I did not anticipate that I would be asked to prepare a new 
edition of the Address of the General Council of the International 
on The Civil War in France, and to write an introduction to it. 
Therefore I can only touch briefly here on the most important 
points. 

I am prefacing the longer work mentioned above by the two 
shorter Addresses of the General Council on the Franco-Prussian 
War.” In the first place, because the second of these, which itself 
cannot be fully understood without the first, is referred to in The 
Civil War. But also because these two Addresses, likewise drafted 
by Marx, are, no less than The Civil War, outstanding examples of 
the author’s remarkable gift, first proved in The Eighteenth 
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, for grasping clearly the character, the 
import and the necessary consequences of great historical events, 
at a time when these events are still in progress before our eyes or 
have only just taken place. And, finally, because today we in 
Germany are still having to endure the consequences which Marx 
predicted would follow from these events. 

Has that which was declared in the first Address not come to 
pass: that if Germany’s defensive war against Louis Bonaparte 
degenerated into a war of conquest against the French people, all 
the miseries that befell Germany after the so-called wars of 
independence '* would revive again with renewed intensity?‘ Have 
we not had a further twenty years of Bismarck’s rule, the 

Exceptional Law and _ socialist-baiting taking the place of the 
prosecution of demagogues,'’* with the same arbitrary action of 
the police and with literally the same staggering interpretations of 
the law?’ 

And has not the prediction been proved to the letter, that the 
annexation of Alsace-Lorraine would “force France into the arms 
of Russia’}* and that after this annexation Germany must either 
become the avowed servant of Russia, or must, after some short 
respite, arm for a new war, and, moreover, “a war of races—a 
war with the combined Slavonian and Roman races”?” Has not the 
annexation of the French provinces driven France into the arms of 
Russia? Has not Bismarck for fully twenty years vainly wooed the 
favour of the tsar, wooed it with services even more lowly than 
those which little Prussia, before it became the “first Power in 
Europe’, was wont to lay at Holy Russia’s feet? And is there not 
every day still hanging over our heads the Damocles’ sword of 
war, on the first day of which all the chartered covenants of 
princes will be scattered like chaff; a war of which nothing ‘is 
certain but the absolute uncertainty of its outcome; a race war 
which will subject the whole of Europe to devastation by fifteen or 
twenty million armed men, and which is not raging already only 
because even the strongest of the great military states shrinks 
before the absolute incalculability of its final result? 

All the more is it our duty to make again accessible to the 
German workers these brilliant proofs, now half-forgotten, of the 
farsightedness of international working-class policy in 1870. 

What is true of these two Addresses is also true of The Civil War 
in France. On May 28, the last fighters of the Commune 
succumbed to superior forces on the slopes of Belleville; and only 
two days later, on May 30, Marx read to the General Council the 
work in which the historical significance of the Paris Commune is 
delineated in short, powerful strokes, but with such trenchancy, 
and above all such truth as has never again been attained in all the 
mass of literature on this subject. 

Thanks to the economic and political development of France 
since 1789, Paris has been placed for the last fifty years in such a 
position that no revolution could break out there without 
assuming a proletarian character, that is to say, without the 
proletariat, which had bought victory with its blood, advancing its 
own demands after victory. These demands were more or less 

unclear and even confused, corresponding to the state of 
development reached by the workers of Paris at the particular 
period, but in the last resort they all amounted to the abolition of 
the class antagonism between capitalists and workers. It is true that 
no one knew how this was to be brought about. But the demand 
itself, however indefinitely it still was couched, contained a threat 
to the existing order of society; the workers who put it forward 
were still armed; therefore, the disarming of the workers was the 
first commandment for the bourgeois, who were at the helm of 
the state. Hence, after every revolution won by the workers, a new 
struggle, ending with the defeat of the workers. 

