Frederick Engels: The Civil War in France

Introduction

1891 Introduction by Frederick Engels

On the 20th Anniversary of the Paris Commune

[Historical Background &

Overview of the Civil War]

Thanks to the economic and political development of France since [the French Revolution of]
1789, for 50 years the position of Paris has been such that no revolutions
could break out there without assuming a proletarian character, that is
to say, the proletariat, which had bought victory with its blood,
would advance its own demands after victory. These demands were more or less
unclear and even confused, corresponding to the state of evolution 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 capitalist
and workers. It is true that no one knew how this was to be brought about.
But the demand itself, however indefinite it still was in its formulation,
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 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 bourgeoisie
of the parliamentary opposition held banquets for securing 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 to allow the radical and republican strata of the bourgeoisie and petty
bourgeoisie gradually to take the lead. But behind these stood the revolutionary
workers, and since 1830,[A] these had acquired far more political independence
than the bourgeoisie, and even the republicans, suspected. At the moment
of the crisis between the government and the opposition, the workers opened
battle on the streets; [King] 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 in their hands, and were a power in the
state. Therefore, as soon as the bourgeois republicans in control felt
something like firm ground under their feet, their first aim was to disarm
the workers. This took place by driving them into the insurrection of June
1848 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 of the defenceless
prisoners, the likes 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
them as a separate class, with its own interests and demands. And yet 1848
was only child’s play compared with their frenzy 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 [Legitimists, Orleanists and Bonapartists] 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,[B] to explode the last stronghold of the bourgeoisie, the National Assembly. The Second Empire opened 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 its
exclusive domination by only a small section of the big bourgeoisie. Louis
Bonaparte took the political power from the capitalists under the pretext
of protecting them, the bourgeoisie, 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 rise and enrichment of the whole
bourgeoisie to an extent hitherto unknown. To an even greater extent, it
is true, corruption and mass robbery developed, clustering around the imperial
court, and drawing their heavy percentages from this enrichment.

But the Second Empire was the appeal to the French chauvinism,
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.[C] 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 long duration of time. Hence the necessity for brief wars and extension
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
to France of the left bank of the Rhine, either all at once or piecemeal,
was merely a question of time. The time came with the Austro-Prussian War
of 1866; cheated of the anticipated “territorial compensation” by Bismarck,
and by his own over-cunning, hesitating policy, there was now nothing left
for Napoleon but war, which broke out in 1870 and drove him first to Sedan,
and then to Wilhelmshohe [prison].

The inevitable result 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 [of Paris]; the armies of
the empire were either hopelessly beleaguered in 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 purpose
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 almost at once 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 some members
of the government. Treachery, the government’s direct breach of its undertakings,
and the interventions of some petty-bourgeois battalions set them free
again, and in order not to occasion the outbreak of civil war inside a
city which was already beleaguered by a foreign power, the former government
was left in office.

At last on January 28, 1871, Paris, almost starving, capitulated
but with honors unprecedented in the history of war. The forts were surrendered,
the outer wall disarmed, 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, who themselves 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 conquerors. 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 very centre of the revolution, were
compelled to stand by respectfully, and salute just 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,[D] now, Thiers, the new head of government, was
compelled to realize that the supremacy of the propertied classes – large
landowners and capitalists – was in constant danger so long as the workers
of Paris had arms in their hands. His first action was to 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 mobilized as one man in defence of the guns, 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 National Guard, 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 that the National Guard, in which all citizens capable of bearing
arms were to be enrolled, was to be the sole armed force. It remitted all
payments of rent for dwelling houses from October 1870 until April, the
amounts already paid to be reckoned to a future rental period, and stopped
all sales of articles pledged in the municipal pawnshops. 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 received by
any employee of the Commune, and therefore also by its members themselves,
might not exceed 6,000 francs. 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, a decree
excluding from the schools all religious symbols, pictures, dogmas, prayers
– in a word, “all that belongs to the sphere of the individual’s conscience”
– was ordered to be excluded from the schools, and this decree was gradually
applied. On the 5th, in reply to the shooting, day after day, of the Commune’s fighters captured by the Versailles troops,
a decree was issued for imprisonment of hostages, but it was never carried
into effect. 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 Vendôme,
which had been cast from guns captured by Napoleon after the war of 1809,
should be demolished as a symbol of chauvinism and incitement to national
hatred. This decree was carried out on May 16. On April 16 the Commune
ordered a statistical tabulation of factories which had been closed down
by the manufacturers, and the working out of plans for the carrying on
of these factories by workers formerly employed in them, who were to be
organized in co-operative societies, and also plans for the organization
of these co-operatives in one great union. On the 20th the Commune abolished
night work for bakers, and also the workers’ registration cards, which
since the Second Empire had been run as a monopoly by police nominees –
exploiters of the first rank; the issuing of these registration cards was
transferred to the mayors of the 20 arrondissements of Paris. On
April 30, the Commune ordered the closing of the pawnshops, on the ground
that they were a private exploitation of labor, and were in contradiction
with the right of the workers to their instruments of labor and to credit.
On May 5 it ordered the demolition 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 without exception,
workers, or recognized representatives of the workers, sat in the Commune,
its decision bore a decidedly proletarian character. Either they 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 realization of the principle that in
relation to the state, religion is a purely private matter – or they
promulgated decrees which were in the direct interests of the working class
and to some extent cut deeply into the old order of society. In a beleaguered
city, however, it was possible at most to make a start in the realization
of all these measures. And from the beginning of May onwards all their
energies were taken up by the fight against the ever-growing armies assembled
by the Versailles government.

