Published as a pamphlet in London in the middle of June 1871 and in various European countries and the USA in 1871 and 1872
CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.
ADDRESS
OF
THE GENERAL COUNCIL
OF THE
INTERNATIONAL WORKING-MEN'S
ASSOCIATION.
THIRD EDITION, REVISED.
Printed and Published for the Council by
EDWARD TRUELOVE, 256, HIGH HOLBORN.
1871.
Price Twopence.
The title-page of the third English edition of The Civil War in France
1
T O ALL THE MEMBERS OF THE ASSOCIATION IN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES
I
On the 4th of September, 1870, when the working men of Paris proclaimed the Republic, which was almost instantaneously acclaimed throughout France, without a single voice of dissent, a cabal of place-hunting barristers, with Thiers for their statesman and Trochu for their general, took hold of the Hôtel de Ville. At that time they were imbued with so fanatical a faith in the mission of Paris to represent France in all epochs of historical crisis, that, to legitimate their usurped tides as Governors of France, they thought it quite sufficient to produce their lapsed mandates as representatives of Paris. In our second address on the late War, five days after the rise of these men, we told you who they were.(1)
Yet, in the turmoil of surprise, with the real leaders of the working class still shut up in Bonapartist prisons and the Prussians already marching upon Paris, Paris bore with their assumption of power, on the express condition that it was to be wielded for the single purpose of national defence. Paris, however, was not to be defended without arming its working class, organizing them into an effective force, and training their ranks by the war itself. But Paris armed was the Revolution armed. A victory of Paris over the Prussian aggressor would have been a victory of the French workman over the French capitalist and his State parasites. 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.
The first step they took was to send Thiers on a roving tour to all the courts of Europe, there to beg mediation by offering the barter of the Republic for a king. 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, addressed the assembled mayors of Paris in these terms: —
"The first question put to me by my colleagues on the very evening of the 4th of September was this: Paris, can it, with any chance of success stand a siege by 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 hold out a siege by the Prussian army, would be a folly. Without doubt, I added, it would be an heroic folly; but that would be all.... The events" (managed by himself) "have not given the lie to my prevision."(2)
This nice little speech of Trochu was afterwards published by M. Corbon, one of the mayors present.
Thus, on the very evening of the proclamation of the Republic, Trochu's "plan" was known to his colleagues to be the capitulation of Paris. If national defence had been more than a pretext for the personal government of Thiers, Favre, & Co., the upstarts of the 4th of September would have abdicated on the 5th — would have initiated the Paris people into Trochu's "plan," and called upon them to surrender at once, or to take their own fate into their own hands. Instead of this, the infamous impostors resolved upon curing the heroic folly of Paris by a regimen of famine and broken heads, and to dupe her in the meanwhile by ranting manifestoes, holding forth that Trochu, "the Governor of Paris, will never capitulate,"(3) and Jules Favre, the Foreign Minister, will "not cede an inch of our territory, nor a stone of our fortresses."(4) In a letter to Gambetta, that very same Jules Favre avows that what they were "defending" against were not the Prussian soldiers, but the working men of Paris. During the whole continuance of the siege the Bonapartist cut-throats, whom Trochu had wisely intrusted with the command of the Paris army, exchanged, in their intimate correspondence, ribald jokes at the well-understood mockery of defence (see, for instance, 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 Susane, general of division of artillery, a correspondence published by the Journal officiel of the Commune*). The mask of imposture was at last dropped on the 28th of January, 1871.[164]
With the true heroism of utter self-debasement, the Government of National Defence, in their capitulation, came out as the Government of France by Bismarck's prisoners — a part so base that Louis Bonaparte himself had, at Sedan, shrunk from accepting it. After the events of the 18th of March, on their wild flight to Versailles, the capitulards[165] 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,
"those men would not recoil from battering Paris into a heap of ruins washed by a sea of blood."b
To be eagerly bent upon such a consummation, some of the leading members of the Government of Defence had, besides, most peculiar reasons of their own.
