The republic proclaimed on the 4th September by the Paris 
workmen was acclaimed through all France without a single voice 
of dissent. Its right of life was fought for in a 5 months’ defensive 
war (centring in) based upon the resistance of Paris. Without that 
war of defence waged in the name of the Republic, William the 
“Conqueror” would have restored the Empire of his “good 
brother” Louis Bonaparte. The cabal of barristers, with Thiers for 
their statesman, and Trochu for their general, installed 
themselves at the Hotel-de-Ville at a moment of surprise, when 
the real leaders of the Paris working class were still shut up in 
Bonapartist prisons and the Prussian army was already marching 
upon Paris. So deeply were the Thiers, the Jules Favre, the Picard 
then imbued with the belief in the historical leadership of Paris, 
that to legitimate their title as the government of national defence 
they founded their claim exclusively upon their having been 
chosen in the elections to the Corps Législatif, in 1869, as the 
Deputies of Paris. 

In our Second address on the late war, five days after the 
advent of those men, we told you what they were.* If they had 
seized the government without consulting Paris, Paris had 
proclaimed the republic in the teeth of their resistance. And their 
first step was to send Thiers begging about at all courts of Europe 
there to buy if possible Foreign mediation, bartering the Republic 
for a king. Paris did bear with their assumption of power, because 
they highly professed on their solemn vow to wield that power for 
the single purpose of national defence. Paris, however, was not to be 

a See this volume, pp. 268-69.— Ed. 

seriously defended without arming the working class, organizing 
them into a National Guard, and training their ranks through the 
war itself. But Paris armed was the social Revolution armed. The 
victory of Paris over its Prussian besieger would have been a 
victory of the Republic over French class rule. In this conflict 
between national duty and class interest, the Government of 
national Defence did not hesitate one moment to turn into a 
government of national defection. In a letter to Gambetta, Jules 
Favre confessed that what Trochu stood in defence of, was not the 
Prussian soldier, but the Paris workman. Four months after the 
commencement of the siege, when they thought the opportune 
moment come for breaking the first word of capitulation, Trochu, 
in the presence of Jules Favre and others of his colleagues, 
addresses the reunion of the maires of Paris in these terms: 

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

(This little speech of Trochu’s was after the armistice published 
by M. Corbon, one of the maires present.)* Thus, on the very 
evening of the proclamation of the Republic, Trochu’s “plan”, 
known to his colleagues, was nothing else but the capitulation of 
Paris and France. To cure Paris of its “heroic folly”, it had to 
undergo a treatment of decimation and famine, long enough to 
screen the usurpers of the 4th of September from the vengeance 
of the December men.*"” If the “national defence” had been more 
than a false pretence for “government”, its self-appointed 
members would have abdicated on the 5th of September, publicly 
revealed Trochu’s “plan”, and called upon the Paris people to at 
once surrender to the conqueror or take the work of defence in its 
own hands. Instead of this the imposters published high-sounding 
manifestoes wherein Trochu “the governor will never capitulate” 
and Jules Favre the Foreign minister “not cede a stone of our 
fortresses, nor a foot of our territory”.“ Through the whole time 

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

b L. J. Trochu, [Proclamation aux habitants de Paris. Paris, 6 janvier 1871], 
Journal officiel (Paris), No. 7, January 7, 1871.— Ed. 

‘ J. Favre, “Circulaire adressée aux agents diplomatiques de France ... Le 
6 septembre 1870”, Journal officiel (Paris), No. 246, September 7, 1870.— Ed. 

Second Draft.—1) Government of Defence ; 517 

of the siege Trochu’s plan was systematically carried out. In fact, 
the vile Bonapartist cut-throats, to whose trust they gave the 
generalship of Paris, cracked in their intimate correspondence 
ribald jokes at the well-understood farce of the defence. (See f.1. 
the correspondence of Alphonse Simon Guiod, supreme commander 
of the artillery of the army of defence of Paris and Grand Cross of 
the Legion of Honour, to Suzanne, General of Division of 
Artillery,? published by the Journal officiel of the Commune.) The 
mask of imposture was dropped at the capitulation of Paris. The 
“government of national defence” unmasked itself as the “government 
of France by Bismarck’s prisoners”—a part which Louis Bonaparte 
himself at Sedan had considered too infamous even for a man of 
his stamp. On their wild flight to Versailles, after the events of the 
18th March, the capitulards' have left in the hands of Paris the 
documentary evidence of their treason, to destroy which, as the 
Commune says in its Manifesto to the Provinces, 

“they would not recoil from battering Paris into a heap of ruins washed in a sea 
of blood”.> 

Some of the most influential members of the government of 
defence had moreover urgent private reasons of their own to be 
passionately bent upon such a consummation. Look only at Jules 
Favre, Ernest Picard, and Jules Ferry! 

Shortly after the conclusion of the armistice, M. Muilliére, one of 
the representatives of Paris to the National Assembly, published a 
series of authentic legal documents* in proof that Jules Favre, 
living in concubinage with the wife of a drunkard, resident at 
Algiers,* had, by a most daring concoction of forgeries, spread 
over many years, contrived to grasp, in the name of the children 
of his adultery, a large succession which made him a rich man, 
and that, in a law-suit undertaken by the legitimate heirs, he only 
escaped exposure through the connivance of the Bonapartist 
tribunals. Since those dry legal documents were not to be got rid 
of by any horsepower of rhetorics, Jules Favre, in the same 
heroism of self-abasement, remained for once tongue-tied until 
the turmoil of the civil war allowed him to brand the Paris people 
in the Versailles assembly as a band of “escaped convicts” in utter 
revolt against family, religion, order and property! 

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

b “Manisfeste”, Le Vengeur, No. 30, April 28, 1871.— Ed. 

© J.-B. E. Milliére, ‘““Le Faussaire”, Le Venguer, No. 6, February 8, 1871.— Ed. 

d Jeanne Charmont, who lived separately from her husband Vernier.— Ed. 

(Pic affaire.) This very forger had hardly got into power when he 
sympathetically hastened to liberate two brother-forgers, Pic and 
Taillefer, under the Empire itself convicted to the hulks for theft 
and forgery.’ One of these men, Taillefer, daring to return to 
Paris after the instalment of the Commune, was at once returned 
to a convenient abode; and then Jules Favre told all Europe that 
Paris was setting free all the felonious inhabitants of her prisons! 

Ernest Picard, appointed by himself the home minister of the 
French Republic on the 4th of September, after having striven in 
vain to become the home minister of Louis Bonaparte, is the 
brother of one Arthur Picard, an individual expulsed from the 
Paris bourse as a blackleg (Report of the Prefecture of Police d.d. 
31 July 1867) and convicted on his own confession of a theft of 
300,000 fcs while a director of one of the branches of the Société 
Générale,*’ (see Report of the Prefecture of Police, 11 December 
1868).* Both these reports were still published at the time of 
the Empire. This Arthur Picard was made by Ernest Picard the 
rédacteur en chef of his “Electeur libre” to act, during the whole 
siege, as his financial go-between, discounting at the Bourse the 
state secrets in the trust of Ernest and safely speculating on the 
disasters of the French army, while the common jobbers were 
misled by the false news, and official lies, published in the 
“Electeur libre”? the organ of the home minister. The whole 
financial correspondence between that worthy pair of brethren has 
fallen into the hands of the Commune. No wonder that Ernest 
Picard, the Joe Miller of the Versailles government, “with his 
hands in his trousers’ pockets, walked from group to group 
cracking jokes’, at the first batch of Paris National Guards made 
prisoners and exposed to the ferocious outrages of Piétri’s lambs.‘ 

Jules Ferry, a pennyless barrister before the 4th of September, 
contrived, as the Maire of Paris, to job during the siege a fortune 
out of the famine which was to a great part the work of his 
maladministration. The day on which he would have to give an 
account of his maladministration would be his day of judgement. 
The documentary proofs are in the hands of the Commune. 

These men, therefore, are the deadly foes of the workingmen’s 

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

b Marx corrected the inaccuracy in the final version of The Civil War in France: 
Ernest Picard was Minister of Finance in the Government of National Defence and 
the newspaper Electeur libre was the organ of the Ministry of Finance (see this 
volume, p. 314).— Ed. 

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

Second Draft.—2) Thiers. Dufaure. Pouyer-Quertier 519 

Paris, not only as parasites of the ruling classes, not only as the 
betrayers of Paris during the siege, but above all as common felons 
who but in the ruins of Paris, this stronghold of the French 
Revolution, can hope to find their tickets-of-leave. These de- 
speradoes were exactly the men to become the ministers of Thiers. 

2) THIERS. DUFAURE. POUYER-QUERTIER 

In the “parliamentary sense” things are only a pretext for words 
serving as a snare for the adversary, an ambuscade for the people, 
or a matter of artistic display for the speaker himself. 

Their master, M. Thiers, the mischievous gnome, has charmed 
the French bourgeoisie for almost half a century because he is the 
most consummate intellectual expression of their own class 
corruption. Even before he became a statesman, he had shown his 
lying powers as a historian. Eager of display, like all dwarfish men, 
greedy of place and pelf, with a barren intellect but lively fancy, 
epicurean, sceptical, of an encyclopedic facility for mastering the 
surface of things, and turning things into a mere pretext for talk, 
a wordfencer of rare conversational power, a writer of lucid 
shallowness, a master of small state roguery, a virtuoso in perjury, 
a craftsman in all the petty stratagems, cunning devices and base 
perfidies of parliamentary party warfare, national and _ class 
prejudices standing him in the place of ideas, and vanity in the 
place of conscience, in order to displace a rival, and to shoot the 
people, in order to stifle the Revolution, mischievous when in 
opposition, odious when in power, never scrupling to provoke 
revolutions, the history of his public life is the chronicle of the 
miseries of his country. Fond of brandishing with his dwarfish 
arms in the face of Europe the sword of the first Napoleon, whose 
historical shoeblack he had become,” his Foreign policy always 
culminated in the utter humiliation of France, from the London 
Convention of 1841 °° to the Paris capitulation of 1871 ''* and the 
present civil war he wages under the shelter of Prussian invasion. 
It need not be said that to such a man the deeper undercurrents 
of modern society remained a closed book, but even the most 
palpable changes on its surface were abhorrent to a brain all 
whose vitality had fled to the tongue. F.1. he never fatigued to 
denounce any deviation from the old French protective system as 

*« See this volume, p. 314.— Ed. 
b The reference is to Thiers’ Histoire de la Révolution frangaise and Histoire du 
Consulat et de V'Empire.— Ed. 

