A SHORT HISTORY
OF THE
PARIS COMMUNE
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THE TWENTIETH CENTURY PRESS. LIMITED.
37a, Clerkenwell Green, E.c.
I907.
A SHORT HISTORY
OF THE
PARIS COMMUNE
Author of "The Religion of Socialism," "The Ethics of Socialism," " Life of
Jean Paul Marat," "German Society at the End of^the Middle Ages," "Manual
of Philosophy," etc., etc.
REPRINTED FROM "JUSTICE."
JonboR :
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY PRESS, LIMITED,
37A, CLERKENWELL GREEN, E C.
1907.
BY
E.
BAX.
PREFACE.
The Commune of Paris is the one event which
Socialists throughout the world have agreed with single
accord to celebrate. Every 18th of March witnesses
thousands of gatherings throughout the civilised world
to commemorate the (alas ! only temporary) victory of
organised Socialist aspiration over the forces of pro¬
perty and privilege in 1871.
The Commune, it is said, did little of a distinctively
Socialistic character ; it made many mistakes ; it was
infatuated with the idea of decentralisation. All this is
true. What constitutes the importance of the Commune
in history is not certainly the measures that it enacted,
is not even its admirable conduct of the administration
of a great metropolis under circumstances of extreme
difficulty ; it is the fact that the Commune is a land¬
mark as being the first administration manned by the
working classes, having for its more or less conscious
aim the reorganisation of Social conditions—the trans¬
formation of a Civilised Society into a Socialist Society.
It is this question of aim, as symbolised by the Red Flag,
ii.
which is the central one. For, however nebulous may
have been the views of some of those that took part in
it, that such was the aim of the movement has been
recognised by friends and foes alike.
What meant the blood-frenzy of the Versaillese ?
What meant the tacit or avowed approval of the
capitalistic press throughout the civilised world, at the
most hideous carnage known to history, but the desperate
rage of threatened class interests ? We all recognise
that those who died under the Red Flag in 1871 died
for Socialism, and a nobler army of martyrs no cause
has ever had.
In dedicating this little book to the Social-Democratic
Federation, I should say that its initiation is due to my
old friend Harry Quelch, now editor of Justice, in the
columns of which journal it originally appeared in serial
form.
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
I.
introduction.
In an historical sketch of the events of the movement
known as the Paris Comune of 1871, it is desirable to
start with the endeavour to fix that movement in its
true historical perspective.
Now, the Paris Commune occupies a peculiar posi¬
tion in the history of the proletarian movement. It
forms the culmination of the first period of modern
Socialism—a period in which the elements of prior
movements were still clinging to it. The distinction
between Socialism and Anarchism had not as yet fully
emerged ; the Anarchistic-Individualistic doctrines of
Proudhon still had adherents within the Socialist party ;
while Bakunin was regarded as one of the pillars of the
International. The old French Red Republican party,
of which the Commune was the outcome and expres¬
sion, was a very mixed concern. In addition to the
elements above referred to, there were archaeological
survivals of the ideas of '48, and even of the Jacobins
of the Great Revolution. This first period of modern
Socialism dates from the foundation of the Communist
League and the issue of the Communist Manifesto by
B
2
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
Marx and Engels in 1847, and closes with the practi¬
cal extinction of the old International in 1873. After
the great work of the International in the Commune, it
did nothing worth speaking of, although much feared
by the authorities on the Continent. But apart from
the Socialist movement in its proper sense, it is neces¬
sary, in order to fully understand the strains which
composed the Paris Commune, to note more parti¬
cularly its relation to the general revolutionary move¬
ment of '48 and to the French national revolutionary
tradition. The European Revolution of 1848 was the
culmination of the bourgeois revolutionary movement
which began in the sixteenth century, and which in
England partially, though very imperfectly, succeeded
in breaking down the monarchical bureaucracy
veneered with Feudalism—into which the mediaeval
political system had become transformed—at the close
of the seventeenth century. On the Continent, how¬
ever, this transitional political order of things, based
on the power of the reigning monarch (in Germany,
prince or duke) and his functionaries was not even
"scotched," much less killed, before the end of the
eighteenth century. In the general reaction which
succeeded the French Revolution it was temporarily
resuscitated with slight modifications, but it suffered
again a partial reverse in 1830-32, and from that time
forward the irresistible wave of middle-class ascend¬
ancy gathered its forces till it swept all before it in
the great revolutionary year. The middle class was
backed by the proletariat, as yet politically undifferen¬
tiated from it, and constituting, so to say, the body of
the progressive party, which the middle-class leaders
claimed to direct as its head.
One of the main features of the popular movement
of '48 was " patriotism," by which was understood
introduction.
3
centralisation—the " United Germany," " United
Italy," "Independent Hungary" mania, and the rest.
All the united, independent, and patriotic balderdash,
over which so much rhetorical froth and so many
gallons of good black ink were expended, has since
been realised. They have it now, all for which they
strove. And what good has come of all the centralis¬
ing bureaucratisation that the patriotic " forty-eighter "
orated, struggled, gushed, and wept for by turns as
the goal of human aspiration? These precious
"united" nationalities are now groaning under the
united and independent military and administrative
budgets of their respective beloved fatherlands. One
•would think, if one is to risk one's skin at all in a
revolutionary enterprise, it were better to save it for
something more worth having than the sorry result for
which most of the Continentals of '48 were so eager to
Tisk theirs !
In 1848 the present constitutional basis of Europe
was established, and since then the middle-class "ad¬
vanced " movements have become more and more
moderate as the class itself has become politically
dominant and settled down. The revolt of even the
small middle-classes has, since '48, disappeared, its
main object having been attained, such changes as the
poorer section of the class demand, with few excep¬
tions, having been striven for by peaceful and con¬
stitutional methods. In 1848, in short, the bour¬
geoisie, which had long been economically dominant,
put the finishing touch to its political emancipation.
Yet the '48 Revolution, though predominantly a
middle-class concern, is signalised by the first appear¬
ance of the proletariat in conscious opposition to the
middle-class—to wit, in the German Communist
League and the Paris insurrection of June in that year.
b 2
4
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
The former of these movements was the beginning of
Socialism ; the latter, though, as above said, a con¬
scious class-movement, was, in its form and general
character, rather a survival of the original revolt of the
French proletariat during the great Revolution than the
beginning of any new departure on the part of the
French working-classes, notwithstanding that the im¬
mediate " plank " was Louis Blanc's scheme. Indeed,
at this time and for some years later, " scientific
Socialism," as we understand it to-day, was practi¬
cally unknown in France, the brilliant essays of
Proudhon being the nearest approach to anything of
the kind.
It remains to say a few words on the revolutionary
tradition in France. Amongst the working-classes of
the large towns—notably of Paris, of course, but also
of Lyons, Marseilles, and other places—the remem¬
brance of the power and position of the then young
proletariat during the great years of the Revolution,
1792 to 1794, had lingered on ever since, now and
again bursting out in somewhat aimless revolt, and
again slumbering for a while, but always there. The
party of the people embodying this tradition, which,
of course, from time to time absorbed new ideas of a
Socialistic nature as they arose, became definitely con¬
stituted in 1848, and was known after that year as
the Red Republican Party, from the fact that, in the
June insurrection, the red flag was adopted by the
insurgents (I believe at the suggestion of Louis Blanc,
when the national workshop system was the immediate
question at issue) and everywhere acclaimed as the
banner of the class-conscious proletariat and of Social¬
istic Republicanism, in opposition to the tricolour,
which was that of the middle-classes and of bourgeois
or political Republicanism. Such was the origin of the
INTRODUCTION.
5
flag which is now, the world over, the great ensign of
the modern Socialist movement.
In addition to the active Red Republican Party and
its popular leaders, there has always existed in France
a class of men who have made the history of the great
Revolution their life-study. These men naturally con¬
ceive of every revolution as modelling itself on the lines
of the French Revolution of 1789-96. Their influence
has reacted on the popular movement and its leaders,
and confirmed the natural bias of every Frenchman to
try and re-live and re-act the greatest epoch in his
national history, the general outlines and prominent
names of which he is familiar with from his youth up.
In addition to the foregoing influences, there was, of
course, that of the International, and with it, the
Marxists, who had been industriously propagandising
among the Parisian working-classes for five or six
years past, and who made their influence felt at the
time we are speaking of.
Such was the amalgam of tendencies and ideas—•
Proudhonism, neo-Jacobinism reminiscences of '48,
with a recent infusion of the modern Socialism of Marx
—which in various proportions went to constitute the
mental background alike of the leaders and the rank
and file of the French Red Republican Party in 1871, at
the time when it established the Commune of Paris.
6
the paris commune.
II.
prologue.
The shoddy splendour and the all-penetrating corrup¬
tion of the second French Empire had been overtaken
by their Nemesis. After the defeat at Sedan came the
Revolution of September 4th, which gave the Empire
its parting kick, and established, provisionally at least,
the Republic. The Germans were soon in full march
upon Paris, and the incapable and (from the point of
view of its mandate) treacherous "Government of
National Defence " just established, was organising,
Trochu at its head, the resistance. The members of
the Government did not believe in the possibility of
defending the capital, and wanted to capitulate, while
the working classes, and a large proportion of the
smaller middle-classes, were mad for war to the knife-
It is difficult as to this point to feel much sympathy
with either side. For my own part I am utterly
unable to appreciate the enthusiasm of M. Lissagaray
for the stupid chauvinistic frenzy of the general popu¬
lation of Paris in wishing to sacrifice untold thousands
of lives in a more than doubtful attempt to drive back
" les Prussiens " for the sake of rehabilitating the tar¬
nished military glory of " la patrie " ; while on the
other hand nothing can excuse Trochu and his con¬
sorts, the bourgeois political notabilities, for accepting
a definite mandate, and then not only not doing their
best for success, but distinctly riding for a fall.
PROLOGUE.
7
On September 20th, Paris was invested, and the four
months' seige began. The popular excitement within
the city during the whole time was intense. The popu¬
lation resolutely declined to believe in the possibility
of the city being taken, and at ever.y reverse threatening
demonstrations against the impotent Provisional Gov¬
ernment were made. Twice a revolution was on the
point of being accomplished—on October 31st, 1870,
and on January 22nd, 1871. Of course, resistance to
the foreign enemy was what was uppermost in all
minds, and the demands of the Parisian masses for the
establishment of a Commune were largely based on
reminiscences of the wonders effected in this connec¬
tion by the first Paris Commune in 1792-3. On Octo¬
ber 31st, the Hotel de Ville, the seat of the Govern¬
ment, was invaded by an angry crowd, some demand¬
ing a committee of public safety, some the revolution¬
ary Commune. The National Guards, disgusted, re¬
fused to come to the Governmental assistance. The
members of the Government were made prisoners, and
Flourens and Blanqui, the two well-known popular
leaders, for a few hours got the upper hand. But it
was impossible to effect anything. Anarchical con¬
fusion and a babe) of tongues reigned throughout the
municipal headquarters. Finally, towards evening the
reactionists succeeded in stirring up some battalions of
the National Guard to release and reinstate the mem¬
bers of the Government. They used the names of
Flourens and Blanqui as a bogey to scare the timid
and the middle-class. Thus the day ended in a fiasco
from a revolutionary point of view. The resuscitated
Government was compelled, however, to proclaim an
amnesty to all who had played a part in the proceed¬
ings, but subsequently, in violation of all pledges,
Blanqui was arrested, and, after the siege, put on his
8
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
trial for the share he had taken, and Flourens was
arrested and imprisoned within a few days. The result
of October 31st was to strengthen the hands of the
Government of National Defence, which, following the
example of the deposed Emperor, demanded and ob¬
tained a plebiscite of Parisians in its favour. Hence
the old, useless sorties continued as before.
Christmas came and the New Year, but the defence
got no forwarder. At last, on January 20th, Trochu
summoned the mayors of the 20 arrondissements of
the city, and declared all further holding out impossible.
The chauvinist Parisians were struck dumb with indig¬
nation at the idea of surrender, but the next day the
mayors were again summoned, and informed that the
General Staff had decided not to make another sortie,
and, in short, that it was absolutely essential to open
negotiations with the enemy at once. On the night of
the 21st, the Government, after a heated and lengthy
discussion of the situation, replaced Trochu by another
General, Vinoy. Early the next morning found
Flourens at liberty, his prison having been stormed by
a friendly battalion of " Nationals." Meanwhile the
authorities were taking every precaution against the
threatened proletarian insurrection. But by midday of
the 22nd the call-drum was beating in the Batignolles
district and elsewhere, and early in the afternoon the
Hotel de Ville was surrounded by hostile National
Guards and an angry crowd demanding the Commune.
The Hotel de Ville was defended by gardes mobiles,
who were replied to by " Nationals," and a fusillade
lasting three-quarters of an hour ensued, involving over
thirty killed, after which a body of gendarmes ap¬
peared, and the insurgents retreated and dispersed,
leaving about a dozen prisoners in the hands of the
authorities. A few days later, the city was formally
PROLOGUE.
9
surrendered, the terms having been signed, and on
the 29th of the month the German flag was hoisted on
the forts.
The elections which were now held for the purpose of
ratifying the terms of peace were carefully manipulated
by the reactionary elements throughout the provinces—
although Paris remained stoutly Republican—and
showed an enormous clerical and monarchical majority.
This so-called " National Assembly," not content with
fulfilling its mandate of settling the terms of peace, at
once set about openly scheming for the overthrow of
the Republic. The so-called pact of Bordeaux estab¬
lished a concordat between the two rival royalist fac¬
tions under the leadership of the old Orleanist Minister,
Adolphe Thiers, who was immediately constituted chief
of the Executive by the Assembly.
The next thing to do was to deal with the armed
populace, the workmen and small middle class, in the
shape of the various bodies of National Guards through¬
out the country, above all the most numerous, most
determined, and owing to its position, most influential
of them, the National Guard of Paris. In stipulating
the surrender of Paris, Jules Favre, acting for the
Government of National Defence, had arranged for the
retention of their arms by the Paris Nationals. This
was not done out of any affection for the citizen
soldiers, but because the Government well knew that
any attempt to disarm this proletarian army would be
met by a resistance they had no adequate means of
dealing with, and which would not improbably have
upset them and all their schemes, especially the terms
of surrender, which were regarded by all classes as
already humiliating enough. But as soon as the con¬
ditions of peace were definitely settled, the hostility of
IO
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
the new Assembly to Republican Paris became marked,
and the intention of crushing all revolutionary elements,
first and foremost the National Guard, was openly
shown. The people organised on their side. The city,
from the beginning of February to March 18th, was,
as it were, sullenly standing at bay against the
Assembly and the Government, which did not as yet
dare its great coup—the disarmament.
THE l8TH OF MARCH.
II
III.
THE I8TH OF MARCH.
As already stated in the last chapter, the Assembly of
reactionary bourgeois riff-raff and aristocratic fossils,
hurriedly elected at the beginning of February for the
sole purpose of concluding peace, had no sooner met at
Bordeaux than it began insulting the deputies for Paris.
The terms ot peace ratified, it resolved to continue its
functions as a legislative body in defiance of the limi¬
tations of its mandate. But this was not all. The
insults to Paris culminated when the Assembly passed a
resolution to decapitalise the metropolis and transfer
itself and the Government to Versailles. This was
the last straw, which came on the top of a number of
other things. Rumours were confirmed of the pro¬
jected immediate suppression of the only resource of
the workmen, their is. 3d. a day as National Guards,
of their impending disarmament, and, as if of set pur¬
pose to drive them on to starvation and despair, of the
undelayed enforcement of all overdue bills and all
arrears of rent suspended during the seige.
Throughout February the International and other
workmen's and revolutionary associations had been
active, and the indignation of the smaller bourgeoisie
at the conduct of the Government of National Defence,
and their irritation at the attitude of the new Assembly
as regarded Paris and the Republic, made them lend
their passive, where not active, support to the popular
movement. Various mass meetings were held and
12
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
committees formed—the upshot of which was the con¬
stitution of the Central Committee of the National
Guard, three members being elected for each arron¬
dissement. There were also some sub-committees, the
most important being that of the Montmartre division,
having its office in the Rue des Rosiers, and which has
sometimes been mistaken for the Central Committee
itself. The Central Committee was composed entirely
of obscure men, till then utterly unknown to public life,
but elected for their integrity and practical capacity by
the comrades of their district.
The suppression of Red-Republican journals by
General Vinoy, the treacherous condemnation to death
of Flourens and Blanqui for the part taken by them in
the affair of the 31st of October, coming on the nth of
March, the same day that the resolution to decentralise
Paris became known, gave further edge to the popular
fury and to the determination to resist. From this
time to the 18th the storm was visibly impending ; but
the Central Committee, backed by the International
and the workmen's organisations, declared that the
first shot should be fired by the other side.
There were at this stage three distinct elements in
the Parisian movement—(1) The element of Municipal
patriotism, the desire to see Paris remain paramount
in France, possessing a municipal council with exten¬
sive local powers ; (2) The determination to protect the
Republic, as such, from the obvious Monarchical con¬
spiracy being planned against it ; and (3) The definitely
Socialist Revolutionary element represented mainly,
though not exclusively, by the International. The
small middle-class, as might be expected, were in
general moved by the first two objects ; but, as we shall
see, as the Revolution proceeded, its Socialistic telos,
implicit from the first, came more and more to the fore,
THE l8TH OF MARCH.
*3
till in two or three weeks it had completely absorbed
the whole movement. It is desirable to point this out,
as there is a fatuous Fabianesque type of quibbler who
has occasionally tried.to exaggerate the first two
elements, which had their share at the inception of the
Commune, in order to discount its Socialistic character.
It is this same sort of insufferable quidnunc who is
always enlightening the public mind on the true signi¬
ficance of Socialism, explaining that it only means the
General Post-Office somewhat exaggerated—nothing
more whatever !
Thiers and his Ministers, members of the old
National Defence gang, arrived in Paris on the 15th of
March, and at once set about their measures for the
great step of the disarmament of the popular force of
the Metropolis. The proceeding relied upon the
gullibility or imbecility of the Parisians to an in¬
credible extent. The Government had, at the most,
25,000 considerably demoralised and otherwise not very
reliable troops, while the National Guard numbered
nearly 100,000 men, and although some few battalions
might possibly have been gained over to the Assembly,
yet they were an insignificant number as against those
loyal to the Central Committee. Under these un¬
favourable conditions, Thiers, prompted, it is said, by
the big financial thimble-riggers of the Bourse, decided
to begin opérations. The first thing to be done was
to seize the cannon ; and accordingly the order was
secretly given, on the 17th, for 250 pieces of ordnance
to be removed from Montmatre. It was all but
executed by surprise at 3 o'clock on the morning of the
18th by a couple of brigades of the regular army,
scarcely any resistance being offered.
But though the cannons were seized while the people
were asleep, with a fatal want of foresight the
14
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
Government omitted to provide any means of transport,
and while this was under way Montmartre awoke and
begap to take in the situation. The walls were covered
by a placard, in which the ominous word " order "
appeared—a word which, as we all know, generally
spells bloodshed. The women were the first to move,
it is said, and surrounded the cannon, apostrophising
the soldiers, who hesitated. Meanwhile the rappel was
beaten by a couple of drums throughout the district
and bodies of Guards began to roll up. Stragglers of
the " regulars " joined them, and the whole throng
penetrated up to the Buttes Montmartre, defended by
a brigade under General Lecomte, some of the foremost
men of which made signs of fraternisation. Lecomte,
seeing this, ordered the recalcitrants under arrest, at
the same time threatening them with the words," You
shall receive your deserts." A few shots were ex¬
changed between federals and regulars, without doing
much harm, when suddenly a body of Guards, the butt
end of their muskets up, accompanied by a motley
crowd of women and children, debouched from the
neighbouring street, the Rue des Rosiers. Lecomte
gave the order to fire three times. His men stood
immovable. The crowd pushed forward and frater¬
nised with the troops, who immediately afterwards
seized the ruffian with his officers. The soldiers whom
he had just before arrested wanted to shoot him forth¬
with, but some Nationals rescued him and took him to
the headquarters of the staff of the National Guard,
where they made him sign an order for the evacuation
of his positions.
Similar incidents occurred with the other brigades.
There was hardly any resistance to the insurrection.
The soldiers fraternised on all sides. In three hours,
i.e., by ii o'clock, all was over, almost afl the cannon
THE l8TH OF MARCH.
15
recaptured, almost all the battalions of the National
Guard afoot, joined by numbers of regulars—in short,
the insurrection was master of the field. The Govern¬
ment, in spite of proclamations and adjurations, could
do nothing ; a few hundred men were the most that
rallied to them.
Thiers, seeing the whole of Paris against him, in¬
sisted upon the immediate evacuation of the city,
including the forts on the south, by the Government
and remaining troops. He escaped by a back door
from the Hotel de Ville to Versailles. The insurrec¬
tion, it will be observed, now that it had come, was a
purely spontaneous popular movement. The Central
Committee did not meet till comparatively late in the
day. This lack of preparation and organisation had its
drawbacks, however, in spite of the immediate success,
as we shall presently see.
At half-past four in the afternoon, a general who had
had a hand in the slaughtering of the insurgents in 1848,
Clément-Thomas by name, was arrested. There were
many who tried to rescue him from a summary execu¬
tion, crying, " Wait for the Committee !" " Constitute
a court-martial !" but without avail. The old martinet
was thrust against a wall in the Rue des Rosiers, and
riddled with bullets from 20 chassepots. Though the
scoundrel doubtless deserved his fate, it is to be
regretted that the formality of a trial was not observed,
as the score against him was an old one. The same
observation does not apply to Lecomte, who had been
seized in flagrante delicto in the morning, ordering a
massacre. This cowadly miscreant, when the door
of the room where he was confined was burst open
by an angry crowd, grovelling on his knees, spoke of
his family, and whined for mercy. What had he cared
for the fathers of families among his would-be victims
i6
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
to the cause of " order " of a few hours before? He
was taken outside, and justice was summarily dealt out
to him. Of course, the bourgeois journals everywhere
bellowed loudly at the execution of these two rascally
bandits of their cause.
The Central Committee and the staff of the National
Guard now began to take measures for occupying the
Government offices and the chief strategical positions.
In the evening Jules Ferry slunk off after Thiers.
Jules Favre subsequently made his escape. Late at
night Vinoy succeeded in getting off his troops from
the various barracks of Paris with their baggage and
ammunition. Versailles was, of course, the rallying
point of the whole crew. Allowing the Government
and troops to slip through their fingers was the first
serious mistake made by the Insurrection. This was
owing to lack of discipline, organisation, and pre¬
paredness. Nothing would have been easier, if the
Committee had been active and alert, than to have
closed all the gates and arrested all the Governmental
authorities, civil and military, to await their trial. The
" little man," Thiers, and all the rest would have been
then under their thumb. This only proves that though
a popular ebullition may indeed make a revolution, yet
that without organisation it will very soon make a mess
of it.
the central committee and the reaction.
17
IV.
thf. central committee and the reaction.
The 19th of March saw the red flag waving over the
Hotel de Ville and all the public buildings of the city.
The Revolution had triumphed, but it had made its first
mistake ; it had allowed the heads of the Government to
escape with the elements of an army. The Central
Committee was supreme, but stupefied by its sudden
accession to absolute power. Two of the members
alone had the presence of mind to suggest the only
course to retrieve the previous day's mistake, viz., to
march at once on Versailles, then virtually at their
mercy, disperse the Assembly, and arrest the ting-
leaders of the Reaction. The others hung on legal
technicalities. Meanwhile the clearing of the Govern¬
ment offices and the transference of yet more military
to Versailles still went on. But the Committee (to its
honour in one sense) was too eager to abdicate its
functions and proceed to the elections for the Com¬
mune, to think of shutting the gates, or indeed of
anything else. In order to legalise the situation and
put the Revolution right with the rest of France, the
co-operation of the deputies for Paris and of the
mayors was resolved to be sought, in concert with
■whom the Committee wished to proclaim the elections.
