Louise Michel and the Levallois link

Louise Michel will be forever linked with Paris, la Commune and with revolutionary activities in general, but rarely is she connected to the suburban town of Levallois. However, it is here that she is buried and where her eponymous Metro station is situated. What are her connections with this town though and why did she choose to pass eternity here?

It seems strange to find the grave of the country’s most famous female revolutionary in one of Paris’s most bourgeois suburbs. Surrounding her is incessant construction, the headquarter buildings of multinationals, the home of the French secret services and the highest number of security cameras in France. These steel and glass constructions though hide a town with a working class past, and one where Louise Michel felt very much at home.

And she has not been forgotten in the town. She is represented here today by a triptyque of symbols; the Metro station (on the street of the same name) and her tombstone of course, but also in the Parc de la Planchette where a small statue of her stands. Situated in a quiet corner it would be easy to miss, but once found it cannot fail to surprise. It is of an old lady with a cat at her ankles and her arm around an admirative young girl. Beneath, a simple message – Louise Michel 1830 – 1905. Without this label, few would make the link between this maternal image and the ‘vierge rouge’.

For the author Bertrand Tillier, this image of Louise Michel by the sculptor Emile Derré, is problematic. That there is a statue of the ‘red virgin’ in a town where she had many links is entirely normal, but why should it be this figure of an old lady with her revolutionary past behind her rather than something more challenging? However, for the Conseil Municipal who paid for the statue in 1910, it was for the assistance she gave to the poor of the town that she was remembered, rather than for her ideas which they 'didn't entirely share', and a consensual image was therefore chosen.

We are rarely able to control our image after death, but it is probable that she would have cared little for this triviality anyway against the much larger issue of the continuing class struggle. Nevertheless, the way she is represented in the town today provides an interesting footnote to her story, as well as to the story of 20th century France in general.

Louise Michel's links to the town of Levallois were not founded on any particular love for the place, but rather because it was the place where her mother was buried before her. Louise Michel was someone who moved often, in struggle, in exile and through force, but Levallois provided her with a base for the final years of her life.

When Louise Michel was born, her mother, Marianne Michel, was working as a serving-maid at the very austere Vroncourt Château in the east of France. The identity of her father is not clear, but most biographies point the finger at either the son of the châtelain, Laurent Demahis, or at the châtelain himself, Etienne Charles Demahis. Louise Michel was largely brought up by her grandparents, but the seeds of the class struggle had seemingly been sown into her from birth.

She trained as a school teacher and moved to Paris in 1856. The period of Louise Michel's life which followed this has been very well documented (both by herself and others), but my interest is in how she came to live in Levallois, and what this says about her personality and beliefs. Despite being brought up by her grandparents, Louise Michel remained close to her mother, later living with or close to her in various places in Paris. Indeed, during the Commune, Louise Michel gave herself up to the forces of order as they had captured her mother and were threatening to kill her. It seems appropriate therefore that it should be her mother, in 1885, who brought Levallois into this story.

At this time, Louise Michel was locked up inside the notorious Saint Lazare prison. She knew that her mother had been in poor health for a long time, but it that was clear now that Marianne Michel had only a few more weeks to live. Louise Michel asked to be temporarily freed so that she could visit her mother one more time, a request that was accepted, but she was not there when her mother died. She made a second request, this time to attend her mother's funeral - which would take place at the Levallois cemetery, but this time she was refused, a decision that lead to near riots at the event.

When Louise Michel was freed a year later, she immediately set up base in Levallois where the local authorities, admirative of the person and her struggles, had found her a small apartment. A plaque can still be seen today on the wall of this building at 85 Rue Victor Hugo. It is interesting to find this connection between the two personalities, as they had been friends, and some stories even say that Louise Michel bore Victor Hugo a daughter called Victorine. This remains apocryphal, but the letters that Louise Michel wrote to Hugo, as well as the poem, Viro Major, that Hugo wrote about Louise Michel recount much of their tale. When Louise Michel lived in this building though, the name of the street was the Route d'Asnières, and it would only take on the name of the author at a later date.

A staircase at n° 85 Rue Victor Hugo

Louise Michel may have been comfortable at this address, very close to the cemetery, but her revolutionary activities did not end and within a few months she was back in prison. Over the next few years, Michel would be shot in the head, return to prison on several occasions and spend time in exile in London.

It is claimed that Louise Michel returned to Levallois to live on several occasions, but no address is given. What is certain though is that when she wrote her will, Levallois played an important role.

"Je soussignée, Louise Michel, déclare confier à Charlotte Vauvelle, ma compagne depuis 15 ans, et à mes camarades de lutte, pour les mettre à exécution mes dernières volontés, qui sont d'être enterrée sans aucune cérémonie religieuse (...) au cimetière de Levallois-Perret, dans le caveau de ma mère, où il y a une place pour moi" (I the undersigned Louise Michel, confide to Charlotte Vauvelle, my companion for 15 years, and my comrades in the struggle, the execution of my last wishes, which is to be buried without any religious ceremony, at the Levallois-Perret cemetery, in the vault of my mother where there is a place for me)

Louise Michel died in Marseille on January 9th 1905, and on the 21st, her body was transferred by train to Paris. It arrived at the Gare de Lyon at 10 in the morning, and was transported to the Levallois-Perret cemetery followed by a massive procession of mourners. The last wish of Louise Michel was respected, and she was placed alongside her mother.

