Alix Payen | |
|---|---|
 Portrait of Alix Payen by her brother Paul Milliet. | |
| Native name | Louise Alix Milliet |
| Born | 18 May 1842 Le Mans, France |
| Died | December 24, 1903 6th arrondissement of Paris, France |
| Allegiance | Commune of Paris (1871) |
| Unit | 153rd Battalion, XIth Legion Ambulance driver |
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.