The Thiers crew now played out their last card, in
the final number which they issued of the " Journal
Officiel," alleging the Committee to have " assassi-
c
i8
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
nated " in cold blood the Generals Lecomte and
Clément-Thomas, and asking whether the National
Guard would take upon itself the responsibility for
these " assassinations." The Committee, to its credit,
did not allow itself to be bullied into disavowing these
righteous, if too hasty, acts of popular justice ; but
confined itself to inserting a note in the new number of
the " Journal Officiel " (which from this day passed into
its hands), explaining its true position with respect to
them. The Governmental appeal had little effect on
the National Guard, though it was followed by the
defection of the Quartier Latin (the students), hitherto
to the fore in all revolutions, but the essentially bour¬
geois character of which, despite its Bohemian veneer,
became now clearly apparent.
The delegation of mayors who came to the Hotel de
Ville, after much debating, failed to effect anything.
Clemenceau, who was their spokesman, urged the Com¬
mittee to abdicate its functions to the deputies and
mayors, who would use their best offices to obtain satis¬
faction for Paris from the Assembly. Varlin, one of
the Committee, explained that what was wanted was
no mere municipality, but a quasi-autonomous Paris,
with police and legislative power, united to the rest of
France by the bond of federal union alone. Even good
Socialists like Milliere and Malon doubted the expedi¬
ency of the Committee's initiative. It was finally
decided that the Committee in its turn should send
four delegates to the Radical deputies and mayors
assembled in the Town Hall of the 2nd Arrondissement.
This they did ; but after several hours' wrangling, in
which Louis Blanc, Clemenceau, and other Radicals,
to their shame, gibed at the Committee as an insur¬
rectionary body, refusing to treat with it on an equality,
THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE AND THE REACTION. IÇ
no understanding was arrived at, and the delegates
left. Next morning the mayors made a final attempt
to get possession of the Hotel de Ville, and sent one
of their number to> demand it of the Committee. The
latter refused to abdicate until a Commune had been
elected, and forthwith issued a proclamation that the
elections would be held on the following Wednesday,
the 22nd. It was only too obvious that a surrender to
the deputies and mayors meant a complete knuckling
down to Thiers and his Assembly.
The next thing for the Committee to do was to re¬
organise the public services, purposely thrown into as
much disorder as possible by their late occupants prior
to their flight. The Government hoped thereby to
render it impossible for their successors to carry on the
administration of the great metropolis. The new¬
comers, however, set bravely to work, and overcame
all obstacles of this kind. But meanwhile the Com¬
mittee, not realising that they were about to enter on
a life-and-death struggle, had committed a military
blunder which practically sealed the fate of the Revolu¬
tion. Between Paris and Versailles, on a hill a little
to the right, lies the largest and most strategically-
important of the forts—Mont Valérien. This had been
abandoned on an order from Thiers, made during his
flight—he, with a civilian's lack of knowledge of forti¬
fication, believing it not to be worth holding. As a
matter of fact, it was the military key to the whole
position. For 36 hours it remained empty ; but the
Committee, instead of at once placing a strong
garrison there, regarded it as a matter of subsidiary
importance, and contented themselves with some vague
and lying assurances (as the event proved) of its having
been occupied, together with the other forts, given
c 2
20
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
by a portentous, half-crazed officer named Lullier, who,
by his swagger, had imposed upon them and acquired
thereby the temporary command. The military staff
at Versailles, wiser in their generation, had meanwhile
forced an order for its re-occupation from Thiers, and
the morning of the 20th found Mont Valérien well
munitioned and occupied by 1,000 Versaillese soldiers.
On the 21st the Central Committee suspended the
sale of pledged goods, forbade landlords to evict their
tenants till further notice, and prolonged the voucher
bills for a month. The same day the Radical deputies
and mayors made a protest against the elections
announced for the next day, as illegal—falsely alleging,
at the same time, that the Assembly had guaranteed
the maintenance of the National Guard, the municipal
elections at an early date, and other things. The
Press and all the Respectability of the capital joined in
a chorus of denunciation of the elections and of the
Committee's action. A rabble of swell mobsmen and
fancy men paraded the Place de la Bourse, shouting
"Down with the Committee!" "Long live the
Assembly!" The hostility of a few of the arrondisse¬
ments was so great that it became necessary to post¬
pone the elections till the following day.
All this time Versailles, its recently-arrived Assembly,
and all their hangers-on, were in a state of abject and
grovelling panic. News came in of revolts in several
towns of the departments, and there was an hourly
dread of the approach of the battalions of the National
Guard. The subsequently confirmed forger, Jules
Favre, delivered an harangue in the Chamber, denounc¬
ing the insurrection in choice expletives and bristling
with threatenings and slaughter at Paris—an harangue
which the cowering crew of terrified reactionists
THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE AND THE REACTION. 21
applauded with wild extravagance, almost falling on
the forger's neck in their enthusiasm.
The next day the black-coated rabble spoken of
above, together with some journalists and others, with
Admiral Suisset at their back, again set forth, many
of them with arms concealed in their clothes, this time
towards the Place Vendôme, the object being to expel
the National Guards from that position under cover of
a peaceful demonstration. Spying two sentries of the
National Guards they made for them and nearly
murdered them. Seeing this, about 200 Guards
promptly took up their position at the top of the
Rue de la Paix. They were greeted with savage
cries, and sword-sticks were levelled at them. Bergeret,
their leader, repeatedly summoned the rioters to retire,
without avail. Finally, seeing the " Nationals " in¬
disposed to use force, the rioters took courage and
drew their revolvers, killing two of the Guard and
wounding seven others. The muskets of the
" Nationals " then went off, leaving a dozen dead, and a
large number of revolvers, sword-sticks, and hats in
the street. The mob scattered in all directions, yelling.
Of course, ever on the alert for a pretext for a howl at
the movement, the bourgeois press everywhere made
immense capital out of this incident. " Punch's "
celebrated special constable—who says to the Chartist,
" If I kill you, mind, it's nothing ; but if you kill me,
by George! it's murder"—wasn't in it with the
journalists on "respectable" middle-class newspapers
on this occasion.
22
the paris commune.
Chapter V.
the election of the commune.
Notwithstanding the slight rallying of the bourgeois
and reactionary arrondissements referred to in the last
chapter, it was impossible for "order" to effect any
real foothold within the city. In a day or two the
" loyal " National Guards who were going to do such
wonders for the Assembly melted into nothing. The
Committee sent battalions of National Guards into all
the reactionary quarters, and quiet, if not " order,"
inside Paris at least, was re-established.
A few days previously two members of the Com¬
mittee, Varlin and Jourde, had, through Rothschild,
obtained a million francs from the Bank of France.
This was now exhausted with the initial expenses of
organising the public services, and the wages of the
National Guard. The Committee again sent Varlin
and Jourde to the Bank for supplies, but this time
they were received with insults, and gentle persuasion
in the shape of a couple of battalions of the National
Guard had to be forwarded in order to effect a dis¬
bursement. This question of the Bank was a crucial
one. Its treatment at the hands of the Committee, and
a few days later at those of the Commune, who fol¬
lowed in the same steps, showed a childish want of
grasp of the situation, and constituted the third fatal
blunder of the Revolution. There was enough in
specie and in securities in the Bank to have bought up
the whole of the Versailles army. In addition to this,
THE ELECTION OF THE COMMUNE.
23
there were 90,000 titles of depositors to serve as
hostages for the good behaviour of the Government as
representing the middle-classes throughout France.
The Committee, and afterwards the Commune, instead
of seizing the whole concern, allowed the management
to remain, with its entire staff, barring the Chief
Governor, who had fled, and went cap in hand from
time to time to solicit the requisite funds. The sub-
governor by a little diplomacy succeeded before long
in nobbling an old gentleman named Beslay, who
though no more than a Radical bourgeois had had the
pluck to stick gallantly to Paris, yet who, in spite of
his personal honesty, had all the prejudices of his class
when financial matters were concerned. He was,
nevertheless, selected as go-between with the Bank
and the Revolution. But to return to the days of
March. The mayors now concentrated all their efforts
towards trying to further postpone the elections.
These had, after two postponements, been definitely
fixed by the Committee for Sunday, March 26th. At
last the insults toward Paris, and the general attitude
of the Assembly, having disgusted many even of the
moderate Republicans, there was a disposition to com¬
promise on the part of the mayors, and the 30th was
proposed. The Committee, however, stuck to the 26th,
and eventually five mayors, including Clémenceau and
Floquet, finding resistance hopeless, reluctantly signed
a manifesto sanctioning the elections. The rest did
not protest, though they kept steadily aloof. The
adhesion of the mayors, such as it was, gave the elec¬
tions the cachet of technical legality.
On the Sunday, 287,000 men accordingly went to the
polfj and the Paris Commune was elected and pro¬
claimed amid general rejoicing. On the Monday there
24
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
was a muster of National Guards (arms piled up in
front of them) and civilian electors, in the " place " of
the Hotel de Ville to greet the newly-installed repre¬
sentatives of Paris. Salutes of cannon, bands playing
the " Marseillaise," and enthusiastic shouts made the
welkin ring. The spies of Versailles declared the whole
of Paris infected. The members of the new Commune
appeared again and again on the balcony of the Hotel
de Ville in response to the deafening shouts which
demanded them. Amongst the elected, although the
majority were Revolutionists, and, at least up to their
lights, Socialists, there were a small number of bour¬
geois Liberals and Radicals chosen, but these very
soon found an excuse for backing out of an enterprise
which they saw they could not manipulate as they had
hoped. At the first meeting of the Commune, the
before-mentioned well-meaning bourgeois Beslay was
chosen President by virtue of his seniority, and, it must
be admitted, made a not altogether bad opening
speech. The Commune next day proceeded to appor¬
tion itself in committees. There was an Executive
Committee composed of Lefrancais, Duval, Felix Pyat
(the old forty-eighter, with a reputation which he owed
to the rhetoric he talked and penned), Bergeret, Tridon,
Eudes, and Vaillant (the Blanquist, now member of
the Chamber). The other committees were Finance,
of which Varlin and Jourde were members, Justice,
Public Safety, Labour Exchange, Victualling, Foreign
Policy, Public Works, and Education.
One of the first acts of the Commune was to grant a
complete release from all rent from October, 1870, to
July, 1871. Thus a vast number of poor people were
relieved from a crushing liability which they were
utterly unable to meet without ruin. This was all very
THE ELECTION OF THE COMMUNE.
25
proper as far as it went, but the Commune omitted to
perform two important duties which the situation im¬
peratively demanded, the first was to issue a clear and
easily intelligible manifesto explaining its programme
and plan of action. The second and, if anything, still
more serious omission was not keeping in touch with
the provinces which, immediately after March 18th,
had, shown the most favourable signs of sympathetic
action with Paris. Lyons, Marseilles, St. Etienne,
Narbonne, Toulouse, and other towns started Com¬
munes, some of them, notably Marseilles and Narbonne,
with considerable chances of success. But they re¬
ceived no support or even communications from the
head centre of the movement. As a consequence,
isolated materially and morally, they most of them came
to grief in a few days. Marseilles and Narbonne held
out the longest, but in a fortnight the whole Com¬
munistic movement in the provinces was dead. Thiers
and his Versaillese, again wise in their generation, left
no stone unturned to detach the provinces from all
sympathy with Paris, and issued notices to all the
prefects, maligning Paris and the Revolution, mis¬
representing every fact and fabricating every lie.
Having succeeded in rooting out the Commune in the
provinces, Thiers proceeded to stop all goods trains for
Paris and to cut off all the postal communications.
Rampont, the postmaster, received orders to violate the
undertaking he had entered into with Thiesz, the postal
delegate of the Committee, and to disorganise the
postal service. The stupid Committee and Commune,
hoping to the last that peace would be preserved, took
no further steps for the eventuality of war. The
Assembly, on its side, proceeded steadily organising
the isolation of Paris and consolidation of their army,
26
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
which was now strengthened by several regiments of
released prisoners of war from Germany. By the end
of March all the ' ' moderate ' ' members of the Com¬
mune had resigned, with the exception of old Beslay.
The international character of the movement was
accentuated by the unanimous confirmation of the elec¬
tion of Frankel, the Austrian, in the 13th Arrondisse¬
ment. Meanwhile, the "respectable" population,
the friends of " order," were migrating en masse to
Versailles.
the war begins with disaster.
27
Chapter VI.
the war begins with disaster for the commune.
On April 1st Thiers officially declared war in a
•circular sent to the Prefects, and the same day, without
any warning given to Paris, the Versaillese opened fire
upon the town. The Parisians were in consternation
at the recommencement of the siege. No one had
thought that matters would really come to this pass.
Everywhere within the city was bustle and confusion.
The military commission of the Commune placarded
the following :—" The Royalist conspirators have
attacked—our moderate attitude notwithstanding.
Our duty is to defend the city against this wanton
aggression." That day but little was done. The Ver¬
saillese attacked and drove off an inadequate garrison
of Federals at Courbevoie, taking five prisoners, one a
lad of 15, all of whom they murdered in cold blood.
This was the beginning of the series of atrocities
perpetrated by those fiends in human shape which
culminated in that sublimest tragedy in modern his¬
tory, the "bloody week."
After much discussion a sortie was decided upon by
the military authorities of the Commune for the next
•day. That night Cluseret was appointed delegate of
war, in company with Eudes, one of the military men
of the situation. The National Guard, suddenly called
upon to act, was in a state of great disorganisation,
often without staff officers or any guiding spirit, and
much confusion resulted in consequence. At length, at
28
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
midnight, three columns were got together. The plam
was to make a strong demonstration in the direction of
Reuil as a blind for a column under Bergeret and
Flourens to operate on the right, while Eudes and
Duval, respectively, were to command those on the
centre and the left. Unfortunately, these excellent
men had never commanded a battalion in the field'
before, in addition to which the sub-officering, as before
said, was hopelessly defective. The elementary re¬
quisites of a campaign were neglected ; artillery, ambu¬
lances and ammunition-waggons were everywhere else
except where they should have been. At about three-
o'clock on the morning of April 3rd, Bergeret's column,
10,000 men strong, but with only eight cannon, reached'
the bridge at Neuiliy. They proceeded quite coolly
on their way, under the range of Mont Valérien, every
National Guard believing it to be in the possession of
the Commune, when suddenly shells burst from the
great fortress, spreading death and destruction in the
ranks of the Federals and severing the column into two-
halves. Panic, confusion, and cries of "Treachery"
overwhelmed everything.
I well remember my astonishment at the headlong
folly of the Federals' confidence in Mont Valérien being
safe, since the English papers had days previously pub¬
lished the information of its occupation by the Ver-
saillese. It seemed incredible that what was known to
us over here should have been utterly unknown to
those on the spot and most immediately interested.
The fact was the leaders did know that Mont Valérien
was lost to the Commune,* but hoped the troops of the
line would refuse to fire, and so kept the fact secret.
The memory of how the linesmen had fraternised on
March 18th, and reports as to the untrustworthiness of
THE WAR BEGINS WITH DISASTER.
29
the Assembly's soldiers, now reinforced by regiments
from Germany, had deceived them. They forgot that
for this important fort Thiers' military staff had
selected their men, and they forgot, moreover, that
insubordination in the interior of a fortress is a very
■different thing from insubordination in the open street
under the moral pressure of a sympathetic crowd ready
to protect the insubordinate from the vengeance of
their superior officers. This deception, however well-
intentioned it may have been, was little less than
criminal under the circumstances. Most of the Guard
scattered in all directions, and finally found their way
back to Paris, only about 1,200 remaining with Ber-
geret, and pushing on. They were supported by
Flourens, who, with only a thousand men (the rest
having also straggled off, such was the state of
discipline), routed the Versaillese vanguard, and occu¬
pied the village of Bougival. A whole Versaillese
army corps was directed against this detachment, and
the Parisian vanguard had to fall back on Reuil, where
a few men had held the position, the object being to
cover Bergeret's retreat. Flourens was here surprised
with his staff, and this noble-hearted people's hero was
killed, his head cleft with a sabre. Poor Flourens was
a type of revolutionist of whom we have few now-a-
days left. Many there are now who understand the
economic question better than Flourens, but none we
know who have quite that old-world chivalrous devotion
to the Revolution which this remarkable man had, and
which so endeared him to the impressionable working-
classes of Paris. Of a well-to-do middle-class family,
Flourens' impulsive nature led him in his early youth
to join an insurrection against the Turks in the Levant.
During the latter part of the Second Empire he was,
3°
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
next to Rochefort, the most prominent people's
agitator. His untimely death threw a gloom over all
Paris, and heightened the effect of the defeat.
The centre column under Eudes was not more suc¬
cessful than the others. Duval, through mismanage¬
ment, was left unsupported, and had to surrender. He
was murdered by order of Vinoy, in spite of pledges
given to the contrary. Crowds of Guards returned
disheartened in the evening. The only good point,
from a military point of view, in the day's proceed¬
ings was the supplying of Fort Issy with cannon
through the energy and thoughtfulness of Ranvier.
The disaster of April 3rd, however, notwithstanding
all, had the effect of stirring up the old latent
resisting strength of the National Guard. Next day all
the forts were manned. The Commune even gained
a few points, within a day of two re-occupying Cour-
bevoie, and holding the bridge of Neuilly, but it was
not for long. There was no lack of heroism. The
Porte Maillot held out for weeks under the fire of Mont
Valérien. Yet to the onlooker versed in military lore
it was evident that the situation meant a prolonged
death agony for Paris. With Mont Valérien lost
there was no hope. In a few days the Commune was
everywhere on the defensive. Meanwhile strict care
was taken by the Versaillese to prevent any tendency
favourable to Paris from manifesting itself at Ver¬
sailles. Officers who merely expressed regret at the
fratricidal struggle were secretly murdered by order of
the villains with whom the whole of the " respectable "
classes of Europe sided.
On April 6th took place the funeral of those killed
in the disastrous sortie of the 3rd, and an imposing
sight it was. Two hundred thousand accompanied the
THE WAR BEGINS WITH DISASTER.
31
catafalque to the Père la Chaise cemetery. Five mem¬
bers of the Commune, headed by the old hero of '48,
Delescluze, followed as chief mourners. At the grave,
the aged man, the father of the Revolution, spoke a
few words, after which the vast concourse dispersed.
From this time forward the history of the Commune is
largely a history of military blunders and incapacity
allied with bravery and good intentions. We shall,
however, deal very briefly with the purely military side
of the movement, as that has mainly a local and tem¬
porary interest, and, moreover, cannot be properly
understood without a large map of Paris and its
environs.
32
the paris commune.
Chapter VII.
concerning various matters.
•Cluseret now entered upon his duties as delegate of
war. His name was already known to Englishmen,
owing to his connection with the Fenian attack on
Chester Castle, in 1867. He is regarded by many
active participators in the Commune as at once in¬
sincere and incapable. The latter charge seems to be
fairly made out ; as to the former I am not prepared to
offer any opinion. There were two main plans of
defence possible to be adopted, that of the outer
enciente, with its forts, redoubts, etc., but which
required more men, more means, and more military
experience than the Commune had at its disposal,
and that of the inner enciente, the ramparts, which if
effectively carried out would have made Paris practi¬
cally impregnable. Cluseret and the Commune adopted
neither, but messed about with both, neutralising the
one by the other.
The cowardly assassinations of Flourens and Duval
had excited everyone. In deference to public opinion
the Commune ordered the seizure of hostages in full
accordance with the practice recognised by war. Un¬
fortunately, the best hostages they could have had
had been allowed to escape at the outset of the move¬
ment. However, Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris,
Lagarde, his grand-vicar, Duguerry, Curé of the Made¬
leine, Bonjean, Presiding Judge of the Court of Appeal,
Jecker, a financial politician responsible for the Mexican
CONCERNING VARIOUS MATTERS.
33
expedition, and a few Jesuits were laid by the heels.
A decree and a proclamation were then issued threaten¬
ing reprisals in the event of any further murders on the
part of the Versaillese. But the decree remained a
dead letter. The Versailles continued their cold¬
blooded assassination of prisoners, and no reprisals
were taken. As I propose devoting a separate chapter
to the consideration of the whole question of the
hostages, I shall say no more here.
The fatal incapacity and weakness of the Commune
now for the first time became apparent in internal and
external policy. Ever since its first sitting, however,
it had become increasingly evident that it was below
the level of the situation. Beyond two or three com¬
paratively unimportant decrees a fortnight showed no
constructive work done.
Meanwhile immense heroism was displayed at certain
points of the outworks by the Federal troops. The
Porte Maillot, a frightful position, exposed to the full
fire of Mont Valérien, was held for seven weeks by
successive relays of men. It was now that that marvel
of self-devoting intrepidity, Dombrowski the Pole,
appeared upon the scene. This man, by his calm fear¬
lessness and dashing courage, performed incredible
feats with the slenderest means. He swept the Ver¬
saillese from Asnières, while his equally heroic brother
took the Castle of Bécon, and, what was still more,
routed the troops of Vinoy when they attempted to
recover it. But these isolated flashes of momentary
success could not materially affect the situation.
Talk of conciliation went on all the time, and many
were the efforts made by well-intentioned persons (e.g.,
the " Union Syndicale," and the " League of the Rights
of Paris ") to bring about an understanding. But Thiers
D
34
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
would have none of it. He would hear of no compro¬
mise, not even of a truce or armistice, nothing but
unconditional surrender.
On April 16th the complementary elections for the
Commune—necessitated by the vacation of 31 seats
through death, double elections, and resignations—
were held. The change was very marked from
March 26th. Instead of the 146,000 who had appeared
at the polls in the same arrondissements on the previous
occasion only 61,000 voted now. It was felt that all
hope of peace was at an end, and that all who voted
were voting for war to the knife with Versailles. The
inactivity and vacillation of the Commune up to this
time had also alienated many sympathisers.
After these elections, on the 19th, it was finally
decided to issue a political programme. This pro¬
gramme, which was supposed to be drawn up by a
commission of five members, was mainly the work of
a journalist, Pierre Denis, assisted by Delescluze. The
former, a writer in Jules Vallès' " Cri du Peuple," was
fanatical on the question of federal autonomy, and this
he managed to place in the forefront of the new
declaration which demanded the recognition of the
republic, and the autonomy of the township or com¬
mune (irrespective of its size) throughout France. In
the first instance, however, it was only the autonomy of
Paris which was called for. The rest of France was
to follow suit as best it could. The rights of the Com¬
mune were defined as including the voting of the bud¬
get, of taxation, the organisation and control of the
local services, magistracy, police, and education, the
administration of communal wealth, etc., in short, to
all intents complete autonomy. A central council of
delegates from the various communes throughout
CONCERNING VARIOUS MATTERS.
35
France was referred to, but its functions were nowhere
defined. It was apparently forgotten that without
adequate safeguards such a council would have been a
hopelessly reactionary body, owing to the fact that the
large majority of the small rural Communes would have
voted under Clerical influence. The idea was for the
complete autonomy of Paris in all internal affairs to be
forthwith recognised, and that of the other Communes
throughout France to follow, apparently as demanded.
