Louise Michel (1830-1905) teacher, anarchist, Communard

Louise was the illegitimate daughter of Marianne Michel, a domestic servant in Vroncourt-la-Côte, Haute-Marne. Marianne was seduced and then abandoned by Laurent Demahis, the scion of the estate, who quickly left after Louise was born. Unusually, the Demahis grandparents embraced Louise Demahis (as she was known), permitting her the run of the estate, giving her a good education and freedom to pursue scientific enquiries. When the grandparents died in 1850, Laurent’s widow claimed the estate forcing Louise and Marianne, who had received a small bequest, to leave, and forbade Louise from presenting herself any more as Mademoiselle Demahis. Louise studied in Chaumont, the prefecture of Haute-Marne, where she qualified as an assistant teacher. 

In 1851, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, and President of France, did a coup against himself and became Emperor as Napoleon III. It was now required that teachers and other civil servants swear an oath of allegiance. As a sincere Republican, Louise would not do this, and she was not able to teach in the regular schools, but she opened free schools where she taught. In 1856 she and fellow-teacher Julie Longchamps moved to Paris, where they shared accommodation, and where Michel did find work as a teacher. She wrote poems, became a member of the Union of Poets, corresponded with the writer Victor Hugo. 

She was frugal with female dress. It was said that if she had two dresses, she would give the better to one with a greater need. She also kept male clothing, which she would wear to attend evening lectures and meetings. 

In 1870, goaded by Otto von Bismark of Prussia, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia, quickly lost, abdicated and went into exile. The established politicians, not agreeing who should be the next king, established the Third Republic as a compromise. After a further defeat by the German army in March 1871, the government retreated to Tours. 

Soldiers of the National Guard, which had defended the now abandoned Paris, seized control of the city and established the Paris Commune. Its policies included the separation of church and state, self-policing, the remission of rent, the abolition of child labour, and the right of employees to take over an enterprise deserted by its owner. All Catholic churches and schools were closed. Michel became part of the National Guard. When the Paris Commune was declared she was elected head of the Montmartre Women's Vigilance Committee, and as such was responsible for the day-to-day welfare of two hundred children. She was part of a project to reform the city’s education system, ran a soup kitchen and attended to the wounded. She also scolded Karl Marx for his failure to join the Commune. In addition to this, Michel – in the male uniform of the National Guard - fought on the barricades with the 61st Battalion of Montmartre in the battles of Issy, Montmartre and Clamar. To the Franch press, she became La Vierge Rouge (The Red Virgin).

In late May, the “semaine sanglante”, the national French Army suppressed the Commune – it had lasted 73 days. The army killed an estimated 15,000, and arrested 43,000. Michel surrendered after her mother Marianne was arrested.

15,000 were tried in court, 13,500 of whom were found guilty, 95 were sentenced to death, 251 to forced labour, and 1,169 to deportation – mainly to Nouvelle-Calédonie (New Caledonia). Michel was tried in December, charged with offences including trying to overthrow the government, encouraging citizens to arm themselves, being a pétroleuse and herself using weapons and wearing a military uniform. The judges assumed that Michel, as they assumed for all the female Communards, was a “shameless slattern”, and that Michel was sexually involved with Theophile Ferré, of the Commune executive council. Her denials only led to later accusations that she had “tastes against nature”, that she was lesbian.

After twenty months in prison, during which Ferré was executed, Michel was loaded onto the ship Virginie on 8 August 1873, to be deported to New Caledonia where she arrived four months later. Also on the ship was the anarchist Nathalie Lemel who instructed Michel in the theory of anarchism. The two worked together in New Caledonia, and were calumnied as lesbian. 

Marie Ferré, Theophile’s sister cared for Michel’s mother while Michel was in prison, and then in exile.

Michel in New Caledonia befriended the indigenous Kanaks, and learned their culture and language. She supported the 1878 Kanak revolt, and acted as a teacher for the children of the deported. 

In 1880, amnesty was granted to all surviving Communards, and those deported returned to France. Michel became a public speaker, and writer. 

Marie Ferré died two years after Michel’s return, and Michel organised her funeral

In 1883 Michel was one of the leaders of a demonstration of unemployed workers. She was sentenced to six years of solitary confinement for inciting the looting, but released after three. 

