Louise Michel: Exiled

Rebel: How Louise Michel Stood with the Kanaks in Exile


When Louise Michel was sentenced to exile after the fall of the Paris Commune, the French state intended to remove her from the center of political life. In 1873 she was transported across the world to New Caledonia, a distant penal colony used to isolate political prisoners and suppress resistance. What the authorities did not expect was that exile would become another place where her convictions would be tested.


New Caledonia was not only a site of punishment. It was also a place where colonial injustice was starkly visible - and where Louise Michel’s loyalties would once again come into focus.


Exile as Revelation


In New Caledonia, Louise encountered the realities of colonial rule at close range. Indigenous Kanak communities had been dispossessed of their land, subjected to forced labor, and denied political and cultural autonomy. The language of “civilization” was used to justify domination, erasure, and violence.


For Michel, this was not unfamiliar. She recognized the same structures of power she had fought in France - systems that elevated a few while degrading the many. Exile sharpened her understanding that oppression was not confined to Europe, but was woven into the fabric of empire itself.


Learning and Teaching in Exile


Even as a deportee, Louise Michel remained committed to education. Teaching, for her, was never merely a profession - it was a way of engaging with the world, of exchanging knowledge, and of refusing to accept imposed hierarchies.


In New Caledonia, this commitment took on new meaning. She did not see herself as a civilizing agent, but as someone willing to listen, learn, and share. The cultures, languages, and knowledge of the Kanak people mattered to her, and she treated them with the respect she believed every community deserved.


Rebels Don’t Do Quiet, the story in this series set during her exile, is inspired by this period of her life. It draws from Louise Michel’s deep engagement with the people and the place around her, and from her refusal to detach herself from the moral questions raised by colonial rule.


A Rebel Beyond Borders


Louise Michel’s exile expanded the meaning of her rebellion. She was not only a French revolutionary opposing a French government; she was someone who recognized injustice wherever it appeared. Her political imagination was not limited by nationality, race, or geography.


Her writing from this period shows that she understood colonialism, capitalism, and hierarchy as interconnected systems. To oppose one while benefiting from another made no sense to her. Solidarity, if it meant anything, had to cross borders.


Why This Story Matters


I wanted to include Louise Michel’s time in New Caledonia because it reveals a side of her that is often overlooked. Exile did not erase her commitments - it clarified them. Removed from Europe, she continued to ask the same questions about power, dignity, and responsibility.


Rebels Don’t Do Quiet grows out of that spirit. It is not a tale of retreat or resignation, but of a woman carrying her principles into unfamiliar and difficult terrain.


Louise Michel’s life reminds us that rebellion is not only about where you stand, but about who you stand with. In exile, as in Paris, she refused to look away from injustice - and that refusal remains one of her most powerful legacies.


Louise Michel: Rebel

Rebel: How Louise Michel Learned to Say “No”


Louise Michel did not wake up one morning and decide to become a rebel. Rebellion, for her, was not a pose or a taste for danger - it was the result of paying attention.


As a young woman living and teaching in working-class Paris, Michel saw how power operated in everyday life: who made decisions, who carried the consequences, and who was expected to remain silent. She saw hunger treated as a moral failure, obedience mistaken for virtue, and fear used as a tool of governance. Over time, refusal became unavoidable.


Rebellion Begins at Home


Michel’s life was filled with moments of tension that begin quietly. A knock at the door. A rumor moving through the streets. A sense that something precious - hard-won and fragile - is about to be taken away.


It's not only about crowds and speeches, but about the hours before them: the waiting, the listening, the tightening feeling in the body when intuition says that neutrality is no longer possible. For Michel, rebellion often began in kitchens and bedrooms, in half-lit rooms where decisions were made without applause or certainty.


These moments mattered. They were where courage was rehearsed.


Community Before Heroics


One of the most striking things in Louise Michel’s memoirs is how rarely she presents herself as a lone hero. Again and again, she emphasizes collective action: neighbors waking neighbors, women speaking first, ordinary people discovering - sometimes to their own surprise - that fear loses its grip when shared.


Michel understood rebellion not as chaos, but as responsibility taken seriously. When institutions failed to protect the people, the people had to protect one another. This was not romantic in her telling; it was urgent, messy, and necessary.