As an International Revolutionist I have been always
strongly sympathetic with all movements for local
autonomy as most directly tending to destroy the
modern " nation " or centralised bureaucratic State,
and if the movement had been properly organised in
co-operation with the other large towns in the earlier
days of March a decentralising programme, properly
worked out, might have formed the common political
basis. Now, however, it was too late. The idea of
constituting Paris a solitary island in the midst of the
ocean of provincial France in the vague hope that other
islands would spring up in time of themselves, and
form an archipelago1, was little better than a crude
absurdity. The manifesto contained some good
passages, probably the work of Delescluze, but as it
stood it was ill-timed and not to the point. Neverthe¬
less it was accepted almost without discussion by the
Commune, so perfunctory had its proceedings become.
There were now two distinct parties within the
council of the Commune,. the. sorcalled " majority " and
" minority." These originated in the first instance
over a hot discussion on the question of the veri¬
fication of the elections of the 16th, and tended, as
is the wont of such factions, to become increasingly
bitter and personal. The Commune soon became
D2
36
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
split up into cliques which alternately dominated, and
which still further exacerbated the situation by their
mutual recriminations and intrigues. In this way the
defence was paralysed, and decrees, good or bad,
remained more often than not an empty form.
All this time the Versaillese were organising their
attack, and getting into military order the reinforce¬
ments they were almost daily receiving from Germany,
consisting of troops who after their defeat and deten¬
tion in German garrison towns were perfectly ready to
take part in a successful campaign against anybody, no
matter whom. The army of Versailles at the end of
April amounted to 130,000 men, and more were coming
in. Bismarck and the German military authorities
had been only too anxious to offer Thiers and the
French bourgeoisie every assistance within their power
to crush their common proletarian foe.
the internal administration.
37
Chapter VIII.
the internal administration and policy of the
commune.
As already observed, the Commune had organised itself
at starting into nine Commissions or delegations.
These consisted of a victualling department, a depart¬
ment of municipal services, of finance, of war, of public
safety, of justice, of external affairs, of education, and
of labour. The first, the provisioning department, did
not offer any special difficulties until the end of April,
when Thiers ordered the stoppage of all provision
trains for Paris, and even after' that it was possible to
keep the town supplied through the neutral zone
between the German and Versaillese armies. Besides,
the city itself contained enough food to have sustained
a long siege if necessary. The department of public
or municipal services involved the general superin¬
tendence of public offices such as the Post Office, the
Telegraphs, the Mint, the official printing press, the
hospitals, the greater number of the subordinate mem¬
bers of the staff of which had been induced to remain
or return. Theisz, a workman, took the direction of
the Post Office, which involved the most trouble, owing
to its having been intentionally thrown into disorder
38
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
by its late director. The wages of all employees were
at once raised, and the hours shortened. In well-nigh
all these services the "superior officials " had made
off, thus leaving the work of directing them in the
hands of the workmen administrators placed there by
the Commune.
Camélinat, bronze worker, took over the Mint, and
admirably carried on the business of coining bullion and
of engraving postage-stamps. The hospitals were re¬
organised and re-manned by an old revolutionist named
Treilhard. The Commission of Finance was presided
over by Jourde, who had been a clerk and accountant.
Varlin, a workman agitator, energetic and devoted to
the cause, was also an invaluable member of this Com¬
mission, which had the task of raising and distributing
the requisite funds for the payment of all the services,
including the National Guards, and the war expenses
generally. The whole was managed by workmen and
small clerks at workmen's wages, and not at the
salaries of "boss" middle-class financiers. The de¬
partment of war, with Cluseret at its head, seems
unluckily to1 have been the worst conducted of any.
Here everybody was at cross purposes. Continual
wrangling over the possession of the cannon resulted
in a lot of artillery remaining useless. Ammunition of
wrong calibre was often distributed. Important posts
were left unrelieved. The commissariat was, more¬
over, hopelessly disorganised. The barricades which
it had been decided to construct were made regardless
of any intelligible strategical plan. There was a fatal
tendency for the several departments to overlap in their
functions, which were not precisely enough defined.
This was especially noticeable between the war and
police (public safety) departments.
THE INTERNAL ADMINISTRATION.
39
The department last mentioned was under the direc¬
tion of Raoul Rigault, an ardent young Revolutionist,
but without experience and unfitted for such an im¬
portant post. What was worse was that he had with
him a lot of flighty young men who exacerbated
matters. With such colleagues as these, Ferré, Reg-
nard, the chief secretary of police (whose imposing
appearance rests in the memory of some of us who
used often to meet him in the British Museum at the
end of the seventies), and such more solid men, were
hopelessly handicapped in their influence. In the
matter of the Picpus Convent, where racks, cages with
women in a frightful state shut up in them, skulls with
hair on, and other evidences of criminal practices were
unearthed, nothing was done beyond transferring the
nuns to St. Lazare. Decrees of the Commune were not
given effect to. Journals suppressed in the morning
were allowed to be sold in the evening. The only
thing that was not forgotten by this department as by
the whole movement was the humanitarian idea and
the so-called Christian (?) principle of doing good to
those that revile you and persecute you. The Com¬
mune through this delegation supported the wives and
families of the men who were fighting against it, saying
41 the Commune has bread for all misery and care for all
orphans."
Allied with the Commission of Police and Public
Safety was that of Justice. The Commune ordered
that every arrest should be at once notified to this
department. As regards punctiliousness in the matter
of property the department of Justice, like the Com¬
mune, showed itself almost pedantic, returning the
cash-box of a gas company ( !) seized in a search for
hidden arms on the company's premises. It dismissed
40
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
a commissary for having sequestrated, police-fashion,
the money found on Gustave Chaudey when arrested
for having ordered the firing from the Hotel de Ville on
January 22nd.
The delegation of Justice further instituted a rigorous
inquiry into the state of the prisons, and the motives for
the arrest of all persons detained. This latter led to a
conflict between the two departments and to the resig¬
nation of Raoul Rigault after having been admonished
by Delescluze for his careless conduct of the important
functions entrusted to him. With all his faults, how¬
ever, it cannot be said that this young man erred on the
side of harshness.
The delegation of the Exterior was established
mainly for the purpose of enlightening the provinces,
too long neglected, and counteracting the influence of
Versailles, which diligently fed them with lies. By the
time it got into working order, however, the important
movements which followed March 18th had been
crushed, and it did little or nothing to give direction to,
or even to keep alive, the sporadic agitation which
broke forth in various places during the ensuing weeks.
It despatched a few emissaries indeed, but for the most
part obscure Parisians utterly unknown in the localities
where they were sent. Seeing that the sole chance
of the Commune lay in creating powerful diversions by
means of the armed populace of the large provincial
towns, the lukewarmness of the action taken is simply
incredible. It must be said, nevertheless, on behalf of
the Commission itself that the sum of 100,000 francs
(£4,000) allowed it by the Commune was ridiculously
inadequate for the work of stirring up the whole of
provincial France, which was what it ought to have
done.
THE INTERNAL ADMINISTRATION.
41
The Education Department, though it, of course, at
once suppressed religious teaching and emblems in
schools, never got beyond the stage of preparation in
any constructive programme. It was supposed to be
organising a scheme of primary and secondary educa¬
tion, but has left no trace behind it. Elise Réclus and
Benoit Gastineau took excellent charge of the " Biblio¬
thèque Nationale," and Gustave Courbet, the painter,
with a committee of artists, superintended the museums
and picture-galleries. Some of the arrondissements
were more active than the Education Committee itself.
One of them, at its own motion, instituted free clothing
and feeding for the children. Another, in an excellent
memorandum, declared it the mission of the school of
the Revolutionary Commune to teach children to love
their fellow creatures, to love justice, and to bring
home to them the duty of improving themselves, not
for the sake of personal advancement, " but in the
interests of all." At the same time teachers were
instructed in future to exclusively employ " the experi¬
mental and scientific method, that which starts from
facts physical, moral, and intellectual."
The delegation which did most work and which suc¬
ceeded more than any other in giving expression to the
Socialistic principles embodied in the revolution of
March 18th was undoubtedly that of " Labour and
Exchange," presided over by our Austrian comrade,
Léo Frankel. This delegation systematically set to
work to collect and arrange information concerning the
condition of labour, and the precise relations existing
in all trades between employer and workman. It was
also entrusted with the revision of the Customs and
the transformation of the fiscal system. Its report
recommended the return of pledges to all necessitous
42
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
persons and the suppression of the pawnshops, since
the Revolution of the Commune implied the speedy
establishment " of a social organisation giving serious
guarantees of support to workmen out of employment."
The Commune, it proclaimed, implied the rescue of
workmen from the exploitation of capital.
The Labour department further procured the prohibi¬
tion of night work for bakers, and made fines and stop¬
pages of wages illegal. At its instigation the Com¬
mune decreed the confiscation of factories and work¬
shops not in actual use, and their immediate handing
over to trade syndicates of workmen to be conducted on
a co-operative basis. This decree, although defective
enough in its details, nevertheless, for the first time
in history, affirmed the principle of the expropriation
of the capitalist class by the working class, and it is for
this reason of epoch-making importance. Unfortu¬
nately time and circumstances did not allow of its being
■carried into effect.
And what was the city of Paris like during the
Commune? Quiet, peaceful, and, what is more, almost
wholly free from crime. The last fact is admitted by
friends and foes alike. Middle-class Englishmen with
no sympathy for the Commune have been reluctant
witnesses to the safety and good order maintained
throughout the whole city during the two months that
the Revolution was master. Quarters, where at other
times when " order " prevails, assaults are of frequent
occurrence and prostitution is rife, could be traversed
without molestation of any kind night or day. While
the Versailles organs were daily demanding the whole¬
sale slaughter of Parisians, one looks in vain through
all the revolutionary journals for a single bloodthirsty
THE INTERNAL ADMINISTRATION. 43
suggestion. The churches, closed for the farce of a
Christian worship, no longer seriously believed in, and
become solely the instrument for maintaining popular
ignorance and subserviency, we find transformed into
public halls, in which the pulpits, hung with red, are
occupied by preachers of the gospel, not of Christ, but
of Revolutionary Socialism. Revolutionary hymns are
sung to organ accompaniment. The Tuilleries, the late
home of the vulgar and ostentatious profligacy of king
and emperor, are now used to serve as free concert
rooms for the people. Such was the Paris of the
Commune !
44
the paris commune.
Chapter IX.
the freemasons, the committee of public saffty"
and rossel.
The last serious attempt at conciliation between Ver¬
sailles and Paris was made by the Freemasons oni
April 2 ist. They were received coldly by Thiers, who-
assured them that, though Paris were given over to-
destruction and slaughter, the law should be enforced,
and he kept his word. A few days after they decided'
in a public meeting to plant their banner on the ram¬
parts and throw in their lot with the Commune. On the-
29th accordingly, 10,000 of the brethren met (55 lodges
being represented), and marched to the Hotel de Ville,
headed by the Grand Masters in full insignia and the
banners of the lodges. Amongst them the new banner
of Vincennes was conspicuous, bearing the inscription
in red letters on a white ground, " Love one another."
A balloon was then sent up, which let fail at intervals,
outside Paris, a manifesto of the Freemasons. The
procession then wended its way through the boulevards
and the Champs Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe, where
the banners were planted at various points along the
ramparts. On seeing the white flag on the Porte
Maillot the Versaillese ceased firing, and the com¬
mander, himself a Freemason, received a deputation of
brethren, and suggested a final appeal to Versailles,,
THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY. 45
which was agreed to. The "chief of the executive,"
of course, hardly listened to the envoys, and declined
to further discuss the question of peace with anyone.
They might have known before that such would have
been their reception. The little smug bourgeois fiend
was already scenting the proletarian blood he so longed
to shed. This last formal challenge having been made
^ind rejected, the Freemasons definitely took their stand
as combatants for the Commune.
Millière, who had worked hard to organise the pro¬
vincials in Paris ever since the early part of April,
induced the " Republican Alliance of the Departments,"
consisting of provincials residing in Paris, to give a
formal adhesion to the Commune, 15,000 men accom¬
panying Millière to the Hôtel de Ville, after having
voted an address to the departments. This was on
April 30th. The same afternoon news arrived of the
evacuation by the Federals of the fort of Issy, which
had been the result of a surprise. A few remained
behind, however, one of them a lad at the entrance,
with gunpowder and a train, prepared to blow himself
up rather than surrender the fort. As soon as the
news was known reinforcements were sent, and the
Versaillese driven from the park surrounding the fort
and the fort itself was reoccupied. This affair, not¬
withstanding that it had no immediate military conse¬
quences, turned a sudden light on to the way the
defence was being conducted, and led to the arrest of
Cluseret in the evening.
It also led indirectly to the carrying out of a project
mooted some days before, of the creation of a " Com¬
mittee of Public Safety." Here we see the old revolu¬
tionary tradition asserting itself. It was formally ex¬
pressed by that old votary of the revolutionary tradi-
46
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
tion, Félix Pyat, who gave as a reason for it that a
" Committee of Public Safety " belonged to the period
which first produced the " Republic" and the "Com¬
mune." This adoration of phrases and historical
shibboleths is so thoroughly French, and has so often
been the bane of French popular movements, that it is
worth specially noting. However, whatever its name,
the general feeling as to the necessity of some cen¬
tralised power was for the moment paramount. The
permanent Executive Commission of the Commune, in
spite of its having been reorganised, had proved utterly
ineffective in superintending things. In its latest form
it consisted of Cluseret, Jourde, Viard, Paschal
Grousset, Frankel, Protot, Andrien, Vaillant, and
Raoul Rigault. In the end, the establishment of the
Committee of Public Safety was voted by 45 to 23.
This question brought to an issue the quarrel between
the so-called " majority " and " minority " on the Com¬
mune. The majority, led by Félix Pyat, and con¬
taining all the archaeological reconstructors and mere
sentimentalists, as also the Blanquists (with the excep¬
tion of Tridon), voted for the Committee. The
minority, including the most clear-headed Socialists of
the Hôtel de Ville, voted against it. When the ques¬
tion came of selecting the men to serve on it, the
minority refused to take any part. Ranvier, Arnaud,
Meillet, Gérardin, and Pyat were then elected by the
" majority " alone. This squabble had the most
disastrous effects outside, as it for the first time
revealed to the world the dissensions and personal
recriminations long brewing in the council-room.
On the same evening that Cluseret was arrested
(April 30th) Rossel was appointed Delegate of War in
his place. Rossel was a disappointed young officer
THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY.
4?
who had served during the Franco-German war, and
thought himself unduly neglected by the military autho¬
rities. On the look-out for a job in which he might
distinguish himself, and full of bitterness towards his
old superiors, he came to Paris and took service under
the Revolution. He neither knew nor cared anything
for the cause, and frankly confessed, when interrogated
by the Commune, that he did not understand what
Socialism meant, but that he hated the Government
which had signed away two French provinces to the
" Prussians," and was willing to support any move¬
ment for its overthrow. In the teeth of Cluseret's in¬
capacity, and, as some thought, treachery, a young
officer with a certain military reputation, and able to
talk with an air of authority on the situation, seemed
a godsend to the men of the Hôtel de Ville. Rossel
wanted to carry things with a high hand in military
martinet style, however, and from the first showed an
utter lack of savoir faire in his dealings with the citizen-
soldiery, the National Guard. In spite of his preten¬
sions the improvement on the Cluseret régime was not
obvious. Rossel gave orders one day and revoked
them the next. He started on a system of barricades,
connecting the three chief strategic positions within
the city—Montmartre, the Trocadèro, and the Panthéon
—but never saw to its carrying out. The Versaillese
had meanwhile opened new batteries, and the line of fire
was slowly but steadily drawing closer round Paris.
Matters were complicated by the Central Committee,
the personnel of which had been almost entirely
changed from what it was originally by trying to inter¬
meddle and squabbling with the war Commission. Issy
was in a few days reduced to a heap of ruins, and
finally evacuated on May 9th. Rossel, the same
48
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
evening, with an indiscretion which had all the appear¬
ance of being intentional, had placarded all over Paris,
as if it had been the news of a victory, the words, " The
tricolour floats over the fort of Issy abandoned by its
garrison." He immediately after wrote a letter in
which he endeavoured to clear his military reputation
by abusing the organisation of the military services.
These were bad enough in all conscience, but Rossel
knew the position of affairs when he accepted the respon¬
sibility, and there is conclusive evidence that he did not
make the best of things, even bad as they were. He
wound up bv sending in his resignation, and asking for
a " cell at Mazas."
the last days of paris.
49
Chapter X.
the last days of paris.
In addition to their military operations, the Versaillese
were not indisposed to rely on the work of spies in
endeavouring to effect an entry into the city by means of
treachery. These gentlemen, however, quarrelled
among themselves, mutually denounced each other to
their employers, and, in spite of the big promises which
each made in turn, they effected nothing beyond con¬
suming some few hundred thousand francs of govern¬
mental money. They were most of them " old
soldiers," including one or two naval officers, reac¬
tionary National Guards, and Chevaliers d'Industrie.
Some of them having attempted to corrupt Dom-
browski, they were denouncèd by him to the Committee
of Public Safety. This was about the last attempt
made by Thiers to gain over Paris by treachery. He
saw it was no use.
Meanwhile the discussions in the council-room be¬
tween the "majority" and "minority" in the Com¬
mune were, unhappily, going on more acrimoniously
than ever. Rossel, in spite of his demand for a "cell
at Mazas," and of his parole not to escape, slunk off
and hid himself in a safe retreat, whence he was to be
fetched out some three weeks later by the Versaillese,
by that time masters of Paris. His arrest was decreed,
e
50
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
however, almost unanimously by the Commune at the
opening of its sitting of May ioth. The next item
on the agenda on this occasion was the reconstruction
of the redoubtable Committee of Public Safety, which,
after eight days* existence, had been, by general con¬
sensus of opinion, voted a failure. The " minority "
seized the opportunityTor holding out the right hand of
fellowship ; but the " majority," led by Félix Pyat, who
was in the chair, persisted in their attitude of suspicion,
and the schism in consequence became more accen¬
tuated than ever. The Committee was reconstructed,
but again only with members of the " majority. ""
Ranvier, Gambon, Delescluze, Arnaud, and Eudes were
the men chosen. Delescluze was afterwards made
Chief of the War Office ; Billioray, an insignificant
member of the " majority," occupying the vacancy thus:
created on the Committee ; Raoul Rigault again went
into the Department of " security," this time as Pro¬
curator of Police ; while Théophile Ferré was made
Prefect, Cournet (son of an old revolutionist of '48,
killed in a duel in London), who had originally replaced
Rigault in the Prefecture of Police, having resigned.
The new Committee of Public Safety ordered the
demolition of Thiers"s house in Paris, which was forth¬
with effected. There was not much use in this, seeing
that the Assembly was sure to have it rebuilt at the
national expense, and a decree was, of course, imme¬
diately passed at Versailles to this effect. The Com¬
mune, however, and all belonging to it, seemed to think
it bore a charmed life ; and hence, without seriously
applying themselves to the one serious question of the
hour, the defence of Paris, went on passing decrees
of a useful and ornamental nature—many of which were
excellertt in themselves, but few of which were timely.
THE LAST DAYS OF PARIS.
5r
Among the best of what may be termed the " sym¬
bolical " measures, was a decree passed by the Com¬
mune on April 12th for the destruction of the Vendôme
Column. Although preparations for carrying it out
were forthwith set about, owing to various delays these
were not completed for more than a month. Accord¬
ingly, it was not before May 16th that the great
emblem of French Jingoism actually kissed the earth.
Erected to celebrate the victories of the first Napoleon
in his wars of wanton aggression, it was very properly
regarded as a standing insult, not only to every other
European nationality, but, before all, to a Revolution
based on the principles of Internationalism. So the
afternoon of May 16th saw a large assemblage of
Parisians in the Rue de la Paix and in the Place de la
Concorde, the roofs of the houses and the windows,
being occupied with sightseers, watching anxiously,
and not without apprehension, the operations, with the
formidable array of ropes leading up to the final tug
which should lay prone the emblem of aggressive
patriotism. At five o'clock a National Guard affixed
the tricolour to its proper place, the gallery at the top
of this piece of shoddy magnificence, and a few minutes
later the national flag, the statue of Napoleon, and the
column itself were alike lying in fragments on a vast
bed of dung, appropriately prepared for them. The
apprehensions proved unfounded, and the overthrow
was accomplished without any noteworthy mishap.
On the 15th, the previous day, the dispute between
the " minority " and " majority " had reached a climax
in the withdrawal of the former under cover of a
manifesto anent the " Public Safety," which declared
the Commune to have abdicated its functions into the
hands of an irresponsible Committee. " As for us," it
e 2
52
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
went on to say, " we, no less than the ' majority,' desire
the accomplishment of political and social reconstruc¬
tion ; but, contrary to its notions, we claim the right to
be solely responsible for our acts before our electors
without sheltering ourselves behind a supreme dictator¬
ship which our mandate permits us neither to accept
nor to recognise." The manifesto further went on to
state that the signatories, in order not to give rise to
further dissension in the Council room, proposed re¬
tiring into their arrondissements, there to organise the
resistance to the common enemy. The manifesto con¬
cluded with a generous expression of the conviction that
" we all, majority or minority, notwithstanding our
divergences as to policy, pursue the same object, poli¬
tical liberty, and the emancipation of the workers."
"Long live the Social Republic! Long live the
Commune !"
The manifesto bore the signatures of Beslay, Jourde,
Theisz, Lefrancais, Girardin, Vermorel, Clémence,
Andrieu, Serrailler, Longuet, Arthur Arnould, Clement
Victor, Aurial, Ostyn, Franckel, Pindy, Arnold, Vallès,
Tridon, Varlin, and Courbet. Malon subsequently
gave in his adhesion.
The conduct of the minority in withdrawing at this
critical juncture deserves the severest censure. The
reason given was absurd. They had themselves voted
for the second committee. This pedantic Parlia¬
mentarism and horror of dictatorship moreover was
utterly ridiculous in the crisis through which the move¬
ment was passing. The composition of the Committee
may have been open to objection, and, as a matter of
fact, it proved itself sufficiently incapable. But in
principle there is no doubt whatever, that a strong
dictatorship was just what the situation demanded.
THE LAST DAYS OF PARIS.
53
The Committee failed, if for no other reason than
because it contained no man strong enough to " dic¬
tate." There is no gainsaying that this action of the
minority in allowing their personal spleen to get the
better of them, even granting that provocation had been
given, was a great blow to the influence of the Com¬
mune, both internally and externally, and was naturally
the occasion of much "crowing" on the part of the
friends of "'order " at Versailles and elsewhere. Most
of the signatories seem to have felt they had com¬
mitted a blunder almost as soon as the document was
issued, and two days later, the 17th, saw the majority
of them back at the Hôtel de Ville notwithstanding
their virtual resignation. The public meetings they
had called the previous evening in the arrondissements
had by no means endorsed their action. This sitting
of May 17th was the fullest the Commune ever had,
66 members answering to their names. Unhappily it
was mainly occupied with personal recriminations be¬
tween the two factions, till it was abruptly terminated
at seven o'clock in the evening by the blowing up of
the powder manufactory in the Avenue Rapp, which
shook Paris from end to end. Was this disaster due
to an accident, or was it the result of treachery? No
one knows to this day.
the paris commune.
Chapter XI.
the entry of the versaillese.
