Introduction
Between 1869 and 1876, Mina Puccinelli and Elisabeth Dmitrieff occupied a singular place within the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA). Their activities attracted the attention not only of internationalists themselves, but also of police authorities and the conservative press. This visibility can be explained by several converging factors: the scale of their circulations at the European level, their status as foreigners in the territories where they were active, and, above all, their participation in forms of political engagement that challenged the dominant gender norms of nineteenth-century societies. Although the memorialization of their two trajectories has been surrounded by considerable mythologization, behind the romanticized representations lie profoundly different paths.
Dmitrieff became involved in the International in Geneva at a particularly early age (eighteen in 1869) and concentrated her activism within a very short period, at the intersection of several structures of the IWA. Her role in the 1871 Commune—the revolutionary government established in the aftermath of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War—at the head of the Union des femmes pour la défense de Paris et les soins aux blessés (UDF, Women’s Union to Defend Paris and Care for the Wounded),Footnote 1 contributed substantially to her posterity, remaining in the collective imagination as an amazon who had led armed resistance on the women’s barricade at Place Blanche.Footnote 2 Biographical gaps have helped sustain a degree of mystery around her person. The French intelligence services lacked the time to grasp the contours of the figure, and managed to convey only scant factual elements to the Council of War after the Bloody Week of May 1871—the final week of the Paris Commune, marked by the French army’s violent suppression of the insurrection. They reported that she was a twenty-eight-year-old Russian woman (whereas she was barely twenty) in contact with Louis Rossel and Benoît Malon, but that “it has not been possible to ascertain what the woman Dmitrieff was doing before March 18 [1871].”Footnote 3 Even her true birth name was unknown. Subsequently, the police likewise struggled to follow the course of Dmitrieff’s exile: her presence was reported in Geneva in April 1872,Footnote 4 when she had in fact already returned to Russia. Although the press took relatively little interest in Dmitrieff—being focused primarily on either celebrating or discrediting the French-born female Communards—she made a strong impression above all on her militant circles: the Russian exiles in Geneva, including Nikolai Utin, the Swiss internationalist leaders, including Henri Perret, the members of the General Council (GC) of the IWA in London, including Hermann Jung and Karl Marx, and, of course, the French Communards, including Benoît Malon and Leo Frankel.
The sources available on Puccinelli remain considerably more fragmentary, and even contradictory, which complicates any precise reconstruction of her trajectory. Her name began to circulate in the press even before her integration into the networks of the IWA in Belgium in mid-1871. The military exploits attributed to her—during her service with the Armée des Vosges (Army of the Vosges) and during the Communes of Lyon and Paris—immediately forged a myth around this chimerical figure of “Mina The Republican.” She spoke publicly in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain to defend the merits of the Commune and to call upon women to take part in the IWA and in the social revolution. Having become an archetype of the “agitator,”Footnote 5 she crystallized all the fears surrounding the figure of the pétroleuse Footnote 6—at the crossroads between a Fury and a ShrewFootnote 7—and was naturally subjected to obsessive surveillance by the European police forces. However, the descriptions made of her often owed more to fantasy than to factual observation. Oscillating between admiration and hostility, these accounts contributed to romanticizing a revolutionary figure whose actual characteristics were distorted by gendered representations of political violence. Puccinelli was alternately described as a “Joan of Arc,” a “pink devil,” a “valiant warrior,” an “eccentric.” She was credited with around twenty years of age, when she was in fact thirty-six in 1871; she was said sometimes to be blonde, sometimes brunette; she was reported to have had women as bodyguards, and so on. Even among certain internationalists, the terms applied to her were hardly flattering, suspecting her of being a mythomaniac, self-centered and adventurist.
The aim of this study is not to offer a new biographical reading of these two activists. The work of Sylvie BraibantFootnote 8, Woodford McClellanFootnote 9 and Carolyn J. EichnerFootnote 10 has already done much to highlight Dmitrieff’s trajectory, while the research of Florence Loriaux on exiled women internationalistsFootnote 11 and of Freddy Joris on leading women figures of the Belgian InternationalFootnote 12 make it possible to reconstruct certain key stages of Puccinelli’s engagement. The intention here is rather to interrogate their militant circulations in order to examine how mobility shaped their political engagement—what forms of activism it facilitated or hindered, and how these possibilities were conditioned by gendered expectations—analyzing both the diffusion of organizational practices and repertoires of action, and the specific opportunities and constraints that mobility created for women activists.
Neither trajectory, however, should be understood in isolation from the broader history of women’s involvement in the IWA. Dmitrieff and Puccinelli belonged to a wider, if unevenly documented, constellation of women who participated in internationalist sociabilities, women’s sections, mutual-aid initiatives, strikes, political meetings, and revolutionary movements. The Geneva women’s section, in particular, brought together activists whose practices ranged from economic self-organization and working-class education to political solidarity and transnational correspondence. Other women, such as Olga Levachoff, Anna Jaclard, Nathalie Le Mel, Paule Mink, Marguerite Tinayre, Victorine Rouchy-Brocher, Marie Mineur, and Guillermina Rojas, occupied different positions within or around the International and its associated revolutionary networks.
