ABSTRACT
In her Louise Michel Memoires, in the passages relating to her childhood, she elides the facts of her birth - indeed, place and the name of the father are marked only by an absence. Michel, on one hand, although she achieved some little-known publications, originally acquired her signature as a revolutionary activist. Voltaire’s tragedy Herode et Mariamne, to which Louise must have been led both by her grandfather’s cult of the writer and by coincidence of name, had early provided another mythical figure linking the Hebrew name Miriam, its Aramaic version Maryam, and the French Marianne. Piece of heteroglossia is the generic infringement, which mixes verse (her own and that of others), generally in rather hackneyed literary forms, with prose narrative, but also with speeches, newspaper articles and legal documents. It is a way of delegitimating the authorised form of structured narration by infusing it with the random play of memory, represented by shifts in form as well as voice.
