Written by K. Marx between the middle 
of April and May 23, 1871 

(VIII), 1934 

437 

[FIRST DRAFT OF THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE] 

THE GOVERNMENT OF DEFENCE 

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

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

Hence Trochu’s plan, from the very day of the proclamation of 
the Republic, was the capitulation of Paris and of France. In point of 
fact he was the commander in chief of the Prussians. In a letter to 
Gambetta, Jules Favre himself confessed so much that the enemy 
to be put down, was not the Prussian soldier, but the Paris 
“demagogue revolutionist”. The high-sounding promises to the 
people, by the Government of Defence, were therefore as many 
deliberate lies. Their “plan” they systematically carried out by 
entrusting the defence of Paris to Bonapartist generals, by 

a “Paris au jour le jour”, Le Figaro, No. 74, March 19, 1871.— Ed. 

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

It is, therefore, evident, that the men who now form the 

4 Report from Germany in the column “Révélations”, La Situation, No. 156, 
March 21, 1871.— Ed. 

b “Le Gouvernement de la Défense nationale”, La Situation, No. 189, April 29, 
1871.— Ed. 

¢ Stout soldiers.— Ed. 

4d See Journal officiel (Paris), No. 115, April 25, 1871. Marx refers to the item “Le 
Gouvernement de la Défense nationale”, La Situation, No. 189, April 29, 1871.— Ed. 

First Draft—The Government of Defence 439 

government of Versailles, can only be saved from the fate of 
convicted traitors by civil war, the death of the Republic and a 
monarchical restoration under the shelter of Prussian bayonets. 

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

A series of authenticated judiciary documents spreading over 
about 20 years, and published by M. Milliére, a representative to 
the National Assembly,’ proves that Jules Favre, living in adulter- 
ous concubinage with the wife of a drunkard resident at Algiers,” 
had, by a most complicated concatenation of daring forgeries, 
contrived to grasp in the name of his bastards, a large succession 
that made him a rich man and that the connivance only of the 
Bonapartist tribunals saved him from exposure in a_ law-suit 
undertaken by the legitimate claimants. Jules Favre, then, this 
unctuous mouthpiece of family, religion, property, and order, has 
long since been forfeited to the Code Pénal. Lifelong penal 
servitude would be his unavoidable lot under every honest 
government. Ernest Picard, the present Versailles home minister, 
appointed by himself on the 4th of September Home minister of 
the government of defence,° after he had tried in vain to be 
appointed by L. Bonaparte, this Ernest Picard is the brother of 
one Arthur Picard. When, together with Jules Favre and Co., he 
had the impudence to propose this worthy brother of his as a 
candidate in the Seine et Oise for the Corps législatif, the 
Imperialist government published two documents, a report of the 
Prefecture of Police (31 July, 1867) stating that this Arthur Picard 
was excluded from the Bourse as an “escroc”,? and another 
document of the 11 December 1868, according to which Arthur had 
confessed the theft of 300,000 fcs, committed by him as a director 
of one of the branches of the Société Générale, rue Palestro, No. 
5.© Ernest made not only his worthy Arthur the editor in chief of a 

a See J.-B. E. Milliére, “Le Faussaire”, Le Vengeur, No. 6, February 8, 1871.— Ed. 

b Jeanne Charmont, who lived separate from her husband, Vernier.— Ed. 

© In the final version of The Civil War in France Marx corrected the inaccuracy: 
Ernest Picard was Minister of Finance in the Government of National Defence (see 
this volume, p. 314).— Ed. 

4 Swindler.— Ed. 

€ See “Le Sieur Picard”, La Situation, No. 168, April 4, 1871.— Ed. 

paper of his own, the Electeur libre, founded under the Empire 
and continued to this day, a paper, in which the republicans are 
daily denounced as “robbers, bandits, and partageux*”’, but once 
become the home minister of the “Defence”, Ernest employed 
Arthur as his financial medium between the home office to the 
Stock Exchange, there to discount the State secrets entrusted to 
him. The whole “financial” correspondence between Ernest and 
Arthur has fallen into the hands of the Commune. Like the 
lachrymose Jules Favre, Ernest Picard, the Joe Miller of the 
Versailles Government, is a man forfeited to the Code Pénal and 
the galleys! 

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

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

No wonder that when in the beginning of April captured 
National Guards were exposed at Versailles to the ferocious 
outrages of Piétri’s “lambs” and the Versailles mob, M. Ernest 
Picard, “with his hands in his trousers pockets, walked from group 
to group cracking jokes” while “on the balcony of the Prefecture 
Madame Thiers, Madame Jules Favre and a bevy of similar Dames, 
looking in excellent health and spirits”,° exulted in that disgusting 
scene. No wonder then, that while one part of France winces 
under the heels of the conquerors, while Paris, the heart and head 
of France, daily sheds streams of its best blood in self-defence 
against the home traitors, ... the Thiers, Favres et Co. indulge in 
revelries at the Palace of Louis XIV, such f.i. as the grand 
féte given by Thiers in honour of Jules Favre on his return 
from Rouen (whither he had been sent to conspire with (fawn 
upon) the Prussians). It is the cynical orgy of evaded felons! 

4 Supporters of the division of property.— Ed. 

b See this volume, p. 314.— Ed. 

© “The Advance of the Insurgents on Versailles”, The Daily News, No. 7781, April 
7, 1871.— Ed. 

First Draft—The Government of Defence 44] 

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

There is one thing rather mysterious in the proceedings of 
Thiers, his recklessness in precipitating the revolution of Paris. 
Not content to goad Paris by the Antirepublican demonstrations of 
his rurals, by the threats to decapitate and decapitalize Paris,” (by 
Dufaure’s (Thiers’ minister of justice) law of the 10th of March on 
the échéances“ of bills which impended bankruptcy on the Paris 
commerce '*°), by appointing Orleanist ambassadors, by the trans- 
fer of the Assemblée to Versailles, by an imposition of a new tax 
on newspapers, by the confiscation of the Republican Paris journals, 
by the revival of the State of Siege, first proclaimed by Palikao and 
annulled with the downfall of the Imperialist government on the 4th 
of September, by appointing Vinoy, the Décembriseur’*' and 
Exsenator governor of Paris, Valentin, the Imperialist Gendarme 
Prefect of Police, and Aurelle de Paladines, the jesuit General 
Commander in chief of the Paris National Guard—he opened the 
civil war with feeble forces, by Vinoy’s attack on the Buttes 
Montmartre, by the attempt first to rob the National Guards of 
Cannons which belonged to them and which were only left to them 
by the Paris convention, because they were their property, and thus 
to disarm Paris. 

Whence this feverish eagerness d’en finir’? To disarm and put 
down Paris was of course the first condition of a monarchical 
counterrevolution, but an astute intriguer like Thiers could only 
risk the future of the difficult enterprise in undertaking it without 
due preparation, with ridiculously insufficient means, except 
under the sway of some overwhelmingly urgent move. The motive 
was this. By the agency of Pouyer-Quertier, his finance minister, 
Thiers had concluded a loan of two milliards to be paid 
immediately down and some more milliards to follow at certain 
terms. In this loan transaction a truly royal pot-de-vin (drink- 

4 Manors (i.e. big landlords).— Ed. 

b See “The scanty news from the capital of Revolution...”, The Daily News, 
No. 7774, March 30, 1871.— Ed. 

© The days of payment.— Ed. 

4 To put an end to it— Ed. 

442 | Karl Marx 

money) was reserved for those grand citizens Thiers, Jules Favre, 
Ernest Picard, Jules Simon, Pouyer-Quertier etc. But there was 
one hitch in the transaction. Before definitively sealing the treaty, 
the contractors wanted one guarantee—the tranquillization of 
Paris." Hence the reckless proceedings of Thiers. Hence the 
savage hatred against the Paris workmen perverse enough to 
interfere with this fine job. 

