Table of Contents for this Episode
584 Louise Michel and La Commune de Paris (Feb 8)
[00:00:15] Introduction
Annie Sargent: This is Join Us in France, episode 584, cinq cent quatre-vingt-quatre.
Annie Sargent: Bonjour, I’m Annie Sargent, and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture, and flavors of France.
[00:00:30] Today on the podcast
Annie Sargent: Today, I bring you a conversation with Elyse Rivin of Toulouse Guided Walks about Louise Michel.
Annie Sargent: This is Paris in 1871. The city is starving, the government has fallen, and the radical uprising is about to change history forever.
Annie Sargent: Let us introduce you to Louise Michel, schoolteacher, anarchist, and one of the most fearless women of the 19th century. From the barricades of the Paris Commune to exile in New Caledonia, her story is one of defiance, feminism, and revolution.
Annie Sargent: In this episode, Elyse and I unpack the dramatic events of the Commune, the myths of the Pétroleuse, and the legacy of a woman who fought for justice, no matter the cost.
[00:01:21] Podcast supporters
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Annie Sargent: If you’d like to support the podcast and skip the ads, you’ll find a link in the show notes, and all my tours and services are at joinusinfrance.com/boutique.
[00:02:03] Magazine segment
Annie Sargent: For the magazine part of the podcast, after my chat with Elyse today, I’ll talk to you about the legacy of the Paris Olympics, how Paris and Saint-Denis have transformed as a result of the investments made during the Olympics.
Annie Sargent: And by the way, Winter Olympics in Italy just started, so bonne chance à nos amis italiens, or in bocca al lupo, Italia!
Annie Sargent: Want to explore more of France? Browse all my episodes at joinusinfrance.com/episodes, and don’t forget to grab your free weekly recap of the best stories, tips, and hidden gems. Just sign up at joinusinfrance.com/newsletter.
Annie Sargent: It’s like a postcard from France delivered straight to your inbox.
[00:03:03] Elyse and Annie about Louise Michel and La Commune de Paris
Annie Sargent: Bonjour, Elyse!
Elyse Rivin: Bonjour, Annie.
Annie Sargent: Well, we have quite the topic today. It might twist our brains a bit.
Elyse Rivin: My brain is already twisted. This is just adding another twist to it, you know, really.
[00:03:18] Understanding La Commune de Paris
Annie Sargent: So, we are going to talk about La Commune de Paris, middle of the 1800s, 1870, and Louise Michel. So we have to do both at once because you cannot understand her if you don’t understand La Commune. So we’ll start with La Commune with some questions.
Annie Sargent: So I’m going to ask you some of these questions. I don’t expect you to know all the answers, because…
Elyse Rivin: I won’t. Because I won’t.
Annie Sargent: Most people will not know any of this, but we’ll go quickly through the history.
Elyse Rivin: Okay.
[00:03:47] The Paris Commune: Key Events and Figures
Annie Sargent: So what was the Paris Commune?
Elyse Rivin: My understanding of it was that it was a group of people who organized around Montmartre, the hill of Montmartre, in opposition to the French government giving in to the Prussians.
Elyse Rivin: Now, that’s very complicated, but what I understand is that the Prussians invaded Paris or northern France in 1870, I’m not sure why, and the French government, this is like what happened again later on, unfortunately, after a short amount of time, basically gave up or gave in to whatever, I don’t know what the demands were, you’ll explain maybe.
Elyse Rivin: And then they announced that they officially they were giving up whatever the fighting they were going to do, and there were a group of people who were basically more radical, more independent, and who were against the government in general anyway, and they formed a group, and they were in Montmartre, and they took up arms against the French army. Is that right?
Annie Sargent: Yes, a lot of this is correct. Let me give you a simpler definition. The Paris Commune was a radical socialist and revolutionary government that briefly ruled Paris from
Annie Sargent: the 18th of March to the 20th of May, 1871.
Annie Sargent: It emerged after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, which the French started, as a matter of fact.
Elyse Rivin: The French started it? Okay.
Annie Sargent: Yes, they did. They thought it was going to be won easily. Hubris. Hubris.
Annie Sargent: Okay, so, it emerged after France’s defeat in this Franco-Prussian War and the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. The Commune tried to establish a more democratic and egalitarian form of government, but was eventually crushed by the French army.
Elyse Rivin: And my understanding is that they really wanted to… And I knew that they were opposed to Napoleon III anyway, but that this new government that was put into place, they were opposed to it completely. So but I’m not really up on all of the different aspects of the government and what this represented.
Annie Sargent: Right. So there were a lot of problems in Prussia, Austria, Germany, because this is the time when Germany united, and in the process of doing that, there were… A strong leader needed to emerge. And it’s always good, to be seen as a strong leader, to lead a war, especially to victory. That’s why the Prussians kept on niggling at the French, to the point where the French declared war because they thought, “We can beat them easily.”
Annie Sargent: And French people were all for this war. They were like, “Hey, we got to get rid of these people.” So there you have it. We know when it happened, we know what it was. What triggered it, it were several factors. So one was the France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.
Annie Sargent: Second, the harsh terms of the armistice with Prussia.
Annie Sargent: Third, the Siege of Paris, which took place between September 1870 and January 1871, which caused untold hunger and hardship.
Elyse Rivin: Let me ask you a question about that. When you say the siege, because I really don’t know that much about it, that means the Prussian army encircled Paris or a part of Paris and was basically starving people out. Is that what was happening?
Annie Sargent: Yes, that’s what was happening. Yes.
Elyse Rivin: Okay.
Annie Sargent: We will talk about it a little bit here, but not too much because it’s another…
Elyse Rivin: It’s another whole topic, yeah.
Annie Sargent: Yeah, it’s another whole topic. The other reason for the triggering of the Paris Commune was the anger at Adolphe Thiers. He had a conservative government which tried to disarm the National Guard, and this disarmament attempt was on 18th of March 1871, and that sparked the revolt.
