Epilogue

Epilogue

Much against her wishes, Louise Michel was pardoned and expelled— there is no other word for it—from prison in January 1886. By now, she was legendary. Or as Paul Verlaine put it in his “Ballade en l’honneur de Louise Michel,” she was “nearly Joan of Arc.” She was “Saint Cecilia / And the harsh and slender Muse / Of the Poor, as well as their guardian angel.” Now in her late fifties, Michel was indefatigable; she produced poetry, wrote several involuted novels, and marched incessantly to the speaker’s platform. And the summer following her release she was indicted once again, this time in company with Jules Guesde, Paul Lafargue, and Susini, for “instigating murder and looting.”

She was accused of saying that the government was composed of “thieves and murderers. Thieves are arrested and murderers are killed. Throw them in the water!” Although Michel denied saying those exact words, she admitted that the tone was correct—which seems likely. The jury found her guilty, but despite their convicting her, it would have caused the government grave embarrassment to send her to jail again, and ultimately she was pardoned without going back to prison.

In January 1888, while Michel was delivering a speech at Le Havre, a fanatical Catholic Breton shot her. Her injury, a bullet that lodged behind her left ear, did not heal well, and for a time her health was precarious. True to her principles, however, Michel entered the trial of her assailant to plead for him, arguing that he was misled by an evil society, and he was acquitted.

This period of Michel’s life coincided with the peak of the Boulangist movement, a political phenomenon that began on the left and moved over the years to the right, uniting at one time or another all those who opposed the Third Republic and particularly, at the end, those who wanted revenge against Germany. Although Michel’s general principles would seem to dictate her opposing the final stages of the movement, she avoided involvement, perhaps because her friend Henri Rochefort was a staunch Boulangist. It is also possible that Michel, like the Marxist Guesde, saw Boulangism as only a bourgeois struggle and, as such, irrelevant.

Michel did take the lead in a temporary alliance of anarchists and monarchists who found a common enemy in the Third Republic. Through her, the royalists funneled funds to support anarchist activi¬ ties. Some of the monarchists certainly were using Michel as the Ger¬ mans would use Lenin in 1917; any trouble the anarchists fomented would serve the monarchist cause. But Michel, if she was aware she was being used, was entirely happy with the situation. Her main enemies now were not monarchists but “Possibilist” socialists, who in her eyes were no better than the “Opportunist” republicans she loathed.

The Possibilists, usually classified today as evolutionary socialists, hoped to alleviate the misery of the poor through small reforms and to work within the system to win power. Michel believed that, in fact, the Possibilists had no greater aim than to replace the bourgeoisie with themselves. Moreover, the minor reforms they supported would only postpone the Social Revolution.

In 1889 the problems in founding the Second International illustrated these theoretical distinctions. The First International had perished offi¬ cially in 1876, although it had been moribund for several years prior to that date, the victim of repression from without and schism from within. Posthumously, the First International was gaining a reputation for effectiveness it had not earned during its life, and in 1889, the centenary of the first French Revolution, there were two international meetings held simultaneously in Paris to revive it, one of Possibilists and the other of Marxists, with delegates drifting from one meeting to the other. Michel played little role in either of those meetings, perhaps because of her lack of interest in organizations and organizational politics.

But from that chaotic founding of the Second International came the idea of using May Day demonstrations to show solidarity. By the late 1880s Michel had come to focus on the general strike, la grande grlve, as the means by which the poor would achieve the Social Revolution. It would “interrupt ... all industries and all branches of commerce and would finally carry the Social Revolution along.” Despite Michel’s dreams of la grande greve, her enthusiasm for the May Day demonstra¬ tions was limited; the demonstrations were not intended to incite the people to rebel but only to publicize the Left. Perhaps Michel was no longer so sure of crowds, and clearly she was inclining more and more simply to belief in “propaganda by the deed” and faith in direct action inspired and led by a small elite.

