Historic anarchists Louise Michel (b. France 1830, d. France 1905) and Emma Goldman (b. Russian Empire 1869, d. Canada 1940) continue, a hundred years on from the heyday of their revolutionary activity, to pop up in unexpected places.
We can’t know whether Emma Goldman would have enjoyed Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s 00s pop song ‘If I can’t dance…’, but it seems unlikely. Ellis-Bextor transforms a phrase that is often attributed to Goldman, ‘if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution’, into a catchy confection of synths, sultry vocals and leggy dance routines. The song’s association with the turn-of-the-century revolutionary, described by J. Edgar Hoover as one of the most dangerous anarchists in America, is unexpected, out of character, even inappropriate.
All the same, the movement of this quotation, or misquotation, from a passage in Goldman’s autobiography, through its appearance on activist merchandise in the 1970s and into Ellis-Bextor’s glitterball world, demonstrates the staying power of this radical figure – not to mention the ways in which she is transformed from a committed militant, viewed by the public as violent and lawless, into an all-purpose party girl.
Goldman lives on because of the hard work of later activists who found inspiration in her actions and solace in her words, often representing her as a foremother of radical feminism. After her initial engagement with anarchism in the hotbed of New York’s immigrant communities in the 1880s and 90s, Goldman unwaveringly pursued what she called, ‘[t]he philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary’.
Her political activity involved organising strikes and rallies, pamphleting, petitioning and, in a particularly dramatic incident, she co-organised an (unsuccessful) assassination attempt on a wealthy oil magnate. She frequently found herself in prison. At the lectern Goldman was a tour de force, packing out lecture halls on both sides of the Atlantic with talks on the twinned evils of militarism and capitalism and topics ranging from access to birth control to modern theatre, the virtues of free love, the value of education and the transformative power of art.
Yet when Goldman died in 1940, it was in relative obscurity. Alienated from many on the international Left thanks to her staunch critique of the USSR and no longer allowed into the United States, Goldman was no one’s idea of a revolutionary icon.
This began to change in the 1960s when American feminists in the women’s liberation movement ‘rediscovered’ Goldman. Citing her as a role model for how to live a radical life and excited by her interweaving of the personal and the political, they wrote biographies and essays about ‘Red Emma’. Soon she had become a historical paradigm for the movement, associated with a series of stereotypes from the stern Jewish granny to the free-loving hippy.
Goldman’s stardom grew and grew. An archival collection, the Emma Goldman Papers Project, was established in Berkley, California (although it has since been in jeopardy). She appeared as a fiery character in EL Doctorow’s 1975 novel Ragtime and its eponymous musical, which includes the song ‘The Night That Goldman Spoke at Union Square’. In stern and formidable form, she played a pivotal role in Warren Beatty’s 1981 historical epic Reds – a performance for which Maureen Stapleton won several awards.
Today Goldman’s anarchist feminist ideas continue to infuse theoretical discussions of gender and power and pamphlet versions of her essays are available in anarchist bookshops across the world. Last year, Goldman’s capacious autobiography Living My Life (1931) was translated into Arabic for the first time. Yet these efforts to grapple with Goldman’s politics co-exist with evocations that are less political, celebrating the lifelong anarchist as an impressively outspoken woman above all else.
As in the song ‘If I can’t dance’, there is a persistent characterisation of Emma Goldman as a curious character or girl-power icon which overlooks her strongly held political views, involvement in forms of violent protest and her reputation, during her lifetime, as an extreme and radical threat to the status quo.
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We can see a similar process of sanitisation at play in the afterlives of Goldman’s near contemporary Louise Michel, once referred to by Goldman as the ‘priestess of pity and vengeance’. Like Goldman, Michel was a committed anarchist and proponent of violent tactics to achieve political ends; both were involved in multiple causes – for the emancipation of the working classes, women, colonised subjects and more – over the course of long lives; and both of their original archives can be found in the same location: the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.