520 | Karl Marx 

a sacrilege, railways he sneeringly derided, when a minister of 
Louis Philippe, as a wild chimera, and every reform of the rotten 
French army system he branded under Louis Bonaparte as a 
profanation. With all his versatility of talent and shiftiness of 
purpose, he was steadily wedded to the traditions of a fossilized 
routine, and never, during his long official career, became guilty 
of one single, even the smallest measure of practical use. Only the 
old world’s edifice may be proud of being crowned by two such 
men as Napoleon the little and littlke Thiers. The so-called 
accomplishments of culture appear in such a man only as the 
refinement of debauchery and the...* of selfishness. 

Banded with the Republicans under the restoration, Thiers 
insinuated himself with Louis Philippe as a spy upon and the 
jail-accoucheur of the Duchess of Berry, but his activity when he 
had first slipped into a ministry (1834-35) centred in the massacre 
of the insurgent Republicans at the rue Transnonain and the 
incubation of the atrocious September laws against the press.’ 

Reappearing as the chief of the cabinet in March 1840, he came 
out with the plot of the Paris fortifications.’”° To the [outcry] of the 
Republican party, against the sinister attempt on the liberty of 
Paris, he replied: 

“What! To fancy that any works of fortification could endanger liberty! And 
first of all, you calumniate every Government whatever in supposing that it could one 
day try to maintain itself by bombarding the capital.... But it would be hundred 

Indeed no French government whatever save that of M. Thiers 
himself with his ticket-of-leave‘ ministers and his rural assembly '”° 
ruminants could have dared upon such a deed! And this too in 
the most classic form; one part of his fortifications in the hands of 
his Prussian conquerors and protectors. 

When King Bomba“ tried his hands at Palermo in January 1848, 
Thiers rose in the Chamber of Deputies: 

“You know, gentlemen, what passes at Palermo: you all shook with horror” 
(in the “parliamentary” sense) “when hearing that during 48 hours a great town has 
been bombarded. By whom? was it by a Foreign enemy, exercising the rights of war? 
No, gentlemen, by its own government.” 

2 A blank space in the manuscript.— Ed. 

6 L. A. Thiers’ speech at the session of the Chamber of Deputies, January 13, 
1841, Le Venguer, No. 14, April 12, 1871.— Ed. 

© See this volume, p. 314.— Ed. 

d Ferdinand II.— Ed. 

Second Draft.—2) Thiers. Dufaure. Pouyer-Quertier 521 

(If it had been by its own government, under the eyes and on 
the sufferance of the Foreign enemy, all would, of course, have 
been right.) 

“And why? Because that unfortunate town (city) demanded its rights. Well, then. For 
the demand of its rights, it has had 48 hours of bombardment.” 

(If the bombardment had lasted 4 weeks and more all would 
have been right.) 

“Allow me to appeal to the opinion of Europe. It is doing a service to 
mankind to come and make reverberate from the greatest tribune perhaps of 
Europe some words of indignation” (indeed! words!) “against such acts.... When the 
regent Espartero, who had rendered services to his country” (what Thiers never 
did), “in order to suppress an insurrection, wanted to bombard Barcelona, there was 
from all parts of the world a general shriek of indignation.” @ 

Well, about a year later this fine-souled man became the sinister 
suggester and the most fierce defender (apologist) of the 
bombardment of Rome by the troops of the French republic, 
under the command of the legitimist Oudinot.'” 

A few days before the Revolution of February, fretting at the 
long exile from power to which Guizot had condemned him, 
smelling in the air the commotion, Thiers exclaimed again in the 
Chambre of Deputies: 

“IT am of the party of Revolution not only in France, but in Europe. I wish the 
government of the Revolution to remain in the hands of moderate men.... But if 
that government should pass into the hands of ardent men, even of the Radicals, I 

should not for all that desert (abandon) my cause. I shall always be of the party of the 
Revolution. ’’> 

The Revolution of February came. Instead of displacing the 
Guizot cabinet by the Thiers cabinet as the litthe man had dreamt, 
it displaced Louis Philippe by the Republic. To put down that 
Revolution was M. Thiers’ exclusive business from the proclama- 
tion of the Republic to the Coup d’Etat. On the first day of the 
popular victory, he anxiously hid himself, forgetting that the 
contempt of the people rescued him from its hatred. Still, with his 
legendary courage, he continued to shy the public stage until after 
the bloody disruption of the material forces of the Paris proletariat 
by Cavaignac, the bourgeois republican.’ Then the scene was 
cleared for his sort of action. His hour had again struck. He 
became the leading mind of the “Party of Order’!” and _ its 
“Parliamentary Republic”, that anonymous reign in which all the 

aL. A. Thiers’ speech at the session of the Chamber of Deputies, January 31, 
1848, Le Rappel, No. 673, April 17, 1871; Le Vengeur, No. 21, April 19, 1871.— Ed. 

b L. A. Thiers’ speech at the session of the Chamber of Deputies, February 2, 
1848, Le Moniteur universel, No. 34, February 3, 1848.— Ed. 

rival factions of the ruling classes conspired together to crush the 
working class and conspired against each other, each for the 
restoration of its own monarchy. 

(The Restoration had been the reign of the aristocratic landed 
proprietors, the July monarchy the reign of the capitalist, 
Cavaignac’s republic the reign of the “Republican” fraction of the 
bourgeoisie, while during all these reigns the band of hungry 
adventurers forming the Bonapartist party had panted in vain for 
the plunder of France, that was to qualify them as the saviours of 
“order and property, family and religion”. 

That Republic was the anonymous reign of coalesced Legitim- 
ists, Orleanists, and Bonapartists, with the bourgeois Republicans 
for their tail.) 

3) THE RURAL ASSEMBLY 

If this rural assembly, meeting at Bordeaux, made this 
government, the “government of defence men” had beforehand 
taken good care to make that assembly. For that purpose they had 
dispatched Thiers on a travelling tour through the provinces, 
there to foreshadow coming events and make ready for the 
surprise of the general elections. Thiers had to overcome one 
difficulty. Quite apart from having become an abomination to the 
French people, the Bonapartists, if numerously elected, would at 
once have restored the Empire and embaled M. Thiers and Co. 
for a voyage to Cayenne.’ The Orleanists were too sparsely 
scattered to fill their own places and those vacated by the 
Bonapartists. To galvanize the Legitimist party, had therefore 
become unavoidable. Thiers was not afraid of his task. Impossible 
as a government of modern France, and therefore contemptible as 
rivals for place and pelf, who could be fitter to be handled as the 
blind tool of Counter-revolution, than the party whose action, in 
the words of Thiers, had always been confined to the three 
resources of “Foreign invasion, civil war, and anarchy”. (Speech of 
Thiers at the Chambre of Deputies of January 5, 1833.*) A select set of 
the Legitimists, expropriated by the Revolution of 1789, had 
regained their estates by enlisting in the servant hall of the first 
Napoleon, the bulk of them by the milliard of indemnity and the 
private donations of the Restoration. Even their seclusion from 
participation in active politics under the successive reigns of Louis 
Philippe and Napoleon the little, served as a lever to the 
reestablishment of their wealth as landed proprietors. Freed from 

a See La Tribune de Bordeaux, April 25, 1871.— Ed. 

Second Draft—3) The Rural Assembly 523 

court dissipation and representation costs at Paris, they had, out of 
the very corners of provincial France, only to gather the golden 
apples falling into their chateaux* from the tree of modern 
industry, railways enhancing the price of their land, agronomy 
applied to it by capitalist farmers, increasing its produce, and the 
inexhaustible demand of a rapidly swollen town population 
securing the growth of markets for that produce. The very same 
social agencies which reconstituted their material wealth and 
remade their importance as partners of that jointstock company of 
modern slaveholders, screened them from the infection of the 
modern ideas and allowed them, in rustic innocence, nothing to 
forget and nothing to learn. Such people furnished the mere 
passive material to be worked upon by a man like Thiers. While 
executing the mission, entrusted to him by the government of 
Defence, the mischievous imp overreached his mandataries in 
securing to himself that multitude of elections which was to 
convert the defence men from his opponent masters into his 
avowed servants. 

The electoral traps being thus laid, the French people was 
suddenly summoned by the capitulards of Paris to choose within 
8 days a national assembly with the exclusive task by virtue of the 
terms of the convention of the 31st January, dictated by 
Bismarck,’ to decide on war or peace. Quite apart from the 
extraordinary circumstances, under which that election occurred, 
with no time for deliberation, with one half of France under the 
sway of Prussian bayonets, with its other half secretly worked upon 
by the government intrigue, with Paris secluded from the 
provinces, the French people felt instinctively that the very terms 
of the armistice, undergone by the capitulards, left France no 
alternative (choice) but that of a peace a outrance” and that for its 
sanction the worst men of France would be the best. Hence the 
rural assembly emerging at Bordeaux. 

