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]

[A] The Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, founded in
the 10th century and constituting a union of feudal principalities and free
towns which recognized the supreme of authority of an emperor.

[B] In 1618 the Electorate of Brandenburg united with the
Prussian Dutchy (East Prussia), which had been formed early in the 16th
century out of the Teutonic Order possessions and which was still a feudal
vessel of the Kingdom of Poland. The Elector of Brandenburg, a Prussian Duke
at the same time, remained a Polish vassal until 1657 when, taking advantage
of Poland’s difficulties in the war against Sweden, he secured
sovereign rights to Prussian possessions.

[C] The Treaty of Basle concluded by Prussia, a member of
the first anti-French coalition of the European states, with the French
Republic on April 5, 1795.

[D] Marx’s clear assessment of Germany’s
historical position took some time to completely fulfill itself, but when it
did Germany’s war on races occurred in full force.

[E] Marx refers here to the triumph of feudal reaction in
Germany after the downfall of Napoleon. The feudalist unity of Germany was
restored, the feudal-monarchist system was established in the German states,
which retained all the privileges of the nobility and intensified the
semi-feudal exploitation of the peasantry.

[F] The Tuileries Palace in Paris, a residence of
Napoleon III.

[G] Campaigns by English workers to secure recognition of
the French Republic proclaimed on Sept. 4, 1870. On Sept. 5 a series of
meetings and demonstrations began in London and other big cities, at which
resolutions and petitions were passed demanding that the British Government
immediately recognize the French Republic. The General Council of the First
International took a direct part in the organization of this movement.

[H] Marx is alluding to England’s active part in
forming a coalition of feudal monarchies which started a war against
revolutionary France in 1792, and also to the fact that the English oligarchy
was the first in Europe to recognize the Bonapartist regime in France,
established as a result of the coup d’etat, by Louis Bonaparte on
December 2, 1851.

[I] During the American Civil War (1861-65) between the
industrial North and the slave-owning South, the English bourgeois press took
the side of the South.

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]