But Michel believed, as she always had, that it was her duty to participate in demonstrations, and she was preparing to participate in the 1890 May Day demonstration when she was arrested the day before its scheduled occurrence. In a fit of rage and frustration she destroyed the furnishings of her cell, and officials rushed to use that behavior to have her certified insane. For reasons that remain unclear, the Minister of the Interior, Constans, intervened directly to stop the committal proceedings and to have her released.

Michel immediately left for England, and from 1890 until her death she spent the greater part of her time there. Perhaps the near-successful committal proceeding had frightened her; being committed was a fear she had carried for years. Perhaps she was simply tired. In any event, England was the traditional home of foreign exiles, and Rochefort, himself a refugee after the collapse of Boulangism, was there. Rochefort gave her money to live on, and Prince Kropotkin gave her what aid he could. During the following years she tried through personal contact to help the English poor—as always, whatever money she had at any moment she gave away on request—and she became known in the worst slums of London as “the good woman.”

She returned to France only once, briefly, during the five years from 1890 to 1895, which were the years of anarchism’s greatest notoriety in France. It was during those years that France lived in daily fear of bombings, the most savage period being the months from Ravachol’s bombings in the spring of 1892 to the explosions in the Chamber of Deputies in December 1893 and the Caf6 Terminus in February 1894. Although Michel objected to bombs because they indiscriminately killed women and children, she continued to approve the use of force. Rava- chol was, she said, “the hero of modern legend,” and later she approved the bombing of the Chamber of Deputies.

In 1895 Michel returned to France and for the next seven months made speeches and wrote poetry. The following summer she returned to England, presumably so she could attend the scheduled meeting of the International, the one which confirmed the expulsion of the anar¬ chists. Michel was horrified at the proceedings and the enforcement of Marxist orthodoxy. The meeting proved, she said, that even the best, most intelligent, and most devoted Marxist revolutionary “will be worse than anyone he replaces because the Marxists claim infallibility and practice excommunication.” The rupture between Michel and the Marx¬ ist socialists, like the one with the Possibilists before them, was complete.

In the spring of 1897 Michel, now in her sixty-seventh year, made an extensive speaking tour throughout France. In France, the Dreyfus Affair was reaching its height, but Michel took no active part in it, although she did speak out against secret trials and anti-Semitism. Maybe her faith temporarily was burning low. She had, after all, been preaching revolution, or been imprisoned for preaching it, for forty years. Moreover, her audiences were dwindling.

In spite of her increasingly frail health she began a new series of speeches in France in May 1902, which continued into 1903 with one break in London. By then, Russia, which had fascinated her for years, seemed on the verge of revolution, and events there were rekindling her enthusiasm, particularly after the outbreak of war in 1904 between Russia and Japan. A determined antimilitarist, Michel was nonetheless delighted at the opportunity an unpopular war provided for the onset of the Social Revolution. She made more speeches in France during Febru¬ ary and early March 1904, but then fell gravely ill.

She recovered, and after her well-publicized illness, which the public had supposed would be mortal, the enormous crowds as of old came to hear her speak. Perhaps now people were only coming to view a legend, but come they did in great numbers, and they applauded her. At the end of the year she went to Algeria; upon her return to France she fell ill in Marseille. This illness was her last. On 9 January 1905 she died in that city at the Hotel de l’Oasis.

Her death became the occasion of one of those spectacles she would have loved. With red flags, masses of flowers, and two thousand mourn¬ ers—representatives of labor unions, socialist groups, anarchists, and antireligious organizations—the funeral procession was a kilometer long as it wound through Marseille to the cemetery. Memorial services took place throughout France and in London and elsewhere. On January 20 her body was disinterred, taken to Paris, and two days later buried at her mother’s side in Levallois-Perret to the accompaniment of another spectacle, the largest, said the press, since the death of Victor Hugo. Not only would Michel have approved the spectacle, she would have noted how strange it was that on that very day a crowd of Russians in St. Petersburg attempted to deliver a petition to their czar, and the ensuing massacre marked the day forever as Bloody Sunday.