Sull we must distinguish between the old regime orgies and the 
real historical business of the rurals. Astonished to find themselves 
the strongest fraction of an immense majority, composed of 
themselves and the Orleanists, with a contingent of Bourgeois 
republicans and a mere sprinkling of Bonapartists, they verily 
believed in the long-expected advent of their retrospective 
millennium. There were the heels of the Foreign invasion 
trampling upon France, there was the downfall of the Empire and 

* Manors.— Ed. 
b At any price.— Ed. 

the captivity of a Bonaparte, and there they were themselves. The 
wheel of history had evidently turned round to stop at the 
Chambre introuvable’” of 1816, with its deep and impassionate 
curses against the Revolutionary deluge and its abominations, with 
its “decapitation and decapitalization of Paris”,* its “decentraliza- 
tion” breaking through the network of state rule by the local 
influences of the Chateaux and its religious homilies and its tenets 
of antediluvian politics, with its gentilhommerie, flippancy, its 
genealogic spite against the drudging masses, and its Oeil de 
Boeuf*” views of the world. Still in point of fact they had only to 
act their part as joint-stock holders of the “party of order’, as 
monopolists of the means of production. From 1848 to 1851, they 
had only to form a fraction of the interregnum of the 
“parliamentary republic”, with this difference that then they were 
represented by their educated and trained parliamentary champ- 
ions, the Berryer, the Falloux, the Larochejaquelein, while now 
they had to ask in their rustic rank and file, imparting thus a 
different tone and tune to the assembly, maskerading its 
bourgeois reality under feudal colours. Their grotesque exaggera- 
tions (homilies) serve only to set off the liberalism of their banditti 
government. Ensnared into an usurpation of powers beyond their 
electoral mandates, they live only on the sufferance of their 
selfmade rulers. The Foreign invasion of 1814 and 1815°”° having 
been the deadly weapon wielded against them by the bourgeois 
parvenus, they have in injudicial blindness bestowed upon 
themselves the responsibility for this unprecedented surrender of 
France to the Foreigner by their bourgeois foes. And the French 
people astonished and insulted by the reappearance of all the 
noble Pourceaugnacs it believed buried long since, has become 
aware that beside making the Revolution of the 19th century it has 
to finish off the Revolution of 1789 by driving the ruminants to 
the last goal of all rustic animals—the shambles. 

5) OPENING OF THE CIVIL WAR. 18 MARCH REVOLUTION. 
CLEMENT THOMAS. LECOMTE. THE VENDOME AFFAIR 

The disarmament of Paris, as a mere necessity of the 
counter-revolutionary plot, might have been undertaken in a more 
temporizing, circumspect manner, but as a clause of the urgent 
financial treaty with its irresistible fascinations, it brooked no 
delay.'** Thiers had therefore to try his hand at a coup d’état. He 

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

Second Draft.—5) Opening of the Civil War 525 

opened the civil war by sending Vinoy, the Décembriseur,'*' at the 
head of a multitude of sergents-de-ville and a few regiments of the 
line, upon the nocturnal expedition against the Montmartre Buttes. 
Thiers’ felonious attempt having broken down on the resistance of 
the National Guards and their fraternization with the soldiers, on 
the following day, in a manifesto, stuck to the walls of Paris, 
Thiers told the National Guards of his magnanimous resolve to 
leave them their arms* with which, he felt sure, they would be 
eager to rally round the government against “the rebels”. Out of 
300,000 national guards only 300 responded to his summons. The 
glorious workmen’s Revolution of the 18th March had taken 
undisputed possession (sway) of Paris. 

The Central Committee, which directed the defence of 
Montmartre and emerged on the dawn of the 18th March as the 
leader of the Revolution, was neither an expedient of the moment 
nor the offspring of secret conspiracy. From the very day of the 
capitulation, by which the government of the national defence had 
disarmed France but reserved to itself a bodyguard of 40,000 
troops for the purpose of cowing Paris, Paris stood on the watch. 
The national guard reformed its organization and entrusted its 
supreme control to a Central Committee, consisting of the 
delegates of the single companies, mostly workmen, with their 
main strength in the workmen’s suburbs, but soon accepted by the 
whole body save its old Bonapartist formations. On the eve of the 
entrance of the Prussians into Paris, the Central committee took 
measures for the removal to Montmartre, Belleville, and La 
Villette, of the cannon and mitrailleuses treacherously abandoned 
by the capitulards, even in those quarters which the Prussians were 
about to occupy. It thus made safe the artillery, furnished by the 
subscriptions of the National Guard, officially recognized as their 
private property in the convention of the 28th of January,’ and 
on that very title exempted from the general surrender of arms. 
During the whole interval from the meeting of the National 
Assembly at Bordeaux to the 18th of March, the Central 
Committee had been the people’s government of the capital, 
strong enough to persist in its firm attitude of defence despite the 
provocations of the Assembly, the violent measures of the 
Executive, and the menacing concentration of troops.” 

The defeat of Vinoy by the National Guard was but a check 

aE. Picard, L. J.-B. d’Aurelle de Paladines, “To the National Guards of the 
Seine”, The Daily News, No. 7765, March 20, 1871.— Ed. 

b Then follows a paragraph beginning with the words “The revolution of the 

4th September” to “of a long bygone past”, which was crossed out by Marx since it 
occurs on the next page.— Ed. 

given to the Counterrevolution plotted by ruling classes, but the 
Paris people turned at once that incident of their selfdefence into 
the first act of a social Revolution. The revolution of the 4th 
September had restored the Republic after the throne of the 
usurper had become vacant. The tenacious resistance of Paris 
during its siege, serving as the basis for the defensive war in the 
provinces, had wrung from the Foreign invader the recognition of 
that Republic, but its true meaning and purpose were only 
revealed on the 18th of March. It was to supersede the social and 
political conditions of class rule, upon which the old world’s system 
rests, which had engendered the Second Empire and under its 
tutelage, ripened into rottenness. Europe thrilled as under an 
electric shock. It seemed for a moment to doubt whether its late 
sensational performances of state and war had any reality in them 
and were not the mere sanguinary dreams of a long bygone past. 
The traces of the long endured famine still upon their figures, and 
under the very eye of Prussian bayonets, the Paris working class 
conquered in one bound the championship of progress etc. 

In the sublime enthusiasm of historic initiative, the Paris 
workmen’s Revolution made it a point of honour to keep the 
proletarian clean of the crimes in which the revolutions and still 
more the counterrevolutions of their betters (natural superiors) 
abound. 

Clément Thomas. Lecomte etc. 

But the horrid “atrocities” that have sullied this Revolution? 

So far as these atrocities imputed to it by its enemies are 
not the deliberate calumny of Versailles or the horrid spawn of 
the penny a liner’s brain, they relate only to two facts—the 
execution of the Generals Lecomte and Clément Thomas and the 
Vendome Affaire, of which we shall dispose in a few words. 

One of the paid cut-throats selected for the (felonious handy 
work) execution of the nocturnal coup de main* on Montmartre, 
General Lecomte had on the place Pigalle four times ordered his 
troops of the 81st of the line to charge an unarmed gathering, and 
on their refusal fiercely insulted them. Instead of shooting women 
and children, some of his own men shot him, when taken prisoner 
in the afternoon of the 18th March, in the gardens of the Chateau 
rouge. The inveterate habits acquired by the French soldatesque 
under the training of the enemies of the working class, are of 

4 Sudden attack.— Ed. 

Second Draft.—5) Opening of the Civil War 527 

course not likely to change the very moment they change sides. 
The same soldiers executed Clément Thomas. 

“General” Clément Thomas, a_ discontent  ex-quarter- 
master-sergeant had, in the latter times of Louis Philippe’s 
reign, enlisted in the “republican” National newspaper, there to 
serve in the double quality of strawman (responsible Gérant*) and 
bully. The men of the National having abused the February 
Revolution,” to cheat themselves into power, metamorphosed their 
old quartermaster-sergeant into a “General” on the eve of the 
butchery of June, of which he, like Jules Favre, was one of the 
sinister plotters and became one of the most merciless executors. 
Then his generalship came to a sudden end. He disappears only 
to rise again to the surface on the Ist November 1870. The day 
before the government of defence, caught at the Hotel de Ville, 
had, upon their word of honour, solemnly bound themselves to 
Blanqui, Flourens and the other representatives of the working 
class to abdicate their usurped power into the hands of a 
Commune to be freely chosen by Paris.'** They broke, of course, 
their word of honour, to let loose the Bretons of Trochu, who had 
taken the place of the Corsicans of L. Bonaparte,'* upon the 
people guilty of believing in their honour. M. Tamisier alone 
refusing to brand himself by such a breach of faith, tendering at 
once his resignation of the commandership-in-chief of the 
National Guard, ‘‘General’”’ Clément Thomas was shuffled into his 
place. During his whole tenure of office he made war not upon 
the Prussians, but upon the Paris National Guard, proving 
inexhaustible in pretexts to prevent its general armament, in 
devices of disorganization by pitching its bourgeois element 
against its working men’s elements, of weeding out the officers 
hostile to Trochu’s “plan” and disbanding, under the stigma of 
cowardice, the very proletarian battalions whose heroism is now 
astonishing their most inveterate enemies. Clément Thomas felt 
proud of having reconquered his June preeminence as the 
personal enemy of the Paris working class. Only a few days before 
the 18th of March he laid before the war minister Le Fl6 a new 
plan of his own for finishing off “la fine fleur (the cream) of the 
Paris canaille’.“ As if haunted by the June spectres, he must needs 
appear, in the quality of an amateur detective, on the scene of 
action after Vinoy’s rout! 

a Editor.— Ed. 

b Of 1848.— Ed. 

©“ “La Sociale publie une curieuse lettre...”’, Le Venguer, No. 21, April 19, 1871. 
Canaille— mob.— Ed. 

The Central Committee tried in vain to rescue these two 
criminals, Lecomte and Clément Thomas, from the soldiers’ wild 
lynch justice, of which they themselves and the Paris workmen 
were as guilty as the Princess Alexandra of the people crushed to 
death on the day of her entrance in London. Jules Favre, with his 
forged Pathos, flung his curses upon Paris, the den of assassins. 
The Rural Assembly mimicked hysterical contortions of “sensible- 
rie”.* These men never shed their crocodile tears but as a pretext 
for shedding the blood of the people. To handle respectable 
cadavers as weapons of civil war has always been a favourite trick 
with the party of order. How did Europe ring in 1848 with their 
shouts of horror at the assassination of the Archbishop of Paris” 
by the insurgents of June, and while they were fully aware from 
the evidence of an eyewitness: M. Jacquemet, the Archbishop’s 
vicar, that the Bishop had been shot by Cavaignac’s own soldiers! ‘ 
Through the letters to Thiers of the present Archbishop of Paris,‘ 
a man with no martyr’s vein in him, there runs the shrewd 
suspicion that his Versailles friends were quite the men to console 
themselves of his prospective execution in the violent desire to fix 
that amiable proceeding on the Commune! However, when the cry 
of “assassins” had served its turn, Thiers coolly disposed of it by 
declaring from the tribune of the National Assembly, that the 
“assassination” was the private deed of a few, “very few” obscure 
individuals.° 

The “men of order”, the reactionists of Paris, trembling at the 
people’s victory as the signal of retribution, were quite astonished 
by proceedings strangely at variance with their own traditional 
methods of celebrating a defeat of the people. Even the 
sergents-de-ville, instead of being disarmed and locked up, had the 
doors of Paris flung wide open for their safe retreat to Versailles, 
while the “men of order”, left not only unhurt, were allowed to 
rally quietly and lay hold of the strongholds in the very centre of 
Paris. They interpreted, of course, the indulgence of the Central 
Committee and the magnanimity of the armed workmen as mere 
symptoms of conscious weakness. Hence their plan to try under 
the mask of an “unarmed” demonstration the work which four 

a Sentimentality.— Ed. 

b D. A. Affre.— Ed. 

