Workers of All Countries, Unite!

Fly-leaf drawing

An English tribute to the French Commune by Walter Crane

KARL MARX
and
FREDERICK ENGELS

__TITLE__ On the
Paris
Commune __TEXTFILE_BORN__ 2009-06-01T12:43:39-0700 __TRANSMARKUP__ "Y. Sverdlov"

Progress Publishers Moscow

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CONTENTS

Preface

Part One

Karl Marx

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE

Frederick Engels. INTRODUCTION...........21

Karl Marx. FIRST ADDRESS OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING MEN'S ASSOCIATION ON THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR.......35

Karl Marx. SECOND ADDRESS OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING MEN'S ASSOCIATION ON THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR........ 40

Karl Marx. THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.......48

II.

III.

IV.

.....................

....................

.....................

First printing 1971

Notes....................

1......................

II......................

Karl Marx. OUTLINES OF THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE .

102

FIRST OUTLINE OF THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE ...

102

Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

CONTENTS

The Government of Defence...............

102

The Commune...................

1.38

1. Measures for the Working Class.........

138

2. Measures for the Working Class, but Mostly for the Middle Classes.................

139

3. General Measures................

140

4. Measures of Public Safety...........

142

5. Financial Measures...............

144

The Commune . .................

145

The Rise of the Commune and the Central Committee . . .

145

The Character of the Commune...........

149

Peasantry....................

157

Union (Ligue) Republicaine.............

161

The Communal Revolution as the Representative of All

Classes of Society Not Living upon^^1^^ Foreign Labour . . .

161

Republic Only Possible as Avowedly Social Republic . . .

163

The Commune (Social Measures)...........

164

Decentralisation by the Rurals and the Commune.....

168

Fragments.....................

173

SECOND OUTLINE OF THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE . .

182

1. Government of Defence. Trochu, Favre, Picard, Ferry, as

the Deputies of Paris...............

182

2. Thiers. Dufaure. Pouyer-Quertier..........

186

3. The Rural Assembly..............

190

5. Opening of the Civil War. 18 March Revolution. Clement Thomas. Lecomte. The Vendome Affair........

192

6. The Commune.................

201

7. Conclusion..................

207

Fragments....................

210

RECORD OF MARX'S SPEECH ON THE PARIS COMMUNE. From the Minutes of the General Council Meeting of

April 25, 1871...................

Frederick Engels. RESOLUTION OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL

EXPELLING TOLAIN FROM THE I.W.M.A........

RECORD OF ENGELS'S SPEECH ON THE PARIS COMMUNE. From the Minutes of the General Council Meeting of

May 9, 1871....................

RECORD OF MARX'S SPEECH ON THE PARIS COMMUNE. From the Minutes of the General Council Meeting of

May 23, 1871...................

ACCOUNT OF MARX'S SPEECH AGAINST THE LIES SPREAD BY THE BOURGEOIS PRESS ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL AND THE PARIS COMMUNE. From the Newspaper Report of the General Council Meeting of

June 6, 1871....................

Karl Marx. STATEMENT BY THE GENERAL COUNCIL TO

THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES............

Karl Marx. LETTER FROM THE GENERAL COUNCIL TO

THE EDITOR OF THE STANDARD..........

Frederick Engels. STATEMENT BY THE GENERAL COUNCIL

ON HOLYOAKE'S LETTER.............

Frederick Engels. LETTER FROM THE GENERAL COUNCIL TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR (RESP. EXAMINER) Karl Marx. TO THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY NEWS . . . Frederick Engels. STATEMENT BY THE GENERAL COUNCIL ON THE LETTERS OF HOLYOAKE AND LUCRAFT . . . Frederick Engels. From the ADDRESS THE CIVIL WAR IN

FRANCE AND THE ENGLISH PRESS........

From a RECORD OF MARX'S TALK WITH THE WORLD

CORRESPONDENT.................

Karl Marx. MR. WASHBURNE, THE AMERICAN AMBASSADOR IN PARIS..................

Frederick Engels. TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES . . . Karl Marx. TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEWSPAPER

LA vmne....................

Frederick Engels. From APROPOS OF WORKING-CLASS POLITICAL ACTION. Author's Record of the Speech Made at the London Conference of the International Working Men's

Association, September 21, 1871............

From a RECORD OF MARX'S SPEECH ON THE STATE OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING MEN'S ASSOCIATION

IN GERMANY AND BRITAIN............

Karl Marx. From the speech ON THE SEVENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE INTERNATIONAL. Reporter's Record of the Speech Delivered at the Celebration Meeting in London,

September 25, 1871.................

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. From FICTITIOUS SPLITS

IN THE INTERNATIONAL.............

Karl Marx. RESOLUTIONS OF THE MEETING HELD TO CELEBRATE THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE PARIS

233 235

236 238

240 242 244

245

247 248

250 252 254

256 260

262

264 265

266 267

Part Two

SPEECHES, DOCUMENTS, ARTICLES

RECORD OF MARX'S SPEECH ON THE GOVERNMENT OF NATIONAL DEFENCE. From the Minutes of the General

Council Meeting of January 17, 1871..........225

RECORD OF ENGELS'S SPEECH ON THE MARCH 18 REVOLUTION IN PARIS. From the Minutes of the General

Council Meeting of March 21, 1871...........227

Karl Marx. TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES......229

RECORD OF ENGELS'S SPEECH ON THE PARIS COMMUNE. From the Minutes of the General Council Meeting of April 11. 1871....................231

CONTENTS

COMMUNE....................269

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. From the PREFACE TO THE GERMAN EDITION OF THE MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF 1872...............270

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. TO THE CHAIRMAN OF THE SLAVONIC MEETING, MARCH 21st, 1881, IN CELEBRATION OF THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE PARIS COMMUNE 271 Frederick Engels. ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE PARIS

COMMUNE....................273

Frederick Engels. MESSAGE OF GREETINGS TO THE FRENCH WORKERS ON THE 21st ANNIVERSARY OF THE PARIS

COMMUNE...................275

Frederick Engels. TO THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF THE FRENCH WORKERS' PARTY ON THE OCCASION OF THE 23rd ANNIVERSARY OF THE PARIS COMMUNE .... 277

Part Three LETTERS

MARX TO PAUL LAFARGUE, March 23, 1871.....

281

MARX TO WILHELM LIEBKNECHT, April 6, 1871 ....

283

MARX TO LUDWIG KUGELMANN, April 12, 1871 ....

284

MARX TO LUDWIG KUGELMANN, April 17, 1871 ....

285

MARX TO LEO FRANKEL, about April 26, J871......

286

MARX TO LEO FRANKEL AND LOUIS EUGfiNE VARLIN,

May 13, 1871....................

287

MARX TO EDWARD SPENCER BEESLY, June 12, 1871

288

ENGELS TO WILHELM LIEBKNECHT, June 22, 1871 . . .

290

MARX TO FRIEDRICH BOLTE, August 25, 1871.....

290

ENGELS TO ELISABETH ENGELS, October 21, 1871 ...

291 ENGELS TO CARLO TERZAGHI, January 14-[15], 1872

(Second Version]..................

292

ENGELS TO FRIEDRICH ADOLF SORGE, September 12-

[17], 1874.....................

292

MARX TO F. DOMELA-NIEUWENHUIS, February 22, 1881

293

ENGELS TO AUGUST BEBEL, October 29, 1884......

294

Notes.....................; .

297

Name Index....................

333

Index of Literary and Mythological Names.........

351

Subject Index....................

353

PREFACE

On March 18, 1871, the workers of Paris expelled the bourgeois rulers from the city and took power into their own hands, a shining achievement never to be forgotten. Ten days later, on March 28, they set up the Paris Commune, the world's first proletarian state. It was of an entirely new type, being governed by the people and for the people, with all its social and political measures taken in the interests of the working people, the working class above all.

The Commune lived for 72 days and fell, after heroic resistance, under the blows of internal and external reactionary forces, but its experience and lessons have had a tremendous influence on the world revolutionary movement. "The Commune," Lenin said, "taught the European proletariat to pose concretely the tasks of the socialist revolution" (Collected Works, Vol. 13, p. 477). And later he wrote: "The thunder of the cannon in Paris awakened the most backward sections of the proletariat from their deep slumber, and everywhere gave impetus to the growth of the revolutionary socialist propaganda" (Vol. 17, p. 143).

The revolution in Paris generated a vibrant response throughout the world and a powerful movement of international solidarity. In the spring and summer of 1871, mass meetings and demonstrations were staged by workers in Britain, Germany, Belgium, the United States and other

PREFACE

PREFACE

countries in support of the Commune, in protest against the atrocities committed by its suppressors and in defence of its refugees. This movement was led by the world's first mass revolutionary proletarian organisation, the International Working Men's Association---the First International---which was headed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the founders of scientific communism.

Marx and Engels kept a close watch on developments in Paris, maintained intimate ties with the leaders of the Commune and gave them every kind of assistance. When the Commune went down, they mounted a campaign in defence of and aid for the Communards who escaped abroad.

In their writings and letters, Marx and Engels gave a detailed analysis of the events connected with the Paris Commune, showing its essence as the world's first essay in the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marx warmly welcomed the fact that in the atmosphere of chauvinism and bellicose hysteria "the workmen of France and Germany send each other messages of peace and goodwill" (see p. 39 of this collection), and urged the working class to greater international co-operation. He wrote: "... In contrast to old society, with its economical miseries and its political delirium, a new society is springing up, whose International rule will be Peace, because its national ruler will be everywhere the same---Labour" (p. 39).

The Second Address was written when the character of the war had undergone a change---following the collapse of the Second Empire, it had become a war of liberation on the part of France, and a war of conquest on the part of Germany, which had fought for her unity at the first stage of the war, and was now trying to annex French lands. Marx argued that, historically and strategically, the demand for the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine was untenable, and went on to re-emphasise the international task of the working class, which was to resist the bourgeoisie's policy of conquest. Otherwise, he warned, "the present tremendous war will be but the harbinger of still deadlier international feuds, and lead in every nation to a renewed triumph over the workman by the lords of the sword, of the soil, and of capital" (p. 47). Since then this prediction has been fully borne out by history.

Marx's characteristic of the situation in France and the tasks of the French proletariat,' which he gave in the Second Address, is vital for an understanding of the subsequent revolutionary events in the country and the International's tactics at the time. Noting that the reactionary forces were strong and there was danger of a restoration of the monarchy, he said that it would be "desperate folly" on the part of the French workers to attempt another uprising, and advised them to use the republican liberties they had won to consolidate their own class organisation. Lenin wrote: "In the celebrated Address of the International of September 9, 1870, Marx warned the French proletariat against an untimely uprising, but when an uprising nevertheless took place (1871), Marx enthusiastically hailed the revolutionary initiative of the masses, who were 'storming heaven'" (Vol. 21, p. 78).

This collection includes all the major works by Marx and Engels on the Paris Commune: articles, appeals, official documents of the working-class movement, speeches, statements in various periodicals, and letters.

The material is grouped under three heads.

The first contains one of the chief works in scientific communism on the state, revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is The Civil War in France, and other writings by Marx and Engels bearing on it.

The Civil War in France was written after the first and second addresses issued by the General Council of the First International in 1870 on the Franco-Prussian War---both written by Marx---stating the Marxist view of the workingclass attitude to militarism and war. Both documents show the implacable struggle Marx and Engels conducted against wars of aggrandisement and for the practice of the principles of proletarian internationalism.

The First Address exposed the reactionary schemes of the rulers of royal Prussia and Bonapartist France, who had provoked the war to advance their selfish dynastic interests.

PREFACE

PREFACE

The General Council's Address, The Civil War in France, was written by Marx during the bloody battles against the Versailles troops in the last days of the Commune. Many years later, Engels recalled: "On May 28, the last fighters of the Commune succumbed to superior forces on the slopes of Belleville; and only two days later, on May 30, Marx read to the General Council the work in which the historical significance of the Paris Commune is delineated in short, powerful strokes, but with such trenchancy, and above all such truth as has never again been attained in all the mass of literature on this subject" (pp. 22-23).

The Civil War in France and the two addresses on the Franco-Prussian War, Engels said, were "outstanding examples of the author's remarkable gift, first proved in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, for grasping clearly the character, the import and the necessary consequences of great historical events, at a time when these events are still in progress before our eyes or have only just taken place" (p. 21).

Marx analysed the historical conditions and causes for the emergence of the Commune, and exposed the "national betrayal" of the French bourgeoisie, which surrendered to the foreign invader in order to suppress the "enemy at home"---the revolutionary proletariat.

Marx's study of the Commune's experience gave him proof that he had been right when he said, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that the socialist revolution must break up the bourgeois state machine to its very foundations and set up a new type of state. Lenin said this conclusion was "the chief and fundamental point in the Marxist theory of the state" (Vol. 25, p. 406). In The Civil War in France, Marx showed that the Commune had been a state form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, "the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour" (p. 75).

Marx took a close look at the Commune's social measures and gave concrete examples to show that it had actually been a working-class government, thereby exploding the assertions of those who regarded the Paris revolutionaries only as champions of municipal freedoms and communal federalism. Marx stressed that the Commune had produced

genuine national unity and proved the importance of a centralised state under the proletarian dictatorship.

Marx drew all these conclusions after a painstaking study of the revolutionary events in Paris and on the strength of a mass of facts. Lenin wrote: "There is no trace of utopianism in Marx, in the sense that he made up or invented a `new' society. No, he studied the birth of the new society out of the old, and the forms of transition from the latter to the former, as a natural-historical process. He examined the actual experience of a mass proletarian movement and tried to draw practical lessons from it" (Vol. 25, p. 425).

Marx dealt at length with the problem of the proletariat's allies in the revolution. He analysed the Commune's social and political measures and its policy-making documents and proved that the proletarian state had acted, not only in the interests of the working class, but also of the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie.

Marx wrote his work with the express purpose of giving the working class of all countries an understanding of the essence and character of the Commune's activity and the importance of the Communards' heroic struggle. One indication that he brilliantly coped with this task is the book's wide popularity; in 1871 alone it saw nearly 30 editions in 11 languages. Its publication in all the civilised countries of the world helped the working class to see the events in Paris in the same light.

The first part of the collection also includes the initial, preparatory variants of the work, the first and second "Outlines of The Civil War in France". These contain the material which supplements and explains The Civil War in France. In an effort to make the final text more concise and give it the ring of a manifesto, Marx abridged and dropped some passages from the preliminary variants.

These variants have a more elaborate exposition of the Commune's socio-economic measures, a characteristic of the revolutionary movement in the period preceding the Commune, and a more detailed examination of the question of state centralisation and the Commune's policy toward the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie. Marx showed the tremendous historical importance of the Paris Commune and gave a strictly precise and realistic assessment of all its

PREFACE

acts. In the preliminary variants he gave a circumstantial analysis of the mistakes made by the revolutionary government in Paris, which hastened the Commune's downfall, and urged that these should serve as lessons for the proletariat's subsequent revolutionary fight.

Marx criticised the Communards for their laxity and failure to take a firm stand against the counter-- revolutionaries and argued that the proletarian power must be wellorganised and strong, wielding all the means necessary to suppress the counter-revolution. He warned that even after the working class had set up its power on a national scale it would be threatened with "sporadic slaveholders' insurrections", and confirmed the need to strengthen the proletarian state in every possible way.

The more elaborate propositions on the need for the proletariat to break up the exploiting state machine, which are given in the outlines, are a valuable supplement to The Civil War in France. Marx's idea concerning the class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat, which he formulated in the first outline, is of exceptional importance. He wrote: "The Commune does not [do] away with the class struggles, through which the working classes strive for the abolition of all classes and, therefore, of all [class rule]," but "it affords the rational medium in which that class struggle can run through its different phases in the most rational and humane way" (p. 156). Elaborating on this proposition, Marx plots some of the lines in the gigantic economic and political work which the dictatorship of the proletariat must carry out in moving from capitalist to socialist society. This theoretical generalisation, which brims with ideas, already contains some elements of the doctrine about the period of transition from capitalism to socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat as the state of this period, a doctrine he set out in his Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1875 .

Lenin made full use of Marx's conclusions about the Paris Commune, as the prototype of the proletarian state, and while further elaborating, in the new imperialist epoch, the Marxist theory of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat, he discovered the Soviet form of the proletarian state and produced an integrated and harmonious doctrine of the Republic of Soviets as a state form of the dictator-

ship of the proletariat. Lenin upheld Marx's idea that the oppressing state machinery needs to be broken up and replaced by a Paris-Commune type of state, an idea that was being attacked, twisted and ignored by the opportunists and revisionists of the Second International. In his The State and Revolution, Lenin showed why these attacks were being launched: this idea of Marx's constituted the essence of his revolutionary theory of the state.

In 1891, preparing a special edition of The Civil War in France to mark the 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune, Engels prefaced it with the two addresses on the FrancoPrussian War and wrote a special introduction for the whole series which opens the first part of the present collection. Engels showed the epoch-making significance of the Paris Commune and the great contribution Marx made to the theory of the state, the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, by summing up the experience of the Commune. Engels amplified Marx's classic characteristic of the Commune's activity, and brought out the criticism of the mistakes of the Blanquists and Proudhonists in the Commune to emphasise the need for a theoretically mature revolutionary proletarian party to guide the proletariat wielding state power. He gave, Lenin said, "a remarkably vivid summary of the lessons of the Commune" (Vol. 25, p. 449), expanding it with a generalisation of the experience gained in the working-class struggle over the subsequent two decades. Engels came down very strongly against the "superstitious reverence for the state" which was so widespread in Germany, not only among the bourgeoisie, but also among the vacillating Social-Democratic elements. Engels noted the importance of Marx's conclusion that the bourgeois state machine is oppressive and needs to be broken up, and added: ".. .The state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy" (p. 34). To back up this proposition, Engels cited as an example the republican state and the two-party system in America, where there are "two great gangs of political speculators who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends" (p. 33).

PREFACE

Engels rejected the reformist theories about using the bourgeois state in bringing about the peaceful growing over of capitalism into socialism, in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat, with the working class setting up a new proletarian state radically differing from that of the exploiting classes. His introduction ended with a passage addressed to the opportunist elements among the German SocialDemocrats: "Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (p. 34).

Engels went on to develop the thesis about the withering away of the state under communism which Marx and he had worked out, and stressed that the working class had no intention of setting up its dictatorship for all time, and that the new, socialist type of state was to exist only "until such time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap heap" (p. 34).

The second part of the collection includes the statements of Marx and Engels at meetings of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association, and a number of speeches and articles on the Paris Commune. In their numerous reviews of events in Paris, Marx and Engels exposed the Versailles counter-revolution, stressing that the Commune marked the start of a new epoch for the revolutionary movement. History has fully borne out what Marx told the Council on May 23, 1871: "The principles of the Commune ... would assert themselves again and again until the working classes were emancipated" (p. 238).

In their Preface to the 1872 German Edition of the Communist Manifesto, and in the "Resolutions of the Meeting Held to Celebrate the Anniversary of the Paris Commune", Marx and Engels said that the Commune had meant the transfer of political power into the hands of the working class---even if only for a short time---and that they regarded "the glorious movement inaugurated upon the 18th March, 1871, as the dawn of the great social revolution which will for ever free the human race from class rule" (p. 269).

On the strength of the Commune's experience, Marx and Engels gave the anarchists no respite and argued the need for a political party of the proletariat. A reflection of this struggle is Engels's own record of his speech "Apropos of Working-Class Political Action", which he delivered at the London Conference of the First International on September 21, 1871 (p. 264).

The Commune precipitated an acute ideological struggle within the First International. The opportunist leaders of the working-class movement were terrified at the grand scope of the proletarian revolution in Paris, and refused to accept the Commune's practical steps to set up a dictatorship of the proletariat and transform society on revolutionary lines. Some reformists (like Tolain) openly betrayed the workingclass movement. Others, like the Right-wing leaders of the British trade unions, Odger and Lucraft, came out against Marx's The Civil War in France, which meant a rejection of his revolutionary conclusions. The renegades were sharply criticised in a number of documents written by Marx and Engels and issued by the General Council.

The spring and summer of 1871 also saw an unprecedented campaign of lies and slander in the capitalist press against the International and the Paris Commune. It was joined by bourgeois democrats (like Holyoake, Bradlaugh and Mazzini) and the reactionary London Times. The second part of the collection also includes material reflecting the polemic of Marx and Engels against the bourgeois press, refuting the lying assertion that the Paris Commune was the product of a conspiracy master-minded by the International Working Men's Association. On July 3, 1871, Marx gave an interview to the American newspaper The World, exploding all these charges. He said: "The insurrection in Paris was made by the workmen of Paris. The ablest of the workmen must necessarily have been its leaders and administrators; but the ablest of the workmen happen also to be members of the International Association" (p. 255).

The second part also includes documents written by Marx and Engels many years later, in the 1880s and 1890s ("To the Chairman of the Slavonic Meeting, March 21st, 1881, in Celebration of the Anniversary of the Paris Commune", "On the Anniversary of the Paris Commune", etc.). These

2-2648

PREFACE

show that throughout the years after 1871, Marx and Engels continued to spread among the revolutionary workers the traditions of the world's first proletarian revolution and to explain its essence. These works clearly show the importance of the Commune for the working-class movement in the years that followed. In March 1881, they wrote: "...The Commune, which the powers of the old world believed to be exterminated, lives, stronger than ever" (p. 272).

The third part of the collection contains the letters of Marx and Engels dealing with the Paris Commune.

Among them are the famous letters Marx wrote to his friend and member of the International, Ludwig Kugelmann, giving a comprehensive assessment of the heroic exploits of the Communards, who "stormed heaven", and warmly welcoming the revolutionary initiative displayed by the masses in Paris. In one letter he formulates the following conclusion about the significance of the Commune for the further development of the international working-class movement: "With the struggle in Paris the struggle of the working class against the capitalist class and its state has entered upon a new phase. Whatever the immediate outcome may be, a new point of departure of world-wide importance has been gained" (p. 285).

The importance of the Commune for the international working-class movement is also examined by Engels in his letters to Friedrich Adolf Sorge dated September 12-17, 1874, to F. Domela-Nieuwenhuis dated February 22, 1881, and to August Bebel dated October 29, 1884. A number of letters reveal the connections between Marx and Engels and the Commune, and provide fresh evidence bearing out Lenin's statement that Marx's attitude to the Commune was "that of a practical adviser, of a participant in the struggle of the masses" (Vol. 12, p. 110). Readers will also be highlyinterested in the letters which show the courageous struggle of the founders of Marxism against the swarm of hack writers who tried to slander the heroic Paris Commune.

Part One

KARL MARX

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE^

* =:- *

All the works in this collection are published from the originals or first editions. The collection is supplied with editorial notes, and a name and a short subject index.

Frederick Engels INTRODUCTION^^2^^

I did not anticipate that I would be asked to prepare a new edition of the Address of the General Council of the International on The Civil War in France, and to write an introduction to it. Therefore I can only touch briefly here on the most important points.

I am prefacing the longer work mentioned above by the two shorter Addresses of the General Council on the FrancoPrussian War. In the first place, because the second of these, which itself cannot be fully understood without the first, is referred to in The Civil War. But also because these two Addresses, likewise drafted by Marx, are, no less than The Civil War, outstanding examples of the author's remarkable gift, first proved in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,^^3^^ for grasping clearly the character, the import and the necessary consequences of great historical events, at a time when these events are still in progress before our eyes or have only just taken place. And, finally, because today we in Germany are still having to endure the consequences which Marx predicted would follow from these events.

Has that which was declared in the first Address not come to pass: that if Germany's defensive war against Louis Bonaparte degenerated into a war of conquest against the

INTRODUCTION TO THE CIVIL WAR Iff FRANCE

INTRODUCTION TO THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE

French people, all the misfortunes which befell Germany after the so-called wars of liberation^^4^^ would revive again with renewed intensity? Have we not had a further twenty years of Bismarck's rule, the Exceptional Law and Socialistbaiting^^5^^ taking the place of the prosecutions of demagogues,⁶with the same arbitrary action of the police and with literally the same staggering interpretations of the law?

And has not the prediction been proved to the letter, that the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine would "force France into the arms of Russia", and that after this annexation Germany must either become the avowed servant of Russia, or must, after some short respite, arm for a new war, and, moreover, "a race war against the combined Slavonic and Roman races"?"" Has not the annexation of the French provinces driven France into the arms of Russia? Has not Bismarck for fully twenty years vainly wooed the favour of the tsar, wooed it with services even more lowly than those which little Prussia, before it became the "first Power in Europe", was wont to lay at Holy Russia's feet? And is there not every day still hanging over our heads the Damocles' sword of war, on the first day of which all the chartered covenants of princes will be scattered like chaff; a war of which nothing is certain but the absolute uncertainty of its outcome; a race war which will subject the whole of Europe to devastation by fifteen or twenty million armed men, and which is not raging already only because even the strongest of the great military states shrinks before the absolute incalculability of its final result?

All the more is it our duty to make again accessible to the German workers these brilliant proofs, now halfforgotten, of the farsightedness of international workingclass policy in 1870.

What is true of these two Addresses is also true of The Civil War in France. On May 28, the last fighters of the Commune succumbed to superior forces on the slopes of Belleville^^7^^; and only two days later, on May 30, Marx read to the General Council the work in which the historical significance of the Paris Commune is delineated in short, powerful strokes, but with such trenchancy, and above all

such truth as has never again been attained in all the mass of literature on this subject.

Thanks to the economic and political development of France since 1789, Paris has been placed for the last fifty years in such a position that no revolution could break out there without assuming a proletarian character, that is to say, without the proletariat, which had bought victory with its blood, advancing its own demands after victory. These demands were more or less unclear and even confused, corresponding to the state of development reached by the workers of Paris at the particular period, but in the last resort they all amounted to the abolition of the class antagonism between capitalists and workers. It is true that no one knew how this was to be brought about. But the demand itself, however indefinitely it still was couched, contained a threat to the existing order of society; the workers who put it forward were still armed; therefore, the disarming of the workers was the first commandment for the bourgeois, who were at the helm of the state. Hence, after every revolution won by the workers, a new struggle, ending with the defeat of the workers.

This happened for the first time in 1848. The liberal bourgeois of the parliamentary opposition held banquets for securing a reform of the franchise, which was to ensure supremacy for their party. Forced more and more, in their struggle with the government, to appeal to the people, they had gradually to yield precedence to the radical and republican strata of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. But behind these stood the revolutionary workers, and since 1830 these had acquired far more political independence than the bourgeois, and even the republicans, suspected. At the moment of the crisis between the government and the opposition, the workers began street-fighting; Louis Philippe vanished, and with him the franchise reform; and in its place arose the republic, and indeed one which the victorious workers themselves designated as a ``social'' republic. No one, however, was clear as to what this social republic was to imply; not even the workers themselves. But they now had arms and were a power in the state. Therefore, as soon as the bourgeois republicans in control telt something like firm ground under their feet, their first

* See p. 45.---Ed<

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INTRODUCTION TO THE CIVIL WAR Iff FRANCE

aim was to disarm the workers. This took place by driving them into the insurrection of June 1848^^8^^ by direct breach of faith, by open defiance and the attempt to banish the unemployed to a distant province. The government had taken care to have an overwhelming superiority of force. After five days' heroic struggle, the workers were defeated. And then followed a blood-bath among the defenceless prisoners, the like of which has not been seen since the days of the civil wars which ushered in the downfall of the Roman republic. It was the first time that the bourgeoisie showed to what insane cruelties of revenge it will be goaded the moment the proletariat dares to take its stand against the bourgeoisie as a separate class, with its own interests and demands. And yet 1848 was only child's play compared with the frenzy of the bourgeoisie in 1871.

Punishment followed hard at heel. If the proletariat was not yet able to rule France, the bourgeoisie could no longer do so. At least not at that period, when the greater part of it was still monarchically inclined, and it was divided into three dynastic parties^^9^^ and a fourth, republican party. Its internal dissensions allowed the adventurer Louis Bonaparte to take possession of all the commanding points---army, police, administrative machinery---and, on December 2, 1851,^^10^^ to explode the last stronghold of the bourgeoisie, the National Assembly. The Second Empire began---the exploitation of France by a gang of political and financial adventurers, but at the same time also an industrial development such as had never been possible under the narrow-minded and timorous system of Louis Philippe, with the exclusive domination of only a small section of the big bourgeoisie. Louis Bonaparte took the political power from the capitalists under the pretext of protecting them, the bourgeois, from the workers, and on the other hand the workers from them; but in return his rule encouraged speculation and industrial activity---in a word, the upsurgence and enrichment of the whole bourgeoisie to an extent hitherto unknown. To an even greater extent, it is true, corruption and mass thievery developed, clustering around the imperial court, and drawing their heavy percentages from this enrichment.

But the Second Empire was the appeal to French chauvinism, was the demand for the restoration of the

frontiers of the First Empire, which had been lost in 1814, or at least those of the First Republic. A French empire within the frontiers of the old monarchy and, in fact, within the even more amputated frontiers of 1815---such a thing was impossible for any length of time. Hence the necessity for occasional wars and extensions of frontiers. But no extension of frontiers was so dazzling to the imagination of the French chauvinists as the extension to the German left bank of the Rhine. One square mile on the Rhine was more to them than ten in the Alps or anywhere else. Given the Second Empire, the demand for the restoration of the left bank of the Rhine, either all at once or piecemeal, was merely a question of time. The time came with the AustroPrussian War of 1866^^11^^; cheated of the anticipated "territorial compensation" by Bismarck and by his own over-cunning, hesitant policy, there was now nothing left for Napoleon but war, which broke out in 1870 and drove him first to Sedan, and thence to Wilhelmshohe.^^12^^

The necessary consequence was the Paris Revolution of September 4, 1870. The empire collapsed like a house of cards, and the republic was again proclaimed. But the enemy was standing at the gates; the armies of the empire were either hopelessly encircled at Metz or held captive in Germany. In this emergency the people allowed the Paris deputies to the former legislative body to constitute themselves into a "Government of National Defence". This was the more readily conceded, since, for the purposes of defence, all Parisians capable of bearing arms had enrolled in the National Guard and were armed, so that now the workers constituted a great majority. But very soon the antagonism between the almost completely bourgeois government and the armed proletariat broke into open conflict. On October 31, workers' battalions stormed the town hall and captured part of the membership of the government. Treachery, the government's direct breach of its undertakings, and the intervention of some petty-bourgeois battalions set them free again, and in order not to occasion the outbreak of civil war inside a city besieged by a foreign military power, the former government was left in office. At last, on January 28, 1871, starved Paris capitulated. But with honours unprecedented in the history of war. The

INTRODUCTION TO THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE

forts were surrendered, the city wall stripped of guns, the weapons of the regiments of the line and of the Mobile Guard were handed over, and they themselves considered prisoners of war. But the National Guard kept its weapons and guns, and only entered into an armistice with the victors. And these did not dare enter Paris in triumph. They only dared to occupy a tiny corner of Paris, which, into the bargain, consisted partly of public parks, and even this they only occupied for a few days! And during this time they, who had maintained their encirclement of Paris for 131 days, were themselves encircled by the armed workers of Paris, who kept a sharp watch that no `` Prussian'' should overstep the narrow bounds of the corner ceded to the foreign conqueror. Such was the respect which the Paris workers inspired in the army before which all the armies of the empire had laid down their arms; and the Prussian Junkers, who had come to take revenge at the home of the revolution, were compelled to stand by respectfully, and salute precisely this armed revolution!

During the war the Paris workers had confined themselves to demanding the vigorous prosecution of the fight. But now, when peace had come after the capitulation of Paris,¹³now Thiers, the new supreme head of the government, was compelled to realise that the rule of the propertied classes--- big landowners and capitalists---was in constant danger so long as the workers of Paris had arms in their hands. His first action was an attempt to disarm them. On March 18, he sent troops of the line with orders to rob the National Guard of the artillery belonging to it, which had been constructed during the siege of Paris and had been paid for by public subscription. The attempt failed; Paris mobilised as one man for resistance, and war between Paris and the French Government sitting at Versailles was declared. On March 26 the Paris Commune was elected and on March 28 it was proclaimed. The Central Committee of the National Guard, which up to then had carried on the government, handed in its resignation to the Commune after it had first decreed the abolition of the scandalous Paris " Morality Police". On March 30, the Commune abolished conscription and the standing army, and declared the sole armed force to be the National Guard, in which all citizens capable

of bearing arms were to be enrolled. It remitted all payments of rent for dwelling houses from October 1870 until April, the amounts already paid to be booked as future rent payments, and stopped all sales of articles pledged in the municipal loan office. On the same day the foreigners elected to the Commune were confirmed in office, because "the flag of the Commune is the flag of the World Republic". On April 1, it was decided that the highest salary to be received by any employee of the Commune, and therefore also by its members themselves, was not to exceed 6,000 francs (4,800 marks). On the following day the Commune decreed the separation of the church from the state, and the abolition of all state payments for religious purposes as well as the transformation of all church property into national property; as a result of which, on April 8, the exclusion from the schools of all religious symbols, pictures, dogmas, prayers--- in a word, "of all that belongs to the sphere of the individual's conscience"---was ordered and gradually put into effect. On the 5th, in reply to the shooting, day after day, of captured Commune fighters by the Versailles troops, a decree was issued for the imprisonment of hostages, but it was never carried into execution. On the 6th, the guillotine was brought out by the 137th battalion of the National Guard, and publicly burnt, amid great popular rejoicing. On the 12th, the Commune decided that the Victory Column on the Place Vendome, which had been cast from captured guns by Napoleon after the war of 1809, should be demolished as a symbol of chauvinism and incitement to national hatred. This was carried out on May 16. On April 16, it ordered a statistical tabulation of factories which had been closed down by the manufacturers, and the working out of plans for the operation of these factories by the workers formerly employed in them, who were to be organised in co-operative societies, and also plans for the organisation of these co-operatives in one great union. On the 20th, it abolished night work for bakers, and also the employment offices, which since the Second Empire had been run as a monopoly by creatures appointed by the police---• labour exploiters of the first rank; these offices were transferred to the mayoralties of the twenty arrondissements of Paris. On April 30, it ordered the closing of the pawnshops,

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INTRODUCTION TO THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE

on the ground that they were a private exploitation of the workers, and were in contradiction with the right of the workers to their instruments of labour and to credit. On May 5, it ordered the razing of the Chapel of Atonement, which had been built in expiation of the execution of Louis XVI.

Thus from March 18 onwards the class character of the Paris movement, which had previously been pushed into the background by the fight against the foreign invaders, emerged sharply and clearly. As almost only workers, or recognised representatives of the workers, sat in the Commune, its decisions bore a decidedly proletarian character. Either these decisions decreed reforms which the republican bourgeoisie had failed to pass solely out of cowardice, but which provided a necessary basis for the free activity of the working class---such as the realisation of the principle that in relation to the state, religion is a purely private matter--- or the Commune promulgated decrees which were in the direct interest of the working class and in part cut deeply into the old order of society. In a beleaguered city, however, it was possible to make at most a start in the realisation of all this. And from the beginning of May onwards all their energies were taken up by the fight against the armies assembled by the Versailles government in ever-growing numbers.

On April 7, the Versailles troops had captured the Seine crossing at Neuilly, on the western front of Paris; on the other hand, in an attack on the southern front on the llth they were repulsed with heavy losses by General Eudes. Paris was continually bombarded and, moreover, by the very people who had stigmatised as a sacrilege the bombardment of the same city by the Prussians. These same people now begged the Prussian government for the hasty return of the French soldiers taken prisoner at Sedan and Metz,^^14^^ in order that they might recapture Paris for them. From the beginning of May the gradual arrival of these troops gave the Versailles forces a decided superiority. This already became evident when, on April 23, Thiers broke off the negotiations for the exchange, proposed by the Commune, of the Archbishop of Paris* and a whole number * Georges Darboy.---Ed,

of other priests held as hostages in Paris, for only one man, Blanqui, who had twice been elected to the Commune but was a prisoner in Clairvaux. And even more from the changed language of Thiers; previously procrastinating and equivocal, he now suddenly became insolent, threatening, brutal. The Versailles forces took the redoubt of Moulin Saquet on the southern front, on May 3; on the 9th, Fort Issy, which had been completely reduced to ruins by gunfire; on the 14th, Fort Vanves. On the western front they advanced gradually, capturing the numerous villages and buildings which extended up to the city wall, until they reached the main defences; on the 21st, thanks to treachery and the carelessness of the National Guards stationed there, they succeeded in forcing their way into the city. The Prussians, who held the northern and eastern forts, allowed the Versailles troops to advance across the land north of the city, which was forbidden ground to them under the armistice, and thus to march forward, attacking on a wide front, which the Parisians naturally thought covered by the armistice, and therefore held only weakly. As a result of this, only a weak resistance was put up in the western half of Paris, in the luxury city proper; it grew stronger and more tenacious the nearer the incoming troops approached the eastern half, the working-class city proper. It was only after eight days' fighting that the last defenders of the Commune succumbed on the heights of Belleville and Menilmontant; and then the massacre of defenceless men, women and children, which had been raging all through the week on an increasing scale, reached its zenith. The breechloaders could no longer kill fast enough; the vanquished were shot down in hundreds by mitrailleuse fire. The "Wall of the Federals"'"'' at the Pere Lachaise cemetery, where the final mass murder was consummated, is still standing today, a mute but eloquent testimony to the frenzy of which the ruling class is capable as soon as the working class dares to stand up for its rights. Then, when the slaughter of them all proved to be impossible, came the mass arrests, the shooting of victims arbitrarily selected from the prisoners' ranks, and the removal of the rest to great

Now usually called the Wall of the Communards.---Ed.

INTRODUCTION TO THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE

camps where they awaited trial by courts-martial. The Prussian troops surrounding the northeastern half of Paris had orders not to allow any fugitives to pass; but the officers often shut their eyes when the soldiers paid more obedience to the dictates of humanity than to those of the Supreme Command; particular honour is due to the Saxon army corps, which behaved very humanely and let through many who were obviously fighters for the Commune.

INTRODUCTION TO THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE

doctrinaires come to the helm---that both did the opposite of what the doctrines of their school prescribed.

Proudhon, the Socialist of the small peasant and mastercraftsman, regarded association with positive hatred. He said of it that there was more bad than good in it; that it was by nature sterile, even harmful, because it was a fetter on the freedom of the worker; that it was a pure dogma, unproductive and burdensome, in conflict as much with the freedom of the worker as with economy of labour; that its disadvantages multiplied more swiftly than its advantages; that, as compared with it, competition, division of labour and private property were economic forces. Only in the exceptional cases---as Proudhon called them---of large-scale industry and large establishments, such as railways, was the association of workers in place. (See General Idea of the Revolution, 3rd sketch.^^16^^)

By 1871, large-scale industry had already so much ceased to be an exceptional case even in Paris, the centre of artistic handicrafts, that by far the most important decree of the Commune instituted an organisation of large-scale industry and even of manufacture which was not only to be based on the association of the workers in each factory, but also to combine all these associations in one great union; in short, an organisation which, as Marx quite rightly says in The Civil War, must necessarily have led in the end to communism, that is to say, the direct opposite of the Proudhon doctrine. And, therefore, the Commune was the grave of the Proudhon school of socialism. Today this school has vanished from French working-class circles; here, among the Possibilists^^17^^ no less than among the ``Marxists'', Marx's theory now rules unchallenged. Only among the ``radical'' bourgeoisie are there still Proudhonists.

The Blanquists fared no better. Brought up in the school of conspiracy, and held together by the strict discipline which went with it, they started out from the viewpoint that a relatively small number of resolute, well-organised men would be able, at a given favourable moment, not only to seize the helm of state, but also by a display of great, ruthless energy, to maintain power until they succeeded in sweeping the mass of the people into the revolution and ranging them round the small band of leaders. This involved,

If today, after twenty years, we look back at the activity and historical significance of the Paris Commune of 1871, we shall find it necessary to make a few additions to the account given in The Civil War in France.

The members of the Commune were divided into a majority, the Blanquists, who had also been predominant in the Central Committee of the National Guard; and a minority, members of the International Working Men's Association,^^15^^ chiefly consisting of adherents of the Proudhon school of socialism. The great majority of the Blanquists were at that time Socialists only by revolutionary, proletarian instinct; only a few had attained greater clarity on principles, through Vaillant, who was familiar with German scientific socialism. It is therefore comprehensible that in the economic sphere much was left undone which, according to our view today, the Commune ought to have done. The hardest thing to understand is certainly the holy awe with which they remained standing respectfully outside the gates of the Bank of France. This was also a serious political mistake. The bank in the hands of the Commune---this would have been worth more than ten thousand hostages. It would have meant the pressure of the whole of the French bourgeoisie on the Versailles government in favour of peace with the Commune. But what is still more wonderful is the correctness of much that nevertheless was done by the Commune, composed as it was of Blanquists and Proudhonists. Naturally, the Proudhonists were chiefly responsible for the economic decrees of the Commune, both for their praiseworthy and their unpraiseworthy aspects; as the Blanquists were for its political commissions and omissions. And in both cases the irony of history willed---as is usual when

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above all, the strictest, dictatorial centralisation of all power in the hands of the new revolutionary government. And what did the Commune, with its majority of these same Blanquists, actually do? In all its proclamations to the French in the provinces, it appealed to them to form a free federation of all French Communes with Paris, a national organisation which for the first time was really to be created by the nation itself. It was precisely the oppressing power of the former centralised government, army, political police, bureaucracy, which Napoleon had created in 1798 and which since then had been taken over by every new government as a welcome instrument and used against its opponents--- it was precisely this power which was to fall everywhere, just as it had already fallen in Paris.

From the very outset the Commune was compelled to recognise that the working class, once come to power, could not go on managing with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment. What had been the characteristic attribute of the former state? Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests, originally through simple division of labour. But these organs, at whose head was the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance of their own special interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into the masters of society. This can be seen, for example, not only in the hereditary monarchy, but equally so in the democratic republic. Nowhere do ``politicians'' form a more separate and powerful section of the nation than precisely in North America. There, each of the two major parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions. It is well known how the Americans have been trying for thirty years to shake off this yoke,

which has become intolerable, and how in spite of it all they continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. And nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends---and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.

Against this transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants of society into masters of society--- an inevitable transformation in all previous states---the Commune made use of two infallible means. In the first place, it filled all posts---administrative, judicial and educational---by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the same electors. And, in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 6,000 francs. In this way an effective barrier to place-- hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates to representative bodies which were added besides.

This shattering [Sprengung] of the former state power and its replacement by a new and truly democratic one is described in detail in the third section of The Civil War. But it was necessary to dwell briefly here once more on some of its features, because in Germany particularly the superstitious belief in the state has been carried over from philosophy into the general consciousness of the bourgeoisie and even of many workers. According to the philosophical conception, the state is the "realisation of the idea", or the Kingdom of God on earth, translated into philosophical terms, the sphere in which eternal truth and justice is or should be realised. And from this follows a superstitious

3-2648

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Karl Marx

FIRST ADDRESS OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL

OF THE INTERNATIONAL

WORKING MEN'S ASSOCIATION

ON THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR^^19^^

reverence for the state and everything connected with it, which takes root the more readily since people are accustomed from childhood to imagine that the affairs and interests common to the whole of society could not be looked after otherwise than as they have been looked after in the past, that is, through the state and its lucratively positioned officials. And people think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible until such time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap heap.

Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine^^18^^ has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

To the Members of the International Working Men's Association in Europe and the United States

In the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's Association, of November, 1864, we said:---"If the emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfil that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure?". We defined the foreign policy aimed at by the International in these words: "Vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice, which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as the laws paramount of the intercourse of nations.''^^20^^

No wonder that Louis Bonaparte, who usurped his power by exploiting the war of classes in France, and perpetuated it by periodical wars abroad, should from the first have treated the International as a dangerous foe. On the eve of the plebiscite^^21^^ he ordered a raid on the members of the Administrative Committees of the International Working Men's Association throughout France, at Paris, Lyons, Rouen, Marseilles, Brest, etc., on the pretext that the International was a secret society dabbling in a complot for his assassination, a pretext soon after exposed in its full absurdity by his own judges. What was the real crime of the French branches of the International? They told the

London, on the twentieth anniversary of the Paris Commune, March 18, 1891

F. Engels

Published in Die Neue Zeit, Bd. 2, No. 28, 1890-91, and in the book: Marx. Der Biirgerkrieg in Frankreich. Berlin, 1891

Printed according to the text of the book

Translated German

from the

KARL MARX

FIRST ADDRESS ON THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR

French people publicly and emphatically that voting the plebiscite was voting despotism at home and war abroad. It has been, in fact, their work that in all the great towns, in all the industrial centres of France, the working class rose like one man to reject the plebiscite. Unfortunately the balance was turned by the heavy ignorance of the rural districts. The Stock Exchanges, the Cabinets, the ruling classes and the press of Europe celebrated the plebiscite as a signal victory of the French Emperor over the French working class; and it was the signal for the assassination, not of an individual, but of nations.

The war plot of July, 1870,^^22^^ is but an amended edition of the coup d'etat of December, 1851.^^10^^ At first view the thing seemed so absurd that France would not believe in its real good earnest. It rather believed the deputy"" denouncing the ministerial war talk as a mere stock-jobbing trick. When, on July 15th, war was at last officially announced to the Corps Legislatif, the whole opposition refused to vote the preliminary subsidies, even Thiers branded it as ``detestable''; all the independent journals of Paris condemned it, and, wonderful to relate, the provincial press joined in almost unanimously.

Meanwhile, the Paris members of the International had again set to work. In the Reveil of July 12th they published their manifesto "to the workmen of all nations", from which we extract the following few passages:

``Once more," they say, "on the pretext of the European equilibrium, of national honour, the peace of the world is menaced by political ambitions. French, German, Spanish workmen! Let our voices unite in one cry of reprobation against war!... War for a question of preponderance or a dynasty, can, in the eyes of workmen, be nothing but a criminal absurdity. In answer to the warlike proclamations of those who exempt themselves from the impost of blood, and find in public misfortunes a source of fresh speculations, we protest, we who want peace, labour and liberty!... Brothers of Germany! Our division would only result in the complete triumph of despotism on both sides

of the Rhine___ Workmen of all countries! Whatever may for the

present become of our common efforts, we, the members of the International Working Men's Association, who know of no frontiers, we send you as a pledge of indissoluble solidarity the good wishes and the salutations of the workmen of France.''

This manifesto of our Paris section was followed by numerous similar French addresses, of which we can here only quote the declaration of Neuilly-sur-Seine, published in the Marseillaise"^^13^^ of July 22nd:

``The war, is it just?---No! The war, is it national?---No! It is merely dynastic. In the name of humanity, of democracy, and the true interests of France, we adhere completely and energetically to the protestation of the International against the war.''

These protestations expressed the true sentiments of the French working people, as was soon shown by a curious incident. The Band of the 10th of December,'^^2^^'^^11^^ first organised under the presidency of Louis Bonaparte, having been masqueraded into blouses and let loose on the streets of Paris, there to perform the contortions of war fever, the real workmen of the Faubourgs came forward with public peace demonstrations so overwhelming that Pietri, the Prefect of Police, thought it prudent to at once stop all further street politics, on the plea that the real Paris people had given sufficient vent to their pent up patriotism and exuberant war enthusiasm.

Whatever may be the incidents of Louis Bonaparte's war with Prussia, the death knell of the Second Empire has already sounded at Paris. It will end as it began, by a parody. But let us not forget that it is the Governments and the ruling classes of Europe who enabled Louis Bonaparte to play during eighteen years the ferocious farce of the Restored Empire.

On the German side, the war is a war of defence, but who put Germany to the necessity of defending herself? Who enabled Louis Bonaparte to wage war upon her? Prussial It was Bismarck who conspired with that very same Louis Bonaparte for the purpose of crushing popular opposition at home, and annexing Germany to the Hohenzollern dynasty. If the battle of Sadowa^^25^^ had been lost instead of being won, French battalions would have overrun Germany as the allies of Prussia. After her victory did Prussia dream one moment of opposing a free Germany to an enslaved France? Just the contrary. While carefully preserving all the native beauties of her old system, she superadded all the tricks of the Second Empire, its real despotism and its

Jules Favre.---Ed.

KARL MARX

FIRST ADDRESS ON THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR

mock democratism, its political shams and its financial jobs, its high-flown talk and its low legerdemains. The Bonapartist regime, which till then only flourished on one side of the Rhine, had now got its counterfeit on the other. From such a state of things, what else could result but war?

If the German working class allow the present war to lose its strictly defensive character and to degenerate into a war against the French people, victory or defeat will prove alike disastrous. All the miseries that befell Germany after her war of independence will revive with accumulated intensity.

The principles of the International are, however, too widely spread and too firmly rooted amongst the German working class to apprehend such a sad consummation. The voices of the French workmen have re-echoed from Germany. A mass meeting of workmen, held at Brunswick on July 16th, expressed its full concurrence with the Paris manifesto, spurned the idea of national antagonism to France, and wound up its resolutions with these words:

``.We are enemies of all wars, but above all of dynastic wars.... With deep sorrow and grief we are forced to undergo a defensive war as an unavoidable evil; but we call, at the same time, upon the whole German working class to render the recurrence of such an immense social misfortune impossible by vindicating for the peoples themselves the power to decide on peace and war, and making them masters of their own destinies.''

At Chemnitz, a meeting of delegates representing 50,000 Saxon workers adopted unanimously a resolution to this effect:

``In the name of the German Democracy, and especially of the workmen forming the Democratic Socialist Party, we declare the present war to be exclusively dynastic.... We are happy to grasp the fraternal hand stretched out to us by the workmen of France.... Mindful of the watchword of the International Working Men's Association: Proletarians of all countries, unite, we shall never forget that the workmen of all countries are our friends and the despots of all countries our enemies."

The Berlin branch of the International has also replied to the Paris manifesto:

``We," they say, "join with heart and hand your protestation. ... Solemnly we promise that neither the sound of the trumpet, nor the

roar of the cannon, neither victory nor defeat shall divert us from our common work for the union of the children of toil of all countries.''

Be it so!

In the background of this suicidal strife looms the dark figure of Russia. It is an ominous sign that the signal for the present war should have been given at the moment when the Moscovite Government had just finished its strategical lines of railway and was already massing troops in the direction of the Pruth. Whatever sympathy the Germans may justly claim in a war of defence against Bonapartist aggression, they would forfeit at once by allowing the Prussian Government to call for, or accept, the help of the Cossacks. Let them remember that, after their war of independence against the first Napoleon,^^4^^ Germany lay for generations prostrate at the feet of the Czar.

The English working class stretch the hand of fellowship to the French and German working people. They feel deeply convinced that whatever turn the impending horrid war may take, the alliance of the working classes of all countries will ultimately kill war. The very fact that while official France and Germany are rushing into a fratricidal feud, the workmen of France and Germany send each other messages of peace and goodwill; this great fact, unparalleled in the history of the past, opens the vista of a brighter future. It proves that in contrast to old society, with its economical miseries and its political delirium, a new society is springing up, whose International rule will be Peace, because its national ruler will be everywhere the same---Labourl The Pioneer of that new society is the International Working Men's Association.

Office: High Holborn, W.G., July 23rd, 1870

Written by Karl Marx between July 19 and 23, 1870

Published as a leaflet in English in July 1870, as well as in the form of leaflets and in periodicals in German, French and Russian in August-September

Printed according to

the text of the English

leaflet

1870

Karl Marx

SECOND ADDRESS ON THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR

SECOND ADDRESS OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL

OF THE INTERNATIONAL

WORKING MEN'S ASSOCIATION

ON THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR^^26^^

to make war upon the emperor of the French, and not upon the French people. On the llth of August he had issued a manifesto to the French nation, where he said:

``The Emperor Napoleon having made, by land and sea, an attack on the German nation, which desired and still desires to live in peace with the French people, I have assumed the command of the German armies to repel his aggression, and I have been led by military events to cross the frontiers of France."

Not content to assert the defensive character of the war by the statement that he only assumed the command of the German armies "to repel aggression", he added that he was only "led by military events" to cross the frontiers of France. A defensive war does, of course, not exclude offensive operations dictated by "military events''.

Thus this pious king stood pledged before France and the world to a strictly defensive war. How to release him from his solemn pledge? The stage-managers had to exhibit him as giving, reluctantly, way to the irresistible behest of the German nation. They at once gave the cue to the liberal German middle class, with its professors, its capitalists, its aldermen, and its penmen. That middle class which in its struggle for civil liberty had, from 1846 to 1870, been exhibiting an unexampled spectacle of irresolution, incapacity, and cowardice, felt, of course, highly delighted to bestride the European scene as the roaring lion of German patriotism. It revindicated its civic independence by affecting to force upon the Prussian Government the secret designs of that same government. It does penance for its longcontinued and almost religious faith in Louis Bonaparte's infallibility, by shouting for the dismemberment of the French Republic. Let us for a moment listen to the special pleadings of those stout-hearted patriots!

They dare not pretend that the people of Alsace and Lorraine pant for the German embrace; quite the contrary. To punish their French patriotism, Strasbourg, a town with an independent citadel commanding it, has for six days been wantonly and fiendishly bombarded by ``German'' explosive shells, setting it on fire, and killing great numbers of its defenceless inhabitants! Yet, the soil of those provinces once upon a time belonged to the whilom German

To the Members of the International Working Men's Association in Europe and the United States

In our first Manifesto of the 23rd of July we said:---"The death knell of the Second Empire has already sounded at Paris. It will end as it began, by a parody. But let us not forget that it is the Governments and the ruling classes of Europe who enabled Louis Napoleon to play during eighteen years the ferocious farce of the Restored Empire."*

Thus, even before war operations had actually set in, we treated the Bonapartist bubble as a thing of the past.

If we were not mistaken as to the vitality of the Second Empire, we were not wrong in our apprehension lest the German war should "lose its strictly defensive character and degenerate into a war against the French people".** The war of defence ended, in point of fact, with the surrender of Louis Bonaparte, the Sedan capitulation,^^12^^ and the proclamation of the Republic at Paris. But long before these events, the very moment that the utter rottenness of the Imperialist arms became evident, the Prussian military camarilla had resolved upon conquest. There lay an ugly obstacle in their way---King William's own proclamations at the commencement of the war. In his speech from the throne to the North German Diet, he had solemnly declared

* See p. 37.---Ed. ** See p. 38.---Ed.

KARL MARX

SECOND ADDRESS ON THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR

Empire.^^27^^ Hence, it seems, the soil and the human beings grown on it must be confiscated as imprescriptible German property. If the map of Europe is to be remade in the antiquary's vein, let us by no means forget that the Elector of Brandenburg, for his Prussian dominions, was the vassal of the Polish Republic.^^28^^

The more knowing patriots, however, require Alsace and the German-speaking part of Lorraine as a "material guarantee" against French aggression. As this contemptible plea has bewildered many weak-minded people, we are bound to enter more fully upon it.

There is no doubt that the general configuration of Alsace, as compared with the opposite bank of the Rhine, and the presence of a large fortified town like Strasbourg, about halfway between Basle and Germersheim, very much favour a French invasion of South Germany, while they offer peculiar difficulties to an invasion of France from South Germany. There is, further, no doubt that the addition of Alsace and German-speaking Lorraine would give South Germany a much stronger frontier, inasmuch as she would then be master of the crest of the Vosges mountains in its whole length, and of the fortresses which cover its northern passes. If Metz were annexed as well, France would certainly for the moment be deprived of her two principal bases of operation against Germany, but that would not prevent her from constructing a fresh one at Nancy or Verdun. While Germany owns Coblenz, Mainz, Germersheim, Rastatt, and Ulm, all bases of operation against France, and plentifully made use of in this war, with what show of fair play can she begrudge France Strasbourg and Metz, the only two fortresses of any importance she has on that side? Moreover, Strasbourg endangers South Germany only while South Germany is a separate power from North Germany. From 1792-95 South Germany was never invaded from that direction, because Prussia was a party to the war against the French Revolution; but as soon as Prussia made a peace of her own in 1795, and left the South to shift for itself, the invasions of South Germany, with Strasbourg for a base, began, and continued till 1809. The fact is, a united Germany can always render Strasbourg and any French army in Alsace innocuous by concentrating all her troops,

as was done in the present war, between Saarlouis and Landau, and advancing, or accepting battle, on the line of road between Mainz and Metz. While the mass of the German troops is stationed there, any French army advancing from Strasbourg into South Germany would be outflanked, and have its communications threatened. If the present campaign has proved anything, it is the facility of invading France from Germany.

But, in good faith, is it not altogether an absurdity and an anachronism to make military considerations the principle by which the boundaries of nations are to be fixed? If this rule were to prevail, Austria would still be entitled to Venetia and the line of the Mincio, and France to the line of the Rhine, in order to protect Paris, which lies certainly more open to an attack from the North East than Berlin does from the South West. If limits are to be fixed by military interests, there will be no end to claims, because every military line is necessarily faulty, and may be improved by annexing some more outlying territory; and, moreover, they can never be fixed finally and fairly, because they always must be imposed by the conqueror upon the conquered, and consequently carry within them the seed of fresh wars.

Such is the lesson of all history. Thus with nations as with individuals. To deprive them of the power of offence, you must deprive them of the means of defence. You must not only garrotte but murder. If ever conqueror took " material guarantees" for breaking the sinews of a nation, the first Napoleon did so by the Tilsit treaty,^^29^^ and the way he executed it against Prussia and the rest of Germany. Yet, a few years later, his gigantic power split like a rotten reed upon the German people. What are the "material guarantees" Prussia, in her wildest dreams, can, or dare impose upon France, compared to the "material guarantees" the first Napoleon had wrenched from herself? The result will not prove the less disastrous. History will measure its retribution, not by the extent of the square miles conquered from France, but by the intensity of the crime of reviving, in the second half of the 19th century, the policy of conquest^.

But, say the mouthpieces of Teutonic^^30^^ patriotism, you

KARL MARX

SECOND ADDRESS ON THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR

of autocracy, could the Czar afford to bear with such a loss of foreign prestige? Already the Moscovite journals repeat the language of the Bonapartist journals after the war of 1866. Do the Teuton patriots really believe that liberty and peace will be guaranteed to Germany by forcing France into the arms of Russia? If the fortune of her arms, the arrogance of success, and dynastic intrigue lead Germany to a dismemberment of France, there will then only remain two courses open to her. She must at all risks become the avowed tool of Russian aggrandisement, or, after some short respite, make again ready for another ``defensive'' war, not one of those new-fangled ``localised'' wars, but a war of races---a war with the combined Slavonian and Roman races.

The German working class has resolutely supported the war, which it was not in their power to prevent, as a war for German independence and the liberation of France and Europe from that pestilential incubus, the Second Empire. It was the German workmen who, together with the rural labourers, furnished the sinews and muscles of heroic hosts, leaving behind their half-starved families. Decimated by the battles abroad, they will be once more decimated by misery at home. In their turn they are now coming forward to ask for ``guarantees'',---guarantees that their immense sacrifices have not been brought in vain, that they have conquered liberty, that the victory over the Imperialist armies will not, as in 1815, be turned into the defeat of the German people^^33^^; and, as the first of these guarantees, they claim an honourable peace for France, and the recognition of the French Republic.

The Central Committee of the German Social-Democratic Workmen's Party issued, on the 5th of September, a manifesto, energetically insisting upon these guarantees.

must not confound Germans with Frenchmen. What we want is not glory, but safety. The Germans are an essentially peaceful people. In their sober guardianship, conquest itself changes from a condition of future war into a pledge of perpetual peace. Of course, it is not Germans that invaded France in 1792, for the sublime purpose of bayoneting the revolution of the 18th century. It is not Germans that befouled their hands by the subjugation of Italy, the oppression of Hungary, and the dismemberment of Poland. Their present military system, which divides the whole adult male population into two parts---one standing army on service, and another standing army on furlough, both equally bound in passive obedience to rulers by divine right---such a military system is, of course, a "material guarantee" for keeping the peace, and the ultimate goal of civilising tendencies! In Germany, as everywhere else, the sycophants of the powers that be poison the popular mind by the incense of mendacious self-praise.

Indignant as they pretend to be at the sight of French fortresses in Metz and Strasbourg, those German patriots see no harm in the vast system of Moscovite fortifications at Warsaw, Modlin and Ivangorod. While gloating at the terrors of imperialist invasion, they blink at the infamy of autocratic tutelage.

As in 1865 promises were exchanged between Louis Bonaparte and Bismarck, so in 1870 promises have been exchanged between Gorchakov and Bismarck.^^31^^ As Louis Bonaparte flattered himself that the war of 1866, resulting in the common exhaustion of Austria and Prussia, would make him the supreme arbiter of Germany, so Alexander flattered himself that the war of 1870, resulting in the common exhaustion of Germany and France, would make him the supreme arbiter of the Western Continent. As the Second Empire thought the North German Confederation³²incompatible with its existence, so autocratic Russia must think herself endangered by a German empire under Prussian leadership. Such is the law of the old political system. Within its pale the gain of one state is the loss of the other. The Czar's paramount influence over Europe roots in his traditional hold on Germany. At a moment when in Russia herself volcanic social agencies threaten to shake the very base

``We," they say, "we protest against the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. And we are conscious of speaking in the name of the German working class. In the common interest of France and Germany, in the interest of peace and liberty, in the interest of Western civilisation against Eastern barbarism, the German workmen will not patiently tolerate the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine.... We shall faithfully stand by our fellow-workmen in all countries for the common international cause of the Proletariat!''

KARL MARX

SECOND ADDRESS ON THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR

Unfortunately, we cannot feel sanguine of their immediate success. If the French workmen amidst peace failed to stop the aggressor, are the German workmen more likely to stop the victor amidst the clangour of arms? The German workmen's manifesto demands the extradition of Louis Bonaparte as a common felon to the French Republic. Their rulers are, on the contrary, already trying hard to restore him to the Tuileries^^34^^ as the best man to ruin France. However that may be, history will prove that the German working class are not made of the same malleable stuff as the German middle class. They will do their duty.

Like them, we hail the advent of the Republic in France, but at the same time we labour under misgivings which we hope will prove groundless. That Republic has not subverted the throne, but only taken its place become vacant. It has been proclaimed, not as a social conquest, but as a national measure of defence. It is in the hands of a Provisional Government composed partly of notorious Orleanists,^^9^^ partly of middle-class Republicans, upon some of whom the insurrection of June, 1848,^^8^^ has left its indelible stigma. The division of labour amongst the members of that Government looks awkward. The Orleanists have seized the strongholds of the army and the police, while to the professed Republicans have fallen the talking departments. Some of their first acts go far to show that they have inherited from the Empire, not only ruins, but also its dread of the working class. If eventual impossibilities are in wild phraseology demanded from the Republic, is it not with a view to prepare the cry for a ``possible'' government? Is the Republic, by some of its middle-class managers, not intended to serve as a mere stopgap and bridge over an Orleanist Restoration?

The French working class moves, therefore, under circumstances of extreme difficulty. Any attempt at upsetting the new Government in the present crisis, when the enemy is almost knocking at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly. The French workmen must perform their duties as citizens; but, at the same time, they must not allow themselves to be deluded by the national souvenirs'' of 1792, as

the French peasants allowed themselves to be deluded by the national souvenirs of the First Empire. They have not to recapitulate the past, but to build up the future. Let them calmly and resolutely improve the opportunities of Republican liberty, for the work of their own class organisation. It will gift them with fresh Herculean powers for the regeneration of France, and our common task---the emancipation of labour. Upon their energies and wisdom hinges the fate of the Republic.

The English workmen have already taken measures to overcome, by a wholesome pressure from without, the reluctance of their Government to recognise the French Republic.^^35^^ The present dilatoriness of the British Government is probably intended to atone for the Anti-Jacobin war and its former indecent haste in sanctioning the coup d'etat.¹⁰The English workmen call also upon their Government to oppose by all its power the dismemberment of France, which part of the English press is so shameless enough to howl for. It is the same press that for twenty years deified Louis Bonaparte as the providence of Europe, that frantically cheered on the slaveholders' rebellion.^^36^^ Now, as then, it drudges for the slaveholder.

Let the sections of the International Working Men's Association in every country stir the working classes to action. If they forsake their duty, if they remain passive, the present tremendous war will be but the harbinger of still deadlier international feuds, and lead in every nation to a 'renewed triumph over the workman by the lords of the sword, of the soil, and of capital.

Vive la hepublique.

Office: 256, High Holborn, London, W.G., September 9th, 1870

Written by Karl Marx

between September 6 and 9, 1870

Published as a leaflet in English on September 11-13, 1870, as a leaflet in German, and in periodicals in German and French in September-December 1870

Printed according to the text of the English leaflet (second edition)

* Remembrances.---Ed.

Karl Marx

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.-I

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE^^1^^

over the French capitalist and his State parasites. In this conflict between national duty and class interest, the Government of National Defence did not hesitate one moment to turn into a Government of National Defection.

The first step they took was to send Thiers on a roving tour to all the courts of Europe, there to beg mediation by offering the barter of the Republic for a king. Four months after the commencement of the siege, when they thought the opportune moment come for breaking the first word of capitulation, Trochu, in the presence of Jules Favre and others of his colleagues, addressed the assembled mayors of Paris in these terms:

``The first question put to me by my colleagues on the very evening of the 4th of September was this: Paris, can it with any chance of success stand a siege by the Prussian army? I did not hesitate to answer in the negative. Some of my colleagues here present will warrant the truth of my words and the persistence of my opinion. I told them, in these very terms, that, under the existing state of things, the attempt of Paris to hold out a siege by the Prussian army would be a folly. Without doubt, I added, it would be an heroic folly; but that would be all. . . . The events" (managed by himself) "have not given the lie to my prevision.''

This nice little speech of Trochu was afterwards published by M. Corbon, one of the mayors present.

Thus, on the very evening of the proclamation of the Republic, Trochu's ``plan'' was known to his colleagues to be the capitulation of Paris. If national defence had been more than a pretext for the personal government of Thiers, Favre, and Co., the upstarts of the 4th of September would have abdicated on the 5th---would have initiated the Paris people into Trochu's ``plan'', and called upon them to surrender at once, or to take their own fate into their own hands. Instead of this, the infamous impostors resolved upon curing the heroic folly of Paris by a regimen of famine and broken heads, and to dupe her in the meanwhile by ranting manifestoes, holding forth that Trochu, "the governor of Paris, will never capitulate", and Jules Favre, the foreign minister, will "not cede an inch of our territory, nor a stone of our fortresses". In a letter to Gambetta, that very same Jules Favre avows that what they were `` defending'' against were not the Prussian soldiers, but the working

4-2648

ADDRESS OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING MEN'S ASSOCIATION

To All the Members of the Association in Europe and the United States

On the 4th of September, 1870, when the working men of Paris proclaimed the Republic, which was almost instantaneously acclaimed throughout France, without a single voice of dissent, a cabal of place-hunting barristers, with Thiers for their statesman and Trochu for their general, took hold of the Hotel de Ville. At that time they were imbued with so fanatical a faith in the mission of Paris to represent France in all epochs of historical crisis, that, to legitimate their usurped titles as governors of France, they thought it quite sufficient to produce their lapsed mandates as representatives of Paris. In our second address on the late war, five days after the rise of these men, we told you who they were/^^1^^" Yet, in the turmoil of surprise, with the real leaders of the working class still shut up in Bonapartist prisons and the Prussians already marching upon Paris, Paris bore with their assumption of power, on the express condition that it was to be wielded for the single purpose of national defence. Paris, however, was not to be defended without arming its working class, organising them into an effective force, and training their ranks by the war itself. But Paris armed was the Revolution armed. A victory of Paris over the Prussian aggressor would have been a victory of the French workman

* See p. 46.---Ed.

KARL MARX

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.-I

men of Paris. During the whole continuance of the siege the Bonapartist cut-throats, whom Trochu had wisely intrusted with the command of the Paris army, exchanged, in their intimate correspondence, ribald jokes at the well-understood mockery of defence. (See, for instance, the correspondence of Alphonse* Simon Guiod, supreme commander of the artillery of the Army of Defence of Paris and Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, to Susane, general of division of artillery, a correspondence published by the Journal Officiel of the Commune.^^37^^) The mask of imposture was at last dropped on the 28th of January, 1871. With the true heroism of utter self-debasement, the Government of National Defence, in their capitulation, came out as the government of France by Bismarck's prisoners---a part so base that Louis Bonaparte himself had, at Sedan, shrunk from accepting it. After the events of the 18th of March, on their wild flight to Versailles, the capitulards^^38^^ left in the hands of Paris the documentary evidence of their treason, to destroy which, as the Commune says in its manifesto to the provinces,

``those men would not recoil from battering Paris into a heap of ruins washed by a sea of blood''.

To be eagerly bent upon such a consummation, some of the leading members of the Government of Defence had, besides, most peculiar reasons of their own.

Shortly after the conclusion of the armistice, M. Milliere, one of the representatives of Paris to the National Assembly, now shot by express order of Jules Favre, published a series of authentic legal documents in proof that Jules Favre, living in concubinage with the wife of a drunkard resident at Algiers, had, by a most daring concoction of forgeries, spread over many years, contrived to grasp, in the name of the children of his adultery, a large succession, which made him a rich man, and that, in a lawsuit undertaken by the legitimate heirs, he only escaped exposure by the connivance of the Bonapartist tribunals. As these dry legal doc-

uments were not to be got rid of by any amount of rhetorical horse-power, Jules Favre, for the first time in his life, held his tongue, quietly awaiting the outbreak of the civil war, in order, then, frantically to denounce the people of Paris as a band of escaped convicts in utter revolt against family, religion, order and property. This same forger had hardly got into power, after the 4th of September, when he sympathetically let loose upon society Pic and Taillefer, convicted, even under the empire, of forgery, in the scandalous affair of the ``Etendard''^^39^^. One of these men, Taillefer, having dared to return to Paris under the Commune, was at once reinstated in prison; and then Jules Favre exclaimed, from the tribune of the National Assembly, that Paris was setting free all her jailbirds!

