Alix Payen

Alix Payen (born Milliet on May 18, 1842, in Le Mans and died on December 24, 1903, in Paris) was a French Communard ambulance driver. She is known for her letters to her family, which were published after her death.

Born into a bourgeois, republican and Fourierist family, Alix Payen grew up in Savoy, exiled from the regime of Napoleon III. She settled in the 10th arrondissement of Paris in 1861, after marrying Henri Payen, a sergeant in the National Guard, at the age of 19.

After the 1870 war against Germany was lost, the National Guard took part in the Paris Commune insurrection and was subjected to a siege by the regular army, known as the Versailles army. While her husband left to fight alongside the insurrectionists, Alix Payen followed him. She joined the 153rd Battalion of the XIth Legion as an ambulance driver. For a month, from April to May 1871, she was present at the fort of Issy, the fort of Vanves, in the trenches of Clamart, in Levallois and then in Neuilly. Her husband was wounded and suffering from tetanus, and she retired to Paris at the end of May to look after him. He died during the last days of the Commune. She managed to escape the Versailles repression.

During her enlistment, Alix Payen maintained regular correspondence with her family. With a bourgeois eye, she describes the difficult conditions, the lack of food and equipment. She recounts the confrontations as well as life within her battalion. In Paris, her mother and sister tell of their daily lives during the Commune. Her letters, a rare contemporary testimony, give an account of women's participation in the fighting and their place in it, ambiguous between overstepping a space reserved for men and accepting male domination, through the duties imposed on the wife who follows her husband.

After the Commune, with no money, Alix Payen returned to live with her parents in Paris. She tried to make a living on her own by doing odd jobs in the art world, before marrying for a second time in 1880, albeit briefly. She spent the last thirty years of her life with her family at the Colonie, a Fourierist phalanstery in the forest of Rambouillet. She died in 1903 at the age of 61.

After his death, his correspondence was published in 1910 by Paul Milliet, Alix Payen's brother, as part of a family biography in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine directed by Charles Péguy, and then in 2020 in a book dedicated to him by Michèle Audin.

Life until 1870

Family Alix Payen was born Louise Alix Milliet in 1842 in Le Mans, in the department of Sarthe. She was the daughter of Louise de Tucé, from a wealthy aristocratic family in Le Mans, and of Félix Milliet, a less wealthy rentier from the Drôme,

She had two brothers, Fernand (1840-1885), a soldier sent to Algeria and Mexico, and Paul (1844-1918), a painter and family biographer, Félix Milliet fled, with his wife and children, from the coup d'état of 2 December 1851 by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. and entrusted their youngest child, Jeanne, to her grandmother. They settled in Geneva, Switzerland, and then fled again to the mountain town of Samoëns in the Kingdom of Sardinia. She made her first communion in Samoëns on April 2, 1854, The Milliets considered joining the Reunion phalanstery, founded in 1855 in Texas by Victor Considerant. On September 24, 1861, Alix Milliet married Henri Payen (1836-1871 ), the son of Adolphe Payen, a Parisian jewelry manufacturer. She met him through her childhood friend Suzanne Reynaud (daughter of the watchmaker and jeweller Paul Alexandre Reynaud), who had married Alphonse Glatou, a close friend of Henri's and a designer for Adolphe Payen's factory. It was while following his friend to Geneva that Henri Payen met his future wife. They got married in Geneva, at the town hall and at the church. She was 19 years old, he 25.

Life in Paris alt=Portrait of Henri Payen, cut below the trunk. He is dressed in a suit, with a bow tie. Looking to the left, he is leaning on a pile of books. alt=Oval frame, composed of a small illustration in the centre surrounded by a dozen medallions that occupy most of the frame. The central illustration represents a dozen characters, some of whom are dancing, as well as two angels. Filigree and enamel frame, created by Henri Payen and presented at the 1862 Universal Exhibition in London. Alix and Henri Payen move to Paris and settle in the 10th arrondissement.

