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sensitiveuser · 19 days ago

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The deportation of Louise Michel to New Caledonia (1873-1880).

Good evening, I announce my return to Tumblr. I have been absent a lot, due to many things to do, a damn depression, loss of energy, loss of confidence... This post is a bit long, but I thank all those who will pay attention to it. Of course, there may be missing information, despite the fact that I am a "historian" (a future professor and history enthusiast, to be exact) and, of course, in love with Louise Michel :) Besides, I wanted to write many posts about her to commemorate in my own way the 120th anniversary of her death... There you go, it's up to you to read, and if it sucks, please comment and take my work apart (I'll let you imagine my level of self-confidence... When I'll be a teacher, I'll hug the walls in front of students^^) :)

In 1853, Napoleon III and his violent army seized New Caledonia. From 1864 to 1896, New Caledonia served as a place of deportation for those sentenced to more than eight years of forced labor. The law of March 23, 1872 established New Caledonia as the place of deportation for those involved in the Paris Commune. In 1875, according to a report by General Appert, out of the 10,137 sentences to deportation, there were 4,500 sentences to deportation, including 3,417 sentences to simple deportation (Isle of Pines) and 1,169 to deportation in a fortified enclosure on the Ducos peninsula (as was the case for Louise Michel), and 251 sentences to forced labor (penal colony on Nou Island). The authorities defended colonization: agricultural colonization, and it was a question of strengthening the French presence in the Pacific Ocean.

In August 1873, Louise Michel, after spending twenty months in Auberive prison (not far from Vroncourt), was called up for deportation. Here is the letter from her fellow prisoners also sentenced to deportation:

1. Louise Michel. 2. Nathalie Le Mel. 3. Marie Caieux. 4. Madame Leroy. 5. Victorine Gorget. 6. Marie Magnan. 7. Elisabeth Deguy. 8. Adèle Desfossés (wife of Jean-Baptiste Viard – not to be confused with Auguste…). 9. Madame Louis. 10. Madame Bail. 11. Jeanne Taillefer. 12. Marie Théron. 13. Louise Leblanc. 14. Adélaïde Germain. 15. Mme Orlowska. 16. Mrs. Bruteau. 17. Marie Broum. 18. Marie Smith. 19. Marie Caieux. 20. Augustine Chiffon (embarked two years later). 21. Adeline Régissard (embarked two years later).

All these women (including Louise) were sent from Auberive to Rochefort (La Virginie’s port of departure) via Langres and La Rochelle. Louise’s testimonies highlight the extreme harshness of the conditions inflicted on the convicts.

On board La Virginie, Louise Michel and 18 fellow prisoners were locked in a cage. In the cage opposite, Henri Rochefort, Henri Ménager, Henri Place, and Wolowski were locked up. Of course, the convicts were not allowed to communicate from one cage to another, but they did it anyway! The convicts were only allowed to leave the cage for half an hour a day to go on deck. They were very poorly fed. Although the way they were treated depended on the captains, there was no shortage of punishments against them ! "Nathalie Le Mel and Henri Rochefort began to be ill, from the first moment and ended at the last; there were some among us who were also ill, but none during the entire voyage; for me, I escaped seasickness as well as bullets, and I really reproached myself for finding the voyage so beautiful, while in their frames Rochefort nor Madame Le Mel enjoyed nothing"; "There were days when the sea was rough, the wind blowing in a storm, the wake of the ship was like two rivers of diamonds joining in a single current that sparkled in the sun a little far away" (p.383, La Commune).

I quote one of his poems that perfectly illustrates his deportation convoy, entitled "Dans les mers polaires":

The snow falls, the flood rolls,

The air is icy, the sky is black,

The ship creaks under the swell

And morning mingles with evening

Forming a heavy round,

The sailors dance while singing:

Like an organ with a thundering voice,

The wind blows in the sails.

Another testimony: "The cruelest thing I saw on La Virginie was the long and terrible torture inflicted on the albatrosses, which came in flocks around the Cape of Good Hope. After having caught them with hooks, they were hung up by their feet so that they would die without staining the whiteness of their feathers. Poor Cape sheep! How sadly and for a long time they raised their heads, rounding their swan necks as much as they could in order to prolong the miserable agony that could be read in the terror of their black-lashed eyes." (La Commune)

The landing took place on December 10, 1873. She arrived on the Ducos peninsula, which was a hostile environment. It was an environment "without running water, without greenery, and furrowed by small arid hills interspersed with two valleys, Numbo and Tendu, ending towards the sea in marshes where grow puny mangroves and rare niaoulis. Never did settlers want to waste an hour on this dead land." She met up with Paschal Grousset, Olivier Pain, Cipriani, Champy, Henry Bauer, as well as Blanquist friends she had known before the Commune, members of the Corderie du Temple, and marching companies. She learned late of the death of Augustin Verdure (he died in April 1873 in Noumea); in Verdure's case, many letters were addressed to him, but he did not have time to read them... Regarding the letters, she specifies that "the correspondence naturally remained three and four months on the way, and had taken a long time to regularise. Verdure, not receiving letters from anyone, became so upset that he died; a packet of letters addressed to him arrived a few days after his death. Once the mail had been regularised, one could have a response to each letter after six to eight months; there was a letter every month, but what we received was three or four dated. And yet, what a joy the arrival of the mail! We hurriedly climbed the small hill above which was the mailmaster's house, near the prison, and like a treasure we took the letters away". (La Commune).

