othing
in common with modern scientific Socialism, except its unsparing
criticism of the modern form of society and its persistent attempt to
transform it and to produce a state of things more suitable to modern
conditions. But her criticism finds support in quite different
arguments; an idealist lack of clearness enfolds the end to be
attained, and still more the means to it. She knows historical facts
well enough, but lacks insight into the historical process of
development; and still less does she possess a clear comprehension of
economic relationships. To her a social transformation is not the
natural and necessary product of historical and economic development,
but the demand made by a passionate feeling of justice, a categorical
imperative. If Louise Michel had lived in the middle ages, she would,
without doubt, have been the foundress of a new religious order; as a
child of the nineteenth century, as an atheist, who cannot postpone
the redress of injustice into another life, she became a social
revolutionary."

[11] Her books, _Le Livre de Miseres_ and _Prise de
Possession_, were not procurable by me, and I had to depend
upon Ossip Zetkin's sketch of her in _Charakterkoepfen aus der
franzoesischen Arbeiterbewegung_, pp. 40-48, Berlin, 1893, and
the _Volkslexikon, l. c._

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 A