As to the Jules Favres, Picards etc, we have said enough to 
prove them the worthy accomplices of such a jobbery. As to 
Thiers himself, it is notorious that during his two ministries under 
Louis Philippe he realized 2 millions, and that during his 
premiership (dating March 1840) he was taunted from the tribune 
of the Chambre of Deputies with his Bourse peculations, in answer 
to which he shed tears, a commodity he disposes of as freely as 
Jules Favre and the celebrated comedian Frédérick Lemaitre. It is 
no less notorious that the first measure taken by M. Thiers to save 
France from the financial ruin, fastened upon her by the war, 
was—to endow himself with a yearly salary of 3 Millions of francs, 
exactly the sum L. Bonaparte got in 1850 as an equivalent from 
M. Thiers and his troop in the Legislative Assembly for allowing 
them to abolish the general suffrage.?*’ This endowment of M. 
Thiers with 3 millions was the first word of “the economic republic” 
the vista of which he had opened to his Paris electors in 1869. As 
to Pouyer-Quertier, he is a cottonspinner at Rouen. In 1869, he 
was the leader of the millowners’ conclave that proclaimed a 
general reduction of wages necessary for the “conquest” of the 
English market—an intrigue, then baffled by the International.?** 
Pouyer-Quertier, otherwise a fervent and even servile partisan of 
the Empire, found only one fault with it, its commercial treaty 
with England *'° damaging to his own shop interests. His first step 
as M. Thiers’ finance minister was to denounce that “hateful” 
treaty and to pronounce the necessity of reestablishing the old 
protective duties for his own shop. His second step was the 
patriotic attempt to strike Alsace by the reestablished old protective 
duties on the pretext that in this case no international treaty stood 
in the way of their re-introduction. By this masterstroke his own 
shop at Rouen would have got rid of the dangerous competition 
of the rival shops at Mulhausen.* His last step was to make a 
present to his son-in-law, M. Roche Lambert, of the receveur- 
generalship of the Loiret, one of the rich booties falling into the 
lap of the governing bourgeois, and which Pouyer-Quertier had 

2 Mulhouse.— Fad. 

First Draft.—The Government of Defence 443 

found so much fault with his Imperialist predecessor M. Magne, 
endowing his own son with that big jobbing place. This 
Pouyer-Quertier was then exactly the man for the perpetration of 
the above-said job. 

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

Small state-rogueries,— a little character ... cankering conscience ... 
everlasting suggester of Parliamentary intrigue ... petty expedients 
and devices ... rehearsing his homilies of liberalism, of the 
“libertés nécessaires” '*... eagerly bent on ... strong reasons to 
weigh against the chances of failure ... cogent arguments which 
counterpoise ... kind of heroism in exaggerated baseness ... lucky 
parliamentary stratagems... 

M. E. Picard is a swindler, who throughout the siege speculated on 
the Bourse over the defeats of our armies. 

massacre, treason, arson, assassination, calumny, lies.” 

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

“assassins of Clément Thomas and Lecomte” are a handful of criminals‘ “like 
those who may justly be regarded as having been accomplices in these crimes 
through abetting and assistance, that is, a very small number of individuals”.4 

Dufaure 

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

Dufaure plays a great part in the Thiers intrigue. By his law of 
the 10th of March, he roused all the indebted commerce of 

a Marx wrote this paragraph in French except for the words “for the city of 
Paris” .— Ed. 

b Marx wrote this and the preceding paragraph in French.— Ed. 

¢ The following text in the paragraph is in French.— Ed. 

d “Méditation des municipalités de la Seine”, Le Rappel, No. 684, April 28, 
1871.— Ed. 

Paris. By his law on Paris houserents, he menaced all Paris.'*° Both 
laws were to punish Paris for having saved the honour of France and 
delayed the surrender to Bismarck for 6 months. Dufaure is an 
Orleanist, and a “Liberal”, in the parliamentary sense of the word. 
Consequently, he has always been the minister of repression and of 
the State of Siege. 

He accepted his first portefeuille on the 13 May, 1839, after the 
defeat of the derniére prise d’armes* of the Republican party,” was 
therefore the minister of the pitiless repression of the July 
government of that day. 

Cavaignac, forced on the 29th October (1848) to raise the state of 
siege, called into his ministry two ministers of Louis Philippe 
(Dufaure, for the Interior, and Vivien). He appointed them on the 
demand of the rue Poitiers (Thiers),?°° which demanded guarantees. 
He thus hoped to secure the support of the dynastics for the 
impending election of president. Dufaure employed the most illegal 
means to secure Cavaignac’s candidature. Intimidation and electoral 
corruption had never been exercised on a larger scale. Dufaure 
inundated France with defamatory prints against the other 
candidates, and especially of Louis Bon., what did not prevent him 
to become later on Louis Bonaparte’s minister. Dufaure became 
again the minister of the state of siege of 13 June 1849 (against the 
demonstration of the National Guard against the bombardment of 
Rome etc by the French army). He is now again the minister of 
the state of siege, proclaimed at Versailles (for department of 
Seine et Oise). Power given to Thiers to declare any department 
whatever in a state of siege. Dufaure, as in 1839, as in 1849, wants 
new repressive laws, new press laws, a law to “abridge the 
formalities of the Courts Martial”.'** In a circular to the 
Procureurs-Généraux he denounces the cry of “conciliation” as a 
press crime to be severely prosecuted.* It is characteristic of the 
French magistrature that only one single Procureur Général (that 
of Mayenne)* wrote to Dufaure to 

“resign... I-cannot serve an Administration which orders me, in a moment of 
civil war, to rush into party struggles and prosecute citizens whom my conscience 
holds innocent, for uttering the word conciliation.” € 

4 The latest armed uprising.— Ed. 

b The next sentence began with the words “On June 2, 1849”, which were 
subsequently crossed out by Marx.— Ed. 

¢ J. Dufaure, (Circulaire aux procureurs généraux. Versailles, 23 avril 1871], Le 
Mot d’Ordre, No. 62, April 26, 1871.— Ed. 

4 Louis Vacheron.— Ed. 

¢ “The French Assembly”, The Daily News, No. 7800, April 29, 1871.— Ed. 

First Draft.— The Government of Defence 445 

He belonged to the “Union libérale” in 1847 which conspired 
against Guizot, as he belonged to the “Union libérale” of 1869 
which conspired against Louis Bonaparte.*”! 

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

Now as after the Revolution of February 1848, these men tell 
the Republic, as the executioner told Don Carlos, “Je vais 
t’assassiner, mais c’est pour ton bien”. (I shall murder thee, but for 
thy own good.) . 

