Chapter 19. Speeches Abroad, 1882 -1883

During the year after Marie’s death, I made speeches not only in France but also in Belgium, Holland, and England. More or less true accounts exist of the speeches I gave in Brussels in October 1882. They went very well except for the third or fourth speech. At that one some young fool who claimed his name was Fallou caused a disturbance. To explain why no one knew him in Brussels, he declared ingenuously that he had come from Paris the same time I did. To the crowd he stated that I had written an article in La Revolution sociale proposing the erection of a statue to M. Thiers!!! He claimed he had the issue that proved his allegations, and a large number of people believed his nonsense, even though the only article I had ever written about Thiers was one that began, “The little squirt has been castrated.”

In spite of the objects that “friends of order” threw at the rostrum, I finished my speech. The incident showed by the very example people had before their eyes that those “friends of order” understood “order” to mean their right to knock down people like myself who claim that bees should not have to work forever for hornets.

Reactionaries have raised two questions about my foreign speeches which would be laughable if our principles were not involved. One question is, Where did I get the money for my trips? and the other was, What did I do with the money I made?

The money for the trips came from Henri Rochefort when whatever group that invited me did not furnish it. He lent me the money, which I have never paid back, and any money I received over my expenses I gave to the sponsoring group. Other friends bought my railroad tickets. Receipts? Both in New Caledonia and since my return, I have made it a practice to keep receipts or documents which would establish, if necessary, what I have done with the various sums I have been given to dispense, but the revolutionary groups know what was done with the money. They know I kept nothing for myself.

I’d like to quote a piece from L’Intransigeant .

We’ve seen a report in the magazine Voltaire which reads: “Revolutionary propaganda brings in a great deal of money. Mile Louise Michel’s three speeches at Brussels each got her 500 francs, or 1500 francs for all three. At prices like those, calls for revolt have become a pretty good deal.”

Not only have we seen that report, but one of our kind readers, astonished at the princely gifts Citizen Louise Michel is giving to Chagot’s victims through us, has asked us for information about her means of support. That gentleman feels Louise Michel has a knack for uttering “charming bits of nonsense” and making “pleasure trips at the expense of fools exploited by a committee of scoundrels.” . . .

To this gentle reader we shall limit ourselves to submitting a few figures which the Voltaire is also at liberty to use for its own purposes.

Over and above the cost of the first speech and independently of what was earmarked for the work of revolutionary propaganda, Ulntransigeant received a hundred francs to give to the exiles of 1871.

Over and above the cost of the second speech, a hundred francs were given to the Barinage miners. Another hundred francs went to the socialist press in Antwerp, and the remainder, three hundred francs, the “princely gift,” was featured yesterday at the head of the list of contributors for the accused of Chalon-sur-Saone and their families.

There certainly was no less democratic or worthwhile use made of the proceeds of the third speech.

Is our gentle reader satisfied?

I’m obliged to get quotations from friends because I can find the truth nowhere else. I delete things that are too flattering to me when I can; they are only exaggerations in response to the exaggerated hatred my enemies express, and I do not deserve that flattery—although I’m not a monster. I just follow my own inclinations, the way everybody and everything does.

We are the product of our own times, that’s all, and each of us has his good side and his bad. It does not matter what we are so long as our work is great and covers us with its glory. In the midst of the things we begin, what our own lives are does not matter. What counts is what will be left for humanity when we have disappeared.

Two weeks after my speeches in Brussels, I spoke at Ghent. Our friend Deneuvillers has told the story of what happened that day in Ghent. I’m going to quote his account from revolutionary pride, not personal pride. It shows the conduct of the people compared to the conduct of those who are their exploiters, consciously or unconsciously.

Louise Michel at Ghent

Louise Michel gave a speech Wednesday at the Mont-Parnasse hall, the proceeds from which were earmarked for the socialist cause. Three thousand comrades were present and gave an enthusiastic welcome to the speaker, who talked on “Revolutionary Proselyting.”

Then she left to go to deliver a speech at the Hippodrome in a bourgeois and reactionary setting. The brave and courteous people of Ghent wanted to form a procession around her to protect her from hecklers, but Louise Michel told them: “We must not allow the enemies of the people to believe that any one person from our ranks is an idol. We should form processions only for the Revolution. That’s why I ask you to let me go on by myself.”

The workers who heard her at Mont-Parnasse were composed and enthusiastic, but the reactionaries at the Hippodrome were wild and furious. For three days the delirious Catholic clerics had been preparing howling choristers to prevent people from hearing her. Only wide open mouths yelling out furious cries could be seen, along with enough raised clubs to make Pietri envious.

There was a comic side to the Hippodrome speech; as a souvenir of the clerical arguments the speaker was able to keep a two-kilogram piece of a bench which had been thrown at her head.