Today, Michel’s birthplace of Vroncourt has a statue to her, and the street going through town bears her name. Her grave in Levallois-Per¬ ert—not the one in which she was buried in 1905, but a new one to which she was moved during the Popular Front days of 1936—still has flowers placed on it by anonymous hands. The authorities have even named a metro station and a street for her, but both are just barely outside the city limits of Paris.

She is now a legend. That she invented part of it herself is irrelevant. Louise Michel was heroic, but as she herself said: “There is no heroism; people are simply entranced by events.”

Louise Michel discussed her own writings briefly in her memoirs.

Let me record a balance sheet of my writings. I have spoken of the various bits of poetry from the years before the events of 1870—71 inserted in different newspapers, in the Journal de lajeunesse, in the Union despoetes, in Addle Esquiros’ newspaper, in Addle Caldelar’s La Raison, and other places. Of the verses I sent to Victor Hugo in my childhood and youth, of which I have cited a few here and there, two or three pieces which were in the papers that Marie Ferrd and my mother arranged during my deportation will be found in my volume of verse. I used the name Enjolras on a certain number of pieces of verse, Louis Michel on others, and my own name on still more. I don’t know what has become of them. I’ve mentioned an article signed Louis Michel in Le Progres musical in which I discussed an instrument I dreamed up, a piano with bows instead of mallets. They make them now in Germany.

There are a large number of signed articles in the Revolution sociale, the Etendard, and a number of other signed articles are scattered. The first part of my Encyclopedie enfantine, which I wrote in New Caledonia, appeared in Mile Cheminat’s Journal d’education.

During my last trip to Lyon I left a drama, Le Coq rouge, at the Nouvelliste. The masses of drama for children have all vanished after each awarding of prizes during so many years.

All my life I have kept working on La Legende du barde; there are fragments of it everywhere. I have some fragments of other prose manuscripts, the Livre d’Hermann, the Sagesse d’un fou, Litterature au crochet, the Diableries de Chaumont, and so forth. Perhaps I will put them together some day to search in them, as in my poetry, for the changes of my ideas across life.

Of the works done at Auberive I have a few pages remaining from the book Le Bagne. La Conscience and Le Livre des morts are completely lost. The first part of La Femme & travers les ages was published in H. Place’s LExcommunie. That newspaper had announced it would publish Memoires d’Hanna la nihiliste, but the paper died. Under that title I had gathered a great many episodes of my life, along with Russian episodes. The Oceaniennes and the Legendes canaques have appeared in fragments in Noumea and here upon my return.

When I collaborate with someone, I keep the papers which establish the facts of my collaboration so as to be free not to take part in the profits or losses in any lawsuits my collaborators attempt. They are at liberty to do as they wish. I collaborated with Grippa de Winter in a novel, Le Bdtard imperial, and took a play, Nadine, from it. Since my return from New Caledonia I have had two collaborators, one of whom was Mme Tynaire, Jean Guetr£. She wrote almost all the first part of La Misere, while the second part, from the chapter on Toulon on, is completely mine. In a Lille magazine, Le Format, I had begun to publish this second part in installments which would form a complete work with the addition of a few lines of introduction. Mme Tynaire could also make a complete work out of the first part by adding a few pages.

Mme Tynaire can be my friend, but it turned out that she could not be my collaborator because we see things differently. Those differences are perfectly visible in LaMisere, and the two distinct parts are easily discernible. Mme Tynaire expects to promote general well-being through means in which I see no effec¬ tiveness. I see general well-being promoted only by successive revolutions cutting through the series of social transformations.

To remain good friends with Mme Tynaire instead of quarreling with our pens, I gave up a second collaboration with her, the second part of Les Meprisees. If I had taken it on, I would have been obliged to make the remaining characters undergo changes in character and circumstances which would have been incom¬ patible with the way they were introduced to the reader in the first part. The novel Les Meprisees thus contains only one line I wrote.

I can’t list the sketches in progress, novels begun everywhere which I never had the time to finish owing to events. Let me end by noting that the complete text of the Encyclopedie enfantine will be published at Mme Keva’s and that the Legendes canaques has already been published by the same publisher.