LOVE HUMANIZES AN ICON

LOUISE MICHEL SEEMS TO HAVE ONLY ONE DIMENSION:

HEROINE OF THE COMMUNE...

"I almost never slept, when I did it was anywhere or when there was nothing better to do; many others did the same." 

Biography: by Edith Thomas, 1971, pdf (in English),

Detailled summary (in French)

    Internet, now gone

"The people get only what they take."

Or "a grim, lumbering figure, stomping up and down the Commune's front line, a tunnel-vision revolutionary with no life beyond the cause."

-- Paris Babylon by Rupert Christiansen, p. 316 

-- Much more objective: Georges and Louise by Michel Ragon, 2000

An outsider and rebel from birth

Louise was the illegitimate child of a servant and the master's son, whose refusal to recognize her insulted her and her beloved mother. She was born a radical.

The excellent education given by her father's parents, chatelains, made her as inapt for a servile position as her birth for a respectable one. 

Teaching was the only professional opening but as she refused to swear allegiance to the Emperor, official establishments were closed to her. 

Her first exploit: founding a school for girls in poverty-stricken Montmartre.

• During the siege an ambulance driver, nurse, guard...

Zoom

"I was not such a bad soldier."

• During La Commune she was known as an orator.

Jean Renoir's aunt would go to hear her. Vuillaume did not know her personally but mentions a speech. When guards took her for a spy they at first refused to believe who she was, which means that they had heard of her. 

But she was not a leading figure. Though she was on the boat that took deported Communards to New Caledonia, she does not appear in this evocation:

     Painting at the musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Saint-Denis 

Amnestied with other survivors in 1880, she returned to France and for the rest of her life defended the most vulnerable: prostitutes, delinquents, the insane. Her speeches made her well known for a time, though at her death in 1905 she thought herself forgotten.

• Yet her funeral convoy attracted a crowd of 120,000, which helped unite the Socialist movement.

 Louise Michel's Funeral Cortège by Albert Peters-Desreract, Musée d'art et d'histoire de Saint-Denis 

The bier merges with the crowd.

               Zoom (at bottom of page) 

The mayor of the suburb where she rests (Levallois-Perret) reads his speech.

Celebrity

• A park, a library and a metro have been named after her

The park, on the Montmartre hilltop where La Commune broke out.

The library, appropriately in the east (at 29 rue des Haies, 20th district)

The only métro stop named after one woman. 

• She is part of popular culture

In the popular restaurant Les Trois Frères in La Goutte d'Or.

The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games (in Paris, 2024)

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But there's a contradiction: her demand during La Commune that a hostage be shot each day contrasts with her legendary kindness, even climbing down from a barricade to rescue a cat.

Was that exaltation due to the man in her life, the fanatical 

Théophile Ferré?

     La Vierge rouge narration of Alain Decaux, YouTube 2019 

As police chief in La Commune's tragic last days, he had City Hall with its ceiling by Delacroix burned, ordered the execution of the kindly Archbishop of Paris with five other ecclesiastics and tried to have 20 more hostages shot (the prison director did not obey). 

He was as indifferent to his own life:

-- "These aren't sheets we're sleeping in, but shrouds."

-- "So what." 

At his trial he admitted his responsibilities, as other Commune members did not. He was shot.

-- Most information: Vuillaume 

The director does not obey: 

Elements of History of the Commune of the 13th Arrondissement by Gérard Comte, 1989

He was not in love with Louise:

"I shake your hand fraternally," 

he wrote her just before his death. 

 -- The Communard Trials by Jacques Rougerie, 1964

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Next,
Crowd and soldiers fraternize