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 11th they were repulsed with heavy losses
by General Eudes. Paris was continually bombarded and, moreover, by the
very people who had stigmatized 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, 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 ascendancy. This already became evident when, on April 23, Thiers
broke off the negotiations for the exchange, proposed by Commune, of the
Archbishop of Paris [Georges Darboy] and a whole number of other priests held 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; and 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 wall itself; 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 and attack on a long front, which the Parisians naturally thought
covered by the armistice, and therefore held only with weak forces. 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 real working
class city.

It was only after eight days’ fighting that the last defender
of the Commune were overwhelmed 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 workers
were shot down in hundred by mitrailleuse fire [over 30,000 citizens of Paris were massacred]. The “Wall of the Federals” [aka Wall of the Communards] at the Pere Lachaise cemetery, where the final mass murder was consummated,
is still standing today, a mute but eloquent testimony to the savagery
of which the ruling class is capable as soon as the working class dares
to come out for its rights. Then came the mass arrests [38,000 workers arrested]; when the slaughter
of them all proved to be impossible, the shooting of victims arbitrarily
selected from the prisoners’ ranks, and the removal of the rest to great
camps where they awaited trial by courts-martial. The Prussian troops surrounding
the northern 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 General Staff; particularly,
honor is due to the Saxon army corps, which behaved very humanely and let
through many workers who were obviously fighters for the Commune.

Frederick Engels

London, on the 20th anniversary

of the Paris Commune, March 18, 1891.

Chapter 1: [The Beginning of the Franco-Prussian War]

For Reference see while reading: Timeline of the Civil War

A.
The revolution of July 1830 in France.

B.
The coup d’etat, by Louis Bonaparte on December 2, 1851, which marked the beginning of the Bonapartist regime of the Second Empire.

C.
The first republic was proclaimed in 1792 and was replaced by the First Empire of Napoleon I (1804-14), which expanded the borders of France as far east as to include most of Northern Italy and stopped short of Denmark. Further, Napoleon established a series of satellite states that stretched throughout central and Eastern Europe, up through Poland. His attempt to spread his empire into Russia was met with bitter failure, by the hand of the extremely courageous and the bold resistance of the Russian land and peasantry.

D.
The preliminary peace treaty between France and Germany signed at Versailles on February 26, 1871 by Thiers and Jules Favre, on the one hand, and Bismarck, on the other. According to the terms of this treaty, France ceded Alsace and East Lorraine to Germany and paid it indemnities to the sum of 5 billion francs. The final peace treaty was signed in Frankfort-on-Main on May 10, 1871.

Karl Marx: The Civil War in France

The First Address[1]

July 23, 1870

[The Beginning of the Franco-Prussian War]

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 fulfill 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.”

No wonder that Louis Bonaparte, who usurped 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[A] he
ordered a raid on the members of the Administrative Committee 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
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 [19] 1870[B] is but an amended edition of the coup
d’etat of December 1851. 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 15, 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 12, 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
European equilibrium, of national honor, 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 blood
tax, and find in public misfortunes a source of fresh speculations, we
protest, we who want peace, labor, and liberty!

[...]

“Brothers in Germany! Our division would only result
in the complete triumph of the 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 of July 22:

“The war, is it just? No! The war, is it national?
No! It is merely dynastic. In the name of humanity, or 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, first organized under the presidency of Louis
Bonaparte, having been masqueraded into blouses [i.e., to appear as common workers] and let loose on
the streets of Paris, there to perform the contortions of war fever, the real
workmen of the Faubourgs [suburbs, workers’
districts] came forward with public peace demonstrations so
overwhelming that Pietri, the Prefect of Police, thought it prudent to stop
at once 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 18 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? Prussia! 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 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
super-added all the tricks of the Second Empire, its real despotism, and its
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 allows the present war to lose its strictly
defensive character and to degenerate into a war against the French people,
victory of defeat will prove alike disastrous. All the miseries that befell
Germany after her wars 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 had re-echoed from Germany. A
mass meeting of workmen, held at Brunswick on July 16, 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 the 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 workmen,
adopted unanimously a resolution to this effect:

“In the name of 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
trumpets, 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 strike 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
strategic lines of railway and was already massing troops in the direction of
the Prut.[C] Whatever
sympathy the Germans may justly claim in a war of defense against Bonapartist
aggression, they would forfeit at once by allowing the Prussian government to
call for, or accept the help of, the Cossack. Let them
remember that after their war of independence against the first Napoleon,
Germany lay for generations prostrate at the feet of the tsar.