This happened for the first time in 1848. The liberal bourgeois 
of the parliamentary opposition held banquets for securing a 
reform of the franchise,’’© which was to ensure supremacy for 
their party. Forced more and more, in their struggle with the 
government, to appeal to the people, they had gradually to yield 
precedence to the radical and republican strata of the bourgeoisie 
and petty bourgeoisie. But behind these stood the revolutionary 
workers, and since 1830 these had acquired far more political 
independence than the bourgeois, and even the republicans, 
suspected. At the moment of the crisis between the government 
and the opposition, the workers began street-fighting; Louis 
Philippe vanished, and with him the franchise reform; and in its 
place arose the republic, and indeed one which the victorious 
workers themselves designated as a “social” republic. No one, 
however, was clear as to what this social republic was to imply; not 
even the workers themselves. But they now had arms and were a 
power in the state. Therefore, as soon as the bourgeois republi- 
cans in control felt something like firm ground under their feet, 
their first aim was to disarm the workers. This took place by 
driving them into the insurrection of June 1848 by direct breach 
of faith, by open defiance and the attempt to banish the 
unemployed to a distant province. The government had taken 
care to have an overwhelming superiority of force. After five days’ 
heroic struggle, the workers were defeated. And then followed a 
blood-bath among the defenceless prisoners, the like of which has 
not been seen since the days of the civil wars which ushered in the 
downfall of the Roman republic. It was the first time that the 
bourgeoisie showed to what insane cruelties of revenge it will be 
goaded the moment the proletariat dares to take its stand against 
the bourgeoisie as a separate class, with its own interests and 
demands. And yet 1848 was only child’s play compared with the 
frenzy of the bourgeoisie in 1871. 

Punishment followed hard at heel. If the proletariat was not yet 
able to rule France, the bourgeoisie could no longer do so. At least 
not at that period, when the greater part of it was. still 
monarchically inclined, and it was divided into three dynastic 
parties '°’ and a fourth, republican party. Its internal dissensions 
allowed the adventurer, Louis Bonaparte, to take possession of all 
the commanding points—army, police, administrative machine- 
ry—and on December 2, 1851, to explode the last stronghold of 
the bourgeoisie, the National Assembly.'"** The Second Empire 
began—the exploitation of France by a gang of political and 
financial adventurers, but at the same time also an industrial 
development such as had never been possible under the narrow- 
minded and timorous system of Louis Philippe, with the exclusive 
domination of only a small section of the big bourgeoisie. Louis 
Bonaparte took the political power from the capitalists under the 
pretext of protecting them, the bourgeois, from the workers, and 
on the other hand the workers from them; but in return his rule 
encouraged speculation and industrial activity—in a word, the 
insurgence and enrichment of the whole bourgeoisie to an extent 
hitherto unknown. To an even greater extent, it is true, 
corruption and mass thievery developed, clustering around the 
imperial court, and drawing their heavy percentages from this 
enrichment. 

But the Second Empire was the appeal to French chauvinism, 
was the demand for the restoration of the frontiers of the First 
Empire, which had been lost in 1814, or at least those of the First 
Republic. A French empire within the frontiers of the old 
monarchy and, in fact, within the even more amputated frontiers 
of 1815—such a thing was impossible for any length of time. 
Hence the necessity for occasional wars and extensions of 
frontiers. But no extension of frontiers was so dazzling to the 
imagination of the French chauvinists as the extension to the 
German left bank of the Rhine. One square mile on the Rhine was 
more to them than ten in the Alps or anywhere else. Given the 
Second Empire, the demand for the restoration of the left bank of 
the Rhine, either all at once or piecemeal, was merely a question 
of time. The time came with the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 °°; 
cheated of the anticipated ‘territorial compensation” by Bismarck 
and by his own over-cunning, hesitant policy, there was now 
nothing left for Napoleon but war, which broke out in 1870 and 
drove him first to Sedan, and thence to Wilhelmshodhe.'™ 

