Introduction to the 1891 Edition [1]¶
Core Argument¶
Engels’s 1891 introduction to Marx’s The Civil War in France establishes the Paris Commune as the decisive historical proof that the bourgeois state must be smashed, not merely captured. The core argument is that the armed working class of Paris, from 1848 onward, posed an existential threat to bourgeois rule, forcing the ruling class into ever more frenzied and bloody repression. The 1848 revolution is presented as the dress rehearsal: the liberal bourgeoisie, having used the workers to overthrow Louis Philippe, immediately turned on them, driving them into the June insurrection and then carrying out a “blood-bath” of the defeated. Engels notes that this savagery, unprecedented since the Roman civil wars, was only “child’s play” compared to 1871. The key claim is that the disarming of the workers is the “first commandment” for the bourgeoisie whenever it regains control.
Engels traces the political logic of the Second Empire as the necessary outcome of bourgeois incapacity to rule directly. Louis Bonaparte’s coup exploited the bourgeoisie’s internal divisions (Legitimists, Orleanists, Bonapartists, republicans) and its fear of the proletariat. The Empire’s industrial boom and corruption were predicated on chauvinism and the drive to restore the Rhine frontier, a policy that culminated in the disastrous war with Prussia. The collapse of the Empire at Sedan produced the Government of National Defence, which, though armed by the workers, immediately conspired to betray them. The capitulation of Paris in January 1871 is depicted as a humiliation for the Prussian conquerors, who dared not enter the city and were themselves “encircled” by the armed National Guard.
The introduction then catalogues the Commune’s first decrees as a direct, proletarian challenge to the old order: abolition of conscription and the standing army, rent remissions, the 6,000-franc salary maximum, separation of church and state, the burning of the guillotine, the demolition of the Vendôme Column, and plans for workers’ co-operatives. Engels stresses that these measures, though only a “start” in a besieged city, revealed the Commune’s class character. The polemical target is the Versailles government of Thiers, whose hypocrisy is exposed: the same men who denounced Prussian bombardment now begged for the return of French prisoners to bombard Paris themselves. The final, detailed account of the Bloody Week massacre—30,000 shot, mass arrests, the “Wall of the Federals”—is Engels’s clinching evidence that the ruling class will stop at nothing. The introduction thus serves as a militant historical lesson: the Commune’s fate proves that the working class must be prepared to destroy the state apparatus entirely, not merely to wield it.