5) Financial Measures

(See Daily News. 6 May)⁽¹⁾

Principal outlay for war! Only 8,928 fcs. from confiscations⁽²⁾—all taken from ecclesiastics etc

Vengeur 6 May.⁽³⁾

The Commune

The Rise of the Commune and the Central Committee

The Commune had been proclaimed at Lyons, then Marseilles, Toulouse etc after Sedan. Gambetta tried his best to break it down.^[307]

The different movements at Paris in the beginning of October aimed at the establishment of the Commune, as a measure of defence against the Foreign invasion, as the realisation of the rise of the 4th of September. Its establishment by the movement of the 31 October failed only because Blanqui, Flourens and the other then leaders of the movement believed in the gens de paroles* who had given their parole d'honneur6 to abdicate and make room to a Commune freely elected by all the arrondissements of Paris. It failed because they saved the lives of those men so eager for the assassination of their saviours. Having allowed Trochu and Ferry to escape, they [were] surprised then by Trochu's Bretons. It ought to be remembered that on the 31st of October the selfimposed "government of defence" existed only on sufferance. It had not yet gone even through the farce of a plebiscite.^[308]

Under the circumstances, there was of course nothing easier than to misrepresent the character of the movement, to decry it as a treasonable conspiracy with the Prussians, to improve the dismissal of the only man amongst them who would not break his word,c for strengthening Trochu's Bretons who were for the Government of the Defence what the Corsican spadassinsd had been for L. Bonaparte^[185] by the appointment of Clément Thomas as Commander-in-Chief of the National Guard; there was nothing easier for these old panic-mongers than — appealing to the cowardly fears of the middle class [before] working bataillons who had taken the initiative, throwing distrust and dissension amongst the working bataillons themselves, by an appeal to patriotism — to create one of those days of blind reaction and disastrous misunderstandings by which they have always contrived to maintain their usurped power. As they had slipped into power the 4th of September by a surprise, they were now enabled to give it a mock sanction by a plebiscite of the true Bonapartist pattern during days of reactionary terror.

The victorious establishment at Paris of the Commune in the beginning of November 1870 (then already initiated in the great cities of the country and sure to be imitated all over France) would not only have taken the defence out of the hands of traitors and imprinted its enthusiasm as the present heroic war of Paris shows, it would have altogether changed the character of the war. It would have become the war of republican France, hoisting the flag of the social Revolution of the 19th century, against Prussia, the banner bearer of the conquest and counterrevolution. Instead of sending the hackneyed old intriguer⁽¹⁾ a begging at all courts of Europe, it would have electrified the producing masses in the old and the new world. By the escamotage of the Commune on October 31, the Jules Favre and Co secured the capitulation of France to Prussia and initiated the present civil war.

But this much is shown: The revolution of the 4th September was not only the reinstalment of the Republic because the place of the usurper⁽²⁾ had become vacant by his capitulation at Sedan,—it not only conquered that republic from the Foreign invader by the prolonged resistance of Paris although fighting under the leadership of its enemies — that revolution was working its way in the heart of the working classes. The republic had ceased to be a name for a thing of the past. It was impregnated with a new world. Its real tendency veiled from the eye of the world through the deceptions, the lies and the vulgarizing of a pack of intriguing lawyers and word fencers, came again and again to the surface in the spasmodic movements of the Paris working classes (and the South of France) whose watchword was always the same: the Commune !

The Commune — the positive form of the Revolution against the Empire and the conditions of its existence — first essayed in the cities of Southern France, again and again proclaimed in the spasmodic movements during the siege of Paris and escamotés by the sleights of hand of the Government of Defence and the Bretons of Trochu, the "plan of capitulation" hero — was at last victoriously installed on the 26th March, but it had not suddenly sprung into life on that day. It was the unchangeable goal of the workmen's revolution. The capitulation of Paris, the open conspiracy against the Republic at Bordeaux, the Coup d'Etat initiated by the nocturnal attack on Montmartre, rallied around it all the living elements of Paris, no longer allowing the defence men to limit it to the insulated efforts of the most conscious and revolutionary portions of the Paris working class.

The government of defence was only undergone as a pis aller⁽³⁾

of the first surprise, a necessity of the war. The true answer of the Paris People to the Second Empire, the Empire of Lies — was the Commune.

Thus also the rising of all living Paris — with the exception of the pillars of Bonapartism and its official opposition, the great capitalists, the financial jobbers, the sharpers, the loungers, and the old state parasites — against the government of Defence does not date from the 18th of March, although it conquered on that day its first victory against the conspirators, it dates from the 28 January, from the very day of the capitulation. The National Guard — that is all the armed manhood of Paris — organized itself and really ruled Paris from that day, independently of the usurpatory government of the capitulards ^[165] installed by the grace of Bismarck. It refused to deliver its arms and artillery, which was its property and only left them in the capitulation because its property. It was not the magnanimity of Jules Favre that saved these arms from Bismarck, but the readiness of armed Paris to fight for its arms against Jules Favre and Bismarck. In view of the Foreign invader and the peace negotiations Paris would not complicate the situation. It was afraid of civil war. It observed a mere attitude of defence and [was] content with the de facto self-rule of Paris. But it organized itself quietly and steadfastly for resistance. QEven in the terms of the capitulation itself the capitulards had unmistakeably shown their tendency to make the surrender to Prussia at the same time the means of their domination over Paris. The only concession of Prussia, they insisted upon, a concession, which Bismarck would have imposed upon them as a condition, if they had not begged it as a concession — was 40,000 soldiers for subduing Paris. In the face of its 300,000 national guards,— more than sufficient for securing Paris from an attempt by the Foreign enemy, and for the defence of its internal order — the demand of these 40,000 men — a thing which was besides avowed — could have no other purpose. ^[175]J On its existing military organization it grafted a political federation according to a very simple plan. It was the alliance of all the National Guards put in connection the one with the other by the delegates of each company, appointing in their turn the delegates of the battalions, who in their turn appointed general delegates, generals of legions, who were to represent an arrondissement and to cooperate with the delegates of the 19 other arrondissements. Those 20 delegates, chosen by the majority of the battalions of the National Guard, composed the Central Committee, which on the 18th of March initiated the greatest revolution of this century and still holds its post in the present glorious struggle of Paris. Never were elections more sifted, never delegates fuller representing the masses from which they had sprung. To the objection of the outsiders that they were unknown — in point of fact, that they only were known to the working classes, but no old stagers, no men illustrated by the infamies of their past, by their chase after pelf and place — they proudly answered: "So were the 12 Apostles"⁽⁴⁾ and they answered by their deeds.

The Character of the Commune

The centralized state machinery which, with its ubiquitous and complicated military, bureaucratic, clerical and judiciary organs, entoils (inmeshes) the living civil society like a boa constrictor, was first forged in the days of absolute monarchy as a weapon of nascent modern society in its struggle of emancipation from feudalism. The seignorial privileges of the medieval lords and cities and clergy were transformed into the attribute of a unitary state power, displacing the feudal dignitaries by salaried state functionaries, transferring the arms from medieval retainers of the landlords and the corporations of townish citizens to a standing army, substituting for the checkered (party coloured) anarchy of conflicting medieval powers the regulated plan of a state power, with a systematic and hierarchic division of labour. The first French Revolution with its task to found national unity (to create a nation) had to break down all local, territorial, townish and provincial independences. It was, therefore, forced to develop, what absolute monarchy had commenced, the centralization and organization of state power, and to expand the circumference and the attributes of the state power, the number of its tools, its independence of, and its supernaturalist sway of real society which in fact took the place of the medieval supernaturalist heaven with its saints. Every minor solitary interest engendered by the relations of social groups was separated from society itself, fixed and made independent of it and opposed to it in the form of state interest, administered by state priests with exactly determined hierarchical functions.