The necessary consequence was the Paris Revolution of Sep- 
tember 4, 1870. The empire collapsed like a house of cards, and 

the republic was again proclaimed. But the enemy was standing at 
the gates; the armies of the empire were either hopelessly 
encircled at Metz or held captive in Germany. In this emergency 
the people allowed the Paris deputies to the former legislative 
body to constitute themselves into a “Government of National 
Defence”. This was the more readily conceded, since, for the 
purposes of defence, all Parisians capable of bearing arms had 
enrolled in the National Guard and were armed, so that now the 
workers constituted a great majority. But very soon the antago- 
nism between the almost completely bourgeois government and the 
armed proletariat broke into open conflict. On October 31, 
workers’ battalions stormed the town hall and captured part of the 
membership of the government. Treachery, the government’s 
direct breach of its undertakings, and the intervention of some 
petty-bourgeois battalions set them free again, and in order not to 
occasion the outbreak of civil war inside a city besieged by a 
foreign military power, the former government was left in office. 

At last, on January 28, 1871, starved Paris capitulated. But with 
honours unprecedented in the history of war. The forts were 
surrendered, the city wall stripped of guns, the weapons of the 
regiments of the line and of the Mobile Guard were handed over, 
and they themselves considered prisoners of war. But the National 
Guard kept its weapons and guns, and only entered into an 
armistice with the victors. And these did not dare enter Paris in 
triumph. They only dared to occupy a tiny corner of Paris, which, 
into the bargain, consisted partly of public parks, and even this 
they only occupied for a few days! And during this time they, who 
had maintained their encirclement of Paris for 131 days, were 
themselves encircled by the armed workers of Paris, who kept a 
sharp watch that no “Prussian” should overstep the narrow 
bounds of the corner ceded to the foreign conqueror. Such was 
the respect which the Paris workers inspired in the army before 
which all the armies of the empire had laid down their arms; and 
the Prussian Junkers, who had come to take revenge at the home 
of the revolution, were compelled to stand by respectfully, and 
salute precisely this armed revolution! 

During the war the Paris workers had confined themselves to 
demanding the vigorous prosecution of the fight. But now, when 
peace had come after the capitulation of Paris,’*' now Thiers, the 
new supreme head of the government, was compelled to realise 
that the rule of the propertied classes—big landowners and 
capitalists — was in constant danger so long as the workers of Paris 
had arms in their hands. His first action was an attempt to disarm 

them. On March 18, he sent troops of the line with orders to rob 
the National Guard of the artillery belonging to it, which had been 
constructed during the siege of Paris and had been paid for by 
public subscription. The attempt failed; Paris mobilised as one 
man for resistance, and war between Paris and the French 
Government sitting at Versailles was declared. On March 26 the 
Paris Commune was elected and on March 28 it was proclaimed. 
The Central Committee of the National Guard, which up to then 
had carried on the government, handed in its resignation to the 
Commune after it had first decreed the abolition of the scandalous 
Paris “Morality Police’. On March 30 the Commune abolished 
conscription and the standing army, and declared the sole armed 
force to be the National Guard, in which all citizens capable of 
bearing arms were to be enrolled. It remitted all payments of rent 
for dwelling houses from October 1870 until April, the amounts 
already paid to be booked as future rent payments, and stopped 
all sales of articles pledged in the municipal loan office. On the 
same day the foreigners elected to the Commune were confirmed 
in office, because “the flag of the Commune is the flag of the 
World Republic”.* On April 1 it was decided that the highest 
salary to be received by any employee of the Commune, and 
therefore also by its members themselves, was not to exceed 
6,000 francs (4,800 marks). On the following day the Commune 
decreed the separation of the church from the state, and the 
abolition of all state payments for religious purposes as well as the 
transformation of all church property into national property; as a 
result of which, on April 8, the exclusion from the schools of all 
religious symbols, pictures, dogmas, prayers—in a word, “of all 
that belongs to the sphere of the individual conscience” ’—was 
ordered and gradually put into effect—On the 5th, in reply to 
the shooting, day after day, of captured Commune fighters by the 
Versailles troops, a decree was issued for the imprisonment of 
hostages, but it was never carried out.—On the 6th, the guillotine 
was brought out by the 137th battalion of the National Guard, and 
publicly burnt, amid great popular rejoicing.—On the 12th, the 
Commune decided that the Victory Column on the Place Vendome, 
which had been cast from captured guns by Napoleon after the 
war of 1809, should be demolished as a symbol of chauvinism and 

francaise, No. 90, March 31, 1871.— Ed. 

