Echoes of Imperialism: Louise Michel and t Louise Michel is a striking figure in French history. Though she is most famous for her role in the Paris Commune, an uprising against the French government in 1871, Michel was also an anarchist feminist voice speaking out against imperialism by telling the stories of the oppressed indigenous people, the Kanak, of New Caledonia. This month, UWM professor of History and Women’s & Gender Studies Carolyn Eichner’s article, “Language of Imperialism, Language of Liberation: Louise Michel and the Kanak-French Colonial Encounter,” is forthcoming in Feminist Studies and details how Michel is a revolutionary figure - both in politics and in language. Before we talk about the paper, let’s ask the question on everyone’s mind: Who, exactly, is Louise Michel? She was an impressive and unusual person, and somewhat of a hero in France. There’s a Metro station named after her in Paris and quite a few schools across France. She was trained as a teacher in the provinces and came to Paris in the 1860s, where she became involved in some left-wing political movements. This was the training ground for what came next: France went to war with Prussia, lost, and then there was a revolutionary civil war called the Paris Commune. She was heavily involved in this uprising, and this is the thing she is most known for. She’s by far the most widely-known woman who participated in this revolutionary civil war. The Paris Commune lasted 72 days. It was brutally crushed by the French government, with 25,000 Parisians slaughtered in the streets. Michel was arrested and tried by a military court. She
attempted to take the blame for everything as a martyr. The French authorities didn’t shoot her because if they had, she would have been a martyr. Instead, they sent her to a prison colony in New Caledonia, an archipelago in the South Pacific, over ten thousand miles from France. What does your new paper tell readers about Michel? This article looks at the way that Louise Michel used indigenous Kanak oral tales as a way of altering Louise Michel Europeans’ deeply negative view of the Kanak, but also to advance her own political agenda. In the time Michel was imprisoned in New Caledonia, she became interested in the Kanak people. With the cooperation of Daoumi, an indigenous man who spoke French, she translated and transcribed Kanak oral tales and published them, initially in a newspaper in New Caledonia and then in books published in France. She hoped to present the Kanak to the French public as a people with culture and civilization, as opposed to the dominant racist idea that they were amongst the very lowest of the people in France’s colonies. It was also a way of advancing Michel’s anarchist-feminist politics. She wanted to show how the French had something to learn from indigenous people. What was the prevailing French attitude toward the Kanak at the time? The French had developed a racialized ‘hierarchy of civilization,’ with white Europeans at the top – French at the very top, of course. Then came Arabs, North Africans, Polynesians and southeast Asians in the next level. If you think about skin color, this is what it’s based on. The lowest level was sub-Saharan Africans, so black Africans, and Melanesians (people in the south Pacific with dark skin like the Kanak). France’s argument was that by bringing imperialism to “less evolved” people like the Kanak, the French would help elevate them and bring them up the civilizational ladder more quickly than they would rise on their own. And what was the reality? The Kanak were living happily (before French traders came to New Caledonia). It’s an abundant place. They practiced agriculture and fishing, but they did not have A rendering of two Kanak men in New Caledonia, circa 1880.
