London, March 17

Citizens and citizenesses,

It is twenty years ago today that working-class Paris rose as one
man against the criminal attack of the bourgeois and the rurals,
led by Thiers. These enemies of the proletariat trembled when
they saw the workers of Paris armed and organised to defend
their rights. Thiers thought to deprive them of the arms which
they had used with glory against the foreign invasion and which
they would use even more gloriously against the attacks of the
Versailles mercenaries. To crush Paris in revolt the rurals and the
bourgeois begged for and obtained the Prussians’ assistance. After
an heroic struggle, Paris was crushed by weight of numbers and
disarmed.

For twenty years now the workers of Paris have been without
arms, and it is the same everywhere: in all the large civilised
countries the proletariat is deprived of the material means of
defence. Everywhere it is the adversaries and exploiters of the
working class who have armed forces under their exclusive
control.

What has all this led to?

It means that today, when every able-bodied man serves in the
army, this army increasingly reflects popular feelings and ideas,
and this army, the great means of repression, is becoming less
secure day by day: already the heads of all the big states foresee
with terror the day when soldiers under arms will refuse to butcher
their fathers and brothers. We saw it in Paris when the Tonkinois*
had the audacity to claim the presidency of the French republic;

a Jules Ferry.— Ed.

we see it today in Berlin, where Bismarck’s successor* is asking the
Reichstag for the means to strengthen obedience in the army with
non-commissioned officers bought for money—because there are
thought to be too many socialists amongst the N.C.O.s! '”!

When such things start to happen, when day starts to dawn in
the army, the end of the old world is visibly approaching.

May destiny be fulfilled! May the bourgeoisie in its decadence
abdicate or die, and long live the Proletariat! Long live the
international social Revolution!

F. Engels