No. 132, May 12, 1871.— Ed. 

incitement to national hatred. This was carried out on May 16.— 
On April 16 it ordered a statistical tabulation of factories which 
had been closed down by the manufacturers, and the working out 
of plans for the operation of these factories by the workers 
formerly employed in them, who were to be organised in 
co-operative societies, and also plans for the organisation of these 
co-operatives in one great union.—On the 20th it abolished night 
work for bakers, and also the employment offices, which since the 
Second Empire had been run as a monopoly by creatures 
appointed by the police—labour exploiters of the first rank; these 
offices were transferred to the mayoralties of the twenty arrondisse- 
ments of Paris—QOn April 30 it ordered the closing of the 
pawnshops, on the ground that they were a private exploitation of 
the workers, and were in contradiction with the right of the 
workers to their instruments of labour and to credit—On May 5 
it ordered the razing of the Chapel of Atonement, which had been 
built in expiation of the execution of Louis XVI. 

Thus from March 18 onwards the class character of the Paris 
movement, which had previously been pushed into the _ back- 
ground by the fight against the foreign invaders, emerged sharply 
and clearly. As almost only workers, or recognised representatives 
of the workers, sat in the Commune, its decisions bore a decidedly 
proletarian character. Either these decisions decreed reforms 
which the republican bourgeoisie had failed to pass solely out of 
cowardice, but which provided a necessary basis for the free 
activity of the working class—such as the implementation of the 
principle that in relation to the state, religion is a purely private 
matter—or the Commune promulgated decrees which were in the 
direct interest of the working class and in part cut deeply into the 
old order of society. In a beleaguered city, however, it was possible 
to make at most a start in the realisation of all this. And from the 
beginning of May onwards all their energies were taken up by the 
fight against the armies assembled by the Versailles government in 
ever-growing numbers. 

On April 7 the Versailles troops had captured the Seine crossing 
at Neuilly, on the western front of Paris; on the other hand, in an 
attack, on the southern front on the 11th they were repulsed with 
heavy losses by General Eudes. Paris was continually bombarded 
and, moreover, by the very people who had stigmatised as a 
sacrilege the bombardment of the same city by the Prussians. 
These same people now begged the Prussian government for the 
hasty return of the French soldiers taken prisoner at Sedan and 
Metz, in order that they might recapture Paris for them. From the 

beginning of May the gradual arrival of these troops gave the 
Versailles forces a decided superiority. This already became 
evident when, on April 23, Thiers broke off the negotiations for 
the exchange, proposed by the Commune, of the Archbishop of 
Paris* and a whole number of other priests held as hostages in 
Paris, for only one man, Blanqui, who had twice been elected to 
the Commune but was a prisoner in Clairvaux. And even more 
from the changed language of Thiers; previously procrastinating 
and equivocal, he now suddenly became insolent, threatening, 
brutal. The Versailles forces took the redoubt of Moulin Saquet on 
the southern front, on May 3; on the 9th, Fort Issy, which had 
been completely reduced to ruins by gunfire; on the 14th, Fort 
Vanves. On the western front they advanced gradually, capturing 
the numerous villages and buildings which extended up to the city 
wall, until they reached the main defences; on the 21st, thanks to 
treachery and the carelessness of the National Guards stationed 
there, they succeeded in forcing their way into the city. The 
Prussians, who held the northern and eastern forts, allowed the 
Versailles troops to advance across the land north of the city, 
which was forbidden ground to them under the armistice, and 
thus to march forward, attacking on a wide front, which the 
Parisians naturally thought covered by the armistice, and therefore 
held only weakly. As a result of this, only a weak resistance was 
put up in the western half of Paris, in the luxury city proper; it 
grew stronger and more tenacious the nearer the incoming troops 
approached the eastern half, the working-class city proper. It was 
only after eight days’ fighting that the last defenders of the 
Commune succumbed on the heights of Belleville and Menilmon- 
tant; and then the massacre of defenceless men, women and 
children, which had been raging all through the week on an 
increasing scale, reached its zenith. The breechloaders could no 
longer kill fast enough; the vanquished were shot down in 
hundreds by mitrailleuse fire. The “Wall of the Federals’ at the 
Pere Lachaise cemetery, where the final mass murder was 
consummated,” is still standing today, a mute but eloquent 
testimony to the frenzy of which the ruling class is capable as soon 
as the working class dares to stand up for its rights. Then, when 
the slaughter of them all proved to be impossible, came the mass 
arrests, the shooting of victims arbitrarily selected from the 
prisoners’ ranks, and the removal of the rest to great camps where 
they awaited trial by courts-martial. The Prussian troops surround- 

