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, who, shortly after her birth, resigned from the army to live with his family.
She had two brothers, Fernand (1840-1885), a soldier sent to Algeria and Mexico, and Paul (1844-1918), a painter and family biographer, and two sisters. The first, named Jeanne (1848-1854), died in childhood, and the second, Louise (1854-1929), was an artist. The family lived in Le Mans, in a house they had built near the Tucé family home.
Political exile in Savoy
Félix and Louise Milliet were both Republicans and followed the precepts of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. Félix Milliet developed a socialism "in his own way", in which he remained bourgeois and opposed the class conflict. He expressed his ideas in songs which he had published and was elected captain of the National Guard of Le Mans.
Persecuted as were all the republicans of the Sarthe, Félix Milliet fled, with his wife and children, from the coup d'état of 2 December 1851 by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. They sold their properties 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. In accordance with the Fourierist principle, the girls received the same education as their brothers, went to school and to religious classes. Thus, Alix Milliet went to school with the Sisters. She made her first communion in Samoëns on April 2, 1854, before the family moved again, this time to Bonneville, where the education provided was considered more complete. His little sister Jeanne, the youngest, whom his mother Louise had recently brought back to them, died in the autumn of an unidentified illness. The Milliets considered joining the Reunion phalanstery, founded in 1855 in Texas by Victor Considerant.
At the end of the decade, the Milliet family returned to Geneva, where they were allowed to stay. 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
Alix and Henri Payen move to Paris and settle in the 10th arrondissement. In ten years, they moved three times. Always close to the Château d'Eau, they lived, at least until 1863, at no. 1 boulevard de Strasbourg, then in 1865 at 95 boulevard de Magenta and finally, in 1870 at 17 rue Martel.
With her husband, Alix Payen lives alone, far from her family, but remains in close contact with her mother, whom she visits and with whom she corresponds. Some time later, taking advantage of a general amnesty pronounced in 1859, the Milliet family returned to France and also took up residence in Paris, at 95 Boulevard Saint-Michel. They also took part in the life of the Colony, a Fourierist community established at Condé-sur-Vesgre in Seine-et-Oise, in the Rambouillet forest. Louise Milliet mother became the administrator.
As a jewelry craftsman, Henri Payen became self-employed. He opened his own factory, independent of his father's, with whom he had worked until then. However, in contrast to his talent as a goldsmith, he was a bad manager and squandered his wife's dowry. The dowry, which amounted to 40,000 francs at the time of the marriage in 1861, was placed with a Geneva notary in May 1862 but no longer existed ten years later. They tried to have children, without success.
Ambulance driver for the Paris Commune
The Siege of Paris
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.
As sergeants in the National Guard, Henri Payen and Paul Milliet, Alix Payen's younger brother, received different assignments during the siege. 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 and Buzenval in January. 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.
From Condé-sur-Vesgre, Louise Milliet returned to Paris to be with her children, and took with her her youngest daughter, also named Louise and aged 16. On the other hand, the father, Félix Milliet, who was approaching 60 years of age, remained in the Colony. 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, and more particularly their neighborhoods. During their last move, a dozen days later, they witnessed the uprising of January 22, 1871 - in which Louise Michel participated - but which failed.
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
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.
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. The transmission of mail between the territories controlled by the Commune and those under the domination of the Germans or the regular French army was difficult. If the transport of letters sent from Paris was ensured by Albert Theisz, administrator of the postal services during the insurrectionary period, via Saint-Denis, the reverse correspondence was much more complex.
In Paris, the Milliets, republicans and patriots, took the side of the partisans of the Commune, called Communards or Fédérés. Henri Payen and Paul Milliet took up arms, the former in the 153rd battalion of the Xth legion, the latter in the 1st engineering battalion. 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 in May. At the Colony, Félix Milliet reports a carefree atmosphere, where people danced and celebrated.
Alix Payen's commitment
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. Henri Payen remained in the barracks and Alix Payen visited him regularly.
When he was deployed with his battalion to Fort Issy, south-west of Paris, on the 15th of the same month, she wanted to join him. 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, a position - like that of canteen maid - usually given to soldiers' wives. She joined the 153rd Battalion the following day, April 16, 1871.
On the battlefield, Alix Payen shares the difficult living conditions of the soldiers. Together, they camped in an unprotected cemetery, taking shelter in mausoleums in the pouring rain, and the relentless Versailles bombardment. At first she worked in Beatrix Excoffon's ambulance. She provided her first treatment on the day of her arrival, on her husband, who had been wounded in the eye, and by assisting the doctor with the amputation of a soldier called Deshayes.
The combats
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. The camp of the 153rd battalion was moved in the days that followed to an annex of the Oiseaux convent, located in the village of Issy.