With her husband, Alix Payen lives alone, far from her family, Louise Milliet mother became the administrator. They tried to have children, without success.

Ambulance driver for the Paris Commune

The Siege of Paris alt=Painting representing a bivouac of soldiers of the French army. They occupy the lower half of the painting, the other half is occupied by a large grey cloud. Dozens of soldiers are standing in uniform or wrapped in blankets; some are sleeping on the ground or in a small trench. Behind them, there is no vegetation left. In the background, a large building, of which only parts of the wall remain. Bivouac after the battle of Le Bourget, December 21st 1870, oil on canvas by Alphonse de Neuville in 1873, kept at the Musée d'Orsay. Paul Milliet takes part in the battle of Le Bourget. The North German Confederation and the French Second Empire of Napoleon III went to war in July 1870. This resulted in the fall of the Emperor and the siege of Paris, which began in September 1870 and ended on March 2 of the following year, and which saw the defeat of the nascent French Republic, then led by the monarchists. Paul, who had been active in combat since August in the 1st company of engineers of the Paris army, was successively posted to the Avron plateau, Pantin, Le Bourget in December Henri Payen fought in a neighborhoods battalion, where he met his neighbors and relatives. His sister-in-law Louise reports in a letter dated January 15 that he leaves for Vitry. Alix Payen was already in Paris. At the back of the fighting, she was mobilized and took part in the manufacture of balaclavas.

In January 1871, her mother and youngest daughter left the Boulevard Saint-Michel, where they lived, to join her. They were fleeing the bombardments, which affected the left bank more than the right bank,

The government of the National Defense capitulated and signed the armistice with Germany on January 28, 1871. The men returned and the family could reunite. On February 13, a pass authorized Alix Payen to go to Condé-sur-Vesgre on "family business"; it is not known whether she used it. At least part of the family returned to the Colony.

Life under the Paris communard alt= Watercolour by Jean-Baptiste Arnaud-Durbec depicting the construction of a barricade on the Place Blanche on 19 March 1871. In the foreground, we can see people, including a man dressed in a red top, bent over and armed with a pickaxe to unseal the cobblestones placed further away by his comrades. Two children are lying just behind the barricade of paving stones, and on the lower right-hand side of the painting in the foreground a woman can be seen holding an object out to a kneeling man, a broom lying on the ground behind her. On the left, a man sitting on a straw mattress seems to be breaking bread, a woman and a dog sitting next to him. Three men are talking on the right-hand side of the painting, and the other figures in the background are placing the cobblestones to raise the barricade. Beyond the barricade in the shade is the sunny square with buildings. The watercolour is in the Carnavalet Museum in Paris. Construction of a barricade on Place Blanche on March 19, 1871, watercolour by Jean-Baptiste Arnaud-Durbec. Preserved in the Carnavalet Museum in Paris. A fortnight after the end of the siege of Paris and the French capitulation, revolutionaries - including the Federation of the National Guard - rose up and established the Paris Commune on March 18, 1871. Elections were held on March 26 and an elected Commune Council was established on March 28. As the Milliet and Payen families are together, they do not write to each other. We do not know what they did during the two months of February and March, nor where they lived, nor what their vision of the latest events was. alt=Back of a letter, bearing the following cancellation: "Saint-Denis-sur-Seine (60) May 15th 1871". It is addressed to : "Monsieur Milliet à la Colonie de Condé sur Vesgre." Letter addressed to Félix Milliet, passed in Saint-Denis on May 15, 1871. Their correspondence resumed in April, between Paris, where Alix Payen, her husband, her mother, her brother and her sister were based, and the Colonie de Condé-sur-Vesgre where Félix Milliet was once again alone.

In Paris, the Milliets, republicans and patriots, took the side of the partisans of the Commune, called Communards or Fédérés. Alix's mother and sister, accompanied by Marie Delbruck (daughter of the forty-eighter and then Communard Joseph Louis Delbruck), regularly visited the wounded soldiers in the Luxembourg ambulance, where those of the 153rd battalion were taken; the ambulance was moved to Saint-Sulpice Fighting broke out near Paris in the first days of April 1871, pitting Commune supporters against Versailles troops, who were responding to the "chief executive" of the new republic, Adolphe Thiers.