This parasitical [excrescence upon] civil society, pretending to be its ideal counterpart, grew to its full development under the sway of the first Bonaparte. The restoration and the monarchy of July added nothing to it but a greater division of labour, growing at the same measure in which the division of labour within civil society created new groups of interest, and, therefore, new material for state action. In their struggle against the Revolution of 1848, the parliamentary republic of France and the governments of all continental Europe, were forced to strengthen, with their measures of repression against the popular movement, the means of action and the centralization of that governmental power. All revolutions thus only perfected the state machinery instead of throwing off this deadening incubus. The fractions and parties of the ruling classes which alternately struggled for supremacy, considered the occupancy (Control) (seizure) and the direction of this immense machinery of government as the main booty of the victor. It centred in the creation of immense standing armies, a host of state vermin, and huge national debts. During the time of the absolute monarchy it was a means of the struggle of modern society against feudalism, crowned by the French revolution, and under the first Bonaparte it served not only to subjugate the Revolution and annihilate all popular liberties, it was an instrument of the French revolution to strike abroad, to create for France on the Continent instead of feudal monarchies more or less states after the image of France. Under the Restoration and the Monarchy of July it became not only a means of the forcible class domination of the middle class, and a means of adding to the direct economic exploitation a second exploitation of the people by assuring to their families all the rich places of the State household. During the time of the Revolutionary struggle of 1848 at last it served as a means of annihilating that Revolution and all aspirations at the emancipation of the popular masses. But the state parasite received only its last development during the second Empire. The governmental power with its standing army, its all directing bureaucracy, its stultifying clergy and its servile tribunal hierarchy, had grown so independent of society itself, that a grotesquely mediocre adventurer with a hungry band of desperadoes behind him sufficed to wield it. It did no longer want the pretext of an armed Coalition of old Europe against the modern world founded by the Revolution of 1789. It appeared no longer as a means of class domination, subordinate to its parliamentary ministry or legislature. Humbling under its sway even the interests of the ruling classes, whose parliamentary show-work it supplanted by self-elected Corps Législatifs and self-paid senates, sanctioned in its absolute sway by universal suffrage, the acknowledged necessity for keeping up "order", that is the rule of the landowner and the capitalist over the producer, cloaking under the tatters of a maskerade of the past, the orgies of the corruption of the present and the victory of the most parasite fraction, the financial swindler, the debauchery of all the reactionary influences of the past let loose — a pandemonium of infamies — the state power had received its last and supreme expression in the Second Empire. Apparently the final victory of this governmental power over society, it was in fact the orgy of all the corrupt elements of that society. To the eye of the uninitiated it appeared only as the victory of the Executive over the legislative, as the final defeat of the form of class rule pretending to be the autocracy of society under its form pretending to be a superior power to society. But in fact it was only the last degraded and the only possible form of that class rule, as humiliating to those classes themselves as to the working classes which they kept fettered by it.

The 4th of September was only the revindication of the Republic against the grotesque adventurer that had assassinated it. The true antithesis to the Empire itself—that is to the state power, the centralized executive, of which the Second Empire was only the exhausting formula — was the Commune. This state power forms in fact the creation of the middle class, first a means to break down feudalism, then a means to crush the emancipatory aspirations of the producers, of the working class. All reactions and all revolutions had only served to transfer that organized power— that organized force of the slavery of labour — from one hand to the other, from one fraction of the ruling classes to the other. It had served the ruling classes as a means of subjugation and of pelf. It had sucked new forces from every new change. It had served as the instrument of breaking down every popular rise and served it to crush the working classes after they had fought and been ordered to secure its transfer from one part of its oppressors to the others. This was, therefore, a Revolution not against this or that, legitimate, constitutional, republican or Imperialist form of State Power. It was a Revolution against the State itself, this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people, of its own social life. It was not a revolution to transfer it from one fraction of the ruling classes to the other, but a Revolution to break down this horrid machinery of Class domination itself. It was not one of those dwarfish struggles between the executive and the parliamentary forms of class domination, but a revolt against both these forms, integrating each other, and of which the parliamentary form was only the deceitful bywork of the Executive. The Second Empire was the final form of this State usurpation. The Commune was its definite negation, and, therefore the initiation of the social Revolution of the 19th century. Whatever therefore its fate at Paris, it will make le tour du monde.⁽¹⁾ It was at once acclaimed by the working class of Europe and the United States as the magic word of delivery. The glories and the antediluvian deeds of the Prussian conqueror seemed only hallucinations of a bygone past.

It was only the working class that could formulate by the word "Commune" and initiate by the fighting Commune of Paris — this new aspiration. Even the last expression of that state power in the Second Empire although humbling for the pride of the ruling classes and casting to the winds their parliamentary pretentions of self-government, had been only the last possible form of their class rule. While politically dispossessing them, it was the orgy under which all the economic and social infamies of their régime got full sway. The middling bourgeoisie and the petty middle class were by their economical conditions of life excluded from initiating a new revolution and induced to follow in the tracks of the ruling classes or [be] the followers of the working class. The peasants were the passive economical basis of the Second Empire, of that last triumph of a State separate of and independent from society. Only the Proletarians, fired by a new social task to accomplish by them for all society, to do away with all classes and class rule, were the men to break the instrument of that class rule — the State, the centralized and organized governmental power usurping to be the master instead of the servant of society. In the active struggle against them by the ruling classes, supported by the passive adherence of the peasantry, the Second Empire, the last crowning at the same time as the most signal prostitution of the State — which had taken the place of the medieval church — had been engendered. It had sprung into life against them. By them it was broken, not as a peculiar form of centralized governmental power, but as its most powerful, elaborated into seeming independence from society expression, and, therefore, also its most prostitute reality, covered by infamy from top to bottom, having centred in absolute corruption at home and absolute powerlessness abroad.⁽²⁾

Parliamentarism in France had come to an end. Its last term and fullest sway was the parliamentary Republic from May 1848 to the Coup d'Etat. The Empire that killed it, was its own creation. Under the Empire with its Corps Législatif and its Senate — and in this form it has been reproduced in the military monarchies of Prussia and Austria — it had been a mere farce, a mere bywork of Despotism in its crudest form. Parliamentarism then was dead in France and the workmen's Revolution certainly was not to awaken it from the death.

But this one form of class rule had only broken down to make the Executive, the governmental state machinery the great and single object of attack to the Revolution.

The Commune—the reabsorption of the State power by society, as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the organized force of their suppression — the political form of their social emancipation, itstead of the artificial force (appropriated by their oppressors) (their own force opposed to and organized against them) of society wielded for their oppression by their enemies. The form was simple like all great things. The reaction of former Revolutions — the time wanted for all historical developments, and in the past always lost in all Revolutions in the very days of popular triumph, whenever it had rendered its victorious arms, to be turned against itself—[the Commune] first displaced the army by the National guard.

"For the first time since the 4th September the republic is liberated from the government of its enemies... to the city a national militia that defends the citizens against the power (the government) instead of a permanent army that defends the government against the citizens" (Proclamation of Central Committee of 22 March).⁽³⁾

(the people had only to organize this militia on a national scale, to have done away with the Standing armies; the first economical conditio sine qua non⁽⁴⁾ for all social improvements, discarding at once this source of taxes and state debt, and this constant danger to government usurpation of class rule — of the regular class rule or an adventurer pretending to save all classes); at the same time the safest guarantee against Foreign aggression and making in fact the costly military apparatus impossible in all other states; the emancipation of the peasant from the bloodtax and the most fertile source of all state taxation and state debts. Here already the point in which the Commune is a bait for the peasant, the first word of his emancipation. With the "independent police" abolished, and its ruffians supplanted by servants of the Commune. The general suffrage, till now abused either for the parliamentary sanction of the Holy State Power, or a play in the hands of the ruling classes, only employed by the people to choose the instruments of parliamentary class rule once in many years, adapted to its real purposes, to choose by the communes their own functionaries of administration and initiation. [Gone is] the Delusion as if administration and political governing were mysteries, transcendent functions only to be trusted to the hands of a trained caste, state parasites, richly paid sycophants and sinecurists, in the higher posts, absorbing the intelligences of the masses and turning them against themselves in the lower places of the hierarchy. Doing away with the state hierarchy altogether and replacing the haughteous masters of the people by its always removable servants, a mock responsibility by a real responsibility, as they act continuously under public supervision. Paid like skilled workmen, 12 pounds a month, the highest salary not exceeding 240 £ a year, a salary somewhat more than 7^[5], according to a great scientific authority, Professor Huxley, to satisfy a clerk for the Metropolitan School Board.^[193] The whole sham of state mysteries and state pretensions ^ > ^ M ^ .^ vv ^u^ v-w^^ H . - ^ ^ vu^^wft sy^i^-^ u ^ r f 7 ^

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A paragraph from the manuscript of the First Draft of The Civil War in was done away by a Commune, mostly consisting of simple working men, organizing the defence of Paris, carrying war against the Pretorians of Bonaparte, securing the approvisionment of that immense town, filling all the posts hitherto divided between Government, police, and Prefecture, doing their work publicly, simply, under the most difficult and complicated circumstances, and doing it, as Milton did his Paradise Lost, for a few pounds, acting in bright daylight, with no pretensions to infallibility, not hiding itself behind circumlocution office, not ashamed to confess blunders by correcting them. Making in one order the public functions,—military, administrative, political—real workmen's functions, instead of the hidden attributes of a trained caste; (keeping order in the turbulence of civil war and revolution) (initiating measures of general regeneration). Whatever the merits of the single measures of the Commune, its greatest measure was its own organisation, extemporized with the Foreign Enemy at one door, and the class enemy at the other, proving by its life its vitality, confirming its thesis by its action. Its appearance was a victory over the victors of France. Captive Paris resumed by one bold spring the leadership of Europe, not depending on brute force, but by taking the lead of the Social Movement, by giving body to the aspirations of the working class of all countries.