Lecomte and Clément Thomas 

After Vinoy’s attempt to carry the Buttes Montmartre (on the 
18th March, they were shot in the gardens of the Chateau Rouge, 
4 o'clock, 18th) General Lecomte and Clément Thomas were taken 
prisoners and shot by the same excited soldiers of the 81st of 
the line. It was a summary act of Lynch justice performed despite 
the instances of some delegates of the Central Committee. Lecomte, 
an epauletted cut-throat, had four times commanded his troop, on 
the place Pigalle, to charge an unarmed gathering of women and 
children. Instead of shooting the people, the soldiers shot him. 
Clément Thomas, an ex-quartermaster, a “general” extemporized 
at the eve of the June massacres (1848)'*? by the men of the 
National, whose gérant* he had been, had never dipped his sword 
in the blood of any other enemy but that of the Paris working 
class). He was one of the sinister plotters who deliberately 
provoked the June insurrection and one of its most atrocious 
executioners. When on the 31 October 1870, the Paris Proletarian 
National Guards surprised the “Government of Defence” at the 
Hotel de Ville and took them prisoners, these men, who had 
[been] appointed by themselves, these gens de paroles,” as one of 
them, Picard, called them recently, gave their word of honour that 
they would make place to the Commune. Thus allowed to escape 

2 Responsible editor.— Ed. 
b Men of their word.— Ed. 

scot free, they launched Trochu’s Bretons' on their too- 
confident captors. One of them, however, M. Tamisier, resigned 
his dignity as commander in chief of the National Guard. He 
refused to break his word of honour. Then the hour had again 
struck for Clément Thomas. He was appointed in Tamisier’s place 
commander in chief of the National Guard. He was the true man 
for Trochu’s “plan”. He never made war upon the Prussians; he 
made war upon the National Guard, whom he disorganized, 
disunited, calumniated, weeding out all its officers hostile to 
Trochu’s “plan”, setting one set of National Guards against the 
other, and whom he sacrificed in “sorties” so planned as to cover 
them with ridicule. Haunted by the spectres of his June victims, 
this man, without any official charge, must needs again reappear 
on [the] theatre of war of the 18th of March, where he scented 
another massacre of the Paris people. He fell a victim of Lynch 
justice in the first moment of popular exasperation. The men who 
had surrendered Paris to the tender mercies of the Décembriseur 
_ Vinoy, in order to kill the Republic and pocket the pots-de-Vin 
stipulated by the Pouyer-Quertier contract, shouted now: Assas- 
sins, Assassins! Their howl was re-echoed by the press of Europe 
so eager for the blood of the “Proletarians”. A farce of hysterical 
“sensibility” was enacted in the rural Assemblée,’ and, as now as 
before, the corpses of their friends were most welcome weapons 
against their enemies. Paris and the Central Committee were made 
responsible for an accident out of their control. It is known how in 
the days of June 1848 the “men of order” shook Europe with the 
cry of indignation against the Insurgents because of the assassina- 
tion of the Archbishop of Paris.* Even at that time they knew 
perfectly well from the evidence of M. Jacquemet, the vicaire 
général of the Archbishop, who had accompanied him to the 
barricades, that the Bishop had been shot by the troops of 
“Cavaignac”, and not by the insurged,” but his dead corpse served 
their turn. M. Darboy, the present Archbishop of Paris, one of the 
hostages taken by the Commune in self-defence against the savage 
atrocities of the Versailles government, however seems, as appears 
from his letter to Thiers,° to have strange misgivings [that] Papa 
Transnonain'™ be eager to speculate in his dead body, as an object 
of holy indignation. There passed hardly a day, in which the 

4D. A. Affre.— Ed. 

b The reference is to Jacquemet’s statement of June 26, 1848, published in La 
Situation, No. 185, April 25, 1871.— Ed. 

© G. Darboy, “Prison de Mazas, le 8 avril 1871”, Le Rappel, No. 669, April 13, 
1871.— Ed. 

First Draft.—The Government of Defence 447 

Versailles journals did not announce his execution, which the 
continued atrocities, and violation of the rules of war on the side 
of “order”, would have sealed on the part of every government 
but that of the Commune. The Versailles government had hardly 
realized a first military success, when Captain Desmarets, who at 
the head of his gendarmes assassinated the chivalrous Flourens, 
has been decorated by Thiers. Flourens had saved the lives of the 
“defence men” on the 31st October." Vinoy, the runaway 
(runagate), was appointed grand cross of the Legion of Honour, 
because he had our brave comrade Duval, when taken prisoner, 
shot inside the redoubts, because as a second instalment, he had 
shot some dozen captive troops of the line who had joined the 
Paris people and inaugurated this civil war by the “methods of 
December”.?*? General Galliffet—“the husband of that charming 
Marchioness whose costumes at the masked balls were one of the 
wonders of the Empire’’, as a London penny a liner delicately puts 
it, “surprised” near Rueil a captain, lieutenant, and private of 
National Guards, had them at once shot, and immediately 
published a proclamation to glorify himself in the deed.* These 
are a few of the murders officially narrated and gloried in by the 
Versailles government. 25 soldiers of the 80th Regiment of the 
line shot as “rebels” by the 75th.” 

“Every man wearing the uniform of the regular army who was captured in the 
ranks of the Communists was straightaway shot without the slightest mercy. The 
government troops were perfectly ferocious.” ¢ 

“M. Thiers communicated the encouraging particulars of Flourens’ death to the 
Assembly.” 

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

“Never had more degraded countenances of a degraded democracy met the 
afflicted gaze of honest men.”4 (Piétri’s men!) 
“Vinoy protests against any mercy to insurgent officers or line men.” 

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

a Notice on the proclamation of General de Galliffet, April 3, 1871, The Daily 
News, No. 7783, April 10, 1871.— Ed. 

b “Paris, Monday, April 3, 1871”, The Daily Telegraph, No. 4931, April 4, 
1871.— Ed. 

c “Every man wearing...”, The Daily Telegraph, No. 4932, April 5, 1871.— Ed. 

d L. A. Thiers’ proclamation of April 4, 1871, The Daily News, No. 7779, April 5, 
1871.— Ed. 

€ “Versailles, April 5”, The Daily News, No. 7781, April 7, 1871.— Ed. 

“Considering that the Versailles government openly treads underfoot the laws 
of humanity and those of war, and that it has been guilty of horrors such as even 
the invaders of France have not dishonoured themselves by ... it is decreed etc.” ( There 
follow the points.) ? 

April 5. Proclamation of the Commune: 

“Every day the banditti of Versailles slaughter or shoot our prisoners, and every 
hour we learn that another murder has been committed... The people even in its 
anger, detests bloodshed, as it detests civil war, but it is its duty to protect itself 
against the savage attempts of its enemies, and whatever it may cost it shall be an 
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”> 

“The police who are fighting against Paris have 10 fcs a day.” 

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

In his letter to Thiers, Darboy protests 

“against the atrocious excesses which add to the horror of our fratricidal war’’.¢ 

In the same strain writes Deguerry (curé de la Madeleine): 

“These executions rouse? great wrath in Paris and may well lead to terrible 
reprisals”. “Thus, a decision has already been taken to execute two of the 
numerous hostages they hold for every new execution. Judge for yourself how 
pressing and absolutely necessary is that which, [I] as a priest, am asking you to 
do.” ¢ 

In midst of these horrors Thiers writes to the Prefects: 
“L’assemblée siege paisiblement.”’ (Elle aussi a le ceur léger.)' 

* Decree of April 5, 1871 on reprisals and hostages, The Daily News, No. 7781, 
April 7, 1871. The phrase in parentheses is in German in the original. See also 
Journal officiel (Paris), No. 96, April 6, 1871.— Ed. 

6 The Commune’s Proclamation of April 5, 1871 is quoted according to “The Civil 
War in France” in The Daily News, No. 7781, April 7, 1871. See also Journal officiel 
(Paris), No. 96, April 6, 1871. Marx wrote the next sentence in French.— Ed. 

© G. Darboy, “Prison de Mazas, le 8 avril 1871”, Le Rappel, No. 669, April 13, 
1871.— Ed. 

4d Beginning from here Marx quotes in French.— Ed. 

€ G. Deguerry, “A Messieurs les membres du gouvernement a Versailles”, Le 
Rappel, No. 669, April 13, 1871.— Ed. 