Shortly after the conclusion of the armistice, M. Millière, one of the representatives of Paris to the National Assembly, now shot by express order of Jules Favre, published a series of authentic legal documents0 in proof that Jules Favre, living in concubinage with the wife of a drunkard resident at Algiers,d 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 lawsuit undertaken by the legitimate heirs, he only escaped exposure by the connivance of the Bonapartist tribunals. As these dry legal documents were not to be got rid of by any amount of rhetorical horse-power, Jules Favre, for the first time in his life, held his tongue, quietly awaiting the outbreak of the civil war, in order, then, frantically to denounce the people of Paris as a band of escaped convicts in utter revolt against family, religion, order, and property. This same forger had hardly got into power, after the 4th of September, when he sympathetically let loose upon society Pic and Taillefer, convicted, even under the Empire, of forgery, in the scandalous affair of the Etendard.[166] One of these men, Taillefer, having dared to return to Paris under the Commune, was at once reinstated in prison; and then Jules Favre exclaimed, from the tribune of the National Assembly, that Paris was setting free all her jailbirds!
Ernest Picard, the Joe Miller(5) of the Government of National Defence, who appointed himself Finance Minister of the Republic after having in vain striven to become the Home Minister of the Empire, is the brother of one Arthur Picard, an individual expelled from the Paris Bourse as a blackleg (see report of the Prefecture of Police, dated 31st July, 1867), and convicted, on his own confession, of a theft of 300,000 francs, while manager of one of the branches of the Société Générale,[167] rue Palestro, No. 5 (see report of the Prefecture of Police, 11th December, 1868).(6) This Arthur Picard was made by Ernest Picard the editor of his paper,
L'Electeur libre. While the common run of stockjobbers were led astray by the official lies of this Finance-Office paper, Arthur was running backwards and forwards between the Finance Office and the Bourse, there to discount the disasters of the French army. The whole financial correspondence of that worthy pair of brothers fell into the hands of the Commune.
Jules Ferry, a penniless barrister before the 4th of September, contrived, as Mayor of Paris during the siege, to job a fortune out of famine. The day on which he would have to give an account of his maladministration would be the day of his conviction.
These men, then, could find, in the ruins of Paris only, their tickets-of-leave*: they were the very men Bismarck wanted. With the help of some shuffling of cards, Thiers, hitherto the secret prompter of the Government, now appeared at its head, with the ticket-of-leave men for his Ministers.
Thiers, that monstrous gnome, has charmed the French bourgeoisie for almost half a century, because he is the most consummate intellectual expression of their own class-corruption. Before he became a statesman he had already proved his lying powers as an historian. The chronicle of his public life is the record of the misfortunes of France. Banded, before 1830, with the Republicans, he slipped into office under Louis Philippe by betraying his protector Laffitte, ingratiating himself with the king by exciting mob-riots against the clergy, during which the church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois and the Archbishop's palace were plundered, and by acting the minister-spy upon, and the jail-accoucheur of, the Duchess de Berry.[168] The massacre of the Republicans in the Rue Transnonain, and the subsequent infamous laws of September against the press and the right of association, were his work.[1] Reappearing as the chief of the Cabinet in March, 1840, he astonished France with his plan of fortifying Paris.[170] To the Republicans, who denounced this plan as a sinister plot against the liberty of Paris, he replied from the tribune of the Chamber of Deputies: —
"What! to fancy that any works of fortification could ever endanger liberty! And first of all you calumniate any possible Government in supposing that it could some day attempt to maintain itself by bombarding the capital;... but that government would be a hundred times more impossible after its victory than before."(7)
Indeed, no Government would ever have dared to bombard Paris from the forts, but that Government which had previously surrendered these forts to the Prussians.
When King Bomba tried his hand at Palermo,[171] in January, 1848, Thiers, then long since out of office, again rose in the Chamber of Deputies:
"You know, gentlemen, what is happening at Palermo. You, all of you, shake with horror" (in the parliamentary sense) "on hearing that during forty-eight hours a large town has been bombarded — by whom? Was it by a foreign enemy exercising the rights of war? No, gentlemen, it was by its own Government. And why? Because that unfortunate town demanded its rights. Well, then, for the demand of its rights it has got forty-eight hours of bombardment.... Allow me to appeal to the opinion of Europe. It is doing a service to mankind to arise, and to make reverberate, from what is perhaps the greatest tribune in Europe, some words" (indeed words) "of indignation against such acts.... When the Regent Espartero, who had rendered services to his country," (which M. Thiers never did) "intended bombarding Barcelona, in order to suppress its insurrection, there arose from all parts of the world a general outcry of indignation."(8)
Eighteen months afterwards, M. Thiers was amongst the fiercest defenders of the bombardment of Rome by a French army.[172] In fact, the fault of King Bomba seems to have consisted in this only, that he limited his bombardment to forty-eight hours.
