A furious champion of goodness. Louise Michel: emotions, charisma and anarchy

Abstract

The article explores the role that emotions played both in the political action of the French revolutionary Louise Michel and in the construction of her figure as a charismatic symbol of the transnational anarchist movement. It argues that the use of emotions as an analytical and methodological tool allows to reevaluate the coherence of Michel’s political outlook and her significance in the history of the anarchist movement. Her case study indicates that this perspective should be adopted to challenge the dominant trope in the narratives of women’s activism and to assert the importance of emotions in the political agency of other anarchist militants: sentiment was not a limit, but at the core of their pioneering ideas and political militancy.