THE
CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.
ADDRESS
THE GENERAL COUNCIL
INTERNATIONAL WORKING-MEN'S
ASSOCIATION.
THIRD EDITION, REVISED.
Printed and Published for the Council by
EDWARD TRUELOVE, 256, HIGH HOLBORN.
1871.
Price Twopence.
TO ALL THE MEMBERS OP THE ASSOCIATION
IN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES.
I.
On the 4th of September, 1870, when the working men of Paris pro¬
claimed the Republic, which was almost instantaneously acclaimed
throughout France, without a single voice of dissent, a cabal of place-
hunting barristers, with Thiers for their statesman and Trocliu for their
general, took hold of the Hôtel de Ville. At that time they were imbued
with so fanatical a faith in the mission of Paris to represent France in all
epochs of historical crisis, that, to legitimate their usurped titles a3
Governors of France, they thought it quite sufficient to produce their
lapsed mandates a3 representatives of Paris. In our second address on
the late War, five days after the rise of these men, we told you who they
were. Yet, in the turmoil of surprise, with the real leaders of the
working class still shut up in Bonapartist prison s and the Prussians
already marching upon Paris, Paris bore with their assumption of power,
on the express condition that it was to be wielded for the single
purpose of national defence. Paris, however, was not to be defended
without arming its working class, organizing them into an effective force,
and training their ranks by the war itself. But Paris armed was the
Revolution armed. A victory of Paris over the Prussian aggressor would
have been a victory of the French workman over the French capitalist
and his State parasites. In this conflict between national duty and class
interest, the Government of National Defence did not hesitate one
moment to turn into a Government of National Defection.
The first step they took was to send Thiers on a roving tour to all the
courts of Europe, there to beg mediation by offering the barter of the
Republic for a king. Four months after the commencement of the siege,
when they thought the opportune moment come for breaking the
first word of capitulation, Trcchu, in the presence of Jules Favre and
others of his colleagues, addressed the assembled mayorB of Paris in these
terms :—
"The first question put to me by my colleagues on the very evening of
the 4th of September was this : Paris, can it, with any chance of success
4
stand a siege by the Prussian army ? I did not hesitate to answer in
the negative. Some of my colleagues here present will warrant the truth
of my words and the persistence of my opinion. I told them, in these
very term?, that, under the existing state of things, the attempt of Paris
to hold out a siege by the Prussian army, would be a folly. Without
doubt, I added, it would be an heroic folly ; but that would be all
The events [managed by himself] have not given the lie to my prevision."
Thi3 nice little speech of Trochu was afterwards published by M. Corbon,
one of the mayors present.
Thus, on the very evening of the proclamation of the Republic,
Trochu's " plan " was known to his colleagues to be the capitulation of
Paris. If national defence had been more than a pretext for the personal
government of Thiers, Favre, & Co., the upstarts of the 4th of September
would have abdicated on the 5 th—would have initiated the Paris people
into Trochu's " plan," and called upon them to surrender at once, or to
take their own fate into their own hands. Instead of this, the infamous
impostors resolved upon curing the heroic folly of Paris by a regimen of
famine and broken heads, and to dupe her in the mean while by ranting
manifestoes, holding forth that Trochu, " the Governor of Paris, will
never capitulate," and Jules Favre, the Foreign Minister, will " not cede
an inch of our territory, nor a stone of our fortresses." In a letter to
Gambetta, that very same Jules Favre avows that what they were
" defending " against were not the Prussian soldiers, but the working men
of Paris. During the whole continuance of the siege the Bonapartist cut¬
throats, whom Trochu had wisely intrusted with the command of the
Paris army, exchanged, in their intimate correspondence, ribald jokes at
the well-understood mockery of defence (see, for instance, the correspond¬
ence of Alphonse Simon Guiod, supreme commander of the artillery of
the Army of Defence of Paris and Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour,
to Suzanne, general of division of artillery, a correspondence published
by the Journal Officiel of the Commune). The mask of imposture was at
last dropped on the 28th of January, 1871. With the true heroism of
utter self debasement, the Government of National Defence, in their
capitulation, came out as the Government of France by Bismarck's
prisoners—a part so base that Louis Bonaparte himself had, at Sedan,
shrunk from accepting it. After the events of the 18th of March, on
their wild flight to Versailles, the capitulards left in the hands of Paris
the documentary evidence of their treason, to destroy which, as the
Commune says in its manifesto to the provinces, " those men would not
recoil from battering Paris into a heap of ruins washed by a sea of
blood."
To be eagerly bent upon such a consummation, some of the leading
members of the Government of Defence had, besides, most peculiar
reasons of their own.
Shortly after the conclusion of the armistice, M. Millière, one of the
representatives of Paris to the National Assembly, now shot by express
order of Jules Favre, published a series of authentic legal documents in
proof that Jule3 Favre, living in concubinage with the wife of a drunkard
resident at Algiers, had, by a most daring concoction of forgeries, spread
5
over many years, contrived to grasp, in the name of the children of his
adultery, a large succession, which made him a rich man, and that, in a
lawsuit undertaken by the legitimate heirs, he only escaped exposure by
the connivance of the Bonapartist tribunals. As these dry legal docu¬
ments were not to be got rid of by any amount of rhetorical horse-power,
Jules Favre, for the first time in his life, held his tongue, quietly awaiting
the outbreak of the civil war, in order, theD, frantically to denounce the
people of Paris as a band of escaped convicts in utter revolt against family,
religion, order, and property. This Bame forger had hardly got into
power, after the 4th of September, when he sympathetically let loose
upon society Pic and Taillefer, convicted, even under the Empire, of
forgery, in the scandalous affair of the " Etendard." One of these men,
Taillefer, having dared to return to Paris under the Commune, was at once
reinstated in prison ; and then Jules Favre exclaimed, from the tribune of
the National Assembly, that Paris was setting free all her jailbirds !
Ernest Picard, the Joe Miller of the Government of National Defence,
who appointed himself Finance Minister of the Eepublic after having in
vain striven to become the Home Minister of the Empire, is the brother
of one Arthur Picard, an individual expelled from the Paris Bourse as a
blackleg (see report of the Prefecture of Police, dated 13th July, 1867),
and convicted, on hi3 own confession, of a theft of 300,000 francs, while
manhger of one of the branches of the Société Générale, rue Palestro,
No. 5 (see report of the Prefecture of Police, 11th December, 1868). This
Arthur Picard was made by Ernest Picard the editor of his paper,
VElecteur Libre. While the common run of stockjobbers were led astray
by the official lies of this Finance-Office paper, Arthur was running back¬
wards and forwards between the Finance Office and the Bourse, there to
discount the disasters of the French army. The whole financial corre¬
spondence of that worthy paif of brothers fell into the hands of the
Commune.
Jules Ferry, a penniless barrister before the 4th of September, contrived,
as Mayor of Paris during the siege, to job a fortune out of famine. The
day on which he would have to give an account of his maladministration
would be the day of his conviction.
These men, then, could find, in the ruins of Paris only, their tiekets-
of-leave : they were the very men Bismarck wanted. With the help of
some shuffling of cards, Thiers, hitherto the secret prompter of the
Government, now appeared at its head, with the ticket-of-leave men for
his Ministers.
Thiers, that monstrous gnome, has charmed the French bourgeoisie for
almost half a century, because he is the most consummate intellectual
expression of their own class-corruption. Before he became a statesman
he had already proved his lying powers as an historian. The chronicle of
his public life is the record of the misfortunes of France. Banded, before
1830, with the Republicans, he slipped into office under Louis Philippe
by betraying his protector Lafitte, ingratiating himself with the king by
exciting mob-riots against the clergy, during which the church of Saint
Germain l'Auxerrois and the Archbishop's palace were plundered, and
by acting the minister-spy upon, and the jail-accoucheur of, the Duchess
b 2
c
de Berri. The massacre of the Republicans in the Rue Transnonain, and
the subsequent infamous laws of September against the press and the
right of association, were his work. Reappearing as the chief of the
Cabinet in March, 1840, he astonished France with his plan of fortifying
Paris. To the Republicans, who denounced this plan as a sinister plot
against the liberty of Paris, he replied from the tribune of the Chamber
of Deputies:—
" What ! to fancy that any works of fortification could ever endanger
liberty ! And first of all you calumniate any possible Government in sup¬
posing that it could some day attempt to maintain itself by bombarding
the capital ; . . . , but that government would be a hundred times more
impossible after its victory than before." Indeed, no Government would
ever have dared to bombard Paris from the forts, but that Government
which had previously surrendered these forts to the Prussians.
When King Bomba tried his hand at Palermo, in January, 1848,
Thiers, then long since out of office, again rose in the Chamber of Deputies :
" You know, gentlemen, what is happening at Palermo. You, all of you,
shake with horror [in the parliamentary sense] on hearing that during
forty-eight hours a large town has been bombarded—by whom ? Was it
by a foreign enemy exercising the rights of war ? No, gentlemen, it was
by its own Government. And why I Because that unfortunate town
demanded its rights. Well, then, for the demand of its rights it has got
forty-eight hours of bombardment Allow me to appeal to the
opinion of Europe. It is doing a service to mankind to arise, and to make
reverberate, from what is perhaps the greatest tribune in Europe, some
words [indeed words] of indignation against such acts When the
Regent Espartero, who had rendered services to his country, [which
M. Thiers never did,] intended bombarding Barcelona, in order to
suppress its insurrection, there arose from all parts of the world a general
outcry of indignation."
Eighteen months afterwards, M. Thiers was amongst the fiercest
defenders of the bombardment of Rome by a French army. In fact, the
fault of King Bomba seems to have consisted in this only, that he limited
his bombardment to forty-eight hours.
A few days before the Revolution of February, fretting at the long exile
from place and pelf to which Guizot had condemned him, and sniffing in
the air the scent of an approaching popular commotion, Thiers, in that
pseudo-heroic style which won him the nickname of Mirabeau-raouche,
declared to the Chamber of Deputies : "lam of the party of Revolution,
not only in France, but in Europe. I wish the Government of the
Revolution to remain in the hands of moderate men .... but if that
Government should fall into the hands of ardent minds, even into those of
Radicals, I shall, for all that, not desert my cause. I shall always be of
the party of the Revolution." The Revolution of February came. Instead
of displacing the Guizot Cabinet by the Thiers Cabinet, as the little man
had dreamt, it superseded Louis Philippe by the Republic. On the first
day of the popular victory he carefully hid himself, forgetting that the
contempt of the working men screened him from their hatred. Still, with
his legendary courage, he continued to sby the public stage, until the
7
June massacres had cleared it for his sort of actioD. Then he became
the leading mind of the " Party of Order" and its Parliamentary
Eepublic, that anonymous interregnum, in which all the rival factions of
the ruling class conspired together to crush the people, and conspired
against each other to restore each of them its own monarchy. Then, as
now, Thiers denounced the Bepublicans as the only obstacle to the con¬
solidation of the Eepublic ; then, as now, he spoke to the Eepublic as
the hangman spoke to Don Carlos—" I shall assassinate thee, but for thy
own good." Now, as then, he will have to exclaim on the day after his
victory : IIEmpire est fait—the Empire is consummated. Despite his
hypocritical homilies about necessary liberties and his personal grudge
against Louis Bonaparte, who had made a dupe of him, and kicked
out parliamentarism—and outside of its factitious atmosphere the
little man is conscious -of withering into nothingness—he had a
hand in all the infamies of the Second Empire, from the occupation
of Eome by French troops to the war with Prussia, which he incited by
his fierce invective against German unity—not as a cloak of Prussian
despotism, but as an encroachment upon the vested right of France in
German disunion. Fond of brandishing, with his dwarfish arms, in the
face of Europe the sword of the first Napoleon, whose historical shoe-black
he had become, his foreign policy always culminated in the utter humili¬
ation of France, from the London convention of 1840 to the Paris capitu¬
lation of 1871, and the present civil war, where he hounds on the prisoners
of Sedan and Metz against Paris by special permission of Bismarck. De¬
spite his versatility of talent and shiftiness of purpose, this man has his
whole lifetime been wedded to the most fossil routine. It is self-evident
that to him the deeper under-currents of modern society remained for
ever hidden ; but even the most palpable changes on its surface were
abhorrent to a brain all the vitality of which had fled to the tongue.
