Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
As every schoolgirl knows or ought to know, the documentary history of French feminism took its first great leap forward in 1791 when the playwright Marie Gouze, who signed her literary works Olympe de Gouges, published Déclaration des droits de la femme et la citoyenne [Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizeness], in answer to the Marquis de Lafayette’s Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen [Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen], which had been adopted by the National Assembly in August 1789 as the fundamental statement of the French Revolution.
Lafayette had probably assumed, unthinkingly, that his own declaration covered the rights of women too, but Olympe de Gouges pointed out in no uncertain terms that the problematic situation of women not only included the political and legal oppressions that the male leaders of the Revolution were attempting to overturn but also the oppressions originating from the rights that men routinely arrogated over their wives and daughters, which similarly stood in urgent need of redress.
As one of the few genuine revolutionaries involved in the 1789 Revolution, Marie Gouze inevitably met the same fate as the others and was guillotined by the sham revolutionaries in 1793 during the Terror. Among her papers, the incomplete text was found of a play entitled La France sauvée, ou Le Tyran détroné [France Preserved; or, The Tyrant Dethroned] in the plot of which Marie-Antoinette is interrupted while planning the defense of the monarchy and engaged in a philosophical dialogue by Olympe de Gouges. We have no idea how the play would have ended, although we can be certain that it would not have ended with a gang of hypocritical thugs bursting in and chopping off the heads of both characters; fantasy, unlike reality, has to respect the boundaries of narrative plausibility and at least pay some attention to questions of moral order.
Historians of speculative fiction are well aware of the fact that the history in question is extremely patchy because of all the kinds of difficulties both political and commercial that have prevented a great many works that might have been published from reaching print, or, for the most part, even being written. If it were possible to compile a narrative out of those unpublished and unwritten works, it would add enormously and interestingly to the narrative history of imaginative fiction, but that is an impossible task in practice; history can only deal with the documents that actually exist. It is not the case, however, that we know nothing at all about the “unhistory” that those nonexistent documents constitute because the documents that do exist have margins, some of which carry intriguing implications of what might lie beyond them in the virtual world of the imagination. It requires speculative extrapolation to reach into that unhistory, but if historians of speculative fiction are not qualified and willing to do that, who is?
The simplest instances of such margins are, of course, the literal margins of unfinished works. We do not know how La France sauvée would have proceeded beyond the point when circumstances cut it off in the middle of Act Two, but we can perceive something of the narrative momentum that had been built up, some of the narrative threads whose initial development had been laid down and some of the arguments set out for logical development. We also know a good deal about Marie Gouze’s opinions and conviction from her other works, which provide a context for the relevant extrapolation. It is, therefore, not inconceivable that another writer could complete the text, producing something not entirely alien to what “Olympe de Gouges,” the author, would have produced had she kept her head. The title alone suggests that it would probably have ended with Olympe de Gouges, the character, helping Marie-Antoinette to claim the sovereign rights she had never had and to begin the process of reform that would have made France a better place for women in general.
One thing, at least, of which we can be absolutely sure is that the play—even had it been completed, staged, and enjoyed a record-breaking run at the Comédie-Française—would not have made any difference whatsoever to the fate of France or French women in the nineteenth century because history informs us very clearly of the enormous difficulties subsequent French feminists had in making any headway at all in claiming any of the rights asserted in Olympe de Gouges’s Déclaration. A few details of the predicament faced by future female writers are visible in the margins of other speculative works, which similarly permit oblique glimpses into the unhistory that lies beyond them, as frustratingly inaccessible as any promised land. It is worth considering two further examples that cast some faint light on the near non-existence of nineteenth-century feminist fantasy in France.