The story The Cannons of Montmartre grows out of this understanding. It is rooted in the idea that rebellion does not begin with violence, but with refusal - with people deciding that some things cannot be surrendered, even when authority demands it.


Women at the Center


Louise Michel was always explicit: women were not accessories to rebellion. They were often its engine.


Women organized, confronted, negotiated, and held their ground when others hesitated. Not because they were fearless, but because they understood what was at stake - homes, children, dignity, and the future of their communities.


Michel herself never framed courage as a masculine trait. Rebellion, in her view, belonged to those who cared enough to act.


What Rebellion Meant to Michel


To be a rebel, for Louise Michel, was not to seek conflict. It was to recognize a line - and refuse to step back when it was crossed.


She felt that rebellion is not loud by nature. It becomes loud only when ignored. It starts with awareness, grows through solidarity, and crystallizes in moments when people realize that waiting is more dangerous than acting.


This is the spirit that animates The Cannons of Montmartre. The story does not ask what rebellion looks like at its end, but what it feels like at its beginning - when fear and resolve exist side by side, and when ordinary people discover that together, they are not as powerless as they were meant to believe.


Why This Story Matters


As the author of this series, I was drawn to this aspect of Louise Michel’s life because it speaks to a universal moment: the instant when compliance stops making sense.


The Cannons of Montmartre is not about glorifying upheaval. It is about understanding how rebellion emerges from care, loyalty, and a deep attachment to place and people. Louise Michel reminds us that rebellion is rarely abstract. It is personal. It is local. And it begins when someone decides that what they love is worth standing up for.


That decision - quiet at first, collective soon after - is where this story lives.

Louise Michel: Educator

Discover How Louise Became a Teacher and Looked After Her Students


Louise Michel is remembered today as a revolutionary, a writer, and one of the most vivid figures of the Paris Commune of 1871. Yet long before she stood on barricades or faced exile, she was first and foremost an educator. Teaching was not a detour on her way to politics; it was the ground on which her ideas, her compassion, and her defiance of injustice were formed.


This website is dedicated to five short stories inspired by Louise Michel’s life. One of the central threads running through these stories is Louise as a teacher: a woman who believed, fiercely and tenderly, that education could be an act of care, resistance, and hope.


Louise Michel’s Path to Teaching


Born in 1830 in rural Haute-Marne, Louise Michel grew up surrounded by books, music, and intellectual curiosity. Raised by her mother and grandparents, she received an unusually rich education for a girl of her background. From an early age, she read widely, wrote poetry, and absorbed both Enlightenment ideas and a deep sympathy for the poor and marginalized.


Becoming a teacher was a natural expression of this upbringing. In her early twenties, she trained as a schoolmistress and eventually made her way to Paris. Teaching gave her independence, but more importantly, it gave her a place to put her beliefs into practice at a time when education was often rigid, punitive, and deeply unequal.


Louise rejected authoritarian methods. She believed children learned best through curiosity, imagination, and trust. She filled her classroom with stories, music, and attention to the natural world, treating her pupils not as empty vessels but as individuals worthy of respect.


Education as Care


For Louise Michel, teaching was never only about books and lessons. It was about paying attention - to the conditions in which children lived, to the obstacles they faced, and to the quiet ways hardship could shape their lives.


The Little School of Big Dreams is inspired by this dimension of her work. Rather than focusing only on what happens in a classroom, it explores how Louise understood education as something that extended beyond walls and schedules. To teach, in her view, was also to notice what made learning difficult, and to care about the lives of children beyond their schoolwork.


This approach was radical in its time. Louise believed that education could not be separated from dignity, safety, and well-being. A child who was cold, hungry, frightened, or excluded could not truly learn - and so the teacher’s responsibility went far beyond the page.


From the Classroom to the Commune


Louise’s years as a teacher in Paris unfolded alongside growing political unrest. The same injustices she saw affecting her students - poverty, hunger, and exclusion - were shaking French society as a whole.


When the Paris Commune erupted in 1871, Louise was already shaped by years of working with children on the margins. She remained deeply committed to education during and after the uprising, insisting that learning should be free, secular, and open to all. Even in exile, she continued to teach, proving that for her, education was not a role but a lifelong calling.


