as we left the platform; this was the moment not to reveal ourselves. Louise walked ahead of me, and since I had forgotten to hand her her ticket, she said to the ticket collector, quite naturally, pointing at me:

“My ticket? There it is — Girault has it.”

That was enough to identify us. In a flash, we were recognised, booed, insulted, threatened. Louise did not lose her composure, and as she got into the hotel carriage, she repeated to the enraged chouans:

“Come on, comrades, we are tired; let us go home and sleep.”

Arriving at the hotel, I registered us under the name of the Gérard family, insisting to Louise that she must not give herself away A quarter of an hour later, the hotel boy came up to ask whether we would be eating the next morning; Louise very kindly replied: “You know, we never eat before the lecture.” That was enough for him.

At seven in the morning, two thousand people were shouting themselves hoarse beneath the hotel windows; but Louise, to whom I pointed out the danger of her imprudence, sent me out for a walk, telling me she did not like fussing…

In the evening, after our lecture at the Popular University, we found ourselves, on the Duguay-Trouin quay, besieged in a wooden shack for three hours by five thousand fanatics who wanted to rip us apart and throw us into the canal. There were four of us: Louise, Charlotte, a comrade and myself. When I pointed out to her the very real and imminent danger, she replied calmly:

“Four against four thousand, that’s splendid. When Brittany is revolutionary, these people will remember us and they will esteem us. Let us wait until they have finished shouting.”

It was during this series of lectures that she showed her finest apostolic attitude; and if she must be considered a fanatic of her convictions, it was indeed during our stay in the land of Armor that she rose to the stature of a visionary agitator of the Revolution.

The events at Hennebont, Lorient, Brest, and the great strikes in the ports fascinated and electrified her, and it was as a herald of the coming General Strike that she addressed the crowd. The sacred mission she had imposed upon herself gave her a sense of invulnerability. No danger could reach her; she shrank from nothing; threats made her shrug her shoulders, the fury of the Breton and Vendéan crowds brought a smile to her lips, and, as on 22 January 1871, before the Town Hall, when those from Morbihan fired on the people, she cried out to the chouans who threatened: “Bandits, we will have you for the Revolution!”

At Hennebont, the drunken mob, taking the wrong route, mistook for Louise Michel a poor old devout woman who, although she had taken refuge in the church, was beaten. When Louise was told of this incident: “If I had known,” she said, “that they meant harm there, I would not have failed to run there with Girault.”

When we passed through Lorient — in front of the cannons, the town being under siege — to go and give a lecture in the open air since all halls had been refused to us, the women of Plémeur wanted to tear her apart. On one side, mouths ready to spit grapeshot; on the other, those spewing insults and hatred. Louise ran toward the white bonnets: “You have children, my good friends; it is so that they are not killed that we come to you.” The old Breton women seemed at first stunned; then they came to the meeting, and when the revolutionary had spoken, aflame, all the women of Lorient wanted to embrace her.

“You did not know us. Well then, you too, like your sons, we will have you for the Revolution.”

Before leaving the hotel, from which the landlady had wanted to throw us out as soon as she knew who we were, we were served a cup of coffee. This last one contained poison.

Pressed for time and absorbed in packing our bags, I had no time to drink it and was therefore not in the least indisposed. Louise, who had only taken a few sips — making a face, since by the taste she thought it contained chicory, which she disliked — felt violent colic and began vomiting.

As for Mlle Charlotte, who had swallowed the whole cup, she became so ill that we did not think she would get off the train alive when we arrived in Nantes.

When I pointed out to Louise all the infamy contained in this attempt at poisoning, in her reply there was, as always, not a trace of bitterness, only forgiveness:

“These people, you see, Girault, wanted to poison us because they do not know us. I am sure that if they had come to the meeting, they would never have done such a thing.”

At Nantes, another ambush. Returning from the lecture, no one stirred in the hotel to open the door for us, while several individuals were preparing to surround us. Without the slightest alarm and smiling all the while, Louise went up to them:

“Well then, comrades, you were at the meeting; are we wicked people?”

And she asked them if they would open the door for us.

Disconcerted, these poor devils, certainly paid, withdrew without daring to carry out their “task.”

During these lecture tours, in certain towns we were received by crowds. We were insulted, the windows of our carriage were smashed, attempts were made to throw us over bridges, and stones whistled past our ears. Nothing came of it; nothing ever discouraged Louise. She went on, calm and smiling, toward the General Strike, which she announced every day and believed to be near.

There was in her apostolate a phenomenon of ideological hypnotism. She saw this strike as one sees an announcing dream or a poem, and that was enough for her to march tirelessly through all betrayals, all traps, all ambushes, all insults and — something even more admirable — through all mockery. Louise Michel was, in fact, the only person in France whom ridicule did not kill.

Singular was the revolutionary spirit of this “visionary.” As we have already had occasion to point out, there was an absolute contradiction between her anarchist conception and her humanitarianism. If, for example, one had come to tell her one morning that the insurrection was swelling in the streets, she would have applauded it with all her heart; and yet, if one had proposed that she take part, at the appointed hour, in necessary judgments and executions, she would certainly have refused — not because she was a woman, but because, until the very last moment, she believed she could persuade her worst enemies.

At Nîmes, we were a second time victims of an attempt at poisoning; she again took the matter on the good side, if there was one, contenting herself with affirming that those who had acted thus would come to us, if only out of simple remorse.

Further south, on the line from Mèze to Pézenas, an attempt was made to derail the train she was on, so that she would not arrive for the evening lecture; she made a charming remark:

“I am quite pleased to see that they are learning how to derail trains; on the day of the Revolution, they will help us.”

It was materially impossible to leave in her the slightest rancour, the least spirit of vengeance. The worst misdeeds, the basest actions, the most revolting brutalities found justification in her ultimate goodness. It is, however, impossible not to recognise the element of abnormality in such an attitude, not to see the paradoxical nature of certain sentiments. All acts have a cause, of course; but can determinism, ipso facto, engender the universal excuse and the eternal pardon from which bourgeois, priests, and policemen benefit? The “divine” law proclaimed by the prophet of Judea and modernised by the comedian of Yasnaya Polyana is the greatest deception humanity has ever known. No! It is not true that the unfortunate, the oppressed, the victim can return good for evil. It is impossible that the starving should not steal, that the crushed should not rise up, that the attacked should not throw himself upon the aggressor, that the outraged should never protest!

It was this Christian aspect of her way of being that led more than one of her critics to say that, if Louise had not professed anarchism, she would have been a Sister of Charity.

III

Her kindness and her naivety nearly cost her dearly more than once — indeed, what am I saying — they even cost her very dearly: years of freedom.

First, there was the affair of the Invalides, in 1883, for which she paid with five years of imprisonment for her participation in a rather peaceful demonstration. The reactionary and bourgeois press took pleasure in complicating, exaggerating, and distorting the facts, in order, of course, to make the agitators pay beyond measure for the propaganda they had carried out.