Consider the case of Léonie Rouzade, who was born Louise-Léonie Camusat in Paris in 1839. She was the daughter of a watchmaker and liked to boast that she was the granddaughter of a delegate to the 1789 Estates-General. She worked as an embroideress before marrying Auguste Rouzade, the municipal accountant of the wealthy Parisian suburb of Meudon, at the age of twenty-one. According to her lifelong friend Hubertine Auclert, who introduced her to socialism, the marriage was happy from its beginning until Auguste’s death in 1901. Rouzade’s political activism gained considerable impetus from her attendance at the International Congress on Women’s Rights held in Paris in 1878. In 1880 she, along with Eugénie Pierre (later Potonié-Pierre) and the ex-Communard Marcelle Tinayre, of the Union des femmes [Women’s Union], cofounded a group designed to obtain representation for women in the Parti ouvrier [Workers’ Party], and she was one of the authors of its manifesto.
In 1881, Rouzade stood as a socialist candidate for the Municipal Council in Paris—the first woman to do so. While women had been allowed to vote and stand in French municipal elections since 1872, they were not allowed to vote or offer themselves as candidates in legislative elections until 1944. She had no chance of being elected, especially as one of the two main socialist parties in Paris refused to support her, but the mere fact that she stood and campaigned was a tiny landmark in the political progress of women in France. Contemporary reportage of her political activism suggests that she was an outspoken and controversial figure—the Evening Post described her in 1896 as “notorious for her combative nature.” Rouzade annoyed many of her fellow feminists almost as much as the male socialists she continually castigated for their lack of concern regarding the oppression of women. She was one of the most radical of the Parisian feminists of the day notably in her advocacy of the collectivization of motherhood.
Rouzade published a number of articles in left-wing periodicals and printed some of her speeches, but her most successful publication by far was the anticlerical Petit catéchisme de morale laïque et socialiste (1895; tr. as The Feminist Catechism). This document went through several editions in isolation and three more as an appendix to La Femme et la people, organisation sociale de demain [Women and the People: The Social Organization of Tomorrow] (1896), which was her only full-length work of non-fiction. She was forgotten for some time thereafter but began to make it into modern feminist reference books after Charles Sowerwine devoted a considerable section to her in Femmes et le socialisme (1978; tr. as Sisters of Citizens? Women and Socialism in France since 1876). Among other things, Sowerwine took the trouble to look up five obscure items Rouzade published before attracting attention as a political activist during a very narrow window of opportunity after the Second Empire fell when publishers no longer subject to political censorship thought there might be a market for radical texts.
Lachaud, a publisher specializing in reflections on the war and the Commune that briefly followed it, issued five volumes by Rouzade: Connais-toi toi-même? [Do you Know Yourself?] (1871); Le Roi Johanne [King Johanne] (1872); Voyage de Théodose à l’île d’Utopie (1872; tr. as “A Voyage to the Isle of Utopia”); Le Monde renversé (1872; tr. as The World Turned Upside Down in a volume that also includes the previous item); and Ci et çà, çà et là [This and That; Here and There] (1872), in that order. The first and last were brief, non-fictional meditations whereas, the second, which had a considerably lower page-count than the two novellas that succeeded it, was a visionary fantasy reflecting the same socialist and feminist concerns as its successors in a similarly oblique fashion.
The total wordage of the five Lachaud volumes is approximately 100,000, so it is possible that they were written in much the same fifteen-month interval as was taken up by their publication, but it seems more probable that at least some of them had been written some time before publication. Voyage de Théodose à l’île d’Utopie is dated September 1872 at the end of the text, but the last chapter is radically different from the remainder. It might be the case that it was added at that date to a story written some time before; indeed, the final section might have been a separate story awkwardly grafted onto the remainder. The epilogue of Le Monde reversé strongly suggests that the author experimented with more earnest utopian fictions before developing the more adventurous rhetorical strategies tentatively applied in Voyage de Théodose à l’île d’Utopie and far more wholeheartedly in Le Monde renversé—in which the author’s scathing sarcasm and righteous wrath are given much freer rein—but went unappreciated in her earlier efforts.