Ernest Picard, the Joe Miller' of the Government of National Defence, who appointed himself Finance Minister of the Republic after having in vain striven to become the Home Minister of the Empire, is the brother of one Arthur Picard, an individual expelled from the Paris Bourse as a blackleg (see report of the Prefecture of Police, dated the 31st of July, 1867), and convicted, on his own confession, of a theft of 300,000 francs, while manager of one of the branches of the Societe Generale,® Rue Palestro, No. 5 (see report of the Prefecture of Police, llth December, 1868). This Arthur Picard was made by Ernest Picard the editor of his paper, I'flecleur libre.^ While the common run of stockjobbers were led astray by the official lies of this Finance Office paper, Arthur was running backwards and forwards between the Finance Office and the Bourse, there to discount the disasters of the French army. The whole financial correspondence of that worthy pair of brothers fell into the hands of the Commune.

Jules Ferry, a penniless barrister before the 4th of September, contrived, as Mayor of Paris during the siege, to job a fortune out of famine. The day on which he would have to give an account of his maladministration would be the day of his conviction.

These men, then, could find, in the ruins of Paris only,

* Should be Adolphe.---Ed.

* The German editions of 1871 and 1891 have Karl Vort- the French edition of 1871, Falstaff.---Ed.

KARL MARX

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.-I

their tickets-of-leave^::": they were the very men Bismarck wanted. With the help of some shuffling of cards, Thiers, hitherto the secret prompter of the Government, now appeared at its head, with the ticket-of-leave-men for his Ministers.

Thiers, that monstrous gnome, has charmed the French bourgeoisie for almost half a century, because he is the most consummate intellectual expression of their own classcorruption. Before he became a statesman he had already proved his lying powers as an historian. The chronicle of his public life is the record of the misfortunes of France. Banded, before 1830, with the Republicans, he slipped into office under Louis Philippe by betraying his protector Laffitte, ingratiating himself with the king by exciting mob.riots against the clergy, during which the church of Saint Germain 1'Auxerrois and the Archbishop's palace were plundered, and by acting the minister-spy upon, and the jailaccoucheur of, the Duchess de Berry.^^42^^ The massacre of the Republicans in the rue Transnonain, and the subsequent infamous laws of September against the press and the right of association, were his work.^^43^^ Reappearing as the chief of the Cabinet in March, 1840, he astonished France with his plan of fortifying Paris.^^44^^ To the Republicans, who denounced this plan as a sinister plot against the liberty 9f Paris, he replied from the tribune of the Chamber of Deputies:

``What! To fancy that any works of fortification could ever endanger liberty! And first of all you calumniate any possible Government in supposing that it could some day attempt to maintain itself by bombarding the capital... but that Government would be a hundred times more impossible after its victory than before.''

Indeed, no Government would ever have dared to bombard Paris from the forts, but that Government which had previously surrendered these forts to the Prussians.

When King Bomba tried his hand at Palermo, in January,

1848,^^45^^ Thiers, then long since out of office, again rose in the Chamber of Deputies:

``You know, gentlemen, what is happening at Palermo, You, all of you, shake with horror" (in the parliamentary sense) "on hearing that during forty-eight hours a large town has been bombarded---by whom? Was it by a foreign enemy exercising the rights of war? No, gentlemen, it was by its own Government. And why? Because that unfortunate town demanded its rights. Well, then, for the demand of its

rights it has got forty-eight hours of bombardment----- Allow me to

appeal to the opinion of Europe. It is doing a service to mankind to arise, and to make reverberate, from what is perhaps the greatest tribune in Europe, some words" (indeed words) "of indignation against such acts. . . . When the Regent Espartero, who had rendered services to his country" (which M. Thiers never did), "intended bombarding Barcelona, in order to suppress its insurrection, there arose from all parts of the world a general outcry of indignation.''

Eighteen months afterwards, M. Thiers was amongst the fiercest defenders of the bombardment of Rome by a French army.^^46^^ In fact, the fault of King Bomba seems to have consisted in this only, that he limited his bombardment to forty-eight hours.

A few days before the Revolution of February, fretting at the long exile from place and pelf to which Guizot had condemned him, and sniffing in the air the scent of an approaching popular commotion, Thiers, in that pseudo-heroic style which won him the nickname of Mirabeau-monche* declared to the Chamber of Deputies:

``I am of the party of Revolution, not only in France, but in Europe. I wish the Government of the Revolution to remain in the hands of moderate men .. . but if that Government should fall into the hands of ardent minds, even into those of Radicals, I shall, for all that, not desert my cause. I shall always be of the party of the Revolution.''

The Revolution of February came. Instead of displacing the Guizot Cabinet by the Thiers Cabinet, as the little man had dreamt, it superseded Louis Philippe by the Republic. On the first day of the popular victory he carefully hid himself, forgetting that the contempt of the working men screened him from their hatred. Still, with his legendary courage, he continued to shy the public stage, until the June

* In England common criminals are often discharged on parole after serving the greater part of their term, and are placed under police surveillance. On such discharge they receive a certificate called ticket-of-leave, their possessors being referred to as ticket-of-- leavemen. [Note by Engels to the German edition of 1871.]

* Mirabeau the fly.---Ed,

KARL MARX

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.---I

massacres^^8^^ had cleared it for his sort of action. Then he became the leading mind of the "Party of Order"^^47^^ and its Parliamentary Republic, that anonymous interregnum, in which all the rival factions of the ruling class conspired together to crush the people, and conspired against each other to restore each of them its own monarchy. Then, as now, Thiers denounced the Republicans as the only obstacle to the consolidation of the Republic; then, as now, he spoke to the Republic as the hangman spoke to Don Carlos:---"I shall assassinate thee, but for thy own good." Now, as then, he will have to exclaim on the day after his victory: ``L' Empire est fait"---the Empire is consummated. Despite his hypocritical homilies about necessary liberties and his personal grudge against Louis Bonaparte, who had made a dupe of him, and kicked out parliamentarism---and outside of its factitious atmosphere the little man is conscious of withering into nothingness---he had a hand in all the infamies of the Second Empire, from the occupation of Rome by French troops to the war with Prussia, which he incited by his fierce invective against German unity---not as a cloak of Prussian despotism, but as an encroachment upon the vested right of France in German disunion. Fond of brandishing, with his dwarfish arms, in the face of Europe the sword of the first Napoleon, whose historical shoe-black he had become, his foreign policy always culminated in the utter humiliation of France, from the London Convention of 1840^^48^^ to the Paris capitulation of 1871, and the present civil war, where he hounds on the prisoners of Sedan^^12^^ and Metz^^14^^ against Paris by special permission of Bismarck. Despite his versatility of talent and shiftness of purpose, this man has his whole lifetime been wedded to the most fossil routine. It is self-evident that to him the deeper undercurrents of modern society remained forever hidden; but even the most palpable changes on its surface were abhorrent to a brain all the vitality of which had fled to the tongue. Thus he never tired of denouncing as a sacrilege any deviation from the old French protective system. When a minister of Louis Philippe, he railed at railways as a wild chimera; and when in opposition under Louis Bonaparte, he branded as a profanation every attempt to reform the rotten French army system. Never in his long political career has he been

guilty of a single---even the smallest---measure of any practical use. Thiers was consistent only in his greed for wealth and his hatred of the men that produce it. Having entered his first ministry under Louis Philippe poor as Job, he left it a millionaire. His last ministry under the same king (of the 1st of March, 1840) exposed him to public taunts of peculation in the Chamber of Deputies, to which he was content to reply by tears---a commodity he deals in as freely as Jules Favre, or any other crocodile. At Bordeaux his first measure for saving France from impending financial ruin was to endow himself with three millions a year, the first and the last word of the "Economical Republic", the vista of which he had opened to his Paris electors in 1869. One of his former colleagues of the Chamber of Deputies of 1830, himself a capitalist and, nevertheless, a devoted member of the Paris Commune, M. Beslay, lately addressed Thiers thus in a public placard:

``The enslavement of labour by capital has always been the cornerstone of your policy, and from the very day you saw the Republic of Labour installed at the Hotel de Ville, you have never ceased to cry out to France: 'These are criminals!' "

A master in small state roguery, a virtuoso in perjury and treason, a craftsman in all the petty stratagems, cunning devices, and base perfidies of parliamentary party-warfare; never scrupling, when out of office, to fan a revolution, and to stifle it in blood when at the helm of the state; with class prejudices standing him in the place of ideas, and vanity in the place of a heart; his private life as infamous as his public life is odious---even now, when playing the part of a French Sulla, he cannot help setting off the abomination of his deeds by the ridicule of his ostentation.

The capitulation of Paris, by surrendering to Prussia not only Paris, but all France, closed the long-continued intrigues of treason with the enemy, which the usurpers of the 4th of September had begun, as Trochu himself said, on that very same day. On the other hand, it initiated the civil war they were now to wage, with the assistance of Prussia, against the Republic and Paris. The trap was laid in the very terms of the capitulation. At that time above pne-third of the territory was in the hands of the enemy,

KARL MARX

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.---I

the capital was cut off from the provinces, all communications were disorganised. To elect under such circumstances a real representation of France was impossible, unless ample time were given for preparation. In view of this, the capitulation stipulated that a National Assembly must be elected within eight days; so that in many parts of France the news of the impending election arrived on its eve only. This assembly, moreover, was, by an express clause of the capitulation, to be elected for the sole purpose of deciding on peace or war, and, eventually, to conclude a treaty of peace. The population could not but feel that the terms of the armistice rendered the continuation of the war impossible, and that for sanctioning the peace imposed by Bismarck, the worst men in France were the best. But not content with these precautions, Thiers, even before the secret of the armistice had been broached to Paris, set out for an electioneering tour through the provinces, there to galvanise back into life the Legitimist party,^^9^^ which now, along with the Orleanists,^^9^^ had to take the place of the then impossible Bonapartists. He was not afraid of them. Impossible as a government of modern France, and, therefore, contemptible as rivals, what party were more eligible as tools of counterrevolution than the party whose action, in the words of Thiers himself (Chamber of Deputies, 5th January, 1833),

``had always been confined to the three resources of foreign invasion, civil war, and anarchy''?

They verily believed in the advent of their long-expected retrospective millennium. There were the heels of foreign invasion trampling upon France; there was the downfall of an empire, and the captivity of a Bonaparte; and there they were themselves. The wheel of history had evidently rolled back to stop at the "chambre introuvable" of 1816.^^49^^ In the Assemblies of the Republic, 1848 to 51, they had been represented by their educated and trained parliamentary champions; it was the rank-and-file of the party which now rushed in---all the Pourceaugnacs of France.

As soon as this Assembly of ``Rurals''^^50^^ had met at Bordeaux, Thiers made it clear to them that the peace preliminaries must be assented to at once, without even the honours of a. Parliamentary debate, as the only condition

on which Prussia would permit them to open the war against the Republic and Paris, its stronghold. The counter-- revolution had, in fact, no time to lose. The Second Empire had more than doubled the national debt, and plunged all the large towns into heavy municipal debts. The war had fearfully swelled the liabilities, and mercilessly ravaged the resources of the nation. To complete the ruin, the Prussian Shylock was there with his bond for the keep of half a million of his soldiers on French soil, his indemnity of five milliards, and interest at 5 per cent on the unpaid instalments thereof. Who was to pay the bill? It was only by the violent overthrow of the Republic that the appropriators of wealth could hope to shift on the shoulders of its producers the cost of a war which they, the appropriators, had themselves originated. Thus, the immense ruin of France spurred on these patriotic representatives of land and capital, under the very eyes and patronage of the invader, to graft upon the foreign war a civil war---a slaveholders' rebellion.

There stood in the way of this conspiracy one great obstacle---Paris. To disarm Paris was the first condition of success. Paris was therefore summoned by Thiers to surrender its arms. Then Paris was exasperated by the frantic anti-republican demonstrations of the ``Rural'' Assembly and by Thiers' own equivocations about the legal status of the Republic; by the threat to decapitate and decapitalise Paris; the appointment of Orleanist ambassadors; Dufaure's laws on over-due commercial bills and house-rents,^^51^^ inflicting ruin on the commerce and industry of Paris; PouyerQuertier's tax of two centimes upon every copy of every imaginable publication; the sentences of death against Blanqui and Flourens; the suppression of the Republican journals; the transfer of the National Assembly to Versailles; the renewal of the state of siege declared by Palikao, and expired on the 4th of September; the appointment of Vinoy, the Decembriseur,^^52^^ as governor of Paris---of Valentin, the Imperialist gendarme, as its prefect of police---and of D'Aurelle de Paladines, the Jesuit general, as the commander-in-chief of its National Guard.

And now we have to address a question to M. Thiers and the men of national defence, his under-strappers. It is

KARL MARX

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.---II

known that, through the agency of M. Pouyer-Quertier, his finance minister, Thiers had contracted a loan of two milliards. Now, is it true, or not,---

1. That the business was so managed that a consideration of several hundred millions was secured for the private benefit of Thiers, Jules Favre, Ernest Picard, PouyerQuertier, and Jules Simon? and---

2. That no money was to be paid down until after the ``pacification'' of Paris^^53^^?

At all events, there must have been something' very pressing in the matter, for Thiers and Jules Favre, in the name of the majority of the Bordeaux Assembly, unblushingly solicited the immediate occupation of Paris by Prussian troops. Such, however, was not the game of Bismarck, as he sneeringly, and in public, told the admiring Frankfort philistines on his return to Germany.

Armed Paris was the only serious obstacle in the way of the counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Paris was, therefore, to be disarmed. On this point the Bordeaux Assembly was sincerity itself. If the roaring rant of its Rurals had not been audible enough, the surrender of Paris by Thiers to the tender mercies of the triumvirate of Vinoy the Decembriseur, Valentin the Bonapartist gendarme, and Aurelle de Paladines the Jesuit general, would have cut off even the last subterfuge of doubt. But while insultingly exhibiting the true purpose of the disarmament of Paris, the conspirators asked her to lay down her arms on a pretext which was the most glaring, the most barefaced of lies. The artillery of the Paris National Guard, said Thiers, belonged to the State, and to the State it must be returned. The fact was this: From the very day of the capitulation, by which Bismarck's prisoners had signed the surrender of France, but reserved to themselves a numerous body-guard for the express purpose of cowing Paris, Paris stood on the watch. The National Guard reorganised themselves and intrusted their supreme control to a Central Committee elected by their whole body, save some fragments of the old Bonapartist formations. On the eve of the entrance of the Prussians into Paris, the Central Committee took measures

KARL MARX

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.---II

for the removal to Montmartre, Belleville, and La Villette of the cannon and mitrailleuses treacherously abandoned by the capitulards in and about the very quarters the Prussians were to occupy. That artillery had been furnished by the subscriptions of the National Guard. As their private property, it was officially recognised in the capitulation of the 28th of January, and on that very title exempted from the general surrender, into the hands of the conqueror, of arms belonging to the Government. And Thiers was so utterly destitute of even the flimsiest pretext for initiating the war against Paris, that he had to resort to the flagrant lie of the artillery of the National Guard being State property!

The seizure of her artillery was evidently but to serve as the preliminary to the general disarmament of Paris, and, therefore, of the Revolution of the 4th of September. But that Revolution had become the legal status of France. The Republic, its work, was recognised by the conqueror in the terms of the capitulation. After the capitulation, it was acknowledged by all the foreign Powers, and in its name the National Assembly had been summoned. The Paris working men's Revolution of the 4th of September was the only legal title of the National Assembly seated at Bordeaux, and of its executive. Without it, the National Assembly would at once have to give way to the Corps Legislatif, elected in 1869 by universal suffrage under French, not under Prussian, rule, and forcibly dispersed by the arm of the Revolution. Thiers and his ticket-of-leave-men would have had to capitulate for safe conducts signed by Louis Bonaparte, to save them from a voyage to Cayenne.^^54^^ The National Assembly, with its power of attorney to settle the terms of peace with Prussia, was but an incident of that Revolution, the true embodiment of which was still armed Paris, which had initiated it, undergone for it a five months' siege, with its horrors of famine, and made her prolonged resistance, despite Trochu's plan, the basis of an obstinate war of defence in the provinces. And Paris was now either to lay down her arms at the insulting behest of the rebellious slaveholders of Bordeaux, and acknowledge that her Revolution of the 4th of September meant nothing but a simple transfer of power from Louis Bonaparte to his Royal rivals;

or she had to stand forward as the self-sacrificing champion of France, whose salvation from ruin, and whose regeneration were impossible, without the revolutionary overthrow of the political and social conditions that had engendered the Second Empire, and, under its fostering care, matured into utter rottenness. Paris, emaciated by a five months' famine, did not hesitate one moment. She heroically resolved to run all the hazards of a resistance against the French conspirators, even with Prussian cannon frowning upon her from her own forts. Still, in its abhorrence of the civil war into which Paris was to be goaded, the Central Committee continued to persist in a merely defensive attitude, despite the provocations of the Assembly, the usurpations of the Executive, and the menacing concentration of troops in and around Paris.

Thiers opened the civil war by sending Vinoy, at the head of a multitude of sergents-de-ville and some regiments of the line, upon a nocturnal expedition against Montmartre, there to seize, by surprise, the artillery of the National Guard. It is well known how this attempt broke down before the resistance of the National Guard and the fraternisation of the line with the people. Aurelle de Paladines had printed beforehand his bulletin of victory, and Thiers held ready the placards announcing his measures of coup d'etat. Now these had to be replaced by Thiers' appeals, imparting his magnanimous resolve to leave the National Guard in the possession of their arms, with which, he said, he felt sure they would rally round the Government against the rebels. Out of 300,000 National Guards only 300 responded to this summons to rally round little Thiers against themselves. The glorious working men's Revolution of the 18th March took undisputed sway of Paris. The Central Committee was its provisional government. Europe seemed, for a moment, to doubt whether its recent sensational performances of state and war had any reality in them, or whether they were the dreams of a long bygone past.

From the 18th of March to the entrance of the Versailles troops into Paris, the proletarian revolution remained so free from the acts of violence in which the revolutions, and still more the counter-revolutions, of the "better classes" abound, that no facts were left to its opponents to cry out about but

KARL MARX

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.-II

the execution of Generals Lecomte and Clement Thomas, and the affair of the Place Vendome.

One of the Bonapartist officers engaged in the nocturnal attempt against Montmartre, General Lecomte, had four times ordered the 81st line regiment to fire at an unarmed gathering in the Place Pigalle, and on their refusal fiercely insulted them. Instead of shooting women and children, his own men shot him. The inveterate habits acquired by the soldiery under the training of the enemies of the working class are, of course, not likely to change the very moment these soldiers changed sides. The same men executed Clement Thomas.

``General" Clement Thomas, a malcontent exquartermaster-sergeant, had, in the latter times of Louis Philippe's reign, enlisted at the office of the Republican newspaper Le National,^ there to serve in the double capacity of responsible man-of-straw (gerant responsable) and of duelling bully to that very combative journal. After the Revolution of February,^^56^^ the men of the National having got into power, they metamorphosed this old quartermaster-sergeant into a general on the eve of the butchery of June,^^8^^ of which he, like Jules Favre, was one of the sinister plotters, and became one of the most dastardly executioners. Then he and his generalship disappeared for a long time, to again rise to the surface on the 1st November, 1870. The day before the Government of Defence, caught at the Hotel de Ville, had solemnly pledged their parole to Blanqui, Flourens, and other representatives of the working class, to abdicate their usurped power into the hands of a commune to be freely elected by Paris.^^57^^ Instead of keeping their word, they let loose on Paris the Bretons of Trochu, who now replaced the Corsicans of Bonaparte.^^58^^ General Tamisier alone, refusing to sully his name by such a breach of faith, resigned the commandership-in-chief of the National Guard, and in his place Clement Thomas for once became again a general. During the whole of his tenure of command, he made war, not upon the Prussians, but upon the Paris National Guard. He prevented their general armament, pitted the bourgeois battalions against the working men's battalions, weeded out the officers hostile to Trochu's ``plan'', and disbanded, under the stigma of cowardice, the

very same proletarian battalions whose heroism has now astonished their most inveterate enemies. Clement Thomas felt quite proud of having reconquered his June pre-eminence as the personal enemy of the working class of Paris. Only a few days before the 18th of March, he laid before the War Minister, Le Flo, a plan of his own for "finishing off la fine fleur [the cream] of the Paris canaille". After Vinoy's rout, he must needs appear upon the scene of action in the quality of an amateur spy. The Central Committee and the Paris working men were as much responsible for the killing of Clement Thomas and Lecomte as the Princess of Wales was for the fate of the people crushed to death on the day of her entrance into London.

The massacre of unarmed citizens in the Place Vendome is a myth which M. Thiers and the Rurals persistently ignored in the Assembly, intrusting its propagation exclusively to tiie servants' hall of European journalism. "The men of order", the reactionists of Paris, trembled at the victory of the 18th of March. To them it was the signal of popular retribution at last arriving. The ghosts of the victims assassinated at their hands from the days of June, 1848, down to the 22nd of January, 1871,^^59^^ arose before their faces. Their panic was their only punishment. Even the sergents-de-ville, instead of being disarmed and locked up, as ought to have been done, had the gates of Paris flung wide open for their safe retreat to Versailles. The men of order were left not only unharmed, but allowed to rally and quietly to seize more than one stronghold in the very centre of Paris. This indulgence of the Central Committee--- this magnanimity of the armed working men---so strangely at variance with the habits of the "Party of Order", the latter misinterpreted as mere symptoms of conscious weakness. Hence their silly plan to try, under the cloak of an unarmed demonstration, what Vinoy had failed to perform with his cannon and mitrailleuses. On the 22nd of March a riotous mob of swells started from the quarters of luxury, all the petits creves in their ranks, and at their head the notorious familiars of the Empire---the Heeckeren, Coetlogon, Henri de Pene, etc. Under the cowardly pretence of a pacific demonstration, this rabble, secretly armed with the weapons of the bravo, fell into marching order, ill-

KARL MARX

THE GENERAL COUNCIL, .--

OF1HB

II0rMttp!itt^fs

01ST THE

treated and disarmed the detached patrols and sentries of the National Guards they met with on their progress, and, on debouching from the Rue de la Paix, with the cry of "Down with the Central Committee! Down with the assassins! The National Assembly for ever!" attempted to break through the line drawn up there, and thus to carry by a surprise the headquarters of the National Guard in the Place Vendome. In reply to their pistol-shots, the regular sommations (the French equivalent of the English Riot Act)⁶⁰were made, and, proving ineffective, fire was commanded by the general of the National Guard."" One volley dispersed into wild flight the silly coxcombs, who expected that the mere exhibition of their ``respectability'' would have the same effect upon the Revolution of Paris as Joshua's trumpets upon the wall of Jericho. The runaways left behind them two National Guards killed, nine severely wounded (among them a member of the Central Committee""""), and the whole scene of their exploit strewn with revolvers, daggers, and sword-canes, in evidence of the ``unarmed'' character of their ``pacific'' demonstration. When, on the 13th of June, 1849, the National Guard made a really pacific demonstration in protest against the felonious assault of French troops upon Rome,^^46^^ Changarnier, then general of the Party of Order, was acclaimed by the National Assembly, and especially by M. Thiers, as the saviour of society, for having launched his troops from all sides upon these unarmed men, to shoot and sabre them down, and to trample them under their horses' feet. Paris, then, was placed under a state of siege. Dufaure hurried through the Assembly new laws of repression. New arrests, new proscriptions---a new reign of terror set in. But the lower orders manage these things otherwise. The Central Committee of 1871 simply ignored the heroes of the "pacific demonstration"; so much so that only two days later they were enabled to muster under Admiral Saisset for that armed demonstration, crowned by the famous stampede to Versailles. In their reluctance to continue the civil war opened by Thiers' burglarious attempt on Montmartre, the Central Committee made itself, this time, guilty of a decisive mistake

* Bergeret.---Ed. ** Maljournal.---Ed.

TO THE MEMBERS OP THE IHTEENATIOHAL

MIH`S' ASSOCIATIOM

IN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES.

In the inaugural Address of the IXTKEXATIOKAI, WOSEWQMSH'S AstociAKOK, of November, 1884, we said:---" If the emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal concurrence, how ar« they to fulfil that great mission with, a foreign policy ia pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejadices and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure ?" We defined the foreign, policy aimed at "by the International in these words;---- " Yindieate the simple laws of morals and justice, which ought •to govern the relations of private indif idsals, as the laws paramount of the intercourse of nations,"

Ho wonder that Louis Bonaparte, who asarpei Ms power by exploiting the war of classes ia France, and perpetuated it by periodical wars abroad, should from th« first have treated the International as a dangeroas foe. On the eye of the plebiscite he ordered a raid on the members of the Administrative Committees of the International ``Workingmen'g Association throughout France, at Parii, Lyons, Eoaen, Marseilles, Brest, fa,, on the pretext that the International was a secret society dabbling in a eoaplot for his assassination, a pretext goon after exposed in its fall absurdity byMs own judges. What was the real crime of the French branches of the International ? They told the French people pnbliely and emphatically that voting the plebiscite was voting despotism at home and war abroad,. It has been, in fact, their work that in all th» great towns, in all the iudnstrial centres of France, the working class rose like one man. to reject the plebiscite. TJafortmnately the balanoe was tamed by the- heavy ignorance of the rural districts.' The Stock Exchanges, the Cabinets, the ruling classes and the press of Europe celebrated the plebiscite as a signal victory of the French Emperor o-rer the Frwaeh, working class; and it was the signal for the assassination, mot of an individual, bat of nations.

The war plot of July, 1870, is but an amended edition of theeeap. <f««t of December, 1851. At fiwt view the thing seemed *o absurd that France would not believe ia its real good earnest. It rather believed the deputy denouncing the ministerial wax talk as a mere stock jobbing trick. When, os July 15th, war WM at last offici«

First page of the leaflet with the Address of the General Council of the

International Working Men's Association on the Franco-Prussian War

issued on July 23, 1870

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THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.---II

in not at once marching upon Versailles, then completely helpless, and thus putting an end to the conspiracies of Thiers and his Rurals. Instead of this, the Party of Order was again allowed to try its strength at the ballot box, on the 26th of March, the day of the election of the Commune. Then, in the mairies of Paris, they exchanged bland words of conciliation with their too generous conquerors, muttering in their hearts solemn vows to exterminate them in due time. Now look at the reverse of the medal. Thiers opened his second campaign against Paris in the beginning of April. The first batch of Parisian prisoners brought into Versailles was subjected to revolting atrocities, while Ernest Picard, with his hands in his trousers' pockets, strolled about jeering them, and while Mesdames Thiers and Favre, in the midst of their ladies of honour (?), applauded, from the balcony, the outrages of the Versailles mob. The captured soldiers of the line were massacred in cold blood; our brave friend, General Duval, the iron-founder, was shot without any form of trial. Galliffet, the kept man of his wife, so notorious for her shameless exhibitions at the orgies of the Second Empire, boasted in a proclamation of having commanded the murder of a small troop of National Guards, with their captain and lieutenant, surprised and disarmed by his Chasseurs. Vinoy, the runaway, was appointed by Thiers Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, for his general order to shoot down every soldier of the line taken in the ranks of the Federals. Desmarest, the gendarme, was decorated for the treacherous butcher-like chopping in pieces of the high-souled and chivalrous Flourens, who had saved the heads of the Government of Defence on the 31st of October, 1870.^^61^^ "The encouraging particulars" of his assassination were triumphantly expatiated upon by Thiers in the National Assembly. With the elated vanity of a parliamentary Tom Thumb, permitted to play the part of a Tamerlane, he denied the rebels against his littleness every right of civilised warfare, up to the right of neutrality for ambulances. Nothing more horrid than that monkey, allowed for a time to give full fling to his tigerish instincts, as foreseen by Voltaire.^^62^^ (See note, p. 35.*)

* See pp. 98-99.---Ed.

5-2648

Proclamation of the Commune in the Paris Town Hall on March 28, 1871

KARL MARX

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.---II

After the decree of the Commune of the 7th April, ordering reprisals and declaring it to be its duty "to protect Paris against the cannibal exploits of the Versailles banditti, and to demand an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth",⁶³Thiers did not stop the barbarous treatment of prisoners, moreover insulting them in his bulletins as follows:---"Never have more degraded countenances of a degraded democracy met the afflicted gazes of honest men",---honest like Thiers himself and his ministerial ticket-of-leave-men. Still the shooting of prisoners was suspended for a time. Hardly, however, had Thiers and his Decembrist generals become aware that the Communal decree of reprisals was but an empty threat, that even their gendarme spies caught in Paris under the disguise of National Guards, that even sergentsde-ville, taken with incendiary shells upon them, were spared,---when the wholesale shooting of prisoners was resumed and carried on uninterruptedly to the end. Houses to which National Guards had fled were surrounded by gendarmes, inundated with petroleum (which here occurs for the first time in this war), and then set fire to, the charred corpses being afterwards brought out by the ambulance of the Press at the Ternes. Four National Guards having surrendered to a troop of mounted Chasseurs at Belle Epine, on the 25th of April, were afterwards shot down, one after another, by the captain, a worthy man of Galliffet's. One of his four victims, left for dead, Scheffer, crawled back to the Parisian outposts, and deposed to this fact before a commission of the Commune. When Tolain interpellated the War Minister upon the report of this commission, the Rurals drowned his voice and forbade Le Flo to answer. It would be an insult to their ``glorious'' army to speak of its deeds. The flippant tone in which Thiers' bulletins announced the bayoneting of the Federals surprised asleep at Moulin Saquet, and the wholesale fusillades at Clamart shocked the nerves even of the not oversensitive London Times.^^6^^** But it would be ludicrous today to attempt recounting the merely preliminary atrocities committed by the bombarders of Paris and the fomenters of a slaveholders' rebellion protected by foreign invasion. Amidst all these horrors, Thiers, forgetful of his parliamentary laments on the terrible responsibility weighing down his dwarfish

shoulders, boasts in his bulletins that VAssemblee siege paisiblement (the Assembly continues meeting in peace), and proves by his constant carousals, now with Decembrist generals, now with German princes, that his digestion is not troubled in the least, not even by the ghosts of Lecomte and Clement Thomas.

KARL MARX

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.-III

III

clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern State edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France. During the subsequent regimes the Government, placed under parliamentary control---that is, under the direct control of the propertied classes---became not only a hotbed of huge national debts and crushing taxes; with its irresistible allurements of place, pelf, and patronage, it became not only the bone of contention between the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling classes; but its political character changed simultaneously with the economic changes of society. At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labour, the State power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour, of a public force organised for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism. After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the State power stands out in bolder and bolder relief.-The Revolution of 1830, resulting in the transfer of Government from the landlords to the capitalists, transferred it from the more remote to the more direct antagonists of the working men. The bourgeois Republicans, who, in the name of the Revolution of February,^^56^^ took the State power, used it for the June massacres, in order to convince the working class that ``social'' republic meant the republic ensuring their social subjection, and in order to convince the royalist bulk of the bourgeois and landlord class that they might safely leave the cares and emoluments of Government to the bourgeois ``Republicans''. However, after their one heroic exploit of June, the bourgeois Republicans had, from the front, to fall back to the rear of the "Party of Order"---a combination formed by all the rival fractions and factions of the appropriating class in their now openly declared antagonism to the producing classes. The proper form of their joint-stock Government was the Parliamentary Republic, with Louis Bonaparte for its President. Theirs was a regime of avowed class terrorism and deliberate insult toward the "vile multitude". If the Parliamentary Republic, as M. Thiers said, "divided them"

On the dawn of the 18th of March, Paris arose to the thunderburst of "Vive La Commune!" What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalising to the bourgeois mind?

``The proletarians of Paris," said the Central Committee in its manifesto of the 18th March, "amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs... . They have understood that it is their imperious duty and their absolute right to render themselves masters of their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power.''

But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the readymade state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.

The centralised State power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature---organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labour,---originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle-class society as a mighty weapon in its struggles against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of mediaeval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the eighteenth century swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus

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(the different fractions of the ruling class) ``least'', it opened an abyss between that class and the whole body of society outside their spare ranks. The restraints by which their own divisions had under former regimes still checked the State power, were removed by their union; and in view of the threatening upheaval of the proletariat, they now used that State power mercilessly and ostentatiously as the national war-engine of capital against labour. In their uninterrupted crusade against the producing masses they were, however, bound not only to invest the Executive with continually increased powers of repression, but at the same time to divest their own parliamentary stronghold---the National Assembly---one by one, of all its own means of defence against the Executive. The Executive, in the person of Louis Bonaparte, turned them out. The natural offspring of the `` Partyof-Order'' Republic was the Second Empire.

The Empire, with the coup d'etatⁱ⁰ for its certificate of birth, universal suffrage for its sanction, and the sword for its sceptre, professed to rest upon the peasantry, the large mass of producers not directly involved in the struggle of capital and labour. It professed to save the working class by breaking down Parliamentarism, and, with it, the undisguised subserviency of Government to the propertied classes. It professed to save the propertied classes by upholding their economic supremacy over the working class; and, finally, it professed to unite all classes by reviving for all the chimera of national glory. In reality, it was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation. It was acclaimed throughout the world as the saviour of society. Under its sway, bourgeois society, freed from political cares, attained a development unexpected even by itself. Its industry and commerce expanded to colossal dimensions; financial swindling celebrated cosmopolitan orgies; the misery of the masses was set off by a shameless display of gorgeous, meretricious and debased luxury. The State power, apparently soaring high above society, was at the same time itself the greatest scandal of that society and the very hotbed of all its corruptions. Its own rottenness, and the rottenness of the society it had saved, were laid bare by the bayonet of Prussia,

herself eagerly bent upon transferring the supreme seat of that regime from Paris to Berlin. Imperialism is, at the same time, the most prostitute and -the ultimate form of the State power which nascent middle-class society had commenced to elaborate as a means of its own emancipation from feudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois society had finally transformed into a means for the enslavement of labour by capital.

The direct antithesis to the Empire was the Commune. The cry of "social republic", with which the Revolution of February was ushered in by the Paris proletariat, did but express a vague aspiration after a Republic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class-rule, but class-rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that Republic.

Paris, the central seat of the old governmental power, and, at the same time, the social stronghold of the French working class, had risen in arms against the attempt of Thiers and the Rurals to restore and perpetuate that old governmental power bequeathed to them by the Empire. Paris could resist only because, in consequence of the siege, it had got rid of the army, and replaced it by a National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of working men. This fact was now to be transformed into an institution. The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.

The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time. Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible and at all times revocable agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the Administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen's wages. The vested interests and the representation allow-

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ances of the high dignitaries of State disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the State was laid into the hands of the Commune.

Having once got rid of the standing army and the police, the physical force elements of the old Government, the Commune was anxious to break the spiritual force of repression, the ``parson-power'', by the disestablishment and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies. The priests were sent back to the recesses of private life, there to feed upon the alms of the faithful in imitation of their predecessors, the Apostles. The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of Church and State. Thus, not only was education made accessible to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it.

The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to mask their abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable.

The Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great industrial centres of France. The communal regime once established in Paris and the secondary centres, the old centralised Government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers. In a rough sketch of national organisation which the Commune had no time to develop, it states clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service. The rural communes of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif (formal

instructions) of his constituents. The few but important functions which still would remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal, and therefore strictly responsible agents. The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organised by the Communal Constitution and to become a reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence. While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other hand, nothing could be' more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supersede universal suffrage by hierarchic investiture.^^65^^

It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even defunct forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus, this new Commune, which breaks the modern State power, has been mistaken for a reproduction of the mediaeval Communes, which first preceded, and afterwards became the substratum of, that very State power.---The Communal Constitution has been mistaken for an attempt to break up into a federation of small States, as dreamt of by Montesquieu and the Girondins,^^66^^ that unity of great nations which, if originally brought about by political force, has now become a powerful coefficient of social production.---The antagonism of the Commune against the State power has been mistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle against over-centralisation. Peculiar

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historical circumstances may have prevented the classical development, as in France, of the bourgeois form of government, and may have allowed, as in England, to complete the great central State organs by corrupt vestries, jobbing councillors, and ferocious poor-law guardians in the towns, and virtually hereditary magistrates in the countries. The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the State parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society. By this one act it would have initiated the regeneration of France.---The provincial French middle class saw in the Commune an attempt to restore the sway their order had held over the country under Louis Philippe, and which, under Louis Napoleon, was supplanted by the pretended rule of the country over the towns. In reality, the Communal Constitution brought the rural producers under the intellectual lead of the central towns of their districts, and these secured to them, in the working men, the natural trustees of their interests.---The very existence of the Commune involved, as a matter of course, local municipal liberty, but no longer as a check upon the, now superseded, State power. It could only enter into the head of a Bismarck, who, when not engaged on his intrigues of blood and iron, always likes to resume his old trade, so befitting his mental calibre, of contributor to Kladderadatsch (the Berlin Punch),®^^1^^ it could only enter into such a head, to ascribe to the Paris Commune aspirations after that caricature of the old French municipal organisation of 1791, the Prussian municipal constitution which degrades the town governments to mere secondary wheels in the police-machinery of the Prussian State.

The Commune made that catchword of bourgeois revolutions, cheap government, a reality, by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure---the standing army and State functionarism. Its very existence presupposed the nonexistence of monarchy, which, in Europe at least, is the normal incumbrance and indispensable cloak of class-rule. It supplied the Republic with the basis of really democratic institutions. But neither cheap government nor the "true Republic" was its ultimate aim; they were its mere concomitants.

The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favour, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour.

Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class-rule. With labour emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labour ceases to be a class attribute.

It is a strange fact. In spite of all the tall talk and all the immense literature, for the last sixty years, about Emancipation of Labour, no sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society with its two poles of Capital and Wages-Slavery (the landlord now is but the sleeping partner of the capitalist), as if capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgin innocence, with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with its prostitute realities not yet laid bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilisation! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class-property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labour, into mere instruments of free and associated labour. But this is Communism, ``impossible'' Communism! Why, those members of the ruling classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system---and they are many---have become the ob-

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trusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the Capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of Capitalist production--- what else, gentlemen, would it be but Communism, `` possible'' Communism?

The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made Utopias to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen's gentlemen with the pen and inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility.

When the Paris Commune took the management of the Revolution in its own hands; when plain working men for the first time dared to infringe upon the Governmental privilege of their "natural superiors", and, under circumstances of unexampled difficulty, performed their work modestly, conscientiously, and efficiently,---performed it at salaries the highest of which barely amounted to one-fifth of what, according to high scientific authority,"" is the minimum required for a secretary to a certain metropolitan school board,---the old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight of the Red Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labour, floating over the Hotel de Ville.

And yet, this was the first revolution in which the work-

ing class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris middle class---shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants---the wealthy capitalists alone excepted. The Commune had saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever-recurring cause of dispute among the middle classes themselves---the debtor and creditor accounts.^^68^^ The same portion of the middle class, after they had assisted in putting down the working men's insurrection of June, 1848,^^8^^ had been at once unceremoniously sacrificed to their creditors by the then Constituent Assembly.^^69^^ But this was not their only motive for now rallying round the working class. They felt that there was but one alternative---the Commune, or the Empire---under whatever name it might reappear. The Empire had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesale financial swindling it fostered, by the props it lent to the artificially accelerated centralisation of capital, and the concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them politically, it had shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted their Voltairianism by handing over the education of their children to the freres ignorantins,^^70^^ it had revolted their national feeling as Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one equivalent for the ruins it made---the disappearance of the Empire. In fact, after the exodus from Paris of the high Bonapartist and capitalist boheme, the true middle-class Party of Order came out in the shape of the "Union Republicaine",^^71^^ enrolling themselves under the colours of the Commune and defending it against the wilful misconstruction of Thiers. Whether the gratitude of this great body of the middle class will stand the present severe trial, time must show.

The Commune was perfectly right in telling the peasants that "its victory was their only hope". Of all the lies hatched at Versailles and re-echoed by the glorious European pennya-liner, one of the most tremendous was that the Rurals represented the French peasantry. Think only of the love of the French peasant for the men to whom, after 1815, he had to pay the milliard of indemnity!^^72^^ In the eyes of the French peasant, the very existence of a great landed proprietor is in itself an encroachment on his conquests of

* Professor Huxley. [Note to the German edition of 1871.]

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1789. The bourgeois, in 1848, had burdened his plot of land with the additional tax of forty-five cents in the franc; but then he did so in the name of the Revolution; while now he had fomented a civil war against the Revolution, to shift on to the peasant's shoulders the chief load of the five milliards of indemnity to be paid to the Prussian. The Commune, on the other hand, in one of its first proclamations, declared that the true originators of the war would be made to pay its cost. The Commune would have delivered the peasant of the blood tax,---would have given him a cheap government,---transformed his present blood-suckers, the notary, advocate, executor, and other judicial vampires, into salaried communal agents, elected by, and responsible to, himself. It would have freed him of the tyranny of the garde champelre, the gendarme, and the prefect; would have put enlightenment by the schoolmaster in the place of stultification by the priest. And the French peasant is, above all, a man of reckoning. He would find it extremely reasonable that the pay of the priest, instead of being extorted by the taxgatherer, should only depend upon the spontaneous action of the parishioners' religious instincts. Such were the great immediate boons which the rule of the Commune---and that rule alone---held out to the French peasantry. It is, therefore, quite superfluous here to expatiate upon the more complicated but vital problems which the Commune alone was able, and at the same time compelled, to solve in favour of the peasant, viz., the hypothecary debt, lying like an incubus upon his parcel of soil, the proletariat fonder (the rural proletariat), daily growing upon it, and his expropriation from it enforced, at a more and more rapid rate, by the very development of modern agriculture and the competition of capitalist farming.

The French peasant had elected Louis Bonaparte president of the Republic; but the Party of Order created the Empire. What the French peasant really wants he commenced to show in 1849 and 1850, by opposing his maire to the Government's prefect, his schoolmaster to the Government's priest, and himself to the Government's gendarme. All the laws made by the Party of Order^^47^^ in January and February, 1850, were avowed measures of repression against the peasant. The peasant was a Bonapartist, because the great

Revolution, with all its benefits to him, was, in his eyes, personified in Napoleon. This delusion, rapidly breaking down under the Second Empire (and in its very nature hostile to the Rurals), this prejudice of the past, how could it have withstood the appeal of the Commune to the living interests and urgent wants of the peasantry?

The Rurals---this was, in fact, their chief apprehensionknew that three months' free communication of Communal Paris with the provinces would bring about a general rising of the peasants, and hence their anxiety to establish a police blockade around Paris, so as to stop the spread of the rinderpest.

If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national Government, it was, at the same time, as a working men's Government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labour, emphatically international. Within sight of the Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world.

The Second Empire had been the jubilee of cosmopolitan black-legism, the rakes of all countries rushing in at its call for a share in its orgies and in the plunder of the French people. Even at this moment the right hand of Thiers is Ganesco, the foul Wallachian, and his left hand is Markovsky, the Russian spy. The Commune admitted all foreigners to the honour of dying for an immortal cause. Between the foreign war lost by their treason, and the civil war fomented by their conspiracy with the foreign invader, the bourgeoisie had found the time to display their patriotism by organising police-hunts upon the Germans in France. The Commune made a German working man* its Minister of Labour. Thiers, the bourgeoisie, the Second Empire, had continually deluded Poland by loud professions of sympathy, • while in reality betraying her to, and doing the dirty work of, Russia. The Commune honoured the heroic sons of Poland** by placing them at the head of the defenders of

* Leo Frankel.---Ed. ** J. Dombrowski and W. Wroblewski.---Ed.

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Paris. And, to broadly mark the new era of history it was conscious of initiating, under the eyes of the conquering Prussians, on the one side, and of the Bonapartist army, led by Bonapartist generals, on the other, the Commune pulled down that colossal symbol of Martial glory, the Vendome column.^^73^^

The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. Its special measures could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people. Such were the abolition of the nightwork of journeymen bakers; the prohibition, under penalty, of the employers' practice to reduce wages by levying upon their work-people fines under manifold pretexts,---a process in which the employer combines in his own person the parts of legislator, judge, and executor, and filches the money to boot. Another measure of this class was the surrender to associations of workmen, under reserve of compensation, of all closed workshops and factories, no matter whether the respective capitalists had absconded or preferred to strike work. <

The financial measures of the Commune, remarkable for their sagacity and moderation, could only be such as were compatible with the state of a besieged town. Considering the colossal robberies committed upon the city of Paris by the great financial companies and contractors, under the protection of Haussmann, the Commune would have had an incomparably better title to confiscate their property than Louis Napoleon had against the Orleans family. The Hohenzollern and the English oligarchs, who both have derived a good deal of their estates from Church plunder, were, of course, greatly shocked at the Commune clearing but 8,000 f. out of secularisation.

While the Versailles Government, as soon as it had recovered some spirit and strength, used the most violent means against the Commune; while it put down the free expression of opinion all over France, even to the forbidding of meetings of delegates from the large towns; while it subjected Versailles and the rest of France to an espionage far surpassing that of the Second Empire; while it burned by its gendarme inquisitors all papers printed at Paris, and sifted all correspondence from and to Paris; while in the National Assembly the most timid attempts to put in a word

for Paris were howled down in a manner unknown even to the Chambre introuvable of 1816^^49^^; with the savage warfare of Versailles outside, and its attempts at corruption and conspiracy inside Paris---would the Commune not have shamefully betrayed its trust by affecting to keep up all the decencies and appearances of liberalism as in a time of profound peace? Had the Government of the Commune been akin to that of M. Thiers, there would have been no more occasion to suppress Party-of-Order papers at Paris than there was to suppress Communal papers at

T r Ml * ^x A i

Versailles.

It was irritating indeed to the Rurals that at the very same time they declared the return to the Church to be the only means of salvation for France, the infidel Commune unearthed the peculiar mysteries of the Picpus nunnery, and of the Church of Saint Laurent.^^74^^ It was a satire upon M. Thiers that, while he showered grand crosses upon the Bonapartist generals in acknowledgement of their mastery in losing battles, signing capitulations, and turning cigarettes at Wilhelmshohe, the Commune dismissed and arrested its generals whenever they were suspected of neglecting their duties. The expulsion from, and arrest by, the Commune of one of its members"' who had slipped in under a false name, and had undergone at Lyons six days' imprisonment for simple bankruptcy, was it not a deliberate insult hurled at the forger, Jules Favre, then still the Foreign Minister of France, still selling France to Bismarck, and still dictating his orders to that paragon Government of Belgium? But indeed the Commune did not pretend to infallibility, the invariable attribute of all governments of the old stamp. It published its doings and sayings, it initiated the public into all its shortcomings.

In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a different stamp; some of them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of tradition; others mere bawlers, who, by dint of repeating

* Blanchet---Ed.

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year after year the same set of stereotyped declamations against the Government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water. After the 18th of March, some such men did also turn up, and in some cases contrived to play pre-eminent parts. As far as their power went, they hampered the real action of the working class, exactly as men of that sort have hampered the full development of every previous revolution. They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off; but time was not allowed to the Commune.

Wonderful, indeed, was the change the Commune had wrought in Paris! No longer any trace of the meretricious Paris of the Second Empire. No longer was Paris the rendezvous of British landlords, Irish absentees,^^75^^ American exslaveholders and shoddy men, Russian ex-serfowners, and Wallachian boyards. No more corpses at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any robberies; in fact, for the first time since the days of February, 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and that without any police of any kind.

``We," said a member of the Commune, "hear no longer of assassination, theft and personal assault; it seems indeed as if the police had dragged along with it to Versailles all its Conservative friends.''

The cocoltes had refound the scent of their protectors--- the absconding men of family, religion, and, above all, of property. In their stead, the real women of Paris showed again at the surface---heroic, noble, and devoted, like the women of antiquity. Working, thinking, fighting, bleeding Paris---almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of the cannibals at its gates---radiant in the enthusiasm of its historic initiative!

Opposed to this new world at Paris, behold the old world at Versailles---that assembly of the ghouls of all defunct regimes, Legitimists and Orleanists, eager to feed upon the carcass of the nation,---with a tail of antediluvian Republicans, sanctioning, by their presence in the Assembly, the slaveholders' rebellion, relying for the maintenance of their Parliamentary Republic upon the vanity of the senile mountebank at its head, and caricaturing 1789 by holding their

ghastly meetings in the Jeu de Pau/ne* There it was, this Assembly, the representative of everything dead in France, propped up to the semblance of life by nothing but the swords of the generals of Louis Bonaparte. Paris all truth, Versailles all lie; and that lie vented through the mouth of Thiers.

Thiers tells a deputation of the mayors of the Seine-- etOise,

``You may rely upon my word, which I have never broken!''

He tells the Assembly itself that "it was the most freely elected and most Liberal Assembly France ever possessed"; he tells his motley soldiery that it was "the admiration of the world, and the finest army France ever possessed"; he tells the provinces that the bombardment of Paris by him was a myth:

``If some cannon-shots have been fired, it is not the deed of the army of Versailles, but of some insurgents trying to make believe that they are fighting, while they dare not show their faces.''

He again tells the provinces that

``the artillery of Versailles does not bombard Paris, but only cannonades it".

He tells the Archbishop of Paris that the pretended executions and reprisals (!) attributed to the Versailles troops were all moonshine. He tells Paris that he was only anxious "to free it from the hideous tyrants who oppress it", and that, in fact, the Paris of the Commune was "but a handful of criminals''.

The Paris of M. Thiers was not the real Paris of the "vile multitude", but a phantom Paris, the Paris of the francs-fileursj^^17^^ the Paris of the Boulevards, male and female---the rich, the capitalist, the gilded, the idle Paris, now thronging with its lackeys, its black-legs, its literary boheme, and its cocottes at Versailles, Saint-Denis, Rueil, and Saint-

* Jeu de Paume: The tennis court where the National Assembly of 1789 adopted its famous decisions.76 [Note by Engels to the German edition of 1871.]

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Germain; considering the civil war but an agreeable diversion, eyeing the battle going on through telescopes, counting the rounds of cannon, and swearing by their own honour, and that of their prostitutes, that the performance was far better got up than it used to be at the Porte St. Martin. The men who fell were really dead; the cries of the wounded were cries in good earnest; and, besides, the whole thing was so intensely historical.

This is the Paris of M. Thiers, as the emigration of Coblenz was the France of M. de Calonne.^^78^^

The first attempt of the slaveholders' conspiracy to put down Paris by getting the Prussians to occupy it, was frustrated by Bismarck's refusal. The second attempt, that of the 18th of March, ended in the rout of the army and the flight to Versailles of the Government, which ordered the whole administration to break up and follow in its track. By the semblance of peace-negotiations with Paris, Thiers found the time to prepare for war against it. But where to find an army? The remnants ' of the line regiments were weak in number and unsafe in character. His urgent appeal to the provinces to succour Versailles, by their National Guards and volunteers, met with a flat refusal. Brittany alone furnished a handful of Chouans fighting under a white flag, every one of them wearing on his breast the heart of Jesus in white cloth, and shouting "Vive le Roil" (Long live the King!). Thiers was, therefore, compelled to collect, in hot haste, a motley crew, composed of sailors, marines, Pontifical Zouaves,^^79^^ Valentin's gendarmes, and Pietri's sergentsdc-ville and mouchards. This army, however, would have been ridiculously ineffective without the instalments of imperialist war-prisoners, which Bismarck granted in numbers just sufficient to keep the civil war a-going, and keep the Versailles Government in abject dependence on Prussia. During

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the war itself, the Versailles police had to look after the Versailles army, while the gendarmes had to drag it on by exposing themselves at all posts of danger. The forts which fell were not taken, but bought. The heroism of the Federals convinced Thiers that the resistance of Paris was not to be broken by his own strategic genius and the bayonets at his disposal.

Meanwhile, his relations with the provinces became more and more difficult. Not one single address of approval came in to gladden Thiers and his Rurals. Quite the contrary. Deputations and addresses demanding, in a tone anything but respectful, conciliation with Paris on the basis of the unequivocal recognition of the Republic, the acknowledgement of the Communal liberties, and the dissolution of the National Assembly, whose mandate was extinct, poured in from all sides, and in such numbers that Dufaure, Thiers' Minister of Justice, in his circular of April 23rd to the public prosecutors, commanded them to treat "the cry of conciliation" as a crime! In regard, however, of the hopeless prospect held out by his campaign, Thiers resolved to shift his tactics by ordering, all over the country, municipal elections to take place on the 30th of April, on the basis of the new municipal law dictated by himself to the National Assembly. What with the intrigues of his prefects, what with police intimidation, he felt quite sanguine of imparting, by the verdict of the provinces, to the National Assembly that moral power it had never possessed, and of getting at last from the provinces the physical force required for the conquest of Paris.

His banditti-warfare against Paris, exalted in his own bulletins, and the attempts of his ministers at the establishment, throughout France, of a reign of terror, Thiers was from the beginning anxious to accompany with a little by-play of conciliation, which had to serve more than one purpose. It was to dupe the provinces, to inveigle the middle-class element in Paris, and, above all, to afford the professed Republicans in the National Assembly the opportunity of hiding their treason against Paris behind their faith in Thiers. On the 21st of March, when still without an army, he had declared to the Assembly:

``Come what may, I will not send an army to Paris.''

On the 27th March he rose again:

``I have found the Republic an accomplished fact, and I am firmly resolved to maintain it.''

In reality, he put down the revolution at Lyons and Marseilles^^80^^ in the name of the Republic, while the roars of his Rurals drowned the very mention of its name at Versailles. After this exploit, he toned down the "accomplished fact" into an hypothetical fact. The Orleans princes, whom he had cautiously warned off Bordeaux, were now, in flagrant breach of the law, permitted to intrigue at Dreux. The concessions held out by Thiers in his interminable interviews with the delegates from Paris and the provinces, although constantly varied in tone and colour, according to time and circumstances, did in fact never come to more than the prospective restriction of revenge to the

``handful of criminals implicated in the murder of Lccomte and Clement Thomas,"

on the well-understood premise that Paris and France were unreservedly to accept M. Thiers himself as the best of possible Republics, as he, in 1830, had done with Louis Philippe. Even these concessions he not only took care to render doubtful by the official comments put upon them in the Assembly through his Ministers. He had his Dufaure to act. Dufaure, this old Orleanist lawyer, had always been the justiciary of the state of siege, as now in 1871, under Thiers, so in 1839 under Louis Philippe, and in 1849 under Louis Bonaparte's presidency. While out of office he made a fortune by pleading for the Paris capitalists, and made political capital by pleading against the laws he had himself originated. He now hurried through the National Assembly not Only a set of repressive laws which were, after the fall of Paris, to extirpate the last remnants of Republican liberty in France^^81^^; he foreshadowed the fate of Paris by abridging the, for him, too slow procedure of courts-martial,^^82^^ and by a new-fangled, Draconic code of deportation. The Revolution of 1848, abolishing the penalty of death for political crimes, has replaced it by deportation. Louis Bonaparte did not dare, at least not in theory, to re-establish the regime of

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THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.-IV

the guillotine. The Rural Assembly, not yet bold enough even to hint that the Parisians were not rebels, but assassins, had therefore to confine its prospective vengeance against Paris to Dufaure's new code of deportation. Under all these circumstances Thiers himself could not have gone on with his comedy of conciliation, had it not, as he intended it to do, drawn forth shrieks of rage from the Rurals, whose ruminating mind did neither understand the play, nor its necessities of hypocrisy, tergiversation, and procrastination.

In sight of the impending municipal elections of the 30th April, Thiers enacted one of his great conciliation scenes on the 27th April. Amidst a flood of sentimental rhetoric, he exclaimed from the tribune of the Assembly:

``There exists no conspiracy against the Republic but that of Paris, which compels us to shed French blood. I repeat it again and again. Let those impious arms fall from the hands which hold them, and chastisement will be arrested at once by an act of peace excluding only the small number of criminals.''

To the violent interruption of the Rurals he replied:

``Gentlemen, tell me, I implore you, am I wrong? Do you really regret that I could have stated the truth that the criminals are only a handful? Is it not fortunate in the midst of our misfortunes that those who have been capable to shed the blood of Clement Thomas and General Lecomte are but rare exceptions?''

France, however, turned a deaf ear to what Thiers flattered himself to be a parliamentary siren's song. Out of 700,000 municipal councillors returned by the 35,000 communes still left to France, the United Legitimists, Orleanists⁹and Bonapartists did not carry 8,000. The supplementary elections which followed were still more decidedly hostile. Thus, instead of getting from the provinces the badly-needed physical force, the National Assembly lost even its last claim to moral force, that of being the expression of the universal suffrage of the country. To complete the discomfiture, the newly-chosen municipal councils of all the cities of France openly threatened the usurping Assembly at Versailles with a counter Assembly at Bordeaux.

Then the long-expected moment of decisive action had at last come for Bismarck. He peremptorily summoned Thiers to send to Frankfort plenipotentiaries for the definitive set-

tlement of peace. In humble obedience to the call of his master, Thiers hastened to despatch his trusty Jules Favre, backed by Pouyer-Quertier. Pouyer-Quertier, an ``eminent'' Rouen cotton-spinner, a fervent and even servile partisan of the Second Empire, had never found any fault with it save its commercial treaty with England,^^83^^ prejudicial to his own shop-interest. Hardly installed at Bordeaux as Thiers' Minister of Finance, he denounced that ``unholy'' treaty, hinted at its near abrogation, and had even the effrontery to try, although in vain (having counted without Bismarck), the immediate enforcement of the old protective duties against Alsace, where, he said, no previous international treaties stood in the way. This man, who considered counter-- revolution as a means to put down wages at Rouen, and the surrender of French provinces as a means to bring up the price of his wares in France, was he not the one predestined to be picked out by Thiers as the helpmate of Jules Favre in his last and crowning treason?

On the arrival at Frankfort of this exquisite pair of plenipotentiaries, bully Bismarck at once met them with the imperious alternative: Either the restoration of the Empire, or the unconditional acceptance of my own peace terms! These terms included a shortening of the intervals in which the war indemnity was to be paid and the continued occupation of the Paris forts by Prussian troops until Bismarck should feel satisfied with the state of things in France; Prussia thus being recognised as the supreme arbiter in internal French politics! In return for this he offered to let loose, for the extermination of Paris, the captive Bonapartist army, and to lend them the direct assistance of Emperor William's troops. He pledged his good faith by making payment of the first instalment of the indemnity dependent on the `` pacification'' of Paris. Such a bait was, of course, eagerly swallowed by Thiers and his plenipotentiaries. They signed the treaty of peace on the 10th of May, and had it endorsed by the Versailles Assembly on the 18th.

In the interval between the conclusion of peace and the arrival of the Bonapartist prisoners, Thiers felt the more bound to resume his comedy of conciliation, as his Republican tools stood in sore need of a pretext for blinking their eyes at the preparations for the carnage of Paris. As late

KARL MARX

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.---IV

as the 8th of May he replied to a deputation of middle-class conciliators:

``Whenever the insurgents will make up their minds for capitulation, the gates of Paris shall be flung wide open during a week for all except the murderers of Generals Clement Thomas and Lecomte.''

A few days afterwards, when violently interpellated on these promises by the Rurals, he refused to enter into any explanations; not, however, without giving them this significant hint:

``I tell you there are impatient men amongst you, men who are in too great a hurry. They must have another eight days; at the end of these eight days there will be no more danger, and the task will be proportionate to their courage and to their capacities.''

As soon as MacMahon was able to assure him that he could shortly enter Paris, Thiers declared to the Assembly that

``he would enter Paris with the laws in his hands, and demand a full expiation from the wretches who had sacrificed the lives of soldiers and destroyed public monuments''.

As the moment of decision drew near he said---to the Assembly, "I shall be pitiless!"---to Paris, that it was doomed; and to his Bonapartist banditti, that they had State licence to wreak vengeance upon Paris to their hearts' content. At last, when treachery had opened the gates of Paris to General Douay, on the 21st of May, Thiers, on the 22nd, revealed to the Rurals the ``goal'' of his conciliation comedy, which they had so obstinately persisted in not understanding.

``I told you a few days ago that we were approaching our goal; today I come to tell you the goal is reached. The victory of order, justice and civilisation is at last won!''

So it was. The civilisation and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters. Then this civilisation and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge. Each new crisis in the class struggle between the appropriator and the producer brings out this

fact more glaringly. Even the atrocities of the bourgeois in June, 1848, vanish before the ineffable infamy of 1871. The self-sacrificing heroism with which the population of Paris--- men, women and children---fought for eight days after the entrance of the Versaillese, reflects as much the grandeur of their cause, as the infernal deeds of the soldiery reflect the innate spirit of that civilisation of which they are the mercenary vindicators. A glorious civilisation, indeed, the great problem of which is how to get rid of the heaps of corpses it made after the battle was over!

To find a parallel for the conduct of Thiers and his bloodhounds we must go back to the times of Sulla and the two Triumvirates of Rome.^^84^^ The same wholesale slaughter in cold blood; the same disregard, in massacre, of age and sex; the same system of torturing prisoners; the same proscriptions, but this time of a whole class; the same savage hunt after concealed leaders, lest one might escape; the same denunciations of political and private enemies; the same indifference for the butchery of entire strangers to the feud. There is but this difference, that the Romans had no mitrailleuses for the despatch, in the lump, of the proscribed, and that they had not "the law in their hands", nor on their lips the cry of ``civilisation''.

And after those horrors, look upon the other, still more hideous, face of that bourgeois civilisation as described by its own press!

``With stray shots," writes the Paris correspondent of a London Tory paper, "still ringing in the distance, and untended wounded wretches dying amid the tombstones of Pere la Chaise---with 6,000 terror-stricken insurgents wandering in an agony of despair in the labyrinth of the catacombs, and wretches hurried through the streets to be shot down in scores by the mitrailleuse---it is revolting to see the cafes filled with the votaries of absinthe, billiards, and dominoes; female profligacy perambulating the boulevards, and the sound of revelry disturbing the night from the cabinets particuliers of fashionable restaurants.''

M. Edouard Herve writes in the Journal de Paris,^^85^^ a Versaillist journal suppressed by the Commune:

``The way in which the population of Paris (!) manifested its satisfaction yesterday was rather more than frivolous, and we fear it will grow worse as time progresses. Paris has now a fete day appearance,

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THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.---IV

which is sadly out of place; and, unless we are to be called the Parisiens de la decadence, this sort of thing must come to an end.''

And then he quotes the passage from Tacitus:

``Yet, on the morrow of that horrible struggle, even before it was completely over, Rome---degraded and corrupt---began once more to wallow in the voluptuous slough which was destroying its body and polluting its soul---alibi proelia et vulnera, alibi balnea popinaeque (here fights and wounds, there baths and restaurants).''

M. Herve only forgets to say that the "population of Paris" he speaks of is but the population of the Paris of M. Thiers---the francs-fileurs returning in throngs from Versailles, Saint-Denis, Rueil and Saint-Germain---the Paris of the ``Decline''.

In all its bloody triumphs over the self-sacrificing champions of a new and better society, that nefarious civilisation, based upon the enslavement of labour, drowns the moans of its victims in a hue-and-cry of calumny, reverberated by a world-wide echo. The serene working men's Paris of the Commune is suddenly changed into a pandemonium by the bloodhounds of ``order''. And what does this tremendous change prove to the bourgeois mind of all countries? Why, that the Commune has conspired against civilisation! The Paris people die enthusiastically for the Commune in numbers unequalled in any battle known to history. What does that prove? Why, that the Commune was not the people's own government but the usurpation of a handful of criminals! The women of Paris joyfully give up their lives at the barricades and on the place of execution. What does this prove? Why, that the demon of the Commune has changed them into Megaeras and Hecates! The moderation of the Commune during two months of undisputed sway is equalled only by the heroism of its defence. What does that prove? Why, that for months the Commune carefully hid, under a mask of moderation and humanity, the blood-thirstiness of its fiendish instincts, to be let loose in the hour of its agony!

The working men's Paris, in the act of its heroic selfholocaust, involved in its flames buildings and monuments. While tearing to pieces the living body of the proletariat, its rulers must no longer expect to return triumphantly into the intact architecture of their abodes. The Government of

Versailles cries, "Incendiarism!" and whispers this cue to all its agents, down to the remotest hamlet, to hunt up its enemies everywhere as suspect of professional incendiarism. The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed -by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar! When governments give state-licences to their navies to "kill, burn and destroy", is that a licence for incendiarism? When the British troops wantonly set fire to the Capitol at Washington and to the summer palace of the Chinese Emperor,^^86^^ was that incendiarism? When the Prussians, not for military reasons, but out of the mere spite of revenge, burned down, by the help of petroleum, towns like Chateaudun and innumerable villages, was that incendiarism? When Thiers, during six weeks, bombarded Paris, under the pretext that he wanted to set fire to those houses only in which there were people, was that incendiarism?---In war, fire is an arm as legitimate as any. Buildings held by the enemy are shelled to set them on fire. If their defenders have to retire, they themselves light the flames to prevent the attack from making use of the buildings. To be burnt down has always been the inevitable fate of all buildings situated in the front of battle of all the regular armies of the world. But in the war of the enslaved against their enslavers, the only justifiable war in history, this is by no means to hold good! The Commune used fire strictly as a means of defence. They used it to stop up to the Versailles troops those long, straight avenues which Haussmann had expressly opened to artillery-fire; they used it to cover their retreat, in the same way as the Versaillese, in their advance, used their shells which destroyed at least as many buildings as the fire of the Commune. It is a matter of dispute, even now, which buildings were set fire to by the defence, and which by the attack. And the defence resorted to fire only then, when the Versaillese troops had already commenced their wholesale murdering of prisoners.---Besides, the Commune had, long before, given full public notice that, if driven to extremities, they would bury themselves under the ruins of Paris, and make Paris a second Moscow,^^87^^ as the Government of Defence, but only as a cloak for its treason, had promised to do. For this purpose Trochu had

KARL MARX

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found them the petroleum. The Commune knew that its opponents cared nothing for the lives of the Paris people, but cared much for their own Paris buildings. And Thiers, on the other hand, had given them notice that he would be implacable in his vengeance. No sooner had he got his army ready on one side, and the Prussians shutting up the trap on the other, than he proclaimed: "I shall be pitiless! The expiation will be complete, and justice will be stern!" If the acts of the Paris working men were vandalism, it was the vandalism of defence in despair, not the vandalism of triumph, like that which the Christians perpetrated upon the really priceless art treasures of heathen antiquity; and even that vandalism has been justified by the historian as an unavoidable and comparatively trifling concomitant to the titanic struggle between a new society arising and an old one breaking down. It was still less the vandalism of Haussmann, razing historic Paris to make place for the Paris of the sightseer!

But the execution by the Commune of the sixty-four hostages, with the Archbishop of Paris at their head! The bourgeoisie and its army in June, 1848, re-established a custom which had long disappeared from the practice of war---the shooting of their defenceless prisoners. This brutal custom has since been more or less strictly adhered to by the suppressors of all popular commotions in Europe and India; thus proving that it constitutes a real "progress of civilisation"! On the other hand, the Prussians, in France, had re-established the practice of taking hostages---- innocent men, who, with their lives, were to answer to them for the acts of others. When Thiers, as we have seen, from the very beginning of the conflict, enforced the humane practice of shooting down the Communal prisoners, the Commune, to protect their lives, was obliged to resort to the Prussian practice of securing hostages. The lives of the hostages had been forfeited over and over again by the continued shooting of prisoners on the part of the Versaillese. How could they be spared any longer after the carnage with which MacMahon's praetorians^^88^^ celebrated their entrance into Paris? Was even the last check upon the unscrupulous ferocity of bourgeois governments---the taking of hostages ---to be made a mere sham of? The real murderer of Arch-

bishop Darboy is Thiers. The Commune again and again had offered to exchange the archbishop, and ever so many priests in the bargain, against the single Blanqui, then in the hands of Thiers. Thiers obstinately refused. He knew that with Blanqui he would give to the Commune a head; while the archbishop would serve his purpose best in the shape of a corpse. Thiers acted upon the precedent of Cavaignac. How, in June, 1848, did not Cavaignac and his men of order raise shouts of horror by stigmatising the insurgents as the assassins of Archbishop Affre! They knew perfectly well that the archbishop had been shot by the soldiers of order. M. Jacquemet, the archbishop's vicar-general, present on the spot, had immediately afterwards handed them in his evidence to that effect.

All this chorus of calumny, which the Party of Order⁴⁷never fail, in their orgies of blood, to raise against their victims, only proves that the bourgeois of our days considers himself the legitimate successor to the baron of old, who thought every weapon in his own hand fair against the plebeian, while in the hands of the plebeian a weapon of any kind constituted in itself a crime.

The conspiracy of the ruling class to break down the Revolution by a civil war carried on under the patronage of the foreign invader---a conspiracy which we have traced from the very 4th of September down to the entrance of MacMahon's praetorians through the gate of St. Cloud--- culminated in the carnage of Paris. Bismarck gloats over the ruins of Paris, in which he saw perhaps the first instalment of that general destruction of great cities he had prayed for when still a simple Rural in the Prussian Chambre introuvable of 1849.^^89^^ He gloats over the cadavers of the Paris proletariat. For him this is not only the extermination of revolution, but the extinction of France, now decapitated in reality, and by the French Government itself. With the shallowness characteristic of all successful statesmen, he sees but the surface of this tremendous historic event. Whenever before has history exhibited the spectacle of a conqueror crowning his victory by turning into, not only the gendarme, but the hired bravo of the conquered Government? There existed no war between Prussia and the Commune of Paris. On the contrary, the Commune had accept-

KARL MARX

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.---IV

ed the peace preliminaries, and Prussia had announced her neutrality. Prussia was, therefore, no belligerent. She acted the part of a bravo, a cowardly bravo, because incurring no danger; a hired bravo, because stipulating beforehand the payment of her blood-money of 500 millions on the fall of Paris. And thus, at last, came out the true character of the war, ordained by Providence as a chastisement of godless and debauched France by pious and moral Germany! And this unparalleled breach of the law of nations, even as understood by the old-world lawyers, instead of arousing the ``civilised'' governments of Europe to declare the felonious Prussian Government, the mere tool of the St. Petersburg Cabinet, an outlaw amongst nations, only incites them to consider whether the few victims who escape the double cordon around Paris are not to be given up to the hangman at Versailles!

That after the most tremendous war of modern times, the conquering and the conquered hosts should fraternise for the common massacre of the proletariat---this unparalleled event does indicate, not, as Bismarck thinks, the final repression of a new society upheaving, but the crumbling into dust of bourgeois society. The highest heroic effort of which old society is still capable is national war; and this is now proved to be a mere governmental humbug, intended to defer the struggle of classes, and to be thrown aside as soon as that class struggle bursts out into civil war. Class-rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; the national governments are one as against the proletariat!