Thus he never tired of denouncing as a sacrilege any deviation from the
old French protective system. When a minister of Louis Philippe, he
railed at railways as a wild chimera ; and when in opposition under
Louis Bonaparte, he branded as a profanation every attempt to reform
the rotten French army system. Never in his long political career has he
been guilty of a single—even the smallest—measure of any practical use.
Thiers was consistent only in his greed for wealth and his hatred
of the men that produce it. Having entered his first ministry under
Louis Philippe poor as Job, he left it a millionaire. His last ministry
under the same king (of the 1st of March, 1840) exposed him to
public taunts of peculation in the Chamber of Deputies, to which
he was content to reply by tears—a commodity he deals in as freely
as Jules Favre, or any other crocodile. At Bordeaux his first measure
for saving France from impending financial ruin was to endow himself
with three millions a year, the first and the last word of the " Economical
Eepublic," the vista of which he had opened to his Paris electors in 1869.
One of his former colleagues of the Chamber of Deputies of 1830, himself
a capitalist and, nevertheless, a devoted member of the Paris Commune,
M. Beslay, lately addressed Thiers thus in a public placard :—" The
enslavement of labour by capital has always been the corner-stone of your
8
policy, and from the very day you saw the Republic of Labour installed
at the Hôtel de Ville, you have never ceased to cry out to France : ' These
are criminals ! A master in small state roguery, a virtuoso in perjury
and treason, a craftsman in all the petty stratagems, cunning devices, and
base perfidies of Parliamentary party-warfare ; never scrupling, when out
of office, to fan a revolution, and to stifle it in blood when at the helm
of the State ; with class prejudices standing him in the place of ideas,
and vanity in the place of a heart ; his private life as infamous as his
public life is odious—even now, when playing the part of a French
Sulla, he cannot help setting off the abomination of his deeds by the
ridicule of his ostentation.
The capitulation of Paris, by surrendering to Prussia not only Paris,
but all France, closed the loDg-continued intrigues of treason with the
enemy, which the usurpers of the 4th September had begun, as Trochu
himself said, on that very same day. On the other hand, it initiated the
civil war they were now to wage, with the assistance of Prussia, against
the Republic and Paris. The trap was laid in the very terms of the
capitulation. At that time above one-third of the territory was in the
hands of the enemy, the capital was cut off from the provinces, all com¬
munications were disorganized. To elect under such circumstances a
real representation of France was impossible, unless ample time were
given for preparation. In view of this, the capitulation stipulated that a
National Assembly must be elected within eight days ; so that in many
parts of France the news of the impending election arrived on its eve
only. This Assembly, moreover, was, by an express clause of the capitula¬
tion, to be elected for the sole purpose of deciding on peace or war, and,
eventually, to conclude a treaty of peace. The population could not but
feel that the terms of the armistice rendered the continuation of the war
impossible, and that for sanctioning the peace imposed by Bismarck, the
worst men in France were the best. But not content with these pre¬
cautions, Thiers, even before the secret of the armistice had been
broached to Paris, set out for an electioneering tour through the
provinces, there to galvanize back into life the Legitimist party,
whioh now, along with the Orleanists, had to take the place of the
then impossible Bonapartists. He was not afraid of them. Impossible
as a government of modern France, and, therefore, contemptible as
rivals, what party were more eligible as tools of counter-revolution
than the party whose action, in the words of Thiers himself (Chamber of
Deputies, 5th January, 1833), " had always been confined to the three
resources of foreign invasion, civil war, and anarchy"? They verily
believed in the advent of their long-expected retrospective millennium.
There were the heels of foreign invasion trampling upon France; there
was the downfall of an Empire, and the captivity of a Bonaparte ; and
there they were themselves. The wheel of history had evidently rolled
back to stop at the "chambre introuvable" of 1816. lu the Assemblies
of the Republic, 1848 to '51, they had been represented by their educated
and trained Parliamentary champions ; it was the rank-and-file of the
party which now rushed in—all the Pourceangnacs of France.
As soon as this assembly of " Rurals " had met at Bordeaux, Thiers
9
made it cleat to them that the peace preliminaries must be assented to at
once, without even the honours of a Parliamentary debate, as the only
condition on which Prussia would permit them to open the war against
the Eepublic and Paris, its stronghold. The counter revolution had, in
fact, no time to lose. The Second Empire had more than doubled the
national debt, and plunged all the large towns into heavy municipal debts.
The war had fearfully swelled the liabilities, and mercilessly ravaged the
resources of the nation. To complete the ruin, the Prussian Shylock was
there with his bond for the keep of half a million of his soldiers on
French soil, his indemnity of five milliards, and interest at 5 per cent, on
the unpaid instalments thereof. Who was to pay the bill ? It was only
by the violent overthrow of the Eepublic that the appropriators of wealth
could hope to shift on to the shoulders of its producers the cost of a war
which they, the appropriators, had themselves originated. Thus, the
immense ruin of France spurred on these patriotic representatives of land
and capital, under the very eyes and patronage of the invader, to graft
upon the foreign war a civil war—a slaveholders' rebellion.
There stood in the way of this conspiracy one great obstacle—Paris.
To disarm Paris was the first condition of success. Paris was therefore sum¬
moned by Thiers to surrender its arms. Then Paris was exasperated by the
frantic anti-republican demonstrations of the " Eural " Assembly and by
Thief's own equivocations about the legal status of the Eepublic ; by the
threat to decapitate and decapitalize Paris ; the appointment of Orleanist
ambassadors ; Dufaure's laws on over-due commercial bills and house-rents,
inflicting ruin on the commerce and industry of Paris ; Pouyer-Quertier's
tax of two centimes upon every copy of every imaginable publication ; the
sentences of death against Blanqui and Flourens ; the suppression of the
Eepublican journals ; the transfer of the National Assembly to Versailles ;
the renewal of the state of siege declared by Palikao, and expired on the
4th of September ; the appointment of Vinoy, the Décsmbriseur, as
governor of Paris—of Valentin, the Imperialist gendarme, as its prefect
of pQlice—and of D'Aurelles de Paladine, the Jesuit general, as the
commander-in-chief of its National Guard.
And now we have to address a question to M. Thiers and the men of
national defence, his understrappers. It is known that, through the
agency of M. Pouyer Quertier, his finance minister, Thiers had contracted
a loan of two milliards. Now, is it true, or not,—
1. That the business was so managed that a consideration of several
hundred millions was secured for the private benefit of Thiers, Jules
Favre, Ernest Picard, Pouyer-Quertier, and Jules Simon 1 and—
2. That no money wa3 to be paid down until after the " pacification "
of Paris 1
At all events, there must have been something very pressing in the
matter, for Thiers and Jules Favre, in the name of the majority of the
Bordeaux Assembly, unblushingly solicited the immediate occupation of
Paris by Prussian troops. Such, however, was not the game of
Bismarck, as he sneeringly, and in public, told the admiring Frankfort
Philistines on hia return to Germany.
10
II.
Armed Paris was the only serious obstacle in the way of the counter¬
revolutionary conspiracy. Paris was, therefore, to be disarmed. On
this point the Bordeaux Assembly was sincerity itself. If the roaring
rant of its Rurals had 'not been audible enough, the surrender of
Paris by Thiers to the tender mercies of the triumvirate of Yinoy the
Décembriseur, Valentin the Bonapartist gendarme, and Aurelles de
Paladine the Jesuit general, would have cut off even the last subterfuge
of doubt. But while insultingly exhibiting the true purpose of the dis¬
armament of Paris, the conspirators asked her to lay down her arms on
a pretext which was the most glaring, the most barefaced of lies.
The artillery of the Paris National Guard, said Thiers, belonged to the
State, and to the State it must be returned. The fact was this :—From
the very day of the capitulation, by which Bismarck's prisoners had
signed the surrender of France, but reserved to themselves a numerous
body-guard for the express purpose of cowing Paris, Paris stood on the
watch. The National Guard reorganized themselves and intrusted their
supreme control to a Central Committee elected by their whole body, save
some fragments of the old Bonapartist formations. On the eve of the
entrance of the Prussians into Paris, the Central Committee took mea¬
sures for the removal to Montmartre, Belleville, and La Villette of the
cannon and mitrailleuses treacherously abandoned by the capitulards in
and about the very quarters the Prussians were to occupy. That artillery
had been furnished by the subscriptions of the National Guard. As
their private property, it was officially recognized in the capitulation of
the 28th of January, and on that very title exempted from the general
surrender, into the hands of the conqueror, of arms belonging to the
Government. And Thiers was so utterly destitute of even the flimsiest
pretext for initiating the war against Paris, that he had to resort to the
flagrant lie of the artillery of the National Guard being State property !
The seizure of her artillery was evidently but to serve as the pre¬
liminary to the general disarmament of Paris, and, therefore, of the
Revolution of the 4th of September. But that Revolution had become
the legal status of France. The republic, its work, was recognized by
the conqueror in the terms of the capitulation. After the capitulation,
it was acknowledged by all the foreign Powers, and in its name the
National Assembly had been summoned. The Paris working men's
revolution of the 4th of September was the only legal title of the
National Assembly seated at Bordeaux, and of its executive. Without it,
the National Assembly would at once have to give way to the Corps
Législatif, elected in 1869 by universal suffrage under French, not under
Prussian, rule, and forcibly dispersed by the arm of the Revolution.