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

4d G. Darboy, “Prison de Mazas, le 8 avril 1871”, Le Rappel, No. 669, April 13, 
1871.— Ed. 

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

Second Draft.—5) Opening of the Civil War 529 

days before Vinoy’s cannon and mitrailleuses had failed in. 
Starting from their quarters of luxury, this riotous mob of 
“gentlemen”, with all the “petits crevés’* in their ranks and the 
familiars of the Empire, the Heeckeren, Coétlogon, H. de Péne 
etc. at their head, fell in marching order under the cries of “down 
with the Assassins! down with the Central Committee! Vive 
l’Assemblée Nationale!” illtreating and disarming the detached 
posts of National Guards they met with on their progress. When 
then at last debouching in the place Vendéme, they tried, under 
shouts of ribald insults, to dislodge the National Guards from their 
headquarters and forcibly break through the lines. In answer to 
their pistol shots the regular sommations (the French equivalent of 
the English reading of the Riot acts)'*’ were made, but proved 
ineffective to stop the aggressors. Then fire was commanded by 
the general of the National Guard” and these rioters dispersed in 
wild flight. Two national guards killed, eight dangerously wound- 
ed, and the streets, through which they disbanded (runaways fled), 
strewn with revolvers, daggers and cane-swords, gave clear 
evidence of the “unarmed” character of their “pacific” demonst- 
ration.” When, on the 13th June 1849, the National guards of 
Paris made a really “unarmed” demonstration of protest against 
the felonious assault on Rome by French troops, Changarnier, the 
general of the “party of order”, had their ranks sabred, trampled 
down by cavalry and shot down, the state of siege was at once 
proclaimed, new arrests, new proscriptions, a new reign of terror 
set in.“ But the “lower orders” manage these things otherwise. 
The runaways of the 22nd March being neither followed up on 
their flight nor afterwards called to account by the judge of 
instruction (juge d’instruction), were able two days later to muster 
again an “armed” demonstration under Admiral Saisset. Even 
after the grotesque failure of this their second rising, they were, 
like all other Paris citizens, allowed to try their hands at the 
ballot-box for the election of the Commune, and when succumb- 
ing in this bloodless battle, they at last purged Paris from their 
presence by an unmolested Exodus, dragging along with them the 
cocottes, the lazzaroni and the other dangerous class of the capital. 

* Fops.— Ed. 

b J. Bergeret.— Ed. 

© See “Le Journal officiel de Paris raconte...”, Le Rappel, No. 650, March 25, 
1871.— Ed. 

d Marx gives a detailed analysis of the events of June 13, 1849 in his work The 
Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, Ch. II (see present edition, Vol. 10, 
pp. 71-100).— Ed. 

19* 

The “assassination of the unarmed citizens” on the 22nd of March 
is a myth which even Thiers and his rurals'”* have never dared to 
harp upon, entrusting it exclusively to the servant hall of 
European journalism. 

If there is to be found fault with in the conduct of the Central 
Committee and the Paris workmen towards these “men of order” 
from 18th March to the time of their Exodus, it is an excess of 
moderation bordering upon weakness. 

Look now to the other side of the medal! 

After the failure of their nocturnal surprise of Montmartre, the 
party of order began their regular Campaign against Paris in the 
commencement of April. For inaugurating the civil war by the 
methods of December, the massacre in cold blood of the captured 
soldiers of the line and infamous murder of our brave friend 
Duval, Vinoy, the runaway, is appointed by Thiers Grand Cross of 
the Legion of Honour! Galliffet, the fancy-man of that woman so 
notorious for her shameless maskerades at the orgies of the 
Second Empire,’ boasts in an official manifesto of his cowardly 
assassination of Paris National Guards, their lieutenant and their 
captain, made by surprise and treason.” Desmaréts, the gendarme, 
is decorated for his butchery-like chopping of the highsouled and 
chivalrous Flourens, the “encouraging” particulars of whose death 
are triumphantly communicated to the Assembly by Thiers.© In 
the horribly grotesque exultation of a Tom Pouce playing the 
part of Timur Tamerlane, Thiers denies the “rebels” against his 
littleness all the rights and customs of civilized warfare, even the 
rights of “ambulances”.'” 

When the Commune had published on the 7 April its decree of 
reprisals, declaring it its duty to protect itself against the cannibal 
exploits of the Versailles banditti and to demand an eye for an 
eye, a tooth for a tooth,‘ the atrocious treatment of the Versailles 
prisoners, of whom Thiers says in one of his bulletins: 

a “The wild tumults of...”, The Daily News, No. 7779, April 5, 1871.— Ed. 

b Notice on Proclamation of General de Galliffet, April 3, 1871, The Daily News, 
No. 7783, April 10, 1871.— Ed. 

¢ Marx sets forth Thiers’ speech in the National Assembly on April 3, 1871 
according to The Daily Telegraph, No. 4932, April 5, 1871.— Ed. 

d The Proclamation of the Commune of April 5, 1871 is cited from The Civil 
War in France published in The Daily News, No. 7781, April 7, 1871; see also 
Journal officiel (Paris), No. 96, April 6, 1871.— Ed. 

Second Draft.—5) Opening of the Civil War 531 

“never had more degraded countenances of a degraded democracy met the 
afflicted gazes of honest men”? 

did not cease, but the fusillades of the captives were stopped. 
Hardly however had he and his Decembrist generals become 
aware, that the Commune’s decree was but an empty threat, that 
even their spying gendarmes caught in Paris under the disguise of 
National Guards, that even their sergents-de-ville captured with 
explosive bombs upon them were spared, when at once the old 
regime set in wholesale and has continued to this day. The 
National Guards who had surrendered at Belle Epine to an 
overwhelming force of Chasseurs were then shot down one after 
the other by the captain of the peloton? on horseback; houses, to 
which Parisian troops and National guards had fled, surrounded 
by Gendarmes, inundated with petroleum, and then set on fire, 
the calcinated corpses being afterward transported by Paris 
ambulance; the bayoneting of the national guards surprised 
(Federals surprised in their beds asleep) by treason in their beds at 
the Redoubt of Moulin Saquet, the massacre (fusillades) of 
Clamart, prisoners wearing the line uniform shot offhand, all 
these high deeds flippantly told in Thiers bulletin,© are only a few 
incidents of this slaveholders’ rebellion! But would it not be 
ludicrous to quote single facts of ferocity in view of this civil war, 
fomented amidst the ruins of France, by the conspirators of 
Versailles from the meanest motives of class interest, and the 
bombardment of Paris under the patronage of Bismarck, in the 
sight of his soldiers! The flippant manner in which Thiers reports 
on these things in the bulletin, has even shocked the not 
oversensitive nerves of The Times. All this is however “regular” as 
the Spaniards say. All the fights of the ruling classes against the 
producing classes menacing their privileges are full of the same 
horrors, although none exhibits such an excess of humanity on the 
part of the oppressed and few such an abasement.... Theirs has 
always been the old axiom of knight-errantry that every weapon is 
fair if used against the plebeian. 

“L’assemblée siege paisiblement”, writes Thiers to the Prefects.* 

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

b A company.— Ed. 

© See ‘Voici, sur le méme fait, le bulletin...”, Le Rappel, No. 692, May 6, 
1871.— Ed. 

d See “The Massacre at Clamart”, The Times, No. 27056, May 6, 1871.— Ed. 

e “Assembly meets peacefully”, quoted in: Th. Astrie, “L’>homme rouge”, La 
Situation, No. 176, April 14, 1871.— Ed. 

The Affaire at Belle-Epine 

The affair at Belle-Epine, near Villejuif this: On the 25th April 
four national guards, being surrounded by a troop of mounted 
Chasseurs, who bid them to surrender and lay down their arms. 
Unable to resist, they obeyed and were left unhurt by the 
Chasseurs. Some time later then their captain, a worthy officer of 
Galliffet’s, arrives in full gallop and shoots the prisoners down 
with his revolver, one after the other, and then trots off with his 
troop. Three of the guards were dead, one, named Scheffer, 
grievously wounded, survives, and is afterwards brought to the 
Hospital of Bicétre. Thither the Commune sent a commission to 
take up the evidence of the dying man which it published in its 
report.*, When one of the Paris members of the Assemblée 
interpellated the war minister upon that report, the rurals 
drowned the voice of the deputy and forbid the minister to 
answer.” It would be an insult to their “glorious” army—not to 
commit murder, but to speak of it. 

The tranquillity of mind with which that Assembly bears with 
the horrors of civil war is told in one of Thiers’ bulletins to his 
prefects: “L’assemblée si¢ge paisiblement” (has the coeur léger‘ like 
Ollivier) and the executive with its ticket-of-leave men shows by its 
gastronomical feats, given by Thiers and at the table of German 
princes, that their digestion is not troubled even by the ghosts of 
Lecomte and Clément Thomas. 

