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."