A few days before the Revolution of February, fretting at the long exile from place and pelf to which Guizot had condemned him, and sniffing in the air the scent of an approaching popular commotion, Thiers, in that pseudo-heroic style which won him the nickname of Mirabeau-mouche, declared to the Chamber of Deputies:
"I 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 fall into the hands of ardent minds, even into those of Radicals, I shall, for all that, not desert my cause. I shall always be of the party of the Revolution."[3]
The Revolution of February came. Instead of displacing the Guizot Cabinet by the Thiers Cabinet, as the little man had dreamt, it superseded Louis Philippe by the Republic. On the first day of the popular victory he carefully hid himself, forgetting that the contempt of the working men screened him from their hatred. Still, with his legendary courage, he continued to shy the public stage, until the June massacres [133] had cleared it for his sort of action. Then he became the leading mind of the "Party of Order" (9) and its Parliamentary Republic, that anonymous interregnum, in which all the rival factions of the ruling class conspired together to crush the people, and conspired against each other to restore each of them its own monarchy. Then, as now, Thiers denounced the Republicans as the only obstacle to the consolida-tion of the Republic; then, as now, he spoke to the Republic as the hangman spoke to Don Carlos—"I shall assassinate thee, but for thy own good." Now, as then, he will have to exclaim on the day after his victory: L'Empire est fait—the Empire is consummated. Despite his hypocritical homilies about necessary liberties[174] and his personal grudge against Louis Bonaparte, who had made a dupe of him, and kicked out parliamentarism — and outside of its factitious atmosphere the little man is conscious of withering into nothingness — he had a hand in all the infamies of the Second Empire, from the occupation of Rome by French troops to the war with Prussia, which he incited by his fierce invective against German unity — not as a cloak of Prussian despotism, but as an encroachment upon the vested right of France in German disunion. Fond of brandishing, with his dwarfish arms, in the face of Europe the sword of the first Napoleon, whose historical shoe-black he had become,(10) his foreign policy always culminated in the utter humiliation of France, from the London convention of 1840 [10]° to the Paris capitulation of 1871, and the present civil war, where he hounds on the prisoners of Sedan and Metz against Paris by special permission of Bismarck.[175] Despite his versatility of talent and shiftiness of purpose, this man has his whole lifetime been wedded to the most fossil routine. It is self-evident that to him the deeper under-currents of modern society remained for ever hidden; but even the most palpable changes on its surface were abhorrent to a brain all the vitality of which had fled to the tongue. Thus he never tired of denouncing as a sacrilege any deviation from the old French protective system. When a minister of Louis Philippe, he railed at railways as a wild chimera; and when in opposition under Louis Bonaparte, he branded as a profanation every attempt to reform the rotten French army system. Never in his long political career has he been guilty of a single — even the smallest — measure of any practical use. Thiers was consistent only in his greed for wealth and his hatred of the men that produce it. Having entered his first ministry under Louis Philippe poor as Job, he left it a millionaire. His last ministry under the same king (of the 1st of March, 1840) exposed him to public taunts of peculation in the Chamber of Deputies, to which he was content to reply by tears — a commodity he deals in as freely as Jules Favre, or any other crocodile. At Bordeaux(11) his first measure for saving France from impending financial ruin was to endow himself with three millions a year,(12) the first and the last word of the "Economical Republic," the vista of which he had opened to his Paris electors in 1869. One of his former colleagues of the Chamber of Deputies of 1830, himself a capitalist and, nevertheless, a devoted member of the Paris Commune, M. Beslay, lately addressed Thiers thus in a public placard: —
"The enslavement of labour by capital has always been the corner-stone of your policy, and from the very day you saw the Republic of Labour installed at the Hôtel de Ville, you have never ceased to cry out to France: 'These are criminals!'"(13)
A master in small state roguery, a virtuoso in perjury and treason, a craftsman in all the petty stratagems, cunning devices, and base perfidies of Parliamentary party-warf are; never scrupl-ing, when out of office, to fan a revolution, and to stifle it in blood when at the helm of the State; with class prejudices standing him in the place of ideas, and vanity in the place of a heart; his private life as infamous as his public life is odious — even now, when playing the part, of a French Sulla, he cannot help setting off the abomination of his deeds by the ridicule of his ostentation.