In 1888, while speaking in Le Havre, Michel was shot at twice: one bullet was lost in her hat, the other wounded her behind the ear. After medical attention, she refused to press charges. 

In 1890, after an attempt to commit her to a mental asylum she moved to London, where she ran the International Anarchist School for the children of political refugees.

From 1890 onwards, Charlotte Vauvelle became Michel's almost constant companion, accompanying her on her international travels. In 1895 Michel met Emma Goldman at an anarchist conference in London.

Michel was on a speaking tour in Marseille in January 1905 when she died of pneumonia.

In 1937 the Collège Louise-Michel was opened in the 10th arrondissement. On 1 May 1946 the Paris Metro Vallier station in Levallois-Perret was renamed Louise Michel station. In 2004 the Square Louise-Michel in Montmartre was renamed after her. Michel was one of 10 French women honoured during the 2024 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Paris, where a gold statue of her was raised along the Seine river.

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The first biography of Louise Michel was by Karl von Levetzow, an associate of Magnus Hirschfeld, and as such concerned to show that famous persons could be gay.  His article was published in Jahrbuch fiir sexuelle Zwischenstufen, in the same year that she died.  Levetzow emphasized her non-conformity with the 19^th-century ideas of gender and found lesbianism even in her  facial features. 

"A more virile character than hers cannot be found even among the most masculine of men” (p324). 

 He also quotes Theophil Zolling, who interviewed Michel in 1880 and called her “ugly” and 

“the wide-slit mouth, whose thick, pale, cracked lips by no means invite a kiss, and hide the small, icy eyes lurking behind bushy brows. A moustache, which would arouse the envy of a grammar school pupil, is shaded under the strong and not ignobly cut nose” (p327-8)  

This reading is not supported by the photographs that we have. 

This reinforced an idea that had already been proposed by her political enemies intended as a calumny., although this apparently was not Levetzow’s intention.

A year later a different biography appeared written by fellow anarchist Ernest Girault.  To protect her from insinuations of “tastes against nature” he emphasised her love for Theophile Ferré.  Her energy, courage, and "disgust with life" all stemmed, in his opinion, from Ferré's rejection of her affections.

A similar opinion was found the article on Michel in the 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Hirschfeld, in his Die Transvestiten, 1910 in his chapter on Women as Soldiers, discusses her only in the context of the Commune, where he states that women soldiers can be just as ‘inhuman’ as their male comrades, and quotes Levetzow.

In 1923 Emma Goldman visited Hirschfeld’s Institut fuer Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin and saw Michel’s photograph on a wall amidst other well-known lesbians. She objected to this arguing that Michel was a woman who had rejected the 19^th century roles for women, but that this did not make her a lesbian.  This reply was published in Jahrbuch fiir sexuelle Zwischenstufen.

Hirschfeld’s reply: 

“that even what appears to be the best circumstantial evidence can be based on error [...]. The various views of Levetzow and Mrs. Goldmann about Louise Michel, whose admirers and admirers are both to the same extent, is new evidence of this old experience. And yet there is also a bridge over the seemingly unbridgeable gap, namely where Ms. Goldmann speaks of Louise Michel in the following statements as a 'new type of femininity‘, a 'complicated nature‘. Individual psychology is not limited to a classification, no matter how sophisticated. Every scheme is shadowy.  The differentiation of human individualities is inexhaustible, unlimited.” (Hirschfeld 1923: 71 f).

Havelock Ellis in his Sexual Inversion, 1927 added a sentence on Michel to his third edition: “Great religious and moral leaders, like Madame Blavatsky and Louise Michel, have been either homosexual or bisexual or, at least, of pronounced masculine temperament” and a footnote referring his readers to Levetzow.

The major biography of Michel is by Edith Thomas, after she broke with the French Communist party.  She again continued the heterosexualisation by speculating a possible sexual relation with Victor Hugo also.  She portrayed Michel as an 

"unhappy woman who had lost the man she loved and admired” (p143-4)

Andrew Hussey has a paragraph on Louise Michel in his Paris: The Secret History, in which he makes a claim not found anywhere else, and without giving a source: 

“Michel was called the ‘Red Virgin’ because she refused to marry, but this did not stop her enjoying a long list of lovers, whom she took in the name of total freedom”.

