Louise Michel ou La Velléda de l'anarchie

by Edith Thomas

Édith Thomas a traité la vie de Louise Michel qui est un des acteurs les plus célèbres de la Commune de 1871 avec une passion, un esprit critique et une rigueur toute chartiste, à partir de documents inédits puisés notamment dans les archives historiques de la Préfecture de police et de l'Institut international d'histoire sociale d'Amsterdam. Il s'en dégage une étrange et haute figure de légende, prophétesse des révolutions du XXᵉ, enracinée néanmoins dans le plus ancien passé, à la fois de son temps et en dehors de son temps : la Velléda de l'anarchie.

Genres: History, Biography Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have long wanted to read an in-depth biography of Louise Michel. Previously I'd only been able to track down a graphic novel The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia and a more general book about the women of the Paris Commune, The Women Incendiaries, also by Edith Thomas. After seven years of searching, I found a copy of Thomas' 1971 biography in the Oxfam online bookshop - a brilliant source for second-hand nonfiction. I found Louise Michel to be a slightly uneven but fascinating investigation of an exceptional woman. I learned a great deal about Michel's life after the Commune, as she continued to be a wholehearted revolutionary for the more than thirty subsequent years of her life. It was very interesting to trace how her influence in French revolutionary circles waxed and waned.

Although I found the biography very readable on the whole, I think Thomas is at times needlessly rude about the poetry and fiction that Michel wrote in large quantities to express her philosophies and feelings:

Meanwhile prison life followed its same monotonous rhythm. Louise kept writing: La Femme à travers les âges (later published in a newspaper), L'Excommunié, La Conscience, Le Livre des morts, the first part of Livre du Bagne. All these efforts have disappeared without a trace, but what remains is more than enough. There's far too much bad writing in print as it is!
Louise was as belligerent as ever, even after two years in prison. She did write to the Commission of Pardons, but only to threaten them.

That final sentence demonstrates that Thomas respects Michel's actions more than her writings. Perhaps I am simply unused to being directly addressed by the author of a biography. None of Thomas' quotations from Michel's poetry are translated, which taxed my rusty French considerably. I found the chapters dealing with Michel's years of exile in New Caledonia particularly striking. These show that her humanitarian ethos made her instinctively anticolonialist:

In 1878, the Melanesians rebelled. The colony was terrified but Louise, true to her principles, sided with the rebels against the French. Most of the former Communards, however, rallied to the white man's cause. "I respected them a great deal, but that day, they disgusted me," Louise later told Girault. In her opinion - and she was right - the 'Kanakas' revolt was the same fight that the Communards had waged in 1871. "They too were fighting for independence, control of their own lives, and liberty. I sided with them just as I sided with the rebellious, oppressed, and then defeated people of Paris." [...]
With Louise, feelings always led to actions. She taught the rebels how to cut telegraph wires, thereby shutting down the island's entire communication system. She sent documents to Paris that exposed the massacres of indigenous people that had taken place.

Thomas explores the evolution of Michel's political philosophies via her activities and writing. I was delighted to discover that she wrote, among many other things, utopian sci-fi:

Furthermore, Louise stands up very well to a comparison with Eugène Sue, Edgar Allan Poe, and the writers of science fiction. She foretold radio ('soon there will be long-distance waves'), organ transplants ('The ship's doctor claimed that human life, with preservatives and repairs, could surive much longer than the normal span'), submarines, airplanes, and even the atomic bomb and space travel ('the planets are already sending us signals').

Michel was evidently a compelling speaker, as she gave lectures and talks continually for decades. Media coverage at the time provides some snappy quotes from these:

She talked about the separation of Church and State, a continuing subject of controversy: "I don't want them separated; I don't want either of them to exist."

For context, Michel had recently been shot in the head when she made this remark. She immediately forgave the assassin named Lucas who attempted to murder her, stating that, 'I'd rather people shot me from point-blank range, rather than insulted me from a safe distance'. Lucas wrote to her in remorse at his unpremeditated act of brief madness. As in Francis Wheen's Karl Marx biography, money troubles are a recurrent theme. Michel's Engels (financial benefactor) was named Rochefort. She was so generous to anyone in need that she perpetually struggled to pay her rent or bills from bookshops.

Despite some carping about Michel's writing style, Thomas evidently does admire her and this is most evident in the book's conclusion:

Her glory is that she unhesitatingly and unequivocally sided with the oppressed against the oppressors, that she never allowed herself to be co-opted by the system but fought it tooth and nail to the end. Her glory is that she never lost her faith in, or her passion for, the destiny of humanity.
She was an atheistic prophet, a women with a medieval devotion to man's destiny in the world, and she demonstrated, peerlessly, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. To those virtues, moreover, she added the secular virtues of solidarity and justice.

Given the evidence Thomas presents, I consider those statements to be justified rather than hagiographic. Louise Michel wasn't a perfect saint, but she was an incredible person who lived up to her political convictions in a way that few have managed before or since. In addition, I deeply respect her for wearing black for more than thirty years in mourning for the Commune. Thomas does not consider that this choice, combined with a rather overwrought poetry and prose style, might indicate that Louise Michel was the most gothic of revolutionaries. I wonder if any further biographies of Michel have been published in English in the past fifty years?

[Nic · Rating 4 out of 5]

highly readable, sympathetic account of the life of Louise Michel. Provides an account of Michel's life that takes into account her politics but also unpicks some of the complexities too. The author also avoids the common clichés that often accompany accounts of Louise Michel's life - steering clear of references to the 'red virgin'.