After Whit-Sunday, 1871, there can be neither peace nor truce possible between the working men of France and the appropriators of their produce. The iron hand of a mercenary soldiery may keep for a time both classes tied down in common oppression. But the battle must break out again and again in ever-growing dimensions, and there can be no doubt as to who will be the victor in the end,---the appropriating few, or the immense working majority. And the French working class is only the advanced guard of the modern proletariat.

While the European governments thus testify, before Paris, to the international character of class-rule, they cry down the International Working Men's Association---the

international counter-organisation of labour against the cosmopolitan conspiracy of capital---as the head fountain of all these disasters. Thiers denounced it as the despot of labour, pretending to be its liberator. Picard ordered that all communications between the French Internationals and those abroad should be cut off; Count Jaubert, Thiers' mummified accomplice of 1835, declares it the great problem of all civilised governments to weed it out. The Rurals roar against it, and the whole European press joins the chorus. An honourable French writer'^^1^^", completely foreign to our Association, speaks as follows:

``The members of the Central Committee of the National Guard, as well as the greater part of the members of the Commune, are the most active, intelligent, and energetic minds of the International Working Men's Association; ... men who are thoroughly honest, sincere, intelligent, devoted, pure, and fanatical in the good sense of the word.''

The police-tinged bourgeois mind naturally figures to itself the International Working Men's Association as acting in the manner of a secret conspiracy, its central body ordering, from time to time, explosions in different countries. Our Association is, in fact, nothing but the international bond between the most advanced working men in the various countries of the civilised world. Wherever, in whatever shape, and under whatever conditions the class struggle obtains any consistency, it is but natural that members of our Association should stand in the foreground. The soil out of which it grows is modern society itself. It cannot be stamped out by any amount of carnage. To stamp it out, the governments would have to stamp out the despotism of capital over labour---the condition of their own parasitical existence.

Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.

Office: 256, High Holborn, London, W.C., May 30th, 1871

* An apparent reference to Robinet.---Ed.

7-2648

KARL MARX

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.---NOTES

Notes I

Empire", went, during the war, by the name of the French "Ensign Pistol''.

``The Temps^^91^^ which is a careful journal, and not given to sensation, tells a dreadful story of people imperfectly shot and buried before life was extinct. A great number were buried in the square round St. Jacques-la-Bouchiere; some of them very superficially. In the daytime the roar of the busy streets prevented any notice being taken; but in the stillness of the night the inhabitants of the houses in the neighbourhood were roused by distant moans, and in the morning a clenched hand was seen protruding through the soil. In consequence

of this, exhumations were ordered to take place----- That many

wounded have been buried alive I have not the slightest doubt. One case I can vouch for. When Brunei was shot with his mistress on the 24th ult. in the courtyard of a house in the Place Vendome, the bodies lay there until the afternoon of the 27th. When the burial party came to remove the corpses, they found the woman living still and took her to an ambulance. Though she had received four bullets she is now out of danger."---Paris Correspondent "Evening Standard''^²June 8th.

``The column of prisoners halted in the Avenue Uhrich, and was drawn up, four or five deep, on the footway facing to the road. General Marquis de Galliffet and his staff dismounted and commenced an inspection from the left of the line. Walking down slowly and eyeing the ranks, the General stopped here and there, tapping a man on the shoulder or beckoning him out o_f the rear ranks. In most cases, without further parley, the individual" thus selected was marched out into the centre of the road, where a small supplementary column was, thus,

soon formed----- It was evident that there was considerable room for

error. A mounted officer pointed out to General Galliffet a man and woman for some particular offence. The woman, rushing out of the ranks, threw herself on her knees, and, with outstretched arms, protested her innocence in passionate terms. The General waited for a pause, and then with most impassible face and unmoved demeanour, said, 'Madame, I have visited every theatre in Paris, your acting will have no effect on me' ('ce n'est pas la peine de jouer la comedie'}. ... It was not a good thing on that day to be noticeably taller, dirtier, cleaner, older, or uglier than one's neighbours. One individual in particular struck me as probably owing his speedy release from the ills of this world to his having a broken nose.. . . Over a hundred being thus chosen, a firing party told off, and the column resumed its march, leaving them behind. A few minutes afterwards a dropping fire in our rear commenced, and continued for over a quarter of an hour. It was the execution of these summarily-convicted wretches."---Paris Correspondent "Daily News",^^90^^ June 8th.

This Galliffet, "the kept man of his wife, so notorious for her shameless exhibitions at the orgies of the Second

The following letter appeared in the [London] Times^Gftof June 13th^^93^^:

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES:

``Sir,---On June 6, 1871, M. Jules Favre issued a circular to all the European Powers, calling upon them to hunt down the International Working Men's Association.^^15^^ A few remarks will suffice to characterise that document.

``In the very preamble of our Statutes it is stated that the International was founded 'September 28, 1864, at a public meeting held at St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, London.' For purposes of his own Jules Favre puts back the date of its origin behind 1862.

``In order to explain our principles, he professes to quote 'their (the International's) sheet of the 25th of March, 1869'. And then what does he quote? The sheet of a society which is not the International. This sort of manoeuvre he already recurred to when, still a comparatively young lawyer, he had to defend the National newspaper,^^55^^ prosecuted for libel

ioo

KARL MARX

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.---NOTES

101

by Cabet. Then he pretended to read extracts from Cabet's pamphlets while reading interpolations of his own---a trick exposed while the court was sitting, and which, but for the indulgence of Cabet, would have been punished by Jules Favre's expulsion from the Paris bar. Of all the documents quoted by him as documents of the International, not one belongs to the International. He says, for instance,

`` 'The Alliance declares itself Atheist, says the General Council, constituted in London in July, 1869'.

``The General Council never issued such a document. On the contrary, it issued a document which quashed the original statutes of the `Alliance'^^94^^---L'Alliance de la Democratic Socialiste at Geneva---quoted by Jules Favre.

``Throughout his circular, which pretends in part also to be directed against the Empire, Jules Favre repeats against the International but the police inventions of the public prosecutors of the Empire, which broke down miserably even before the law courts of that Empire.

``It is known that in its two addresses (of July and September last) on the late war,* the General Council of the International denounced the Prussian plans of conquest against France. Later on, Mr. Reitlinger, Jules Favre's private secretary, applied, though of course in vain, to some members of the General Council for getting up by the Council a demonstration against Bismarck, in favour of the Government of National Defence; they were particularly requested not to mention the Republic. The preparations for a demonstration with regard to the expected arrival of Jules Favre in London were made---certainly with the best of intentions---in spite of the General Council, which, in its address of the 9th of September, had distinctly forewarned the Paris workmen against Jules Favre and his colleagues.

``What would Jules Favre say if, in its turn, the International were to send a circular on Jules Favre to all the Cabinets of Europe, drawing their particular attention to the documents published at Paris by the late M. Milliere?

``I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

"John Hales,

``Secretary to the General Council of the International Working Men's Association

``London, June 12th, 1871.''

In an article on "The International Society and its aims", that pious informer, the London Spectator'^ (June 24th), amongst other similar tricks, quotes, even more fully than Jules Favre has done, the above document of the ``Alliance'' as the work of the International, and that eleven days after the refutation had been published in the Times. We do not wonder at this. Frederick the Great used to say that of all Jesuits the worst are the Protestant ones.

Written by Karl Marx in April-May 1871

Originally published in

English, as a pamphlet,

in London in mid-June 1871,

it was, in the course

of 1871 and 1872, published

in the various countries of

Europe and the United States

Printed according to

the text of the English

pamphlet (third edition)

* See pp. 35-39 and 40-47.---Ed.

Karl Marx

FIRST OUTLINE.---THE GOVERNMENT OF DEFENCE

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OUTLINES OF THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE™

gogue". The high-sounding promises to the people by the Government of Defence were therefore as many deliberate lies. Their ``plan'' they systematically carried out by entrusting the defence of Paris to Bonapartist generals, by disorganising the National Guard and by organising famine under the maladministration of Jules Ferry. The attempts of the Paris workmen on the 5th of October, the 31st of October, etc., to supplant these traitors by the Commune, were put down as conspiracies with the Prussians!^^98^^ After the capitulation the mask was thrown off (cast aside). The_ capitulards^ became a government by the grace of Bismarck. Being his prisoners, they stipulated with him a general armistice, the conditions of which disarmed France and rendered all further resistance impossible. Resuscitated at Bordeaux as the Government of the Republic, these very same capitulards, through Thiers, their ex-Ambassador, and Jules Favre, their Foreign Minister, fervently implored Bismarck, in the name of the majority of the so-called National Assembly, and long before the rise of Paris, to disarm, and occupy Paris, and put down "its canaille", as Bismarck himself on his return from France to Berlin sneeringly told his admirers at Frankfort. This occupation of Paris by the Prussians---such was the last word of the ``plan'' of the Government of Defence. The cynical effrontery with which, since their instalment at Versailles, the same men fawn upon and appeal to the armed intervention of Prussia, has dumbfounded even the venal press of Europe. The heroic exploits of the Paris National Guard, since they fight no longer under but against the capitulards, have forced even the most sceptical to brand the word ``traitor'' on the brazen fronts of the Trochu, Jules Favre and Co. The documents seized by the Commune have, at last, furnished the juridical proof of their high treason. Amongst these papers there are letters of the Bonapartist sabreurs, to whom the execution of Trochu's ``plan'' had been confided, in which these infamous wretches crack jokes at and make fun of their own "defence of Paris" (cf. for instance the letter of Alphonse Simon Guiod, supreme commander of the artillery of the army of defence of Paris and Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, to Susane, general of division of artillery, published by the Journal Officiel of the Commune).

First Outline

of The Civil War in France

The Government of Defence

Four months after the commencement of the war, when the Government of Defence had thrown a sop to [the] Paris National Guard by allowing them to show their fighting capabilities at Buzenval,^^97^^ the Government considered the opportune moment come to prepare Paris for capitulation. To the assembly of the mayors of Paris for capitulation, Trochu, in presence of and supported by Jules Favre and some others of his colleagues, revealed at last his "plan". He said literally:

``The first question, addressed to me by my colleagues on the evening of the 4th September, was this: Paris, can it stand, with any chance of success, a siege against the Prussian army? / did not hesitate to answer in the negative. Some of my colleagues here present will warrant the truth of these my words, and the persistence of my opinion. I told them in these very terms that, under the existing state of things, the attempt of Paris to maintain a siege against the Prussian army would be a folly. Without doubt, I added, this might be an heroic folly, but it would be nothing else. . .. The events have not given the lie to my prevision."

Hence, Trochu's plan, from the very day of the proclamation of the Republic, was the capitulation of Paris and of France. In point of fact he was the commander-in-chief of the Prussians. In a letter to Gambetta, Jules Favre himself confessed so much that the enemy to be put down was not the Prussian soldier, but the Paris (revolutionary) "dema-

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It is, therefore, evident that the men who now form the government of Versailles can only be saved from the fate of convicted traitors by civil war, the death of the Republic and a monarchical restoration under the shelter of Prussian bayonets.

But---and this is most characteristic of the men of the Empire, as well as of the men who but on its soil and within its atmosphere could grow into mock-tribunes of the people---the victorious Republic would not only brand them as traitors; it would have to surrender them as common felons to the criminal court. Look only at Jules Favre, Ernest Picard, and Jules Ferry, the great men, under Thiers, of the Government of Defence!

A series of authenticated judiciary documents spreading over about 20 years, and published by M. Milliere, a representative to the National Assembly, proves that Jules Favre, living in adulterous concubinage with the wife of a drunkard resident at Algiers, had, by a most complicated concatenation of daring forgeries, contrived to grasp, in the name of his bastards, a large succession that made him a rich man, and that the connivance only of the Bonapartist tribunals saved him from exposure in a lawsuit undertaken by the legitimate claimants. Jules Favre, then, this unctuous mouthpiece of family, religion, property, and order, has long since been forfeited to the Code penal. Lifelong penal servitude would be his unavoidable lot under every honest government.

Ernest Picard, the present Versailles Home Minister, appointed by himself, on the 4th of September, Home Minister of the Government of Defence,* after he had tried in vain to be appointed by Louis Bonaparte, this Ernest Picard is the brother of one Arthur Picard. When, together with Jules Favre and Co., he had the impudence to propose this worthy brother of his as a candidate in the Seine-et-Oise for the Corps Legislatif, the Imperialist government published two documents, a report of the Prefecture of Police (31 July 1867) stating that this Arthur Picard was excluded from the

Bourse as an ``escroc''*, and another document of the llth December 1868, according to which Arthur had confessed the theft of 300,000 francs, committed by him as a director of one of the branches of the Societe Generate,^^^0^^ Rue Palestro, No. 5. Ernest not only made his worthy Arthur the editorin-chief of a paper of his own, the tlecteur libre,^ founded under the Empire and continued to this day, a paper, in which the Republicans are daily denounced as "robbers, bandits, and partageux"',** but once [having] become the Home Minister of the ``Defence'', Ernest employed Arthur as his financial medium between the Home Office and the Stock Exchange, there to discount the state secrets entrusted to him.

The whole ``financial'' correspondence between Ernest and Arthur has fallen into the hands of the Commune. Like the lachrymose Jules Favre, Ernest Picard, the Joe Miller of the Versailles Government, is a man forfeited to the Code penal and the galleys!

To make up this trio, Jules Ferry, a poor briefless barrister before 4 September, not content to organise the famine of Paris, had contrived to job a fortune out of this famine. The day on which he would have to give an account of his peculations during the Paris siege would be his day of judgment!

No wonder then that these men who can only hope to escape from the hulks in a monarchy, protected by Prussian bayonets, who but in the turmoil of civil war can win their ticket-of-leave, that these desperadoes were at once chosen by Thiers and accepted by the Rurals as the safest tools of the counter-revolution!

No wonder that when in the beginning of April captured National Guards were exposed at Versailles to the ferocious outrages of Pietri's ``lambs'' and the Versailles mob, M. Ernest Picard, "with his hands in his trousers' pockets, walked from group to group cracking jokes", while "on the balcony of the Prefecture Madame Thiers, Madame Jules Favre and a bevy of similar Dames, looking in excellent health and spirits", exulted in that disgusting scene. No wonder then that while one part of France winces under the heels of the

* In the final text of The Civil War in France, Marx specified that Ernest Picard was Finance Minister in the Government of National Defence (see p. 51).---Ed,

* Blacklegs.---Ed. ** One who wants to share all goods and wealth.---Ed.

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conquerors, while Paris, the heart and head of France, daily sheds streams of its best blood in self-defence against the home traitors . . . the Thiers, Favres and Co. indulge in revelries at the Palace of Louis XIV, such for instance as the grand fete given by Thiers in honour of Jules Favre on his return from Rouen (whither he had been sent to conspire with (fawn upon) the Prussians). It is the cynical orgy of evaded felons!

left to them by the Paris convention, because they were their property, and thus to disarm Paris.

Whence this feverish eagerness d'en finir^c? To disarm and put down Paris was of course the first condition of a monarchical counter-revolution, but an astute intriguer like Thiers could only risk the failure of the difficult enterprise in undertaking it without due preparation, with ridiculously insufficient means, except under the sway of some overwhelmingly urgent move. The motive was this. By the agency of Pouyer-Quertier, his Finance Minister, Thiers had concluded a loan of two milliards to be paid immediately down, and some more milliards to follow at certain terms. In this loan transaction a truly royal pot-de-vin (drink money) was reserved for those grand citizens---Thiers, Jules Favre, Ernest Picard, Jules Simon, Pouyer-Quertier, etc. But there was one hitch in the transaction. Before definitively sealing the treaty, the contractors wanted one guarantee---the tranquillisation of Paris. Hence the reckless proceedings of Thiers. Hence the savage hatred against the Paris workmen perverse enough to interfere with this fine job.

As to the Jules Favres, Picards, etc., we have said enough to prove them the worthy accomplices of such a jobbery. As to Thiers himself, it is notorious that during his two ministries under Louis Philippe he realised two millions, and that during his premiership (dating [from] March 1840) he was taunted from the tribune of the Chamber of Deputies with his Bourse peculations, in answer to which he shed tears, a commodity he disposes of as freely as Jules Favre and the celebrated comedian Frederick Lemaitre. It is no less notorious that the first measure taken by M. Thiers to save France from the financial ruin, fastened upon her by the war, was to endow himself with a yearly salary of three millions of francs, exactly the sum Louis Bonaparte got in 1850 as an equivalent from M. Thiers and his troop in the Legislative Assembly for allowing them to abolish the general suffrage." This endowment of M. Thiers with three millions was the first word of "the economic republic", the vista of which he had opened to his Paris electors in 1869. As to Pouyer-Quertier, he is a cotton spinner at Rouen. In 1869,

If the Government of Defence first made Thiers their Foreign Ambassador, going a-begging at all the courts of Europe, there to barter a king for France for their intervention against Prussia, if, later on, they sent him on a travelling tour throughout the French provinces, there to conspire with the chateaux* and secretly prepare the general elections which together with the capitulation would take France by surprise---Thiers, on his side, made them his ministers and high functionaries. They were safe men.

There is one thing rather mysterious in the proceedings of Thiers, his recklessness in precipitating the revolution of Paris. Not content to goad Paris by the anti-Republican demonstrations of his Rurals, by the threats to decapitate and decapitalise Paris, by Dufaure's (Thiers' Minister of Justice) law of the 10th of March on the echeances** of bills which impended bankruptcy on the Paris commerce, by appointing Orleanist ambassadors, by the transfer of the Assembly to Versailles, by an imposition of a new tax on newspapers, by the confiscation of the Republican Paris journals, by the revival of the state of siege, first proclaimed by Palikao and annulled with the downfall of the Imperialist government on the 4th of September, by appointing Vinoy, the Decembrisetir^^5^^'^^2^^ and ex-senator, governor of Paris, Valentin, the Imperialist gendarme, prefect of police, and Aurelle de Paladines, the Jesuit general, commanderin-chief of the Paris National Guard---he opened the civil war with feeble forces, by Vinoy's attack on the Montmartre Hill, by the attempt first to rob the National Guards of [the] cannon which belonged to them and which were only

* Castles, i.e., the big landowners.---Ed. ** Maturity.---Ed.

To have done with it.---Ed.

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he was the leader of the millowners' conclave that proclaimed a general reduction of wages necessary for the `` conquest'' of the English market---an intrigue then baffled by the International.^^100^^ Pouyer-Quertier, otherwise a fervent and even servile partisan of the Empire, found only one fault with it, its commercial treaty with England^^83^^ damaging to his own shop interests. His first step as M. Thiers' Finance Minister was to denounce that ``hateful'' treaty and to pronounce the necessity of re-establishing the old protective duties for his own shop. His second step was the patriotic attempt to strike Alsace by the re-established old protective duties on the pretext that in this case no international treaty stood in the way of their re-introduction. By this masterstroke his own shop at Rouen would have got rid of the dangerous competition of the rival shops at Miilhausen. His last step was to make a present to his son-in-law, M. RocheLambert, of the receiver-generalship of the Loiret, one of the rich booties falling into the lap of the governing bourgeois; and this Pouyer-Quertier had found so much fault with his Imperialist predecessor, M. Magne, endowing his own son with that big jobbing place. This Pouyer-Quertier was then exactly the man for the perpetration of the abovesaid job.

heroism in exaggerated baseness ... lucky parliamentary stratagems....

<M. E. Picard is a swindler who throughout the siege speculated on the Bourse over the defeat of our armies.>

< Massacre, treason, arson, assassination, slander, lies.>

In his speech to the assembly of mayors, etc. (25th April), Thiers says himself that the

``assassins of Clement Thomas and Lecomte" [are] a handful of criminals---<"like those who may justly be regarded as having been accomplices in these crimes through act or conspiracy, that is, a very small number of individuals'^.

DUFAURE

Dufaure wants to put down Paris by press prosecutions in the provinces. Monstrous to bring journals before a jury because preaching "conciliation".

Dufaure plays a great part in the Thiers intrigue. By his law of the 10th of March, he roused all the indebted commerce of Paris. By his law on Paris house-rents, he menaced all Paris. Both laws were to punish Paris for having saved the honour of France and delayed the surrender to Bismarck for six months. Dufaure is an Orleanist, and a ``Liberal'', in the parliamentary sense of the word. Consequently, he has always been the minister of repression and of the state of siege.

He accepted his first portfolio on the 13th May 1839, after the defeat of the derniere prise d'armes* of the Republican party,^^102^^ [and] was therefore the minister of pitiless repression of the July Government of that day.

On the 2nd June 1849, Cavaignac, forced on the 29th October (1848) to raise the state of siege, called into his ministry two ministers of Louis Philippe (Dufaure, for the Interior, and Vivien^ios). He appointed them on the demand

* Last armed uprising.---Ed.

<March 30. Rappel.ⁱ⁰ⁱ Jules Ferry, ex-mayor of Paris, issued a circular on March 28, ordering the town dues officials to stop forthwith all collections>* for the city of Paris.

Small state rogueries---a little character ... cankering conscience . . . everlasting suggester of Parliamentary intrigues ... petty expedients and devices ... rehearsing his homilies of liberalism, of the "libertes necessaires"**... eagerly bent on ... strong reasons to weigh against the chances of failure . .. cogent arguments which counterpoise . . . kind of

* Angle brackets are used throughout to indicate passages and words translated from the French.---Ed, ** Necessary liberties.---Ed.

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of the Rue de Poitiers (Thiers),^^104^^ which demanded guarantees. He thus hoped to secure the support of the dynasties for the impending election of president. Dufaure employed the most illegal means to secure Cavaignac's candidature. Intimidation and electoral corruption had never been exercised on a larger scale. Dufaure inundated France with defamatory prints against the other candidates, and especially Louis Bonaparte, which did not prevent him to become later on Louis Bonaparte's minister. Dufaure became again the minister of the state of siege of 13 June 1849 (against the demonstration of the National Guard against the bombardment of Rome, etc., by the French army). He is now again the minister of the state of siege, proclaimed at Versailles (for the Department of Seine-et-Oise). Power [is] given to Thiers to declare any department whatever in a state of siege. Dufaure, as in 1839 and in 1849, wants new repressive laws, new press laws, a law to "abridge the formalities of the courts martial". In a circular to the Procureurs-General he denounces the cry of "conciliation" as a press crime to be severely prosecuted. It is characteristic of the French magistrature that only one single Procureur-General (that of Mayenne)^::" wrote to Dufaure to resign. . . .

``I cannot serve an Administration which orders me, in a moment of civil war, to rush into party struggle and prosecute citizens, whom my conscience holds innocent, for uttering the word conciliation."

He [Dufaure] belonged to the "Union liberale" in 1847, which conspired against Guizot, as he belonged to the "Union liberale" of 1869, which conspired against Louis Bonaparte.^^105^^

With respect to the law of 10 March and the law of houserents, it ought to be remarked that both Dufaure's and Picard's (both advocates) best clients are amongst the houseproprietors and the big bourses averse to losing anything by the siege of Paris.

vais t'assassiner, mais cest pour ton bien" (I shall murder thee, but for thy own good).

LECOMTE AND CLEMENT THOMAS

After Vinoy's attempt to carry the Montmartre Hill (on the 18th March, they were shot in the gardens of the Chateau Rouge, 4 o'clock) General Lecomte and Clement Thomas were taken prisoner and shot by the same excited soldiers of the 81st of the line. It was a summary act of Lynch justice performed despite the instances of some delegates of the Central Committee. Lecomte, an epauletted cutthroat, had four times commanded his troop, on the Place Pigalle, to charge an unarmed gathering of women and children. Instead of shooting the people, the soldiers shot him. Clement Thomas, an ex-quartermaster, a ``general'', extemporised [on] the eve of the June massacres^^8^^ (1848) by the men of the National?^^5^^ whose gerant* he had been, had never dipped his sword in the blood of any other enemy but that of the Paris working class. He was one of the sinister plotters who deliberately provoked the June insurrection and one of its most atrocious executioners. When, on the 31st October, 1870, the Paris proletarian National Guard surprised the "Government of Defence" at the Hotel de Ville and took them prisoner, these men who had [been] appointed by themselves, these gens de paroles''* as one of them, Picard, called them recently, gave their word of honour that they would make place to the Commune. Thus allowed to escape scotfree, they launched Trochu's Bretons on their too confident captors. One of them, however, M. Tamisier, resigned his dignity as commander-in-chief of the National Guard. He refused to break his word of honour. Then the hour had again struck for Clement Thomas. He was appointed in Tamisier's place commander-in-chief of the National Guard. He was the true man for Trochu's ``plan''. He never made war upon the Prussians; he made war upon the National Guard, whom he disorganised, disunited, calumniated, weed-

Now, as after the Revolution of February 1848, these men tell the Republic, as the executioner told Don Carlos, "Je

* Louis Vacheron.---Ed.

* Managing editor.---Ed. ** Men of their word.---Ed.

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ing out all its officers hostile to Trochu's ``plan'', setting one set of National Guards against the other, and whom he sacrificed in ``sorties'', so planned as to cover them with ridicule. Haunted by the spectres of his June victims, this man, without any official charge, must needs again reappear on [the] theatre of war of the 18th of March, where he scented another massacre of the Paris people. He fell a victim to Lynch justice in the first moment of popular exasperation. The men who had surrendered Paris to the tender mercies of the Decembriseur Vinoy, in order to kill the Republic and pocket the pots-de-vin, stipulated by the Pouyer-Quertier contract, shouted now: Assassins, Assassins! Their howl was reechoed by the press of Europe so eager for the blood of the ``proletarians''. A farce of hysterical ``sensibleness'' was enacted in the Rural Assembly, and, now as before, the corpses of their friends were most welcome weapons against their enemies. Paris and the Central Committee were made responsible for an accident out of their control. It is known how in the days of June 1848 the "men of order" shook Europe with their cry of indignation against the insurgents because of the assassination of the Archbishop of Paris. Even at that time they knew perfectly well from the evidence of M. Jacquemet, the vicaire-general of the Archbishop, who had accompanied him to the barricades, that the Bishop had been shot by the troops of Cavaignac and not by the insurgents, but his dead corpse served their turn. M. Darboy, the present Archbishop of Paris, one of the hostages taken by the Commune in self-defence against the savage atrocities of the Versailles Government, however, seems, as appears from his letter to Thiers, to have strange misgivings [that] Papa Transnonain**^^3^^ be eager to speculate in his body, as an object of holy indignation. There passed hardly a day, in which the Versailles journals did not announce his execution, which the continued atrocities, and violation of the rules of war on the side of ``order'', would have sealed on the part of every government but that of the Commune..The Versailles Government had hardly realised a first military success, when Captain Desmarest, who at the head of his gendarmes assassinated the chivalrous Flourens, was decorated by Thiers. Flourens had saved the lives of the "defence men"^^61^^ on the 31st October. Vinoy, the runaway (runa-

gate), was appointed Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, because he had our brave Comrade Duval, when taken prisoner, shot inside the redoubts, because as a second instalment he had shot some dozen captive troops of the line who had joined the Paris people and inaugurated this civil war by the "methods of December".^^106^^ General Galliffet---"the husband of that charming marchioness whose costumes at the masked balls were one of the wonders of the Empire", as a London penny-a-liner delicately puts it---``surprised'' near Rueil a captain, a lieutenant, and privates of the National Guard, had them at once shot, and immediately published a proclamation to glorify himself in the deed. These are a few of the murders officially narrated and gloried in by the Versailles Government. 25 soldiers of the 80th regiment of the line [were] shot as ``rebels'' by the 75th.

``Every man wearing the uniform of the regular army who was captured in the ranks of the Communists was straightaway shot without the ^slightest mercy. The governmental troops were perfectly ferocious.''

``M. Thiers communicated the encouraging particulars of Flourens' death to the Assembly."

Versailles. April 4. Thiers, that misshapen dwarf, reports on his prisoners brought to Versailles (in his proclamation):

``Never had more degraded countenances of a degraded democracy met^the afflicted gaze of honest men" (Pietri's men!).

"Vinoy protests against any mercy to insurgent officers or line

On the 6th of April, decree of the Commune on reprisals (and hostages) :

``Considering that the Versailles Government openly treads underfoot the laws of humanity and those of war, and that it has been guilty of horrors such as even the invaders of France have not dishonoured themselves by ... it is decreed, etc." (Follow the points.*)

April 5. Proclamation of the Commune:

``Every day the banditti of Versailles slaughter or shoot our prisoners, and every hour we learn that another murder has been committed. . . . The people, even in its anger, detests bloodshed, as it detests civil war, but it is its duty to protect itself against the savage

In the MS, this sentence is in German.---Ed.

8-2648

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attempts of its enemies, and whatever it may cost, it shall be an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.''

<j"The police who are fighting against Paris have 10 francs a day.">

Versailles. April 11. Most horrible details of the coldblooded shooting of prisoners, not deserters, related with an evident gusto by general officers and other eyewitnesses.

In his letter to Thiers, Darboy protests

``against the atrocious excesses which add to the horror of our fratricidal war''.

In the same strain writes Deguerry (Cure of La Madeleine) :

``These executions rouse •Cgreat wrath in Paris and may well lead to terrible reprisals." "Thus, a decision has already been taken to execute two of the numerous hostages they hold for every new execution. Judge for yourself how urgent and absolutely necessary is that which I, as a priest, am asking you to do.">

In midst of these horrors Thiers writes to the Prefects: ``L'Assemblee siege paisiblement." (Elle aussi a le coeur le-

letter! Not even the gendarmes masqueraded into officers, not even the captive sergents-de-ville, upon whom explosive bombs have been seized, were placed before a court martial! The Commune has refused to soil its hands with the blood of these bloodhounds!

A few days before the 18th March, Clement Thomas laid before the War Minister Le F16^xa plan for the disarmament of three-quarters of the National Guard.

<j"The flower of the Paris canaille," he said, "has crowded round Montmartre and is working hand-in-glove with Bellcvillc.">

THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY

Thiers and la Commission des quinze of his Rurals^^107^^ had the cool impudence to "deny officially" the "pretended summary executions and reprisals attributed to the troops of Versailles". But Papa Transnonain, in his circular of 16th April on the bombardment of Paris [says):

``If some cannon-shots have been fired, it is not the deed of the army of Versailles, but of some insurgents wanting to make believe that they are fighting, while they do not dare show themselves.''

Thiers has proved that he surpasses his hero, Napoleon I, at least in one thing---lying bulletins. (Of course, Paris bombards itself, in order to be able to calumniate M. Thiers!)

To these atrocious provocations of the Bonapartist blacklegs, the Commune has contented itself to take hostages and to threaten reprisals, but its threats have remained a dead

* "The Assembly continues meeting in peace." (It, too, is lighthearted.) This is a play on the words of the President of the Council, Ollivier, who announced just before the declaration of war against Prussia that he was assuming the responsibility for the war "with a light heart".---Ed.

CHANZY, ARCHBISHOP OP PARIS, ETC.

Liberation of Chanzy took place almost simultaneously with the retreat of Saisset. The Royalist journalists were unanimous in decreeing the death of the general. They desired to fix that amiable proceeding on the Reds. Three times he had been ordered to execution, and now he was really going to be shot.

After the Vendome affair': There was consternation at Versailles. An attack on Versailles was expected on 23 March, for the leaders of the Communal agitation had announced that they would march on Versailles, if the Assembly took any hostile action. The Assembly did not. On the contrary, it voted as urgent a proposition to hold Communal elections at Paris, etc. By these concessions the Assembly

See pp. 178-80.---Ed.

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admitted its powerlessness. At the same time---Royalist intrigues at Versailles. Bonapartist generals and the Due d'Aumale.^^108^^ Favre avowed he had received a letter from Bismarck announcing that unless order were restored by the 26th March, Paris would be occupied by the German troops. Reds saw plainly through his little artifice. The < Vendome affair was provoked > by <the forger and foul Jesuit, J. Favre, who> (21 March?) < mounted the rostrum of the Versailles Assembly to insult the people who had rescued him from insignificance, and to rouse Paris against the departments^

30 March. Proclamation of the Commune:

<"Today, the criminals, whom you did not even want to pursue, are abusing your magnanimity to organise a hotbed of monarchist conspiracy at the very gates of the city. They have been inciting to civil war, they have resorted to every means of corruption, they have acted as accomplices with everyone, and have gone to the extent of begging foreigners for aid."]>

THIERS

On the 25th April, in his reception of the mayors, adjuncts, and municipal councillors of the suburban communes of the Seine, Thiers said:

<j'The Republic is there. The chief of the executive power is onty a common citizen."^*

The progress of France from 1830 to 1871, according to M. Thiers, consists in this: In 1830 Louis Philippe was "the best of Republics". In 1871 the ministerial fossil of Louis Philippe's reign, little Thiers himself, is the best of Republics.

M. Thiers commenced his regime by an usurpation. By. the National Assembly he was appointed chief of the ministry of the Assembly; he appointed himself chief of the executive of France.

pose: To decide the continuation of war or settle the conditions of peace. In their calling the French people to electoral urns, the capitulards of Paris themselves plainly defined that specific mission of the Assembly and this accounts to a great part for its very constitution. The continuation of the war having become impossible through the very terms of the armistice humbly accepted by the capitulards, the Assembly had in fact but to register a disgraceful peace and for this specific performance the worst men of France were best.

The Republic was proclaimed on the 4th of September, not by the pettifoggers who installed themselves at the Hotel de Ville as a government of defence, but by the Paris people. It was acclaimed throughout France without a single dissentient voice. It conquered its own existence by a five months' war, whose cornerstone was the prolonged resistance of Paris. Without this war, carried on by the Republic and in the name of the Republic, the Empire would have been restored by Bismarck after the capitulation of Sedan, the pettifoggers with M. Thiers at their head would have had to capitulate not for Paris, but for personal guarantees against a voyage to Cayenne, and the Rural Assembly would never have been heard of. It met only by the grace of the Republican Revolution, initiated at Paris. Being no Constituent Assembly, as M. Thiers himself has repeated to nauseousness, it would, if not as a mere chronicler of the past incidents of the Republican Revolution, not even have had the right to proclaim the destitution of the Bonaparte dynasty. The only legitimate power, therefore, in France is the Revolution itself, centring in Paris. That Revolution was not made against Napoleon the Little, but against the social and political conditions, which engendered the Second Empire, which received their last finish under its sway, and which, as the war with Prussia glaringly revealed, would leave France a cadaver, if they were not superseded by the regenerating powers of the French working class. The attempt of the Rural Assembly holding only an attorney's power from the Revolution to sign the disastrous bond handed over by its present ``executive'' to the foreign invader, its attempt to treat the Revolution as its own capitulard, is, therefore, a monstrous usurpation. Its war

THE ASSEMBLY AND THE PARIS REVOLUTION

The Assembly, summoned at the dictate of the foreign invader, was, as is clearly laid down in the Versailles Convention of the 28th January, but elected for one single pur-

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against Paris is nothing but a cowardly Chouannerie^^109^^ under the shelter of Prussian bayonets. It is a base conspiracy to assassinate France, in order to save the privileges, the monopolies and the luxuries of the degenerate, effete, and putrefied classes that have dragged her to the abyss, from which she can only be saved by the Herculean hand of a truly Social Revolution.

TRIERS' FINEST ARMY

Even before he became a ``statesman'', M. Thiers had proved his lying powers as a historian. But the vanity, so characteristic of dwarfish men, has this time betrayed him into the sublime of the ridiculous. His army of order, the dregs of the Bonapartist soldatesca, freshly reimported, by the grace of Bismarck, from Prussian prisons, the Pontifical Zouaves, the Chouans^^79^^ of Charette, the Vendeans of Cathelineau, the ``municipals''^^110^^ of Valentin, the ex-- sergentsde-villc of Pietri and the Corsican gendarmes of Valentin, who under Louis Bonaparte were only the spies of the army but under M. Thiers form its warlike flower, the whole under the supervision of epauletted mouchards* and under the command of the runaway Decembrist marshals, who had no honour to lose---this motley, ungainly, hangdog lot, M. Thiers dubs "the finest army France ever possessed]" If he allows the Prussians still to quarter at St. Denis, it is only to frighten them by the sight of the "finest army" of Versailles.

class corruption. When in the ranks of the opposition, he over and over [again] rehearsed his stale homily of the "libertes necessaires", to stamp them out when in power. When out of office, he used to threaten Europe with the sword of France. And what were his diplomatic performances in reality? To pocket in 1841 the humiliation of the London Treaty,^^111^^ to hurry on the war with Prussia by his declamations against German unity, to compromise France in 1870 by his begging tour at all the courts of Europe, to sign in 1871 the Paris capitulation,^^13^^ to accept a "peace at any price" and implore from Prussia a concession---[the] leave and means to get up a civil war in his own downtrodden country. To a man of his stamp the underground agencies of modern society remained of course always unknown, but even the palpable changes on its surface he failed to understand. For instance, any deviation from the old French protective system he denounced as a sacrilege and, as a minister of Louis Philippe, went the length of treating disdainfully the construction of railways as a foolish chimera and even under Louis Bonaparte he eagerly opposed every reform of the rotten French army organisation. A man without ideas, without convictions, and without courage. A professional ``revolutionist'' in that sense, that in his eagerness of display, of wielding power and putting his hands into the National Exchequer, he never scrupled, when banished to the ranks of the opposition, to stir the popular passions and provoke a catastrophe to displace a rival; he is at the same time a most shallow man of routine, etc. The working class he reviled as "the vile multitude". One of his former colleagues in the legislative assemblies, a contemporary of his, a capitalist and however a member of the Paris Commune, M. Beslay, thus addresses him in a public address:

``The subjugation (asservissemenf) of labour to capital, such is the cornerstone of your politics (policy), and the day you saw the Republic of Labour installed at the Hotel dc Ville, you have never ceased to cry to France 'They are criminals!' "

No wonder that M. Thiers has given orders through his Home Minister Ernest Picard to prevent "the International Association" from communicating with Paris (Sitting of As-

THIERS

Small state rogueries. Everlasting suggester of Parliamentary intrigues, M. Thiers was never anything else but an ``able'' journalist and a clever "word fencer", a master of Parliamentary roguery, a virtuoso in perjury, a draftsman in all the small stratagems, base perfidies, ana subtle devices of Parliamentary party warfare. This mischievous gnome charmed the French bourgeoisie during half a century because he is the truest intellectual expression of their own

* Spies.---Ed.

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sembly. March 28). <.Circular of Thiers to the prefects and sub-prefects:^

``The good workmen, so numerous as compared to the bad ones, ought to know, that if bread flies again from their mouths, they owe it to the adepts of the International, who are the tyrants of labour, of which they pretend themselves [to be] the liberators.''

Without the International.. .*

(Now for the story of the money.) (He and Favre have transferred their money to London.)** It is a proverb that if rogues fall out, truth comes out. We can therefore not better finish the picture of Thiers than by the words of the London Moniteur of the master of his Versailles generals. Says the Situation^^112^^ in its number of the 28th March:

``M. Thiers has never been minister without pushing the soldiers to the massacre of the people, he, the parricide, the man of incest, the peculator, the plagiarist, the traitor, the ambitious, the impuissant."***

Shrewd in cunning devices and artful dodges.

first of all, you calumniate any government whatever in supposing that it could one day try to maintain itself by bombarding the capital. Do you really think that after it had pierced with its bombs the dome of Les Invalides or the Pantheon, after it had swept the homes of your families with its fire, it could come before you and ask you to confirm it in office? But it would be a hundred times more impossible after its victory than before."^-

Indeed, neither the government of Louis Philippe nor that of the Bonapartist regency dared to withdraw from Paris and bombard it. This employment of the fortifications was reserved to M. Thiers, their original plotter.

When King Bomba of Naples* bombarded Palermo in January 1848,^^45^^ M. Thiers again declared in the Chamber of Deputies:

<"You know, gentlemen, what is happening at Palermo: you all shake with horror on hearing that during 48 hours a large town has been bombarded. By whom? Was it by a foreign enemy exercising the rights of war? No, gentlemen, it was by Us own government. And why? Because that unfortunate town demanded its rights. Well then, for the demand of its rights, it has had 48 hours of bombardment. Allow me to appeal to the opinion of Europe. It will be a service to mankind to rise and, from the top of what is perhaps the greatest tribune in Europe, voice a few words of indignation against such acts. Gentlemen, there was a cry of general indignation when, 50 years ago, in order to avoid a long siege the Austrians, exercising the rights of war, wanted to bombard Lille, when later, exercising the same rights of war, the English bombarded Copenhagen, and when, just recently, the Regent Espartero, who had rendered services to his country, wanted to bombard Barcelona in order to suppress an insurrection."^*

Little more than a year later, Thiers acted the most fiery apologist of the bombardment of Rome by the troops of the French Republic,^^46^^ and exalted his friend, General Changarnier, for sabring down the Paris National Guards protesting against this breach of the French Constitution.

A few days before the Revolution of February 1848, fretting at the long exile from [the] place to which Guizot had condemned him, scenting the growing commotion of the masses, which he hoped would enable him to oust his rival and impose himself upon Louis Philippe, Thiers exclaimed in the Chamber of Deputies:

Banded with the Republicans before the Revolution of July, he slipped into his first ministry under Louis Philippe by ousting Laffitte, his old protector. His first deed was to throw his old collaborator Armand Carrel into prison. He insinuated himself with Louis Philippe as a spy upon and the gaol-accoucheur of the Duchess of Berry, but his activity centred in the massacre of the insurgent Paris Republicans in the Rue Transnonain and the September Laws against the press,^^43^^ to be then cast aside as an instrument become blunted. Having intrigued himself again into power in 1840, he planned the Paris fortifications, opposed as an attempt on the liberty of Paris by the whole democratic party, except the bourgeois Republicans of the National. M. Thiers replied to their outcry from the tribune of the Chamber of Deputies:

<"What? To fancy that any works of fortification could endanger freedom?... This is being completely out of touch with reality. And

* In the MS, this sentence is unfinished.---Ed. ** In the MS, these sentences are in German.---Ed. *** Impotent.---£rf.

Ferdinand II.---Ed.

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<"/ am of the party of the Revolution, not only in France, but in the whole of Europe. I wish the government of the Revolution to remain

in the hands of moderate men-----But if that government should fall

into the hands of ardent minds, even into those of Radicals, I shall, for all that, not desert my cause. / shall always be of the party of the Revolution."^-

To put down the February Revolution was his exclusive occupation from the day when the Republic was proclaimed to the coup d'etat.

The first days after the February explosion he anxiously hid himself, but the Paris workmen despised him too much to hate him. Still, with his notorious cowardice---which made Armand Carrel answer to his boast, "He would one day die on [the] banks of the Rhine", "Thou wills't die in a gutter" ---he dared not play a part on the public stage before the popular forces were broken down through the massacre of the insurgents of June. He confined himself first to the secret direction of the conspiracy of the Reunion of the Rue de Poitiers, which resulted in the restoration of the Empire, until the stage had become sufficiently clear to reappear publicly on it.

the taking of "Moulin Saquet" (4th of May), where 300 prisoners were taken.

<"The rest of the insurgents has fled in a wild flight, leaving 150 dead and wounded on the field of battle",^> and snappishly adds: <V'Such is the victory the Commune can celebrate in its bulletins tomorrow. . . . Paris will soon be delivered from the terrible tyrants oppressing it.">

Paris---the Paris of the mass of the Paris people fighting against him is not ``Paris''. "Paris---that is the rich, the capitalist, the idle" (why not the cosmopolitan stew?). This is the Paris of M. Thiers. The real Paris, working, thinking, fighting Paris, the Paris of the people, the Paris of the Commune, is a "vile multitude". There is the whole case of M. Thiers, not only for Paris, but for France. The Paris that showed its courage in the "pacific procession" and Saisset's ``escapade'', that throngs now at Versailles, at Rueil, at St. Denis, at St. Germain-en-Laye, followed by the cocottes, sticking to the "men of religion, family, order, and property" (the Paris of the really ``dangerous'', of the exploiting and lounging classes) ("the franc-fileurs"^^77^^), amusing itself by looking through telescopes at the battle going on, for whom "the civil war is but an agreeable diversion"---that is the Paris of M. Thiers (as the emigration of Coblenz^^78^^ was the France of M. de Calonne). In his vulgar journalist vein he knows not even [how] to observe sham dignity, but he murders the wives and girls, and children found under the ruins of Neuilly, not to swerve from the etiquette of `` legitimacy''. He must needs illuminate the municipal elections he has ordered in France by the conflagration of Clamart burned by petroleum bombs. The Roman historians finish off Nero's character by telling us that the monster gloried in being a rhymester and a comedian. But lift a professional mere journalist and parliamentary mountebank like Thiers to power, and he will outnero Nero.

He acts only his part as the blind tool of class interests in allowing the Bonapartist ``generals'' to revenge themselves on Paris; but he acts his personal part in the little byplay of bulletins, speeches, addresses, in which the vanity, vulgarity, and lowest taste of the journalist creep out.

During the siege of Paris, on the question whether Paris was about to capitulate, Jules Favre answered that, to utter the word capitulation, the bombardment of Paris was wanted! This explains his melodramatic protests against the Prussian bombardment, and why the latter was a mock bombardment, while the Thiers bombardment is a stern reality.

Parliamentary mountebank.

He is for 40 years on the stage. He has never initiated a single useful measure in any department of state or life. Vain, sceptical, epicurean, he has never written or spoken for things. In his eyes the things themselves are mere pretexts for the display of his pen or his tongue. Except his thirst for place and pelf and display there is nothing real about him, not even his chauvinism.

In the true vein of vulgar professional journalist he now sneers in his bulletins [at] the bad looks of his Versailles prisoners, now communicates that the Rurals are "feeling fine", now covers himself with ridicule by his bulletin on

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He compares himself with Lincoln and the Parisians with the rebellious slaveholders of the South.^^36^^ The Southerners fought for the slavery of labour and the territorial secession from the United States. Paris fights for the emancipation of labour and the secession from the power of Thiers state parasites, of the would-be slaveholders of France!

himself and Co. This stipulation was a stipulation for civil war. That war itself he opens not only with the passive permission of Prussia, but by the facilities she lends him, by the captive French troops she magnanimously despatches him from German dungeons! In his bulletins, in his and Favre's speeches in the Assembly, he crawls in the dust before Prussia and threatens Paris every eight days with her intervention, after having failed to get it, as stated by Bismarck himself. The Bourbons were dignity itself compared to this mountebank, this grand apostle of chauvinism!

In his speech to the mayors:

<J"You may rely upon my word, which I have never broken!"^ <i"This Assembly is one of the most liberal ever elected by France."^

He is going to save the Republic,*

<V'provided order and labour are not continuously threatened by those who claim to be the special guardians of the Republic's "

After the breakdown of Prussia (Tilsit Peace, 1807^^29^^), its government felt that it could only save itself and the country by a great social regeneration (revulsion). It naturalised in Prussia on a small scale, within the limits of a feudal monarchy, the results of the French revolution. It liberated the peasant, etc.^^114^^

After the Crimean defeat, which, however Russia might have saved her honour by the defence of Sevastopol and dazzled the foreigner by her diplomatic triumphs at Paris, laid open at home the rottenness of her social and administrative system, her government emancipated the serf and her whole administrative and judicial system.^^115^^ In both countries the social daring reform was fettered and limited in its character because it was octroied from the throne and not (instead of being) conquered by the people. Still there were great social changes, doing away with the worst privileges of the ruling classes and changing the economical basis of the old society. They felt that the great malady could only be cured by heroic measures. They felt that they could only answer to the victors by social reforms, by calling into life elements of popular regeneration. The French catastrophe of 1870 stands unparalleled in the history of the modern world! It showed official France, the France of Louis Bonaparte, the France of the ruling classes and their state parasites---a putrescent cadaver. And what is the first attempt of the infamous men who had got into her government by a surprise of the people and who continue to hold it by a conspiracy with the foreign invader, what is [their] first attempt? To assassinate, under Prussian patronage, by

At the April 27 sitting of the Assembly, he said^^5^^':

<j"The Assembly is more liberal than he himself."^

He, whose rhetorical trump-card was always the denunciation of the Vienna treaties, he signs the Paris treaty,¹³not only the dismemberment of one part of France, not only the occupation of almost one half of it, but the milliards of indemnity, without even asking Bismarck to specify and prove his war expenses! He does not even allow the Assembly at Bordeaux to discuss the paragraphs of his capitulation!

He, who upbraided throughout his life the Bourbons because they came back in the rear of foreign armies and because of their undignified behaviour to the allies occupying France after the conclusion of peace,^^113^^ he asks nothing from Bismarck in the treaty but one concession: 40,000 troops to subdue Paris (as Bismarck stated in the Diet). Paris was, for all purposes of internal defence and foreign aggression, fully secured by its armed National Guard, but Thiers superadded at once [to] the capitulation of Paris to the foreigner, the character of the capitulation of Paris to

* In the MS, this part of the sentence is in German.---Ed.

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Louis Bonaparte's soldatesca and Pietri's police, the glorious work of popular regeneration commenced at Paris, to summon all the old Legitimist^^9^^ spectres, beaten by the July Revolution, the fossil swindlers of Louis Philippe, beaten by the Revolution of February, and celebrate an orgy of counter-revolution! Such heroism in exaggerated self-debasement is unheard of in the annals of history! But, what is most characteristic, instead of arousing a general shout of indignation on the part of official Europe and America, it evokes a current of sympathy and of fierce denunciation of Paris! This proves that Paris, true to its historical antecedents, seeks the regeneration of the French people in making it the champion of the regeneration of old society, making the social regeneration of mankind the national business of France! It is the emancipation of the producing class from the exploiting classes, their retainers and their state parasites who prove the truth of the French proverb that, "les valets du diable sont pire que le diable".''' Paris has hoisted the flag of mankind! 18 March: Government laid

``stamp of two centimes on each copy of every periodical, whatever its nature". "Forbidden to found new journals until the raising of the state of siege.''

The different factions of the French bourgeoisie had successively their reigns, the great landed proprietors under the Restoration (the old Bourbons), the capitalists under the parliamentary monarchy of July (Louis Philippe), while its Bonapartist and Republican elements kept rankling in the background. Their party feuds and intrigues were of course carried on on pretexts of public welfare, and a popular revolution having got rid of these monarchies, the other set in. All this changed with the Republic (February). All the factions of the bourgeoisie combined together in the Party of Order, that is, the party of proprietors and capitalists, bound together to maintain the economic subjugation of labour and the repressive state machinery supporting it. Instead of a monarchy, whose very name signified the prevalence of one bourgeois faction over the other, a victory on

one side and a defeat on the other (the triumph of one side and the humiliation of the other), the Republic was the anonymous joint-stock company of the combined bourgeois factions, of all the exploiters of the people clubbed together; and, indeed, Legitimists, Bonapartists, Orleanists, bourgeois Republicans, Jesuits and Voltairians embraced each other. No longer hidden by the shelter of the crown, no longer able to interest the people in their party feuds by masquerading them into struggles for popular interest, no longer subordinate the one to the other. Direct and confessed antagonism of their class rule to the emancipation of the producing masses---Order [is] the name for the economical and political conditions of their class rule and the servitude of labour; this anonymous or republican form of the bourgeois regime, this bourgeois Republic, this Republic of the Party of Order is the most odious of all political regimes. Its direct business, its only raison d'etre is to crush down the people. It is the terrorism of class rule. The thing is done in this way. The people having fought and made the Revolution, proclaimed the Republic, and made room for a National Assembly, the bourgeois whose known republican professions are a guarantee for their ``Republic'^' are pushed on the foreground of the stage by the majority of the Assembly, composed of the vanquished and professed enemies of the Republic. The Republicans are entrusted with the task to goad the people into the trap of an insurrection to be crushed by fire and sword. This part was performed by the party of the National with Cavaignac at their head after the Revolution of February (by the June Insurrection). By their crime against the masses, these Republicans lose then their sway. They have done their work and, if yet allowed to support the Party of Order® in its general struggle against the proletariat, they are at the same time displaced from the government, forced to fall back in the last ranks, and only allowed "on sufferance". The combined royalist bourgeois then become the father of the Republic, the true rule of the "Party of Order" sets in. The material forces of the people being broken for the time being, the work of reaction---the breaking down of all the concessions conquered in four revolutions---begins piece by piece. The people is stung to madness not only by the deeds of the Party of Order, but by the cyni-

* "The devil's valets are worse than the devil himself."---Ed.

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cal effrontery with which it is treated as the vanquished, with which, in its own name, in the name of the Republic, that low lot rules it supreme. Of course, that spasmodic form of anonymous class despotism cannot last long, can only be a transitory phasis. It knows that it is seated on a revolutionary volcano. On the other hand, if the Party of Order is united in its war against the working class, in its capacity of the Party of Order, the play of intrigue of its different factions, the one against the other, each for the prevalence of its peculiar interest in the old order of society, each for the restoration of its own pretender and personal ambitions, sets in in full force as soon as its rule seems secured ( guaranteed) by the destruction of the material revolutionary forces. This combination of a common war against the people and a common conspiracy against the Republic, combined with the internal feuds of its rulers, and their play of intrigues, paralyses society, disgusts and bewilders the masses of the middle class and ``troubles'' business, keeps them in a chronic state of disquietude. All the conditions of despotism are created (have been engendered) under this regime, but despotism without quietude, despotism with parliamentary anarchy at its head. Then the hour has struck for a coup d'etat, and the incapable lot has to make room for any lucky pretender, making an end of the anonymous form of class rule. In this way Louis Bonaparte made an end of the bourgeois Republic after its four years of existence.¹⁰During all that time Thiers was the "ame damnee"* of the Party of Order that in the name of the Republic made war upon the Republic, a class war upon the people, and, in reality, created the Empire. He played exactly the same part now as he had played then, only then but as a parliamentary intriguer, now as the Chief of the Executive. Should he not be conquered by the Revolution, he will now as then be a baffled tool. Whatever countervailing government will set in, its first act will be to cast aside the man who surrendered France to Prussia and bombarded Paris.

Thiers had many grievances against Louis Bonaparte. The latter had used him as a tool and a dupe. He had frightened him (shocked his nerves) by his arrest after the coup

d'etat. He had annulled him by putting down the parliamentary regime, the only one under which a mere state parasite like Thiers, a mere talker, [can] play a political part. Last [but] not least, Thiers, having been the historic shoeblack of Napoleon, had so long described his deeds, as to fancy he had enacted them himself. The legitimate caricature of Napoleon I was in his eyes not Napoleon the Little, but little Thiers. With all that there was no infamy committed by Louis Bonaparte which had not been backed by Thiers, from the occupation of Rome by the French troops to the war with Prussia.

Only a man of his shallow head can fancy for one moment that a Republic with his head on its shoulders, with a National Assembly half Legitimist, half Orleanist, with an army under Bonapartist leaders, will, if victorious, not push him aside.

There is nothing more grotesquely horrid than a Tom Thumb affecting to play the (acting the part) Timur Tamerlane. With him the deeds of cruelty are not only a matter of business, but a thing of theatrical display (stage-effect) of fantastical vanity. To write ``his'' bulletins, to show ``his'' severity, to ^ have ``his'' troops, ``his'' strategy, ``his'' bombardments, ``his'' petroleum-bombs, to hide ``his'' cowardice under the cold-bloodedness with which he allows the Decembrist blacklegs to take their revenge on Paris! This kind of heroism in exaggerated baseness! He exults in the important part he plays and the noise he makes in the world! He quite fancies to be a great man! And how gigantic (titanic) he, the dwarf, the parliamentary dribbler, must look in the eyes of the world! Amidst the horrid scenes of this war, one cannot help smiling at the ridiculous capers Thiers' vanity cuts! M. Thiers is a man of lively imagination, ^there runs an artist's vein through his blood, and an artist's vanity able to gull him into a belief in his own lies, and a belief in his own grandeur.

Through all the speeches, bulletins, etc., of Thiers, runs a vein of elated vanity.

I.e., Thiers had "sold his soul" to the Party of Order.---Ed.

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That disgusting Triboulet.

Splendid bombardment (with petroleum-bombs) from Mont Valerien destroys a part of the houses in the Ternes within the rampart, with a grandiose conflagration and a fearful thunder of cannon shaking all Paris. Bombs purposely thrown into the Ternes and the Champs Elysees quarters.

Explosive bombs, petroleum-bombs.

May 5. Mot d'Ordre: <According to the Liberte,ⁱⁱ⁷ which is published in Versailles, "all regular army soldiers found at Clamart among the insurgents were shot on the spot"> (by Lincoln-Thiers!) (Lincoln acknowledged the belligerent rights). "These are the men denouncing on the walls of all French communes the Parisians as assassins!" The banditti! Desmarest.

<A deputation of the Commune went to Bicetre (April 27) to investigate the case of four National Guards of the 185th field battalion and there saw one survivor (badly wounded) Scheffer.

``The wounded man said that on April 25 he and his three comrades were overtaken at Belle Epine, near Villejuif, by a detachment of mounted Chasseurs, who told them to surrender. As it was quite impossible to put up any resistance against the forces that surrounded them, they laid down their arms and gave up. The soldiers surrounded them and took them prisoner without resorting to violence or threats against them. They had been prisoners for a few minutes, when a captain of the mounted Chasseurs appeared and threw himself upon them revolver in hand. Without saying a word, he fired at one of them and killed him outright; then he also fired at Guardsman Scheffer, who was shot in the chest and fell by his comrade. The other two guardsmen, terrified at this sneaking attack, tried to escape but the wild captain ran after the two prisoners and killed them both with revolver shots. After these savage and cowardly acts, the mounted Chasseurs retired with their chief, leaving their victims lying on the ground.">

New York Tribune^^118^^ outdoes the London papers.

M. Thiers' "most liberal and most freely elected National Assembly with the Orleanist mummy Thiers at its head with his "finest army that France ever possessed". This senile chambre introuvable chosen on a false pretext, consists almost exclusively of Legitimists and Orleanists.^^9^^ The municipal elections, carried on under Thiers himself, on the 30th of April, show their relation to the French people! Of the 700,000 councillors (in round numbers) returned by the 35,000 communes still left in mutilated France, 200 are Legitimists, 600 Orleanists, 7,000 avowed Bonapartists, and all the rest Republicans or Communists. (Versailles Cor. Daily News,^^90^^ 5 May.) Is any other proof wanted that this Assembly that ever existed in France" is quite of a piece represents only an usurpatory minority?

THE COMMUNE

The glorious British penny-a-liner has made the splendid discovery that this is not what we used to understand by self-government. Of course, it is not. It is not the selfadministration of the towns by turtle-soup guttling aldermen, jobbing vestries, and ferocious workhouse guardians. It is not the self-administration of the counties by the holders of broad acres, long purses and empty heads. It is not the judicial abomination of "the Great Unpaid".^^116^^ It is not political self-government of the country through the means of an oligarchic club and the reading of the Times newspaper. It is the people acting for itself by itself.

Within this war of cannibals the most disgusting [are] the ``literary'' shrieks of the hideous gnome seated at the head of the government!

The ferocious treatment of the Versailles prisoners was not interrupted one moment, and their cold-blooded assassination was resumed so soon as Versailles had convinced itself that the Commune was too humane to execute its decree of reprisals!

The Paris-Journal (at Versailles) says that 13 line soldiers made prisoners at the railway station of Clamart were shot offhand, and all prisoners wearing the line uniforms who arrive in Versailles will be executed whenever doubts about their identity are cleared up!

M. Alexander Dumas, fils, tells that a young man exercising the functions, if not bearing the title, of a general, was shot when having marched (in custody) a few hundred yards along a road.

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PARIS

M. Thiers represented again and again the Commune as the instrument of a handful of ``convicts'' and "ticket-- ofleave men", of the scum of Paris. And this ``handful'' of desperadoes holds in check since more than six weeks the "finest army that France ever possessed" led by the invincible MacMahon and inspired by the genius of Thiers himself!

The exploits of the Parisians have not only refuted him. All elements of Paris have spoken.

<j"You must not confuse the movement of Paris with the seizure of Montmartre, which was only its opportunity and starting point; this movement is general and profound in the conscience of Paris; the greatest number even of those who, for one reason or another, hold aloof from it, have not denied that it is socially legitimate."^

Who says this? The delegates of the Syndical chambres, men who speak in the name of 7,000-8,000 merchants and

industrialists. They have gone to tell it at Versailles----The

Ligue de la reunion republicaine ... the manifestation of the freemasons,^^119^^ etc.

ments and reign there unrivalled.)> Pillages and murders of 20,000 ticket-of-leave men dishonour the capital.

<j"The League* considers it to be its primary duty to shed light on the facts and restore normal relations between the province and Paris.">

As they were, when besieged in Paris, thus they are now in besieging it in their turn.

<."As in the past, the lie is their favourite weapon. They suppress and confiscate the journals of the capital, intercept reports, and sift the letters, in such a way that the province is reduced to having the news that it pleases Jules Favre, Picard and Company to let it have, without it being possible to verify its truth.">

Thiers' bulletins, Picard's circulars, Dufaure's.... The placards in the communes. The felon press of Versailles and the Germans. The little Moniteur.^m The re-- introduction of passports for travelling from one place to another. An army of mouchards** spreads in every direction. Arrests (in Rouen, etc., under Prussian authority), etc. <Thousands of commissioners of police scattered in the environs of Paris have been ordered by the prefect of the gendarmerie, Valentin, to confiscate journals of any trend published in the insurgent city, and to burn them publicly, as used to be done in the heyday of the Holy Inquisition. >

Thiers' government first appealed*** to the provinces to form battalions of National Guards and send them to Versailles against Paris.

``The Province," as the Journal de Limoges^^1^^"^^11^^ says, "showed its discontent by refusing the battalions of volunteers which were asked from it by Thiers and his Rurals.''

The few Breton idiots, fighting under a white flag, every one of them wearing on his breast a Jesus heart in white cloth and shouting "Vive le Roil", are the only ``provincial'' army gathered round Thiers.

THE PBOVINCE

Les provinciaux espiegles*

If Thiers fancied one moment that the provinces were really antagonistic to the Paris movement, he would do all in his power to give the provinces the greatest possible facilities to become acquainted with that movement and all "its horrors". He would solicit them to look at it in its naked reality, to convince themselves with their own eyes and ears of what it is. Not he! He and his "defence men" try to keep the provinces down, to prevent their general rising for Paris, by a wall of lies, as they kept out the news from the provinces in Paris during the Prussian siege. The provinces are only allowed to look at Paris through the Versailles camera obscura (distorting glass). <(Nothing but the lies and slanders of the Versailles journals reach the depart-

* Ligue de 1'Union republicaine pour les droits de Paris.---Ed. ** Spies.---Ed.

*** Above these words, in the MS, is the following: "made an anxious appeal ... before having got a prisoner army from Bismarck".---Ed.

* Provincial rogues.---Ed.

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sprung. If then the provinces have till now only made a passive resistance against Versailles without rising for Paris, [this is] to be explained by the strongholds the old authorities hold here still, [and] the trance in which the Empire merged and the war maintained the provinces. It is evident that it is only the Versailles army, government and Chinese wall of lies that stand between Paris and the provinces. If that wall falls, they will unite with it.

It is most characteristic that the same men (Thiers, etc., and Co.) who in May 1850 abolished by a parliamentary conspiracy (Bonaparte aided them, to get them into a snare, to have them at his mercy, and to proclaim himself after the coup d'etat as the restorer of the universal suffrage against the Party of Order and its Assembly) the universal suffrage, because under the Republic it might still play them freaks, are now its fanatical adepts, [and] make it their `` legitimate'' title against Paris, after it had received under Bonaparte such an organisation as to be a mere plaything in the hands of the Executive, a mere machine of cheat, surprise, and forgery on the part of the Executive. (Congres de la Ligue des Villes) (Rappel, May 6!)^m

The elections. Uengeur of May 6.^m

M. Dufaure's press law (April 8) confessedly directed against the ``excesses'' of the provincial press.

Then the numerous arrests in the province. It is placed under the laws of suspects.^

<.lntellectual and police blockade of the province.>

April 23. Havre: The municipal council has despatched three of its members to Paris and Versailles with instructions to offer mediation, with the view of terminating the civil war on the basis of the maintenance of the Republic, and the granting of municipal franchises to the whole of

France___ April 23, delegates from Lyons received by

Picard and Thiers---<"war at any price" > is their reply.

The municipalities of the provincial towns committed the great impudence to send their deputations to Versailles in order to call upon them to grant what [was being] demanded by Paris; not one commune of France has sent an address approving of the acts of Thiers and the Rurals; the provincial papers, like these municipal councils, as Dufaure complains in his circular against conciliation to the Procureurs-General,

<C'put on the same footing the Assembly, elected by universal suffrage, and the self-styled Paris Commune; reproach the former for having failed to recognise the municipal rights of Paris, etc.">

and what is worse, these municipal councils, for instance that of Auch,

<^"have unanimously demanded that it should at once propose an armistice to Paris, and that the Assembly, elected on February 8, should dissolve itself because its mandate has expired" (Dufaure. Versailles Assembly, April 26j.>

It ought to be remembered that these were the old municipal councils,^^125^^ not those elected on April 30. Their delegations [were] so numerous that Thiers decided no longer to receive them personally but address them to a ministerial subaltern.

Lastly, the elections of April 30---the final judgment on the Assembly and the electoral surprise from which it had

TROCHU, JULES FAVRE AND THIERS, PROVINCIALS

It may be asked how these superannuated parliamentary mountebanks and intriguers like Thiers, Favre, Dufaure, Gamier-Pages (only strengthened by a few rascals of the same stamp) continue to reappear, after every revolution, on the surface, and usurp the executive power? These men that always exploit and betray the Revolution, shoot down the people that made it, and sequester the few liberal concessions conquered from former governments (which they opposed themselves)?

The thing is very simple. In the first instance, if very unpopular, like Thiers after the February Revolution, popular magnanimity spares them. After every successful rising of the people the cry of conciliation, raised by the implacable enemies of the people, is re-echoed by the people in the first moments of enthusiasm at its own victory. After this first moment men like Thiers and Dufaure eclipse themselves as long as the people holds material power, and work

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in the dark. They reappear as soon as it is disarmed and are acclaimed by the bourgeoisie as their chefs de file*

Or, like Favre, Gamier-Pages, Jules Simon, etc. ( recruited by a few younger ones of similar stamp), and Thiers himself after the 4th of September, [they] were the `` respectable'' republican opposition under Louis Philippe; afterwards, the parliamentary opposition under Louis Bonaparte. The reactionary regimes they have themselves initiated when raised to power by the Revolution, secure for them the ranks of the opposition, deporting, killing, exiling the true revolutionists. The people forgets their past, the middle class look upon them as their men, their infamous past is forgotten, and thus they reappear to recommence their treason and their work of infamy.

he has to apprehend danger for himself) and firm, when everything was to be gained by some concessions. (The rascal is always firm, when the employment of material force bleeds France, gives great airs to himself, but when he, personally, is safe. This is his whole cleverness. Like Anthony, Thiers is an "honest man".)

Thiers' bulletin on Moulin Saquet (May 4):

^.''Deliverance of Paris from the hideous tyrants who oppress it." ("The Versaillese were disguised as National Guards"); ("most of the Federals were asleep and were killed or taken in their sleep").

Picard: "Our artillery does not bombard---but it cannonades, it is true." (Moniteur des communes,^^120^^ Picard's newspaper.)

,,Blanqui thrown into jail in a dying state, Flourens cut to pieces by the gendarmes, Duval shot by Vinoy, they all had them in their hands on the 31st of October, and did nothing to them.">

Night of 1 to 2 May: the village of Clamart had been in the hands of the military, the railway station in those of the insurgents (this station dominates the Fort of Issy). By a surprise (their patrols being let in by a soldier on guard, the watchword having been betrayed to them) the 22nd Battalion of Chasseurs got in, surprised the garrison, most of them sleeping in their beds, took only 60 prisoners, bayoneted 300 of the insurgents. In addition, line soldiers afterwards shot offhand. Thiers in his circular to the prefects, civil and military authorities of 2 May has the impudence to say:

``It (the Commune) arrests generals (Cluseret!) only to shoot them, and institutes a committee of public safety which is utterly unworthy!''

Troops under General Lacretelle took the Redoubt of Moulin Saquet, situated between Fort Issy and Montrouge, by a coup de main.** The garrison was surprised by treachery on the part of the commandant Gallien, who had sold the password to the Versaillese troops; 150 of the Federals bayoneted and over 300 of them made prisoners. M. Thiers, says the Times^^6^^^ correspondent, was weak, when he ought to have been firm (the coward is always weak as long as

* Leaders.---Ed. ** Surprise attack.---Ed.

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The Commune 1. MEASURES FOR THE WORKING CLASS

some indemnity for the capitalist deserters (16 April); (this commission has also to make statistics of the abandoned workshops).

[The] Commune has given order to the mairies to make no distinction between the wives called illegitimate, the mothers and widows of National Guards, as to the indemnity of 75 centimes.

The public prostitutes till now kept for the "men of order" at Paris [were] but for their ``safety'' kept in personal servitude under the arbitrary rule of the police; the Commune has liberated the prostitutes from this degrading slavery, but swept away the soil upon which, and the men by whom, prostitution flourishes. The higher prostitutes---the cocottes---were, of course, under the rule of order, not the slaves, but the masters of the police and the governors.

There was, of course, no time to reorganise public instruction (education); but by removing the religious and clerical element from it, the Commune has taken the initiative in the mental emancipation of the people. It has appointed a commission for the organisation of education (primary (elementary) and professional) (28 April). It has ordered that all tools of instruction, like books, maps, paper, etc., be given gratuitously by the schoolmasters who receive them in their turn from the respective mairies to which they belong. No schoolmaster is allowed on any pretext to ask payment from his pupils for these instruments of instruction (28 April}.

Pawnshops: <Under all receipts issued by Mont de Piete before April 25, 1871, the pawned clothes, furniture, linen, books, bedding and implements of labour, valued at not more than 20 francs, may be demanded and obtained free of charge, beginning from May 12 (May 7).>

Nightwork of journeymen bakers suppressed (20 April).