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Pétroleuse – a term of abuse aimed at female participants in the Commune, suggesting that they used petroleum to burn down buildings during the semaine sanglante (in later years lit bottles of petroleum were called Molotov cocktails). The EN.Wikipedia and FR.Wikipedia articles are strongly in disagreement. The latter says that recent research shows that actually there were no proven incidents of arson committed by women, and that no woman was afterwards convicted as an arsonist. The former lists some who were so convicted.

Caledonia is of course the Roman name for what we call Scotland. “New Caledonia” was named by British explorer James Cook during a quick visit in 1774. It became a French colony, but they kept the British name, merely revising it to Nouvelle-Calédonie. Not to be confused with Nova Scotia. To the indigenous Kanaks, it is Kanaky.

Republican parties across Europe are generally left-wing, anti-clerical, anti-monarchy, anti-aristocrats and anti-oligarchs. In the US of course it is the reverse. And the new French Party, Les Républicains, founded by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2015, is more like the US party as it was pre-Trump.

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So, was Louise Michel in any way trans? Remember that several French trans men such as Violette Morris and Madeleine Pelletier lived and dressed as male but never took a male name. Remember also the common practice of claiming that politicians etc are gender or sexually deviant. This has recently happened to Brigitte Macron and Michelle Obama. 

I see Louise Michel as gender fluid. She was not determined enough to be transgender – her passions lay within anarchism. But she was not uptight about being a lady or a woman either. When convenient she dressed as male – and it was no big deal at all. It is unfortunate that the debate about her private life centres on whether she had “tastes against nature” for which there is no definite evidence either way. It would be better to ask whether anarchists should be gender conformists? Are not gender roles part of the oppression that anarchy is fighting against? Louise is a model of non-conforming.

• Theophil Zolling. Reise um die Pariser Welt. Verlag von W Spemann, 1882: 52.
• Karl von Levetzow, "Louise Michel," Jahrbuchfiir sexuelle Zwischenstufen 7, pt. 1 (1905): 307-70.
• Ernest Girault, La Bonne Louise. Bibliothèque des Auteurs modères, 1906.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. Die Transvestiten; ein Untersuchung uber den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb: mit umfangreichem casuistischen und historischen Materia Berlin: Pulvermacher, 1910: 532-3. English translation by Michael A Lombardi-Nash. Transvestites: The Erotic urge to Crossdress. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991: 404-5.
• Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 3^rd vol. 2, Sexual Inversion. Random House, 1927): 197.
• Emma Goldman, "Offener Brief an den Herausgeber der Jahrbücher uber Louise Michel," Jahrbuchfur sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 23 (1923): 70-92.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. „Vorbemerkung des Herausgebers“. Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 1923; 23: 70–72.
• Alistair Horne. The Fall of Paris: The Seige and the Commune 1870-71. Macmillan, 1965, 1989: 28, 57, 237-8, 270-1, 278, 298-9, 319, 357, 379, 408, 413, 423, 425 ,
• Edith Thomas, translated by Penelope Williams. Louise Michel. Black Rose Books, 1980 – French original 1971.
• Marie Marmo Mullaney. “Sexual Politics in the Career and Legend of Louise Michel”. Signs, 15, 2, 1990:300-22.
• Bonnie Haaland. Emma Goldman: Sexuality and the Impurity of the State. Black Rose Books, 1993: 149, 155, 156, 166-170.
• Nic Maclellan (ed). Louise Michel. Ocean Press, 2004.
• Andrew Hussey. Paris: The Secret History. Bloomsbury, 2006: .
• Sidonie Verhaeghe. « Should we still call Louise Michel the Red Virgin? ». Cahiers d’histoire: Revue d’histoire critique, 148, 2021: 19-32.

EN.Wikipedia                FR.Wikipedia

A review of Alison Li’s biography of Harry Benjamin

• Alison Li. Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution. University of North Carolina Press, 2023.
  
  
  

There are four biographies of Magnus Hirschfeld (by Charlotte Wolff, Ralf Dose, Elena Mancini and Heike Bauer), an autobiography and three biographies of Havelock Ellis (by Phyllis Grosskurth, Chris Nottingham, Arthur Calder-Marshall, John Stewart). Why has there been no book length biography of Harry Benjamin previously?