[00:08:07] Commune Policies
Annie Sargent: So what policies did the Commune enact? That’s another thing that people want to know very often. They wanted the separation of church and state.
Elyse Rivin: Which, if I’m not mistaken, had been one of the ideas of the revolution?
Annie Sargent: Correct.
Elyse Rivin: Okay.
Annie Sargent: They wanted that back.
Elyse Rivin: They wanted it back, okay.
Annie Sargent: Yes. They wanted the abolition of night work in bakeries.
Elyse Rivin: Mm-hmm.
Annie Sargent: Yeah, that’s kind of hard to do, because people want their bread in the morning.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah, that’s true.
Annie Sargent: They wanted a remission of rent for the siege period. They wanted workers’ cooperatives, that would be encouraged to take over abandoned workshops. And they wanted to promote women’s right through associations, even though women couldn’t vote, okay?
[00:08:56] The Fall of the Commune and Its Aftermath
Annie Sargent: Part of La Commune is called La Semaine Sanglante, the Bloody Week, that was the final week of May 1871, when government troops entered Paris and brutally crushed the Commune. There was street fighting, mass executions, and reprisals that left thousands dead.
Elyse Rivin: That, of course, I do know about, because that’s connected to Louise Michel.
Annie Sargent: Yeah, exactly, and we’ll come back to that.
Annie Sargent: So this marks the violent end of the Commune. How many people were killed or punished? Estimates vary, of course, but they say between 10,000 and 20,000 communards, were killed in the final week.
Elyse Rivin: Mm-hmm.
Annie Sargent: Around 38,000 were arrested, and thousands were deported to New Caledonia.
Elyse Rivin: Yep.
Annie Sargent: Notably, Louise Michel.
Elyse Rivin: Yep.
Annie Sargent: This level of repression was one of the harshest period episodes of political violence in 19th-century, France.
Annie Sargent: It was just a terrible time. Another question is, what became of the Communard women, and the so-called Petroleuse, right? You might tell us more about that. Women played key roles as nurses, propagandists, and fighters. Figures like Louise Michel became legendary, which is why we’re going to talk about her. However, after the Commune rumors spread about women arsonists,
Annie Sargent: les Petroleuses, who supposedly set fire to Paris with oil.
Annie Sargent: Historians see this as largely a myth used to discredit women rebels, and many women were executed, imprisoned, or deported along with the men.
Annie Sargent: So what buildings and monuments were destroyed or damaged somehow?
Annie Sargent: The Tuileries Palace burned down by Communards. The Louvre, the Louvre has three sides.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah.
Annie Sargent: There used to be a fourth side that closed it off, and that was the Tuileries Palace. It wasn’t exactly closing it off, but it was in that area, and it was never rebuilt. There were many talks about that, but they never rebuilt it.
Annie Sargent: L’Hotel de Ville, City Hall, was destroyed by fire and rebuilt in the 1880s.
Annie Sargent: La Colonne de Vendôme, Place Vendôme, was toppled as a symbol of imperial militarism, and it was later rebuilt.
Annie Sargent: And churches, many churches, and other public buildings suffered damage. Okay?
Elyse Rivin: So it wasn’t just in Montmartre?
Annie Sargent: Oh, no, no, definitely not. And you will see signs of memories of La Commune all around Paris. I’ve seen some in the 13th. There’s some by some of the parks, north-east.
Elyse Rivin: Interesting. Okay.
[00:11:47] La Commune’s Significance Today
Annie Sargent: All right, so what is the Commune, La Commune, the legacy or significance today? Well, Marx and Engels saw it as the first example of a dictatorship of the proletariat, which was a big part of communism.
Annie Sargent: It inspired later socialists, anarchists, and communists movement worldwide.
Annie Sargent: In France, it remains divisive. Some view it as heroic, others as destructive, and there are annual commemorations that still take place at the Mur des Fédérés in Père Lachaise Cemetery, where many Communards were lined up and executed.
Elyse Rivin: Hmm.
Annie Sargent: And now, the last point I want to bring is,who were the key figures of the Commune? So you had the Blanquists, they were revolutionary socialists, followers of Louis Auguste Blanqui. That’s why they’re called Blanquists. Proudhonists, the followers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, advocating decentralization and workers’ rights.
Annie Sargent: Les Jacobins, we heard about them in the French Revolution. They are radical Republicans, in the tradition of 1793.
Annie Sargent: Prominent individuals included Charles Delescluze, who was a radical journalist, Louis Rossel, who was a military leader, and Louise Michel, a famous schoolteacher and anarchist.
Annie Sargent: And on the other side, you have Adolphe Thiers, head of the French government, who was central in suppressing the Commune.
Annie Sargent: So I hope this question-and-answer type thing has given you a vague idea of what it was, but it was a time of terrible, terrible upheaval in Paris, and it was a sort of revolution. I would call it another revolution, really, because it didn’t last as long as the previous one, but it was a big deal, and it killed a lot of people.
Elyse Rivin: I didn’t realize it had killed that many people, to be honest. I knew that it was a big deal, and certainly after the mini Three-Day Revolution of 1830, this was the next moment when there was a huge movement and an upheaval.
Elyse Rivin: But I really did not realize how extensive it was and how, I know I’ve heard many, many things about how brutal it was, how repressive it was, but I really had no idea there were that many people killed. And it’s interesting because one of the things I read in preparing the notes about Louise Michel was that, well, we both know because, the history of France in the 19th century was a history of, like, every- almost every 10 years, going from monarchy to empire to republic and back again. It was totally unstable from the French Revolution until the end of 1871. But what I didn’t realize was that at the time of this, and maybe it was because of the war with Prussia, I really don’t know, but there was apparently extensive starvation everywhere. There were really many, many, many poor people, and the general sentiment, the general feeling of the lower classes was of resentment towards the powers that be.
