THE CIVIL WAR
IN FRANCE

The present English edition of Karl Marx's The Civil War in France is compiled according to the Chinese edition of the same book, published by the People's Publishing House, Peking, in May 1964. Engels' introduction and the three Addresses of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association on the Franco-Prussian War and on the Civil War in France are reprinted from the text given in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, English edition, Moscow, 1951, Vol. I. The two drafts of The Civil War in France follow the English text in the Archives of Marx and Engels, Moscow, 1934, Vol. III (VIII). Obvious corrections of spelling or grammar are not indicated. Necesrary additions of words and translations of French and German words and passages which appeared in Marx's manuscript are put in square brackets.

    The footnotes and notes at the end of the book are compiled by us from various sources.

page 108 [blank]

page 109

page 111

    Four months after the commencement of the war, when the Government of Defence had thrown a sop to [the] Paris National Guard by allowing them to show their fighting capabilities at Buzenvall,[112] the Government considered the opportune moment come to prepare Paris for capitulation. To the assembly of the maires of Paris for capitulation, Trochu in presence of and supported by Jules Favre and some others of his colleagues, revealed at last his " plan. " He said literally:

    "The first question, addressed to me by my colleagues on the evening of the 4th September, was this: Paris, can it stand, with any chance of success, a siege against the Prussian army? I did not hesitate to answer in the negative. Some of my colleagues here present will warrant the truth of these 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 maintain a siege against the Prussian army would be a folly. Without doubt, I added, this might be a heroical folly, but it would be nothing else. . . . The events have not given the lie to my prevision. "

page 112

    Trochu's plan, from the very day of the proclamation of the Republic, was the capitulation of Paris and of France. In point of fact he was the commander-in-chief of the Prussians. In a letter to Gambetta, Jules Favre himself confessed so much that the enemy to be put down, was not the Prussian soldier, but the Paris (revolutionary) "demagogue." The high-sounding promises to the people by the Government of Defence were therefore as many deliberate lies. The "plan" they systematically carried out by entrusting the defence of Paris to Bonapartist generals, by disorganizing the National Guard and by organizing famine under the maladministration of Jules Ferry. The attempts of the Paris workmen on the 5th of October, the 31st of October, etc., to supplant these traitors by the Commune, were put down as conspiracies with the Prussian![113] After the capitulation the mask was thrown off (cast aside). The capitulards became a government by the grace of Bismarck. Being his prisoners, they stipulated with him a general armistice, the conditions of which disarmed France and rendered all further resistance impossible. Resuscitated at Bordeaux as the Government of the Republic, these very same capitulards through Thiers, their ex-Ambassador, and Jules Favre, their Foreign Minister, fervently implored Bismarck in the name of the majority of the so-called National Assembly, and long before the rise of Paris, to disarm, and occupy Paris, and put down "its canaille," as Bismarck himself on his return from France to Berlin sneeringly told his admirers at Frankfurt. This occupation of Paris by the Prussians -- such was the last word of the "plan" of the Government of Defence. The cynical effrontery with which, since their instalment at Versailles, the same men fawn upon and appeal to the armed intervention of Prussia, has dumbfounded even the venal press of Europe. The heroic exploits of the Paris National Guard, since they fight no longer

page 113

under but against the capitulards, has forced even the most sceptical to brand the word "traitor" on the brazen fronts of the Trochu, Jules Favre et Co. The documents seized by the Commune, have, at last, furnished the juridical proofs of their high treason. Amongst these papers there are letters of the Bonapartist sabreurs, to whom the execution of Trochu's "plan" had been confided, in which these infamous wretches crack jokes at and make fun of their own "defence of Paris" (cf., for instance, the letter 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, published by the Journal officiel of the Commune).

    It is, therefore evident, that the men who now form the government of Versailles, can only be saved from the fate of convicted traitors by civil war, the death of the Republic and a monarchical restauration [restoration] under the shelter of Prussian bayonets.

    But -- and this is most characteristic of the men of the Empire, as well as of the men who but on its soil and within its atmosphere could grow into mock-tribunes of the people -- the victorious Republic would not only brand them as traitors, it would have to surrender them as common felons to the criminal court. Look only at Jules Favre, Ernest Picard, and Jules Ferry, the great men, under Thiers, of the Government of Defence!

    A series of authenticated judiciary documents spreading over about 20 years, and published by M. Millière, a representative to the National Assembly, proves that Jules Favre, living in adulterous concubinage with the wife of a drunkard resident at Algiers, had, by a most complicated concatenation of daring forgeries, contrived to grasp in the name of his

page 114

bastards, a large succession that made him a rich man and that the connivance only of the Bonapartist tribunals saved him from exposure in a law-suit undertaken by the legitimate claimants. Jules Favre, then, this unctuous mouthpiece of family, religion, property, and order, has long since been forfeited to the Code pénal. Lifelong penal servitude would be his unavoidable lot under every honest government.