It is entirely possible that no one read any of those five texts a hundred years before Charles Sowerwine looked them up in the Bibliothèque Nationale; he warmly recommended Le Monde renversé to the attention of contemporary publishers with no response—except that the BN eventually placed that text and its immediate predecessor on its website, gallica <gallica.bnf.fr>, making them available for consultation and hence for belated translation into English. Although interesting in terms of what they are, they are even more interesting for what they are not. Le Monde renversé goes to some trouble to make it clear that it is only what it is because the author had been frustrated in her attempts to publish the earnest feminist works she had written beforehand.
This is one complaint issued by a writer in the course of the plot:
“Personally,” said another, “in spite of the incapacity to which women were relegated, I was able to write what I thought; then I went to request support from the apostles of humanity; except for a few extraordinary exceptions, the apostles continued their preaching and did not budge.
“‘Pardon me, Messieurs,’ I said, ‘are you not fighting for the oppressed and progress?’
“‘Yes,’ they replied.
“‘Well, I’m one of the oppressed, and I’ve worked myself to destroy my shackles.’
“‘So what?’
“‘So, since supporting the oppressed and progress is helping everyone who is hindered and supporting all their efforts, support me.’
“‘Look at this flighty thing, this pretty bluestocking,’ sniggered the apostles.
“‘Give up this mania for scribbling, my darling,’ one of them said, more gently. ‘An article that we write is worth a thousand times more than your feminine whining.’
“‘However, Messieurs,’ I went on, clinging on even so, ‘since I’m part of the suffering, I know as well as you do where the stick wounds us, and how it can be ameliorated.’
“‘But my good lady, we know all that and more,’ mocked the apostles. ‘At this very moment, do you know what the most urgent question is? It’s the perfect square.’
“‘Marvelous!’ I cried. ‘I have a clear and precise study of the perfect square.’
“‘Well, isn’t that nice!’ they said, looking at one another.
“‘It’s not a matter of the perfect square, Madame Strong-Pen’ another snapped at me, going back to lining up his bread and butter, ‘it’s the angle of the circle that’s the order of the day.’ With that, a hearty burst of laughter saluted my departure.”
The lady concluded, amiably: “I didn’t look for the angle of the circle, but if by chance I find it, I’ll accord the rights to those Messieurs.”
A further comment is added in the epilogue to the story:
Célestine’s servant returned to France. She wrote a memoir of her mistress. That consoled her a little for the loss of her idol, but she perceived that counterfeits had been made of the history; she complained about that, saying that Célestine was a true model and that people had made her into a she-devil.
“It’s to make her story useful,” one cynic said to her, “for, however beautiful the things you say are, they go moldy in the light, if you don’t know how to adapt them. As one knows one’s saints, one honors them, mark my words....”
Marthe heard the words but did not understand them at all. It was explained to her that virtue had no history, that only vice counted, and that if, naively, an author embarked upon an account of everyday virtues, the book would be given as a prize to schoolchildren who would already smile, in accordance with the spirit of the age if they didn’t impertinently add the familiar locution: “It’s boring.”
“So,” her interlocutor concluded, “in order to make humans swallow the pill of education, do what the druggists do; envelop the bitterness of reason in something pleasant—and what pleases our epoch is cascades, upheavals and the risqué; otherwise, my dear, your protests will be a waste of effort, for no one will read a single word.”
The poor servant tried to protest; she wrote sensible things simply, but, as no one ever read them, she was obliged to admit that what she had been told was true.
Le Monde renversé is, in essence, the answer to that advice. It presents the history of the divine Célestine, the ultimate femme fatale, as a sequence of “cascades, upheavals and the risqué,” in no uncertain terms. The most beautiful daughter of a family of Montmartean whores, she learns the art of the only power that women retain in a masculinist society—the power of sex appeal—and contrives to cajole and bribe her way to a temporary sultanate. Once in power, she tells her subjects that, as they have never sought to change their laws, they are obviously very content with them, so that she will retain them all integrally—except that she will invert the terms “woman” and “man” so that women will henceforth have all the powers over men than men previously had over women.