Louise Michel was an energetic participant in the Paris Commune of 1871, during which she attended to the wounded, gave rousing speeches in the city’s oratory clubs and fought on the barricades. For this she was tried, narrowly avoided execution and was exiled to New Caledonia. On her journey to the French colony, she met Nathalie Lemel (1827-1921) who, reportedly, turned her into an anarchist.
Returning from exile in 1880, Michel found herself to be one of the few remaining Communards in France. She became a radical celebrity, honoured as an almost mythical presence. She gave speeches, wrote extensively, travelled across Europe, made a trip to Algeria and was repeatedly imprisoned.
Unlike Goldman, she was still a revolutionary icon at the time of her death. Tens of thousands of people came to her funeral, following her coffin through the streets of Paris to its resting place in the Levallois-Perret cemetery.
The early stages of Michel’s afterlives were marked by tensions between different political camps. Socialists, communists, anarchists and supporters whose political alignments were less clear disagreed on how best to commemorate her life. Should she have a statue and where? Who were her rightful political heirs? As the image below shows, the statue that was erected presented her as a gentle and nurturing woman.
The early winners of this battle were the French Communist Party. From the 1920s, and indeed through much of the early twentieth century, the Party imbricated the Paris Commune into a wider history of social struggle wherein it was depicted as a proto-Soviet protest. Despite a steady flow of anarchist objections, Michel entered a pantheon of exemplary Marxist revolutionaries.
However, following a fallow period in the 1940s and 50s, there was a renewal of wider public interest in Michel from groups who stood outside or even against the Party – including Henri Lefebvre and the Situationists. In the wake of the protests of May 1968, the Communist Party’s control over celebrations of the Commune’s centenary was much diminished. Moreover Michel, like Goldman, became a subject of interest for 1970s feminists looking to reinscribe ‘feminist’ heroes into the historical record.
This resurgence of interest in Michel has proven long-lasting. Since the 1980s she, far more than Goldman, who – as an immigrant – had a complicated relationship with nationality, has been turned into an emblem of national pride. Her face adorned a stamp celebrating International Women’s Day in 1982. In 2004, a large square in Montmartre under the Sacré Cœur – the very church that had been built to celebrate the failure of the Paris Commune – was given her name.
To this day Michel remains the only woman to have a Parisian metro station named after her and there have been campaigns to place her in the Pantheon. Two years ago, in the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, a golden statue of Michel emerged from the Seine. Positioned alongside nine other ‘golden heroines of French history‘, she was described as a ‘teacher, writer, anarchist and feminist activist’. This final label is one that that she would never have picked for herself but is in keeping with her designation as a generic symbol of political progress. These instances, like her statue, celebrate Michel for her bravery and her goodness but not, on the whole, for her politics.
This state-approved version of Michel is of course not the only one and there is a longstanding anarchist critique of her absorption into the French Republic. The Spanish Civil War saw two different battalions named after Michel, testimony to her radical legacy outside of France. Michel’s name, like Goldman’s, appears on anarchist reading lists and in radical bookshops.
Case in point is the MV Louise Michel, an enormous pink ex-Navy boat, sponsored by the mysterious street artist Banksy and operated by activists who help refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean. Commentary on the ship has focused on Banksy and sidelined Michel to a sentence of two that describe her as a ‘French anarchist feminist’ or similar. But it’s worth noting that the ship’s name came not from Banksy but from the crew, who identified Michel’s political vision as the ‘perfect encapsulation of what we believe’.
Emma Goldman and Louise Michel both lived in stark defiance of the powers that be. In their many written works and their tireless campaigning, which often came at substantial risk to their own safety, they were unswervingly committed to anarchist politics. Both caused panic during their lifetimes, perceived as deeply dangerous – sometimes even subhuman. Yet as shown by the objects I have discussed, in their afterlives these figures are often sanitised.
A tendency to absorb them in stories of national progress, to focus on their personal lives rather than their ideas and to overlook their engagement in violent tactics is compounded by their status as women.
Yet, as I develop in my book Remembering Revolutionary Women, these are figures whose stories can help in the fight against forces of oppression in the present and for the future.