Montmartre teacher who fought on the Commune’s barricades, was deported to New Caledonia and became the anarchist “Red Virgin”
Born in a château in Haute-Marne to a servant, she became a teacher, opened a school in Montmartre in the 1850s and frequented republican and socialist clubs. On 18 March 1871 she turned out to defend the cannon on Montmartre, and during the Commune she served on the vigilance committee, in ambulance work and with a Guard battalion. After Bloody Week she surrendered in place of her mother, demanded death in court and was sentenced to deportation to New Caledonia, where she supported the Kanak revolt of 1878. Amnestied in 1880, she spoke and was jailed again and again as an anarchist, dying on a lecture tour in Marseille in 1905.