III
On the dawn of the 18th of March, Paris arose to the thunderburst of "Vive la Commune! " What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind?
"The proletarians of Paris," said the Central Committee in its manifesto of the 18th March, "amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them 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 render themselves masters of their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power. " (1)
But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.(2)
The centralized State power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature— organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labour — originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle-class society as a mighty weapon in its struggles against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of mediaeval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies and provincial con-stitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the eighteenth century swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern State edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France. During the subsequent régimes the Government, placed under parliamentary control — that is, under the direct control of the propertied classes — became not only a hotbed of huge national debts and crushing taxes; with its irresistible allurements of place, pelf, and patronage, it became not only the bone of contention between the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling classes; but its political character changed simultaneously with the economic changes of society. At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labour, the State power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.(3) After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the State power stands out in bolder and bolder relief. The Revolution of 1830, resulting in the transfer of Government from the landlords to the capitalists, transferred it from the more remote to the more direct antagonists of the working men. The bourgeois Republicans, who, in the name of the Revolution of February, took the State power, used it for the June massacres, in order to convince the working class that "social" republic meant the republic ensuring their social subjection, and in order to convince the royalist bulk of the bourgeois and landlord class that they might safely leave the cares and emoluments of government to the bourgeois "Republicans." However, after their one heroic exploit of June, the bourgeois Republicans had, from the front, to fall back to the rear of the "Party of Order"—a combination formed by all the rival fractions and factions of the appropriating class in their now openly declared antagonism to the producing classes. The proper form of their joint-stock Government was the Parliamentary Republic, with Louis Bonaparte for its President. Theirs was a régime of avowed class terrorism and deliberate insult towards the "vile multitude." If the Parliamentary Republic, as M. Thiers said, "divided them (the different fractions of the ruling class) least," it opened an abyss between that class and the whole body of society outside their spare ranks. The restraints by which their own divisions had under former régimes still checked the State power, were removed by their union; and in view of the threatening upheaval of the proletariate, they now used that State power mercilessly and ostentatiously as the national war-engine of capital against labour. In their uninterrupted crusade against the producing masses they were, however, bound not only to invest the executive with continually increased powers of repression, but at the same time to divest their own parliamentary stronghold— the National Assembly — one by one, of all its own means of defence against the Executive. The Executive, in the person of Louis Bonaparte, turned them out. The natural offspring of the "Party-of-Order" Republic was the Second Empire.
The Empire, with the coup d'état for its certificate of birth, universal suffrage for its sanction, and the sword for its sceptre, professed to rest upon the peasantry, the large mass of producers not directly involved in the struggle of capital and labour. It professed to save the working class by breaking down Parliamentarism, and, with it, the undisguised subserviency of Government to the propertied classes. It professed to save the propertied classes by upholding their economic supremacy over the working class; and, finally, it professed to unite all classes by reviving for all the chimera of national glory. In reality, it was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation. It was acclaimed throughout the world as the saviour of society. Under its sway, bourgeois society, freed from political cares, attained a development unexpected even by itself. Its industry and commerce expanded to colossal dimensions; financial swindling celebrated cosmopolitan orgies; the misery of the masses was set off by a shameless display of gorgeous, meretricious, and debased luxury. The State power, apparently soaring high above society, was at the same time itself the greatest scandal of that society and the very hotbed of all its corruptions. Its own rottenness, and the rottenness of the society it had saved, were laid bare by the bayonet of Prussia, herself eagerly bent upon transferring the supreme seat of that regime from Paris to Berlin. Imperialism is, at the same time, the most prostitute and the ultimate form of the State power which nascent middle-class society had commenced to elaborate as a means of its own emancipation from feudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois society had finally transformed into a means for the enslavement of labour by capital.
The direct antithesis to the Empire was the Commune. The cry of "Social Republic," with which the revolution of February was ushered in by the Paris proletariate, did but express a vague aspiration after a Republic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class-rule, but class-rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that Republic.