On the Ducos peninsula, the deportees were installed inside a fortified enclosure surrounded by soldiers. "Through the narrowest of the breaches of the double coral belt, the most accessible, we enter the bay of Noumea. There, as in Rome, seven bluish hills, under the sky of an intense blue; further away, the Mont-d'Or, all cracked with red gold-bearing earth. Everywhere mountains, with arid crimes with torn-out gorges, gaping from a recent cataclysm; one of the mountains has been split in two, it forms a V whose two branches, by joining together, would make the rocks which hang on one side half-torn back into the alveolus, while their place is empty on the other."

In 1874, Louise Michel witnessed the escape of Rochefort, Jourde, Grousset, Pain, Bullière, Granthille. In response, Governor Gaultier de La Richerie called a council of war. "The guards saw while calling out that Rochefort, Pain, Granthille, Bullière, were missing (...) At Bastien Granthille's call someone shouted: he has boots, Bastien, he has gone to put them on. And as the guards were desperately calling Rochefort, some said: he has gone to light his lantern; others: he promised to come back; still others: go and see if they are coming", "Too worried to be able to punish at this moment, the authorities were saving themselves for later. The spectacle of the frank gaiety that reigned among the deportees put the galley slaves into such a rage that they tore down the very innocent curtains of all this, going to check whether they would find anything in the escapees' hut that would put them on the trail" ; "After Rochefort's escape, Messrs. Aleyron and Ribourt, sent to terrify the deportation, probably in order to make Rochefort return, were ridiculous enough to send sentries to the heights around Numbo for a while who looked like they were playing La Tour de Nesle with grandiose scenery". In fact, in 1874, Henri Rochefort escaped in the middle of the night. He went to Sydney, Melbourne, New York, then London, where he resumed his activities as a journalist. For their part, François Jourde and Olivier Pain then worked at the Schiltigheim factory founded by Augustin Avrial and Camille Langevin.

In 1875, she was transferred to the Baie de l’Ouest. She began to take an interest in the Kanak people, their history and their culture. Louise Michel and Charles Malato (son of Antoine Malato, a future important figure in French anarchism) were the rare Communards to denounce and protest against the mistreatment that the colonizers inflicted on this people. Let us not forget that the majority of the deported Communards were hostile towards the Kanaks (they even reduced them to their supposed “cannibalism”!). First, she became friends with a certain Daoumi, who introduced her to the legends of the tribes and the language. She later resumed her duties as a teacher, giving lessons to the Kanaks.

In 1878, Louise Michel (like Charles Malato) supported the Kanak insurgents, "I am with them, as I was with the people of Paris, revolted, crushed and defeated". Ataï, Kanak chief of Komalé, asked the French colonists to end the dispossessions. In June 1878, Chêne, a former convict and guardian of a colonial property, was assassinated by Kanaks; Nouméa was plunged into stupor. The colonial administration reacted by imprisoning 10 tribal chiefs. The preparation of the attack on Nouméa was abandoned and the offensive was launched from Poya to Baie Saint Vincent.

The day before the June 25 uprising, a group of Kanaks came to say goodbye to Louise, who gave them her red Commune scarf as a sign of solidarity. The uprising spread to Grande Terre. On June 27, Governor Olry declared a state of siege. The settlers carried out a bloody repression, which cost the lives of more than 2,000 Kanaks (from June 1878 to June 1879).

Atai was killed on September 1, 1878 by a member of the Canala tribe who had rallied to the colonial troops. His head was cut off to be sent to Paris as a military trophy. Louise Michel considers Ataï's assassins as traitors. In her Memoirs, speaks of Ataï’s death: “Ataï himself was struck by a traitor. May traitors everywhere be cursed! According to Kanak law, a chief can only be struck by a chief or by proxy.” Nondo, a chief sold to the whites, gave his power of attorney to Segou, handing him the weapons that were to strike Ataï. Between the Negro huts and Amboa, Ataï, with some of his men, was returning to his camp, when, breaking away from the columns of the whites, Segou pointed out the great chief, recognizable by the snow-whiteness of his hair. His sling rolled around his head, holding a gendarmerie sabre in his right hand, a tomahawk in his left, having around him his three sons and the bard Andja, who was using an assegai as a lance, Ataï faced the column of whites. He saw Segou. Ah! he said, there you are! The traitor staggered for a moment under the gaze of the old chief; but, wanting to finish, he threw an assegai at him which went through his right arm. Ataï then raised the tomahawk he was holding in his left arm; his sons fall, one dead, the others wounded; Andja rushes forward, shouting: tango! tango! (cursed! cursed!) and falls, struck dead. Then, with blows of an axe, as one cuts down a tree, Segou strikes Ataï; he raises his hand to his half-detached head and it is only after several more blows that Ataï is dead. The death cry was then uttered by the Kanakas, echoing through the mountains.