Here is what really happened: that winter there was an enormous number of unemployed people in Paris. Émile Pouget, then employed at the Printemps department stores, had organised a large demonstration in support of the unemployed. The crowd, coming from the Esplanade des Invalides, where there had been scuffles and where Louise had addressed those present, passed along Rue du Four. A bakery stood open, with a few small loaves left in the window. Demonstrators sang and shouted; street boys followed and threw stones; one of them smashed a bakery window, and someone seized a loaf and held it up. The police rushed in — a scuffle broke out, and several demonstrators were arrested. Meanwhile, Louise followed the crowd heading toward Rue de Sèvres, to demonstrate in front of the Jesuits’ headquarters.

Taking refuge at a friend’s house, she went every day, disguised as a man, to visit her mother, who was then ill. Knowing that Pouget was being prosecuted, she did not want to leave him alone and went to surrender herself to the police prefect, Camescasse.

That was enough for her to be accused of having advised the looting and of having herself taken bread from the shopfront. From then on, Louise would have her legend, built through police “reports” and caricature; she would henceforth be portrayed as the “looter of bakeries.”

Tried at the same time as Pouget, she refused to beg the judges for leniency and, proudly, boldly, claimed the right to steal when one is hungry. Having advised no one to do what she had not herself begun to do, at least the accusation would serve some purpose: since they claimed she had stolen a loaf, then yes — let the unfortunate “take bread when they are hungry.”

“It is not I,” she said, “who will blame them when they act thus. If that is the only way to feed their children, then let them use it.”

— Five years of imprisonment — such was the judges’ response. Take note, stubborn ones; petty “counter-top” socialists, look at this woman whom you constantly claim as your own, and whose slightest actions lash your opportunism and your cowardice. After having committed yourselves, you disown; she, without having commanded, approves. Where is greatness, and where does cowardice lie?

Her internment at the Clermont central prison only made her more deeply revolutionary and anarchist, for it was during this detention that she would lose the being dearest to her: her mother. The authorities were then pitiless toward her. They knew that Louise’s presence beside her mother might prolong the life of that poor woman, who was dying of loneliness; so they locked her cell even more tightly. Louise was allowed only to attend the burial, without being permitted to follow the procession, the police pretending to fear that her presence might provoke a demonstration.

When she was brought back to her cell, the republican henchmen of the ministry felt a kind of remorse. They granted her pardon — over the corpse of that old woman. Justly outraged, she refused to leave her cell, from which she had to be literally driven out.

Thus, throughout the time she remained imprisoned at Saint-Lazare, despite the deep suffering that overwhelmed her at being separated from those she loved, she became for her fellow prisoners a great comforter and devoted herself to every charitable need. With old scraps, she made dresses for the prisoners; she taught the illiterate; she even washed linen for the sick; and finally, she cared for a host of cats and tamed an entire army of mice.

On one occasion, among others, she played a clever trick on the warder nuns. Several lengths of cloth had been brought into an empty cell near hers for the needs of the prison. As she was able to come and go fairly freely, obtaining a pair of scissors, she seized a certain quantity of cloth, which she hid under her mattress. After a week, the theft was discovered, and suspicion falling strongly on her, she was questioned about what she had done with the cloth.

“I am going to return it to you,” she said.

She then produced four shirts that she had made for her fellow prisoners:

“They need them very much; give them to them.”

So much so that, when her release order was signed, the “sisters,” despite all the propaganda she had carried out, did not want to let her go:

“My God! And what will become of our prisoners?”

Louise was expelled from the Clermont central prison, and thus had to part from her fellow detainee “comrades,” from her mice and her cats. On receiving her freedom, she had tears in her eyes…

There are temperaments that suffering, pain, and injustice make better, gentler, deeply compassionate. It is the altruistic conscience that emerges, purified and enlarged, from rational and ordinary self-interest.

We know — we remember — what we have suffered, and if the memory of endured pains is cruel, it tends to produce a discomfort, a new pain at the sight of the pain or suffering of others, simply by reflected impression. And rightly did the wise man say: “The good cannot be happy in a world of the unhappy.”

To have suffered much is to be good and compassionate, whether that suffering was physical or moral. Not to tremble before the misfortune of others is to be, physiologically and psychologically, an abnormal being.

Indeed, Louise was, in this respect, good beyond human limits, precisely because she had endured the full measure of human suffering: the Caesarian repression, the excesses and hatreds of the Commune, the assassination of Ferré, the penal colony, the death of her mother, seclusion and, meanwhile, continual privations, insults, jealousy, betrayal, slander (even from revolutionaries who wanted to prevent her from writing anywhere); all this had made her feel the full weight of human wickedness, hatred, and stupidity. She had come to appreciate keenly the justice of men and the value of doctrines professed by rogues.

People were foolishly astonished at Louise’s attitude during the assassination attempt of which she was the victim on the part of Lucas; the “shopkeepers,” the spiteful, and the fools did not understand why she saved the man who had wanted to kill her. M. Homais let slip his idiot’s grin, and the respectable press did not fail to accuse her of affectation. Yet how natural her attitude was! Here was a woman who had spent ten years of her life in the penal colony and endured five years of imprisonment; who knew all the tortures, all the anguishes of isolation, of silence, of incarceration; who had been struck down by mortal grief, under the weight of sorrow — and they would have her be happy to see such a fate fall upon another being; that her vengeance should demand for another the same hell, the same sufferings, the same anguish, even if that one were her worst enemy, even if he had wished to take her life!

No — her generosity, her goodness forbade her to utter a single word of blame against the individual who had struck her; more than that, she took an interest in him as soon as she learned that he had acted without discernment, when she understood that he was a simpleton, or rather, an unconscious instrument.

Lucas was in fact a poor devil without instruction or education, whom a priest had known how to use for a base religious vengeance. More precisely: the curé who pushed Lucas to his act was not himself an evil man; he was one of those country priests, as ignorant as they are fanatical, as foolish as they are Christian. He had heard it said about Louise in such terms; he had read such horrifying stories about her that our holy man became convinced that in her he saw a daughter, a missionary of Satan, an impious creature charged by the Spirit of Evil with flooding the earth with the most dreadful scourges. To make her disappear — to kill her — would therefore be a pious act, for which the Divine would credit him generously in his heavenly account.

He then meditates on the means of accomplishing his “good deed,” of carrying out the command of God.

Louise Michel was to give a lecture in Le Havre, on 23 January 1888, in the large Franklin hall. The priest, a cowardly schemer, therefore seeks a vengeful arm to substitute for his own, and in the Sainte-Adresse district he finds a man he had previously confessed. He takes him aside, flatters him, buys him drinks, even slips him money generously; then, suddenly, reveals to him the mission that the Most High has reserved for him, Lucas:

“He must kill Louise Michel, that unbeliever, that witch, that envoy of Satan!”

The drunkard is overpowered by the madman; after receiving twenty francs, he goes to find another drunkard; the two of them go to the meeting, and while the speaker occupies the platform, Lucas fires at her almost point-blank, discharging two bullets. Struck in the neck and below the ear, Louise realises she is wounded when she sees her blood flowing over her cloak.