Paris, the central seat of the old governmental power, and, at the same time, the social stronghold of the French working class, had risen in arms against the attempt of Thiers and the Rurals to restore and perpetuate that old governmental power bequeathed to them by the Empire. Paris could resist only because, in consequence of the siege, it had got rid of the army, and replaced it by a National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of working men. This fact was now to be transformed into an institution. The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.(4)
The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, of acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time. Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible and at all times revocable agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the Administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen's wages. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of State disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves.(5)
Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the State was laid into the hands of the Commune.
Having once got rid of the standing army and the police, the physical force elements of the old Government, the Commune was anxious to break the spiritual force of repression, the "parson-power," by the disestablishment(6) and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies. The priests were sent back to the recesses of private life, there to feed upon the alms of the faithful in imitation of their predecessors, the Apostles. The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of Church and State. Thus, not only was education made accessible to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it.
The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to mask their abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable.
The Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great industrial centres of France. The communal régime once established in Paris and the secondary centres, the old centralized Government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers. In a rough sketch of national organization which the Commune had no time to develop,(7) it states clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service. The rural communes of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat impératif (formal instructions) of his constituents. The few but important functions which still would remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally mis-stated, but were to be discharged by Communal, and therefore strictly responsible agents. The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by the Communal constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence. While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supersede universal suffrage by hierarchic investiture.
It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even defunct forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus, this new Commune, which breaks the modern State power, has been mistaken for a reproduction of the mediaeval Communes, which first preceded, and afterwards became the substratum of, that very State power.—The communal constitution has been mistaken for an attempt to break up into a federation of small States, as dreamt of by Montesquieu(8) and the Girondins,[192] that unity of great nations which, if originally brought about by political force, has now become a powerful coefficient of social production.—The antagonism of the Commune against the State power has been mistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle against over-centralization. Peculiar historical circumstances may have prevented the classical development, as in France, of the bourgeois form of government, and may have allowed, as in England, to complete the great central State organs by corrupt vestries, jobbing councillors, and ferocious poor-law guardians in the towns, and virtually hereditary magistrates in the counties. The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the State parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society. By this one act it would have initiated the regeneration of France.—The provincial French middle-class saw in the Commune an attempt to restore the sway their order had held over the country under Louis Philippe, and which, under Louis Napoleon, was supplanted by the pretended rule of the country over the towns. In reality, the Communal Constitution brought the rural producers under the intellectual lead of the central towns of their districts, and there secured to them, in the working men, the natural trustees of their interests.—The very existence of the Commune involved, as a matter of course, local municipal liberty, but no longer as a check upon the, now superseded, State power. It could only enter into the head of a Bismarck, who, when not engaged on his intrigues of blood and iron, always likes to resume his old trade, so befitting his mental calibre, of contributor to Kladderadatsch (the Berlin Punch), it could only enter into such a head, to ascribe to the Paris Commune aspirations after that caricature of the old French municipal organization of 1791, the Prussian municipal constitution which degrades the town governments to mere secondary wheels in the police-machinery of the Prussian State.3 The Commune made that catch-word of bourgeois revolutions, cheap government, a reality, by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure — the standing*3 army and State functionarism. Its very existence presupposed the non-existence of monarchy, which, in Europe at least, is the normal incumbrance and indispensable cloak of class-rule. It supplied the Republic with the basis of really democratic institutions. But neither cheap government nor the "true Republic" was its ultimate aim; they were its mere concomitants.
The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favour, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government^ the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour.
Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labour emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labour ceases to be a class attribute.
It is a strange fact. In spite of all the tall talk and all the immense literature, for the last sixty years, about Emancipation of Labour, no sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society with its two poles of Capital and Wage-slavery (the landlord now is but the sleeping partner of the capitalist), as if capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgin innocence, with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with its prostitute realities not yet laid bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class-property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labour, into mere instruments of free and associated labour.—But this is Communism, "impossible" Communism! Why, those members of the ruling classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system — and they are many — have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the Capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of Capitalist production — what else, gentlemen, would it be but Communism, "possible" Communism?
The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made Utopias to introduce par décret du peuple.* They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gendemen's gentlemen with the pen and inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility.
When the Paris Commune took the management of the revolution in its own hands; when plain working men for the first time dared to infringe upon the Governmental privilege of their "natural superiors,"(9) and, under circumstances of unexampled difficulty, performed their work modestly, conscientiously, and efficiently,— performed it at salaries the highest of which barely amounted to one-fifth of what, according to high scientific authority,(10) is the minimum required for a secretary to a certain metropolitan school-board,[193]—the old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight of the Red Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labour, floating over the Hôtel de Ville.