Women’s position within the IWA was nevertheless more ambivalent than a simple distinction between inclusion and exclusion would suggest: participation remained conditioned by gendered expectations and by the movement’s predominantly male organizational culture. The exceptional circumstances of war, insurrection, and revolutionary crisis could temporarily unsettle these boundaries. By disrupting established hierarchies, creating urgent needs for political, logistical, and social action, and bringing different categories of activists into closer contact, such situations could open spaces in which women assumed responsibilities that were less readily available to them under more stable conditions. These openings were, however, precarious: as crises subsided and political and organizational routines were re-established, the legitimacy of such forms of female political action could again be contested.
What distinguishes Dmitrieff and Puccinelli is therefore not the mere fact of their political activity as women, but the exceptional scale and visibility of their movements across national borders.Footnote 13 Their comparison is particularly revealing because, while both trajectories were shaped by extensive political mobility, their relationships to the structures of the IWA and the forms of activism they developed differed substantially. Dmitrieff’s authority was largely derived from her insertion into the organizational structures of the IWA, whereas Puccinelli’s political legitimacy rested more heavily on public visibility, individual initiative, and the symbolic capital accumulated through revolutionary action. Rather than representing two organized currents, they can be understood as two contrasting modalities of women’s militant intervention within a wider transnational field.
Cross-referencing journalistic and police sources with the IWA collections held at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, this article seeks to show that Dmitrieff’s and Puccinelli’s exceptional mobilities were not isolated individual trajectories: they also participated in broader processes of political transfer and the circulation of militant know-how within the internationalist space, directed principally toward other women. Whereas it is usually the press that plays the determining role in disseminating ideas and militant models among women internationalists, Puccinelli and Dmitrieff, through their experiences, sociabilities, and talents as writers and orators, succeeded in acting directly as go-betweens on a transnational scale, connecting women’s groups across national contexts and at times shaping the conflicts that ran through them. The study of their paths, finally, sheds light on the porosity between the women’s sections of the IWA and the forms of coordination, often tacit and informal, that developed between them, in particular around the structuring role played by the women’s section of Geneva,Footnote 14 which Dmitrieff and Puccinelli both frequented without, however, crossing paths there.
Circulating as foreign women within the IWA
Although the profiles of Dmitrieff and Puccinelli differ in social, political and generational terms, they nonetheless shared a capacity to cross the material and symbolic boundaries that circumscribed women’s possibilities for action in the nineteenth century: both undertook extensive journeys alone, before, during and after the revolutionary episodes in which they took part, repeatedly moving between different political and organizational settings. Their trajectories therefore offer particularly well-documented examples of sustained transnational mobility among women connected to the IWA.
Born on November 1, 1851, in Volok, in the Toropetsky Uyezd of the Pskov Governorate of the Russian Empire, Elizaveta Lukinichna Kusheleva, later known as Dmitrieff, came from a relatively comfortable social background. The daughter of a Russian noble landowner and a German nurse, she received a high-level education while remaining outside her father’s noble estate: although he later recognized her, she had been born out of wedlock and could inherit part of his fortune but not his noble status. This intermediate social position distinguished her from both the established nobility and the working-class activists with whom she would later engage. Drawn from an early age to socialist ideas and Russian revolutionary currents, she entered into what was known as a “fictitious marriage” with Colonel Mikhail Tomanovsky,Footnote 15 a practice used among Russian radicals to allow women to escape paternal authority and pursue independent lives, including abroad. As Richard Stites has shown, such unions formed part of the strategies through which Russian women sought to circumvent the legal and social constraints governing their mobility and autonomy.Footnote 16 In Dmitrieff’s case, the marriage enabled her to leave her family and go to Switzerland, ostensibly to pursue her studies. This marriage, together with the economic and cultural resources at her disposal, gave her possibilities for political circulation that were exceptional for a woman of her time.