Sunday, May 21st, was one of those glorious spring
days in which the avenues of the Champs Elysées and
the Tuilleries Gardens show up in the clear air a
splendour of young foliage, to which hardly another
capital in Europe than Paris can offer a parallel. This
afternoon a monster open-air concert was being held
under the trees in the Tuilleries Gardens by order of the
Commune, for the benefit of the widows and orphans
of National Guards slain in defence of Paris. Thou¬
sands of Parisians in holiday attire thronged the
grounds. At the close of the performance a staff-
officer of the National Guards announced from the plat¬
form another concert at the same time and place for the
following Sunday. Alas ! What a different scene was
that following Sunday destined to present—a murky
rainfall, Paris enveloped in thick smoke, blood running
In the gutters, corpses and human remains piled-up,
encumbering the streets. How many of those work¬
men and their families then peacefully enjoying them¬
selves were never to see another Sunday ! At the very
moment the above announcement was made the band'ts
of "order" were within the city unknown to those
responsible for its safety. This is how it happened.
The defence had become more completely disorganised
THE ENTRY OF THE VERSAILLESE. 5
than ever since the defection of Rossel. A large extent
of the enciente, including several gates, was completely
undefended. The Versaillese on their side had un¬
masked a formidable array of breech-batteries on the
previous day. The sound of these, hour after hour, on
the defences was insufficient to make the Parisians
realise that the end was at hand.
The first detachment of Government troops entered at
the gate of St. Cloud, one of the undefended points, at
about three o'clock. Dombrowski, who for the last
fortnight had been at the head of the now hopelessly
disintegrated defence, was apprised of the state of
affairs one hour later by an officer of the National
Guard. He at once issued an order to the War Office
for seven cannon, for the immediate mobilisation of the
best battalions, and had the Auteuil Gate occupied.
Soon after, other points were occupied by National
Guards, and the gate at the Jena Bridge was barri¬
caded. Dombrowski, of course, lost no time in com¬
municating with the Committee of Public Safety, which
in its turn sent Billioray to inform the Commune. At
that moment the Commune was trying Cluseret, on the
impeachment of one of its members, Miot, but the
charge of treachery being supported only by loose
gossip was already falling through before the arrival of
Billioray. The message the latter brought was received
with consternation, the proceedings in hand were
hurriedly concluded, and Cluseret acquitted. But in¬
stead of at once entering upon a serious discussion of
the situation which might have led to a decision as to
some definite plan of defence, the council practically
broke up into groups of desultory talkers till eight
o'clock struck, and the chairman formally proclaimed
the proceedings at an end. It was the last sitting of
56
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
the Commune of Paris. Every member to his arron¬
dissement was now the fatuous cry. Instead of at once
passing a resolution declaring the Commune as sitting
in permanence, which was the obvious thing to do-
thereby giving a centre and rallying point to the defence
—the Commune abandoned the Hôtel de Ville, de¬
liberately committed suicide, and with this act of self-
destruction sounded the death-knell of revolutionary
Paris. The last hope lay in a strong, well-organised
raily of all the forces at the disposal of the Commune
within the city, with the construction of a system of
barricades connecting the three chief strategic points,
Montmartre, the Troeadéro, and the Panthéon. In¬
stead of a concentrated effort, all was confusion at this
critical moment. Everyone left the Hôtel de Ville for
his arrondissement. Energy was not lacking, but it
showed itself when too late and was dissipated in
isolated disorganised action. The Committee of Public
Safety fairly lost its head, not knowing which way to
turn. Delescluze at the War Office remained calm,
and quieted the Commune with the assurance that the
street-fighting would be favourable to the Parisians.
The chief of the general staff, Henri Prudhomme,
then sent for the commander of the observatory on the
Arc de Triomphe, who declared he could see nothing of
the Versaillese, whereupon a placard was issued casting
doubt on the fact of the entry. At eleven o'clock at
night, however, a member of the Commune riding
down one of the outer streets near the enceinte, the
Rue Beethoven, found the lights out and his horse
stumbling in pools of blood. Ominous black figures
lay against the wall, which proved to be corpses of
murdered National Guards. At midnight General
Cissey with a body of men scaled the ramparts at
THE ENTRY OF THE VERSAILLESE
57
another undefended point and entered without en¬
countering any resistance. They then opened several
gates from the inside, and by dawn the Versaillese army
was streaming into the city at five distinct apertures.
Paris woke to find the 15th Arrondissement captured,.
Passy and the Trocadéro occupied by Versaillese, and
Versaillese shells even falling in the centre of the city..
There was a veritable sauve qui peut from the out¬
posts yet held. " This is a war of barricades," was
the cry, "each man to his own arrondissement."
Such little discipline as had survived was now at an
end. The anarchic element came everywhere to the v
front. A suicidal placard was issued by Delescluze
(one is sorry to say) full of claptrap about the naked
arms of the people being more than a match for all the V
military strategists in the world, pouring contempt on
organisation and " learned manœuvrers," and, in
short, giving official sanction to the scatter-brained
idiocy of the impromptu demagogue and the worst 1
elements in the National Guard.
Early in the morning the War Office was evacuated,.
Henri Prudhomme neglecting, by a piece of criminal
carelessness, to destroy the official documents, and
thereby sending thousands to death and exile. The
shopkeepers were beginning to take down their shutters
in the inner parts of the city, not even yet fully
realising the state of affairs, but soon closed up again,
upon reading Delescluze's proclamation and finding
that the roar of the cannon came not from outside but
from within the fortifications. Barricades were
hurriedly thrown up in different quarters without any
system, and for the most part only just as the Ver¬
saillese were seen to be threatening the position.
At nine o'clock a few members of the Commune, in-
58
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
sufficient to form a quorum, presented themselves at the
Hôtel de Ville, and separated after a desultory con¬
versation without anyone so much as suggesting any
definite scheme of defence. Proclamations abounded
on every wall—calls to arms, assurances of victory,
demands for barricades. It would be useless without
a map of Paris to describe in detail the slow but steady
progress of the invaders on this day (Monday,
May 22nd). Suffice it to say that the same charac¬
teristics were apparent in the street defence, only in an
acuter form, that we have recorded as present when the
battle was raging round the enceinte—the same limit¬
less bravery, in some cases young boys fighting with
desperation, the same impossibility of getting reinforce¬
ments, cannon, and ammunition when and where re¬
quired. The heights of Montmartre were the main
stronghold left to the Commune, now that the Troca-
déro was gone and the Panthéon threatened. As a
position Montmartre was very strong, and, with a pro¬
perly directed defence, might have held the enemy at
bay for many days. But everywhere was the same
cry, " We must defend our own quarter." Neverthe¬
less, as evening drew near barricades sprang up in
every direction. Paris did indeed seem to be rising
en masse. This deceived many who even still sin¬
cerely believed in victory.
Meanwhile the ferocious Assembly was voting by
acclamation that the " Chief of the Executive " and the
army had merited well of the country, and hilariously
exulting in the orgy of carnage promised them by the
infamous old man.
the barricades.
59
Chapter XII.
the barricades.
The night of Monday-Tuesday was a night of silent
preparation (all too late) and of gloom. In all quarters
the pickaxe was to be heard removing paving stones
and digging the foundations of barricades, which rose
by the hundred. Men, women, and children were at
work. Now began that enthusiasm, that limitless
courage and contempt of death—displayed in defence
of an ideal—the colossal proportions of which dwarf
everything similar in history, and which alone suffices
to redeem the sordidness of the nineteenth century.
Here was a heroism in the face of which the much-
belauded Christian martyrs cut a very poor figure.
The Christian died believing that the moment the tooth
or claw of the panther tore open his throat was the
moment of his transition to a new and endless personal
existence of honour and glory. His steadfastness was '
purely selfish. The Communist workman believed that
the moment the ball of the Versaillese soldier struck
his heart his personal existence came to an end for ever.
Yet he was willing to surrender himself completely for a
future that meant the happiness of his class and a
nobler life for humanity, but which he himself would
never see. Yes, this unparalleled devotion, this
gigantic heroism of the whole working-class of Paris,
was indeed magnificent, but, alas ! it was not war.
Had Cluseret, bad Rossel, had the Committee of Public
6o
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
Safety but organised a comparatively simple system of
barricades and made due preparations beforehand, a
few well-equipped battalions of National Guards might
have saved the situation. But no one had taken the
trouble to see to this. Everything had been let run to
confusion. Finally, the senseless cry of " Every man.
to his arrondissement !" when every man ought to have
been out of his arrondissement at strategical points,
settled matters. An immense number of barricades were
thrown up, without system, in each arrondissement,
and heroically defended, without method, with the
inevitable sequel of capture and massacre, and thus was
the Paris of the Revolution annihilated piecemeal. It
is useless to go in detail over the sad tale of barricade
after barricade, protected for hours, sometimes for two
or three days, by a handful of men, only at last to be
overwhelmed by a whole regiment of " regulars," or
may be taken in flank, as often happened with barri¬
cades impregnable to direct attack. So incredible did
it appear to the enemy that the defenders of Paris
should have made no effective preparations for his
reception, that they should have had no organised
plan of defence, that up to Tuesday evening it was only
with great hesitation the Versaillese pressed forwards
They suspected their unresisted entry and capture of
important positions to hide a trap for the annihilation
of the whole Versaillese army once fairly inside the
city—by means of ambuscades, underground mines, or
what not. Unfortunately, their fears were utterly
groundless and their caution wholly unnecessary.
At one time on the Monday a few well-directed shells
from Montmartre and the Pantheon might have anni¬
hilated two of the main columns of the Versaillese
army, which had met each other and got entangled
THE BARRICADES.
6l
with their artillery on the Place de Trocadèro. But
Montmartre remained silent. At ten o'clock on the
Monday night the Ministry of Finance behind the
Tuilleries blazed up, the first of the great conflagra¬
tions. It took fire from the Versaillese shells directed
against the Federal entrenchments on the terrace of the
Tuilleries, the vast masses of documents in the upper
storeys supplying combustible material which effectually
spread the flames. Early on the Tuesday morning
Bismarck surrendered the neutral ground and the Porte
St. Ouen to another division of the Versaillese army
which poured into Paris—a proof, if such were needed,
of the hollowness of the sham sentiment called
"patriotism" as against the solidarity of real class
interest. The "patriotic" French bourgeois was
ready to lick the boots while imploring the aid of the
hated " Prussien " against the French prolétaire.
Meanwhile, before the common danger the men of the
Commune rose above the petty squabbles and personali¬
ties of the Council room, the public meeting, and the
street. Members of the " majority " and " minority "
met in generous rivalry who could do the most. But
how little there was to be done ! Cluseret was power¬
less ; La Cécilia, an old general of Garibaldi's and a
man of some military capacity, was not obeyed, and
could not get artillery or ammunition for important
positions. Montmartre, the almost impregnable for¬
tress, was defended by a few hundred disorganised
Federals. The few pieces of artillery on the height had
been allowed to get into disorder, and were little better
than useless. Before mid-day on Tuesday Montmartre
was captured in a mere walk-over, scarcely one effective
blow having been struck in its defence. The Batig-
nolles had been already occupied earlier in the morning.
62
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
On Montmartre took place the first of the wholesale
massacres of the "bloody week." Forty-two men,
women, and children were taken to the Rue des
Rosières, and butchered as a holocaust to the manes
of the scoundrels Lecomte and Clément-Thomas. The
soldiers tried to force them all to kneel ; but one woman
with a child in her arms refused to kneel, shouting to
her companions, " Show these wretches that you know
how to die upright ! ' '
On the south side of the Seine the forces of the Com¬
mune made a rather better show. A Polish exile
named Wroblewski, who knew something of military
matters, extemporised a rough system of defences
which served to keep the enemy at bay for a while
over a considerable area. Wroblewski's ultimate idea
was to concentrate the whole defence on this left bank
under cover of the forts, the gunboats of the Seine and
the Pantheon, and he proposed this plan to Delescluze.
But it was impossible to rally matters in accordance-
with any tactical scheme extending beyond the material
immediately at hand and the exigencies of the moment,
so complete was the disintegration of the defence. Lis¬
bonne, the member of the Commune, commanded a
body of Federals in the Pantheon quarter. He
achieved wonders with small means, defending the
approaches to the Luxembourg for two whole days.
The Committee of Public Safety issued a placard calling
upon the Versaillese soldiery to refuse to fire on their
brothers of Paris. The " Central Committee " did the
same. But it was of no avail. By the Tuesday night
scarcely the half of Paris remained to the Commune.
The Versaillese, no longer apprehensive of snares, were
pushing boldly forward in every direction.
In the course of the evening Raoul Rigault, mad-
THE BARRICADES.
63
dened by the horrors he saw perpetrated on all sides
by the friends of "order," but acting on his own
responsibility alone, went to St. Pelagie and ordered
Gustave Chaudey, accused of having instigated the
firing from the Hôtel de Ville in January, to be taken
out into the prison yard and shot, together with three
gendarmes. They had all been taken as hostages, and
their lives had been forfeited a thousand times, but the
Commune had spared them with its usual criminal good
nature in such matters. Things were now going from
bad to worse with the defenders of the Commune. To
absence of superintendence insufficiency of ammunition
was now added, in many cases want of food. Con-r
flagrations now broke forth in all quarters of Paris,
lighting up the midnight sky, some caused by the shells
of the Versaillese, some caused by the action of the
Communards to defend themselves from unseen enemies
on the roofs and upper storeys Of houses whence they
were fired upon.
«4
the paris commune.
Chapter XIII.
the " commune or death."
Tde horror of these nights cannot be described. The
glare of a hundred conflagrations reflected in pools of
blood ; corpses and human remains wherever the eye
lighted ; the half of Paris, one vast, hideous, dreamlike
hell, against the reality of which Dante's imagination
seems feeble ! Such a scene of horror was barely
known to history before ; the proscriptions of Sylla, the
■destruction of Jerusalem, the Sicilian Vespers, St.
Bartholomew, the sacking of Magdeburg—all pale
before this blood orgy of the propertied class of France,
"which had the approval, tacit or avowed, of the same
class throughout the world—a class that, while it could
•day after day witness unmoved the indiscriminate
torture and butchery of countless hecatombs of human
beings whom it imagined were hostile to its class
interests—could, nevertheless, with a refinement of
cynicism, pretend to snivel and caterwaul over a single
archbishop !
One corpse lay that night of Tuesday-Wednesday in
the Hôtel de Ville on a bed of blue satin, a solitary
taper at its head, before which the hurry and scurry of
the headquarters was stilled ; before which all involun¬
tarily bowed their heads. It was the body of Dom-
browski, who had been mortally wounded during the
afternoon. Towards morning the corpse was trans¬
ferred to the Père Lachaise Cemetery. As it passed the
barricades all Federals presented arms. At the July
THE " COMMUNE OK DEATH."
65
column a halt was made, and hundreds of National
Guards crowded round to get a last sight of their
devoted commander. Thus did this valiant soldier of
the people pass into history.
The Tuilleries were blazing all this night, as also the
"'Legion of Honour," the "Council of State," and
other public buildings. From early morning of the
Wednesday desperate battles were fought at the Palais
Royal, the Bank, the Bourse, and the Church of St.
Eustache. At nine o'clock a.m., while a few members
of the Commune, who had assembled at the Hôtel de
Ville, were discussing the situation and contemplating
the abandonment of the Municipal Palace, flames shot
forth from the roof—how and by whom kindled nobody
knew. In an hour the whole place was one vast
furnace. The Hôtel de Ville destroyed, everything
was now transferred to the Mairie of the nth Arron¬
dissement. This day (Wednesday, the 24th), the
official journal of the Commune appeared for the last
time.
All surviving semblance of organisation, discipline, or
plan was thenceforward practically at an end. Frenzied
despair, panic, and anarchy reigned supreme. What
remained of the defence was now further hampered and
obstructed by the sham-equality craze so congenial to
ignorant minds of an anarchist turn. Officers going
with important messages which brooked not a moment's
delay were seized and compelled to carry hods for barri¬
cades, with the words, " There are no more epaulettes
to-day," and " Why shouldn't you help to make barri¬
cades as well as we?" and the like foolery. To argue
that such a thing as " division of functions " was neces¬
sary to the success of any social undertaking would,
of course, have been useless. So one more nail was
F
66
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
hammered into the coffin of the Parisiaq defence. The
shooting of spies, real and supposed, occurred now and
then ; for at last the good-natured and long-suffering
Paris workman had been driven mad with rage and
suspicion as the accounts poured in of the fiendish orgy
of blood which for four whole days had been carried on
in the occupied quarters with the applause of the mis¬
creants at Versailles, who, through their spokesman
Thiers, dared to say of this horde of cowardly assassins,.
" Our valiant soldiers conduct themselves in a manner
to inspire the highest esteem " ( !). In order to give
a plausible colour to the inclusion of women in the
massacres, the myth of the Pétroleuses was now in¬
vented. Relationship to a National Guard, a mere
expression of horror, a tear shed for a friend, was ân
excuse for instant butchery. The murderers, officers
and men, developed a collective blood-lust which seems
almost incredible, and before which the possibly mythi¬
cal figure of the notorious Whitechapel murderer
dwindles into insignificance. To compare these
wretches with any members of the animal kingdom, let
alone with human savages, would be more than unjust
to the beast or the savage. They were incarnations of
the criminal instinct in civilised man. At last, what
was left of the National Guards of Paris, who for well
nigh two months past had been turning the other cheek
to the smiter, pulled themselves together. They be¬
thought them of the three hundred hostages, taken as a
guarantee that the laws of war should be observed but
not a hair of whose heads had been touched, notwith¬
standing that prisoners had been murdered without
intermission at Versailles during the whole time, and
that now, to crown all, for four days every quarter of
Paris occupied by the Versailles army had been con-
the " commune or death."
67
verted into a shambles, with its thousands of victims-
men, women, and children—whose mutilated corpses
lay heaped up pell-mell in the streets. These three
hundred hostages were under lock and key at the prison
of La Roquette, whither they had been removed the
previous day from Mazas. As a last resort Théophile
Ferré, the head of the Public Security Department,
decided to try and stem the tide of butchery by a
reprisal. But did he follow the example of the
assassins of " order " and command the whole three
hundred hostages to be shot out of hand? Certainly
not ! He selected only six of the most prominent of
the bulwarks of " order." These he indicated to be led
out and executed. When the question arose as to who
should form a platoon, dozens crowded round, each
with a dear relation or friend to avenge—one a father,
another a brother, a third a wife. Finally, a firing
party of thirty was selected. The six hostages, the
Archbishop Darboy, Bonjean, the presiding judge of the
Court of Appeal, Daguerry, curé of the Madeleine, and
three Jesuits were led out into the Quadrangle. That
distinguished father in God, " Monseigneur " Darboy,
rather collapsed under the weight of the crown of
martyrdom (as presumably he regarded it) about to be
bestowed upon him. He did not show any special
eagerness to enter the heavenly kingdom. Bonjean,
the High Court judge, fainted and had to be carried
out. Before giving the order to fire Ferré pointed out
to them that it was not the Commune which was
responsible for their deaths, but their friends of Ver¬
sailles, who were deliberately playing the part of fiends.
Meanwhile the conflagrations increased wholesale.
Theatres and churches were alike involved. One whole
bank of the Seine showed up like a wall of flame. But
f 2
«8
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
the quarters where the red flag was displayed became
fewer and fewer. Everywhere was the tricolour. Im¬
mediately a barricade was taken the tricolour was
hoisted. The defence was now mainly in the hands of
Wroblewski, who did his utmost to piece together the
shattered fragments, but, of course, in vain. A Ver-
saillese officer was caught spying round the Bastille and
was shot, an event announced by the arch-villain
Thiers at Versailles with brazen impudence as " with¬
out respect to the laws of war." On Friday evening,
the 26th, at sunset, poor Delescluze, half dead with
illness and fatigue, seeing all was hopeless, walked
out of the Mairie of the nth Arrondissement with his
scarf round his waist and a cane in his hand, and
mounted the barricade at the Château d'Eau, only a
moment afterwards to fall under the hail of bullets
•directed against it. He could not survive another
defeat, he had said a few hours before, referring to the
June days of '48. Thus this noble old Revolutionist
•died, in death, as in life, true to his faith. Delescluze
perhaps never quite intellectually grasped the meaning
of modern Socialism. But his true instincts through¬
out his disinterested public career more than made up
for any lack of intellectual clearness. Let us hope that
one day the Place du Château d'Eau, where he died,
may bear his statue—the day when Paris is one of the
centres of a Socialist Europe.
the commune is dead !
69
Chapter XIV.
the commune is dead !
As the defence receded, the tide of massacre rose higher
and higher. Denunciations poured in on all sides.
Organised hunts were made in the occupied quarters,
and every available building was choked with prisoners,
who were taken out in batches and shot, in some cases,
being mowed down with the mitrailleuse, and buried
half-dead. Through the night was heard the agonised
cries of the wounded and mangled. From the Friday
evening the whole defence centred in Belleville. Satur¬
day showed a murky fog and rainfall, brought on by
the firing. The heroism grew with the hopelessness of
the situation. Barricades were defended to the last
man. Asked by an English journalist what he was
dying for, one of the defenders promptly replied, "For
Human Solidarity." On this day Millière was taken
and shot on the steps of the Panthéon by order of
General Cissey. They tried to force him on his knees,
as a homage to the Capitalistic Civilisation he had
attacked. His last cry was " Long live Humanity."
Millière had taken no part in the Commune, but had
been untiring in his endeavours to bring about an
understanding. He had, however, exposed the mis¬
deeds of the villain Jules Favre, and that was a suffi¬
cient ground for his murder.
The Bastille was captured at two o'clock on the
7o
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
Friday. Scarcely more than Belleville and La Villette
now remained. The nth Arrondissement had been
evacuated at midnight on Thursday. By the terms of
a Convention aranged between the Duke of Saxony and
the Versaillese, the Germans now cut off the Federal
retreat on the North and East. Thus did the heads of
the French Government conspire with their official
enemy to destroy Paris. Ranvier was now the soul of
the defence, by word and deed encouraging all. The
news every minute arriving of the blood-lust of the
Versaillese vampires, which spared neither the doctors
nor nurses, and promises of immunity on surrender
being treacherously violated, lashed the defenders to a
frenzy of suspicion and rage. In the evening forty-
eight of the hostages, ecclesiastics and gendarmes, im¬
prisoned at La Roquette, were removed along the Rue
Haxo to the Cité Vincennes. The crowd insisted upon
their summary execution, even threatening some mem¬
bers of the Commune who tried to at least obtain a
respite for them. They were accordingly shot in the
quadrangle.
It must be remembered that these men represented
the corruption and oppression of the Empire in their
worst forms. All this time it may be mentioned, too,
the Versaillese prisoners taken were simply interned in
churches and other places, not a hair of their heads
being touched. Many of the supposed members and
officers of the Commune were shot by the wretches of
Versailles in the persons of passers-by who happened
to bear a slight resemblance to them, sometimes
several times over. Poor Raoul Rigault unfortu¬
nately was not to escape. He was recognised in the
Rue Gay-Lussac entering a house, was dragged out,
and taken to a Versaillese officer who interrogated
THE COMMUNE IS DEAD !
71
him. Rigault's only reply was, " Long live the Com¬
mune ! Down with the assassins." He was imme¬
diately thrust against a wall and shot. In spite of his
faults he was as brave and devoted to the Revolution as
any, and his heroic death will doubtless be remembered
to him in ages to come.