And yet, this was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris middle class— shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants — the wealthy capitalists alone excepted. The Commune had saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever-recurring cause of dispute among the middle classes themselves — the debtor and creditor accounts.[194]
The same portion of the middle class, after they had assisted in putting down the working men's insurrection of June, 1848, had been at once unceremoniously sacrificed to their creditors by the then Constituent Assembly.[195] But this was not their motive for now rallying round the working class. They felt that there was but one alternative — the Commune, or the Empire — under whatever name it might reappear. The Empire had ruined them economi-cally by the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesale financial swindling it fostered, by the props it lent to the artificially accelerated centralization of capital, and the concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them politically, it had shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted their Voltairianism by handing over the education of their children to the frères Ignorantins,[196] it had revolted their national feeling as Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one equivalent for the ruins it made — the disappearance of the Empire. In fact, after the exodus from Paris of the high Bonapartist and capitalist Bohême, the true middle-class Party of Order came out in the shape of the "Union Républicaine,"[197]
enrolling themselves under the colours of the Commune and defending it against the wilful misconstruction of Thiers. Whether the gratitude of this great body of the middle class will stand the present severe trial, time must show.
The Commune was perfectly right in telling the peasants that "its victory was their only hope."[198] Of all the lies hatched at Versailles and re-echoed by the glorious European penny-a-liner, one of the most tremendous was that the Rurals represented the French peasantry. Think only of the love of the French peasant for the men to whom, after 1815, he had to pay the milliard of indemnity![199] In the eyes of the French peasant, the very existence of a great landed proprietor is in itself an encroachment on his conquests of 1789. The bourgeois, in 1848, had burthened his plot of land with the additional tax of forty-five cents in the franc[200]; but then he did so in the name of the revolution; while now he had fomented a civil war against the revolution, to shift on to the peasant's shoulders the chief load of the five milliards of indemnity to be paid to the Prussians. The Commune, on the other hand, in one of its first proclamations, declared that the true originators of the war would be made to pay its cost.a The Commune would have delivered the peasant of the blood tax,— would have given him a cheap government,—transformed his present blood-suckers, the notary, advocate, executor, and other judicial vampires, into salaried communal agents, elected by, and responsible to, himself. It would have freed him of the tyranny of the garde champêtre? the gendarme, and the prefect, would have put enlightenment by the schoolmaster in the place of stuntification by the priest. And the French peasant is, above all, a man of reckoning. He would find it extremely reasonable that the pay of the priest, instead of being extorted by the tax-gatherer, should only depend upon the spontaneous action of the parishioners' religious instincts. Such were the great immediate boons which the rule of the Commune — and that rule alone — held out to the French peasantry. It is, therefore, quite superfluous here to expatiate upon the more complicated but vital problems which the Commune alone was able, and at the same time compelled, to solve in favour of the peasant, viz., the hypothecary debt, lying like an incubus upon his parcel of soil, the prolétariat fonder (the rural proletariate), daily growing upon it, and his expropriation from it enforced, at a more and more rapid rate, by the very development of modern agriculture and the competition of capitalist farming.
The French peasant had elected Louis Bonaparte president of the Republic; but the Party of Order created the Empire. What the French peasant really wants he commenced to show in 1849 and 1850, by opposing his maire to the Government's prefect, his schoolmaster to the Government's priest, and himself to the Government's gendarme. All the laws made by the Party of Order in January and February, 1850,[201] were avowed measures of repression against the peasant. The peasant was a Bonapartist, because the great Revolution, with all its benefits to him, was, in his eyes, personified in Napoleon. This delusion, rapidly breaking down under the Second Empire (and in its very nature hostile to the Rurals), this prejudice of the past, how could it have withstood the appeal of the Commune to the living interests and urgent wants of the peasantry?
The Rurals — this was, in fact, their chief apprehension — knew that three months' free communication of Communal Paris with the provinces would bring about a general rising of the peasants, and hence their anxiety to establish a police blockade around Paris, so as to stop the spread of the rinderpest.