With all the great towns organized into Communes after the model of Paris no government could repress the movement by the surprise of sudden reaction. Even by this preparatory step the time of incubation, the guarantee of the movement, won. All France organized into self-working and self-governing communes, the standing army replaced by the popular militias, the army of state parasites removed, the clerical hierarchy displaced by the schoolmaster, the state judges transformed into Communal organs, the suffrage for the National representation not a matter of sleight of hand for an allpowerful government, but the deliberate expression of organized communes, the state functions reduced to a few functions for general national purposes.

Such is the Commune—the political form of the social emancipation, of the liberation of labour from the usurpation of the (slaveholding) monopolists of the means of labour, created by the labourers themselves or forming the gift of nature. As the state machinery and parliamentarism are not the real life of the ruling classes, but only the organized general organs of their dominion, the political guarantees and forms and expressions of the old order of things, so the Commune is not the social movement of the working class and therefore of a general regeneration of mankind but the organized means of action. The Commune does not [do] away with the class struggles, through which the working classes strive to the abolition of all classes and, therefore, of all class rule (because it does not represent a peculiar interest. It represents the liberation of "labour", that is the fundamental and natural condition of individual and social life which only by usurpation, fraud, and artificial contrivances can be shifted from the few upon the many), but it affords the rational medium in which that class struggle can run through its different phases in the most rational and human way. It could start violent reactions and as violent revolutions. It begins the emancipation of labour—its great goal— by doing away with the unproductive and mischievous work of the state parasites, by cutting away the springs which sacrifice an immense portion of the national produce to the feeding of the state-monster, on the one side, by doing, on the other, the real work of administration, local and national, for workingmen's wages. It begins therefore with an immense saving, with economical reform as well as political transformation.

The communal organization once firmly established on a national scale, the catastrophes it might still have to undergo, would be sporadic slaveholders' insurrections, which, while for a moment interrupting the work of peaceful progress, would only accelerate the movement, by putting the sword into the hand of the Social Revolution.

The working class know that they have to pass through different phases of class struggle. They know that the superseding of the economical conditions of the slavery of labour by the conditions of free and associated labour can only be the progressive work of time, (that economical transformation) that they require not only a change of distribution, but a new organization of production, or rather the delivery (setting free) of the social forms of production in present organized labour (engendered by present industry) of the trammels of slavery, of their present class character, and their harmonious national and international coordination. They know that this work of regeneration will be again and again relented and impeded by the resistances of vested interests and class egotisms. They know that the present "spontaneous action of the natural laws of capital and landed property"—can only be superseded by "the spontaneous action of the laws of the social economy of free and associated labour", by a long process of development of new conditions, as was the "spontaneous action of the economic laws of slavery" and the "spontaneous action of the economical laws of serfdom". But they know at the same time that great strides may be taken at once through the Communal form of political organization and that the time has come to begin that movement for themselves and mankind.

Peasantry

(War indemnity.) Even before the instalment of the Commune, the Central Committee had declared through its Journal officiel:

"The greater part of the war indemnity should be paid by the authors of war."* This is the great "conspiracy against Civilization"0 the men of order are most afraid of. It is the most practical question. With the Commune victorious, the authors of the war will have to pay its indemnity; with Versailles victorious, the producing masses who have already paid in blood, ruin, and contributions, will have again to pay, and the financial dignitaries will even contrive to make a profit out of the transaction. The liquidation of the war costs is to be decided by the civil war. The Commune represents on this vital point not only the interests of the working class, the petty middle class, in fact, all the middle class with the exception of the bourgeoisie (the wealthy capitalists) (the rich landowners, and their state parasites). It represents above all the interests of the French peasantry. On them the greater part of the war taxes will be shifted, if Thiers and his "Rurals" ^[178] are victorious. And people are silly enough to repeat the cry of the "Rurals" that they — the great landed proprietors — represent the peasant, who is, of course, in the naivety of his soul exceedingly anxious to pay for these good "landowners" the milliards of the war indemnity who made him already pay the milliard of the Revolution indemnity!^[199]

The same men deliberately compromised the Republic of February by the additional 45 Centimes tax on the peasant,^[200] but this they did in the name of the Revolution, in the name of the "provisional government", created by it. It is now in their own name that they wage a civil war against the Communal Republic to shift the war indemnity from their own shoulders upon those of the peasant! He will of course be delighted by it!

The Commune will abolish Conscription, the party of order will fasten the bloodtax on the peasant. The party of order will fasten upon him the tax-collector for the payment of a parasitical and costly state machinery, the Commune will give him a cheap government. The party of order will continue [to] grind him down by the townish usurer, the Commune will free him of the incubus of the mortgages lasting upon his plot of land. The Commune will replace the parasitical judiciary body eating the heart of his income — the notary, the huissier⁽¹⁾ etc — by Communal agents doing their work at workmen's salaries, instead of enriching themselves out of the peasants' work. It will break down this whole judiciary cobweb which entangles the French peasant and gives abodes to the judiciary bench and maires of the bourgeois spiders that suck its blood! The party of order will keep him under the rule of the gendarme, the Commune will restore him to independent social and political life! The Commune will enlighten him by the rule of the schoolmaster, the party of order force upon him the stultification by the rule of the priest! But the French peasant is above all a man of reckoning! He will find it exceedingly reasonable that the payment of the clergy will no longer [be] exacted from him by the tax-collector, but will be left to the "spontaneous action" of his religious instincts!

The French peasant had elected L. Bonaparte President of the Republic, but the party of Order (during the anonymous Regime of the Republic under the assembly constituante, and législative) was the creator of 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 parson, himself to the government's gendarme! The nucleus of the reactionary laws of the Party of Order in 1849 — and peculiarly in January and February 1850^[201]—were specifically directed against the French Peasantry! If the French peasant had made L. Bonaparte president of the Republic because in his tradition all the benefits he had derived from the first Revolution were phantastically transferred on the first Napoleon, the armed risings of Peasants in some departments of France and the gendarme hunting upon them after the Coup d'Etat proved that that delusion was rapidly breaking down! The Empire was founded on the delusions artificially nourished and traditional prejudices, the Commune would be founded on his living interests and his real wants!

The hatred of the French peasant centres on the "rural", the men of the Château, the men of the Milliard of indemnity and the townish capitalist, maskeraded into a landed proprietor, whose encroachment upon him marched never more rapidly than under the Second Empire, partly fostered by artificial state means, partly naturally growing out of the very development of modern agriculture. The "rurals" know that three months rule of the Republican Commune in France would be the signal of the rising of the peasantry and the agricultural Proletariat against them. Hence their ferocious hatred of the Commune! What they fear even more than the emancipation of the townish proletariat is the emancipation of the peasants! The peasants would soon acclaim the townish proletariat as their own leaders and seniors! There exists of course in France as in most continental Countries a deep antagonism between the townish and rural producers, between the industrial Proletariat and the peasantry. The aspirations of the Proletariat, the material basis of its movement is labour organized on a grand scale, although now despotically organized, and the means of production centralized, although now centralized in the hands of the monopolist, not only as a means of production, but as a means of the exploitation and enslavement of the producer. What the proletariat has [to] do is to transform the present capitalist character of that organized labour and those centralized means of labour, transform them from the means of class rule and class exploitation into forms of free associated labour and social means of production. On the other hand, the labour of the peasant is insulated, and the means of production are parcelled, dispersed. On these economical differences rests superconstructed a whole world of different social and political views. But this peasantry proprietorship has long since outgrown its normal phase, that is the phase in which it was a reality, a mode of production and a form of property which responded to the economical wants of society and placed the rural producers themselves into normal conditions of life. It has entered its period of decay. On the one side a large prolétariat fonder (rural proletariat) has grown out of it whose interests are identical with those of the townish wages labourer. The mode of production itself has become superannuated by the modern progress of agronomy. Lastly — the peasant proprietorship itself has become nominal, leaving to the peasant the delusion of proprietorship, and expropriating him from the fruit of his own labour. The competition of the great farm producers, the bloodtax, the statetax, the usury of the townish mortgagee and the multitudin-ous pilfering of the judiciary system thrown around him, have degraded him to the position of a Hindoo Ryot,^[309] while expropriation — even expropriation from his nominal proprietorship — and, his degradation into a rural proletarian is an every day's fact. What separates the peasant from the proletarian is, therefore, no longer his real interest, but his delusive prejudice. If the Commune, as we have shown, is the only power that can give him immediate great boons even in its present economical conditions, it is the only form of government that can secure to him the transformation of his present economical conditions, rescue him from expropriation by the landlord on the one hand, from grinding, trudging and misery on the pretext of proprietorship on the other, that can convert his nominal proprietorship of the land in the real proprietorship of the fruits of his labour, that can combine for him the profits of modern agronomy, dictated by social wants, and every day now encroaching upon him as a hostile agency, without annihilating his position as a really independent producer. Being immediately benefited by the communal Republic, he would soon confide in it.