When he was deployed with his battalion to Fort Issy, south-west of Paris, on the 15th of the same month, To do so, she acquired medical supplies and managed to persuade the authorities to let her join the battlefield with the men. She obtained an ambulance driver's license, alt=Scan of a pass used by Alix Payen. It reads: 'Paris, April 16th 1871. Legion Council of the tenth arrondissement. Let Madame Payen pass, living at number 17 rue Martel, joining the hundred and fifty-third battalion at the fort of Issy to do military service there and to follow the hundred and fifty-third battalion in all its marches. The president of the council, Leroudier. Pass of April 16, 1871. and the relentless Versailles bombardment. She provided her first treatment on the day of her arrival, on her husband, who had been wounded in the eye,

The combats alt=Photograph of the fort of Vanvres, destroyed by the war. In the foreground, a road leading up to it, ending in a bridge. It crosses a low wall which is partly destroyed. In the second plan, the fort's wall and an entrance, located behind a ditch and only slightly damaged. Behind the wall, a few buildings can be seen, including a large barracks of which only parts of the facades remain. The fort of Vanves at the end of the wars of 1870 and 1871, photograph by Alphonse Liébert.

As soon as he arrived at the Issy cemetery, Alix Payen witnessed the battles. During the night of the 17 to 18 April, the Versaillais tried several times to attack the fort, and were each time repulsed by the Fédérés. Certificate confirming Alix Payen's status as a nurse in the 153rd Battalion, dated May 9, 1871. On 19th or 20 April, Alix Payen visited her mother in Paris intra-muros. She found her battalion in the trenches of Vanves Henri Payen organised a concert at the Oiseaux annex to raise the morale of the troops. A poet, Paul Parelon, declaims his verses. Mrs. Mallet, the canteen maid, sang a few songs. There, the medical officer of her battalion, A. Peraldi, issued her with a certificate of her status as a nurse, in which he stated that he had "only to praise her for the many services she has rendered, and that she is therefore entitled to all possible consideration". Probably at the same time, an order emanating from the head of the battalion, Émile Lalande, ordered "Sergeant Payen to arrest and take the National Guards to the Prince Eugène barracks immediately".

Death of Henri Payen and end of the Commune Around May 19, Henri Payen was seriously wounded in the hand and thigh by a piece of shrapnel that went right through it. He retired to Paris with Alix Payen. With her husband repatriated, Alix Payen's involvement in the Communist war ended. From then on, she took care of him. ten days after being wounded, on 29 May at five o'clock in the evening, at the age of 35; the day after the capitulation of the Commune. The Communards experienced a bloody repression from May 21 to 28 and the last of them capitulated the next day. They were arrested, executed or condemned to deportation by the council of war. Her family then wanted to remarry her. In 1873 she was to marry Édouard Lockroy, a journalist and member of the Radical Party, who was to become a minister, but the project fell through after he was sentenced to prison for his writings in Le Rappel.

In order to support herself, However, these works were not very lucrative. alt=Bust of Alix Payen in earthenware by her sister Louise Milliet. She is drawn from the side with her hair braided. In the family biography, her brother Paul Milliet wrote: "Alix Payen, not being married under the community property regime, could have saved her dowry; she abandoned it to her husband's creditors. Completely ruined [...], on returning to her parents' home, she wanted to earn a living by her work. First she worked for Nadar, then for Goupil, retouching photographs. Later, she managed to sell some copies of paintings, which she painted in watercolours in museums. In January 1873, in a letter, their mother: "While waiting for something better, Alix paints photographs on salt paper with watercolours. Everyone finds them charming, but no one buys them.