The capitulation of Paris, by surrendering to Prussia not only Paris, but all France, closed the long-continued intrigues of treason with the enemy, which the usurpers of the 4th September had begun, as Trochu himself said, on that very same day.(14) On the other hand, it initiated the civil war they were now to wage, with the assistance of Prussia, against the Republic and Paris. The trap was laid in the very terms of the capitulation. At that time above one-third of the territory was in the hands of the enemy, the capital was cut off from the provinces, all communications were disorganized. To elect under such circumstances a real representation of France was impossible, unless ample time were given for preparation. In view of this, the capitulation stipulated that a National Assembly must be elected within eight days; so that in many parts of France the news of the impending election arrived on its eve only. This Assembly, moreover, was, by an express clause of the capitulation, to be elected for the sole purpose of deciding on peace or war, and, eventually, to conclude a treaty of peace.(15) The population could not but feel that the terms of the armistice rendered the continuation of the war impossible, and that for sanctioning the peace imposed by Bismarck, the worst men in France were the best. But not content with these precautions, Thiers, even before the secret of the armistice had been broached to Paris, set out for an electioneering tour through the provinces, there to galvanize back into life the Legitimist party,[176] which now, along with the Orleanists, had to take the place of the then impossible Bonapartists. He was not afraid of them. Impossible as a government of modern France, and, therefore, contemptible as rivals, what party were more eligible as tools of counter-revolution(16) than the party whose action, in the words of Thiers himself (Chamber of Deputies, 5th January, 1833),
"had always been confined to the three resources of foreign invasion, civil war, and anarchy"?(17)
They verily believed in the advent of their long-expected retrospective millennium. There were the heels of foreign invasion trampling upon France; there was the downfall of an Empire, and the captivity of a Bonaparte; and there they were themselves. The wheel of history had evidently rolled back to stop at the "chambre introuvable"(18) of 1816.[177] In the Assemblies of the Republic, 1848 to '51, they had been represented by their educated and trained Parliamentary champions; it was the rank-and-file of the party which now rushed in — all the Pourceaugnacs of France.
As soon as this assembly of "Rurals" had met at Bordeaux,[178]
Thiers made it clear to them that the peace preliminaries must be assented to at once, without even the honours of a Parliamentary debate, as the only condition on which Prussia would permit them to open the war against the Republic and Paris, its stronghold.(19)
The counter-revolution had, in fact, no time to lose. The Second Empire had more than doubled the national debt, and plunged all the large towns into heavy municipal debts. The war had fearfully swelled the liabilities, and mercilessly ravaged the resources of the nation. To complete the ruin, the Prussian Shylock was there with his bond for the keep of half a million of his soldiers on French soil, his indemnity of five milliards, and interest at 5 per cent on the unpaid instalments thereof.[179] Who was to pay the bill? It was only by the violent overthrow of the Republic that the approp-riators of wealth could hope to shift on to the shoulders of its producers the cost of a war which they, the appropriators, had themselves originated. Thus, the immense ruin of France spurred on these patriotic representatives of land and capital, under the very eyes and patronage of the invader, to graft upon the foreign war a civil war — a slaveholders' rebellion.
