ABSTRACT
If we move forward to Louise Michel (1830-1905), another heroine of another revolution, the Commune of 1871, we can perceive both striking parallels and enormous differences when she is compared to the earlier revolutionaries. Since she uses the firstperson autobiographical form in her Mémoires (1886), her writing must necessarily foreground the self, yet, in a discourse markedly different from that of Olympe de Gouges or Flora Tristan, it also backgrounds the self. She writes, as she always seems to have acted, as an equal among equals. There results a major difference in their assumption of their illegitimacy. Whereas, as we have seen, Olympe actively campaigns for the rights of women and of the natural child, and Flora’s fictionalisation of the bastard culminates in an apotheosis, Louise discusses the rights and wrongs of women and children but subsumes them within her belief in a Babeuvian vision of a society where all will be equal, happy and without laws or government. In her Mémoires, in the passages relating to her childhood, she elides the facts of her birth-indeed, the place and the name of the father are marked only by an absence, a lack in the text. She is named as a bastard only once, towards the end of the book (M: 309),1 apart from the text given of the prosecutor’s speech at the trial of the communards, where it forms part of the general indictment.2 However, her passionate and guilty devotion to the mother whose surname she bears betrays her inner conflict.
