Louise Michel, anarchist revolutionary, was born today, May 29, 1830, in Vroncourt, France. Also known as The Red Virgin, Michel was a leader of the Paris Commune. After her return from exile, she became a leading anarchist organizer and speaker. She is believed to be the first person to use the black flag as an anarchist symbol, during a demonstration in Paris in 1883.
Early Years
As a child, Louise Michel always empathized with the downtrodden. At age 23, she became a school teacher. In her free time, she wrote poetry and took classes in physics, chemistry and law. Here’s one of her early poems:
I have seen criminals and whores
And spoken with them. Now I inquire
If you believe them made as now they are
To drag their rags in blood and mire
Preordained, an evil race? You to whom all men are prey
Have made them what they are today.
The Paris Commune
In July, 1870, Louise Michel was arrested her for the first time. She was helping cache arms to defend Strasberg against the Prussian army. The Prussians released her at the end of September, but arrested her again, two months later, for leading a demonstration. In January, 1871, the Prussians conquered Paris, but allowed the French to elect a new government, which they filled with monarchists. Two months later, the people overthrew that government in the Paris Commune. In her memoirs, she wrote the following about her state of mind during the commune: “In my mind I feel the soft darkness of a spring night. It is May 1871, and I see the red reflection of flames. It is Paris afire. That fire is a dawn.” At the end of the Blood Week, the authorities forced her to turn herself in by threatening to kill her mother. She was lucky to have survived. They executed 30,000 men, women and children.
Exile
They tried her in December, 1871 for trying to overthrow the government, arming citizens, forgery, attempted assassinations, and numerous other crimes. When asked if she had anything to say in her defense, she replied: “I wished to oppose the invader from Versailles with a barrier of flames. I had no accomplices in this action. I acted on my own initiative. . . since it seems that any heart which beats for freedom has the right only to a lump of lead, I too claim my share. If you let me live, I shall never stop crying for revenge and l shall avenge my brothers. I have finished. If you are not cowards, kill me!”
They sentenced Louise Michel to deportation for life and sent her to New Caldonia. On the boat ride there, in 1873, she met Natalie Lemel, who taught her about anarchism. After five years, they allowed her to start teaching again. She worked with the children of colonists and the indigenous people of New Caldonia. Her struggle against French colonialism and support for the indigenous people is remembered today in their local museum of anarchism.
Amnesty and Continued Organizing
In 1880, the French gave amnesty to commune prisoners and allowed her back into the country. Many of those prisoners could not find work and were starving. She helped set up soup kitchens to feed them and devoted herself to writing about strikes and worker protests. On Mach 9, 1883, she led a demonstration through Paris. During the march, starving workers looted bakeries and stole bread. They arrested Michel and sentenced her to six years solitary confinement.
Imprisoned Again
When socialist Paul Lafargue visited her in prison, he seemed distressed by her living conditions. “My dear Lafargue,” she said. “There is no other parlor in this hotel where the bourgeois lodge me gratis. I’m not complaining. . .I‘ve found a happiness in prison that I never knew when I was free; I have time to study and I take advantage of it. When I was free, I had my classes: 150 students or more. It wasn’t enough for me to live on, since two thirds of them didn’t pay me. I had to give lessons in music, grammar, history, a little bit of everything, until ten or eleven o’clock in the evening, and when I went home I went to sleep exhausted, unable to do anything. At the time I would have given years of my life in order to have time to give over to study.”
While in prison, she wrote children’s books. Her goal was to “teach them to think like citizens, like revolutionaries, while at the same time amusing them. In novels I realistically paint the miseries of life, and I try to breathe the love of the revolution into the hearts of men.”
Two years after being released, a would-be assassin shot her behind her ear. During the trial, she defended the would-be assassin, arguing that he had been misled by an evil society. She died on January 9, 1905, due in part to the bullet that remained lodged in her skull.