There stood in the way of this conspiracy one great obstacle— Paris. To disarm Paris was the first condition of success. Paris was therefore summoned by Thiers to surrender its arms. Then Paris was exasperated by the frantic anti-republican demonstrations of the "Rural" Assembly and by Thiers's own equivocations about the legal status of the Republic; by the threat to decapitate and decapitalize Paris; the appointment of Orleanist ambassadors; Dufaure's laws on over-due commercial bills and house-rents,[180]
inflicting ruin on the commerce and industry of Paris; Pouyer-Quertier's tax of two centimes upon every copy of every imaginable publication; the sentences of death against Blanqui and Flourens; the suppression of the Republican journals; the transfer of the National Assembly to Versailles; the renewal of the state of siege declared by Palikao, and expired on the 4th of September; the appointment of Vinoy, the Décembriseur,[181] as governor of Paris — of Valentin, the Imperialist gendarme, as its prefect of police — and of D'Aurelle de Paladines, the Jesuit general, as the commander-in-chief of its National Guard.(20)
And now we have to address a question to M. Thiers and the men of national defence, his understrappers. It is known that, through the agency of M. Pouyer-Quertier, his finance minister, Thiers had contracted a loan of two milliards. Now, is it true, or not,—
1. That the business was so managed that a consideration of several hundred millions was secured for the private benefit of Thiers, Jules Favre, Ernest Picard, Pouyer-Quertier, and Jules Simon? and—
2. That no money was to be paid down until after the "pacification" of Paris? [182]
At all events, there must have been something very pressing in the matter, for Thiers and Jules Favre, in the name of the majority of the Bordeaux Assembly, unblushingly solicited the immediate occupation of Paris by Prussian troops. Such, however, was not the game of Bismarck, as he sneeringly, and in public, told the admiring Frankfort Philistines on his return to Germany.(21)
Endnotes
[163] The Civil War in France, one of Marx's most important works, was written as an address by the General Council of the International to all Association members in Europe and the United States. From the earliest days of the Paris Commune Marx made a point of collecting and studying all available information about its activities.. He made clippings from all available French, English and German newspapers of the time. Newspapers from Paris reached London with great difficulty. Marx had at his disposal only individual issues of Paris newspapers that supported the Commune. He had to use English and French bourgeois newspapers published in London, including ones of Bonapartist leanings, but succeeded in giving an objective picture of the developments in Paris. The notebook with newspaper excerpts from March 18 to May 1, 1871 is extant (it was published for the first time in the original languages in: Marx/Engels, Archives, Vol. Ill (VIII), Moscow, 1934). Marx also drew valuable information from the letters of active participants and prominent figures of the Paris Commune, such as Leo Frankel, Eugène Varlin, Auguste Serraillier, Yelisaveta Tomanovskaya, as well as from the letters of Paul Lafargue, Pyotr Lavrov and others. Originally he intended to write an address to the workers of Paris, as he declared at the meeting of the General Council on March 28, 1871. His motion was unanimously approved. The further developments in Paris led him, however, to the conclusion that an appeal should be addressed to proletarians of the world. At the General Council meeting on April 18, Marx suggested to issue "an address to the International generally about the general tendency of the struggle". Marx was entrusted with drafting the address. He started his work after April 18 and continued throughout May. Originally he wrote the First and Second drafts of The Civil War in France as preparatory variants for the work (see this" volume, pp. 433-51 and Note 285), and then set about making up the final text of the address. He did most of the work on the First and Second drafts and the final version roughly between May 6 and 30. On May 30, 1871, two days after the last barricade had fallen in Paris, the General Council unanimously approved the text of The Civil War in France, which Marx had read out. The Civil War in France was first published in London on about June 13, 1871 in English, as a pamphlet of 35 pages in 1,000 copies. Since the first edition quickly sold out, the second English edition of 2,000 copies was published at a lower price, for sale to workers. In this edition, Marx corrected some of the misprints occurring in the first edition, and the section "Notes" was supplemented with another document. Changes were made in the list of General Council members who signed the Address: the names of Lucraft and Odger were deleted, as they had expressed disagreement with the Address in the bourgeois press