Private jurisdiction, usurped by the seigneurs of mills, etc. (manufacturers) (employers, great and small), being at the same time judges, executors, gainers and parties in the disputes, that right of a penal code of their own, enabling them to rob the labourers' wages by fines and deductions as punishment, etc., abolished in public and private workshops; penalties impended upon the employers in case they infringe upon this law; fines and deductions extorted since the 18th of March to be paid back to the workmen (27 April). Sale of pawned articles at pawnshops suspended (29 March).

A great lot of workshops and manufactures have been closed in Paris, their owners having run away. This is the old method of the industrial capitalists, who consider themselves entitled "by the spontaneous action of the laws of political economy" not only to make a profit out of labour, as the condition of labour, but to stop it altogether and throw the workmen on the pavement---to produce an artificial crisis whenever a victorious revolution threatens the ``order'' of their ``system''. The Commune, very wisely, has appointed a Communal commission which, in co-operation with delegates chosen by the different trades, will inquire into the ways of handing over the deserted workshops and manufactures to co-operative workmen's societies with

2. MEASURES FOR THE WORKING CLASS, BUT MOSTLY FOR THE MIDDLE CLASSES

House-rent for the last three quarters up to April wholly remitted: Whoever had paid any of these three quarters shall have 'the right of setting that sum against future

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payments. The same law to prevail in the case of furnished apartments. No notice to quit coming from landlords to be valid for three months to come (29 March).

ficheances (payment of bills of exchange due) (expiration of bills): all prosecutions for bills of exchange fallen due suspended (12 April).

All commercial papers of that sort to be repaid in ( repayment spread over) two years, to begin next July 15, the debts being not chargeable with interest. The total amount of the sums due divided into eight equal parts payable by quarter (first quarter to be dated from July 15). Only on these partial payments when fallen due judicial prosecutions permitted (16 April). The Dufaure laws on leases and bills of exchange entailed the bankruptcy of the majority of the respectable shopkeepers of Paris.

The notaries, bailiffs, auctioneers, bum-bailiffs and other judicial officers making till now a fortune of their functions, transformed into agents of the Commune, receiving from it fixed salaries like other workmen.

As the professors of the Ecole de Medecine have run away, the Commune appointed a commission for the foundation of free universities, no longer state parasites; to the students that had passed their examination, means given to practise independent of doctoral titles (titles to be conferred by the faculty).

Since the judges of the Civil Tribunal of the Seine, like the other magistrates always ready to function under any class government, had run away, the Commune appointed an advocate to do the most urgent business until the reorganisation of tribunals on the basis of general suffrage (26 April).

3. GENERAL MEASURES

Conscription abolished. In the present war every able man (National Guard) must serve. This measure [is] excellent to get rid of all traitors and cowards hiding in Paris (29 March).

Games of hazard suppressed (2 April).

Church separated from State; the religious budget sup-

pressed; all clerical estates declared national properties (3 April).

The Commune, having made inquiries consequent upon private .information, found that besides the old guillotine the "government of order" had commanded the construction of a new guillotine (more expeditious and portable), and paid in advance. The Commune ordered both the old and the new guillotine to be burned publicly on the 6th of April. The Versailles journals, re-echoed by the press of order all over the world, narrated [that] the Paris people, as a demonstration against the bloodthirstiness of the Communals, had burned these guillotines! (6 April.) All political prisoners were set free at once after the Revolution of the 18th of March. But the Commune knew that under the regime of Louis Bonaparte and his worthy successor, the Government of Defence, many people were simply incarcerated on no charge whatever as political suspects. Consequently it charged [one] of its members---Protot---to make inquiries. By him 150 people [were] set free who, being arrested since six months, had not yet undergone any judicial examination; many of them, already arrested under Bonaparte, had been for a year in prison without any charge or judicial examination (9 April). This fact, so characteristic of the Government of Defence, enraged them. They asserted the Commune had liberated all felons. But who liberated convicted felons? The forger Jules Favre. Hardly got into power, he hastened to liberate Pic and Taillefer, condemned for theft and forgery in the affair of the Etendard.³⁹One of these men, Taillefer, daring to return to Paris, has been reinstated in his convenient abode. But this is not all. The Versailles Government has delivered in the Maisons Centrales all over France convicted thiefs on the condition of entering M. Thiers' army!

Decree on the demolition of the column of the Place Vendome as

``a monument of barbarism, symbol of brute force and false glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international right" (12 April).

Election of Frankel (German member of the International) to the Commune declared valid, "considering that the

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flag of the Commune is that of the Universal Republic and that foreigners can have a seat in it" (4 April); Frankel afterwards chosen a member of the Executive of the Commune (21 April).

The Journal Officiel^^37^^ has inaugurated the publicity of the sittings of the Commune (15 April).

Decree of Pascal Grousset for the protection of foreigners against requisitions. Never a government in Paris so courteous to foreigners (27 April).

The Commune has abolished political and professional oaths (4 May).

Destruction of the monument called "Chapelle expiatoire de Louis XVI", Rue d'Anjou-St. Honore <(erected by the Chambre introuvable in 1816^^49^^) (7 May).>

Secondly: After the publication by the Commune of the Decree of Reprisals, the taking of hostages, etc., the atrocious treatment of the Versailles prisoners by Pietri's lambs and Valentin's gendarmes did not cease, but the assassination of the captive Paris soldiers and National Guards was stopped to set in with renewed fury so soon as the Versailles Government had convinced itself that the Commune was too humane to execute its decree of the 6th of April. Then the assassinations set in again wholesale. The Commune did not execute one hostage, not one prisoner, not even some gendarme officers who under the disguise of National Guards had entered Paris as spies and were simply arrested.

Surprise of the Redoubt of Clamart (2 May), Railway Station in the hands of the Parisians, massacre, bayonetting, the 22nd battalion of Chasseurs (Galliffet?) shoots line soldiers offhand without any formality (2 May). Redoubt of Moulin Saquet, situated between Fort Issy and Montrouge, surprised in the night by treachery on the part of the commandant Gallien, who had sold the password to the Versaillese troops. Federals surprised in their beds asleep, a great part of them massacred (4 May?).

25 April 4 National Guards (this was established by Commissaries sent to Bicetre, where the only survivor of the 4 men, at Belle Epine, near Villejuif, [lay]. His name [is] Scheffer). These men, being surrounded by horse Chasseurs, on their orders, unable to resist, surrendered, disarmed, nothing done to them by the soldiers. But then arrives the captain of the Chasseurs, and shoots them down one after the other, with his revolver. Left there on the soil. Scheffer, fearfully wounded, survived.

Thirteen soldiers of the line made prisoners at the Railway Station of Clamart were shot offhand, and all prisoners wearing line uniforms who arrive in Versailles will be executed whenever doubts about their identity are cleared up (Liberteⁱⁱ⁷ at Versailles). Alexandre Dumas, fils, now at Versailles, tells that a young man exercising the functions, if not bearing the title, of a general, was shot, by order of a Bonapartist general, after having marched in custody a few 100 yards along a road.... Parisian troops and National Guards surrounded in houses by gendarmes, [who] inun-

4. MEASURES OF PUBLIC SAFETY

Disarmament of the ``loyal'' National Guards (30 March).

Commune declares incompatibility between seats in its ranks and at Versailles (29 March).

Decree of Reprisals. Never executed. Only the fellows arrested, Archbishop of Paris and Cure of La Madeleine; the whole staff of the college of Jesuits; incumbents of all the principal churches; part of these fellows arrested as hostages, part as conspirators with Versailles, part because they tried to save church property from the clutches of the Commune (6 April).

``The Monarchists wage war like savages; they shoot prisoners, they murder the wounded, they fire on ambulances, troops raise the butt-end of their rifles in the air and then fire traitorously" (Proclamation of Commune).

In regard to these decrees of reprisals to be remarked: In the first instance men of all layers of Paris society--- after the exodus of the capitalists, the idlers and the parasites---have interposed at Versailles to stop the civil war--- except the Paris clergy. The Archbishop and the Cure of La Madeleine have only written to Thiers because [they were] averse to "the effusion of their own blood", in their quality as hostages.

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dated the house with petroleum and then fired it. Some cadavers of National Guards (charred) were transported by the ambulance of the press of the Ternes (Mot d'Ordre,^^1^^" 20 April). "They have no right to ambulances.''

Thiers. Blanqui. Archbishop. General Chanzy. (Thiers said his Bonapartists should have liked to be shot.)

Visitation in houses, etc. Casimir Bouis < appointed chairman of a commission of inquiry > into the doings of the dictators of 4 September (14 April). Private houses invaded and papers seized, but no furniture carried away and sold by auction. (Papers of the fellows of 4 September, of Thiers, etc., and Bonapartist policemen, for instance, in Hotel of Lafont, inspector-general of prisons) (11 April}. The houses (properties) of Thiers and Co. as traitors invaded, but only the papers confiscated.

Arrests among themselves: This shocks the bourgeois who wants political idols and "great men" immensely.

``It is provoking (Daily News, 6 May. Paris Correspondence), however, and discouraging, that whatever be the authority possessed by the Commune, it is continually changing hands, and we know not today with whom the power may rest tomorrow.... In all these eternal changes one sees more than ever the want of a presiding mind. The Commune is a concourse of equivalent atoms, each one jealous of another and none endowed with supreme control over the others."

Journal suppression!

The Commune

THE RISE OF THE COMMUNE AND THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE

The Commune had been proclaimed at Lyons, then Marseilles, Toulouse, etc., after Sedan. Gambetta tried his best to break it down.^^127^^

The different movements at Paris in the beginning of October aimed at the establishment of the Commune, as a measure of defence against the foreign invasion, as the realisation of the rise of the 4th of September. Its establishment by the movement of the 31st of October failed only because Blanqui, Flourens and the other then leaders of the movement believed in the gens de paroles* who had given their parole d'honneur** to abdicate and make room for a Commune freely elected by all the arrondissements of Paris. It failed because they saved the lives of those men so eager for the assassination of their saviours. Having allowed Trochu and Ferry to escape, they surprised them by Trochu's Bretons. It ought to be remembered that on the 31st of October the self-imposed "Government of Defence" existed only on sufferance. It had not yet gone even through the farce of a plebiscite.^^128^^ Under the circumstances, there was of course nothing easier than to misrepresent the character of the movement, to decry it as a treasonable

* Men of their word.---Ed. ** Word of honour.---Ed.

10-2648

5. FINANCIAL MEASURES

See "Daily News",^^90^^ 6 May. Principal outlay for war!

Only 8,928 francs from confiscations---all taken from ecclesiastics, etc.

Vengeur,^^122^^ 6 May.

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conspiracy with the Prussians, to improve the dismissal of the only man amongst them who would not break his word,^::" for strengthening Trochu's Bretons who were for the Government of Defence what the Corsican spadassins*'* had been for Louis Bonaparte, by the appointment of Clement Thomas as commander-in-chief of the National Guard; there was nothing easier for these old panic-mongers [than]---appealing to the cowardly fear of the middle class [before] working battalions who had taken the initiative, throwing distrust and dissension amongst the working battalions themselves, by an appeal to patriotism---to create one of those days of blind reaction and disastrous misunderstandings by which they have always contrived to maintain their usurped power. As they had slipped into power on the 4th of September by a surprise, they were now enabled to give it a mock sanction by a plebiscite of the true Bonapartist pattern during the days of reactionary terror.

The victorious establishment at Paris of the Commune in the beginning of November 1870 (then already initiated in the great cities of the [country] and sure to be imitated all over France) would not only have taken the defence out of the hands of traitors, and imprinted its enthusiasm [on it] as the present heroic war of Paris shows; it would have altogether changed the character of the war. It would have become the war of republican France, hoisting the flag of the social Revolution of the 19th century, against Prussia, the banner-bearer of conquest and counter-revolution. Instead of sending the hackneyed old intriguer a-begging at all the courts of Europe, it would have electrified the producing masses in the old and the new world. By the escamotage*** of the Commune on October 31, the Jules Favre and Co. secured the capitulation of France to Prussia and initiated the present civil war.

But this much is shown: The Revolution of the 4th September was not only the reinstalment of the Republic, because the place of the usurper had become vacant by his

capitulation at Sedan,^^12^^---it not only conquered that Republic from the foreign invader by the prolonged resistance of Paris although fighting under the leadership of its enemies---that Revolution was working its way into the hearts of the working classes. The Republic had ceased to be a name for a thing of the past. It was impregnated with a new world. Its real tendency, veiled from the eyes of the world through the deceptions, the lies and vulgarisms of a pack of intriguing lawyers and word-fencers, came again and again to the surface in the spasmodic movements of the Paris working classes (and the South of France), whose watchword was always the same, the Commune!

The Commune---the positive form of the Revolution against the Empire and the conditions of its existence--- first essayed in the cities of Southern France, again and again proclaimed in spasmodic movements during the siege of Paris and escamotes by the sleights of hand of the Government of Defence and the Bretons of Trochu, the "plan of capitulation" hero---was at last victoriously installed on the 26th March, but it had not suddenly sprung into life on that day. It was the unchangeable goal of the workmen's revolution. The capitulation of Paris, the open conspiracy against the Republic at Bordeaux, the coup d'etat initiated by the nocturnal attack on Montmartre, rallied around it all the living elements of Paris, no longer allowing the defence men to limit it to the insulated efforts of the most conscious and revolutionary portions of the Paris working class.

The Government of Defence was only undergone as a pis aller* of the first surprise, a necessity of the war. The true answer of the Paris people to the Second Empire, the Empire of Lies, was the Commune.

Thus also the rising of all living Paris---with the exception of the pillars of Bonapartism and its official opposition, the great capitalists, the financial jobbers, the sharpers, the loungers, and the old state parasites---against the Government of Defence does not date from the 18th of March, although it conquered on that day its first victory against the conspiration; it dates from the 28th January,

* Course taken for want of a better.---Ed.

* Tamisier.---Ed. ** Bandits.---Ed. *** Juggling away.---Ed.

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from the very day of the capitulation. The National Guard ---that is, all the armed manhood of Paris---organised itself and really ruled Paris from that day, independently of the usurpatory government of the capitulards^^38^^ installed by the grace of Bismarck. It refused to deliver its arms and artillery, which were its property and only left them in the capitulation because its property. It was not the magnanimity of Jules Favre that saved these arms from Bismarck, but the readiness of armed Paris to fight for its arms against Jules Favre and Bismarck. In view of the foreign invader and the peace negotiations Paris would not complicate the situation. It was afraid of civil war. It observed a mere attitude of defence and [was] content with the de facto self-rule of Paris. But it organised itself quietly and steadfastly for resistance. (Even in the terms of the capitulation itself the capitulards had unmistakably shown their tendency to make the surrender to Prussia at the same time the means of their domination over Paris. The only concession of Prussia they insisted upon, a concession which Bismarck would have imposed upon them as a condition, if they had not begged it as a concession, was 40,000 soldiers for subduing Paris. In the face of its 300,000 National Guardsmore than sufficient for securing Paris from an attempt by the foreign enemy, and for the defence of its internal order ---the demand for these 40,000 men---a thing which was besides avowed---could have no other purpose.) On its existing military organisation it grafted a political federation according to a very simple plan. It was the alliance of all the National Guards, put in connection the one with the other by the delegates of each company, appointing in their turn the delegates of the battalions, who in their turn appointed general delegates, generals of legions, who were to represent an arrondissement and to co-operate with the delegates of the 19 other anondissements. Those 20 delegates, chosen by the majority of the battalions of the National Guard, composed the Central Committee, which on the 18th March initiated the greatest revolution of this century and still holds its post in the present glorious struggle of Paris. Never were elections more sifted, never delegates fuller representing the masses from which they had sprung. To the objection of the outsiders that they were

unknown---in point of fact, that they only were known to the working classes, but (were) not old stagers, not men illustrated by the infamies of their past, by their chase after pelf and place---they proudly answered: "So were the 12 Apostles", and they answered by their deeds.

THE CHARACTER OF THE COMMUNE

The centralised state machinery which, with its ubiquitous and complicated military, bureaucratic, clerical and judiciary organs, entoils (enmeshes) the living civil society like a boa constrictor, was first forged in the days of absolute monarchy as a weapon of nascent modern society in its struggle of emancipation from feudalism. The seigniorial privileges of the medieval lords and cities and clergy were transformed into the attributes of a unitary state power, displacing the feudal dignitaries by salaried state functionaries, transferring the arms from medieval retainers of the landlords and the corporations of townish citizens to a standing army, substituting for the checkered (party-- coloured) anarchy of conflicting medieval powers the regulated plan of a state power, with a systematic and hierarchic division of labour. The first French Revolution with its task to found national unity (to create a nation) had to break down all local, territorial, townish and provincial independence. It was, therefore, forced to develop what absolute monarchy had commenced, the centralisation and organisation of state power, and to expand the circumference and the attributes of the state power, the number of its tools, its independence, and its supernaturalist sway over real society, which in fact took the place of the medieval supernaturalist heaven with its saints. Every minor solitary interest engendered by the relations of social groups was separated from society itself, fixed and made independent of it and opposed to it in the form of state interest, administered by state priests with exactly determined hierarchical functions.

This parasitical excrescence upon civil society, pretending to be its ideal counterpart, grew to its full development under the sway of the first Bonaparte. The Restoration and the Monarchy of July added nothing to it but a greater

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division of labour, growing at the same measure in which the division of labour within civil society created new groups of interest, and, therefore, new material for state action. In their struggle against the Revolution of 1848, the parliamentary Republic of France and the governments of all continental Europe, were forced to strengthen, with their measures of repression against the popular movement, the means of action and the centralisation of that governmental power. All revolutions thus only perfected the state machinery instead of throwing off this deadening incubus. The factions and parties of the ruling classes, which alternately struggled for supremacy, considered the occupancy ( control) (seizure) and the direction of this immense machinery of government as the main booty of the victor. It centred in the creation of immense standing armies, a host of state vermin, and huge national debts. During the time of the absolute monarchy it was a means of the struggle of modern society against feudalism, crowned by the French Revolution, and under the first Bonaparte it served not only to subjugate the Revolution and annihilate all popular liberties; it was an instrument of the French Revolution to strike abroad, to create for France on the Continent, instead of feudal monarchies, more or less states after the image of France. Under the Restoration and the Monarchy of July it became not only a means of the forcible class domination of the middle class, and a means of adding to the direct economic exploitation a second exploitation of the people by assuring to their families all the rich places of the state household. During the time of the revolutionary struggle of 1848 at last it served as a means of annihilating that Revolution and all aspirations for the emancipation of the popular masses. But the state parasite received only its last development during the Second Empire. The governmental power with its standing army, its all-directing bureaucracy, its stultifying clergy and its servile tribunal hierarchy had grown so independent of society itself that a grotesquely mediocre adventurer with a hungry band of desperadoes behind him sufficed to wield it. It did not any longer want the pretext of an armed coalition of old Europe against the modern world founded by the Revolution of 1789. It appeared no longer as a means of class domination, subordi-

nate to its parliamentary ministry or legislature. Humbling under its sway even the interests of the ruling classes, whose parliamentary show work it supplanted by self-elected Corps Legislatifs and self-paid senates, sanctioned in its absolute sway by universal suffrage, the acknowledged necessity for keeping up ``order'', that is, the rule of the landowner and the capitalist over the producer, cloaking under the tatters of a masquerade of the past the orgies of the corruption of the present and the victory of the most parasite faction, the financial swindler, the debauchery of all the reactionary influences of the past let loose---a pandemonium of infamies---the state power had received its last and supreme expression in the Second Empire. Apparently the final victory of this governmental power over society, it was in fact the orgy of all the corrupt elements of that society. To the eye of the uninitiated it appeared only as the victory of the Executive over the Legislative, of the final defeat of the form of class rule pretending to be the autocracy of society [by] its form pretending to be a superior power to society. But in fact it was only the last degraded and the only possible form of that class rule, as humiliating to those classes themselves as to the working classes which they kept fettered by it.

The 4th of September was only the revindication of the Republic against the grotesque adventurer that had assassinated it. The true antithesis to the Empire itself---that is, the state power, the centralised Executive, of which the Second Empire was only the exhausting formula---was the Commune. This state power forms in fact the creation of the middle class, first a means to break down feudalism, then a means to crush the emancipatory aspirations of the producers, of the working class. All reactions and all revolutions had only served to transfer that organised powerthat organised force of the slavery of labour-from one hand to the other, from one faction of the ruling classes to the other. It had served the ruling classes as a means of subjugation and of pelf. It had sucked new forces from every new change. It had served as the instrument of breaking down every popular rise and served it to crush the working classes after they had fought and been ordered to secure its transfer from one part of its oppressors to the

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other. This was, therefore, a Revolution not against this or that, Legitimate, Constitutional, Republican or Imperialist, form of state power. It was a Revolution against the State itself, of this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life. It was not a Revolution to transfer it from one faction of the ruling classes to the other, but a Revolution to break down this horrid machinery of class domination itself. It was not one of those dwarfish struggles between the executive and the parliamentary forms of class domination, but a revolt against both these forms, integrating each other, and of which the parliamentary form was only the deceitful bywork of the executive. The Second Empire was the final form of this state usurpation. The Commune was its definite negation and, therefore, the initiation of the social Revolution of the 19th century. Whatever, therefore, its fate at Paris, it will make le tour du monde.* It was at once acclaimed by the working class of Europe and the United States as the magic word of delivery. The glories and the antediluvian deeds of the Prussian conqueror seemed only hallucinations of a bygone past.

It was only the working class that could formulate by the word ``Commune'' and initiate by the fighting Commune of Paris this new aspiration. Even the last expression of that state power in the Second Empire, although humbling for the pride of the ruling classes and casting to the winds their parliamentary pretensions of self-government, had been only the last possible form of their class rule. While politically dispossessing them, it was the orgy under which all the economic and social infamies of their regime got full sway. The middling bourgeoisie and the petty middle class were by their economical conditions of life excluded from initiating a new revolution and induced to follow in the track of the ruling classes or [be] the followers of the working class. The peasants were the passive economical basis of the Second Empire, of that last triumph of a State separate from and independent of society. Only the proletarians, fired by a new social task to accomplish by them for all society, to do away with all classes and class rule,

were the men to break the instrument of that class rule--- the State, the centralised and organised governmental power usurping to be the master instead of the servant of society. In the active struggle against them by the ruling classes, supported by the passive adherence of the peasantry, the Second Empire---the last crowning and at the same time the most signal prostitution of the State, which had taken the place of the medieval church---had been engendered. It had sprung into life against them. By them it was broken, not as a peculiar form of governmental (centralised) power, but as its most powerful, elaborated into seeming independence from society, expression, and, therefore, also its most prostitute reality, covered with infamy from top to bottom, having centred in absolute corruption at home and absolute powerlessness abroad.

But this one form of class rule had only broken down to make the Executive, the governmental state machinery, the great and single object of attack to the Revolution.

Parliamentarism in France had come to an end. Its last term and fullest sway was the parliamentary Republic from May 1848 to the coup d'etat. The Empire that killed it, was its own creation. Under the Empire with its Corps Legislatif and its Senate---and in this form it has been reproduced in the military monarchies of Prussia and Austria---it had been a mere farce, a mere by-work of despotism in its crudest form. Parliamentarism then was dead in France and the workmen's Revolution certainly was not to awaken it from the death.

The Commune---the reabsorption of the state power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the organised force of their suppression---the political form of their social emancipation, instead of the artificial force appropriated by their oppressors (their own force opposed to and organised against them) of society wielded for their oppression by their enemies. This form was simple like all great things. The reaction of former revolutions---the time wanted for all historical developments, and in the past always lost in all revolutions in the very days of popular triumph, whenever it had rendered its victorious arms to be turned against

* Go round the worW.---Ed.

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itself---[the Commune] first displaced the army by the National Guard.

``For the first time since the 4th September the Republic is liberated from the government of its enemies-----In the city [is] a national militia that defends the citizens against the power (the government) instead of a permanent army that defends the government against the citizens. (Proclamation of Central Committee of 22 March).

(The people had only to organise this militia on a national scale, to have done away with the standing armies; the first economical conditio sine qua non for all social improvements, discarding at once this source of taxes and state debt, and this constant danger of government usurpation of class rule---of the regular class rule or an adventurer pretending to save all classes); at the same time the safest guarantee against foreign aggression and making in fact the costly military apparatus impossible in all other states; the emancipation of the peasant from the blood-tax and (from being] the most fertile source of all state taxation and state debts. Here already [is] the point in which the Commune is a bait for the peasant, the first word of his emancipation. With the "independent police" abolished, and its ruffians supplanted by servants of the Commune. The general suffrage, till now abused either for the parliamentary sanction of the Holy State Power, or a play in the hands of the ruling classes, only employed by the people to sanction (choose the instruments of) parliamentary class rule once in many years, adapted to its real purposes, to choose by the Communes their own functionaries of administration and initiation. [Gone is] the delusion as if administration and political governing were mysteries, transcendent functions only to be trusted to the hands of a trained caste---state parasites, richly paid sycophants and sinecurists, in the higher posts, absorbing the intelligence of the masses and turning them against themselves in the lower places of the hierarchy. Doing away with the state hierarchy altogether and replacing the haughteous masters of the people by its always removable servants, a mock responsibility by a real responsibility, as they act continuously under public supervision. Paid like skilled workmen, 12 pounds a month, the highest salary not exceeding £240 a

year, a salary somewhat more than a fifth, according to a great scientific authority, Professor Huxley, [needed] to satisfy a clerk for the Metropolitan School Board. The whole sham of state mysteries and state pretensions was done away [with] by a Commune, mostly consisting of simple working men, organising the defence of Paris, carrying on war against the pretorians of Bonaparte, securing the supplies for that immense town, filling all the posts hitherto divided between government, police, and prefecture, doing their work publicly, simply, under the most difficult and complicated circumstances, and doing it, as Milton did his Paradise Lost, for a few pounds, acting in bright daylight, with no pretensions to infallibility, not hiding itself behind circumlocution offices, not ashamed to confess blunders by correcting them. Making in one order the public functions---military, administrative, political---real workmen's functions, instead of the hidden attributes of a trained caste; (keeping order in the turbulence of civil war and revolution) (initiating measures of general regeneration). Whatever the merits of the single measures of the Commune, its greatest measure was its own organisation, extemporised with the foreign enemy at one door, and the class enemy at the other, proving by its life its vitality, confirming its theories by its action. Its appearance was a victory over the victors of France. Captive Paris resumed by one bold spring the leadership of Europe, not depending on brute force, but by taking the lead of the social movement, by giving body to the aspirations of the working class of all countries.

With all the great towns organised into Communes after the model of Paris, no government could have repressed the movement by the surprise of sudden reaction. Even by this preparatory step the time of incubation, the guarantee of the movement, won. All France would have been organised into self-working and self-governing communes, the standing army replaced by the popular militias, the army of state parasites removed, the clerical hierarchy displaced by the schoolmasters, the state judge transformed into Communal organs, _ the suffrage for national representation not a matter of sleight of hand for an all-powerful government, but the deliberate expression of the organised communes,

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the state functions reduced to a few functions for general national purposes.

Such is the Commune---the political form of the social emancipation, of the liberation of labour from the usurpation (slaveholding) of the monopolists of the means of labour, created by the labourers themselves or forming the gift of nature. As the state machinery and parliamentarism are not the real life of the ruling classes, but only the organised general organs of their dominion, the political guarantees and forms and expressions of the old order of things, so the Commune is not the social movement of the working class and, therefore, of a general regeneration of mankind, but the organised means of action. The Commune does not (do) away with the class struggles, through which the working classes strive for the abolition of all classes and, therefore, of all (class rule] (because it does not represent a peculiar interest. It represents the liberation of ``labour'', that is, the fundamental and natural condition of individual and social life which only by usurpation, fraud, and artificial contrivances can be shifted from the few upon the many), but it affords the rational medium in which that class struggle can run through its different phases in the most rational and humane way. It could start violent reactions and as violent revolutions. It begins the emancipation of labour---its great goal---by doing away with the unproductive and mischievous work of the state parasites, by cutting away the springs which sacrifice an immense portion of the national produce to the feeding of the state monster, on the one side, by doing, on the other, the real work of administration, local and national, for working men's wages. It begins therefore with an immense saving, with economical reform as well as political transformation.

The Communal organisation once firmly established on a national scale, the catastrophes it might still have to undergo would be sporadic slaveholders' insurrections, which, while for a moment interrupting the work of peaceful progress, would only accelerate the movement, by putting the sword into the hand of the Social Revolution.

The working classes know that they have to pass through different phases of class struggle. They know that the superseding of the economical conditions of the slavery of

labour by the conditions of free and associated labour can only be the progressive work of time (that economical transformation), that they require not only a change of distribution, but a new organisation of production, or rather the delivery (setting free) of the social forms of production in present organised labour (engendered by present industry) of the trammels of slavery, of their present class character, and their harmonious national and international co-- ordination. They know that this work of regeneration will be again and again relented and impeded by the resistance of vested interests and class egotisms. They know that the present "spontaneous action of the natural laws of capital and landed property" can only be superseded by "the spontaneous action of the laws of the social economy of free and associated labour" in a long process of development of new conditions, as was the "spontaneous action of the economic laws of slavery" and the "spontaneous action of the economical laws of serfdom". But they know at the same time that great strides may be [made] at once through the Communal form of political organisation and that the time has come to begin that movement for themselves and mankind.

PEASANTRY

(War indemnity.) Even before the instalment of the Commune, the Central Committee had declared through its Journal Officiel: "The greater part of the war indemnity should be paid by the authors of war.''^^129^^ This is the great "conspiracy against civilisation" the men of order are most afraid of. It is the most practical question. With the Commune victorious, the authors of the war will have to pay its indemnity; with Versailles victorious, the producing masses who have already paid in blood, ruin, and contributions, will have again to pay, and the financial dignitaries will even contrive to make a profit out of the transaction. The liquidation of the war costs is to be decided by the civil war. The Commune represents on this vital point not only the interests of the working class, the petty middle class, in fact, all the middle class, with the exception of the hour-

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geoisie (the wealthy capitalists) (the rich landowners and their state parasites). It represents above all the interests of the French peasantry. On them the greater part of the war taxes will be shifted, if Thiers and his Rurals are victorious. And people are silly enough to repeat the cry of the Rurals that they---the great landed proprietors--- represent the peasant, who is of course, in the naivety of his soul, exceedingly anxious to pay for these good `` landowners'' the milliards of the war indemnity, who made him already pay the milliard of the Revolution indemnity!^^72^^

The same men deliberately compromised the Republic of February by the additional 45 centimes tax on the peasant^^130^^, but this they did in the name of the Revolution, in the name of the "provisional government" created by it. It is now in their own name that they wage a civil war against the Communal Republic to shift the war indemnity from their own shoulders upon those of the peasant! He will of course be delighted by it!

The Commune will abolish conscription, the Party of Order will fasten the blood-tax on the peasant. The Party of Order will fasten upon him the tax-collector for the payment of a parasitical and costly state machinery, the Commune will give him a cheap government. The Party of Order will continue [to] grind him down by the townish usurer, the Commune will free him of the incubus of the mortgages lasting upon his plot of land. The Commune will replace the parasitical judiciary body eating the heart of his income---the notary, the bailiff, etc.---[by] Communal agents doing their work at workmen's salaries, instead of enriching themselves out of the peasant's work. It will break down this whole judiciary cobweb which entangles the French peasant and gives abodes to the judiciary bench and mayors of the bourgeois spiders that suck his blood! The Party of Order will keep him under the rule of the gendarme, the Commune will restore him to independent social and political life! The Commune will enlighten him by the rule of the schoolmaster, the Party of Order [will] force upon him stultification by the rule of the priest! But the French peasant is above all a man of reckoning! He will find it exceedingly reasonable that the payment of the clergy will no longer [be] exacted from him by the tax-

collector, but will be left to the "spontaneous action" of his religious instincts!

The French peasant had elected Louis Bonaparte President of the Republic, but the Party of Order (during the anonymous regime of the Republic under the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies) was the creator of the Empire! What the French peasant really wants, he commenced to show in 1849 and 1850 by opposing his mayor to the government's prefect, his schoolmaster to the government's parson, himself to the government's gendarme! The nucleus of the reactionary laws of the Party of Order^^47^^ in 1849---and peculiarly in January and February 1850---was specifically directed against the French peasantry! If the French peasant had made Louis Bonaparte President of the Republic, because in his tradition all the benefits he had derived from the first Revolution were fantastically transferred on the first Napoleon, the armed risings of peasants in some departments of France and the gendarme hunting upon them after the coup d'etat proved that that delusion was rapidly breaking down! The Empire was founded on the artificially nourished delusions and traditional prejudices [of the peasant]; the Commune would be founded on his living interests and his real wants.

The hatred of the French peasant is centring on the `` Rural'', the man of the chateau, the man of the milliard of indemnity and the townish capitalist, masqueraded into a landed proprietor, whose encroachment upon him marched never more rapidly than under the Second Empire, partly fostered by artificial state means, partly naturally growing out of the very development of modern agriculture. The Rurals know that three months' rule of the Republican Commune in France would be the signal for the rising of the peasantry and the agricultural proletariat against them. Hence their ferocious .hatred of the Commune! What they fear even more than the emancipation of the townish proletariat is the emancipation of the peasants! The peasants would soon acclaim the townish proletariat as their own leaders and seniors. There exists of course in France as in most continental countries a deep antagonism between the townish and rural producers, between the industrial proletariat and the peasantry. The aspiration of the proletariat, the material basis of its

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movement is labour organised on a grand scale, although now despotically organised, and the means of production centralised, although now centralised in the hands of the monopolist, not only as a means of production, but as a means of the exploitation and enslavement of the producer. What the Proletariat has to do is to transform the present capitalist character of that organised labour and those centralised means of labour, to transform them from the means of class rule and class exploitation into forms of free associated labour and social means of production. On the other hand, the labour of the peasant is insulated and the means of production are parcelled, dispersed. On these economical differences rests super-constructed a whole world of different social and political views. But this peasantry proprietorship has long since outgrown its normal phase, that is, the phase in which it was a reality, a mode of production and a form of property which responded to the economical wants of society and placed the rural producers themselves in normal conditions of life. It has entered its period of decay. On the one side, a large proletariat fonder (rural proletariat) has grown out of it, whose interests are identical with those of the townish wages-labourers. The mode of production itself has become superannuated by the modern progress of agronomy. Lastly---the peasant proprietorship itself has become nominal, leaving to the peasant the delusion of proprietorship, and expropriating him from the fruits of his own labour. The competition of the great farm producers, the blood-tax, the state-tax, the usury of the townish mortgagee and the multitudinous pilfering of the judiciary system thrown around him, have degraded him to the position of a Hindoo ryot, while expropriation---even expropriation from his nominal proprietorship---and his degradation into a rural proletarian is an everyday fact. What separates the peasant from the proletarian is, therefore, no longer his real interest, but his delusive prejudice. The Commune, as we have shown, is the only power that can give him immediate great boons even in its present economical conditions; it is the only form of government that can secure to him the transformation of his present economical conditions, rescue him from expropriation by the landlord, on the one hand, save him from grinding, trudging and misery on

the pretext of proprietorship, on the other, that can convert his nominal proprietorship of the land into real proprietorship of the fruits of his labour, that can combine for him the profits of modern agronomy, dictated by social wants and every day now encroaching upon him as a hostile agency, without annihilating his position as a really independent producer. Being immediately benefited by the Communal Republic, he would soon confide in it.

UNION (LIGUE) REPUBLICAINE

The party of disorder, whose regime topped under the corruption of the Second Empire, has left Paris (exodus from Paris), followed by its appurtenances, its retainers, its menials, its state parasites, its mouchards* its "cocottes", and the whole band of low boheme (the common criminals) that form the complement of that boheme of quality. But the true vital elements of the middle classes, delivered by the workmen's revolution from their sham representatives, have, for the first time in the history of French revolutions, separated from it and come out in their true colours. It is the "League of Republican Liberty"^^131^^ acting the intermediary between Paris and the provinces, disavowing Versailles and marching under the banners of the Commune.

THE COMMUNAL REVOLUTION AS THE

REPRESENTATIVE OF ALL CLASSES OF SOCIETY

NOT LIVING UPON FOREIGN LABOUR

We have seen that the Paris proletarian fights for the French peasant, and Versailles fights against him; that the greatest anxiety of the Rurals is that Paris [may] be heard by the peasant and no longer separated from him through the blockade; that at the bottom of its war upon Paris is the attempt to keep the peasant as its bondman and treat him as before as its thing, "taillable d merci et misericorde"'.**

For the first time in history, the petty and moyenne middle

* Spies.---Ed. ** To be shaped at will.---Ed.

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class has openly rallied round the workmen's revolution, and proclaimed it as the only means of its own salvation and that of France! It forms with them the bulk of the National Guard, it sits with them in the Commune, it mediates for them in the Union Republicaine!

The principal measures taken by the Commune are taken for the salvation of the middle class---the debtor class of Paris against the creditor class! That middle class had rallied in the June insurrection (1848) against the proletariat under the banners of the capitalist class, their generals, and their state parasites. It was punished at once on the 19th September 1848 by the rejection of the "concordats a I' amiable".^ The victory over the June insurrection showed itself at once also as the victory of the creditor, the wealthy capitalist, over the debtor, the middle class. It insisted mercilessly on its pound of flesh. On the 13th June 1849 the National Guard of that middle class was disarmed and sabred down by the army of the bourgeoisie! During the Empire [as a result of) the dilapidation of the state resources, upon which the wealthy capitalist fed, this middle class was delivered to the plunder of the stock-jobber, the railway kings, the swindling associations of the Credit Mobilier,⁴⁰etc., and expropriated by capitalist association (joint-stock company). Lowered in its political position, attacked in its economical interests, it was morally revolted by the orgies of that regime. The infamies of the war gave the last shock and roused its feelings as Frenchmen. [Seeing) the disasters bestowed upon France by that war, its crisis of national breakdown and its financial ruin, this middle class feels that not the corrupt class of the would-be slaveholders of France, but only the manly aspirations and the herculean power of the working class can come to the rescue!

They feel that only the working class can emancipate them from priest rule, convert science from an instrument of class rule into a popular force, convert the men of science themselves from panderers to class prejudice, place-hunting state parasites, and allies of capital into free agents of thought! Science can only play its genuine part in the Republic of Labour.

REPUBLIC ONLY POSSIBLE AS AVOWEDLY SOCIAL REPUBLIC

This civil war has destroyed the last delusions about `` Republic'', as the Empire, the delusion of unorganised " universal suffrage" in the hands of the state gendarme and the parson. All vital elements of France acknowledge that a Republic is only in France and Europe possible as a " Social Republic", that is, a Republic which disowns the capital and landowner class of the state machinery to supersede it by the Commune that frankly avows "social emancipation" as the great goal of the Republic, and guarantees thus that social transformation by the Communal organisation. The other Republic can be nothing but the anonymous terrorism of all monarchical factions, of the combined Legitimists, Orleanists, and Bonapartists, to land in an Empire quelconque* as its final goal, the anonymous terror of class rule which, having done its dirty work, will always burst into an Empire!

The professional Republicans of the Rural Assembly are men who really believe---despite the experiments of 1848- 51,^^132^^ despite the civil war against Paris---the republican form of class despotism a possible, lasting form, while the "Party of Order" demands it only as a form of conspiracy for fighting the Republic and reintroducing its only adequate form, monarchy, or rather Imperialism, as the form of class despotism. In 1848 these voluntary dupes were pushed into the foreground till, by the insurrection of June, they had paved the way for the anonymous rule of all factions of the would-be slaveholders in France. In 1871, at Versailles, they are from the beginning pushed into the background, there to figure as the ``Republican'' decoration of Thiers' rule and sanction by their presence the war of the Bonapartist generals upon Paris! In unconscious self-irony these wretches hold their party meeting in the Salle des Paumes ( tenniscourt) to show how they have degenerated from their predecessors in 1789176 B_y _their Schdlchers, etc., they tried to coax Paris into handing its arms to Thiers and to force it into disarmament by the National Guard of ``Order'' under

Of one sort or another.---Ed.

ll*

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Saisset! We do not speak of the so-called Socialist Paris deputies like Louis Blanc. They undergo meekly the insults of a Dufaure and the Rurals, dote upon Thiers' ``legal'' rights, and, whining in presence of the banditti, cover themselves with infamy!

WORKMEN AND COMTE

If the workmen have outgrown the time of Socialist sectarianism, it ought not be forgotten that they have never been in the leading strings of Comtism. This sect has never afforded the International but a branch of about half a dozen of men, whose programme was rejected by the General Council.^^133^^ Comte is known to the Parisian workmen as the prophet in politics of Imperialism (of personal Dictatorship), of capitalist rule in political economy, of hierarchy in all spheres of human action, even in the sphere of science, and as the author of a new catechism with a new pope and new saints in place of the old ones.

If his followers in England play a more popular part than those in France, it is not by preaching their sectarian doctrines, but by their personal valour, and by the acceptance by their sect of the forms of working men's class struggles created without them, as for instance, the trade unions and strikes in England which by-the-by are denounced as a heresy by their Paris co-religionists.

they have taken the actual management of their Revolution into their own hands and found at the same time, in case of success, the means to hold it in the hands of the people itself, displacing the state machinery, the governmental machinery of the ruling classes by a governmental machinery of their own. This is their ineffable crime! Workmen infringing upon the governmental privilege of the upper 10,000 and proclaiming their will to break the economical basis of that class despotism, which for its own sake wielded the organised state force of society! It is this that has thrown the respectable classes in Europe as in the United States into the paroxysm of convulsions and accounts for their shrieks of abomination about it being a blasphemy, their fierce appeals to assassination of the people, and the Billingsgate of abuse and calumny from their parliamentary tribunes and their journalistic servants' hall!

The greatest measure of the Commune is its own existence, working, acting under circumstances of unheard-of difficulty! The red flag, hoisted by the Paris Commune, crowns in reality only the government of the workmen of Paris! They have clearly, consciously proclaimed the Emancipation of Labour, and the transformation of Society, as their goal! But the actual ``social'' character of their Republic consists only in this, that workmen govern the Paris Commune! As to their measures, they must, by the nature of things, be principally confined to the military defence of Paris and its supply!

Some patronising friends of the working class, while hardly dissembling their disgust even at the few measures they consider ``socialist'', although there is nothing socialist in them except their tendency---express their satisfaction and try to coax genteel sympathies for the Paris Commune by the great discovery that after all workmen are rational men and whenever in power always resolutely turn their back upon socialist enterprises! They have in fact tried to establish in Paris neither a phalanstere nor an /cane.^^134^^ Wise men of their generation! These benevolent patronisers, profoundly ignorant of the real aspirations and the real movement of the working classes, forget one thing. All the socialist founders of sects belong to a period in which neither the working classes themselves were sufficiently trained and

THE COMMUNE (SOCIAL MEASURES)

That the workmen of Paris have taken the initiative of the present Revolution and in heroic self-sacrifice bear the brunt of this battle is nothing new. It is the striking fact of all French revolutions! It is only a repetition of the past! That the Revolution is made in the name and confessedly for the popular masses, that is, the producing masses, is a feature this Revolution has in common with all its predecessors. The new feature is that the people, after the first rise, have not disarmed themselves and surrendered their power into the hands of the Republican mountebanks of the ruling classes, that, by the constitution of the Commune,

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organised by the march of capitalist society itself to enter as historical agents upon the world's stage, nor were the material conditions of their emancipation sufficiently matured in the old world itself. Their misery existed, but the conditions of their own movement did not yet exist. The Utopian founders of sects, while in their criticism of present society clearly describing the goal of the social movement, the supersession of the wages-system with all its economical conditions of class rule, found neither in society itself the material conditions of its transformation, nor in the working class the organised power and the conscience of the movement. They tried to compensate for the historical conditions of the movement by fantastic pictures and plans of a new society in whose propaganda they saw the true means of salvation. From the moment the working men's class movement became real, the fantastic Utopias evanesced---not because the working class had given up the end aimed at by these Utopians, but because they had found the real means to realise them---but in their place came a real insight into the historical conditions of the movement and a more and more gathering force of the militant organisation of the working class. But the last two ends of the movement proclaimed by the Utopians are the last ends proclaimed by the Paris Revolution and by the International. Only the means are different and the real conditions of the movement are no longer clouded in Utopian fables. These patronising friends of the proletariat, in glossing over the loudly proclaimed socialist tendencies of this Revolution, are therefore but the dupes of their own ignorance. It is not the fault of the Paris proletariat, if for them the utopian creations of the prophets of the working men's movement are still the "Social Revolution", that is to say, if the Social Revolution is for them still ``utopian''.

their own hands the direction (management) of public affairs (the state business).''

They denounce "the political incapacity and the moral decrepitude of the bourgeoisie" as the source of "the misfortunes of France''.

``The workmen, who produce everything and enjoy nothing, who suffer from misery in the midst of their accumulated products, the fruit of their work and their sweat . .. shall they never be allowed to work for their emancipation'? . . . The proletariat, in face of the permanent menace against its rights, of the absolute negation of all its legitimate aspirations, of the ruin of the country and all its hopes, has understood that it was its imperious duty and its absolute right to take into its hands its own destinies and to assure its triumph in seizing the state power (en s'emparant du pouvoir)."

It is here plainly stated that the government of the working class is, in the first instance, necessary to save France from the ruin and the corruption impended upon it by the ruling classes, that the dislodgment of these classes from power (of these classes who have lost the capacity of ruling France) is a necessity of national safety.

But it is no less clearly stated that government by the working class can only save France and do the national business by working for its own emancipation, the conditions of that emancipation being at the same time the conditions of the regeneration of France.

It is proclaimed as a war of labour upon the monopolists of the means of labour, upon capital.

The chauvinism of the bourgeoisie is only a vanity, giving a national cloak to all their own pretensions. It is a means, by permanent armies, to perpetuate international struggles, to subjugate in each country the producers by pitching them against their brothers in each other country, a means to prevent the international co-operation of the working classes, the first condition of their' emancipation. The true character of that chauvinism (long since become a mere phrase) has come out during the war of defence after Sedan, everywhere paralysed by the chauvinist bourgeoisie, in the capitulation of France, in the civil war carried on under that high priest of chauvinism, Thiers, on Bismarck's sufferance! It came out in the petty police intrigue of the Anti-German League, [in] foreigner-hunting in Paris after the capitula-

"Journal Offidel" of the Central Committee, March 20:

``The proletarians of the capital, amidst the def alliances* and the treasons of the governing (ruling) classes, have understood (compris) that the hour has arrived for them to save the situation by taking into

* Insolvencies.---Ed.

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tion. It was hoped that the Paris people (and the French people) could be stultified into the passion of national hatred and by factitious outrages upon the foreigner forget its real aspiration and its home betrayers!

How this factitious movement has disappeared (vanished) before the breath of Revolutionary Paris! Loudly proclaiming its international tendencies---because the cause of the producer is every[where) the same and his enemy everywhere the same, whatever his nationality (in whatever national garb)---it proclaimed as a principle the admission of foreigners into the Commune, it even elected a foreign workman"" (a member of the International) to its Executive, it decreed (the destruction of] the symbol of French chauvinism ---the Vendome Column!

And, while the bourgeois chauvinists have dismembered France, and act under the dictatorship of the foreign invasion, the Paris workmen have beaten the foreign enemy by striking at their own class rulers, have abolished frontiers, conquering the post as the vanguard of the workmen of all nations!

The genuine patriotism of the bourgeoisie---so natural for the real proprietors of the different ``national'' estates---has faded into a mere sham consequent upon the cosmopolitan character imprinted upon their financial, commercial, and industrial enterprise. Under similar circumstances it would explode in all countries as it did in France.

DECENTRALISATION BY THE RURALS AND THE COMMUNE

It has been said that Paris, and with it the other French towns, were oppressed by the rule of the peasants, and that its present struggle is for its emancipation from the rule of the peasantry! Never was a more foolish lie uttered!

Paris, as the central seat and the stronghold of the centralised government machinery, subjected the peasantry to the rule of the gendarme, the tax-collector, the prefect, and the priest, and the rural magnates, that is, to the despotism of its enemies, and deprived it of all life (took the life out of it). It repressed all organs of independent life in the

* Leo Frankel.---Ed.

rural districts. On the other hand, the government, the rural magnate, the gendarme and the priest, into whose hands the whole influence of the provinces was thus thrown by the centralised state machinery centring at Paris, brought this influence to bear for the government and the classes whose government it was, not against [the] Paris [of] the government, the parasite, the capitalist, the idler, the cosmopolitan stew, but against the Paris of the workman and the thinker. In this way, by the government centralisation with Paris as its base, the peasants were suppressed by the Paris of the government and the capitalists, and the Paris of the workmen was suppressed by the provincial power handed over into the hands of the enemies of the peasants.

The Versailles "Moniteur"^m (March 29) declares that

``Paris cannot be a free city, because it is the capital".

This is the true thing. Paris, the capital of the ruling classes and its government, cannot be a "free city", and the provinces cannot be ``free'', because such a Paris is the capital. The provinces can only be free with the Commune at Paris. The Party of Order is still less infuriated against Paris because it has proclaimed its own emancipation from them and their government, than because by doing so it has sounded the alarm signal for the emancipation of the peasant and the provinces from their sway.

"Journal Officiel" of the Commune, April 1:

``The Revolution of the 18th March had not for its only object the securing to Paris of Communal representation elected, but subject to the despotic tutelage of a national power strongly centralised. It is to conquer, and secure independence for all the Communes of France, and also for all superior groups, departments, and provinces, united amongst themselves for their common interest by a really national pact; it is to guarantee and perpetuate the Republic.... Paris has renounced her apparent omnipotence which is identical with her forfeiture, she has not renounced that moral power, that intellectual influence, which so often has made her victorious in France and Europe in her propaganda.''

``This time again Paris works and suffers for all France, for which it prepares by its combats and its sacrifices the intellectual, moral, administrative and economical regeneration, the glory and the prosperity" (Programme of the Commune of Paris sent out by balloon).,^^135^^

Mr. Thiers, in his tour through the provinces, managed the elections, and above all, his own manifold elections. But

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there was one difficulty. The Bonapartist provincials had for the moment become impossible. (Besides, he did not want them, nor did they want him.) Many of the old Orleanist stagers had merged into the Bonapartist lot. It was, therefore, necessary to appeal to the rusticated Legitimist landowners who had kept quite aloof from politics and were just the men to be duped. They have given the apparent character to the Versailles Assembly, its character of the "chambre introuvable" of Louis XVIII, its ``rural'' character. In their vanity, they believed, of course, that their time had at last come with the downfall of the Second Bonapartist Empire and under the shelter of foreign invasion, as it had come in 1814 and 1815.^^136^^ Still they are mere dupes. So far as they act, they can only act as elements of the "Party of Order", and its ``anonymous'' terrorism, as in 1848-1851. Their own party effusions lend only a comical character to that association. They are, therefore, forced to suffer as president the jail-accoucheur of the Duchess of Berry and as their ministers the pseudo-Republicans of the Government of Defence. They will be pushed aside as soon as they have done their service. But---a freak of history---by this curious combination of circumstances they are forced to attack Paris because of revolting against the "Republique une et indivisible"'' (Louis Blanc expresses it so, Thiers calls it unity of France), while their very first exploit was to revolt against unity by declaring for the "decapitation and decapitalisation" of Paris, by wanting the Assembly to throne in a provincial town. What they really want is to go back to what preceded the centralised state machinery, become more or less independent of its prefects and its ministers, and put into its place the provincial and local domanial influence of the chateaux. They want a reactionary decentralisation of France. What Paris wants is to supplant that centralisation which has done its service against feudality, but has become the mere unity of an artificial body, resting on gendarmes, red and black armies, repressing the life of real society, lasting as an incubus upon it, giving Paris an "apparent omnipotence" by enclosing it and leaving the provinces outdoor---to supplant this Unitarian France which exists be-

sides French society---by the political union of French society itself through the Communal organisation.

The true partisans of breaking up the unity of France are therefore the Rurals, opposed to the united state machinery so far as it interferes with their own local importance ( seigniorial rights), so far as it is the antagonist of feudalism.

What Paris wants is to break up that factitious Unitarian system, so far as it is the antagonist of the real living union of France and a mere means of class rule.

COMTIST VIEW

Men completely ignorant of the existing economical system are of course still less able to comprehend the workmen's negation of that system. They can of course not comprehend that the social transformation the working class aims at is the necessary, historical, unavoidable birth of the present system itself. They talk in deprecatory tones of the threatened abolition of ``property'', because in their eyes their present class form of property---a transitory historical form ---is property itself, and the abolition of that form would therefore be the abolition of property. As they now defend the ``eternity'' of capitalist rule and the wages-system, if they had lived in feudal times or in times of slavery, they would have defended the feudal system and the slave system, as founded on the nature of things, as springing from nature, fiercely declaiming against their ``abuses'', but at the same time from the height of their ignorance answering to the prophecies of their abolition by the dogma of their ``eternity'' righted by "moral checks" (``constraints'').

They are as right in their appreciation of the aims of the Paris working classes as is M. Bismarck in declaring that what the Commune wants is the Prussian municipal order.

Poor men! They do not even know that every social form of property has ``morals'' of its own, and that the form of social property which makes property the attribute of labour far from creating individual "moral constraints" will emancipate the ``morals'' of the individual from its class constraints.

* One and indivisible Republic.---Ed.

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How the breath of the popular revolution has changed Paris! The Revolution of February was called the Revolution of moral contempt! It was premoved by the cries of the people "A has les grands voleurs! A has les assassins!"* Such was the sentiment of the people. But as to the bourgeoisie, they wanted broader sway for corruption! They got it under Louis Bonaparte's (Napoleon the Little) reign. Paris, the gigantic town, the town of historic initiative, was transformed into the Maison doree of all the idlers and swindlers of the world, into a cosmopolitan stew! After the exodus of the "better class of people", the Paris of the working class reappeared, heroic, self-sacrificing, enthusiastic in the sentiment of its herculean task! No cadavers in the morgue, no insecurity of the streets. Paris was never more quiet within. Instead of the cocottes, the heroic women of Paris! Manly, stern, fighting, working, thinking Paris! Magnanimous Paris! In view of the cannibalism of its enemies, making its prisoners only dangerless! What Paris will no longer stand is yet the existence of the cocottes and cocodes. What it is resolved to drive away or transform is this useless, sceptical and egotistical race which has taken possession of the gigantic town, to use it as its own. No celebrity of the Empire shall have the right to say, "Paris is very pleasant in the best quarters, but there are too many paupers in the others". ("Verite,"™ 23 April):

``Private crime wonderfully diminished at Paris. The absence of thieves and cocottes, of assassinations and street attacks: all the conservatives have fled to Versailles!''

``There has not been signalised one single nocturnal attack even in the most distant and less frequented quarters since the citizens do their police business themselves.''

Fragments

THEERS ON THE EURALS

This party

``knows only [how] to employ three means: foreign invasion, civil war and anarchy ... such a government will never be that of France" (Chamber of Deputies, January 5, 1883).

GOVERNMENT OF DEFENCE

And this same Trochu said in his famous programme: "The governor of Paris will never capitulate" and Jules Favre in his circular: "Not a stone of our fortresses, nor a foot of our territories"; the same as Ducrot: "I shall never return to Paris save dead or victorious." He found afterwards at Bordeaux that his life was necessary for keeping down the ``rebels'' of Paris. These wretches know that in their flight to Versailles they have left behind the proofs of their crimes, and to destroy these proofs they would not recoil from making of Paris a mountain of ruins bathed in a sea of blood. (Manifeste a la Province, by balloon.)

* "Down with the big thieves! Down with the assassins!"---Ed.

``The unity which has been imposed upon us [up] to the present, by the Empire, the Monarchy, and Parliamentary Government, is nothing but centralisation, despotic, unintelligent, arbitrary and onerous. The political unity, as desired by Paris, is a voluntary association of all local initiative ..." a central delegation from the Federal Communes. "End of the old governmental and clerical world, of military supremacy

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and bureaucracy and jobbing in monopolies and privileges to which the proletariat owed its slavery and the country its misfortunes and disasters." (Proclamation of Commune. 19 April.)

GENDARMES AND POLICEMEN

20,000 gendarmes (drawn to Versailles from all France, a total of 30,000 under the Empire) and 12,000 Paris police agents,---the basis of the finest army France ever had.

The National Guard resisted, the soldiers of the line leverent la crosse en I'air* despite the menaces and the orders of General Lecomte, shot the same day by his soldiers at the same time as Clement Thomas.

("Troops of the line threw the butts of their muskets [up] in the air, and fraternised with the insurgents.")

The bulletin of victory by Aurelle de Paladines was already printed; also papers found on the Decembrisation^::"^::' of Paris.

On the 19th March, the Central Committee declared the state of siege of Paris raised, on the 20th Picard proclaimed it for the department of the Seine-et-Oise.

18 March (morning: still believing in his victory): proclamation of 7hiers, placarded on the walls:

``The Government has resolved to act. The criminals who affect to institute a government must be delivered to regular justice and the cannon taken away must be restored to the arsenals.''

Late in the afternoon, the nocturnal surprise having failed, he appeals to the National Guard:

``The Government is not preparing a coup d'etat. The Government of the Republic has not and cannot have any other aim than the safety of the Republic.''

He will only

``do away with the insurgent Committee"... "almost all unknown to the population".

Late in the evening, a third proclamation to the National Guard, signed by Picard and d'Aurelles:

``Some misguided men ... resist forcibly the National Guard and the Army.... The Government has chosen that your arms should be left to you. Seize them with resolution to establish the reign of law and to save the Republic from anarchy."

(On the 17th, Scholcher tries to wheedle them into disarming.)

* Raised their rifles, butts in the air.---Ed. ** I.e., a coup on the lines of that of December 2, 1851.---Ed.

REPUBLICAN DEPUTIES OF PARIS

``The republican deputies of Paris have not protested either against the bombardment of Paris, or the summary executions of the prisoners, or the calumnies against the people <rf Paris. They have on the contrary by their presence at the Assembly and their silence given a consecration to all these acts supported by the notoriety the republican party has given those men. Have become the allies and conscious accomplices of the monarchical party. Declares them traitors to their mandate and the Republic" (Association generals des defenseurs de la Republique)^i3S (9 May).

``Centralisation leads to apoplexy in Paris and to absence of life everywhere else" (Lamennais).

<j"Everything now gravitates to one centre, and this centre is, so to say, the state itself" (Montesquieu).^>

VENDOME AFFAIR, ETC.

The Central Committee of the National Guard, constituted by the nomination of a delegate of each company, on the entrance of the Prussians into Paris, transported to Montmartre, Belleville, and La Villette the cannon and mitrailleuses founded by the subscription of the National Guards themselves, which cannon and mitrailleuses were abandoned by the Government of National Defence, even in those quarters which were to be occupied by the Prussians.

On the morning of the 18th March the Government made an energetic appeal to the National Guard, but out of 400,000 National Guards only 300 men answered.

On the 18th March, at 3 o'clock in the morning, the agents of police, and some battalions of the line were at Montmartre, Belleville, and La Villette to surprise the guardians of artillery and to take it away by force.

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Proclamation of the Central Committee of the 19th March:

``The state of siege is raised. The people of Paris is convoked for its communal elections.''

Id. to the National Guard:

``You have charged us to organise the defence of Paris and of your

rights___At this moment our mandate has expired; we give it back to

you, we will not take the place of those whom the popular breath <has just swept away>.''

They allowed the members of the Government to withdraw quietly to Versailles (even such as they had in their hands, like Ferry).

The communal elections convoked for the 22nd March through the demonstration of the Party of Order removed to the 26th March.

21 March. The Assembly's frantic roars of dissent against the words "Vive la Republique" at the end of a proclamation "To Citizens and Army (soldiers)". Thiers: "It might be a very legitimate proposal, etc." (Dissent of the Rurals). Jules Fame made a harangue against the doctrine of the Republic being superior to universal suffrage, flattered the Rural majority, threatened the Parisians with Prussian intervention and provoked the demonstration of the Paris of Order. Thiers: "Come what may he would not send an armed force to attack Paris" (had no troops yet to do it).

<The Central Committee was so unsure of its victory that it hastened to accept the mediation of the mayors and the deputies of Paris----The stubbornness of Thiers allowed it (the Committee) to survive for a day or two, and by then it had come to realisa its strength. Countless mistakes by the revolutionaries. Instead of rendering the police harmless, the doors were flung open to them; they went to Versailles, where they were met as saviours; they let the 43rd of the line go; all the soldiers who had fraternised with the people were allowed to go home; they let the reactionaries to organise themselves in the very heart of Paris; they left Versailles alone. Tridon, Jaclard, Varlin and Vaillant considered it necessary to go and drive the

royalists out right away----Favre and Thiers took urgent

steps with the Prussian authorities to secure their assist-

ance ... in putting down the insurgent movement in Paris.

Trochu and Clement Thomas concentrated on frustrating every attempt to arm and organise the National Guard. The march on Versailles was decided upon, prepared and undertaken by the Central Committee without the knowledge of the Commune and even directly contrary to its clearly expressed will....

Bergeret ... instead of blowing up the bridge at Neuilly, which the Federals were unable to hold because of Mont Valerien and the batteries installed at Courbevoie, allowed the royalists to take it, and there to entrench themselves strongly, thereby assuring themselves of a route of communication with Paris... .>

As M. Littre said in a letter (Daily News," 20 April):

``Paris disarmed; Paris manacled by the Vinoys, the Valentins, the Paladines, the Republic was lost. This the Parisians understood. With the alternative of succumbing without fighting, and risking a terrible contest of uncertain issue, they chose to fight; and I cannot but praise them for it.''

The expedition to Rome, the work of Cavaignac, Jules Favre, and Thiers.

<"A government which has all the internal advantages of a republican government and the external strength of a monarchist government. I mean a federal republic.... It is a society of societies, a new society, which grows through the addition of numerous new associated members until it becomes strong enough to assure the security of those who have banded together. This kind of republic ... can maintain its size without succumbing to internal corruption. The form of this society averts all difficulties" (Montesquieu. L'Esprit des Lois. 1. IX, Ch. I).

The Constitution of 1793^m:

§ 78. Every commune of the Republic shall have a municipal administration. Every district shall have an intermediate, and every department a central administration. § 79. Municipal officers shall be elected at assemblies of the commune. § 80. The administrators shall be appointed by assemblies of electors in the departments and districts. § 81. One-half of the membership of the municipalities and the administrations shall be renewed every year.

Executive Council. § 62. Consists of 24 members. § 63. The electoral assembly of each department shall nominate one candidate. The Legislative Corps shall elect the members of the Council by general roll. § 64. One-half of it shall be renewed in the last month of the legis-

12-2648

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lative session. § 65. It shall be the duty of the Council to direct and supervise the general administration. § 66. It shall appoint from without its midst the chief officers of the general administration of the Republic. § 68. These officers shall not constitute a council but shall act separately and shall have no direct connection with each other; they shall not exercise any personal authority. § 73. The Council shall recall and replace the officers it appoints.>

Roused on the one hand by Jules Favre's call to civil war in the Assembly---he told that the Prussians had threatened to interfere, if the Parisians did not give in at once,--- encouraged by the forbearance of the people and the passive attitude towards them of the Central Committee, the "Party of Order" at Paris resolved on a coup de main* which came off on the 22nd March under the guise of a Peaceful Procession, a peaceable demonstration against the Revolutionary Government. And it was a peaceful demonstration of a very peculiar character.

``The whole movement seemed a surprise. There were no preparations to meet it.''

``A riotous mob of gentlemen", in their first rank the familiars of the Empire, the Heeckeren, Coetlogon, and H. de Pene, etc. (fell into marching order), ill treating and disarming National Guards detached from advanced sentinels (sentries) who fled to the Place Vendome, whence the National Guards marched at once to the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs. Meeting the rioters, they received orders not to fire, but the rioters advance with the cry: "Down with the Assassins! Down with the Committee!", insult the guards, grasp at their muskets, shoot with a revolver Citizen Maljournal (lieutenant of the Vendome Staff) (member of the Central Committee). General Bergeret calls upon them to withdraw (disband) (retire). During about five minutes the drums are beaten and the sommations (replacing the English reading of the riot acts)^^60^^ made. They reply by cries of insult. Two National Guards fall severely wounded. Meanwhile their comrades hesitate and fire into the air. The rioters try to forcibly break. through the lines and to disarm them. Bergeret commands fire and the cowards fly.

The emeute* is at once dispersed and the fire ceases. Shots were fired from houses on the National Guards. Two of them, Wahlin and Franjois, were killed, eight are wounded. The streets through which the ``pacific'' disband are strewn with revolvers and sword-canes (many of them picked up in the Rue de la Paix). Vicomte de Molinet, killed from behind (by his own people), found with a dagger fixed by a chain.

The Retreat was beaten. A number of cane-swords, revolvers, and daggers lay on the streets by which the ``unarmed'' demonstration had passed. Pistol shots were fired before the insurgents received orders to fire on the crowd. The manifesters were the aggressors (witnessed by General Sheridan from a window).

This was then simply an attempt to do by the reactionists of Paris, armed with revolvers, cane-swords, and daggers, what Vinoy had failed to do with his sergents-de-ville, soldiers, cannon and mitrailleuse. That the "lower orders" of Paris allowed themselves not even to be disarmed by the ``gentlemen'' of Paris was really too bad!

When on the 13th June, 1849 the National Guards of Paris made a really ``unarmed'' and ``pacific'' procession to protest against a crime, the attack on Rome by the French troops, General Changarnier was praised by his intimate Thiers for sabring and shooting them down. The state of siege was declared, new laws of repression, new proscriptions, a new reign of terror! Instead of all that, the Central Committee and the workmen of Paris strictly kept on the defensive during the encounter itself, allowed the assailers, the gentlemen of the dagger, to return quietly home, and, by their indulgence, by not calling them to account for this daring enterprise, encouraged them so much that two days later, under the leadership of Admiral Saisset, sent from Versailles, [they] rallied again and tried again their hands at civil war.

And this Vendome affair evoked at Versailles a cry of "assassination of unarmed citizens", reverberating throughout the world. Be it remarked that even Thiers, while eternally reiterating the assassination of the two generals,

* Revolt.---Ed.

* Surprise attack.---Ed.

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has not once dared to remind the world of this " assassination of unarmed citizens''.

As in the medieval times the knight may use any weapon whatever against the plebeian, but the latter must not dare even to defend himself.

(27 March. Versailles. Thiers:

``I give a formal contradiction to those who accuse me of leading the way to a monarchical settlement. / found the Republic an accomplished fact. Before God and man I declare I will not betray it.")

After the second rising of the Party of Order, the Paris people took no reprisals whatever. The Central Committee even committed the great blunder, against the advice of its most energetic members, not to march at once on Versailles, where, after the flight of Admiral Saisset and the ridiculous collapse of the National Guard of Order, consternation ruled supreme, there being not yet any forces of resistance organised.

After the election of the Commune, the Party of Order tried again their forces at the ballot-box, and, when again beaten, effected their exodus from Paris. During the election [there is) hand-shaking and fraternisation of the bourgeois (in the courts of the mayoralties) with the insurgent National Guards, while among themselves they talk of nothing but "decimation en masse", ``mitrailleuses'', "frying at Cayenne", "wholesale fusillades''.

``The runaways of yesterday think today by flattering the men of the Hotel de Ville to keep them quiet until the Rurals and Bonapartist generals, who are gathering at Versailles, are in a position to fire on them.''

Thiers commenced the armed attack on the National Guard for the second time in the affair of April 2. Fighting between Courbevoie and Neuilly, close to Paris. National Guards beaten, bridge of Neuilly occupied by Thiers' soldiers. Several thousands of National Guards, having come out of Paris and occupied Courbevoie and Puteaux and the bridge of Neuilly, routed. Many prisoners taken. Many of the insurgents immediately shot as rebels. Versailles troops began the firing.

Commune:

``The Government of Versailles has attacked us. Not being able to count upon the army, it has sent Pontifical Zouaves^^79^^ of Charette, Bretons^^58^^ of Trochu, and gendarmes of Valentin, in order to bombard Neuilly.''

On the 2nd April the Versailles Government sent forward a division chiefly consisting of gendarmes, marines, forest guards, and police. Vinoy, with two brigades of infantry, and Galliffet at the head of a brigade of cavalry and a battery of artillery advanced upon Courbevoie.

Paris. April 4. Milliere (Declaration):

``The people of Paris was not making any aggressive attempt... when the Government ordered it to be attacked by the ex-soldiers of the Empire, organised as pretorian troops, under the command of ex-- senators.''

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Second Outline

of The Civil War in France

Paris had proclaimed the Republic in the teeth of their resistance. And their first step was to send Thiers begging about at all the courts of Europe, there to buy if possible foreign mediation, bartering the Republic for a king. Paris did bear with their regime (assumption of power), because they highly professed on their solemn vow to wield that power for the single purpose of national defence. Paris, however, could not be (was not to be) seriously defended without arming the working class, organising them into a National Guard, and training them through the war itself. But Paris armed was the social Revolution armed. The victory of Paris over its Prussian besieger would have been a victory of the Republic over French class rule. In this conflict between national duty and class interest, the Government of National Defence did not hesitate one moment to turn into a government of national defection. In a letter to Gambetta, Jules Favre confessed that what Trochu stood in defence against was not the Prussian soldier, but the Paris workman. Four months after the commencement of the siege, when they thought the opportune moment had come for breaking the first word of capitulation, Trochu, in the presence of Jules Favre and others of his colleagues, addresses the reunion of the mayors of Paris in these terms:

``The first question, addressed to me by my colleagues, on the very evening of the 4th September, was this: Paris, can it, with any chance of success, stand a siege against the Prussian army? / did not hesitate to answer in the negative. Some of my colleagues here present will warrant the truth of my words, and the persistence of my opinion. I told them, in these very terms, that, under the existing state of things, the attempt of Paris to maintain a siege against the Prussian army would be a folly. Without doubt, I added, it might be an heroic folly, but it would be nothing more. . .. The events (managed by himself) have not given the lie to my prevision."

(This little speech of Trochu's was after the armistice published by M. Corbon, one of the mayors present.) Thus, on the very evening of the proclamation of the Republic, Trochu's ``plan'', known to his colleagues, [was] nothing else but the capitulation of Paris and France. To cure Paris of its "heroic folly", it had to undergo a treatment of decimation and famine, long enough to screen the usurpers of the 4th of September from the vengeance of the December men.