ing the northeastern half of Paris had orders not to allow any 
fugitives to pass; but the officers often shut their eyes when the 
soldiers paid more obedience to the dictates of humanity than to 
those of the Supreme Command; particular honour is due to the 
Saxon army corps, which behaved very humanely and let through 
many who were obviously fighters for the Commune. 

If today, after twenty years, we look back at the activity and 
historical significance of the Paris Commune of 1871, we shall find 
it necessary to make a few additions to the account given in The 
Civil War in France. 

The members of the Commune were divided into a majority, 
the Blanquists, who had also been predominant in the Central 
Committee of the National Guard; and a minority, members of 
the International Working Men’s Association, chiefly consisting of 
adherents of the Proudhon school of socialism. The great majority 
of the Blanquists were at that time socialists only by revolutionary, 
proletarian instinct; only a few had attained greater clarity on 
principles, through Vaillant, who was familiar with German 
scientific socialism. It is therefore comprehensible that in the 
economic sphere much was left undone which, according to our 
view today, the Commune ought to have done. The hardest thing 
to understand is certainly the holy awe with which they remained 
standing respectfully outside the gates of the Bank of France. This 
was also a serious political mistake. The bank in the hands of the 
Commune—this would have been worth more than ten thousand 
hostages. It would have meant the pressure of the whole of the 
French bourgeoisie on the Versailles government in favour of 
peace with the Commune. But what is still more wonderful is the 
correctness of much that nevertheless was done by the Commune, 
composed as it was of Blanquists and Proudhonists. Naturally, the 
Proudhonists were chiefly responsible for the economic decrees of 
the Commune, both for their praiseworthy and their unpraisewor- 
thy aspects; as the Blanquists were for its political commissions and 
omissions. And in both cases the irony of history willed —as is 
usual when doctrinaires come to the helm—that both did the 
opposite of what the doctrines of their school prescribed. 

Proudhon, the socialist of the small peasant and master- 
craftsman, regarded association with positive hatred. He said of it 
that there was more bad than good in it; that it was by nature 

sterile, even harmful, because it was a fetter on the freedom of the 
worker; that it was a pure dogma, unproductive and burdensome, 
in conflict as much with the freedom of the worker as with 
economy of labour; that its disadvantages multiplied more swiftly 
than its advantages; that, as compared with it, competition, 
division of labour and private property were economic forces. 
Only in the exceptional cases—as Proudhon called them—of 
large-scale industry and large establishments, such as railways, was 
the association of workers in place. (See General Idea of the 
Revolution, 3rd_sketch.) 

By 1871, large-scale industry had already so much ceased to be 
an exceptional case even in Paris, the centre of artistic handicrafts, 
that by far the most important decree of the Commune instituted 
an organisation of large-scale industry and even of manufacture 
which was not only to be based on the association of the workers 
in each factory, but also to combine all these associations in one 
great union; in short, an organisation which, as Marx quite rightly 
says in The Civil War, must necessarily have led in the end to 
communism,* that is to say, the direct opposite of the Proudhon 
doctrine. And, therefore, the Commune was the grave of the 
Proudhon school of socialism. Today this school has vanished 
from French working-class circles; here, among the Possibilists ! 
no less than among the “Marxists”, Marx’s theory now rules 
unchallenged. Only among the “radical” bourgeoisie are there still 
Proudhonists. 

