March 18

1871



The Paris Commune.

Not to be confused with the Paris Commune of 1789-1795, which was the official name of the Revolutionary government after the fall of the Bastille, and the reason why this uprising was named as it was. For the first version see, for example, Reine Audu on Oct 5.

The fall of this Paris Commune can be found, alas, on May 28; Trotsky's thoughts about it are on Aug 20.

Of the other keyplayers, André Léo can be found on June 17, but I am focusing here on three very remarkable women:


Adèle Paulina Mekarska, though she went by the nom de révolution of Paule Mink, or sometimes Minck. Thirty-two when the Franco-Prussian war ended in defeat and embarrassment, and the oppressed and starving workers of the capital decided that assez had become genug (she was born, of Polish descent but in France, on November 9 1839, and died on April 18 1901), she was already well-known as a revolutionary socialist and an even more revolutionary feminist, having joined André Léo's "Société pour la Revendication du Droit des Femmes" in the 1860s; her fame mostly from her published writings, on both themes: she had, for example, spent a year in Algeria, an official tour with an official title: "Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Clerical": so impactful was it on local Algerians, both "pied-noirs" and indigènes, that two Christian missionaries wrote their own book in dismay and consternation: "En zigzag du Maroc à Malte : à travers l'Algérie, la Tunisie et les états barbaresques : souvenirs d'Afrique External".


For more bio, and a detailed account of her role in the Paris Commune, click here (English) and-or here (French); a more scholarly-academic appraisal here, if you are able to access it


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Louise Michel (1830-1905) known as “The Red Virgin”; an ideologue of anarchism (anarchism, not anarchy, those two are very different), she fought for the liberation of many other groups besides French women, including the indigenous Kanak people of New Caledonia (why them? see below) when they raised a revolution in hopes of independence from France, and for the Algerians in their similar cause later on.

The key positive date in her life was obviously today, which is why she is posted here. The key negative date was August 8 1873: imprisoned for twenty months for her part in the Commune, she was loaded onto the ship Virginie to begin a four-month sea-voyage to New Caledonia, where she remained until all those involved in the Commune were amnestied in 1880.

Returned to Paris, she resumed her commitment to a better world for those born without wealth or power, setting up her own newspaper, "La Vengeance Anarchiste", in March 1883, and then leading a demonstration of unemployed workers to demand jobs or at least social benefits. Arrested for doing so, this time she was sentenced to six years, all of it to be in solitary confinement to prevent her passing on her evil and wicked thoughts to others. When they let her out early, in 1886, she found the paper for whom she now wrote banned just weeks later, and herself arrested yet again - sent to an insane asylum this time, which quickly decided that she wasn't, and let her go. To England for five years, where she established a school that was much more about educating than about teaching; and then back to France, to die of pneumonia in Marseille on January 10 1905. And if you think of anarchists as solitaries and go-it-aloners who don't go in for crowds, you might be surprised to learn that her funeral in Paris was attended by more than 100,000 people.

I did once hear a French woman suggesting that the authorities were planning to rename Mont St Michel after her, but I think she was probably being ironic.


Her memoir “The Red Virgin” in translation here; bio here


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And last, but really she ought to be first, Élisabeth Dmitrieff, principal organiser of the Paris Commune and a close friend of Karl Marx, who she knew in London, and who sent her to Paris as the official envoy of the International. Her birthname, on November 1 1850 in Saint-Petersburg, was Elizaveta Lukinichna Kusheleva; and her goal was rather more a Russian revolution than one anywhere else, but Russia wasn't ready, so she went under her nom-de-guerre to Paris, aged just twenty, and organised the women's involvement in the Paris Commune instead...

and I promise that I will write a full piece about her, but not today. In the meanwhile lots available online, of which I recommend this in particular, this especially, and this one just as much.

She died on February 23 1919 in Moscow.


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Also in Amber:


Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, born today in 1893





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