Why I Wrote These Stories


As the author of these short stories, I was drawn to Louise Michel not only as a revolutionary, but as someone who lived her values in small, daily ways. In The Little School of Big Dreams, her work as a teacher reveals how deeply she believed in the potential of young people - and how seriously she took her responsibility toward them.


These stories are not biographies. They are imaginative responses to the spirit of Louise Michel’s life. By exploring her role as an educator in this particular tale, I wanted to bring readers close to the texture of her world: the classrooms, the seasons, the relationships, and the quiet acts of care that shaped her days.


Louise Michel believed another world was possible - and in this story, she begins building it through education. I invite you to discover her not only as a symbol of rebellion, but as a teacher who looks after her students with intelligence, imagination, and unwavering care.


Purchase or Pre-order The Little School of Big Dreams from the Purchase menu at the top of this page


Louise Michel: Radical

Louise Michel: Radical

Radical: Read About How Louise Fought for the Rights of the Downtrodden


Louise Michel called herself many things over the course of her life: a schoolteacher, a writer, a revolutionary, an anarchist. What bound these identities together was her unwavering loyalty to those pushed to the margins of society. Again and again, she aligned herself - emotionally, practically, and politically - with people crushed by poverty, power, and injustice.


This article accompanies The Fight for Fair Wages, one of the short stories in the Louise Michel series. That story draws inspiration from Louise’s lifelong commitment to economic justice, especially for women - a commitment that shaped her politics long before the Paris Commune and remained central to her thinking throughout her life.


A Lifelong Identification with the Oppressed


In her memoirs, Louise Michel does not describe a sudden political awakening. Instead, she presents her radicalism as something that grew slowly and organically. Raised in rural Haute-Marne, she saw early how hard people worked for very little reward, and how kindness, talent, and effort were rarely matched by security or dignity.


This awareness stayed with her. Whether she was teaching, organizing in Paris, or living in exile, Michel returned to the same moral insight: society was structured to benefit a few at the expense of the many, and to remain neutral in such a system was itself a form of complicity.


Her writing is filled with attention to people whom society preferred not to see - workers, women, the poor, the imprisoned, the colonized. She did not treat them as abstract “causes,” but as human beings with voices, lives, and stories.


Fair Wages and Women’s Work


One of the injustices that most outraged Louise Michel was economic exploitation, especially the chronic underpayment of women. Women labored long hours - in homes, workshops, schools, and factories - yet were paid far less than men for work that was just as essential.


Michel understood this as a structural injustice. Low wages kept women dependent, vulnerable, and excluded from real autonomy, even as their labor sustained families and entire economies.


The Fight for Fair Wages is inspired by this part of her life. Rather than presenting economic justice as an abstract idea, the story draws from Louise Michel’s deep engagement with working people and her insistence that dignity and survival should never be in conflict.


Radicalism Without Detachment


Louise Michel’s radicalism was never cold or theoretical. It grew out of everyday realities - hunger, overcrowded housing, unpaid labor, children forced into work. She distrusted systems that treated people as numbers and preferred to begin with lived experience.


During the Paris Commune of 1871, this approach became visible on a larger scale. Michel supported efforts to expand education, challenge inequality, and improve the lives of workers and families. She worked closely with women’s groups, spoke publicly, and rejected the idea that injustice was inevitable.


After the Commune was crushed, she did not retreat. Exile and imprisonment only deepened her conviction that real justice required more than small reforms - it required a fundamental change in how power and resources were distributed.


Why This Story Matters Now


I was drawn to Louise Michel’s radicalism because it continues to speak directly to the present. Questions of fair pay, gendered labor, and economic precarity remain unresolved today. Her belief that exploitation is built into systems - not simply the result of bad individuals - still speaks with unsettling clarity.


The Fight for Fair Wages is my attempt to explore that spirit in story form. Through moments of tension and decision, it reflects Louise Michel’s fierce commitment to equality, her loyalty to working people, and her conviction that justice is something you act on, not just talk about.


Louise Michel did not fight for the downtrodden because it was fashionable or strategic. She fought because she believed, deeply and uncompromisingly, that a world built on injustice had no moral legitimacy.


That refusal - clear-eyed, compassionate, and radical - is at the heart of her life, and of this story.