The Catholic packs gathered in the streets where they bayed after the trail of socialists. They tried to murder the person the Catholics thought was their leader, the courageous Anseele, and he escaped from their hands only because we intervened in the fight...

Deneuvillers

In Ghent after I had witnessed the magnificent spectacle of the guilds marching, I saw during the night, which added to the setting, a medieval scene in a medieval city. It came after my speech that caused so much furor. One part of the hall in which I was speaking was occupied by policemen sent from Paris, and a person, like the conductor of an orchestra, signaled them when to make a racket. Students from Catholic universities occupied the upper parts of the hall, and with their ears conspicuous against the shadows, they howled out in unison every time the conductor raised his baton. If only there had been some real bellowing at that concert, but all the police and students did was yelp.

My friends forced me to leave that concert, and their decision was wrong. Those raucous little fellows would finally have lost their voices, and the reasonable parts of the room would have been able to judge their conduct at the end. To my regret, I obeyed the wishes of my friends and left, but it was painful.

They pushed me into a cab which immediately pulled away, but Jeanne, a friend who was accompanying me, had been separated from me in the turmoil. I kept trying to make the cab driver turn back for her, but for half an hour he whipped on his horses without answering me or admitting he heard me or even felt me pulling on his arm.

I finally prevailed upon the driver, and he turned back, driving through “Messieurs the scholars,” who were throwing stones at the meeting hall. The windows of the cab were broken, the horse was hardly able to move, and now and again outlined against the black night, a young head, flushed with the drunkenness of the chase, pushed its way through the fragments of the carriage’s windows and howled out some insult. The old phantom city behind them opened out dead black to my view.

Amid my concern for my friend Jeanne, I thought about the old Ghent of the fourteenth century, the days of the van Arteveldes, when the guilds used the ax to kill those they believed were seeking power, and I looked out at the somber banks of the canal. It all made a magnificent spectacle, framed between the water and the night. In front of the meeting hall were the students and those who kept watch over them, all of them milling around. The Middle Ages were alive still.

Very worried about Jeanne, I got down from the cab to ask them if they had seen the tall brunet who had been with me and to ask what they had done with her, because I was the one they wanted to kill. A few of them became serious and began to make inquiries. Then a police superintendent helped me to search for Jeanne.

He was a police superintendent from Ghent, and not at all like the policemen who had migrated from Paris to bellow at my speech. He told me not to get involved in any way with what was going on other than to look for Jeanne, and in fact it was he who located her. I remember that when he found that the students were acting improperly he placed himself in front of me, to my great astonishment, and he helped me move through the packed mass. That surprised me, because I fully expected to be led off to prison for having been insulted. That’s what the police would have done in Paris.

The newspapers recognized the evenhanded honesty of those Belgian police.

The spectacle of fevered madness lasted until evening. The mob thought that by stifling a speech they had saved religion and society. Without the protection of the burgomaster and the police chief, who proved they had truly heroic devotion to principle by intervening in the fight at the Circus and even up to the railroad station, we do not know what might have happened to our friend, Louise Michel.

I traveled to Holland, also. Besides our friends, of whom I have such good memories, there were scholars who were curious to see close up what species of animal we revolutionaries are.. They undertook their studies in good faith. I also met enemies who were sincere because they knew about us only through gossip in reactionary newspapers. They were astonished at having been deceived and ended up by understanding revolutionaries.

In Holland, the motherland of the brave, I also saw Freemasons, and it seemed to me that Freemasonry had undergone a rejuvenation. During the courageous proceedings of the Freemasons in 1871 I had gotten the impression of an assembly of specters drawing themselves up on the ramparts in front of the royalists who were butchering the Revolution. It was grand and coldly beautiful. Later in New Caledonia I saw the Freemasons again; there they had been revitalized by the influence of the tropics. They seemed to be moved by a great desire for progress and were going to a lot of pains to take part in it, there where the sun was warm.

But more and more, it is clear that societies based on rites, or hampered by any rites whatever, will not last until the emergence of the only viable fellowship—that of revolutionary humanity. Rite-bound societies will assist that birth only as ghosts.

An isolated life can be interesting only as it relates to the multitude of lives that surrounds it. Only crowds, with each person free in the immense harmony, are worthwhile now.

Two months after this northern trip, just after the beginning of 1883, I went to London to give a series of speeches. The travel expenses were paid by Citizens Otterbein of Brussels and Mas of Anvers, and I have not paid them back yet.

At London, I lived with our friends Varlet, Armand Morceau, and Viard the way I had done during the conference of 1881, and as always they spoiled me a bit. It is impossible for me to spend money when I go to London; they spend it. As for the proceeds from the speech, our friends know what was to be done with them. For a gathering of revolutionary groups, the hall we rented was very expensive, and what we came up with had to be supplemented. L’Intransigeant added more yet, because we had promised our friends of ’71 who had become infirm that there would be a small remembrance for them.

