Chapter 20 : Speeches in France, 1882-1883

Chapter 20. Speeches in France, 1882-1883

In the summer of 1882 I made a lecture tour through northern France with Jules Guesde, in connection with a strike. The trip had some merry moments. In one cafe a dozen men came over and made a circle around us, looking at us the way curious animals do. I took out my sketch pad and began to draw their mugs. I wrote underneath the sketches “Skillful Stool-pigeon,” “Fool,” and “Spiteful Stool-pigeon.” They weren’t informers any more than we were, but they were so stupid, looking at us the way they did. One of them came and peeked over my shoulder; the others did too, and then we were rid of them.

During the journey, there was another moment of comedy when one fellow went on and on telling another man about the burials of famous men he had seen; nobody could have been as complete a fool as this fellow was. I wondered if he was in earnest. When I realized he was, I became fearful that Guesde would find a way to disturb the bird, but he didn’t, and the fellow ended his recital of hopes for funeral processions with the wish that Victor Hugo, whose age he worked out, would soon give him another spectacle.

After having stirred that prospect around for a long time he began on another subject: Thiers. That mournful crow certainly had a gift for conversation. He was talking to a man who had a neck as red as a turkey’s and who was watching him admiringly, and so was a young woman with big, round eyes. Then a traveling salesman who was neither affected nor boastful straightened him out by telling some truths to the fellow who was deploring the miseries of the “poor bosses.”

At the meeting we had come to attend, the chief of police, all dressed up with his sash of office, placed himself near Guesde and me. Clearly believing the tales the reactionaries were telling about us, he seemed astonished at how calm our friends kept the meeting. It is true that the four sergeants-at-arms appointed to keep order in the hall were all the size of Hercules, and one of them picked up a lower-middle-class troublemaker and put him under his arm the way you carry a cat. That troublemaker was giving a signal for the start of a racket, but the Hercules carried him out before anyone did anything. The other reactionaries calmed down magically.

In September 1882 there was a meeting at Versailles. Quite a group of us anarchists went there together. We were prepared for the worst, but we thought it was our duty to go to Versailles and memorialize there the execution grounds at Satory and the wall at Pdre Lachaise. I still have a letter I wrote about this meeting which was published in Llntransigeant.

24 September 1882

Concerning the incidents which occured at the meeting organized last Sunday at Versailles by a revolutionary socialist group, Louise Michel sends us the following note:

Did our friends expect us to get a different reception? We don’t need to talk about the Revolution to people who are revolutionaries; we need to tell people who aren’t revolutionaries about it.

Since we began at Versailles, I don’t see any obstacle to our ending up in some place like Brittany, which is even more reactionary. Soon we will go to all the royal provinces. Maybe some of the people there will greet us with pitchforks, but our publicity will win others over to the Social Revolution. All their Breton obstinacy will turn toward the truth, and all their fanaticism will be directed toward the future instead of the past.

I’ve thought about conquering Brittany for a long time, ever since 22 January 1871, when I stood in the courtyard of the Hotel de Ville. That day, more than ten years ago, I looked up indignantly at the broad, pale faces of the Breton boys glued against the windows of the building which once had been and again would be the home of the democratic Commune. In accordance with Trochu’s plan, they fired at us then from those windows with great conviction, but we will recruit those Bretons too, like all the others, for the Revolution. We will recruit the king’s faithful, just like all other proletarians.

Louise Michel

That article in Llntransigeant went on to print another of my letters:

Yesterday our friend, Citizen Louise Michel, addressed a letter to the editor-in-chief of Llntransigeant, commenting on an article entitled “Mem¬ ories of Satory.”

To Citizen Rochefort.

My dear traveling companion,

I congratulate you for your article today. How could those people imagine that the pursuit and cries of an ignorant pack of dogs could alarm me when I have the image of Satory in my mind? It would be just like amusing myself by grumbling when I was on the Ducos Peninsula, as I looked at Nou Island visible at the horizon.

Once again we are able to declare that our adversaries have no serious arguments. They use shouts, which is an admission that they have lost.

Still, the crowd was picturesque. The most striking figure was a limping beggar who stretched himself out on his crutches like a spider and screeched against the enemies of property. You’ve seen Callot’s painting “The Beggars,” haven’t you? You would have thought that the fellow had been pulled out of the frame. There were also a few big, funny-looking creatures that looked like the monsters that form the retinue of the goddess of the sea, and some street urchins, among whom there was more than one future insurgent. All in all, they made up the whole tableau of human stupidity.

No matter. This scene will have made its contribution by bringing us more than one listener. Things have an eloquence that words lack.