1) GOVERNMENT OF DEFENCE. TROCHU, FAVRE, PICARD, FERRY, AS THE DEPUTIES OF PARIS

The Republic proclaimed on the 4th September by the Paris workmen was acclaimed through all France without a single voice of dissent. Its right of life was fought for during a five months' defensive war (centring in) based upon the resistance of Paris. Without that war of defence waged in the name of the Republic, William the Conqueror would have restored the Empire of his "good brother" Louis Bonaparte. The cabal of barristers, with Thiers for their statesman, and Trochu for their general, installed themselves at the Hotel de Ville at a moment of surprise, when the real leaders of [the] Paris working class were still shut up in Bonapartist prisons, and the Prussian army was already marching upon Paris. So deeply were the Thiers, the Jules Favre, the Picard then imbued with the belief in the historical leadership of Paris that to legitimate their title as the Government of National Defence they founded their claim exclusively upon their having been chosen in the elections to the Corps Legislatif in 1869.

In our second address on the late war, five days after the advent of those men, we told you what they were.* If they had seized the government without consulting Paris,

* See p. 46.---Ed.

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If the "national defence" had been more than a false pretence for ``government'', its self-appointed members would have abdicated on the 5th of September, publicly revealed Trochu's ``plan'', and called upon the Paris people to at once surrender to the conqueror or take the work of defence into its own hands. Instead of this the impostors published highsounding manifestoes, wherein Trochu "the governor will never capitulate" and Jules Favre the Foreign Minister "(will) not cede a stone of our fortresses, nor a foot of our territory". Through the whole time of the siege Trochu's plan was systematically carried out. In fact, the vile Bonapartist cut-throats, in whose trust they gave the generalship of Paris, cracked in their intimate correspondence ribald jokes at the well-understood farce of the defence. (See, for instance, the correspondence of Alphonse Simon Guiod, supreme commander of the artillery of the army of defence of Paris and Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, to Susane, General of Division of Artillery, published by the Journal Officiel of the Commune.^^37^^) The mask of imposture was dropped at the capitulation of Paris. The "Government of National Defence" unmasked (resurged) itself as the "government of France by Bismarck's prisoners"---a part which Louis Bonaparte himself at Sedan had considered too infamous even for a man of his stamp. On their wild flight to Versailles, after the events of the 18th March, the capitulards^^38^^ left in the hands of Paris the documentary evidence of their treason, to destroy which, as the Commune says in its Manifesto to the Provinces,

``they would not recoil from battering Paris into a heap of ruins washed in a sea of blood''.

Some of the most influential members of the Government of Defence had moreover urgent private reasons of their own to be passionately bent upon such a consummation. Look only at Jules Favre, Ernest Picard, and Jules Ferry!

Shortly after the conclusion of the armistice, M. Milliere, one of the representatives of Paris to the National Assembly, published a series of authentic legal documents in proof that Jules Favre, living in concubinage with the wife of a drunkard, resident at Algiers, had, by a most daring concoction of forgeries, spread over many years, contrived to grasp,

in the name of the children of his adultery, a large succession which made him a rich man, and that, in a lawsuit undertaken by the legitimate heirs, he only escaped exposure through the connivance of the Bonapartist tribunals. Since those dry legal documents were not to be got rid of by any horsepower of rhetorics, Jules Favre, in the same heroism of self-abasement, remained for once tongue-tied until the turmoil of the civil war allowed him to brand the Paris people in the Versailles Assembly as a band of "escaped convicts" in utter revolt against family, religion, order and property!

(Pic Affair). This very forger had hardly got into power when he sympathetically hastened to liberate two brotherforgers, Pic and Taillefer, convicted under the Empire itself to the hulks for theft and forgery. One of these men, Taillefer, daring to return to Paris after the instalment of the Commune, was at once returned to a convenient abode; and then Jules Favre told all Europe that Paris was setting free all the felonious inhabitants of her prisons!

Ernest Picard, appointed by himself the Home Minister of the French Republic on the 4th of September, after having striven in vain to become the Home Minister of Louis Bonaparte, is the brother of one Arthur Picard, an individual, expulsed from the Paris Bourse as a blackleg (Report of the Prefecture of Police dated 31 July 1867) and convicted on his own confession of a theft of 300,000 francs while a director of one of the branches of the Societe Generale^ (see Report of the Prefecture of Police, 11 December 1868). Both these reports were published at the time of the Empire. This Arthur Picard was made by Ernest Picard the redacteur en chef of his "£lecteur libre"^u to act, during the whole siege, as his financial go-between, discounting at the Bourse the state secrets in the trust of Ernest and safely speculating on the disasters of the French army, while the common jobbers were misled by the false news, and official lies, published in the Electeur libre, the organ of the Home Minister/^^1^^" The whole financial correspondence between that

* In the final text of The Civil War in France, Marx specified that Ernest Picard was Finance Minister in the Government of National Defence; the newspaper was an organ of the Ministry of Finance (see p. 51).---Ed,

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mentary party warfare, national and class prejudices standing him in the place of ideas, and vanity in the place of conscience, [...) in order to displace a rival, and to shoot at the people, in order to stifle the Revolution, mischievous when in opposition, odious when in power, never scrupling to provoke revolutions, the history of his public life is the chronicle of the miseries of his country. Fond of brandishing with his dwarfish arms in the face of Europe the sword of the first Napoleon, whose historical shoeblack he had become, his foreign policy always culminated in the utter humiliation of France, from the London Convention of 1841^^111^^ to the Paris capitulation of 1871 and the present civil war he wages under the shelter of Prussian invasion. It need not be said that to such a man the deeper undercurrents of modern society remained a closed book, but even the most palpable changes on its surface were abhorrent to a brain all [of] whose vitality had fled to the tongue. For instance, he never fatigued to denounce any deviation from the old French protective system as a sacrilege; railways he sneeringly derided, when a minister of Louis Philippe, as a wild chimera, and every reform of the rotten French army system he branded under Louis Bonaparte as a profanation. With all his versatility of talent and shiftiness of purpose, he was steadily wedded to the traditions of a fossilised routine, and never, during his long official career, became guilty of one single, even the smallest, measure of practical use. Only the old world's edifice may be proud of being crowned with two such men as Napoleon the Little and little Thiers. The so-called accomplishments of culture appear in such a man only as the refinement of debauchery and the.. .* of selfishness.

Banded with the Republicans under the Restoration, Thiers insinuated himself with Louis Philippe as a spy upon and the jail-accoucheur of the Duchess of Berry, but his activity when he had first slipped into a ministry (1834-35) centred in the massacre of the insurgent Republicans in the Rue Transnonain and the incubation of the atrocious September laws against the press.^^43^^

Reappearing as the chief of the cabinet in March 1840

* An omission in the Ms.---Ed.

worthy pair of brothers has fallen into the hands of the Commune. No wonder that Ernest Picard, the Joe Miller of the Versailles Government, "with his hands in his trousers' pockets, walked from group to group cracking jokes", at the first batch of Paris National Guards, made prisoners and exposed to the ferocious outrages of Pietri's lambs.

Jules Ferry, a penniless barrister before the 4th of September, contrived, as the Mayor of Paris, to job during the siege a fortune out of the famine which was to a great part the work of his maladministration. The documentary proofs are in the hands of the Commune. The day on which he would have to give an account of his maladministration would be his day of judgment.

These men, therefore, are the deadly foes of the working men's Paris, not only as parasites of the ruling classes, not only as the betrayers of Paris during the siege, but above all as common felons who only in the ruins of Paris, this stronghold of the French Revolution, can hope to find their tickets-of-leave. These desperadoes were exactly the men to become the ministers of Thiers.

2) THIERS. DUFAURE. POUYER-QUERTIER

In the "parliamentary sense" things are only a pretext for words serving as a snare for the adversary, an ambuscade for the people, or a matter of artistic display for the speaker himself.

Their master, M. Thiers, the mischievous gnome, has charmed the French bourgeoisie for almost half a century, because he is the most consummate intellectual expression of their own class corruption. Even before he became a statesman, he had shown his lying powers as a historian. Eager of display, like all dwarfish men, greedy of place and pelf, with a barren intellect but lively fancy, epicurean, sceptical, of an encyclopedic facility for mastering ( learning) the surface of things, and turning things into a mere pretext for talk, a word-fencer of rare conversational power, a writer of lucid shallowness, a master of small state roguery, a virtuoso in perjury, a craftsman in all the petty stratagems, cunning devices and base perfidies of parlia-

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of the bombardment of Rome by the troops of the French Republic, under the command of the Legitimist Oudinot/'⁶A few days before the Revolution of February, fretting at the long exile from power to which Guizot had condemned him, smelling in the air the commotion, Thiers exclaimed again in the Chamber of Deputies:

``/ am of the party of Revolution not only in France, but in Europe. I wish the Government of the Revolution to remain in the hands of moderate men. But if that Government should pass into the hands of ardent men, even of the Radicals, I should not for all that desert (abandon) my cause. / shall always be of the party of the Revolution."

The Revolution of February came. Instead of displacing the Guizot Cabinet by the Thiers Cabinet, as the little man had dreamt, it displaced Louis Philippe by the Republic. To put down that Revolution was M. Thiers' exclusive business from the proclamation of the Republic to the coup d'etat. On the first day of the popular victory, he anxiously hid himself, forgetting that the contempt of the people rescued him from its hatred. Still, with his legendary courage, he continued to shy the public stage until after the bloody disruption of the material forces of the Paris proletariat by Cavaignac, the bourgeois Republican. Then the scene was cleared for his sort of action. His hour had again ^struck. He became the leading mind of the "Party of Order" and its "Parliamentary Republic", that anonymous reign, in which all the rival factions of the ruling classes conspired together to crush the working class and conspired against each other, each for the restoration of its own monarchy.

(The Restoration had been the reign of aristocratic landed proprietors, the July Monarchy the reign of the capitalists, Cavaignac's republic the reign of the ``Republican'' faction of the bourgeoisie, while during all these reigns the band of hungry adventurers forming the Bonapartist party had panted in vain for the plunder of France that was to qualify them as the saviours of "order and property, family and religion''.

That Republic was the anonymous reign of the coalesced Legitimists, Orleanists, and Bonapartists with the bourgeois Republicans for their tail).

he came out with the plot of the Paris fortifications. To the [protest] of the Republican Party against the sinister attempt on the liberty of Paris, he replied:

``What! To fancy that any works of fortification could endanger liberty! And first of all, you calumniate every Government whatever in supposing that it could one day try to maintain itself by bombarding

the capital___ But it would be [a] hundred times more impossible

after its victory than before.''

Indeed no French Government whatever save that of M. Thiers himself, with his ticket-of-leave ministers and his rural ruminants' assembly, could have dared upon such a deed! And this too in the most classic form; one part of his fortifications in the hands of his Prussian conquerors and protectors.

When King Bomba* tried his hands at Palermo in January 1848, Thiers rose in the Chamber of Deputies:

``You know, gentlemen, what passes at Palermo: you all shake with horror" (in the ``parliamentary'' sense) "when hearing that during 48 hours a great town has been bombarded. By whom? Was it by a foreign enemy, exercising the rights of war? No, gentlemen, by its own government."

(If it had been by its own government, under the eyes and on the sufferance of the foreign enemy, all would, of course, have been right.)

``And why? Because that unfortunate town (city) demanded its rights. Well, then. For the demand of its rights, it has had 48 hours of bombardment."

(If the bombardment had lasted four weeks and more, all would have been right.)

``.. .Allow me to appeal to the opinion of Europe. It is doing a service to mankind to come and make reverberate from the greatest tribune perhaps of Europe some words of indignation" (indeed! words!) "against such acts.... When the regent Espartero, who had rendered services to his country" (what Thiers never did), "in order to suppress an insurrection, wanted to bombard Barcelona, there was from all parts of the world a general shriek of indignation.''

Well, about a year later this fine-souled man became the sinister suggester and the most fierce defender (apologist)

* Ferdinand II.---Ed.

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3) THE RURAL ASSEMBLY

If this Rural Assembly, meeting at Bordeaux, had made this government, the "government of defence men" had beforehand taken good care to make that Assembly. For that purpose they had dispatched Thiers on a travelling tour through the provinces, there to foreshadow the coming events and make ready for the surprise of the general elections. Thiers had to overcome one difficulty. Quite apart from having become an abomination to the French people, the Bonapartists, if numerously elected, would at once have restored the Empire and embarked M. Thiers and Co. for a voyage to Cayenne. The Orleanists were too sparsely scattered to fill their own places and those vacated by the Bonapartists. To galvanise the Legitimist Party^^9^^ had therefore become unavoidable. Thiers was not afraid of his task. Impossible as a government of modern France, and therefore contemptible as rivals for place and pelf, who could be fitter to be handled as the blind tool of counter-- revolution than the party whose action, in the words of Thiers, had always been confined to the three resources of "foreign invasion, civil war, and anarchy". (Speech of Thiers at the Chamber of Deputies of January 5, 1833.) A select set of the Legitimists, expropriated by the Revolution of 1789, had regained their estates by enlisting in the servant hall of the first Napoleon, the bulk of them by the milliard of indemnity and the private donations of the Restoration. Even their seclusion from participation in active politics under the successive reigns of Louis Philippe and Napoleon the Little served as a lever for the re-establishment of their wealth as landed proprietors. Freed from court and representation costs at Paris, they had, out of the very corners of provincial France, only to gather the golden apples falling into their chateaux from the tree of modern industry, railways enhancing the price of their land, agronomy applied to it by capitalist farmers increasing its produce, and the inexhaustible demand of a rapidly swelling town population securing the growth of markets for that produce. The very same social agencies which reconstituted their material wealth and remade their importance as partners of that joint-stock company of modern slaveholders screened them

from the infection of the modern ideas and allowed them, in rustic innocence, nothing to forget and nothing to learn. Such people furnished the mere passive material to be worked upon by a man like Thiers. While executing the mission, entrusted to him by the Government of Defence, the mischievous imp over-reached his mandataries in securing to himself that multitude of elections which was to convert the defence men from his opponent masters into his avowed servants.

The electoral traps being thus laid, the French people was suddenly summoned by the capitular ds®^^1^^ of Paris to choose, within 8 days, a national assembly with the exclusive task, by virtue of the terms of the convention of the 28th January, dictated by Bismarck, to decide on war or peace. Quite apart [from] the extraordinary circumstances under which that election occurred, with no time for deliberation, with one half of France under the sway of Prussian bayonets, with its other half secretly worked upon by the government intrigue, with Paris secluded from the provinces, the French people felt instinctively that the very terms of the armistice, undergone by the capitulards, left France no choice ( alternative) but that of a peace a outrance? and that for its sanction the worst men of France would be the best. Hence the Rural Assembly emerging at Bordeaux.

Still we must distinguish between the old regime orgies and the real historical business of the Rurals. Astonished to find themselves the strongest faction of an immense majority, composed of themselves and the Orleanists, with a contingent of bourgeois Republicans and a mere sprinkling of Bonapartists, they verily (naively) believed in the long expected advent of their retrospective millennium. There were the heels of the foreign invasion trampling upon France, there was the downfall of the Empire and the captivity of a Bonaparte, and there they were themselves. The wheel of history had evidently turned round to stop at the chambre introuvable of 1816,^^49^^ with its deep and impassioned curses against the revolutionary deluge and its abominations, with its "decapitation and decapitalisation of Paris", its ``decentralisation'' breaking through the net-

* At any price.---Ed..

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work of state rule by the local influences of the chateaux and its religious homilies and its tenets of antediluvian politics, with [its] gentilhommery,^:;" flippancy, its genealogic spite against the drudging masses, and its oeil de boeuf** views of the world. Still, in point of fact, they had only to act their part as joint-stock holders of the "Party of Order", as monopolists of the means of production. From 1848 to 1851, they had only to form a faction of the interregnum of the "parliamentary republic", with this difference that then they were represented by their educated and trained parliamentary champions, the Berryer, the Falloux, the Larochejacquelein, while now they had to ask in their rustic rank-and-file, imparting thus a different tone and tune to the Assembly, and masquerading its bourgeois reality under feudal colours. Their grotesque exaggerations (homilies) serve only to set off the liberalism of their banditti government. Ensnared into an usurpation of powers beyond their electoral mandates, they live only on the sufferance of their self-made rulers. The foreign invasion of 1814 and 1815¹³⁶having been the deadly weapon wielded against them by the bourgeois parvenus, they have in injudicial blindness fastened upon themselves the responsibility for this unprecedented surrender of France to the foreigner by their bourgeois foes. And the French people, astonished and insulted by the reappearance of all the noble Pourceaugnacs it believed buried long since, has become aware that beside making the Revolution of the 19th century it has to finish off the Revolution of 1789 by driving the ruminants to the last goal of all rustic animals---the shambles.

5) OPENING OF THE CIVIL WAR.

18 MARCH REVOLUTION.

CLEMENT THOMAS. LECOMTE.

THE VENDOME AFFAIR

The disarmament of Paris, as a mere necessity of the counter-revolutionary plot, might have been undertaken in a more temporising, circumspect manner, but as a clause

* Gentility.---Ed.

** Literally---bull's eye; a reference to an antechamber at Versailles, with an oval window, where the court assembled to wait for the King. ---Ed.

of the urgent financial treaty with its irresistible fascinations, it brooked no delay. Thiers had therefore to try his hand at a coup d'etat. He opened the civil war by sending Vinoy, the Decembriseur,^^52^^ at the head of a multitude of sergents-dc-ville and a few regiments of the line, upon the nocturnal expedition against the Montmartre Hill. His felonious attempt having broken down on the resistance of the National Guards and their fraternisation with the soldiers, on the following day, in a manifesto, stuck to the walls of Paris, Thiers told the National Guards of his magnanimous resolve to leave them their arms, with which, he felt sure, they would be eager to rally round the government against "the rebels". Out of 300,000 National Guards only 300 responded to his summons. The glorious workmen's Revolution of the 18th March had taken undisputed possession (sway) of Paris.

The Central Committee, which directed the defence of Montmartre and emerged on the dawn of the 18th March as the leader of the Revolution, was neither an expedient of the moment nor the offspring of secret conspiracy. From the very day of the capitulation, by which the Government of National Defence had disarmed France but reserved to itself a bodyguard of 40,000 troops for the purpose of cowing Paris, Paris stood on the watch. The National Guard reformed its organisation and entrusted its supreme control to a Central Committee, consisting of the delegates of the single companies, mostly workmen, with their main strength in the workmen's suburbs, but soon accepted by the whole body, save its old Bonapartist formations. On the eve of the entrance of the Prussians into Paris, the Central Committee took measures for the removal to Montmartre, Belleville, and La Villette, of the cannon and mitrailleuses treacherously abandoned by the capitulards, even in those quarters which the Prussians were about to occupy. It thus safeguarded the artillery, furnished by the subscriptions of the National Guard, officially recognised as their private property in the convention of the 28th of January, and on that very title exempted from the general surrender of arms. During the whole interval from the meeting of the National Assembly at Bordeaux to the 18th of March, the Central Committee had been the people's government of

13-2648

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the capital, strong enough to persist in its firm attitude of defence despite the provocations of the Assembly, the violent measures of the Executive, and the menacing concentration of troops.

The Revolution of the 4th of September had restored the Republic. The tenacious resistance of Paris during the siege, serving as the basis of a war of defence in the provinces, had wrung from the foreign invader the recognition of- the Republic, but its true meaning and purpose were only revealed by the Revolution of the 18th of March and that revelation was a revolution. It was to supersede the social and political conditions of class rule, upon which the old world's system rests, which had engendered the Second Empire, and in their turn ripened under its tutelage into rottenness. Europe thrilled as under an electric shock. It seemed for a moment to doubt whether, in its recent sensational performances of state and war, there was any reality and whether they were not the mere hallucination of a long bygone past.

The defeat of Vinoy by the National Guard was but a check given to the counter-revolution plotted by the ruling classes, but the Paris people turned at once that incident of their self-defence into the first act of a social revolution. The Revolution of the 4th of September had restored the Republic after the throne of the usurper had become vacant. The tenacious resistance of Paris during its siege, serving as the basis for the defensive war in the provinces, had wrung from the foreign invader the recognition of that Republic, but its true meaning and purpose were only revealed on the 18th of March. It was to supersede the social and political conditions of class rule, upon which the old world's system rests, which had engendered the Second Empire and, under its tutelage, ripened into rottenness. Europe thrilled as under an electric shock. It seemed for a moment to doubt whether its late sensational performances of state and war had any reality in them and were not the mere sanguinary dreams of a long bygone past. The traces of the long-endured famine still upon their figures, and under the very eye of Prussian bayonets, the Paris working class conquered in one bound the championship of progress, etc.

In the sublime enthusiasm of historical initiative, the Paris workmen's Revolution made it a point of honour to keep the proletarian clean of the crimes in which the revolution and still more the counter-revolution of their natural superiors (betters) abound.

CLEMENT THOMAS. LECOMTE, ETC.

But the horrid ``atrocities'' that have sullied this Revolution?

So far as these atrocities imputed to them by their enemies are not the deliberate calumny of Versailles or the horrid spawn of the penny-a-liner's brain, they relate only to two facts---the execution of the Generals Lecomte and Clement Thomas and the Vendome affair, of which we shall dispose in a few words.

One of the paid cutthroats selected for the (felonious handiwork) execution of the nocturnal coup de main'' on Montmartre, General Lecomte had, on the Place Pigalle, four times ordered his troops of the 81st of the line to charge an unarmed gathering, and on their refusal fiercely insulted them. Instead of shooting women and children, some of his own men shot him, when taken prisoner in the afternoon of the 18th March, in the gardens of the Chateau Rouge. The inveterate habits acquired by the French soldatesca under the training of the enemies of the working class, are of course not likely to change the very moment they change sides. The same soldiers executed Clement Thomas.

``General" Clement Thomas, a discontent ex-- quartermaster-sergeant had, in the latter times of Louis Philippe's reign, enlisted in the ``Republican'' National newspaper,⁵⁵there to serve in the double quality of strawman ( responsible gerant) and bully. The men of the National, having abused the February Revolution to cheat themselves into power, metamorphosed their old quartermaster-sergeant into a ``General'' on the eve of the butchery of June of which he, like Jules Favre, was one of the sinister plotters and became one of the most merciless executors. Then his generalship came to a sudden end. He disappeared only to

* Surprise attack.---Ed.

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rise again to the surface on the 1st November 1870. The day before the Government of Defence, caught at the Hotel de Ville, had, upon their word of honour, solemnly bound themselves to Blanqui, Flourens and other representatives of the working class to abdicate their usurped power into the hands of a Commune to be freely chosen by Paris. They broke, of course, their word of honour, to let loose the Bretons of Trochu, who had taken the place of the Corsicans of Louis Bonaparte, upon the people guilty of believing in their honour. M. Tamisier alone refusing to sully his name by such a breach of faith, [and] tendering at once his resignation of the commandership-in-chief of the National Guard, ``General'' Clement Thomas was shuffled into his place. During his whole tenure of office he made war not upon the Prussians, but upon the Paris National Guard, proving inexhaustible in pretexts to prevent its general armament, in devices of disorganisation by pitching its bourgeois elements against its working men's elements, of weeding out the officers hostile to Trochu's ``plan'' and disbanding, under the stigma of cowardice, the very proletarian battalions whose heroism is now astonishing their most inveterate enemies. Clement Thomas felt proud of having reconquered his June pre-eminence as the personal enemy of the Paris working class. Only a few days before the 18th of March he laid before the War Minister Le Flo a new plan of his own for finishing off "la fine fleur (the cream) of the Paris canaille". As if haunted by the June spectres, he must needs appear, in the quality of an amateur detective, on the scene of action after Vinoy's rout!

The Central Committee tried in vain to rescue these two criminals, Lecomte and Clement Thomas, from the soldiers' wild Lynch justice, of which they themselves and the Paris workmen were as guilty as the Princess Alexandra of the people crushed to death on the day of her entrance into London. Jules Favre, with his forged pathos, flung his curses upon Paris, the den of assassins. The Rural Assembly mimicked hysterical contortions of ``sensibility''. These men never shed their crocodile tears but as a pretext for shedding the blood of the people. To handle respectable cadavers as weapons of civil war has always been a favourite trick with the Party of Order. How did Europe ring in

1848 with their shouts of horror at the assassination of the Archbishop of Paris by the insurgents of June, while they were fully aware from the evidence of an eyewitness, M. Jacquemet, the Archbishop's vicar, that the Bishop had been shot by Cavaignac's own soldiers! Through the letters to Thiers of the present Archbishop of Paris,* a man with no martyr's vein in him, there runs the shrewd suspicion that his Versailles friends were quite the men to console themselves of his prospective execution in the violent desire to fix that amiable proceeding on the Commune! However, when the cry of ``assassins'' had served its turn, Thiers coolly disposed of it by declaring, from the tribune of the National Assembly, that the ``assassination'' was the private deed of a "very few" obscure individuals.

The "men of order", the reactionists of Paris, trembling at the people's victory as the signal of retribution, were quite astonished by proceedings strangely at variance with their own traditional methods of celebrating a defeat of the people. Even the sergents-de-ville, instead of being disarmed and locked up, had the doors of Paris flung wide open for their safe retreat to Versailles, while the "men of order" [were] left not only unhurt, [but] were allowed to rally and quietly lay hold of the strongholds in the very centre of Paris. They interpreted, of course, the indulgence of the Central Committee and the magnanimity of the armed workmen as mere symptoms of conscious weakness. Hence their plan to try under the mask of an ``unarmed'' demonstration the work which four days before Vinoy's cannon and mitrailleuses had failed in. Starting from the quarters of luxury, this riotous mob of ``gentlemen'', with all the "petits creves"** in their ranks and the familiars of the Empire, the Heeckeren, Coetlogon, H. de Pene, etc., at their head, fell into marching order with the cries of "Down with the Assassins! Down with the Central Committee! Vive I'Assemblee Nationale!", ill-treating and disarming the detached posts of National Guards they met with on their progress. When at last debouching in the Place Vendome, they tried, with shouts of ribald insults, to dislodge

* Georges Darboy.---Ed. ** Fops.-Ed,

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the National Guards from their headquarters and forcibly break through their lines. In answer to their pistol shots the regular sommations (the French equivalent of the English reading of the Riot acts)^^60^^ were made, but proved ineffective to stop the aggressors. Then fire was commanded by the general of the National Guard"' and these rioters dispersed in wild flight. Two National Guards killed, eight dangerously wounded, and the streets, through which the rioters disbanded (runaways fled), strewn with revolvers, daggers and cane-swords, gave clear evidence of the `` unarmed'' character of their ``pacific'' demonstration. When, on the 13th June 1849, the National Guards of Paris made a really ``unarmed'' demonstration of protest against the felonious assault on Rome by French troops,^^46^^ Changarnier, the general of the "Party of Order", had their ranks sabred, trampled down by cavalry, and shot down, the state of siege was at once proclaimed, new arrests, new proscriptions, a new reign of terror set in. But the "lower orders" manage these things otherwise. The runaways of the 22nd March, being neither followed nor harassed in their flight, nor afterwards called to account by the examining magistrate (juge d'instruction), were able two days later to muster again an ``armed'' demonstration under Admiral Saisset. Even after the grotesque failure of this their second rising, they were, like all other Paris citizens, allowed to try their hand at the ballot-box for the election of the Commune and, when succumbing in this bloodless battle, they at last purged Paris from their presence by an unmolested exodus, dragging along with them the cocottes, the lazza- rorez** and the other dangerous class of the capital. The assassination of the "unarmed citizens" on the 22nd of March is a myth which even Thiers and his Rurals have never dared to harp upon, entrusting it exclusively to the servants' hall of European journalism.

If there is to be found fault with in the conduct of the Central Committee and the Paris workmen towards these "men of order" from the 18th March to the time of their

exodus, it is an excess of moderation bordering upon weakness.

Look now to the other side of the medal!

After the failure of their nocturnal surprise of Montmartre, the Party of Order began their regular campaign against Paris in the commencement of April. For inaugurating the civil war by the methods of December, the massacre in cold blood of the captured soldiers of the line and the infamous murder of our brave friend Duval, Vinoy, the runaway, is appointed by Thiers Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour! Galliffet, the fancy-man of that woman so notorious for her shameless masquerades at the orgies of the Second Empire, boasts in an official manifesto of his cowardly assassination of Paris National Guards, with their lieutenant and their captain, made by surprise and treason. Desmarest, the gendarme, is decorated for his butchery-like chopping of the high-souled and chivalrous Flourens, the ``encouraging'' particulars of whose death are triumphantly communicated to the Assembly by Thiers. In the horribly grotesque exultation of a Tom Thumb playing the part of Timur Tamerlane, Thiers denies the ``rebels'' against his littleness all the rights and customs of civilised warfare, even the right of ``ambulances''.

When the Commune had published, on the 7th April, the decree of reprisals, declaring it its duty to protect itself against the cannibal exploits of the Versailles banditti and to demand an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, the atrocious treatment of the Versailles prisoners---of whom Thiers says in one of his bulletins [that] "never had more degraded countenances of a degraded democracy met the afflicted gazes of honest men"---did not cease, but the fusillades of captives were stopped. Hardly however had he and his Decembrist generals become aware that the Commune's decree was but an empty threat, that even their spying gendarmes caught in Paris under the disguise of National Guards, that even their sergents-de-ville captured with explosive bombs upon them were spared, when at once the old regime set in wholesale, and has continued to this day. The National Guards who had surrendered at Belle Epine

* Bergeret.---Ed. ** (It.) beggars and homeless idlers.---Ed.

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to an overwhelming force of Chasseurs were then shot down one after the other by the captain of the platoon on horseback; houses, to which Parisian troops and National Guards had fled, [were] surrounded by gendarmes, inundated with petroleum, and then set on fire, the calcinated corpses being afterwards transported by Paris ambulance; the bayoneting of the National Guards surprised by treason in their beds at the Redoubt of Moulin Saquet (Federals surprised in their beds asleep), the massacre (fusillades) of Clamart, prisoners wearing the line uniform shot offhand, all these high deeds flippantly told in Thiers' bulletins, are only a few incidents of this slaveholders' rebellion! But would it not be ludicrous to quote single facts of ferocity in view of this civil war, fermented amidst the ruins of France, by the conspirators of Versailles, from the meanest motives of class interest, and the bombardment of Paris under the patronage of Bismarck, in the sight of his soldiers! The flippant manner in which Thiers reports on these things in the bulletins, has even shocked the not oversensitive nerves of the Times. All this is, however, ``regular'', as the Spaniards say. All the fights of the ruling classes against the producing classes menacing their privileges are full of the same horrors, although none exhibits such an excess of humanity on

the part of the oppressed and few such an abasement___

Thiers has always held to the old axiom of knight-errantry that every weapon is fair if used against the plebeian.

``L'Assemblee siege paisiblemcnt"* writes Thiers to the Prefects.

Guards were dead, one, named Scheffer, grievously wounded, survives, and is afterwards brought to the Hospital of Bicetre. Thither the Commune sent a commission to take up the evidence of the dying man, which it published in its report. When one of the Paris members of the Assembly interpellated the War Minister upon that report, the Rurals drowned the voice of the deputy and forbade the Minister to answer. It would be an insult to their ``glorious'' army--- not to commit murder, but to speak of it.

The tranquillity of mind with which that Assembly bears with the horrors of civil war is told in one of Thiers' bulletins to his prefects: " L'Assemblee siege paisiblement" (has the coeur leger* like Ollivier), and the executive with its ticket-of-leave men shows by its gastronomical feats, given by Thiers and at the table of German princes, that their digestion is not troubled even by the ghosts of Lecomte and Clement Thomas.

6) THE COMMUNE

The Commune had, after Sedan, been proclaimed by the workmen of Lyons, Marseilles, and Toulouse.^^127^^ Gambetta did his best to destroy it. During the siege of Paris the ever recurrent workmen's commotions, again and again crushed on false pretences by Trochu's Bretons, those worthy substitutes of Louis Bonaparte's Corsicans, were as many attempts to dislodge the government of impostors by the Commune. The Commune then silently elaborated by the proletarian mind was the true secret of the Revolution of the 4th of September. Hence, on the very dawn of the 18th March, after the rout of the counter-revolution, drowsy Europe started up from its dreams of the Prussian Empire under the Paris thunderbursts of Vive la Communel

What is the Commune, this sphinx so tantalising to the bourgeois mind?

In its most simple conception [it is] the form under which the working class assume the political power in their social strongholds, Paris and the other centres of industry.

* A play on the words of the President of the Council Ollivier. See p. 114.---Ed.

AFFAIR AT BELLE EPINE

The affair at Belle Epine, near Villejuif, [is] this: On the 25th April four National Guards were surrounded by a troop of mounted Chasseurs, who bid them to surrender and lay down their arms. Unable to resist, they obeyed and were left unhurt by the Chasseurs. Some time later their captain, a worthy officer of Galliffet's, arrives in full gallop and shoots the prisoners down with his revolver, one after the other, and then trots off with his troop. Three of the

'' "The Assembly continues meeting in peace".---Ed.

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``The proletarians of the capital," said the Central Committee in its proclamation of the 20th March, "have, in the midst of the failures and treason of the ruling classes, understood that for them the hour had struck to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs. . . . They have understood that it was their imperious duty and their absolute right to take into their own hands their own destiny by seizing upon the political power" (state power).

But the proletariat cannot, as the ruling classes and their different rival factions have done in the successive hours of their triumph, simply lay hold of the existent state body and wield this ready-made agency for their own purpose. The first condition for the holding of political power is to transform its traditional working machinery and destroy it as an instrument of class rule. That huge governmental machinery, entoiling like a boa constrictor the real social body in the ubiquitous meshes of a standing army, a hierarchical bureaucracy, an obedient police, clergy and a servile magistrature, was first forged in the days of absolute monarchy as a weapon of nascent middle-class society in its struggles of emancipation from feudalism. The first French Revolution, with its task to give full scope to the free development of modern middle-class society, had to sweep away all the local, territorial, townish and provincial strongholds of feudalism and thus, simultaneously, prepared the social soil for the superstructure of a centralised state power, with omnipresent organs ramified after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labour.

But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for their own purpose. The political instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation.

The modern bourgeois state is embodied in two great organs, parliament and government. Parliamentary omnipotence had, during the period of the Party of Order⁴⁷Republic, from 1848 to 1851, engendered its own negative--- the Second Empire, and Imperialism, with its mere mockery of parliament, is the regime now flourishing in most of the great military states of the Continent. At first view, apparently, the usurpatory dictatorship of the governmental body over society itself, rising alike above and humbling alike all classes, it has in fact, on the European Continent at least, become the only possible state form in which the

appropriating class can continue to sway it over the producing class. The assembly of the ghosts of all the defunct French parliaments, which still haunts Versailles, wields no real force save the governmental machinery as shaped by the Second Empire.

The huge governmental parasite, entoiling the social body like a boa constrictor in the ubiquitous meshes of its bureaucracy, police, standing army, clergy and magistrature, dates its birth from the days of absolute monarchy. The centralised state power had at that time to serve nascent middle-class society as a mighty weapon in its struggles of emancipation from feudalism. The French Revolution of the 18th century, with its task to sweep away the medieval rubbish of seigniorial, local, townish and provincial privileges, could not but simultaneously clear the social soil of the last obstacles hampering the full development of a centralised state power, with omnipresent organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labour. Such it burst into life under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France. During the subsequent parliamentary regimes of the Restoration, the July Monarchy, and the Party of Order Republic, the supreme management of that state machinery with its irresistible allurements of place, pelf and patronage became not only the butt of contest between the rival factions of the ruling class, but at the same degree that the economic progress of modern society swelled the ranks of the working class, accumulated its miseries, organised its resistance and developed its tendencies at emancipation, that, in one word, the modern struggle of classes, the struggle between labour and capital, assumed shape and form, the physiognomy and the character of the state power underwent a striking change. It had always been the power for the maintenance of order, I.e., the existing order of society, and, therefore, of the subordination and exploitation of the producing class by the appropriating class. But as long as this order was accepted as an uncontrovertible and uncontested necessity, the state power could assume an aspect of impartiality. It kept up the existing subordination of the masses which was the unalterable order of things and a social fact undergone

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without contest on the part of the masses, exercised by their "natural superiors" without solicitude. With the entrance of society itself into a new phase, the phase of class struggle, the character of its organised public force, the state power, could not but change also (but also undergo a marked change) and more and more develop its character as the instrument of class despotism, the political engine for forcibly perpetuating the social enslavement of the producers of wealth by its appropriators, of the economic rule of capital over labour. After each new popular revolution, resulting in the transfer of the direction of the state machinery from one set of the ruling classes to another, the repressive character of the state power was more fully developed and more mercilessly used, because the promises made, and seemingly assured by the Revolution, could only be broken by the employment of force. Besides, the change worked by the successive revolutions, sanctioned only politically the social fact, the growing power of capital, and, therefore, transferred the state power itself more and more directly into the hands of the direct antagonists of the working class. Thus the Revolution of July transferred the power from the hands of the landowners into those of the great manufacturers (the great capitalists) and the Revolution of February into those of the united factions of the ruling class, united in their antagonism to the working class, united as the "Party of Order", the order of their own class rule. During the period of the parliamentary republic the state power became at last the avowed instrument of war, wielded by the appropriating class against the productive mass of the people. But as an avowed instrument of civil war, it could only be wielded during a time of civil war, and the condition of life for the parliamentary republic was, therefore, the continuance of openly declared civil war, the negative of that very ``order'' in the name of which the civil war was waged. This could only be a spasmodic, exceptional state of things. It was impossible as the normal political form of society, unbearable even to the mass of the middle classes. When therefore all elements of popular resistance were broken down, the parliamentary republic had to disappear (give way to) before the Second Empire.

The Empire, professing to rest upon the producing

majority of the nation, the peasants, apparently out of the range of the class struggle between capital and labour (indifferent and hostile to both the contesting social powers), wielding the state power as a force superior to the ruling and ruled classes, imposing upon both an armistice (silencing the political, and, therefore, revolutionary form of the class struggle), divesting the state power from its direct form of class despotism by breaking the parliamentary and, therefore, directly political power of the appropriating classes, was the only possible state form to secure [for] the old social order a respite of life. It was, therefore, acclaimed throughout the world as the "saviour of order" and [was] the object of admiration during 20 years on the part of the would-be slaveholders all over the world. Under its sway, coincident with the change brought upon the market of the world by California, Australia,^^140^^ and the wonderful development of the United States, an unsurpassed period of industrial activity set [in], an orgy of stockjobbery, finance swindling, joint-stock company adventures---leading all to rapid centralisation of capital by the expropriation of the middle class and widening the gulf between the capitalist class and the working class. The whole turpitude of the capitalist regime, given full scope to its innate tendency, broke loose unfettered. At the same time, an orgy of luxurious debauch, meretricious splendour, a pandemonium of all the low passions of the higher classes. This ultimate form of the governmental power was at the same time its most prostitute, shameless plunder of the state resources by a band of adventurers, a hotbed of huge state debts, the glory of prostitution, a factitious life of false pretences. The governmental power with all its tinsel covering from top to bottom immerged in the mud. The maturity of rottenness of the state machinery itself, and the putrescence of the whole social body, flourishing under it, were laid bare by the bayonets of Prussia, herself only eager to transfer the European seat of that regime of gold, blood and mud from Paris to Berlin.

This was the state power in its ultimate and most prostitute shape, in its supreme and basest reality, which the Paris working class had to overcome, and of which this class alone could rid society. As to parliamentarism, it had been

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killed by its own triumph and by the Empire. All the working class had to do was not to revive it.

What the workmen had to break down was not a more or less incomplete form of the governmental power of old society, it was that power itself in its ultimate and exhaustive shape---the Empire. The direct opposite to the Empire was the Commune.

In its most simple conception the Commune meant the preliminary destruction of the old governmental machinery at its central seats, Paris and the other great cities of France, and its superseding by real self-government, which, at Paris and the great cities, the social strongholds of the working class, was the government of the working class. Through the siege Paris had got rid of the army which was replaced by a National Guard, with its bulk formed by the workmen of Paris. It was only due to this state of things that the rising of the 18th of March had become possible. This fact was to become an institution, and the National Guard of the great cities, the people armed against governmental usurpation, to supplant the standing army, defending the government against the people. The Commune to consist of the municipal councillors of the different arrondissements (as Paris was the initiator and the model, we have to refer to it), chosen by the suffrage of all citizens, responsible, and revocable in short terms. The majority of that body would naturally consist of workmen or acknowledged representatives of the working class. It was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time. The police agents, instead of being the agents of a central government, were to be the servants of the Commune, having, like the functionaries in all the other departments of administration, to be appointed and always revocable by the Commune, all functionaries, like the members of the Commune itself, having to do their work at workmen's wages. The judges were also to be elected, revocable, and responsible. The initiative in all matters of social life to be reserved to the Commune. In one word, all public functions, even the few ones that would belong to the central government, were to be executed by Communal agents, and, therefore, under the control of the Commune. It is one of the absurdities to say that the central functions,

not of governmental authority over the people, but necessitated by the general and common wants of the country, would become impossible. These functions would exist, but the functionaries themselves could not, as in the old governmental machinery, raise themselves over real society, because the functions were to be executed by Communal agents, and, therefore, always under real control. The public functions would cease to be a private property bestowed by a central government upon its tools. With the standing army and the governmental police the physical force of repression was to be broken. By the disestablishment of all churches as proprietary bodies and the banishment of religious instruction from all public schools (together with gratuitous instruction) into the recesses of private life, there to live upon the alms of the faithful, the divestment of all educational institutes from governmental patronage and servitude, the mental force of repression was to be broken, science made not only accessible to all, but freed from the fetters of government pressure and class prejudice. Municipal taxation to be determined and levied by the Commune, the taxation for general state purposes to be levied by Communal functionaries, and disbursed by the Commune itself for the general purposes (its disbursement for the general purposes to be supervised by the Commune itself).

The governmental force of repression and authority over society was thus to be broken in its merely repressive organs, and where it had legitimate functions to fulfil, these functions were not to be exercised by a body superior to the society, but by the responsible agents of society itself.

7) CONCLUSION*

To fighting, working, thinking Paris, electrified by the enthusiasm of historic initiative, full of heroic reality, the new society in its throes, there is opposed at Versailles the old society, a world of antiquated shams and accumulated lies. Its true representation is that Rural Assembly, peopled

In the MS, this heading is given in German (Schluss).---Ed.

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with the gibberish ghouls of all the defunct regimes into which class rule had successively embodied itself in France, at their head a senile mountebank of parliamentarism, and their sword in the hands of the Imperialist capitular'ds,³⁸bombarding Paris under the eyes of their Prussian conquerors.

The immense ruins which the Second Empire, in its fall, has heaped upon France, is for them only an opportunity to dig out and throw to the surface the rubbish of former ruins, of Legitimism, or Orleanism.

The flame of life is to burn in an atmosphere of the sepulchral exhalations of all bygone emigration. (The very air they breathe is the sepulchral exhalations of all bygone emigration.)

There is nothing real about them but their common conspiracy against life, their egotism of class interest, their wish to feed upon the carcass of French society, their common slaveholders' interest, their hatred of the present, and their war upon Paris.

Everything about them is a caricature, from that old fossil of Louis Philippe's regime, Count Jaubert, exclaiming in the National Assembly, in the palace of Louis XIV: "We are the state" ("The state that is ourselves")^^141^^ (they are in fact the state spectre in its secession from society), to the Republican fawners upon Thiers holding their reunions in the Jeu de Paumes (Tennis Court) to show their degeneracy from their predecessors in 1789.

Thiers at the head, the bulk of the majority split into these two groups of Legitimists and Orleanists, in the tail the Republicans of "old style". Each of these factions intrigues for a restoration of its own, the Republicans for that of the parliamentary Republic---building their hopes upon the senile vanity of Thiers, forming in the meantime the Republican decoration of his rule and sanctioning by their presence the war of the Bonapartist generals upon Paris, after having tried to coax it into the arms of Thiers and to disarm it under Saisset! Knights of the sad figure; the humiliations they voluntarily bear with, [show] what Republicanism, as a special form of class rule, has come down to. It was in view of them that Thiers said to the assembled mayors of the Seine-et-Oise, what more they could want. "Was not he, a

simple citizen, at the head of the State?" Progress from 1830 to 1870 [is] that then Louis Philippe was the best of Republics, and that now Louis Philippe's Minister, little Thiers himself, is the best of Republics.

Being forced to do their real work---the war against Paris---through the Imperialist soldiers, gendarmes, and police, under the sway of the retired Bonapartist generals, they tremble in their shoes at the suspicion that---as during their regime of 1848-51---they are only forging the instrument for a second restoration of the Empire. The Pontifical Zouaves and the Vendeans of Cathelineau and the Bretons of Charette are in fact their ``parliamentary'' army, the mere phantasms of an army compared with the Imperialist reality. While fuming with rage at the very name of the Republic, they accept Bismarck's dictates in its name, waste in its name the rest of French wealth upon the civil war, denounce Paris in its name, forge laws of prospective proscription against the rebels in its name, usurp dictation over France in its name.

Their title (is) the general suffrage which they had always opposed during their own regimes from 1815 to 1848, abolished in May 1850, after it had been established against them by the Republic, and which they now accept as the prostitute of the Empire, forgetting that with it they accept the Empire of the plebiscites! They themselves are impossible even with the general suffrage.

They reproach Paris for revolting against national unity, and their first word was the decapitation of that unity by the decapitalisation of Paris. Paris has done the thing they pretended to want, but it has done it, not as they wanted it, as a reactionary dream of the past, but as the revolutionary vindication of the future. Thiers, the chauvin* threatens, since the 18th March, Paris with the "intervention of Prussia", asked at Bordeaux for the "intervention of Prussia", acts against Paris in fact only with the means accorded to him by Prussia. The Bourbons were dignity itself, compared to this mountebank of chauvinism.

Whatever may be the name---in case they are victorious ---of their restoration, with whatever successful pretender at

Jingo.---Ed.

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its head, its reality can only be the Empire, the ultimate and indispensable political form of the rule of their rotten classes. If they succeed to restore it, and they must restore it with any of their plans of restoration successful---they (will) succeed only to accelerate the putrefaction of the old society they represent and the maturity of the new one they combat. Their dim eyes see only the political outwork of the defunct regimes and they dream of reviving them by placing a Henry V or the Count of Paris at their head. They do not see that the social bodies which bore these political superstructures have withered away, that these regimes were only possible under now outgrown conditions and past phases of French society, and that it can only still bear with Imperialism, in its putrescent state, and the Republic of Labour in its state of regeneration. They do not see that the cycles of political forms were only the political expression of the real changes society underwent.

The Prussians, who in coarse war exultation of triumph, look at the agonies of French society and exploit them with the sordid calculation of a Shylock, and the flippant coarseness of the Krautjunker* are themselves already punished by the transplantation of the Empire to the German soil. They themselves are doomed to set free in France the subterranean agencies which will engulf them with the old order of things. The Paris Commune may fall, but the Social Revolution it has initiated will triumph. Its birth-stead is everywhere.

troops of Versailles", and has this impudent lie confirmed by a commission appointed for this very purpose by his Rurals. He knows of course their triumphant proclamations by the Bonapartist generals themselves. But in "the parliamentary sense" of the word they do not exist.

In his circular of the 16th April on the bombardment of Paris:

``If some cannon-shots have been fired, it is not the deed of the army of Versailles, but of some insurgents wanting to make believe that they are fighting, while they do not dare show themselves.''

Of course, Paris bombards itself, in order to make the world believe that it fights!

Later: <"Our artillery does not bombard---but it cannonades, it is true.">

Thiers bulletin on Moulin Saquet (4 May): <``' Deliverance of Paris from the hideous tyrants who oppress it"> (by killing the Paris National Guards asleep).

The motley lot of an army---the dregs of the Bonapartist soldatesca released from prison by the grace of Bismarck, with the gendarmes of Valentin and the sergents-de-ville of Pietri for their nucleus, set off by the Pontifical Zouaves, the Chouans of Charette and the Vendeans of Cathelineau, the whole placed under the runaway Decembrist generals of capitulation---he dubs "the finest army France ever possessed". Of course, if the Prussians quarter still at St. Denis, it is because Thiers wants to frighten them by the sight of that "finest of fine armies''.

If such is the "finest army"---the Versailles anachronism is "the most liberal and most freely elected assembly that ever existed in France". Thiers caps his eccentricity by telling the mayors, etc., that "he is a man who has never broken his word", of course in the parliamentary sense of wordkeeping.

He is the truest of Republicans and (Sitting of 27 April): <"The Assembly is more liberal than he himself.">

To the mayors: <"You may rely upon my word, which I have never broken" > in an unparliamentary sense, which I have never kept. <"This Assembly is one of the most liberal ever elected by France.">

He compares himself with Lincoln and the Parisians with

FRAGMENTS

THE LIES IN THIERS BULLETINS

The immense sham of that Versailles, its lying character could not better be embodied and resumed than in Thiers, the professional liar, for whom the "reality of things" exists only in their "parliamentary sense", that is, as a lie.

In his answer to the Archbishop's letter he coolly denies "the pretended executions and reprisals (!) attributed to the

Hidebound Junker.---Ed.

14*

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the rebellious slaveholders of the South. The Southerners wanted territorial secession from the United States for the slavery of labour. Paris wants the secession of M. Thiers himself and the interests he represents from power for the emancipation of labour.

The revenge which the Bonapartist generals, the gendarmes and the Chouans wreak upon Paris is a necessity of the class war against labour, but in the little byplay of his bulletins Thiers turns it into a pretext of caricaturing his idol, the first Napoleon, and makes himself the laughing-stock of Europe by boldly affirming that the French army through its war upon the Parisians has regained the renown it had lost in the war against the Prussians. The whole war thus appears as mere child's play to give vent to the childish vanity of a dwarf, elated at having to describe his own battles, fought by his own army, under his own secret commandership-in-chief.

And his lies culminate in regard to Paris and the province.

Paris which in reality holds in check for two months the finest army France ever possessed, despite the secret help of the Prussians, is in fact only anxious to be delivered from its "atrocious tyrants", by Thiers, and therefore it fights against him, although a mere handful of criminals.

He does not tire of representing the Commune as a handful of convicts, ticket-of-leave men, scum. Paris fights against him because it wants to be delivered by him from "the hideous tyrants that oppress it". And this ``handful'' of desperadoes holds in check for two months "the finest army that France ever possessed" led by the invincible MacMahon and inspired by the Napoleonic genius of Thiers himself!

The resistance of Paris is no reality, but Thiers' lies about Paris are.

Not content to refute him by their exploits, all the living elements of Paris have spoken to him, but in vain, to dislodge him out of his lying world.

``You must not confound the movement of Paris with the surprise of Montmartre, which was only its opportunity and starting point; this movement is general and profound in the conscience of Paris; the greatest number even of those who by one reason or another keep back (stand aside), do for all that not disavow its social legitimity.''

By whom was he told this? By the delegates of the syndical chambers, speaking in the name of 7,000-8,000 merchants and industrials. They went to tell it to him personally at Versailles. Thus the League of the Republican Union, thus the Masons' lodges^^119^^ by their delegates and their demonstrations. But he sticks to it.

In his bulletin of Moulin Saquet (4 May):

``300 prisoners taken ... the rest of the insurgents has fled <in

a wild flight, leaving 150 dead and wounded on the field of battle___

Such is the victory the Commune can celebrate in its bulletins tomorrow. Paris will soon be delivered from the terrible tyrants oppressing it.">

But the fighting Paris, the real Paris is not his Paris. His Paris is itself a parliamentary lie. "The rich, the idle, the capitalist Paris", the cosmopolitan stew, this is his Paris. That is the Paris which wants to be restored to him; the real Paris is the Paris of the "vile multitude". The Paris that showed its courage in the "pacific procession" and Saisset's stampede, that throngs now at Versailles, at Rueil, at St. Denis, at St. Germain-en-Laye, followed by the cocottes, sticking to the "men of family, religion, order" and above all "of property", the Paris of the lounging classes, the Paris of the francs-fileurs,^^77^^ amusing itself by looking through telescopes at the battles going on, treating the civil war [as] but an agreeable diversion, that is the Paris of M. Thiers, as the emigration of Coblenz^^78^^ was the France of M. de Calonne and as the emigration at Versailles is the France of M. Thiers.

If the Paris that wants to be delivered from the Commune by Thiers, his Rurals, Decembriseurs and gendarmes is a lie, so is his ``province'' which through him and his Rurals wants to be delivered from Paris.

Before the definitive conclusion at Frankfort of the peace treaty,^^142^^ he appealed to the provinces to send their battalions of National Guards and volunteers to Versailles to fight against Paris. The provinces refused point-blank. Only Bretagne sent a handful of Chouans "fighting under a white flag, every one of them wearing on his breast a Jesus heart in white cloth and shouting: 'Vive le roil' " Thus is the provincial France listening to his summons so that he was

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215

forced to lend captive French troops from Bismarck, lay hold of the Pontifical Zouaves^^79^^ (the real armed representatives of his provincial France) and make 20,000 gendarmes and 12,000 sergents-de-ville the nucleus of his army.

Despite the wall of lies, the intellectual and police blockade, by which he tried to (debar) fence off Paris from the provinces, the provinces, instead of sending him battalions to wage war upon Paris, inundated him with so many delegations insisting upon peace with Paris that he refused to receive them any longer in person. The tone of the addresses sent up from the provinces, most of them proposing the immediate conclusion of an armistice with Paris, the dissolution of the Assembly, "because its mandate had expired", and the grant of the municipal rights demanded by Paris, was so offensive that Dufaure denounced them in his " circular against conciliation" to the prefects. On the other hand, the Rural Assembly and Thiers received not a single address of approval on the part of the provinces.

But the grand defi* the provinces gave to Thiers' ``lie'' about the provinces were the municipal elections of the 30th April, carried on under his government, on the basis of a law of his Assembly. Out of 700,000 councillors (in round numbers) returned by the 35,000 communes still left in mutilated France, the united Legitimists, Orleanists and Bonapartists did not carry 8,000! The supplementary elections still more hostile! This showed plainly how far the National Assembly, chosen by surprise and on false pretences, represents France, provincial France, France minus Paris!

But the plan of an assembly of the municipal delegates of the great provincial towns at Bordeaux, forbidden by Thiers on the ground of his law of 1834 and an Imperialist one of 1855,^^143^^ forced him to avow that his ``provinces'' are a lie, as ``his'' Paris is. He accuses them of resembling the ``false'' Paris, of being eagerly bent upon "laying the foundations of communism and rebellion". Again he has been answered by the late resolutions of the municipal councils of Nantes, Vienne, Chambery, Limoux, Carcassonne, Angers, Carpen-

tras, Montpellier, Privas, Grenoble, etc., asking, insisting upon peace with Paris,

``the absolute affirmation of the Republic, the recognition of the communal right which," as the municipal council of Vienne says, <"those elected on February 8 promised in their circulars when they were still candidates. To stop the external war, it" (the National Assembly) "ceded two provinces and promised Prussia five milliards. What ought it not to do to put an end to the civil war?">

(Just the contrary. The two provinces are not their `` private'' property, and as to the promissory note of five milliards, the thing is exactly that it shall be paid by the French people and not by them.)

If, therefore, Paris may justly complain of the provinces that they limit themselves to pacific demonstrations, leaving it unaided against all the state forces ... the province has in most unequivocal tones given the lie to Thiers and the Assembly to being represented there,, has declared their province a lie, as is their whole existence, a sham, a false pretence.

The General Council feels proud of the prominent part the Paris branches of the International have taken in the glorious revolution of Paris. Not, as the imbeciles fancy, as if the Paris, or any other branch of the International, received its mot d'ordre* from a centre. But the flower of the working class in all civilised countries belonging to the International, and being imbued with its ideas, they are sure everywhere in the working-class movements to take the lead.**

From the very day of the capitulation by which the government of Bismarck's prisoners had signed the surrender of France, but, in return, got leave to retain a bodyguard for the express purpose of cowing Paris, Paris stood on its

* Orders.---Ed.

** Then follows a text written on three separate sheets which are not paginated. The second paragraph is preceded by the words in German: Seite 9 (Page 9).---Ed.

Main challenge.---Ed.

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217

watch. The National Guard reorganised itself and entrusted its supreme control to a Central Committee elected by all the companies, battalions and batteries of the capital, save some fragments of the old Bonapartist formations. On the eve of the entrance of the Prussians into Paris, the Central Committee took measures for the removal to Montmartre, Belleville, and La Villette, of the cannon and mitrailleuses treacherously abandoned by the capitulards in the very quarters the Prussians were about to occupy.

from the general surrender of arms, belonging to the government, into the hands of the conqueror. And Thiers dared initiate the civil war on the mendacious pretext that the artillery of the National Guard was state property!

The seizure of this artillery was evidently but to serve as the preparatory measure for the general disarmament of the Paris National Guard, and therefore of the Revolution of the 4th of September. But that Revolution had become the legal status of France. Its Republic was recognised by the conqueror in the terms of the capitulation itself, it was after the capitulation acknowledged by the foreign powers, in its name the National Assembly had been summoned. The Revolution of the Paris workmen on the 4th of September was the only legal title of the National Assembly seated at Bordeaux and its Executive. Without it, the National Assembly had at once to give room to the Corps Legislatif, elected by general suffrage and dispersed by the arm of the Revolution. Thiers and his ticket-of-leave men would have had to capitulate for safe conducts and securities against a voyage to Cayenne. The National Assembly, with its attorney's power to settle the terms of peace with Prussia, was only an incident of the Revolution. Its true embodiment was the armed Paris that had initiated the Revolution, undergone for it a five months' siege with its horrors of famine, that had made its prolonged resistance, despite Trochu's ``plan'', the basis of a tremendous war of defence in the provinces; and Paris was now summoned with coarse insult by the rebellious slaveholders at Bordeaux whether to lay down its arms and acknowledge that the popular Revolution of the 4th September had had no other purpose but the simple transfer of power from the hands of Louis Bonaparte and his minions into those of his monarchical rivals, or to stand forward as the self-sacrificing champion of France, to be saved from her ruin and to be regenerated only through the revolutionary overthrow of the political and social conditions that had engendered the Empire and, under its fostering care, matured into utter rottenness. Paris, emaciated by a five months' famine, did not hesitate one moment. It heroically resolved to run . all the hazards of a resistance against the French conspirators under the very eye of the Prussian army quartered before its gates. But in its utter

Armed Paris was the only serious obstacle in the way of the counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Paris was, therefore, to be disarmed. On this point the Bordeaux assembly was sincerity itself. If the roaring rant of its Rurals had not been audible enough, the surrender of Paris handed over by Thiers to the tender mercies of the triumvirate of Vinoy, the Decembriseur, Valentin^ the Bonapartist gendarme, and Aurelle de Paladines, the Jesuit general, would have cut off even the last subterfuge of doubt as to the ultimate aim of the disarmament of Paris. But if their purpose was frankly avowed, the pretext on which these atrocious felons initiated the civil war was the most shameless, the most barefaced (glaring) of lies. The artillery of the Paris National Guard, said Thiers, belonged to the State, and to the State it must be returned. The fact was this. From the very day of the capitulation by which Bismarck's prisoners had signed the surrender of France but reserved to themselves a numerous bodyguard for the express purpose of cowing Paris, Paris stood on its watch. The National Guard reorganised themselves and entrusted their supreme control to a Central Committee elected by their whole body, save some fragments of the old Bonapartist formations. On the eve of the entrance of the Prussians into Paris, their Central Committee took measures for the removal to Montmartre, Belleville, and La Villette of the cannon and mitrailleuses, treacherously abandoned by the capitulards in the very quarters the Prussians were about to occupy. That artillery had been furnished by the subscriptions of the National Guard. As their private property, it was officially recognised in the convention of the 28th January, and on that very title exempted

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219

abhorrence of civil war, the popular government of Paris, the Central Committee of the National Guard, continued to persist in its merely defensive attitude, despite the provocations of the Assembly, the usurpations of the Executive, and the menacing concentration of troops in and around Paris. On the dawn of the 18th March Paris arose to the thunderbursts of Vive la Commune! What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalising to the bourgeois mind?

``The proletarians of the capital," said the Central Committee in its manifesto of the 18th March, "have, in the midst of the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, understood that for them the hour has struck to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs.... They have understood that it is their imperious duty and their absolute right to take into their own hands their own destinies by seizing the political power.''

But the working class cannot, as the rival factions of the appropriating class have done in their hours of triumph, simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.

The centralised state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy and magistrature, organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labour, dates from the days of absolute monarchy when it served nascent middle-class society as a mighty weapon in its struggles for emancipation from feudalism. The French Revolution of the 18th century swept away the rubbish of seigniorial, local, townish and provincial privileges, thus clearing the social soil of its last medieval obstacles to the superstructure of the state. It received its final shape under the First Empire, the offspring of the coalition wars of old, semi-feudal Europe against modern France. Under the following parliamentary regimes, the hold of the governmental power, with its irresistible allurements of place, pelf and patronage, became not only the bone of contention between the rival factions of the ruling classes. Its political character changed simultaneously with the economic changes of society. At the same pace that the progress of industry developed, widened and intensified, the class antagonism between capital and labour, the governmental power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour, of a political force

organised to enforce social enslavement, of a mere engine of class despotism. On the heels of every popular revolution, marking a new progressive phase in the march (development) (course) of the struggle of classes (class struggle), the repressive character of the state power comes out more pitiless and more divested of disguise. The Revolution of July, by transferring the management of the state machinery from the landlord to the capitalist, transfers it from the distant to the immediate antagonist of the working men. Hence the state power assumes a more clearly defined attitude of hostility and repression in regard of the working class. The Revolution of February hoists the colours of the "social republic", thus proving at its outset that the true meaning of state power is revealed, that its pretence of being the armed force of public welfare, the embodiment of the general interests of societies rising above and keeping in their respective spheres the warring private interests, is exploded, that its secret as an instrument of class despotism is laid open, that the workmen do want the republic, no longer as a political modification of the old system of class rule, but as the revolutionary means of breaking down class rule itself. In view of the menaces of the "social republic" the ruling class feel instinctively that the anonymous reign of the parliamentary republic can be turned into a joint-stock company of their conflicting factions, while the past monarchies by their very title signify the victory of one faction and the defeat of the other, the prevalence of one section's interests of that class over that of the other, land over capital or capital over land. In opposition to the working class the hitherto ruling class, in whatever specific forms it may appropriate the labour of the masses, has one and the same economic interest, to maintain the enslavement of labour and reap its fruits directly as landlord and capitalist, indirectly as the state parasites of the landlord and the capitalist, to enforce that ``order'' of things which makes the producing multitude, a "vile multitude" serving as a mere source of wealth and dominion to their betters. Hence Legitimists, Orleanists, bourgeois Republicans and the Bonapartist adventurers, eager to qualify themselves as defenders of property by first pilfering it, club together and merge into the "Party of Order", the practical upshot of that revolu-

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SECOND OUTLINE.-FRAGMENTS

221

tion made by the proletariat under enthusiastic shouts of the "Social Republic". The parliamentary republic of the Party of Order is not only the reign of terror of the ruling class. The state power becomes in their hands the avowed instrument of the civil war of the capitalist and the landlord, not [to say of] their state parasites, against the revolutionary aspirations of the producer.

Under the monarchical regimes, the repressive measures and the confessed principles of the day's government are denounced to the people by the factions of the ruling classes that are out of power; the opposition ranks of the ruling class interest the people in their party feuds by appealing to its own interests, by their attitudes of tribunes of the people, by the revindication of popular liberties. But in the anonymous reign of the Republic, while amalgamating the modes of repression of old past regimes (taking out of the arsenals of all past regimes the arms of repression), and wielding them pitilessly, the different factions of the ruling class celebrate an orgy of renegation. With cynical effrontery they deny the professions of their past, trample under feet their `` socalled'' principles, curse the revolutions they have provoked in their name, and curse the name of the Republic itself, although only its anonymous reign is wide enough to admit them into a common crusade against the people.

Thus, this most cruel is at the same time the most odious and revolting form of class rule. Wielding the state power only as an instrument of civil war, it can only hold it by perpetuating civil war. With parliamentary anarchy at its head, crowned by the uninterrupted intrigues of each of the factions of the ``order'' party for the restoration of its own pet regime, in open war against the whole body of society out of its own narrow circle, the Party of Order rule becomes the most intolerable rule of disorder. Having, in its war against the mass of the people, broken all its means of resistance and laid it helplessly under the sword of the Executive, the Party of Order itself and its parliamentary regime are warned off the stage by the sword of the Executive. That parliamentary Party of Order republic can therefore only be an interregnum. Its natural upshot is Imperialism, whatever the number of the Empire. Under the form of Imperialism, the state power, with the sword for its scepter,

professes to rest upon the peasantry, that large mass of producers apparently outside the class struggle of labour and capital, professes to save the working class by breaking down parliamentarism and therefore the direct subserviency of the state power to the ruling classes, professes to save the ruling classes themselves by subduing the working classes without insulting them, professes, if not public welfare, at least national glory. It is therefore proclaimed as the "saviour of order". However galling to the political pride of the ruling class and its state parasites, it proves itself to be the really adequate regime of the bourgeois ``order'' by giving full scope to all the orgies of its industry, turpitudes of its speculation, and all the meretricious splendours of its life. The state, thus seemingly lifted above civil society, becomes at the same time itself the hotbed of all the corruptions of that society. Its own utter rottenness, and the rottenness of the society to be saved of it, was laid bare by the bayonet of Prussia, but so much is this Imperialism the unavoidable political form of ``order'', that is, the ``order'' of bourgeois society, that Prussia herself seemed only to reverse its central seat at Paris in order to transfer it to Berlin.

The Empire is not, like its predecessors, the legitimate monarchy, the constitutional monarchy and the parliamentary republic, one of the political forms of bourgeois society; it is at the same time its most prostitute, its most complete, and its ultimate political form. It is the state power of modern class rule, at least on the European Continent.

Written in April and May 1871

First published in full in

the original (English)

and in Russian in the Marx-Engels

Archives, Vol. Ill (VIII), 1934

Printed according to the text in the Archi'ves, checked with the MS

Part Two

SPEECHES, DOCUMENTS, ARTICLES

RECORD OF MARX'S SPEECH

ON THE GOVERNMENT OF NATIONAL DEFENCE^^144^^

FROM THE MINUTES OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL MEETING OF JANUARY 17, 1871

Cit. Marx said as there were several English members present he had a very important statement to make. At the last meeting at St. James's Hall Odger spoke of the French Government contrary to truth. In our second address we said the brand of infamy attaches to some of the members of the provisional government from the Revolution of 1848. Odger said there was not a blame attached to them. Favre can only be received as the representative of the Republic, not as the spotless patriot Jules Favre. The way that is now talked about him put Favre in the foreground and the Republic almost out of sight. One example of Favre's doings. After the Revolution of 1848 Favre became Secretary of the Interior; on account of Flocon being ill, Ledru-Rollin chose Favre. One of the first things he did was to bring back the army to Paris, which afterwards enabled the bourgeoisie to shoot the work-people down. Later, when the people became convinced that the Assembly consisted of middle-class men, the people made a demonstration in favour of Poland on which occasion the people ran into the assembly.^^145^^ The president entreated Louis Blanc to speak to them and pacify them, which he did. A war with Russia would have saved the Republic. The first thing Jules Favre did a few days after was to ask for authority to prosecute Louis Blanc as an accomplice of the invaders. The Assembly thought he was

15-2648

226

MARX ON THE GOVERNMENT OF NATIONAL DEFENCE

RECORD OF ENGELS'S SPEECH ON THE MARCH 18 REVOLUTION IN PARIS"^^8^^

instructed by the Government to do but all the other members of the Government denounced [this measure] as the private affair of Favre. The provisional government conspired to provoke the insurrection of June.^^8^^ After the people were shot down Favre proposed that the Executive Committee should be abolished.^^146^^ On the 27th he drew up the decree to transport the prisoners without trial; 15,000 were transported. In November the Assembly was compelled to examine some not yet transported. In Brest alone 1,000 had to be liberated. Of the most dangerous who were tried by a military commission many had to be liberated, others were only sentenced to short terms of imprisonment. Afterwards motions were made for an amnesty, Favre always opposed. He was one of the men who insisted for a commission of inquiry of the whole revolution except February. He was instrumental in the passing of the most infamous press laws¹⁴⁷that ever existed and of which Napoleon made good use. Favre had certain relations with the Bonapartists under the July monarchy and he used all his influence to get Napoleon into the National Assembly. He interested himself to bring about the expedition to Rome,^^46^^ which was the first step for the establishment of the Empire.

FROM THE MINUTES OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL MEETING OF MARCH 21, 1871

Git. Engels then gave a description of the state of things in Paris. He said the letters received during the week from Paris, which Serraillier had already mentioned, had cleared up what had been incomprehensible before. It had appeared as if a few men had suddenly seized a number of cannon and kept them. The whole of the press and everyone of the correspondents had written that these men must be [put] down but the French Government had temporised. The information received from our Paris Committee was [that] the National Guards paid for the making of these guns and liked to keep them. After the election they had found that the Republic was anything but safe under such an Assembly as had been elected.^^149^^ When the Prussians had entered Paris the guns had been taken away to another part of the town to keep them out of their reach. Then the Government had laid claim to them and endeavoured to take them away from the National Guards. Aurelle de Paladines had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the National Guards and prefect of the police.* Under Napoleon he had been Com-

An account of the speech (without mention of the author's name) was published in

The Eastern Post No. 121, January 21, 1871

Printed from The General Council of the First International. 1870-1871. Minutes (Progress Publishers, Moscow), pp. 106-07

* At the next meeting, on March 28, 1871, Engels pointed out that there was a mistake in the entry of his speech of March 21: "two Generals, Aurelle de Paladines and Valentin, were made into one. The latter had been appointed as prefect of the police."---Ed.

15*

228

ENGELS ON MARCH 18 REVOLUTION IN PARIS

Karl Marx

mander-in-Chief of the Gendarmerie and he was a partisan of the priests. At the bidding of Dupanloup, the bishop of Orleans, he had done five hours' penance at church while his army had been defeated in an action with the Germans. This had left no doubt as to the intentions of the Government.