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 – Labour! The pioneer of that new society is the
International Working Men’s Association.

Chapter 2: [Prussian Occupation of
France]

Karl Marx: The Civil War in France

The Second Address[2]

September 9, 1870

[Prussian Occupation of France]

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 Bonaparte to play during 18 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 defense ended, in point of fact, with the surrender
of Louis Bonaparte, the Sedan
capitulation, 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 –
[Prussian] King William’s own proclamations at the commencement of the
war.

In a speech from the throne to the North German Diet, he had solemnly
declared to make war upon the emperor of the French and not upon 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, the 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 reluctantly yielding 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 struggles 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 re-vindicated its
civic independence by affecting to force upon the Prussian government the
secret designs of that same government. It does penance for its
long-continued, and almost religious, faith in Louis Bonaparte’s
infallibility, but 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 empire.[A] 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 re-made 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.[B]

The more knowing patriots, however, require Alsace and the German-speaking
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 the
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
concentrating a fresh one at Nancy or Verdun. While Germany owns Coblenz,
Mayence [i.e., 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 to
1795, 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[C] in 1795, and left the South to shift for itself, the
invasions of South Germany with Strasbourg as 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 Mayence 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 communication
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 Minicio, and France to the line of
the Rhine, in order to protect Paris, which lies certainly more open to an
attack from the northeast than Berlin does from the southwest. 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
garrote, but murder. If every conqueror took “material guarantees" for
breaking the sinews of a nation, the first Napoleon did so by the Tilsit
Treaty, 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 imposes 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 intensity 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 [German] patriotism, you 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 bayonetting the revolution of the 18th
century. It is not Germans that befouled their hands by the subjugation of
Italy, the oppressions of Hungary, and the dismemberment of Poland. Their
present military system, which divides the whole able-bodied 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 civilizing
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 [All strongholds of the Russian Empire] . While gloating
at the terrors of imperialist invasion, they blink at the infamy of
autocratic tutelage.

As in 1865, promises were exchanged between Gorchakov and Bismarck. 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 [II of Russia] 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 Confederation incompatible 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 tsar’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 of autocracy, could the tsar afford to bear with such a loss of
foreign prestige? Already the Moscovite journals repeat the language of the
Bonapartist journals of 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 French
territory, there will then only remain two courses open to her. She must at all risks become the avowed tool of
Russian aggrandizement, or, after some short respite, make again ready for
another “defensive” war, not one of those new-fangled
“localized” wars, but a war of races – a war with
the Slavonic and Roman races.[D]

The German working class have 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 laborers,
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 bought 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[E]; and, as the first of these guarantees, they claim an
honorable peace for France, and the recognition of the French
republic.

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

“We,” they say, “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 western civilization 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!”

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 clamour 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[F] 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 labor 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, partly
of middle class republicans, upon some of whom the insurrection of June
1848 has left its indelible stigma. The division of labor 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 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,
promised in the name of 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 undertakers, not intended to serve as a mere stop-gap 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 swayed by the
national souvenirs of 1792, as the French peasant 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 organization. It will gift them with fresh
herculean powers for the regeneration of France, and our common task –
the emancipation of labor. 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
recognize the French republic.[G] The present dilatoriness of the British government is
probably intended to atone for the Anti-Jacobin war [1792] and the former
indecent haste in sanctioning the coup d’etat.[H] The English workmen call also upon their
government to oppose by all its power the dismemberment of France, which a
part of the English press is shameless enough to howl for. It is the same
press that for 20 years deified Louis Bonaparte as the providence of Europe,
that frantically cheered on the slaveholders’ rebellion.[I] 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 Republique!

Chapter 3: [France Capitulates & the
Government of Thiers]

Karl Marx: The Civil War in France

The Third Address

May, 1871

[France Capitulates & the Government of Thiers]