and had withdrawn from the General Council, and the names of the new members of the General Council were added. In August 1871, the third English edition of The Civil War in France came out, in which Marx eliminated the inaccuracies of the previous editions. In 1871-72, The Civil War in France was translated into French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Flemish, Serbo-Croat, Danish and Polish, and published in the periodical press and as separate pamphlets in various European countries and the USA. It was repeatedly published in subsequent years. The German translation was made by Engels and published in Der Volksstaat in June-July 1871 (Nos. 52-61, June 28 and July 1, 5, 8, 12, 16, 19, 22, 26 and 29), and, in abridged form, in Der Vorbote (Nos. 8-10) in August-October 1871, and it also came out as a separate pamphlet in Leipzig. Engels made several insignificant alterations in the text. By the fifth anniversary of the Paris Commune, in 1876, a new German edition was put out, with minor corrections introduced in the text. In 1891, when preparing a jubilee German edition of The Civil War in France to mark the 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune, Engels once again edited the text of his translation. He also wrote an introduction to this edition, emphasising the historical significance of the experience of the Paris Commune, and its theoretical generalisation by Marx in The Civil War in France, and also giving additional information on the activities of the Communards from among the Blanquists and Proudhonists. Engels included in this edition the First and Second addresses of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association on the Franco-Prussian war, which were published in subsequent editions in different languages also together with The Civil War in France. The Civil War in France was published in French for the first time in L'Internationale in Brussels in July-September 1871. A separate French edition appeared in Brussels in 1872; it was edited by Marx, who made numerous changes in the proofs and retranslated many passages. The first Russian edition of The Civil War in France, which served as the basis for a number of subsequent printed and hectographed publications, appeared in Zurich in 1871. In 1905, The Civil War in France came out in Russian in a translation from the German edition of 1891 (Burevestnik Publishers, Odessa). The second edition was brought out under the editorship of Lenin by the same publishing house, also in 1905 during the first Russian revolution. When editing the translation of The Civil War in France, at the request of the publishers, Lenin introduced precise economic and political terminology into the text, eliminated numerous mistakes and inaccuracies of the previous edition of 1905 and restored those parts of the text deleted by Tsarist censorhip. In this volume, The Civil War in France is published according to the 3rd English edition of 1871, collated with the German translations of 1871 and 1891. The most essential textual differences are given in the footnotes. To establish Marx's sources, his notebook with excerpts from various newspapers was used. References to the sources quoted or mentioned in the text are given according to these excerpts. In a number of cases concerning decrees and other documents of the Paris Commune, a reference is also given to the publications of the official organs of the Commune.
[164] On January 28, 1871 Bismarck and Jules Favre, a representative of the Government of National Defence, signed a Convention on the Armistice and the Capitulation of Paris (see Note 120).
[165] Capitulards—a scornful nickname for those who advocated the capitulation of Paris during the siege of 1870-71. It subsequently came to denote capitulators in general. pp. 313, 438, 482, 517, 523, 538, 546
[166] Jean Jules Pic and Jean Taillefer stole large sums of money from the insurance society by forgery and used them to finance the Bonapartist newspaper L'Étendard. In 1869 they were sentenced to hard labour, pp. 313, 475, 518
[167] The Société générale du Crédit Mobilier—a large French joint-stock bank founded by the Péreire brothers in 1852. It was closely associated with Napoleon Ill's government and under the latter's protection engaged in large-scale specula-tion. It went bankrupt in 1867 and was liquidated in 1871. Marx gave an all-out characteristic of the Crédit Mobilier in a number of articles published in the New-York Daily Tribune in 1856-58 (see present edition, Vol. 15). pp. 314, 439, 496, 518