The IWA was not a centralized organization in the modern sense of the term. Although the General Council was intended to coordinate the Association’s activities across national and local sections, its authority depended on the recognition of its decisions by affiliated groups and remained subject to political and organizational tensions. Political information and decisions therefore circulated among several interconnected sections, correspondence networks, and local and national centers rather than simply flowing from a single center to a subordinate periphery. Dmitrieff’s involvement in the IWA began in 1869, during her second stay in Geneva—the first without her husband—from which point she began to call herself “citoyenne Élise” (citizen Elise). She joined the Russian section and the Section des dames (Ladies’ section) of the Geneva International simultaneously. She immediately took part in various forms of mutual aid activity, notably financial support for the newspaper Narodnoe delo as well as for strike movements in Switzerland. Her insertion into the Russian networks of Geneva therefore afforded her a strategic position when these networks decided to strengthen their relations with the GC in London—particularly with Karl MarxFootnote 17—and became involved in decisions and initiatives concerning the IWA’s activities in Paris. She was chosen by Utin as an intermediary to correspond with Marx and the GC concerning the state of the struggles in Russia and Great Britain, and also to report to London on the ongoing conflicts in Geneva with the libertarians of the International Alliance of Socialist DemocracyFootnote 18 (under the aegis of Mikhail Bakunin). Sent to London in November 1870 as official emissary of the Russian section, Dmitrieff was further recommended to the GC by Perret, secretary of the central committee of the whole Geneva International, who praised her dedication and entrusted her with additional tasks relating to the transmission of various documents.Footnote 19 The surviving correspondence does not indicate, however, that her selection as an emissary was explicitly related to her gender or that being a woman made her less likely to attract suspicion when crossing borders. What it does document is the trust placed in her by the Geneva networks and her ability to transmit political information, contacts, and documents between different centers of internationalist activity. In the British capital, buoyed by the trust placed in her by the Geneva militants, Dmitrieff was permitted to attend meetings of the GCFootnote 20 and became a regular visitor to Karl Marx and his family, growing especially close to his daughters Jenny and Eleanor.Footnote 21 No trace exists, by contrast, of any connection between Dmitrieff and Harriet Law (the only woman who was a long-standing member of the GC), which can be explained by the fact that the young Russian’s stay coincided with a phase in which the latter was temporarily withdrawing from the activities of the International.Footnote 22 While she was still in London, Dmitrieff was instructed by the GC to travel to Paris with Auguste Serraillier in order to report on the revolutionary events there. Arriving in the French capital on March 28 under a false passport, she adopted the pseudonym “Dmitrieff,” corresponded with Marx and the GC through Jung,Footnote 23 and even urged Jenny Marx to join her.Footnote 24 Her use of a false passport suggests that her mobility could not simply be understood as the result of being perceived as a less suspicious female traveler: it also required the resources, contacts, and forms of concealment available within transnational political networks. Rapidly moving beyond her initial role as mere observer on behalf of the GC, which she reproached for failing to support the Commune adequately, she founded the UDF together with Nathalie Le MelFootnote 25 on April 11; from the outset, their manifestos acknowledged the necessity to prepare the women’s direct participation in armed combat.Footnote 26
Coming from a more modest social background than Dmitrieff, Wilhelmine Müeller was born on April 18, 1835, in Elbing in Pomerania. The daughter of a Prussian colonel, she married the French officer Léon Puccinelli in Paris in 1862. She developed considerable capacities for mobility at an early stage, thanks to a marked inventiveness, even though she did not possess the economic resources that Dmitrieff enjoyed. After following her husband to Algiers (where he was garrisoned), she began traveling alone through Europe and visiting spa towns while passing herself off as a marquise. Arriving in Berlin without any resources, she presented herself there as a political agent. She was eventually expelled from Prussia, then forced to leave the German states for Bordeaux, being suspected of engaging in both espionage and prostitution.Footnote 27 Puccinelli’s engagement took on a new dimension during the Franco-Prussian War. She is said to have presented herself to Giuseppe Garibaldi in Dijon in October 1870, in order to join the Armée des Vosges and defend the young French Republic from invasion. Demonstrating courage and determination, Puccinelli is said to have been appointed captain of a company of Volontaires de la Mort (Volunteers of Death), made up of around a hundred French and Spanish men who collected funds and provisions in the region. Tasked with recruiting other foreigners, Puccinelli then published an appeal to Spanish republicans calling on them to sustain freedom fighters,Footnote 28 before settling briefly in Madrid in December 1870, where she founded and edited the political and satirical newspaper El León, and collaborated with the republican organ El Iris del Pueblo. She also formed a friendship with female activists of the Spanish International with profiles similar to her own, including Modesta Periù, who had distinguished herself in 1869 through her participation in building barricades and fighting during the republican insurrection in Zaragoza.Footnote 29
The sources diverge regarding what happened next, requiring a distinction, as far as possible, between events documented by contemporary sources, episodes reported in the press, and claims attributed to Puccinelli herself, who may have contributed to the construction of her own public persona. Some newspapers indicate that she was wounded in combat upon her return to France in January 1871, others that she was imprisoned for several months in Berlin. She was in Strasbourg in April 1871, where she recounted having survived an assassination attempt.Footnote 30 Above all, she was credited with taking part in the Communes of Lyon (where she is said to have attempted to form a women’s battalion)Footnote 31 and Paris, although she left no trace of this and faced no legal proceedings whatsoever. After the Bloody Week, Puccinelli’s presence is attested in Belgium, where she drew closer to the IWA, then in Germany in November 1871, in Switzerland in December 1871, and finally in Spain from March 1872 onward. In all these countries, she gave several lectures to promote socialism and the International.