If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national Government, it was, at the same time, as a working men's Government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labour, emphatically international. Within sight of the Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world.
The Second Empire had been the jubilee of cosmopolitan blackleggism, the rakes of all countries rushing in at its call for a share in its orgies and in the plunder of the French people. Even at this moment the right hand of Thiers is Ganesco, the foul Wallachian, and his left hand is Markowski, the Russian spy. The Commune admitted all foreigners to the honour of dying for an immortal cause. Between the foreign war lost by their treason, and the civil war fomented by their conspiracy with the foreign invader, the bourgeoisie had found the time to display their patriotism by organizing police-hunts upon the Germans in France. The Commune made a German working-mana its Minister of Labour. Thiers, the bourgeoisie, the Second Empire, had continually deluded Poland by loud professions of sympathy, while in reality betraying her to, and doing the dirty work of, Russia. The Commune honoured the heroic sons of Polandb by placing them at the head of the defenders of Paris. And, to broadly mark the new era of history it was conscious of initiating, under the eyes of the conquering Prussians on the one side, and of the Bonapartist army, led by Bonapartist generals, on the other, the Commune pulled down that colossal symbol of martial glory, the Vendôme column.0 2oa
The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. Its special measures could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people. Such were the abolition of the nightwork of journeymen bakersd; the prohibition, under penalty, of the employers' practice to reduce wages by levying upon their workpeople fines under manifold pretexts,6—a process in which the employer combines in his own person the parts of legislator, judge, and executor, and filches the money to boot. Another measure of this class was the surrender, to associations of workmen, under reserve of compensation, of all closed workshops and factories, no matter whether the respective capitalists had absconded or preferred to strike work/
The financial measures of the Commune, remarkable for their sagacity and moderation, could only be such as were compatible with the state of a besieged town. Considering the colossal robberies committed upon the city of Paris by the great financial companies and contractors, under the protection8 of Haussmann,[203]
the Commune would have had an incomparably better title to confiscate their property than Louis Napoleon had against the Orléans family. The Hohenzollern and the English oligarchs who both have derived a good deal of their estates from Church plunder, were, of course, greatly shocked at the Commune clearing but 8,000f. out of secularisation.
While the Versailles Government, as soon as it had recovered some spirit and strength, used the most violent means against the Commune; while it put down the free expression of opinion all over France, even to the forbidding of meetings of delegates from the large towns; while it subjected Versailles and the rest of France to an espionage far surpassing that of the Second Empire; while it burned by its gendarme inquisitors all papers printed at Paris, and sifted all correspondence from and to Paris; while in the National Assembly the most timid attempts to put in a word for Paris were howled down in a manner unknown even to the
Chambre introuvable[177] of 1816(11); with the savage warfare of Versailles outside, and its attempts at corruption and conspiracy inside Paris — would the Commune not have shamefully betrayed its trust by affecting to keep up all the decencies and appearances of liberalism as in a time of profound peace? Had the Government of the Commune been akin to that of M. Thiers, there would have been no more occasion to suppress Party-of-Order papers at Paris than there was to suppress Communal papers at Versailles.
It was irritating indeed to the Rurals that at the very same time they declared the return to the Church to be the only means of salvation for France, the infidel Commune unearthed the peculiar mysteries of the Picpus nunnery, and of the Church of Saint Laurent.[204] It was a satire upon M. Thiers that, while he showered grand crosses upon the Bonapartist generals in acknowledgment of their mastery in losing battles, signing capitulations, and turning cigarettes at Wilhelmshöhe,[205] the Commune dismissed and arrested its generals whenever they were suspected of neglecting their duties. The expulsion from, and arrest by, the Commune of one of its members[206] who had slipped in under a false name, and had undergone at Lyons six days' imprisonment for simple bankruptcy, was it not a deliberate insult hurled at the forger, Jules Favre, then still the foreign minister of France, still selling France to Bismarck, and still dictating his orders to that paragon Government of Belgium? But indeed the Commune did not pretend to infallibility, the invariable attribute of all governments of the old stamp. It published its doings and sayings, it initiated the public into all its shortcomings.
