Paris By Louise Michel: Summary

Louise Michel writes about her first hand experience with bloody week in her memoir. Michel recalls “Paris [was] afire” and how she was forced to hold the barricades with her fellow comrades. Gluckestein remarked how, “120 women who held out against tremendous opposition at the Palace Blanche,” and how extraordinary their insurgent resistance was.” Michel recalls how they were outnumbered in the cemetery in Montemarte and eventually were forced to surrender. When recalling the event she states, “Three hundred thousand voices had elected the Commune. Fifteen thousand stood up to the clash with the army during Bloody Week. We’ve counted about thirty-five thousand people were executed, but how many were there that we know nothing of?” Louise

She continued her revolutionary spirit. She “made it a practice to keep receipts or documents” to help further the revolutionary cause. Spreading her own message and even contributing to the revolution in New Cadolonia. This included educating the local population, the kanka, and even took side of the Kanka during their own revolution. Louise Michel had clear goals, that through education desire women would be able to achieve anything a man could. She states in her

Theses nicknames characterize her as a non-sexual revolutionary whom is willing to protect her cause at all costs. She represented a fearsome feminist and John Merriman said: “She embraced the cause of women's rights, proclaiming that one could not separate ‘the caste of women from humanity.’” There was a battalion of two French women during the Spanish Civil War whom called themselves the Louise Michel Battalion and there is a train station in Paris that uses her name. She represents the lefts relentlessness and rationality. She embodies the spirit of the Paris Commune and contributes to the narrative of Paris as a revolutionary city. She is a symbol for the leftist