This article uses a geocritical approach to track fluvial motifs in Louise Michel’s autobiographical writing, particularly in La Commune: Histoire et souvenirs (1898). Michel’s depiction of the miscibility of crowds, power and human agency is mapped onto the Seine and its water imagery. This memorialised and metaphorical space is one where forces—military and geopolitical—abut. Her intertextual and fragmentary account manifests a poetics of space where the fluidity of waterways reflects the lability of both political action and the persuasions of progress.