Union ( Ligue ) Républicaine

The party of disorder, whose régime topped under the corruption of the Second Empire, has left Paris (Exodus from Paris), followed by its appurtenances, its retainers, its menials, its state parasites, its mouchards? its "cocottes", and the whole band of low bohème (the common criminals) that form the complement of that bohème of quality. But the true vital elements of the middle classes, delivered by the workmen's revolution from their sham representatives, have, for the first time in the history of French Revolution, separated from it and come out in its true colours. It is the "Ligue of Republican Liberty" ^[197] acting the intermediary between Paris and the Provinces, disavowing Versailles and marching under the banners of the Commune.

The Communal Revolution as the Representative of All Classes of Society not Living upon Foreign Labour

We have seen that the Paris Proletarian fights for the French Peasant, and Versailles fights against him; that the greatest anxiety of the "Rurals" is that Paris be heard by the Peasants and no longer separated by him through the blockade; that at the bottom of its war upon Paris is the attempt to keep the peasantry as its

Spies.— Ed.

18-1232 bondman and treat him as before as its matière "taillable à merci et miséricorde".⁽¹⁾

For the first time in history the petty and moyenne middle class has openly rallied round the workmen's Revolution, and proclaimed it as the only means of their own salvation and that of France! It forms with them the bulk of the National guard, it sits with them in the Commune, it mediates for them in the Union Républicaine!

The principal measures taken by the Commune are taken for the salvation of the middle class — the debtor class of Paris against the creditor class! That middle class had rallied in the June insurrection (1848) against the Proletariat under the banners of the capitalist class, their generals, and their state parasites. It was punished at once on the 19th September 1848 by the rejection of the "concordats à l'amiable".^[195] The victory over the June insurrection showed itself at once also as the victory of the creditor, the wealthy capitalist, over the debtor, the middle class. It insisted mercilessly on its pound of flesh.⁽²⁾ On the 13th June 1849 the national guard of that middle class was disarmed and sabred down by the army of the bourgeoisie! During the Empire the dilapidation of the State Resources, upon which the wealthy capitalist fed, this middle class was delivered to the plunder of the stockjobber, the Railway kings, the swindling associations of the Crédit Mobilier^[167] etc and expropriated by Capitalist Association (Joint-Stock Company). If lowered in its political position, attacked in its economical interests, it was morally revolted by the orgies of that regime. The infamies of the war gave the last shock and roused its feelings as Frenchmen. The disasters bestowed upon France by that war, its crisis of national downbreak and its financial ruin, this middle class feels that not the corrupt class of the would-be slaveholders of France, but only the manly aspirations and the herculean power of the working class can come to the rescue!

They feel that only the working class can emancipate them from priest rule, convert science from an instrument of class rule into a popular force, convert the men of science themselves from the panderers to class prejudice, place hunting state parasites, and allies of capital into free agents of thought! Science can only play its genuine part in the Republic of Labour.

Republic only Possible as Avowedly Social Republic

This civil war has destroyed the last delusions about "Republic" as the Empire the delusion of unorganized "universal suffrage" in the hands of the State Gendarme and the parson. All vital elements of France acknowledge that a Republic is only in France and Europe possible as a "Social Republic", that is a Republic which disowns the capital and landowner class of the State machinery to supersede it by the Commune, that frankly avows "social emancipation" as the great goal of the Republic and guarantees thus that social transformation by the Communal organisation. The other Republic can be nothing but the anonymous terrorism of all monarchical fractions, of the combined Legitimists, Orleanists, and Bonapartists to land in an Empire quelconque a as its final goal, the anonymous terror of class rule which having done its dirty work will always burst into an Empire!

The professional republicans of the rural assembly^[178] are men who really believe, despite the experiments of 1848-51, despite the civil war against Paris — the republican form of class despotism a possible, lasting form, while the "party of order" m demands it only as a form of conspiracy for fighting the Republic and reintroduc-ing its only adequate form, monarchy or rather Imperialism, as the form of class despotism. In 1848 these voluntary dupes were pushed in the foreground till, by the insurrection of June, they had paved the way for the anonymous rule of all fractions of the would-be slaveholders in France. In 1871, at Versailles, they are from beginning pushed in the background, there to figure as the "Republican" decoration of Thiers' rule and sanction by their presence the war of the Bonapartist generals upon Paris! In unconscious self-irony these wretches hold their party meeting in the Salle des Paumes (Tennis-Court) to show how they have degenerated from their predecessors in 1789! ^[31]° By their Schoel-chers, etc., they tried to coax Paris in tendering its arms to Thiers and to force it into disarmament by the National Guard of "Order" under Saisset! We do not speak of the so-called Socialist Paris deputies like Louis Blanc. They undergo meekly the insults of a Dufaure and the rurals, dote upon Thiers' "legal" rights, and whining in presence of the banditti cover themselves with infamy!

Workmen and Comte

If the workmen have outgrown the time of Socialist Sectarianism, it ought not be forgotten that they have never been in the leading strings of Comtism. This sect has never afforded the International but a branch of about half a dozen of men, and whose programme was rejected by the General Council.^[311] Comte is known to the Parisian workmen as the prophet in politics of Imperialism (of personal Dictatorship), of capitalist rule in political economy, of hierarchy in all spheres of human action, even in the sphere of science, and as the author of a new catechism with a new pope and new saints in place of the old ones.⁽¹⁾

If his followers in England play a more popular part than those in France, it is not by preaching their Sectarian doctrines, but by their personal valour, and by the acceptance on their part of the forms of workingmen class struggle created without them, as f. i. the trade unions and strikes in England which by the by are denounced as a heresy by their Paris coreligionists.

The Commune ( Social Measures) .'.

That the workmen of Paris have taken the initiative of the present Revolution and in heroic self-sacrifice bear the brunt of his battle, is nothing new. It is the striking fact of all French revolutions! It is only a repetition of the past! That the revolution is made in the name and confessedly for the popular masses, that is the producing masses, is a feature this Revolution has in common with all its predecessors. The new feature is that the people, after the first rise, have not disarmed themselves and surrendered their power into the hands of the Republican mountebanks of the ruling classes, that, by the constitution of the Commune, they have taken the actual management of their Revolution into their own hands and found at the same time, in the case of success, the means to hold it in the hands of the People itself, displacing the State machinery, the governmental machinery of the ruling classes by a governmental machinery of their own. This is their ineffable crime! Workmen infringing upon the governmental privilege of the upper 10,000 and proclaiming their will to break the economical basis of that class despotism, which for its own sake wielded the organized State force of society! This is it that has thrown the respectable classes in Europe as in the United States into the paroxysm of convulsions and accounts for their shrieks of abomination, it is blasphemy, their fierce appeals to assassination of the people, and this Billingsgate^[312] of abuse and calumny from their parliamentary tribunes and their journalistic servants' hall!

The greatest measure of the Commune is its own existence, working, acting under circumstances of unheard-of difficulty! The red flag, hoisted by the Paris Commune, crowns in reality only the government of workmen for Paris! They have clearly, consciously proclaimed the Emancipation of Labour, and the transformation of Society, as their goal! But the actual "social" character of their Republic consists only in this, that workmen govern the Paris Commune! As to their measures, they must, by the nature of things, be principally confined to the military defence of Paris and its approvisionment.

Some patronizing friends of the working class, while hardly dis-sembling their disgust even at the few measures they consider as "socialist" although there is nothing socialist in them except their tendency — express their satisfaction and try to coax genteel sympathies for the Paris Commune by the great discovery that after all workmen are rational men and whenever in power always resolutely turn their back upon Socialist enterprises! They do in fact neither try to establish in Paris a phalanstère not an Icarie.$li Wise men of their generation! These benevolent patroni-zers, profoundly ignorant of the real aspirations and the real movement of the working classes, forget one thing. All the Socialist founders of Sects belong to a period in which the working class themselves were neither sufficiently trained and organized by the march of capitalist society itself to enter as historical agents upon the world's stage, nor were the material conditions of their emancipation sufficiently matured in the old world itself. Their misery existed, but the conditions of their own movement did not yet exist. The Utopian founders of sects, while in their criticism of present society clearly describing the goal of the social movement, the supersession of the wages system with all its economical conditions of class rule, found neither in society itself the material conditions of its transformation nor in the working class the organized power and the conscience of the movement. They tried to compensate for the historical conditions of the movement by phantastic pictures and plans of a new society in whose propaganda they saw the true means of salvation. From the moment the workingmen class movement became real, the phantastic Utopias evanesced, not because the working class had given up the end aimed at by these Uto-pists, but because they had found the real means to realize them, but in their place came a real insight into the historic conditions of the movement and a more and more gathering force of the military organization of the working class. But the last 2 ends of the movement proclaimed by the Utopians are the last ends proclaimed by the Paris Revolution and by the International. Only the means are different and the real conditions of the movement are no longer clouded in Utopian fables. These patronizing friends of the Proletariat in glossing over the loudly proclaimed Socialist tendencies of this Revolution, are therefore but the dupes of their own ignorance. It is not the fault of the Paris proletariat, if for them the Utopian creations of the prophets of the workingmen movement are still the "Social Revolution", that is to say, if the Social Revolution is for them still "Utopian".