The Blanquists fared no better. Brought up in the school of 
conspiracy, and held together by the strict discipline which went 
with it, they started out from the viewpoint that a relatively small 
number of resolute, well-organised men would be able, at a given 
favourable moment, not only to seize the helm of state, but also by 
a display of great, ruthless energy, to maintain power until they 
succeeded in sweeping the mass of the people into the revolution 
and ranging them round the small band of leaders. This involved, 
above all, the strictest, dictatorial centralisation of all power in the 
hands of the new revolutionary government. And what did the 
Commune, with its majority of these same Blanquists, actually do? 
In all its proclamations to the French in the provinces, it appealed 
to them to form a free federation of all French Communes with 
Paris, a national organisation which for the first time was really to 
be created by the nation itself. It was precisely the oppressing 
power of the former centralised government, army, political 

police, bureaucracy, which Napoleon had created in 1798 and 
which since then had been taken over by every new government as 
a welcome instrument and used against its opponents—it was 
precisely this power which was to fall everywhere, just as it had 
already fallen in Paris. 

From the very outset the Commune was compelled to recognise 
that the working class, once come to power, could not go on 
managing with the old state machine; that in order not to lose 
again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, 
on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery 
previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself 
against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, 
without exception, subject to recall at any moment. What had been 
the characteristic attribute of the former state? Society had created 
its own organs to look after its common interests, originally 
through simple division of labour. But these organs, at whose 
head was the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance 
of their own special interests, transformed themselves from the 
servants of society. into the masters of society. This can be seen, 
for example, not only in the hereditary monarchy, but equally so 
in the democratic republic. Nowhere do “politicians” form a more 
separate and powerful section of the nation than precisely in 
North America. There, each of the two major parties which 
alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled 
by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats 
in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate 
states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their 
party and on its victory are rewarded with positions. It is well 
known how the Americans have been trying for thirty years to 
shake off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and how in 
spite of it all they continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of 
corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there 
takes place this process of the state power making itself 
independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was 
originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, 
no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the 
Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to 
pensions. And nevertheless we find here two great gangs of 
political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state 
power, and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most 
corrupt ends—and the nation is powerless against these two great 
cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality 
dominate and plunder it. 

Against this transformation of the state and the organs of the 
state from servants of society into masters of society—an inevitable 
transformation in all previous states—the Commune made use of 
two infallible means. In the first place, it filled all posts— 
administrative, judicial and educational—by election on the basis 
of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall 
at any time by the same electors. And, in the second place, all 
officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other 
workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 
6,000 francs. In this way an effective barrier to place-hunting and 
careerism was set up, even apart from the binding mandates to 
delegates to representative bodies which were added besides. 

This shattering [Sprengung] of the former state power and its 
replacement by a new and truly democratic one is described in 
detail in the third section of The Civil War. But it was necessary to 
dwell briefly here once more on some of its features, because in 
Germany particularly the superstitious belief in the state has been 
carried over from philosophy into the general consciousness of the 
bourgeoisie and even of many workers. According to the 
philosophical conception, the state is the “realisation of the idea’’,’ 
or the Kingdom of God on earth, translated into philosophical 
terms, the sphere in which eternal truth and justice is or should be 
realised. And from this follows a superstitious reverence for the 
state and everything connected with it, which takes root the more 
readily since people are accustomed from childhood to imagine 
that the affairs and interests common to the whole of society could 
not be looked after otherwise than as they have been looked after 
in the past, that is, through the state and its lucratively positioned 
officials. And people think they have taken quite an extraordinari- 
ly bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in 
hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In 
reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the 
oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic 
republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil 
inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class 
supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat, just like 
the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as 
possible until such time as a generation reared in new, free social 
conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the 
scrap heap. 

Of late, the German philistine * has once more been filled with 
wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. 
Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this 
dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the 
Dictatorship of the Proletariat. 

London, on the twentieth anniversary of the Paris Commune, 
March 18, 1891 F. Engels