In September 4, 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. 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 on 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, organizing 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 workmen 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 [of
Paris], when they thought the opportune moment came 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. Carbon,
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 has been more than a pretext for
the personal government of Thiers, Favre, and Co., the upstarts of September
4 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 manifestos, 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, the very same Jules Favre avows that what they
were “defending” against were not the Prussian soldiers, but the
working men of Paris. During the whole continuance of the siege, the
Bonapartist cut-throats, whom Trochu had wisely entrusted 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 Honor, to
Suzanne, general of division of artillery, a correspondence published by the
Journal
officiel of the Commune.) The mask of the true heroism was at last
dropped on January
28, 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 March 18 on their wild flight to Versailles, the capitulards 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 orders
of Jules Favre, published a series of authentic legal documents in proof that
Jules Favre, living in concubinage with the wife of a drunken 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 documents 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 September 4, when he sympathetically let loose upon society Pic and
Taillefer, convicted, even under the empire, of forgery in the scandalous
affair of “Etendard.”
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 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 July 13, 1867), and convicted,
on his own confession, of theft of 300,000 francs, while manager of one of
the branches of the Societe Generale,[A] Rue Palestro, No.5 (see report of the
Prefecture of Police, dated December 11, 1868). This Arthur Picard was made
by Ernest Picard the editor of his paper, l’Electeur
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 September 4, 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 their
tickets-of-leave[1]; 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 tickets-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 class corruption. 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 Lafitte, ingratiating himself with the king by
exciting mob riots against the clergy, during which the church of Saint
Germain l’Auxerrois and the Archbishop’s palace were plundered,
and by acting the minister-spy upon, and the jail-accoucheur of the
Duchess de Berry.[B] The
massacre of the republicans in the Rue Transnonian, and the subsequent
infamous laws of September against the press and the right of association,
were his work.[C]
Reappearing as the chief of the cabinet in March 1840, he astonished France
with his plan for fortifying France.[D] To the republicans, who denounced this plan as a
sinister plot against the liberty of 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 the 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, save that government which had previously surrendered these forts to
the Prussians.

When King Bomba [Ferdinand II of Spain] tried his hand at Palermo, in
January 1848, 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 48 hours a large town has been bombarded – by whom? Was it
a foreign enemy exercising the rights of war? No, gentlemen, it was by its
own government. And why? Because the unfortunate town demanded its rights.
Well, then, for the demand of its rights it has got 48 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.[E] In fact, the fault of King Bomba seems to have
consisted in this only – that he limited his bombardment to 48 hours.

A few days before the February Revolution, 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 Mirabeau-mouche [Mirabeau the fly],
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 hand 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 February Revolution 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 [1848] massacres had
cleared it for his sort of action. Then he became the leading mind of the
“Party of Order”[F] 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 to
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 the 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 shoeblack he had become, his foreign
policy always culminated in the utter humiliation of France – from the
London convention[G] of
1840 to the Paris capitulation of 1871, and the present civil war, where he
hounds on the prisoners of Sedan and Metz[H] against Paris by special permission of Bismarck.

Despite his versatility of talent and shiftiness 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 March 1, 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 labor by capital has always been
the cornerstone of your policy, and from the very day you saw the Republic of
Labor 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 strategems, cunning devices, and base perfidies of
parliamentary 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 September 4 had begun, as Trochu himself said, on the
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
one-third of the territory was in the hands of the enemy, the capital was cut
off from the provinces, all communications were disorganized. 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 galvanize back
into life the Legitimist party, which now, along with the Orleanists, 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
counter-revolution than the party whose action, in the words of Thiers
himself (Chamber of Deputies, January 5, 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
Bonaparte; and there they were themselves. The wheel of history had evidently
rolled back to stop at the “Chambers introuvable” of 1816.[I] In the assemblies of the
republic, 1848 to 1851, 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. [a
character in one of Molière’s comedies, typifying the dull-witted,
narrow-minded petty landed gentry.]

As soon as this Assembly of “Rurals"[J] had met at Bordeaux, Thiers made it clear to them
that the peace preliminaries must be assented to at once, without even the
honors of a parliamentary debate, as the only conditions 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 for five milliards[K], and interest at 5 per
cent on the unpaid instalments thereof. Who was to pay this bill? It was only
by the violent overthrow of the republic that the appropriators of wealth
could hope to shift onto 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 decapitalize
Paris; the appointment of Orleanist ambassadors; Dufaure’s laws on
over-due commercial bills and house rents[L], inflicting ruin on the commerce and industry of
Paris; Pouyer-Quertier’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 September 4; the appointment of Vinoy, the
Décembriseur[M], as governor of Paris – of Valentin, the
imperialist gendarme, as its prefect of police – and of
D’Aurelles de Paladine, 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 known that, through the agency of M.
Pouyer-Quertier, his finance ministers, 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, Pouyer-Quertier, and Jules Simon? and –

2. That no money was to be paid down until after the
“pacification” of Paris?[N]

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.

Chapter 4: [Paris Workers’
Revolution

& Thiers’ Reactionary Massacres]

(1) 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 possessor is being referred to as ticket-of-leave-men.

Karl Marx: The Civil War in France

The Third Address

May, 1871

[Paris Workers’ Revolution

& Thiers’ Reactionary Massacres]

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 [National 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 Aurelles de Paladine 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 bodyguard for the express purpose of cowing
Paris, Paris stood on the watch. The National Guard reorganized 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, 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 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 recognized in
the capitulation of January 28, and on that very title exempted from the
general surrender, into the hands of the conqueror, or 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
September 4. But that revolution had become the legal status of France. The
republic, its work, was recognized by the conqueror in the terms of the
capitulation. After the capitulation, it was acknowledged by all foreign
powers, and in its name, the National Assembly had been summoned. The Paris
working men’s revolution of September 4 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[A]. 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 September 4 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 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 fraternization of the
line with the people. Aurelles de Paldine 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 around little Thiers against
themselves. The glorious working men’s Revolution of March 18 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 March 18 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 the executions 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 change sides. The same men executed Clement
Thomas.