“The Assembly’s sitting proceeds peacefully.” (It also takes everything 
light-heartedly.) A reference to Ollivier’s statement that he will take the responsibility 
for the war ‘with a light heart”’, which he made on the eve of the declaration of war on 
Prussia and which was cited in Th. Astrie, “L’>homme rouge”, La Situation, No. 176, 
April 14, 1871.— Ed. 

First Draft.—The Government of Defence 449 

Thiers and la commission des quinze of his rurals?% had the cool 
impudence to “deny officially” the “pretended summary executions 
and reprisals attributed to the troops of Versailles” .* 

But Papa Transnonain, in his circular of 16th April on the 
bombardment of Paris: 

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

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

To these atrocious provocations of the Bonapartist blacklegs, the 
Commune has contented itself to take hostages and to threaten 
reprisals, but its threats have remained a dead letter! Not even the 
Gendarmes maskeraded into officers, not even the captive sergents 
de ville, upon whom explosive bombs have been seized, were 
placed before a court martial. The Commune has refused to soil 
its hands with the blood of these bloodhounds! 

A few days before the 18th March, Clément Thomas laid before 
the war minister Le Fl6 a plan for the disarmament of three quarters 
of the National Garde. 

“The flower of the canaille,” he said, ‘has crowded round Montmartre and is 
working hand-in-glove with Belleville.” » 

The National Assembly 

The assembly elected on February 8 under the pressure of the 
enemy, to whom the men of the Versailles government had 
surrended all the forts and handed over defenceless Paris, this 
Assembly of Versailles has been called for the sole purpose, which 
is clearly stated in the Convention itself* signed at Versailles on 
January 28, namely, to decide whether the war could be continued 
or a peace concluded, and in the latter case to arrange for peace 
terms and ensure the earliest possible evacuation of French 
territory. 

4 “La commission des Quinze...”, Le Rappel, No. 673, April 17, 1871.— Ed. 

b “Ta Sociale publie une curieuse lettre...”, Le Vengeur, No. 21, April 19, 1871. 
Marx quotes in French in the original and gives the French phrase “three quarters” in _ 
the previous sentence.— Ed. 

© On the armistice and the capitulation of Paris.— Ed. 

d Marx wrote this paragraph in French.— Ed. 

Chanzy. Archbishop of Paris etc. 

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

After the Vendome affair*: There was consternation at Versailles. 
An attack on Versailles was expected on 23 March, for the leaders 
of the Communal agitation had announced that they would march 
on Versailles, if the Assembly took any hostile action. The 
assembly did not. On the contrary, it voted as urgent a proposition 
to hold Communal Elections at Paris etc. By the concessions the 
Assembly admitted its powerlessness. At the same time Royalist 
Intrigues at Versailles. Bonapartist Generals and the Duc d’Aumale.*™ 
Favre avowed he had received a letter from Bismarck, announcing 
that unless order were restored by the 26 March Paris would be 
occupied by the German troops. Reds saw plainly through his little 
artifice.” The Vendéme affair was provoked by the forger, that 
infamous jesuit J. Favre, who on(21 March?) mounted the tribune 
of the Assembly of Versailles to insult the people who had rescued 
him from insignificance, and to rouse Paris against the depart- 
ments. 

30 March, Proclamation of the Commune: 

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

Thiers 

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

“The republic is there. The chief of the executive power is only a common citizen.” 4 

a See this volume, pp. 511-12, 528-30.— Ed. 

5 Beginning from here Marx writes in French to the end of the quotation.— Ed. 

€ Quoted according to “Proclamation de la Commune” [March 29, 1871], Le 
Rappel, No. 655, March 30, 1871; see also Journal officiel (Paris), No. 1 (89), March 
30, 1871.— Ed. 

d “Méditation des municipalités de la Seine”, Le Rappel, No. 684, April 28, 1871. 
Marx quotes these two sentences in French.— Ed. 

First Draft—The Government of Defence 451 

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

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

The Assembly and the Paris Revolution 

The Assembly, summoned at the dictate of the Foreign invader, 
was, as is clearly laid down in the Versailles convention of the 28th 
January, but elected for one single purpose: To decide the 
continuation of war or settle the conditions of peace. In their calling 
the French people to electoral urns, the Capitulards of Paris 
themselves plainly defined that specific mission of the Assembly and 
this accounts to a great part for its very constitution. The 
continuation of the war having become impossible through the very 
terms of the armistice humbly accepted by the capitulards, the 
Assembly had in fact but to register a disgraceful peace and for this 
specific performance the worst men of France were best. 

The Republic was proclaimed on the 4th of September, not by the 
pettifoggers who installed themselves at the Hotel de Ville as a 
government of defence, but by the Paris people. It was acclaimed 
throughout France without a single dissentient voice. It conquered 
its own existence by a five months’ war whose cornerstone was the 
prolonged resistance of Paris. Without this war, carried on by the 
Republic and in the name of the Republic, the Empire would have 
been restored by Bismarck after the capitulation of Sedan, the 
pettifoggers with M. Thiers at their head would have had to 
capitulate not for Paris, but for personal guarantees against a voyage 
to Cayenne, and the rural Assembly would never have been heard 
of. It met only by the grace of the Republican revolution, initiated at 
Paris. Being no constituent Assembly, as M. Thiers himself has 
repeated to nauseousness, it would, if not as a mere chronicler of the 
passed incidents of the Republican Revolution, not even have had 
the right to proclaim the destitution of the Bonapartist dynasty. The 
only legitimate power, therefore, in France is the Revolution itself, 
centring in Paris. That revolution was not made against Napoleon 
the little, but against the social and political conditions which 

engendered the Second Empire, which received their last finish 
under its sway, and which, as the war with Prussia glaringly revealed, 
would leave France a cadaver, if they were not superseded by the 
regenerating powers of the French working class. The attempts of 
the Rural Assembly, holding only an Attorney’s Power from the 
Revolution to sign the disastrous bond handed over by its present 
“executive” to the Foreign invader, its attempt to treat the 
Revolution as its own capitulard, is, therefore, a monstrous 
usurpation. Its war against Paris is nothing but a cowardly 
Chouannerie”'' under the shelter of Prussian bayonets. It is a base 
conspiracy to assassinate France, in order to save the privileges, the 
monopolies and the luxuries of the degenerate, effete, and putrefied 
classes that have dragged her to the abyss from which she can only be 
saved by the Herculean hand of a truly social Revolution. 

Thiers’ Finest Army 

Even before he became a “statesman”, M. Thiers had proved 
his lying powers as a historian. But the vanity, so characteristic of 
dwarfish men, has this time betrayed him into the sublime of the 
ridiculous. His army of order, the dregs of the Bonapartist 
soldatesque, freshly reimported, by the grace of Bismarck, from 
Prussian prisons,'” the Pontifical Zouaves, the Chouans?’’ of 
Charette, the Vendeans of Cathelineau; the “municipals” *’ of 
Valentin, the exsergeants de ville of Piétri and the Corsican 
Gendarmes of Valentin who under L. Bonaparte were only the 
spies of the army but under M. Thiers form its warlike flower, the 
whole under the supervision of epauletted mouchards* and under 
the command of the runaway Decembrist Marshals who had no 
honour to lose—this motley, ungainly, hangdog lot, M. Thiers 
dubs “the finest army France ever possessed! 1f he allows the Prussians 
still to quarter at St. Denis, it is only to frighten them by the sight of 
the “finest army” of Versailles. 

a Spies.— Ed. 
6’ Quoted according to Th. Astrie, “L’>homme rouge”, La Situation, No. 176, 
April 14, 1871.— Fd. 

