Louise Michel, born on this day in 1830, was a French anarchist, feminist, educator, author, and militant leader of the Paris Commune.

Born in 1830 as an illegitimate daughter and raised by her grandparents, Louise Michel worked as a schoolteacher before revolution came to Paris, and, in 1865, opened a school dedicated to methods of progressive education.

There, Michel came into contact with radical thinkers such as Jules Vallès and Auguste Blanqui, and was concerned about the impoverishment of those on the margins of French society. In 1869, she was one of the founding members of the “Society for the Demand of Civil Rights for Women”, focused on improving girls’ education.

In 1870, war broke out between France and the Empire of Prussia. The war quickly ended in defeat for France, and, the following March, discontented members of the National Guard mutinied against the new national government in Paris, marking the beginning of the working class uprising known as the Paris Commune.

Michel joined the rebellion and was elected head of the Montmartre Women’s Vigilance Committee, playing an important role in the provisional revolutionary administration. She had a romantic relationship with Théophile Ferré, a senior member of the Commune’s Committee of Public Safety.

Michel personally fought on the front lines at the barricades, also organizing ambulance stations to transport the wounded. She expressed a willingness to sacrifice herself for the sake of revolution, stating “I like the smell of gunpowder, grapeshot flying through the air, but above all, I’m devoted to the Revolution.”

Michel survived the fall of the Commune and was brought to trial in December 1871. She dared the judges to sentence her to death, saying “It seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no other right than a bit of lead, so I claim mine!”

Unlike Ferré, who was executed, she was instead punished by deportation to a penal settlement in the French colony of New Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean.

In New Caledonia, she became acquainted with the indigenous Kanak people, and took an interest in their culture and language, later supporting them during an 1878 revolt against French rule.

Michel also befriended Nathalie Lemel, another exiled figure from the Commune, and became an explicit anarchist under her influence. In 1880, amnesty was granted to former Communards, and Michel returned to Paris, where she was greeted as a hero by the downtrodden of the city and resumed her revolutionary activity.

Michel later moved to London for five years, where she ran a school for children of political refugees, and became a famed speaker across Europe, meeting figures such as the Pankhurst sisters, Peter Kropotkin, and Emma Goldman.

In 1904, Michel embarked on an anti-colonial speaking tour in French Algeria, before falling ill shortly after. She died in Marseille on January 9th, 1905 at the age of 74. Her funeral was attended by over 100,000 people, receiving delegations from socialist and anarchist groups all across Europe.

Today, Michel remains one of the most famous icons of the Paris Commune and is regarded as a pioneer of anarcha-feminism.

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  • BasementParty [none/use name]English
    8•1 year ago

    Could I just pay my local print shop to print out some movie posters for personal use?

    I kinda want to put some up plus a few cool images I found online but I don’t know if that’s legal technically.

  • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]English
    15•1 year ago

    Median Trump voter probably commits a similar style of fraud regularly. The real silent majority is a small business tyrant who would be in federal prison if he ever stopped lying to his CPA.

  • Dolores [love/loves]English
    4•1 year ago

    homebrewtalk.com thread “Onion beer”

    user ‘Yooper’:

    I judged a French onion stout in a beer competition. Seriously. French onion soup stout. After it gone done gushing, the smell of onions filled the room and I had to take a sip. It was disgusting. They did get a few points for the “clone”, though- it tasted exactly like French onion soup, except cold and with beer in it. Absolutely revolting.

    user ‘JonM’

    See, that’s because it didn’t have the croutons and melted Gruyere.

    back to Yooper

    Well, that was the beauty of it. I think it did. It tasted exactly like a bowl of French onion soup, except with beer and cold and carbonated. It gushed like a volcano when opened, and I ran to the sink (we were in a house, judging in one area of the great room), and the whole area smelled of it. And lord help me, I said, “I think this bottle has an infection” and I had the steward bring the second bottle. And repeated the experience before forcing myself to pour what we left into some glasses (two or three other judges) and those brave enough took one sip. Vile doesn’t begin to cover it. I have a cast iron stomach, and have eaten in many countries and drank many weird beverages. I can eat deep fried crickets and wash it down with masato, but I"ll be damned if I’ll ever take another sip of onion beer.

    yes this person and every other respondent said onion beer is terrible. but now i want to taste that

  • GalaxyBrain [they/them]English
    3•1 year ago

    My chef finally succumbing to how everyone else has worked whenever he isn’t in the way finally seeping through and him thinking it’s his idea has made working with the dude way easier. It used to be say, we’d have 5 chits each with a common pizza, he’d make all of those at once, for ‘effeciency’ fire them into the oven and then do the others in the same style until.there were no matches. This was for sure easier on the building the pizza end where there’s 2-3 people working. Sucks for me in the window who has to sit on all these orders as they slowly fill in my tiny expo window (it’s fancy pizza too, so take out and dine in are equal and must be balanced) while pastas come either early or late cause the pizzas are all over the place has been absurd and I would have Gordon Ramseyed the guy if he wasn’t my boss and well, he was a 15 year dishwasher who played in a punk band I saw back when I was 13 and then had a kid and found the government could pay for his chef’s course, he’s in the fray and all that, it’s just he’s neurotic and overthinks stuff and tends to outsmart himself by a half. The fact that I even run the window which is traditionally the chef’s job to call orders and do final quality control instead of him when he’s in does show he’s not an authority guy, but regardless telling your boss their methodology is ass backwards and detrimental is hard. When service blasts off now he takes a background role and seeing how we’ve been rolling anyway and the last two Friday nights we somehow broke our within an hour sales record two weeks in a row and it felt like a fast paced breeze. We’re actually faster now and there’s less mistakes and remakes.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]English
    8•1 year ago

    Hot new World of Darkness Canon: The Enron scandal started when a Genius in the accounting department made a very convincing presentation. In fact, you could say the board was enthralled.

  • Leon_Frotsky [she/her]English
    5•1 year ago
    mentioning eating disorder

    Having an eating disorder fucking sucks ngl, the dumbest thing is I really love food and everything but I just feel like I have to force myself to eat it