In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a different stamp; some of them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of tradition; others mere bawlers, who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereotyped declamations against the Government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water. After the 18th of March, some such men did also turn up, and in some cases contrived to play pre-eminent parts. As far as their power went, they hampered the real action of the working class, exactly as men of that sort have hampered the full development of every previous revolution. They are an unavoidable evil; with time they are shaken off; but time was not allowed to the Commune.
Wonderful, indeed, was the change the Commune had wrought in Paris! No longer any trace of the meretricious Paris of the Second Empire. No longer was Paris the rendezvous of British landlords, Irish absentees,[207] American ex-slaveholders and shoddy men, Russian ex-serfowners, and Wallachian boyards. No more corpses at the Morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any robberies; in fact, for the first time since the days of February, 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and that without any police of any kind.
"We," said a member of the Commune, "hear no longer of assassination, theft, and personal assault; it seems indeed as if the police had dragged along with it to Versailles all its Conservative friends. ""
The cocottes had refound the scent of their protectors — the absconding men of family, religion, and, above all, of property. In their stead, the real women of Paris showed again at the surface — heroic, noble, and devoted, like the women of antiquity. Working, thinking, fighting, bleeding Paris — almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of the cannibals at its gates— radiant in the enthusiasm of its historic initiative!
Opposed to this new world at Paris, behold the old world at Versailles-—that assembly of the ghouls of all defunct régimes, Legitimists and Orleanists, eager to feed upon the carcass of the nation,—with a tail of antediluvian Republicans, sanctioning, by their presence in the Assembly, the slaveholders' rebellion, relying for the maintenance of their Parliamentary Republic upon the vanity of the senile mountebank at its head, and caricaturing 1789 by holding their ghastly meetings in the Jeu de Paume* There it was, this Assembly, the representative of everything dead in France, propped up to the semblance of life by nothing but the swords of the generals of Louis Bonaparte. Paris all truth, Versailles all lie; and that lie vented through the mouth of Thiers. Thiers tells a deputation of the mayors of the Seine-et-Oise,—
"You may rely upon my word, which I have never broken! " He tells the Assembly itself that "it was the most freely elected and most Liberal Assembly France ever possessed"[15]; he tells his motley soldiery that it was "the admiration of the world, and the finest army France ever possessed"0; he tells the provinces that the bombardment of Paris by him was a myth:
"If some cannon-shots have been fired, it is not the deed of the army of Versailles, but of some insurgents trying to make believe that they are fighting, while they dare not show their faces. " d
He again tells the provinces that
"the artillery of Versailles does not bombard Paris, but only cannonades it."e
He tells the Archbishop of Paris[1] that the pretended executions and reprisals (!) attributed to the Versailles troops were all moonshine.[8] He tells Paris that he was only anxious "to free it from the hideous tyrants who oppress it,"h and that, in fact, the Paris of the Commune was "but a handful of criminals."[1]
The Paris of M. Thiers was not the real Paris of the "vile multitude," but a phantom Paris, the Paris of the francs-fileurs,[208]
the Paris of the Boulevards, male and female — the rich, the
* "The tennis court where the National Assembly of 1789 adopted its famous decisions." (Engels' Note to the 1871 German edition.)
a "Meditation des municipalités de la Seine", Le Rappel, No. 684, April 28, 1871.— Ed.
b L. A. Thiers' speech in the National Assembly on April 27, 1871, Le Rappel, No. 685, April 29, 1871.— Ed.
capitalist, the gilded, the idle Paris, now thronging with its lackeys, its blacklegs, its literary bohème, and its cocottes at Versailles, Saint-Denis, Rueil, and Saint-Germain; considering the civil war but an agreeable diversion, eyeing the battle going on through telescopes, counting the rounds of cannon, and swearing by their own honour and that of their prostitutes, that the performance was far better got up than it used to be at the Porte St. Martin.[209]
The men who fell were really dead; the cries of the wounded were cries in good earnest; and, besides, the whole thing was so intensely historical.
This is the Paris of M. Thiers, as the Emigration of Coblenz was the France of M. de Calonne.[210]
Endnotes
[192] Girondins—during the French Revolution the party of the big commercial and industrial bourgeoisie and the landowning bourgeoisie which emerged in the years of the revolution; named after the department of Gironde, which was represented in the Legislative Assembly and the Convention by many leaders of this party. The Girondins stood for turning France into a federation of republics and opposed the Jacobin dictatorship.
