120 years after her death, the hero of the Paris Commune continues to inspire
~ Maurice Schuhmann ~
In the Hôtel Oasis in Marseille, the French anarchist, feminist, and Communard Louise Michel passed away on January 9, 1905. By this time, she was one of the most prominent figures of contemporary anarchism and was often mentioned in the same breath as Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta. Today, a commemorative plaque at the hotel honours her memory, and her grave in the cemetery of Levallois-Perret—a wealthy suburb of Paris—has become a pilgrimage site. At the time of her funeral, this suburb was still considered revolutionary ground.
Louise Michel was born twice—first as a person, on May 29, 1830, and again as a myth, in 1871, in the context of the Paris Commune. In the latter sense, she lives on to this day, albeit in a highly romanticised form that is often appropriated by various political movements. The memory of the “Red Virgin”, as she has been reverently called since the Commune, has been a political issue in France since the early 20th century.
In feminist and anarchist circles, engagement with her life often begins in 1871 or after her conversion to anarchism, a narrative that has posthumously cast her as a precursor to anarcha-feminism. This portrayal, however, does not do justice to her complexity—neither in a positive nor a negative sense. Overlooked in such accounts are, on the one hand, her early literary pursuits at the age of 20 and her correspondence with her idol, the French naturalist writer Victor Hugo, underscoring her legitimacy as an author. On the other hand, they often ignore the fact that, at the beginning of the Paris Commune uprising, she supported authoritarian socialism in the vein of Auguste Blanqui.
Born out of wedlock in Vroncourt-la-Côte (in the Grand Est region), Louise Michel developed an early interest in literature and established contact with Victor Hugo, who later dedicated a lengthy poem to her titled “Viro Major“. Her literary works include novellas (Le Grand Pan), novels (Les Plus Forts), and plays (Le Voile du bonheur). However, these are now rarely read or studied, while she herself has become a protagonist in modern French theatre. Her relationship with Victor Hugo has particularly provided material for such dramatisations.
She worked as a teacher, including at a school in Montmartre that still exists today, where a small memorial now honours its famous former staff member. For her, teaching was more than just a means to earn a living—she was deeply committed to the then-embryonic education of women and, in 1852, opened a free school (though this should not be confused with the concept of modern “free schools”). Unfortunately, little has been documented about her specific pedagogical approach, which remains largely unexplored. The educator Louise Michel is overshadowed by the myth of the revolutionary.
When the Paris Commune rose up in 1871 in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, she was there from the start. Dressed in a male uniform, she led the Commune’s women’s battalion, which defended the area around Pigalle and Place de Clichy—later to become Paris’s red-light district, as is often pointed out with wry humour.
The Commune itself lasted a mere 71 days, yet it demonstrated what an alternative society could look like and how it might function. After the uprising was crushed, she—unlike many other Communards who were summarily shot—was sentenced by a court to exile in New Caledonia, then a French colony. Her seven-year exile began in 1873.
Wearing a male uniform itself became a political issue. One of the charges brought against her during her trial was that by wearing men’s clothing, she engaged in cross-dressing. While this might seem a minor detail, in the context of a queer-feminist reading of her life, it is far from insignificant. She defended herself by claiming that she had worn the uniform for only one day.
Her transformation into an anarchist is typically dated to the time of her journey into exile. During this period, she reflected on the problem of power, particularly its corrupting effects. She concluded that no one is immune to the seduction of power once it is in their hands and inferred that the goal should not be to seize power but to fight against it.
“I saw our comrades in action, and gradually came to the conviction that even the most upright individuals, if they were to wield power, would come to resemble the villains they had once fought against. I saw the impossibility of reconciling freedom with any form of power”.
In the colony she also worked as a teacher, even teaching the local indigenous Kanak people. While many of the Communards harboured racist prejudices against the indigenous population, Louise Michel viewed them as equals and made no racial distinctions. However, some passages in her 1886 memoir about this time do contain racially connoted terms.
After an amnesty was granted to the former Communards, she returned to France on November 9, 1880, disembarking in the port city of Dieppe, Normandy where a large crowd was waiting to greet her. Later, in 1888, the French poet and fellow Communard Paul Verlaine dedicated a poem to her. In Dieppe itself, scattered traces remain of the Communard who once set foot there.
In 1886, her memoirs were published, becoming her most widely read work. In them, she vividly recounts the development and course of the Commune—a project whose legacy had itself become a bone of contention among socialist and anarchist theorists.
Her time in exile, that is, her years-long banishment, did not break Louise Michel—quite the opposite. In her memoirs, one finds the sentence that perhaps best captures her state of mind in this situation: “Now I have only the revolution left”. She thus transformed into a kind of professional revolutionary. Filled with enthusiasm, she immersed herself in the still-young anarchist movement in France, propagated its ideas, and corresponded with figures such as Élisée Reclus, Malatesta and Kropotkin, continuing to lecture and write propagandistic novellas, novels, and plays up until her death.
The French anarchist Sébastien Faure summarised her significance in the journal Le Libertaire in 1935: “The history of the Commune is rich with beautiful and noble figures. The one that has remained the most popular in this remarkable gallery is that of our dear Louise Michel”.
Photos: Yvonne Schwarz / Semiramis Photoart
