Adélaïde Valentin
Adélaïde Valentin participated in the founding of the Union des femmes pour la défense de Paris et les soins aux blessés in April 1871 and became a delegate to the Central Provisional Committee.
[2] In the latter, the participation of women was particularly important;[3] Council members, local politicians, and officers of the National Guard also attended there, and it became the centre of revolutionary action in the 12th arrondissement.
[5][1] Adélaïde Valentin participated in the foundation of the feminist organization, the Union des femmes pour la défense de Paris et les soins aux blessés, directed by the Russian revolutionary Elisabeth Dmitrieff.
[4] On 14 April, she was the first of eight signatories — the seven delegates and Dmitrieff — of an address to the executive commission of the Commune[8] published in Journal officiel[2][1] and then in Le Cri du peuple.
[9] The Union des femmes demanded organizational assistance and declared its intentions: to restructure women's work and to take part actively in the defence of the city.
[11] She was not a member of the new Central Committee that was set up after the fourth public meeting and composed of delegates of each of the arrondissement branches of the Union des femmes.
[14] Valentin was chosen to direct the Legion,[2] alongside Captain Louise Neckbecker (or Neibecker, née Keinerknecht, a 28-year-old trim-maker and ambulance nurse),[15] and the standard-bearer, Marie Rogissart.
[2] Adélaïde Valentin's last known speech was held at the Club des Prolétaires on 20 May, on the eve of the entry of Versailles forces to Paris, the event that marked the beginning of the Semaine sanglante and the end of the Commune.
[2] The abbot Paul Fontoulieu described Valentin in his Les Églises de Paris sous la Commune as "short, fat, red-haired; a fanatic of the worst kind, who can be seen at the opening of all the clubs,"[20] and "a prostitute".
[21] Fontoulieu is a generally reliable observer, but an anti-communard one; he paints a hysterical portrait of Valentin by quoting her violent words, such as those at the 16 May session of Club Éloi: "I urge all women to denounce their husbands and make them take up arms.
"[25][26] Valentin was not the only woman to brandish her weapon at the podium to intimidate or reinforce her words; Julie Magot was also accused of doing so, and Louise Michel testified to it in 1898 in her Souvenirs.
[27][28] Martin Philip Johnson contrasts these remarks with her speech of 20 May, which is not reported by Fontoulieu but comes to us through the minutes of the Club des Prolétaires, wherein she requested that the flowers in front of the statue of Mary be given to poor schoolchildren.
Gay L. Gullickson emphasizes that, while the Communard woman in this illustration has a clearly feminine figure, she has a shaggy and rough, even unsightly appearance, like the caricature of the "pétroleuses,"[32][33] and she is isolated.
A similar masculine posture can be seen in Club à l'église, which shows a woman in the pulpit in front of a crowd of working-class people bearing weapons.