The resultant upside-down society cannot endure, of course, if only because Célestine’s only reason for doing anything is to stave off the deadly effects of ennui—and nothing amuses her for long—but while it lasts its effects are spectacular and hilarious. The story must have seemed utterly bizarre to anyone who read it in 1872, and not at all the sort of book that a respectable married woman ought to write—indeed, it still seems a trifle startling even in the era of such brilliantly sarcastic feminists as Jody Scott, Josephine Saxton, and Pussy Riot. However, it was publishable at that particular moment in time and does cast some light into the dark realm of works deemed unpublishable even then and thus condemned to the same unhistory as Olympe de Gouges’s account of the salvation of France, Marie-Antoinette herself, and citizenesses in general.
One avid reader who would doubtless have been delighted to laugh out loud at Le Monde renversé but who certainly did not get the opportunity was Louise Michel, who, like Marcelle Tinayre, had been involved in the Commune but had suffered its after-effects much more severely.
Louise Michel was born in 1830 at the Château de Vroncourt in the Haut-Marne where her mother was a servant, having been fathered either by the châtelain or his scion. She was brought up there by the châtelain’s family, who invited her to refer to them as her “grandparents,” and given a liberal education, in the course of which she took considerable delight in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire. As a bastard and in terms of social class a “half-breed,” she was well-primed for hostility to the prevailing social order and even for a certain resentful truculence. In 1852, she obtained a certificate permitting her to work as a schoolteacher, but she was unable to work in state-approved schools because she refused to recognize Napoléon III as head of state following his coup d’état in the previous year. She opened a school of her own, but it failed, and in 1856, she went to Paris where she worked in a boarding school run by one Madame Voillier. She did, however, make two further attempts to open schools of her own in 1865 and 1868.
Michel wrote a good deal during this period, including poetry, short stories, and legendary tales; she was in regular correspondence with Victor Hugo and was considerably influenced by his ideas. She contributed to radical periodicals, but her active political involvements in the 1860s were relatively moderate. In 1869, she became the secretary of the Societé démocratque de moralisation, an organization established to assist female workers—effectively, to try to ameliorate the circumstances that forced so many of them into prostitution. She would surely have remained an obscure schoolteacher and unsuccessful writer indefinitely, having no apparent ambition to become a legend in her own lifetime, had not circumstances changed dramatically in 1870 (the year in which she turned forty), with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Paris.
Her initial involvement in the upheaval was patriotic rather than revolutionary; she did what she could to support the cause of National Defense during the siege, running a canteen and working in field hospitals as well as taking an active role in the Comité de vigilance des citoyens du dix-huitième arrondissement de Paris. As president of that committee, she met various people who were later to become important political figures, including Georges Clemenceau, then mayor of Montmartre, and Théophile Ferré, a member of the National Guard who became one of the prime movers and most aggressive promoters of the Commune. Louise became infatuated with Ferré (sixteen years her junior), and her subsequent actions were partly guided by that infatuation.
It is now impossible to separate fact from fiction in trying to determine exactly what part Louise Michel played in the Commune. Her memoirs are understandably a trifle coy and self-serving, and the accusations leveled against her in her subsequent trial were certainly trumped up. The most widely repeated rumors—including the allegation that she volunteered to assassinate Adolphe Thiers, the head of the provisional government that established itself in Versailles in opposition to the Commune, and that she personally set fire to the Hôtel de Ville while wearing a National Guard uniform—were fantasies invented by the newspapers when she became a celebrity of sorts.
Her legend began to take form when, having escaped after the military suppression of the Commune, she was blackmailed into surrendering by threats made against her mother. Detained with thousands of others at the camp at Satory, she witnessed the summary execution of numerous friends and associates, including Ferré. Like Ferré, she had refused to defend herself at her trial on the accurate grounds that it was a hollow travesty of justice. One anecdote more likely to be true than all the rest is that she loudly demanded that her judges sentence her to death. Perhaps if she had not done that they would have, but instead they deported her to New Caledonia. By the time of her embarkation she had already become famous, assisted by Victor Hugo’s campaigning on her behalf and by extensive press coverage which stuck her with such nicknames as “La Louve rouge” [the Red She-wolf].