Annie Sargent: Right, there are some amazing stories of the people of Paris eating everything. You know, they started with the cats and dogs, and then they went to the rats, and they even ate the zoo animals. It was terrible because they had this pair of brothers, elephant brothers, that were very, very sweet animals, and there’s terrible stories about when they shot them.
Elyse Rivin: Oh, okay.
Annie Sargent: Anyway, they ate everything that they could find. There was starvation. These were rough times, and of course, a city like Paris, it takes a lot of food to…
Elyse Rivin: Yeah.
Annie Sargent: And people didn’t have freezers, and, you know, they…
Elyse Rivin: Well, and not only that, but this is a time when Paris is still extremely medieval. It’s right before Haussmann starts destroying a good chunk of the oldest part of Paris, which, of course, is the aftermath of this, in a way, to clear it out, so there aren’t ambushes on top of the idea that you have to make it more modern, you know? There was lots and lots of poverty, lots of shanty towns inside Paris itself.
Annie Sargent: And especially Montmartre was very poor. I mean, Montmartre was where you went because you couldn’t pay the rent anywhere else.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah, and Victor Hugo, of course, who is part of it, in an interesting way, part of the history of this woman, Louise Michel, he wrote about it. He was one of the first to really make it into a cause célèbre in his books, you know?
(Mid-roll ad spot)
[00:16:26] Louise Michel: Early Life and Education
Annie Sargent: So do tell us about Louise Michel, because I completely ignored anything to do with Louise Michel since I knew you were going to cover her.
Elyse Rivin: Well, so in fact, she was actually quite amazing, I have to say. This is a woman who, let’s talk about her beginning. She was born in 1830. She didn’t die in the Commune. She went on to live a relatively long life. She died in 1905 at the age of 74.
Annie Sargent: Nicely done.
Elyse Rivin: She was also someone who had an amount of courage, and an amount of conviction that very few people have in general. And I must say that I spent a whole bunch of days reading all kinds of articles, both in French and in English, to get a kind of overall perspective or point of view about her, wondering if the American perspective was a little bit different than… Actually, not at all. I mean, she’s really a phenomenon, and what I find interesting is that, I asked my husband, who’s 16 years older than you, if he remembered her as a figure he learned about in school, and his answer was, “Duh,” you know?
Elyse Rivin: And, of course, that is the irony of everything, is that one of the things she fought for her entire life was the place of women in society, the place of women in intellectual society, and the final proof is that by the middle end of the 20th century, she was not talked about at all.
Annie Sargent: Yeah, I don’t remember learning about her or about the French Revolution. As a matter of fact, I was a good student, but I didn’t pay too much attention to history back then.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah, well, I have to confess, neither did I, but there you go. I mean…
Annie Sargent: We’ve made up for it, Elyse.
Elyse Rivin: We’ve made up for it now.
Elyse Rivin: This is fascinating to me. We’ve talked about lots of different people. She was born in 1830. She was the daughter of a maid and the son of a family that was what we could call minor nobility. In fact, what makes this story interesting to me is that, unlike many stories like this, she and her mother were kept with the grandparents, and it was the son who was kicked out of the house.
Annie Sargent: Oh, interesting.
Elyse Rivin: And, I don’t know if it was because there were no other grandchildren or not, but she was brought up as their grandchild, even though she was never legitimized. So she was given an excellent education. She was really treated like the granddaughter, the beloved granddaughter of this family. And because she received such an excellent education, and she was very, very, very bright, she lived in a chateau, she grew up living in a… she grew up with privilege, which is basically what I’m saying, is that it’s… This is fascinating to me, and so she was not mistreated. Nothing like that happened.
Elyse Rivin: What happened was, when her grandparents died, they sold the chateau, and my guess is that it was the son who basically said, “Okay, goodbye.” You know, he had moved off and married and whatever, and so they were given a certain sum of money. By that time, she had gone to what was considered to be women’s teacher training school. In the 1850s and ’60s, there were programs for women to learn to be, I guess, what would be considered to be like elementary school teachers, they could teach young girls and women from a certain level of society.
Elyse Rivin: And so she was very bright. She immediately began writing essays and poetry, even as a teenager, and she was very interested in teaching.
Elyse Rivin: So when she and her mother, were basically told to go away, they moved to Paris. She was born in the north of France, and so she decided when she moved to Paris, she was in her middle 20s, that she would open a school for young women. This is also something that was, there weren’t that many, to be honest, but she wanted it to be a school with a modern, progressive form of education.
Elyse Rivin: I’m not sure what that would be, but I find it very interesting. She wanted… What she said, though, from the beginning, and what I could not find, is whether these ideas came to her by herself naturally or by readings that she did.
Elyse Rivin: She immediately was a proponent of women’s rights, whatever you want to consider to be women’s rights. She was immediately, she identified herself as someone who would be a feminist. She wasn’t talking about voting rights, which is interesting, but about women having equal pay, about women being able to have different jobs in society, and she believed that women, and of course she was right, had equal intellectual potential.
Annie Sargent: Uh-huh.
Elyse Rivin: We think of these things now, but then again, there’s still places in the world where that’s not necessarily the case. But she wrote essays and poetry, and at the age of 26, came to the attention of Victor Hugo.
Annie Sargent: Hmm, nice.
Elyse Rivin: And, they began a correspondence, which I think is fascinating because the correspondence lasted for over 30 years, and as she said, she was inspired by his poetry. She was inspired by some of his writing.
Elyse Rivin: I can imagine he must have really… receiving a letter from a young woman like that, who’s very well-educated, it obviously was something that pleased him.
Elyse Rivin: But he really began this very interesting, intellectual correspondence and relationship with her that lasted for a very long time.
Annie Sargent: And knowing Victor Hugo, he probably saw, “Oh, maybe I can sleep with her.”
Elyse Rivin: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And for all we know, maybe that did happen, you know, I mean…
Annie Sargent: We don’t know.