Thus, in Dmitrieff’s case, adherence to socialism and to militancy within the IWA preceded her revolutionary experience, following a logic of continuity. In Puccinelli’s case, by contrast, adherence came in a second phase, following initial revolutionary experiences under the banner of a republican cosmopolitanism inspired by just-war theory. Indeed, she initially displayed an aspiration to solidarity among peoples engaged in common struggles against regimes regarded as authoritarian and bellicose (her writings emphasized her position as a Prussian woman who had chosen to fight the tyranny of her own country).Footnote 32 It was, however, precisely her passage through violent action that gave Puccinelli’s internationalist practice a more clearly socialist theoretical orientation. In sum, even though her formal adherence to the IWA, as well as the exact circumstances surrounding it, remain a matter of debate, her integration into internationalist networks from the time of her stay in Belgium appears to fall within a trajectory of rupture marked by radicalization.
While their political formations and paths differed profoundly, both women acquired a form of militant legitimacy grounded in action, made possible by their ease in crossing national borders. Within the space of barely three years, Dmitrieff moved between three nerve centers of the International, supported and took part in social conflicts in different countries, and maintained direct relations with several major figures of European socialism. These experiences explain why she obtained, on two occasions, an official political mandate that led her into further circulations, despite her young age and the reluctance generally shown toward the integration of women into the workers’ movement—and particularly within an IWA where the very principle of women’s membership was far from unanimously accepted even after the decline of Proudhonism around the turn of 1868-1869. Yet the same mobility that enabled Dmitrieff to move between different centers of internationalist activity also limited the consolidation of a durable local base: her political authority depended less on prolonged integration into a single workers’ milieu than on the trust of several interconnected networks. The same holds, in a similar fashion, for Puccinelli, who, albeit over a longer period, moved between the Germanic and Mediterranean spaces before joining the International in Belgium and Switzerland as a speaker. The available sources do not establish where Puccinelli acquired the military knowledge attributed to her. They do show, however, that she was credited with military experience during the Franco-Prussian War and was subsequently entrusted with military and political roles: she was said to have been appointed captain, tasked with recruiting other foreigners, and able to establish herself as a spokeswoman first for republicanism and then for socialism, spreading a revolutionary message throughout Europe. Yet her successive movements also made her political authority unusually dependent on personal contacts and on the reception she received in each new milieu. Unlike activists whose authority was consolidated through sustained participation in a single local organization, Puccinelli repeatedly had to re-establish her political legitimacy as she moved from one national context to another. These two trajectories should therefore not be read simply as two exceptional biographies, but as particularly visible manifestations of a wider spectrum of women’s political mobility—a contrast that the following sections examine through the concrete forms of militant transfer and disengagement it produced.
From circulations to militant transfers: Influence on internationalist women’s groups
The successive movements of Dmitrieff and Puccinelli also enabled them to participate in the circulation and adaptation of ideas, organizational practices, and models of collective action across national contexts.
Dmitrieff’s case is particularly revealing of these mechanisms of militant transfer. Alongside other Russian women activists such as Olga LevachoffFootnote 33 and Anna Jaclard (former neighbor and childhood friend of Dmitrieff who was briefly exiled in Geneva between August and September 1870), she contributed to an ideological redefinition of the Ladies’ section of Geneva, drawing on her own observations of working-class and peasant poverty in Russia and, above all, on the lessons she had drawn from Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s celebrated novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), whose heroine, Vera Pavlovna, establishes a cooperative of seamstresses organized around collective labor. In August 1870, the Ladies’ section officially renamed itself the Section centrale des travailleuses (Central section of women workers), since, as Utin had already explained to Jung, “the word ladies is not used in Russian except in reference to aristocrats.”Footnote 34 This terminological change, far from being incidental, reflected an effort to redefine the section’s collective political identity. The section itself declared that “this change of name says it all: indeed, the women workers do not wish to disdain their own name, nor do they wish to borrow from the Ladies either their principles or their name.”Footnote 35 The new designation therefore marked a political identification with working women rather than a renunciation of the activists’ existing social identities or status.
This marked the beginning of a political and organizational reorientation of the women’s section, reinforcing the centrality of the labor question within its practices and demands. Indeed, the Russian women subsequently continued to play a key role in organizing a women’s clothing-production cooperative, conceived as early as September 1870Footnote 36 and officially launched in January 1871. Perret recounted that Dmitrieff “contributed in particular to organizing the productive cooperative within this valiant little section.”Footnote 37 A wide variety of garments produced were sold at low prices, and the profits were allocated to the common strike fund of the Geneva sections of the IWA. Thus, although the section claimed that its aim was “to procure work for women workers who are on strike or unemployed, by remunerating their labor appropriately,”Footnote 38 the political purpose of the project was far more extensive: to experiment with alternative forms of work organization emancipated from employer-driven logics, but also to foster women’s financial autonomy while remaining embedded within mechanisms of militant mutual aid.Footnote 39 Der Vorbote noted that “the women’s section does not merely seek to find suitable employment for young women without work; it also seeks to train them for autonomous and better-paid activities by operating certain branches of industry itself.”Footnote 40
The Geneva experience nevertheless provides an important point of reference for understanding Dmitrieff’s action during the Commune. The sources do not establish a simple or mechanical transfer of the Geneva cooperative model to Paris; rather, they suggest that Dmitrieff drew on organizational practices and political lessons acquired in Geneva and reworked them in response to the very different conditions of the Commune. This process of militant translation is visible in the way she moved from immediate forms of assistance to a broader project for the reorganization of women’s labor. Although the UDF initially functioned chiefly as a transmission belt aimed at meeting immediate needs—putting unemployed women in contact with the authorities of the Commune to serve as nurses and canteen workersFootnote 41—Dmitrieff swiftly conceived a far more ambitious project: a whole reorganization of women’s labor through a network of textile production cooperatives.Footnote 42 As in Geneva, the aim here too was to guarantee women autonomous access to employment and to legitimize the very principle of women’s work, while at the same time challenging the logics of capitalist exploitation and embedding the project within dynamics of political mutual aid. The program’s originality lay, however, in the scale of its application. Whereas the Geneva cooperative remained localized, Dmitrieff managed to convince FrankelFootnote 43 (who presided over the Labor and Trade Commission of the Commune) to authorize the establishment of free productive associations federated both nationally and internationally, through official affiliation with the IWA.Footnote 44 Although the project was still in its infancy when the Bloody Week began, it nonetheless represented a broader adaptation of organizational principles and political lessons visible in the Geneva experience, reworked on a larger scale as a model for the emancipation of women workers with the advent of a new society. Dmitrieff had no intention of waiting for the success of the social revolution before beginning women’s liberation, for she regarded the two processes as inseparable.