[168] A reference to the anti-Legitimist and anti-clerical riots in Paris on February 14 and 15, 1831, which were echoed in the provinces. In protest against the Legitimist demonstration during the requiem mass for the Duke du Berry, the mob plundered the church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois and the palace of Archbishop Quélen, who was known for his Legitimist sympathies. The Orleanist government, which was striving to weaken the hostile Legitimist party, did nothing to stop the crowd. Thiers, who was present when the church and palace were attacked, urged the National Guards not to interfere. In 1832, by order of Thiers, then Minister of the Interior, the Duchess de Berry, mother of the Comte de Chambord, the Legitimist pretender to the French throne, was arrested and subjected to a humiliating medical examination to expose her secret marriage with a Neapolitan nobleman and pregnancy, and in this way politically compromise her and her son. pp. 315, 454, 503, 520
[1] The first Address (The General Council of the International Workingmen's Association on the War ) was written by Marx between July 19 and 23, 1870. On July 19, 1870, when the Franco-Prussian war broke out, the General Council instructed Marx to draft an address on the war, of which Marx informed Engels in his letter of July 20 (see present edition, Vol. 44). The Address was adopted by the Standing Committee of the General Council on July 23, and then unanimously approved at the Council meeting on July 26, 1870. It was first published in English, in the London Pall Mall Gazette, No. 1702, July 28, 1870, and a few days later it appeared as a leaflet in 1,000 copies. The Address was reprinted, in full or in part, by a number of British provincial newspapers. As the first edition of the Address was quickly sold out, on August 2, 1870, the General Council resolved to have additional 1,000 copies printed. In September that year, the first Address was published in English again, together with the General Council's second Address on the Franco-Prussian war. In this edition, Marx corrected the misprints that had occurred in the first edition of the First Address. On August 9, the General Council appointed a commission to have the first Address translated into German and French and then distributed. The commission included Marx, Jung, Serraillier and Eccarius. The first German translation of the Address, made by Wilhelm Liebknecht, appeared in Der Volksstaat (Leipzig), No. 63, August 7, 1870. Marx edited it heavily and made a new translation of more than half the text. The new German translation of the Address was published in Der Vorbote (Geneva), No. 8, August 1870, and as a leaflet. Then it appeared in the Arbeiter Union (New York), August 12; Die Tagwacht (Zurich), No. 26, August 13; the Volkswille (Vienna), No. 26, August 13, and the Proletarier (Augsburg), No. 56, August 21. By the twentieth anniversary of the Paris Commune in 1891, Engels had the General Council's first and second addresses published in the book K. Marx, Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich, 3rd German edition, Berlin, 1891, Vorwärts Publishing House. The translation of the two addresses for this edition was made by Louise Kautsky and edited by Engels. The French translation of the Address appeared in L'Égalité (Geneva), No. 28, August 6, 1870; L'Internationale (Brussels), No. 82, August 7, 1870, and Le Mirabeau (Verviers), No. 55, August 7, 1870. The Address was also published as a leaflet in the French translation made by the General Council's commission. The first Russian translation of the first Address was published in Narodnoye Dyelo (People's Cause) (Geneva), No. 6-7, August-September 1870. In this volume, the first Address is reproduced from the first edition of the English leaflet, checked against its second edition and the text of the German 1870 authorised edition and that of 1891. The most important textual differences are marked by footnotes.
[170] In January 1841, Thiers came forward in the Chamber of Deputies with a project, prepared by Minister of War Soult, for building fortifications around Paris — a wall and several forts. Revolutionary and democratic circles took it as a preparatory step towards suppressing any popular movement, though the project was presented as a measure to strengthen the city's defences. It was noted that Thiers' project provided for the construction of especially strong and numerous forts near the working-class quarters to the east and north-east of Paris. pp. 315, 454, 520
[171] In January 1848, the Neapolitan troops of King Ferdinand II, subsequently nicknamed King Bomba for his savage bombardment of Messina in the autumn of that year, shelled Palermo in an effort to suppress a popular uprising, which sparked off the bourgeois revolution in the Italian states in 1848-49. pp. 315, 455, 520
[172] In April 1849, the French bourgeois government, in alliance with Austria and Naples, intervened against the Roman Republic for the purpose of suppressing it and restoring the Pope's secular power. As a result of the armed intervention and the siege of Rome, which was subjected to fierce bombardment by French troops, the Roman Republic, despite heroic resistance, was overthrown and Rome was occupied by French troops. pp. 315, 455, 510, 521, 572
[3] A reference to the coup d'état of December 2, 1851, which gave birth to the Second Empire.