Elyse Rivin: We don’t know. What I find really interesting is that from a very early age, she was a free thinker, okay? She believed that women… First of all, she believed women could do whatever they wanted to, which of course, was not the case with most of society. But also, she was very adamant in the idea thatwomen should be militant.
[00:22:15] Louise Michel: Activism and Legacy
Elyse Rivin: In the beginning of the 1860s, so she’s in her early 30s, she became one of the founding members of a group called the Society for the Demand for Civil Rights for Women.
Annie Sargent: Okay.
Elyse Rivin: So, we have a clear idea immediately of what is going on with her. And all this time, and through her entire life, she continued this, what became very extreme, extreme militancy, but also wrote poetry, and the poetry is very romantic.
Elyse Rivin: So I find her just so absolutely fascinating because she was so absolutely contradictory in so many ways. And because she wrote articles and was a very good speaker, she attracted the attention of a lot of these men who were parts of these radical groups.
Elyse Rivin: And her militantism made her friends with all of these people that you talk about as being part eventually of the Commune and everything else, and she wrote about the hunger. She wrote about the poverty in parts of Paris. And she said that of all the people that she hated, she hated Napoleon III the most.
Annie Sargent: Well, he was heavy-handed, wasn’t he?
Elyse Rivin: He was heavy-handed, right.
Annie Sargent: I mean, imagine having the sort of heavy hand that lets you demolish the homes of so many people.
Elyse Rivin: Right.
Annie Sargent: … just to make it prettier.
Elyse Rivin: Just to make it prettier, right.
Annie Sargent: Like, not a lot of people can get away with that.
Elyse Rivin: No.
Annie Sargent: But he did.
Elyse Rivin: No, he did. She corresponded with people, even in England, before she ever went there, because she did eventually go and spend time in England, and she created a kind of group of feminists that circled around her. She was really a woman who had, must have had a certain charisma as a speaker. She created these feminist groups before the time. Interestingly enough, there’s nothing that I see that talks about voting, but I’m sure that it was because, for the moment, she was more interested in equal pay, of being not mistreated by men, of the values of society in a more social kind of way, as well as the idea that women could have a full education.
Elyse Rivin: She was really adamant about the idea that people could have a full education.
Elyse Rivin: And, one of the people she met was a man named Théophile Ferré, who was one of the most radical of the group that were organizers of the Commune.
Elyse Rivin: She apparently fell in love with him. He was a bit younger than her. He was one of the anarchist leaders of the Commune, and they became very, very close.
Elyse Rivin: She actually met him through his sister, who was a member of a feminist group, and that is how she became involved in the Paris Commune.
Annie Sargent: Okay.
Elyse Rivin: Now, one of the things that happened was that she decided that she wanted to be a soldier in the Commune, fighting against the French army. So there is a photo that you can actually find online of her dressed in a soldier’s uniform, and she became an active member of what is called the National Guard.
Annie Sargent: Yeah, I’ll try and find photos, and there’s got to be paintings of her, too?
Elyse Rivin: There are paintings of her, but there are actually, since this is the 1870s, there were already a fair amount of photos of her. Yeah. She was elected to be the head of the Montmartre Women’s Vigilance Committee.
Annie Sargent: Mm-hmm.
Elyse Rivin: She carried a rifle with her at all times.
Annie Sargent: Yeah.
Annie Sargent: Okay?
Elyse Rivin: She was on the barricades. I mean, she was, you know, out in the front line.
Elyse Rivin: And,you know, what we would call casquoun, she was just… she basically didn’t care. To me, what’s fascinating is, I don’t know, this vehemence about all these ideas. It’s interesting because you wonder where all of that came from in her. But she took an active part in the both the intellectual and the physical parts of resistance in the Commune.
Elyse Rivin: And she was given the task, this is what I’ve read, that, that she did not carry out. She was a member of this group that was supposedly setting fire to places, of course. But she was given the task when they could not get a group to go to Versailles, which is where the President Thiers was holding his government’s meetings, she was the one that was supposed to go to Versailles and assassinate him. But she never did.
Annie Sargent: Wow, yeah.
Elyse Rivin: She never did. Now, if she didn’t because the opportunity didn’t come up, I really, really don’t know.
[00:26:25] Louise Michel’s Role in the Commune
Elyse Rivin: But what happened was that she was, by this time, considered to be the woman as one of the leaders of the martial, active part of the Commune. And then, she was in the 61st Battalion of Montmartre. She organized ambulance stations to take care of the wounded, and she was a participant in this famous bloody week, the week of the 21st to the 28th of May of 1871.
Annie Sargent: Which is crazy. I mean, she had a lot of energy, clearly, because she was in her early 40s.
Elyse Rivin: Yes.
Annie Sargent: So, you know, she was still full of oomph.
Elyse Rivin: Let me tell you, she was in a lot of ways, in spite of… There’s actually a photo of her as an old lady, where you see she’s really old-looking, but she was out speaking… I’ll tell, I mean, that’s how she died. She caught a cold when she was still going around Europe and France, talking about political ideas and all this activity. She just… Right to the minute she died, this is what she did.
[00:27:25] Arrest and Trial of Louise Michel
Elyse Rivin: And her lover, Théophile Ferré, he, in fact, assassinated one of the leaders of the government, and he was arrested. And because she was considered to be one of the conspirators of all of these assassinations and of all of the arson that was going on in Paris, after the bloody week was over, and because she was actually really famous, she was arrested as well. Now, this is where I find it really interesting. Aside from the fact that I, as we mentioned just a minute ago, she was originally a radical socialist. She believed in whatever, you know, that kind of early form of sharing of communism, of socialism, that still required a structure to the government, some kind of structure in society. But because she was accused of a murder that she didn’t commit, and they eventually realized that she had not been involved directly in the arson and that she did not go… They knew that there was a plot to kill Thiers, but that she didn’t take it.
