Echoes of imperialism: Louise Michel and the Kanak tales

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.

Louise Michel

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.

A rendering of two Kanak men in New Caledonia, circa 1880.

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 any kind of large quadrupeds at all. The French brought horses and cattle and it devastated the Kanak agriculture. The French wanted to appropriate the lands and use the Kanak as labor, so they imposed a different social structure on them.

First of all, they assumed that the Kanak land was owned communally, and that was not the case. They also assumed that chiefs had all power, and that was not the case. But the French would only deal with the chiefs. Then ultimately, the French created a reservation system and moved the Kanak off their lands onto reservations, and then seized Kanak lands and desecrated holy places.

How did Louise Michel become interested in Kanak culture and the Kanak themselves?

Michel was held with other French political prisoners in a “prison without walls” on the main New Caledonian island. It was a small peninsula, cut off from the rest of the island. But they had some interactions with the Kanak. Michel was one of the only French prisoners to take an interest in the indigenous people.

The Kanak had 28 different languages, so they had developed a creole that they communicated with. They used it for trade amongst themselves and with international traders.

Michel saw this as much more sophisticated than Europeans or the western world, because she considered language to be a huge barrier between peoples. That was a common thought in the later 19th century, when constructed languages like Esperanto were being developed. There was a belief that if you could surmount (differences in language), that people could connect and communicate and have international peace. Michel saw the Kanak’s common language and said, wait a minute, this is natural. It evolved upwards. This shows greater civilization than the French.

The Kanak also had an oral culture that they passed down from generation to generation. It united people, passed along their history and served as a reflection of the way they saw themselves in relation to the world. They had a different cosmology from Europeans. They didn’t see people as fully separate from each other or fully separate from the natural world, which fit right in with Michel’s conception of universal anarchism.

The French didn’t think that the Kanak had a culture. The Europeans considered the Kanak savages, closer to animals than civilized people. In contrast, Michel saw the beauty of Kanak stories and culture. In the translation, transcription, and publication of the tales, she wanted to have the Europeans re-see the Kanak in this new light.

History and women’s and gender studies professor Carolyn Eichner’s new article details how French anarchist-feminist Louise Michel translated and transcribed the oral tales of the Kanak of New Caledonia.

Was she successful?

She was, at least somewhat. She was cited by anthropologists who saw her work as ground-breaking. She influenced some anthropologists and ethnographers at the time to recognize the Kanak as having a culture and a history. Today, many Kanak recognize her as the first person to translate and transcribe their oral tales in a respectful way.

This happened a long time ago and halfway around the world. Why is it important to study today?

Louise Michel’s story is part of the history of imperialism, anthropology, ethnography, and feminism, and the way that Americans and Europeans have viewed and judged indigenous peoples. It’s the story of how we have shaped, re-shaped, destroyed and attempted to take over their lives and their world.

It’s also part of the history of how indigenous and some European people have opposed such oppressions. Michel was one of the very first of the era’s French antiimperialists. When the Kanak had an anti-imperialist uprising during her time in New Caledonia, Michel was the only French prisoner to fully support their revolt. She opposed imperialism for political reasons and because she valued the indigenous people and their culture.

By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science