In this essay, Clara Vlessing looks at the cultural memory of Louise Michel (1830-1905). The essay compares Michel’s domestic remembrance with her international afterlives to explore how an anarchist individual is adopted, appropriated or taken as the nominal leader for many different causes.

Clara Vlessing is a lecturer in comparative literature at Utrecht University. Her most recent article “Campaigns to Remember: Writing in the Afterlives of Sylvia Pankhurst” appears in Nineteenth Century Gender Studies. Her chapter "Scarcity in Visual Memory: Creating a Mural of Sylvia Pankhurst” is included in the newly published edited collection The Visual Memory of Protest (Amsterdam University Press).

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Essay #62: Clara Vlessing, ‘Remembering Louise Michel: From Anarchist Assassin to Banksy Boat’