The National Guards had then prepared for resistance. Out of 260 battalions 215 had organised a Central Committee, men and officers combined. A delegate had been elected by each company out of whom the local committees of the arrondissements, or wards, had been formed, and they had elected the Central Committee.

Out of twenty arrondissements only five had not elected any delegates. When the Assembly had removed to Versailles the Government had tried to clear Paris of the revolutionists and take the guns from them. The troops only just arrived in Paris had been meant to be employed under the command of Vinoy who had commanded the soldiers that shot down the people on the boulevards during the coup d'etat in 1851. They had partly succeeded early in the morning but when the National Guards had discovered what had been done they had set to work to retake the guns and the soldiers had fraternised with the people. The town was now in the hands of the people; the troops that had not gone over had been withdrawn to Marseilles and the Assembly did not know what to do. None of the men of the Central Committee were known to fame, there were no Felix Pyats and men of that stamp in it, but they were well known among the working class. There were four members of the International in the Committee.

The Commune was to be elected the next day. They had announced that the liberty of the press should be respected but not the rotten Bonapartist press. The most important resolution passed was that the preliminaries of peace should be respected. The Prussians were still near and if they could be kept out of the quarrel the chances of success were increased.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES^^150^^

Sir,---Will you allow me to again intrude upon your columns in order to contradict widely spread falsehoods?

A Lombard telegram, dated Paris, March 30, contains an extract from the Gauloisⁱ⁵ⁱ which, under the sensational heading, "Alleged Organisation of the Paris Revolution in London", has adorned the London papers of Saturday last. Having during the late War successfully rivalled the Figaro and the Paris-Journal*^^52^^ in the concoction of Munchausiades that made the Paris petite presse a byword all over the world, the Gaulois seems more than ever convinced that the news-reading public will always cling to the tenet, "Credo quia absurdum est"* Baron Munchausen himself, would he have undertaken to organise at London "in the early part of February", when M. Thiers did not yet hold any official post, "the insurrection of the 18th of March", called into life by the attempt of the same M. Thiers to disarm the Paris National Guard? Not content to send MM. Assi and Blanqui on an imaginary voyage to London, there to conspire with myself in secret conclave, the Gaulois adds to that conclave two imaginary persons---one "Bentini, general agent for Italy", and one "Dermott, general agent for

* "I believe because it is absurd" (words ascribed to Tertullian, a Christian writer of the late 2nd and the early 3rd century).---Ed.

An account of the speech (without mention of the author's name) was published in The Eastern Post No. 130, March 25, 1871

Printed from The General Council of the First International. 1870-1871. Minutes, pp. 160-61

230

KARL MARX

RECORD OF ENGELS'S SPEECH ON THE PARIS COMMUNE

England". It also graciously confirms the dignity of " supreme chief of the Internationale," first bestowed upon me by the Paris-Journal. These two worthies notwithstanding, the General Council of the International Working Men's Association^^15^^ will, I am afraid, continue to transact its business without the incumbrance of either ``chief'' or ``president''.

I have the honour to be, Sir, your obediently,

Karl Marx

London, April 3

Published in The Times No. 27028, April 4, 1871, and The Daily News No. 7780, April 6, 1871

Printed according to The Times

FROM THE MINUTES OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL MEETING OF APRIL 11, 1871

Cit. Engels said he had another fact to communicate. The press had lately been full of the wonders done by the Association,^^15^^ but the last stated in a Paris paper was that Marx had been private secretary to Bismarck in 1857.

He further said it would not be well to allow the Paris affair to go on without saying something about it. As long as the Central Committee of the National Guards had managed the affair, it had gone on well but after the elections^^153^^ there had been talk and no action. The time for action against Versailles had been when it was weak but that opportunity had been lost and now it seemed that Versailles was getting the upper hand and driving the Parisians back. People would not put up long with being led into defeat. They lost ground, their ammunition was spent to little purpose and they were eating up their provisions. They could not be starved into submission as long as one side of Paris was open. Favre declined to take Prussian help.^^154^^ In June 1848^^8^^ the fight had been over in four days but then the work-people had had no cannon. It would not be over so quick now. Louis Napoleon had made the streets wide that they might be swept with cannon against the workpeople but now it was in their favour: they would sweep the streets with cannon against the other party, The work-peo-

232

ENGELS ON THE PARIS COMMUNE

pie---200,000 men---[were] far better organised than at any other insurrection. Their case was a bad one but the chances were not so good as a fortnight ago.

First published in Russian in the newspaper Pravda No. 77, March 18, 1932

Printed from The General Council of the First International. 1S70-1871. Minutes, pp. 171-72

The Paris Commune meeting in the Town Hall

RECORD OF MARX'S SPEECH ON THE PARIS COMMUNE

FROM THE MINUTES OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL MEETING OF APRIL 25, 1871

[Marx] ... or papers/^^1^^" This would be rectified in future as the commercial communications between the Commune and London would be kept up by a travelling agent who would also take charge of our communications.

Serraillier and Dupont had been elected to fill up vacancies in the 17th arrondissement.^^155^^ Serraillier had written that Dupont was sure to be elected but he had not written since the election; he might have written to Manchester. It appeared that more letters had been written than had arrived.

Felix Pyat and Vesinier were calumniating Serraillier and Dupont in Paris and when Serraillier had threatened to prosecute they had denied it. It was urgent to write at once to Paris to state the reasons why Pyat calumniated Serraillier and Dupont, and upon the motion of Git. Mottershead Cit. Marx was instructed to write.^^156^^

[Marx:] The letters had been posted outside the line by Laf argue; they had therefore been delayed by rail: both the French and the Prussian governments sifted the letters. Most of the information they contained was old but there were a few facts which the papers had not given. It was stated that the provinces knew as little what was going on in Paris

* The beginning of Marx's speech is not extant, as the corresponding page of the General Council Minute Book is missing.---Ed.

Demonstration of solidarity with the Paris Commune held in London in April 1871

234

MARX ON THE PARIS COMMUNE

Frederick Engels

RESOLUTION OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL

EXPELLING TOLAIN

FROM THE I.W.M.A.^^157^^

as during the siege. Except where the fighting was going on it had never been so quiet. A great part of the middle class had joined the National Guards of Belleville. The great capitalists had run away and the small trades-people went with the working class. No one could have an idea of the enthusiasm of the people and the National Guards and the people at Versailles must be fools if they believed that they could enter Paris. Paris did not believe in a rising in the provinces and knew that superior forces were brought against it but there was no fear on that account but there was fear of Prussian intervention and want of provisions. The decrees about rent and commercial bills were two master strokes: without them 3/4 of the trades-people would have become bankrupt. The murder of Duval and Flourens had excited a sentiment of vengeance. The family of Flourens and the Commune had sent a legal officer to have the cause of their death certain but in vain. Flourens had been killed in a house.

About the fabrication of telegrams there was some information. When Brutto* had gone through the accounts of the Government of National Defence he had discovered that money had been paid for the construction of an improved portable guillotine. The guillotine had been found and publicly burnt by order of the Commune. The Gas Company had owed the municipality more than a million but had not shown any willingness to refund till their goods had been seized; then a bill to the amount had been given on the Bank of France. The telegrams and correspondents gave altogether different versions of these things. The greatest' eyesore was that the Commune governed so cheap. The highest officials only received at the rate of 6,000 fr. [per] year, the others only workman's wages.

The address** was to be ready at the next meeting.

The General Council of the International Working Men's Association,

Considering the resolution of the Federal Council of the Paris Sections expelling Citizen Tolain from the Association because, after having been elected to the National Assembly as a representative of the working classes, he has deserted their cause in the most disgraceful manner; which resolution the General Council is called upon to confirm,

Considering that the place of every French member of the I.W.M.A. is undoubtedly on the side of the Commune of Paris and not in the usurpatory and counter-- revolutionary Assembly of Versailles,

Confirms the resolution of the Paris Federal Council and declares that Citizen Tolain is expelled from the I.W.M.A.

The General Council was prevented from taking action in this matter sooner, by the fact that the above resolution of the Paris Federal Council was laid before them, in an authentic shape, on the 25th April only.

An account of the speech (without mention of the author's name) was published in The Eastern Post No. 135, April 29, 1871

Printed from

The General Council of the First International. 1870-1871. Minutes, pp. 180-82

Introduced on April 25, 1871

Published in the newspapers The Eastern Post No. 135, April 29, 1871; L'Internationale No. 122, May 14, 1871; Der Volksstaat No. 42, May 24, 1871

Printed from

The General Council oj

the First International.

1870-1871. Minutes,

p. 355

* Should be Protot.---Ed. *» The Civil War in France.---Ed.

RECORD OF ENGELS'S SPEECH ON THE PARIS COMMUNE

ENGELS ON THE PARIS COMMUNE

237

keep the towns in order. Thiers could not even allow the Town Councils to meet at Bordeaux and talk politics, he had to use Napoleon's Law to prevent it.^^143^^

First published in Russian in the book The First International in the Days of the Paris Commune, 1941

Printed from

The General Council of the First International. 1870-1871. Minutes, pp. 189-90

FROM THE MINUTES OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL MEETING OF MAY 9, 1871

Git. Engels then stated that the address* was not ready yet. Git. Marx had been seriously unwell and drawing up the address had made him worse. But it would be ready on Saturday and the Sub-Committee^^158^^ could meet at Marx's any time after five o'clock in the afternoon.

A delegate from the Commune had been here, the reports were good. Strictness had to be employed not to let people pass without passports. It had been discovered that spies from Versailles had lounged about at their leisure. The main attack had failed. The Versailles army had tried to get in between the National Guards and the ramparts but now they could only attack in one place and that was where they had failed before. The defence was getting stronger. The Commune had lost a little ground [but] had regained Clamart. Even if the army succeeded at the ramparts there were the barricades afterwards and there had never been such a struggle before as the one impending. For the first time barricades would be defended by cannon, by military guns, and by regularly organised forces. The contending armies were nearly equal now. Versailles could get no troops from the country, they had to send some away to

* The Civil War in France.---Ed.

RECORD OF MARX'S SPEECH ON THE PARIS COMMUNE^^159^^

MARX ON THE PARIS COMMUNE

239

and the peasants rose in insurrection; the knights immediately forgot their differences and coalesced to crush the movement of the peasants. To show how Prussians have been doing police work it might be mentioned that 500 were arrested at Rouen which is occupied by the Prussians---upon the plea that they belonged to the International. The International was feared. In the French Assembly the other day, Count Jaubert---a dried-up mummy, a minister of 1834, a man noted for supporting measures against the press---made a speech in which he said that after order was restored, the first duty of the Government must be to inquire into the working of the International, and put it down.

FROM THE MINUTES OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL MEETING OF MAY 23, 1871

Published in

The Eastern Post No.

May 27, 1871

139,

Printed from

The General Council of the First International. 1870-1871. Minutes, pp. 200-01

Citizen Marx explained that he had been ill, and had not been able to finish the address* upon which he was engaged, but he hoped to have it ready by Tuesday next. In reference to the struggle in Paris he said he was afraid the end was near but if the Commune was beaten, the struggle would only be deferred. The principles of the Commune were eternal and could not be crushed; they would assert themselves again and again until the working classes were emancipated. The Commune of Paris was being crushed by the aid of the Prussians, they were acting as gendarmes for Thiers. The plot for its destruction was concocted between Bismarck, Thiers, and Favre; Bismarck stated at Frankfort that Thiers and Favre had asked him to interfere. The result showed that he was willing to do anything he could to assist them, short of risking the lives of German soldiers---not that he valued life when there was anything to be got---but he wished to see France sink still lower so that he might be able to exact the more. He had allowed Thiers to have more soldiers than was stipulated in the Convention, and had only allowed food to go into Paris in limited quantities. It was only the old story. The upper classes always united to keep down the working class. In the llth century there was a war between some French knights and Norman knights,

* The Civil War in France.---Ed.

ACCOUNT OF MARX'S SPEECH AGAINST THE LIES SPREAD BY THE BOURGEOIS PRESS

ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL AND THE PARIS COMMUNE

MARX AGAINST LIES ABOUT INTER. AND PARIS COMMUNE 241

He wished also to call attention to the fact that Mazzini had written in the Contemporary Review^ltii denouncing the Commune. It was not so well known as it ought to be, but Mazzini had always been opposed to the workmen's movements. He denounced the insurgents of June 1848 when Louis Blanc, who then had more courage than he has now, answered him.

When Pierre Leroux---who had a large family---obtained employment in London Mazzini was the man to denounce him. The fact was, Mazzini with his old-fashioned Republicanism knew nothing and accomplished nothing. In Italy he had created a military despotism by his cry for Nationality. With him the State---which was an imaginary thing--- was everything, and Society---which was a reality---was nothing. The sooner the people repudiated such men the better.

FROM THE NEWSPAPER REPORT OP THE GENERAL COUNCIL MEETING OF JUNE 6, 1871

Another thing to which he wished to call the attention of the Council was the infamous lies circulated about the Commune by the English press. They were lies fabricated by the French and Prussian police. They were afraid lest the truth should be known. It was asserted that Milliere was one of the most furious members of the Commune. Now it was a fact that he never was a member of the Commune, but as he had been a deputy for Paris it was necessary to have an excuse for shooting him. The English press acted as police and bloodhounds for Thiers. Slanders against the Commune and against the International were invented to serve his bloody policy. The press knew full well the objects and principles of the International. It had given reports of the prosecutions against it in Paris under the Empire. It had had representatives at the various Congresses held by the Association, and had reported their proceedings, and yet it circulated reports to the effect that the Association included the Fenian Brotherhood, the Carbonari (ceased to exist 1830), the Marianne^^160^^ (ditto 1854), and other secret societies, and asked if Colonel Henderson knew of the whereabouts of the General Council which was said to sit in London. These things were simply invented to justify any action taken against the International. The upper classes were afraid of the principles of the International.

Published in

The Eastern Post No. 141,

June 10, 1871

Printed from

The General Council of the First International. 1870-1871. Minutes, pp. 206-07

Karl Marx

TO THE EDITOR OF THE 7IMES

243

STATEMENT BY THE GENERAL COUNCIL TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES^^162^^

Provisional Council, chosen at the public meeting held at St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, on 28 September 1864. M. Tolain has never been a member of that Council, nor was he present at London, when the programme was drawn up.

You say that ``Milliere'' was "one of the most ferocious members of the Commune". Milliere has never been a member of the Commune.

``We," you proceed, "should also point out that Assi, lately President of the Association, etc.''

Assi has never been a member of the ``International'', and as to the dignity of "President of the Association", it has been abolished long ago, 1867.^^163^^

TO THE TIMES

The General Council of this Association has instructed me to state in reply to your leader of June 19, 1871, on the ``International'' the following facts:

The pretended Paris manifestoes, published by the ParisJournal^^15^^'^^2^^ and similar journals---manifestoes which are mere fabrications of the Versailles police---you place on the same line as our "Address on the Civil War in France''.

You say:

``The 'political notes' published by Professor Beesly, and quoted the other day in these columns, are quoted also, with entire approval, in the Address of the Council, and we can now understand how justly the Ex-Emperor was entitled to be called the saviour of society.''

Now, the Council, in its Address, quotes nothing from the "political notes" except the testimony of the writer, who is a known and honourable French savant, as to the personal character of the "Internationals" implicated in the last Paris revolution.* What has this to do with the "Ex-- Emperor" and the Society saved by him? The ``programme'' of the Association was not, as you say, ``prepared'' by Messrs. Tolain and Odger "seven years ago". It was issued by the

* See p. 97.---Ed.

Written about June 20, 1871

First published in Russian in the Works by Marx and Engels (1st edition), Vol. XIII, Part II, 1940

Printed from

The General Council of the First International. 1S70-1871. Minutes, pp. 419-20

Karl Marx

Frederick Engels

LETTER FROM THE GENERAL COUNCIL

TO THE EDITOR OF THE STANDARD™

STATEMENT BY THE GENERAL COUNCIL

ON HOLYOAKE'S

LETTER^^165^^

TO THE EDITOR OF THE STANDARD

TO THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY NEWS™

In your leader on the ``International'' (of the 19th June)

you say:

``Of the two programmes (that of London and that of Paris) recently issued in favour of the Commune that of the Paris branch has the merit of being the more honest and the more outspoken.''

Unfortunately, the ``Paris'' manifesto has been issued not by our Paris Branch, but by the "Versailles Police". You say:

``The London Internationalists insist no less earnestly than their Paris brethren that 'the old society must perish and ought to perish'. They speak of the burning of the public buildings and the stocking of the hostages as 'a gigantic effort to bring society down'---which, although, unsuccessful once, will be persevered in until it succeeds.''

Now the General Council of this Association summons you to quote the exact page, and lines of our Address where these words attributed by you to us do occur!

Sir,

I am instructed by the General Council of the International Working Men's Association to state, in reply to Mr. Geo Jacob Holyoake's letter in Tuesday's Daily News,

1. As to the insinuation that the address issued by the Council "may become a cause of death or deportation at Versailles", the Council thinks that its Paris friends are better judges than Mr. Holyoake.

2. It is a rule with the Council that the names of all its members whether absent or present are appended to its public documents. On this occasion, however, an exception was made, and the consent of absent members was formally requested.

3. As to the statement that this address "cannot be an English production, though manifestly revised by some Saxon or Celtic pen", the Council begs to observe that, as a matter of course, the productions of an international society cannot have any national character. However, the Council need not have any secrets in this matter. The address, like many previous publications of the Council, was drawn up by the Corresponding Secretary for Germany, Dr. Karl Marx, was adopted unanimously and ``revised'' by nobody.

Written about June 20, 1871

First published in Russian in the Works by Marx and Engels (1st edition), Vol. XIII, Part II, 1940

Published in the original for the first time

246

FREDERICK ENGELS

Frederick Engels

4. On the.. .* 1870, Mr. George Jacob Holyoake presented himself as a candidate for membership of the Council but was not admitted.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

John Hales Secretary to General Council, I.W.M.A.

256, High Holborn, London, W.C., June 21, 1871

LETTER FROM THE GENERAL COUNCIL

TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR^^95^^

(RESP. EXAMINER)™

Written on June 20, 1871

Published in The Daily News, June 23, 1871, and The Eastern Post No. 143, June 24, 1871

Printed from

The General Council of the First International. 1870-1871. Minutes (pp. 421-22), checked with The Daily News

TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR (Resp. Examiner)

Sir,

You will much oblige the General Council of the International Working Men's Association by giving publication to the fact that all the pretended manifestoes, and other publications of the ``International'' of Paris, with which the English Press is now teeming (and which all of them were at first published by the notorious Paris-Journal^^15^^'^^1^^}, are without one exception pure fabrication of the Versailles police.

I am----

Written about June 21, 1871

First published in Russian in the Works by Marx and Engels (1st edition), Vol. XIII, Part II, 1940

Printed from

The General Council of

the First International.

1870-1871. Minutes,

p. 423

A gap in the MS.---Ed.

Karl Marx

TO THE EDITOR OF 'IHE DAILY NEWS

249

TO THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY NEWS™

taunted the British mind? Let me ask Mr. Llewellyn Davies which was worse, the French petite presse, fabricating in the service of the police the most infamous slanders against the Communals, dead, captive, or hidden, or the English press, reproducing them to this day, despite its professed contempt for the petite presse. I do not consider it a French inferiority that such serious charges for instance as those brought forward against the late Lord Palmerston, during a quarter of a century, by a man like Mr. David Urquhart,^^168^^ could have been burked in England but not in France.

Karl Marx

Sir,---A Council consisting of more than thirty members cannot, of course, draw up its own documents. It must entrust that task to some one or other of its members, reserving to itself the right of rejecting or amending. The address on the "Civil War in France", drawn up by myself, was unanimously adopted by the General Council of the International, and is therefore the official embodiment of its own views. With regard, however, to the personal charges brought forward against Jules Favre and Co., the case stands otherwise. On this point the great majority of the Council had to rely upon my trustworthiness. This was the very reason why I supported the motion of another member"" of the Council that Mr. John Hales, in his answer to Mr. Holyoake,** should name me as the author of the address. I hold myself alone responsible for those charges, and hereby challenge Jules Favre and Co. to prosecute me for libel. In his letter Mr. Llewellyn Davies says,

``It is melancholy to read the charges of personal baseness so freely flung by Frenchmen at one another.''

Does this sentence not somewhat smack of that pharisaical self-righteousness with which William Cobbett had so often

Maitland Park Road, Haverstock Hill, June 26

Published in The Eastern Post No. 144, July 1, 1871, and (abridged) in The Daily News, June 27, 1871

Printed according to The Eastern Post

Frederick Engels.---Ed. * See pp. 245-46.---Ed.

Frederick Engels

STATEMENT ON THE LETTERS OF HOLYOAKE AND LUCRAFT 251

STATEMENT BY THE GENERAL COUNCIL

ON THE LETTERS OF HOLYOAKE AND LUCRAFT^^169^^

documents, but he was one of the most strenuous supporters of that rule, and resisted on several occasions attempts made to dispense with it---on May 23, amongst others---and he then voluntarily informed the Council that "his entire sympathy was with the Commune of Paris". On Tuesday evening, June 20, at a meeting of the Council, Mr. Lucraft was forced to admit that he had not even then read the address itself, but that all his impressions about it were derived from the statements of the press. With respect to Mr. Odger's repudiation, all I can say is that he was waited upon personally and informed that the Council was about to issue an address, and was asked if he objected to his name appearing in connection with it, and he said ``No''. The public can draw its own conclusions. I may add that the resignations of Messrs. Lucraft and Odger have been accepted by the Council unanimously.

I am, sir, your obedient servant,

John Hales,

Secretary to the General Council of the International Working Men's Association

TO THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY NEWS^^00^^

Sir,---I am instructed by the General Council of the International Working Men's Association to reply to the letters of Messrs. G. J. Holyoake and B. Lucraft, which appeared in your issue of Monday last. I find, on referring to the Minutes of the Council, that Mr. Holyoake attended a meeting of the Council, by permission, on the 16th of November, 1869, and during the sitting expressed his desire to become a member of the Council, and to attend the next General Congress of the International, to be held in Paris, September, 1870. After he had retired, Mr. John Weston proposed him as a candidate for membership, but the proposition was received in such a manner that Mr. Weston did not insist, but withdrew it. With regard to Mr. Lucraft's statement that he was not present when the address was voted upon, I may say that Mr. Lucraft was present at a meeting of the Council held on the 23rd of May, 1871, when it was officially announced that the draft of the address on the Civil War in France would be read and discussed at the next ordinary meeting of the Council, May the 30th. It was therefore left entirely to Mr. Lucraft to decide whether he would be present or absent upon that occasion, and not only did he know that it was the rule of the Council to append the names of all its members, present or absent, to its public

256, High Holborn, London, W.C.

Written on June 27, 1871

Published in The Daily News, June 29, 1871, and in The Eastern Post No. 144, July 1, 1871

Printed from

The General Council of the First International. 1870-1871. Minutes, pp. 424-25

Frederick Engels

FROM THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE AND ENGLISH PRESS

253

From the ADDRESS THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE AND THE ENGLISH PRESS^^170^^

Democracy^^94^^) for which Jules Favre tried to lay the blame on the International, were ascribed to it, despite the General Council's official protest. Finally, even the philistine was fed up with the noise. The Daily News beat a retreat, and the Examiner,™ the only paper to behave really decently, came out in a circumstantial article firmly in defence of the International. Two English members of the General Council, one of whom (Odger) had long since made up to the bourgeoisie, and the other (Lucraft), who, since his election to the London School Board, seems to have become much more considerate of the opinion of ``respectable'' people, allowed themselves to be moved by the fuss in the newspapers to announce their resignation from the General Council, which was also accepted unanimously. They have already been replaced by two other English workers"" and will soon feel what it means to betray the proletariat at the decisive moment.

Llewellyn Davies, an English parson, lamented in the Daily News about the abuse against Jules Favre and Co. contained in the Address, and said that it was desirable to establish the truth or falseness of these accusations, even if it took a lawsuit by the French Government against the General Council. The next day, Karl Marx declared in the same paper that as the author of the Address he considered himself personally responsible for these accusations**; the French embassy, however, does not seem to have had orders to bring a suit of libel against him. Finally, the Pall Mall Gazette declared that this was unnecessary, the private character of a statesman being always sacrosanct, so that only his public acts could be attacked. Naturally, if the private character of English statesmen were to be made public, the day of the Last Judgement would dawn for the oligarchic and bourgeois world.

London, June 30. In all of London's history no publication has caused such a stir as the Address of the General Council of the International. At first, the big press tried its favourite method of killing the news by total silence, but within a few days it realised that this time this would not do. The Telegraph,"^^1^^ Standard,™ Spectator?^^5^^ Pall Mall Gazette"^^2^^ and The Times,^ one after another, had to devote their editorials to this "remarkable document". Then their readers wrote in to draw special attention to various passages in the Address. Then came more editorials, and over the weekend there was more comment in the weeklies. The whole press had unanimously to admit that the International was a great European power, which had to be reckoned with and which could not be abolished by ignoring it. They all had also to acknowledge the excellent literary style of the Address; it was written in a style, said the Spectator, as powerful as William Cobbett's. That the bourgeois press would almost unanimously attack so energetic an assertion of the proletarian point of view, so decisive a vindication of the Paris Commune, was only to be expected. Nor was it surprising that the Stieberiades^^173^^ fabricated by the Paris police sheets, and the documents of an entirely different organisation (the Bakuninist Alliance of Socialist

Written on June 30, 1871

Published in the newspaper Der Uolksstaat No. 54_fJuly 5, 1871

Translated from the German

John Roach and Alfred Taylor.---Ed. * See p. 248.---Ed.

From a RECORD OF MARX'S TALK WITH THE WORLD CORRESPONDENT^^174^^

MARX'S TALK WITH WORLD CORRESPONDENT

255

R.---Yes, but the soldier need be no exponent of the statecraft that sets him in motion. I know some of your members, and I can believe that they are not of the stuff of which conspirators are made. Besides, a secret shared by a million men would be no secret at all. But what if these were only the instruments in the hands of a bold, and, I hope you will forgive- me for adding, not over-scrupulous conclave?

Dr. M.---There is nothing to prove it. R.---The last Paris insurrection?

Dr. M.---I demand firstly the proof that there was any plot at all---that anything happened that was not the legitimate effect of the circumstances of the moment; or the plot granted, I demand the proofs of the participation in it of the International Association.

R.---The presence in the communal body of so many members of the Association.

Dr. M.---Then it was a plot of the Freemasons, too, for their share in the work as individuals was by no means a slight one. I should not be surprised, indeed, to find the Pope setting down the whole insurrection to their account. But try another explanation. The insurrection in Paris was made by the workmen of Paris. The ablest of the workmen must necessarily have been its leaders and administrators; but the ablest of the workmen happen also to be members of the International Association. Yet the Association, as such, may be in no way responsible for their action.

R.---It will seem otherwise to the world. People talk of secret instructions from London, and even grants of money. Can it be affirmed that the alleged openness of the Association's proceedings precludes all secrecy of communication?

Dr. M.---What association ever formed carried on its work without private as well as public agencies? But to talk of secret instructions from London, as of decrees in the matter of faith and morals from some centre of Papal domination and intrigue, is wholly to misconceive the nature of the International.

London, July 3

.. .1 went straight to my business. The world, I said, seemed to be in the dark about the International, hating it very much, but not able to say clearly what thing it hated. Some, who professed to have peered further into the gloom than their neighbours, declared that they had made out a sort of Janus figure with a fair, honest workman's smile on one of its faces, and on the other a murderous conspirator's scowl. Would he [Marx] light up the case of mystery in which the theory dwelt.

The professor laughed, chuckled a little, I fancied, at the thought that we were so frightened of him.

``There is no mystery to clear up, dear sir," he began, in a very polished form of the Hans Breitmann dialect,¹⁷⁵"except perhaps the mystery of human stupidity in those who perpetually ignore the fact that our Association^^15^^ is a public one, and that the fullest reports of its proceedings are published for all who care to read them. You may buy our Rules for a penny, and a shilling laid out in pamphlets will teach you almost as much about us as we know ourselves.''

R.---Almost---yes, perhaps so; but will not the something I shall not know constitute the all important reservation? To be quite frank with you, and to put the case as it strikes an outside observer, this general claim of depreciation of you must mean something more than the ignorant ill-will of the multitude? And it is still pertinent to ask, even after what you have told me, what is the International Society?

Dr. M.---You have only to look at the individuals of which it is composed---workmen.

Published in the newspaper The World, July 18, 1871, and in Woodhull and Claflins Weekly No. 13/65, August 12, 1871

Printed according to Woodhull and Claflins Weekly

Karl Marx

MR. WASHBURNE, AMERICAN AMBASSADOR IN PARIS

257

MR. WASHBURNE, THE AMERICAN AMBASSADOR IN PARIS^^176^^

may, however, be ascertained from my letter to Lord Lyons, to whom I wrote on the same day. Crossing the Champs Elysees, on my way to Mr. Washburne's residence, I met numerous ambulance-waggons filled with the wounded and dying. Shells were bursting around the Arc de Triomphe, and many innocent people were added to the long list of Mr. Thiers's victims.

``Arriving at No. 95, Rue de Chaillot, I inquired at the Concierge's for the United States' Ambassador, and was directed to the second floor. The particular flight or flat you dwell in is, in Paris, an almost unerring indication of your wealth and position,---a sort of social barometer. We find here a marquis on the first front floor, and an humble mechanic on the fifth back floor,---the stairs that divide them represent the social gulf between them. As I climbed up the stairs, meeting no stout flunkeys in red breeches and silk stockings, I thought, 'Ah, the Americans lay their money out to the best advantage,---we throw ours away.'

``Entering the secretary's room, I inquired for Mr. Washburne,---Do you wish to see him personally?---I do.---My name having been sent in, I was ushered into his presence. He was lounging in an easy-chair, reading a newspaper. I expected he would rise; but he remained sitting with the paper still before him, an act of gross rudeness in a country where the people are generally so polite.

``I told Mr. Washburne that we were betraying the cause of humanity, if we did not endeavour to bring about a conciliation. Whether we succeeded or not, it was at all events our duty to try; and the moment seemed the more favourable, as the Prussians were just then pressing Versailles for a definite settlement. The united influence of America and England would turn the balance in favour of peace.

``Mr. Washburne said, 'The men in Paris are rebels. Let them lay down their arms' I replied that the National Guards had a legal right to their arms; but that was not the question. When humanity is outraged, the civilised world has a right to interfere, and I ask you to co-operate with Lord Lyons to that effect.---Mr. Washburne: 'These men at Versailles will listen to nothing.'---'If they refuse, the moral responsibility will rest with them.'---Mr. Washburne: 'I don't see that. I can't do anything in the matter. You had better see Lord Lyons.'

``So ended our interview. I left Mr. Washburne sadly disappointed. I found a man rude and haughty, with none of those feelings of fraternity you might expect to find in the representative of a democratic republic. On two occasions I had had the honour of an interview with Lord Cowley, when he was our representative in France. His frank, courteous manner formed a striking contrast to the cold, pretentious, and would-be-aristocratic style of the American Ambassador.

``I also urged upon Lord Lyons that, in the defence of humanity, England was bound to make an earnest effort at reconciliation, feeling convinced that the British Government could not look coldly on such atrocities as the massacres of the Clamart station and Moulin Saquet, not to speak of the horrors of Neuilly, without incurring the malediction of every lover of humanity. Lord Lyons answered me verbally through Mr. Edward Malet, his secretary, that he had forwarded my

17-2648

TO THE NEW YORK CENTRAL COMMITTEE FOR THE

UNITED STATES' SECTIONS OF THE INTERNATIONAL

WORKING MEN'S ASSOCIATION

Citizens,---The General Council of the Association consider it their duty to communicate publicly to you evidence on the conduct, during the French Civil War, of Mr. Washburne, the American Ambassador.

The following statement is made by Mr. Robert Reid, a Scotchman who has lived for seventeen years in Paris, and acted during the Civil War as a correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph"^^1^^ and the New York Herald.^^177^^ Let us remark, in passing, that the Daily Telegraph, in the interests of the Versailles Government, falsified even the short telegraphic despatches transmitted to it by Mr. Reid.

Mr. Reid, now in England, is ready to confirm his statement by affidavit.

``The sounding of the general alarm, mingled with the roar of the cannon, continued all night. To sleep was impossible. Where, I thought, are the representatives of Europe and America? Can it be possible that in the midst of this effusion of innocent blood they should make no effort at conciliation? I could bear the thought no longer; and knowing that Mr. Washburne was in town, I resolved at once to go and see him. This was, I think, on the 17th of April; the exact date

258

KARL MARX

MR. WASHBURNE, AMERICAN AMBASSADOR IN PARIS

259

letter to the Government, and would willingly forward any other communication I might have to make on that subject. At one moment matters were most favourable for reconciliation, and had our Government thrown their weight in the balance, the world would have been spared the carnage of Paris. At all events, it is not the fault of Lord Lyons if the British Government failed in their duty.

``But, to return to Mr. Washburne. On Wednesday forenoon, the 24th of May, I was passing along the Boulevard des Gapucines, when I heard my name called, and, turning round, saw Dr. Hossart standing beside Mr. Washburne, who was in an open carriage amidst a great number of Americans. After the usual salutations, I entered into a conversation with Dr. Hossart. Presently the conversation became general on the horrid scenes around; when Mr. Washburne, addressing me with the air of a man who knows the truth of what he is saying,--- All who belong to the Commune, and those that sympathise with them, will be shot.' Alas! I knew that they were killing old and young for the crime of sympathy, but I did not expect to hear it semiofficially from Mr. Washburne; yet, while he was repeating this sanguinary phrase, there was still time for him to save the Archbishop."™

``On the 24th of May, Mr. Washburne's secretary came to offer to the Commune, then assembled at the Mairie of the llth Arrondissement, on the part of the Prussians, an intervention between the Versaillese and the Federals on the following terms:---

`` 'Suspension of hostilities.

`` 'Re-election of the Commune on the one side, and of the National Assembly on the other.

`` 'The Versailles troops to leave Paris, and to take up their quarters in and around the fortifications.

`` 'The National Guard to continue to guard Paris.

`` 'No punishment to be inflicted upon the men serving or having served in the Federal Army.'

``The Commune, in an extraordinary sitting, accepted the propositions, with the provision that two months should be given to France in order to prepare for the general elections of a Constituent Assembly.

``A second interview with the Secretary of the American Embassy took place. At its morning sitting of the 25th May, the Commune resolved to send five citizens---amongst them Vermorel, Delescluze, and Arnold---as plenipotentiaries to Vincennes, where, according to the information given by Mr. Washburne's secretary, a Prussian delegate would then be found. That deputation was, however, prevented from passing by the National Guards on duty at the gate of Vincennes. Consequent upon another and final interview with the same American Secretary, Citizen Arnold, to whom he had delivered a safe conduct, on the 26th May, went to St. Denis, where he was---not admitted by the Prussians.

``The result of this American intervention (which produced a belief in the renewed neutrality of, and the intended intercession between

the belligerents, by the Prussians) was, at the most critical juncture, to paralyse the defence for two days. Despite the precautions taken to keep the negotiations secret, they became soon known to the National Guards, who then, full of confidence in Prussian neutrality, fled to the Prussian lines, there to surrender as prisoners. It is known how this confidence was abused by the Prussians, shooting by their sentries part of the fugitives, and handing over to the Versailles Government those who had surrended.

``During the whole course of the Civil War, Mr. Washburne, through his secretary, never tired of informing the Commune of his ardent sympathies, which only his diplomatic position prevented him from publicly manifesting, and of his decided reprobation of the Versailles Government.''

This statement, No. II, is made by a member of the Paris Commune,* who, like Mr. Reid, will in case of need, confirm it by affidavit.

To fully appreciate Mr. Washburne's conduct, the statements of Mr. Robert Reid and that of the member of the Paris Commune must be read as a whole, as part and counterpart of the same scheme. While Mr. Washburne declares to Mr. Reid that the Communals are ``rebels'' who deserve their fate, he declares to the Commune his sympathies with its cause and his contempt of the Versailles Government. On the same 24th of May, while, in presence of Dr. Hossart and many Americans, informing Mr. Reid that not only the Communals but even their mere sympathisers were irrevocably doomed to death, he informed, through his secretary, the Commune that not only its members were to be saved, but every man in the Federal Army.

We now request you, dear Citizens, to lay these facts before the Working Class of the United States, and to call upon them to decide whether Mr. Washburne is a proper representative of the American Republic.

Office---256, High Holborn, London, W.C., July llth, 1871

Published as a leaflet about July 13, 1871, and in a number of the International's organs in July-September 1871

Printed from The General Council of the First International. 1870-1871. Minutes, pp. 426-30

Auguste Serraillier.---Ed.

Frederick Engels

TO THE EDITOR OF 'IHE 'TIMES

261

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES^^179^^

all rules of fairness, all the juges d'instruction in his cabinet, but he pretends even to regulate the composition of the public to be admitted into the Court; he himself, through M. dc St. Hilaire, distributes the tickets of admission. . . .

``In the meantime the prisoners at Satory die like flies---pitiless death works faster than the justice of this little statesman. . . . There is in the Versailles cellular prison a big fellow who does not speak a word of French, he is supposed to be an Irishman. How he got into this trouble is still a mystery. Amongst the prisoners there is a very honest man called. . . . He has been in his cell for two months and has not yet been examined. It is infamous.''

I am Sir,

Your obedient servant, Justitia

London, 7th August 1871

Sir,---The remarks of the Times, on the repeated postponement of the trial of the Communist prisoners at Versailles, have undoubtedly hit the nail on the head and have expressed the feeling of the French public. The angry note of the Journal Officiel^m in reply to these remarks is but one of the many proofs of the fact. In consequence of the article in the Times many reclamations have been addressed to the Paris press, reclamations which, under these circumstances, had no chance of being published. I have before me the letter of a Frenchman whose official position enables him to know the facts he is writing about, and whose testimony as to the motives of this unaccountable delay ought to have some value. Here are some extracts from this letter:

``Nobody as yet knows when the 3rd court martial will open its sittings. The cause of this appears to be that Captain Grimal, Commissaire de la Republique (public accuser), has been supervised by another and more reliable man. It has been found out at the last moment, on perusal of his general report which was to be read in court, that he was perhaps a little bit of a republican, that he had served under Faidherbe, etc., in the Army of the North, etc. Well, all at once another officer presents himself at his office saying: here is my commission, I am your successor; the poor captain was so surprised that he went nearly mad. .. .

``Mr. Thiers has the pretension to do everything by himself, this mania goes so far, that not only has he called together, contrary to

First published in Russian in the Works by Marx and Engels (1st edition), Vol. XIII, Part II, 1940

Published in the original for the first time

KarZ Marx

TO THE EDITOR OF LA VERITE

263

TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEWSPAPER LA

papers which The Standard (a Tory newspaper) in a recent issue called "organs of the demi-monde".

Please accept, dear sir, assurances of my highest respect.

Karl Marx

Published in the newspaper Le Soir No. 862, September 3, 1871, and in other bourgeois newspapers, arid also in the newspapers L'Internationale No. 139, September 10, 1871, and Der Volksstaat No. 74, September 13, 1871

Translated from the French

International Working Men's Association 256, High Holborn, London, W.C.

August 30, 1871

Dear Mr. Editor,

Having read in today's Daily News^^90^^ that Mr. Renaut has ascribed to the International a manifesto urging the French peasants to burn down all chateaux within sight, etc., Mr. John Hales, General Secretary of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association, at once sent Mr. L. Bigot, d'Assi's defence counsel, the following telegram:

``The call for arson attributed to the International is a fraud. We are prepared to swear an affidavit to that effect before an English magistrate.''

I now hasten to warn the French public, through the medium of your esteemed newspaper, that all the manifestoes printed in Paris on behalf of the International since the entry of French government troops into Paris, that all these manifestoes are forgeries, every one without exception.

I make this statement not only on a word of honour but am prepared to swear an affidavit to that effect before an English magistrate.

I have good reason to assume that this foul fabrication is not even the work of the police itself but of a certain gentleman called B., an individual connected with one of the Paris

Frederick Engels

From a RECORD OF MARX'S SPEECH

ON THE STATE OF THE INTERNATIONAL

WORKING MEN'S ASSOCIATION

IN GERMANY AND BRITAIN^^182^^

From APROPOS OF WORKING-CLASS POLITICAL ACTION^^181^^

AUTHOR'S RECORD OF THE SPEECH MADE AT THE LONDON CONFERENCE

OF THE INTERNATIONAL

WORKING MEN'S ASSOCIATION

SEPTEMBER 21, 1871

FROM THE MINUTES OF THE LONDON CONFERENCE

OF THE INTERNATIONAL

SEPTEMBER 22, 1871

Complete abstention from political action is impossible. The abstentionist press participates in politics every day. It is only a question of how one does it, and of what politics one engages in. For the rest, to us abstention is impossible. The working-class party functions as a political party in most countries by now, and it is not for us to ruin it by preaching abstention. Living experience, the political oppression of the existing governments compels the workers to occupy themselves with politics whether they like it or not, be it for political or for social goals. To preach abstention to them is to throw them into the embrace of bourgeois politics. The morning after the Paris Commune, which has made proletarian political action an order of the day, abstention is entirely out of the question.

During the Commune, the German workers kept reaffirming at their meetings and through their newspapers their solidarity with the revolutionaries in Paris. When the Commune fell, they held a meeting at Breslau which the Prussian police in vain tried to prevent. At the meeting, as at others held in various towns in Germany, they acclaimed the Paris Commune. Finally, during the triumphal entry into Berlin of Emperor Wilhelm and his army, the people met these victors with cries of "Long Live the Commune!''

First published in Russian in the book The London Conference of the First International, 1936

Translated from the French

First published in full in the journal The Communist International No. 29, 1934

Translated from the French

Karl Marx

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

From FICTITIOUS SPLITS IN THE INTERNATIONAL^^184^^

From the Speech ON THE SEVENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE INTERNATIONAL^^183^^

REPORTER'S RECORD OF THE SPEECH

DELIVERED AT THE CELEBRATION MEETING IN LONDON SEPTEMBER 25, 1871

The last movement was the Commune, the greatest that had yet been made, and there could not be two opinions about it---the Commune was the conquest of the political power of the working classes. There was much misunderstanding about the Commune. The Commune could not found a new form of class government. In destroying the existing conditions of oppression by transferring all the means of labour to the productive labourer, and thereby compelling every able-bodied individual to work for a living, the only base for class rule and oppression would be removed. But before such a change could be effected a proletarian dictature would become necessary, and the first condition of that was a proletarian army. The working classes would have to conquer the right to emancipate themselves on the battlefield. The task of the International was to organise and combine the forces of labour for the coming struggle.

After the fall of the Paris Commune, the General Council's first act was to publish its Address on The Civil War in France* in which it came out in support of all the Commune's acts which, at the moment, served the bourgeoisie, the press and all the governments of Europe as an excuse to heap the most vile slander on the vanquished Parisians. Within the working class itself some still failed to realise that their cause was lost. The Council came to understand the fact, among other things, by the resignation of two of its members, Citizens Odger and Lucraft, who repudiated all support of the Address. It may be said that the unity of views among the working class regarding the Paris events dates from the publication of the Address in all the civilised countries.

On the other hand, the International^^15^^ found a very powerful means of propaganda in the bourgeois press and particularly in the leading English newspapers, which the Address forced to engage in the polemic kept going by the General Council's replies.

The arrival in London of numerous refugees from the Commune made it necessary for the General Council to

Published in The World, October 15, 1871

Printed according to the World

See pp. 48-101.---Ed.

268

KARL MARX AND FREDERICK ENGELS

Karl Marx

constitute itself as a Relief Committee and function as such for more than eight months, besides carrying on its regular duties.^^185^^ It goes without saying that the vanquished and exiles from the Commune had nothing to hope for from the bourgeoisie. As for the working class, the appeals for aid came at a difficult moment. Switzerland and Belgium had already received their contingent of refugees whom they had either to support or send on to London. The funds collected in Germany, Austria and Spain were sent to Switzerland. In England, the big fight for the nine-hour working day, the decisive battle of which was fought at Newcastle,^^186^^ had exhausted both the workers' individual contributions and the funds set up by the Trades Unions, which could be used, incidentally, according to the rules, only for labour conflicts. Meanwhile, by working diligently and sending out letters, the Council managed to accumulate, bit by bit, the money which it distributed weekly. The American workers responded more generously to its appeal. It is unfortunate that the Council could not avail itself of the millions which the terrified bourgeoisie believed the International to have amassed in its safes!

After May 1871, some of the Commune's refugees were asked to join the Council, in which, as a result of the war, the French side was no longer represented. Among the new members were some old Internationalists and a minority composed of men known for their revolutionary energy whose election was an act of homage to the Paris Commune.

RESOLUTIONS OF THE MEETING HELD

TO CELEBRATE THE ANNIVERSARY

OF THE PARIS COMMUNE^^187^^

[I]

``That this meeting assembled to celebrate the anniversary of the 18th March last, declares, that it looks upon the glorious movement inaugurated upon the 18th March, 1871, as the dawn of the great social revolution which will for ever free the human race from class rule.''

[II]

``That the incapacity and the crimes of the middle classes, extended all over Europe by their hatred against the working classes, have doomed old society no matter under what form of government---Monarchical or Republican.''

[Ill]

``That the crusade of all governments against the International, and the terror of the murderers of Versailles as well as of their Prussian conquerors, attest the hollowness of their successes, and the presence of the threatening army of the proletariat of the whole world gathering in the rear of its heroic vanguard crushed by the combined forces of Thiers and William of Prussia.''

Written between

mid-January and

March 5, 1872

Published as a pamphlet (in

French) in Geneva in 1872

Printed from The General Council the First International. 1871-1872. Minutes, pp. 356-58

Written between March 13 and 18, 1872 Published in La Liberte No. March 24, 1872 and in The International Herald No. 3, March 30, 1872

Printed from

The General Council of

the First International.

1871-1872. Minutes,

p. 414

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

KarZ Marx and Frederick Engels

From the PREFACE TO THE GERMAN EDITION

OF THE MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST

PARTY OF 1872^^188^^

TO THE CHAIRMAN OF THE SLAVONIC MEETING,

MARCH 21st, 1881,

IN CELEBRATION OF THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE PARIS COMMUNE

However much the state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in this Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry in the last twenty-five years, and of the accompanying improved and extended party organisation of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details become antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes". (See The Civil War in France; Address of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association* London, Truelove, 1871, p. 15, where this point is further developed.)

Karl Marx Frederick Engels

Citizen,

With great regret we have to inform you that we are not able to attend your meeting.

When the Commune of Paris succumbed to the atrocious massacre organised by the defenders of ``Order'', the victors little thought that ten years would not elapse before an event would happen in distant Petersburg^^189^^ which, maybe after long and violent struggles, must ultimately and certainly lead to the establishment of a Russian Commune.

That the King of Prussia^::" who had prepared the Commune by besieging Paris and thus compelling the ruling bourgeoisie to arm the people---that that same King of Prussia, ten years after, besieged in his own capital by socialists, would only be able to maintain his throne, by declaring the state of siege in his capital, Berlin.^^190^^

On the other hand, the Continental governments who after the fall of the Commune by their persecutions compelled the International) Wforking) M[en's) Association) to give up its formal, external organisation---these governments who believed they could crush the great International Labour Movement by decrees and special laws---little did they think that ten years later that same International Labour Move-

London, June 24, 1872

Published in the pamphlet Das kommunistische Manifest. Neue Ausgabe mit einem Vorwort der Verfasser. Leipzig, 1872

* See pp. 48-101.---Ed.

Translated from the German

* Wilhelm I.---Ed.

KARL MARX AND FREDERICK ENGELS

Frederick Engels

ment, more powerful than ever, would embrace the working classes not only of Europe but of America also; that the common struggle for common interests against a common enemy would bind them together into a new and greater spontaneous International, outgrowing more and more all external forms of association.

Thus the Commune, which the powers of the old world believed to be exterminated, lives, stronger than ever, and thus we may join you in the cry: Vive la Commune!

ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE PARIS COMMUNE^^191^^

Written on March 21, 1881

First published in Russian in the newspaper Pravda No. 308, November 7, 1933

Printed in the original for the first time

Tonight the workers of the world are marking, together with you and at the same time, the anniversary of the most glorious and most tragic stage in the proletariat's development. In 1871, for the first time since a record of its history began, the working class took political power in a big capital. Alas, it was only a dream. Caught between the mercenaries of the former French Empire, on the one side, and the Prussians, on the other, the Commune was quickly snuffed out in an unprecedented massacre that cannot be forgotten. Victorious, reaction knew no bounds; socialism appeared to be drowned in blood and the proletariat doomed to eternal bondage.

Fifteen years have passed since that defeat. All this time the power at the service of the landowners and the capitalists in all countries shunned no means to put an end to the last strivings of the workers for revolt. What have they achieved?

Look around you. Revolutionary working-class socialism has never been more viable and is now a force which makes all governments tremble, the French Radicals like Bismarck, America's stock-market barons like the Tsar of all the Russias.

But that is not all.

We have arrived at a point where all our adversaries, whatever they do, work for us in spite of themselves.

18-2648

274

FREDERICK ENGELS

Frederick Engels

They had hoped to kill the International.^^15^^ Today, the international unity of the proletarians, the brotherhood of the revolutionary workers of various countries is a thousand times stronger and more comprehensive than it was before the Commune. The International is no longer in need of an organisation in the narrow sense of the word; it lives and grows through the spontaneous and ardent co-operation of the workers of Europe and America.

In Germany, Bismarck has used every means, including the foulest, to crush the working-class movement. The result is that before the Commune he was faced with four socialist deputies; his persecutions have led to the election of 25. And the German proletarians are laughing at the great chancellor, who could not have conducted better revolutionary propaganda even if he were paid for it.

In France, you have had foisted on you a system of elections by roll,^^192^^ a bourgeois system par excellence, and one invented for the express purpose of getting in only lawyers, journalists and other political adventurers who speak for capital. What has the bourgeoisie got out of this system invented by the rich? It has created in the bosom of the French parliament a revolutionary socialist workers' party whose very emergence on the scene has sufficed to throw the ranks of all the bourgeois parties into confusion.

That is what we now have. Every event turns to our advantage. The measures best calculated to impede the proletariat's progress merely serve to accelerate its victorious advance. The enemy himself fights, is in fact forced to fight, for us. And it has done so much good in that direction that today, March 18, 1886, from the breast of countless numbers of workers---from the proletarian miners of California and Aveyron to the convict miners of Siberia---comes this great unanimous cry:

``Long Live the Commune! Long Live the International Unity of the Workers!''

MESSAGE OF GREETINGS

TO THE FRENCH WORKERS

ON THE 21st ANNIVERSARY

OF THE PARIS COMMUNE

London, March 17, 1892

Citizens, Men and Women!

It is 21 years today since the people of Paris raised the red flag, simultaneously issuing a challenge to the French tricolore flying over Versailles and the three-coloured German flag flying over the forts occupied by the Prussians.

The red flag symbolised the Paris proletariat scaling heights from which victors and vanquished both appear to be invisible.

It was the Commune's eminently international character that gave it its historical grandeur. It was a bold challenge to any sign of bourgeois chauvinism. The proletariat of all countries had no doubts at all on that score. Let the bourgeois celebrate their July 14 or their September 22.^^193^^ Everywhere, March 18 will always be a proletarian festival. That is why the foul bourgeoisie has been heaping base slander on the tomb of the Commune. That is why, too, it was the International Working Men's Association alone that dared, from first to last, to identify itself with the Paris insurgents, and then with the defeated proletarians. It is true that when the Commune fell, the International could not survive^^15^^: to the cries of "At the Communards!", it was crushed across Europe.

Well, it is 21 years today since the guns on the Montmartre Hill were recaptured. The children born in 1871 have grown

18*

Written on March 15, 1886

Published in the newspaper Le Socialiste No. 31, March 27, 1886

Translated from the French

276

FREDERICK ENGELS

Frederick Engels

to manhood, and because of the stupidity of the ruling class, they are soldiers and are being taught to handle arms, and the art to organise and defend themselves rifle in hand. The Commune, which was reputed dead, and the International, which was believed to be destroyed for good, are with us; they are alive and are twenty times stronger than in 1871. Their hundreds have turned into thousands, and today millions instead of thousands respond to our call. The union of the international proletariat, which the First International could merely envisage and prepare, is now a reality. What is more, the sons of the Prussian soldiers who in 1871 held the forts around the Paris of the Commune are now fighting in their millions and in the front ranks, shoulder to shoulder with the sons of the Paris Communards, for the full and final emancipation of the working class.

Long Live the Commune!

Long Live the International Social Revolution!

TO THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF THE FRENCH WORKERS' PARTY^^194^^

ON THE OCCASION

OF THE 23rd ANNIVERSARY

OF THE PARIS COMMUNE

London, March 18, 1894

I drink with you to the speedy arrival of an international 18th of March, which will ensure the victory of the proletariat, abolish class antagonisms and strife between nations and bring about peace and happiness in the civilised countries.

Engels

Published in the newspaper Le Socialiste No. 79, March 26, 1892

Fred. Engels

Translated from the French

Published in Le Socialiste No. 183, March 25, 1894

Translated from the French

Part Three

LETTERS

MARX TO PAUL LAFARGUE

IN BORDEAUX

London, 23 March, 1871

Dear Paul,

I enclose Serrailliers' declaration in the "Courrier de I'Europe, 18 March, 1871" (this French paper is published at London) in regard to the impudent mystification of the Paris-Journal of March 14th, of which you are probably aware.^^195^^

The following is published in the Times^^6^^* of 22nd March, 1871 under the title "The International Association"^^15^^:

``M. Karl Marx asks us to contradict the statement contained in a letter published by us on the 16th of March, from our Paris correspondent, that

`` 'Karl Marx has written a letter to one of his principal affilies in Paris, stating that he is not satisfied with the attitude which the members of that society have taken up in that city, that they violate the Statutes of the Association in dabbling in politics, that they disorganise labour instead of organising it, etc.'

``M. Karl Marx says this statement has evidently been taken from the Paris-Journal^^152^^ of the 14th of March, where also the publication in full of the pretended letter is promised, and that the Paris-Journal of the 19th of March contains a letter dated London, February 28th, 1871, purporting to be signed by him, which letter M. Marx declares is from beginning to end an impudent forgery."

I come now to the second trick of that dirty Parisian reactionary press. When we were informed of the pretended

282

MARX TO PAUL LAFARGUE, MARCH 23, 1871

MARX TO W. LIEBKNECHT, APRIL 6, 1871

283

exclusion of the German ``Internationals'' by the Paris "Internationals", we wrote to the "freres et amis"* at Paris, who replied that this story was nothing but an invention of the Paris press scum. Meanwhile, the false news spread like wildfire through the London press which indulged in long leaders upon that pleasant event proving at the same time the decomposition of the International and the incorrigible perversion of the Paris workmen.

In today's Times (23 March, 1871) the following declaration of the General Council is published:

"The Anti-German League of Paris. "To the Editor of the Times.

``Sir,---a statement has gone the round of the English press that the Paris members of the International Working Men's Association had so far joined the so-called Anti-German League as to declare all Germans to be henceforth excluded from our Association.

``This statement is the very reverse of fact. Neither the Federal Council of our Association in Paris, nor any of the Paris sections represented by that Council, have ever passed any such resolution. The so-called Anti-German League, as far as it exists at all, is the exclusive work of the upper and middle classes; it was started by the Jockey Club,^^196^^ and kept up by the adhesions of the Academy, of the Stock Exchange, of some bankers and manufacturers, etc. The working classes have nothing whatever to do with it.

``The object of these calumnies is evident. A short time before the outbreak of the late war, the International was made the general scapegoat for all untoward events. This is now repeated over again. While the Swiss and Prussian press accuse it of having created the late outrage upon Germans in Zurich,^^197^^ French papers, such as the Courrier de Lyon, Le Courrier de la Gironde,^m La Liberte,^^117^^ etc., tell of certain secret meetings of Internationals having been held at Geneva and Berne, the Prussian Ambassador in the chair, in which meetings a plan was concocted to hand over Lyons to the United Prussians and Internationals for the sake of common plunder.

* Brothers and friends.---Ed.

``By order of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association

London, March 22

J. G. Eccarius, General Secretary." Written in English

MARX TO WILHELM LIEBKNECHT IN LEIPZIG

(London,) April 6, 1871

... It seems the Parisians are succumbing. It is their own fault, but a fault which really was due to their too great decency. The Central Committee and later the Commune gave that mischievous abortion Thiers time to centralise hostile forces, in the first place by their folly of not wanting to start a civil war---as if Thiers had not already started it by his attempt at the forcible disarming of Paris, as if the National Assembly, summoned to decide the question of war or peace with the Prussians, had not immediately declared war on the Republic \ Secondly, in order that the appearance of having usurped power should not attach to them they lost precious moments (they should immediately have advanced on Versailles after the defeat (Place Vendome] of the reaction in Paris*) by the election of the Commune, the organisation of which, etc., cost yet more time.

You must not believe a word of all the stuff you get to see in the papers about the internal events in Paris. It is all lies and deception. Never has the vileness of the reptile bourgeois newspaper hacks displayed itself more splendidly.

It is highly characteristic that the German UnityEmperor,** Unity-Empire, and Unity-Parliament in Berlin appear not to exist at all for the outside world. Every breath of wind that stirs in Paris excites more interest....

Translated from the German

* See pp. 63-64.---Ed. ** Wilhelm I.---Ed,

284

MARX TO LUDWIG KUGELMANN, APRIL 12, 1871

MARX TO LUDWIG KUGELMANN, APRIL 17, 1871

285

MARX TO LUDWIG KUGELMANN IN HANOVER

London, April 12, 1871

... If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire,^^3^^ you will find that I declare that the next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is the preliminary condition for every real people's revolution on the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting. What elasticity, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians! After six months of hunger and ruin, caused by internal treachery more even than by the external enemy, they rise, beneath Prussian bayonets, as if there had never been a war between France and Germany and the enemy were not still at the gates of Paris! History has no like example of like greatness! If they are defeated only their "good nature" will be to blame. They should have marched at once on Versailles after first Vinoy and then the reactionary section of the Paris National Guard had themselves retreated. They missed their opportunity because of conscientious scruples. They did not want to start a civil i/far, as if that mischievous abortion Thiers had not already started the civil war with his attempt to disarm Paris! Second mistake: The Central Committee surrendered its power too soon, to make way for the Commune. Again from a too- ``honourable'' scrupulosity! However that may be, the present rising in Paris---even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine, and vile curs of the old society---is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June insurrection in Paris. Compare these Parisians, storming heaven, with the slaves to heaven of the German-Prussian Holy Roman Empire, with its posthumous masquerades reeking of the barracks, the Church, cabbage-junkerdom and, above all, of the philistine....

Translated from the German

MARX TO LUDWIG KUGELMANN IN HANOVER

[London,] April 17, 1871

... How you can compare petty-bourgeois demonstrations a la June 13, 1849,^^199^^ etc., with the present struggle in Paris is quite incomprehensible to me.

World history would indeed be very easy to make if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favourable chances. It would on the other hand be of a very mystical nature, if ``accidents'' played no part. These accidents naturally form part of the general course of development and are compensated by other accidents. But acceleration and delay are very much dependent upon such `` accidents'', including the ``accident'' of the character of the people who first head the movement.

The decisively unfavourable ``accident'' this time is by no means to be sought in the general conditions of French society, but in the presence of the Prussians in France and their position right before Paris. Of this the Parisians were well aware. But of this, the bourgeois canaille of Versailles were also well aware. Precisely for that reason they presented the Parisians with the alternative of either taking up the fight or succumbing without a struggle. The demoralisation of the working class in the latter case would have been a far greater misfortune than the succumbing of any number of ``leaders''. With the struggle in Paris the struggle of the working class against the capitalist class and its state has entered upon a new phase. Whatever the immediate outcome may be, a new point of departure of world-wide importance has been gained.

Adieu!

K.M.

Translated from the German

268

MARX TO LEO FRANKEL, ABOUT APRIL 26, 1871

MARX TO LEO FRANKEL AND LOUIS VARLIN, MAY 13, 1871

287

MARX TO LEO FRANKEL^^200^^

Meanwhile, time has not been wasted. The true character of this grand Paris revolution was explained to workers everywhere in letters from various secretaries to sections on the Continent and in the United States.

I have had a letter and a visit from a certain citizen over the dispatch of what you are aware of. The mistake they made in Paris was to have failed to hand over the papers required to facilitate the operations. You should now have some three per cent securities which circulate freely and which can be sold at the prevailing rate. The citizen will give you any other necessary explanations. He can be quite safely entrusted with the document.

[Rough draft]

IN PARIS

[London, about April 26, 1871)

Dear Citizen!

I have been authorised by the General Council to issue a most categorical denial on its behalf of the foul slander being spread by Citizen F. Pyat against Serraillier. Pyat's fury springs from one single source: his haired for the International. Through the so-called French Section in London, which has been expelled by the General Council, and which has been infiltrated by police spies, one-time royal guardsmen and touts, Pyat has been trying to pose before the world as the secret leader of our Association, to which he does not belong, and to make us responsible for his ridiculous manifestations in London and his compromising indiscretions in Paris, which, by the way, Citizen Tridon has already flayed during his stay in Brussels. That is why the General Council was forced publicly to disown this dirty schemer. Hence his furies against Dupont and Serraillier. When Serraillier threatened to summon these vile toadies of Pyat before an English court to answer for the slander Pyat has kept spreading in Paris, the French Section itself disowned them and branded them as slanderers.

Since Serraillier's political life has given no occasion for slander, it was his private life that was attacked. Had Pyat's private life been as clean as Serraillier's, he would not have had to submit here, in London, to affronts which it takes blood to wash away----

One of these days, the General Council is to issue an address on the Commune/^^1^^" It has been putting off this manifesto up to now, expecting the Paris Section from day to day to supply it with precise information. In vain! Not a word! The Council could not afford waiting any longer because the English workers have been eagerly awaiting its explanation.

Translated the French

from

MARX TO LEO FRANKEL AND LOUIS EUGENE VARLIN

IN PARIS

[Rough draft]

[London], May 13, 1871

Dear Citizens Frankel and Varlin,

I have had meetings with the bearer.""

Would it not be useful to put the documents which compromise the Versailles blackguards in a safe place? A precaution of this kind could not do any harm.

Somebody wrote to me from Bordeaux that four members of the International were elected at the last municipal elections.^^201^^ The provinces are beginning to ferment. Unfortunately the action there is only local and ``pacific''.

I have written several hundred letters in support of your case to every corner of the world in which we have branches. The working class has been, for the rest, on the side of the Commune from its very beginning.

* An apparent reference to Eilau.---Ed.

The Civil War in France.---Ed.

288

MARX TO EDWARD SPENCER BEESLY, JUNE 12, 1871

289

Even the bourgeois papers in England have given up their original ferocity. I have succeeded in slipping some favourable paragraphs into them from time to time.

The Commune seems to me to be wasting too much time in trivialities and personal quarrels. One can see that there are other influences besides that of the workers. None of this would matter if you were able to make up for lost time.

It is absolutely necessary that whatever you want to do outside Paris, in England or elsewhere, you should do quickly. The Prussians will not hand over the forts to the Versailles government, but after the final conclusion of peace (May 26^^142^^) will allow it to invest Paris with its gendarmes. Since Thiers & Co. had, as you know, stipulated for a large commission for themselves in the treaty concluded by PouyerQuertier,* they refused to accept the help from the German bankers which Bismarck offered them. Had they accepted it they would have lost their commission. As the preliminary condition for the realisation of their treaty was the conquest of Paris, they asked Bismarck to postpone the payment of the first instalment until after the occupation of Paris. Bismarck has accepted this condition. Prussia, being herself in very urgent need of this money, will therefore give the Versailles government every possible facility for hastening the occupation of Paris. So be on your guard!

Translated from the French

you or one of your friends have any commissions there please write to me.

What comforts me is the nonsense which the yellow press publishes every day about my writings and my relations to the Commune; this is sent to me each day from Paris. It shows that the Versailles police is very hard put to it to get hold of genuine documents. My relations with the Commune were maintained through a German merchant* who travels between Paris and London all the year round. Everything was settled verbally with the exception of two matters:

First, through the same intermediary I sent the members of the Commune a letter in answer to a question from them as to how they could sell certain securities on the London Exchange.**

Second, on May 11, ten days before the catastrophe, I sent them via the same channel all the details of the secret agreement between Bismarck and Favre in Frankfort.^^142^^

I had this information from Bismarck's right hand---a man*** who had formerly (from 1848-53) belonged to a secret society of which I was the leader. This man knows that I have still got all the reports which he sent me from and about Germany. He is dependent on my discretion. Hence his continual efforts to prove to me his good intentions. It is the same man who, as I told you, had warned me that Bismarck decided to have me arrested if I visited Dr. Kugelmann in Hanover again this year.

If only the Commune had listened to my warnings! I advised its members to fortify the northern side of the heights of Montmartre, the Prussian side, and they still had time to do this; I told them beforehand that they would otherwise be caught in a trap; I denounced Pyat, Grousset and Vesinier to them; I demanded that they should at once send to London all the documents compromising the members of the National Defence, so that by this means the savagery of the enemies of the Commune could to some extent be held in check---thus the plan of the Versailles people would at least partially have been frustrated.

MARX TO EDWARD SPENCER BEESLY IN LONDON

[London], June 12, 1871 1, Maitland Park Road, N.W.

... A woman friend of mine will be going to Paris in three or four days. I am giving her regular passes for some members of the Commune who are still hiding in Paris. If

* See p. 58.---Ed.

* An apparent reference to Eilau.---Ed. ** See pp. 286-87.---Ed. *** Johannes Miguel.---Ed.

19-2648

290

MARX TO FRIEDRICH BOLTE, AUGUST 25, 1871

ENGELS TO ELISABETH ENGELS, OCTOBER 21, 1871

291

If these documents had been discovered by the Versailles people they would not have published forged ones.

The Address of the International"" will not be published before Wednesday.** I shall then send you a copy immediately. Material for four to five sheets has been compressed into two. Hence the numerous corrections, revisions and misprints. Hence also the delay....

Translated from the German

kept alive by the General Council, but in the last fortnight our funds have dwindled to such an extent, while the number of new-arrivals has grown from day to day, that the latter are in a very deplorable state. I hope that everything possible will be done in New York. In Germany, all Party funds are still being absorbed by the victims of the police persecutions there; the same is happening in Austria, ditto in Spain and Italy.^^204^^ In Switzerland, it has not only to support the refugees, even if a small part of them, but, because of the St. Gallen lockout, it also has to stand by the Internationals.²⁰⁵Finally, there is also a small part of the refugees in Belgium, and, in addition, the Belgians have to help those who are making their way to London.

In view of these circumstances, all funds for the mass of the refugees in London have up to now been raised exclusively in England.

The General Council now includes the following members of the Commune: Serraillier, Vaillant, Theisz, Longuet, Frankel, and the following agents of the Commune: Delahaye, Rochat, Bastelica, Chalain....

Translated from the German

ENGELS TO WILHELM LIEBKNECHT

IN LEIPZIG

London, June 22, 1871

... In this last big crisis the German workers behaved splendidly, better than all the rest. They were very ably represented by Bebel, whose speech on the Commune has been carried by the whole English press and has made a big impression here. .. -^^202^^

Translated from the German

ENGELS TO ELISABETH ENGELS

IN BARMEN

MARX TO FRIEDRICH BOLTE

IN NEW YORK

Brighton, August 25, 1871

.. .Next week you will receive the General Council's Appeal for help to the communard refugees.^^203^^ Most of them are in London (over 80 or 90). Up to now they have been

* The Civil War in France.---Ed. ** The Address was published on Tuesday, June 13, 1871.---Ed.

London, October 21, 1871

Dear Mother,

I have not written you for so long because I wanted to answer your last remarks about my political activity in a way that would not hurt you. But when I read over and over again the disgraceful lies in the Kolnische Zeitung,^^20^^® especially the vile stuff by that scoundrel Wachenhusen, when I saw the very people who had found nothing but lies in the whole French press during the war now loudly proclaiming every police fabrication, every slander of the most corrupt Paris

292

ENGELS TO ADOLF SORGE, SEPTEMBER 12-[17], 1874

MARX TO F. DOMELA-NIEWENHUIS, FEBRUARY 22, 1881

293

rag against the Commune as gospel truth, I was plunged in a mood that was hardly suitable for writing an answer. A great cry is raised over a few hostages shot after the Prussian manner, over a few palaces burned down after the Prussian example (everything else is lies), but nobody mentions the mechanical massacre by the Versaillians of 40,000 men, women and children, after they had been disarmed!...

Translated from the German

and abstention from all internal polemics to the workers' movement, then just reawakening. It was the moment when the common cosmopolitan interests of the proletariat could come to the fore. Germany, Spain, Italy and Denmark had only just come into the movement or were just coming into it. Actually in 1864 the theoretical character of the movement was still very unclear everywhere in Europe, that is, among the masses. German communism did not yet exist as a workers' party, Proudhonism was too weak to be able to trot out its particular hobbyhorses, Bakunin's new balderdash had not so much as come into being in his own head, and even the leaders of the English Trade Unions thought the programme laid down in the preamble to the Rules gave them a basis for entering the movement. The first great success was bound to explode this naive conjunction of all factions. This success was the Commune, which was without any doubt the child of the International intellectually, although the International did not lift a finger to produce it, and for which the International to a certain extent was quite properly held responsible. When, thanks to the Commune, the International had become a moral force in Europe, the row at once began. Every trend wanted to exploit the success for itself. Disintegration, which was inevitable, set in.

Translated from the German

ENGELS TO CARLO TERZAGHI

[SECOND VERSION]

[Rough draft]

[London, January 14-[15), 1872, 256, High Holborn]

... It was the want of centralisation and authority that cost the Paris Commune its life. Once you have won you can do with this authority whatever you like, etc., but the fight needs to have all our forces brought together in a fist and concentrated at the central point of attack. And when I hear people speak of authority and centralisation as of two things deserving condemnation whatever the circumstances, I feel that those who say this either have no idea of what revolution is or are revolutionaries only in word. ...