Elyse Rivin: She was arrested, and she was put in prison. And they say that she gave herself up because her mother, who apparently defended all of her causes, was an older lady, and she was arrested as well. And they told Louise Michel that if she didn’t give herself up, they were going to put her mother in prison. And so she gave herself up.
Elyse Rivin: And she was put on trial in a military court, and she was charged with treason and revolutionary acts, including the plotting to kill the president. And she was potentially someone that could be executed, and she said she wanted to be a martyr.
Elyse Rivin: This is where I find it gets a little bit complicated for me because I’m not sure if I agree with the idea of the whole notion of martyrdom for a cause like this. But she said publicly, and there are records of this, every time she was taken to a court, and this happened several times at this point later on in her life, and she would say to them, “I don’t care what you do with me. You can kill me. I stand for this.”
Elyse Rivin: And you get the impression that somehow she wanted to be killed because she wanted to make herself into a martyr that would mobilize people. The problem was, she was never killed. She was simply sentenced, she was sentenced to prison.
Elyse Rivin: And in this case, what they did was they sentenced her to 10 years in prison, and what they did for people like her was they sent them to the penal colonies.
Annie Sargent: Aha, yeah.
[00:29:53] Exile to New Caledonia
Elyse Rivin: And so after spending almost three years in a prison in France, they shipped her out to New Caledonia, which of course, is in the, halfway around the world, in the Pacific, you know.
Annie Sargent: Not so far from our Australian and New Zealander listeners.
Elyse Rivin: Exactly, and those know, I mean, they know that England did pretty much the same thing at the founding of Australia. I was talking to my husband about this, and he said, “Yeah, at the time, the penal colony was the thing to do, basically.” I mean, anybody who was considered to be not just a common criminal, the penal colony was not for people who robbed people on the street. It was for people who were a danger to the status of society.
Annie Sargent: Right. So the… Yeah, there were a lot of arrests back then that were political in nature, and thousands of them during the French Revolution, it didn’t get any better for a long, long time.
Elyse Rivin: No, and there were several penal colonies. This was the one that was the furthest away. You could go to the one on the coast of South America, in, what is it? It’s in Guiana.
Elyse Rivin: But this one, this was the one where they assumed that you may never come back. You know, basically, you were out there.
Elyse Rivin: So they ship her out, and what happens? This is incredible to me. She clearly was not in a cell where she couldn’t go out. Because what happens is, she meets other people, including other anarchist women, and particularly a woman named Nathalie Lemel, who was also sentenced to New Caledonia. And this Nathalie Lemel is a diehard anarchist.
Annie Sargent: Okay. All right. So that’s, like, one level, I mean, like, in socialism and communism, they put everything in common, but you still have a government, a central government telling people, “Okay, you’re going to produce this many pans, and you’re going to produce so many beds,” and et cetera. All right? It’s directed kind of economy and all of that.
Elyse Rivin: So an anarchist is… Anarchism as, and it was… Do you know that it was created in France? Anarchism is Proudhon. You mentioned Proudhon. I have a word to say about him in a little bit. But, it was created by a group of thinkers in the middle of the 19th century in France, and it spread to other places, basically. The difference is that even radical socialism believed in a government. They believed in rules. They believed in law and order of some kind, even if it was a regulated economy. Let’s put it that way.
Elyse Rivin: Whereas anarchists, true anarchists, and this woman was one, who actually believed, and I think there are still some of them out there, unfortunately, that there should be no government, there should be no law, and that by dissolving all of this and creating a world where you do what you want at any given moment, that people will bring out, it will bring out the best of humans. That is the most naive, stupid thing I’ve ever heard of in my entire life, you know?
Annie Sargent: Yeah, that’s going to end well, right?
Elyse Rivin: It’s really going to end well, knowing what human beings are like.
Elyse Rivin: But it was a huge, incredibly important movement in the second half of the 19th century, and what happened was, she literally was convinced that this was the future. And at the same time, what did she do? She’s in New Caledonia. For those of you out there who don’t have any idea, it’s a place that is a colony of France, where the people, to this day, speak another language called Kanak, where they have a culture that’s a Polynesian culture. Caledonia is actually a big island.
Elyse Rivin: And so what does she do? She learned Kanak, and she became interested in Kanak culture and society, and she started a training school for young girls, and she started teaching in Nouméa, in New Caledonia, which, 170 years ago, I’m sure was exactly, not exactly modern or anything like that.
Elyse Rivin: And then she started teaching them French so that they would be able to have something to say about the fact that the French were ruling their colony. And she participated in the revolt, in the Kanak revolt of 1878.
Annie Sargent: Wow!
Elyse Rivin: She didn’t learn a lesson, and that is that she kept on her activity, they allowed her to open a school and teach. She became basically an ethnologue who, writing all these documents and studying Kanak culture. I don’t know if it was for that, I’m being facetious now.
Elyse Rivin: But in fact, what happened was, she was there from 1873 until 1880. She actually spent seven years of the 10-year sentence, and then in 1880, there was a general amnesty, and so she was allowed to come back to France.
Annie Sargent: Oh, okay. Okay.
[00:34:36] Return to France and Continued Activism
Elyse Rivin: And apparently, when she arrived, she arrived on the coast near Le Havre, up there on the northwestern coast of France. She was greeted by huge crowds. When she arrived by train in Paris, she was greeted by enormous crowds everywhere.
Elyse Rivin: So her fame stayed all the time she was overseas, and she was not diminished at all in her beliefs. She was not diminished at all in her ideas. In 1881, she went to London. She began a tour of Europe to talk about feminist ideas, about anarchy, but also about feminism. It was like half of her wanted to just be a radical feminist, and the other half wanted to blow up the world. She met Sylvia Pankhurst, who was very famous as being one of the very first of the suffragette and feminists, very famous English woman. Met her group of friends, and corresponded with women who were active in feminist activities all over Europe and in the United States. She was detested by the French government, but because she was so popular, they were afraid to get rid of her, literally.