6) THE COMMUNE 

The Commune had, after Sedan, been proclaimed by the 
workmen of Lyons, Marseilles, and Toulouse.**” Gambetta did his 
best to destroy it. During the siege of Paris the ever recurrent 
workmen’s commotions again and again crushed on false pre- 
tences by Trochu’s Bretons, those worthy substitutes of 
L. Bonaparte’s Corsicans,'*’ were as many attempts to dislodge the 
government of impostors by the Commune. The Commune then 
silently elaborated, was the true secret of the Revolution of the 4th 
of September. Hence on the very dawn of the 18th March, after 
the rout of the Counterrevolution, drowsy Europe started up from 

a [Rapport de la Commission d’enquéte de la Commune], Le Mot d’Ordre, No. 65, 
April 29, 1871.— Ed. 

b Report of the National Assembly’s Sitting of May 6, 1871, Journal officiel 
(Versailles), No. 127, May 7, 1871.— Ed. 

€ Carefree mind.— Ed. 

Second Draft.—6) The Commune 533 

its dreams of the Prussian Empire under the Paris thunderbursts 
of Vive la Commune!? 

What is the Commune, this sphinx so tantalizing to the 
Bourgeois mind? 

In its most simple conception, the form under which the 
working class assume the political power in their social strong- 
holds, Paris and the other centres of industry. 

“The proletarians of the capital,” said the Central Committee in its proclama- 
tion of the 20 March, “have, in the midst of the failures and treasons of the ruling 
classes, understood that for them the hour had struck to save the situation by 
taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs.... They have understood 
that it was their imperious duty and their absolute right to take into their own 
hands their own destiny by seizing upon the political power” (state power).> 

But the proletariat cannot, as the ruling classes and _ their 
different rival fractions have done in the successive hours of their 
triumph, simply lay hold of the existent state body and wield this 
ready-made agency for their own purpose. The first condition for 
the holding of political power, is to transform the traditional 
working machinery and destroy it as an instrument of class rule. 
That huge governmental machinery, entoiling like a boa constric- 
tor the real social body in the ubiquitous meshes of a standing 
army, a hierarchical bureaucracy, an obedient police, clergy and a 
servile magistrature, was first forged in the days of absolute 
monarchy as a weapon of nascent middleclass society in its 
struggles of emancipation from feudalism. The first French 
Revolution, with its task to give full scope to the free development 
of modern middleclass society, had to sweep away all the local, 
territorial, townish and _ provincial strongholds of feudalism, 
prepared the social soil for the superstructure of a centralized 
state power, with omnipresent organs ramified after the plan of a 
systematic and hierarchic division of labour. 

But the working class cannot simply lay hold onthe ready-made 
state machinery and wield it for their own purpose. The political 
instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political 
instrument of their emancipation. 

The modern bourgeois state is embodied in two great organs, 
parliament and government. Parliamentary omnipotence had, 
during the period of the party of order republic, from 1848 to 
1851, engendered its own negative—the Second Empire, and 

a “Long live the Commune!”— Ed. 
b “La Révolution du 18 mars”, Le Petit Journal, No. 3002, March 22, 1871.— Ed. 

Imperialism, with its mere mockery of parliament, is the regime 
now flourishing in most of the great military states of the 
continent. At first view apparently the usurpatory dictatorship of 
the governmental body over society itself, rising alike above and 
humbling alike all classes, it has in fact, on the European continent 
at least, become the only possible state form in which the 
appropriating class can continue to sway it over the producing 
class. The assembly of the ghosts of all the defunct French 
parliaments which still haunts Versailles, wields no real force save 
the governmental machinery as shaped by the Second Empire. 
The huge governmental parasite, entoiling the social body like a 
boa constrictor in the ubiquitous meshes of its bureaucracy, police, 
standing army, clergy and magistrature—dates its birth from the 
days of absolute monarchy. The centralized state power had at 
that time to serve nascent middleclass society as a mighty weapon 
in its struggles of emancipation from feudalism. The French 
Revolution of the 18th century, with its task to sweep away the 
medieval rubbish of seigniorial, local, townish, and_ provincial 
privileges, could not but simultaneously clear the social soil of the 
last obstacles hampering the full development of a centralized state 
power, with omnipresent organs wrought after the plan of a 
systematic and hierarchic division of labour. Such it burst into life 
under the first Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of 
old semifeudal Europe against modern France. During the 
subsequent parliamentary regimes of the Restoration, the July 
Monarchy, and the party of order Republic, the supreme 
management of that state machinery with its irresistible allure- 
ments of place, pelf and patronage, became not only the butt of 
contest between the rival fractions of the ruling class, but at the 
same degree that the economic progress of modern society swelled 
the ranks of the working class, accumulated its miseries, organized 
its resistance and developed its tendencies at emancipation, that, in 
one word, the struggle of classes, the struggle between labour and 
capital assumed shape and form, the physiognomy and the 
character of the state power underwent a striking change. It had 
always been the power for the maintenance of order, ie., the 
existing order of society, and, therefore, of the subordination and 
exploitation of the producing class by the appropriating class. But 
as long as this order was accepted as the uncontrovertible and 
uncontested necessity, the state power could assume an aspect of 
impartiality. It kept up the existing subordination of the masses 
which was the unalterable order of things and a social fact 
undergone without contest on the part of the masses, exercised by 

Second Draft.—6) The Commune 535 

their “natural superiors” without solicitude. With the entrance of 
society itself into a new phase, the phase of class struggle, the 
character of its organized public force, the state power, could not 
but change also (but also undergo a marked change) and more 
and more develop its character as the instrument of class 
despotism, the political engine for forcibly perpetuating the social 
enslavement of the producers of wealth by its appropriators, of 
the economic rule of capital over labour. After each new popular 
revolution, resulting in the transfer of the direction of the state 
machinery from one set of the ruling classes to another, the 
repressive character of the state power was more fully developed 
and more mercilessly used, because the promises made, and 
seemingly assured by the Revolution, could only be broken by the 
employment of force. Besides, the change worked by the 
successive revolutions, sanctioned only politically the social fact, 
the growing power of capital, and, therefore, transferred the state 
power itself more and more directly into the hands of the direct 
antagonists of the working class. Thus the Revolution of July 
transferred the power from the hands of the landowners into 
those of the great manufacturers (the great capitalists) and the 
Revolution of February into those of the united fractions of the 
ruling class, united in their antagonism to the working class, 
united as “the party of order’, the order of their own class rule. 
During the period of the parliamentary republic the state power 
became at last the avowed instrument of war wielded by the 
appropriating class against the productive mass of the people. But 
as an avowed instrument of civil war it could only be wielded 
during a time of civil war and the condition of life for the 
parliamentary republic was, therefore, the continuance of openly 
declared civil war, the negative of that very “order” in the name 
of which the civil war was waged. This could only be a spasmodic, 
exceptional state of things. It was impossible as the normal 
political form of society, unbearable even to the mass of the 
middle class. When therefore all elements of popular resistance 
were broken down, the parliamentary republic had to disappear 
(give way to) before the Second Empire. 

The Empire, professing to rest upon the producing majority of 
the nation, the peasants, apparently out of the range of the class 
struggle between capital and labour (indifferent and hostile to 
both the contesting social powers), wielding the state power as a 
force superior to the ruling and ruled classes, imposing upon both 
an armistice, (silencing the political, and, therefore, revolutionary 
form of the class struggle), divesting the state power of its direct 

form of class despotism by braking the parliamentary and, 
therefore, directly political power of the appropriating classes, was 
the only possible state form to secure the old social order a respite 
of life. It was, therefore, acclaimed throughout the world as the 
“saviour of order” and the object of admiration during 20 years 
on the part of the would-be slaveholders all over the world. Under 
its sway, coincident with the change brought upon the market of 
the world by California, Australia,**! and the wonderful develop- 
ment of the United States, an unsurpassed period of industrial 
activity set [in], an orgy of stockjobbery, finance swindling, 
Joint-Stock Company adventure—leading all to rapid centraliza- 
tion of capital by the expropriation of the middle class and 
widening the gulf between the capitalist class and the working 
class. The whole turpitude of the capitalist regime, gave full scope 
to its innate tendency, broke loose unfettered. At the same time an 
orgy of luxurious debauch, meretricious splendour, a_pan- 
demonium of all the low passions of the higher classes. This 
ultimate form of the governmental power was at the same time its 
most prostitute, shameless plunder of the state resources by a 
band of adventurers, hotbed of huge state debts, the glory of 
prostitution, a factitious life of false pretences. The governmental 
power with all its tinsel covering from top to bottom immerged in 
mud. The maturity of rottenness of the state machinery itself, and 
the putrescence of the whole social body, flourishing under it, 
were laid bare by the bayonets of Prussia, herself only eager to 
transfer the European seat of that regime of gold, blood, and mud 
from Paris to Berlin. 

This was the state power in its ultimate and most prostitute 
shape, in its supreme and basest reality, which the Paris working 
class had to overcome, and of which this class alone could rid 
society. As to parliamentarism, it had been killed by its own 
triumph and by the Empire. All the working class had to do was 
not to revive it. 

What the workmen had to break down was not a more or less 
incomplete form of the governmental power of old society, it was 
that power itself in its ultimate and exhausting shape—the Empire. 
The direct opposite to the Empire was the Commune. 