11
Thiers and his ticket-of-leaye men would have had to capitulate for safe-
conducts signed by Louis Bonaparte, to save them from a voyage to
Cayenne. The National Assembly, with its power of attorney to settle
the terms of peace with Prussia, was but an incident of that Revolution,
the true embodiment of which was still armed Paris, which had initiated
it, undergone for it a five months' siege, with its horrors of famine, and
made her prolonged resistance, despite Trochu's plan, the basis of an
obstinate war of defence in the provinces. And Paris was now either to
lay down her arms at the insulting behest of the rebellious slaveholders of
Bordeaux, and acknowledge that her Revolution of the 4th of September
meant nothing but a simple transfer of power from Louis Bonaparte to
his Royal rivals ; or she had to stand forward as the self-sacrificing
champion of Prance, whose salvation from ruin, and whose regeneration
were impossible, without the revolutionary overthrow of the political and
social conditions that had engendered the second Empire, and, under its
fostering care, matured into utter rottenness. Paris, emaciated by a
five months' famine, did not hesitate one moment. She heroically resolved
to run all the hazards of a resistance against the French conspirators,
even with Prussian cannon frowning upon her from her own forts. Still,
in its abhorrence of the civil war into which Paris was to be goaded, the
Central Committee continued to persist in a merely defensive attitude,
despite the provocations of the Assembly, the usurpations of the
Executive, and the menacing concentration of troops in and around
Paris.
Thiers opened the civil war by sending Vinoy, at the head of a multi¬
tude of sergents-de-ville and some regiments of the line, upon a nocturnal
expedition against Montmartre, there to seize, by surprise, the artillery of
the National Guard. It is well known how this attempt broke down
before the resistance of the National Guard and the fraternization of the
line with the people. Aurelles de Paladine had printed beforehand his
bulletin of victory, and Thiers held ready the placards announcing his
measures of coup d'etat. Now these had to be replaced by Thiers' appeals,
imparting his magnanimous resolve to leave the National Guard in the
possession of their arms, with which, he said, he felt sure they would rally
round the Government against the rebels. Out of 300,000 National
Guards only 300 responded to this summons to rally round little Thiers
against themselves. The glorious working men's Revolution of the 18th
March took undisputed sway of Paris. The Central Committee was
its provisional Government. Europe seemed, for a moment, to doubt
whether its recent sensational performances of slate and war had any
reality in them, or whether they were the dreams of a long bygone past.
From the 18th of March to the entrance of the Versailles troops into
Paris, the proletarian revolution remained so free from the acts of
violence in which the revolutions, and still more the counter-revolutions,
of the " better classes" abound, that no facts were left to its opponents to
cry out about, but the execution of Generals Lecomte and Clement
Thomas, and the affair of the Place Vendôme.
One of the Bonapartist officers engaged in the nocturnal attempt against
Montmartre, General Lecomte, had four times ordered the 81st line
12
regiment to fire at an unarmed gathering in the Place Pigale, and on their
refusal fiercely insulted them. Instead of shooting women and children,
his own men shot him. The inveterate habits acquired by the soldiery
under the training of the enemies of the working class are, of course, not
likely to change the very moment these soldiers change sides. The same
men executed Clement Thomas.
"General" Clement Thomas, a malcontent ex-quartermaster-sergeant,
had, in the latter times of Louis Philippe's reign, enlisted at the office of
the Eepublican newspaper Le National, there to serve in the double
capacity of responsible man-of-straw (gérant responsable) and of duelling
bully to that very combative journal. After the revolution of February,
the men of the National having got into power, they metamorphosed this
old quartermaster-sergeant into a general on the eve of the butchery of
June, of which he, like Jules Favre, was one of the sinister plotters, and
became one of the most dastardly executioners. Then he and his general¬
ship disappeared for a long time, to again rise to the surface on the 1st
November, 1870. The day before the Government of Defence, caught at
the Hôtel de Ville, had solemnly pledged their parole to Blanqui, Flourens,
and other representatives of the working class, to abdicate their usurped
power into the hands of a commune to be freely elected by Paris. Instead
of keeping their word, they let loose on Paris the Bretons of Trochu, who
now replaced the Corsicans of Bonaparte. General Tamisier alone,
refusing to sully his namo by such a breach of faith, resigned the com-
mandership-in-chief of the National Guard, and in his place Clement
Thomas for once became again a general. During the whole of his tenure
of command, he made war, not upon the Prussians, but upon the Paris
National Guard. He prevented their general armament, pitted the
bourgeois battalions against the working men's battalions, weeded out the
officers hostile to Trochu's " plan," and disbanded, under the stigma of
cowardice, the very same proletarian battalions whose heroism has now
astonished their most inveterate enemies. Clement Thomas felt quite
proud of having reconquered his June pre-eminence as the personal
enemy of the working class of Paris. Only a few days before the 18th of
March, he laid before the War Minister, Leflô, a plan of his own for
"finishing off la fine fleur [the cream] of the Paris canaille." After Vinoy's
rout, he must needs appear upon the scene of action in the quality of an
amateur spy. The Central Committee and the Paris working men were
as much responsible for the killing of Clement Thomas and Lecomte as
the Princess of Wales was for the fate of the people crushed to death on
the day of her entrance into London.
The massacre of unarmed citizens in the Place Vendôme is a myth
which M. Thiers and the Burals persistently ignored in the Assembly,
intrusting its propagation exclusively to the servants' hall of European
journalism. " The men of order," the reactionists of Paris, trembled at
the victory of the 18th of March. To them it was the signal of popular
retribution at last arriving. The ghosts of the victims assassinated at
their hands from the days of June, 1848, down to the 22nd of January,
1871, arose before their faces. Their panic was their only punishment.
Even the sergents-de-ville, instead of being disarmed and locked up, as
13
ought to have been done, had the gates of Paris flung wide open for their
safe retreat to Versailles. The men of order were left not only un¬
harmed, but allowed to rally and quietly to seize more than one stronghold
in the very centre of Paris. This indulgence of the Central Committee—
this magnanimity of the armed working men—so strangely at variance
with the habits of the " party of order," the latter misinterpreted as mere
symptoms of conscious weakness. Hence their silly plan to try, under
the cloak of an unarmed demonstration, what Vinoy had failed to perform
with his cannon and mitrailleuses. On the 22nd of March a riotous mob
of swelb started from the quarters of luxury, all the petits crevés in their
ranks, and at their head the notorious familiars of the Empire—the
Heeckeren, Coëtlogon, Henri de Pêne, &c. Under the cowardly pretence
of a pacific demonstration, this rabble, secretly armed with the weapons
of the bravo, fell into marching order, ill-treated and disarmed the
detached patrols and sentries of the National Guards they met with on
their progress, and, on debouching from the Rue de la Paix, with the cry
of " Down with the Central Committee ! Down with the assassins ! The
National Assembly for ever ! "attempted to break through the line drawn
up there, and thus to carry by a surprise the head-quarters of the National
Guard in the Place Vendôme. In reply to their pistol-shots, the regular
sommations (the French equivalent of the Eoglish Riot Act) were made,
and, proving ineffective, fire was commanded by the general of the
National Guard. One volley dispersed into wild flight the silly cox¬
combs, who expected that the mere exhibition of their " respectability "
would have the same effect upon the Revolution of Paris a3 Joshua's
trumpets upon the walls of Jericho. The runaways left behind them two
National Guards killed, nine severely wounded (among them a
member of the Central Committee), and the whole scene of their
exploit strewn with revolvers, daggers, and sword-canes, in evidence
of the "unarmed" character of their "pacific" demonstration.
When, on the 13th of June, 1849, the National Guard made a
really pacific demonstration in protest against the felonious assault
of French troops upon Rome, ChaDgarnier, then general of the party
of order, was acclaimed by the National Assembly, and especially by
M. Thiers, a3 the saviour of society, for having launched his troops from
all sides upon these unarmed men, to shoot and sabre them down, and to
trample them under their horses' feet. Paris, then, was placed under a
state of siege. Dufaure hurried through the Assembly new laws of repres¬
sion. New arrests, new proscriptions—a new reign of terror set in. But
the lower orders manage these things otherwise. The Central Committee
of 1871 simply ignored the heroes of the " pacific demonstration so
much so, that only two days later they were enabled to muster, under
Admiral Saisset, for that armed demonstration, crowned by the famous
stampede to Versailles. In their reluctance to continue the civil war
opened by Thiers' burglarious attempt on Montmartre, the Central
Committee made themselves, this time, guilty of a decisive mistake in not
at once marching upon Versailles, then completely helpless, and thus
putting an end to the conspiracies of Thiers and his Rurals. Instead of
this, the party of order was again allowed to try its strength at the ballot-
14
box, on the 26th of March, the day of the election of the Commune. Then,
in the mairies of Paris, they exchanged bland words of conciliation with
their too generous conquerors, muttering in their hearts solemn tows
to exterminate them in due time.
Now, look at the reverse of the medal. Thiers opened his second cam¬
paign against Paris in the beginning of April. The first batch of Parisian
prisoners brought into Versailles was subjected to revolting atrocities,
while Ernest Picard, with his hands in his trousers' pockets, strolled
about jeering them, and while Mesdames Thiers and Favre, in the midst
of their ladies of honour (?) applauded, from the balcony, the outrages of
the Versailles mob. The captured soldiers of the line were massacred in
cold blood ; our brave friend, General Duval, the ironfounder, was shot
without any form of trial. Gallifet, the kept man of his wife, so notorious
for her shameless exhibitions at the orgies of the Second Empirp, boasted
in a proclamation of having commanded the murder of a small troop of
National Guards, with their captain and lieutenant, surprised and dis¬
armed by his Chasseurs. Vinoy, the runaway, was appointed by Thiers
Grand Cross of the Légion of Honour, for his general order to shoot down
every soldier of the line taken in the ranks of the Federals. Desmarêt,
the gendarme, was decorated for the treacherous butcher like chopping
in pieces of the highsouled and chivalrous Flourens, who had saved the
heads of the Government of Defence on the 31st of October, 1870. " The
encouraging particulars" of his assassination were triumphantly expa¬
tiated upon by Thiers in the National Assembly. With the elated vanity
of a parliamentary Tom Thumb, permitted to play the part of a Tamerlane,
he denied the rebels against his littleness every right of civilized warfare,
up to the right of neutrality for ambulances. Nothing more horrid than
that monkey allowed for a time to give full fliDg to his tigerish instincts,
as foreseen by Voltaire. (See note, p. 35.)