First Draft—-The Government of Defence 453 

Thiers 

Small state rogueries. Everlasting suggester of Parliamentary 
intrigues, M. Thiers was never anything else but an “able” 
journalist and a clever “word fencer”, a master of parliamentary 
roguery, a virtuoso in perjury, a craftsman in all the small 
stratagems, base perfidies, and subtle devices of Parliamentary 
party-warfare. This mischievous gnome charmed the French 
bourgeoisie during half a century because he is the truest 
intellectual expression of their own class-corruption. When in the 
ranks of the opposition he over and over rehearsed his stale 
homily of the “libertés nécessaires”,'”* to stamp them out when in 
power. When out of office, he used to threaten Europe with the 
sword of France. And what were his diplomatic performances in 
reality? To pocket in 1841 the humiliation of the London treaty,” 
to hurry on the war with Prussia by his declamations against 
German unity, to compromise France in 1870 by his begging tour 
at all the Courts of Europe, to sign in 1871 the Paris capitulation, 
to accept a “peace at any price” and implore from Prussia a 
concession: leave and means to get up a civil war in his own 
downtrodden country. To a man of his stamp the underground 
agencies of modern society remained of course always unknown, 
but even the palpable changes at its surface he failed to 
understand. F.i. any deviation from the old French protective 
system he denounced as a sacrilege and, as a minister of Louis 
Philippe, went the length of treating disdainfully the construction 
of railways as a foolish chimera and even under Louis Bonaparte 
he eagerly opposed every Reform of the rotten French army 
organization. A man without ideas, without convictions, and 
without courage. 

A professional ‘“Revolutionist” in that sense, that in_ his 
eagerness of display, of wielding power and putting his hands into 
the National Exchequer, he never scrupled, when banished to the 
banks of the opposition, to stir the popular passions and provoke a 
catastrophe to displace a rival; he is at the same time a most 
shallow man of routine, etc. The working class he reviled as “the 
vile multitude”. One of his former colleagues in the legislative 
assemblies, a contemporary of his, a capitalist, and however a 
member of the Paris Commune, M. Beslay thus addresses him in a 
public address: 

~ 

“The subjugation (asservissement) of labour to capital, such is the ‘corner- 
stone’ of your politics (policy), and the day you saw the Republic of Labour installed 

at the Hotel-de-Ville, you have never ceased to cry to France “They are crimi- 
nals!’”’@ 

No wonder that M. Thiers has given orders by his home 
minister Ernest Picard to prevent “the International Association” 
from communicating with Paris.” (Sitting of Assembly. 28 March.) 
Circular of Thiers, to prefects and sub-prefects. 

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

Without the International..4 

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

“M. Thiers has never been minister without pushing the soldiers to the 
massacre of the people, he the parricide, the man of incest, the peculator, the 
plagiarist, the traitor, the ambitious, the impotent”. 

Shrewd in cunning devices, and artful dodges. 

Banded with the republicans before the Revolution of July, he 
slipped into his first ministry under Louis Philippe by ousting 
Laffitte, his old protector. His first deed was to throw his old 
collaborator Armand Carrel into prison. He insinuated himself 
with Louis Philippe as a spy upon and the goal-accoucheur of 
the Duchesse of Berry, but his activity centred in the massacre 
of the insurgent Paris Republicans in the Rue Transnonain and the 
September Laws against the press, to be then cast aside as an 
instrument become blunted. Having intrigued himself again into 
power in 1840, he planned the Paris fortifications '”° opposed as an 

4 Ch. Beslay, “Au citoyen Thiers...”, Le Mot d’Ordre, No. 64, April 28, 
1871. Marx gives the word “cornerstone” in French.— Ed. 

b “The French Assembly”, The Daily News, No. 7774, March 30, 1871.— Ed. 

¢ L. A. Thiers, [Circulaire 4 préfets et sous-préfets. Versailles, 28 mars 1871], Le 
Rappel, No. 655, March 30, 1871. Marx gives the previous sentence in French.— Ed. 

d This sentence is incomplete in the manuscript. It is followed by two German 
sentences in parentheses.— Ed. 

First Draft.—The Government of Defence 455 

attempt on the liberty of Paris by the whole democratic party, except 
the Bourgeois Republicans of the National. M. Thiers replied to 
their outcry from the Tribune of the Chambre des Députés: 

“What? To fancy that any works of fortification could endanger freedom?... 
This is to be completely out of touch with reality. And first of all, you calumniate 
any government whatever in assuming that it could one day try to maintain itself by 
bombarding the capital. Do you really think that after it had pierced with its bombs 
the dome of Les Invalides or the Pantheon, after it had swept the homes of your 
families with its fire, it could come before you and ask you to confirm it in office? 
But it would be a hundred times more impossible after its victory than before.” 2 

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

When King Bomba of Naples '”’ bombarded Palermo in January 
1848, M. Thiers again declared in the Chambre of Deputies: 

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

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

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

aL. A. Thiers’ speech at the sitting of the Chamber of Deputies on January 13, 
1841, Le Vengeur, No. 14, April 12, 1871. Marx quotes from it in French.— Ed. 

b L. A. Thiers’ speech at the sitting of the Chamber of Deputies on January 31, 
1848, Le Rappel, No. 673, April 17, 1871; Le Vengeur, No. 21, April 19, 1871. Marx 
quotes in French.— Ed. 

“I am of the party of the Revolution not only in France, but in the whole of Europe. 1 
wish the government of the Revolution to remain in the hands of moderate men... 
But when that government falls into the hands of ardent minds, even into those of 
Radicals, I shall, for all that, not desert my cause. I shall always be of the party of the 
Revolution.” # 

To put down the February Revolution was his exclusive 
occupation from the day when the Republic was proclaimed to the 
Coup d’Etat. 

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

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

Parliamentary mountebank. 

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

In the true vein of vulgar professional journalists he now sneers 
in his bulletins [at] the bad looks of his Versailles prisoners, now 
communicates that the rurals are “a leur aise’’,© now covers 

a L. A. Thiers’ speech at the sitting of the Chamber of Deputies on February 2, 
1848, Le Moniteur universel, No. 34, February 3, 1848. Marx quotes from it in 
French.— Fd. 

b See “If the contest between M. Thiers and the Commune...”, The Standard, 
No. 14572, April 15, 1871.— Ed. 

© At ease.— Ed. 

First Draft—The Government of Defence 457 

himself with ridicule by his bulletin on the taking of ‘“Moulin- 
Saquet” (4 of May), where 300 prisoners were taken. 

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

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

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

a “Voici, sur le méme fait, le bulletin...”, Le Rappel, No. 692, May 6, 1871. Marx 
gives a French quotation.— Ed. 
b “The Commune of Paris...”, The Times, No. 27028, April 4, 1871.— Ed 

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

In his speech to the maires: 

“You may rely upon my word, which I have never broken!” 
“The Assembly is one of the most liberal ever elected by France.” 

He will save the Republic 

“provided order and labour are not continuously threatened by those who claim 
to be the special guardians of the Republic’s weal’”.@ 

At the April 27 sitting of the Assembly, he said: 

“The Assembly is more liberal than he is.”> 

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

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

a “Méditation des municipalités de la Seine”, Le Rappel, No. 684, April 28, 1871. 
Marx quotes from it in French; the phrase “He will save the Republic” is in 
German.— Ed. 

