Introduction¶
Core Argument¶
This introduction, penned by Eleanor Marx Aveling in 1886, presents Lissagaray’s History of the Commune as the definitive, authentic account of the Paris Commune, the most significant proletarian uprising of the nineteenth century. The translation was made from a second edition that the French Government suppressed, and Aveling refuses to update it, preserving the text as her father, Karl Marx, knew and corrected it.
The core argument is that the Commune was not the orgy of violence and destruction portrayed in English public opinion—a view she dismisses as ignorant prejudice—but the first genuine attempt by the working class to govern itself. The Commune meant “the government of the people by the people,” the abolition of all class rule, and the replacement of capitalist production with communist, co-operative production. It was internationalist, not merely nationalist, in character.
Aveling’s key polemical thrust is against the hypocrisy of bourgeois condemnation of Communard “atrocities.” She contrasts the sixty-five hostages shot by a handful of desperate Communards with the thirty thousand men, women, and children massacred by the Versaillese troops of “law and order,” often after fighting had ceased. She directs English readers to contemporary reports in The Times, Daily News, and Standard from May and June 1871, which she quotes at length. These extracts describe summary executions at Moulin Saquet and Clamart, prisoners shot in batches of fifty to one hundred, women and boys bayoneted in churches, and firing parties disposing of five hundred prisoners a day at the Caserne Napoléon. The evidence is drawn from the enemy’s own press and parliamentary inquiries, not from partisan sources.
The historical context is the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the collapse of the Second Empire. The Commune, Aveling insists, was forced upon the people of Paris to save France from a fourth Empire. She notes that Lissagaray, though a soldier of the Commune, does not hide the errors or fatal weaknesses of the revolution; his moderation and scrupulous care for verifiable proof make his work reliable.
The polemic extends to contemporary opponents of socialism—the bourgeois Republic of France, the Autocrat of Russia, Bismarck, and democratic America—who denounce socialists as firebrands while using fire and sword to crush the people. Yet, she concludes, socialism is a greater power than ever; it was not drowned in the blood of Paris. The time has come for justice to the Commune, and even opponents of socialism should read this honest account of the greatest socialist movement of the century.