Back on the commune of Paris, from March 18 to May 28, 1871 : 72 days of utopias, of freedom where the Parisian workers, the craftsmen, the republicans rise up against the state with a monarchist majority, in short, the people against the powerful.
Among the muses of the town, a teacher: Louise Michel, teacher in Montmartre and who teaches in an enlightened way, an education based on culture, literature, learning about life, far from obscurantism and dogma. The friends of Louise Michel, every year in Paris, meet to celebrate her memory in the square that bears his nameat the foot of the Montmartre hill.
At the end of May 1871, it was a bloody week, the Communards were hunted down, killed and shot by the regular army of Versailles under Adolphe Thiers. Louise Michel fights on the barricades at Clignancourt, in the cemetery of Montmartre, she escapes the massacre and surrenders. She is one of the 39,000 Parisians detained. She is imprisoned in the Versailles reformatorytried and sentenced.
In 1880, after 7 years in prison in New Caledonia, Louise Michel returns to Paris. 10,000 people greet him triumphantly at Saint Lazare station. She becomes a muse anarchist socialist libertarian, feminist of course, she gives conferences, Georges Clemenceau admires her, Victor Hugo writes him a poem :
Having seen the immense massacre, the combat,
The people on their cross, Paris on their pallets,
Tremendous pity was in your words;
You were doing what great crazy souls do,
And tired of struggling, of dreaming, of suffering,
You said: I killed! Because you wanted to die
Louise Michel died at age 75 in 1905, the very year of the separation of state and church for which she fought so hard. She will write her memoirs “Memories and adventure of my life” and songs “La danse des bombes” and a variant of “L’international”. 2022, go salute his memory at the cemetery of Levallois Perret.