Translated from the Italian

MARX TO F. DOMELA-NIEUWENHUIS

IN THE HAGUE

London, February 22, 1881

41, Maitland Park Road, N.W.

... Perhaps you will refer me to the Paris Commune; but apart from the fact that this was merely the rising of a city under exceptional conditions, the majority of the Commune was in no wise socialist, nor could it be. With a modicum of common sense, however, it could have reached a compromise with Versailles useful to the whole mass of the people---the

ENGELS TO FRIEDRICH ADOLF SORGE IN HOBOKEN

London, September 12-[17], 1874

... With your resignation^^207^^ the old International^^15^^ is anyhow entirely wound up and at an end. And that is well. It belonged to the period of the Second Empire, during which the oppression reigning throughout Europe prescribed unity

294

ENGELS TO AUGUST BEBEL, OCTOBER 29, 1884

only thing that could be reached at the time. The appropriation of the Bank of France alone would have been enough to put an end with terror to the vaunt of the Versailles people, etc., etc----

Translated from the German

NOTES

ENGELS TO AUGUST BEBEL IN PLAUEN-DRESDEN

INDEXES

London, October 29, 1884

... In France, I expect this to lead to a new upswing for our Party. Over there, people still labour under the consequences of the Commune. It has just as strongly affected Europe as it has thrown back the French proletariat. To have wielded power for three months, and what's more in Paris, and not to have unhinged the world, but to have gone under owing to its own incompetence (that is the one-sided interpretation being given the Commune today)---proves that the Party is not viable. This is generally said by people who do not see that the Commune was the grave of the old, specifically French socialism, while being the cradle of the international communism, which is new for France....

Translated from the German

NOTES

~^^1^^ The Address of the International's General Council, The Civil War in France, is one of the most important works of scientific communism. On the strength of the Paris Commune's experience, it further develops the basic Marxist propositions on the class struggle, the state, revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

From the earliest days of the Paris Commune, Marx made a point of collecting and studying all information about its activity: material from the French, English and German press, letters from Paris, and so on. At the General Council's meeting on April 18, 1871, he proposed that it should issue a special address to all members of the International on the "general tendency of the struggle" in France. He was also asked to draft the Address. He started to work on it after April 18 and continued it throughout May. He wrote the first and second outlines of The Civil War in France as preparatory variants for the work (see pp. 102-221 and Note 96), after which he went on to write the final text. On May 30, 1871, two days after the last barricade had fallen in Paris, the General Council unanimously approved the final text of The Civil War in France, which Marx had read out.

The Civil War in France was first published in London on June 13, 1871, in English. It was soon sold out and a second English edition was issued at a lower price for sale to workers. In the second edition, Marx corrected -some of the misprints occurring in the first edition and added another document to the ``Notes'' section. Changes were made in the list of General Council members who signed the Address: the names of trade unionists Lucraft and Odger were deleted, because they had written in the bourgeois press about their disagreement with the Address and had withdrawn from the General Council, while the names of new members were added. A third English edition

298

NOTES

NOTES

299

was issued in August 1871, and in it Marx corrected some of the inaccuracies discovered in the earlier editions.

In 1871 and 1872, The Civil War in France was translated into French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish and Dutch, and published in periodicals and as separate editions in various countries of Europe and the United States.

The German translation was made by Engels and appeared in the newspaper Der Volksstaat, central organ of the German SocialDemocratic Workers' Party (the Eisenachers), in June and July 1871, in an abridged version in the journal Der Vorbote, organ of the German sections of the International in Switzerland, in AugustOctober 1871, and also as a separate pamphlet in Leipzig. When translating, Engels made a few insignificant alterations in the text. On the fifth anniversary of the Paris Commune in 1876, a new German edition appeared, with some passages given greater precision.

In 1891, in preparing a German edition of The Civil War in France to mark the 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune, Engels again edited the text of his translation and wrote an introduction (see pp. 21-34). He included in this edition the first and second addresses of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association on the Franco-Prussian War, which Marx had written (see pp. 35-39 and pp. 40-47) and which were usually included in subsequent separate editions of The Civil War in France in various languages.

In French, The Civil War in France was first published in the newspaper L'Internationale, organ of the Belgian sections of the International, in Brussels from July to September 1871. A separate French edition appeared in Brussels in 1872 in a translation edited by Marx, who made numerous changes in the proofs, and retranslated many passages.

The first Russian edition of The Civil War in France, which became the basis of a series of subsequent printed editions and duplicated reprints, appeared in Zurich in 1871. In 1905, The Civil War in France appeared in Russian under the editorship of V. I. Lenin in a translation from the German edition of 1891 (Burevestnik Publishers, Odessa).---19, 48, 169

~^^2^^ Engels wrote this introduction for the Social-Democratic Party of Germany's edition of Marx's work published in 1891 to mark the 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune. He noted the historical importance of the experience gained by the Paris Commune and its theoretical generalisation by Marx in The Civil War in France, and gave additional information on the history of the Paris Commune, notably, on the activity of its Blanquist and Proudhonist members.---21

~^^3^^ The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was written by Marx from December 1851 to March 1852. He analysed the events of the 1848-51 revolution in France and further developed the fundamental propositions of historical materialism, the theory of the class struggle and the proletarian revolution, and the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this work Marx first put forward the idea that

the bourgeois state machine had to be broken up by the victorious proletariat, an idea he then elaborated in The Civil War in France.---21, 284

~^^4^^ A reference to the German people's national liberation war against Napoleon's rule in 1813-14.---22, 39

~^^5^^ The Anti-Socialist Law (the Exceptional Law against Socialists) was introduced in Germany on October 21, 1878. It banned all Social-Democratic Party organisations, mass proletarian organisations, and the working-class press, confiscated socialist literature, and outlawed Social-Democrats. Under pressure from the working-class movement, the law was rescinded on October 1, 1890.---22

~^^6^^ The name reactionary German circles gave to members of the opposition movement who, in the period after the wars against Napoleonic France, opposed the reactionary system in the German states and mounted political manifestations demanding the unification of Germany. The movement spread among the intelligentsia and the students, especially in students' gymnastic societies. The `` demagogues'' were harassed by the reactionary authorities.---22

~^^7^^ Belleville---the working-class quarter in Paris lying on a hill of that name, where the Commune made its last stand during the street fighting in May 1871.---22

~^^8^^ A reference to the heroic insurrection by the Paris proletariat on June 23-26, 1848, which was fiercely suppressed by the French bourgeoisie. It was the world's first great civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The defeat of the June insurrection served as a signal for a counter-revolutionary offensive in the European countries.---24, 54, 62, 77, 111, 231

~^^9^^ Orleanists---supporters of the dukes of Orleans, the cadet branch of the Bourbon dynasty, who were in power after the July revolution of 1830, and who were overthrown by the 1848 revolution. They represented the interests of the financial aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie.

Legitimists---the party of the supporters of the Bourbon dynasty, which was overthrown in France in 1792, representing the interests of the big landed aristocracy and higher clergy; it took shape as a party in 1830, after the second overthrow of the dynasty. Under the Second Empire (1852-70), the Legitimists, failing to win any support from the people, confined themselves to issuing critical pamphlets and were galvanised into action only in 1871, when they joined the general counter-revolutionary onslaught against the Paris Commune. Bonapartists---supporters of restoration of the Bonapart dynasty in France after the downfall of the First (1804-14) and the Second Empire.---24, 46, 56, 88, 131, 190

~^^10^^ A reference to the December 2, 1851 coup d'etat in France staged by Louis Bonaparte, who had been President of the French Republic from December 10, 1848. On that day, the country's highest bodies--- the Legislative Assembly and the State Council were dispersed, many deputies were arrested, martial law was declared in 32 departments,

300

NOTES

301

and socialist and republican leaders were deported. A new constitution was adopted on January 14, 1852, concentrating all power in the hands of the President, and on December 2, 1852, Louis Bonaparte was proclaimed Emperor of France as Napoleon III.---24, 36, 47, 70, 128

~^^11^^ The Austro-Prussian War of 1866 ended in a victory for Prussia, deciding the long rivalry between these two states and predetermining the unification of Germany under Prussia's hegemony. A number of German states were on Austria's side, while Prussia was allied with Italy. Under the Prague peace treaty, Austria waived her rights to the North-German duchies of Schleswig and Holstein to Prussia, agreed to pay her a small indemnity, and handed over the Region of Venice to the Kingdom of Italy. The German Confederation of more than 30 German states, set up by the Vienna Congress back in 1815, was dissolved, giving place to the North German Confederation, without Austria's participation and with Prussia at its head. Prussia also annexed the Kingdom of Hanover, the Electorate of Hessen-Kassel, the Grand Duchy of Nassau and the free city of Frankfort-On-Main.---25

~^^12^^ One of the crucial battles of the Franco-Prussian War was fought at Sedan, on September 1 and 2, 1870, and ended with the rout of the French. Under the act of capitulation signed by the French command on September 2, 1870, over 80,000 soldiers, officers and generals, including Napoleon III himself, surrendered. From September 5, 1870, to March 19, 1871, the Emperor was confined to Wilhelmshohe, a castle of the Prussian kings. The Sedan disaster hastened the collapse of the Second Empire and led to the proclamation of a republic in France on September 4, 1870.---25, 40, 54, 147

~^^13^^ A reference to the provisional peace treaty between France and Germany, signed by Thiers and Jules Favre, on the one hand, and Bismarck, on the other, at Versailles on February 26, 1871. Under it, France ceded Alsace and Eastern Lorraine to Germany, and paid an indemnity of 5,000 million francs; German troops continued to occupy a part of French territory until the indemnity was paid. The final peace treaty was signed at Frankfort-On-Main on May 10, 1871.---26, 119

~^^14^^ A French army, under Marshal Bazaine, surrendered to the Germans in the besieged city of Metz in October 1870, and together with the men taken prisoner at Sedan the French soldiers were subsequently used to put down the Paris Commune and massacre its participants.---28, 54

~^^15^^ International Working Men's Association (First International)---the first international mass organisation of the proletariat, which was led by Marx and Engels (1864-76). It carried to the forward-looking workers of the leading capitalist countries ideas of scientific socialism and "laid the foundation of an international organisation of the workers for the preparation of their revolutionary attack on capital (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 306).---30, 99, 230, 231, 254, 267, 274, 275, 281, 292

~^^10^^ A reference to Proudhon's book, Idee generate de la Revolution au XIX siecle, Paris, 1851, which Marx criticised in a letter to Engels on August 8, 1851, and Engels in his "Critical Analysis of Proudhon's Book, Idee generale de la Revolution au XIX siecle" (Marx-Engels Archives, Vol. X, pp. 5-34).---31

~^^17^^ Possibilists---an opportunist trend in the French socialist movement led by Brousse, Malon and others, who brought about a split in the Workers' Party in 1882 of France. They acted on the reformist principle of working for the ``possible'' only---hence their name.--- 31

~^^18^^ When this work of Engels's was first published in Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical German Social-Democratic journal, under the title, On the Civil War in France, the editors made this change in the text: in the final paragraph, the expression "Social-Democratic philistine" used in the original was altered to "German philistine". Engels expressed his disapproval of this arbitrary change but, apparently wishing to prevent any variorum reading in the simultaneous editions of his work, let the words stand in the separate edition as well. Here the original text is restored.---34

~^^19^^ First Address of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association on the Franco-Prussian War was written by Marx between July 19 and 23, 1870. On July 19, 1870, the day war broke out, the General Council asked Marx to draft an address on the war, and that was adopted by the General Council's Standing Committee on July 23, and then unanimously approved by the Council on July 26, 1870. The Address was first published in English in the London ^h_e Pall Mall Gazette No. 1702, of July 28, 1870, and appeared a few days later in a printing of 1,000 copies as a leaflet. It was also reproduced fully or in part by various provincial English papers.

The first edition was soon sold out, and in view of the continued demand the General Council decided on August 2, 1870, to issue an additional printing. In September 1870, it was reprinted in English together with the General Council's Second Address on the FrancoPrussian War, with Marx making various corrections of misprints in the first edition.

On August 9, the General Council appointed a committee to translate the First Address into German and French and to circulate it. In German, it was first published in Leipzig in the newspaper Der Volksstaat on August 7, 1870, in a translation by Wilhelm Liebknecht. When Marx received the German translation, he heavily edited the text and retranslated almost one-half of it. In the new German translation, the Address was published in Geneva in the journal Der Vorbote in August 1870, and was also issued as a separate leaflet. To mark the Paris Commune's 20th anniversary in 1891, Engels published the General Council's first and second addresses in the German edition of The Civil War in France, which was put out in Berlin by the Social-Democratic newspaper Vorwarts. He also supervised the translation of the first and second addresses for this edition.

302

NOTES

303

In French, the Address was published in August 1870, in the Swiss newspaper L'Egalite, organ of the Romance Federation of the International, and in the Belgian organs of the Association, the newspapers L'Internationale and Le Mirabeau. It was also issued as a leaflet in French, in a translation by the General Council's committee.

In Russian, the Address was first published in the newspaper Narodnoye Dyelo (The People's Cause), organ of the Russian section of the International, in Geneva in August and September 1870. In 1905, the first and second addresses were included in an edition of The Civil War in France which was published in a translation from the 1891 German edition and edited by V. I. Lenin (see Note 1). Subsequently, there were numerous editions of these addresses in Russian together with the main text of The Civil War in France. ---35

~^^20^^ Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's Association (see Note 15) was written by Marx in October 1864, soon after the Association was founded, and was its first policy-making document. It gave a brief sketch of the condition of the proletariat in capitalist society and a popular formulation of its tasks and purposes in the struggle (including the sphere of international relations). On November 1, 1864, the Address was unanimously adopted by the Provisional Committee, the first governing body of the International.---35

~^^21^^ In May 1870, the government of Napoleon III held a plebiscite in an effort to consolidate the shaken regime of the Second Empire, which was breeding discontent among broad sections of the population. Issues put to the vote were so formulated as to make it impossible to express disapproval of the policy of the Second Empire without also coming out against all democratic reforms. Despite this demagogic dodge, the plebiscite revealed a growing opposition to the regime.

In preparing the plebiscite, the government mounted a campaign of reprisals against the working-class movement, widely spreading slander against the workers' organisations, distorting their aims and trying to scare the middle classes with the spectre of a "red peril''.

The Paris Federation of the International and the Paris Federal Chamber of Working Men's Societies issued a manifesto on April 24, 1870, exposing the Bonapartist trick over the plebiscite and urging the workers to stay away from the polls. On the eve of the plebiscite, members of the Paris Federation were arrested by the police on a trumped-up charge of conspiring to assassinate Napoleon III, and this charge was used by the government to start a broad campaign of harassment and persecution of members of the International in various towns in France. The trial of the members of the Paris Federation, held from June 22 to July 5, 1870, fully exposed the fraudulent charges of conspiracy, but several members of the International in France were sentenced to imprisonment merely for belonging to that body.

The persecution of the International in France led to massive protests by the working class.---35

~^^22^^ The Franco-Prussian War broke out on July 19, 1870.---36

~^^23^^ Le Reveil---a French weekly, and a daily from May 18C9, organ of Left-wing Republicans, published in Paris from July 1S68 to January 1871. From October 1870, opposed the Government of National Defence.

La Marseillaise---a French daily, organ of Left-wing Republicans, published in Paris from December 1869 to September 1870. It carried reports on the activity of the International and the working-class movement.---37

~^^24^^ A reference to the Society of December 10 (so called to mark the election of its patron, Louis Bonaparte, President of the French Republic on December 10, 1848)---a secret Bonapartist society set up in 1849 and consisting mainly of declasse elements, political adventurists, members of the military clique, etc. It was nominally dissolved in November 1850, but its members in fact continued to spread Bonapartist propaganda and took an active part in the December 2, 1851 coup. Marx gives a detailed characteristic of the society in his work, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

On July 15, 1870, the Bonapartists, with the assistance of the police, staged a chauvinistic manifestation in support of Louis Napoleon's plans for conquest.---37

~^^25^^ The Battle of Sadowa in Bohemia was fought on July 3, 1866, between Austrian and Saxon troops, on the one hand, and Prussian troops, on the other, and decided the outcome of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, which ended in a victory for Prussia over Austria (see Note 11). It is also known as the battle of Koniggratz, now Hradec Kralov.---37

~^^26^^ Second Address of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association on the Franco-Prussian War was written by Marx between September 6 and 9, 1870.

On September 6, 1870, having examined the new situation which had taken shape after the collapse of the Second Empire and the start of a new stage of the war, the General Council of the International decided to issue a second address on the Franco-Prussian War and for that purpose appointed a special committee, of which Marx was a member.-

In his work on the Address, Marx used the material he received from Engels, exposing the efforts to justify, on the grounds of military-strategic considerations, the urge on the part of the Prussian military clique, the Junkers and the bourgeoisie to annex French territory. The Address was unanimously adopted by a special meeting of the General Council on September 9, 1870, and was circulated to all the bourgeois London newspapers, almost all of which ignored it entirely. On September 11-13, it was issued as a leaflet in English; a new edition containing the first and second addresses appeared in late September. In it the misprints of the first edition were corrected and some editorial changes made.

The Second Address was translated into German by Marx who added several sentences, which he intended for the German workers, and deleted some passages. This translation was published in the

304

NOTES

NOTES

305

newspaper Der Volksstaat on September 21, 1870, and in the journal Der Vorbote in October-November 1870, and also as a leaflet in Geneva. In 1891, Engels published the Second Address in a German edition of The Civil War in France, and supervised the translation for this edition.

In French, the Second Address was published in October 1870 in the newspapers L'Internationale and, in an abridged version, in L'Egalite.

In Russian, the Second Address first appeared in an edition of The Civil War in France in 1905 translated from the 1891 German edition and edited by V. I. Lenin.---40

~^^27^^ Up to August 1806, Germany was a part of the so-called Holy Roman Empire of the German nation set up in the 10th century and constituting a union of feudal principalities and free cities recognising the supreme power of the Emperor.---42

~^^28^^ In 1618, the Electorate of Brandenburg was united with the Duchy of Prussia (East Prussia), which had been formed from the possessions of the Teutonic Order in the early 16th century and was a fief of Poland. The Elector of Brandenburg, in his capacity as the Duke off Prussia, continued to be a vassal of Poland until 1657, when, making use of Poland's embroilment in a war with Sweden, he secured recognition of his sovereign rights to his Prussian possessions.---42

29 The Treaty of Tilsit was signed on July 7-9, 1807, between Napoleonic France, and Russia and Prussia, members of the fourth antiFrench coalition, who had been defeated in the war. The peace terms were very onerous for Prussia, which lost a sizable part of her territory. Russia did not suffer any territorial losses, but was forced to recognise France's stronger position in Europe and to join in the so-called Continental blockade of England. The plunderous Peace of Tilsit, dictated by Napoleon I, bred acute discontent among the population of Germany, thereby preparing the ground for the liberation movement against Napoleon's domination, which started m 1813.---43, 125

~^^30^^ Teutons---ancient tribes, apparently of Germanic origin, and a name sometimes used to designate Germans in general. Here, Marx drops an ironic hint at the use of this word by the German nationalists. ---43

~^^31^^ During their meeting at Biarritz in October 1865, Bismarck got Napoleon III to agree to an alliance between Prussia and Italy and to a war by Prussia against Austria; in agreeing to this, Napoleon III expected to intervene in the conflict with benefit for himself, in the event of Prussia's defeat.

At the start of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, tsarist Foreign Minister Gorchakov declared, in the course of his negotiations with Bismarck in Berlin, that in the war Russia would maintain a neutrality favourable for Prussia, and would exert diplomatic pressure on Austria; for its part, the Prussian Government undertook not to impede tsarist Russia in her policy in the East.---44

~^^32^^ The North German Confederation---a federal German state, set up in 1867, with Prussia at the head, after her victory in the AustroPrussian War (see Note 11). It included 19 German states and three free cities, which were nominally recognised as autonomous. Its constitution secured a dominant position for Prussia: the Prussian king was proclaimed President of the Confederation and Commander-- inChief of the federal armed forces. He also assumed direction of foreign policy. The legislative powers of the federal Reichstag, elected by universal suffrage, were heavily curtailed: the laws it adopted entered into force only after approval by a reactionary Federal Council and confirmation by President. In 1870, Bavaria, Baden, Wiirtternberg and Hessen-Darmstadt were integrated with the Confederation. It was dissolved in January 1871 with the formation of the German Reich.---44

~^^33^^ A reference to the triumph of feudal reaction in Germany after the downfall of Napoleon's rule.

The results of the liberation war against Napoleon I's rule, in which broad sections of the German people took part together with the other European nations, were used by the rulers of Europe's feudal absolutist states who relied on the reactionary aristocracy. A counterrevolutionary alliance of monarchs---the Holy Alliance---with Austria, Prussia and tsarist Russia constituting its nucleus, began to rule the destinies of the European nations. Feudal divisions remained in Germany, the feudal absolutist system was consolidated in the German states, all the privileges of the aristocracy were retained, and the semi-feudal exploitation of the peasants was intensified.---45

~^^34^^ A reference to the Tuileries in Paris, the residence of Napoleon III.--- 46

^3o A reference to the English workers' movement for recognition of the French Republic set up on September 4, 1870, and for diplomatic support of it. Mass meetings and demonstrations were held in London, Birmingham, Newcastle and other big cities from September 5, with the trade unions playing an active role. They expressed sympathy for the French people and adopted resolutions and petitions demanding immediate recognition of the French Republic by the English Government.

The General Council of the International had a hand in organising the movement.---47

~^^36^^ A reference to the Civil War in the United States of America (1861-65), which was fought between the industrial states of the North and the rebellious slave-holding states of the South. English ruling circles gave support to the slave-owning planters and intended to fight on their side. However, the English working class opposed the policy of the English bourgeoisie and prevented their country's armed intervention in the war in the United States.---47, 124

~^^37^^ Journal Officiel, an abbreviated form for the Journal Officiel de la Republique Franfaise, which was published from March 20 to May 24, 1871, as the official organ of the Paris Commune. The paper

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retained the name of the official organ of the government of the French Republic which was published in Paris from September 5, 1870 (during the Paris Commune, a newspaper of the Thiers government was published in Versailles under the same name). The issue of March 30 came out under the name of Journal Officiel de la Commune de Paris.---50, 142, 184

~^^38^^ On January 28, 1871, Bismarck and Favre, a representative of the Government of National Defence, signed a Convention on the Armistice and Capitulation of Paris, an ignominious act betraying the national interests of France. When signing the Convention, Favre accepted humiliating demands put forward by the Prussians: payment within a fortnight of an indemnity of 200 million francs, surrender of most of the Paris forts, and the handing over of the field guns and ammunition of the Paris army.

Capitulards---scornful name for those who favoured the capitulation of Paris during the 1870-71 siege. This term was subsequently adopted to designate scuttlers of every stripe.---50, 103, 148, 184, 191, 208

~^^39^^ L'Stendard---a French Bonapartist newspaper published in Paris from 1866 to 1868. It was wound up after the discovery of the fraudulent operations used as a source to finance it.---51

~^^40^^ Societe Generate du Credit Mobilier---a big French bank set up in 1852 whose profits came mainly from speculation in securities put out by joint-stock companies it itself established. Credit Mobilier was closely connected with the government circles of the Second Empire. It went bankrupt in 1867, and was liquidated in 1871. Marx exposed the essence of Credit Mobilier in a number of articles published in The New-York Daily Tribune.---51, 105, 162, 185

~^^41^^ L'Electeur libre---a. weekly (a daily from the Franco-Prussian War), an organ of the Right-wing Republicans, was published in Paris from 1868 to 1871; in 1870 and 1871, it was connected with the Ministry of Finance of the Government of National Defence.---51, 105, 185

~^^42^^ A reference to the anti-Legitimist and anti-clerical action in Paris on February 14 and 15, 1831, which was echoed in the provinces. In protest against the Legitimist (see Note 9) demonstration at the funeral service for the Duke du Berry, the crowd destroyed the church of Saint Germain 1'Auxerrois and the palace of Archbishop Quelen, who was known for his Legitimist sympathies. The Orleanist government, which was striving to hit out at the hostile Legitimist party, did nothing to stop the crowd; Thiers, who was present when the church and the palace were attacked, urged the National Guardsmen not to hinder the crowd.

In 1832, on orders from Thiers, then Minister of the Interior, the Duchess de Berry, the mother of the Legitimist pretender to the French throne, Count Chambord, was arrested and subjected to a humiliating medical examination designed to expose her secret marriage and so politically to compromise her.---52

~^^43^^ A reference to the unseemly role played by Thiers (then Minister of the Interior) in suppressing the popular insurrection in Paris, directed by the secret Republican Society of the Rights of Man (Societe des droits de I'homme), against the regime of the July Monarchy, on April 13-14, 1834. In suppressing the insurrection, the militarists committed various atrocities, one of which was the massacre of the inhabitants of a house in Rue Transnonain. Thiers was the moving spirit behind the fierce reprisals against the democrats during and after the insurrection.

September Laws---reactionary laws issued by the French Government in September 1835. They put a limitation on trial by jury and introduced harsh measures against the press, including higher deposits for periodicals, and prison terms and large fines for statements against property and the existing state system.---52, 112, 120, 187

~^^44^^ In January 1841, Thiers came forward in the Chamber of Deputies with a project for the erection of fortifications around Paris, and this the revolutionary and democratic circles took to be preparation for suppressing any popular movement, though the project was presented as a measure to strengthen the city's defences. It was noted that for that very purpose Thiers's project provided for the erection of especially strong and numerous forts near the working-class quarters to the east and north-east of Paris.---52

~^^45^^ In January 1848, troops of King Ferdinand II of Naples, subsequently nicknamed King Bomba for his savage bombardment of Messina in the autumn of that year, shelled Palermo in an effort to suppress a popular uprising which sparked off the bourgeois revolution in the Italian states in 1848-49.---53, 121

~^^46^^ In April 1849, the French bourgeois government, in alliance with Austria and Naples, mounted an intervention against the Roman Republic for the purpose of suppressing it and reinstalling the Pope's secular power. As a result of the armed intervention and the siege of Rome, which was subjected to fierce bombardment by the French troops, the Roman Republic, despite its heroic resistance, was overthrown and Rome was occupied by the French troops.---53j 64, 121, 189, 198, 226

~^^47^^ Party of Order---a party of the big conservative bourgeoisie, which emerged in 1848 as a coalition of two monarchist groups in France: the Legitimists and the Orleanists (see Note 9). From 1849 until the coup d'etat of December 2, 1851, it held commanding positions in the Legislative Assembly of the Second Republic. Louis Bonaparte's clique used the failure of the anti-popular policy pursued by the Party of Order to establish the regime of the Second Empire.---54, 78, 95, 127, 159, 202

~^^48^^ On July 15, 1840, Britain, Russia, Prussia, Austria and Turkey, without the participation of France, signed a convention in London on aid to the Turkish Sultan against the Egyptian ruler MohammedAli, who was supported by France. This gave rise to the threat of a war between France and the coalition of the European powers, but

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King Louis Philippe did not risk fighting a war and abandoned support of Mohammed-Ali.---54

~^^49^^ Chambre introuvable---the French Chamber of Deputies in 1815-16 (the early years of the Bourbon restoration), which consisted of extreme reactionaries.---56, 81, 191

~^^50^^ The Assembly of "Rurals" (or the Landlord Chamber)---a scornful nickname for the 1871 National Assembly, which consisted mostly of reactionary monarchists, such as provincial landowners, civil servants, coupon-clippers and merchants elected from the rural constituencies.---56

~^^51^^ On March 10, 1871, the National Assembly adopted a law on overdue bills. Under it, a seven-month moratorium, beginning from the day on which they had been contracted, was set for payments under obligations made from August 13 to November 12, 1870; no moratorium was allowed on payments under obligations contracted after November 12. This meant that the law gave virtually no deferment to the bulk of those in debt, and this was a heavy blow to the working class and the impecunious sections of the population, and also caused the bankruptcy of many small industrialists and merchants.---57

~^^52^^ Decembriseur---participant in the Bonapartist coup d'etat of December 2, 1851, and supporter of action in the spirit of the coup. Vinoy was directly involved in the coup, having used troops to put down attempts to start a republican uprising in one of the departments of France.---57, 106, 193

53 Newspaper reports said that of the internal loan, which the Thiers government had decided to float, Thiers himself'and other ministers were to receive more than 300 million francs by way of ``commission''. Thiers subsequently admitted that the men representing the financial circles with whom the loan was being negotiated were demanding swift suppression of the revolution in Paris. On June 20, 1870, after the Versailles troops had crushed the Paris Commune, the loan bill was passed.---58

~^^64^^ Cayenne---town in French Guiana (South America), a penal settlement and place of exile.---60

~^^55^^ Le National---a French daily published in Paris from 1830 to 1851, organ of moderate bourgeois republicans.---62, 99, 111, 195

~^^56^^ A reference to the uprising in Paris on February 22-24, 1848, which overthrew the regime of Louis Philippe's July Monarchy and inaugurated the Second Republic in France.---62, 69

~^^67^^ On October 31, 1870, following reports of the capitulation at Metz, the defeat at Le-Bourget, and the negotiations with the Prussians started by Thiers on behalf of the Government of National Defence, Paris workers and the revolutionary section of the National Guard started an uprising and took the Town Hall, setting up an organ of revolutionary power---the Committee of Public Safety headed by Blanqui. Under pressure from the workers, the Government of

National Defence was forced to promise to resign and appoint elections to the Commune on November 1. But, making use of the loose organisation of the revolutionary forces in Paris and differences between the Blanquists and the petty-bourgeois Jacobin Democrats who led the uprising, the government went back on its promise to resign, threw the loyal battalions of the National Guard against the Town Hall and restored its power.---62

~^^58^^ Bretons---the Breton Mobile Guard (home guard) which Trochu used as gendarmery to suppress the revolutionary movement in Paris.

Corsicans under the Second Empire constituted a large section of the gendarmery corps.---63

~^^59^^ On January 22, 1871, the Blanquists initiated a revolutionary action by the Paris proletariat and the National Guard, who demonstrated in demand for the overthrow of the Government of National Defence and establishment of a Commune. On orders of the Government oi National Defence they were fired upon by the Breton Mobile Guard, who were defending the Town Hall. Participants in the demonstration were arrested, all the clubs in Paris were closed down, public

eitherings were prohibited and a number of newspapers banned, nee the revolutionary movement was suppressed by means of terrorism, the government went on to prepare for the surrender of Paris.---69, 181

~^^60^^ Faire les trois sommations---read the Riot Act. This was a 1831 law similar to an English statute of 1715 providing that if 12 or more persons assembled unlawfully and riotously, to the disturbance of the public peace, and refused to disperse upon proclamation, read out three times, the authorities shall be empowered to use force to disperse the assembly.---64, 178, 198

~^^61^^ During the October 31 events (see Note 57), when the members of the Government of National Defence were detained at the Town Hall, Flourens prevented their being shot, as one of the insurgents was demanding.---65, 112

~^^62^^ Voltaire, Candide, Chapter 22.---65

~^^63^^ The decree on hostages here mentioned was adopted by the Commune on April 5, 1871 (Marx gives the day of its adoption according to English press reports). Under this decree, all persons charged with maintaining contacts with Versailles, and the charges proved, were declared to be hostages. By this means, the Paris Commune tried to prevent the Versailles men from shooting Communards.---66

~^^64^^ The Times---a leading conservative newspaper published in London since 1785.---66, 99, 136, 252

~^^85^^ Investiture---in the Middle Ages the transfer of land by the seigneur to his vassal or the appointment of a clerical to his office. Also used to denote a system of appointments to office of persons who were entirely dependent on their superiors in the hierarchy.---73

~^^66^^ Girondins---during the French bourgeois revolution at the end ol

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the 18th century the party of the big commercial and industrial bourgeoisie and the landowning bourgeoisie which emerged in the years of the revolution. Named after the department of Gironde which was represented in the Legislative Assembly and the Convent by many leaders of this party. The Girondins opposed the Jacobin Government and the revolutionary masses supporting it and stood for the rights of the departments to autonomy and federation.---73

^B7 Kladderadatsch---an illustrated satirical weekly published in Berlin since 1848.

Punch---abbreviation of the Punch, or the London Charivari, an English humorous bourgeois-liberal weekly published in London since 1841.---74

~^^68^^ A reference to the Paris Commune's Decree of April 16, 1871, allowing a three-year moratorium on all promissory notes and cancelling interest on them.---77

~^^69^^ A reference to the rejection by the Constituent Assembly on August 22, 1848, of the "concordats a I'amiable", providing for a moratorium for debtors able to prove that they had gone bankrupt due to the depression caused by the 1848 revolution. This had ruined a large section of the petty bourgeoisie and left it in the clutches of big bourgeois creditors.---77, 162

~^^70^^ Freres ignorantins---the name of a religious order which was founded in Rheims in 1680 and whose members devoted their lives to teaching the children of the poor. In their schools, instruction was mainly religious, with very little knowledge in other subjects. Marx uses the term to hint at the low level and clerical nature of primary education in bourgeois France.---77

~^^71^^ This refers to the Alliance republicaine des Departements, a political organisation consisting of representatives of petty-bourgeois sections from various regions of France resident in Paris. It sided with the Paris Commune, and called for struggle against the Versailles government and the monarchist National Assembly, and urged support for the Commune in all the departments.---77

~^^72^^ A reference to the April 27, 1825 law passed by the reactionary government of Charles X, authorising the payment of indemnity to former emigres for the landed estates confiscated from them during the French bourgeois revolution. Most of this money went to the top courtiers and big landowners.---77, 158

~^^73^^ The column was erected in 1806-10 in the Place Vendome in Paris to commemorate the victories of Napoleon I. It was removed on May 16, 1871, by decision of the Paris Commune.---80

~^^74^^ Searches carried out in the Picpus nunnery revealed cases of nuns being incarcerated for years and even instruments of torture. A secret cemetery was discovered in the Church of Saint Laurent, indicating that murders had been committed. These facts were brought to light by the newspaper Mot d'Or Are on May 5, 1871, and also in a pamphlet entitled Les crimes des congregations religieuses.---81

~^^75^^ Absentees---big landowners whose estates were managed by agents or leased to middlemen who subleased them to small tenants on harsh terms.---82

~^^76^^ On June 20, 1789, in a response to an attempt of the government of Louis XVI to prevent a regular meeting of the General States, which proclaimed themselves to be the National Assembly, the deputies of the third estate (bourgeoisie) meeting in the Jeu de Paume (tennis court) at Versailles swore not to disperse until a constitution was worked out. This was one of the events serving as the prologue to

'the French bourgeois revolution at the end of the 18th century.--- 82, 163

~^^77^^ Francs-ftleurs---a derisive name given to the Paris bourgeois who fled from the city during its siege. It is a pun on Francs-tireurs, the name of French partisans who took an active part in the fight against the Prussians.---83, 123, 213

~^^78^^ Coblenz---a city in Germany, and a centre of the aristocratic monarchist emigres during the French bourgeois revolution at the end of the 18th century, where intervention against revolutionary France was being prepared. It was the seat of an emigre government headed by the rabid reactionary and one-time minister of Louis XVI, de Calonne, which enjoyed the support of the feudal absolutist states.---84, 123, 213

~^^79^^ Chouans---the name given by the Communards to the monarchistminded detachment of the Versailles army recruited in Britanny by analogy with those who participated in the counter-revolutionary rebellion in the area during the French bourgeois revolution at the end of the 18th century.

Pontifical Zouaves---a regiment of the papal guard organised and trained like the Zouaves, French light infantry, and consisting ol young French aristocrats. When the Pope's secular power was abolished in September 1870, the Pontifical Zouaves were sent to France and took part in the Franco-Prussian War. After the war, the regiment helped to suppress the Paris Commune.---85, 118, 180, 214

~^^80^^ Under the impact of the proletarian revolution of March 18 in Paris, which led to the establishment of the Paris Commune, revolutionary mass action was mounted in Lyons, Marseilles and other French cities. On March 22, the Town Hall in Lyons was seized by the National Guard and the city's working people. Following the arrival of a delegation from Paris, a Commune was proclaimed in Lyons on March 26, but the provisional committee set up to prepare the elections to the Commune abdicated its powers because it commanded only a small military force and was insufficiently connected with the people and the National Guard. Fresh action by the working people of Lyons on April 30 was fiercely suppressed by the army and the police.

In Marseilles, the insurgent population took the Town Hall and arrested the prefect. A committee of the department was set up in the

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city and elections for the Commune were scheduled for April 5. The revolutionary movement in Marseilles was put down on April 4 by government troops who shelled the city.---87

~^^81^^ A reference to the following laws: (a) the law on the prosecution of crimes committed by the press, which re-introduced provisions from old reactionary laws on the press (1819 and 1849); it provided for harsh penalties, including the closure of periodicals, for statements against the authorities and also the re-instatement of the officials of the Second Empire who had been dismissed; (b) a special law on the procedures governing the return of property confiscated by the Commune and on the introduction of penalties for its confiscation as a criminal offence.---87

~^^82^^ The law motioned by Dufaure in the National Assembly went even further in reducing the procedures of the courts-martial, as compared with the provisions of the Military Code of 1857. It confirmed the power of the army commander and the Minister of War to institute criminal proceedings without any preliminary investigation, as they saw fit. In such instances, the case, including examination of appeal and execution of sentence, was to be decided within 48 hours.---87

~^^83^^ A reference to a commercial treaty between Britain and France signed on January 23, 1860, under which France abandoned her prohibitive tariff policy and substituted for it duties which were not to exceed 30 per cent of the value of goods. The result was a sharp intensification of competition on the domestic markets, which were flooded with goods from Britain, and this caused discontent among French industrialists.---89, 108

~^^84^^ A reference to the reign of terror and bloody reprisals in Ancient Rome at various stages of the crisis which gripped the slave-holding Roman Republic in the 1st century B.C.

Sulla's dictatorship (82-79 B.C.)

The first and second triumvirates (60-53 and 43-36 B.C.)---periods of dictatorship by the Roman generals: Pompey, Caesar and Crassus--- the first triumvirate; Octavianus, Antonius and Lepidus---the second triumvirate.---91

~^^85^^ Journal de Paris---a monarchist-Orleanist weekly, published in Paris since 1867.---91

~^^86^^ In August 1814, during the war between Britain and the United States, the British troops took Washington and burned the Capitol (the Congressional building), the White House and other public buildings.

In October 1860, during the colonial war waged by Britain and France against China, the Anglo-French troops plundered and then burned down the Summer Palace near Peking, a treasure-house of Chinese architecture and art.---93

~^^87^^ In the autumn of 1812, during the Russian people's Patriotic War, the inhabitants of Moscow burned down a large section of the city occupied by the French army of Napoleon I, to deprive it of winter quarters and food stocks.---93

~^^88^^ Praetorians in Ancient Rome were the bodyguard of the commander or the emperor; under the Roman Empire the praetorians were constantly involved in internal disorders and frequently installed their own men in power. Their name has come to symbolise outrages and arbitrary acts by mercenary military cliques.---94

~^^89^^ Marx gives the name of "Chambre introuvable", by analogy with the French one (see Note 49), to the Prussian Assembly elected in January-February 1849. It consisted of two chambers: the privileged, aristocratic "Chamber of the gentry" and a second chamber in whose two-stage elections only so-called independent Prussians took part, so as to ensure its domination by the Junkers, bureaucrats and Rightwing bourgeois elements. Bismarck, elected to the second chamber, was the leader of its extreme Right-wing Junker group.---95

~^^90^^ The Daily News---an English liberal newspaper, an organ of the industrial bourgeoisie, published in London from 1846 to 1930. ---98, 131, 177, 245, 250, 262

~^^91^^ Le Temps---a French conservative daily, an organ of the big bourgeoisie, published in Paris from 1861 to 1943.---99

~^^92^^ The Evening Standard---the evening edition of The Standard, published in London from 1857 to 1905.---99

~^^93^^ The statement issued by the General Council of the First International over Jules Favre's circular of June 6, 1871, was written by Marx and Engels and included in the second and third English editions of The Civil War in France and the German editions of 1871, 1876 and 1891. It was also published separately in a number of newspapers.---99

~^^94^^ A reference to the circular letter "The International Working Men's Association and the Alliance of Socialist Democracy" written by Marx.

The Alliance of Socialist Democracy---an organisation founded by Bakunin in Geneva in 1868, calling for the equalisation of classes and abolition of the state. It denied the need for political struggle by the working class. Its petty-bourgeois anarchist programme found support in the poorly industrialised regions of Italy, Switzerland, Spain and other countries. In 1869, the Alliance applied to the General Council for admission to the International. The General Council agreed to admit its sections, provided the Alliance dissolved itself as an independent organisation. Actually, however, while joining the International, the members of the Alliance retained their secret organisation within the International Working Men's Association and were led by Bakunin in their fight against the General Council. This fight was intensified by the Alliance after the suppression of the Pans Commune, when Bakunin and his supporters came out with especially sharp objections to the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat and consolidation of an independent political party of the working class based on the principles of democratic centralism. The Hague Congress of the First International in September 1872 decided by an overwhelming majority to expel the leaders of the Alliance---Bakunin and Guillaume---from the International.---100, 253

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~^^95^^ The Spectator---an English liberal weekly published in London since 1828.---101, 247, 252

~^^96^^ Outlines of "The Civil War in France", preparatory variants of this work, were written by Marx in April and May 1871. They were not published in the lifetime of Marx and Engels, and not for a long time after their death. The full text of the first and second outlines was first published in the U.S.S.R. in 1934 in English (the original) and in a Russian translation in the Marx-Engels Archives, Vol. Ill (VIII), published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the C.P.S.U. Central Committee.---102

~^^97^^ The Battle of Buzenval (also known as the battle of Montretout or Mont-Valerien) was fought on January 19, 1871, four months after the start of the siege of Paris. It was the final sortie from besieged Paris mounted by Trochu to undermine the remaining strength of the National Guard and to demoralise it, so as to convince the population and the army that it was hopeless to continue the defence of the city. During the sortie, which was not adequately prepared, there was no co-ordination between the action of the attacking troops, and the necessary reserves were not provided. Despite the courage displayed by the French soldiers, the sortie was beaten back at every point.---102

~^^98^^ On October 5, 1870, a demonstration of the workers' battalions of the National Guard was staged in front of the Town Hall in Paris under the leadership of Gustave Flourens to demand that the Government of National Defence should hold elections to the Commune, take steps to fortify the Republic and carry on a resolute fight against the invader. The government rejected these demands and banned National Guard assemblies without an order and armed demonstrations.

On the October 31, 1870 uprising see Note 57.---103

~^^99^^ A reference to the introduction of new electoral qualifications under the May 31, 1850 law, passed by the Legislative Assembly of the French Republic on a motion by the Party of Order headed by Thiers, which had been terrified by the successes of the Democrats and the Socialists at the by-elections to the Legislative Assembly in March and April 1850. The new electoral law was aimed against the urban and rural workers and peasant poor, and introduced a threeyear residential qualification; only persons who paid a personal^ tax were allowed to take part; as a result, the number of persons entitled to vote was reduced by almost three million.

Soon after, the Assembly increased that year's salary paid from the treasury to the President of the Republic, Louis Bonaparte, from 600,000 to three million francs.---107

~^^100^^ The attempts by Normandy millowners to reduce the wages of textile workers, so as to be able to compete with British manufacturers, brought on a big strike at Sotteville-les-Rouen in late 1868 and early

1869. In response to the strikers' request for support, the International's General Council organised the collection of funds through trade unions in London and France. The strike was defeated, but it

helped to promote working-class unity and organisation in Normandy's textile industry and led to the emergence of trade unions in Rouen, Elboeuf, Darn6tal and other towns, and also consolidated the fraternal alliance between British and French workers.---108

~^^101^^ Le Rappel---a Left-wing republican daily founded by Victor Hugo and Henri Rochefort and published from 1869 to 1928. It sharply criticised the Second Empire and came out in support of the Paris Commune.---108

~^^102^^ A reference to the revolutionary action on May 12, 1839, by the secret Society of the Seasons, headed by Blanqui and Barbes. Without popular support, this action was in the nature of a plot and was put down by the army and the National Guard.---109

~^^103^^ This.is a slip of the pen: Dufaure became Minister of the Interior, and Vivien, Minister of Public Works in the Cavaignac Government on October 13, 1848. On June 2, 1849, Dufaure became Minister in the Cabinet of Odilon Barrot.---109

~^^104^^ A reference to the Rue de Poitiers Committee---the governing body of the so-called Party of Order (see Note 47). The Committee was dominated by the Orleanists headed by Thiers.---110

~^^105^^ In speaking of the "Union liberate" of 1847, Marx has in mind a group of "Progressive Conservatives" in the French Chamber of Deputies which took shape after the 1846 elections. Among their leaders were the Orleanists Girardin, Tocqueville and Dufaure. The Progressive Conservatives demanded of the Guizot government a number of economic reforms in the interests of the big industrial bourgeoisie, and some extension of suffrage so as to consolidate the July Monarchy. In their attacks against Guizot, they concentrated on exposing the scandalous activity of his ministers.

The Union liberate---a coalition of bourgeois Republicans, Orleanists and a section of Legitimists, which was formed on the basis of their common opposition to the Second Empire during the elections to the Legislative Corps in 1863. An attempt to revive the Union liberale during the 1869 electoral campaign failed because of differences between the parties of the 1863 coalition. In 1869, moderate bourgeois Republicans (among them Jules Favre and Jules Simon) favoured an alliance with the monarchists and supported the candidature of Orleanist Dufaure, who was, however, not returned.---110

~^^106^^ That is, by action in the spirit of the Bonapartist coup d'etat of December 2, 1851.---113

~^^107^^ La commission des quinze (the Commission of Fifteen) was appointed by the National Assembly on March 20, 1871, to help the Thiers government fight revolutionary Paris. On it were mainly monarchists and bourgeois Republicans supporting Thiers. The commission appealed to the provinces to form volunteer units to fight the Commune, but this met with no support. After the defeat of the Commune, the commission ceased to function.

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For the Rurals see Note 50.---114

~^^108^^ In The Civil War in France, Marx apparently intended to give examples of monarchist machinations in the Versailles National Assembly. His extracts from the press of the period contain reports about the intrigues of members of the House of Orleans, the Due d'Aumale and his brother Prince Joinville at Versailles, rumours concerning a merger of the Bourbon and the Orleans lines and plans to install the Due d'Aumale on the French throne.---116

~^^109^^ Chouannerie---a revolt by the Chouans; see Note 79.

Vendeans---another name for the Chouans.---118

``° "Municipals" or the Municipal Guard (from 1871---the Republican Guard)---a para-military foot and mounted police in Paris, set up in 1830 by the government of the July Monarchy to fight the revolutionary movement; in 1871, the shock brigade of the counter-- revolutionary Versailles army.---118, 187

~^^111^^ In 1840, as a result of the London Convention, concluded by Russia, Britain, Austria, Prussia and Turkey, and providing for aid to the Turkish Sultan against Egypt's Pasha Mohammed-Ali (see Note 48), France, which was supporting Mohammed-Ali, faced isolation in foreign affairs and the threat of an anti-French coalition of the European Powers. At the price of abandoning support for MohammedAli, which was a major defeat for French policy in the Middle East, the French Government secured France's participation in the London Convention of 1841 on the closure of the Black Sea Straits for foreign warships in peacetime. The convention was signed on July 13, 1841, by Russia, Britain, France, Austria and Prussia, on the one hand, and Turkey, on the other.

In the third English edition of The Civil War in France, Marx cites the first of these London conventions (that of 1840) as an example of France's diplomatic defeat.---119

~^^112^^ La Situation---a Bonapartist daily published in London in French from September 1870 to August 2, 1871; in opposition to the Government of National Defence and that of Thiers.---120

~^^113^^ Marx mentions here the diplomatic documents fixing the situation in Europe which took shape after the Napoleonic wars.

The Vienna Treaties---treaties concluded in Vienna in May and June 1815, between the belligerents in the Napoleonic wars, as a result of the deliberations of the Vienna Congress (1814-15). They reshaped the map of Europe for the purpose of restoring Legitimist monarchies, contrary to the interests of the unity and independence of nations.

After the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire in 1814 and Napoleon's second overthrow in 1815 after his short-lived comeback, France was forced to sign two peace treaties with members of the sixth and seventh anti-French coalitions---Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia.

Under the Paris Peace Treaty of May 30, 1814, France lost almost all the territories she had conquered under the Republic and the Empire, and was reduced to the boundaries of January 1, 1792, with the exception of some small territories along her northern, eastern and south-eastern borders.

Under the Paris Peace Treaty of November 20, 1815, France lost the strategically important points along her northern, eastern and south-eastern borders, which the 1814 Paris Treaty had left her. In order to prop up the regime of the restored Bourbon monarchy, the frontier- fortresses in North-Eastern France were manned by a 150,000-strong allied army, which remained there until the end of 1818.---124

~^^114^^ A reference to the hollow bourgeois reforms in Prussia in 1807-11, following her defeat in the 1806 war against Napoleonic France, which revealed the socio-political system of the feudal Prussian state as being quite rotten. The peasants were released from personal bondage, but had to perform all the old feudal services, whose redemption was allowed only with the consent of the lord; limited local self-government was introduced in Prussia, and the army and central administrative bodies were re-organised.---125

~^^115^^ The heroic defence of Sevastopol, the capture of the Turkish fortress of Kars by the Russian army, and allied reverses on the Baltic enabled Russian diplomats at the Paris Peace Congress (February and March 1856) to use the contradictions between Britain, Austria and France to secure much milder terms for the peace that followed upon the Crimean War, which Russia lost: the territorial concessions to Turkey were substantially reduced, and Russia retained her possessions in the Caucasus and the right to have her fleet and the fortresses in the Azov Sea. The Congress adopted a decision to end the Austrian occupation of Moldavia and Valachia, and this made Austria's expansion in the Balkans very much more difficult.

Speaking of the reforms carried out by the tsarist government after Russia's defeat in the Crimean War, Marx has in mind the 1861 reform which abolished serfdom in Russia, reforms in local government (the Zemstvo reform of 1864 and the reform of municipal administration in 1870), introduction of new judicial rules in 1864, and the reform of the financial system. These all constituted a step on Russia's way to becoming a bourgeois monarchy.---125

~^^116^^ The Great Unpaid---an ironical name for magistrates in Britain who were not paid for their services.---130

~^^117^^ Le Mot d'Ordre---a Left-wing Republican daily published in Paris from February 3, 1871, under the editorship of Henri Rochefort. It was suspended on March 11 by order of the governor of Paris, was resumed under the Paris Commune and continued until May 20, 1871. It sharply attacked the Versailles government and the monarchist majority of the National Assembly, but did not side with the Commune completely, being opposed to the measures designed to suppress the counter-revolutionary elements in Paris.

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NOTES

La Liberte---a conservative evening newspaper, an organ of the big bourgeoisie, published in Paris from 1865 to 1944.---130, 143, 144, 282

~^^118^^ The New York Daily Tribune---a newspaper published from 1841 to 1924. Until the mid-1850s, it was an organ of the Left wing of the American Whigs, and then an organ of the Republican Party. From August 1851 to March 1862, it carried contributions from Marx. Engels wrote many articles for the paper at Marx's request. During the period of reaction in Europe, Marx and Engels made wide use of the newspaper---then progressive and widely read---to expose the evils of capitalist society on the strength of concrete facts. During the Civil War in the United States (see Note 36), Marx stopped contributing to the paper, one of the main reasons being the increase on its editorial staff of those who wanted to do a deal with the slaveowners and the paper's abandonment of its progressive stand. Subsequently, the paper continued to move farther to the Right.---131

~^^119^^ Ligue de I'Union republicaine pour les droits de Paris---a bourgeois organisation which emerged in Paris in early April 1871. It tried to help stop the civil war, expecting an agreement between Versailles and Paris on the basis of recognition of the Republic and the municipal liberties of Paris to result in a peaceful elimination of the Commune.

The manifestation of the freemasons---a procession of Paris freemasons on April 29, 1871 which marched to the city fortifications for the purpose of getting Versailles to stop its military operations. On April 26 and 29, the Commune arranged a meeting with the freemasons at the Town Hall to win the sympathies of the republican petty and middle bourgeoisie, whose views the freemasons expressed. At these meetings, the freemasons, whose proposals for the armistice were rejected by Thiers, announced their support for the Commune. The above-mentioned manifestation, in which a delegation of the Commune took part, was held after the April 29 meeting.---132, 213

120 A reference to the Moniteur des communes, a French government paper published at Versailles during the Paris Commune as an evening supplement for the Journal Officiel of the Thiers Government. ---133, 137, 169

~^^121^^ A reference to the French republican newspaper, La Defense republicaine, published in Limoges in 1871.---133

~^^122^^ Le Vengeur---a Left-wing republican daily, published in Paris from February 3, 1871; closed down on March 11 by order of the governor of Paris; resumed publication under the Paris Commune and continued until May 24, 1871. The newspaper supported the Commune, published its official documents and reported its official meetings.---134, 144

~^^123^^ A reference to the "law of suspects" passed by the Legislative Corps on February 19, 1858, which gave the government and the emperor unlimited powers to transport to various parts of France

NOTES

319

and Algeria or to exile from French territory all persons suspected of taking a hostile attitude to the regime of the Second Empire. ---134

~^^124^^ An address from the Lyons municipal council, handed to the National Assembly by deputy Greppo, demanded an end to the civil war and reconciliation between Versailles and Paris. It also proposed a strict demarcation of functions between the National Assembly and the Paris Commune, and a limitation of the Commune's activity to municipal matters.---134

~^^125^^ A reference to the municipal councils elected in 1865 under the Empire with the authorities exerting strong pressure.---134

~^^126^^ Ligue des Villes (full name: Ligue patriotique des villes republicaines)---an organisation which bourgeois Republicans who feared a restoration of the monarchy after the suppression of the Paris Commune tried to set up in April-May 1871. Its provisional committee, with the active participation of the Ligue de I'Union republicaine pour les droits de Paris (see Note 119), set a city municipal congress at Bordeaux for May 9, 1871, to help stop the civil war and consolidate the Republic, and also to give the league an organisational framework. The congress was banned by the Versailles government, and the provisional committee was soon wound up.

The newspaper Le Rappel on May 6, 1871, published the programme of the proposed congress of the League of the Cities.---135

~^^127^^ Revolutionary action by workers was staged in many cities of France, following the news of the disaster at Sedan and the revolution of September 4, 1870, in Paris. In some of them---Lyons, Marseilles and Toulouse---popular organs of power---communes---were set up, but these were later fiercely crushed by the Government of National Defence. The short-lived provincial communes, however, succeeded in putting through a number of important revolutionary measures especially in Lyons (replacement of the police and bureaucratic apparatus, release of political prisoners, introduction of secular education, imposition of taxes on big property owners, free return of pawned things involving small pledges, etc.).---145, 201

~^^128^^ On November 3, 1870, the Government of National Defence tried to reinforce its positions, which had been shaken by the revolutionary events of October 31, 1870, by staging a plebiscite in Paris on support for the government. Although a considerable section of the population voted against the government's policy, it managed, because of a virtual state of siege, to obtain a majority, by putting pressure on the population and carrying on a demagogic propaganda campaign.---145

~^^129^^ In this sentence Marx gives the content of an article in the Journal Officiel de la Republique Franfaise reflecting tke stand of the Central Committee of the National Guard on the payment of the indemnity.---157

~^^130^^ The additional 45 centimes tax per franc of direct taxes laid by

320

NOTES

321

the Provisional Government of the Second Republic on March 16, 1848, with the full burden of it falling on the peasantry. This aroused great discontent, which the big landowners and the Roman Catholic clergy used in a campaign against the democrats and workers of Paris so as to turn the peasantry into a reserve of the counter-- revolution.---158

~^^131^^ An apparent reference to the Alliance republicaine des Departements (see Note 71).---161

132 A reference to the period of the Second Republic in France which ended in a coup on December 2, 1851 (see Note 10) and the proclamation of Napoleon III as emperor the following year.---166

~^^133^^ A reference to the Paris Societe proletaires positivistes, whose programme contained a number of principles in the spirit of Auguste Comte, a bourgeois philosopher. In early 1870, in view of the working-class make-up of the society, the General Council admitted it to the International as a section; at the same time, its programme was sharply criticised.---164

~^^134^^ Phalanstere---palaces envisaged by the French Utopian socialist, Charles Fourier, in which members of producer and consumer associations were to live in an ideal socialist society.

Icarie---a fantastic communist country depicted in a social and philosophical novel by fitienne Cabet, a Utopian socialist, Voyage en Icarie.---165

~^^135^^ This is a quotation from the manifesto, "To the French People", issued by the Paris Commune on April 19, 1871, and published in the newspaper Journal Officiel de la Republique Frangaise No. 110, April 20, 1871.---169

~^^136^^ A reference to the invasion of France in 1814 and 1815 by troops of the sixth and seventh anti-French coalitions headed by Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia for the purpose of overthrowing the regime of Napoleon I's Empire and restoring the Legitimist Bourbon monarchy.---170, 192

~^^137^^ La Verite---a Republican bourgeois-radical daily, published in Paris from October 1870 to September 3, 1871. Initially it supported the Commune, and later opposed its social measures.---172, 262

~^^138^^ L''Association generate des Defenseurs de la Republique---a bourgeois-democratic organisation set up in Paris in February 1871 for the purpose of fighting for a Republic. It supported the Commune and censured the Versailles government's policy.---174

~^^139^^ The Constitution of 1793---a. constitution of the French Republic, adopted by the Convent during the revolutionary dictatorship of the Jacobins at the time of the French bourgeois revolution, and the most democratic of the bourgeois constitutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.---177

MO A reference to the influence exerted on the development of international trade by the discovery of gold in California and Australia in the mid-19th century.---205

~^^141^^ An ironic hint at the well-known saying, ascribed to the French King Louis XIV, which has become the motto of absolutism: "I am the state."---208

^1/12 The Frankfort Peace Treaty, concluded on May 10, 1871, defined the final terms of the peace between France and Germany, confirming the cession to Germany of Alsace and Eastern Lorraine, as provided for by the .provisional peace treaty of February 26, 1871 (see Note 13). The Frankfort Treaty contained much more onerous terms for French territory by the German troops, the price of Bismarck's help to the Versailles government in putting down the Commune. Because the Frankfort Peace Treaty robbed France, it made inevitable a future armed clash between France and Germany.---213, 288, 289

~^^143^^ An apparent reference to the law on municipal organisation of 1831, which sharply curtailed the powers of the municipal councils, and also the law on municipal organisation of 1855, which prohibited the municipal councils from entering into relations with each other.

About the plan for convening an assembly of municipal delegates at Bordeaux see Note 126.---214, 237

~^^144^^ Marx's speech on the Government of National Defence, which he delivered in the General Council on January 17, 1871, was aimed against the praise which Odger gave to the government and its Foreign Minister, Jules Favre, at a meeting in St. James's Hall in London on January 10. Favre was expected in London in connection with the forthcoming international conference to revise the articles of the 1856 Paris Treaty on neutralising the Black Sea. Odger motioned a resolution eulogising the Government of National Defence, which clashed with the class assessment given to that government in the General Council's second address on the FrancoPrussian War. In connection with Marx's criticism of Odger's speech, the General Council discussed the question of the need for members of the International to take a principled stand at meetings and rallies.---225

~^^145^^ A reference to the mass demonstration organised by revolutionary clubs in Paris on May 15, 1848, in which 150,000 people, mainly workers, took part. They walked to the Constituent Assembly, which that day was to discuss the Polish question, penetrated into the hall and demanded the extension of military aid to Poland in her struggle for independence, and resolute measures to combat unemployment and poverty. When these demands were rejected, the demonstrators declared the Constituent Assembly dissolved and set up a revolutionary government. The demonstration was dispersed by troops and bourgeois detachments of the National Guard.---225

KG A reference to the Executive Committee---the government of the French Republic---set up by the Constituent Assembly on May 10, 1848, in place of the Provisional Government which had resigned. It continued in office until June 24, 1848, when Cavaignac established his dictatorship.---226

21-2648

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~^^147^^ A reference to the reactionary press laws passed by the Constituent Assembly on August 9 and 11, 1848. These laid down large cash deposits, which made inevitable the closure of progressive and working-class periodicals. They also provided for strict penalties ( imprisonment and fines) for statements against the government, the existing regime and private property.---226

~^^148^^ This is the first in a series of speeches and reports by Marx and Engels on the proletarian revolution in Paris on March 18, 1871, the heroic struggle of the Communards and the activity of the Paris Commune, which they made at regular intervals to the General Council. The minutes of the General Council's meeting containing a record of Engels's speech was first erroneously dated March 14, and this was corrected to March 21 by Marx, when he read the minutes.---227

~^^149^^ A reference to the extremely reactionary make-up of the National Assembly elected on February 8, which opened at Bordeaux on February 12, 1871 (see Note 50).---227

~^^150^^ Marx sent a similar letter to The Daily News (see Note 90), which carried it on April 6, 1871.---229

~^^151^^ Le Gaulois---a conservative-monarchist daily, an organ of the big bourgeoisie and aristocracy, published in Paris from 1867 to 1929.---229

~^^152^^ Le Figaro---a conservative French newspaper published in Paris since 1826. It was connected with the government of the Second Empire.

Paris-Journal---a reactionary daily, connected with the police, published in Paris from 1868 to 1874. Supported the policy of the Second Empire and after its collapse the Government of National Defence and the Thiers government. It spread foul slander about the International and the Paris Commune and urged the use of violence against the Communards.---229, 242, 247, 282

153 A reference to the March 26, 1871, elections to the Commune. Following the victory of the popular uprising in Paris, from March 18 to March 28, 1871, power was in the hands of the Central Committee of the National Guard, which then handed its powers over to the Commune.---231

~^^154^^ This remark refers to Favre's speech in the National Assembly on April 10, 1871, in which he tried to deny the charges that the Versailles government had in fact concluded an alliance with Bismarck to suppress the Paris Commune. He said hypocritically that the government had refused Bismarck's proffered aid. The traitorous deal of the French counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie with the foreign enemy for the suppression of the working-class movement was exposed by Marx and Engels in a number of their speeches and articles, and chiefly in Marx's The Civil War in France.---231

~^^155^^ Serraillier was elected to the Commune at the by-election on April 16, 1871, from the second district of Paris. Another candidate was

Eugene Dupont, a member of the General Council, but he did not stand because he was unable to come from Britain. In this election, Jean M. A. Dupont was elected to the Commune from the 17th district.---233

~^^156^^ At the request of the General Council, Marx wrote, about April 26, a letter to Leo Frankel in Paris (see pp. 286-87) exposing the slanders being spread about Serraillier by the French petty-bourgeois radical Felix Pyat---233

~^^157^^ Tolain, who was elected deputy to the National Assembly in February 1871 as a representative of the Paris workers, remained in the Versailles Assembly even after the Paris Commune was proclaimed, despite the fact that Versailles was fighting against the revolution in Paris, and refused to fulfil the Commune's demand that workers' deputies break with that reactionary body. Tolain's betrayal meant that the Right-wing Proudhonists had openly switched to the counterrevolutionary side. The Federal Council of the Paris sections of the International then passed a resolution expelling Tolain from the International Working Men's Association as a traitor to the workingclass cause, and published it in La Revolution politique et sociale, organ of one of the Paris sections of the International, on April 16, 1871.

Even before receiving the resolution, the General Council, acting on the strength of reports in the London press about Tolain's switch to the bourgeoisie's side, at its meeting on April 18 had a preliminary discussion of Tolain's treasonable behaviour and decided that it should be publicly stigmatised. Having received the resolution on April 25, the General Council resumed its examination of Tolain's case and adopted a resolution expelling him from the International.---235

158 A reference to the Standing Committee or Sub-Committee of the General Council of the International, which developed from a commission set up in the early period of the International Working Men's Association in 1864 to draft its programme and rules. The Standing Committee consisted of corresponding secretaries for various countries, the General Secretary of the General Council, and a treasurer. The Committee, which was not provided for by the Rules, was in the nature of an executive body. Under Marx's direction it fulfilled a wide range of duties in the day-to-day guidance of the International's activity and the framing of its documents which were then submitted to the General Council.---236

159 Marx's speech in the General Council on May 23, 1871, started the discussion on exposure of the Versailles government and protest against the savage massacre of the Communards which Thiers was preparing. In his speech on this question (of which there is a very brief record in the minutes), Engels noted the treachery of Thiers, who had promised to spare members of the Paris Commune. At this meeting, the General Council decided to set up a commission to look into the measures that could be taken in Britain to stop the barbarous acts of the Versailles government.---238

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325

~^^160^^ The Fenian Brotherhood---the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood---a secret organisation which arose in the late 1850s among Irish immigrants in America and then in Ireland herself. Its members fought for the independence of Ireland and establishment of an Irish Republic. The organisation gave objective expression to the interests of the Irish peasantry and, in social terms, came mainly from the urban petty bourgeoisie and middle-class intellectuals. Marx and Engels repeatedly stressed the weak sides of the Fenian movement and criticised their conspiratorial tactics and sectarian and bourgeoisnationalistic mistakes, but highly appreciated their revolutionary character and tried to direct the movement towards mass action and joint efforts with the English working class.

Carbonari---members of a secret conspiratorial society active in Italy in the first third of the 19th century and in France---in the 1820s.

Marianne---the name of a secret republican society in France which emerged in 1850; under the Second Empire its aim was to fight against Napoleon.---240

~^^101^^ The Contemporary Review---an English bourgeois-liberal monthly published in London since 1866. The article by Mazzini mentioned by Marx appeared in the June issue for 1871.---241

166 -phis letter was written, on Marx's proposal, by Engels in connection with a reprint in the English newspapers of reports from the reactionary French press about the so-called manifestoes of the International (which had been fabricated by the French police). Marx's proposal to send a denial to the press was approved by the General Council on'June 20, 1871. However, neither of the newspapers published the letter.

The Examiner---a bourgeois-liberal weekly published in London from 1808 to 1881.---247, 253

~^^167^^ This letter was written by Marx over the publication in The Daily News on June 26, 1871, of letters from the English Bishop Llewellyn Davies, trade-unionist Benjamin Lucraft and George Holyoake, who followed the General Council's statement of June 21 with more slanderous attacks on the Address The Civil War in France. In his letter, Lucraft flatly declared his disagreement with the propositions set out in The Civil War in France and announced his withdrawal from the General Council. Because the newspaper refused to print the second half of Marx's letter, which exposed the British bourgeois press, the letter was sent to The Eastern Post, where it appeared on July 1, 1871, together with a report on the General Council's meeting on June 27, 1871, when Marx spoke of the arbitrary treatment of his letter to The Daily News. An extract from the letter was also carried in The Pall Mall Gazette on June 27, 1871.---248

168 A reference to the articles and documents exposing Palmerston's foreign policy which were published in 1830s and the 1840s by David Urquhart, an English conservative publicist and political figure; they appeared in his collection of diplomatic documents, The Portfolio, and also in various periodicals. Marx, who carried on a tireless campaign to expose the diplomacy of the ruling classes, made use, along with other sources, of the documents published by Urquhart in his series of accusatory articles, Lord Palmerston, written in 1853. At the same time, Marx sharply criticised Urquhart's own reactionary views.---249

~^^169^^ This statement by the General Council, written by Engels in connection with the letters of Holyoake and Lucraft, published in The Daily News on June 26, 1871, was approved by the General Council on June 27, 1871. The General Council unanimously stigmatised the desertion of trade-unionists Lucraft and Odger, who had disavowed the General Council's Address, The Civil War in France, and in response to their announcement that they were resigning from the General Council adopted a decision, which in fact placed them outside the ranks of the International.---250

~^^170^^ Engels's note was published in the newspaper Der Volksstaat without any caption. It has been supplied by the Institute of Marxism-- Leninism under the C.P.S.U. Central Committee.---252

~^^171^^ The Daily Telegraph---a Liberal, and from the 1880s Conservative, English newspaper. Published under that title in London from 1855 to 1937, and since 1937, after its merger with The Morning Post, under the title of The Daily Telegraph and Morning Post.---252, 256

162 'phis statement was written by Marx after the paper carried an editorial on June 19, containing slanderous attacks against the Paris Commune and the International and extolling the ``merits'' of Louis Bonaparte in putting down the revolutionary working-class movement.

The Times refused to publish the statement. Some editorial changes were made by Engels in Marx's rough draft of this document.---242

~^^163^^ The post of permanent President of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association was abolished by the Council decision of September 24, 1867.---243

^1(i/* The final paragraph of Marx's rough draft of the letter contained some editorial changes made by Engels. The Standard did not publish the letter.

The Standard---a conservative newspaper founded in London in

1827.---244, 252

~^^165^^ This statement by the General Council was drawn up by Engels in connection with a letter from the English reformist George Holyoake which appeared in The Daily News on June 20, 1871. Holyoake tried to cast a slur on the Address The Civil War in France, so as to reduce its influence on the workers of Britain, insisting that its authors were not connected with the British working-class movement. Holyoake paid tribute to the British trade-unionist leaders, with Odger and Lucraft in mind, and alleged that their names had been appended to the Address illegally. This was, in fact, egging them on to come out against the Address. In accordance with Marx's wishes, this statement on behalf of the General Council said that it was Marx who had written The Civil War in France. The statement was approved by the General Council on June 20, 1871.---245

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327

~^^172^^ The Pall Mall Gazette---z London daily published from 1865 to 1920, with a conservative bias in the 1860s and 1870s. In 1870 and 1871, it published some works by Marx and Engels. But at the end of June 1871, the newspaper joined the bourgeois press campaign against the International and the Paris Commune, and this made Marx and Engels stop their contributions.---252

~^^173^^ A reference to the articles and ``documents'' forged by the Paris police press to slander the Paris Commune and the International, like the forgeries used in the fight against the revolutionary movement by the Prussian police headed by Stieber, a leading organiser of the provocative Cologne trial of the members of the Communist League (1852).---252

^17/1 A record of the interview was made by R. Landor, London correspondent of the New York newspaper the World, which the paper published on ]uly 18, 1871, and which was reprinted in Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly on August 12, 1871. At the end of the article Landor says that he made a record of his interview from memory.---254

~^^175^^ A reference to the curious Anglo-German dialect used by American writer Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903) in his humorous Hans Breitmann's Ballads.---254

~^^176^^ The General Council's address to the New York Central Committee of the sections of the I.W.M.A., "Mr. Washburne, the American Ambassador in Paris", written by Marx, made use of a letter from Robert Reid, Paris correspondent of The Daily Telegraph (Section I) and a report from Serraillier, a member of the Paris Commune and the General Council (Section II). Upon his return from Paris to England, Reid contacted Marx and the General Council to join in their statements in defence of the Paris Commune, for which Reid developed a sympathy during his stay in Paris. Having discussed on July 7 the question of Washburne's subversive activity against the Commune, the Standing Committee of the General Council adopted the address read out by Marx. On July 11, the address was unanimously adopted by the General Council and first published in London as a separate leaflet. The New York Central Committee of the sections of the International secured its publication in the widely read New York bourgeois newspaper The Sun on August 1, 1871. This contained a preface explaining the real meaning of the Commune and describing Washburne as representative of a big family of parasites feeding on society. The New York Committee urged the workers not to believe the reports of the corrupt bourgeois press which came from the enemies of the working class.