[193] On December 21, 1870, Professor Thomas Huxley suggested to the School Board for London that the Board Secretary's salary should be £1,000. The School Board decided on a salary of £800. pp. 336, 488
[194] On April 12, 1871, the Commune suspended all kinds of prosecution for delay of payments (Décret sur la suspension des poursuites pour échéances) until the law on payment terms was published. The Paris Commune law of April 16, 1871 (Loi sur les échéances) provided for payment of all debts in instalments over three years and the abolition of interest on them. The law greatly alleviated the financial position of the petty bourgeoisie and was disadvantage-ous to the big capitalist creditors. pp. 336, 474
[195] Marx is referring to the Constituent Assembly's rejection, on August 22, 1848, of the bill on "amicable agreements" ("concordats à l'amiable"), providing for a moratorium for debtors able to prove that they had gone bankrupt as a result of the depression caused by the revolution. This had ruined a considerable section of the petty bourgeoisie and left it in the clutches of big bourgeois creditors. pp. 336, 496
[196] 196 frères ignorantins or ignorantines—the name of the religious order Frères des écoles chrétiennes (Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools), which was founded in Rheims in 1680 and whose members pledged themselves to educate the children of the poor. Marx uses the term to hint at the low level and clerical nature of primary education in France.
[197] T h ^ refers to the Alliance des départements, a political association of républicaine petty-bourgeois residents in Paris who came from various regions of France. It was founded in April 1871 and soon sided with the Paris Commune. The Alliance came out against the Versailles Government, organised solidarity meetings in the provinces, and worked out a project for democratic reforms to strengthen the Republican system. pp. 337, 495
[198] This apparently refers to the Paris Commune appeal "To the Working People of the Villages" ("Aux travailleurs des campagnes"), published in April-early May 1871 in the Commune newspapers and issued as a separate leaflet.
[199] Marx is referring to the law passed by the government of Charles X on April 27, 1825, authorising the payment of compensation to former émigrés for the landed estates confiscated from them during the French Revolution. Most of this compensation, which came to 1 billion francs and was paid as a three per cent state rent, went to top courtiers and big landowners. pp. 337, 492
[200] An additional tax of forty-five centimes on the franc of the direct tax was established by the Provisional Government of the Second Republic on March 16, 1848. The tax, the whole brunt of which fell on the shoulders of the peasants, aroused intense resentment among them, and this mood was utilised by the big landowners and Catholic priests for agitation against the democrats and workers of Paris in order to turn the peasantry into a reserve of the counter-revolution. pp. 337, 492
[201] A reference to the ordinance dividing France into military districts and granting almost unlimited powers to their commanders; the bill giving the President of the Republic the right to remove or appoint mayors; the law on village teachers, who were put under the supervision of the prefects, and the education law which increased the influence of the clergy on education. Marx gives a description of these laws in his work The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 (see present edition, Vol. 10, p. 123). pp. 338, 493
[203] In the 1850s and 1860s, G.E. Haussmann, prefect of the Seine Department, carried out considerable work on rebuilding Paris. The old streets were widened and new straight ones were laid to facilitate the use of artillery by troops in suppressing popular uprisings. Big sums of money allocated by the state for these works were misappropriated by Haussmann and his subordinates, pp. 339, 351
[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
[204] In May 1871, facts exposing crimes committed in monasteries became known. In the Picpus nunnery, in the St. Antoine suburb of Paris, cases were established of nuns being incarcerated in cells for many years and instruments of torture found; in the Church of Saint Laurent, a secret cemetery was discovered attesting to the murders that had been committed there. See "Les squelettes découverts..." in Le Mot d'Ordre, No. 71, May 5, 1871; H. Rochefort, "Les mystères du Couvent Picpus", Le Mot d'Ordre, No. 72, May 6, 1871, and also the pamphlet Les crimes des congrégations religieuses. Mystères de l'Eglise Saint Laurent, Paris, [1871].
[205] Wilhelmshöhe (near Kassel)—the castle of the Prussian kings, where the ex-Emperor Napoleon III, captured by the Prussians, was retained from September 5, 1870 to March 19, 1871.
