Chapter 1. Chapter 2. Chapter 3. The End of Childhood. Chapter 4. The Making of a Revolutionary. Chapter 5. Schoolmistress in the Haute-Marne. Chapter 6. Schoolmistress in Paris. Chapter 7. The Decaying Empire. Chapter 8.
The Siege of Paris. Chapter 9. The Commune of Paris. Chapter After the Commune. The Trial of The Background of the Case against Louise Michel. Statement by the Clerk of the Court-Martial. The Testimony of Louise Michel. The Sentence.
Voyage to Exile. Numbo, New Caledonia. The Bay of the West. Speeches and Journalism, November β January Speeches Abroad, Speeches in France, Final Thoughts. While her contemporaries were just beginning to decry colonialism, she, as a convict in New Caledonia, was involved in the Kanaka uprising of Born illegitimately on 29 May , Louise Michel was brought up by her mother and paternal grandparents in a half-ruined, fortified manor house in the Haute-Marne.
Her paternal grandfather, Etienne-Charles Demahis, was descended from nobility and had changed his name from De Mahis to the less grand Demahis in republican sympathy with the French Revolution of Although impoverished, he was serving as mayor of the village of Vroncourt when Louise was born to a servant of the household, Marie Anne or Marianne Michel, and his son Laurent, of whom no further record exists.
Louise was raised as if she had been a legitimate Demahis granddaughter, and after her paternal grandparents died, she became a schoolmistress, teaching first in the Haute-Marne and later in Paris. During the Franco- Prussian War of and the Prussian siege of Paris, she was a leading member of the revolutionary groups controlling Montmartre, that squalid and colorful district which has been inhabited by the disaffected poor for centuries.
