Paule Minck (1839–1901)

Paule Minck or Mink was born Adèle Paulina Mekarska in Clermont-Ferrand, France. Her parents were Count Jean Nepomucène Mekarski, a Polish officer in exile after the unsuccessful Polish uprising of 1830, and his wife, Jeanne-Blanche Cornelly de la Perrière, a French aristocrat. Adèle was educated by private tutors. She became a republican and an opponent of the regime of Emperor Napoléon III. As a young woman, she was married to a Polish aristocrat, Prince Bohdanowicz, with whom she had two daughters; the marriage was unhappy and ended in divorce. In 1867, she moved to Paris, where she gave language courses and worked as a seamstress. She also joined Polish patriotic organizations and socialist circles. She participated in meetings of the Société pour la Revendication du Droit des Femmes at the home of her friend, the journalist and writer André Léo, along with Louise Michel, Eliska Vincent, Élie Reclus and Néomie Reclus, Mme Jules Simon, Caroline de Barrau, and Maria Deraismes. The following year, she began speaking in public and writing about women's issues and socialism. She contributed articles to the journal La Réforme and joined the First International. At about this time, she began calling herself Paule Minck. She had a relationship with the painter Jean-Baptiste Noro, with whom she had two more daughters. She participated in the Paris Commune of 1871 but escaped the government's bloody reprisals while on a fundraising tour of the provinces. Like many other refugees from the Commune, she went into exile in Switzerland until a general amnesty in 1880 allowed her to return to France. She became involved in founding the French Workers' Party (POF) with Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue. She caused an uproar at some socialist meetings with her forthright feminist opinions, and was imprisoned in 1881 for her role in a demonstration on behalf of Russian refugee Jessy Helfman. To avoid the threat of deportation, she married a fellow revolutionary, Maxime Négro, a mechanic; they had two children together. In 1897, she co-founded and contributed to the first all-women's newspaper, La Fronde, with Marguerite Durand and others. In addition to her journalism and political activism, she wrote many stories, poems and plays. In the 1890s, she was an outspoken supporter of Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish officer wrongly accused of treason.