“General” Clement Thomas, a malcontent
ex-quartermaster-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 February Revolution, the men of the
National having got into power, they metamorphosed this old
quarter-master-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 dastardly executioners. Then he and his generalship
disappeared for a long time, to again rise to the surface on November 1,
1870. The day before, the Government of National 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.[B] Instead of keeping their word, they let
loose on Paris the Bretons of Trochu, who now replaced the Corsicans of
Bonaparte.[C] 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 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 March 18, he laid before the War
Minister, Leflo, 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 for the fate of the people crushed to death on the day of her entrance
into London.

The massacre of unarmed citizens in Place Vendome is a myth which M.
Thiers and the Rurals persistently ignored in the Assembly, entrusting its
propagation exclusively to the servants’ hall of European journalism.
“The men of order,” the reactionists of Paris, trembled at the
victory of March 18. 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 January 22, 1871,[D] 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 open
wide for their safe retreat to Versailles. The men of order were left not
only unharmed, but allowed to rally and quietly 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 March
22, 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 [i.e. hired
assassin], fell into marching order, ill-treated and disarmed the
detached patrols and sentries of the National Guard 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 forever!” attempted to break through the line drawn up there,
and thus to carry by 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)[E] were made, and, proving
ineffective, fire was commanded by the general [Bergeret] 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
walls of Jericho. The runaways left behind them two National Guards killed,
nine severely wounded (among them a member of the Central Committee
[Maljournal]), 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 June 13, 1849, the
National Guard made a really pacific demonstration in protest against the
felonious assault of French troops upon Rome, Changarnier, then general of
the Party of Order, was acclaimed by the National Assembly, and especially by
M. Thiers, as the savior 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
themselves, this time, guilty of a decisive mistake 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 March 26, 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 honor (?) 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. Galifet, 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 Honor, for his general order to shoot down every soldier of the
line taken in the ranks of the Federals. Desmaret, 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 October 31, 1870.[F] “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 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.[Candide, Ch. 22](See news articles)

After the decree of the Commune of April 7, ordering reprisals and
declaring it to be the 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,” [G]
Thiers 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 [of the December 2, 1851 coup by Louis Bonaparte]
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 sergents-de-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 April 25, were afterwards shot down, one after
another, by the captain, a worthy man of Gallifet’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 Leflo to answer. It would be an insult to their
“glorious” army to speak of its deeds. The flippant tone in which
Thiers’ bulletin announced the bayoneting of the Federals, surprised
asleep at Moulin Saquet, and the wholesale fusillades at Clamart shocked the
nerves even of the not over-sensitive London Times. 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 l’Assemblee 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.

Chapter 5: [The Paris Commune]

Karl Marx: The Civil War in France

The Third Address

May, 1871

[The Paris Commune]

On the dawn of March 18, Paris arose to the thunder-burst of “Vive
la Commune!” What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the
bourgeois mind?

“The proletarians of Paris,” said the Central
Committee in its manifesto of March 18, “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 ready-made state
machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.

The centralized 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 labor – originates from
the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class society as a
mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Still, its development
remained clogged by all manner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local
privileges, municipal and guild monopolies, and provincial constitutions. The
gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 18th century swept away all
these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of
its last hinderances 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 labor, the state power assumed more and more the character of the
national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized 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 February Revolution, took the state
power, used it for the June [1848] massacres, in order to convince the
working class that “social” republic means the republic
entrusting 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 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 towards the “vile multitude.”

If the parliamentary republic, as M. Thiers said, “divided them [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
labor.

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 “Party of
Order” republic was the Second Empire.

The empire, with the coup d’etat for its birth certificate,
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 labor. 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
savior 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 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 labor by capital.

The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune. The cry of
“social republic,” with which the February Revolution was ushered
in by the Paris proletariat, did but express a vague aspiration after a
republic that was not only to supercede 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
workman’s wage. The vested interests and the representation
allowances 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 centralized government would in the
provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers.

In a rough sketch of national organization, 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 communities 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 would still remain for a
central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally
misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal and thereafter responsible
agents.

The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be
organized by 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 supercede universal suffrage by
hierarchical investiture.[A]

It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be
mistaken for the counterparts of older, and even defunct, forms of social
life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus, this new Commune,
which breaks with the modern state power, has been mistaken for a
reproduction of the medieval Communes, which first preceded, and afterward
became the substratum of, that very state power. The Communal Constitution
has been mistaken for an attempt to break up into the federation of small
states, as dreamt of by Montesquieu and the Girondins,[B] 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-centralization. Peculiar 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
counties.