In its most simple conception the Commune meant the 
preliminary destruction of the old governmental machinery at its 
central seats, Paris and the other great cities of France, and its 
superseding by real self-government which, in Paris and the great 
cities, the social strongholds of the working class, was the 
government of the working class. Through the siege Paris had got 

Second Draft.—6) The Commune 537 

rid of the army which was replaced by a National Guard, with its 
bulk formed by the workmen of Paris. It was only due to this state 
of things, that the rising of the 18th of March had become 
possible. This fact was to become an institution, and the national 
guard of the great cities, the people armed against governmental 
usurpation, to supplant the standing army, defending the govern- 
ment against the people. The commune to consist of the municipal 
councillors of the different arrondissements, (as Paris was the 
initiator and the model, we have to refer to it) chosen by the 
suffrage of all citizens, responsible, and revocable in short terms. 
The majority of that body would naturally consist of workmen or 
acknowledged representatives of the working class. It was to be a 
working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the 
same time. The police agents, instead of being the agents of a 
central government, were to be the servants of the Commune, 
having, like the functionaries in all the other departments of 
administration, to be appointed and always revocable by the 
Commune; all the functionaries, like the members of the 
Commune itself, having to do their work at workmen’s wages. The 
judges were also to be elected, revocable, and responsible. The 
initiative in all matters of social life to be reserved to the 
Commune. In one word, all public functions, even the few ones 
that would belong to the Central Government, were to be 
executed by communal agents, and, therefore, under the control 
of the Commune. It is one of the absurdities to say, that the 
Central functions, not of governmental authority over the people, 
but necessitated by the general and common wants of the country, 
would become impossible. These functions would exist, but the 
functionaries themselves could not, as in the old governmental 
machinery, raise themselves over real society, because the func- 
tions were to be executed by communal agents, and, therefore, 
always under real control. The public functions would cease to be 
a private property bestowed by a central government upon its 
tools. With the standing army and the governmental police the 
physical force of repression was to be broken. By the disestablish- 
ment of all churches as proprietary bodies and the banishment of 
religious instruction from all public schools (together with 
gratuitous instruction) into the recesses of private life, there to live 
upon the alms of the faithful, the divestment of all educational 
institutes from governmental patronage and servitude, the mental 
force of repression was to be broken, science made not only 
accessible to all, but freed from the fetters of government pressure 
and class prejudice. The municipal taxation to be determined and 

levied by the Commune, the taxation for general state purposes to 
be levied by communal functionaries, and disbursed by the 
Commune itself for the general purposes. (its disbursement for 
the general purposes to be supervised by the Commune itself.) 

The governmental force of repression and authority over society 
was thus to be broken in its merely repressive organs, and where it 
had legitimate functions to fulfil, these functions were not to be 
exercised by a body superior to the society, but by the responsible 
agents of society itself. 

7) SCHLUSS* 

To fighting, working, thinking Paris, electrified by the en- 
thusiasm of historic initiative, full of heroic reality, the new society 
in its throes, there is opposed at Versailles the old society, a world 
of antiquated shams and accumulated lies. Its true representation 
is that rural Assembly,'” peopled with the gibberish ghouls of all 
the defunct regimes into which class rule had _ successively 
embodied itself in France, at their head a senile mountebank of 
parliamentarism, and their sword in the hands of the Imperialist 
capitulards,'” bombarding Paris under the eyes of their Prussian 
conquerors. 

The immense ruins which the second Empire, in its fall, has 
heaped upon France, is for them only an opportunity to dig out 
and throw to the surface the rubbish of former ruins, of 
Legitimism or Orleanism. 

The flame of life is to burn in an atmosphere of the sepulchral 
exhalations of all the bygone emigration. (The very air they 
breathe is the sepulchral exhalation of all bygone emigrations.) 

There is nothing real about them but their common conspiracy 
against life, their egotism of class interest, their wish to feed upon 
the carcass of French society, their common slaveholders’ interests, 
their hatred of the present, and their war upon Paris. 

Everything about them is a caricature, from that old fossil of 
Louis Philippe’s regime, Count Jaubert exclaiming in the National 
assembly, in the palace of Louis XIV: “we are the state” (“The 
state, that is ourselves”) *** (they are in fact the State spectre in its 
secession from society) to the Republican fawners upon Thiers 
holding their reunions in the Jeu de Paumes (Tennis Court) to 
show their degeneracy from their predecessors in 1789.°'° 

Thiers at the head, the bulk of the majority split into these two 
groups of Legitimists and Orleanists, in the tail the Republicans of 

4 Conclusion.— Ed. 

Second Draft.—7) Schluss 539 

“old style”. Each of these fractions intrigues for a restoration of its 
own, the Republicans for that of the parliamentary Republic— 
building their hopes upon the senile vanity of Thiers, forming in 
the meantime the Republican decoration of his rule and sanction- 
ing by their presence the war of the Bonapartist generals upon 
Paris, after having tried to coax it into the arms of Thiers and to 
disarm it under Saisset! Knights of the sad figure, the humiliations 
they voluntarily bear with, show what Republicanism, as a special 
form of class rule, has come down to. It was in view of them that 
Thiers said to the assembled maires of the Seine and Oise: What 
could they more want? “Was not he, a simple citizen, at the head 
of the State.”* Progress from 1830 to 1870 that then Louis 
Philippe was the best of Republics, and that now Louis Philippe’s 
Minister, little Thiers himself, is the best of Republics. 

Being forced to do their real work—the war against Paris, 
through the Imperialist soldiers, Gendarmes, and police, under 
the sway of the retired Bonapartist generals, they tremble in their 
shoes at the suspicion that—as during their regime of 1848-51— 
they are only forging the instrument for a second Restoration of 
the Empire. The Pontifical Zouaves’*’ and the Vendeans of 
Cathelineau and the Bretons of Charette’ are in fact their 
“parliamentary” army, the mere phantasms of an army compared 
with the Imperialist reality. While fuming with rage at the very 
name of the Republic, they accept Bismarck’s dictates in its name, 
waste in its name the rest of French wealth upon the civil war, 
denounce Paris in its name, forge laws of prospective proscription 
against the rebels in its name, usurp dictation over France in its 
name. 

Their title [is] the general suffrage, which they had always 
opposed during their own régimes from 1815 to 1848, abolished 
in May 1850, after it had been established against them by the 
Republic, and which they now accept as the prostitute of the 
Empire, forgetting that with it they accept the Empire of the 
Plebiscites! They themselves are impossible even with the general 
suffrage. 

They reproach Paris for revolting against national unity, and 
their first word was the decapitation of that Unity by the decapitaliza- 
tion of Paris. Paris has done the thing they pretended to want, but 
it has done it, not as they wanted it, as a reactionary dream of the 
past, but as the revolutionary vindication of the future. Thiers, the 

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

540 . Karl Marx 

Chauvin,’ threatens since the 18th March Paris with the “interven- 
tion of Prussia’, asked at Bordeaux for the “intervention of 
Prussia”, acts against Paris in fact only by the means accorded to 
him by Prussia. The Bourbons were dignity itself, compared to 
this mountebank of Chauvinism. 

Whatever may be the name—in case they are victorious—of 
their Restoration, with whatever successful pretender at its head, 
its reality can only be the Empire, the ultimate and indispensable 
political form of the rule of their rotten classes. If they succeed to 
restore it, and they must restore it with any of their plans of 
restoration successful—they succeed only to accelerate the put- 
refaction of the old society they represent and the maturity of the 
new one they combat. Their dim eyes see only the political 
outwork of the defunct regimes and they dream of reviving them 
by placing a Henry the 5th or the Count of Paris at their head. 
They do not see that the social bodies which bore these political 
superstructures have withered away, that these regimes were only 
possible under now outgrown conditions and past phases of 
French society, and that it can only yet bear with Imperialism, in 
its putrescent state, and the Republic of Labour in its state of 
regeneration. They do not see that the cycles of political forms 
were only the political expression of the real changes society 
underwent. 

The Prussians who in coarse war exultation of triumph look at 
the agonies of French society and exploit them with the sordid 
calculation of a Shylock, and the flippant coarseness of the 
Krautjunker,” are themselves already punished by the transplanta- 
tion of the Empire to the German soil. They themselves are 
doomed to set free in France the subterranean agencies which will 
engulf them with the old order of things. The Paris Commune 
may fall, but the Social Revolution it has initiated, will triumph. Its 
birthstead is everywhere. 

[FRAGMENTS] 

The Lies in Thiers’ Bulletins 

The immense sham of that Versailles, its lying character could 
not better be embodied and resumed than in Thiers, the 
professional liar, for whom the “reality of things” exists only in 
their “parliamentary sense”, that is as a lie. 

a Jingo.— Ed. 
b The country squire.— Ed. 

Second Draft.— Fragments 541 

In his answer to the Archbishop’s letter he coolly denies “the 
pretended executions and reprisals (!) attributed to the troops of 
Versailles” ,* and has this impudent lie confirmed by a commission 
appointed for this very purpose by his rurals.”* He knows of 
course their triumphant proclamations by the Bonapartist generals 
themselves. But in “the parliamentary sense” of the word they do 
not exist. 

In his circular of the 16th April on the bombardment of Paris: 

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

Of course, Paris bombards itself, in order to make the world 
believe that it fights! 

Later: “Our artillery does not bombard — but it cannonades, it is true.” 

Thiers’ bulletin on Moulin-Saquet (4 May): “Deliverance of Paris from 
the hideous tyrants who oppress it’ (by killing the Paris National 
Guards asleep). 

The motley lot of an army—the dregs of the Bonapartist 
soldatesque released from prison by the grace of Bismarck,'” with 
the gendarmes of Valentin and the sergents-de-ville of Piétri for 
their nucleus, set off by the Pontifical Zouaves, the Chouans of 
Charette and the Vendeans of Cathelineau, the whole placed 
under the runaway Decembrist generals of capitulation, he dubs 
“the finest army France ever possessed”* Of course, if the Prussians 
quarter still at St. Denis, it is because Thiers wants to frighten 
them by the sight of that “finest of fine armies”. 

If such is the “finest army”—the Versailles anachronism is “the 
most liberal and most freely elected assembly that ever existed in 
France”’.© Thiers caps his eccentricity by telling the maires etc that 
“he is a man, who has never broken his word”, of course in the 
parliamentary sense of word-keeping. 

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

b Cited in: “La Circulaire de M. Thiers”, Le Vengeur, No. 21, April 19, 
1871.— Ed. 

© “Voici, sur le méme fait, le bulletin,,,”, Le Rappel, No. 692, May 6, 1871. 
Marx gives the quotations in this and the previous paragraph in French.— Ed. 

4 Quoted according to: Th. Astrie, “L’>homme rouge”, La Situation, No. 176, 
pel 14, 1871.— Ed. 

“Meditation des wamicipalies de la Seine”, Le Rappel, No. 684, April 28, 

1871.— Ed. 

He is the truest of Republicans and (Séance of 27 April): “The 
Assembly is more liberal than he himself.’ * 

To the Maires: “You can rely on my word which I have never 
broken”, in an unparliamentary sense, which I have never kept. 