Li did a BSc in Biochemistry at McGill University and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at University of Toronto supervised by historian Michael Bliss, with the thesis J.B. Collip and the Making of Medical Research in Canada, which included Collip’s work 1921-2 contributing to the refinement of insulin and thereby saving the lives of many diabetics. Li taught at Toronto’s York University and more recently has been an independent historian and writer. She specialises in the history of hormones, their discovery and applications. She published a book based on her thesis, the biography, J.B. Collip and the Development of Medical Research in Canada, 2003. She was also a co-editor of Women, Health, and Nation: Canada and the United States since 1945, 2003, to which she contributed an essay on the hormonal product Premarin. In 2008 she was a co-editor of Essays in Honour of Michael Bliss: Figuring the Social, in which she contributed the essay “Wondrous Transformations: Endocrinology after Insulin”. This essay covers Harry Benjamin and his rejuvenation treatment of the novelist Gertrude Atherton, her 1922 novel based on the experience and the subsequent film. This last is redone in the 2023 book.

Li did research in quite a lot of academic archives, including the Kinsey Institute in Indiana, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Haeberle-Hirschfeld Archives at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. She read Benjamin’s diary, his correspondence and his unpublished book The Winter of Our Discontent, 1941. Hence she is able to relate details not found in other accounts: what happened to his brother and sister; how his wife Greta became involved in his clinic as secretary and as nurse; how the mothers of both Harry and Greta came to stay. She also tells anecdotes about Benjamin’s sex life:

“He continued to be attracted to actresses and chorus girls. For a time, he saw patients in Los Angeles and mixed with the rich and famous. Jean Harlow’s initials appear in his address book, and colleagues would recall that he later reminisced about ‘dating’ her.” (p135)

However, a few matters must be discussed. 

On p112, Li repeats the most well-known accounts of Hirschfeld’s trans patients. One she names as Carla Van Crist. This is a name she found in Meyerowitz’ How Sex Changed, 2002. The problem is that most of us know, since Raimund Wolfert’s 2021 biography, that Crist was a pseudonym for Charlotte Charlaque. And Li apparently knows nothing of Charlotte as receptionist at Hirschfeld’s Institute, and acting as his translator in London, of her involvement with Toni Ebel, another of the well documented trans patients of Hirschfeld who had completion surgery, and their attempted escape from the Third Reich into Czechoslovakia. Li quickly mentions the two-patient surgery account (archive) by Felix Abraham, tells us that one of these was Dorchen Richter, but is mute about the fact that the other was Ebel. There is of course a detailed account of Ebel in Rainer Herrn’s Schnittmuster des Geschlechts, 2005. However neither Wolfert nor Herrn are in Li’s bibliography – she relies on Meyerowitz only. Meyerowitz’ book was groundbreaking 20 years ago, but trans history and biography have moved on.

Incidentally, Charlotte, back in the US in the 1950s, corresponded with Benjamin using the name Charlotte Von Curtius. Neither Meyerowitz nor Li, despite their reading of Benjamin’s correspondence at the Kinsey Institute realize that this is the same person, nor even mention a Von Curtius.

Li next gives a very ordinary account of “Lili Elbe”. Li made a decision to not include any accounts of Benjamin’s associates – such as Leo Wollman – and their trans patients – so why does she include Elbe, who was Kurt Warnekros’ patient? She does briefly mention Pamela Caughie in an endnote, but does not seem to have read the books and the extensive website by Caughie, Sabine Meyer and their team, not even to note that Lili’s post transition name was Lili Elvenes. 

In New York in the 1960s and 1970s, if you were trans and had money or contacts or were lucky, you went to Dr Benjamin. For less money you could go to Dr Leo Wollman located close to Coney Island. And if Wollman was too expensive, there were Drs David Wesser and Benito Rish at the Professional Hospital in Yonkers. Benjamin and Wollman sent patients to Wesser and Rish for surgery, but Wesser and Rish are mentioned not at all by Li. 

Wollman is mentioned only once – in a list of the members of the Harry Benjamin Foundation. Li three times mentions the Harry Benjamin Foundation, but fails to mention its major accomplishment, the 1969 anthology book Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment edited by Richard Green and John Money.

