The Conscripts Strike – Louise Michel (1881)

An excerpt translated from the French-language book ‘Mémoires‘ (1886), where Louise Michel republished some articles she had contributed to the (unknown to be at the time) police entrapment newspaper, ‘La Révolution Sociale‘ (February 13, 1881), along with her condemnation of that paper and the police prefect behind it, Louis Andrieux, after the scheme had been revealed

Ah! There is no social question!

This is why little children are born in the very bed where their father dies, and why Public Assistance sends one franc per person for this horrible misery.

This is why a speech display costs the people thirty-four thousand francs.

Because it is the people who pay, always the people.

But one must be content, because he is told that he is “sovereign”, an opportune word to hide the other word of tomorrow, no less opportune: the vile multitude…

Because the law of majorities applies in an affirmative way when it comes time for the human flock to nominate Badinguet III or Opportun I, and in a negative way when it comes to the right that the “sovereign” multitude could well use to solve the social question, other than by selling the daughters of the populace to the lupanar [brothel/wolf-den]; or the slaughter of his sons on the battlefield, for all the great and opportune pleasures; or the death from hunger of the old workers, like that of the old horses of Montfaucon.

Ah! There is no social question!

But it could be summed up in a single act of will by the people, who are shackled in that they are made to believe they are free!

A purely passive act that would not be repressed, because one can shoot down an army, or slaughter a city, but dares not attack an entire nation.

If an entire heroic people, with their full authority, were to close the records of the morality police which cause some girls to kill themselves (and they would be right, rather than to be registered in them)… ;

If a whole people refused to offer their sons for hazardous ventures leading to future Sedans [battles/wars];

If this conscripts strike silenced the despots who claimed to enrich the fertile soil with blood for themselves alone, and forced the kings or dictators to take the eagle of Boulogne, or the army of Membrin, or the sword of Marlborough, and go to war themselves, the questions they hope to benefit from in order to maintain themselves would soon be settled, because they would be careful not to leave their convenient places of rest and enrichment!…

Well, yes! Now, with the war wind blowing, let us, in the name of the new law on freedom of the press, come and stop at the bedside of my sick mother, and I, who have seen the Prussian War with its sell-out generals and large battalions whose momentum was neutralized by forced marches, etc., will unleash this cry that escapes from my conscience:

Conscripts Strike!

Louise Michel