5 Marx gives the first part of the sentence in German and quotes from the speech 
in French.— Ed. 

First Draft—-The Government of Defence 459 

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

After the downbreak of Prussia (Tilsit peace 1807), its govern- 
ment felt that it could only save itself and the country by a great 
social regeneration. It naturalized in Prussia—on a small scale, 
within the limits of a feudal monarchy—the results of the French 
revolution. It liberated the peasant etc.” After the Crimean 
defeat, which, however Russia might have saved her honour by 
the defence of Sebastopol and dazzled the Foreigner by her 
diplomatic triumphs at Paris, laid open at home the rottenness of 
her social and administrative system, her government emancipated 
the serf and her whole administrative and judicial system.*” In 
both countries the daring social reform was fettered and limited in 
its character because it was octroyed from the throne and not 
conquered by the people. Still there were great social changes 
doing away with the worst privileges of the ruling classes and 
changing the economical basis of the old society. They felt that the 
great malady could only be cured by heroic measures. They felt 
that they could only answer to the victors by social reforms, by 
calling into life elements of popular regeneration. The French 
catastrophe of 1870 stands unparalleled in the history of the 
modern world! It shewed official France, the France of Louis 
Bonaparte, the France of the ruling classes and their state 
parasites—-a putrescent cadaver. And what is the first attempt of 
the infamous men, who had got at her government by a surprise 
of the people and who continue to hold it by a conspiracy with the 
Foreign invader, what is their first attempt? To assassinate, under 
Prussian patronage, by L. Bonaparte’s soldatesque and_ Piétri’s 
police, the glorious work of popular regeneration commenced at 
Paris, to summon all the old legitimist spectres, beaten by the July 

a See report from Germany under the general heading “Révélations”, La 
Situation, No. 156, March 21, 1871.— Ed. 

Revolution, the fossil swindlers of Louis Philippe, beaten by the 
revolution of February, and celebrate an orgy of counterrevolu- 
tion! Such heroism in exaggerated self-debasement is unheard of 
in the annals of history! But, what is most characteristic, instead of 
arousing a general shout of indignation on the part of official 
Europe, and America, it evokes a current of sympathy and of 
fierce denunciation of Paris! Cfossiles, vilains, hommes tarés*) This 
proves that Paris, true to its historical antecedents, seeks the 
regeneration of the French people in making it the champion of 
the regeneration of old society, making the social regeneration of 
mankind the national business of France! It is the emancipation of 
the producing class from the exploiting classes, their retainers and 
their state parasites who prove the truth of the French adage, that 
“les valets du diable sont pire que le diable himself.”” Paris has 
hoisted the flag of mankind! 

18 March. Government laid 

“stamp of 2 centimes on each copy of every periodical, whatever its nature”. 
“forbidden to found new journals until the raising of the state of siege”. 

The different fractions of the French bourgeoisie had succes- 
sively their reigns, the great landed proprietors under the 
Restoration (the old Bourbons), the capitalists under the parliamen- 
tary monarchy of July (Louis Philippe), while its Bonapartist and 
republican elements kept rankling in the background. Their party 
feuds and intrigues were of course carried on on pretexts of public 
welfare, and a popular revolution having got rid of these 
monarchies, the other set in. All this changed with the Republic 
(February). All the fractions of the Bourgeoisie combined together 
in the Party of Order, that is the party of [landed] Proprietors 
and Capitalists, bound together to maintain the economic subjuga- 
tion of labour and the repressive state machinery supporting it. 
Instead of a monarchy, whose very name signified the prevalence of 
one bourgeois fraction over the other, a victory on one side and a 
defeat on the other (the triumph of one side and the humiliation of 
the other), the Republic was the anonymous joint-stock-company 
of the combined bourgeois fractions, of all the exploiters of the 
people clubbed together, and indeed, Legitimists, Bonapartists, | 
Orleanists, Bourgeois Republicans, Jesuits, and Voltaireans, em- 
braced each other. No longer hidden by the shelter of the crown, 

4 Fossils, villains, ill-famed men.— Ed. 
b “The Devil’s valets are worse than the Devil himself”.— Ed. 

First Draft— The Government of Defence 461 

no longer able to interest the people in their party feuds by 
maskerading them into struggles for popular interest, no longer 
subordinate the one to the other. Direct and confessed antagonism 
of their class rule to the emancipation of the producing 
masses,— order the name for the economical and political condi- 
tions of their class rule and the servitude of labour, this 
anonymous or republican form of the bourgeois regime—this 
Bourgeois Republic, this Republic of the Party of Order is the most 
odious of all political regimes. Its direct business, its only raison 
d‘étre* is to crush down the people. It is the terrorism of class rule. 
The thing is done in this way. The people having fought and 
made the Revolution, proclaimed the Republic, and made room 
for a National Assembly, the Bourgeois whose known Republican 
professions are a guarantee for their “Republic”, are pushed on 
the foreground of the stage by the majority of the Assembly, 
composed of the vanquished and professed enemies of the 
Republic. The Republicans are entrusted with the task to goad the 
people into the trap of an insurrection to be crushed by fire and 
sword. This part was performed by the party of the National with 
Cavaignac at their head*™ after the Revolution of February (by 
the June Insurrection). By their crime against the masses, these 
Republicans lose then their sway. They have done their work and, 
if yet allowed to support the party of order in its general struggle 
against the Proletariate, they are at the same time displaced from 
the government, forced to fall back in the last ranks, and only 
allowed “on sufferance”. The combined royalist bourgeois then 
become the fathers of the Republic, the true rule of the “Party of 
Order” sets in. The material forces of the people being broken for 
the time being, the work of reaction—the breaking down of all 
the concessions conquered in four revolutions—begins piece by 
piece. The people is stung to madness not only by the deeds of the 
party of order, but by the cynical effrontery with which it 1s treated 
as the vanquished, with which in its own name, in the name of the 
Republic, that low lot rules it supreme. Of course, that spasmodic 
form of anonymous class despotism cannot last long, can only be a 
transitory phase. It knows that it is seated on a revolutionary 
volcano. On the other hand, if the party of order is united in iis 
war against the working class, in its capacity of the party of order, 
the play of intrigue of its different fractions the one against the 
other, each for the prevalence of its peculiar interest in the old 
order of society, each for the Restoration of its own pretender and 

a Meaning of existence.— Ed. 

personal ambitions, sets in in full force as soon as its rule seems 
secured (guaranteed) by the destruction of the material revolution- 
ary forces. This combination of a common war against the people 
and a common conspiracy against the Republic, combined with the 
internal feuds of its rulers, and their play of intrigues, paralyses 
society, disgusts and bewilders the masses of the middle class and 
“troubles” business, keeps them in a chronic state of disquietude. 
All the conditions of despotism are created (have been engen- 
dered) under this regime, but despotism without quietude, 
despotism with parliamentary anarchy at its head. Then the hour 
has struck for a Coup d’Etat, and the incapable lot has to make 
room for any lucky pretender, making [an] end of the anonymous 
form of class rule. In this way Louis Bonaparte made an end of 
the Bourgeois Republic after its 4 years of existence. During all 
that time Thiers was the “ame damnée”* of the party of order, 
that in the name of the Republic made war upon the Republic, a 
class war upon the people, and, in reality, created the Empire. He 
played exactly the same part now as he played then, only then but 
as a parliamentary intriguer, now as the Chief of the Executive. 
Should he not be conquered by the Revolution, he will now as 
then be a baffled tool. Whatever countervailing government will 
set in, its first act will be to cast aside the man who surrendered 
France to Prussia and bombarded Paris. 

Thiers had many grievances against L. Bonaparte. The latter 
had used him as a tool and a dupe. He had frightened him by his 
arrest after the Coup d’Etat. He had annulled him by putting 
down the parliamentary regime, the only one under which a mere 
state-parasite, like Thiers, a mere talker can play a political part. 
Last not least, Thiers having been the historic shoeblack of 
Napoleon” had so long described his deeds as to fancy he had 
enacted them himself. The legitimate caricature of Nap. I was in 
his eyes not Nap. the little, but little Thiers. With all that there was 
no infamy committed by L. B. which had not been backed by 
Thiers, from the occupation of Rome by the French troops to the 
war with Prussia. 