After the decree of the Commune of the 7 th April, ordering reprisals and
declaring it to be its duty " to protect Paris against the cannibal exploits
of the Versailles banditti, and to demand an eye for an eye, a tooth for a
tooth," Thiers did not stop the barbarous treatment of prisoners, more¬
over insulting them in his bulletins as follows :—" Never have more
degraded countenances of a degraded democracy met the afflicted gazes of
honest men,"—honest like Thiers himself and his ministerial ticket-of-leave
men. Still the shooting of prisoners was suspended for a time. Hardly,
however, had Thiers and his Decembrist generals become aware that the
Communal decree of reprisals was but an empty threat, that even their
gendarme spies caught in Paris under the disguise of National Guards,
that even sergents-de-ville taken with incendiary shells upon them, were
spared,—when the wholesale shooting of prisoners was resumed and
carried on uninterruptedly to the end. Houses to which National Guards
had fled were surrounded by gendarmes, inundated with petroleum
(which here occurs for the first time in this war), and then set fire to, the
charred corpses being afterwards brought out by the ambulance of the
Press at the Ternes. Four National Guards having surrendered to a
troop of mounted Chasseurs at Belle Epine, on the 25th of AprH, were
afterwards shot down, one after another, by the captain, a worthy man of
15
Gallifet's. One of his four victims, left for dead, Scheffer, crawled back
to the Parisian outposts, and deposed to thb fact before a commission
of the Commune. When Tolain interpellated the War Minister upon the
report of this commission, the Eurals drowned his voice and forbade Leflô
to answer. It would be an insult to their " glorious " army to speak of
its deeds. The flippant tone in which Thiers' bulletins announced the
bayoneting of the Federals surprised asleep at Moulin Saquet, aDd the
wholesale fusillades at Ciamart shocked the nerves even of the not over¬
sensitive London Times. But it would be ludicrous to-day to attempt
recounting the merely preliminary atrocities committed by the bombarders
of Paris and the fomenters of a slaveholders' rebellion protected by foreign
invasion. Amidst all these horrors, Thiers, forgetful of his parliamentary
laments on the terrible responsibility weighing down his dwarfish shoulders,
boasts in his bulletins that l'Assemblée siège paisiblement (the Assembly
continues meeting in peace), and proves by his constant carousals, now
with Decembrist generals, now with German princes, that his digestion is
not troubled in the least, not even by the ghosts of Lecomte and Clement
Thomas.
III.
On the dawn of the 18th of March, Paris arose to the thunderburst of
" Vive la Commune ! " What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalizing
to the bourgeois mind ?
" The proletarians of Paris," said the Central Committee in its mani¬
festo of the 18th March, " amidst the failures and treasons of the ruliDg
classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the
situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs.
. . . . They have understood that it is their imperious duty and their
absolute right to render themselves masters of their own destinies, by
seizing upon the governmental power." But the working class cannot
simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its
own purposes.
The centralized State power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing
army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature—organs wrought after
the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labour,—originates from
the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle-class society as a
mighty weapon in its struggles against feudalism. Still, its development
remained clogged by all manner of mediœval rubbish, seignorial rights,
local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies and provincial constitu¬
tions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the eighteenth
century swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simul¬
taneously the social soil of its last hindrances to the superstructure of the
modern State edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of
the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France.
During the subsequent regimes the Government, placed under parlia-
16
mentary control—that is, under the direct control of the propertied
classes—became not only a hotbed of huge national debts and crushing
taxes ; with its irresistible allurements of place, pelf, and patronage, it
became not only the bone of contention between the rival factions and
adventurers of the ruling classes ; but its political character changed
simultaneously with the economic changes of society. At the same pace
at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified
the class-antagonism between capital and labour, the State power assumed
more and more the character of the national power of capital over
labour, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of
class despotism. After every revolution marking a progressive phase in
the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the State power
stands out in bolder and bolder relief. The Revolution of 1830, resulting
in the transfer of Government from the landlords to the capitalists,
transferred it from the more remote to the more direct antagonists of the
working men. The bourgeois Republicans, who, in the name of the
Revolution of February, took the State power, used it for the June mas¬
sacres, in order to convince the working class that "social" republic
meant the republic ensuring their social subjection, and in order to
convince the royalist bulk of the bourgeois and landlord class that they
might- safely leave the cares and emoluments of government to the
bourgeois "Republicans." However, after their one heroic exploit of
June, the bourgeois Republicans had, from the front, to fall back to the
rear of the " Party of Order "—a combination formed by all the rival
fractions and factions of the appropriating class in their now openly
declared antagonism to the producing classes. The proper form of their
joint-stock Government was the Parliamentary Republic, with Louis
Bonaparte for its President. Theirs was a régime of avowed class
terrorism and deliberate insult towards the " vile multitude." If the
Parliamentary Republic, as M. Thiers said, " divided them [the different
fractions of tbe ruling class] least," it opened an abyss between that class
and the whole body of society outside their spare ranks. The restraints
by which their own divisions had under former régimes still checked the
State power, were removed by their union ; and in view of the threatening
upheaval of the proletariate, they now used that State power mercilessly
and ostentatiously as the national war-engine of capital against labour.
In their uninterrupted crusade against the producing masses they were,
however, bound not only to invest the executive with continually
increased powers of repression, but at the same time to divest their own
parliamentary stronghold—the National Assembly—one by one, of all
its own means of defence against the Executive. The Executive, in the
person of Louis Bonaparte, turned them out. The natural offspring of the
" Party-of Order" Republic was the Second Empire.
The Empire, with the coup d'état for its certificate of birth, universal
suffrage for its sanction, and the sword for its sceptre, professed to reBt
upon the peasantry, the large mass of producers not directly involved in
the struggle of capital and labour. It professed to save the working
class by breaking down Parliamentarism, and, with it, the undisguised
subserviency of Government to the propertied classes. It professed to
17
save the propertied classes by upholding their economic supremacy over
the -working class ; and, finally, it professed to unite all classes by reviving
for all the chimera of national glory. In reality, it was the only form of
government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and
theworking class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruliDg the nation. It
was acclaimed throughout the world as the saviour of society. Under its
sway, bourgeois society, freed from political cares, attained a development
unexpected even by itself. Its industry and commerce expanded to
colossal dimensions ; financial swindling celebrated cosmopolitan orgies ;
the misery of the masses was set off by a shameless display of gorgeous,
meretricious, and debased luxury. Tne State power, apparently soaring
high above society, was at the same time itself the greatest scandal of that
society and the very hot-bed of all its corruptions. Its own rottenness,
and the rottenness of the society it had saved, were laid bare by the
bayonet of Prussia, herself eagerly bent upon transferring the supreme
seat of that régime from Paris to Berlin. Imperialism is, at the same
time, the most prostitute and the ultimate form of the State power which
nascent middle-class society had commenced to elaborate as a means of
its own emancipation from feudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois
society had finally transformed into a means for the enslavement of labour
by capital.
The direct antithesis to the Empire was the Commune. The cry of
" Social Bepublic," with which the revolution of February was ushered
in by the Paris proletariate, did but express a vague aspiration after a
Bepublic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class-
rule, but class-rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that
Bepublic.
Paris, the central seat of the old governmental power, and, at the same
time, the social stronghold of the French working class, had risen in arms
against the attempt of Thiers and the Eurals to restore and perpetuate
that old governmental power bequeathed to them by the Empire. Paris
could resist only because, in consequence of the siege, it had got rid of
the army, and replaced it by a National Guard, the bulk of which con¬
sisted of working men. This fact was now to be transformed into an
institution. The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the
suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the
armed people.
The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by
universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and
revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally
working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The
Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and
legislative at the same time. Instead of continuing to be the agent of the
Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attri¬
butes, and turned into the responsible and at all times revocable agent of
the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the Administra¬
tion. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service
had to be done at ivorlcmeris wages. The vested interests and the repre¬
sentation allowances of the high dignitaries of State disappeared along
18
with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be
the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only
municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by
the State was laid into the hands of the Commune.
Having once got rid of the standing army and the police, the physical
force elements of the old Government, the Commune was anxious to break
the spiritual force of repression, the "parson-power," by the disestablishment
and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies. The priests were
sent back to the recesses of private life, there to feed upon the alms of the
faithful in imitation of their predecessors, the Apostles. The whole of
the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and
at the same time cleared of all interference of Church and State. Thus,
not only wa3 education made accessible to all, but science itself freed
from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed
upon it.
The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence
which had but served to mask their abject subserviency to all succeeding
governments to which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of
allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were
to be elective, responsible, and revocable.
The Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great
industrial .centres of France. The communal régime once established
in Paris and the secondary centres, the old centralized Govern¬
ment would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-
government of the producers. In a rough sketch of national organiza¬
tion which the Commune had no time to develop, it stages clearly that the
Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country
hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be
replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service.
The rural communes of every district were to administer their common
affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district
assemblies were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in
Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the
mandat impératif (formal instructions) of his constituents. The few but
important functions which still would remain for a central govern¬
ment were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally mis stated,
but were to be discharged by Communal, and therefore strictly responsible
agents. The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the con¬
trary, to be organized by the Communal constitution, and to become a
reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the
embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation
itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence. While the merely
repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated,
its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping
pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of
society. Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of
the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal
suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual
suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and
19
managers in his business. And it is well known that companies, like
individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right
man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it
promptly. On the other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the
spirit of the Commune than to supersede universal suffrage by hierarchic
investiture.
It is generally the fate of completelynewhistorical creations to be mistaken
for the counterpart of olderand even defunct forms of sociallife, to which they
may bear a certain likeness. Thus, this new Commune, which breaks the
modern State power, has been mistaken for a reproduction of the mediœval
Communes, which first preceded, and afterwards became the substratum of,
that very State power.—The communal constitution has been mistaken
for an attempt to break up into a federation of small States, as dreamt of
by Montesquieu and the Girondins, that unity of great nations which, if
originally brought about by political force, has now become a powerful
coefficient of social production.—The antagonism of the Commune against
the State power has been mistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient
struggle against over-centralization. Peculiar historical circumstances
may have prevented the classical development, as in France, of the bour¬
geois form of government, and may have allowed, as in England, to com¬
plete the great central State organs by corrupt vestries, jobbing councillors,
and ferocious poor-law guardians in the towns, and virtually hereditary
magistrates in the counties. The Communal Constitution would have
restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the State
parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society. By
this one act it would have initiated the regeneration of France.—The
provincial French middle-class saw in the Commune an attempt to restore
the sway their order had held over the country under Louis Philippe, and
which, under Louis Napoleon, was supplanted by the pretended rule of
the country over the towns. In reality, the Communal Constitution
brought the rural producers under the intellectual lead of the central towns
of their districts, and there secured to them, in the working men, the
natural trustees of their interests.—The very existence of the Commune
involved, as a matter of course, local municipal liberty, but no longer as a
check upon the, now superseded, State power. It could only enter into
the head of a Bismarck, who, when not engaged on his intrigues of blood
and iron, always likes to resume his old trade, so befitting his mental
calibre, of contributor to Kladderadatsch (the Berlin Punch)l it could only
enter into such a head, to ascribe to the Paris Commune aspirations after
that caricature of the old French municipal organization of 1791, the
Prussian municipal constitution which degrades the town governments to
mere secondary wheels in the police-machinery of the Prussian State.—The
Commune made that catchword of bourgeois revolutions, cheap govern¬
ment, a reality, by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure—
the standing army and State functionarism. Its very existence pre¬
supposed the non-existence of monarchy, which, in Europe at least, is the
normal incumbrance and indispensable cloak of class-rule. It supplied
the Republic with the basis of really democratic institutions. But neither
«heap government nor the "true Republic" was its ultimate aim; they
were its mere concomitants.
20
The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been
subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their
favour, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all
previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true
secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government, the
produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class,
the political form at last discovered under which to work out the econo¬
mical emancipation of Labour.
Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have
been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer
cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune
was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations
upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule.
With labour emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and
productive labour ceases to be a class attribute.