Settling in the Colony with her family alt=Photograph of the main building of the Colonie, Condé-sur-Vesgre. It is a long symmetrical one-storey building with large regular windows, six on each side of the door. In front of it is a small grassy area with bushes and a few trees. Alix Payen married for a second time in the early 1880s. On April 2, to Louis Gustave Poisson, For two years, from 1886 to 1888, Alix Payen kept a notebook in which she recounted their lives and copied her past correspondence with her mother. She did this in order to tell her personal story, without wanting to go beyond the family circle.

Her elder brother Fernand died in 1885, and she maintained a close relationship with his widow Euphémie Barbier (1844-1903), who lived in Brains in the Sarthe. The latter's family, also from Manche, Fourierists and exiled in 1851, were long-time friends of the Milliets and sometimes visited the Colony. Alix Payen also frequently visited her father Félix Milliet. He died in 1888 and his wife followed him five years later. Their relationship continued outside the Colony, through weekly correspondence, after Sabine's marriage in 1900 to the zoologist Maurice Caullery. She also kept a diary. The last letter is dated May 28 or 29 and the last entry in the diary is dated May 29, the day Henri died. Contemporary testimonies of the Communards are rare. This is because the repression they suffered did not allow them to preserve their writings, but also because of their limited writing skills and the short existence of the Communard. and Bernard Guyon as an "exceptional" and "remarkable" testimony, particularly with regard to the details of the defence of Paris besieged by the Versaillais. and only benefits from a few citations. Michèle Audin speculates on the invisibility of her existence and that of her writings - even though Édith Thomas had mentioned her in her book Les Pétroleuses - and on the fact that Alix Payen does not correspond to the stereotypes constructed by the Versaillais or those of historians specialising in the Commune. A woman of bourgeois origin, she was not active, nor was she a member of any club or organisation such as the International Workers' Association or the Women's Union for the Defence of Paris and the Care of the Wounded, nor did she use her pen in the newspapers, nor, unlike the canteen worker Victorine Brocher, did she have a memoir published. They were taken out of the family circle by her brother Paul Milliet, when he included them in a family biography published in Charles Péguy's in which Alix Payen, along with her sister Louise Milliet, played a large part. Four years later, he brought together all of these chapters in a two-volume work, Une famille de républicains fouriéristes, les Milliet, who, from 2018 to 2019, published some of them on her blog macommunedeparis.com. She presents them in a new version that she describes as "mixed", derived from the two sources of Paul Milliet. After having had access to the family archives of the descendants of Louise Milliet's daughter,

Michèle Audin's publication appears on the eve of the centenary of the Commune. A tribute is also paid to her by the street-artist Dugudus in his series of portraits of Nous la Commune exhibited in Paris - accompanied by a portrait in L'Humanité - as well as by the historian Ludivine Bantigny, who addresses a correspondence to her "beyond time" in her book La Commune au présent .

Contents of Alix Payen's letters in battle alt=Medallion portrait of Alix Payen. She is in front, standing and holding her face while leaning on a seat back. She is dressed in a dress and has long, braided hair. In her letters, Alix Payen offers a concrete vision of the harsh life of the Communards in combat. She recounts the lack of food and equipment, the rough management of the troops, between the cold The battalion was constantly exposed to enemy fire, Suffering from a heartbreak, he drinks heavily from Clichy, is compared to the figure of the "Parisian from the suburbs, cheerful, mocking, a bit of a rogue". sometimes the letters were even contradictory within the family. Others, fewer in number, enlisted to support their companion sent into battle, working as ambulance drivers or canteen workers. Alix Payen, the wife of a sergeant, was one of these. Her bourgeois origin also distinguishes her from most of the Communard women, who come from the bottom of the wage scale and live a life of misery, toil and struggle to feed their children. in an analysis in her 2004 book Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune, sees her as an illustration of how a woman's social position affects her life on the battlefield. complying with the duty of a wife imposed on her, even if it meant sacrificing her well-being and putting her life in danger. Carolyn J. Eichner concludes that although Alix Payen encroaches on the masculine space of the battlefield, this encroachment is moderate, due both to the bourgeois privileges she preserves and to the male dominance embodied by her husband, whose service she remains.

Appendices

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