Perhaps the most pathetic of all the deaths of pro¬
minent men in the Commune was that of Varlin, who
was seized in the Rue Lafayette and dragged to the
Buttes Montmartre, his hands tied behind his back,
and subjected to a hail of blows, insults, and sabre-
cuts, for a whole hour. Long before arriving at his
destination one side of his face was a mass of blood,
the eye torn from the socket. The last part of the way
he was carried, unable to walk. Arrived at the Rue
des Rosiers the wretches dashed his brains out with
the butt ends of their muskets. Varlin was a young
workman who had devoted all his leisure time to study,
a clever organiser, and one of the best and most active
members of the Commune.
By Saturday night only a portion of Belleville re¬
mained to the defence. The murky rainfall and dense
clouds of smoke of the Sunday morning disclosed but
a few streets still holding out. In London that Sunday
morning was bright, the commons on the south side
showing in their early summer green. Firing still went
on from behind a few barricades in the early hours of
Sunday, and it was not, in fact, till near midday that
the last barricade, that of the Rue de Paris, was taken.
This street will be memorable as the last entrenchment
of the partisans of the Commune. It was defended by
a single man for a quarter of an hour, all his com¬
panions having fallen. Wonderful to relate, this last
combatant escaped with his life. The fort of Vin-
72;
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
cennes alone remained now—a solitary outpost—and
that surrendered at discretion on the following day,
Monday, May 29th.
The Commune was now dead. Order reigned ir«
Paris. Smoking ruins, corpses, and desolation were
all that met the eye. One side of the Seine ran red
with blood. The gutters ran blood. The roads were red
with blood, as though the soil had been London clay.
Clouds of flesh-flies rose from the heaps of corpses ,~
flocks of crows hovered over the charnel-house. Paris
now subjugated, the assassins could organise the
slaughter at their leisure. It has been proved that
these massacres were arranged at Versailles before
the entry of the troops, and, indeed, the utterances of
Thiers were of themselves quite sufficient to show this.
Strange it is that to an extent unparalleled in any-
other movement the vilifiers of the Commune suc¬
ceeded immediately in travestying the situation and
giving currency to the grotesque notion among the
unthinking of the Commune as responsible for the
horrors of its own suppression ! Never before has a
murderer been so successful in casting the obloquy of
his own foul crime upon his innocent victim whose
mouth he has closed in death. It began immediately,,
even on the spot. Paschal Grousset has related to me
how, passing through a courtyard, he heard a woman
with a child in her arms saying in a tone of indignation,
" Oui, oui, mon petit, nous nous rappelerons la Com¬
mune, n'est ce pas?" ("Yes, yes, my child, w-e shall
remember the Commune, shan't we?"). This was
within sound of the mitrailleuses as they were
slaughtering the hapless partisans of the Commune
wholesale. To think that the Commune, whose chief
crime was its ill-judged mildness and humanity, should
THE COMMUNE JS DEAD !
73
ever have become regarded as the agent of bloodshed
by anyone !
The city was now divided into foqr military districts,
under the commands respectively of Generals Vinoy,
Ladmirault, Cissey, and Douai. In each numerous pre-
votai courts were established, which worked all day
organising the butcheries. The property of the
murdered men was plundered by the soldiery. It
sufficed to wear a blouse, to have deplored the carnage,
let alone to have ever spoken or written a word in
favour of the rights of workmen, to be drafted into one
of these murder dens and instantly dispatched. Every¬
where might be seen columns of prisoners being led to
the shambles. Foremost among the wretches who
took a delight in the fiendish work was the debauched
Bonapartist scoundrel Gallifet. The description by the
" Daily News " correspondent of this monster's deeds
of blood as witnessed by him has been often quoted.
He ordered some hundreds of old men, women, and
children out of a column of which he was in charge, and
had them shot down. This dastardly ruffian now
occupies a high position in the French army. At last
all prisoners were taken to one or two specially-ap¬
pointed places to be mowed down. These wholesale
masacres went on till June 3rd, when they were
stopped, mainly from fear of pestilence through the
accumulation of corpses, which it was impossible to
dispose of. The executions of those condemned by the
permanent tribunal, which took place on the plain of
Satory, outside Paris, continued till the end of the year.
Meanwhile, with 30,000 proletarians butchered in cold
blood crying for vengeance, the Assembly assisted in a
solemn thanksgiving service for the restoration of
" order."
74
the paris commune.
Chapter XV.
the civilised world and its " thrill of horror."
We have seen that the Commune had one special fault,
that of a fatuous moderation in all its doings ; we have
seen that probably never since history began have any
body of men allowed themselves and theirs to be treated
as lambs in the slaughterhouse with more lamblike for¬
bearance and absence of retaliation than the Commune
and its adherents ; we have seen this illustrated by the
incredible fact that up to the last, amid all the
slaughterings of Communists, the vast majority of the
hostages and prisoners in its hands remained unscathed.
We have seen, on the other hand, the Versaillese, under
Thiers, organising with a cold-blooded deliberation and
ferocity an orgy of blood for weeks in advance, keeping
their hands in the while by isolated murders of
prisoners of daily occurrence ; in short, deliberately
planning and carrying out a crime unexampled in his¬
tory, compared to which the worst Anarchist "out¬
rage " of our days is but as the pressure of a suckling's
gums is to the rending of a tiger's maw. Having seen
this, it remains toi consider, in view of the facts, the
attitude of the ' ' civilised world ' ' as expressed in its
accredited organs, in other words the public opinion of
bourgeois society. Now this public opinion, judging
by its indignant eloquence over the infantile attempts of
silly youths and others to feebly emulate the exploits of
THE CIVII-ISED WORLD AND ITS " THRILL OF HORROR." 75
Theirs and the miscreants of Versailles in the line of
-cold-blooded murder (e.g., at the Liceo Theatre and
the Café Terminus), we might have imagined would
have been animated at the very least to some energetic
remonstrances. Such an expectation would have
shown an ingenuous ignorance of the ways and the
manners of a class public opinion, and its hired press
lackeys. Not only was there no remonstrance, but
as if by a concerted action, " Society " and its press
began, not in France alone, but equally throughout the
"civilised world," to pour forth abuse, not on the
murdering Versaillese, but on the murdered Com¬
munards.
The orgy of carnage perpetrated by the Versailles
troops was everywhere hailed as a glorious victory of
" order." The " Commune " was at once stamped as
a bye-word of breath-bating unutterable horror. The
■execution of a handful of hostages out of some"
hundreds, the single act of retributive justice exercised
by the adherents of the Commune, was a godsend to
the bourgeois classes, as they wanted something to
'hang their vituperation upon, and otherwise they would
•have had to go on ranting anent the execution of their
sainted heroes Lecomte and Clément Thomas, or else
on the wickedness of the National Guards in the Rue
•de la Paix in daring to resent being prodded with
sword-sticks, and riddled with the revolvers of the
"respectable" mob which attacked them, both of
which incidents were getting rather worn. It is true
:it did not much matter, as the "respectable" world
was prepared to swallow anything against the Com¬
mune, and with or without 'the hostage business the
villainy of the Commune would have been equally great
3n its eyes. But still, the death of the hostages came
76
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
as a good "stalking horse" for the sham "horror"
and bogus " indignation " so extensively manufactured!
in Fleet Street and other places where they print on.
occasions when the voice of threatened class-interests
makes itself heard. An Archbishop was slain ! Not
merely a man, or a priest, or even a bishop, but actually
an archbishop ! If that does not " thrill " us what
would? What mattered it that he was a hostage for
the lives of tens of thousands of innocent persons pre¬
viously murdered in cold blood, including many-
children, at whose massacre the " civilised world " did!
not experience any symptom of that " thrill of horror
and indignation " which invariably afflicts it when a
representative of its own class interests is killed !
It is a noteworthy circumstance how this " thrill of
horror" accompanied by "indignation," "detesta¬
tion," "abhorrence," and the rest of the vocabulary
of penny-a-lining telegraphese, symptoms invariably
following the assassination of some head of a State,
never show themselves on the murder of a common*
domestic man through the official agency of the saicf
State. For example, the " civilised world " duly
thrilled over the knife in the late M. Carnot's liver, but
we failed to observe any " thrill " after the recent
fiendish murder by the cavalry officer of the Italian-
soldier Evangelista. Yet had the attempt on Signor
Crispi's life been successful the " horror and indigna¬
tion " tap would doubtless have been turned on as
usual. Again, we did not notice any special symptoms
of a " thrill of horror " over the deliberate shooting of
a harmless passer-by by a Prussian sentry last year, for
which the said sentry was specially rewarded by his
sovereign ! Had, instead, the sovereign had the mis¬
fortune to be shot at and killed by a political malcon-
THE CIVILISED WORLD AND ITS " THRILL OF HORROR." 77
tent, we imagine the " civilised world " would have
thrilled " properly, with all the recognised accessory
symptoms. If the prognosis and diagnosis of these
" thrills of horror " be studied, it will be seen that they
regulate themselves in a singularly accurate manner in
accordance with the danger to the existing order of
society which the bourgeois thinks he sees in the nature
of the act supposed to cause them. The murder of
soldiers by their officers, and on occasion the shooting
of harmless passers-by by sentries, are simply regret¬
table incidents of " military discipline," a thing neces¬
sary to the existence of the modern bureaucratic State.
Besides, no matter what the acts they commit, it would
be subversion of all "order" to thrill with horror at
anything done by " heads of States," or even inferior
Government functionaries in their official capacity.
At the time of the Commune I was not up to all this.
Accordingly my innocent surprise at the number of
mere domestic human lives it must take to equal that of
an archbishop was considerable.
It was not for some time that I saw the full meaning
of all the crocodile tears and caterwauling over the
handful of hostages—not only that it was meant to
drown the silent appeal for vengeance of the thousands
of slaughtered workmen whose murder had led up to
the retributive execution in question, but that this
wholesale brew of horrific emotion ( ?) formed part of a
tacitly understood, though none the less definite policy
of the bourgeois world according to which moral judg¬
ments are to be dictated solely by political expediency,
and the requisite sentiment pumped up to order.
The present Anarchist madness, of course, gives
plenty of scope for the well-calculated fabrication of
these newspaper and platform hysterics. The facts of
78
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
the case are simply that the Anarchists in their foolish*
attempts to overthrow, by individual acts of violence,
the existing order of society, can be as cruel and un¬
scrupulous as the governing classes can in their efforts
to maintain it. The firing into unarmed crowds by
which non-combatants are as likely to be killed as
anyone else is certainly unjustifiable, yet it is universally
recognised as a legitimate act of the Executive. We,
as Social-Democrats, condemn the acts of the
Anarchists, and we also condemn many of the acts of
existing Governments—for instance, capital punishment
and panic-made laws. We believe the "potting" of
the ' ' heads ' ' of States to be a foolish and reprehensible
policy, but the matter does not concern us as Socialists.
We have our own quarrel with the Anarchists, both as^
to principles and tactics, but that is no reason why, as
certain persons seem to think, we should put on sack¬
cloth and ashes and dissolve ourselves in tears because,
say, M. Carnot or the head of any other State has been'
assassinated by Anarchists. What is Carnot to us or
we to Carnot that we should weep for him? We do
not specially desire the death of political personages,
while we often regret their slaying on grounds of expe¬
diency, if on no others. But at the same time Socialists
have no sentimental tears to waste over the heads of
States and their misfortunes. To the Socialist the
head of a State, as such, is simply a figure-head to
whose fate he is indifferent—a ninepin representing
the current political and social order. If one of these
skittles is bowled over, another will be put up in its
place. To talk about the " head of the State" when'
alive as merely the representative of an impersonal
political entity, to talk of him when executing some
cruel function in the name of " law and order " as a
THE CIVILISED WORLD AND ITS " THRILL OF HORROR. " 79
mere mechanical figure " doing his duty," and, when
assassinated, as " the man, the brother and the father
of his family," over whose fate we are supposed to
weep our eyes out, is a little too thin. Every sphere
of life has its dangers, the chief danger attending the
headship of a Government being assassination. The
aspirant to this lucrative and " honourable " office and
his friends should recognise this fact beforehand, and
discount the risk in the general average, just as the
soldier or the sailor discounts the risks attending his
calling. As it is, the heads of States cannot be con¬
gratulated on the courage, either moral or physical,
with which they face this comparatively slight danger.
The foregoing remarks are necessary as the " thrill of
horror ' ' in its varied forms is one of the stock pro¬
perties of Reaction, by which it seeks to thimblerig
public opinion, and hitherto unfortunately with only
too much success. People are told by their papers that
they are feeling " thrills of horror " till they really think
they are, the journalist who pens the gasping leaders
meanwhile laughing up his sleeve, knowing, it is all
"business." These observations are specially appro¬
priate to the subject in hand, as never was there a more
barefaced or more successful attempt made by the
governing classes of the world to bluff their own
hideous crime by trumping up a sham horror at their
victims than in the " civilised world's " verdict on the
Commune of Paris.
8o
the paris commune.
Chapter XVI.
the hostages.
That there was never, throughout all history, an execu¬
tion more completely justified than that of the hostages
by the despairing adherents of the Commune must be
apparent to every unbiassed mind. This the purveyors
of public sentiment cooked up at the cheapest rate
knew perfectly well, but their master, bourgeois class-
interest, demanded, as we have seen, that they and all
true bourgeois should pretend to regard this simple and,
judged by their own standard, even grossly inadequate,
act of judicial retribution as an unspeakable atrocity.
Hinc illae lachrymae ! As for the argument that the
hostages in their personal capacity were technically
innocent, the bourgeois should have bethought himself
of this when the practice of seizing hostages for the
good behaviour of the enemy was revived by the
German military authorities during the war. The idea
of innocent French citizens being killed for the mis¬
deeds of those who wore the national uniform, never
evoked any special protest, that I am aware of, from
the sensitive middle-class conscience or from that of its
press. For the rest, I altogether fail to see where the
injustice comes in, when, in a state of war, the official
representatives of the enemy are regarded and treated
as identified with the policy and acts of the party they
represent. That is surely a logical consequence of the
THE HOSTAGES.
8l
position held by them. That this was the view
ostensibly taken by the German military authorities, the
pious King of Prussia, afterwards Emperor William, at
their head, and tacitly acquiesced in by the middle-class
conscience throughout the world, bars criticism of the
hostage incident on grounds of principle. Most of the
hostages, e.g., Darboy, the Archbishop, Bonjean, the
judge of the Court of Cassation, Jecker, the high
financier, and the gendarmes, were fair " representa¬
tives " of the "enemy," of church, State, police and
capitalism in their most aggressive forms. However,
this point is not worth discussing. Those who howled
loudest knew that the action of the Commune was
justified, but as with the wolf and the lamb, the typical
bourgeois is bound by his traditions and class interests
to make out the Commune and all connected with it as
having been in the wrong, and he will continue to do
so, despite all facts and arguments to the contrary.
After all, the best advice to give the authorities of
the modern State is " kill not that ye be not killed."
The, in this respect, criminally fatuous Commune
allowed the Versaillese a free butcher's bill of thousands
of its supporters. It was only when, not content with
this, they ran it up to tens of thousands, that some of
the Commune's adherents were wicked enough to
attempt, as they hoped, to check the slaughter by a
reprisal consisting of a few tens. The middle-class
apparently thinks that its own governing bodies ought
to have the uninterrupted enjoyment of an unlimited,
and exclusive, monopoly of killing, as regards its
opponents. This demand is surely a little bit strong,
even for a dominant class.
The facts, however, tend to show not merely that the
Versaillese were absolutely indifferent to the fate of
G
82
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
these precious hostages, respecting whose death the
" civilised world " (read dominant class-interest) raised:
so hideous a caterwauling, but that some of them rather
wished such a consummation than otherwise. Thus
Barthélémy St. Hilaire, Thiers' secretary, when their
danger was pointed out to him, cynically replied, " We
can do nothing ! So much the worse for them !"
Thiers deliberately rejected an offer to exchange five
of the hostages, including the sainted Archbishop, for
the single person of Blanqui ! This was refused,
partly, perhaps, at the instigation of the Ultramontane
Catholics, who were strong in the Assembly, and to
whom Darboy, who was a Gallican, i.e., who favoured
an independent attitude of the French clergy towards
the papal pretensions, was by no means a persona
grata. By his death they would kill two birds with one
stone ; get a Christian martyr on the cheap, and pro¬
bably obtain for one of their own men the wealthy
diocese of Paris. The negotiation was conducted on
the side of the hostages by a fellow named Lagarde, the
Vicar-General of Darboy. This perjured poltroon and
worthless wretch, after having given his parole
d'honneur, swearing by all he professed to hold sacred
that he would return " even though it were to be shot,"
when he found the negotiations fall through, caring
only for his own safety, resolved to leave his colleagues
to their fate. He refused to come back. Darboy him¬
self, when apprised of the resolution of his Vicar-
General, refused to believe it. "It is impossible,"
said he, " M. Lagarde has sworn to me himself that he
would return without fail." The prayers and entreaties
of the old prelate were of no avail ; Lagarde persisted
in his refusal. That at the very last the Versaillese
thought the execution of the hostages would be advan-
the hostages.
83
tageous as a stalking-horse to cover their bloodthirsty
designs, and hence purposely refrained from rescue, is
strongly evidenced by the fact that, although masters
of nearly all the approaches to the prison of La
Roquette for twelve hours before the execution took
place, they made no attempt to penetrate into the
building.
The Versaillese vengeance, as already stated, lasted,,
uninterruptedly, till the end of the year. Ferré, abused,,
bespattered, and calumniated by the press-lackeys of
capitalism, died on November 28th like a Communist,
an atheist, and a hero. Rossel, beslavered by the
same press-lackeys, who recognised in him one of them¬
selves, a hopeful middle-class young man on the make,
was shot together with him, after having first betrayed
and then calumniated the Commune in the hope of
favour from high quarters. He died like a bourgeois,
a Christian, and a poltroon. But though the constant
stream of judicial murders slacked off at the end of
1871, it must not be supposed that they ceased. There
were several "executions" on the plain of Satory
during the year 1872, the last three persons shot for
participation in the Commune having met their deaths
so late as January 22nd, 1873. All these unhappy
victims perished after a farcical trial on "evidence"
which would be laughed out of any English court, in
most cases convicted of participation in events which
they had no more to do with than the readers of this
history. The statements of suborned witnesses, every
calumny, however absurd on the face of it, was eagerly
accepted and gloated over by the courts-martial and
the press. Not content with murder, the vile French
bourgeoisie had the dastardly meanness in more than
g 2
84
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
one case to blacken their victims' character with foul
insinuations which they did not even pretend to prove.
A board of assassins was established composed of the
greatest reactionists in the Chamber called the " Com¬
mission of Pardons " whose function it was to confirm
the sentences of the courts-martial. These murders,
be it remembered, were not done in the heat of combat
or even immediately after the victory, but were carried
■on continuously for more than six months, and sporadi¬
cally for a year longer. And the same people who
applauded or, at least, acquiesced in these horrors
without protest, pretend to stand aghast at the
depravity of a Vaillant or a Caserio !
the lessons of the commune.
85
Chapter XVII.
the lessons of the commune.
The great general lesson taught us by the failure of the
Commune of 1871 is the supreme necessity of art
organisation comprising a solid body of class-con¬
scious proletarians and other Socialists well acquainted
with each other, whose views are clearly defined, who.
know what they want, and who have, at all events,,
some notion of the course to pursue on an emergency.
Had there been such a body of men in Paris in Febru¬
ary and March, 1871, the subsequent course of events
might have been very different. As a consequence
of the heterogeneous nature of the elements com¬
prising the Central Committee, divided councils pre¬
vailed, and any dishonest or incapable person (as, for
instance, Lullier) who only made himself sufficiently
busy could obtain a momentary ascendancy which at a
critical juncture may be fatal.
The importance of not taking men on their owni
estimation alone, was, moreover, never realised, either
by the Committee or the Commune. Had the Com¬
mittee not trusted Lullier, but seen to the occupation
of Mont Valérien itself, one of the greatest military
blunders would have been avoided. Had there been a
leading body of men to have given a head to the insur¬
rection of March 18th, the gates of Paris would have
been immediately closed, and the already disaffected
86
TUE PARIS COMMUNE.
troops would never have been suffered to slip through
the fingers of the insurrection and form the nucleus of
a hostile army at Versailles. The Ministers, the
•officers, in short all the civil and military functionaries
■of the Government would have been simultaneously
arrested, and preparations made for trying the guilty.
The Assembly and the Government had been col¬
lectively guilty of a crime, even from the ordinary
point of view. They had violated the conditions under
which they were elected, their mandate being solely
to ratify the forms of peace, and then to appeal to the
country on the constitutional issue. Instead of this
they had virtually usurped the powers of a constituent
assembly with the avowed intention of crushing all
Republican, Democratic, and Socialistic aspirations
throughout France, and especially of striking a blow at
Paris, which they regarded as the head-centre of such
aspirations—in other words, they were traitors to the
country.
They had chosen as their leader the "head of the
Executive," Louis Adolphe Thiers, probably the
cleverest, most hypocritical, and most unscrupulous
villain that ever defiled the page of history. As stated
in Chapter III., owing to the remissness of the Central
Committee, the chief of the monarchical conspiracy at
Versailles was allowed to escape with the other
Ministers from Paris instead of his having been arrested
on March 18th. Had he, with the rest, been taken
and tried, they might have been condemned and the
execution of their sentence held over pending events.
The Commune would then have had effective hostages.
For the Versailles would have thought twice of
massacring prisoners if they had felt convinced that
the first instance of the kind would have been answered
THE LESSONS OF THE COMMUNE. 87
by the peremptory execution of (say) Adolphe Thiers.
The Commune wished the war to be carried out on
decently humane principles. This was excellent in
intention, but would not work without the bargain
being endorsed by both belligerents. It was a criminal
weakness on the part of the Commune not to shape its
■conduct by the fact that the Yersaillese were deter¬
mined to conduct the war upon wild-beast principles.
But the best hostage of all, for the Commune, was the
Bank of France. As M. Lissagary well says, the bank,
the civil register, the domains, and the suitors' fund,
were the tender points on which to hold the bourgeoisie.
Had the Committee or the Commune seized the bank
with its millions, and the registers of 90,000 depositors
throughout France, Versailles must have capitulated.
Instead of doing this, they allowed themselves to be
bamboozled by a well-intentioned old fool like Beslay,
who in his turn was made a tool of by De Plœuc,
the sub-governor of the bank, the result being that
the vast financial resources at the disposal of the
Commune remained virtually untouched.
No one among those engaged in the Revolution we
have been describing seemed to appreciate the French
maxim "iA la guerre, comme à la guerre " (in war, as in
war), and the scrupulosity of all concerned as to laying
hands on the property or persons of their adversaries
allowed the cause no chance. No one seemed even to
appreciate adequately the ethics of insurrection—that
an insurrectionary administration which has succeeded
in establishing itself, becomes by that very fact (from
the point of view of the insurrection) the sole rightful
repository of power for the time being, and that the
Government, against which the insurrection was
directed, becomes in its turn the rebel power, to be
88
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
crushed in the most expeditious manner possible. The
Assembly and the Ministers were rebels not to be
parleyed with but suppressed. The Committee, instead
of negotiating, should have at once thrown the whole
force of the National Guard upon Versailles, then weak
in resources, and dispersed the Assembly. This was
the only reasonable tactics after having made the initial
blunder of letting the Ministers escape, followed by the
elements of an army. Instead, they allowed a whole
fortnight to be frittered away in abortive attempts
at negotiations which the Versaillese gladly protracted
till they had organised their military forces, and made
their arrangements with the German authorities for the
rapid delivery of the prisoners of war. Of the later
blunders we have already said enough in describing
the course of the defence.
