LOVE HUMANIZES AN ICON

LOUISE MICHELSEEMS 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, a well-known 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. 

• Deported to New Caledonia and 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.

• At her death she thought herself forgotten. But her funeral convoy attracted a crowd of 120,000, which helped unite the Socialist movement (in 1905):

 Louise Michel's Funeral Cortège by Albert Peters-Desreract, Saint-Denis City Museum

The artist merges the bier with the crowd.

       Zoom (scroll way down) 

Postcard: 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.

Internet / no photographer named

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

The only métro stop named after a woman alone. 

• She is part of popular culture

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

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

# # #

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

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

Théophile Ferré?

The Red Virgin, narration of Alain Decaux, YouTube 2019 (in French)

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." 

Render him justice: at his trial he admitted his responsibilities, as other Commune members did not. He was shot.

He was not in love with Louise: "I shake your hand fraternally," he wrote her just before his death. 

-- Most information: Vuillaume (in French)

-- The director does not obey: 

Elements of history in the 13th arrondissement by Gérard Comte, 1989 (in French)

--Trial: Trials of the Communards by Jacques Rougerie, 1964 (in French)

Michel's memoirs say little about La Commune.
Because of him? 

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Crowd and soldiers fraternize