LOUISE MICHELE * by Flick Ruby

Revolution; beloved mother who devours us
Giving equality, take our broken destinies
And make of them a dawning.  Make liberty
Fly above our cherished dead.  When the bells
of ominous May ring out again, wake us
To your luminescent clarity.
                                            Louise Michele Feb 1882

"The revolution is terrifying, but its purpose is to win happiness for
humanity.  It has intrepid combatants, pitiless fighters, and it needs
them.  The Revolution is pulling humanity from an ocean of mud and blood,
and ocean in which thousands of unknown persons serve as feasts for a few
sharks, and if the revolution has to cause pain to achieve its victory, it
is necessary.  To pull a drowning person from the water, you do not choose
whether you are pulling them by the hair or in some way they find more
comfortable."       Louise Michele, Memoirs

As usual it is largely by accident, or by word of mouth that feminists
discover their heroines, barely mentioned in "real" political circles,
never mentioned in texts, they remain forgotten and their contribution to
events in history dies with them, leaving us without record of our
heritage, without inspiration and with the sensation of reinventing the
wheel.  Feminists have spent a lot of time rewriting and rediscovering the
women that his-story has insulted, defiled and ommitted.  George Sand a
screaming French feminst with some dubious ideas however she was prolific
fictional writer on the subject of women and was more popoular than Dickens
in her day, but as ever we study Hard Times at Bleak House in Two Cities.
Alexandra Kollontai, the only women involved in Lenin's cabinet who had the
radical feminist content of her writings edited out and was practically
exiled as embassador to Norway for the expression of her sexuality, is
unheard of and unread by the host of fucking macho gender blind socialists,
continuting in the great tradition of bumbling that she sought to address.
Along with the Spanish women during the 1936 revolution, there are many
French women who did absolutely nothing at all of any importance throughout
their incredibly rich history.

Louise Michele was a brilliant inspiring and notorious French anarchist
feminist, very involved with the Paris Commune of 1871, for which she was
sent to New Caledonia where she participated in the Kanak uprising of 1878.
During the Commune she was on the Committee of Vigilance, was secretary of
Improvement of Working Women through their Work and on the central committe
of the Union of Women.  She wrote boldly and prolifically on the subject of
women and revolution but she was by no stretch of the imagination an
academic theorist although she was a qualified teacher. She said "The
privilege of knowledge is worse than the privilege of wealth" also "prose
and verse and music disappeared because we felt so near the drama coming
from the street, the true drama, the drama of humanity". "Knowledge makes
you think; it is a bar to action, for it prevents you from surrendering
yourself gladly to the unknown."

'The first thing we must change is the relations between the sexes....I
admit that  man, too, suffers in this accursed society, but no sadness can
compare to a woman's.  In the street she is merchandise.  In the convents,
where she hides as if in a tomb, ignorance binds her, and rules take up in
their machine like gears and pulverise her heart and brain.  In the world
she bends under mortification.  In her home, her burdens crush her.  And
men want to keep her that way.  They do not want her to encroach upon
either their funcion or their titles."  She noted this tendency also in the
movement; 'At the meetings of the Rights of Women group, and at other
meetings the most advanced men applauded the idea of equality.  I noticed -
I had seen it before, and I saw it later - that men, their declartations
notwithstanding, although they appeared to help us, were always content
with just the appearance... convinved me that  we women must simply take
our place without begging for it.' ' I salute all those brave women of the
vanguard who were drawn from group to group; The Committee of Vigilance,
the society for the Victims of the War, and later the League of Women.  The
old world ought to fear the day when those women finally decide they have
had enough.  Those women will not slack off.  Strength finds refuge in
them.  Beware of them...Beware of the women when they are sickened by all
that is  around them and rise up against the old world.  On that day a new
world will begin.'

 Her emphasis and experience was the spontaneous uprising which kept her
from, like other anarchist demanding the use of terror; "Tyrannicide is
practical only when a tryanny has a single head, or at most a small number
of heads.  When it is a hydra, only a Revolution can kill it."  She did
contemplate the assasination of certain men and was involved in the
attempted blowing up of a statue as well as the fighting behind baracades
during the commune.  In one of her trials which are testiment to her humour
and courage she admits to  publically approving of assasinations to spur on
revolutionary zeal.  She refuses to defend herself in the trials she is
involved in, accepting responsibilty for all her actions which she boldly
admitted, proudly discussing the goals of social revolution and her
motivations. To capture her after the fall of the Commune the authorities
imprisoned her mother until she came out and faced trial.  'Since it seems
that any heart which beats for liberty has the right only to a small lum of
lead, I demand my share..If you are not cowards, kill me.'  She even wrote
while on remand to the trials authority, General Appert "If you don't want
to go through the legal formalities, you already know enough about me to
shoot me.  I'm ready and the plain of Satory is nearby.  You and all you
accomplices know very well that if I get out of here alive I will avange
the martyrs.  Long live the Commune!"  Transcrpits of her trials appear in
her memoirs The Red Virgin published by University of Alabama Press
available through Jura Books.