One of the most unfortunate characteristics of the
leaders of the Commune was their sensitiveness to
bourgeois public opinion. The first thing for the leader
of a revolutionary movement to learn is a healthy con¬
tempt for the official public opinion of the "civilised
world." He must resolutely harden his heart against
its " thrills of horror," its " indignation," its " abomi¬
nation," and its " detestation," and he must learn to
smile at all the names it will liberally shower upon him
and his cause.
To aid in breaking the force of the representatives of
the established order in press and on platform, it is
necessary to have a vigorous party press which will
place matters in their true light before that mixed and
nebulous section of public opinion possessed of waver¬
ing or of no definite principles, but which, in default
of thinking and examining into facts for itself, takes
the impress of any statement that it finds repeated a
THE LESSONS OF THE COMMUNE.
8»
few times without very decisive and publicly-made con¬
tradiction. The deliberate perversion of facts and the
distorted judgments of the bourgeois journals anent the
Commune were too impudently flagrant to have passed
muster as they did, even with the ordinary mind, had
there been a Socialist press to expose them, such as
we now have, for example in Germany.
But the dominant classes, though they may succeed,
by aid of their wealth and power, in perverting the
truth for the time, can do no more. The proletariat
once conscious of its class-interests, and knowing what
these interests imply, will not forget the pioneers in
the struggle for liberty. Already March 18th has
become throughout the civilised world the greatest day
in the Socialist calendar. The wonder is, indeed, not
so much that the great capitalist class, possessing the
monopoly of every organ of public opinion, of the whole
press, and of every hall and meeting place, were able
to drown the voice of truth and justice by their noisy
bluff and bullying, but rather that despite all the
clamour, and without any Socialist press at the time
worth speaking of, the true meaning and facfs of the
Commune should have come to light as much as they
did. But so it was. There were a few honest middle-
class men to be found who, though caring nothing for
the Commune, and with no sympathy for its aims, yet
refused to join in the great class-conspiracy of vilifica¬
tion, and who, at all events up to their lights, spoke
the truth as to what they had seen and heard in Paris
under the red flag, who bore witness to the noble dis¬
interestedness of the defenders of the cause, and to the
foulness of their persecutors.
For the rest, if there is one lesson which the Com¬
mune has been the indirect means of teaching all who
go
THE PARIS COMMUNE.
are willing to learn, and for which alone all Socialists
should owe it a debt of gratitude, it is this : It has
taught us all that the opinion of the " civilised world,"
as voiced by the leader-writers of its great organs of
the press, and the speakers on the platforms of its
great party meetings, alike in its moral judgments, its
political judgments, and its social judgments, has, in
spite of all seeming diversity, one thing only as its final
measure and standard—the interests, real or imagined,
of the dominant capitalist class.
APPENDIX
The following are reprints of two pamphlets which were
issued by the General Council of the International
Working-Men's Association during the progress of the
War of 1870 and on the Communal rising in the spring
of 1871.
the general council op the
INTERNATIONAL WORKING-MEN'S ASSOCIATION
ON THE WAR.
to the members of the
INTERNATIONAL WORKING-MEN'S ASSOCIATION
in europe and the united states.
In the inaugural Address of the International Working-
Men's Association, of November, 1864, we said " If the-
emancipation of the working-classes requires their fraternal con¬
currence, how are they to fulfil that great mission with a foreign
policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national pre¬
judices and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and
treasure ?" We defined the foreign policy aimed at by the Inter¬
national in these words :—" Vindicate the simple laws of morals-
and justice, which ought to govern the relations of private
individuals, as the laws paramount of the intercourse of nations."
No wonder that Lonis Bonaparte, who usurped his power by
exploiting the war of classes in France, and perpetuated it by
periodical wars abroad, should from the first have treated* the
International as a dangerous foe. On the eve of the plebiscite h»
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL. 93
ordered a raid on the members of the Administrative Committees of
the International Working-men's Association throughout France,
at Paris, Lyons, Rouen, Marseilles, Brest, &c., on the pretext that
the International was a secret society dabbling in a complot for his
assassination, a pretext soon after exposed in its full absurdity by
his own judges. What was the real crime of the French branches
of the International ? They told the French people publicly and
emphatically that voting the plebiscite was voting despotism at
home and war abroad. It has been, in fact, their work that in all
the great towns, in all the industrial centres of France, the work¬
ing-class rose like one man to reject the plebiscite. Unfortunately
the balance was turned by the heavy ignorance of the rural dis¬
tricts. The Stock Exchanges, the Cabinets, the ruling classes and
the press of Europe celebrated the plebiscite as a signal victory of
the French Emperor over the French working-class ; and it was the
signal for the assassination, not of an individual, but of nations.
The war plot of July, 1870, is but an amended edition of the coup
d'etat of December, 1851. At first view the thing seemed so absurd
that France would not believe in its real good earnest. It rather
believed the deputy denouncing the ministerial war talk as a mere
stock-jobbing trick. When, on July 15th, war was at last officially
announced to the Corps Législatif, the whole Opposition refused to
vote the preliminary subsidies—even Thiers branded it as " detest¬
able" ; all the independent journals of Paris condemned it, and,
wonderful to relate, the provincial press joined in almost
unanimously.
Meanwhile, the Paris members of the International had again
set to work. In the Beveil of July 12th, they published their
manifesto "to the Workmen of all Nations," from which we
extract the following few passages :—
"Once more," they say, "on the pretext of European
equilibrium, of national honour, the peace of the world is menaced
by political ambitions. French, German, Spanish Workmen ! let our
voices unite in one cry of reprobation against war !.. .War for
a question of preponderance or a dynasty, can, in the eyes of work¬
men, be nothing but a criminal absurdity. In answer to the war¬
like proclamations of those who exempt themselves from the blood-
tax, and find in public misfortunes a source of fresh speculations,
we protest, we who want peace, labour, and liberty ! . . . .
Brothers of Germany I Our division would only result in the com¬
plete triumph of despotism on both sides of the Rhine. . . .
Workmen of all countries ! Whatever may for the present become
of our common efforts, we, the members of the International
Working-men's Association, who know of no frontiers, we send you,
as a pledge of indissoluble solidarity, the good wishes and the
salutations of the workmen of France."
'"his manifesto of our Paris section was followed by numerous
94
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
similar French addresses, of which we can here only quote tne
declaration of Neuilly-sur-Seine, published in the Marseillaise of
July 22nd :—"The war, is it just ? No ! The war, is it national ?
No I It is merely Dynastic. In the name of humanity, of
democracy, and the true interests of France, we adhere completely
and energetically to the protestation of the International against
the war. "
These protestations expressed the true sentiments of the French
working-people, as was soon shown by a curious incident. The
band of the 10th of December, first organised under the presidency
of Louis Bonaparte, having been masqueraded into blouses and let
loose on the streets of Paris, there to perform the contortions of
war fever, the real workmen of the Faubourgs came forward with
public peace demonstrations so overwhelming that Pietri, the
Prefect of Police, thought it prudent to at once stop all further
street politics, on the plea that the feal Paris people had given
sufficient vent to their pent-up patriotism and exuberant war
enthusiasm.
Whatever may be the incidents of Louis Bonaparte's war with
Prussia, the death-knell of the Second Empire has already sounded
at Paris. It will end, as it began, by a parody. But let us not
forget that it is the Governments and the ruling classes of Europe
who enabled Louis Bonaparte to play during eighteen years the
ferocious farce of the Restored Empire.
On the German side, the war is a war of defence ; but who put
Germany to the necessity of defending herself ? Who enabled Louis
Bonaparte to wage war upon her ? Prussia ! It was Bismarck who
conspired with that very same Louis Bonaparte for the purpose of
crushing popular opposition at home, and annexing Germany to
the Honenzollern dynasty. If the battle of Sadowa had been lost
instead of being won, French battalions would have overrun
Germany as the allies of Prussia. After her victory did Prussia
dream one moment of opposing a free Germany to an enslaved
France ? Just the contrary. While carefully preserving all the
native beauties of her old system, she superadded all the tricks of
the Second Empire, its real despotism and its mock democratism,
its political shams and its financial jobs, its high-flown talk and
its low legerdemains. The Bonapartist regime, which till then
only flourished on one side of the Rhine, had now got its counter¬
feit on the other. From such a state of things, what else could
result but war ?
If the German working class allow the present war to lose its
strictly defensive character and to degenerate into a war against
the French people, victory or defeat will prove alike disastrous.
All the miseries that befell Germany after her war of independence
will revive with accumulated intensity.
The principles of the International are, however, too widely
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL
95
spread and too firmlv rooted amongst the German working class
to apprehend such a sad consummation. The voices of the French
workmen have re-echoed from Germany. A mass meeting of work¬
men, held at Brunswick on July 16th, expressed its full concurrence'
with the Paris manifesto, spurned the idea of national antagonism
to France, and wound up its resolutions with these words :—" We-
are enemies of all wars, but above all of dynastic wars. . . .
With deep sorrow and grief we are forced to undergo a defensive war
as an unavoidable evil ; but we call, at the same time, upon the
whole German working-class to render the recurrence of such an
immense social misfortune impossible by vindicating for the-
peoples themselves the power to decide on peace and war, and
making them masters of their own destinies."
At Chemnitz, a meeting of delegates, representing 50,000 Saxon
workmen, adopted unanimously a resolution to this effect :—" In-
the name of the German Democracy, and especially of the workmen
forming the Democratic Socialist party, we declare the present war
to be exclusively dynastic We are happy to grasp the
fraternal hand stretched out to us by the workmen of France. . . .
Mindful of the watchward of the International Working-men's
Associations : Proletarians of all countries unite, we shall never
forget that the workmen of all countries are our friends and the
despots of all countries our enemies."
The Berlin branch of the Internatienal has also replied to the
Paris manifesto :—"We," they say, "join with heart and hand
your protestation. . . . Solemnly we promise that neither the
sound of the trumpet, nor the roar of the cannon, neither victory
nor defeat, shall divert us from our common work for the union of
the children of toil of all countries."
Be it so !
In the background of this suicidal strife looms the dark figure of
Russia. It is an ominous sign that the signal for the present waT
should have been given at the moment when the Moscovite Govern¬
ment had just finished its strategic lines of railway and was
already massing troops in the direction of the Pruth. Whatever
sympathy the Germans may justly claim in a war of defence against
Bonapartist aggression, they would forfeit at once by allowing
the Prussian Government to call for, or accept the help of, the
Cossack. Let them remember that, after their war of independence
against the first Napoleon, Germany lay for generations prostrate
at the feet of the Czar.
The English working-class stretch the hand of fellowship to the
French and German working-people. They feel deeply convinced
that whatever turn the impending horrid war may take the
alliance of the working-classes of all countries will ultimately kill
war. The very fact that while official France and Germany are
rushing into a fratricidal feud, the workmen of France and Germany
gô
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
•end each other messages of peace and goodwill ; this groat fact,
unparalleled in the history of the past, opens the vista of a brighter
fntnre. It proves that in contrast to old society, with its
economical miseries, and its political delirium, a new society is
springing up, whose International rule will be Peace, because its
national ruler will be everywhere the same—Labour ! The Pioneer
of that new society is the International Working Men's Association.
July 23rd, 1870.
SECOND ADDRESS.
In our first manifesto of the 23rd of July we said :—
"The death-knell of the Second Empire has already sounded at
Paris. It will end, as it began, by a parody. But let us not forget
that it is the Governments and the ruling classes of Europe who
enabled Louis Napoleon to play during eighteen years the ferocious
farce of the Restored Empire. "
Thus, even before war operations had actually set in, we treated
che Bonapartist bubble as a thing of the past.
If we were not mistaken as to the vitality of the Second
Empire, we were not wrong in our apprehension lest the German
war should ' lose its strictly defensive character and degenerate
into a war against the French people." The war of defence ended,
in point of fact, with the surrender of Louis Bonaparte, the
Sedan capitulation, and the proclamation of the Republic at Paris.
But long before these events, the very moment that the utter
rottenness of the Imperialist arms became evident, the Prussian
military camarilla had resolved upon conquest. There lay an ugly
obstacle in their way—King William's own proclamations at the
commencement of the war. In his speech from the throne to the
North German Diet, he had solemnly declared to make war upon
the Emperor of the French, and not upon the French people. On
the 11th of August he had isssued a manifesto to the French
nation, where he said : " The Emperor Napoleon having
made, by land and sea, an attack on the German nation which
desired and still desires to live in peace with the French people, I
have assumed the command of the German armies to repel his
aggression, and I have been led by military events to cross the
frontiers of France." Not content to assert the defensive character
of the waT by the statement that he only assumed the command of
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL. 97
the German armies "to repel aggression,'' he added that he was
only "led by military events " to cross the frontiers of France. A
defensive war does, of course, not exclude offensive operations,
dictated by "military events."
Thus this pious king stood pledged before France and the world
to a strictly defensive war. How to release him from his solemn
pledge ? The stage managers had to exhibit him as reluctantly
yielding to the irresistible behest of the German nation. They at
once gave the cue to the liberal German middle class, with its pro¬
fessors, its capitalists, its aldermen, and its penmen. That middle
class, which, in its struggles for civil liberty, had, from 1846 to
1870, been exhibiting an unexampled spectacle of irresolution,
incapacity, and cowardice, felt, of course, highly delighted to
bestride the European scene as the roaring lion of German
patriotism. It re-vindicated its civic independence by affecting to
force upon the Prussian Government the secret designs of that
same Government. It does penance for its long-continued and
almost religious faith in Louis Bonaparte's infallibility, by
shouting for the dismemberment of the French Republic. Let us
for a moment listen to the special pleadings of those stout-hearted
patriots !
They dare not pretend that the people of Alsace and Lorraine
pant for the German embrace ; quite the contrary. To punish
their French patriotism, Strasburg, a town with an independent
citadel commanding it, has for six days been wantonly and
fiendishly bombarded by "German" explosive shells, setting it
on fire, and killing great numbers of its defenceless inhabitants t
Vet, the soil of those provinces once upon a time belonged to th«
whilom German Empire. Hence, it seems, the soil and the humai:
beings grown on it must be confiscated as imprescriptible German
property. If the map of Europe is to be re-made in the antiquary'»
vein, let us by no means forget that the EleetoT of Brandenburg, for
his Prussian dominions, was the vassal of the Polish Republic.
The more knowing patriots, however, require Alsace and the
German speaking part of Lorraine as a "material guarantee"'
against French aggression. As this contemptible plea has bewil¬
dered many weak-minded people, we are bound to enter more fully
upon it.
There is no doubt that the general configuration of Alsace, as
compared with the opposite bank of the Rhine, and the presence
of a large fortified town like Strasburg, about halfway between
Basle and Germersheim, very much favour a French invasion of
South Germany, while they offer peculiar difficulties to an invasion
of France from South Germany. There is, further, no doubt that
the addition of Alsace and German-speaking Lorraine would give
South Germany a much stronger frontier, inasmuch as she would
then b« master of the crest of the Vosges mountains in its whole
H
98
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
length, and of the fortresses which cover its northern passes, if
Metz were annexed as well, France would certainly for the moment
be deprived of her two principal bases of operation against
Germany, but that would not prevent her from constructing a
fresh one at Nancy or Verdun. While Germany owns Coblentz,
Mainz, Germersheim, Rastadt, and Ulm, all bases of operation
against France, and plentifully made use of in this war, with
what show of fair play can she begrudge France Strasburg and
Metz, the only two fortresses of any importance she has on that
side? Moreover, Strasburg endangers South Germany only while
South Germany is a separate power from North Germany. From
1792 to 1795 South Germany was never invaded from that direc¬
tion, because Prussia was a party to the war against the French
Revolution ; but as soon as Prussia made a peace of her own in
1795, and left the South to shift for itself, the invasions of South
Germany, with Strasburg for a base began, and continued till
1809. The fact is, a united Germany can always render Strasburg
Hid any French army in Alsace innocuous by concentrating all her
troops, as was done in the present war, between Saarlouis and
Landau, and advancing, or accepting battle, on the line of road
between Mainz and Metz While the mass of the German troops
is stationed there, any French army advancing from Strasburg into
South Germany would be outflanked, and have its communications
threatened. If the present campaign has proved anything, it is
the facility of invading France from Germany.
But, in good faith, is it not altogether an absurdity and an
anachronism to make military considerations the principle by
which the boundaries of nations are to be fixed ? If this rule were
to prevail, Austria would still be entitled to Venetia and the line
of the Mincio, and France to the line of the Rhine, in order to
protect Paris, which lies certainly more open to an attack from the
North Fast than Berlin does from the South West. If limits are
to be fixed by military interests, there will be no end to claims,
because every military line is necessarily faulty, and may be im¬
proved by annexing some more outlying territory ; and, moreover,
they can never he fixed finally and fairly, because they always
must he imposed by the conqueror upon the conquered, and conse¬
quently carry within them the seed of fresh wars.
Such is the lesson of all history. Thus with nations as with
individuals. To deprive them of the power of offence, you must
deprive them of the means of defence. You must not only garrot,
but murder. If ever conqueror took " material guarantees " for
breaking the sinews of a nation, the first Napoleon did so by the
. Tilsit treaty, and the way he executed it against Prussia and the
: rest of Germany, Yet, a few years later, his gigantic power split
Hike a rotten" reed Upon tlie German people. What are the
"material "guarantees" Prussia, in her Wildest dreams, can, or
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
99
■dare impose upon Prance, compared to the "material guarantees "
the first Napoleo.n had wrenched from herself ? The result will
not prove the less disastrous. History will measure its retribution,
not by the extent of the square miles conquered from France, but
by the intensity of the crime of reviving, in the second half of the
19th century, the policy of conquest!
But, say the mouth-pieces of Teutonic patriotism, you must not
confound Germans with Frenchmen. What we want is not glory,
but safety. The Germans are an essentially ppaceful people. In
their sober guardianship, conquest itself changes from a condition
of future war into a pledge of perpetual peace. Of course, it is not
Germans that invaded France in 1792, for the sublime purpose of
hayonetting the revolution of the 13th century. It is not Germans
that befouled their hands by the subjugation of Italy, the oppres¬
sion of Hungary, and the dismemberment of Poland. Their present
military system, which divides the whole able-bodied male popula¬
tion into two parts—one standing army on service, and another
standingarmy on furlough, both equally bound in passive obedience
to rulers by divine right—such a military system is, of course, " a
material guarantee " for keeping the peace, and the ultimate goal
of civilising tendencies ! In Germany, as everywhere else, the
sycophants of the powers that be poison the popular mind by the
incense of mendacious self praise.
Indignant as they pretend to be at the sight of French fortresses
in Metz and Strasburg, those German patriots see no harm in the
vast system of Moscovite fortifications at Warsaw, Modlin, and
Ivangorod. While gloating at the terrors of Imperialist invasion,
they blink the infamy of Autocratic tutelage.
As in 1865 promises were exchanged between Louis Bonaparte
and Bismarck, so in 1870 promises have been exchanged between
Gortschakoff and Bismarck. As Louis Bonaparte flattered himself
that the war of 1866, resulting in the common exhaustion of
Austria and Prussia, would make him the supreme arbiter of
Germany, so Alexander flattered himself that the war of 1870,
resulting in the common exhaustion of Germany and France, would
make him the supreme arbiter of the Western Continent. As the
second Empire thought the North German Confederation incom¬
patible with its existence, so autocratic Russia must think herself
endangered by a German empire tinder Prussian leadership. Such
is the law of the old political system. Within its pale the gain of
one State is the loss of the other. The Czar's paramount influence
"over Europe roots in his traditional hold on Germany. At a
moment when in-Russia herself volcanic social agencies threaten
to shake the very base of autocracy, could the .Czar afford to bear
with such à loss of foreign '•prestige,? Already the Moseoyite
I journals, repeat the. language of the Bona partlst. joivrnals- after the
war of 1866. Do the Teuton patriots really believe that liberty
H 2
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
and peace will be guaranteed to Germany by forcing France into
the arms of Russia ? If the fortune of her arms, the arrogance of
success, and dynastic intrigue lead Germany to a spoliation of
French territory, there will then only remain two courses open to
her. She must at all risks become the avowed tool of Russian
aggrandisement, or, after some short respite, make again ready
for another "defensive" war, not one of those new-fangled
"localised " wars, but a war of races—a war with the combined
Sclavonian and Roman races.
The German working-class have resolutely supported the war,
vhich it was not in their power to prevent, as a war for Germain
independence and the liberation of France and Europe from that
pestilential incubus, the Second Empire. It was the German,
workmen who, together with the rural labourers, furnished the-
sinews and msscles of heroic hosts, leaving behind their half-
starved families. Decimated by the battles abroad, they will be once
more decimated by misery at home. In their turn they are now
coming forward to ask for " guarantees,"—guarantees that their
immense sacrifices have not been brought in vain, that they have
conquered liberty, that the victory over the Imperialist armies will
not, as in 1815, be turned into the defeat of the German people ;
and, as the first of these guarantees, they claim an honourable peace-
for France, and the recognition of the French Republic.
The Central Committee of the German Socialist Democratic
Workmen's Party issued, on the 5th of September, a manifesto,
energetically insisting upon these guarantees. "We," they say,.
" we protest against the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. And'
we are conscious of speaking in the name of the German working»
class. In the common interest of France and Germany, in the-
interest of peace and liberty, in the interest of Western civilisation
against Eastern barbarism, the German workmen will not
patiently tolerate the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. . . .We
shall faithfully stand by our fellow-workmen in all countries for
the common International cause of the Proletariat ! "
Unfortunately, we cannot feel sanguine of their immediate-
success. If the French workmen amidst peace failed to stop the-
aggressor, are the German workmen more likely to stop the victor
amidst the clangour of arms ? The German workmen's manifesto-
demands the extradition of Louis Bonaparte as a common felon to the
French Republic. Their rulers are, on the contrary, already trying:
hard to restore him to the Tuileries as the best man to ruin France.
However that may be, history will prove that the German working
class are not made of the same malleable stuff as the German
middle class. They will do their duty.
Like them, we hail the advent of the Republic in France, but at
the same time we labour under misgivings which we hope wilh
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
IOI
mrove groundless. That Republic has not subverted the throne,
1>ut only taken its place become vacant. It has been proclaimed,
lot as a social conquest, but as a national measure of defence. It
Is in the hands of a Provisional Government composed partly of
•notorious Orleanists, partly of middle-class Republicans, upon
-some of whom the insurrection of June, 1818, has left its indelible
-stigma. The division of labour amongst the members of that
Government looks awkward. The Orleanists have seized the
strongholds of the army and the police, while to the professed
Republicans have fallen the talking departments. Some of their
first acts go far to show that they have inherited from the Empire,
not only ruins, but also its dread of the working-class. If eventual
impossibilities are in wild phraseology promised in the name of
the Republic, is it not with a view to prepare the cry for a
'possible ' government ? Is the Republic, by some of its middle-
class undertakers, not intended to serve as a mere stop-gap and
'bridge over an Orleanist Restoration?