One can imagine the fury of the crowd, already sympathetic to the revolutionary; some of those present want to lynch Lucas; Louise opposes them with all her strength; in the end he is arrested and imprisoned.

From that moment, Louise thinks only of what must be done to save him: Lucas must not be condemned. He must be saved, and on the very day when she undergoes surgery to remove the bullet that struck her, Louise says to the surgeon:

“Above all, do not forget to tell the examining judge that it was nothing, barely a scratch.”

Once recovered, she immediately rushed about in all directions, making fifty démarches on behalf of Lucas; she went to see Laguerre, whom she engaged as a lawyer, pleaded the wretch’s case before the prosecutor, had Charcot and Dr Labbé intervene, and finally defended her attacker insistently before the judges.

“He has a little daughter,” she said, imploring the jurors in her name.

In the end, the drunkard was acquitted.

Despite his brutishness, such an attitude from the woman he had tried to kill completely transformed his thinking. He made the effort to reflect, as best he could, and a few years later, when he died of tuberculosis and alcoholism, there appeared, toward the end of his life, a kind of clarity:

“Above all,” he said, “may the anarchists look after my daughter.”

But, on the other hand, the priest who had instigated the act had also reflected. As soon as he learned that Louise Michel was striving to save Lucas, he came to find her and told her everything that had happened, announcing his intention to go and find the examining magistrate and to present himself as the principal culprit.

“I am defending him well,” she exclaimed; “we have enough to do saving one man!”

And, as her only revenge, she offered this ironic remark about the priest:

“Well then, if it is your God who commanded you to do such a stupidity, he is a damned fool!”

Never knowing, and never wishing to know, distrust, the affair of the Invalides did not alter her temperament in the slightest; imprisonment did not make her any more cautious.

On 1 May 1890, the events of Vienne (Isère) broke out. An intense strike movement began; the anarchists Pierre Martin and Thévenin led it and called upon Louise, who hurried there. Turbulent meetings took place; the beginnings of an insurrection appeared; factories were attacked; one of them was looted; violent open-air meetings were held.

In the end, the authorities gained the upper hand. Comrades were arrested. Louise Michel, on 2 May, returning with Thévenin, was arrested at the Lyon station and taken back to Vienne.

It was there that her kindness and her naïveté would lead her into an infamous trap prepared by the sinister Constans (of Fourmies). Immediately imprisoned and made the prey of the police, this is what happened: being thirsty, she asked for something to drink; the trap already set, an officer handed her a bottle of wine that had been sent to her, along with water, and, flattering her, asked whether she would like to share a drink with him.

“How could I refuse?” replied the brave woman, without resentment; “I bear you no ill will; it is simply that you are ignorant, and I am sure that in you there is a good fellow.”

Without her noticing, the “good fellow” poured a dreadful mixture into her glass.

After two hours, she was delirious, and in that state she was brought before a police commissioner, who drew up a report accordingly before witnesses…

In the first days of June, she was released as irresponsible. Immediately, the vile press called her mad; the “good comrades” all hastened to abandon her, and Constans thus rid himself of her more surely than with two or three years of prison.

At the time, Louise did not grasp the full implications of such a manoeuvre, and it was quite calmly that she set off again for the capital and returned home, at 89 rue Victor-Hugo, in Levallois-Perret. It would not be for long. Constans, driven by relentless hatred, continued his pursuit. After having had her declared insane, he would push his crime to the end by trying to have her committed.

Fortunately, a police officer, seized by scruples and harbouring a certain sympathy for the revolutionary, warned her in time. She would have been lost forever if officer Roger — a strange coincidence — who was later killed by a madman, had not one day come to find her and urged her to leave for abroad:

“You know,” he told her, “madmen set fires. Beware of everyone.The prefect has assigned someone, secretly, who is to come and stay in your house; you understand, don’t you?”

She understood so well that two days later she was fleeing to London, in the company of her friend Mlle Charlotte Vauvelle; and she did well to do so, for, in the name of Louise Michel, Constans had a torch ready to set the building on fire.

---

IV

Her exile in London rendered Louise silent, much to her regret, for several years. Apart from her many visits to the Jews of Whitechapel, whom she loved greatly, her life was, so to speak, void from 1890 to 1895. Surrounded by dogs, cats, and birds, she wrote mountains of novels, poems, plays, and pedagogical treatises… All this will probably never see publication.

(Note: It should be mentioned, however, that the Internationalist Bookshop in Alfortville (Seine) is currently publishing her Posthumous Works. The first volume, already released, is titled Before the Commune. The second, in preparation, will contain a powerful drama by Louise Michel, Prometheus; and the third, poems and selected works written after the Commune.)

What long and sad days she must have endured had she not lived in London! She had come to spend her time searching for abandoned animals, which she gathered up and brought to the sisters of the French hospital; so much so that in the end they had to ask her to stop bringing more, as there were too many.

However, since French territory was not forbidden to her and she could come there as she pleased, she was occasionally seen passing through Paris. Almost always mysteriously, she would arrive at the Gare du Nord, dressed in her long, very simple black dress, the fur collar of her coat pulled up to her eyes, and wearing her usual unadorned straw hat.

What then did she come to do in secret in the capital? Why did she so carefully avoid reporters and the police? It was because our Louise was constantly hurrying to conspiratorial meetings. Twenty times, in the clubs of London, the Revolution was prepared; twenty times she came to seek money for that Revolution. For several years she was the quartermaster of the great upheaval, which was always simmering and never bursting forth.

She once came to collect funds for the insurrection in Flanders, which three Don Quixotes had prepared and of which the Flemings never wanted to hear. That revolution found its end and its moral in a reprimand delivered to the three “insurgents” by a good Belgian burgomaster: “For once, you know, you are going to return each to your own home. One must let peaceful people sleep in Belgium, you understand, anarchist.”

And while the riot was thus rumbling in the land of Leopold, Louise was dying of fever, following a chill caught during the journey from London to Paris. All that she had gathered as money was in the hands of the “rioters”; she did not even have enough left to buy medicine. Those around her reproached her: “That is nothing,” she replied; “if I die, well then, so be it, provided it warms things up in Belgium.”

Alas! yes, it warmed things up! It had never even warmed things up so much!

It was also for a dozen or so Italian revolutions that the poor naïve woman raised funds. Those whom she tapped for the ‘Great Cause’ are legion, and more than one generous soul, reading these lines, will remember a coin given gladly, so much did Louise’s sincerity and gentleness know how to convince even the most sceptical. She begged tirelessly and without fatigue for the Spanish Republic, for Cuban independence, for the release of the martyrs of Montjuich, for the defence of Dreyfus and of anarchist prisoners in Guyana. Almost always, the money went to revolutionaries behind the scenes or to journalists (?) of dubious scruples, who were content to frequent the clubs with a clandestine arsenal hidden beneath their frock coats.

Whenever one wanted to ‘make the revolution’ somewhere, one came – an obligatory first step of the programme – to find Louise; the ‘good comrade’ would get up, put on her hat, and immediately set off in search of the necessary funds. Her kindness thus squandered fabulous sums.