The influence exercised by Puccinelli followed different but equally significant paths. Unlike Dmitrieff, her militant authority rested less on an institutional position within the International than on the symbolic capital accumulated through the engagements she claimed for herself, or that were attributed to her. Accounts of her exploits among the Garibaldian volunteers and during the Communes of Lyon and Paris afforded her considerable media exposure in 1871. This favored the warm reception initially extended to her within the IWA in Belgium, allowing her to become one of the movement’s principal speakers. Her lecture tours combined several registers: exaltation of the Communard experience, valorization of revolutionary violence and heroism, and a call for greater participation by women in social struggles.
This strong individual visibility could nevertheless have concrete effects on collective organizational dynamics. Puccinelli’s speeches contributed to legitimizing women’s activism within the IWA and appear to have reinforced an organizational dynamic that was already developing locally. The Belgian International recorded a rise in female membership around the period of her tours, at a time when it had until recently stood as one of the strongholds of Proudhonism and of its conception of an essentially domestic role for women—to the extent that even the few women’s groups, such as the one in Montignies-sur-Sambre in 1870, had expressed an ambivalent position regarding the very legitimacy of women’s work.Footnote 45 Rather than attributing the emergence of new structures directly to Puccinelli, it is more accurate to see her as an intermediary or accelerator within a field in which ideas about women’s internationalist activism were already circulating. A women’s section was formed in Verviers in February 1872 by Marie Mineur and Hubertine Ruwette, on the occasion of a strike by women workers at the Wegnez spinning mill, in a sequence of events that closely followed the fiery lecture tour given by Puccinelli in early November 1871 in Dison, Ensival and Verviers itself. One of these lectures being reserved for women only, she had declared without ambiguity that only women’s participation in the IWA and in the social revolution could guarantee the success of the struggle for social emancipation. Thus, Puccinelli illustrates a capacity for influence on terrain that was becoming fertile, owing to the prior circulation of information about the activism of the women of Geneva—in 1870, in Le Mirabeau of Verviers, the isolated pen of a female wool-comber called on her peers to follow their example.Footnote 46 Her mobility, in other words, could facilitate the transmission of organizational practices and repertoires of action to women who were not themselves mobile.
The comparative study of Dmitrieff and Puccinelli thus confirms, at the level of militant transfer, the two contrasting modes of authority sketched above—a contrast that their respective experiences of exile would soon put to a harsher test.
The trial of exile: Disillusionment and conflict, toward disengagement
Dmitrieff’s return to Geneva in June 1871, followed by Puccinelli’s arrival in the same city in December, marked a turning point in their respective trajectories, henceforth shaped by mounting disillusionment with the IWA. After the intensity of their revolutionary experiences, both activists found themselves confronted with the harsh realities of political exile at a moment when the whole internationalist movement was fragmenting, leading to a stark weakening of the revolutionary prospects that had opened up at the start of the decade. Thus, their trajectories can be read in light of diasporas understood not as fixed communities but as fragile configurations, subject to recomposition, fragmentation, or dissolution depending on political conjunctures.Footnote 47 Although their reactions differed, their respective paths nonetheless attest to the difficulties faced by socialist women in the post-revolutionary period.
Dmitrieff arrived in Geneva in a state of physical and moral exhaustion, having narrowly escaped the Versaillais repression following the fighting at the women’s barricade at Place Blanche, where she had been wounded. Perret reported on June 4:
Good news, our dear sister Elise is safe; she left Paris amid all manner of obstacles and through shells and bullets; it is a miracle that she is safe, we have her in Geneva and we are guarding her preciously; she managed to escape that terrible slaughter with a few friends.Footnote 48
Once there, she found herself confronted with a twofold crisis within the IWA. On the one hand, pre-existing structures were placed under pressure by the repressive turn taking place across Europe and by the massive influx of exiles in urgent need of assistance. On the other, internal ideological disputes were worsening, pitting the centralists, supporters of Marx and the GC, against the federalists, supporters of Bakunin and his Alliance—a conflict known as that between “authoritarian” Marxists and “anti-authoritarian” anarchists.