Only a man of his shallow head can fancy for one moment, that 
a Republic with his head on its shoulders, with a National 

a The tool.— Ed. 
b The reference is to Thiers’ Histoire de la Révolution frangaise and Histoire du 
Consulat et de l’Empire.— Ed. 

First Draft—The Government of Defence 463 

Assembly half-Legitimist, half-Orleanist, with an army under 
Bonapartist leaders, will, if victorious, not push him aside. 

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

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

that affreux Triboulet. 

Splendid Bombardment (with petroleum bombs) from Mont 
Valérien on one part of the houses in the Ternes within the 
rampart, with a grandiose conflagration and a fearful thunder of 
cannon shaking all Paris. Bombs purposely thrown into Ternes 
and the Champs Elysées quarters. 

Explosive bombs, petroleum bombs. 

The Commune 

The glorious British penny a liner has made the splendid 
discovery that this is not what we use to understand by 

a Atrocious.— Ed. 

17~1232 

464 | Karl Marx 

self-government. Of course, it is not. It is not the self- 
administration of the towns by turtle-soup guttling aldermen, 
jobbing vestries, and ferocious workhouse guardians. It is not the 
self-administration of the counties by the holders of broad acres, 
long purses and empty heads. It is not the judicial abomination of 
“the Great Unpaid”.*' It is not political self-government of the 
country through the means of an oligarchic club and the reading 
of The Times newspaper. It is the people acting for itself by itself. 

Within this war of cannibals the most disgusting, the “literary” 
shrieks of the hideous gnome seated at the head of the 
government! 

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

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

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

5 May, Mot d’Ordre: According to the Liberté, which is published 
in Versailles, “all regular army soldiers found at Clamart among 
the insurgents were shot on the spot” (by Lincoln Thiers!) 
(Lincoln acknowledged the belligerent rights). “These are the men 
denouncing on the walls of all French communes the Parisians as 
assassins!” The banditti!* 

Desmarets. 

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

“The wounded man said that on April 25 he and three of his comrades were 
overtaken at Belle Epine, near Villejuif, by a detachment of mounted Chasseurs, 
who told them to surrender. As it was quite impossible to put up any resistance 
against the forces that surrounded them, they laid down their arms and gave up. 

4 The first half of the paragraph, to the parenthesis, is in French in the 
original.— Ed. 

First Draft—The Government of Defence 465 

The soldiers surrounded them and took them prisoner without resorting to 
violence or threats against them. They had been prisoners for a few minutes, when 
a captain of the mounted Chasseurs appeared and threw himself upon them 
revolver in hand. Without saying a word he fired at one of them and killed him 
outright; then he also fired at Guardsman Scheffer, who was shot in the chest and 
fell by his comrade. The other two guardsmen, terrified at this sneaking attack, 
tried to escape but the wild captain ran after the two prisoners and killed them 
both with revolver shots. After these savage and outrageous acts the Chasseurs retired 
with their chief, leaving their victims lying on the ground.” 

New York Tribune outdoes the London papers. 

M. Thiers’ “most liberal and most freely elected National 
assembly that ever existed in France” is quite of a piece with his 
“finest army that France ever possessed”.? The municipal elec- 
tions, carried on under Thiers himself on the 30th of April, show 
their relations to the French people! Of 700,000 councillors (in 
round numbers) returned by the 35,000 communes still left in 
mutilated France, 200 are Legitimists, 600 Orleanists, 7,000 
avowed Bonapartists, and all the rest Republicans or Communists. 
( Versailles Cor. Daily News, 5 May.) Is any other proof wanted that 
this Assembly with the Orleanist mummy Thiers at its head 
represent only an usurpatory minority? 

Paris 

M. Thiers represented again and again the Commune as the 
instrument of a handful of “convicts” and “ticket of leave men”’, 
of the scum of Paris. And this “handful” of desperadoes holds in 
check since more than 6 weeks the “finest army that France ever 
possessed” led by the invincible Mac Mahon and inspired by the 
genius of Thiers himself! 

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

“You must not confuse the movement of Paris with the seizure of Montmartre, 
which was only its opportunity and starting point; this movement is general and 
profound in the conscience of Paris; the greatest number even of those who, for 

a [Rapport de la Commission d’enquéte de la Commune], Le Mot d’Ordre, No. 65, 
April 29, 1871; see also Journal officiel (Paris), No. 118, April 28, 1871. These two 
paragraphs are in French in the original.— Ed. 

b The following text is crossed out in the manuscript: “This senile chambre 
introuvable,!77 chosen on a false pretext, consists almost exclusively of Legitimists !76 
and Orleanists.— Ed. 

17* 

one reason or another, hold aloof from it, do not deny that it is socially 
legitimate.” 4 

Who says this? The delegates of the Syndical chambres, men who 
speak in the name of 7-8,000 merchants and industrials. They have 
gone to tell it at Versailles... The Ligue de la réunion républicaine ... the - 
manifestation of the Francs Magons*” etc. 

The Province 

Les provinciaux espiégles.” 

If Thiers fancied one moment that the provinces were really 
antagonistic to the Paris movement, he would do all in his power 
to give the provinces the greatest possible facilities to become 
acquainted with that movement and all “its horrors”. He would 
solicit them to look at it in its naked reality, to convince themselves 
with their own eyes and ears of what it is. Not he! He and his 
“defence men” try to keep the provinces down, to prevent their 
general rising for Paris, by a wall of lies as they kept out the news 
from the provinces in Paris during the Prussian siege. The 
Provinces are only allowed to look at Paris through the Versailles 
camera obscura. (Nothing but the lies and slanders of the Versailles 
journals reach the departments and reign there unrivalled.)< 
Pillages and murders of 20,000 ticket of leave men dishonour the 
capital. 

“The League considers it to be its primary duty to shed light on the facts and 
restore normal relations between the province and Paris.” 4 

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

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

a “Rapport des délégués. des chambres syndicales. Au syndicat de Union 
nationale”, quoted according to A. Vacquerie, “Une poignée de factieux”, Le Rappel, 
No. 669, April 13, 1871; see also Journal officiel (Paris), No. 102, April 12, 1871. Marx 
gives a French quotation.— Ed. ; 

5 Provincial wags. Quoted from “Ceci est vraiment merveilleux...”, Le Rappel, 
No. 669, April 13, 1871.— Ed. 

¢ The sentence in parentheses is in French.— Ed. 

4 “Le comité de Union républicaine pour les droits de Paris...”, Le Rappel, 
No. 673, April 17, 1871. Marx gives a French quotation.— Ed. 

e “La circulaire de M. Thiers”, Le Vengeur, No. 21, April 19, 1871. Marx gives a 
French quotation in the original and uses the English phrase “‘sift the letters” .— Ed. 

First Draft.— The Government of Defence 467 

Thiers’ bulletins, Picard’s circulars, Dufaure’s... The placards in 
the Communes. The felon press of Versailles and the Germans. The 
petit Moniteur” The reintroduction of passports for travelling from 
one place to another. An army of mouchards> spread in 
every direction. Arrests (in Rouen etc under Prussian authority) 
etc. Thousands of commissioners of police scattered in the 
environs of Paris have been ordered by the prefect of the 
gendarmerie, Valentin, to confiscate journals of any trend 
published in the insurgent city, and to burn them publicly, as used 
to be done in the heyday of the Holy Inquisition.‘ 

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

“The Province,” as the Journal de Limoges says, “showed its discontent by 
refusing the battalions of volontaires which were asked from it by Thiers and his 
ruraux.” © 

The few Breton idiots, fighting under a white flag, every one of 
them wearing on his breast a Jesus heart in white cloth and 
shouting “vive le roi!”' are the only “provincial” army gathered 
round Thiers. 