Louise Michel

At another meeting, this one at the de la Perle meeting hall, I believe, someone managed to break a window and throw a smoke-bomb behind the speaker’s rostrum. If we had not dealt with it immediately and told the audience it was a trick of the police or of idiots, it would have caused the crowd to rush toward the one very small exit, and there would have been some accidents. It turned out to have been the work of idiots. Ashamed of what they’d done, they later sent me their apologies, which I read publicly, of course without mentioning their names.

There were many other meetings; accounts of them are in one of Marie’s notebooks. Among them was one at the Graffard meeting hall. Speaking of that, there is a painting of me in the Gr6vin Museum entitled “Louise Michel at the Graffard Meeting Hall.” Why the Graf¬ fard, I don’t know; that title is given to other portraits and caricatures. I certainly have been at the Graffard hall, as I have been at almost every other meeting hall in Paris, but it seems to me that your face does not change from one speaker’s platform to another.

“Louise Michel at the Graffard Meeting Hall” is again the inscription, I believe, under the portrait that a very young painter, the son of Mme Tynaire, stubbornly persisted in doing for the Salon. I let him do it in spite of the distress I felt at posing during that time, for it was immediately after Marie’s death. I did not want to thwart a child who had talent, and I was sure the Salon would accept it for two reasons. The first and foremost was that he painted very well. The second, and the one on which I counted, was that his portrait of me resembled, feature for feature and especially expression for expression, not me, but an old prisoner named Mme Dumollard whom I had seen in 72 at the Auberive prison.

I’m aware of my own ugliness, but between my ugliness and the portrait I’m speaking of—a portrait which was magnificently painted and which doesn’t resemble me at all—there is a difference that can be checked simply by comparing it to any of my photographs.

The reactionaries must have rubbed their paws together and said, “What a fright.” It made me laugh until someone was stupid enough to tell my mother about several incidents, the knowledge of which pained her, but her distress was relieved when a simple-minded man, absolutely dressed to the teeth, a stupid man as stiff as a wooden doll, appeared at the door of 45, boulevard Ornano, where my mother and I were living.

“Mile Michel?” he asked, forgetting to take off his stove-pipe hat and beating his right hand with a small stick.

“I am she,” I said.

“No, you aren’t her.”

“I’m not me?”

“Well! I know Louise Michel. I saw her portrait in the Salon.”

“So?”

“So! Try not to make fun of me. A woman who has horses and carriages doesn’t open her own door. Go and get her for me. I repeat: It isn’t her who is opening this door.”

“It’s she who is closing it,” I said. Whereupon, as this stupid man wasn’t all the way inside, I pushed him completely outside and slammed the door in his face. He blustered a little from the other side of the door, and then I heard him going down the steps, still shouting insults.

People did say that I had horses and carriages, and people appeared to believe that I made money from my speeches. Because the persons who organized the meetings know what was done with the profits, I confess that I spent hardly any time worrying about that spiteful, stupid talk.

In October 1882 I went to Lille to speak in connection with the strike of the women spinners there. They were all around us at the speaker’s platform, all those female workers from the cellars of Lille, whose cheap shoes protect their feet so little from the water, and who are killed by work before their time. They were asking for only ten or fifteen centimes more a day to continue their horrible life. Those ten or fifteen centimes for bread would be sufficient for those who work so hard to support the rich.

Those poor workers are just like the silkworm, which is boiled when it has spun its cocoon. When their labor is finished, those workers, too, must die. Like the silkworms, their lives must stop with the thread. How will they exist in their old age? Won’t their daughters be chained to the same torture before they are scarcely out of their cradles?

The rich must use and abuse their flocks. Both the silkworms and the daughters of the people are made for spinning; the worm will be boiled, and the girl will die or become twisted like green wood that has been bent. All they wanted was ten or fifteen centimes for a little bread, and they earned billions for others.

All the strikers had to do was hold out for one week more and the exploiters would have given in, but to last a week longer the strikers needed two thousand francs. That was why I went to Lille to make a speech. Thanks to the reactionaries who paid for their seats so that they could come to insult me, we made the two thousand francs in one lecture alone. I asked the organizers of the speech to put that money away safely, and then I was able to announce to the gentlemen who had bought tickets that we had what we needed. Thus, they were free either to listen to me or to spend their time howling, either of which was perfectly all right with me because we already had the two thousand francs that we needed.

That frank explanation calmed them down, and the speech took place without further incident. Around one in the morning I was able to take the train and return to my mother. For the tomb of Marie Ferre I brought back a sacred souvenir—a bouquet the workers of Lille had given me.

Unfortunately, at the end of the week a few evil persons made some gullible workers believe that others had gone back to their workshops, and they believed it was their duty to do the same. Once back in their capitalist prison, they saw they had been fooled, and then it was too late for them, but the lesson will not be lost.