Although she remained occasionally active in mechanisms of working-class mutual aid—in June 1871 she contributed twenty francs toward a strike in Saint-GallenFootnote 49—Dmitrieff appears to have withdrawn gradually from the militant spaces that had formed the core of her engagement since 1869. Thus, there is no trace of her reintegration into the women’s section. This was so despite the fact that French Communard women such as Paule Mink, Marguerite Tinayre and Victorine Rouchy-Brocher joined it during this same period, at the start of their exile. This distancing may be explained by the section’s new projects—centered on solidarity with exiles and the establishment of a free kindergarten run by the women’s Footnote section 50—which no longer corresponded to the revolutionary ambitions Dmitrieff had developed during the Commune.
At the same time, the intensifying invective that was fracturing the IWA directly affected Dmitrieff’s standing. Her support for Utin, for Marx and for the centralists in general drew criticism and insults upon her. Whereas she had already been far from universally accepted by the libertarians during the Commune, James Guillaume now accused her of having plotted against the federalists during and after her stay in London, in particular by attempting to deny the authenticity of the documentation through which the GC had accepted the affiliation of the Alliance to the IWA. This criticism moreover went beyond purely political grounds, extending into an ad hominem attack combining xenophobia and antisemitism. Guillaume indeed wrote: “This well-informed person was Madame Dmitrieff, a friend of Utin’s, Russian like him, and – let us say so, for it is a characteristic detail – Jewish like him, like Marx, … like Frankel.”Footnote 51 Guillaume’s description of Dmitrieff as “Jewish” was a polemical attribution rather than a biographical fact established by the evidence presented here. The formulation was also politically charged: by describing her as Jewish “like” Utin, Marx, and Frankel, Guillaume simultaneously associated her with figures located, to varying degrees, on the side of the International opposed to his own federalist position. The passage thus combined an antisemitic stereotype with an attempt to place Dmitrieff within the political network of Guillaume’s opponents.
Finally, the material constraints attached to her status as a refugee considerably limited Dmitrieff’s possibilities for public action. She could no longer hold lodgings in her own name, being hunted by the French police. On July 12, 1871, the French Legation in Bern pressed the Swiss authorities by issuing a request for the extradition of “a woman bearing the name Elise, living with the person named Utin.”Footnote 52 Perret wrote: “Our dear Elise is threatened with arrest, but we are watching over her and we intend to act in Geneva and in Switzerland.”Footnote 53 Dmitrieff thus became a focal point for the thirst for vengeance of the French authorities, who sought to inflict an exemplary punishment on one of the notorious pétroleuses. The French request for her extradition and the threat of arrest provide the context for her departure from Geneva in the autumn of 1871, although the surviving sources do not establish a single or explicit reason for her decision to return to Russia. In Paris, the Council of War sentenced her in absentia on October 26, 1872, to deportation to a fortified enclosure for incitement to civil war, but by then she was already no longer traceable.
Puccinelli was expelled from Belgium in November 1871. Her presence is then attested in Germany, where she attempted to resume a lecture tour, but this effort came to nothing. After a public meeting in Mainz, she went to Leipzig, where, for lack of money, she could find no lodging and was arrested for vagrancy.Footnote 54 Released the following day, she immediately left Germany and settled in Geneva in December 1871, shortly after Dmitrieff’s departure. There she resumed her activity as a lecturer, but her position deteriorated rapidly. She was once again subjected to a media frenzy concerning her supposed dangerousness, and to intense police surveillance, particularly regarding rumors about her alleged lovers. A French police report dwelt on her incompatibility with norms of femininity: “This girl, who lives by nothing but prostitution, is very dangerous: she rides a horse like a true horseman and makes remarks that in no way belong to her sex.”Footnote 55 By this point, however, Puccinelli was also the target of fierce criticism from within her own camp.