It is a strange fact. In spite of all the tall talk and all the immense
literature, for the last sixty years, about Emancipation of Labour, no
sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own
hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of
the mouthpieces of present society with its two poles of Capital and
Wages-slavery (the landlord now is but the sleeping partner of the
capitalist), as if capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgin
innocence, with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions
still unexploded, with its prostitute realities not yet laid bare. The
Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all
civilization ! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that
class-property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few.
It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make
individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land
and capita], now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labour, into
mere instruments of free and associated labour.—But this is Communism,
" impossible" Communism ! Why, those members of the ruling classes
who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the
present system—and they are many—have become the obtrusive and full-
mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative production
is not to remain a sham and a snare ; if it is to supersede the Capi¬
talist system ; if united eo operative societies are to regulate national
production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control,
and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions
which are the fatality of Capitalist production—what else, gentlemen, would
it be but.Communism, " possible" Communism 1
The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They
bave no ready-made Utopias to introduce par décret du peuple. They
know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with
it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its
own economical agencies, they will have to pass through loDg struggles,
through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and
men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the
new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.
21
In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic
resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse
invective of the gentlemen's gentlemen with the pen and inkhorn, and at
the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring
forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone
of scientific infallibility.
When the Paris Commune took the management of the revolution in
its own hands ; when plain working men for the first time dared to infringe
upon the Governmental privilege of their " natural superiors," and, under
circumstances of unexampled difficulty, performed their work modestly,
conscientiously, and efficiently,—performed it at salaries the highest of
which barely amounted to one-fifth of what, according to high scientific
authority, is the minimum required for a secretary to a certain metro¬
politan school-board,—the old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the
sight of the Red Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labour, floating over
the Hôtel de Viile.
And yet, this was the first revolution in which the working class was
openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative, even
by the great bulk of the Paris middle class—shopkeepers, tradesmen,
merchants—the wealthy capitalists alone excepted. The Commune had
saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever-recurring cause of dis¬
pute among the middle classes themselves — the debtor and creditor
accounts. The same portion of the middle class, after they had assisted
in putting down the working men's insurrection of June, 1848, had been
at once unceremoniously sacrificed to their creditors by the then Con¬
stituent Assembly. But this was not their only motive for now rallying
round the working class. They felt that there was but one alternative—
the Commune, or the Empire—under whatever name it might reappear.
The Empire had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of
public wealth, by the wholesale financial swindling it fostered, by the
ptops it lent to the artificially accelerated centralization of capital, and
the concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed
them politically, it had shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted
their Voltairianism by handing over the education of their children to
the frères Ignorantins, it had revolted their national feeling as Frenchmen
by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one equivalent
for the ruins it made—the disappearance of the Empire. In fact, after
the exodus from Paris of the high Bonapartist and capitalist Bohême, the
true middle-class Party of Order came out in the shape of the "Union
Républicaine," enrolling themselves under the colours of the Commune
and defending it against the wilful misconstruction of Thiers. Whether
the gratitude of this great body of the middle class will stand the present
severe trial, time must show.
The Commune was perfectly right in telling the peasants that "its
victory was their only hope." Of all the lies hatched at Versailles and
re-echoed by the glorious European penny-a-liner, one of the most tremen¬
dous was that the Rurals represented the French peasantry. Think only
of the love of the French peasant for the men to whom, after 1815, he had
to pay the milliard of indemnity ! In the eyes of the French peasant,
22
the very existence of a great landed proprietor is in itself an encroach¬
ment on his conquests of 1780. The bourgeois, in 1848, had burthened
his plot of land with the additional tax of forty-five cents, in the franc ;
but then he did so in the name of the revolution ; while now he had
fomented a civil war against the revolution, to shift on to the peasant's
shoulders the chief load of the five milliards of indemnity to be paid to
the Prussian. The Commune, on the other hand, in one of its first pro¬
clamations, declared that the true originators of the war would be made
to pay its cost. The Commune would have delivered the peasant of the
blood tax,—would have given him a cheap government,—transformed his
present blood-suckers, the notary, advocate, executor, and other judicial
vampires, into salaried communal agents, elected by, and responsible to,
himself. It would have freed him of the tyranny of the garde champêtre,
the gendarme, and the prefect ; would have put enlightenment by tho
schoolmaster in the place of stultification by the priest. And the French
peasant is, above all, a man of reckoning. He would find it extremely
reasonable that the pay of the priest, instead of being extorted by the
tax-gatherer, should only depend upon the spontaneous action of the
parishioners' religious instincts. Such were th9 great immediate boons
which the rule of the Commune—and that rule alone—held out to the
French peasantry. It is, therefore, quite superfluous here to expatiate
upon the more complicated but vital problems which the Commune alone
was able, and at the same time compelled, to solve in favour of the
peasant, viz., the hypothecary debt, lying like an incubus upon his parcel
of soil, the prolétariat foncier (the rural proletariate), daily growing upon
it, and his expropriation from it enforced, at a more and more rapid rate,
by the very development of modern agriculture and the competition of
capitalist farming.
The French peasant had elected Louis Bonaparte president of the
Republic ; but the Party of Order created the Empire. What the French
peasant really wants he commenced to show in 1849 and 1850, by oppos¬
ing his maire to the Government's prefect, his schoolmaster to the
Government's priest, and himself to the Government's gendarme. All
the laws made by the party of order in January and February, 1850, were
avowed measures of repression against the peasant. The peasant was a
Bonapartist, because the great Revolution, with all its benefits to him,
was, in his eyes, personified in Napoleon. This delusion, rapidly breaking
down under the Second Empire (and in its very nature hostile to the
Rurals), this prejudice of the past, how could it have withstood the appeal
of the Commune to the living interests and urgent wants of the
peasantry ?
The Rurals—this was, in fact, their chief apprehension—knew that three
months' free communication of Communal Paris with the provinces would
bring about a general rising of the peasants, and hence their anxiety to
establish a police blockade around Paris, so as to stop the spread of the
rinderpest.
If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy
elements of French society, and therefore the truly national Government,
it was, at the same time, as a working men's Government, as the bold
23
champion of the emancipation of labour, emphatically international.
Within sight of the Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two
French provinces, the Commune annexed to France the working people
all over the world.
The Second Empire had been the jubilee of cosmopolitan blackleggism,
the rakes of all countries rushing in at its call for a share in its orgies
and in the plunder of the French people. Even at this moment the right
hand of Thiers is Ganesco, the foul Wallachian, and his left hand is
Markowski, the Russian spy. The Commune admitted all foreigners to
the honour of dying for an immortal cause. Between the foreign war lost
by their treason, and the civil war fomented by their conspiracy with the
foreign invader, the bourgeoisie had found the time to display their
patriotism by organizing police-hunts upon the Germans in France. The
Commune made a German working-man its minister of labour. Thiers, the
bourgeoisie, the Second Empire, had continually deluded Poland by loud
professions of sympathy, while in reality betraying her to, and doing the
dirty work of, Russia. The Commune honoured the heroic sons of Poland
by placing them at the head of the defenders of Paris. And, to broadly
mark the new era of history it was conscious of initiating, under the eyes
of the conquering Prussians on the one side, and of the Bonapartist
army, led by Bonapartist generals, on the other, the Commune pulled
down that colossal symbol of martial glory, the Vendôme column.
The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence.
Its special measures could but betoken the tendency of a government of
the people by the people. Such were the abolition of the nightwork of
journeymen bakers; the prohibition, under penalty, of the employers'
practice to reduce wages by levying upon their workpeople fines under
manifold pretexts,—a process in which the employer combines in his own
person the parts of~legislator, judge, and executor, and filches the money
to boot. Another measure of this class was the surrender, to associations
of workmen, under reserve of compensation, of all closed workshops and
factories, no matter whether the respective capitalists had absconded or
preferred to strike work.
The financial measures of the Commune, remarkable for their sagacity
and moderation, could only be such as were compatible with the state of
a besieged town. Considering the colossal robberies committed upon the
city of Paris by the great financial companies and contractors, under the
protection of HaussmanD, the Commune would have had an incomparably
better title to confiscate their property than Loui3 Napoleon had against
the Orleans family. The Hohenzollern and the English oligarchs who both
have derived a good deal of their estates from Church plunder, were, of
course, greatly shocked at the Commune clearmg but 8,000f. out of
secularisation.
While the Versailles Government, as soon as it had recovered some
spirit and strength, used the most violent means against the Commune
while it put down the free expression of opinion all over France, even to
the forbidding of meetings of delegates from the large towns ; while it
subjected Versailles and the rest of France to an espionage far surpassing
that of the Second Empire ; while it burned by its gendarme inquisitors
24
all pipers printed at Paris, and sifted all correspondence from and to Paris;
while in the National Assembly the most timid attempts to put in a word
for Paris were howled down in a manner unknown even to the Chambre
introuvable of 181G ; with the Bavage warfare of Versailles outside, and
its attempts at corruption and conspiracy inside Paris—would the Com¬
mune not have shamefully betrayed its trust by affecting to keep up all
the decencies and appearances of liberalism as in a time of profound
peace Î Had the Government of the Commune been akin to that of
M. Thiers, there would have been no more occasion to suppress Party-of-
Order papers at Paris than there was to suppress Communal papers at
Versailles.
s It was irritating indeed to the RuraH that at the very same time they
declared the return to the Church to be the only means of salvation for
France, the infidel Commune unearthed the peculiar mysteries of the
Picpus nunnery, and of the Church of Saint Laurent. It was a satire
upon M. Thiers that, while he showered grand crosses upon the Bonapartist
generals in acknowledgment of their mastery in losing battles, signing
capitulations, and turning cigarettes at Wilhelmshohe, the Commune
dismissed and arrested its generals whenever they were suspected of
neglecting their duties. The expulsion from, and arrest by, the Com¬
mune of one of its members who had slipped in under a false name, and
had undergone at Lyons six days' imprisonment for simple bankruptcy,
was it not a deliberate insult hurled at the forger, Jules Favre, then stQl
the foreign minister of France, still selling France to Bismarck, and still
dictating his orders to that paragon Government of Belgium Î But
indeed the Commune did not pretend to infallibility, the invariable
attribute of all governments of the old stamp. It published its doings and
sayings, it initiated the public into all its shortcomings.
In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of
a different stamp ; some of them survivors of and devotees to past revolu¬
tions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving popular
influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of
tradition ; others mere bawlers, who, by dint of repeating year after year
the same set of stereotyped declamations against the Government of the
day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water.
After the 18th of March, some such men did also turn up, and in some
cases contrived to play pre-eminent parts. As far as their power went,
they hampered the real action of the working class, exactly as men of
that sort have hampered the full development of every previous revolu¬
tion. They are an unavoidable evil : with time they are shaken off ; but
time was not allowed to the Commune.
Wonderful, indeed, was the change the Commune had wrought in Paris !