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 there 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)[C] – it could only
enter into such a head to ascribe to the Paris Commune aspirations after the
caricature of the old French municipal organization 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 non-existence 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
favor, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all the
previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true
secret was this:

It was essentially a working class government, the product
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 labor.

Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been
an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot
co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was
therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon
which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labor
emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labor 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 60 years, about emancipation of labor, 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 the 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 civilization!

Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which
makes the labor 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 labor, into mere instruments of free
and associated labor. 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 obtrusive 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 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 décret 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 realize, 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 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 it at salaries the highest
of which barely amounted to one-fifth of what, according to high scientific
authority,(1) 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 Labor, floating over the Hôtel de Ville.

And yet, this was the first revolution in which the working 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 capitalist alone excepted. The Commune had
saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever recurring cause of dispute
among the middle class themselves – the debtor and creditor
accounts.[D] The same
portion of the middle class, after they had assisted in putting down the
working men’s insurrection of June 1848, had been at once
unceremoniously sacrificed to their creditors[E] by the then Constituent Assembly. But this was not
their only motive for now rallying around the working class. They felt 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 centralization
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 fréres Ignorantins,[F] 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 bohème, the
true middle class Party of Order came out in the shape of the “Union
Republicaine,”[G]
enrolling themselves under the colors of the Commune and defending it against
the wilful misconstructions 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 penny-a-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 indemnity.[H]
In the eyes of the French peasant, the very existence of a great landed
proprietor is in itself an encroachment on his conquests of 1789. The
bourgeois, in 1848, had burdened his plot of land with the additional tax of
45 cents in the franc; but then he did so in the name of the revolution;
while now he had fomented a civil war against revolution, to shift on to the
peasant’s shoulders the chief load of the 5 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
champêtre, 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
tax-gatherer, should only depend upon the spontaneous action of the
parishioners’ religious instinct. 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 favor of the peasant
– viz., the hypothecary debt, lying like an incubus upon his parcel of
soil, the prolétariat foncier (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 school-master to the
government’s priest, and himself to the government’s gendarme.
All the laws made by the Party of Order 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 apprehension –
knew 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 [cattle pest – contagious
disease].

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 labor, emphatically international. Within
sight of that 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 blackleggism, 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 Ganessco, the foul Wallachian, and his left hand is Markovsky, the
Russian spy. The Commune admitted all foreigners to the honor 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 organizing police hunts
upon the Germans in France. The Commune made a German working man [Leo
Frankel] its Minister of Labor. 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
honored the heroic sons of Poland [J. Dabrowski and W. Wróblewski] by placing
them at the head of the defenders of Paris. And, to broadly mark the new era
of history it was conscious of initiating, under the eyes of the conquering
Prussians on one side, and the Bonapartist army, led by Bonapartist generals,
on the other, the Commune pulled down that colossal symbol of martial glory,
the Vendôme Column.[I]

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 workpeople 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 Haussman,[J] 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 plunders, were, of course, greatly shocked at the Commune
clearing but 8,000F out of secularization.

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; 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 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 that there was to suppress Communal
papers at 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 St. Laurent.[K] It was a satire upon M. Thiers that, while he
showered grand crosses upon the Bonapartist generals in acknowledgment of
their mastery in losing battles, signing capitulations, and turning
cigarettes at Wilhelmshöhe,[L] 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 [Blanchet] 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
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 brawlers who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set
of stereotyped declarations against the government of the day, have sneaked
into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water. After March 18,
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,[M] American ex-slaveholders
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 cocottes [‘chickens’ – prostitutes] 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
Paume.(2) 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-et-Oise –
“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 was 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-fileurs,[N] the Paris of the Boulevards, male and female –
the rich, the capitalist, the gilded, the idle Paris, now thronging with its
lackeys, its blacklegs, its literary bonhome, and its
cocottes at Versailles, Saint-Denis, Rueil, and Saint-Germain;
considering the civil war but an agreeable diversion, eyeing the battle going
on through telescopes, counting the rounds of cannon, swearing by their own
honor 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.[O]

Chapter 6: [The Fall of Paris]

Authors Notes

(1) Professor Huxley. [Note to the German addition of
1871.]

(2) The tennis court where the National Assembly of 1789
adopted its famous decisions. [Note to the German addition of 1871.]

Karl Marx: The Civil War in France

The Third Address

May, 1871

[The Fall of Paris]

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 March 18, 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[A]
fighting under a white flag, every one of them wearing on his breast the
heart of Jesus in white cloth, and shouting “Vive le Roi!” (Long
live the King!)

Thiers was, therefore, compelled to collect, in hot haste, a motley crew,
composed of sailors, marines, Pontifical Zouaves, Valentin’s gendarmes,
and Pietri’s sergents-de-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 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 acknowledgment 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 23 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 April 30, 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 bandit-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 elements 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 March 21, when still without an army, he had declared to the Assembly:
“Come what may, I will not send an army to Paris.”