It was in 1895 that she reappeared in France as an agitator, on the occasion of the founding of Le Libertaire by Sébastien Faure. On 16 November 1895, she took part in a series of lectures, the proceeds of which were intended to aid Les Temps Nouveaux, La Sociale, and the journal Le Trimard. It was perhaps the first time that money produced by her words and her popularity was destined for a truly honest purpose. This series of lectures, which covered a large number of towns, was a colossal success.

During this reappearance, the ‘Good Louise’ reached the height of her eloquence. She was still under the impression of the acts of propaganda by deed that had taken place the previous year: Ravachol, Vaillant, Émile Henry had rekindled her enthusiasm for the Commune. The platform found her entirely vibrant and magnificently fiery, and her ardour yielded in nothing to that of the youngest propagandists who revealed themselves at that time, but of whom very few, unlike the woman condemned by Versailles, gradually climbed the ranks of revolutionary thought and contemporary ideas.

In June 1896, she visited Holland and returned to Paris for a few lectures; then, called to Scotland, she disappeared again until May 1897. At that time, she undertook a new tour with Sébastien Faure, during which the two speakers gathered enormous crowds. At that moment, it was truly to the masses, to the people, to the revolutionaries that Louise was able to speak. In the aftermath of the horrors of Montjuich, she electrified herself at the same time as the crowd, at the account of the atrocities committed by the Spanish inquisitors. Her sincere revolt, communicated first and foremost, inflamed such multitudes that public opinion, then hostile to the anarchists, wavered for a moment in their favour.

Louise Michel and Sébastien Faure at the tribune: that spectacle alone was enough to shake entire populations out of their torpor and indifference. The clamour that arose following their crusade was so great that the torturers hesitated for a moment before the uprising of universal conscience… Montjuich did not keep all its martyrs…

Humanitarian, profoundly—almost religiously—humanitarian, Louise had taken part in the work of liberation and justice, in the work of goodness and fraternity; she had realised part of her programme; nothing in the world could have made her happier.

In May and June 1902, Louise undertook another series of lectures which proved most unfortunate. It was in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair. The anarchists, split almost unanimously into two camps, each claiming both to be right, reproached one another either for having taken part in this great agitation or for having remained strangers to it.

Émile Janvion, a violent and fiercely sincere character, had been decidedly anti-Dreyfusard. His temperament, making him unjustly harsh toward a number of comrades, meant that, although he was often right, his attitude almost always put him in the wrong. Sébastien Faure in particular—although he carefully avoided all personalisation and any generalisation of the quarrel—was violently attacked by him.

And once again one witnessed the deplorable effects of party spirit, from which anarchists above all ought to have been—and until then had always been—free. The comrades split into fauristes and janvionistes; it was perfectly absurd, yet so it was. And Louise, poor woman, who concerned herself with none of this and had taken part in neither side, nevertheless paid for it in accusations and the sacrifice of her personality to the Idea, which she did not wish to compromise. Rather die, burst, as she always said, than accuse a comrade, than justify herself to the detriment of a militant, than arm the attackers against the Cause by shedding light on some small ‘private drama.’

Tormented by the rancours of injustice and ingratitude, she knew how to remain silent, though it later cost her many tears. And it was submerged in a deep sadness that once again she returned to shut herself away in Dahomey Street.

---

V

On 8 August 1905, I wrote to Louise the following letter:

My dear Louise,

I see in Le Libertaire that you are calling upon militants from certain towns to organise a lecture tour. For my part, I intend shortly to travel across all of Brittany. You often told me how happy you would be to go and speak to the lads of Armor. Would you like, once your lectures are finished, for us to join hands and travel together through the land of the Chouans, to whom we would speak of Revolution and Anarchy?

Hoping to read you soon,

Your affectionate comrade,

E. Girault.

On 10 August, Louise replied to me:

Dahomey Street,

Mitcham Lane,

London.

My dear Girault,

Of course, it is better for us to unite for the conferences rather than each go our own way. So do what seems best to you; organise as you see fit. I have confidence in you. Simply give me the day and time when we are to meet, and count on me.

My regards,

Louise Michel.

---

Fifteen days later, we met in Compiègne; our beginnings were happy, and from that day Louise Michel was to carry out the most extraordinary, the most eventful, and the fullest series of her lectures.

In certain towns, upon our arrival, the crowd acclaimed her and cried: “Long live Louise Michel!” She would then become indignant at these good people who thus showed their sympathy and never ceased to urge them not to shout “Long live Louise Michel!” but rather “Long live the General Strike!”

On the other hand, we were sometimes received in a very heated manner. One evening of a lecture in Vernon, hundreds upon hundreds of agitated people welcomed us with shouting, whistles, spit, even stones. They tried to overturn our carriage; failing that, all the windows were smashed. While I was doing my best to hold off the attackers, calm and smiling, Louise said to them: “Come now, comrades, be reasonable; let us go to the theatre; tonight, you will have the floor for contradiction.”

In Rennes, what I recounted earlier occurred. In Saint-Brieuc, it was impossible to get off the train: the region was in revolt, and the chouans, armed, forced establishments to close so that we could enter nowhere. But matters became far more complicated in Lorient. Alarmed by the intense agitation that she provoked, combined with the awakening of a Breton revolutionary movement, the presence of the famous agitator led the government to place the city under siege. Ten thousand troops were concentrated there. Local organisers were ordered to refuse us all halls; it was clearly intended to make it completely impossible for us to speak.

A section of the working population, outraged by the overly despotic attitude of the authorities, threatened to storm the establishments. That was enough to drive to delirium the smallest and most foolish of our admirals of France; he called in the artillery and, brave man, claimed to fight our speeches with cannon fire!…

Then came Nantes, Angers, Limoges, Orléans, with indescribable ovations. At Saint-Junien, Louise was lifted onto the shoulders of the glove-makers and thus experienced the “gentleness” and the emotion of triumph.

Thus we were able to witness first-hand all the oddities and inconsistencies of the crowd, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile. In turn, fury or joy presided over our receptions; cheers and jeers alternated from one town to another, showing how unstable, how unreflective is the mentality of a class supposedly awakening, the opinion of a people patriotically united, the reason of a world born of a revolution.

Twenty kilometres away, the crowd would shout insults at us or acclaim us… Louise was transported; the agitation, whatever its nature, was enough for her happiness and fulfilled her enthusiasm. “It’s moving quickly,” she would tell me every morning. “Indeed, I believe the Great Strike is near!” At these words, her large, expressive, gentle eyes would light up incredibly. Her face became radiant, and one could read in the movements of her features an indescribable expression of belief and fervour.

Joining her hands, then placing them between her knees, fixing intensely whoever was looking at her, she would fall into a true ecstasy at the thought that they would be able to “overturn” the old world.

Her joy was so great, following our tour in Brittany, that she begged me to organise a second one. “I will not stop now… I will go all the way, until the day of the final Strike that will free the world!”

Thus we began once more to travel across the whole of France. Louise had insisted that this tour be very long; that conferences follow one another day after day; that the agitation be intense, constant, unceasing. “I want, one more time, to rouse the crowds before I die,” she told me when I left her to organise this new campaign.