No longer any trace of the meretricious Paris of the Second Empire. No
longer was Paris the rendezvous of British landlords, Irish absentees,
American ex-slaveholders and shoddy meD, Russian ex-serfowners, and
Wallachian boyards. No more corpses at the Morgue, no nocturnal bur¬
glaries, scarcely any robberies ; in fact, for the first time since the days
of February, 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and that without any
police of any kind. "We," said a member of the Commune, "hear
25
no longer of assassination, theft, and personal assault ; it seems indeed
as if the police had dragged along with it to Versailles all its Conser¬
vative friends." The cocottes had refonnd the scent of their protectors—
the absconding men of family, religion, and, above all, of property. In
their stead, the real women of Paris showed again at the surface—heroic,
noble, and devoted, like the women of antiquity. Working, thinking,
fighting, bleeding Paria—almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new
society, of the cannibals at its gates—radiant in the enthusiasm of its
historic initiative !
Opposed to this new world at Paris, behold the old world at Versailles
—that assembly of the ghouls of all defunct régimes, Legitimists and
Orleanists, eager to feed upon the carcass of the nation,—with a tail of
antediluvian Kepublicans, sanctioning, by their presence in the Assembly,
the slaveholders' rebellion, relying for the maintenance of their Parlia¬
mentary Kepublic upon the vanity of the senile mountebank at its head,
and caricaturing 1789 by holding their ghastly meetings in the Jeu de
Paume. There it was, this Assembly, the representative of everything
dead in France, propped up to the semblance of life by nothing but the
swords of the generals of Louis Bonaparte. Paris all truth, Versailles all
lie ; and that lie vented through the mouth of Thiers.
Thiers tells a deputation of the mayors of the Seine-et-Oise,—" You
may rely upon my word, which I have never broken ! " He tells the
Assembly itself that " it was the most freely elected and most Liberal
Assembly France ever possessed " ; he tells his motley soldiery that it was
" the admiration of the world, and the finest army France ever possessed" ;
he tells the provinces that the bombardment of Paris by him was a myth :
"If some cannon-shots have been fired, it is not the deed of the army of
Versailles, but of some insurgents trying to make believe that they are
fighting, while they dare not show their faces." He again tells the pro¬
vinces that " the artillery of Versailles does not bombard Paris, but only
cannonades it." He tells the Archbishop of Paris that the pretended
executions and reprisals (!) attributed to the Versailles troops were all
moonshine. He tells Paris that he was only anxious " to free it from the
hideous tyrants who oppress it," and that, in fact, the Pari3 of the
Commune was " but a handful of criminals."
The Paris of M. Thiers was not the real Paris of the " vile multitude,"
but a phantom Paris, the Paris of the francs-fileurs, the Paris of the
Boulevards, male and female—the rich, the capitalist, the gilded, the idle
Paris, now thronging with its lackeys, its blacklegs, its literary boliéme,
and its cocottes at Versailles, Saint-Denis, Eueil, and Saint Germain ;
considering the civil war but an agreeable diversion, eyeing the battle
going on through telescopes, counting the rounds of cannon, and swearing
by their own honour and that of their prostitutes, that the performance
was far better got up than it used to be at the Porte St. Martin. , The
men who fell were really dead ; the crie3 of the wounded were cries in good
earnest ; and, besides, the whole thing was so intensely historical.
This is the Paris of M. Thiers, as the Emigration of Coblentz was the
France of M. de Calonne.
26
IV
The first attempt of the slaveholders' conspiracy to put down Paris by
getting the Prussians to occupy it, was frustrated by Bismarck's refusal.
The second attempt, that of the 18th of March, ended in the rout of the
army and the flight to Versailles of the Government, which ordered the
whole administration to break up and follow in its track. By the semblance
of peace-negotiations with Paris, Thiers found the time to prepare for war
against it. But where to find an army 1 The remnants of the line regi¬
ments were weak in number and unsafe in character. His urgent appeal
to the provinces to succour Versailles, by their National Guards and
volunteers, met with a flat refusal. Brittany alone furnished a handful of
Chouans fighting under a white flag, every one of them wearing on his
breast the heart of Jesus in white cloth, and shouting "Vive le Roi ! "
(Long live the King !) Thiers was, therefore, compelled to collect, in hot
haste, a motley crew, composed of sailors, marines, Pontifical Zouaves,
Valentin's gendarmes, and Piétri's sergents de ville and mouchards.
This army, however, would have been ridiculously ineffective without the
instalments of imperialist war-prisoners, which Bismarck granted in
numbers just sufficient to keep the civil war a-going, and keep the Ver¬
sailles Government in abject dependence on Prussia. During the war
itself, the Versailles police had to look after the Versailles army, while
the gendarmes had to drag it on by exposing themselves at all posts
of danger. The forts which fell were not taken, but bought. The
heroism of the Federate convinced Thiers that the resistance of Paris
was not to be broken by his own strategic genius and the bayonets at
his disposal.
Meanwhile, his relations with the provinces became more and more
difficult. Not one single address of approval came in to gladden Thiers
and hisRurals. Quite the contrary. Deputations and addresses demanding,
in a tone anything but respectful, conciliation with Paris on the basis of
the unequivocal recognition of the Republic, the acknowledgment of the
Communal liberties, and the dissolution of the National Assembly, whose
mandate was extinct, poured in from all sides, and in such numbers that
Dufaure, Thiers's Minister of Justice, in his circular of April 23cd to the
public prosecutors, commanded them to treat "the cry of conciliation" as a
crime ! In regard, however, of the hopeless prospect held out by his cam¬
paign, Thiers resolved to shift his tactics by ordering, all over the country,
municipal elections to take place on the 30th of April, on the basis of the
new municipal law dictated by himself to the National Assembly. What
with the intrigues of hi3 prefects, what with police intimidation, he felt
quite sanguine of imparting, by the verdict of the provinces, to the
National Assembly that moral power it had never possessed, and of
getting at last from the provinces the physical force required for the
conquest of Paris.
His banditti-warfare against Paris, exalted in his own bulletins, and the
attempts of his ministers at the establishment, throughout France, of a
27
reign of terror, Thiers was from the beginning anxious to accompany
with a little byplay of conciliation, which had to serve more than one
purpose. It was to dupe the provinces, to inveigle the middle- class
element in Paris, and, above all, to afford the professed Republicans in
the National Assembly the opportunity of hiding their treason against
Paris behind their faith in Thiers. On the 21st of March, when still
without an army, he had declared to the Assembly : " Come what may, I
will not send an army to Paris." On the 27th March he rose again : " I
have found the Republic an accomplished fact, and I am firmly resolved to
maintain it." In reality, he put down the revolution at Lyons and
Marseilles in the name of the Republic, while the roars of his Rurals
drowned the very mention of its name at Versailles. After this exploit,
he toned down the " accomplished fact " into an hypothetical fact. The
Orleans princes, whom he had cautiously warned off Bordeaux, were now,
in flagrant breach of the law, permitted to intrigue at Dreux. The con¬
cessions held out by Thiers in his interminable interviews with the
delegates from Paris and the provinces, although constantly varied in tone
and colour, according to time and circumstances, did in fact never come to
more than the prospective restriction of revenge to the "handful of
criminals implicated in the murder of Lecomte and Clement Thomas," on
the well-understood premiss that Paris and France were unreservedly to
accept M. Thiers himself as the best of possible Republics, a3 he, in 1830,
had done wilh Louis Philippe. Even these concessions he not only took
care to render doubtful by the official comments put upon them in the
Assembly through his Ministers. He had his Dufaure to act. Dufaure, this
old Orleanist lawyer, had always been the justiciary of the state of siege,
as now in 1871, under Thiers, so in 1839 under Louis Philippe, and in
1849 under Louis Bonaparte's presidency. While out of office he made
a fortune by pleading for the Paris capitalists, and made political capital
by pleading against the laws he had himself originated. He now hurried
through the National Assembly not only a set of repressive laws which
were, after the fall of Paris, to extirpate the last remnants of Republican
liberty in France ; he foreshadowed the fate of Paris by abridging the,
for him, too alow procedure of courts-martial, and by a new-fangled,
Draconic code of deportation. The Revolution of 1848, abolishing the
penalty of death for political crimes, had replaced it by deportation.
Louis Bonaparte did not dare, at least not in theory, to re-establish the
régime of the guillotine. The Rural Assembly, not yet bold enough even
to hint that the Parisians were not rebels, but assassins, had therefore to
confine its prospective vengeance against Paris to Dnfaure's new code of
deportation. Under all these circumstances Thiers himself could not have
gone on with his comedy of conciliation, had it not, as he intended it to
do, drawn forth shrieks of rage from the Rurals, whose ruminating mind
did neither understand the play, nor its necessities of hypocrisy, tergi¬
versation, and procrastination.
In sight of the impending municipal elections of the 30th April, Thiers
enacted one of his great conciliation scenes on the 27th April. Amidst a
flood of sentimental rhetoric, he exclaimed from the tribune of the
Assembly : " There exists no conspiracy against the Republic but that of
28
Paris, which compels us to shed French blood. I repeat it again and
again. Let those impious arms fall from the hands which hold them, and
chastisement will be arrested at once by an act of peace excluding only the
small number of criminals." To the violent interruption of the Rurals he
replied . " Gentlemen, tell me, I implore you, am I wrong ? Do you
really regret that I could have stated the truth that the criminals are only
a handful Î Is it not fortunate in the midst of our misfortunes that those
who have been capable to shed the blood of Clement Thomas and General
Lecomte are but rare exceptions ?"
France, however, turned a deaf ear to what Thiers flattered himself to
be a parliamentary siren's song. Out of 700,000 municipal councillors
returned by the 35,000 communes still left to France, the united Legitimists,
Orleanists, and Bonapartists did not carry 8,000. The supplementary
elections which followed were still more decidedly hostile. Thus, instead
of getting from the provinces the badly-needed physical force, the National
Assembly lost even its last claim to moral force, that of being the
expression of the universal suffrage of the country. To complete the
discomfiture, the newly-chosen municipal councils of all the cities of
France openly threatened the usurping Assembly at Versailles with a
counter Assembly at Bordeaux.
Then the long-expected moment of decisive action had at last come for
Bismarck. He peremptorily summoned Thiers to send to Frankfort
plenipotentiaries for the definitive settlement of peace. In humble
obedience to the call of his master, Thiers hastened to despatch his
trusty Jules Favre, backed by Pouyer-Quertier. Pouyer-Quertier, an
"eminent" Rouen cotton-spinner, a fervent and even servile partisan of
the Second Empire, had never found any fault with it save its commercial
treaty with England, prejudicial to his own shop-interest. Hardly installed
at Bordeaux as Thiers's Minister of Finance, he denounced that " unholy"
treaty, hinted at its near abrogation, and had even the effrontery to try,
although in vain (having counted without Bismarck), the immediate
enforcement of the old protective duties against Alsace, where, he said,
no previous international treaties stood in the way. This man, who
considered counter-revolution as a means to put down wages at Rouen,
and the surrender of French provinces as a means to bring up the price
of his wares in France, was he not the one predestined to be picked
cut by Thiers as the helpmate of J ales Favre in his last and crowning
treason ?