It is well-known that in the face of the Kanak revolt, the deported communards, with the exception of Louise Michel and Charles Malato, sided with the repression. However, Stéphane Pannoux points out that the majority of the deportees, while awaiting amnesty, were witnesses from a distance, and only a few debated. The deportees were informed of the progress of the revolt through newspapers and mail from France, and by the echoes of the fighting relayed by those living in Nouméa or Ducos, the barracks of the troops arriving as reinforcements. From July 1878 to March 1879, the Album de l'île des Pins published by and for the communards reported on the insurrection. The authors noted the places, the names of the tribes, the identity of the actors including the Kanaks, the chronology of events, the reactions of the population as well as the echoes of the Caledonian or Parisian press. They mention the Kanak victims, the destruction of tribes, the arrests, the convictions, the executions. From now on, the Kanak insurgents are no longer seen by the majority of the deportees as savages driven only by the desire to kill, but as "enemies with opposing interests". In the context of the penal colony, where censorship weighs on writings, this would demonstrate a desire to remain neutral (without entering into the debate around neutrality). Victor Cossé expressed this neutrality, "I am neither Kanak nor a civilizer" (while deploring "the violence of the savages"!).

Here is an example to illustrate the involvement of the deportees in the Kanak revolt (according to S. Pannoux): On June 26, the National Guard of Moindou, which includes 80 deportees, is raised. From the end of 1878 to April 1879, commanded by Charles Amouroux, they became the Canala Scouts; among them we find Gaston Da Costa, Henri Berthier, Alphonse Bioret, Prosper Tavernier, pardoned in 1879 - before the amnesty vote - for their "patriotic action".

In 1879, Louise Michel's sentence of "deportation to a fortified enclosure" was changed to "simple deportation". Thus, she left the Ducos peninsula for Noumea, and continued to teach. "On Sundays, from morning to night, my hut was full of Kanakas learning with all their hearts on condition that the methods were lively and very simple. They carved flowers from their country quite gracefully in relief on small boards that Mr. Simon gave us (...) I have never had more docile and affectionate students. They came from all the tribes", "Poor Daoumi had loved the daughter of a white man. When his father married her, he died of grief. It was for her as much as his own that he had begun this giant's work: to learn what a white man knows. He tried to live in a European way" (La Commune); "In Noumea, I found good old Etienne, one of the Marseille death row inmates commuted to deportation. Mr. Malato senior (Antoine), for whom the mayor Mr. Simon had great veneration, and at the local counter one of our sailors from the Commune, Ensign Cogniet, Mrs. Orlowska who was like a mother to us, Victorine having the Noumea baths under her direction and offering us as many as we wanted. There, we fraternized widely." (The Commune). Louise Michel also gave lessons to the children of Algerian deportees, then in a girls' school.

On July 11, 1880, a general amnesty was decreed. Louise Michel was thus authorized to return to France. She recounts her last moments in Noumea: "The last July 14 spent there, between the two evening cannon shots (it is the cannon that announces the days and the nights), at the request of Mr. Simon, we went, Madame Penaud, director of the Noumea boarding school, an artilleryman and I, to sing La Marseillaise on the Place des Cocotiers. In Caledonia, there is neither dusk nor dawn: darkness falls suddenly (...) We heard the Kanaks crying in the light rustling of the coconut branches." She later learned that her mother had a "paralytic attack."

"Before my departure from Noumea and taking the mail on the shore I found the black anthill of the Kanaks. As I did not believe that the amnesty was so close, I had to go and found a school in the tribes; they reminded me of it with bitterness by saying: but you will not come again! So, without intending to deceive them, I told them: yes, I will come back (…) I looked at the black anthill on the shore and I too was crying. Who knows if I will not see them again ?".

Louise Michel indicates that she became an anarchist in the context of her deportation. On this subject, allow me to retrace a discussion with Nathalie Le Mel on board La Virginie: “Between two clearings of calm where she was not too bad, I shared with Madame Le Mel my thoughts on the impossibility that any men in power could ever do anything other than commit crimes, if they are weak or selfish; be annihilated if they are devoted and energetic”; Nathalie Le Mel claims to agree with her.

Louise Michel returned to Paris on November 9, 1880. Several thousand people were present at her arrival, including Louis Blanc, Henri Rochefort, and even Clemenceau…

Sources :

Edith Thomas

Xavière Gauthier

Laure Godineau

Stéphane Pannoux

#louise michel #paris commune #19th century #new caledonia #socialism #anarchism #history

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