Her career shows the unselfishness and self-sacrifice with which Louise Michel carried out her ideas. She was born in 1836 at the French castle of Broncourt; she calls herself "a bastard"; her mother was a simple peasant girl, an orphan without either brothers or sisters, brought up in the castle, and seduced by the son of its owner. The young man's parents decided that Louise and her mother should remain in the castle, as an act of justice, not of kindness. After the death of her grandparents Louise left the castle with her mother in 1850, passed her examination as a teacher, and, as she would not take the oath necessary for holding office in Napoleonic France, she opened a "free school," i. e., a private school in a little village. In 1856 she came to Paris as assistant teacher in another private school, lived in extreme poverty, took a most active part in the struggles of the Commune in May, 1871, was taken prisoner and was to have been shot, but was condemned in December, 1871, to be transported to New Caledonia, whence she returned in 1880, in consequence of the general amnesty then given. She took part in editing Anarchist journals, and was condemned in 1886 to five years' imprisonment "for incitement to plunder." After three years she was pardoned by the President, but "she regarded this as a disgraceful insult," against which she protested violently, and absolutely refused to accept it, so that she had to be turned out of prison by force. Since then she has lived in London, where she acts as head of the "Réveil International des Femmes," an organisation possessing a journal and preaching an exceedingly confused and old-maidish form of female emancipation.
Around these figures of modern French Anarchism are grouped a number of theorists of inferior rank, partly belonging to the literary aftergrowth and Bohemia, partly learned persons, contributors to the Révolté, the Père Peinard, the Revue Anarchiste, the L'en Dehors, and other Anarchist prints in Paris,[46] mostly of a very ephemeral character.
Thus we have G. Eliévant, who wrote a declaration of Anarchist principles (Déclarations, Paris, 1893), in consequence of a charge made against him in 1893 in connection with the dynamite robbery at Soisy-sous-Etiolles, a book regarded by the Anarchists as one of the standard works of their literature. A. Hamon, a learned sociologist, has written a pamphlet, Les Hommes et les Théories de l'Anarchie (Paris, 1893), which has enjoyed a wide circulation; and is preparing a large Psychology of Anarchists, of which he has already published a short summary (see Dubois, u. s., pp. 207-243). Hamon, in order to gain a knowledge empirically of the assumptions of psychology, has set on foot an inquiry (enquête), and put to several Anarchists the question, how and why they have become Anarchists. An examination of the confessions thus obtained showed that the chief peculiarity of the Anarchist mind is the inclination to revolt, which displays itself in the most various forms, such as a desire for opposition, criticism, and love of modernity (philoneismus); and that this tendency is combined with a remarkable love of freedom and strongly developed individuality. "The Anarchist must be free: he hates laws and authority"—all three traits unite in one; but Hamon's investigations completely confirm our assertion, that Anarchism is principally an emphasising of the sentiment of individuality and freedom, and cannot be explained sufficiently—perhaps not at all—by mere pauperism; in other words, Anarchism is not an economic but a political question. But to this predisposition to individualism, says Hamon, there must be united, in order to produce an Anarchist, also a strongly developed sentiment of Altruism, a fanatical love of humanity, a strong sense of justice, and finally, a keen faculty for logic. We do not wish to deny this; but we have seen that Cosmopolitanism, an over-excited sense of justice, and a certain tendency to dialectic jeux d'esprit, has been a common quality of all the doctrines we have hitherto described.
Charles Malato (de Corné), of the old Italian nobility, the son of a Communist, with whom he went to New Caledonia, is one of the chief literary representatives and more eager supporters of the propaganda of Anarchism in Paris. Besides a Philosophy of Anarchy, a book called Révolution Chrétienne et Révolution Sociale, and the widely circulated pamphlet, Les Travailleurs des Villes aux Travailleurs des campagnes (issued anonymously in 1888, and recently again at Lyons in 1893), he has written a long-winded diary, De la Commune à l'Anarchie (Paris, 1894), a kind of family history of Anarchism in Paris, its press, its groups, and its representatives, from doctrinaires like Grave and Kropotkin to the men of action like Pini, Ravachol, and Vaillant.
Other names of some note in the Anarchist world are Zo d'Axa (his real name is Galland), the former editor of L'en Dehors, a literary adventurer who has wandered into the camp of every party; Sebastian Faure, the father of the Père Peinard and author of Le Manchinisme et ses Conséquences; Bernard Lazare, Octave Mirbeau, François Guy, author of Les Préjugés et l'Anarchie (Béziers, 1888); Emil Darnaud, author of La Société Future (1890), Mendiants et Vagabonds, une Revolution à Foix, and others. The programme of these men is almost without exception that of Kropotkin, which they water down and popularise in numerous newspaper articles and pamphlets. Some of them, like Faure and Duprat, are decidedly men of action; others, like Saurin and Mirbeau, condemn bombs as the most sanguinary of all forms of authority.
France does not to-day possess any representatives of individualist Anarchism. An isolated adherent of the Anarchist Collectivism of Proudhon is Adolphe Bonthons, for some time business manager of an Anarchist paper in Lyons, showing himself an eager Collectivist and opponent of rent and profit in many writings (e. g., Menace à la Bourgeoisie, Lyons, 1882, and La Répartition des Produits du Travail, 1881; of Garin, Die Anarchisten, p. 94), and demanding quite in the style of the Anarchist agitator the absolute abolition of all authority. To-day Bonthons is quite behind the times, and does not himself regard himself as an Anarchist.
Finally, we note as eager defenders of Anarchist Communism the Italians Carlo Cafiero, the former friend of Bakunin, who devoted the whole of his great wealth to the Anarchist cause; Merlino, and Malatesta[47]—all of them men of action of the most reckless character, who have become acquainted with the prisons of many lands, and still wander through life as homeless revolutionaries.