On the arrival at Frankfort of this exquisite pair of plenipotentiaries,
bully Bismarck at once met them with the imperious alternative : Either
the restoration of the Empire, or the unconditional acceptance of my own
peace terms ! These terms included a shortening of the intervals in which
the war indemnity was to be paid, aud the continued occupation of the
Paris forts by Prussian troops until Bismarck should feel satisfied with
the state of things in France ; Prussia thus being recognized as the
supreme arbiter in internal French politics ! In return for this he offered
to let loose, for the extermination of Paris, the captive Bonapartist army,
and to lend them the direct assistance of Emperor William's troops. He
pledged his good faith by making payment of the first instalment of the
29
indemnity dependent on the " pacification" of Paris. Such a bait was, of
course, eagerly swallowed by Thiers and his plenipotentiaries. They
signed the treaty of peace on the 10th of May, and had it endorsed by
the Versailles Assembly on the 18tb.
In the interval between the conclusion of peace and the arrival of the-
Bonapartist prisoners, Thiers felt the more bound to resume his comedy of
conciliation, as his Bepublican tools stood in sore need of a pretext for
blinking their eyes at the preparations for the carnage of Paris. As late
as the 8th May he replied to a deputation of middle-class conciliators—
" Whenever the insurgents will make up their minds for capitulation, the
gates of Paris shall be flung wide open during a week for all except the
murderers of Generals Clement Thomas and Lecomte."
A few days afterwards, when violently interpellated on these promises
by the Rurals, he refused to enter into any explanations ; not, however,
without giving them this significant hint :—" I tell you there are impatient
men amoDgst you, men who are in too great a hurry. They must have
another eight days ; at the end of these eight days there will be no more
danger, and the task will be proportionate to their courage and to their
capacities." As soon as MacMahon was able to assure him that he could
shortly enter Paris, Thiers declared to the Assembly that "he would
enter Paris with the laws in his hands, and demand a full expiation from
the wretches who had sacrificed the lives of soldiers and destroyed public
monuments." As the moment of decision drew near he said—to the
Assembly, " I shall be pitiless ! "—to Paris, that it was doomed ; and to
his Bonapartist banditti, that they had State license to wreak vengeance-
upon Paris to thc-ir hearts' content. At last, when treachery had
opened the gates of Paris to General Douai, on the 21st May, Thiers,
on the 22nd, revealed to the Rurals the "goal" of his conciliation
comedy, Which they had so obstinately persisted in not understanding.
" I told you a few days ago that we were approaching our goal ; to-day
I come to tell you the goal is reached. The victory of order, justice, and
civilization is at last won ! "
So it was. The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out
in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise
against their masters. Then this civilization and justice stand forth as
undisguised savagery and lawless revenge. Each new crisis in the class
struggle between the appropriator and the producer brings out this fact
more glaringly. Even the atrocities of the bourgeois in June, 1848,.
vanish before the ineffable infamy of 1871. The self-sacrificing heroism
with which the population of Paris—men, women, and children—fought
for eight days after the entrance of the Versaillese, reflects as much the
grandeur of their cause, as the infernal deeds of the soldiery reflect
the innate spirit of that civilization of which they are the mercenary
vindicators. A glorious civilization, indeed, the great problem of
which is how to get rid of the heaps of corpses it made after the battle
was over !
To find a parallel for the conduct of Thiers and his bloodhounds we
must go back to the times of Sulla and the two Triumvirates of Rome.
The same wholesale slaughter in cold blood ; the same disregard, in mas-
30
saore, of age and sex ; the same system of torturing prisoners ; the same
proscriptions, but this time of a whole class ; the same savage hunt after
concealed leaders, lest one might escape ; the same denunciations of
political and private enemies ; the same indifference for the butchery of
entire strangers to the feud. There is but this difference, that the
Eomans had no mitrailleuses for the despatch, in the lump, of the proscribed,
and that they had not " the law in their hands," nor on their lips the cry
of " civilization."
And after those horrors, look upon the other, still more hideous,
face of that bourgeois civilization as described by its own press !
" With stray shots," writes the Paris correspondent of a London Tory
paper, " still ringing in the distance, and untended wounded wretches
dying amid the tombstones of Père la Chaise—with 6,000 terror-stricken
insurgents wandering in an agony of despair in the labyrinth of the cata¬
combs, and wretches hurried through the streets to be shot down in scores
by the mitrailleuse—it is revolting to see the cafés filled with the votaries
of absinthe, billiards, and dominoes ; female profligacy perambulating the
boulevards, and the sound of revelry disturbing the night from the
cabinets particuliers of fashionable restaurants." M. Edouard Hervé
writes in the Journal de Paris, a Versaillist journal suppressed by the
Commune :—" The way in which the population of Paris (!) manifested
its satisfaction yesterday was rather more than frivolous, and we fear it
will grow worse as time progresses. Paris has now a fête day appearance,
which is sadly out of place ; and, unless we are to be called the Parisiens
de la décadence, this sort of thing mu3t come to an end." And then he
quotes the passage from Tacitus :—" Yet, on the morrow of that horrible
struggle, even before it was completely over, Eome—degraded and corrupt
—began once more to wallow in the voluptuous slough which was destroy¬
ing its body and polluting its soul—alibi prrelia et vulnera, alibi balnea
popinœque—(here fights and wounds, there baths and restaurants)."
M. Hervé only forgets to say that the " population of Paris " he speaks
of is but the population of the Paris of M. Thiers—the francs-jihurs
returning in throngs from Versailles, Saint-Denis, Eueil, and Saint-
Germain— the Paris of the "Decline."
In all its bloody triumphs over the self-sacrificing champions of a new
and better society, that nefarious civilization, based upon the enslavement
of labour, drowns the moans of its victims in a hue-and-cry of calumny,
reverberated by a world-wide echo. The serene working men's Paris of
the Commune is suddenly changed into a pandemonium by the blood¬
hounds of " order." And what does this tremendous chaDge prove to the
bourgeois mind of all countries ? Why, that the Commune has conspired
against civilization ! The Paris people die enthusiastically for the Com¬
mune in numbers unequalled in any battle known to history. What does
that prove ? Why, that the Commune was not the people's own govern¬
ment, but the usurpation of a handful of criminals ! The women of Pari3
joyfully give up their lives at the barricades and on the place of execution.
What does this prove ? Why, that the demon of the Commune has
changed them into Megseras and Hecates ! The moderation of the Com¬
mune during two months of undisputed sway is equalled only by the
31
heroism of its defence. What does that prove ? Why, that for months
the Commune carefully hid, under a mask of moderation and humanity,
the blood-thirstiness of its fiendish instincts, to be let loose in the hour of
its agony !
The working men's Paris, in the act of its heroic self-holocaust, involved
in its flames buildings and monuments. While tearing to pieces the living
body of the proletariate, its rulers must no longer expect to return
triumphantly into the intact architecture of their abodes. The Government
of Versailles cries, Incendiarism ! " and whispers this cue to all its agents,
down to the remotest hamlet, to hunt up its enemies everywhere as suspect
of professional incendiarism. The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which
looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is con¬
vulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar !
When governments give state-licenses to their navies to " kill, burn,
and destroy," is that a license for incendiarism ? When the British
troops wantonly set fire to the Capitol at Washington and to the
summer palace of the Chinese Emperor, was that incendiarism ? When
the Prussians, not for military reasons, but out of the mere spite of
revenge, burnt down, by the help of petroleum, towns like Cbâteaudun
and innumerable villages, was that incendiarism 1 When Thiers,
during six weeks, bombarded Paris, under the pretext that he wanted
to set fire to those houses only in which there were people, was
that incendiarism ? — In war, fire is an arm as legitimate as
any. Buildings held by the enemy are shelled to set them on fire.
If their defenders have to retire, they themselves light the flames to
prevent the attack from making use of the buildings. To be burnt down
has always been the inevitable fate of all buildings situated in the front
of battle of all the regular armies of the world. But in the war of the
enslaved against their enslavers, the only justifiable war in history, this is
by no means to hold good ! The Commune used fire strictly as a means
of defence. They used it to stop up to the Versailles troops those long
straight avenues which Haussmann had expressly opened to artillery-fire ;
they used it to cover their retreat, in the same way as the Versaillese,
in their advance, used their shells which destroyed at least as many
buildings a3 the fire of the Commune. It is a matter of dispute,
even now, which buildings were set fire to by the defence, and
which by the attack. And the defence resorted to fire only then,
when the Versaillese troops had already commenced their whole¬
sale murdering of prisoners.—Besides, the Commune had, long before,
given full public notice that, if driven to extremities, they would
bury themselves under the ruins of Paris, and make Paris a second
Moscow, as the Government of Defence, but only as a cloak for its treason,
had promised to do. For this purpose Trochu had found them the
petroleum. The Commune knew that its opponents cared nothing for the
lives of the Paris people, but cared much for their own Paris buildings.
And Thiers, on the other hand, had given them notice that he would be
implacable in his vengeance. No sooner had he got his army ready on one
side, and the Prussians shutting up the trap on the other, than he pro¬
claimed : " I Bhall be pitiless ! The expiation will be complete, and
32
justice will be stern!" If the acts of the Paris working men were
vandalism, it was the vandalism of defence in despair, not the vandalism
of triumph, like that which the Christians perpetrated upon the really-
priceless art treasures of heathen autiquity ; and even that vandalism
has been justified by the historian as an unavoidable and comparatively
trifling concomitant to the Titanic struggle between a new society arising
and an old one breaking down. It was still less the vandalism of
Haussmann, razing historic Paris to make place for the Paris of the
sightseer !
But the execution by the Commune of the Bixty-four hostages, with
the Archbishop of Paris at their head ! The bourgeoisie and its army in
June, 1848, re-established a custom which had long disappeared from the
practice of war—the shooting of their defenceless prisoners. This brutal
custom has since been more or less strictly adhered to by the suppressors
of all popular commotions in Europe and India ; thus proving that it
constitutes a real " progress of civilization " ! On the other hand, the
Prussians, in France, had re-established the practice of taking hostages—
innocent men, who, with their lives, were to answer to them for the acts
of others. When Thiers, as we have seen, from the very beginning of
the conflict, enforced the humane practice of shooting down the
Communal prisoners, the Commune, to protect their lives, was obliged
to resort to the Prussian practice of securing hostages. The lives
of the hostages had been forfeited over and over again by the con¬
tinued shooting of prisoners on the part of the Versaillese. How could
they be spared any longer after the carnage with which MacMahon's
praetorians celebrated their entrance into Paris ? Was even the last
check upon the unscrupulous ferocity of bourgeois governments—the
taking of hostages—to be made a mere sham of ? The real murderer of
Archbishop Darboy is Thiers. The Commune again and again had offered
to exchange the archbishop, and ever so many priests in the bargain,
against the single Blanqui, then in the hands of Thiers. Thiers obstinately
refused. He knew that with Blanqui he would give to the Commune a
head ; while the archbishop would serve his purpose beBt in the shape of
a corpse. Thiers acted upon the precedent of Cavaignac. How, in June,
1848, did not Cavaignac and his men of order raise shouts of horror by
stigmatizing the insurgents as the assassins of Archbishop Affre ! They
knew perfectly well that the archbishop had been shot by the soldiers
of order. M. Jacquemet, the archbishop's vicar-general, present on
the spot, had immediately afterwards handed them in his evidence to
that effect.
