Michelle Montpellier was born in 1859 on a small farm near Grenoble in France. Her father was a tenant farmer and basically under the thumb of their landlord. Although an intelligent girl, Michelle had no chance to be educated or even to learn to read. In 1874 she was married to Sebastian, the son of a friend of her father, another tenant farmer. Shortly after their marriage, her husband left the farm, and taking Michelle with him went to Nice in search of work. The only jobs Sebastian was able to find were menial labour, and they lived in fairly squalid conditions in a Nice slum. Then one day Sebastian was killed in an industrial accident at the factory where he was working. As Sebastian was only temporarily working at the factory, she got no pension from the owners after his death, and they had no savings to enable her to return to her family. As time went by Michelle had to take more and more menial jobs in order to get money, and was eventually forced into prostitution in order to survive, losing touch with her family at about this time. However, she didn't seem to suffer from the diseases plaguing many of the other prostitutes on the streets (little did she know at the time, but this was the first sign of her powers activating). Eventually Michelle's luck ran out. One night late in the summer of 1881 she was set upon by a gang of sailors while walking the streets, raped, beaten up and left for dead. She woke up in the charity ward of a Nice hospital but left within days, having physically recovered with unusual speed. Mentally, however she was deeply traumatised and mistrusted all men. Unable to stay in Nice she left the city and walked cross-country back to her parents farm, hoping to rebuild her life there, only to find that her parents had been evicted after their landlord had died. Unable to locate them, in despair, she began a trek north to Paris, where she hoped to find a new life. As she moved north she discovered that she was becoming much, much stronger and tougher, and also seemed to be becoming more intelligent, understanding more about what was going on in the world around her and seeing how badly women were treated by society in general. She realised she was an Overman, and should use her new-found abilities to try and reverse the lot of women everywhere, freeing them and putting men in a subservient position. As she travelled she taught herself to read and learnt that the French government was putting out calls to loyal French Overmen to join the new Imperial Elite Guard. She decided that perhaps she could change society from within this organisation. Arriving in Paris, she suppressed her extreme distrust of men and signed up for the Guard as, initially, their only female member, under the name of The Amazon, in the summer of 1881.
She soon realised that the Overmen in the Guard were just as sexist as their normal counterparts outside and treated her as an inferior despite her being at least as clever as all the other members of the Guard. Her misgivings came to a head when Firebrand, a member of the Guard from the Nice area with fire powers and the ability to fly found out about her past. He tried to seduce her, and wouldn't take no for an answer, flying her high above Paris in an attempt to force her to have sex with him. Despite the danger of falling Michelle's suppressed hatred of men came to the fore and she suddenly fought back and knocked him out, injuring him badly. As they fell Michelle suddenly discovered that she could fly and after dropping Firebrand from a great height (although he did not die and later recovered) told the astonished Guard what she really thought of them before flying off at high speed.
After going into hiding for a while and thinking about the whole problem, Michelle decided that the only way she could achieve her aims would be to convince the French government (and by association other governments) of her aims using a language they understood - violence. She spent years building up money and resources by crime, at the same time expanding her knowledge of science and the arts until she knew as much as any other scientist on Earth. At the same time she spoke at and offered support to the various women's suffrage groups springing up at the time. In 1892 she decided the time had come to strike. She delivered a series of demands to the French government concerning the liberation of women in France, and threatened to destroy their newly-completed Panama Canal if they weren't met.
The French government didn't even acknowledge that they had received her demands, but did send the Imperial Elite Guard to patrol the Canal. With a heavy heart Michelle easily avoided the patrols and destroyed the Canal. She then re-sent her demands to the French government and, this time, to the newspapers as well. This time her demands met with a massive hostile response, and an intensive hunt for her was staged. Seeing this and the suppression of the suffrage groups she aided when her involvement with them became known, she realised that there was no way she would be able to find acceptance in France any more, and came to the conclusion that she would have to carve out a nation of her own which would serve as a shining example to women everywhere.
Again she spent years building up her resources, but she realised that there was no way she could take and hold a country on her own. For five years she secretly recruited and trained women from the poorest areas of Europe for what becomes known as L'Armée pour Liberation de la Femme (The Women's Liberation Army), giving them new hope and a sense of purpose. At the same time she also recruited six female Overmen (Tyche, Phoenix, Lupa, Daydream, Psyche and Lament) to her cause into a group which became known as Les Liberatrices (The Liberators). During this time, as she threw herself into training her forces, her ideas of what her new country should look like slowly changed from one in which men were as subservient as women were now into one where all people could live equally free of discrimination and poverty regardless of their sex or beliefs. This she also drummed into her forces, with great success.
In 1898, while the great powers were distracted by the war in Russia and Spain was distracted by its war with the USA, the Amazon struck. With her army and the Liberators she managed to take control of the parts of France and Spain encompassing the Pyrenees and hold them against both the French and Spanish armies. When it became obvious to the French and Spanish governments that they were not going to be able to retake the land (a process which took some time as they initially thought that they would have an easy victory over these upstart women) they halted their fighting and merely took up guarding the borders.
Inside the new nation of Minerva, the Amazon slowly reorganised things as she thought they should be, into a benevolent dictatorship with her at the head. Although to her disgust Minerva was not recognised by the other nations of the world until 1908, even before then Minervan agents were at work around the world in a massive program which by the mid-1920's had managed to almost completely eliminate sexism from the civilised world. A not-insignificant part of this was her invention and secret introduction of the female contraceptive pill all around the world by 1905, and the success of the women of L'Armée pour Liberation de la Femme in activities normally considered a masculine preserve also greatly aided the campaigns success.
With the opening of Minerva's borders in 1908, refugee's from oppression from all over the world began to flow in, and found places in the structure of Minerva's burgeoning economy. Soon Minerva became known as one the most scientifically advanced nations on Earth, a state of affairs entirely attributable to the Amazons brilliant intellect and care for her people.
Since then, despite occasional (unsuccessful) attempts by the governments of France and Spain to take Minerva back into themselves, Minerva has remained at the forefront of science and technology and almost unaffected by fluctuations in the worlds economy, a state of affairs which allows its two hundred million plus population to enjoy one of the highest standards of living on Earth. In 1975 Michelle Montpellier was awarded a special Nobel Prize in recognition of her many contributions to life on Earth, including the female contraceptive pill, both 'Hot' and 'Cold' nuclear fusion power, the first artificial satellite, the first lunar mines, many techniques for clean waste disposal and reclamation, the first permanently manned satellite, the Unified Field Theory (with Albert Einstein), gravitic thruster technology and cloning technology. She has also been awarded several honorary doctorates by universities around the world for her various works.
Michelle still rules Minerva as a benevolent dictator and although there are occasional calls for democracy from various groups, the fact that the Amazon really is a benevolent ruler, and her obvious care for her people, means that most of the population of Minerva accept and support her rule. However, her uncompromising views on freedom and human rights have made her few friends among the governments of the world. She tends to work very hard, has little time for the arts and cares little for relaxation.
When she first appeared, Michelle was a fairly short, attractive young woman with dark brown eyes and short dark brown hair. She usually wore dark red uniform-style clothing with black trim. As time passed her regenerative abilities have meant that she has aged only very slowly so that now although over 130 years old she only appears to be a stately mid-60's.
The Amazon of 1890 and 1995 in Champions terms.