On the one hand, she encountered activists little inclined to grant her any legitimacy whatsoever, such as the centralists of the Zurich International and the Marxists of the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (Social Democratic Workers’ Party) of Leipzig, who, as early as December 1871, publicly denied the veracity of her accounts. In Der Volksstaat, they claimed to have investigated and to have reason to believe she was “an adventuress compromising our cause.”Footnote 56 They accused Puccinelli of drunkenness and boastfulness, expressed doubts as to the claim that “she purports to speak 7 languages, to have fought as a captain during last year’s war and to have been a prisoner of war in Berlin for 4 months,” and characterized as a deliberate lie the claim “that she was attacked in the street by secret agents from Leipzig and thrown to the ground, causing her to lose important documents.”Footnote 57 To this was added an outright challenge to her legitimacy as a socialist:
It very soon became apparent that this lady knew only very vaguely the true aims of the workers’ movement, for although she expressed a whole series of pertinent, if well-known, truths regarding the republican political movement and the free religious movement, she displayed great ignorance in economic matters. Her southern and provocative manner was thoroughly conducive to inviting the attacks of her adversaries and put off many comrades of the party.Footnote 58
The episode reveals that Puccinelli’s mobility had a double effect: it increased her visibility while exposing her, beyond the genuine inconsistencies in her account, to forms of political and gendered scrutiny that undermined her overall militant credibility. In the eyes of the German socialists, her lack of knowledge and of analysis proper to the workers’ movement rendered her unfit to speak in the name of the IWA or to hold any status of significance. Yet it was also Puccinelli’s character that came under harsh judgment. Her consumption of alcohol was presented as evidence of her unfitness, while her “provocative” manner was placed on the same footing as political criticism. Moreover, drawing on substantial racial stereotypes, her detractors’ report also called her German origins into question, accusing her instead of having a “southern” manner.
On the other hand, Puccinelli fell out with Utin and with the women’s section of Geneva. Whereas the latter operated collectively and developed a discourse linking the economic emancipation of women workers with the transformation of social relations between the sexes, Puccinelli’s engagement remained centered above all on her own person and on military and political action. This singularity helps explain the misunderstandings that arose between her and a number of the Geneva women activists. In a letter to Johann Philipp Becker, she claimed that Utin had used women to have her slandered, and added that she now felt great contempt for the female sex, which she described as nothing more than a “machine for producing children.”Footnote 59 She thus came to disavow the positions she had previously expressed not only on the social emancipation of women, but also on their participation in revolutionary struggles.
Although these criticisms were not unanimous, Puccinelli appears as an easy target on two counts: not only because a large part of her exploits were recounted chiefly by herself, and were in all likelihood exaggerated, but also and above all because her combative temperament transgressed every barrier of gender. Unlike Dmitrieff, who left no evidence of an explicitly reflexive approach to her own non-normative position within the organization, Puccinelli openly, consciously, and ostentatiously claimed her transgressive stance, both in her public appearance and, above all, in her writings. Her adoption of masculine clothing, documented most clearly during her later political activities in Spain, provides a particularly striking example of this deliberate transgression. As early as October 1870, she admitted:
Perhaps my fondness for politics and my energetic and bellicose language, so contrary to the instinct and education of my sex, will also have caused astonishment; … precisely the sensibility, the tenderness, and the passion of a woman make me deplore the horrors of war; but that very exaltation of these sweet qualities, invigorated by the sentiment of liberty, … renders insignificant in my eyes any sacrifice that love for humanity might demand of me, and pushes me forcefully toward a terrain that prejudice, perhaps a selfish monopoly, perhaps an unjustified feeling of inferiority, has forbidden to woman.Footnote 60
Thus, the discourse produced about her attests to a desire to discredit her engagement by systematically reducing it to moral considerations. Even more than other women activists of the period, Puccinelli was confronted with a specific form of delegitimization in which the transgression of gender norms itself became an object of political condemnation. Her lack of integration into the collective dynamics of the IWA, also a consequence of her constant travels, only heightened the suspicion and hostility directed against her.
Faced with these difficulties, the two activists followed diverging paths, at least initially. Dmitrieff’s return to Russia in the autumn of 1871 marked a rather abrupt break with the European internationalist networks. The reasons for her return remain difficult to establish, but it marked the end of her political engagement, even though she had managed to occupy a central position within the space of only a few years. This swift disappearance from the militant scene, apart from a handful of letters she still addressed to Jung (which were read to Marx, who had developed a particular fondness for “The Russian Lady”), ultimately contributed to the later construction of her enigmatic image and to a memorialization that was modest but early, thereby ensuring she was not forgotten by the first historians of international socialism.
Puccinelli, by contrast, immediately chose the path of relentless struggle. At the end of March 1872, she left Geneva for Genoa, from where she embarked for Barcelona.Footnote 61 She joined once again the ranks of the republicans: well received among the “intransigent” circles, she collaborated with La Igualdad, took part in public meetings,Footnote 62 and undertook lecture tours throughout Spain, including one in Mallorca in July 1872Footnote 63. After an arrest for contempt of authority in Cádiz, followed by a brief detention at the Cárcel del Pópulo in Seville in March 1873,Footnote 64 her estrangement from socialism and from theories of women’s emancipation was confirmed in June, when she engaged in a polemic in La Gaceta Popular against Guillermina Rojas,Footnote 65 one of the leaders of the Madrid International:
Mina Puccinelli, … whom some have confused with Mrs Guillermina Rojas, wishes a distinction to be drawn between the two female figures. According to the former, her representation is exclusively political and warlike, whereas Guillermina Rojas is an internationalist and defends free love and other insignificant things.Footnote 66
Thus, rather than explicitly rejecting free love, the passage suggests that Puccinelli regarded it as secondary to political and military action. She sought to shape her own public identity in contrast to that of Rojas by establishing a hierarchy between forms of engagement. She emphasized a political and warlike identity, presenting armed participation in just causes as more significant than the causes with which she associated Rojas. This distinction also distanced her from the collective and explicitly emancipatory dimensions of the Geneva women’s milieu, but the passage alone does not justify interpreting it as a wholesale rejection of feminism.