This time, she had overestimated her strength…

Or else, aware that she was nearing her end, did she truly wish to fall in the breach? To end one evening after a conference, after a good “sweat” at the podium and a sudden chill out in the street?

At bottom, I believe I understood that this final decision was already settled within her and that there was nothing we could do. Her will asserted itself unshakably: she would go, she would walk, she would advance despite everything and against everything, alone if necessary. The Revolution, the General Strike were near; she had devoted herself to them, she belonged to them: she would not fail in her mission. Thus she walked, a prophetess of Anarchy, moving through the crowd like a living symbol, the tangible promise of a future of justice and goodness.

It was during this series of conferences that I came to realise the sum of courage, tenacity, and self-sacrifice contained in this woman’s being. In truth, Louise left London suffering from bronchitis, yet putting on a brave face and never ceasing to insist that she was well. However, those who knew her could perceive the superhuman efforts she set against the advance of illness and her own decline.

She admitted defeat to illness only in Troyes, when it became physically impossible for her to put one foot in front of the other and she had to take to her bed.

We then decided, her friend Mlle Charlotte and I, not to continue, and to prove to her that my decision was final, I returned to Paris. Eight days later, I received a letter in which she told me that, “completely recovered,” she was rushing to Villefranche, that I was free to be a “loafer”… What was to be done? Should we let her go alone? That would certainly have been a grave mistake. One had to either follow Louise to watch over her, or incur the slander of “good comrades,” who would not fail to shout everywhere that she was being made to march against her will and up to her last breath. I preferred to choose slander, and from that moment on I never left my old friend’s side for a single step.

VI

Until Toulon, where infectious pneumonia finally seized her, she grew animated in a striking way. A curious phenomenon: her eloquence expanded, suddenly intensifying; it was as though within her there arose a final and formidable surge of life, where the youthful blended with the mystical and with reverie; her flow of speech became gentle, soothing, almost lulling.

She seemed to glimpse a city very near, a universal Icaria, within which humanity, reconciled in well-being, in love, and in freedom, would all extend a fraternal hand to one another, to march toward the definitive conquest of a planet still harsh and of elements too often cruel:

The time is near when the masses will become aware of their strength and finally take possession of the earth. Humanity cannot go backward; no more than one can force an insect back into its chrysalis, one cannot compel the man of the twentieth century to return to caves. We are no longer in prehistoric times, when members of a clan killed their enemies to feed on their blood; we are in an age when science will liberate all humans, and above all the most unfortunate.

As for me, I feel it coming: the Great Strike will give each individual their instrument of labour and allow them to raise their children with dignity, abundantly and proudly. Governments are powerless: power is dying; politics is expiring. It is, through Revolution, that the new world advances! Let it be welcomed, the old world has lasted long enough.

This peroration never failed to stir the audience. It inflamed the least impulsive and calmed the most ferocious opponents.

And to think that in Toulon, on the very morning of the day when she took to her bed to endure her long and painful pneumonia, she still had the courage to proclaim it in one last effort of will. Then she paused for a moment to catch her breath, and before three thousand workers who were applauding her, she resumed:

“Excuse me, comrades, I am a little unwell. It is the flu that has me; I ask your permission to withdraw in order to go and kill the flu, while we wait to kill the old bourgeois society.”

It was, however, rather sadly, that day, that she left the platform, which she always departed with a broad, confident smile.

An hour later, the good Louise was trembling with fever and writhing under the most terrible nightmares. Doctor Berthollet, summoned immediately to her side, declared categorically that it was the end, that the infectious pneumonia would last seven to eight days, but that on the ninth, there would be no more Louise Michel. “However,” he added, “there are organisms that confound science; sometimes phenomena that we do not fully understand manifest themselves, and such beings as those we condemn sometimes manage quite well to survive. Who knows? Louise is cerebral; do not lose courage and redouble your care for your friend.”

On the sixth day came the agony: an agony with no other conclusion than death. But what an agony: an incredible resistance, a disconcerting will, a formidable struggle of the nervous system against microbial invasion. She clung desperately to life, not because she was afraid, but because her task seemed to her unfinished.

“I do not want to die yet, this time, for I know that the Great Strike will soon come, and I want to take part in it. Besides, they have predicted it to me — and I believe it — that I will die on an immense plain where terrible battles will be fought.”

Forced to leave her so as not to miss the conferences organised in Algeria, I left her reluctantly. Fully lucid, she still had, as she embraced me, the strength to say: “In eight days, I will be cured. Let them wait for me!”

For fifteen days, fifteen long days, she fought with Death, gathering all her strength for the expectoration that would contribute to the clearing of her lungs. Gifted with a superhuman capacity for resistance, she refused, this time again, to slip into nothingness, and little by little expelled, after dreadful coughing fits, the invading bacillus. She brought it up painfully, but patiently, with the confidence and certainty that she would live a little longer. The struggle was harsh and terrible, desperate, but it ended in the victory of the Good Louise.

Once recovered, one might have thought that the propagandist would at last stop, that she would enjoy a well-earned rest, that her final years would now pass in tranquillity and contemplation. No one imagined that she would reappear at the tribune; the friendship, esteem, and respect that her friends — and they were many — brought her in her retreat could have sufficed for her joys, for her final consolations.

But no! Was it possible for her to retreat into silence and absolute calm? Could she contemplate, impassive and resigned because of age, events that she believed must take a grand turn? No! More than ever she needed action, agitation, the tumultuous daily struggle, the intense and troubling contact of the enthusiastic, roaring crowd…

Just as we believed her very calm in some villa near Toulon, prudently undergoing a necessary convalescence, did we not receive one morning, at the office of L’Homme libre, to which she was a frequent contributor, the following little note, accompanied by a delicate and gentle short poem:

Hôtel Cronstadt,
Rue Jacob,
Paris.

My dear Girault,

Come quickly to see me. I have many things to tell you, and some verses to give you for your dear little Fernande.

I embrace you warmly,
Louise Michel.

⸻

WELCOME
To Fernande Girault

Fernande, be welcome
Upon our crumbling old world;
Here you are, beneath the red cloud,
Opening your lovely child’s eyes.

Fear nothing! Like a dreadful dream,
The past slips away in the winds.
Very near is the Great Strike
That has been sought for so long.

⸻

Little ones, who come upon the earth,
At the dawn of Germinal,
You will be a proud race,
Unable to commit evil.

The arts in great flights,
Discoveries, knowledge,
Will fill your years,
In place of our dark horizon.

…

Grow happy, beautiful and wise,
Little child, go your way;
Be good also in your passage:
It is a strength of Tomorrow.

And I, devoted to Anarchy,
To the very little ones being born here
For a more powerful life,
Joyful, I go forward.

Toulon, 15 April 1904

⸻

One can imagine our astonishment!
What — Louise Michel in Paris! Yet it had not been fifteen days since she had emerged from that serious illness! And what an illness! There she was, now here, after an exhausting journey of more than a thousand kilometres! It seemed unbelievable, and we wondered how she was made!