[133] 133 x h e reference is to the June insurrection, the heroic insurrection of Paris workers on June 23-26, 1848. It was the first civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in history. Marx called it the first great battle between the two classes. H e assessed its historical importance in the Class Struggles in France, to 1850 (see present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 67-70). 1848 pp. 269, 316, 445, 521
[174] On January 11, 1864, Thiers spoke in the Corps législatif about the government's duty to return the "necessary liberties" to the country, including freedom of the individual, the press, association, and elections to parliament (Le Moniteur universel, No. 12, January 12, 1864). pp. 316, 443, 453
[10] Engels is here referring to the duchies of Schleswig and Lauenburg, which came under Prussian rule as a result of the war between Prussia and Denmark in 1864 (see Note 64), and also the Kingdom of Hanover, the Electorate of Hesse-Cassel, the Grand Duchy of Nassau, the free city of Frankfurt am Main, the Duchy of Holstein and certain parts of Bavaria and Hesse-Darmstadt, annexed by Prussia after her victory over Austria in 1866 (see Note 5).
[175] Thiers asked Bismarck for permission to increase the number of troops, which was not to exceed 40,000 according to Art. 3 of the preliminary treaty signed by Thiers and Jules Favre, on the one hand, and Bismarck and representatives of the South German states, on the other, in Versailles on February 26, 1871. Thiers' government assured Bismarck that the troops would be used exclusively for suppressing the insurrection in Paris, and on March 28, 1871, according to the Rouen Convention, Thiers received permission to increase the size of the Versailles army to 80,000 and, somewhat later, to 100,000 men. Accordingly, the German Command repatriated French prisoners of war, most of whom had been serving in the armies that surrendered in Sedan and Metz. The Versailles government quartered these units in secret camps, where they were trained for action against the Paris Commune. pp. 317, 452, 458, 483, 541
[176] Legitimists—the party of supporters of the Bourbon dynasty, which was overthrown in France in 1792, representing the interests of the big landed aristocracy and top clergy; it took shape as a party and assumed this name in 1830, after the dynasty was overthrown for the second time. During the Second Republic, the Legitimists, together with the other monarchist parties, formed the Party of Order (see Note 173). Under the Second Empire, failing to win any support from the people, they confined themselves to marking time and issuing critical pamphlets, and were galvanised into action only in 1871, when they joined the general counter-revolutionary onslaught against the Paris Commune. pp. 318, 465
[177] Chambre introuvable—the name given by King Louis XVIII to the Chamber of Deputies in France which in 1815-16 consisted of extreme reactionaries. pp. 319, 340, 465, 476, 503, 524
[178] The Assembly of "Rurals"—a scornful nickname for the National Assembly, which met on February 12, 1871 in Bordeaux and consisted mostly of reactionary monarchists, such as provincial landowners, civil servants, rentiers and merchants elected from rural constituencies. pp. 319, 446, 492, 497, 520, 530, 538, 543, 629
[179] According to the terms of the preliminary peace treaty, signed on February 26, 1871 at Versailles, France ceded Alsace and East Lorraine to Germany and paid it 5 billion francs indemnity; until the indemnity was paid, a part of the French territory continued to be occupied by the German troops. The final peace treaty was signed in Frankfurt am Main on May 10, 1871 (see this volume, pp. 346-47).
[180] On March 10, 1871, the National Assembly adopted a law on overdue bills. Accordingly, a seven-month moratorium was set for payments on security made from August 13 to November 12, 1870; no moratorium was allowed for payments on securities contracted after November 12. This meant that the law gave virtually no deferment to those in debt, the working class and the impecunious sections of the population. It also caused the bankruptcy of many small industrialists and merchants. During the siege of Paris, the time for rent payment was transferred from one quarter of a year to another. At the end of March 1871 another payment came due. The project advanced by Thiers and Dufaure gave house-owners the right, if the rent had not been paid for two years, to evict the tenants and appropriate their furniture and personal belongings. The National Assembly refused to consider the project. pp. 319, 441, 444, 474
[181] Decembriseur—participant in the Society of December 10 (see Note 4). Vinoy was directly involved in the coup d'état of December 2, 1851, having used troops to put down attempts to start a republican uprising in one of the departments of France. pp. 320, 441, 525, 543
[182] According to newspaper reports, out of the internal loan that the government of the Third Republic had decided to float, its head Thiers and other ministers were to receive more than 300 million francs by way of "commission". Thiers subsequently admitted that the men representing the financial circles with whom the loan was being negotiated were demanding swift suppression of the revolution in Paris. The loan bill was passed on June 20, 1870, after the Paris Commune had been crushed. pp. 320, 442, 524