Louise Michel Quotes

French author and anarchist (1830-1905)

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Louise Michel (French: [lwiz miʃɛl]; 29 May 1830 – 9 January 1905) was a teacher and important figure in the Paris Commune. Following her penal transportation to New Caledonia she embraced anarchism. When returning to France she emerged as an important French anarchist and went on speaking tours across Europe. Her use of a black flag at a demonstration in Paris in March 1883 was the earliest known use of what would become known as the anarchy black flag.

Bio from: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Pen Names: Enjolras • La Vierge rouge • Porte drapeau de la Révolution

Alternative Names: Clémence-Louise Michel • Clemence-Louise Michel

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I am told that I am an accomplice of the Commune. Certainly, yes, since the Commune wanted more than anything else the social revolution, and since the social revolution is the dearest of my desires. More than that, I have the honour of being one of the instigators of the Commune, which by the way had nothing–nothing, as is well known–to do with murders and arson. I who was present at all the sittings at the Town Hall, I declare that there was never any question of murder or arson...Do you want to know who are really guilty? It is the politicians. And perhaps later light will be brought on to all these events which today it is found quite natural to blame on all partisans of the social revolution…Since it seems that any heart which beats for freedom has the right only to a lump of lead, I too claim my share.

He had brought a volume of Baudelaire which we read a few pages of when we had the time.

The land which belongs to all can no more be divided than the light which also belongs to all.

One of the future revenges for the murder of Paris will be that of revealing the customary infamous betrayals of military reaction.

The ideal alone is the truth — it is the measure of our horizon. Time was when the ideal was to live without eating an other up. Is it not so still under another form which exists in the so-called civilized countries where the exploiter eats up the exploited? Do not the people in nocks fertilize the soil by their sweat and blood?

We are Anarchists because it is absolutely impossible to obtain justice for all in any other way than by destroying institutions founded on force and privilege. We cannot believe that improvement is possible, if we still keep up the same institutions, now more rotten than in the past, or if we merely replace those whose iniquities are known by new men.

how I loved her. How grateful I am to her for the freedom she allowed me to act as my conscience dictated, and how much I would have liked to spare her the bad days she so often had.

is it not time that our limited tongues should fall into the ocean of speech and of human thought? What will be the language of mankind delivered to the new Aurora — Anarchy!

That is what we want to destroy — this annihilation — this eating of man by an other man.

In what would you that we should help those who govern—their work being only exploitation and wholesale murder—it has never been otherwise: the reason for the existence of a state is nothing but the accomplishment of some crime or other in order to assure the domination of a privileged class.