And our astonishment grew even greater when she told us of her firm decision to stop giving further lectures. Naturally, no one agreed to it.

Then she grew angry, rebelled, and even went so far as to beg us, with tears in her eyes, telling us that at least we should let ourselves be moved by the fact that she was in misery, that we would not be so harsh as to let her die of hunger.

“My animals and I need money; I beg you, Girault, do not concern yourself with what malicious people might say, and help me get out of this.”

I knew indeed that Louise was without a penny. A subscription in her favour had gathered nearly 800 francs. She could have benefited from it after her illness; generously, however, merely because M. de Rochefort had offered to pay part of the expenses of her illness, she gave up everything she had to strikers and to comrades in need.

I allowed myself to be persuaded once again by these considerations and did not think I should refuse Louise the organisation of a few lectures.

The first took place on 20 May 1904, at the Hôtel des Sociétés savantes. The presentation of this lecture already reveals the impressionable nature and above all the extreme sensitivity of Louise Michel. She had chosen this highly suggestive title: At the Gates of Death. I think it right to reproduce her speech briefly, for it so clearly displays both the qualities of her affectionate heart and a remarkable ideological transcendence.

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AT THE GATES OF DEATH

It is likely that every being, at the threshold of death, as at every phase of existence, experiences sensations in relation to itself; mine, no more than others, therefore cannot serve as generalisations. Here they are as notes:

Several times I had believed, during the early days of our lecture tour, that my will would overcome the influenza, contracted in a northern town where we had been caught in a snowstorm.

Girault and I gave a lecture each evening: his under the title Toward the Better City; mine under that of Seizure of Possession (the main lines of these lectures will soon be published in Le Libertaire). I had great hope in this tour as a means of propaganda; our itinerary was long and included Algeria.

In Troyes, I fell ill for the first time with pulmonary congestion; it passed fairly quickly, but the doctor would not let me go out for the Chaumont lecture; the opinion of my comrades being similar to his, I yielded.

My personal opinion was that the pleasure I felt in returning to Chaumont, where I had studied, the only town besides Paris I had seen before my first long journey, that of New Caledonia, and where I was expected with affection, would have restored me; the constrained will found itself presenting less strength for the continuation of the journey.

After eight days spent in Troyes, our lectures resumed. Girault had had to give several alone during that time.

I had one or two relapses again, but in Toulon I believed I had finally prevailed, and the final words of my lecture were that, in my struggle with illness, I thought I had the last word.

Once at the Hôtel Terminus, the opposite occurred. Pulmonary congestion declared itself with such severity that I felt myself descending, minute by minute, to a lower level of existence.

The expression sometimes used, “the human rag,” seemed entirely accurate to me; I felt my body like a worn-out cloth, which I myself regarded as I would have regarded any other object.

At that degree, everything becomes material. Sensations acquire an acuity all the greater because the senses can hardly be used one for the other. It seemed to me that I was reading, through my fingers, dispatches that Charlotte, my young companion, held in her hands. The manner of reading was not ours, but a simple impression. As for the dispatches, if I am not mistaken, I think it was because I was thinking about where and from whom they came.

Thought itself becomes material; it becomes symbol; language disappears.

In feeling oneself leaving within the elements, one experiences a double impression: a very gentle slipping along the same plane, as if following a stream of water, and a diffusion like that of scents or colours; the molecules spread far, far away.

The idea is that of an incorporation into the elements.

I then recalled an impression from New Caledonia: during a cyclone, the sky and the sea were black, torrents of water poured like oceans, and I, clinging to a rock, looked into that darkness and felt an attraction toward the depths of the sea, where roared, like the howls of beasts, the hissings of reptiles, the waves in the abysses; I felt, just as strongly as on that day, that same thought returning to me: that we have lived within the elements.

I had other memories still, among them that of a piece of music composed by a nihilist who left no name, which our friend Huot played on his violin, and which made me think of a pit of darkness where one struggles, striking the walls of an abyss with one’s arms. These memories had more intensity than distant reality.

When the final hour is awaited by all those around you, when one no longer suffers, while a little life still remains, the senses, which at first replaced one another, become one alone, containing all; time becomes a block that crushes you, the eternal past joins the present, and the present holds to the future.

As for duration, I was mistaken: time seemed long like eternity, and yet it seemed so much shorter to me that I counted eight days instead of three weeks.

This impression must give rise to the continual question of the dying: “What time is it?” I did not ask it because at every moment, with a station clock before the window, Charlotte or the doctor said it aloud.

Being higher, thought becomes higher; one looks at the vast world as one would look at a painting; war appears as a great stain of blood, the successive eras as ever higher summits.

The two human currents, one toward the past, the other toward the future, move along, colliding like the agitation of an anthill, where some persist in burying themselves under the debris, while others hasten to carry the larvae toward a new city.

I express all this less clearly than I felt it; it was then vast and beautiful: all the evil of the eternal miseries darkened; past and present friendships, the sympathies that arise, are currents of life; it seemed that infinite love had become a sense and enveloped you. It is one of the forces of the future. It is from there that I returned, and I have kept infinite love.

Perhaps the race that is rising, which will be the twentieth century, will understand these things; we are not we, who are only the primates of the idea; the humanity of tomorrow, elevated with globes, telescopes, microscopes to replace crosses — among whom drowsy mysticism will have evolved into a love of the unknown, of the arts, of discoveries — will create the legend of the future…

But the time when all will be conscious is still far off, perhaps, and the struggle to reach it will be as harsh as my return to life.

…

Once I felt better, I asked myself, in the face of all the signs of sympathy that had been shown to me, what I could do to deserve them. It would perhaps be by continuing my life of propaganda for the seizure of the world by humanity, by working to diminish hatred among men, since it was fading around me.

It was indeed with this paradoxical state of mind that Louise, for a few months more, continued to carry her apostolate across the world. She expounded the revolutionary principle of “taking possession,” at the same time as her deeply altruistic feelings.

---

One might have thought that she was troubled by the need to reconcile class struggle with love among all people — even between exploited and exploiters — to resolve the economic dualism of fraternity and the exploitation of man by man… Not in the least; she possessed a rhetoric that allowed her to appear both humanitarian and revolutionary at the same time, a phrasing that enabled her to remain both fierce and kind.

Certainly, she was far from having a doctrine that resolved all possible contradictions; but she approached things in such a way that greatness of soul replaced logic in her speeches.

Let us admit it: for her work to have remained effective and lasting, she would have needed to live ten centuries. She is dead; nothing remains of her philosophy, just as nothing will remain of the propaganda of the apostles of pure goodness, of pure sentimentalism. Their influence counts for nothing historically: only as a surge of sympathies: they are the good memories of Humanity, that is all.

Cold reason, pitiless observation, rigorous analysis are other levers for social transformation. Kindness is a force, certainly, but only when it is grounded in the objective factors of life and above all when it finds a rational and normal application. Kindness without reason, without consideration of reciprocity, vague, uniform, and universal kindness, is a deception, and too often a harmful one.