The story though does not end there. Twenty years later, the municipal authorities in Levallois decided to change the name of one of the streets in the town to the Rue Louise Michel. This decision though was overturned by the regional authorities who stated that such tributes could only be made for "des personnalités décédées sur lesquelles l’Histoire a pu se prononcer" (dead figures for whom history has been able to make a judgement). In other words, the scars of the Commune had still not healed in Paris.

The street name was finally changed in 1946 (along with the Metro, from the previous Vallier), at a time when the authorities probably had more important subjects to think about. At the same moment, Louise Michel was also exhumed and moved to a more central, important position in the cemetery, the 'Rond-point des Victimes du devoir'. Her bust looks out proudly and defiantly from her new tomb, and there is always a red rose to keep her company. But is that all there is?

When I visit, I ask for the location of the tomb of her mother, the vault from which she was exhumed in 1946. I'm told that her mother is still with her today, but her name is not written anywhere on the stone. Louise Michel would have cared little for her personal idolisation, but never wanted to be separated from her mother. I hope that they are together somewhere in this town.

Saints and Sinners (Part 2)

What do cities do with the places which throughout history have been the scene of suffering and humiliation? The city of Paris has been pondering this question since 1999, when the Hopital St Lazare was finally shut down, bringing to an end almost 900 years of treatment, punishment and isolation. How can this site be renovated and brought back into the heart of the city, and how can they remove the scars, wipe away the pain and tidy up the memories?

This site is a tale of two saints and a whole cast of sinners. It is a tale of decay, death and rebirth. It is a tale of a constant tearing down of walls, then the building of new structures with fresh purposes in their place. It is a tale mostly of women with many unhappy endings, but hopefully a tale which will end with a final note of optimism.

The first saint is Lazare, the name given to the site, today a hotchpotch collection of buildings behind the Square Alban Satragne. The second saint is Vincent de Paul who created a mission here and who today quietly surveys the scene from an adjoining wall. The use of the name Lazare for this spot dates back to the 11th century, but did they know how prophetic it would prove? The name was chosen as it was originally a shelter for lepers, for whom Lazare (Lazarus) is the patron saint, but with the subsequent history of the site, the constant destruction and rebuilding, the name has assumed a second resonance.

Walking around the crumbling buildings today gives a haunting insight into a past that Paris would very much like to forget. There are few places in a modern city where we get to see a ghost town, but here the jumble of structures from the last two hundred years are all empty and crumbling into ruin. The majority of buildings are still standing, mostly 20th century hospital structures, but the scars are still on display; broken windows and walls that have turned green with age. Renovation in the area has so far largely been confined to a zone outside the site, with a new school and playground in place, but even here there is a sense of unease. The playground contains three cowering pigs hiding from a wicked witch whilst a wooden cat silently overlooks the scene.

For around 500 years up until the French Revolution this site had seen only the calm treatment of the sick, but with the uprisings sparking mass arrests, every spare space in the city was required to house prisoners. The structure became the St Lazare Prison, with a famous early guest in 1794 being the Marquis de Sade. He was only held here for around two months though and was also someone who had seen the inside of almost every prison in the city! More poignantly, it was also here that the poet André Chénier wrote the poem ‘La Jeune Captive’ a handful of days before his eventual execution and only 19 days before the fall of Robespierre and the end of the terror.

Religious influence had been banished from the site during the revolution, but by the 19th century the site had assumed a bizarre triple role. It was transformed into a prison for women, but also contained a hospital wing and a Chapel. Nuns ran the service, but it was difficult to make any clear distinction between treatment and punishment. This period was famously chronicled by the writer and singer Aristide Bruant in a song called ‘A Saint Lazare’ written from the perspective of one of the female prisoners here. She sings;

"C'est la misère. Ici tout l'monde est décavé" (It’s pitiable. Everyone here is ruined)

Conditions were harsh inside, but they were little better outside the walls. Working class women in the 19th century had tough lives ridden through with malnourishment and alcoholism which often led to the reasons for their being locked up, the petty crimes and casual prostitution that they resorted to simply to survive. The hospital wing was used mostly for sick prostitutes, but how to tell the difference between this and the prison? They never left and had few visitors, and were kept here mostly to protect the city. They were the lepers of the period.

Other female prisoners were more political, notably the anarchist and communard Louise Michel who was here in 1883, and later Mata Hari in 1917. The latter underwent what was said to be a humiliating interrogation here during which she confessed to receiving money from German officers in Madrid. Whether this was a simple form of prostitution or the spying she was tried for is not clear, but it was rendered irrelevant by her execution later that year.

Louis-Pierre Baltard’s Chapel still survives today (the father of Victor, the creator of the market halls of Les Halles), but the majority of the other buildings date from the most recent incarnation of the site, the hospital which was re-established in 1935. Even when the site became a hospital again, the calm did not return. The hospital had a curious speciality, as it was here that the city prostitutes were taken for obligatory medical check-ups. Even after this law was removed (1946), a service ‘Saint Lazare’ still existed, and it was here that prostitutes were taken after being rounded up by the police (until 1975).

Today the site is silent but it is easy to imagine the sounds of tears and screaming breaking through the thick, stone walls. To the credit of the city, they have not taken the easy path of destruction and rebuilding, but are attempting to recreate a more positive environment within these haunted walls. The Chapel will become a performance space and galleries will be placed in the wings. There will also be a creche, an infant school, a gymnasium, park and a library. This may not be able to right the wrongs of the past, but it does provide hope for the future.