It was in the course of the four-month voyage to New Caledonia in the company of other Communards who escaped the firing squad that her political views became refined into anarchism. She later participated in the formulation its manifesto, perhaps initially under the influence of the polemicist Henri Rochefort. However, if the government of the Third Republic had hoped to export her burgeoning legend along with her, they failed. She remained a person of interest to the Parisian press, and there nothing stood in the way of her promotion as a heroine—initially for attempting to arrange for the education of the children of the exiles and those of the native islanders and then for allegedly being the only anarchist among the former Communards to be consistent enough in her views to side with the native Kanaks in their 1878 rebellion. She remained in communication with Hugo, Clemenceau, and other supporters in Paris who campaigned for her release.
Eventually in 1880, the transported Communards were given a general amnesty, and most of them returned to Paris, including Michel. On arrival, crowds in Dieppe and Paris warmly welcomed her, and Dieppe eventually erected a plaque commemorating the occasion. She became a popular public speaker and resumed writing, seemingly set for a successful career as a political agitator. However, in March 1883, she took part in a demonstration on behalf of the unemployed, inevitably placed at the head of the march, which ended in a confrontation with the police and during which three bakers’ shops were pillaged. For that participation, she was tried in June and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for “incitement to riot”—with instructions that she be kept in solitary confinement and not allowed any communication with the outside world in an attempt to shut her up for good.
Her silence proved more eloquent than her speechifying, and further campaigns on her behalf eventually forced her release. While she was in jail, she staved off the effects of solitary confinement by writing: letters of protest to the government, her memoirs (focusing on the rank injustice of her trials), and several works of fiction, apparently for light relief. There is no doubt at all that no one else would have been able to publish those works of fiction, but the simple fact that she was famous made her an exception. Even so, like Léonie Rouzade’s Le Monde renversé, they are more interesting for what they are not than what they are and for the unhistory tantalizingly glimpsed in their margins.
The first of the two volumes derived from her prison writings, Les Microbes humains (tr. as The Human Microbes) was published by Dentu in 1886, not long after her release from jail halfway through her sentence. Although clearly written with publication half in mind, the primary motive guiding its composition can only have been to provide a distraction and an internal refuge from her awful circumstances. By necessity, therefore, Les Microbes humains is the work of an author who was certainly malnourished, in poor physical condition, and under considerable mental stress. It was probably written in dribs and drabs with shoddy implements, on paper of poor quality, and without access to reference books. When the manuscript was eventually handed to the publisher—some years before the author had initially anticipated having that opportunity—it must have posed a challenge. At any rate, the Dentu text is an unholy mess, riddled with errors.
Text is missing in several places, including an entire chapter, and the incoherency of the text is compounded by the fact that fragments of several other stories are rather arbitrarily jammed into the main narrative. Many passages are synoptic, bearing some resemblance to the skeletal texts Auguste Maquet used to provide for fleshing out and embellishment by Alexandre Dumas, and it seems indubitable that the narrative was at one time intended to be fleshed out and tidied up at a later date. The story is clearly modeled on the classic feuilleton serials of the 1840s, especially those of Eugène Sue and most especially of all Les Mystères de Paris, and it contains sufficient incident to make up a text of 250,000 words rather than a meager 60,000. If that was the author’s original intention, however, she abandoned the idea, and by the time of its publication or shortly thereafter she had formed a different one.
