Espace Louise Michel

The Espace Louise Michel is defined by a deep, concrete amphitheater that sinks into the hillside of Les Lilas. It sits on land that once held a nineteenth-century gypsum quarry, a place that provided the plaster used to build much of Paris. During the late nineteen eighties, local officials reclaimed this scarred industrial hollow to create a public stage. They named it for the anarchist schoolteacher who fought on the barricades of the Paris Commune, a woman frequently exiled for her radical political defiance.