This evening, at the same time as you, and with you, the 
workers of the Two Worlds celebrate the anniversary of the most 
glorious and most tragic stage of proletarian evolution. In 1871, 
for the first time in its history, the working class seized political 
power in a major capital. It was, alas! but a dream. Caught 
between the mercenaries of the former French Empire on one 
side and the Prussians on the other, the Commune was soon 
strangled in an unparalleled massacre which will never be 
forgotten. Victorious, reaction knew no bounds; socialism seemed 
to have been drowned in blood, and the proletariat doomed to 
slavery forever. 

Fifteen years have elapsed since that defeat. In all this time, in 
every country, the powers-that-be, in the service of the owners of 
land and capital, have not shunned any means to eradicate the last 
remaining intentions of working class revolt. And what have they 
achieved? 

Look around you. Revolutionary working-class socialism, more 
alive than ever, is today a force before which governments 
everywhere tremble, the French radicals as well as Bismarck, the 
stock-exchange kings of America just as the Tsar of all the 
Russias. 

That is not all. 

We have arrived at the point where all our adversaries, whatever 
they do, are working for us in spite of themselves. 

They believed they had killed the International. Yet at the 
present moment the international union of the proletariat, the 
revolutionary brotherhood between the workers of different 
countries, is a thousand times stronger, more widespread than it 


On the Anniversary of the Paris Commune 407 


was before the Commune. The International no longer needs an 
organisation in the proper sense; it lives and grows through the 
spontaneous and heartfelt cooperation of the workers of Europe 
and America. 

In Germany Bismarck has exhausted every means, even the 
foulest, in order to crush the working-class movement. Result: 
before the Commune he was faced with four socialist deputies; his 
persecutions have led to the election of twenty-five today.” And 
the German proletariat is laughing at the Grand Chancellor who 
could not have made better revolutionary propaganda if he were 
paid for it. 

In France they have imposed on you voting by list,” this 
bourgeois election method par excellence, deliberately invented to 
ensure the election of lawyers, journalists and other political 
adventurers, the spokesmen of capital. And what has it done for 
the bourgeoisie, this poll of the rich? It has created in the heart of 
the French parliament a revolutionary socialist workers’ party 
whose mere appearance on the scene was sufficient to throw the 
ranks of all the bourgeois parties into disarray.” 

This is where we are now. Every event turns out in our favour. 
The most calculated measures to arrest the progress of the 
proletariat serve only to speed its victorious march. The enemy 
itself is fighting for us, is condemned to fight for us. And it has 
done so much and done it so well that on this day, the 18 March 
1886, the same cry emerges from thousands of workers’ throats, 
from the proletarian miners of California and Aveyron to the 
convict miners of Siberia: 

“Long live the Commune! Long live the international union of 
workers!”