Just after the turn of the year, in January 1883, was the trial of the sixty-eight anarchists in Lyon, fifty-four of whom were prisoners, the other fourteen being tried in absentia. Because the reactionaries could not figure out a crime to accuse them of, they were indicted for being affiliated with the International, which had been dissolved in 1876. The trial was a travesty.

It began on January 9 and Prince Kropotkin, Emile Gautier, Bordat, Bernard, and forty-three others of the accused issued a manifesto which Gautier had written.

Manifesto of the Anarchists

What is anarchy and what are anarchists?

Anarchists are citizens who, in a century where freedom of opinion is preached everywhere, have believed it to be their right and duty to appeal for unlimited liberty.

Throughout the world there are a few thousand of us, maybe a few million, for we have no merit other than saying out loud what the crowd is thinking. We are a few million workers who claim absolute liberty, nothing but liberty, every liberty.

We want liberty; we claim for every human being the right to do whatever he pleases and the means to do it with. A person has the right to satisfy all his needs completely, with no limit other than natural impossibi¬ lities and the needs of his neighbors, which must be respected equally with his.

We want freedom, and we believe its existence incompatible with the existence of any power whatsoever, no matter what its origin and form, no matter whether it be elected or imposed, monarchist or republican, in¬ spired by divine right, popular right, holy oil, or universal suffrage.

History teaches us that every government is like every other government and that all are worth the same. The best are the worst. In some there is more cynicism, in others more hypocrisy, but at bottom there are always the same procedures, always the same intolerance. There is no govern¬ ment, including even the ones that appear the most liberal, which does not have in the dust of its legislative arsenals some good little law about the International to use against inconvenient opposition.

Evil, in the eyes of anarchists, does not dwell in one form of government more than any other. Evil lies in the idea of government itself. The principle of authority is evil.

Our ideal for human relations is to substitute a free contract, perpetually open to revision or cancellation, in place of administrative and legal guardianship and imposed discipline.

Anarchists propose teaching people to get along without government as they are already learning to get along without God.

Anarchists will also teach people to get along without private ownership. Indeed, the worst tyrant is not the one who locks you up; it is the one who starves you. The worst tyrant is not the one who takes you by the collar; it is the one who takes you by the belly.

No liberty without equality! There is no liberty in a society where capital is monopolized in the hands of an increasingly smaller minority, in a society where nothing is divided equally, not even public education, which is paid for by everyone’s money.

We believe that capital is the common patrimony of mankind because it is the fruit of the collaboration between past and present generations, and that it ought to be put at the disposal of everyone in such a way that no one is excluded and in such a way that no one can hoard one part of it to the detriment of other people.

In one word, what we want is equality. We want factual equality as the corollary of liberty, indeed as its essential preliminary condition.

To each according to his rights; to each according to his needs.

That is what we want; that is what our energies are devoted to. It is what shall be, because no limitation can prevail against claims that are both legitimate and necessary. That is why the government wishes to discredit us.

Villains that we are, we claim bread for all, knowledge for all, work for all, independence and justice for all.

That was the manifesto of the anarchists. I was in London when the trial began, but I arrived in time to go to several of the last sessions and to see the prosecutor, M. Fabreguettes. When I looked at his angular profile, with his arm raised and the wide sleeve of his robe rolled up, and heard his biting words, I thought of an engraving I had dreamed in front of during my childhood, an engraving of the Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada.

I have only one account of the speeches I gave at Lyon during the trial, and I no longer remember which newspaper it was taken from:

Telegraphed from Lyon, 19 January 1883

Yesterday evening in the Elysee meeting hall, Louise Michel gave a lecture for the benefit of the families of the detained anarchists.

The meeting proclaimed Kropotkin and Bernard as honorary chair¬ men.

When Louise Michel started her speech, she stated that only force can transform society, since force is being used to destroy it.

At Lyon, she said, anarchists are in the dock. In England they are members of the House of Commons,

Louise Michel said she had brought back a resolution signed by the French refugees in London protesting against the trial at Lyon and declaring their solidarity with the accused and their theories. But because she knew she was under police surveillance, she had destroyed the piece so as not to compromise anyone.

Louise Michel developed at length her ideas on the situation of women in present society.

The chairman put the order of the day—the taking up of arms to defend oneself against the bourgeoisie—to a vote. It was adopted.

At this point a person named Besson requested that the journalists present be expelled. Louise Michel protested, saying that liberty must be equal for everyone.

Another speaker requested the assembly to pass a motion in favor of acquitting the anarchists. The chairman answered that that matter was the business of the court and not of the assembly. Such a resolution could not be passed without the consent of the persons accused.

The meeting adjourned in the midst of cheering by those present.

Of course, the court found Kropotkin and all the others guilty. The idiocy of the charge was no defense, and Kropotkin and the main defendants were sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.

With all this in my mind I returned to Paris at the end of January 1883.