---

VII

As she left London to join me in Paris, Louise was in excellent health; no trace remained of her terrible illness, and it was with great enthusiasm, with youth once again in her heart, that she rushed to the platform which attracted her, magnetised her so powerfully.

Our final lecture tour of 1904–1905 was a frantic race across France and Algeria. Each evening a meeting had to be held, and the next morning we would escape, fly toward another region, toward a new city where the crowd, eager to hear the Bonne Louise, whom her illness had made more popular than ever, would come rushing, dense and pressing. I no longer know exactly how many lectures we gave that time — more than a hundred perhaps! And the Red Virgin was always at her post, vibrant, warmly eloquent.

Sometimes, however, the speech lacked coordination, precision, clarity; toward the end, certain developments frayed at the edges; but she knew how to recover, return to the subject, despite long and sometimes awkward digressions; always, on the other hand, her peroration took on an impeccable form.

It must be said that the chosen theme — antimilitarism and the Russian Revolution — lent itself to the finest flights of eloquence, the broadest developments, the highest rhetoric, the tightest logic, the most moving sentiment. Indeed, Louise had devoted herself to an urgent, immediately necessary crusade: that of the antimilitarist International. The anarchist congress of Amsterdam, from which the new association had emerged, had filled her with enthusiasm. She confessed to me that she was once again carried away by it.

“We are going to do extraordinary things, you see, Girault. We are going to raise the world with the International. This time, it is the right one, I feel it; the antimilitarist International — that is what will overturn the old world! Come, let us march without stopping for a single moment. We must give a lecture every day until the Oxford Congress!”

And so we marched, as the Bonne Louise wished. We did, in fact, give a lecture every day, creating section after section each evening, gathering thousands of adherents, scattering piles of pamphlets…

And the good Louise died in the midst of it! And the Oxford Congress did not take place! And the world did not stir, and the International overturned nothing, alas! And the socialists, and even certain anarchists, became patriots again! Poor Louise, come now — you “believed,” did you not — or rather, dreadful thought, did you only wish to try to believe, to delude yourself, so as not to suffer too much from the infamy of some, the slander of others, and the cowardice of all!

What astonishment would not have crushed her had she lived one year longer — she who, in all her speeches, proclaimed loudly and categorically that “the conscripts would henceforth throw down their rifles and that they would abolish the chiefs barbarous enough to lead them to war”; she who, without the slightest hesitation, affirmed that “the children of the twentieth century must no longer be either assassins or the assassinated.” Her disappointment would have been great to see suddenly appear the neo-patriotism of the Sociale, as well as the unexpected “remorse” of the arrivistes of Anarchy. To this astonishment would have been added a deep sorrow: that of observing the low level of initiative within the International Antimilitarist Workers’ Association, to whose propaganda she had devoted herself entirely.

It is true that at this very hour, when we are writing, there seems at last to be an awakening, under the pressure of the times, of the peoples’ hatred of war and militarism. Perhaps — and we hope so — this is finally the ultimate upheaval that will sweep forever from our world oppression, murder, and injustice!

As always, the most eager around her corpse were those who disavowed her then, those who now invoke her incessantly for reasons of popularity or publicity, those who, the very day before, were spreading against her all manner of vileness and slander. Thus, one month before her death (we were passing through Marseille), some friends had organised an antimilitarist conference. We thought that all the members of the antimilitarist section of Marseille would at least be present; not only had the “good comrades” of the A.I.A. stayed at home, but they had even campaigned so that no one would come to hear Louise Michel! We were boycotted by the antimilitarists themselves. The reason: jealousy, quite simply, on the part of small-minded people.

Yet such behaviour wounded her deeply: nothing, in fact, hurt her more than seeing few people at her lectures. And yet, only a few hours after she had breathed her last, “comrades” came running, their faces distraught and mournful; they crowded around us, offered their help for the smallest tasks, and brought the finest wreath one could imagine. And who were these “comrades”? Those who, the day before, had deserted — and caused others to desert — the conferences of the Bonne Louise.

Moreover, the final months of the old revolutionary were, at the same time as a glorious and almost visionary march toward the future, a true ordeal. If the anonymous crowd generally remained respectful and sympathetic, the same could not be said of her comrades. What did she not endure? What did she not hear? It would be hard to believe, perhaps, but without exaggeration, no human being was more envied than Louise Michel. What the leaders of Socialism and Anarchy did toward her is truly astonishing — and in the most covert way! — without one being able to catch the hypocrites acting in the shadows. At every step, in every town, we encountered ambushes; we felt betrayal; disgraceful words buzzed in our ears; venomous insinuations were thrown out on every occasion; systematic boycotts took place; articles full of spiteful insinuations were published over the slightest incident or even nothing at all. The fury of these “hunters of popularity” manifested itself intensely.

Of course, it was from certain journalistic circles in Paris that the slander escaped. I possess dreadful letters demonstrating to what depths of baseness certain “leaders” of “revolutionism” had descended. I will never publish them, since I promised Louise to burn them. They are floods of filth that the “honest militants,” the “apostles of love,” the “Generosity itself,” have poured or caused to be poured upon this harmless woman… In her final days, it was a tropical flowering of ignominy. All the vileness, all the swindles, all the insanities came together in a powerful bundle of disgrace, in response to our efforts and our activity.

At times we were carried away by so much malice; and yet Louise rose above it all, still wanting to forgive everything. Had it not been for her interventions, her pleas, more than one so-called “sincere journalist” would perhaps have been unmasked. One may learn some fine things about this one day!

In the end, those who, in the shadows, hurled insults at her, mistreated her, and obstructed her, were the very ones who showed themselves most eager around her corpse, organising in her honour a triumphal procession and invoking her today on every occasion.

May their conscience, if they have one, be light!

Among militants or before the public, Louise never wished to admit that she was being mistreated. “Come now, comrades, let us not quarrel, it is nothing. You have misunderstood, that is all. We must make peace!” But when alone, the poor old woman bore it deeply in her heart; and I know her profound disgust, her bitter resentments. She wept more than once, the Bonne Louise, during our last tour, faced with the “brilliant solidarity” of certain militants.

Once, among others, in Algiers, she burst into sobs beside me. I tried to console her, speaking of the results we were achieving and would achieve still. — “Yes, my poor Girault, all that is very fine; but one thing grieves me deeply. They do not dare to attack me openly; but when I am dead, it is you who will pay for all this.”

I later thought I perceived that she was partly right; but why attach any importance to it?

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VIII

What best characterises the final expression of her temperament, what reveals the strength of her convictions in the ultimate manifestations of her mind, is that, up to her last hour, she retained an unshakable faith in the Revolution, an absolute certainty in the General Strike. And what above all contributed to anchoring this confidence and certainty within her was her time in Algeria. The Arabs and the Jews welcomed her, even listening to her in her most subversive lectures; this seemed extraordinary to her — she would never have hoped for it.

“These,” she would say, “are the peoples who are awakening: they feel the Revolution coming. Islam, which one believed to be asleep until the end of the centuries, will soon be with us. As for the Jews, you will see that they will quickly surpass us!”