During the summer and autumn of 1871, the address was also repeatedly published in working-class newspapers in Europe and the U.S.A. To prevent Washburne's exposure, the Thiers government had its agents to take steps to prevent the publication of this address in France.---256

~^^177^^ The New York Herald---a daily, organ of the Republican Party, published in New York from 1835 to 1924.---256

~^^178^^ A reference to Washburne's actual refusal to exercise an influence on the Thiers government and to ind-uce it to accept the Paris Commune's proposal t6 exchange Archbishop Darboy, who had been arrested among other hostages by the Commune to counter the shooting of Communards, for Blanqui, whom the Versailles authorities were keeping in prison. Following the Archbishop's execution, Washburne wrote articles and gave lectures slandering the Paris Commune on the strength of this measure, which the Commune had been forced to take to stop the terrorism of the Versailles authorities.---258

~^^179^^ This was proceeded by a covering letter written by Marx, which is not published here. The Times did not print either of the documents.---260

180 A reference to the official organ of the French Government.---260

~^^181^^ The London Conference of the First International was held from September 17 to 23, 1871, in an atmosphere of severe reprisals against members of the I.W.M.A. following the defeat of the Paris Commune. It was not a big conference and met behind closed doors. It marked an important stage in the struggle carried on by Marx and Engels to set up a proletarian party. It adopted a resolution, "Political Action of the Working Class", formulating the need for an independent proletarian party as a key principle of the international working-class movement. Several of its other resolutions set out the most important tactical and organisational principles of the proletarian party and struck out at sectarianism and reformism. The key-note of the conference was implacable struggle by Marx, Engels and their supporters against Bakuninism. It played an important part in the triumph of proletarian party principles over anarchist opportunism. ---264

182 This ;_s _a short report given by Marx, as the General Council's Corresponding Secretary for Germany.---265

~^^183^^ This speech was delivered by Marx at a special meeting to mark the seventh anniversary of the International. It was attended by members of the General Council, participants in the Paris Commune and other associates of Marx and Engels.---266

~^^184^^ "Fictitious Splits in the International"---a private circular of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association written by Marx and Engels from mid- January to early March 1872. It marks the completion of an important stage in their struggle against the Bakuninists, who were trying to split the International and take over its leadership. It exposes before the proletariat of all countries the anarchists' true aims, their ties with men hostile to the working class, and the activity of Bakunin's Alliance of Socialist Democracy (see Note 94) as a sect inimical to the working-class movement.---267

~^^185^^ From June 1871, in view of the arrival in London of Communards who fled from the prosecution of the Versailles government, the General Council was engaged in the collection and distribution ot

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funds and the placement of Commune refugees. This campaign was organised by Marx. In July, the General Council set up a special committee to aid the refugees, on which, among other members of the Council, were Marx and Engels.---268

~^^186^^ The nine-hour working day was one of the main demands of the English workers from the end of the 1850s. A big strike was staged by building workers and engineers in Newcastle in May 1871, and was led by the Nine Hours' League. The strike became highly acute, because the League got non-unionised workers to take part in it and asked the General Council of the International to help prevent the importation of strike-breakers to Britain. In this connection, the General Council sent two of its members to the continent to explain to the workers the importance of the struggle in Newcastle. Thanks to the vigorous action of the International, the importation of strikebreakers was frustrated and in October 1871 the strike ended in a victory for the workers.---268

~^^187^^ On February 20, 1872, the General Council decided to stage a mass meeting in London to mark the first anniversary of the Paris Commune. A special commission was appointed, with Marx as one of the speakers. The public meeting was not held, however, because the owner of the premises refused the use of the hall. Nevertheless, members of the International and former Communards met on March 18 to mark the anniversary of the first proletarian revolution. On a motion by Communards Theisz and Camelinat and a member of the General Council, Milner, the meeting adopted the three resolutions published here. The text of these, apart from newspaper publications, is also extant in a manuscript copied by Marx's daughter, Jenny, and corrected by the author.---269

~^^188^^ The German edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, with a preface by Marx and Engels and with small corrections in the text, was issued on the initiative of Der Volksstaat, Central Organ of the German Social-Democratic Workers' Party. Like the subsequent German editions of 1883 and 1890, the 1872 edition was entitled The Communist Manifesto.---270

~^^189^^ On March 1, 1881, Emperor Alexander II was assassinated in St. Petersburg under a sentence passed on him by the Executive Committee of the secret revolutionary organisation Narodnaya Volya (People's Will).---271

~^^190^^ A reference to the Anti-Socialist Law (see Note 5), adopted in 1878. In the spring of 1880 it was extended for another five years.---271

~^^191^^ This letter was written by Engels in response to a request from French Socialists for a public expression of solidarity with them over the 15th anniversary of the Paris Commune.---273

~^^192^^ Until 1885, France had a "little district" electoral system, with one deputy elected to the Chamber from each district. In June 1885, on the initiative of moderate bourgeois Republicans, a system of elections by departmental roll was used. This system, which remained in force until 1889, amalgamated the small districts into larger ones, each of

which coincided with a department. In this, the voting was by electoral roll, on which were candidates from various parties, with the proviso, however, that voters cast their ballots for the total number of candidates to be elected from the given department, one deputy being elected from 70,000 population. A deputy was deemed elected in the first round if he received an absolute majority of all the votes cast. In the second round, a simple majority ensured election.---274

~^^103^^ July 14, 1789---the day the Bastille was taken by the people of Paris, and the start of the French bourgeois revolution of the end of the 18th century.

September 22, 1792---the first day of the French Republic proclaimed on September 21, 1792. It was the first in the revolutionary calendar adopted in 1793.---275

~^^104^^ The Workers' Party of France---the. first French Marxist party founded in 1879 with Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue at its head. In the 1880s and the first half of the 1890s, the Party's activity was steadily influenced by Marx and Engels, and in 1880 Marx wrote the preamble to the Party programme.

The Party separated from the Possibilists (see Note 17) and strengthened its influence on the French proletariat, setting up its base in the industrial areas. It spread Marxist ideas, opposed reformism and conciliation and worked for the unity of the international working-class movement and against the colonial policy of the French bourgeoisie. But in the 1890s the Party made various sectarian and dogmatic mistakes. In 1900, it joined other revolutionary groupings in founding the Revolutionary Socialist Alliance, which was subsequently transformed into the Socialist Party of France.---277

~^^195^^ On March 14, 1871, the reactionary French Paris-Journal carried an article, "Le Grand Chef de 1`Internationale'', alleging that it had a letter from Marx to Serraillier revealing contradictions between the French and German members of the International. It published the forged letter on March 19. These slanders were caught up by the London press, including The Times. At a meeting of the General Council on March 21, 1871, and in a letter to The Times, specially written at his request by Engels, Marx exposed the Paris-Journal for trying to split the French and German members of the International. In addition, at Marx's request, the letter exposing Paris-Journal's provocative inventions was written by Serraillier (Marx appended to this letter a clipping of the text of the letter dated March 16, 1871, and published in Courrier de I'Europe).

The meeting of the General Council on March 21, 1871, exposed another provocative invention by the French reactionary press alleging expulsion of persons of German nationality from the Paris sections of the International. Marx sent these documents to Lafargue in the hope that they would be read by the Paris members of the International.

Courrier de I'Europe---zn Orleanist newspaper published in London from 1840 to 1899.---281

330

NOTES

331

~^^196^^ A reference to the "Ligue anti-prussienne", set up in Paris in the first half of March 1871.

Jockey Club---an aristocratic club in Paris founded in 1833.

---282

~^^197^^ A meeting of Germans belonging to the propertied classes was held in Zurich in March 1871 to celebrate Germany's victory in the FrancoPrussian War. At the meeting, there was a clash between a group of French officers interned in Switzerland and the Germans. The reactionary press blew up a provocative campaign in order to undermine the international ties between the workers of various countries and accused the International of staging these events. The Swiss section of the International issued a special statement exposing the slander of the bourgeois press. Several trade unions in Zurich likewise issued statements saying that members of the International had nothing to do with the clash.---282

~^^198^^ Courrier de Lyon---a bourgeois-republican weekly published from 1834 to 1939.

Courrier de la Gironde---a reactionary paper published at Bordeaux from 1792.---282

199 A reference to a demonstration by the Paris National Guard in protest against the attack by French troops on the Roman Republic (see p. 64 and Note 46).---282, 285

~^^200^^ This rough draft was written by Marx when the General Council, on April 25, 1871, asked him to reply to the slanderous inventions of Pyat and Vesinier concerning Serraillier and Dupont, French members of the General Council, in connection with their election to the Paris Commune. In particular, Pyat tried to slander Serraillier, the General Council's representative in Paris, who was elected a member of the Commune in a by-election in April 1871 and was appointed to the Labour and Exchange Commission headed by Frankel. In an effort to reduce Serraillier's influence in the Commune, Pyat spread false rumours denigrating Serraillier's political and moral reputation. After making a study of the relevant material, the Labour and Exchange Commission completely rejected these slanders.---286

~^^201^^ At the municipal elections at Bordeaux in April 1871, which were won by the democratic forces, four delegates of the International's section were elected. Their programme was similar to that of the Paris Commune.---287

~^^202^^ A reference to Bebel's speech in the German Reichstag on May 25, 1871, in which he strongly defended the Communards against the slander and attacks of bourgeois-Junker deputies. He ended by saying that the "rallying cry of the Paris proletariat---'War on the palaces, peace to the huts, death to privation and idleness!'---would become the rallying cry of the whole European proletariat".---290

~^^203^^ This appeal was written by Marx and sent to Sorge. The text is not extant.---290

^w'' A reference to the following acts by the reactionary governments of Europe against the International, which were intensified especially after the defeat of the Paris Commune:

On September 9, 1870, members of the Committee of the German Social-Democratic Workers' Party---Bracke, Bonhorst, Spier, Kiihn, Gralle---and also the printer Sievers were arrested in Germany for publishing, on September 5, 1870, a manifesto exposing Prussia's true aims in the war against France. In November 1871, after many months of imprisonment, the members of the Committee were put on trial on charges, trumped up by the police, of breaking the law on public order, and sentenced to imprisonment.

In July 1870, long prison sentences were handed down to Austrian Social-Democrats Oberwinder, Most, A. Scheu and others, whose revolutionary activity was qualified as treason.

On August 20, 1871, the police smashed the Naples section of the International.

In the spring and summer of 1871, the Spanish Government applied reprisals against the working-class organisations and sections of the International. In this connection, members of the Spanish Federal Council, Mora, Morago and Lorenzo, were forced to emigrate to Lisbon.---291

~^^205^^ In June 1871, a conflict arose between finishing workers in the textile mills of St. Gallen and the owners over the intolerable working conditions. The workers demanded shorter working hours and higher wages. The owners refused to see a delegation of the workers and dismissed members of the International. The strike that broke out was supported'by Swiss organisations of the International, and this enabled the workers to continue the strike until September 1871. It ended in a compromise when the authorities intervened. Although not all the demands of the workers were satisfied, the strike was of very great importance in consolidating proletarian solidarity and expanding the organisation of the International in St. Gallen.---291

~^^206^^ Kolnische Zeitung---a German daily published under that name in Cologne since 1802; an organ of the big Rhineland bourgeoisie and the National-Liberal Party. In the 1870s it was considered to be a mouthpiece of Bismarck's.---291

~^^207^^ In August 1874, Sorge left the General Council of the International, which under a decision of the Hague Congress was transferred to New York in 1872. Serge's official resignation followed in September 1874.---292

NAME INDEX

Affre, Denis Auguste (1793- 1848)---Archbishop of Paris (1840-48); shot " by government troops in the Paris insurrection of June 1848 while trying to persuade the insurgent workers to lay down their arms---95, 112, 197

Alexander II (1818-1881)---- Russian Emperor (1855-81)---44

Alexandra (1844-1925)---- daughter of Christian IX, King of Denmark; in 1863 married Edward, Prince of Wales, who in 1901 became English King, Edward VII---63, 196

Arnold, Georges (b. 1840)--- French architect; member of the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Paris Commune; after the suppression of the Commune was deported to New Caledonia--- 258

Assi, Adolphe Alphonse (1840- 1886)---French mechanic; active in the French working-class movement; member of the

Central Committee of the National Guard and the Paris Commune; after the suppression of the Commune was deported to New Caledonia--- 229, 243, 262

Aumale, Henri Eugene Philippe Louis d'Orleans, Due d'(1822- 1897)---son of the King of France, Louis Philippe; after the February 1848 revolution fled to England, deputy to the National Assembly of 1871---116

Aurelle de Paladines, Louis Jean Baptiste d'(1804-1877)---French general, Clerical, participant in the Franco-Prussian War; in March 1871 Commanderin-Chief of the Paris National Guard; deputy to the National Assembly of 1871---57, 59, 61, 106, 175, 177, 216, 227

Bakunin, Mikhail Alexandrovich (1814-1876)---Russian revolutionary and publicist, Na-

334

NAME INDEX

335

rodnik, an ideologist of anarchism; participant in the revolution of 1848-49 in Germany; within the First International behaved as a sworn enemy of Marxism; at the Hague Congress (1872) was expelled from the International for his schismatic activities---252, 293

Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, Jules (1805-1895)---French philosopher and statesman, moderate bourgeois Republican; deputy to the National Assembly of 1871; manager of Thiers's Office (1871-73), Foreign Minister (1880-81)---261

Bastelica, Andre (1845-1884)--- French printer; active in the French and Spanish workingclass movement; member of the First International; Bakuninist; took part in the revolutionary actions in Marseilles in October and November 1870; member of the General Council of the First International (1871)---291

Bebel, August (1840-1913)--- prominent figure in the German and international working-class

movement;

turner by trade; from 1867 President of the League of German Workers' Unions; member of the First International; deputy to the Reichstag (from 1867)j one of the founders and leaders of German Social-Democracy, fought against the Lassalleans; during the Franco-Prussian War adopted the stand of proletarian internationalism, came out in defence of the Paris Commune; friend and associate of Marx and Engels; active in the Second International. In the 1890s and at the beginning of the 20th

century opposed reformism and revisionism making, however, especially in the latter period of his activity, a number of Centrist mistakes--- 290, 294

Beesly, Edward Spencer (1831- 1915)---English historian and politician, bourgeois Radical, positivist, Professor of History at University College, London; defended the Paris Commune in the English press---242, 288

Bergeret, Jules Victor (1839- 1905)---member of the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Paris Commune, general of the National Guard; after the suppression of the Commune emigrated to England and then to the United States---64, 177, 178, 198

Berry, Marie Caroline Ferdinande Louise, Duchess de (1798-1870)---mother of Comte de Chambord, Legitimist claimant to the French throne; in 1832 tried to provoke an uprising in Vendee to overthrow Louis Philippe---52, 120, 170, 187

Berryer, Pierre Antoine (1790- 1868)---French lawyer and politician, Legitimist---192

Beslay, Charles (1795-1878)--- French entrepreneur, man of letters and politician; member of the First International; follower of Proudhon; member of the Paris Commune and its Finance Committee; as delegate to the Bank of France, pursued a policy of non-- interference in the latter's internal affairs and abstention from its nationalisation; after the suppression of the Commune emigrated to Switzerland---55, 119

Bigot, Leon (1826-1872)---French

lawyer and publicist; Leftwing Republican; after the suppression of the Commune became the Communards' defence counsel at Versailles ---262

Bismarck, Otto, Prince (1815- 1898)---Prusso-German statesman and diplomat; champion of the interests of Prussian Junkers; ambassador in St.Petersburg (1859-62) and Paris (1862); MinisterPresident of Prussia (1862-71), Chancellor of the German Empire (1871-90); carried out the unification of Germany by counter-revolutionary means; bitter enemy of the workingclass movement, author of the Anti-Socialist Law (1878)--- 22, 25, 37, 44, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 59, 74, 81, 83, 88, 89, 95, 100, 103, 109, 116, 117, 118, 124, 133, 148, 167, 171, 184, 185, 191, 200, 214, 215, 216, 229, 238, 273, 274, 288, 289

Blanc, Louis (1811-1882)--- French petty-bourgeois socialist, historian; in 1848 member of the Provisional Government and President of the Luxembourg

Commission;

advocated conciliation with the bourgeoisie; deputy to the National Assembly of 1871, came out against the Paris Commune---164, 170, 225, 241

Blanchet, Stanislas (real name Pourille) (b. 1833)---former monk, merchant and police agent; during the German siege of Paris served in the National Guard, was elected member of the Paris Commune; in May 1871 was exposed and arrested; after the suppression of the Com-

mune emigrated to Switzerland---81

Blanqui, Louis Auguste (1805- 1881)---French revolutionary, Utopian Communist, organiser of a number of secret societies and plots; active participant in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848; prominent leader of the French proletarian movement; one of the leaders of the Paris uprising on October 31, 1870; during the Paris Commune was imprisoned---29, 30, 31, 32, 57, 62, 95, 137, 144, 145, 196, 229

Bolte, Friedrich---prominent figure in the American labour movement;

cigar - maker,

German-born; Secretary of the Federal Council of NorthAmerican Sections of the First International (1872), member of the Arbeiter-Zeitung editorial board; member of the General Council of the First International (1872-74) elected by the Hague Congress; in 1874 expelled from the International in view of the wrong .policy pursued by the ArbeiterZeitung---WO

Bonaparte, See Napoleon I.

Bonaparte, Louis. See Napoleon III.

Bouis, Casimir (c. 1843-1916)--- French journalist, follower of Blanqui; member of the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Paris Commune, chairman of the commission of inquiry into the activities of the Government of National Defence; after the suppression of the Commune was deported to New Caledonia---144

Bourbons---French royal dynasty (1589-1792, 1814-15 and 1815- 30)---124, 125, 126, 209

336

NAME INDEX

337

Brunei, Antoine Magloire (b. 1830)---French officer, Blanquist, member of the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Paris Commune; in May 1871 was gravely wounded by the Versaillists; after the suppression of the Commune emigrated to England---99

Chalain, Louis Denis (b. 1845)--- French turner; active in the French working-class movement; member of the Paris Commune, member of the Commission of Public Safety and of the Labour and Exchange Commission; after the suppression of the Commune emigrated to England; later joined the anarchists---291

Chambord, Henri Charles, Comte de (1820-1883)---last representative of the elder Bourbon line, grandson of Charles X; after the victory of the July 1830 revolution fled abroad; claimant to the French throne under the name of Henry V ---210

Changarnier, Nicolas Anne Theodule (1793-1877)---French general and bourgeois politician, monarchist; after the June 1848 insurrection commander of the garrisons and the National Guard of Paris; took part in dispersing a Paris demonstration on June 13, 1849; after the coup d'etat of December 2, 1851, was arrested and deported; returned to France in 1859j participant in the FrancoPrussian War; deputy to the National Assembly of 1871--- 64, 121, 179, 198

Chanzy, Antoine Alfred Eugene (1823-1883)---French general, participant in the FrancoPrussian War; deputy to the National Assembly of 1871--- 115, 144

Charette de la Contrie, Athanase, Baron de (1832-1911)---French general, royalist; during the Franco-Prussian War commander of the Pontifical Zouaves and then of a legion of volunteers from the West ---118, 180, 209, 211

Cluseret, Gustave Paul (1823- 1900)---French

politician,

member of the First International, was associated with the Bakuninists; participant in the revolutionary uprisings in Lyons and Marseilles (1870); member of the Paris Commune, war delegate (April 1871); after the suppression of the Commune emigrated to Belgium---136

Cobbet, William (1762-1835)--- British politician and publicist; prominent petty-bourgeois radical; advocated demqcratisation of the British political system---248, 252

Coetlogon, Louis Charles Emmanuel, Comte de (1814-1886)--- French official, Bonapartist, one of the organisers of the counter-revolutionary action in Paris on March 22, 1871---63, 178, 197

Comte, Auguste (1798-1857)--- French bourgeois philosopher and sociologist, founder of positivism---164

Carbon, Claude Anthime (1808- 1891)---French politician, Republican; after the fall of the Second Empire mayor of a Paris district; deputy to the National Assembly of 1871--- 49, 183

Cousin-Montauban, Charles Guillaume Marie Apollinaire Antoine, Comte de Palikao (1796-1878)---French general, Bonapartist; during the third Opium War commanded the Anglo-French expedi t i o n forces in China (1860); Minister of War and Head of Government

(August-Sep-

tember 1870)---57, 106

Cowley, Henry Richard Charles Wellesley, Earl (1804-1884)---

22---2648

British diplomat, Ambassador in Paris (1852-67)---257

Darboy, Georges (1813-1871) ---French theologist, Archbishop of Paris (from 1863), in May 1871 was shot by the Communards as a hostage--- 28, 95, 112, 114, 197

Davies, John Llewellyn (1826- 1916)---English bishop and theologist, Liberal---220, 225

Deguerry, Gaspard (1797-1871) ---French clergyman, Cure of La Madeleine in Paris; in May 1871 was shot by the Commune as a hostage---114, 142

Delahaye, Pierre Louis (b. 1820) ---French engineer; member of the First International (from 1864); member of the Commune, after its suppression emigrated to England;,member of the General Council of the First International (1871-72) ---291

Delescluze, Louis Charles (1809- 1871)---French politician and journalist, petty-bourgeois revolutionary, participant in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848; deputy to the National Assembly of 1871; member of the Paris Commune, military delegate of the Commune; was killed on the barricades during the street fighting in Paris in May 1871---258

Desmarest---French gendarme officer, killed Gustave Flourens---65, 112, 131, 199 Dombrowski (Dabrowski), Jaroslaw (1836-1871)---Polish revolutionary democrat, took part in the Polish national liberation movement of the 1860s; general of the Paris Com-

Cabet, Etienne (1788-1856)--- French publicist, prominent representative of Utopian communism, author of the book Voyage en Icarie---100

Calonne, Charles Alexandre de (1734-1802)---French statesman, Controller-General of Finance (1783-87); during the French bourgeois revolution at the end of the 18th century one of the leaders of the counter-revolutionary emigres ---84, 123, 213

Carrel, Armand (1800-1836)--- French bourgeois publicist, liberal; one of the founders and the editor of Le National ---120, 122

Cathelineau, Henri de (181-3- 1891)---French general, royalist; during the Franco-- Prussian War and the suppression of the Paris Commune commanded a volunteer detachment from Brittany and Vendee---118, 209, 211

Cavaignac, Louis Eugene (1802- 1857)---French general and statesman, moderate bourgeois Republican; in the 1830s and 1840s took part in the conquest of Algeria; Minister of War (May-June 1848); quelled the June insurrection of the Paris workers; Head of the Executive Power (June-- December 1848)---95, 109, 110, 112, 127, 177, 189, 197

338

NAME INDEX

339

mune, in early May 1871 became Commander-in-Chief of its Armed Forces, was killed on the barricades---79 Douay, Felix (1816-1879)--- French general, participant in the Franco-Prussian War, taken prisoner at Sedan; one of the hangmen of the Paris Commune, commander of the 4th Corps of the Versailles army---90

Ducrot, Auguste Alexandre (1817-1882)---French general, participant in the FrancoPrussian War; during the suppression of the Paris Commune took part in building up the Versailles army; deputy to the National Assembly of 1871, Orleanist---173

Dufaure, Jules Armand Stanislas (1798-1881)---French advocate and statesman, Orleanist, a hangman of the Paris Commune; Minister of Public Works (1839-40), Minister of the Interior (1848 and 1849), Minister of Justice (1871-73, 1875-76 and 1877-79), President of the Council (1876, 1877-79) ---57, 64, 86, 87, 88, 109, 110, 133, 134, 135, 140, 164, 186, 214

Dumas, Alexandre (fils) (1824- 1895)---French novelist and dramatist---130, 143

Dupanloup, Felix (1802-1878)--- French theologist and politician, one of the leaders of the Catholic Party, Bishop of Orleans (from 1849), deputy to the National Assembly of 1871---228

Dupont, Eugene (c. 1831-1881)--- French musical instrument maker; prominent figure in the international working-class movement; took part in the June 1848 insurrection in

Paris; from 1862 lived in London; member of the General Council of the First International (November 1864- 1872); pursued Marx's line--- 206, 286

Duval, £mile Victor (1841-1871) ---French ironfounder; active in the French working-class movement; member of the First International; member of the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Paris Commune; general of the Commune's National Guard; on April 4, 1871, was taken prisoner and shot by the Versaillists---65, 113, 137, 199, 234

---Spanish general and statesman, leader of the Progressists, Regent of Spain (1841- 43), Head of Government (1854-56)---53, 121, 188 Eudes, Smile (1843-1888)--- French revolutionary, follower of Blanqui, general of the National Guard and member of the Paris Commune; after the suppression of the Commune emigrated to Switzerland and then to England; upon his return to France (under the amnesty of 1880), became one of the organisers of the Blanquists' Central Revolutionary Committee---28

182, 183, 184, 185, 195, 196, 225, 226, 231, 238, 248, 253, 289

Ferdinand II (1810-1859)---King of Naples (1830-59) nicknamed King Bomba for bombarding Messina in 1848---52, 53, 121, 188

Ferry, Jules (1832-1893)---French lawyer and politician, one of the leaders of the moderate bourgeois Republicans, member of the Government of National Defence, Mayor of Paris (1870- 71), deputy to the National Assembly of 1871, President of the Council (1880-81, 1883- 85)---51, 104, 105, 108, 145, 176, 182, 184, 186

Flocon, Ferdinand (1800-1866)--- French politician and publicist, petty-bourgeois democrat, an editor of the newspaper La Reforme, member of the Provisional Government (1848)--- 225

Flourens, Gustave (1838-1871)--- French revolutionary and naturalist, follower of Blanqui, a leader of the Paris uprisings on October 31, 1870 and January 22, 1871; member of the Paris Commune; assassinated by the Versaillists in April 1871---57, 62, 65, 112, 113, 137, 145, 196, 199, 234

Francois---member of the French National Guard, Communard, killed during the counter-- revolutionary action in Paris on March 22, 1871---179

Frankel, Leo (1844-1896)---- jeweller; prominent in the Hungarian and international working-class

movement;

member of the Paris Commune, headed the Labour and Exchange Commission; member of the General Council of the First International (1871-72); one of the founders of the General Workers' Party of Hun-

Eccarius, Johann Georg (1818- 1889)---prominent figure in the international and German working-class

movement,

working-class publicist; tailor, emigrated to London; member of the League of the Just, later of the Communist League; member of the General Council of the First International (1864-72), the Council's General Secretary (1867-71), Corresponding Secretary for America (1870-72); afterwards joined the reformist leaders of the British trade unions---283

Eilau, N.---German merchant, acted as a mediator between Marx and members of the Paris Commune handing over documents and letters---287, 289

Engels, Elisabeth Franziska (1797-1873)---mother of F. Engels---291

Engels, Frederick (1820-1895)--- 21, 83, 227, 231, 236, 245, 248, 260, 261, 270, 271, 273, 275, 276, 277, 291, 292, 294

Espartero, Baldomero (1793-1879)

Faidherbe, Louis Leon Cesar (1818-1889)---French general, participant in the FrancoPrussian War---260

Falloux, Alfred (1811-1886)--- French politician and writer; Legitimist and Clerical; Minister of Public Instruction and Religious Worship (1848-49); inspired the suppression of the June 1848 insurrection in Paris---192

fame, Jules (1809-1880)---French lawyer and politician, a leader of the moderate bourgeois Republicans: in 1848 General Secretary of the Home Ministry and then Deputy Foreign Minister; as Foreign Minister in the Government of National Defence and the Thiers government (1870-71) negotiated the capitulation of Paris and peace with Germany, hangman of the Paris Commune---36, 49, 50, 51, 55, 62, 81, 89, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 116, 120, 125, 133, 135, 136, 141, 146, 148, 173, 176, 177, 178,

22'

340

NAME INDEX

341

gary; associate of Marx and Engels---79, 141, 142, 168, 286, 287, 291

Friedrich II (1712-1786)---King of Prussia (1740-86)---101

Gallien---officer of the National Guard of the Commune who disclosed the password of the Redoubt of Moulen Saquet to the Versaillists---136, 143

Galliffet, Gaston Alexandre Auguste, Marquis de (1830- 1909)---French general, participant in the Franco-Prussian War, taken prisoner at Sedan; released to fight the Commune; one of the hangmen of the Paris Commune; commanded the cavalry brigade in the Versailles army---65, 66, 98, 113, 143

Gambetta, Leon (1838-1882)--- French statesman, bourgeois Republican, member of the Government of National Defence (1870-71); President of the Council and Foreign Minister (1881-82)---49, 102, 145, 183, 201

Ganesco, Gregori (c. 1830-1877) ---French journalist; born in Rumania; during the Second Empire, follower of Bonaparte and, later, supporter of the Thiers government---79

Gamier-Pages, Louis Antoine (1803-1878)---French politician, moderate bourgeois Republican, member of the Government of National Defence (1870-71)--- 135, 136

Gorchakov, Alexander Mikhailovich, Prince (1798-1883)--- Russian statesman and diplomat, Foreign Minister (1856- 82)---44

Greppo, Jean Louis (1810-1888) ---French politician, petty-

bourgeois socialist, participant in the Lyons uprisings in 1831 and 1834; in 1870-71 Mayor of a Paris district, deputy to the National Assembly of 1871--- 110

Grimal---French officer, public accuser at a trial of the Communards at Versailles---260

Grousset, Pascal (1844-1909)--- French publicist and politician, Blanquist; member of the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Paris Commune, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee; after the Commune's suppression deported to New Caledonia from which he fled in 1874; subsequently went over to the side of the bourgeoisie ---142

Guiod, Adolphe Simon (b. 1805) ---French general, participant in the Franco-Prussian War, Chief of the artillery during the siege of Paris in 1870-71 ---50, 103, 184

Guizot, Franfois Pierre Guillaume (1787 - 1874)---French bourgeois historian and statesman; from 1840 until the February Revolution in 1848 actually directed France's home and foreign policy expressing the interests of the big financial bourgeoisie---53, 110, 121

Hales, John (b. 1839)---English weaver; trade union leader; member of the General Council of the First International (1866-72) and its Secretary; from the beginning of 1872 stood at the head of the reformist wing of the British Federal Council; waged a struggle against Marx and his

followers with a view to taking over the leadership of the First International's organisations in England---101, 246, 248, 251, 262

Haussmann, Georges Eugene (1809-1891)---French politician, Bonapartist, participant in the coup d'etat of December 2, 1851, Prefect of the Seine (1853-70), directed work on the reconstruction of Paris---80, 93, 94

Heeckeren, Georges Charles d'Anthes, Baron de (1812- 1895)---French politician. Royalist, officer in the Russian army (1834-37), murderer of Alexander Pushkin; from 1848 Bonapartist, Senator of the Second Empire, an organiser of a counter-revolutionary action in Paris on March 22, 1871---63, 178, 197

Henderson, Edmund Newmans Wolcott (1821-1896)---English officer, chief of the London police (1869-86)---240

Henry V. See Chambord, Henri Charles.

Herve Edouard^ (1835-1899)--- French publicist, one of the founders and Editor-in-Chief of Journal de Paris; bourgeois liberal; Orleanist after the fall of the Second Empire---91

Hohenzollerns---dynasty of Brandenburg Electors (1415-1701), Prussian Kings (1701-1918) and German Emperors (1871-1918) ---37, 80

Holyoake, George Jacob (1817- 1906)---English publicist, social reformer; in the 1830s and 1840s joined the Owenites and Chartists; then prominent figure in the co-operative movement---245, 246, 248, 250

Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825- 1895)---English biologist, close associate of Charles Darwin

and expounder of his theory; inconsistent materialist---76, 155

Jaclard, Charles Victor (1843- 1900)---French publicist, Blanquist; from the early 1870s member of the First International; follower of Marx; member of the National Guard Central Committee; during the Paris Commune commander of a legion of the National Guard; after the suppression of the Commune emigrated to Switzerland and then to Russia---176

Jacquemet---French priest; in 1848, Vicar-General of the Archbishop of Paris---95, 112, 197

Jaubert, Hippolyte Franfois, Comte de (1798-1874)---French politician, monarchist, Minister of Public Works in Thiers' Cabinet (1840), deputy to the National Assembly of 1871--- 97, 208

King Bomba. See Ferdinand II.

Kugelmann, Ludwig (1830-1902) ---German physician, took part in the 1848-49 revolution in Germany; member of the First International; from 1862 to 1874 corresponded with Marx and kept him informed of the situation in Germany; friend of Marx and Engels---284, 285, 289

Lacretelle, Charles Nicolas (1822- 1891)---French general, participant in the Franco-Prussian War; a hangman of the Paris Commune, commander of a

342

NAME INDEX

343

division of the Versailles army ---136

Lafargue, Paul (1842-1911)--- prominent figure in the international working-class movement, outstanding propagator of Marxism; member of the General Council of the First International; helped to organise the International's sections in France (1869-70), Spain and Portugal (1871-72); one of the founders of the Workers' Party of France; disciple and associate of Marx and Engels--- 233, 281

Laffitte, Jacques (1767-1844)--- big French banker and politician, Orleanist, representative of the financial bourgeoisie, Premier (1830-31)---52, 120

Lafont---French official, inspector-general of prisons in 1871---144

Lamennais, Felicite (1782-1854) ---French priest, publicist, an ideologist of Christian socialism---174

Larochejacquelein, Henri August Georges, Marquis (1805-1867) ---French politician, one of the leaders of the Legitimist Party; later on, Senator of the Second Empire---192

Lecomte, Claude Martin (1817- 1871)---French general, participant in the Franco-Prussian War; on March 18, 1871 was shot by the insurgent soldiers after the failure of the Thiers government to seize the National Guard's artillery---62, 67, 87, 88, 90, 109, 111, 175, 192, 195, 196, 201

Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre Auguste (1807-1874)---French publicist and politician, one of the leaders of the petty-bourgeois democrats; editor of the newspaper La Reforme; member of the Provisional Government

(1848), deputy to the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies where he headed the Montague party; after the demonstration of June 13, 1849 emigrated to England, where he lived until early 1870; deputy to the National Assembly of 1871, resigned in protest against the conclusion of peace with Germany---225

Le Flo, Adolphe Emmanuel Charles (1804-1887)---French general, politician and diplomat, monarchist; Minister of War in the Government of National Defence and the Thiers Ministry (1870-71), deputy to the National Assembly of 1871; Ambassador in St.'Petersburg (1848-49 and 1871-79)---63, 66, 115, 196

Lemaitre, Antoine Louis Prosper (pseudonym---Frederick Lemaitre) (1800-1876)---French actor and playwright, representative of progressive romanticism and founder of critical realism in the 19 thcentury French theatre; well known for creating the character of a villain, Robert Macaire, which is a satire on the ruling financial aristocracy under the July monarchy---107

Leroux, Pierre (1797-1871)--- French petty-bourgeois publicist, Utopian socialist, representative of Christian socialism; an emigre in England (1851-52)---241

Liebknecht, Wilhelm (1826- 1900)---prominent figure in the German and international working-class movement; participant in the revolution of 1848-49; member of the Communist League; member of the First International, active fighter against Lassalleanism and for the principles of the

International in the German working-class movement; from 1867 Reichstag deputy; a founder and leader of German Social-Democracy; editor of the newspaper Der Volksstaat (1869-76); adopted a conciliatory attitude towards some questions; during the FrancoPrussian War and the Paris Commune came out against the predatory plans of the Prussian Junkers and the bourgeoisie in defence of the Paris Commune; friend and associate of Marx and Engels---283, 290 Lincoln, Abraham (1809-1865)--- outstanding American statesman, one of the founders of the Republican Party, President of the United States (1861-65); during the American Civil War, under pressure from the masses, carried out a number of bourgeois-- democratic reforms testifying to the transition to the revolutionary methods of warfare; assassinated by the slaveowners' agent in April 1865---124, 131, 211

Littre, Emile (1801-1881)--- French bourgeois philosopher, lexicographer and politician--- 177

Longuet, Charles (1839-1903)--- French journalist; one of the leaders of the Fren,ch workingclass movement, Proudhonist; member of the General Council of the First International (1866-67 and 1871-72); took part in the defence of Paris Commune; after the suppression of the Commune emigrated to England; subsequently joined the Possibilists ---an opportunist trend in the Workers' Party of France--- 291

Louis Bonaparte. See Napoleon III.

Louis Napoleon. See Napoleon III.

Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans (1773-1850)---King of France (1830-48)---23, 24, 52, 54, 55, 62, 74, 107, 109, 116, 119, 120, 121, 125, 126, 136, 187, 189, 190, 195, 209

Louis Philippe, Albert, Duke oj Orleans, Count of Paris (1838- 1894)---grandson of the French king, Louis Philippe, claimant to the French throne---210

Louis XIV (1638-1715)---King of France (1643-1715)---106, 208

Louis XVI (1754-1793)---King of France (1774-92), guillotined during the French bourgeois revolution at the end of the 18th century---28, 142

Louis XVIII (1755-1824)---King of France (1814-15 and 1815- 24)---170

Lucraft, Benjamin (1809-1897)--- British cabinet-maker; one of the reformist leaders of the British trade unions; member of the General Council of the First International (1864-71); in 1871 came out against the Paris Commune and the General Council's address The Civil War in France; condemned for apostasy by the General Council, he withdrew from it---250, 251, 253, 267 Lyons, Richard Bickerton Pemell, Earl (1817-1887)---British diplomat, Minister to Washington (1858-65), Ambassador at Constantinople (1865-67) and Paris (1867-87)---257

MacMahon, Marie Edme Patrice Maurice (1808-1893)---French reactionary military man and politician, Marshal, Bonapartist; participant in the FrancoPrussian War; a hangman of

344

NAME INDEX

NAME INDEX

345

the Paris Commune, Commander-in-Chief of the Versailles army; President of the Third Republic (1873-79)---90, 94, 95, 132, 212

Magne, Alfred---French official, son of Pierre Magne, collectorgeneral of taxes in the Loiret ---108

Magne, Pierre (1806-1879)--- French statesman, Bonapartist, Finance Minister (1855-60, 1867-69, 1870, 1873-74)---108

Malet, Edward Baldwin (1837- 1908)---British diplomat, Secretary of the Embassy in Paris (1867-71)---258

Maljournal (born c. 1843)---- officer of the National Guard, member of the First International, member of the National Guard's Central Committee, Communard---64, 178

Markovsky---agent of the tsarist government in France; in 1871 was in the service of Thiers. ---79

Marx, Karl (1818-1883)---21, 22, 31, 104, 185, 225, 230, 231, 233, 236, 238, 240, 245, 248, 249, 253, 254, 255, 256, 262, 263, 270, 281, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 290, 293

Mazzini, Giuseppe (1805-1872)--- Italian revolutionary, bourgeois democrat, one of the leaders of the Italian national liberation movement; in 1849 head of the Provisional Government of the Roman Republic; in 1850 an organiser of the Central Committee of the European Social-- Democracy in London; when the First International was being founded, in 1864, tried to bring it under his influence; in 1871 came out against the Paris Commune and the General Council of the First International---241

Miller, Joseph (Joe) (1684-1738) ---celebrated English comic actor---51, 105, 186

Milliere, Jean Baptiste (1817- 1871)---French journalist, Leftwing Proudhonist; deputy to the National Assembly of 1871, criticised the Thiers government and defended the Paris Commune; shot by the Versaillists in May 1871--- 50, 101, 104, 181, 184,240,243

Milton, John (1608-1674)---great English poet and publicist, participant in the English bourgeois revolution of the 17th century---155

Miquel, Johannes (1828-1901)--- German politician and financier; member of the Communist League in the 1840s; later on National-Liberal, deputy to the Reichstag---289

Mirabeau, Honore Gabriel (1749-1791)---prominent figure in the French bourgeois revolution at the end of the 18th century; exponent of the interests of the big bourgeoisie and of the nobility that adopted bourgeois way of life---53

Molinet, Vicomte de (d. 1871)--- French aristocrat, killed during the counter-revolutionary action in Paris on March 22, 1871---179

Montesquieu, Charles (1689- 1755)---outstanding French bourgeois sociologist, economist and writer; representative of the 18th-century Enlightenment, theoretician of constitutional monarchy---73, 174, 177

Mottershead, Thomas G.--- English weaver; member of the General Council of the First International (1869-72); being a reformist, opposed Marx's line in the General Council and the British Federal Council---231

Napoleon I Bonaparte (1769-

1821)---Emperor of the French

(1804-14 and 1815)---27, 32, 39,

43, 54, 79, 114, 129, 159, 187,

190, 212.

Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon Bonaparte)---nephew of Napoleon I, President of the Second Republic (1848-51), Emperor of the French (1852-70)---21, 24, 25, 35, 37, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 53, 54, 56, 60, 62, 69, 70, 74, 78, 80, 83, 87, 104, 107, 110, 117, 118, 125, 126, 128, 129, 135, 136, 141, 146, 155, 159, 172, 182, 184, 185, 187., 190, 191, 196, 201, 217, 226, 227, 231

Nero (37-68)---Roman Emperor (54-68)---123

Nieuwenhuis, Ferdinand Domela (1846-1919)---active participant in the Dutch working-class movement, one of the founders of the Dutch Social-- Democratic Party; M.P. from 1888; in the 1890s adopted the standpoint of anarchism---293

---225, 242, 251, 253, 267 Ollivier, Smile (1825-1913)--- French politician, moderate bourgeois Republican; Bonapartist from the late 1860s; Head of Government ( JanuaryAugust 1870)---114, 201 Orleans---dukes, the cadet branch of the Bourbon dynasty, who were in power from 1830 to 1848---80

Oudinot, Nicolas Charles Victor (1791-1863)---French general, Orleanist; in 1849 commanded the troops which destroyed the Roman Republic---189

Paladines. See Aurelle de Paladines.

Palikao. See Cousin-Montauban.

Palmerston, Henry John Temple, Viscount (1784-1865)---British statesman; Tory at the beginning of his career; from 1830 on, a Whig leader relying on the Right-wing elements of that party; Foreign Secretary (1830-34, 1835-41 and 1846- 51), Home Secretary (1852-55) and Prime Minister (1855-58 and 1859-65)---249

Paris, Count of. See Louis Philippe, Albert.

Pene, Henri de (1830-1888)--- French journalist, monarchist, an organiser of the counterrevolutionary action in Paris on March 22, 1871---63, 178, 197

Pic, Jules---French journalist, Bonapartist, responsible publisher of the newspaper L'£- tendard---Sl, 141, 185

Picard, Ernest (1821-1877)--- French lawyer and politician, moderate bourgeois Republican, Finance Minister in the Government of National Defence (1870-71), Home Min-

Odger, George (1820-1877)---a reformist leader of the British trade unions; shoemaker; member of the General Council of the First International (1864-71), its President (1864- 67); during the reform movement stroke a deal with the bourgeoisie; in 1871 came out against the Paris Commune and the General Council's address The Civil War in France; withdrew from the Council, which denounced him as a renegade; subsequently continued a slander campaign against the International's leaders and the Communards

23-2648

346

NAME INDEX

347

ister in the Thiers government (1871), one of the hangmen of the Paris Commune--- 51, 58, 65, 97, 104, 105, 107, 109, 110, 111, 120, 133, 134, 137, 175, 182, 185, 186

Picard, Eugene Arthur (b. 1825) ---French politician and stockbroker, moderate bourgeois Republican, Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper L'Electeur libre; brother of Ernest Picard ---51, 104, 105, 107, 185

Pietri, Joseph Marie (1820-1902) ---French politician, Bonapartist, prefect of the Paris police (1866-70)---37, 85, 105, 113, 118, 126, 143, 186, 211

Pouyer-Quertier,

Augustin

Thomas (1820-1891)---big French manufacturer and politician, advocate of the protectionist policy; Minister of Finance (1871-72), took part in the peace negotiations with Germany in Frankfort (1871) ---57, 58, 89, 107, 108, 112, 186

Protot, Eugene (1839-1921)--- French lawyer, physician and journalist; Right-wing Blanquist; member of the Paris Commune, delegate of the Justice Commission; after the suppression of the Commune emigrated to Switzerland and then to England; afterwards came out against the International and the Marxists---141, 234

Proudhon, Pierre Joseph (1809- 1865)---French publicist, economist and sociologist, ideologist of the petty bourgeoisie, one of the founders of anarchism---30, 31

Pyat, Felix (1810-1889)---French journalist, dramatist and politician, petty-bourgeois democrat; took part in the revolution of 1848; opposed independent working-class move-

ment; for a number of years carried on a slander campaign against Marx and the First International; deputy to the National Assembly of 1871; member of the Paris Commune; after the suppression of the Commune escaped to England---228, 239, 286, 289

First International; Communard; member of the General Council of the First International---291

Roche-Lambert---French official, son-in-law of Pouyer-Quertier; in 1871 was appointed collector-general of taxes in the Loiret---108

ber of the Paris Commune; supported Marx's line---227, 233, 259, 281, 286, 291 Sheridan, Philipp Henry (1831- 1888)---American general, participant in the American Civil War (1861-65) on the side of the North; during the FrancoPrussian War, an observer at the German headquarters, Commander-in-Chief of the US army (1884-88)---179 Simon, Jules (1814-1896)---French statesman and idealist philosopher, moderate bourgeois Republican, member of the Government of National Defence, Minister of Public Instruction in that government and in the Thiers government (1870-73), deputy to the National Assembly of 1871, an instigator of the struggle against the Paris Commune, President of the Council (1876- 77)_58, 107, 136 Sorge, Friedrich Adolf (1828- 1906)---prominent figure in the international and American labour and socialist movement, participant in the revolution of 1848 in Germany; in 1852 emigrated to the United States, organiser of the American sections of the First International; active propagator of Marxism; friend and associate of Marx and Engels--- 292

Sulla, Lucius Cornelius (138-78 B.C.)---Roman general and statesman, Consul (88 B.C.), Dictator (82-79 B.C.)---55, 91 Susane, Louis (1810-1876)--- French general; for a number of years held the post of Chief of the Artillery Department in the War Ministry; author of several works on the history of the French army---50, 103, 184

Saint-Hilaire. See Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, Jules.

Saisset, Jean (1810-1879)---French admiral and politician, monarchist, participant in the Franco-Prussian War; commander of the Paris National Guard (March 20-25, 1871), failed in his attempts to unite the reactionary forces in Paris to put down the proletarian revolution of March 18; deputy to the National Assembly of 1871---64, 115, 123, 164, 179, 180, 198, 208, 213

Scheffer---soldier of the French National Guard, Communard ---66, 131, 143, 200

Schdlcher, Victor (1804-1893)--- French politician and publicist, Left-wing Republican; during the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune commanded an artillery legion of the Paris National Guard; deputy to the National Assembly of 1871; failed to make the Commune capitulate before the Thiers government---163, 175

Serraillier, August (b. 1840)--- prominent in the French and international working - class movement; last maker; member of the General Council of the First International (1869-72); in September 1870, after the fall of the Second Empire, was sent to Paris as the General Council's representative; mem-

23*

Reid, Robert---British journalist, correspondent of the British and American press in France (1871), sympathised with the Paris Commune---256, 259

Reitlinger---friend and private secretary of Jules Favre---100

Renaut---French lawyer, defence counsel of Rastoul---a Paris Commune member---in Versailles court in 1871---262

Roach, John---active in the British working-class movement, member of the General Council of the First International (1871-72), Corresponding Secretary of the British Federal Council (1872), where he belonged to the reformist wing, opposed the decisions of the Hague Congress of the First International---253

Robinet, Jean Franfois Eugene (1825-1899)---French physician and historian, Positivist, Republican; took part in the revolution of 1848; mayor of a district in Paris during the latter's siege in 1870-71; member of the Ligue de VUnion republicaine pour les droits de Paris; favoured conciliation between the Commune and Versailles---94

Rochat, Charles---active figure in the French working-class movement; member of the Paris Federal Council of the

348

NAME INDEX

349

Tacitus (Publius Cornelius Tacitus) (c. 55-c. 120)---Roman historian---92

Taillefer---took part in machinations connected with the publication of the Bonapartist paper L'Etendard---51, 141, 185

Tamerlane. See Timur.

Tamisier, Francois Laurent Alphonse (1809-1880)---French general and politician, Republican; Commander of the Paris National Guard ( September - November 1870); deputy to the National Assembly of 1871---62, 111, 146, 196

Taylor, Alfred---English worker; member of the General Council of the First International (1871-72)---253

Tertullian, Quintus Septimius Florens (c. 150-c. 222)--- Christian theologian, rabid enemy of science---229

Terzaghi, Carlo (born c. 1845)--- Italian lawyer, secretary of the workers' society Emancipazione del proletario in Turin; in 1872 became a police agent---292

Theisz, Albert (1839-1880)--- French metal-cutter; active in the working-class movement; Proudhonist; member of the Paris Commune; after the suppression of the Commune emigrated to England, member of the General Council of the First International (1871)--- 291

Thiers, Adolphe (1797-1877)--- French bourgeois historian and statesman, Orleanist, Minister of the Interior (1832, 1834), Prime Minister (1836, 1840) Chief of the Executive Power (1871); President of the Republic (1871-73); hangman of

the Paris Commune---26, 28, 29, 36, 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 71, 77, 79, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 103-110, 112-

114, 116-124, 129, 131-137, 141-144, 158, 164, 167, 169, 170, 173, 175-177, 179, 180, 182, 183, 186-191, 193, 197, 198-201, 208-17, 229, 237, 238, 240, 257, 260, 269, 283, 284, 288

Thomas, Clement (1809-1871)--- French politician, general, moderate bourgeois Republican; took part in suppressing the June 1848 insurrection in Paris; Commander of the Paris National Guard ( November 1870-February 1871), sabotaged the city's defence; on March 18, 1871 was shot by the insurgent soldiers---62, 63, 67, 87, 88, 90, 109, 111,

115, 146, 175, 177, 192, 195, 196, 201

Timur (Tamerlane) (1336-1405) ---Central Asian general and conquerer---65

Tolain, Henri Louis (1828-1897) ---French worker, engraver; Right-wing Proudhonist; one of the leaders of the Paris Section of the First International; deputy to the National Assembly of 1871; during the Paris Commune went over to the Versaillists and was expelled from the International ---66, 235, 242, 243

Tridon, Edme Marie Gustave (1841-1871)---French politician and publicist, Blanquist, member of the First International; a deputy who resigned from the National Assembly of 1871; member of the Paris Commune; after its suppression emigrated to Belgium--- 176, 260

Trochu, Louis Jules (1815-1896) ---French general and politician, Orleanist, took part in conquering Algeria (1830 s1840s), in the Crimean (1853- 56) and the Italian (1859) wars; President of the Government of National Defence, Commander-in-Chief of the Paris armed forces ( September 1870-January 1871), sabotaged the city's defence; deputy to the National Assembly of 1871---48, 49, 50, 55, 60, 62, 94, 102, 103, 111, 135, 145, 146, 147, 173, 177, 181-84J 196, 201, 217

Urquhart, David (1805-1877)--- Scottish diplomat, reactionary 'publicist and politician, Turkofile; strong opponent of the foreign policies of Palmerston and the Whigs---249

leaders of the First International's sections in France; member of the National Guard Central Committee and the Paris Commune; shot by the Versaillists on May 28, 1871--- 176, 287

Vermorel, Auguste (1841-1871)--- French publicist, Proudhonist, member of the Paris Commune; during the street fighting in Paris in May 1871 was gravely wounded, taken prisoner, and died in captivity--- 258

Vesinier, Pierre (1826-1902)--- French petty-bourgeois publicist, member of the Paris Commune; after the suppression of the Commune emigrated to England; opposed Marx and the General Council of the First International---233, 289

Vinoy, Joseph (1800-1880)--- French general, Bonapartist, participant in the coup d'etat of December 2, 1851; took part in the Franco-Prussian War; from January 22, 1871, Governor of Paris; one of the hangmen of the Paris Commune, commander of the Versailles reserve army---57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 106, 111, 112, 113, 137, 177, 179, 193, 196, 197, 199, 216, 228, 284

Vivien Alexandre Francois (1799- 1854)---French lawyer and politician, Orleanist; Minister of Justice (1840) and Minister of Public Works in the Cavaignac government (1848)---109

Vogt, Karl (1817-1895)---German naturalist, vulgar materialist, petty-bourgeois democrat; in 1848-49 deputy to the Frankfort National Assembly, belonged to its Left wing; in June 1849 one of the five imperial regents; in 1849 left Germany; in the 1850s and

Vacheron, Louis---French lawyer; Procurator-General in the Mayenna (1871)---110

Vaillant, Edouard (1840-1915)--- French socialist, follower of Blanqui, member of the Paris Commune; member of the General Council of the First International (1871-72); a founder of the Socialist Party of France, subsequently became reformist---30, 176, 291

Valentin, Louis Ernest---French general, Bonapartist, acting prefect of police on the eve of the insurrection of March 18, 1871---57, 59, 85, 106, 118, 133₂143, 177, 211, 216, 227

Varlin, Louis Eugene (1839- 1871)---French bookbinder; prominent figure in the French working-class movement; Leftwing Proudhonist; one of the

350

NAME INDEX

1860s, Louis Bonaparte's paid agent and an active participant in the slander campaign against proletarian revolutionaries---51

Voltaire, Franfois Marie (real name Arouet) (1694-1778)--- French deist philosopher, satirist and historian, outstanding representative of the bourgeois 18th-century Enlightenment, fought against absolutism and Catholicism---65, 127

Wachenhusen, Hans (1823- 1898)---German bourgeois publicist and writer---291

Wahlin---member of the National Guard, Communard, killed during the counter-- revolutionary action in Paris on March 22, 1871---179

Wales, Princess. See Alexandra.

Washburne, Elihu Benjamin (1816-1887)---American politician and diplomat, member of

the Republican Party; Ambassador in Paris (1869-77), carried on a subversive provocative policy against the Paris Commune---256-59

Western, John---prominent in the British working-class movement; carpenter, then entrepreneur; Owenist; member of the General Council of the First International (1864-72)--- 250

Wilhelm I (1797-1888)---King of Prussia (1861-88), German Emperor (1871-88)---40, 89, 182, 236, 269, 271

Wroblewski, Walery (1836-1908) ---Polish revolutionary democrat, one of the leaders of the Polish insurrection of 1863-64; general of the Paris Commune; member of the General Council of the First International and Corresponding Secretary for Poland (1871-72), delegate to the Hague Congress (1872); took an active part in the struggle against the Bakuninists---79

INDEX OF LITERARY AND

MYTHOLOGICAL

NAMES

Anthony (Marc Anthony)---a character from Shakespeare's tragedy Julius Caesar---137

Christ (Jesus Christ) (myth.)--- founder of Christianity---85, 133, 213

Don Carlos---the son of Philipp II of Spain (1545-68), a character idealised in several literary works; was persecuted for opposition to his father and died in prison---54, 110

Falstaff---personage

from

Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV; coward, joker and drunkard--- 51

Hecate (Greek myth.)---goddess of moonlight with three heads and three bodies; mistress of monsters and ghosts of the underworld, patron of evil and enchantment---92

Hercules---Roman name of He-

racles, popular ancient Greek hero known for his manly strength and super-human deeds---47, 118, 162, 172

Job (Bible)---image of a longsuffering poor man whom God rewarded for his patience and meekness---55

Joshua (Yehoshua ben Nun) (Bible)---hero who ruined the walls of Jericho by the sounds of sacred trumpets and cries of his warriors----64

Megaera---one of the three goddesses of vengeance, embodiment of wrath and envy; used figuratively---a malicious shrew ---92

Munchausen---the name of a braggart and Her in German literature---229

Pistol---character from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Henry V and Merry Wives of Windsor;

352

INDEX OF LITERARY AND MYTHOLOGICAL NAMES

cheat, coward and braggart--- 99

Pourceaugnac---chief character from Moliere's comedy Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, image of a dull and ignorant provincial noble---56, 192

---character from Shakes-

peare's comedy The Merchant of Venice, image of an avaricious usurer---57, 210

Tribulet---fool, a character from Hugo's drama Le roi s amuse ---130

SUBJECT INDEX

Accident and law in history---285 Alliance of Socialist Democracy

---100, 101

Alsace-Lorraine---41-43, 89, 108 Austro-Prussian War of 1866---

25, 37, 44

Blanquists---30-32

Bonap artists, Bonapartism---37- 38, 56, 70, 71, 78, 88, 126, 127, 131, 143, 144, 146, 147, 163, 170, 189, 190, 191, 204, 205, 214, 219-21, 226

Bourgeois Republicans in France ---23, 28, 46, 54, 62, 69, 82, 110, 120, 126, 127, 136, 163, 174, 189, 194, 208, 209, 219, 225, 226

Capitalist society---75 "Chambre introuvable". See

France, Restoration. Chauvinism---167 "Civil War in France, The"---

21, 22, 30, 31, 33, 236, 238,

242, 245, 248, 250, 253, 267,

270, 286, 290 Communism---15, 76 Comtists---164, 111 Counter-revolutionary action in

Paris on March 22, 1871---63, 64, 115, 116, 174, 175, 178-79, 195, 197, 198, 283

"Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis

Bonaparte, The"----21, 284 England. See Great Britain.

February Revolution. See France, Revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic. First International----22, 30, 35, 38, 39, 97, 99, 100, 101, 108, 164, 166, 225, 230, 239, 240, 242, 243, 246, 247, 248, 250- 55, 266, 271, 274, 276, 287, 290, 291, 292, 293 ---the General Council's Addresses on the FrancoPrussian War---21, 22, 40, 48, 100 ---and the struggle for peace---

35, 38, 39, 47, 99, 100 •---the persecution and slander by the bourgeois press---35, 97, 99, 100, 101, 229-32, 239, 240, 242-45, 247, 250-51, 252, 253, 255, 262, 267, 268, 269, 271, 281-83, 286 ---and the Paris Commune---•

354

SUBJECT INDEX

355

120, 141, 142, 215, 227, 228, 233, 235-38, 250-53, 255, 256, 262, 263, 267, 268, 275, 286, 287, 290, 291 France---22, 23, 24, 25, 31, 42-44,

56, 57, 74, 78, 80, 159, 192, 203,

204, 209, 210, 218, 238, 274,

275, 284, 285, 294

---the working-class movement ---22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 35,

36, 38, 39, 46, 47, 48, 69-71, 96, 159, 160, 162

---bourgeoisie---23, 24, 30 ---foreign policy and treaties--- 42-45, 54, 107, 108, 119, 124,

125, 126, 187

---consequences of the FrancoPrussian War---37, 57, 78,

126, 157, 158, 162, 191, 208 ---bourgeois revolution at the

end of the 18th century---44, 68, 74, 77, 78, 82, 83, 149, 150, 151, 163, 177, 178, 190, 192, 202, 203, 208, 218, 275

---Restoration---56, 57, 80, 81, 126, 149, 150, 170, 187, 189- 91

---First Empire---25, 32, 46, 69, 149, 150, 159, 203, 218

---July Revolution of 1830 and the July Monarchy---23, 52, 55, 62, 74, 87, 107, 109, 110, 116, 119, 120, 121, 126, 127, 136, 149, 150, 187, 189, 195, 203," 204, 219, 226

---Revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic---23, 24, 53, 54, 56, 57, 62, 64, 69-71, 78, 79, 87, 107, 109, 110, 121, 122, 126-28, 135, 150, 153, 159, 162-63, 179, 188, 189," 191, 192, 195, 198, 202-04, 209; 219, 225, 226

---June insurrection of 1848--- 24, 46, 53, 54, 62, 63, 69, 77, 95, 111, 112, 122, 127, 162, 163, 189, 195, 196, 197, 226, 231, 241

---Second Empire---24, 25, 35-

37, 40, 44, 54, 57, 60, 61, 65, 70, 71, 74, 77-80, 87, 94, 98,

99, 104, 107, 125, 128, 129, 150-53, 159, 202, 204, 205, 220, 221, 228, -Revolution of 1870 and the 46, 48, 57, 60, 146, 151, 183, 217

110, 111, 119, 135, 136, 141, 162, 187, 194, 206, 209, 217, 231, 293, 294 September 4, Republic---25, 104, 106, 117, 184, 194, 201,

and the Franco-Prussian

War---38, 45, 46 ---the working-class movement

and the Paris Commune---

265, 274, 290

---the Anti-Socialist Law---22 ---the German bourgeoisie---

41, 43, 44

Government of National Defence ---25, 46, 49-52, 62, 111, 115, 118, 119, 141, 145-47, 170, 182, 183, 189, 191, 196, 201, 225, 226

---and its capitulatory policy--- 49, 50, 55, 59, 93, 94, 102, 103, 106, 111, 122, 125, 126, 145, 146, 173, 183, 184, 216- 18

Government of Thiers---26, 28, 29, 30, 54, 56, 57-63, 64-67, 79-83, 85, 86, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 103, 105, 109, 113-16, 118, 123-24, 126, 128, 129, 131-36, 141, 158, 163, 164, 169, 170, 175, 176, 177, 179, 189, 198- 201, 208-14, 228, 231, 236, 240, 288

---and its policy of provoking an insurection in Paris---57, 58, 61, 106, 107, 117, 124, 125, 193-195, 215, 216, 217, 240, 288

Great Britain---47, 74, 164, 240,

249, 252, 253, 288, 290, 291

---the working class and the

workers' . movement---225,

268, 293

---the working-class movement and the Franco-Prussian War---39, 47, 225 ---the working-class movement and the Paris Commune--- 250, 251, 253, 267, 268, 286

Insurrection of October 31, 1870 in Paris---25, 62, 65, 103, 111, 112, 145, 146, 195, 196

International Working Men's Association, See First International.

Ligue de I'Union republicaine

pour les droits de Paris---77,

132, 162, 213 Legitimists---52, 53, 54, 56, 126,

127, 129, 131, 163, 173, 189-

92, 208, 214

"Manifesto of the Communist Party"---270

Marxism and its victory in the working-class movement after 1871---31

Masons---132, 213, 255

National Assembly of 1871--- 51, 56-61, 65, 67, 71, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86-90, 103, 104, 113-17, 119, 120, 124, 125, 127, 129, 131-35, 157, 163, 170, 175-78, 190, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 207, 208, 211, 214, 217, 227, 228, 235, 283

National Guard---25, 26, 27, 59,

60-67, 71, 102, 103, 111, 115,

124, 146-48, 154, 162, 174,

175, 176, 178, 179, 183, 193,

194, 196, 197, 198, 206, 216,

217, 227-28, 234

---its Central Committee---26,

59-64, 97, 111, 112, 148, 157,

166, 174-77, 178, 179, 180,

193, 196-98, 216-18, 228,

231, 284

Orleanists---46, 53, 56, 87, 127, 131, 163, 170, 189-91, 208, 214, 219

Paris---31, 82-84, 168-72, 186, 196, 197, 209, 213, 214, 215, 227, 233

---as a revolutionary centre--- 23, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 71, 72, 82, 117, 123, 126, 145, 146, 147, 155, 168-72, 183, 192, 193, 201, 207, 215, 217, 218 ---as the centre of France---• 48, 60, 71, 96, 106, 126, 168, 169

Paris Commune of 1871---26, 27, 32, 33, 50, 51, 55, 61, 66, 72- 75, 79-83, 91-96, 112-16, 119, 130, 131, 132, 136, 140-44,

Franco-Prussian War---25, 26, 29, 36, 37, 40, 45, 50, 54-57, 60, 61, 81, 93, 94, 117, 118, 126, 146, 167, 168, 182, 183, 184, 191, 193, 194, 200, 275 ---reasons for its origin---25,

26, 36-38 ---change in its character---21,

22, 38, 39, 40, 41, 45 ---and the post-war alignment

of forces in Europe---22, 45 ---and the danger of a world

war---22, 45 ---siege and capitulation of

Paris---25, 26, 48, 49, 51,

55, 59, 60, 62, 71, 94, 102, 103, 105, 106, 115-18, 122, 124, 147, 182-85, 193-196, 201, 206, 216-18, 271

---preliminary peace and the Frankfort Peace Treaty---26,

56, 89, 117-19, 124, 158, 192, 213, 214, 289

---and the working class and its movement of protest--- 22, 27, 28, 36-39, 45-47

---and the French working class---25, 26, 27, 28, 36-39, 46-47

---and the German working class---38, 45, 46

Germany---21, 22, 39, 42-45,

283, 284, 289, 293

---and the Franco-Prussian War---21, 37-39, 40, 41

---the working class and the working-class movement--- 33, 38, 274, 291, 294

---the working-class movement

SUBJECT INDEX

357 356

SUBJECT INDEX

147, 156-58, 180, 181, 199, 201,

212, 214, 215, 231, 232, 234,

258, 259, 271, 285, 292, 293,

294

---insurrection of March 18,

1871---26, 61-63, 68, 83, 111,

112, 147, 174, 175, 193-96,

198, 201, 206, 229 ---conditions of its origin---26,

56, 59-62, 71, 147, 183, 192,

193, 206, 271 ---as a new type of the state---

27, 32-34, 68, 71-76, 78-81, 92, 130, 140, 141, 142, 146, 147, 151-56, 158, 163, 164,

165, 169, 201, 202, 206, 207, 218, 266, 270, 284

---as a proletarian revolution---

28, 61, 68, 71, 75-77, 79, 147, 152-54, 162, 201, 202, 255,

266, 267, 270, 273, 275

---and social reorganisation of society---31, 74-77, 97, 151- 54, 155, 156, 157, 160-64,

166, 167, 194, 210, 266, 269 ---the role of the masses---68,

71, 76, 77, 92, 123, 152, 153, 164, 165, 194, 218, 228, 231, 234, 275, 284, 285

---and the workers' movement and their role in---28, 76, 77, 79, 82, 92, 96, 152, 155, 159, 162, 164-67, 194, 195, 197, 198, 201, 202, 206, 218, 231, 234, 235, 255, 266, 270, 273, 285, 294

---and internationalism---27, 79, 126, 142, 152, 167, 168, 275

---and the international working class---250, 251, 253, 265,

267, 268, 274, 287, 290

---socio-economic policy---27, 28, 30, 31, 71, 72, 78-80, 138-40, 144, 158, 161, 162, 206, 207, 234

---separation of the Church from the State---72, 140, 141, 207

---struggle of trends---30, 32

---Marx's advice to the Com-

mune, aid to the Communards---268, 287-89, 290, 291

---and the provinces---79, 83, 86, 88, 132-35, 169, 170, 201, 213-15, 233, 234, 236, 237, 287

---German intervention and aid to Versailles---28, 29, 30, 54, 85, 89, 96, 118, 119, 124, 125, 148, 167, 168, 176, 177, 209, 238, 269, 273, 288

---military operations---28, 29, 64-66, 82-87, 89, 93-95, 136, 143_; 176, 177, 179, 199, 212, 231, 236

---Versailles terrorism and brutalities---27, 28, 29, 80, > 64-67, 83, 84, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 98, 99, 105, 113, 114, 123_t129-31, 136, 137, 142, 143, 179, 180, 181, 186, 199-201, 212, 260, 261, 267, 271, 273, 292

---and the bourgeois press--- 66, 140, 141, 144, 198, 227, 229, 240, 244, 249, 255, 267,

283, 289₂ 291

---its mistakes and causes of its defeat---29, 30, 63-66, 115, 142, 176, 177, 179, 180, 197, 199, 200, 218, 231, 283,

284, 288, 289, 292

---lessons and significance---75,

79, 164, 165, 238, 264, 270,

272-77, 284, 285, 293, 294

---misunderstanding of the

Commune---73, 74, 130, 165,

166, 206, 207, 266, 267, 394

---and the middle classes---77,

132, 139, 140, 162, 212, 233,

234

---and the peasantry---77-79.

_154, 157-61 _ Parliamentarianism---55, 56, 73,

153-56, 202, 204, 220, 221 Party of Order---34, 64, 65, 69, 70, 78, 95, 126-28, 158, 159, 170, 189, 198, 202-04, 219, 220 Proudhonism---30, 31, 293 Prussia---37, 70, 94, 95, 96, 125, 126, 153. 210, 221, 271, 288

Republic, bourgeois---126-29, 135

Revolution of 1848-49 in Italy--- 53, 54, 64, 110, 121, 129, 177, 179, 188, 189, 198, 226

Roman Expedition. See Revolution of 1848-49 in Italy.

Roman Republic. See Revolution of 1848-49 in Italy.

Rome. See Revolution of 1848- 49 in Italy.

Rome (ancient)---24, 91, 92, 123

Rural Assembly. See National Assembly of 1871.

Russia---22, 39, 45, 93, 125, 271

State, exploiting---32-34, 68-72, 73-75, 96, 126-29, 149-53, 155, 163, 164, 170, 171, 202-06, 218-21, 268

United States of America---32, 33, 93, 205, 291 ---the Civil War in the United

States---47, 124, 211, 212 ---American diplomacy and the

Commune---256-59 Utopian socialism---30, 31, 165

Versailles as the centre of counter-revolution---50, 63, 64, 65, 82-86, 106, 115, 157, 161, 176, 184, 185, 207, 213, 275

Versailles army---86, 118, 130-33, 174, 180, 181, 209, 211-14

Versailles Government. See Government of Thiers.

Versaillists---50-56, 82, 83, 91, 92, 104-108, 120, 121, 122, 123, 135, 136, 141, 142, 143, 160, 161, 179-81, 184-89, 196-99, 207, 213

Working class---156, 157, 159, 165, 166, 171, 219, 264, 272, 274

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