Louise Michel - Mémoires Inédits
Louise Michel, icon of the Commune of Paris, published her memoirs in book form in 1886.
'Part 1' was on the cover of this Mémoires de Louise Michel, écrits par la-même (Paris, F. Roy, 1886). In part 2, the public had to wait a hundred and thirty years, but now it's here!
A travers la mort. Mémoires Inédits was published in 2015, provided by Claude Rétat, at La Découverte publishing house. In fact, these memories, which cover the period 1886-1890, have been published before, but not as a book. They appeared in columns in the daily newspaper l'Egalité in 1890, 69 in number.
Michel herself did not like her columns at the time, she found little or nothing of herself in it. She felt that she had to compromise between the limitations of censorship and the political, activist purposes of the chief editor. 'I seem to consist exclusively of meetings and meetings. The heart is dried up ... "she wrote, because her texts were about 'things'. The newspaper provided her subjects and she worked on the basis of newspaper clippings, which were delivered to her by the chief editor. The few texts that did come from her heart are undoubtedly the most interesting for the reader of today, like her observations from the various prisons where she was enprisoned. She found it not as bad as one would think.
The archive of Louise Michel is at the IISH. The deliverer of this source publication, research director of the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique Claude Rétat, praises the Institute in an accompanying letter as 'ce paradis du chercheur.'