Annie Sargent: Right. Right, yeah.
Elyse Rivin: So instead of trying to get somebody to assassinate her, they just tried to figure out what to do with her, and there was nothing they could do with her because there she was. She actually managed, by some of her writings, to bring back a group of people from the Kabyle area of Algeria and Morocco, who had been sent to New Caledonia for whatever reasons, probably because they were revolting against the French colonies.
Elyse Rivin: But by her writings and her influence, she managed to get them released from prison in, in New Caledonia. Must’ve been incredible to listen to her speak someplace, you know. But she was looking for trouble the whole time, okay?
Elyse Rivin: A year later, in 1882, there was a meeting of anarchists in March of ’82, in Paris. It was a huge demonstration near Les Invalides because there was a problem with starvation again, because there was a problem with people not having enough to eat. And the slogan of this group was, “Bread, work or lead,” meaning, if the people didn’t get work and did not have what they needed to eat, they would take arms up and start a revolt again.
Annie Sargent: Lead bullets, they mean.
Elyse Rivin: Lead as bullets, exactly. And in this demonstration, she walked around, leading the group, holding up a black flag. And the black flag she had taken first a few months before that to a meeting of anarchists in Paris. And when they asked her why she was carrying a black flag, she said the red flag was a symbol of socialism, communism, and that it didn’t help anything.
Elyse Rivin: So she decided it was time to have a black flag, which said, “Death to the illusions that socialism was going to work.” It was time to go even more radical than that.
Elyse Rivin: And that is why the black flag is, to this day, associated with anarchists.
Annie Sargent: All right! I didn’t know this. I didn’t know any of this, so it’s cool. Yeah.
Elyse Rivin: Neither did I. I mean, this is just absolutely incredible. So after this meeting and leading… they set fire to three bakeries. Why? I don’t know. I mean, I understand…
Annie Sargent: Probably because they had worked at night.
Elyse Rivin: They had worked at night, who knows? Maybe because they refused to give out the free bread. I really don’t know. But this time, she was arrested again. She was sentenced to six years in prison for inciting riots, but she was liberated after three months by Clemenceau.
Annie Sargent: Aha, yes.
Elyse Rivin: And why? Theoretically, so that she could spend time with her mother as she was dying, but really, it was because by liberating her, she did not have as much influence as a martyr as if she was in prison.
Annie Sargent: I think with people like that, you just let them be. Like, you let them be because you can’t stop them. Like, they are never going to shut up, so let them talk!
Elyse Rivin: And because she kept saying… You know, you can just see this as almost like a cartoon. She kept saying, “Okay, kill me,” and there she is, standing there, and they’re afraid of her, literally. They don’t know what to do with her.
Elyse Rivin: So she started, she wrote two articles for a journal called “The Vengeance of Anarchists” that lasted a couple of months.
Annie Sargent: They were just subtle, really subtle.
Elyse Rivin: Really, you know. She was imprisoned again for four months for demonstrating in favor of the miners of Decazeville, which, of course, is not very far from here, and that, of course, was Jules Guesde and Jean Jaures and people like that, who were, in fact, radical socialists. She didn’t despise them. She just didn’t think that their actions and ideas were going to get the country to change enough, basically, you know?
Annie Sargent: They were too mild.
Elyse Rivin: They were too mild for her, right. But because she participated in those activities, in 1888, she was shot. She was shot twice, and one of the bullets went into her head.
Annie Sargent: Whoa!
Elyse Rivin: She was shot by a Chouan. The Chouan were the reactionary Christians who, of course, were against the revolution from the beginning. I believe they come from the Vendée area.
Annie Sargent: Vendée, Breton, et cetera, yeah.
Elyse Rivin: And believe it or not, it was while she was speaking in the Theater of the Gaite in Paris, which is a theater that still exists. She was taken to the hospital. The first shot was a minor… I don’t remember where it went, but the second shot actually went into her head, and it did not stop her. It didn’t impair her abilities intellectually, and they could not get the bullet out, so she lived the rest of her life with the bullet in her head.
Annie Sargent: Well, yeah, this happens more than we realize. Sometimes it’s better to leave the bullet where it is, because you’re going to do more damage getting it out. Yeah.
Elyse Rivin: So it didn’t stop her, but what happened was, she did go off to London. She decided it was time to get out of France.
Annie Sargent: A little peace.
Elyse Rivin: Well, if you can call it that. She spent actually five years, from 1890 to 1895, living, teaching, writing and speaking in London.
Annie Sargent: And calling for revolution?
Elyse Rivin: And calling for revolution.
Annie Sargent: Okay.
Elyse Rivin: And at the same time, writing poetry, and at the same time, teaching women to educate them, and being a member of the radical feminists, which was a very important group in England at the time. And so starting in 1895, she moved back to France.
Elyse Rivin: So how old is she then? 1895, she’s 65.
Annie Sargent: Okay, okay.
Elyse Rivin: And she moved back. She was relatively sick. I mean, she was not a well woman…. didn’t make any difference. She continued writing, she continued her speeches, and she considered herself to be a revolutionary anarchist feminist.
[00:41:23] Final Years and Legacy
Elyse Rivin: And in her last speeches, when she was 74, she was in the Alps, giving speeches in small towns, trying to incite women to organize, to do feminist activities, to get educated. It was there that she got a bronchitis that led to pneumonia, and she died in a hotel in Marseille, where she had been transferred when she got sick in the Alps.
Elyse Rivin: Her funeral was in January of 1905, and there were thousands, thousands who came to see her off, to say goodbye to her. One of the things I was reading said, strangely enough, she was relatively forgotten in the 20th century, but we can’t imagine how important she was for the whole time she was alive. She’s buried in a cemetery in the Banlieue, Le Levallois-Perret.