In that different plan, Les Microbes humains was to be the first book in a six-novel series. Several periodicals, including the English-language periodicals The Nation and The Critic reported in 1887 that the titles of the other five would be Le Monde nouveau [The New World]; La Débâcle, ou le Cauchemar de la vie [The Debacle; or, The Nightmare of Life]; Premère Étape [First Stage]; L’Épopée, ou la légende nouvelle [The Epic; or, The New Legend]; and D’Astre en astre [From One Planet to Another]. Only the second volume appeared, in 1888. The Gazette anecdotique reported in 1887 that the author was correcting the proofs of all five of the other volumes, but that was optimism; the main story of the second is abruptly cut off and the remaining pages filled in by fragments of other texts, and the remaining four volumes were never written—which is a great pity, given that the schema seems to have embraced not merely a worldwide transformation of the Earth but an expansion of humankind to other worlds, which would indeed have made it an unparalleled epic of anarchist scientific romance.
Why the project was aborted is unclear; perhaps the initial surge of enthusiasm simply ran out. The fact that she was jailed again late in 1886 for four months, followed by an attempt to assassinate her in 1888—she was shot in the head—certainly did not help, nor did the fact that she was subsequently imprisoned yet again and she then fled France in order to live in London from 1890–95. She continued writing through all of that but as always had other priorities to juggle. Although she had drafted the entire text while in prison, the second and third volumes of her Mémoires remained unpublished while she was alive, either because she was never able to get around to preparing it or because it ran into problems with its prospective publisher.
Les Microbes humains is, inevitably, a deeply problematic text; the Revue Britannique’s reviewer called it “le roman le plus incoherent, le plus fou, le plus drôle qui ait jamais paru”—“the most incoherent, craziest, and oddest novel that has ever been published.” The prose and the plot both have a pulp-fiction crudity, but that kind of prose has a verve of its own, and the plot is deliberately calculated to make the jaw drop. The first chapter has a sleeping tramp being eaten alive by rats, followed by the laconic observation that there are far worse things to come—and the author meant what she said. One might perhaps be able to imagine some other follower of Eugène Sue writing a human vivisection scene in 1886 and perhaps even getting it into print, but not a human vivisection scene in which the victim is hypnotized in order to be able to report on her agony let alone one in which she gives birth mid-vivisection.
Similarly, one can imagine a successor of Sue or an admirer of Zola writing and publishing a scene of brutal child rape in 1886 but surely not a scene of necrophiliac child molestation, set against a background in which it is taken for granted that avid violent pederasty is rampant in the upper strata of society and that the invariable practice of the law in those and all other circumstances is to let the guilty go free while mercilessly imprisoning and executing the innocent. Given the nature of her legend and her past, however, what else could be expected of a melodrama by Louise Michel? All standardized nineteenth-century melodramas were virtually compelled to conclude with a nick-of-time rescue, a joyous family reunion, a loving marriage and an abundant inheritance, those being the essential elements of a “happy ending” back then, but Michel, having carefully provided the narrative raw material for all of them, refuses every single one. Her plot—including all the missing sections as well as those that are there and those that are there is spite of the fact that they clearly do not belong—is one long blast of unmitigated wrath against the corrupt society that had treated her and all her unfortunate peers so very badly.
Needless to say, the book was not well received. Les Microbes humains was never reprinted in France and is presently an extremely rare book, not yet available on gallica. It is, admittedly, a very bad book by purely literary standards, but it is a remarkable and unique book nevertheless at least within its own era. Le Nouveau monde is even worse by those same pure literary standards but still remarkable for the hysterical pitch of indignation it achieves in depicting and castigating a society in which women and young girls in particular are cruelly and relentlessly victimized—debauched, tortured and murdered—while the law invariably sides with the torturers, unsurprisingly, given that its representatives are among the most ruthless persecutors.
There are, however, glimpses of relief within the horrific imagery; there are heroic anarchists who, having no realistic chance of overthrowing the existing order, establish a utopian enclave of their own to which they recruit escapees from New Caledonia and other places of exile. In Les Microbes humains, the foundations of that utopian community are still a distant prospect, but in Le Nouveau monde, it is actually established in the Arctic where it works very well until the villain contrives to blow it up by means of a new kind of explosive invented there and stored a trifle carelessly. The details of the utopia within the text are slight, but there is an inevitable insistence on the fact that women there are safe from the terrible oppressions that they suffer in the outside world and able to take a full and equal role in the maintenance and progress of the society—that they are citizenesses in the sense of Olympe de Gouges’s Déclaration. Perhaps there is not sufficient emphasis on that to recommend Louis Michel as a specifically feminist propagandist, but her understanding of anarchism definitely forbade all domestic tyranny as well as overarching political tyranny.