The French working-class moves, therefore, under circumstances
•of extreme difficulty. Any attempt at upsetting the new Govern¬
ment in the present crisis, when the enemy is almost knocking at
the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly. The French work¬
men must perform their duties as citizens ; but, at the same time,
they must not allow themselves to be swayed by the national
souvenirs of 17S2, as the French peasants allowed themselves to be
deluded by the national souvenirs of the First Empire. They have
•not to recapitulate the past, but to build up the future. Let them
calmly and resolutely improve the opportunities of Republican
liberty, for the work of their own class organisation, it will gift
them with fresh Herculean powers for the regeneration of France,
and our common task—the emancipatiou of labour. ITpon their
energies and wisdom hinges the fate of the Republic,
The English workmen have already taken measures to oversA-me,
oy a wholesome pressure from without, the reluctance 01 toeir
■Government to recognise the French Republic. The present
dilatoriness of the British Government is probably intended to
atone for the Anti-Jacobin war and the former indecent haste in
sanctioning the coup d'etat. The English workmen call also upon
their Government to oppose by all its power the dismemberment of
France, which a part of flie English press is shameless enough to
howl for. It is the same press that for twenty years deified Loui3
Bonaparte as the providence of Europe, that frantically cheered on
the slaveholders to rebellion. Now, as then, it drudges for the
■slaveholder.
Let the sections of the International Working Men's Association
4n every oountry stir the working classes to action. If they forsaki
I02
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
their duty, if they remain passive, the present tremendous war wilL
be but the harbinger of still deadlier international feuds, and lead!
in every nation to a renewed triumph over the workman by the-
lords of the sword, of the soil, and of capital.
Robert Applegartli ; Martin J. Boon; Fred. Bradnick ; Caihil ;
John Hales; William Hales; George Harris; Fred. Lessner ;
Laysatine ; B. Lucraft, George MilneT ; Thomas Mottershead ;.
Charles Murray; George Oilger ; James Parnell ; Pfander : Riikl
Joseph Shepherd ; Oovvell Stepney ; Stoll ; Schmitz.
Vive la République !
THE GENERAL COUNCIL.
CORRESPONDING SECRETARIES.
Eugene Dupont
Karl Marx
For France.
,, Germany and Russia
,, Belgium, Holland, and Spaiiu
,, Switzerland.
,, Italy.
,, Hungary.
,, J'uland.
,, Denmark.
,, The United States.
A. Serp.aili.er
Hermann Iung
Giovanni Bora
Zeny Maurice
Anton Zaiiiki
James Cohen
J. G. Eccakius
WILLIAM TOV'NSEND, Chairman.
JOHN WESTON, Treasurer.
J. GEORGE ECCARIl'S, Ceneral Secretary.
—256, High Holborn, London W.C., Seqdemler 9/lt, 187£k.
the
CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE
address of the general council
or THE
INTERNATIONAL WORKING-MEN'S ASSOCIATION
TO ALL THE MEMBERS OF THE ASSOCIATION IN EUROPE AND I'd»
UNITED STATES.
I.
On the 4th of September, 1870, when the working men of Paris
proclaimed 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 states¬
man and Trochu for their general, took hold of the Hotel 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
crises, that, to legitimatise their usurped titles as Governors of
France, they thought it quite sufficient to produce their lapsed
mandates as representatives of Paris. In our second address on
the late war, five days after the rise of these men, we told von who
they were. Yet, in the turmoil of surprise, with the real leaders
of the working class still shut up in Bonapartist prisons and the
Prnssiins air' ady 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, how¬
ever, was not to be defended without arming its working class,
organising 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
I04 MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
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 com¬
mencement of the siege, when they thought the opportune moment
come for breaking the first word of capitulation, Trochu, in the
presence of Jules Favre and others of his colleagues, addressed the
■assembled mayors of Paris in these terms :—
" The first question put to me by my colleagues on the very eveu-
ng of the 4th of September was this : Paris, can it, with any
chance of success stand a siege by the Prussian army î 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 terms, 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
ivents (managed by himself) have not given the lie to my pre¬
vision." .This nice little speech of Trochu was afterwards pub¬
lished 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 capitula¬
tion of Paris. If national defence had been more than a pretext for
the personal government of Thiers, Favre and Go., the upstarts of
the 4th of September would have abdicated on the 5th—would have
initiated the Paris people into Trochu's " plan," and called upon
ihem 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 meanwhile 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 con¬
tinuance of the siege the Bonapartist cut-throats, whom Trochu
had wisely intrusted with the command of the Paris army, ex¬
changed, 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 correspond¬
ence published by the Journal Officiel of the Commune). The
mask of imposture was at last dropped on the 28th of January,
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL. I°5
1871. Vith 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 permission—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 capitulants 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. Milliere, 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 Jules Favre, living in concubinage
with the wife of a drunkard resident at Algiers, had, by a most
daring concoction of forgeries, spread'over many years, contrived to
.grasp, in the name of the children of his adultery, a large succes¬
sion, which made him a rich man, and that, in a lawsuit under¬
taken 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, then,
-frantically to denounce the people of Paris as a band of
escaped convicts in utter revolt against family, religion, order,
and property. This same 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 Com¬
mune, was at once reinstated in prison ; and then Jules Favre ex¬
claimed, 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 Home Minister of the Republic
-after having in vain striven to become the Home Minister of the
Empire, is the brother of one Arthur Picard, an individual
îxpelled from the Paris Bourse as a blackleg (see report of the Pre¬
fecture of Police, dated 13th July, 1867), and convicted, on his own
confession, of a theft of 300,000 francs, while manager of one of the
branches of the Société Generate, 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, l'Electeur
Libre, "> While the common run of stockjobbers were led asuay by
lo6 MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
the official lies of the Home Office paper, Arthur was running back¬
wards and forwards between the Home Office aud the Bourse, there
to discount the disasters of the French army. The whole financial
correspondence of that worthy pair of brothers fell into the hands
of tlie 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
tickets-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 bour¬
geoisie for almost half a century, because he is the most consum¬
mate 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 Phillippe by betraying his pro¬
tector Lafitte, ingratiating himself with the king bv 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, tho
Duchess 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. Re¬
appearing 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 aris,
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 jeu calumniate any possible
Government in supposing that it could some day attempt to main¬
tain 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 bom-
boarded—by whom? Was it by a foreign enemy exercising the-
rigbts of war ? No, gentlemen, it was by its own Government. And.
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
*hy ? Because, that unfortunate town demanded its rights. Well,,
then, for the demand of its rights it hasg'.t fort v-eight hours of bom-,
bardment Allow me to appeal to the oui iiion of Europe. Itis.
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 alterwards, 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 thé-
long exile from place and pelf to which Guizot had condemned him,
and sniffing in the air the scent of an approaching popular commo¬
tion, Thiers, in that pseudo-heroic style which won him the nick¬
name of Mirabeau-mouche, declared to the Chamber of Deputies :
"I am of the party of Revolution, not only in France, but iu
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 s'uall 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 Phillippe by the Republic.
On the first day of the popular victory he carefully hid himself, for¬
getting that the contempt of the working men screened him from
their hatred. Still, with his legendary courage, he continued to
shy the public stage, until the June massacres had (Fared it for
his sort of action. Then he became the leading mind of the " Party
of Order" and its Parliamentary Republic, that anonymous
interregnum, in which all the rival factions of the ruling closs.
conspired together to crush the people, and conspired against each
Other to restore each of them its own monarchy. Then, as now, Thi«i a
denounced the Republicans as the only obstacle to the consolida¬
tion of the Republic ; then, as now, he spoke to the Republic 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 : L'Empire est fait—the Empire is consummated.
Despite his hypocritical homilies about necessary liberties and his-
ersonal grudge against Louis Bonaparte, who had made a dupe < t
im, and kicked out parliamentarism—and on*aide of its factitious-
atmosphere the little man is conscious of withering into otliiugni-e
—he had a hand in all the infamies of the Second Empire, the
occupation of Rome by French troops to the war with Prussia,,
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
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
'cr.iign policy always culminated in the utter humiliation of
F:-« ee, from the London convention of 1841 to the Paris capitula¬
tion of 1871, and the present civil war, where he hounds on the
Îirisoners of Sedan ana Metz against Paris by special permission of
lismarck. Despite H« versatility of talent and shiftiness of
purpose, this man has £-* 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 pro¬
tective 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 attb.opt 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
pr ictical 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 Republic,"
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, him¬
self a capitalist and, nevertheless, a devoted member of the Paris
Commune, M. Beslay, lately addressed Thiers thus in a publia
placard :—"The enslavement of labour by capital has always beet
the corner-stone of your policy, and from the very day you saw the
Republic of Labour installed at the Hotel de Ville, you have never
reased to cry out to France : ' These are criminals ! ' " A masteï
in small state roguery, a virtuoso in perjury and treason, a crafts¬
man 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.
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL. IO9,
The capitulation of Paris, by surrendering to Prussia not only-
Paris, but all France, closed the long-continued intrigues of-
treason with the enemy, which the usurpeis 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 communi¬
cations were disorganised. 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 witbin 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 capitulation, 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 terma
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 precautions,,
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, which 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 them¬
selves. The wheel of history has evidently rolled back to stop att
the " Chambre introuvable " of 1816. In 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 Pourceaugnacs of
France.
As soon as this assembly of " Rurals " had met at Bordeaux, Thiers
made it clear 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 Republic and Paris, its stronghold. The
counter-r«volution had, in fact, no time to lose. The Second
IIO
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
emp ,ire ],a(i more than doubled tlio national debt, and plunged all
tlio large towns into heavy municipal debts. The war hail fearfully
swelled the liabilities, and mercilessly ravaged the resources of the
nation. To complete the ruin, tne Prussian Shvbck was lb-re
with his bond for the keep of half a million of hissoldicrs 011 French
soil, his indemnity of five miliarcis and interest at 5 per cent, oh
the unpaid instalments thereof. Who was to pay the bill ? It ivae
only by the violent overthrow of the Republic that the ap propri¬
etors of wealth could hope to shift 011 tu 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 con ili n of success, i arij
was therefore summoned by Thiers to surrender its arms. Then
Paris was exasperated by the frantic anti-republican demonstrations
of the " Rural ' Assembly and by Thiers's own equivocations about
the legal status i f the Republic ; by the threat to decapitate and
and decapitalise 1 aris ; the appointment of Orleanist ambassa'ors ;
Dufaure's laws 011 over-due commercial bills and bouse rents,
inflicting ruin 011 tlie commerce and industry of Paris; lon er-
■Qncrtier's tax of two centimes upon every copy of every imaginable
-publication ; the sentences of death against I lanqui and Fhiuruns;
the suppression of the Republican journals; the tiansi'er of the
;National Assembly to Versailles; the-renewal of the state of siege
-declared by 1 nlikan, and expired 011 the 4th of September ; the
■ ap •intn ei t of Vinoy, tire Décembriseur, as govern r • f Parrs—of
•Vu'» ir 1 in, 1 be Imperialist gendarme, as its prefect of police—and of
• 'D'Aurelh-s de l'a a inc. t. c Jesuit gen ral, as the commander-in-
clii f of ii a Null 1 1 I aid.
• And now we bar to aodressa question to M. Thiers and the men
■ft ■ 11.1't 1 nal 1lclc1.ee, lis understrappers. It is known that,
•tl v ti"h th • m ei i v of M. Pviuyer Qnerth r, his fin nice minister,
• T!Lii rs ba l no i nn 'e l a loan of two milliards, to be paid down at
oi" o N< w, is : 11.. r r not —
1. That the b siiiiss was so managed that a consideration of
se-r 1 ral bum m1 loli.o s was secured for the private benefit of
'•Tl; era', .nos I .re, iiniest icard, buyer-Quertigr, and Jules
fcimi 1. t- am.
, g. "'J-at 1 m my was to be paid down until after the
. *' ] «filin ! ion ' ' of Paris ?
At ad ovi 1 t , tl ne must have been something very pressing in
, tin mat. 1 r, I r 'J l.i*ia and .Julcs Favre, in thy jiajneof the majority
.of the .Porlcnux As-gmbly, unblushingly solicited the.immediate
^occupât on of Paris by Prussian troops. .Such, ho,wever„ wqs not
the game of Pismari k. as he Sneeringly, and in public, told,
the admiring Frankfort Philistines on his return to Germany.
manifesto of the international.
i i i
II.
Abmkp Paris was tV only serious obstade in the way of counter¬
revolutionary en* ûnicy. Piris.was, there-fore, to bs disarmed,
tin this i" iut tli . i- ik As- inhly was sincerity itself, if the
roaring rant of its Rurals 1 i-i nut been an lible enough, the
surrender i.l Purls by '1 i.it-is to. the tender mercies of the trium¬
virate of Yiiinv tn ])&•■ inbrixtur, Valentin the Bonapartist
yeudnrmr, an AiitI- s de I'.iladine the Jesuit general, would have
cut nil" i v. i tli ■ la . sttlile.ringe of d uet. Hut while insultingly
exhibit ii g tin; 'rue ion'; < se of the d.sa m tin eut ot Paris, the con-
spiruun s asked Jut to la. down her annsim a pretext-which u ns the
most fierl i g, t he most barefaced of lies, 'l lie artill-ry of the Paris
National Gun-.;, said Thiers, belonged to the State, and to the State
it must be rc turned. The lact is I his :—From the very day of the
capitulation, by which 1 ismaivk's prisoners had signed the
surrender of Fram e, but reserved to themselves a numerous body¬
guard i*ii* the exi tee.- purpose of cowing Paris, Paris stood on the
watch, 'ill- Nation - toiard reorganised themselves and intrusted
their sup re m I- eon 11 - i -i a (A - -tr.il < niumittcc elected by Unit- whole
body, save s -me Ira; n cuts of the old bonapartist formath n. On
'the eve c? tin- entrai - > , { t'en J russiaus into Paris, the Central
-Contient ec to k u-: res I - r the rem--val t Montmartre, Fell ville,
and I,a Yillette of h e canvi- ii and mitrailleus -s treacherously
.abandoned by the cat i-ir- s in and about the very qua itc-rs ills
PrtiEsiaiis were to uiv |-e. That artillery had-been furnished by the
subscriptions of tie-N > : -■ -r. ; Guard. As their private, prop rty,
it was < flii ally rec •- n in-hi -a < tittln i-ji. of the _8! h of January,
•andon that very title ex- m gin (imp in.- .oral surrender, into
■the In- m! s c-1 tin c - - i . i" - u i " ro Gie GoveriiUi-1 t.
And Tinovs was s>> u i r lilt- oi even the 11- de t pretext
for initialing.the v.ar i î. ;t .an , t. a. ha h I to lesort to the
liagi til lie oi tue atnli-ry ot the National Guard being State
propel t v 1
v The i. are of her art 1 y was evidently hut to serve as the pre-
lituinsrv I--the genera: . u-o > - ut of I'- vis, and, therefore, of the
Jievoliui n " lb - -i nr. Hut. that. It volution had
b.êàoine tin 1 gal status of ;Fi;.vu. .The It public, its work, was
•l'ecogii s I by.the cnqtv-rpr m .1 "w term* id'tee cap t illation. After
tbe.ca: itn'nti ai, i i w-.i-ack-ii v i t bv all the t' -r ign -Powers,
and in its t nine tin- National A'-'*-, mbly had been sninnmiicd. The
Paris woi.k'iig m - s.ve.volutiou of tie 4th of September was the
only k-pii title if 1 National Assembly seated at Bordeaux, and of
its executive. Yd lent it, the N-vîi mal Assembly would at once
lraVD.tc.gLve way tn t lie Corps Lcgislat-f, de led in 1869 by universal
■suffrage under French, not under Prussian, rule, and forcibly
1I2 MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
dispersed by the arm of the Revolution. Thiers and his ticket-o£~
leave 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 term»
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
France, 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
lier 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
multitude 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 fraternisation 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, ha 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 un¬
disputed sway of Paris. The Central Committee was its pro¬
visional Government. Europe seemed, for a moment, to doubt,
whether its recent sensational performances of Btate 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 troop»
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL. 113
into Pari», the proletarian revolution remained so free fr< in tha
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 oSScers engaged in the nocturnal attempt
♦gainst Montmartre, General Lecomte, had four times ordered tho
$lst line regiment to fire at an unarmed gathering in the Place
Pigale, and on their refusal fiercely insulted thein. Instead of
«hooting women and children, his own men shot him. The in¬
veterate 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 Republican 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
naving got into power, they metamorphosed this old quarter¬
master-sergeant into a general on the eve of the butchery of June,
of which he, like Jules Favre, was one of the sinister plotters, ana
became one of the most dastardly executioners. Then he and his
generalship 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 Hotel 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
eommune 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, re¬
fusing to sully his name by such a breach of faith, îesigned tho
eommandership-in-chief of the National Guard, and in his place
Element Thomas for once became again a general. During the
whole of his tenure of command, he made war, not upon tho
Prussians, but upon the Paris National Guard. He prevented their
general armament, pitted the bourgeois battalions against tho
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 tho
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
i&M] of his own for " finishing off la fine fleur (the cream) of th«
I
114 MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
Paris cana*2le." After Vinoy's rout, he must needs appear upon
the scene of action in the quality of an amateur spy. The Centra)
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 Tlace Vendôme is a
myth which M. Thiers and the Durais persistently ignored in the
Assembly, entrusting its propagation exclusively to the servants'
hall of European journalism. "The men of order," the re¬
actionists 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, 1818, 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
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 unharmed, 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 worsing
men—so strangely at variance with the habits of the " party of
order," the latter misinterpreted as mere symptoms of conscious
weakness. 3 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
swells 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, Ac, Under the
cowardly pretence of a pacific demonstration, this rabble, secretly
armed with the weapons of the br vo, fell into marching order, ill-
treated and disarmed the detacned patrols and sentries of the
National Guard they met with on their progress, and, on debouch¬
ing from the Rue de la Paix, with the cry of "Down with the
Central Committee ! Down with the assassins ! The National
Assembly for ever I " attempted to breakthrough 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 (ths French equivalent of the English
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 coxcombs, who expected that the mere exhibi¬
tion of their "respectability" would have the same effect upon
the Revolution of Paris as 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
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
"5
with revolvers, daggers, and sword-canes, in evidence of the " un¬
armed " character of their "pacific" demonstration. When, oh
the 13th of June, 1849, the National Guard made a really pacific
demonstration in protest against the felonious assault of French
troops upon Rome, Changarnier, then general of the party of order,
was acclaimed by the National Assembly, and especially by M.
Thiers, as 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 repression. New arrests, new proscriptions
—anew 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 openedi
by Thiers' burglarious attempt on Montmartre, the Central
Committee made themselves, this time, guilty of a decisive mis¬
take in not at once marching upon Versailles, then completely
helpless, and thus putting an end to the conspiracies of Thiers
and his Iturals. Instead of this, the party of order was again
allowed to try its strength at the ballot-box, on the 26th of March,
the day of the election of tbe Commune. Then, in the mairies of
Paris, they exchanged bland words of conciliation with their too
generous conquerors, muttering in their hearts solemn vows to
exterminate them in due time.
Now, look at the reverse of the medal. Thiers opened his second
campaign 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 snot without
any form of trial. Gallifet, the kept man of his wife, so notorious
for her shameless exhibitions at the orgies of the Second Empire,
boasted in a proclamation of having commanded the murder of a
small troop of National Guards, with their captain and lieutenant,
surprised and disarmed by his Chasseurs. Vinoy, the runaway, was
appointed Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour by Thiers, for his
general order to shoot down every soldier of the line taken in the
ranks of the Federals. Desmaret, the. gendarme, was decorated for
the treacherous butcher-like chopping in pieces of the high-souled
end ^chivalrous Flourens, who had saved the heads of the
Government of Defence on the 31st of October, 1870. "The
l 2
jl6 manifesto of the international
encouraging particulars " of hia assassination were triumphantly
expatiated upon by Thiers in the National Assembly. With the
elevated vanity of a parliamentary Tom Thumb, permitted to play
the part of a Tamerlane, he denied the rebels against his littleness
every right of civilised warfare, up to the right of neutrality tot
ambulances. Nothing more horrid than that monkey allowed for a
time to give full fling to his tigerish instincts, as foreseen by
Voltaire. (See note, p. 136).
After the decree of the Commune of the 7th 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, moreover insulting them in his
bulletins as follows:—" Never have more degraded countenances
•cf a degraded democracy met the afflicted gaze 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 Paries under the
■disguise of National Guards, that even sergents-de-ville taken
with incendiary shells upon them, were spared,—when the whole¬
sale shooting of prisoners was resumed and carried on uninter¬
ruptedly 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 April, were afterwards shot down, one after another,
by the captain, a worthy man of Gallilet's. One of his four
vicnms, left for dead, Scheflfer, crawled back to the Parisian out¬
posts, and deposed to this fact before a commission of the Com¬
mune. When Tolain interpellated the War Minister upon the
report of this commission, the Rurals drowned his voice and for¬
bade Leflo to answer. It would be an insult to their "glorious"
army to speak of its deeds. The flippant tone in which Thiers'
tralletins announced the bayoneting of the Federals surprised
-asleep at Moulin Saquet, and the wholesale fusillades at Clamart
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
•thecfomenters of a slaveholders' rebellion protected by foreign
invasion. Amidst all these horrors, Thiers', forgetful of his parlia¬
mentary laments on the terrible responsibility weighing down his
-dwarfish shoulders, boasts in his bulletins that 1'A.ssemblit siigi
manifesto of the international. h7
paisiblement (th# 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 thunder-
burst of " Vive la Commune ! " What is the Commune, that
sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind ?
"The proletarians of Paris," said the Central Committee in its-
manifesto of the 18th March, "amidst the failures and treasons of
the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for
them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the
direction of public affairs They have understood that it is.
their imperious duty and their absolute right to render themselves
masters of their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental
power," 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 ol
standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature—organs
wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of
labour—originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving
nascent middle-class society as a mighty weapon in its struggles
against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all
manner of mediaeval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges,
municipal and guild monopolies and provincial constitutions. 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 parliamentary control—that is,©under the direct
control of the propertied classes—became not only a hotbed of huge
national debts and crushing taxes ; with its irresistible allure¬
ments 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
I I 8 MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
assumed more and more the character of the national powpr of
capital over labour, of a public force organised for social enslave¬
ment, of an engine of class despotism. After every revolution
marking a progressive phase iu 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 Revolu¬
tion of February, took the State power, used it for the Junemassacres,
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 regime of avowed class terrorism and deliberate insult
towards the " vile multitude." If the Parliamentary Republic, as
M Thiers said, " divided them (the different fractions of the
ruling class) least," it opened an abyss between that class and the
whole body of society outside their spare ranks, m The restraints by
which their own divisions had under former regimes still checked
the State power, were removed by their union ; and in view of the
threatening upheaval of the proletariat, they now used that State
power mercilessly and ostentatiously as the national war engine of
capital against labour. In their uninterrupted crnsade 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
Lonis Bonaparte, turned them out. The natural offspring of the
" Party-of-Order " Republic was the Second Empire.
The Empire, with the coup d'etat for its certificate of birth,
nniversal suffrage for its sanction, and the sword for its sceptre,
professed to rest upon the peasantry, the large mass of producers
not directly involved in the struggle of capital and labour. • It
professed to save the working class by breaking down Parliamen¬
tarism, and, with it, the undisguised subserviency of Government
to the propertied classes: c It professed to save the propertied
«lasses by upholding their economic supremacy over the working
«lass ; and, finally, it professed to unite «Il «lasses by reviving fo»
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
"9
;al the chimera of national glory. In reality, it was the only form
of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already
lost, and the working class bad not yet acquired, the faculty of
ruling the nation. It was acclaimed throughout the world as the
saviour of society. Under its sway, bourgeois society, freed from
political cares, attained a development unexpected even by itself.
Its industry and commerce expanded to colossal dimensions,
.financial swindling celebrated cosmopolitan orgies ; the misery of
the masses was set off by a shameless display of gorgeous, mere¬
tricious, and debased luxury. The State power, apparently
soaring high above society, was at the same time itself the greatest
scandal of that society and the very hot-bed of all its corruptions.