[206] This refers to Stanislas Pourille, elected to the Commune under the false name of Blanchet. On May 5, 1871 he was expelled from the Commune and then arrested.
[207] Absentees—landlords who owned estates in Ireland but lived permanently in England. Their estates were managed by agents who robbed the Irish peasants, or were leased to speculator-middlemen, who subleased small plots to the peasants.
[15] The French command intended to form a corps for landing on Germany's Baltic coast. The course of the military operations frustrated this plan, however, and the landing troops were used for other operations (see this volume, pp. 35, 37, 67).
[8] Notes on the War is one of Engels' major works on the military question in which he analysed the events of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 from the position of historical materialism. These constitute a series of 59 closely connected articles, written in the form of military surveys. Forty of them are entitled Notes on the War and are numbered correspondingly; the rest have different titles. The immediate incentive to write these articles was provided by the proposal to send military reviews to The Pall Mall Gazette, made to Marx by Thieblin (Taran), a contributor to the newspaper. In a letter of July 20, 1870 Marx passed on the proposal to Engels (see present edition, Vol. 44). Engels sent the first three articles to Marx, who read them and forwarded them to the editors. To speed up publication, Engels sent the subsequent articles directly to the newspaper's editorial board. Engels wrote the articles immediately after the events took place. As The Pall Mall Gazette appeared in the evening, his articles, written in the morning and posted from Manchester to London, were often published the same day. Engels made a thorough study of all the material available on the military operations: reports by English, German and French newspapers, the latest telegrams from France and Germany. Though these reports were incomplete and contradictory, he succeeded in presenting the real course of military operations, despite inaccuracies in certain details, which are inevitable in such circumstances. Marx's and Engels' letters from July to the end of September 1870, when Engels moved from Manchester to London and their regular correspondence stopped, contain information on Engels' work on this series of articles, his appraisals and forecasts concerning individual operations, the character of the war in general. The ideas Engels expressed in his letters were developed in his articles. When Engels began the Notes on the War, he intended writing two articles a week. After the first three articles aroused the readers' keen interest and attracted the attention of the press, the Pall Mall Gazette editor Greenwood proposed that Engels send as many articles as he could; during periods of the most active military actions, Engels wrote three and even four articles a week. Greenwood repeatedly made changes in Engels' text without his consent. As Engels pointed out, he arbitrarily changed various military terms in the Notes on the War.—III, which clearly showed Greenwood's incompetence in military terminology (see Engels' letter to Marx of August 3, 1870, present edition, Vol. 44), and, besides, he added a paragraph at the end of the Notes on the War.—XIII (see Note 45). Notes on the War appeared in The Pall Mall Gazette from July 29, 1870 to February 18, 1871; with the exception of the first three articles, signed "Z", they were published unsigned, and Engels' authorship was known to only a few people. Marx valued the Notes highly. "Both your last articles [II and III] are splendid", "your articles ... are masterfully written" [XVI-XVII], he praised Engels in his letters of August 1 and September 10, 1870. The articles were a great success. Marx informed Engels on September 30, 1870 that The Spectator had declared his articles "the only significant ones in the English press". A number of newspapers reproduced them in their reviews. Among Engels' friends the nickname "General" stuck with him. These articles on the Franco-Prussian war were not republished during Engels' lifetime. Victor Adler, one of the Austrian Social-Democratic leaders, kept cuttings from The Pall Mall Gazette with Engels' autograph. Only in 1923 were Engels' articles published in Vienna as a separate, lithographic, edition in English, under the general title Notes on the War. In this volume, Notes on the War are reproduced from The Pall Mall Gazette, checked against the sources used by Engels. Minor misprints and inaccuracies of transcriptions have been silently corrected.
[208] Francs-fileurs (literally: "free absconders")—the name given to the Paris bourgeois who fled from the city during the siege. It sounded all the more ironical being a pun on francs-tireurs (see Note 34). pp. 342, 350, 457, 543
[209] This refers to the Theatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin in Paris.
[210] Coblenz—a city in Western Germany, the centre of counter-revolutionary emigration during the French Revolution. It was the seat of the émigré government headed by de Calonne, former minister of Louis XVI. pp. 343, 457, 543
[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.