Memoirs of Louise Michel

Louise Michel wrote two memoirs in her life.

Mémoirs de Louise Michel, écrits par elle-même is a direct, passionate account of her life, tracing her ideas, struggles and revolutionary commitments in her own unmistakable voice.

La Commune is Louise Michel’s vivid first-hand account of the 1871 uprising, capturing its hopes, conflicts and crushing defeat with clarity and conviction.

You can read them both below.

Memoirs of Louise Michel

Louise Michel wrote her memoirs while in solitary confinement from 1883-1886, where she had been imprisoned for taking part in a bread demonstration and waving the black flag of anarchy. This was a particularly cruel punishment for the deeply empathic and community-connected Louise. She coped with the aloneness of confinement by writing her memoirs, which she secretly sent to her lawyer while imprisoned.

There was a great deal of interest in Louise’s memoirs when they were published. Louise had become a public figure during the 1871 Paris Commune, where she ran the women’s Montmartre Vigilance Committee, and worked as a teacher of an independent school. When the fledgling socialist Commune was proclaimed and the French government reacted with violence, she worked as an ambulanciere for the wounded, and fought beside them as a soldier.

Louise was a lifelong poet, and her memoirs traversed her childhood, the regional culture of Lorraine, dreams, myth, and humour, in the context of growing up in Second Empire France. Her memoirs were not chronological, following paths of impressions and associations, as she spoke of the last decades of the Empire, the Paris Commune, and her ten years of exile in New Caledonia, all woven in with her mystical and passionate philosophy of the world.

La Commune

Louise Michel’s La Commune is her account of the 1871 Paris Commune, written in 1898. Part memoir, part political testimony, it includes songs, snippets and commentaries from others who shared the great hope and defeat of the world’s first socialist revolution. The book stands as both a defence of the Commune’s ideals and a critique of the forces that destroyed it, offering an unfiltered view of revolutionary Paris from one of its most committed participants.