Its owl, rottenness, and the rottenness of the society it had saved,
were laid bare by the bayonet of Prussia, herself eagerly bent upon
transferring the supreme seat of that regime from Paris to Berlin.
Imperialism is, at the same time, the most prostitute and the
ultimate form of the State power which nascent middle-class
society had commenced to elaborate as a means of its own emanci¬
pation from feudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois society had
finally transformed into a means for the enslavement of labour by
capital.
The direct antithesis to the Empire was the Commune. The cry
•of " Social Republic," with which the revolution of February was
ushered in by the Paris proletariate, did but express a vague
aspiration after a Republic that was not only to supersede the
.monarchial dorm of class-rule, but class-rule itself. The Commune
wvas the positive form of that Republic. -is
Paris, the central seat of the old governmental power, and, at
the same time, the social stronghold of the French working class,
ihad risen in arms against the attempt of Thiers and the Rurals to
.restore and perpetuate that old governmental power bequeathed
to them by the Empire. Paris could resist only because, in conse¬
quence of the siege, it had got rid of the army, and replaced it by
a National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of working men.
This fact was now to be transformed into an institution. The
first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the
standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people. ~
The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen
by universal suffrage in 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 parlia-
■mentary body, executive and legislative at the same time. Instead
f continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the
police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned
into the responsible and at all times revocable agent of the
1 20
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the Admini
tration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the publia
service had to be done at workmen's wages. The vested interest»
and tbi representation allowances of the high dignitaries of State
disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Publia
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 was education made accessible to all, but
science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and
governmental force had imposed upon it.
The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham inde¬
pendence 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 t« all the
great industrial centres of France. The communal régime once
established in Paris and the secondary centres, the old centralised
Government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the
self-government of the producers. In a rough sketch of national
organisation which the Commune had no time to develop, it states
clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the
smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the
standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an
extremely short term of service. The rural communes of every
district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of
delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were
again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each
delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat
impératif (formal instructions) of his constituents. The few but
important functions which still would remain for a central govern¬
ment were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally mis¬
stated, but were to be discharged by Communal, and therefor»
strictly responsible agents. The unity of the nation was not to be
broken ; but, on the contrary, to be organised by the Communal
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
121
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 represent the people in Parlia¬
ment, universal suffrage was to serve the peopie, constituted in
Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in
the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it
is well known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real,
business generally know how to put the right man in the right
place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly.
On the other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of
the Commune than to supersede universal suffrage by hierarchic
investiture.
It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to
be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even defunct forms of
social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus,
this new Commune, which breaks the modern State power, has.
been mistaken for a reproduction of the mediaeval Communes,
which first preceded, and afterwards became the substratum of,
that very State power. The communal constitution has been mis¬
taken 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-centralisation. Peculiar historical circumstances may have
prevented the classical development, as in France, of the bourgeois,
form of government, and may have allowed, as in England, to.
complete the great central State organs by corrupt vestries,
jobbing councillors, and ferocious poor-law guardians in the towns,
and .virtually hereditary magistrates in the counties. The Com¬
munal Constitution would have restored tô 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, ami
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.
12 2
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
"them, in the working man, 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, ol contributor to Kladderadatch (the Berlin Punch), it could
only enter in such a head, to ascribe to the Paris Commune aspira¬
tions after that caricature of the old French municipal organisation
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 catch¬
word of bourgeois revolutions, cheap government, a reality, by
destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure—the standing
army and State functionarism. Its very existence presupposed the
non-existence of monarchy, which, in Europe at lea«t, is the normal
incumbrance and indispensable cloak of class-rule. It supplied
the Republic with the basis of really democratic institutions. But
neither cheap government nor the " true Republic" was its
ultimate aim ; they were its mere concomitants.
The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has
been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed
it in their favour, show that it was a thoroughly expansive
political form, while all previous forms of government had been
emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this. It was
essentially a working-class government, the produce of the
struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the
political form at last discovered under which to work out the
economical emancipation of Labour.
Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would
have been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of
the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social
slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for up¬
rooting 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 phraseolgy of the mouthpieces of present society with its
two poles of Capital and Wage-slavery (the landlord row 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. Ths Commune, they exclaim,
intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization ! Yes,
gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class-property
which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few. It
aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to
make individual property a truth by transforming the means of
production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and
exploiting labour, into mere instruments of free and associated
labour. But this is Communism, "impossible" Communism!
Why, those members of the ruling classes who are intelligent
enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present
system—and they are many—have become the obtrusive and full-
mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative pro¬
duction is not to remain a sham aud a snare ; if it is to supersede
the Capitalist system ; if united co-operative societies are to regu¬
late national production upon a common plan, thus taking itund-Kf
their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and
periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist pro¬
duction—what else, gentlemen, would it be but Communism,
"possible " Communism ?
The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune.
They have no ready-made Utopias to introduce par décret du
peuplé. They know that in order to work out their own emancipa¬
tion, and along with it that highej form to which present
society is irresistibly tending, by its own economical agencies,
they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of
historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They
have no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new
society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is
pregnant. In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and
with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can
afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen's gentle¬
men 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 metropolitan school
board,—the old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight
of the Bed Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labour, float ing over
the Hôtel de Ville.
And yet, this was the first revolution in which the working «lass
J24 MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social
initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris middle-class—shop¬
keepers, tradesmen, merchants—the wealthy capitalist alone
excepted. The Commune had saved them by a sagacious settlement
of that ever recurring cause of dispute among the middle-class-
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 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 props it lent to the artificially accele¬
rated centralisation of capital, and the concomitant expropriation of
their own ranks. It has suppressed them politically, it has shocked
them morally by its orgies, it had insulted their Voltairianism by
handing over the education of their children to the freres Ignoran-
tins, it had revolted their national feeling as Frenchmen by
precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one equiva¬
lent for the ruins it made—the disappearance of the Empire. Id
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 Républicane," 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 tremendous was that the Rurals represented the
French peasantry. Think only of the love of the French peasant
for the men to whom, after 1815, he had to pay the milliard of
indemnity ! In the eyes of the French peasant, the very existence
of a great lauded proprietary is in itself an encroachment on his
conquests of 1789. The bourgeoisie, in 1848, had burthened his
plot of land with the additional tax of forty-five cents, in the
franc ; hut then he did so in the name of the revolution ; while now
he had fomented a civil war against the revolution, to shift on 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 proclamations, 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 biood-suckers, the notary.
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL. 125
advocate, executor, and other judicial vampires, into salaried
communal agents, elected by, and responsible to, himself. It
would have freed him 01" the tyranny of the garde champêtre, the
gendarme, and the prefect ; would have put enlightenment by the
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 tne pay of the priest, instead of being
extorted by the tax-gatherer, should only depend upon the spon¬
taneous action of the parishioners' religicus instincts. Such were
the great immediate boons which the rule of the Commune—and
that rule alone—held out to the French peasantry. It is, therefore,
•quite superfluous here to expiate 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
hopotbecary debt, lying like an incubus upon his parcel of soil, the
proletariat ponctir (the rural proletariat), 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 the capitalist farming.
The French peasant had elected Louis Bonaparte president of the
Republic ; but the Party of Order created the Empire. What
the French peasant really wants he commenced to show in 1849
and 1850, by opposing his maire to the Government's prefect, his
schoolmaster to the Government's priest, and himself to the
Government's gendarme. All the laws made by the party of order
in January and February, 1850, 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
Kurals), 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, a working men's Govern¬
ment», as the bold champion of the emancipation of labour,
emphatically international. Within sight of the Prussian army,
that bad 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 black-
leggism, the rakes of all countries rushing in at its call for a share
126
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
in its orgies and in the plunder of the French people. Even at thi»
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 the immortal
cause. Between the foreign war lost by their treason, and the
civil war fomented by their conspiracy with the foreign invader,
!he bourgeoisie had found the time to display their patriotism by
organising police-hunts upon the Germans in France. The Com-
saune made a German working-man its Minister of Labour, Thiers,
the bourgeoisie, the Second Empire, had continually deluded
^oland by loud professions of sympathy, while in reality betraying
Vr to, and doing the dirty work of, Russia. The Commune
honoured the heroic sous 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 con¬
quering Prussians on the one side and of the lionapartist army, led
by Bonapartist generals, on the other, the Commune pulled down
that colossal symbol of martial glory, the Vendôme column.
?he 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 journeyman bakers; the prohibition, under
penalty, of the employers' practice to reduce wages by levying
upon their workpeople lines under manifold pretexts—a process in
which the employer combines in his own person the parts of legis¬
lator, judge, and executioner, and filches the money to boot. Another
measure of this class was the surrender, to associations, of work¬
men, 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 rob¬
beries committed upon the City of Paris by the great financial
companies and contractors, under the protection of Uaussmana
the Commune would have had an incomparably better title to con¬
fiscate their property than Louis 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 clearing but
8,000f. out of secularisation.
While the Versailles Government, as soon as it had recovered
some spirit and strength, used the most violent means against,
the Commune ; while it put down the free expression of opinion al!
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 ;
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
127
while it burned by its gendarme inquisitors all papers printed at-
Paris, and sifted all correspondence from and to Paris ; while in.
the National Assembly the most timid attempts to put in a word
for Paris were howled down in a manner unknown even to the
Chambre introuvable of 1816 ; with the savage warfare of Versailles,
outside, and its attempts at corruption and conspiracy inside Paris
—would the Commune not have shamefully betrayed its trust by
affecting to keep up all the decencies and appearances of liberalism,
as in a time of profound peace ? Had the Government of the Com¬
mune been akin to that of M. Thiers, there would have been no
more occasion to suppress Party-of-Order papers at Paris than
there was to suppress Communal papers at Versailles.
It was irritating, indeed, to the Rurals that at the very same
time they declared the return to the Church to be tbe only means of
salvation for France, the infidel Commune unearthed the peculiar
mysteries of the Picpus nunnery and of the Church of St. 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 Wilhelmshoe, the Commune dismissed and arrested
its generals whenever they were suspected of neglecting their
duties. The expulsion from, and arrest by, the Commune of one of
its membeis who had slipped in under a false name, and had under¬
gone at Lyons six days' imprisonment for simple bankruptcy, was
it not a deliberate insult hurled at the forger, Jules Favre, then
still the Foreign Minister of France, still selling France to Bis¬
marck, and still dictating his orders to that paragon Government,
of Belgium ? But, indeed, the Commune did not pretend to infalli¬
bility, the invariable attribute of all governments of the old stamp.
It published its doings and sayings, it initiated the public into all
its shortcomings.
In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents,
men of a different stamp ; some of them survivors of and devotees-
to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement,
but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and
courage, 01 by the sheer force of tradition ; others mere bawlers, who
by dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereotyped de¬
clamation n gainst the Government of the day, have sneaked into
the reputation of revolutionists of the first water. After 18th of-
March, some such men did also turn np, and in some cases con¬
trived to play pre-eminent parts. As far as theiT power went,
they hampered the real action of the working class, exactly as
men of that sort have hampered the full development of every
previous revolution. They are an unavoidable evil : with time
they aTe shaken off ; but time was not allowed to the Commune.
Wonderful, indeed, was the change the Commune had wrought
in Paris I No longer any trace of the meretricious Paris of tha-
128
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
'Second Empire. No longer was Paris the rendezvous of British
landlords, Irish absentees, American ex-slaveholders and shoddy
men, Kussian ex-serfowners, and Wallachian boyards. .Ko more
-corpses at the Morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any rob¬
beries ; in fact, for the first time since the days of February, 1848,
the streets of Paris were safe, and that without any police of any
kind. "We," said a member of the Commune, " hear no longer of
assasination, theft, and personal assault ; it seems, indeed, as if the
police had dragged along with it to Versailles all its Conservative
friends." The cocottes had refound the scent of their protectors—
the absconding men of family, religion, and, above all, of property.
In their stead, the real women of Paris showed again at the surface
—heroic, noble, and devoted, like the women of antiquity.
Working, thinking, fighting, bleeding Paris—almost forgetful, in
its incubation of a new society, of the cannibals at its gates—
"radiant in the enthusiasm of its historic initiative !
Opposed to this new world at Paris, behold the old world at
Versailles—that assembly of the ghouls of all defunct regimes,
Legitimists and Orleanists, eager to feed upon the carcass of the
natidn—with a tail of antediluvian Republicans, sanctioning, by
their presence in the Assembly, the slaveholders' rebellion,
relying for the maintenance of their Parliamentary Republic upon
the vanity of the senile mountebank at its head, and caricaturing
1789 by holding their ghastly meetings in the Jeu de Paume.
There it was, this Assembly, the representative of everything dead
in France, propped up by the semblance of life by nothing but the
swords of the generals of Louis Bonaparte. Paris all truth, Ver¬
sailles 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 ore 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 Ver¬
sailles 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 Paris 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-fiUvrst
manifesto of the international. 12ç
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 toheme, and its cocottes at Ver¬
sailles, Saint-Denis, Bueil, and Saint-Germain ; considering the
civil war but an agreeable diversion, eyeing the battle going on
through telescopes, counling the rounds of cannon, and swearing
by their own honour and that of their prostitutes, that the per¬
formance was far better got up than it used to be at the Porte St.
Martin. The men who fell were really dead ; the cries of the
wounded were cries in good earnest ; and, besides, the whole thing
was so intensely historical.
This is the Paris of M. Thiers, as the Emigration of Coblentz
was the France of M. de Calonne.
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-negociations
with Paris, Thiers found the time to prepare for war against it.
But where to find an army ? The remnants of the line regiments
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 Choudas 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, com-
Sosed of sailors, marines, Pontifical Zouaves, Valentin's gen-
armes, and Piétri's sergents de ville and mouchards. This army,
however, would have been ridiculously ineffective without the
instalments of imperialist waT-prisoners, which Bismarck granted
in numbers just sufficient to keep the civil war a-going, and keep
the Versailles 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 Federals convinced Thiers
that the resistance of Paris was not to be broken by his own
strategic genius and the bayonets at his disposal.
K
30 MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
Meanwhile, his relations with the provinces became more and
more difficult. Not one single address of approval came in to
gladden Thiers and his Rurals. Quite the contrary. Deputation»
and addresses demanding, in a tone anything but respectful, con¬
ciliation 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'» Minister of Justice, in his circular of April 23rd
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 campaign, 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 his 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 re¬
quired for the conquest of Paris.
His banditti-warfare against Paris, exalted in his own bulletins,
and the attempts of his ministers at the establishment, through¬
out France, of a 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." Id reality, he put down the revolution
at Lyons and Marseilles in the name of the Republic, while the
roaTs 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 Pordeaux, were now, in flagrant breach
of the law, permitted to intrigue at Dieux. The concession»
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 oome 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, as he, in 1830, had done with Louis
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL. '31
Philippe. Even these concessions he not only took care to render
doubtful by the official comments pnt upon them in the Assembly
through his Ministers. He had his Duraure 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 him¬
self 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 slow
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
regime 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 Dufaure'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, ter¬
giversation, 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 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 n umber 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 ? Is it not fortunate in the midst of our misfor¬
tunes 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 muni¬
cipal councillors returned by the 35,000 communes still left to
France, the united Legitimists, Orleanists, and Bonapartists did
not caTry 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
K 2
'32 MANIFESTO OF THE 1NTERNATI0. »AU
lost even its clast laim of moral force, that of being the ex-
pression of the universal suffrage of the country. To complete the
discomfiture, the newly-chosen municipal councils r-f all the cities
of Prance 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 humhle obedience to the call of his master, Thiers hastened to
despatch his tiusty Juives 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, pre¬
judicial to his own shop-interest. Hardly installed at Bordeaux
asThiers'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 im¬
mediate enforcement of the old protective duties against Alsace,
where, he said, no previous international treaties stood in the way.
This man, who considered counter-revolutiou 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
erne predestined to be picked out by Thiers as the helpmate of Jules
Favre in his last and crowning treason ?
On the arrival at Frankfort of this exquisite pair of plenipoten¬
tiaries, bully Bismarck at once met them with the. imperious alter¬
native ' Either the restoration of the Empire, or the unconditional
acceptance of my own peace terms 1 These terms included a
shortening of the intervals in which the war indemnity was to be
paid, and 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 recognised 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 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 18th.
In the interval between the conclusion of peace and the arrival of
the Bonapartist prisoners, Thiers felt more bound to resume his
comedy of conciliation as his Republican tools stood in sore need of a
pretext for blinking their eyes at the preparations for the carnage
of Paris. As late as the 18th May he replied to a deputation of
Middle-class conciliators—"Whatever the insurgents will make up
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL. *33
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 amongst 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
licence to wreak vengence upon Paris to their heart's 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 came to tell
you the goal is reached. The victory of order, justice,
civilisation is at last won ! "
So it was. The civilisation 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 civilisation 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
civilisation of which they are the mercenary vindicators. A glorious
civilisation, 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 dis¬
regard, in massacre, 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 sams
indifference for the butchery of entire strangers to the feud. There
T34 MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
is but this difference, that the Romans 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 "civilisa¬
tion."
And after those horrors, look upon the other, still more hideous,
face of that bourgeois civilisation 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 catacombs, and wretches hurried through the
streets to be shot down in scores by the mitrailleuse—it is revolting
to see the café s 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 Yersaillist journal suppressed by the Com¬
mune :—"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 fete
day appearance, which is sadly out of place ; and, unless we are to
be called the Parisiens de la décadence, this sort of thing must
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, Rome—degraded and corrupt—began once
more to wallow in the voluptuous slough which was destroying its
body and polluting its soul—ali prcelia et vulnera, alibi balnea
popinceque—(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-Jileurs returning in throngs from Versailles, Saint Denis,
Rueil, 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 civilisation, 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
workingmen's Paris of the Commune is suddenly changed into a
pandemonium by the bloodhounds of "order." And what does this
tremendous change prove to the bourgeois mind of all countries ?
Why, that the Commune has conspired against civilisation ! The
Paris people die enthusiastically for the Commune in numbers
unequalled in any battle known to history. What does that prove I
Why, that the Commune was not the people's own government, but
the usurpation of a handful of criminals ! The womeu of Paris
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 Megaeras and Hecates ! ' The
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL. *35
moderation of the Commune during two months of undisputed
away is equalled only by the heroism of its defence. What does
that prove f Why, that for months the Commune carefully hid,
under a mask of moderation and Humanity, the bloodthirstiness 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 pro¬
fessional incendiarism. The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which
looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle,
is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar !
When governments give state-licences to their navies to " kill,
burn, and destroy, ' ' is that a licence 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 incen¬
diarism ? When the Prussians, not for military reasons, but out
of the mere spite of revenge, burnt down, by the help of petroleum,
towns like Châteaudun and innumerable villages, was that incen¬
diarism ? 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 as 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 wholesale 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. Th#
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
Commune knew that its opponents cared nothing for the lires 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 he implacable in his vengeance. No sooner had he got his
army ready on one side, and the Prussians shutting np the trap on
the other, than he proclaimed : " I shall be pitiless ! The expia¬
tion will be complete, and 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 antiquity ; and even that vandalism has been justified
by the historian as an unavoidable and comparatively trifling con¬
comitant 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 t
But the execution by the Commune of the sixty-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 dis¬
appeared from the practice of war—the shooting of their defence¬
less 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 civilisation " ! 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 continued 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 unscrupu¬
lous ferocity of bourgeois governments—the taking of hostages—
to be made a mere sham of? The real murderer of Arch¬
bishop Darbov 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 arch-
biskf.p would serve his purpose best 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 stig¬
matising the insurgents as the assassins of Archbishop Affre ! They
»new perfectly weil that t'w> archbishop had been shot by the
manifesto of the international.
13 7
soldiers of order. M. Jacquemet, the archbishop's vicar-general,
resent on the spot, had immediately afterwards handed them in
is 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 plebian, while in the hands of the plebian a
weapon of any kind constituted in itself a crime.
The conspiracy of the ruling class to break down the Revolution
by a civil war carried on under the patronage of the foreign invader
—a conspiracy which we have traced from the very 4th of Septem¬
ber down to the entrance of MacMahon's prseterians 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 destruction 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 l evolution, but the
extinction of France, now decapitated in reality, and by the French
Government itself. "With the shallowness characteristic of all suc¬
cessful 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 pre¬
liminaries, 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 chastise¬
ment of godless and debauched France by pious and moral Germany !
And this unparalleled breach of the law of nations, even as under¬
stood by the old world lawyers, instead of arousing the " civilised "
Governments of Europe to declare the felonious Prussian Govern¬
ment, 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 be
given up to the hangman at Versailles !
That after the most tremendous war of modern times, the con¬
quering 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 up¬
heaving, but the crumbling into dust of bourgeois society. The
MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL.
highest heroic effort 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 the classes, and to be thrown aside
as soon as that class struggle bursts out in 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, there can be neither peace nor truce
possible between the working men of France and the appropriators
»f 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-organisa¬
tion of labour against the cosmopolitan of capital—as the head
fountain of all these disasters. Thiers denounced it as the despot
of labour, pretending to be its liberator. Picard ordered that all
communications between the French Internationals and those
abroad should be cut off; Count Jaubet, Thiers's mummified
accomplice of 1835, declares it the great problem of all civilised
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 as the "greater part of the members of the Commune, are
the most active, intelligent, and energetic minds of the Inter¬
national 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 Asso¬
ciation as acting in the manner of a secret conspiracy, its central
body ordering, from time to time, explosions in different counties.
Our Association is, in fact, nothing but the international bond
between the most advanced working men in the various countries
of the civilised world. Wherever, in whatever shape, and under
whatever conditions the class struggle obtains any consistency, it
is but natnral that members of our association should stand in the
foreground. The soil out of which it grows is modern society
itself. * It cannot be stamped out by any amount of carnage. Te
stamp it out, the Government would have to stamp out the despot¬
ism of capital over labour—the condition of their'own parasitical
existence.
manifesto of The international.
Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever cele¬
brated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are
-enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its extermi¬
nators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which
all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them.
THE GENERAL COUNCIL.
M. J. Boon, Fred. Bradnick, G. H. Buttery, Caihil, William
Hales, Kolb, Lessner, B. Lucraft, George Milner, Thomas Mot-
•tershead, Charles Murray, George Odger, Pfânder, Riihl, Sadler,
Cowell Stepney, William Townshend.
CORRESPONDING SECRETARIES.
Eugene Dupont
■Karl Marx
■Feed Engels
Hermann Jung
P. Giovacchint
-Zevy Maurice
Anton Zabicki
James Cohen
J. G. Eccaiuus
For France.
,, Germany anil Holland.
,, .Belgium, and Spain.
,, Switzerland.
,, Italy.
„ Hungary.
,, Poland.
,, Denmark.
,, The United States.
HERMANN JUNG, Chairman.
JOHN WESTON, Treasurer.
GEORGE HARRIS, Financial Secretary.
JOHN HALES, General Secretary.
Offices—256, High Holborn, London W.C., May 30th, 1871.
NOTES.
" 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 shoulder 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 kneee, and, with outstretched arms, protested her
innocence in passionate terms. The general waited for a pause,
and then with most impassable face ana 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 afterwards 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 ot
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-Bouchiere ; some of them very super¬
ficially. 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
protruding through the soil. In consequence of this, exhumations
were ordered to take place That many wounded have been
buried alive 1 have not the slightest doubt. One case I can vouch
for. When Brunei was shot with his mistress on the 24th ult. in
the courtyard of a house in the Place Vendôme, the bodies lav-
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,'' June 8th,