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Louise Michel: A walk after exile

12.3 km / 3.5 hours

A nearly circular walk that glances at the early Louise Michel but focuses on her life from 1880 to 1905

Arrondissements: 6 – 7 – 8 – 10 -12

Émile Pouget

The walk focuses mainly on some of the Parisian places Michel was associated with after her return from exile in 1880. It starts at an address near today’s Place République and Bourse du Travail where she lived in the 1860s. It then passes the Gare St Lazare prison (now Square Alban-Satragne) where she was jailed in 1883 and the Gare St Lazare railway station at which huge crowds met her in 1880. It continues on to the Left Bank, following the route of the 1883 unemployed march that saw her carry a black piece of cloth on top of a broom for a flag. Further on there is the site of the flat where she lived for the last 9 years of her life as well as the site of the Women’s Technical Drawing School she set up during the 1871 Commune. Finally, the walk passes through the Luxembourg Gardens, where Mitterrand exchanged a remembrance column featuring her and Blanqui for a statue of his mentor, Pierre Mendès-France, and goes on to the Gare de Lyon.  In 1905 some 120,000 mourners accompanied her remains from there on the two-hour walk to the Levallois-Perret Cemetery in north-west Paris. We won’t follow her that far…

14 rue Château d’eau

Square Alban Satragne (prison St Lazare)

Gare Saint-Lazar 108 rue St Lazare

L’Esplanade des Invalides

Boulevard Saint-Germain

Rue du Four

2 rue Jacob

7 rue Dupuytren

Jardin du Luxembourg

Gare de Lyon Boulevard Diderot