On March 27, 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[B] in the name of the
republic, while the roars of his Rurals drowned the very mention of his name
at Versailles. After this exploit, he toned down the “accomplished
fact” into a 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 color, 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 Lecomte 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, 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; he foreshadowed the fate of Paris by abridging what was
for him the too slow procedure of courts-martial,[C] and by a new-fangled, Draconic code of
deportation. The Revolution of 1848, abolishing the penalty of death for
political crimes, had replaced it by deportation. Louis Bonaparte did not
dare, at least not in theory, to re-establish the regime of 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 April 30, Thiers enacted
one of his great conciliation scenes on April 27. Amidst a flood of sentiment
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,
Orleanists, and 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 settlement 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,[D] 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 Frankfurt 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 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 recognized as the supreme arbiter in internal
French politics! In return for this, he offered to let loose for the
extermination of Paris the 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 installment of the indemnity dependent on the
“pacification” of Paris. Such bait was, of course, eagerly
swallowed by Thiers and his plenipotentiaries. They signed the treaty of
peace on May 10 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 as
May 18, 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 bandits, 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 Douai, on
May 21, 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 civilization is at last
won!”

So it was. The civilization 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 civilization 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 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
civilization, 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.[E] 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 “civilization.”

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

“With stray shots,” writes the Paris
correspondent of a London Tory paper, “still ringing in the distance,
and unintended 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, a Versaillist
journal pressed 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, 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 pulling its soul – alibi proelia et vulnera, alibi balnea
popinoeque [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 civilization, based upon the enslavement
of labor, 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 civilization! The
Paris people die enthusiastically for the Commune in numbers unequally 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 Megaera and Hecates!

The moderation of the Commune during the 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 bloodthirstiness 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 self-holocaust,
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 licence for incendiarism? When the
British troops wantonly set fire to the Capitol at Washington and to the
summer palace of the Chinese emperor,[F] 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 burned 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 Haussman 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 Versailles
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, as the Government of National Defence, but
only as a cloak for its treason, had promised to do. For this purpose Trochu
had 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 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 Haussman, razing historic Paris to make
place for the Paris of the sightseer!

But the execution by the Commune of the 64 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 civilization”!

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 human 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 have 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[G] 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 Archbishop 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 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 stigmatizing 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 the chorus of calumny, which the Party of Order never 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 installment of that general
destruction of great cities he had prayed for when still a simple Rural in
the Prussian Chambre introuvable of 1849.[H] 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 accepted 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
“civilized” 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
of Versailles!

That, after the most tremendous war of modern times, the conquering and
the conquered hosts should fraternize for the common massacre of the
proletariat – this unparalleled event does indicate, not, as Bismarck
thinks, the final repression of a new society up heaving, 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-organization of
labor against the cosmopolitan conspiracy of capital – as the head
fountain of all these disasters. Thiers denounced it as the despot of labor,
pretending to be its liberator. Picard ordered that all communications
between the French Internationals and those abroad be cut off; Count Jaubert,
Thiers’ mummified accomplice of 1835, declares it the great problem of
all civilized governments to weed it out. The Rurals roar against it, and the
whole European press joins the chorus. An honorable French writer [Robinet],
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 civilized 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 labor – the condition of their
own parasitical existence.

Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever 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 priest
will not avail to redeem them.

The General Council

M. J. Boon, Fred. Bradnick, G. H. Buttery, Caihil,
Delayhaye, William Hales, A. Hermann, Kolb, Fred. Lessner, Lochner, T. P.
Macdonnell, George Milner, Thomas Mottershead, Ch. Mills, Charles Murray,
Pfander, Roach, Rochat, Ruhl, Sadler, A. Ser- Railler, Cowell Stepney, Alf.
Taylor, William Townshend.

Corresponding Secretaries:

Eugene Dupont, For France Zevy Maurice, For Hungary Karl
Marx, For Germany And Anton Zabicki, For Poland Holland James Cohen, For
Denmark Fred. Engels, For Belgium And J.G. Eccarius, For The United Spain
States Hermann Jung, For Switzerland P. Giovacchini, For Italy

Hermann Jung, Chairman John Weston, Treasurer George
Harris, Financial Secretary J. George Eccarius, General Secretary

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

Postscript by Engels

Frederick Engels: The Civil War in France

1891 Introduction by Frederick Engels

On the 20th Anniversary of the Paris Commune

[PostScript][A]

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 Franco-Prussian War. [Chapter 1 and Chapter 2] 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, for grasping clearly the character, the import, and the
necessary consequences of great historical events, at a time when these
events are still in process before our eyes, or have only just taken place.
And, finally, because we in Germany are still having to endure the
consequences which Marx prophesied 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 French people, all the misfortunes which befell
Germany after the so-called wars of liberation[B] would revive again with renewed intensity?
Have we not had a further 20 years of Bismarck’s government, the Exceptional
Law and the anti-socialist campaign taking the place of the prosecutions
of demagogues,[C] with
the same arbitrary police measures and with literally the same staggering
interpretations of the law?