At the very beginning of the Cantonal Revolution, Puccinelli’s transgressive behavior nonetheless eventually offended republican circles as well. Thus, when in July 1873 she was arrested at her home after having “made herself ridiculously conspicuous in Barcelona by wearing men’s clothing,” the Catalan republican press “expressed satisfaction at this arrest.”Footnote 67 Increasingly isolated, she was arrested again in October: first in Málaga, “disguised as a man,”Footnote 68 then in Lisbon, where the authorities grew concerned at her arrival on Portuguese territory and at her request for asylum. While Puccinelli commented on this last episode by saying “It seems to me that everyone wants me to die in prison,”Footnote 69 the press wrongly claimed she died during the Valencia uprising.Footnote 70 Having returned to Madrid in 1874, Puccinelli withdrew definitively from revolutionary struggles to devote herself to giving private lessons in German, English and French, drawing for this purpose on the linguistic skills she had acquired during her travels—a project she had already begun to sketch out in August 1872 in Barcelona, at the inn where she was stayingFootnote 71. In 1875, she submitted a request to the French embassy in Spain to join her husband, who was employed at the Intendance in Rennes. Her request was granted, since no conviction had been brought against her, although the police were advised to maintain heightened surveillance.Footnote 72 By 1877, having settled once again in Barcelona, Puccinelli was described in the press as suffering from a nervous breakdown, after a suicide attempt undertaken to put an end to a supposedly imaginary pregnancy.Footnote 73 Puccinelli’s political decline and the disintegration of her standing within militant circles may help explain her absence from the memorialization of the Commune and the historiographical neglect surrounding her.
Conclusion
The cross-study of Puccinelli’s and Dmitrieff’s trajectories reveals a fundamental divergence in their modes of inscription within the internationalist space. Dmitrieff was deeply embedded in the structures and networks of the IWA, acting within official mandates and collective frameworks while retaining a degree of interpretive latitude. Puccinelli, by contrast, oscillated between the inside and the outside of the organization and developed an engagement centered above all on her own person, drawing on the symbolic capital forged through military action to legitimize a public voice. These differences point not to two distinct currents of women’s internationalism, but to two contrasting modalities of militant intervention: organizational mediation on the one hand, and personalized mobilization on the other.
Their circulations were exceptional in scale and visibility, but they were not detached from a broader field of women’s internationalist activity. Their trajectories show how mobility could become a resource for political agency by enabling activists to carry experiences between different settings, establish connections between geographically separated groups, and make organizational practices and political repertoires available for local appropriation and reinterpretation.
Embodying the materialization of the fantasy of female violence, the discourses to which Dmitrieff and Puccinelli were subjected reveal the tensions provoked by women’s irruption into spaces traditionally associated with the male sphere—the political platform, revolutionary organization, and above all the violence of war. They thus became prominent targets of gendered disqualification, exposing the structural fragility of the spaces of intervention won by women within the international workers’ movement: opened up by exceptional circumstances—war, insurrection, exile—these spaces could become increasingly contested or constrained as the conjuncture evolved and internal divisions grew more acute.
Finally, these two trajectories highlight the mechanisms by which militant memory is produced. Both activists enjoyed renown within European revolutionary circles, yet neither was publicly known under her birth name: Dmitrieff adopted a political pseudonym, while Puccinelli was known under her married name. In both cases, the name attached to their political activity came to overshadow their birth identity through different processes. Their posterity nonetheless diverges considerably, and both ultimately remain in the shadow of the figure of Louise Michel, the prominent Communard activist and writer, who crystallizes the whole range of representations of the revolutionary woman and concentrates upon herself the memorialization of the Commune undertaken by the internationalist women themselves.Footnote 74 Dmitrieff retains a fragile but real place in the memory of the Communard episode, but first and foremost through the sole lens of the heroism of the UDF. Puccinelli, an ambivalent and awkward figure—too volatile to be claimed by any single current, too singular to be integrated into a collective narrative—disappears almost entirely from the historiography. This differentiated invisibilization serves as a reminder that the memory of women’s engagements rests not solely on the significance of the actions accomplished, but on processes of selection, legitimation and transmission that obey their own logics—political, gendered, national.
Their paths, beyond their biographical singularity, thus reveal both the possibilities and the limits of women’s political engagement in revolutionary nineteenth-century Europe. They also point toward a tension that would remain characteristic of radical women’s transnational activism beyond the IWA: the tension between participation in collective organizations and the construction of autonomous forms of female political authority. Women’s activism repeatedly negotiated how to acquire political agency without simply reproducing the hierarchies of the movements in which they intervened. Dmitrieff and Puccinelli therefore illuminate not a linear genealogy of later women’s radicalism, but two recurrent modalities of political intervention whose coexistence would continue to shape transnational feminist and revolutionary activism.
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