Annie Sargent: Right.
Elyse Rivin: Which is on the outskirts of the city. Every year there’s a ceremony,the anniversary of her death. I just wanted to add, because I added this as a last-minute thing on the notes, I put this in bold, because to me, this was… she was a mass of contradictions. She was a vegetarian, who believed that you should not mistreat animals.
Annie Sargent: Well, that’s not a contradiction.
Elyse Rivin: Well, she believed in killing people. I mean, you know… I mean, she believed it was okay to kill people. She believed that technology would solve all the problems of poverty, instead of imagining that machines would, which is what Marx said, and he was right, unfortunately, would replace humans in terms of work. She was all for new technology because she believed that it would be the panacea that would solve all of the world’s problems.
Annie Sargent: Well, you know, I would be very upset if I couldn’t have my dishwasher and my washing machine. So, yes.
Elyse Rivin: Well, that’s… this technology that helps relieve work, that is basically work for women.
Annie Sargent: Traditionally, women’s work. Can you imagine the work it would be to have to grab your clothes…
Elyse Rivin: And go down to the washing thing every day?
Annie Sargent: Yeah.
Elyse Rivin: I know.
Annie Sargent: No, no, no, no, no.
Elyse Rivin: So, I mean, she believed in anarchy, but she, at the same time, wrote romantic poetry. Okay, so here we are.
Annie Sargent: You don’t have any of her poetry that you can…
Elyse Rivin: No. Yes, there was a piece. I’m sorry, I didn’t copy it out. It was in French. It’s hard for me to translate poetry. Maybe you can find it.
Elyse Rivin: There’s one metro station named after her.
Annie Sargent: Right, right.
Elyse Rivin: It was in 1937, they named a station after her.In 1986, there was a stamp with her effigy on it. The square in front of Sacré-Cœur was renamed in 2004, the Square Louise Michel. And there is a square in Marseille also named after her. But there isn’t that much else that’s actually named after her, except for a couple of schools.
Annie Sargent: Wow, interesting. What a strange, interesting woman.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah.
Annie Sargent: You can see she had a full life. She never had any kids? You didn’t mention any kids.
Elyse Rivin: No, and, I think I forgot to mention that, her lover, he was executed.
Annie Sargent: Yeah!
Elyse Rivin: And from then on, as far as anybody knew, she had no lovers.
Annie Sargent: She was just adamant about her political stance and her intellectual activities. But she wasapparently extremely distraught by the fact that they actually executed him. Do you know, was she able to support herself by selling her books, her speeches, something?
Elyse Rivin: I don’t know, but my guess is yes. She certainly was not poor, you know, and I don’t know how much you made at the time by writing, but she certainly gave speeches everywhere, and she was invited by people all over Europe to come and speak.
Elyse Rivin: So but I’m assuming that she may not have been super rich, but she certainly was not poor. I mean…
Annie Sargent: So here’s a thought for people who are listening to us in the US.
Annie Sargent: Sometimes people say to me that the political shenanigans in the US at this time are very intense. Perspective is everything.
Elyse Rivin: Maybe it’s time to have a few Louise Michels, but you know.
Annie Sargent: Every country has had its times of upheaval, and definitely between the end of this, you know, 1700s till the end of the 1800s, was lots of upheaval. In France, that’s just how we… lots of revolution, lots of battles, lots of people killed.
Elyse Rivin: One of the things that impressed me, in general, doing the reading and the preparation for this, was how important political and social ideas were in France in the middle of the 19th century, and that there were so many different groups with very different ideas, but there was nothing dormant about any of this.
Elyse Rivin: This was really, whether you agreed with some of their ideas or not, it went from really the extreme reactionary on one side to the extreme anarchist on the other, but it was incredibly rich in terms of being a center of this kind of activity.
Elyse Rivin: I mean, this, as you mentioned, this is where Marx, who was, you know, eventually in London and all of these people got some of their ideas from. You mentioned somebody named Proudhon, who was one of the first people to describe things as an anarchist movement. What was interesting was that she disassociated herself from him later on because he became reactionary, and he was an anti-Dreyfusard who believed in nationalism.
Elyse Rivin: So some of these people who started out as anarchists wound up shifting to this position that was more nationalist, and it’s hard to follow all of this stuff, you know?
Annie Sargent: Yes, yes. All of the events around these things are really, really hard to follow because, so, you know, kudos to you for simplifying these things.
Annie Sargent: So it’s important to understand what happened,
Annie Sargent: to be familiar with the history, but it is very, very confusing when you hear about it.
Annie Sargent: And the book I read to prepare for this is called Paris in Ruins by Sebastian Smee, and it’s a book about the trauma of the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, and the Commune shaped by artists like Manet and Morisot.
Elyse Rivin: Right.
Annie Sargent: It’s an interesting book because it kind of gives the point of view of the artists who were mostly anti Napoleon III.
Elyse Rivin: Right.
Annie Sargent: Which is really something, because he was the one giving them all the money to produce all the art and to do all the things.
Elyse Rivin: I think I have to read this book.
Annie Sargent: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a good book. It’s interesting. So a lot to learn about, but hopefully, we kept it simple enough, and interesting enough that people, when they go through that metro station, they go, “Ah, I know who Louise Michel was.”
Elyse Rivin: And now if you go up to Sacré-Cœur, and you have the square in front that says it’s Louise Michel Square, you can stand there and raise your arm.
Annie Sargent: Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. The Sacré-Cœur is surrounded by very interesting plazas and streets. Le Chevalier de la Barre is another one, so yeah, lots of history around that.
Annie Sargent: Merci beaucoup, Michelle! Michelle… no.
Annie Sargent: Merci beaucoup, Elyse.
Elyse Rivin: De rien. De rien, Annie.
Annie Sargent: Au revoir!
Elyse Rivin: Au revoir!