And has not the prophecy 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 tool 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 20 years vainly wooed the favor 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 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 15 or 20 million armed men, and
is only not already raging because even the strongest of the great military
states shrinks before the absolute incalculability of its final outcome?

All the more is it our duty to make again accessible to the German workers
these brilliant proofs, now half-forgotten, of the far-sightedness of the
international working class 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; 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 clearness, and above all such truth, as has never again been
attained on all the mass of literature which has been written on this
subject.

If today, 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 of 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,
chiefly consisting of adherents of the Proudhon school of socialism. The
great majority of the Blanquists at that time were socialist only by
revolutionary and proletarian instinct; only a few had attained greater
clarity on the essential 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 10,000
hostages. It would have meant the pressure of the whole of the French
bourgeoisie on the Versailles government in favor of peace with the Commune,
but what is still more wonderful is the correctness of so much that was
actually 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 actions and
omissions. And in both cases the irony of history willed – as is usual
when doctrinaires come to the helm – that both did the opposite of what
the doctrines of their school proscribed.

Proudhon, the Socialist of the small peasant and master-craftsman,
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 workers; that it was a pure dogma,
unproductive and burdensome, in conflict as much with the freedom of the
workers as with economy of labor; that its disadvantages multiplied more
swiftly than its advantages; that, as compared with it, competition, division
of labor and private property were economic forces. Only for the exceptional
cases – as Proudhon called them – of large-scale industry and
large industrial units, such as railways, was there any place for the
association of workers. (Cf. Idee Generale de la Revolution, 3
etude.)

By 1871, even in Paris, the centre of handicrafts, large-scale industry
had already so much ceased to be an exceptional case that by far the most
important decree of the Commune instituted an organization of large-scale
industry and even of manufacture which was not based only on the association
of workers in each factory, but also aimed at combining all these
associations in one great union; in short an organization 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 antithesis of the Proudhon
doctrine. And, therefore, the Commune was also the grave of the Proudhon
school of socialism. Today this school has vanished from French working class
circles; among them now, among the Possibilists no
less than among the “Marxists”, Marx’s theory 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-organized men would be able, at a given favorable moment, not only seize
the helm of state, but also by energetic and relentless action, to keep power
until they succeeded in drawing the mass of the people into the revolution
and ranging them round the small band of leaders. this conception involved,
above all, the strictest dictatorship and centralization 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 organization, which for the first
time was really to be created by the nation itself. It was precisely the
oppressing power of the former centralized government, army, political police
and bureaucracy, which Napoleon had created in 1798 and 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 outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working
class, once come to power, could not manage 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 labor. 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, as can be seen, for example,
not only in the hereditary monarchy, but equally also in the democratic
republic. Nowhere do “politicians” form a more separate, powerful
section of the nation than in North America. There, each of the two great
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 that the Americans have been striving for 30 years to
shake off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and that in spite of all
they can do 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 exploit 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 expedients. In this first place, it filled all posts –
administrative, judicial, and educational – by election on the basis of
universal suffrage of all concerned, with the right of the same electors to
recall their delegate at any time. 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 also
added in profusion.

This shattering of the former state power and its replacement by a new and
really democratic state 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 to many workers. According to the
philosophical notion, “the state is the realization 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 realized. And from this
follows a superstitious reverence for the state and everything connected with
it, which takes roots the more readily as people from their childhood are
accustomed 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 well-paid officials.
And people think they have taken quite an extraordinary 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 proletariat, just like
the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment,
until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social
conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the
scrap-heap.

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.

Frederick Engels

London, on the 20th anniversary

of the Paris Commune, March 18, 1891.

Karl Marx: The Civil War in France

News Stories

June 8-12, 1871

After the defeat of the Paris Commune

I

“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 Gallifet 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 of 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.... A mounted officer pointed out to General Gallifet a man
and woman for some particular offence. The women, 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 demeanor, 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, uglier than one’s neighbors. 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 the summarily-convicted wretches.” (Paris Correspondent, Daily News, June 8.)

This Gallifet, “the kept man of his wife, so notorious for her shameless
exhibitions at the orgies of the Second Empire,” went, during the war,
by the name of the French “Ensign Pistol.”

“The Temps, 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
neighborhood 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 Brunel 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 still living, and took her to an
ambulance. Though she had received four bullets she is now out of
danger.” (Paris Correspondent, Evening Standard, June 8.)

II

The following letter appeared in the [London] Times, June 13:

“To the editor of The Times:

“Sir. – On June 6, 1871, M. Jules Favre issued a circular to
all the European Powers, calling them to hunt down the
International Working Men’s Association. A few remarks will
suffice to characterize that document.

“In the very preamble to our statutes it is stated that the
International was found “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 maneuvre he already recurred to when,
still a comparatively young lawyer, he had to defend the National
newspaper, prosecuted for libel 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 for 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 declared
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’ – L’Alliance de la Démocratie
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 laws 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 favor 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 document 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.