The great rebel was never so happy as when travelling through Algeria at that time. The adventures, the obstacles, the difficulties of propaganda made her relive the turbulent periods of her life. And then, what joy to think that it was still to her activity, to her devotion, that one owed the awakening of the Algerian populations!

Alas! this deep joy, felt by all apostles engaged in the constant and arduous struggle of conviction, in the sacrifice of their personality and their immediate interests, was not to last long. After about twenty lectures and a journey to Figuig made by the author of this book, we returned to France, to the land of Revolution and nascent Anarchy. What hardships, annoyances, and painful episodes awaited us there!

Ah! that final month of the life of the Bonne Louise, with what poignant episodes was it filled! First, we left Algiers without a cent in our pockets; our travels, our stay, our interesting inquiry at Figuig, our expenses for four people, a subsidy we paid to the journal Libre Examen—all this had absorbed our very last sou.

My wish had been for Louise to rest for a time somewhere on the Côte d’Azur; but we found ourselves obliged to give immediately a certain number of lectures in order to meet at least urgent material needs. It was then, above all, that we felt a dull hostility manifest itself toward us, a silent conspiracy, whose articles, though not all, belonging to the same camp of reactionary. Certain “snobs of the Revolution” took pains to cast discredit on this noble woman, whose generosity and magnanimity went so far as to fully excuse their petty jealousy and baseness.

Our adversaries overwhelmed us in advance in their newspapers or by means of posters; nothing more logical or more natural. But what should one think of pseudo-comrades, who fiercely attacked groups and unions, spreading slander and nonsense about us so that emptiness would surround our meetings? Apart from Toulon, Nice, and the small town of Oraison, where militants showed Louise the most moving sympathy, the series of lectures was pitiful. Never had so few people attended.

Louise consoled herself by thinking of events in Russia, of the rising Revolution in the empire of the autocratic tsars.

“Here, you see, Girault, they are fools; they do not understand, history seems to pass them by. But look over there in Russia, see how beautiful it is! You will see: in the land of Gorky and Kropotkin, grand events will take place. I feel it rising, growing, the revolution that will sweep away the tsar and all his grand dukes, the servile bureaucracy, and that will overturn this immense House of the Dead. What will be most astonishing is that in Moscow, in Petersburg, in Cronstadt, in Sevastopol, the soldiers will be with the people. That officer who made his company throw down their rifles will have imitators, you can be sure of it. They killed him, did they not? Well then, he will be the most alive of all, as long as the great Russian revolt endures!”

Indeed, she felt it coming, the upheaval, the insurrection that even now was shaking immense Russia. She foresaw the Potemkin, the military and peasant revolt, the uprising of all classes against the Romanov dynasty born of Prussia, the enthusiastic participation of students and intellectual circles in the liberation of a people too long enslaved. As an inspired prophetess, she announced the formidable Revolution that would completely transform the face of things in our twentieth century. At the end of this long ordeal that was her whole life, I believe she felt a gentle consolation in seeing the great avengers of history arise — Sophia Perovskaya, Balmashov, and Kalyaev. The Russian Revolution was the supreme breath of hope that soothed her mind, wounded by half a century of disappointments and resentments.

Each morning, scarcely awake, she would immediately ask for the newspapers to keep up with the Russo-Japanese War and the workers’ insurrection. She devoured the news. One day, I found her smiling broadly, rubbing her hands:

“What is it, Louise, that makes you so joyful?”

“They have just killed a governor, a wretched scoundrel, in Russia.”

Despite these gleams of hope, we could clearly see her sadness and her growing gloom. The brave propagandist felt herself weakening and fading away. Her lucidity remained intact until the coma, and she had the full physiological awareness of death.

Our last lecture took place in the small town of Oraison (Basses-Alpes). That evening, we were both struck down by illness. Sudden and severe chills had set in, and although we had taken every precaution while travelling, we had caught a cold in Nice. While I was suffering from acute bronchitis, Louise’s condition worsened into pneumonia. Shivering and trembling with fever, we nevertheless gave our lecture in Oraison, but we were utterly exhausted.

We had to return to Marseille. Upon arriving at the Hôtel de l’Oasis, we each collapsed into our beds. To make matters worse, my own companion was writhing in pain from laryngitis and various ailments; after a few days, in a surge of energy, I got up nonetheless: Louise would completely transform the face of things in our twentieth century. At the end of this long ordeal that was her whole life, I believe she felt a gentle consolation in seeing the great avengers of history arise — Sophia Perovskaya, Balmashov, and Kalyaev. The Russian Revolution was the supreme breath of hope that soothed her wounded mind, after half a century of disappointments and resentments.

Each morning, barely awake, she would immediately ask for the newspapers in order to keep up with the Russo-Japanese War and the workers’ insurrection. She devoured the news. One day, I found her smiling, rubbing her hands:

“What is it, Louise, that makes you so happy?”

“They have just killed a governor, a vile scoundrel, in Russia.”

Despite these glimmers of hope, we could clearly see her sadness and her growing gloom. The brave propagandist felt herself weakening and fading. Her lucidity remained complete right up to the coma, and she possessed the full physiological awareness of death.

Our last lecture took place in the small town of Oraison (Basses-Alpes). That evening, we were both struck down by illness. Sudden and violent chills appeared and, despite all the precautions we had taken while travelling, we had caught a chill in Nice. While I was suffering from acute bronchitis, Louise’s condition worsened into pneumonia. Shivering and trembling with fever, we nevertheless gave our lecture in Oraison, but we were utterly exhausted.

We had to return to Marseille. Upon arriving at the Hôtel de l’Oasis, we each collapsed into bed. To make matters worse, my own companion was writhing in pain from laryngitis and various ailments; after a few days, in a sudden burst of energy, I got up all the same: Louise was dying, and my companion had been irreparably struck in the brain.

We were enveloped in sadness, in misery, in suffering, and in mourning…

• • •

It can be said, and said again, that Louise died as she had lived: magnificently poor. And, however little one may wish to admit it, our last five-franc coin was used to buy an oxygen cylinder. The last twenty sous of what we had left departed with her final breath.

For four days, she was given every possible care. The doctor administered serum injections; we gave her inhalations; nothing had any effect: our very dear friend had reached the irrevocable end of her destiny.

Until the day before her death, she spoke to us quite rationally, and her final words were, as always, filled with hope and conviction. She told us that she had entrusted her last wishes to Henri Rochefort, noting that this man had been misjudged; that if he wished to admit it, to acknowledge it, he would be “saved.” She also asked us to ensure that the Parisian publisher who had undertaken the task would publish her Memoirs. Then she began, like all the dying, to ramble, to moan… and then she fell silent.

On 10 January 1905, at ten o’clock in the morning, Louise Michel was no more.

Kindness died, departed from humanity; the godless Christian woman vanished from the earth.

• • •

Already, as this radiant figure of Generosity and Gentleness slowly faded, there slipped into shadow that long and difficult life of example, of self-sacrifice and effort, at the very moment when something great was fleeing our world forever