#paris commune week

[begettingmonsters]

In Memory of Marie Ferré

We have to admit that she is dead. From the gates of jail, we’ll see her no more. The door to cold nothing will never reopen. These words shall go where tears can’t reach. To speak her name will take us back To all those we have lost. Marie was modest, brave, and proud, A contrast of charm we often admired. It’s over now; and in her tomb She sleeps forever; our last smile Held in her heart; and beneath the stone My heart is buried alive. Betwixt bleak skies and stony earth A few rare treasures are fleetingly ours Before pale death swoops in to steal. We stand beneath our crimson flags And mourn the loss of those we love, Too soon taken to the tomb. Revolution; beloved mother who devours us Giving equality, take our broken destinies And make of them a dawning. Make liberty Fly above our cherished dead. When the bells Of ominous May ring out again, wake us To your luminescent clarity. Louise Michel February 1882

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Louise “Enjolras” Michel

Leader of 1871 Paris Commune, aided anticolonial Kanaka Uprising 1878, Leader of 1883 Black Flag Demonstration

"It is not a question of breadcrumbs. What is at stake is the harvest of an entire world, a harvest necessary to the whole future human race, one without exploiters and without exploited".

Louise Michel spent her childhood rehabbing animals and wildlife. She became a teacher and spoke about access to art and science as a human right. When she refused to teach nationalism she left teaching for driving an ambulance. She was a poet who wrote about social justice for sex workers and the treatment of prisoners. She was arrested for organizing and demonstrating with other women twice in 1870. In 1871 she joined with the Paris National Guard and fought against the French ruling class on the barricades. When captured while protecting her mother in the fall of the 1871 Commune she demanded to be executed promising if she was not she would only revolt again. She followed through with her promise. When they deported her to a colony she joined the indigenous Kanaka people in their uprising helping them to cut French communication. When she was able to return to France she led the Black Flag Demonstration redistributing food until she was arrested again. Louise continued to write, raise money for striking women workers, work toward building a soup kitchen, and organize for social revolution. She spent her life devoted to equality and defending society’s most vulnerable.

Everyone must take up a torch to let the coming era walk in light. Art for all! Science for all! Bread for all!

[begettingmonsters]

La Barricade, Lefman

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Students in a chain passing cobble stones for the barricades, Gay Lussac Street, 5th arrondissement. Paris, France. May 10, 1968. © Bruno Barbey | Magnum Photos

[battydings]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/31554677

Horror genre fiction for Commune Week.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works