Journal officiel of the Central Committee, 20 March:

"The proletarians of the capital, in midst the défaillances^ and the treasons of the governing (ruling) classes, have understood (compris) that the hour was arrived for them to save the situation in taking into their own hands the direction (management) of public affairs (the state business)."

They denounce "the political incapacity and the moral de-crepitude of the bourgeoisie" as the source of "the misfortunes of France".

"The workmen, who produce everything and enjoy nothing, who suffer from misery in the midst of their accumulated products, the fruit of their work and their sweat, ... shall they never be allowed to work for their emancipation?... The proletariat, in face of the permanent menace against its rights, of the absolute negation of all its legitimate aspirations, of the ruin of the country and all its hopes, has understood that it was its imperious duty and its absolute right to take into its hands its own destinies and to assure their triumph in seizing the state power (en s'emparant du pouvoir)." b

It is here plainly stated that the government of the working class is, in the first instance, necessary to save France from the ruins and the corruption impended upon it by the ruling classes, that the dislodgment of these classes from Power (of these classes who have lost the capacity of ruling France) is a necessity of national safety.

But it is no less clearly stated that the government by the working class can only save France and do the national business, by working for its own emancipation, the conditions of that emancipation being at the same time the conditions of the regeneration of France.

It is proclaimed as a war of labour upon the monopolists of the means of labour, upon capital.

The chauvinism of the bourgeoisie is only the supreme vanity, giving a national cloak to all their own pretensions. It is a means, by permanent armies, to perpetuate international struggles, to subjugate in each country the producers by pitching them against their brothers in each other country, a means to prevent the international cooperation of the working classes, the first condition of their emancipation. The true character of that chauvinism (long since become a mere phrase) has come out during the war of defence after Sedan, everywhere paralysed by the Chauvinist bourgeoisie, in the capitulation of France, in the civil war carried on under that high Priest of Chauvinism, Thiers, on Bismarck's sufferance! It came out in the petty police intrigue of the Anti-German league,^[3] Foreigners-hunting in Paris after the capitulation. It was hoped that the Paris people (and the French people) could be stultified into the passion of National hatred and by factitious outrages to the Foreigner forget its real aspiration and its home betrayers!

How has this factitious movement disappeared (vanished) before the breath of Revolutionary Paris! Loudly proclaiming its international tendencies — because the cause of the producer is every [where] the same and its enemy everywhere the same, whatever its nationality (in whatever national garb)—it proclaimed as a principle the admission of Foreigners into the Commune, it chose even a Foreign workman ⁽¹⁾ (a member of the International) into its Executive, it decreed [the destruction of] the symbol of French chauvinism — the Vendôme column⁽²⁾!

And, while their bourgeois chauvins have dismembered France, and act under the dictatorship of the Foreign invasion, the Paris workmen have beaten the Foreign enemy by striking at their own class rulers, have abolished frontiers, in conquering the post as the vanguard of the workmen of all nations!

The genuine patriotism of the bourgeoisie — so natural for the real proprietors of the different "national" estates^[314]—has faded into a mere sham consequent upon the cosmopolitan character imprinted upon their financial, commercial, and industrial enter-

Decentralisation by the Rurals and the Commune

prise. Under similar circumstances it would be exploded in all countries as it did in France.

DECENTRALIZATION BY THE RL'RALS AND THE COMMUNE

It has been said that Paris, and with it the other French towns, were oppressed by the rule of the peasants, and that its present struggle is for its emancipation from the rule of the peasantry! Never was a more foolish lie uttered!

Paris as the central seat and the stronghold of the centralized government machinery subjected the peasantry to the rule of the gendarmes, the tax collector, the Prefect, and the priest, and the rural magnates, that is to the despotism of its enemies, and deprived it of all life (took the life out of it). It repressed all organs of independent life in the rural districts. On the other hand, the government, the rural magnates, the gendarme and the priest, into whose hands the whole influence of the provinces was thus thrown by the centralized state machinery centring at Paris, brought this influence to bear for the government and the classes whose government it was, not against Paris [of] the government, the parasite, the capitalist, the idle, the cosmopolitan stew, but against the Paris of the workmen and the thinker. In this way, by the government centralization with Paris as its base, the peasants were suppressed by the Paris of the government and the capitalist, and the Paris of the workmen was suppressed by the provincial power handed over into the hands of the enemies of the peasants.

The Versailles Moniteur⁽¹⁾ (29 March) declares

"that Paris cannot be a free city, because it is the capital".⁽²⁾

This is the true thing. Paris, the capital of the ruling classes and its government, cannot be a "free city", and the provinces cannot be "free", because such a Paris is the capital. The provinces can only be free with the Commune at Paris. The party of order is still less infuriated against Paris because it has proclaimed its own emancipation from them and their government, than because, by doing so, it has sounded the alarm signal for the emancipation of the peasant and the provinces from their sway.

Journal officiel of the Commune, 1 April:

"The revolution of the 18th March had not for its only object the securing to Paris of communal representation elected, but subject to the despotic tutelage of a national power strongly centralized. It is to conquer, and secure independence for all the communes of France, and also of all superior groups, departments, and provinces, united amongst themselves for their common interest by a really national pact; it is to guarantee and perpetuate the Republic... Paris has renounced her apparent omnipotence which is identical with her forfeiture, she has not renounced that moral power, that intellectual influence, which so often has made her victorious in France and Europe in her propaganda."^[3]

"This time again Paris works and suffers for all France, of which it prepares by its combats and its sacrifices the intellectual, moral, administrative and economic regeneration, the glory and the prosperity" (Programme of the Commune de Paris sent out by balloon).⁽³⁾

Mr. Thiers, in his tour through the provinces, managed the elections, and above all, his own manifold elections. But there was one difficulty. The Bonapartist provincials had for the moment become impossible. (Besides, he did not want them, nor did they want him.) Many of the old Orleanist stagers had merged into the Bonapartist lot. It was, therefore, necessary, to appeal to the rusticated legitimist landowners, who had kept quite aloof from politics and were just the men to be duped. They have given the apparent character to the Versailles assembly, its character of the "chambre introuvable" ^[177] of Louis XVIII, its "rural" character. In their vanity, they believed, of course, that their time had at last come with the downfall of the Second Bonapartist Empire and under the shelter of Foreign invasion, as it had come in 1814 and 1815. Still they are mere dupes. So far as they act, they can only act as elements of the "party of order",⁽⁴⁾ and its "anonymous" terrorism as in 1848-1851. Their own party effusions lend only the comical character to that association. They are, therefore, forced to suffer as president the jail- accoucheur of the Duchess of Berry^[168] and as their ministers the pseudo republicans of the government of defence. They will be pushed aside as soon as they have done their service. But — a freak of history — by this curious combination of circumstances they are forced to attack Paris because of revolting against "the République une et indivisible" (Louis Blanc expresses it so,⁽⁵⁾ Thiers calls it unity of France), while their very first exploit was to revolt against unity by declaring for the "decapitation and decapitalization"⁽⁶⁾ of Paris, by wanting the Assembly to throne in a provincial town. What they really want is to go back to what preceded the centralized state machinery, become more or less independent of its prefects and its ministers, and put into its place the provincial and local domanial influence of the

Châteaux. They want a reactionary decentralization of France. What Paris wants is to supplant that centralization which has done its service against feudality, but has become the mere unity of an artificial body, resting on gendarmes, red and black armies, repressing the life of real society, lasting as an incubus upon it, giving Paris an "apparent omnipotence" by enclosing it and leaving the provinces outdoor — to supplant this unitarian France which exists besides the French society — by the political union of French society itself through the Communal organization.

The true partisans of breaking up the unity of France are therefore the rurals, opposite to the united state machinery so far as it interferes with their own local importance (seignorial rights), so far as it is the antagonist of feudalism.

What Paris wants is to break up that factitious unitarian system, so far as it is the antagonist of the real living union of France and a mere means of class rule.

Comtist view

Men completely ignorant of the existing economical system are of course still less able to comprehend the workmen's negation of that system. They can of course not comprehend that the social transformation the working class aim at is the necessary, historical, unavoidable birth of the present system itself. They talk in deprecatory tones of the threatened abolition of "property" because in their eyes their present class form of property — a transitory historical form—is property itself, and the abolition of that form would therefore be the abolition of property. As they now defend the "eternity" of capital rule and the wages system, if they had lived in feudal times or in times of slavery, they would have defended the feudal system and the slave system as founded on the nature of things, as springing from nature, fiercely declaimed against their "abuses", but at the same time from the height of their ignorance answering to the prophecies of the abolition by the dogma of their "eternity" righted by "moral checks" (constraints).

They are as right in their appreciation of the aims of the Paris working classes, as is M. Bismarck in declaring that what the Commune wants is the Prussian municipal order.3

Poor men! They do not even know that every social form of property has "morals" of its own, and that the form of social property which makes property the attribute of labour, far from creating individual "moral constraints" will emancipate the "morals" of the individual from its class constraints.