(Mid-roll ad spot)
[00:49:03] Thank you Patrons
Annie Sargent: Again, I want to thank my patrons for giving back and supporting the show. Patrons get several exclusive rewards for doing that. You can see them at patreon.com/joinus.
Annie Sargent: And a special shout-out this week to my new Join Us in France champions, Min, Bonnie Davis, and Nicole Segura.
Annie Sargent: Would you join them, too? You can do it for as little as 3$ a month, but if you can afford it, I would love to have you pledge more so you have access to more of the rewards.
Annie Sargent: And to support Elyse, go to patreon.com/elysart.
Annie Sargent: This week, I shared a video about what it’s like to look for housing in Southern France, and also about La Chandeleur, AKA Crêpe Day, with my patrons, and had some interesting conversations about those.
[00:50:01] Join Us in France Boutique
Annie Sargent: One of the things you’ll find at joinusinfrance.com/boutique is a section about audio tours and how you can order tour codes. This is where I get to take you by the hand and show you my favorite places in Paris.
Annie Sargent: Self-guided audio tours on the Voice Map app give you incredible freedom to see the best of Paris on your own schedule, at your own pace, with me chatting with you in your ears.
Annie Sargent: And podcast listeners get a great discount for buying these tour codes directly from my website. Give them a try, I think you’ll love them.
Annie Sargent: And if you’re planning a trip to France and would like some expert help, you can hire me as your itinerary consultant. I get so many repeat customers who came back, you know, two, three times, and, who come visit France many times, and they, they enjoy the places I recommend, so they come back.
Annie Sargent: It’s wonderful to talk to them over the years. If you already have a plan, I’ll help you fine-tune it, and if you just feel overwhelmed by all the choices and not sure what sources to trust, I can design a custom plan for you.
Annie Sargent: And you’ll find all the details at joinusinfrance.com/boutique.
Annie Sargent: And one of the things I do in these itinerary calls that makes things so much easier is I can just make a phone call.
Annie Sargent: Sometimes you spend a long time online trying to figure out, “How does this work? Why can’t I book this or that?”
Annie Sargent: I can just call them because it’s easy, and in France, a lot of things are still done by phone. We still get to talk to real people over the phone a lot of the time.
[00:51:37] After the Olympics 2024
Annie Sargent: One of the big questions after the Paris 2024 Olympics was, what happens next? Just not what happens to the stadiums, a lot of them were already there to begin with anyway in Paris, but to the places where the games actually took place.
Annie Sargent: A year and a half after the Olympics, the former Olympic Village in Saint-Denis, in the Pleyel district, is now a brand-new neighborhood, and people are officially living there.
Annie Sargent: During the games, this was home to thousands of athletes. Today, those same buildings are welcoming new residents, and according to the people who live there, the place still carries a certain Olympic spirit.
Annie Sargent: One resident even said that they moved into the building where the Australian team stayed, and that the athletes left behind postcards and little traces of their time there.
Annie Sargent: It’s a small thing, but it gives the neighborhood a sense of continuity and memory.
Annie Sargent: Tony Estanguet, who led the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee, says, “This is exactly the legacy the games were meant to leave behind, not empty monuments, but a place designed to be useful for everyday life.”
Annie Sargent: The site covers fifty-two hectares, and includes a mix of social housing, private apartments, student residences, senior housing, and office space.
Annie Sargent: In the long run, the goal is to have more than six thousand residents and six thousand workers in the area. People have been moving in for a few weeks, and overall, the feedback is positive, but not without some concerns.
Annie Sargent: The biggest issue right now is daily life logistics. Several residents say they’re still waiting for the nearby shops and easier access to public transport. The metro is there, but buses and local services aren’t quite all in place yet.
Annie Sargent: The good news is that shops are expected to open within the next two or three months, so to encourage businesses to move in, commercial rents are being kept relatively low, for Paris anyway. The spaces are still very raw, mostly concrete, so shop owners have to build everything from scratch. For some, that’s a challenge.
Annie Sargent: For others, it’s an opportunity, of course. No competition yet, a growing population, and a chance to shape a brand-new neighborhood. In short, the Olympic Village has not turned into a ghost town, far from it. It’s becoming a living, evolving part of Greater Paris, still unfinished, still finding its rhythm, but very much alive, and that, honestly, is one of the most interesting legacies of Paris 2024.
Annie Sargent: And I wish our Italian friends, and the Winter Olympics all the best, and may they also enjoy some nice areas after the athletes have left.
[00:54:31] The Gers Area Trip
Annie Sargent: This week, I spent a few days in the Gers area, looking around, getting to know the parts that I hadn’t seen yet. It was a fun discovery for me, the city of Marciac, especially. It’s a small city, let’s call it a big village. Marciac, where the jazz festival takes place, made a big impression on me.
Annie Sargent: I fully intend to go back in the summer. Usually, the jazz festival takes place from the end of July until the end of August. So this year, the opening act is Mr. Sting, on July 20th.
Annie Sargent: There are still tickets left, but I didn’t get one because they warned me, it’s standing room only, and you have to stand, you know.
Annie Sargent: They open the area around 6pm, and he’s not going to come till 10, and, yeah, so you have to stand the whole time. I’m like, “Eh, no, no.” I’ll listen to a Sting album instead.
Annie Sargent: My thanks to podcast editors Anne and Christian Cotovan, who produced the transcripts.
[00:55:33] Next week on the podcast
Annie Sargent: Next week on the podcast, Louisiana meets France.
Annie Sargent: Join me, Renee, and Dixie Poche as we chat about their mother-daughter adventures in Nice and Paris, from champagne caves in Épernay to Moulin Rouge, the cabaret. Spoiler, Dixie bought five dresses.
Annie Sargent: Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you join me next time so we can look around France together. Au revoir.
[00:56:03] Copyright
Annie Sargent: The join us in France Travel Podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent and copyright 2026 by Addicted to France. It is released under a Creative Comments, attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.