The proceeds were small. Some time ago we made a plan to create a very modest refuge where old and starving former exiles could find a little bread and a few drops of broth. With no qualification other than destitution, those poor people who had become unable to work or to whom people had refused work could receive food and find shelter. Many of the Communards are proud, and some of them had already taken the path of Pere Malezieux. With the proceeds from our meetings, we hoped to support a home for these exiles, owned by the exiles themselves, and if we had received sufficient funds, perhaps we could have saved a few desperate persons.

Even the most aristocratic and reactionary English newspapers reported my London speeches quite impartially. Perhaps that relative kindness was owed to the bad faith of the bourgeois gutter press of France. Nothing puts people in a better light than to say too many bad things about them. After a good round of violent criticism, exaggerations are immediately noticeable.

As for the accounts of my London speeches in the opportunistic press of Paris, they were all based on the same stereotype. They did not need to send reporters. It was enough for them to know the name of the meeting hall where I was speaking, the subject treated, and the group that had organized the meeting to permit them to fix up their accounts of the “revolutionary craze” in their good old-fashioned way.

Because my London lectures were given in rich neighborhoods where people knew about me only through the legend my enemies had invented, my British audience was quite astonished at finding me neither so ill-mannered nor so ridiculous as it had heard. Those who saw me in England did not recognize in the slightest the horrible portrait of me they had been given. Also, all the newspapers, even the aristocratic Pall Mall Gazette, were extremely courteous to me.

One thing that surprised them was that I did not share the current British ideas on workhouses, but they were incorrect when they thought they saw me contradict myself on on this point. They thought I was enthusiastic about the workhouses, and that’s not what I think of them. I only stated the pleasure I felt over England’s considering it a duty to be concerned about people who have neither food nor shelter. The thing that struck me—and I immediately said so—was the care with which in some workhouses, Lambeth for example, they soften the refuge where old Albion piles its poverty.

The English will wait on their own little island until the rest of Europe has had its revolution, and then, not imitating the stupid mistakes others have committed, England will do everything at once. Albion will rise suddenly and light the sacred fire. The winds from abroad will cause the sacred fire to burn more brightly and will make it a dawning.

So that their antiquated institutions will last longer, the English warm them up with the enthusiasm of women. Women direct the workhouses now, and in the future there will be women in Parliament. But the green branches on the old tree cannot rejuvenate the rotten trunk.

There is one workhouse where the old and the poor are happy; it is one in which the woman who directs it feels that liberty is necessary if the destitute are to stay alive like other people. “There are no rules” is written in big letters on the wall, and the place is more orderly than anywhere else. The clock directs people. At the time for meals or work or a walk, everybody goes freely where he must, the same way a person in his own house goes to his own meal or his own work.

I will not name the people in England who showed me their sympathy. They will remember that evening of the black London winter on which a cloud of fog floated. Raindrops condensed in an unceasing mist and now and again came in broad sheets. They will remember a frozen evening in the large, cold meeting hail in front of a cold and correct audience drawn from a grand neighborhood of immense palaces under which the wretches have holes like animals. But despite that, I felt an impression of human honesty persisting regardless of the accursed chains that people interminably fasten on each other.

The audience did not share my beliefs, but they were sincere. I do not know why, but they seemed like a family to me, even as serious and cold as they were. Then, as I had done long ago during my childhood at Vroncourt, as I had done when I was a young schoolmistress and sat on the hearth-stone at Mme Fayet’s while I let everything in my heart break free, I began to talk unrestrainedly. In this large, cold meeting hall in London, I spoke freely about the scenes of my life which came to mind—from Vroncourt to New Caledonia, and at that moment those past things were truly present.

My English friends, Miss M-, Miss X-, Miss F-, do not believe for a minute that I have forgotten you. Do you really believe, Miss M-, that the book in which you wrote the words of the old Jacobins—“neither God nor master”—could ever have been destroyed? I certainly still have it. I also have “The Song of the Shirt” translated into French so well by you, Sir T. S-. London! I love London, where my exiled friends have always been welcomed, London, where old England, standing in the shadow of the gallows, is still more liberal than the French bourgeois republicans are.

Maybe those French opportunists really think they are liberal. Do you suppose that everybody who commits crimes against the people is conscious of what he is doing? Among them are persons who are deluding themselves and who wish to reward themselves for virtue and intelligence. Intelligence, nonsense! Wisdom is found in the people.

It is quite true that today the people do not know any science, but considering the mess science is in now, that’s all right. Science today is only opening its buds. Tomorrow it will be wonderful, and tomorrow science will belong to everybody. Today, if the people do not know this or that little bit of information, at least they are not stubborn about believing, for example, that glowworms are stars. That’s something.