All this chorus of calumny, which the party of order never fail, in their
orgies of blood, to raise against their victims, only proves that the bourgeois
of our days considers himself the legitimate successor to the baron of old,
who thought every weapon in his own hand fair against the plebeian, while
in the hands of the plebeian a weapon of any kind constituted in itself a
crime.
The conspiracy of the ruling class to break down the Bevolution by a
civil war carried on under the patronage of the foreign invader—a
conspiracy which we have traced from the very 4th of September down to
33
the entrance of MacMahon's prretorians through the gate of St. Cloud—
culminated in the carnage of Paris. Bismarck gloats over the ruins of
Paris, in which he saw perhaps the first instalment of that general destruc¬
tion of great cities he had prayed for when still a simple Rural in the
Prussian Chambre introuvable of 1849. He gloats over the cadavres of
the Paris proletariate. For him this is not only the extermination of
revolution, but the extinction of France, now decapitated in reality, and
by the French Government itself. With the shallowness characteristic of
all successful statesmen, he sees but the surface of this tremendous historic
event. Whenever before has history exhibited the spectacle of a conqueror
crowning his victory by turning into, not only the gendarme, but the
hired bravo of the conquered Government? There existed no war between
Prussia and the Commune of Paris. On the contrary, the Commune had
accepted the peace preliminaries, and Prussia had announced her neutrality.
Prussia was, therefore, no belligerent. She acted the part of a bravo, a
cowardly bravo, because incurring no danger ; a hired bravo, because
stipulating beforehand the payment of her blood-money of 500 millions
on the fall of Paris. And thus, at last, came out the true character of
the war, ordained by Providence as a chastisement of godless and
debauched France by pious and moral Germany ! And this unparalleled
breach of the law of nations, even as understood by the old world lawyers,
instead of arousing the " civilized'' Governments of Europe to declare the
felonious Prussian Government, the mere tool of the St. Petersburg
Cabinet, an outlaw amongst nations, only incites them to consider whether
the few victims who escape the double cordon around Paris are not to bo
given up to the hangman at Versailles !
That after the most tremendous war of modern times, the conquering
and the conquered hosts should fraternize for the common massacre of
the proletariate—this unparalleled event does indicate, not, as Bismarck
thinks, the final repression of a new society upheaving, but the
crumbling into dust of bourgeois society. The highest heroic efiort of
which old society is still capable is national war ; and this is now
proved to be a mere governmental humbug, intended to defer the
struggle of classes, and to be thrown aside as soon as that class
struggle bursts out into civil war. Class rule is no longer able to disguise
itself in a national uniform ; the national Governments are one as against
the proletariate !
After Whit-Sunday, 1871, theTe can be neither peace nor truce pos¬
sible between the working men of France and the appropriators of their
produce. The iron hand of a mercenary soldiery may keep for a time
both classes tied down in common oppression. But the battle must break
out again and again in ever-growing dimensions, and there can be no
doubt as to who will be the victor in the end,—the appropriating few, or the
immense working majority. And the French working class is only the
advanced guard of the modern proletariate.
While the European Governments thus testify, before Paris, to the
international character of class rule, they cry down the International
Working Men's Association—the international counter-organization of
labour against the cosmopolitan conspiracy of capital—as the head
34
fountain of all these disasters. Thiers denounced it as the despot of
labour, pretending to be its liberator. Picard ordered that all commu¬
nications between the French Internationals and those abroad should be
cut off ; Count Jaubert, Thiers's mummified accomplice of 1835, declares
it the great problem of all civilized governments to weed it out. The
Rurals roar against it, and the whole European press joins the chorus. An
honourable French writer, completely foreign to our Association, speaks
as follows :—" The members of the Central Committee of the National
Guard, as well a3 the greater part of the members of the Commune, are
the most active, intelligent, and energetic minds of the International
Working Men's Association ; . . . . men who are thoroughly honest,
sincere, intelligent, devoted, pure, and fanatical in the good sense of the
word." The police-tinged bourgeois mind naturally figures to itself the
International Working Men's Association as acting in the manner of a
secret conspiracy, its central body ordering, from time to time, explosions
in different countries. Our Association is, in fact, nothing but the inter¬
national bond between the most advanced working men in the various
countries of the civilized world. Wherever, in whatever shape, and under
whatever conditions the class struggle obtains any consistency, it is but
natural that members of our association should stand in the foreground.
The soil out of which it grows is modern society itself. It cannot be
stampedout by any amount of carnage. To stamp it out, the Govern¬
ments would have to stamp out the despotism of capital over labour—the
condition of their own parasitical existence.
Working men's Paris, with it3 Commune, will be for ever celebrated as
the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the
great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already
nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests
will not avail to redeem them.
The General Council.
M. T. Boon, Fred. Bradnick, G. H. Buttery, Caihil, Delahaye, William
Hales, A. Hermann, Kolb, Fred. Lessner, Lochner, T. P. Macdonnell,
George Milner, Thomas Mottershead, Ch. Mills, Charles Murray, Pfander,
Roach, Rochat, Riihl, Sadler, A. Serraillier, Cowell Stepney, Alf. Taylor,
William Townshend.
Corresponding Secretaries.
Eugène Dupont, for France.
Karl Marx, for Germany and Hol¬
land.
Fred. Engels, for Belgium and Spain.
Hermann Jung, for Switzerland.
Hermann Jung, Chairman.
John Weston, Treasurer.
P. Giovaccbini, for Italy.
Zévy Maurice, for Hungary.
Anton Zabicki, for Poland.
James Cohen, for Denmark.
J. G. Eccarius, for the United States.
George Harris, Financial Sec.
John Hales, General Sec.
Office—256, High Holborn, London, W.C-,
May 'iOth, 1871.
NOTES.
i.
" The column of prisoners halted in the Avenue Uhrich, and was drawn
up, four or five deep, on the footway facing to the road. General Marquis
de Gallifet and his staff dismounted and commenced an inspection from
the left of the line. Walking down slowly and eyeing the ranks, the
General stopped here and there, tapping a man on the Bhoulder or
beckoning him out of the rear ranks. In most cases, without further
parley, the individual thus selected was marched out into the centre of
the road, where a small supplementary column was, thus, soon formed.
.... It was evident that there was considerable room for error. A
mounted officer pointed out to General Gallifet a man and woman for
some particular offence. The woman, rushing out of the ranks, threw
herself on her knees, and, with outstretched arms, protested her innocence
in passionate terms. The general waited for a pause, and then with most
impassible face and unmoved demeanour, said, 'Madame, I have visited
every theatre in Paris, your acting will have no effect on me ' (' ce n'est
pas la peine de jouer la comédie ') It was not a good thing on that
day to be noticeably taller, dirtier, cleaner, older, or uglier than one's
neighbours. One individual in particular struck me as probably owing
his speedy release from the ills of this world to his having a broken nose.
.... Over a hundred being thus chosen, a firing party told off, and the
column resumed its march, leaving them behind. A few minutes after¬
wards a dropping fire in our rear commenced, and continued for over a
quarter of an hour. It was the execution of these summarily-convicted
wretches."—Paris Correspondent "Daily News," June 8th.—This Gallifet,
" the kept man of his wife, so notorious for her shameless exhibitions at
the orgies of the Second Empire," went, during the war, by the name of
the French " Ensign Pistol."
" The Temps, which is a careful journal, and not given to sensation,
tells a dreadful story of people imperfectly shot and buried before life was
extinct. A great number were buried in the square round St. Jaques-la-
Boucbicre ; some of them very superficially. In the daytime the roar of
the busy streets prevented any notice being taken ; but in the stillness of
the night the inhabitants of the houses in the neighbourhood were roused
by distant moans, and in the morning a clenched hand was seen pro¬
truding through the soil. In consequence of this, exhumations were
ordered to take place That many wounded have been buried alive
I have not the slightest doubt. One case I can vouch for. When Brunei
was shot with bis mistress on the 24th ult. in the courtyard of a house in
the Place Vendôme, the bodies lay there until the afternoon of the 27th.
When the burial party came to remove the corpses, they found the woman
living still, and took her to an ambulance. Though she had received four
bullets she is now out of danger."—Paris Correspondent "Evening
Standard," J une 8th.
II.
The following letter appeared in the Times of June 13th :—
"to the editor of the 'times.'
" Sir,—On June 6, 1871, M. Jules Favre issued a circular to all the
European Powers, calling upon them to hunt down the International
Workîng-Men'a Association. A few remarks will suffice to characterize
that document.
" In the very preamble of our statutes it is stated that the Interna¬
tional was founded ' September 28, 1864, at a public meeting held at
St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, London.' For purposes of. his own Jules
Favre puts back the date of its origin behind 1862.
" In order to explain our principles, he professes to quote ' their (the
International's) sheet of the 25ih of March, 1869.' And then what does
he quote ? The sheet of a society which is not the International. This
sort of manœuvre he already recurred to when, still a comparatively
young lawyer, he bad to defend the National newspaper, prosecuted for
libel by Cabet. Then he pretended to read extracts from Cabet's
pamphlets while reading interpolations of his own—a trick exposed
while the Court was sitting, and which, but for the indulgence of Cabet,
would have been punished by Jules Favre's expulsion from the Paris bar.
Of all the documents quoted by him as documents of the International,
notone belongs to the International. He says, for instance, ' The Alliance
declares itself Atheist, says the General Council, constituted in London
in July, 1869.' The General Council never issued such a document. On 1
the contrary, it issued a document which quashed the original statutes of
the 'Alliance'—L'Alliance de la Démocratie Socialiste at Geneva—
quoted by Jules Favre.
" Throughout his circular, which pretends in part also to be directed
against the Empire, Jules Favre repeats against the International but
the police inventions of the public prosecutors of the Empire, and which
broke down miserably even before the law courts of that Empire.
" It is known that in its two addresses (of July and September last) on
the late war, the General Council of the International denounced the
Prussian plans of conquest against France. Later on, Mr. Reitlinger,
Jules Favre's private secretary, applied, though of course in vain, to some
members of the General Council for getting up by the Council a demon¬
stration against Bismarck, in favour of the Government of National
Defence ; they were particularly requested not to mention the Republic.
The preparations for a demonstration with regard to the expected arrival
of Jules Favre in London were made—certainly with the best of intentions
—in spite of the General Council, which, in its address of the 9th of
September, had distinctly forewarned the Paris workmen against Jules
Favre and his colleagues.
" What would Jules Favre say if, in its turn, the International were to
send a circular on Jules Favre to all the Cabinets of Europe, drawing their
particular attention to the documents published at Paris by the late
M. Milliere 1 I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
"John Hales,
" Secretary to the General Council of the International
" Working Men's Association.
"256, High Holborn, W.C., June 12th."
In an article on "The International Society and its aims," that pious
informer, the London Spectator (June 24tb), amongst other similar tricks,
quotes, even more fully than Jules Favre has done, the above document
of the " Alliance" as the work of the International, and that eleven days
after the refu'ation had been published in the Times We do not wonder
at this. Frederick the Great used to say that of all Jesuits the worst are
the Protestant ones. cPj L/1 / <3 §
_ 137/