Here Is Louise Michel This, People Could Say She Is a Pathological Case
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Number 93-94 £1 or two dollars Mar. 2018 Here is Louise Michel this, people could say she is a pathological case. But there are thousands like her, millions, none of whom gives a damn about authority. They all repeat the battle cry of the Russian revolutionaries: land and freedom! Yes, there are millions of us who don’t give a damn for any authority because we have seen how little the many-edged tool of power accomplishes. We have watched throats cut to gain it. It is supposed to be as precious as the jade axe that travels from island to island in Oceania. No. Power monopolized is evil. Who would have thought that those men at the rue Hautefeuille who spoke so forcefully of liberty and who denounced the tyrant Napoleon so loudly would be among those in May 1871 who wanted to drown liberty in blood? [1] Power makes people dizzy and will always do so until power belongs to all mankind. Note 1, A swipe at moderate republicans who opposed the [Louise Michel (1830-1905) was back in prison Paris Commune: ‘Among the people associated with (again) in the 1880s when she wrote her memoirs the [education centre on] rue Hautefeuille was Jules (after the 1883 Paris bread riot). They were published Favre. At this time he was a true republican leader, but in February 1886. In this extract she looks back at her after the fall of Napoleon III he became one of those younger self, just before the Paris Commune of 1871.] who murdered Paris. Power would poison him as it poisons all who are clothed in that cloak of Nessus’ And so here is Louise Michel. She is a menace to (p.50) society, for she has declared a hundred times that everyone should take part in the banquet of life. What From chapter 7, ‘The decaying empire’ in The Red would be the pleasure of riches if one were unable to Virgin: memoirs of Louise Michel, edited and compare one’s own well-fed condition to that of translated by Bullitt Lowry and Elizabeth Ellington people dying of hunger? Where would the feeling of Gunter. (page 52). This extract appears courtesy of the security come from if one were unable to compare University of Alabama Press. one’s good, solid position to that of people who must Image work in poverty? https://fabienribery.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/louis What is more, Louise Michel is a woman. If she e-michel-profil-2.jpg could only be fooled by the idea that women can get their rights by asking men for them. But she has the The Princess Casamassima by Henry James villainy to insist that the strong sex is just as much a [Review] slave as the weak sex, that it is unable to give what it James peoples his novel with figures from the London does not have itself. All inequalities, she claims, will anarchist scene of his day. He makes the indefatigable collapse when men and women engage in the common Johann Most serve as the basis for three characters: a battle together. bookbinder, a chemist, and a German international Louise Michel is a monster who maintains that men revolutionist, all of which Most was. Kropotkin, still and women are not responsible for their situations and tired from his journey, perhaps, will do for only one, claims it is stupidity which causes the evils around us. but James compensates by giving him a sex change She claims that politics is a form of that stupidity and and making him the expatriate noblewoman of the is incapable of ennobling the race. book’s title, who abandons a life of luxury to side with If Louise Michel were the only person saying all the oppressed. Inside: tactics, arguments and keeping the flame alight Anarchists in London (real and imaginary) In his preface, James claims to have gathered the and navy that kept them safe from their enemies and information with which to set the scene by sheer defended or extended their dominions for them. The dogged observation: “pulling no wires, knocking at idea that it is the sheer usefulness of the poor that no closed doors, applying for no ‘authentic’ makes the rich determined to keep them poor was information”; instead, it was his practice to “haunt evidently beyond Henry James. the great city and by this habit to penetrate it, To describe and comment upon the actual plot of imaginatively, in as many places as possible”. the novel would be to dignify it quite unjustifiably. In When it comes down to it, James’s “imaginative their blurb, the publishers describe the book as penetration” consists of projecting his personal hang- portraying “the crucial era of England before ups and his class prejudices onto the working class in socialism”. Of course, what they mean is general and the revolutionary socialist movement in authoritarian socialism, with its bourgeois, particular. The central figure, the bookbinder, has a parliamentary, statist and militarist tactics. It would grudge against the nobility, while at the same time he have been fascinating to read an account of life hankers for their “cultivated” life: a clear metaphor before this disease had infected the labour movement. for James’s own persistent bourgeois-colonial Unfortunately, all we get is an account of the author’s hobnobbing. prejudices. Since these correspond to the ideology of The actual absence of any true independence of the ruling class today, just as much as yesterday, they mind and total incapacity for any enlightened social are of little interest. thinking that are the rule among both the Recently, James’s old house in Sussex was state/industrial baronry and the academic mandarins acquired by the Rolls-Royce car firm, to be used for who are their cerebral proxies – this chronic their directors’ frolics. Words or wheels, the social intellectual debility, which is concealed by their reality expressed is the same. impressive titles, appearances, and generally exalted MH positions, James projects upon the would-be From: Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review #5 revolutionaries, who are all muddle and dither. The (1980). murderous selfishness of the privileged and mighty, so elegantly promoted in that day in the apparel of the Mr Batllori’s Death. The Friend of Ferrer academically approved doctrine of social darwinism, At the age of only 51, Mariano Batllori, a personal finds its reflection in James’s novel in the portrayal of friend of Ferrer, has just died at Walthamstow. social revolution as culminating in a massive As manager of Ferrer’s publishing business in slaughter of the rich and the share-out of their Barcelona, he found himself exposed to the property. This despite the fact that anarchist persecutions that followed the insurrectory movement communism, i.e. collective ownership, self- of July 1909, and became one of its innocent and management and free exchange, was well established unfortunate victims. as a revolutionary doctrine before 1886. Batllori had formed with Ferrer, during their The instrument of the revolution, at least in its schooldays, one of those solid friendships that resist early stages, is to be an international terrorist time and all sorts of trials. conspiracy that binds its members by oath before When Ferrer was charged with complicity in giving them its orders. For of course, since the Morral’s attempt on the life of the King and Queen of violence of the ruling class really is originated in Spain, and thrown in prison, some friends of Morral hidden hierarchical conspiracies (for the sake of found in a letter addressed to them, by the latter, “national security”), and carried out by mere sentences which completely proved Ferrer’s myrmidons, whose slave status is sealed by swearing innocence; but not daring to trust the post office with them in, so must revolutionary violence be ordered such a precious document, they sought in Ferrer’s by shadowy command structures that enforce blind surroundings for a trustworthy person who might obedience by the administration of oaths so terrible carry it to Madrid and put it in the hands of the that they cannot be reported. solicitor; the choice fell on Mariano Batllori. James cannot see the inhumanity, idleness, and As manager of the Modern School, he had had cowardice of the rich, because of their veneer of time already to endure the vexations and threats of “culture”. These vices, however, are all too obvious the police, and for a whole year had been trembling to him in the poor: insurmountable obstacles to the for the life of his friend. creation of a just social order. Yet the evidence of When, after his acquittal, Ferrer understood the tenderness, the skill, the courage of the dispossessed uselessness of his efforts to restart his school, and was all around him. It was into the bosoms of decided to start a publishing business, it was upon working women that the rich thrust their children for Batllori he conferred the post of manager and his nursing, it was into the hands of the working men that power of attorney. they put their very lives when they went travelling, it Then came the tragic events of July 1909. Batllori was the sons of working men and women in the army was arrested in the shop, at the Calle Cortes, and to Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library www.katesharpleylibrary.net Page 2 Anarchists in London (real and imaginary) reach the prison he had to walk through the streets of of the sympathy with which he was surrounded, he Barcelona, handcuffed with Senor Casasola, the looked at one time as if he was going to recover, but former headmaster of the Modern School.