On p116, Li writes “A few years later Benjamin wrote Hirschfeld in alarm that an unauthorized, abridged translation of the first volume of Hirschfeld’s Sexualpathologie had been published by Julian Press in 1932 with ‘a most atrocious translation, utterly impossible”. Why not name the book? By the date and publisher, she is referring to Sexual Pathology: A Study of Derangements of the Sexual Instinct, translated by Jerome Gibbs, Julian Press, 1932. However, most readers will assume the much better-known Sexual anomalies and perversions, a compilation from Sexualpathologie by Arthur Koestler, revised for the English version by Norman Haire, an associate of both Hirschfeld and Benjamin, which came out a few years later. The Koestler-Haire book actually is not mentioned at all.

Benjamin and Virginia Prince were associated across several decades, he prescribed hormones to her, and whenever Prince was in New York they would have a meal together. In Transvestia # 12, December 1961, p14. Prince wrote: “I was chauffeured over to Dr. Benjamin's office for a nice but too brief visit and dinner with him. Those of you who have never met Dr. Benjamin have missed a real treat. People of our persuasion have no better professional friend.” It was from Prince that Benjamin adopted the expression: “Gender is located above, and sex below the belt”.

Prior to 1962 Prince’s magazine Transvestia frequently featured reprints and new articles by Benjamin, she is mentioned several times in The Transsexual Phenomenon (unlike Louise Lawrence who is surprisingly not mentioned at all) and most significantly Prince had a significant effect on Benjamin’s scale in that in accordance with her views it erases gay and female transvestites and gynephilic transsexuals. 

Li mentions Prince once only (p148): “Benjamin also began to work with Virginia Prince, a chemist, transvestite, researcher”. Her footnote chp9n49 shows that her one and only source is Meyerowitz (again) p181-2. She does not note the mentions in The Transsexual Phenomenon, and ignores the biographies by Richard Docter and myself.

The ongoing interaction between Benjamin and Prince is only partially documented. I was hoping that Li’s reading of Benjamin’s diary and correspondence would have provided more detail.

As Li says of The Transsexual Phenomenon: “At a dense 286 pages, the book ranged over the entire field of study”. My A critical rereading of Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon required 56 pages. Li devotes only two pages to it, only one page to its contents (p178-180). She gives only the 1966 Julian Press hardback in her bibliography, and in the text mentions that the 16 pages of photographs were withheld but could be requested by medical and psychological professionals. However most of us who have read the physical book, read the 1977 Warner Books paperback which did include the photographs. And of course most readers today use the PDF version which is available online. With such a short summary she is not able to discuss the Benjamin Scale, Benjamin’s inconsistencies, his ambivalences, his anticipations of future debates or of course the Virginia Prince impacts. Both Ray Blanchard with autogynephilia, and Charlotte Goiar with Harry Benjamin Syndrome later found a basis in The Transsexual Phenomenon but their applications deny his moral legacy. (See my A Critical Reading p10, 30-1)

She says that it was “the first major text” on the topic. “Major” is of course an equivocal term, but there had been three previous books specifically about transsexuality, the first two, as it happened, by persons themselves transsexual: Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology, 1946, by Michael Dillon, and Over the Sex Border, 1963, by Georgina Turtle. The third was Eugene de Savitsch’s Homosexuality, Transvestism and Change of Sex, 1958 which discussed the transition of the Swiss trans woman Arlette Leber who had surgery in 1941-2 . None of these are mentioned by Benjamin, although the latter two are included without comment in Richard Green's bibliography at the end of the book. And none of them are mentioned or are found in Li’s bibliography.

Charles Ihlenfeld was Benjamin’s assistant from 1969 to 1976 and had been expected to take over the practice, but chose otherwise. Li tells this, but does not tell of Jeanne Hoff who did take over, and was herself in transition. 

Obviously the strength of the book is in the history of endocrinology, and the reading in various archives of Benjamin’s diary and his correspondence with patients and associates provide interesting anecdotes of them as people. It would be a better book if she had not mainly retold the stories that we know so well from Meyerowitz, and had told of some less-well-known patients instead. However it is a book that will be an essential reading for future biographers of Harry Benjamin.