Emilie Carles was born in abject poverty in the High Alps. She became a schoolteacher as a common sort of means of social ascension for a poor person from a village. She married an anarchist from the Department of the Ardeche. And she moved from one school to the next.

When she was a very old lady, she led a demonstration to try to protect her little part of France on the Italian border from being exploited by tourism, more about that at the end, and with her tractor she led this demonstration.

She ended up on this very famous French television show called Apostrophe, with Bernard Pivot, who said that she was one of the most interesting people that he'd ever had on his show. And she died in 1977.