“This Assembly is one of the most liberal ever elected by 
France.” ? . 

He compares himself with Lincoln and the Parisians with the 
rebellious slaveholders of the South. The Southerners wanted 
territorial Secession from the United States for the slavery of 
labour.*”? Paris wants the secession of M. Thiers himself and the 
interests he represents from power for the emancipation of 
labour. 

The revenge which the Bonapartist Generals, the Gendarmes 
and the Chouans wreak upon Paris is a necessity of the class war 
against labour, but in the little byplay of his bulletins Thiers turns 
it into a pretext of caricaturing his idol, the first Nap., and makes 
himself the laughing-stock of Europe by boldly affirming, that the 
French army through its war upon the Parisian has regained the 
renown it had lost in the war against the Prussian. The whole war 
thus appears as mere childplay to give vent to the childish vanity 
of a dwarf, elated at having to describe his own battles, fought by 
his own army, under his own secret commandership-in-chief. 

And his lies culminate in regard to Paris and the province. 

Paris which in reality holds in check for two months the finest 
army France ever possessed, despite the secret help of the 
Prussian, is in fact only anxious to be delivered from _ its 
“atrocious tyrants”, by Thiers, and therefore it fights against him, 
although a mere handful of criminals. 

He does not tire of representing the Commune as a handful of 
convicts, ticket-of-leave men, scum. Paris fights against him 
because it wants to be delivered by him from “the affreux tyrants 
that oppress it”. And this “handful” of desperadoes holds in 
check for two months “the finest army that France ever 
possessed” led by the invincible MacMahon and inspired by the 
Napoleonic genius of Thiers himself! 

The resistance of Paris is no reality, but Thiers’ lies about Paris 
are. 

Not content to refute him by its exploits, all the living elements 

aL. A. Thiers’ speech in the National Assembly on April 27, 1871, Le Rappel, 
No. 685, April 29, 1871. Marx cites the French text of the speech here and in the 
next paragraph.— Ed. 

b Marx gives this quotation in French.— Ed. 

© Atrocious.— Ed. 

Second Draft. Fragments 548 

of Paris have spoken to him, but in vain, to dislodge him out of 
his lying world. 

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

who by one reason or another keep back (stand aside), do for all that not disavow 
its social legitimity.” 

By whom he was told this? By the delegates of the syndical 
chambers, speaking in the name of 7-8,000 merchants and 
Industrials. They went to tell it him personally at Versailles. Thus 
the League of the Republican Union, thus the Masons’ lodges*”? by 
their delegates and their demonstrations. But he sticks to it. 

In his bulletin of Moulin-Saquet (4 May): 

“300 prisoners taken ... the rest of the insurgents has fled like the wind, leaving 
150 dead and wounded on the field of battle.... Such is the victory the Commune 
can celebrate in its bulletins. Paris will soon be delivered from the terrible tyrants 
oppressing it.”> 

But the fighting Paris, the real Paris is not his Paris. His Paris is 
itself a parliamentary lie. “The rich, the idle, the capitalist Paris”, ‘ 
the cosmopolitan stew, this is his Paris. That is the Paris which 
wants to be restored to him, the real Paris is the Paris of the ‘‘vile 
multitude”. The Paris that shewed its courage in the “pacific 
procession” and Suisset’s stampedo, that throngs now at Versailles, 
at Rueil, at St. Denis, at St. Germain-en-Laye, followed by the 
cocottes, sticking to the “man of family, religion, order” and above 
all “of property”, the Paris of the lounging classes, the Paris of the 
francs-fileurs,*”* amusing itself by looking through telescopes at the 
battles going on, treating the civil war but as an agreeable 
diversion,’ that is the Paris of M. Thiers, as the emigration of 
Coblenz? was the France of M. de Calonne and as the emigration 
at Versailles is the France of M. Thiers. 

If the Paris, that wants to be delivered of the Commune by 
Thiers, his rurals,'’”? Décembriseurs !*! and Gendarmes, is a lie, so 
is his “province” which through him and his rurals wants to be 
delivered from Paris. 

a Quoted according to: A. Vacqueries, “Une Poignée de Factieux”, La Rappel, 
No. 669, April 13, 1871.— Ed. 

b “Voici, sur le méme fait, le bulletin...”, Le Rappel, No. 692, May 6, 1871. 
Marx quotes from it in French beginning with the words “like the wind”.— Ed. 
© “The Commune of Paris...”, The Times, No. 27028, April 4, 1871.— Ed. 

d “The really dangerous classes...”, The Observer, No. 4170, April 23, 1871.— 
Ed. 

Before the definitive conclusion at Frankfort of the peace 
treaty,”°* he appealed to the provinces to send their battalions of 
national guards and volunteers to Versailles to fight against Paris. 
The Province refused point blank.* Only Bretagne sent a handful 
of Chouans “fighting under a white flag, every one of them 
wearing on his breast a Jesus heart in white cloth and shouting: 
“Vive le roi!”” Thus is the provincial France listening to his 
summons so that he was forced to lend captive French troops 
from Bismarck, lay hold of the Pontifical Zouaves (the real armed 
representatives of his provincial France) and make 20,000 
Gendarmes and 12,000 sergents-de-ville the nucleus of his army. 

Despite the wall of lies, the intellectual and police blockade, by 
which he tried to (debar) fence off Paris from the provinces, the 
provinces, instead of sending him battalions to wage war upon 
Paris, inundated him with so many delegations insisting upon 
peace with Paris, that he refused to receive them any longer in 
person. The tone of the addresses sent up from the Provinces, 
proposing most of them the immediate conclusion of an armistice 
with Paris, the dissolution of the Assembly, “because its mandate 
had expired”, “ and the grant of the municipal rights demanded by 
Paris, was so offensive that Dufaure denounces them in his 
“circular against conciliation” to the prefects.? On the other hand, 
the rural assembly and Thiers received not one single address of 
approval on the part of the provinces. 

But the grand défi the Provinces gave to Thiers’ “lie” about 
the provinces were the municipal elections of the 30th April, 
carried on under his government, on the basis of a law of his 
Assembly. Out of 700,000 councillors (in round numbers) re- 
turned by the 35,000 communes still left in mutilated France, the 
united Legitimists, Orleanists and Bonapartists did not carry 
8,000! The supplementary elections still more hostile! This showed 
plainly how far the National Assembly, chosen by surprise, and on 
false pretences, represents France, provincial France, France 
minus Paris! 

3 6c 

2 Report from La Défense républicaine of Limoges, Le Mot d’Ordre, No. 65, 
April 29, 1871.— Ed. 

b “Long live the King!” “The Communal Delegation...”, The Daily News, 
No. 7779, April 5, 1871.— Ed. 

© J. Dufaure’s speech in the National Assembly on April 26, 1871, Le Mot 
d’Ordre, No. 65, April 29, 1871.— Ed. 

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

€ Challenge.— Ed. 

Second Draft.— Fragments 545 

But the plan of an assembly of the municipal delegates of the 
great provincial towns at Bordeaux, forbidden by Thiers on the 
ground of his law of 1834 and an Imperialist one of 1855,°° 
forced him to avow that his “Provinces” are a lie, as “his” Paris is. 
He accuses them of resembling the “false” Paris, of being eagerly 
bent upon “laying the fundaments of Communism and Rebel- 
lion”. Again he has been answered by the late resolutions of the 
municipal councils of Nantes, Vienne, Chambéry, Limoux, Carcas- 
sonne, Angers, Carpentras, Montpellier, Privas, Grenoble etc. 
insisting upon peace with Paris, 

“the absolute affirmation of the Republic, the recognition of the communal 
right which”, as the municipal council of Vienne says,4 “those elected on February 8 
promised in their circulars when they were candidates. To stop the external war, 

it (the National Assembly) ceded two provinces and promised Prussia five 
milliards. What ought it not to do to put an end to the civil war?” 

(Just the contrary. The two provinces are not their “private” 
property, and as to the promissory note of 5 milliards, the thing is 
exactly that it shall be paid by the French people and not by 
them.) 

If, therefore, Paris may justly complain of the Provinces that 
they limit themselves to pacific demonstrations, leaving it unaided 
against all the State forces ... the Province has in most unequivocal 
tones given the lie to Thiers and the Assembly to be represented 
there, has declared their Province a lie as is their whole existence, 
a Sham, a false pretence. 

The General Council feels proud of the prominent part the Paris 
branches of the International have taken in the glorious revolution 
of Paris. Not, as the imbeciles fancy, as if the Paris, or any other 
branch of the International received its mot d’ordre? from a centre. 
But the flower of the working class in all civilized countries 
belonging to the International, and being imbued with its ideas, 
they are sure everywhere in the working-class movements to take 
the lead. 

From © the very day of the capitulation by which the government 
of Bismarck prisoners had signed the surrender of France, but in 

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

b Orders.— Ed. 

¢ The following text was written on three pages without any pagination; the 
second paragraph is marked “to p. 9”.— Ed. 

return, got leave to retain a bodyguard for the express purpose of 
cowing Paris, Paris stood on its watch. The National guard 
reorganized itself and entrusted its supreme control to a central 
committee elected by all the companies, battalions, and batteries of 
the capital, save some fragments of the old Bonapartist forma- 
tions. On the eve of the entrance of the Prussians into Paris, the 
central committee took measures for the removal to Montmartre, 
Belleville, and La Villette, of the cannon and _ mitrailleuses 
treacherously abandoned by the capitulards in the very quarters 
the Prussians were about to occupy. 