The elections. Vengeur 6 May. 

M. Dufaure’s presslaw (8 April)*'* confessedly directed against 
the “excesses” of the Provincial press. 

Then the numerous arrestations in the Province. It is placed under 
the laws of suspects.’ Intellectual and police blockade of province! 

April 23 Havre: The municipal council has despatched three of 
its members to Paris and Versailles with instructions to offer 
mediation, with the view of terminating the civil war on the basis 
of the maintenance of the Republic, and the granting of municipal 
franchises to the whole of France... 23 April delegates from Lyon 
received by Picard and Thiers—‘“war at any price” is their reply. 

a The reference is to the Moniteur des Communes.— Ed. 

b Spies.— Ed. 

¢ Marx gives the French sentence in the original.— Ed. 

d The manuscript contains the following text written above this sentence: 
“made an anxious appeal ... before having got a prisoner army from Bismarck.” — 
Fd. 

€ Communication from the Limoges paper La Défense républicaine in Le Mot 
d’Ordre, No. 65, April 29, 1871.— Ed. 

f “Long live the King!” — Ed. 

8 Quoted in French from “Qui, c’en est fait...”, Le Vengeur, No. 38, May 6, 
1871.— Ed. 

The address of the Lyons delegates* is handed to the Assembly 
by Greppo on April 24.°" 

The municipalities of the provincial towns committed the great 
impudence to send their deputations to Versailles in order to call 
upon them to grant what demanded by Paris; not one Commune 
of France has sent an address approving of the acts of Thiers and 
the rurals; the provincial papers, like these municipal councils, as 
Dufaure complains in his circular against Conciliation to the Procureur 
Général, 

“put on the same footing the Assembly elected by universal suffrage, and the 
self-styled Paris Commune; reproach the former for having failed to recognise the 

and what is worse, these municipal councils, f. i. that of Auch, 

“have unanimously demanded that it should at once propose an armistice with Paris, 
and that the Assembly chosen on the 8-th of February, dissolves itself because its 
mandate had expired”. (Dufaure, l’assemblée de Versailles, April 26) 

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

Lastly the elections of 30 April the final judgment of the Assembly 
and the electoral surprise from which it had sprung. If then, the 
provinces have till now only made a passive resistance against 
Versailles without rising for Paris, to be explained by the 
strongholds the old authorities hold here still, the trance in which 
the Empire merged and the war maintained the Province. It is 
evident that it is only the Versailles army, government, and 
Chinese wall of lies, that stand between Paris and the provinces. If 
that wall falls, they will unite with it. 

It is most characteristic, that the same men (Thiers et Co.) who 
in May 1850 abolished by a parliamentary conspiracy (Bonaparte 
aided them, to get them into a snare, to have them at his mercy, 
and to proclaim himself after the coup d’état as the restorator of 

a “Adresse des Délégués de Lyon a |l’Assemblée nationale et 4 la Commune de 
Paris”, Le Mot d'Ordre, No. 63, April 27, 1871. Marx gives this sentence and the end of 
the previous one in French and the words “is their reply” in German.— Ed. 

6 J. Dufaure, [Circulaire aux procureurs généraux. Versailles, 23 avril 1871], Le 
Mot d’Ordre, No. 62, April 26, 1871. Marx gives a French quotation.— Ed. 

© Marx gives this part of the quotation in French.— Ed. 

First Draft—The Government of Defence 469 

the universal suffrage against the party of order and its Assembly) 
the universal suffrage, because under the Republic it might still play 
them freaks, are now its fanatical adepts, make it their “legiti- 
mate” title against Paris, after it had received under Bonaparte 
such an organization as to be the mere plaything in the hand of 
the Executive, a mere machine of cheat, surprise, and forgery on 
the part of the Executive. Congrés de la Ligue des Villes (Rappel 6 
May!) 

Trochu, Jules Favre, and Thiers’ 
Provincials 

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

The thing is very simple. In the first instance, if very unpopular, 
like Thiers after the February Revolution, popular magnanimity 
spares them. After every successful rising of the people the cry of 
conciliation, raised by the implacable enemies of the people, is 
reechoed by the people in the first moments of the enthusiasm at 
its own victory. After: this first moment men like Thiers and 
Dufaure eclipse themselves as long as the people hold material 
power and work in the dark. They reappear as soon as it is 
disarmed and are acclaimed by the bourgeoisie as their chefs de 
file.* 

Or, like Favre, Garnier Pagés, Jules Simon etc (recruited by a 
few younger ones of similar stamp) and Thiers himself after the 
4th of September, were the “respectable” republican opposition 
under Louis Philippe: afterwards the parliamentary opposition 
under L. Bonaparte. The reactionary regimes they have them- 
selves initiated when raised to power by the Revolution, secure for 
them the ranks of the opposition, deporting, killing, exiling the 
true Revolutionists. The people forget their past, the middle class 
look upon them as their men, their infamous past is forgotten, 

a File-leaders.— Ed. 

and thus they reappear to recommence their treason and their 
work of infamy. 

Night of 1 to 2 May: the village of Clamart had been in the hands 
of the military, the railway station in those of the insurgents. (this 
station dominates the Fort of Issy.) By a surprise (their patrouzilles 
being let in by a soldier on guard, the watchword having been 
betrayed to them) the 23 Battalion of Chasseurs got in, surprised 
the garrison most of them sleeping in their bed, made only 60 
prisoners, bayoneted 300 of the insurgents. Dazu* line soldiers 
afterwards shot offhand. Thiers in his circular to the Prefects, civil 
and military authorities of 2 May has the impudence to Say: 

“It (the Commune) arrests generals (Cluseret!) only to shoot them, and 

Troops under General Lacretelle took the redoubt of Moulin 
Saquet situated betwixt Fort Issy and Montrouge, by a coup de 
main. The garrison was surprised by treachery on the part of the 
commandant Gallien, who had sold the password to the Versaillese 
troops. 150 of the Federals bayoneted and over 300 of them made 
prisoners. 

M. Thiers, says the Times correspondent, was weak when he 
ought to have been firm (the coward is always weak as long as he 
has to apprehend danger for himself) and firm, when everything was 
to be gained by some concessions.‘ (the rascal is always firm, when 
the employment of material force bleeds France, gives great airs to 
himself, but when he, personally, is safe. This is his whole 
cleverness. Like Anthony, Thiers is an “honest man”’.‘) 

Thiers’ bulletin on Moulin-Saquet (4 May)! 

4 Moreover.— Ed. 

b L. A. Thiers, [Circulaire 4 toutes les autorités civiles et militaires. Versailles, 2 
mai 1871], Journal officiel (Versailles), No. 123, May 3, 1871.— Ed. 

© Sudden attack.— Ed. 

d “The Commune of Paris...”, The Times, No. 27055, May 5, 1871.— Ed. 

€ W. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene II.— Ed. 

f Then follows the French text to the end of the section.— Ed. 

First Draft.—The Government of Defence 47) 

“Deliverance of Paris from the hideous tyrants who oppress it” (“the Versaillese were 
disguised as National Guards”) (“most of the Federals were asleep and were killed or 
taken in their sleep’’).4 

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

a “Voici, sur le méme fait, le bulletin...”, Le Rappel, No. 692, May 6, 1871. The 
following passage, written by Marx in French, is crossed out in the manuscript: “Picard 
‘our artillery does not bombard; true, tt cannonades’”’ (Moniteur des communes, journal de 
Picard).— Ed. 

472, 

THE COMMUNE