The most interesting aspect of the two published books, however, is the hints that they offer as to the intended or hoped for contents of the four that were not. From the titles alone, we can deduce that they were to tell the story of a massive geological upheaval that was to bring down the existing social order (such upheavals were a standard features of French futuristic fiction of the nineteenth century, especially in the long sequence of stories featuring the future ruins of Paris), followed by a process of reconstruction that would eventually see the triumph of anarchism and then a further phase of human evolution involving travel between the different worlds of the solar system and perhaps the integration of human society with a much broader society of intelligent beings.
One of the fragments appended to the story told in Le Nouveau monde offers some significant clues as to what the new phase of evolution and the expansion into the solar system would have involved and the role to be played therein by science, symbolized within both extant texts by the enigmatic character of Dr. Gael. Gael is introduced in Les Microbes humain as a vivisectionist, seemingly as a stock villain. In one of the extraneous fragments dropped into the pages, we find him in Africa operating on the brains of a human child and a number of chimpanzees, hoping to make discoveries regarding the relationship between brain and mind by reducing the intelligence of the child and enhancing that of the apes. He is also the doctor who carries out the bloodcurdling experiment mentioned above, in which a pregnant woman undergoing vivisection while hypnotized gives birth in his laboratory.
In the second volume, however, Gael, no longer a villain, has joined the anarchists in order to lend the support of his scientific genius to their utopian enterprise; the fact that one of his discoveries is used to destroy the enclave does not seem to be held against him. In another extraneous fragment, he has built a device that allows him to communicate with the inhabitants of Mars with whom he is busy trading information, and he has developed a means of replacing the cells of his body with more resilient ones which effectively make him superhuman and perhaps immortal. Presumably, both of these elements were scheduled to play a significant role in the future volumes of the series, facilitating the recovery of society after the great catastrophe and the eventual expansion of that society beyond the Earth.
Could Louise Michel have written those books if she had not been shot, imprisoned, and harassed until the day she died? If she had, would they have been any good? If they had been any good, would they have been published? One suspects that the answer to the first question was no, rendering the others redundant, but there was certainly a moment in time when she had the ambition to write the great anarchist epic, mapping out the future course of human society’s evolution from the utter corruption and degradation described so luridly in Les Microbes humains to a condition of true liberty, equality, and sorority: a world fit not merely for heroes but also for wives and little girls.
Let us remember, however, the advice that Célestine’s maid received to the effect that “what pleases our epoch is cascades, upheavals, and the risqué.” There is no lack of those three elements in Les Microbes humains or even Le Nouveau monde, and one can be reasonably sure that La Débâcle, ou le Cauchemar de la vie would not have lacked them had it ever been written—but what about the other three in which young girls would presumably have some other role in the plot than to be abducted, debauched, pimped, and condemned to murder or suicide, and even scientists would find kinder ways of treating women than subjecting them routinely to hypnosis and vivisection? Whence, then, the cascades, whence the upheavals, and whence the risqué?
We do not know. That, alas, is unhistory, which can only be fugitively glimpsed from the corner of the eye, more imagined than seen. All we do know is that in the documented world, nobody ever did write the great Anarchist epic that Louise Michel did not write or the novel that would depict the divine Célestine as she really should and would have loved to have been as a femme anything but fatale, and nobody ever found out how Marie-Antoinette, once she had had some sense knocked into her instead of having her head cut off, might have saved France and women from Terror and oppression alike.
As for the fiction that does exist and whose history can be written—not to mention the real world—it’s pretty much business as usual, on the whole.
Olympe Chambrionne is a fictitious person, but then, deep down as well as superficially, aren’t we all?
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