Armed Paris was the only serious obstacle in the way of the 
counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Paris was, therefore, to be 
disarmed. On this point the Bordeaux assembly was sincerity itself. 
If the roaring rant of its rurals had not been audible enough, the 
surrender of Paris handed over by Thiers to the tender mercies of 
the triumvirat of Vinoy, the Décembriseur, Valentin, the Bonapart- 
ist Gendarme, and Aurelle de Paladines, the Jesuit General, 
would have cut off even the last subterfuge of doubt as to the 
ultimate aim of the disarmament of Paris. But if their purpose was 
frankly avowed, the pretext on which these atrocious felons 
initiated the civil war was the most shameless, the most barefaced 
(glaring) of lies. The artillery of the Paris National Guard, said 
Thiers, belonged to the State and to the State it must be returned.* 
The fact was this. From the very day of the capitulation by which 
Bismarck’s prisoners had signed the surrender of France but 
reserved to themselves a numerous bodyguard for the express 
purpose of cowing Paris, Paris stood on its watch. The national 
guard 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, their central committee took 
measures for the removal to Montmartre, Belleville, and La 
Villette of the cannon and mitrailleuses treacherously abandoned 
by the capitulards in the very quarters the Prussians were about 
to occupy. That artillery had been furnished by the subscriptions 
of the National Guard. As their private property it was officially 
recognized in the convention of the 28th January, and on that 

* L. A. Thiers’ proclamation of March 17, 1871 to the inhabitants of Paris, The 
Daily News, No. 7765, March 20, 1871.— Ed. 

Second Draft.— Fragments 547 

very title exempted from the general surrender of arms, belonging 
to the government, into the hands of the conqueror. And Thiers 
dared initiate the civil war on the mendacious pretext that the 
artillery of the National Guard was state property! 

The seizure of this artillery was evidently but to serve as the 
preparatory measure for the general disarmament of the Paris 
National Guard, and therefore of the Revolution of the 4th of 
September. But that revolution had become the legal status of 
France. Its republic was recognized in the terms of the capitulation 
itself by the conqueror, it was after the capitulation acknowledged 
by the Foreign powers, in its name the National Assembly had 
been summoned. The Revolution of the Paris workmen of the 4th 
of September was the only legal title of the National Assembly 
seated at Bordeaux and its Executive. Without it, the National 
Assembly had at once to give room to the Corps Législatif, elected 
by general suffrage and dispersed by the arm of the Revolution. 
Thiers and his ticket-of-leave men would have had to capitulate 
for safe conducts and securities against a voyage to Cayenne. The 
National Assembly, with its Attorney’s Power to settle the terms of 
peace with Prussia, was only an incident of the Revolution. Its true 
embodiment was armed Paris, that had initiated the Revolution, 
undergone for it a five months siege with its horrors of famine, 
that had made its prolonged resistance, despite Trochu’s “plan”, 
the basis of a tremendous war of defence in the provinces, and 
Paris was now summoned with coarse insult by the rebellious 
slaveholders at Bordeaux to lay down its arms and acknowledge 
that the popular revolution of the 4th September had had no 
other purpose but the simple transfer of power from the hands of 
Louis Bonaparte and his minions into those of his monarchical 
rivals, or to stand forward as the selfsacrificing champion of 
France to be saved from her ruin and to be regenerated only 
through the revolutionary overthrow of the political and social 
conditions that had engendered the Empire and under its 
fostering care, matured into utter rottenness. Paris, Paris 
emaciated by a five months’ famine, did not hesitate one moment. 
It heroically resolved to run all the hazards of a resistance against 
the French conspirators under the very eye of the Prussian army 
quartered before its gates. But in its utter abhorrence of civil war, 
the popular government of Paris, the Central Committee of the 
National Guard, continued to persist in its merely defensive 
attitude, despite the provocations of the Assembly, the usurpations 
of the Executive, and the menacing concentration of troops in and 
around Paris. 

548 Kar] Marx 

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

“The proletarians of the capital,” said the Central Committee in its manifesto of 
the 18th March, “have, in the midst of the failures and treasons of the ruling 
classes, understood that for them the hour has struck to save the situation by taking 
into their own hands the direction of public affairs.... They have understood that it 
is their imperious duty and their absolute right to take into their own hands their 
own destinies by seizing the political power.” ? 

But the working class cannot, as the rival factions of the 
appropriating class have done in their hours of triumph, simply 
lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its 
own purposes. 

The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of 
standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy and magistrature, 
organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and _ hierarchic 
division of labour, dates from the days of absolute monarchy when 
it served nascent middleclass society as a mighty weapon in its 
struggles for emancipation from feudalism. The French Revolu- 
tion of the 18th century swept away the rubbish of seigniorial, 
local, townish and provincial privileges, thus clearing the social soil 
of its last medieval obstacles to the final superstructure of the 
state. It received its final shape under the First Empire, the 
offspring of the Coalition wars of old, semifeudal Europe against 
modern France. Under the following parliamentary regimes, the 
hold of the governmental power, with its irresistible allurements of 
place, pelf, and patronage, became not only the bone of 
contention between the rival factions of the ruling classes. Its 
political character changed simultaneously with the economic 
changes of society. At the same pace that the progress of industry 
developed, widened and intensified the class antagonism between 
capital and labour, the governmental power assumed more and 
more the character of the national power of capital over labour, of 
a political force organized to enforce social enslavement, of a mere 
engine of class despotism. On the heels of every popular 
revolution, marking a new progressive phase in the march 
(development) (course) of the struggle of classes, (class struggle), 
the repressive character of the state power comes out more pitiless 
and more divested of disguise. The Revolution of July, by 
transferring the management of the state machinery from the 

a “Ta Révolution du 18 mars”, Le Petit Journal, No. 3002, March 22, 1871.— Ed. 

Second Draft.— Fragments 549 

landlord to the capitalist, transfers it from the distant to the 
immediate antagonist of the working men. Hence the state power 
assumes a more clearly defined attitude of hostility and repression 
in regard of the working class. The Revolution of February hoists 
the colours of the “social Republic”, thus proving at its outset that 
the true meaning of state power is revealed, that its pretence of 
being the armed force of public welfare, the embodiment of the 
general interests of societies rising above and keeping in their 
respective spheres the warring private interests, is exploded, that 
its secret as an instrument of class despotism is laid open, that the 
workmen do want the republic, no longer as a political modifica- 
tion of the old system of class rule, but as the revolutionary means 
of breaking down class rule itself. In view of the menaces of “the 
Social Republic” the ruling class feels instinctively that the 
anonymous reign of the parliamentary republic can be turned into 
a jointstock company of their conflicting factions, while the past 
monarchies by their very title signify the victory of one faction and 
the defeat of the other, the prevalence of one section’s interests of 
that class over that of the other, land over capital or capital over 
land. In opposition to the working class the hitherto ruling class, 
in whatever specific forms it may appropriate the labour of the 
masses, has one and the same economic interest, to maintain the 
enslavement of labour and reap its fruits directly as landlord and 
capitalist, indirectly as the state parasites of the landlord and the 
capitalist, to enforce that “order” of things which makes the 
producing multitude, “a vile multitude” serving as a mere source 
of wealth and dominion to their betters. Hence Legitimists, 
Orleanists, Bourgeois Republicans and the Bonapartist adventur- 
ers, eager to qualify themselves as defenders of property by first 
pufering it, club together and merge into the “Party of Order”, the 
practical upshot of that revolution made by the proletariat under 
enthusiastic shouts of the “Social Republic”. The parliamentary 
republic of the Party of Order is not only the reign of terror of 
the ruling class. The state power becomes in their hand the avowed 
instrument of the civil war in the hand of the capitalist and the 
landlord, not their state parasites, against revolutionary aspirations 
of the producer. 

Under the monarchical regimes the repressive measures and the 
confessed principles of the day’s government are denounced to the 
people by the fractions of the ruling classes that are out of power, 
the opposition’s ranks of the ruling class interest the people in 
their party feuds, by appealing to its own interests, by their 
attitudes of tribunes of the people, by the revindication of popular 

liberties. But in the anonymous reign of the republic, while 
amalgamating the modes of repression of old past regimes (taking 
out of the arsenals of all past regimes the arms of repression), and 
wielding them pitilessly, the different fractions of the ruling class 
celebrate an orgy of renegation. With cynical effrontery they deny 
the professions of their past, trample under foot their “socalled” 
principles, curse the revolutions they have provoked in their 
name, and curse the name of the republic itself, although only its 
anonymous reign is wide enough to admit them into a common 
crusade against the people. 

Thus this most cruel is at the same time the most odious and 
revolting form of class rule. Wielding the state power only as an 
instrument of civil war, it can only hold it by perpetuating civil 
war. With parliamentary anarchy at its head, crowned by the 
uninterrupted intrigues of each of the fractions of the “order” 
party for the restoration of each own pet regime, in open war 
against the whole body of society out of its own narrow circle, the 
party of order rule becomes the most intolerable rule of disorder. 
Having. in its war against the mass of the people broken all its 
means of resistance and laid it helplessly under the sword of the 
Executive, the party of order itself and its parliamentary regime are 
warned off the stage by the sword of the Executive. That 
parliamentary party of order republic can therefore only be an 
interreign. Its natural upshot is Imperialism, whatever the 
number of the Empire. Under the form of imperialism, the state 
power with the sword for its scepter, professes to rest upon the 
peasantry, that large mass of producers apparently outside the 
class struggle of labour and capital, professes to save the working 
class by breaking down parliamentarism and therefore the direct 
subserviency of the state power to the ruling classes, professes to 
save the ruling classes themselves by subduing the working classes 
without insulting them, professes, if not public welfare, at least 
national glory. It is therefore proclaimed as the “saviour of 
order”. However galling to the political pride of the ruling class 
and its state parasites, it proves itself to be the really adequate 
regime of the bourgeois “order” by giving full scope to all the 
orgies of its industry, turpitudes of its speculation, and all the 
meretricious splendours of its life. The state thus seemingly lifted 
above civil society, becomes at the same time itself the hotbed of 
all the corruptions of that society. Its own utter rottenness, and 
the rottenness of the society to be saved of it, was laid bare by the 
bayonet of Prussia, but so much is this Imperialism the unavoida- 
ble political form of “order”, that is, the “order” of bourgeois 

Second Draft.— Fragments 55] 

society, that Prussia herself seemed only to reverse its central seat 
at Paris in order to transfer it to Berlin. 

The Empire is not, like its predecessors, the legitimate 
monarchy, the constitutional monarchy and the parliamentary 
republic, one of the political forms of bourgeois society, it is at the 
same time its most prostitute, its most complete, and its ultimate 
political form. It is the state power of modern class rule, at least 
on the European continent. 

552 

Frederick Engels