La jeunesse de Louise Michel : enjeux politiques des récits sur les origines d’une révolutionnaire

In the last third of the nineteenth century, Louise Michel is the subject of an abundant and politically opposed discursive production. Particularly, biographical researches and narratives about her youth seek to determine an essence, a genetic heritage, or dispositions to revolutionary commitment. At the crossroads between science and politics, these stories reveal the values and ideas of the actors, their way of defining social problems, their positioning in different political cleavages : memory of Paris Commune, revolutionary action, feminism. This article shows how the youth of Louise Michel is constructed and imagined in order to give meaning and legitimacy to the discourse of credit and discredit of a personality who represents political oppositions of the Third Republic beginning