How the breath of the popular revolution has changed Paris! The revolution of February was called the Revolution of moral contempt! It was proclaimed by the cries of the people: "à bas les grands voleurs! à bas les assassins!,,h Such was the sentiment of the people. But as to the bourgeoisie, they wanted broader sway for corruption! They got it under Louis Bonaparte's (Napoleon the little) reign. Paris, the gigantic town, the town of historic initiative, was transformed in the Maison dorée of all the idlers and swindlers of the world, into a cosmopolitan stew! After the exodus of the "better class of people", the Paris of the working class reappeared, heroic, self-sacrificing, enthusiastic in the sentiment of its herculean task! No cadavers in the Morgue, no insecurity of the streets. Paris was never more quiet within. Instead of the Cocottes, the heroic women of Paris! Manly, stern, fighting, working, thinking Paris! Magnanimous Paris! In view of the cannibalism of their enemies, making their prisoners only dangerless!...

"What Paris will no longer stand is yet the existence of the Cocottes and Cocodès. What it is resolved to drive away or transform is this useless, sceptical and egotistical race which has taken possession of the gigantic town, to use it as its own. No celebrity of the Empire shall have the right to say, Paris is very pleasant in the best quarters, but there are too many paupers in the others."c

(Vérité: 23 April)

"Private crime wonderfully diminished*1 at Paris. The absence of thieves and cocottes, of assassinates and street attacks: all the conservateurs have fled to Versailles!"

"There has not been signalized one single nocturnal attack even in the most distant and less frequented quarters since the citizens do their police business themselves." e

Fragments

Thiers on the Rurals

"This party knows only to employ three means: Foreign invasion, civil war and anarchy ... such a government will never be that of France." (Chambre des Deputes of 5th Janvier 1833.)A

Government of Defence

And this same Trochu said in his famous programme: "the governor of Paris will never capitulate"b and Jules Favre in his circular: "Not a stone of our fortresses, nor a foot of our territories"0; same as Ducrot: "I shall never return to Paris save dead or victorious.'"1 He found afterwards at Bordeaux that his life was necessary for keeping down the "rebels" of Paris. (These wretches know that in their flight to Versailles they have left behind the proofs of their crimes, and to destroy these proofs, they would not recoil from making of Paris a mountain of ruins bathed in a sea of blood) (Manifeste à la Province, by balloon6).

"The unity which has been imposed upon us to the present, by the Empire, the Monarchy, and Parliamentary Government is nothing but centralization, despotic, unintelligent, arbitrary and onerous. The political unity as desired by Paris, is a voluntary association of all local initiatives..." a central delegation from the Federal Communes... "End of the old governmental and clerical world, of military supremacy and bureaucracy and jobbing in monopolies and privileges to which the proletariat owed its slavery and the country its misfortunes and disasters." (Proclamation of Commune 19 April.)⁽¹⁾

The Gendarmes and Policemen

20,000 Gendarmes drawn to Versailles from all France (a total of 30,000 under the Empire)⁽²⁾ and 12,000 Paris police agents,— basis of the finest army France ever had.

Republican Deputies of Paris

The Republican deputies of Paris "have not protested either against the bombardment of Paris, nor the summary executions of the prisoners, nor the calumnies against the People of Paris. They have on the contrary by their presence at the assembly and their mutisme given a consecration to all these acts supported by the notoriety the republican party has given those men. "Have become the allies and conscious accomplices of the monarchical party. Declares them traitors to their mandate and the Republic". (Association générale des défenseurs de la République^⁽³⁾)

(9 May)

"Centralization leads to apoplexy in Paris and to absence of life everywhere else" (Lamennais).

"Everything now gravitates to one centre, and this centre is, so to say, the state itself" (Montesquieu).^

Vendôme affair etc.

The Central Committee of the National Guard, constituted by the nomination of a delegate of each company, on the entrance of the Prussians into Paris, transported to Montmartre, Belleville and La Villette the cannon and mitrailleuses founded by the subscrip-tion of the National guards themselves, which cannon and mitrailleuses were abandoned by the government of the National defence, even in those quarters which were to be occupied by the Prussians.

On the morning of the 18th March the government made an energetic appeal to the National Guard, but out of 400,000 National Guard only 300 men answered.

On the 18th March, at 3 o'clock in the morning, the agents of police, and some bataillons of the line were at Montmartre, Belleville, and La Villette to surprise the guardians of artillery and to take it away by force.

The National Guard resisted, the soldiers of the line raised their rifle-butts in the air,⁽⁴⁾ despite the menaces and the orders of General Lecomte, shot the same day by his soldiers at the same time as Clément Thomas.

("troops of the line threw the butts of their muskets in the air, and fraternized with the insurgents.")⁽⁵⁾

The bulletin of victory by Aurelle de Paladines was already printed, also papers found on the Decembrisation of Paris.⁽⁶⁾

On the 19 March the Central Committee declared the state of siege of Paris raised,⁽⁷⁾ on the 20 Picard proclaimed it for the department of the Seine-et-Oise.

18 March (Morning: still believing in his victory) proclamation of Thiers, placarded on the walls:

"The Government has resolved to act. The Criminals who affect to institute a government must be delivered to regular justice, and the cannon taken away must be restored to the Arsenals."

Late in the afternoon, the nocturnal surprise having failed he appeals to the National Guards:

"The Government is not preparing a coup d'état. The Government of the Republic has not and cannot have any other aim than the safety of the Republic."

He will only

"do away with the insurgent committee ... almost all unknown to the population''.⁽⁸⁾

Late in the evening a third proclamation to the National Guard, signed by Picard and d'Aurelle:

"Some misguided men ... resist forcibly the National Guard and the army.... The Government has chosen that your arms should be left to you. Seize them with resolution to establish the reign of law and to save the Republic from anarchy."⁽⁹⁾

(On the 17th Schoelcher tries to wheedle them into disarming.) Proclamation of the Central Committee of the 19 March:

"the state of siege is raised. The people of Paris is convoked for its communal elections."

Id. to the National Guards:

"You have charged us to organize the defence of Paris and of your rights.... At this moment our mandate has expired; we give it back to you, we will not take the place of those whom the popular breath has just swept away."⁽¹⁰⁾

They allowed the members of the Government to withdraw quietly to Versailles (even such as they had in their hands like Ferry).

The communal elections convoked for the 22 March through the demonstration of the party of order removed to the 26th March.

21 March. The Assembly's frantic roars of dissent against the words "Vive la République" at the end of a Proclamation "To Citizens and Army (soldiers)".⁽¹¹⁾ Thiers: "It might be a very legitimate proposal etc." (Dissent of the rurals.) Jules Favre made a harangue against the doctrine of the Republic being superior to universal suffrage, flattered the rural majority, threatened the Parisians with Prussian intervention and provoked—the demonstration of the Paris of Order. Thiers: "come what may he would not send an armed force to attack Paris. "⁽¹²⁾ (had no troops yet to do it.)

The Central Committee was so unsure of its victory that it hastened to accept the mediation of the mayors and the deputies of Paris.... The stubbornness of Thiers allowed it (the Committee) to survive for a day or two, and by then it had come to realise its strength. Countless mistakes by the revolutionaries. Instead of rendering the police harmless, the doors were flung open to them; they went to Versailles, where they were welcomed as saviours; they let the 43rd of the line go; all the soldiers who had fraternised with the people were allowed to go home; they let the reactionaries organise themselves in the very heart of Paris; they left Versailles alone. Tridon, Jaclard, Varlin and Vaillant wanted them to go and drive the royalists out right away.... Favre and Thiers took urgent steps with the Prussian authorities to secure their assistance ... in putting down the insurgent movement in Paris.

Trochu and Clément Thomas concentrated on frustrating every attempt to arm and organise the National Guard. The march on Versailles was decided upon, prepared and undertaken by the Central Committee without the knowledge of the Commune and even directly contrary to its clearly expressed will....

Bergeret... instead of blowing up the bridge at Neuilly, which the Federals were unable to hold because of Mont Valerien and the batteries installed at Courbevoie, allowed the royalists to take it, and there to entrench themselves strongly, thereby assuring themselves of a route of communication with Paris...⁽¹³⁾

As M. Littré said in a letter {Daily News, 20 April):

"Paris disarmed; Paris manacled by the Vinoys, the Valentins, the Paladines, the Republic was lost. This the Parisians understood. With the alternative of succumbing without fighting, and risking a terrible contest of uncertain issue, they chose to fight; and I cannot but praise them for it."⁽¹⁴⁾

The expedition to Rome,^[172] the work of Cavaignac, Jules Favre, and Thiers.

