The Red Virgin : Memoirs of Louise Michel

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... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 24 : Final Thoughts
Chapter 24. Final Thoughts I come to the end. Now that the black bird of the fallow field has sung for me, I want to explain what it means when a person no longer has anything to fear, when a person no longer has anything to suffer from. From the other side of sorrow, I can watch events coldly, feeling nothing more than the indifference a trash man feels as he turns over rags and tatters with his spiked stick. People wonder how all these things could have happened during the fifteen years which have just passed. When we are crushed, it only removes the last obstacle to our being useful in the revolutionary struggle. When we are beaten down, we become free. When we are no longer suffering because of what happens to us, we are invincible. I have reached that point, and it is better for the cause. What does it matter now to my heart, which has already been torn bleeding from my chest, if pen nibs dig into it like the beaks of crows? With my mother dead, no... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 23 : My Mother's Death
Chapter 23. My Mother's Death For a while during my deportation my mother lived with a relative she had always been very fond of, at a little woolens shop opposite the Louver stores in Paris. After a time she went to live with other relatives in Lagny, and she was living there when I returned from New Caledonia. Four months after my return she moved back to Paris where we lived at 24 [sic: 36], rue Polonceau, and at that place we had fleeting moments of joy. With my mother and Marie near me, I was almost afraid, because happiness is such a fragile branch, and we break it when we rest on it. Two old women, friends of my mother, came to see her every day, and they gave her those little attentions old people love so much; my dear Marie stayed with her while I was away at meetings. My mother’s last home was at 45, boulevard Ornano on the fifth floor. There she underwent the long torture of two years without me before her death. In the middle room her bed was... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 22 : Prison
Chapter 22. Prison There’s no party without a morning after. Two years ago on July 14, I was taken to the Centrale Prison at Clermont. Women’s prisons are less harsh than men’s. I did not suffer from cold or hunger or any of the vexations our male friends underwent. As far as I am concerned, my stay in prison was as easy as it would be for any other schoolmistress. Solitude is restful, especially for a person who has spent a great part of her life always needing an hour of silence and never finding it, except at night. That is the case with a great number of schoolmistresses. In those silent hours of the night, she hurries to think, to feel alive, to read, to write, to be just a little free. At the end of the day, at the last lesson, she feels herself becoming an overworked beast of the fields, but a beast that is still proud, still lifting its head to go to the end of the hour without breaking down. When the hour is ended, silence sur... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 21 : The Trial of 1883
Chapter 21. The Trial of 1883 Several weeks after the trial at Lyon, it seemed to me that I would have been an accessory to cowardice if I did not use the liberty I was allowed—I don’t know why—to call up a new and immense International which would stretch from one end of the earth to the other. On 9 March 1883 there was a mass demonstration at the Esplanade of les Invalides, after which Louise Michel led a number of demonstrators across Paris. For that, she was accused of rioting and looting. A massive police hunt for her in Paris and throughout Europe ensued while she remained comfortably hidden at the home of the editor of L’Intransigeant, M. Vaughan. On March 30 she surrendered herself in a farce designed to make the police look as foolish as possible. I stayed in hiding for three weeks. While certain reporters claimed they were chatting with me in a house where I wasn’t present, others saw me at a pleasure par... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Translators' Introduction Even today, Louise Michel, who won fame as the “Red Virgin” during the Paris Commune of 1871, remains a heroine to the French Left. While Karl Marx sat in the British Museum writing tracts, Michel was facing French government troops across the barricades of Paris. While her contemporaries were just beginning to decry colonialism, she, as a convict in New Caledonia, was involved in the Kanaka uprising of 1878. Freed by the amnesty of 1880 from her exile at the other end of the earth, she returned to France and the speaker’s platform, and except for several periods in prison she continued her revolutionary exhortations until her death in 1905. Born illegitimately on 29 May 1830, Louise Michel was br... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Trial of 1871
Chapter 11. The Trial of 1871 This chapter consists of an account of the trial as reported in the Gazette des Tribunaux that Louise Michel included as an appendix to her memoirs. Sixth Court-Martial Board (Versailles) President of the Court: Delaporte, Colonel, Twelfth Cavalry Session of 16 December 1871 The Background of the Case against Louise Michel The Commune had an insufficient number of men for protection against the loyal members of the National Guard, so it established companies of children known as Wards of the Commune. It also tried to organize a battalion of amazons. This group was never formed, but women wearing fanciful uniforms and carrying carbines at their shoul¬ ders could be seen preceding the battalions that went to ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Vroncourt
Chapter 2. Vroncourt My childhood nest was a tumbled-down chateau. At its corners, the same height as the main building, were four square towers with roofs like church steeples. The south side had no windows, only loopholes in the towers, which made the building look like a tomb or a castle, depending on the point of view. A long time ago, people called the place the Fortress, but when I lived there it was usually called the Tomb. To the east lay a vineyard, and we were separated from the little village of Vroncourt by a grassy stretch as wide as a prairie. At the end of it, a brook flowed down the only street in the village, and in the winter the brook became so swollen that people in Vroncourt had to put stepping stones in it to make it p... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Bay of the West
Chapter 14. The Bay of the West When I was forced to go to the Bay of the West, I had a greater opportunity to observe the countryside that I loved. Between the Western Forest and the sea, there is a band of volcanic rocks, some standing like the menhirs at Karnak, others affecting monstrous poses, one even looking like an enormous rose with a few broken petals. At high tide the sea prevents people who are fearful of the water from prowling around. Dominating the Western Forest is the signal post. Covered with swallows resting on its supports, the signal post appears from afar to be a gigantic tree with spreading branches, and from their resting places the talkative swallows gossip with each other. The forest was beautiful. Lianas cover it ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Commune of Paris
Chapter 9. The Commune of Paris After Paris surrendered to the Prussians in January 1871, the other French forces agreed to an armistice, during which the Prussians allowed the French to elect a national government, there being some doubt whether the self-proclaimed Parisian government could speak for France as a whole. Expected to decide on the terms of the peace, that new government met first at Bordeaux and then moved to Versailles, just outside Paris. Monarchists dominated the new Versailles govern¬ ment, and until the divisions between those who supported rival pretenders to the throne became evident, it seemed likely that the Versailles government would reestablish a monarchy in which the dreams of republicans and revolutionaries ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)