 The Commune which lasted from March to May 1871 was voted in by 300,000
French citizens, 35,000 of whom were slaughtered defending it and by June
1872 the "justice" system had processed another 32,905 persons for
participating, and Louise notices that they didn't sentence the boldest
women to death to save face.  The Commune had been declared on October 31,
1870 at the Hotel de Ville with the word commune being hushed up by the
authorties in their reporting of the rising movement.  For five months
before the commune Paris was under siege by the German army and Kropotkin
states that this meant citizens "had to draw upon their own vital
resources, and moral strength which they possessed", after realising the
incompetence of governments and the complicity of the governments in
increasing their chains of bondage.  This encouraged the start of a new
idea which did not originate from one brain, a theory, but of the springing
of the heart of the whole community into action. "It was made by the people
themselves, it sprang spontaneousely from the midst of the mass, and it was
the idea of social revolution, vague certainly, perhaps unconscious, but
still the effort to obtain at last, after the struggle of many centuries,
true freedom, true equality for all."  The commune came at a time of
political transition, the split in the International WorkingMENS Associaion
between the idea of the popular state and anarchy was rife and again
Kropotkin states 'the anarchist theory did need some short clear mode of
expresson, some formula at once simple and practical, to show plainly its
point of departure, and embody its conception,s to indicate how it was
supported by an actually existing tendency among the people.'   The Paris
Commune's popular character began a new series of revolutions and a whole
new element for contemplation.

The Paris Commune declared education free, abolished consription, abolished
the need and the proffitteer of prostitution, fixed the salaries of all
judicial and associated justice workers, freed all the prisoners on the
18th of March, suspended the payment of all rents for 6 months, destroyed
"monuments of barbarism, symbols of brute force and false glory,
affirmations of militarism, all negations of international right",
abolished professional and political oaths, severed any possible connection
to the church and converted all church property into national property,
excluded all religious symbols dogmas and prayers from schools, the
guillotine was publically burnt, factories were converted into co-opeative
societies, abolished night work, closed pawn shops, ordered the razing of
the Chapel of attonement built in expiation of the execution of Louis XVI.
The Commune did not execute one hostage, not one prisoner, not even spies -
they were simply arrested.

Marx, in his address to the International WorkingMENS Association two days
after the fall of the commune (May 30th), also in The Civil War in France
gives us details celebrating its success under incredibly difficult
circumstances.  He tells of the carnage committed against the communards
and also provides the exasperated anarchist with such beaudies as "...it
was a revolution against the State itself, of this supernaturalist abortion
of society, a resumption by the people, for the people of its own social
life.  It was not a revolution to transfer it from one fraction of the
ruling class to the other, but a revolution to break down this horrid
machinery of class domination itself.....All revolutions thus only
perfected the State machinery instead of throwing off this deadening
incubus..the state, the centrelized and organized governmental power
usurping to be the master instead of the servant of society...All France
would be organized into self-working and self-governing Communes, the
standing army replaced by popular militias, the army of State parasites
removed, the clerical heirarchy displaced b ythe schoolmaster, the State
judge transformed into Communal organs, the suffrage for the national
representation not a matter of sleight of hand for an all-powerful
government but the deliberate expression of organized Communes, the State
functions reduced to a few function for general national purposes."

At the time Louise Michele wrote 'Perhaps it would be better for the people
if all of us who lead the fight now should fall in battle, so that after
the victory there will be no more general staffs.  Then the people could
understand that when everyone together shares power, then power is just and
splendid; but unshared it drives some people mad.' 'Who will record the
crimes that power commits, and the mostrous manner in which power
transforms men?  Those crimes can be ended forever by spreading power out
to the entire human race.  To spread the feeling of the homeland to the
entire world, to extend well being to all people..'  In her memoirs she
states that the origins of her revolt was the tortures inflincted upon
animals.  She longed for the animals revenge as she noted that 'the more
ferocious a man is toward animals, the more that man cringes before the
people who dominate him'.  Her ideas of freedom therefore extend to all
beings.

After returning from New Caledonia, from which she had attempted escape a
couple of times, she returns to Paris to a new political scene altogether.
She said 'Now people are enchained through having been made to believe that
they are free' under the self proclaimed republic.  She resumed her
political activities almost at once after being greeted by thousands of
people.  She embarked on a speaking tour through France, Belgium and
England.  After her involvement in a demonstration which entailed her
carrying the black flag across Paris, she was sentenced to 6 years of
solitary confinement.  She was pardoned after her mothers funeral which was
unbelievably huge, uniting many revolutionary groups.  Her work tirelessly
continues until her death in 1905, travelling around raising funds and
addressing revolutionary groups.  She is arrested a number of times  and is
threatened with the asylum which was one of her only fears, so she fled to
England.

"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 becuase of what happens to us , we are
invincable."  "When the hour comes, which ferocious and stupid governments
are  pushing forward, it will not be a boulevard that quivers under the
steps of a crowd.  It will be the entire earth trembling under the March of
the Human race.  In the meantime, the wider the river of blood flowing from
the scaffold where our people are being assasinated, the more crowded the
prisons, the greater the poverty, the more tyranical the governments, the
more quickly the hour will come and the more numerous the combatants will
be.  How many wrathful people, young people, will be with us when the red
and black banners wave in the wind of anger.."

"When the revolution comes, you and I and all humanity will be transformed.
Everything will be changed and better times will have joys that the people
of today arn't able to understand.  Feeling for the arts and for liberty
will surely beocme greater, and the harvest of that development will be
marvellous.  Beyond this cursed time will come a day when humanity, free
and consicous of its powers will no longer torture either man or beast. The
hope is worth all the suffering we undergo as we more through the horrors
of life."