"A government which has all the internal advantages of a republican government and the external strength of a monarchist government. I mean a federal republic... It is a society of societies, a new society, which grows through the addition of numerous new associated members until it becomes strong enough to assure the security of those who have banded together. This kind of republic ... can maintain its size without succumbing to internal corruption. The form of this society averts all difficulties" {Montesquieu. L'Esprit des Loix, I.IX, Ch. I). ⁽¹⁵⁾

The Constitution of 1793*i6

§ 78. Every commune of the Republic shall have a municipal administration. Every district shall have an intermediate administration and every department a central administration. § 79. Municipal officers shall be elected by assemblies of the commune. § 80. The administrators shall be appointed by assemblies of electors in the departments and districts. § 81. One-half of the membership of the municipalities and the administrations shall be renewed every year.

Executive Council, § 62. Shall consist of 24 members. § 63. The electoral assembly of each department shall nominate one candidate. The Legislative Corps shall elect the members of the Council by general roll. § 64. One-half of it shall be renewed in the last month of the legislative session. § 65. The Council shall be charged with directing and supervising the general administration. § 66. It shall appoint not from its members the chief officers of the general administration of the Republic. § 68. These officers shall not constitute a council but shall act separately and shall have no direct connection with one another; they shall not exercise any personal authority. § 73. The Council shall recall and replace the officers it appoints.3

Roused on the one hand by J. Favre's call to civil war in the Assembly — he told that the Prussians had threatened to interfere, if the Parisians did not give in at once,—encouraged by the forbearance of the people and the passive attitude towards them of the Central Committee, the "Party of Order" at Paris resolved on a coup de mainb which came off on the 22 March under the etiquette of a Peaceful Procession, a peaceable demonstration against the Revolutionary Government. And it was a peaceful demonstration of a very peculiar character.

"The whole movement seemed a surprise. There were no preparations to meet it."c

A riotous mob of "gentlemen", in their first rank the familiars of the Empire, the Heeckeren, Coëtlogon, and H. de Pêne etc, illtreating and disarming national guards detached from advanced sentinels (sentries) who fled to the Place Vendôme whence the National Guards march at once to the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs. Meeting the rioters, they received order not to fire, but the rioters advance under the cry: "down with the Assassins! down with the Committee! " insult the guards, grasp at their muskets, shoot with a revolver citizen Maljournal (lieutenant of the General Staff on the Place)d (membre du Comité central). General Bergeret calls upon them to withdraw (disband) (retire). During about 5 minutes the drums are beaten and the sommations^ (replacing the English reading of the riot acts)187 made. They reply by cries of insult. Two national guards fall severely wounded. Meanwhile their comrades hesitate and fire into the air. The rioters try to forcibly break through the lines and to disarm them. Bergeret commands fire and the cowards fly. The émeute* is at once dispersed and the fire ceases. Shots were fired from houses on the national guard. Two of them, Wahlin and François were killed, eight are wounded. The streets through which the "pacific" disband are strewn with revolvers and sword-canes (many of them picked up in the Rue de la Paix). Vicomte de Molinet, killed from behind (by his own people) found with a dagger fixed by a chain.⁽¹⁶⁾

Rappel⁽¹⁷⁾ was beaten. A number of cane swords, revolvers, and daggers lay on the streets by which the "unarmed" demonstration had passed. Pistol shots were fired before the insurgents received orders to fire on the crowd. The manifesters were the aggressors (witnessed by General Sheridan from a window).

This was then simply an attempt to do by the reactionists of Paris, armed with revolvers, caneswords, and daggers, what Vinoy had failed to do with his sergents-de-ville, soldiers, cannon and mitrailleuse. That the "lower orders" of Paris allowed themselves not even to be disarmed by the "gentlemen" of Paris, was really too bad!

When on the 13th June 1849 the National Guards of Paris made a really "unarmed" and "pacific" procession to protest against a crime, the attack on Rome by the French troops, General Changarnier was praised by his intimate Thiers for sabring and shooting them down. The state of siege was declared, new laws of repression,^[188] new proscriptions, a new reign of terror!⁽¹⁸⁾ Instead of all that, the Central Committee and the workmen of Paris strictly kept on the defensive during the encounter itself, allowed the assailers, the gentlemen of the dagger, to return quietly home, and, by their indulgence, by not calling them to account for this daring enterprise, encouraged them so much, that two days later, under the leadership of admiral Saisset, sent from Versailles, [they] rallied again and tried again their hands at civil war.

And this Vendôme affair evoked at Versailles a cry of "Assassination of unarmed citizens" reverberating throughout the world. Be it remarked that even Thiers, while eternally reiterating the assassination of the two generals, has not once dared to remind the world of this "Assassination of unarmed citizens".

As in the medieval times the knight may use any weapon whatever against the plebeian, but the latter must not dare even to defend himself.

(27 March. Versailles. Thiers:

"I give a formal contradiction to those who accuse me of leading the way for a monarchical settlement. I found the Republic an accomplished fact. Before God and men I declare I will not betray it".}

After the second rising of the party of Order, the Paris people took no reprisals whatever. The Central Committee even committed the great blunder, against the advice of its most energetic members, not to march at once at Versailles, where, after the flight of Adm. Saisset and the ridiculous collapse of the National Guard of Order, Consternation ruled supreme, there being not yet any forces of resistance organized.

After the election of the Commune, the party of order tried again their forces at the ballot-box, and, when again beaten, effected their Exodus from Paris. During the election, handshaking and fraternization of the Bourgeois (in the courts of the Mayoralties) with the insurgent National Guards, while among themselves they talk of nothing but "decimation en masse",⁽¹⁹⁾

"mitrailleuses", "frying at Cayenne", "wholesale fusillades".

"The runaways of yesterday think to-day by flattering the men of the Hôtel de Ville to keep them quiet until the Rurals and Bonapartist generals, who are gathering at Versailles will be in a position to fire on them." ⁽²⁰⁾

Thiers commenced the armed attack on the National Guard for the second time in Affair of April 2. Fighting between Courbevoie and Neuilly, close to Paris. National Guards beaten, bridge of Neuilly occupied by Thiers' soldiers. Several thousands of National Guards, having come out of Paris and occupied Courbevoie and Puteaux and the bridge of Neuilly, routed. Many prisoners taken. Many of the insurgents immediately shot as rebels. Versailles troops began the firing.

Commune:

"The Government of Versailles has attacked us. Not being able to count upon

^{[108] [185]} the army, it has sent Pontifical Zouaves of Charette, Bretons of Trochu, and Gendarmes of Valentin, in order to bombard Neuilly."⁽²¹⁾

On 2nd April the Versailles Government had sent forward a division chiefly consisting of Gendarmes, Marines, Forest Guard, and Police. Vinoy with two brigades of infantry, and Galliffet at the head of a brigade of cavalry and a battery of artillery advanced upon Courbevoie.

Paris. April 4. Millière (Declaration)

"the people of Paris was not making any aggressive attempt ... when the government ordered it to be attacked by the ex-soldiers of the Empire, organized as pretorian troops, under the Command of ex-Senators."⁽²²⁾

---

Endnotes

(1) Ibid. See also Journal officiel (Paris), No. 124, May 4, 1871.— Ed.

(2) Marx gives the French word.— Ed.

(3) Concerning the financial account of the Commune see "Et maintenant...", Le Vengeur, No. 38, May 6, 1871.— Ed.

[307] -phe news of the Sedan disaster and the revolution in Paris, which brought about the fall of the Empire on September 4, 1870, caused revolutionary actions of the workers in many towns of France. In Lyons, Marseilles and Toulouse organs of popular power — communes — were set up. Though they were short-lived, provincial communes, especially in Lyons, implemented a number of important revolutionary measures. The Government of National Defence brutally crushed the provincial communes. pp. 480, 532

[308] On November 3, 1870, the Government of National Defence held a plebiscite in Paris on the question of support for the government, trying in this way to consolidate its unstable position, which had been demonstrated during the revolutionary events of October 31, 1870 (see Note 184). Although a considerable section of Parisians voted against the government's policy, it succeeded, at the time of the actual state of siege, in winning a majority vote by exerting pressure on the population, carrying on demagogical propaganda, etc. '

a Men as good as their word.— Ed. b Word of honour.— Ed. c F.A.L. Tamisier.— Ed. d Bravos.— Ed.

(1) Thiers.— Ed.

(2) Napoleon III.— Ed.

[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

[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

(3) A makeshift.— Ed.

(4) "To the objection...", The Daily News, No. 7776, April 1, 1871.— Ed.

(1) It will go round the world.— Ed.

(2) Marx added the following two paragraphs on the upper margin of the manuscript.— Ed.

[5] A reference to Bismarck's policy during the preparations for and the unleashing of the Austro-Prussian war of 1866. Bismarck used the contradictions between Austria and France to secure Napoleon Ill's neutrality in this war. The war ended in a victory for Prussia and led to the formation of the North German Confederation (see Note 9), under the supremacy of militarist Prussia. This was a major step towards the unification of Germany under the auspices of the Prussian monarchy. The decisive battle of the Austro-Prussian war was fought on July 3, 1866, not far from the village of Sadowa, at the town of Königgrätz (Hradec Krâlové). The Austrian troops suffered a major defeat. On the course of the Austro-Prussian war, see Engels' series of articles "Notes on the War in Germany" (present edition, Vol. 20).

[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

(3) [Proclamation du Comité central de la Garde nationale. Paris, 22 mars 1871], Le Rappel, No. 650, March 25, 1871; see also Journal officiel (Paris), No. 84, March 25, 1871.— Ed.

(4) The necessary condition.— Ed.

[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

a [V.] Grêlier, "Le comité central de la garde nationale est décidé...", Journal officiel (Paris), No. 80, March 21, 1871.— Ed. b Quoted from "The Commune of Paris...", The Times, No. 27028, April 4, 1871.— Ed.

[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

[309] Ry0ts—hereditary tenants of state-owned lands in India. Here — Indian peasants.

(1) Bailiff.— Ed.

[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

[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

[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

(1) As its subject "in its power and at its mercy".— Ed.

(2) W. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene I.— Ed.

[31] A reference to the armies of the first European counter-revolutionary coalition, which invaded France in 1793-94. The coalition included Austria, Prussia, the Kingdom of Sardinia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Spain and the Kingdom of Naples.

Of some sort.— Ed. 18*

[311] A reference to the Paris Société des prolétaires positivistes, whose programme was based on Auguste Comte's ideas. At the beginning of 1870, the General Council, taking into account the working-class composition of the society, admitted it to the International as a section; at the same time, the society's programme was sharply criticised (see Marx's letter to Engels of March 19, 1870, present edition, Vol. 43). pp. 498, 556

[312] Billingsgate was one of the early gates into London; the fish-market situated nearby is named after it. Used figuratively, it can mean the abusive language of the market.

(1) A. Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, T. 1-6, Paris, 1830-1842.— Ed.

a Impotence.— Ed. b "La Révolution du 18 mars", Le Petit Journal, No. 3002, March 22, 1871; see also Journal officiel (Paris), No. 80, March 21, 1871.— Ed.

[314] National estates (Biens nationaux)—real estate and movable property of the clergy, émigrés and enemies of the revolution confiscated by the government during the French Revolution. A considerable part of national property passed to the bourgeoisie and rich peasants. During the Restoration period, the unsold lands from the national estates were returned to their former owners; owners whose lands had been sold received monetary compensation.

(1) See this volume, pp. 286-87.— Ed.

(2) Leo Frankel.— Ed.

(1) Moniteur des Communes.—Ed.

(2) Quoted from "The Moniteur which is...", The Daily News, No. 7776, April 1, 1871.— Ed.

[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

[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

(3) Quoted from "An article in the Journal officiel...", The Evening Standard, No. 14561, April 3, 1871.—Ed.

(4) "Déclaration au peuple français. [Paris, 19 avril 1871]", The Daily News, No. 7793, April 21, 1871; see also Journal officiel (Paris), No. 110, April 20, 1871.—Ed.

(5) "United and indivisible republic", quoted from L. Blanc's letter to the editor of Le Siècle in The Daily News, No. 7797, April 26, 1871.— Ed.

(6) "The scanty news from the capital of Revolution...", The Daily News, No. 7774, March 30, 1871.— Ed.

a O. von Bismarck's speech in the Reichstag, May 2, 1871, Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstages, 1. Legislatur-Periode. 1. Session 1871. Bd. 1, Berlin, 1871.— Ed. b "Down with big robbers! Down with the assassins!" — Ed. c "The really dangerous classes...", The Observer, No. 4170, April 23, 1871.— Ed. d "Life in Paris", The Daily News, No. 7791, April 19, 1871.— Ed. e "Manifeste", Le Vengeur, No. 30, April 28, 1871.— Ed.

a Quoted in La Tribune de Bordeaux, April 25, 1871.— Ed. b L. J. Trochu, [Proclamation aux habitants de Paris. Paris. 6 janvier 1871 ], Journal officiel (Paris), No. 7, January 7, 1871.— Ed. c J. Favre, "Circulaire adressée aux agents diplomatiques de France.... Le 6 septembre 1870", Journal officiel (Paris), No. 246, September 7, 1870.— Ed. d A. Ducrot, "Soldat de la 2 e armée de Paris!" [Order of November 28, 1870], Journal officiel (Paris), No. 329, November 29, 1870.— Ed. e "Manifeste", Le Vengeur, No. 30, April 28, 1871.— Ed.

(1) "Déclaration au peuple français. [Paris, 19 avril 1871]", The Daily News, No. 7793, April 21, 1871; see also Journal officiel (Paris), No. 110, April 20, 1871.— Ed.

(2) Marx gives a German phrase in parentheses.— Ed.

(3) Ch.-L. de Montesquieu, De l'Esprit des Loix, London, 1769, Liv. 23, Ch. 24. Marx gives a French quotation.— Ed.

(4) Marx gives "raised their rifle-butts in the air" in French.— Ed.

(5) "Paris, March 18, 1871", The Daily News, No. 7765, March 20, 1871.— Ed.

(6) I. e. a coup d'état like that of December 2, 1851. See "Paris in Insurrection", The Daily News, No. 7765, March 20, 1871; see also Journal officiel (Paris), No. 78, March 19, 1871.— Ed.

(7) "Au Peuple", The Standard, No. 14550, March 21, 1871 (published in French).— Ed.

(8) L. A. Theirs' proclamation of March 17, 1871 to the inhabitants of Paris and proclamation of March 18, 1871 to the National Guards, The Daily News, No. 7765, March 20, 1871.—Erf.

(9) E. Picard, L. J.-B. d'Aurelle de Paladines, "To the National Guards of the Seine", The Daily News, No. 7765, March 20, 1871.— Ed.

(10) "Au Peuple"; "Aux Gardes nationaux de Paris", The Standard, No. 14550, March 21, 1871; see also Journal officiel (Paris), No. 79, March 20, 1871. Marx gives the last four words in French.— Ed.

(11) Proclamation of March 21, 1871 "To the Citizens and Soldiers", The Daily News, No. 7768, March 23, 1871.— Ed.

(12) See L. A. Thiers' and J. Favre's speeches in the National Assembly on March 21, 1871, The Daily News, No. 7768, March 23, 1871.— Ed.

[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

(13) Marx wrote the last three paragraphs in French.— Ed.

(14) "A French View of the Presence and Future of France", The Daily Neivs, No. 7792, April 20, 1871.— Ed.

(15) Marx gives a French quotation in the original.— Ed.

a These two paragraphs are in French in the original.— Ed. b Sudden attack.— Ed. c "The Rule of Sedition", The Daily Telegraph, No. 4921, March 23, 1871.—Ed. d Marx gives the phrase in parentheses in French.— Ed. e Summons.— Ed. f Rebellion.— Ed.

[188] This refers to the repressive laws initiated or actively supported by J. Dufaure and passed in 1839 and 1849. On May 14, 1839, after the armed action, the secret Republican Society of the Seasons was banned. After the demonstration of June 13, 1849 had been dispersed, a number of repressive laws were adopted: on June 19, the law on associations, on June 27 — the law on the press (loi sur la presse), on August 9 — the law on the state of siege (loi sur l'état de siège). After Dufaure became Minister of Justice in February 1871, he adopted a whole series of repressive laws. The law on the state of siege of April 28, 1871 restored certain laws meant to suppress freedom of the press, including the law of 1849. pp. 325, 444, 512

(16) "Le Journal officiel de Paris raconte...", Le Rappel, No. 650, March 25, 1871.—Ed.

(17) Retreat.— Ed.

(18) Marx gives a detailed analysis of the events of June 13, 1849 in his The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, Ch. 2 (see present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 71-100).— Ed.

[108] "Papal Zouaves"—a regiment of the Papal Guard organised and trained like the Zouaves (see Note 13) and consisting of young French aristocratic volunteers. When Rome was occupied by Italian troops and the Pope's secular power abolished in September 1870, the Papal Zouaves were sent to France, where they were reorganised into a "volunteer legion of the West". As part of the First and Second Loire armies, they participated in operations against the Germans. After the war, the legion helped suppress the Paris Commune and was later disbanded. pp. 204, 343, 452, 513, 539

(19) Mass decimation.— Ed.

(20) "Paris, March 26, 1871", The Daily News, No. 7772, March 28, 1871.— Ed.

(21) Proclamation of the Commune of April 2, 1871 to the National Guards, The Daily Telegraph, No. 4931, April 4, 1871; see also Journal officiel (Paris), No. 93, April 3, 1871.— Ed.

(22) J.-B. E. Millière's declaration of April 4, 1871, The Daily Telegraph, No. 4933, April 6, 1871.—Ed.

[185] Bretons—the Breton Mobile Guard, which Trochu used as a gendarmerie to suppress the revolutionary movement in Paris. The Bretons replaced the Corsicans who, under the Second Empire, constituted a large section of the gendarmerie corps. pp. 323, 446, 481, 513, 527, 532, 539

[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

[3] A reference to the coup d'état of December 2, 1851, which gave birth to the Second Empire.