    Ernest Picard, the present Versailles Home Minister, appointed by himself on the 4th of September, Home Minister of the Government of Defence,[*] after he had tried in vain to be appointed by Louis Bonaparte, this Ernest Picard is the brother of one Arthur Picard. When, together with Jules Favre and Co., he had the impudence to propose this worthy brother of his as a candidate in the Seine-et-Oise for the Corps législatif, the imperialist government published two documents, a report of the Prefecture of Police (13 July,[**] 1867) stating that this Arthur Picard was excluded from the Bourse as an "escroc " [swindler], and another document of the 11 December 1868, according to which Arthur had confessed the theft of 300,000 frs., committed by him as a director of one of the branches of the Société générale, Rue Palestro, No. 5. Ernest made not only his worthy Arthur the editor-in-chief of a paper of his own, the Electeur libre, founded under the Empire and continued to this day, a paper, in which the Republicans are daily denounced as "robbers, bandits, and partageux [appropriators]," but once become the Home Minister of the "De-

    There is one thing rather mysterious in the proceedings of Thiers, his recklessness in precipitating the revolution of Paris. Not content to goad Paris by the anti-Republican demonstrations of his Rurals, by the threats to decapitate and decapitalize Paris, by Dufaure's (Thiers' Minister of Justice) law of the 10th of March on the échéances of bills [bills falling due] which impended bankruptcy on the Paris commerce, by appointing Orleanist ambassadors, by the transfer of the Assemblée to Versailles, by an imposition of a new tax on newspapers, by the confiscation of the Republican Paris journals, by the revival of the state of siege, first proclaimed by Palikao[61] and annulled with the downfall of the imperialist government on the 4th of September, by appointing Vinoy, the Décembriseur and ex-senator, Governor of Paris, Valentin, the imperialist gendarme, Prefect of Police, and Aurelle de Paladines, the Jesuit general, commander-in-chief of the Paris National Guard -- he opened the civil war with feeble forces, by Vinoy's attack on the buttes Montmartre, by the attempt first to rob the National Guards of

page 117

cannon which belonged to them and which were only left to them by the Paris convention, because they were their property, and thus to disarm Paris.

    Whence this feverish eagerness d'en finir [to finish it off]? To disarm and put down Paris was of course the first condition of a monarchical counter-revolution, but an astute intriguer like Thiers could only risk the future of the difficult enterprise in undertaking it without due preparation, with ridiculously insufficient means, except under the sway of some overwhelmingly urgent wave. The motive was this. By the agency of Pouyer-Quertier, his Finance Minister, Thiers had concluded a loan of two milliards to be paid immediately down, and some more milliards to follow at certain terms. In this loan transaction a truly royal pot de vin (drink money) was reserved for those grand citizens -- Thiers, Jules Favre, Ernest Picard, Jules Simon, Pouyer-Quertier, etc. But there was one hitch in the transaction. Before definitively sealing the treaty, the contractors wanted one guarantee -- the tranquillization of Paris. Hence the reckless proceedings of Thiers. Hence the savage hatred against the Paris workmen, perverse enough to interfere with this fine job.

    As to the Jules Favres, Picards, etc., we have said enough to prove them the worthy accomplices of such a jobbery. As to Thiers himself, it is notorious that during his two ministries under Louis Philippe he realized 2 millions, and that during his premiership (dating March 1840) he was taunted from the tribune of the Chamber of Deputies with his Bourse peculations, in answer to which he shed tears, a commodity he disposes of as free]y as Jules Favre and the celebrated comedian Frédérick Lemaître. It is no less notorious that the first measure taken by M. Thiers to save France from the financial ruin, fastened upon her by the war, was -- to endow himself with a yearly

page 118

salary of 3 millions of francs, exactly the sum Louis Bonaparte got in 1850 as an equivalent from M. Thiers and his troop in the Legislative Assembly for allowing them to abolish the general suffrage.[114] This endowment of M. Thiers with 3 millions was the first word of "the economic republic," the vista of which he had opened to his Paris electors in 1869. As to Pouyer-Quertier, he is a cotton-spinner at Rouen. In 1869, he was the leader of the millowners' conclave that proclaimed a general reduction of wages necessary for the "conquest" of the English market -- an intrigue, then baffled by the International.[115] Pouyer-Quertier, otherwise a fervent and even servile partisan of the Empire, found only one fault with it, its commercial treaty with England damaging to his own shop interests. His first step, as M. Thiers' Finance Minister, was to denounce that "hateful" treaty and to pronounce the necessity of re-establishing the old protective duties for his own shop. His second step was the patriotic attempt to strike Alsace by the re-established old protective duties on the pretext that in this case no international treaty stood in the way of their re-introduction. By this master-stroke his own shop at Rouen would have got rid of the dangerous competition of the rival shops at Mülhausen. His last step was to make a present to his son-in-law, M. Roche-Lambert, of the receveur-generalship [general tax-collector's office] of the Loiret, one of the rich booties falling into the lap of the governing bourgeois, and which Pouyer-Quertier had found so much fault with his imperialist predecessor, M. Magne, endowing his own son with that big jobbing place. This Pouyer-Quertier was then exactly the man for the perpetration of the above said job.

    30 mars. Rappel.[116] Jules Ferry, ex-maire de Paris, a défendu, par une circulaire du 28 mars, aux employés de l'octroi

page 119

. . . de continuer toute perception for the city of Paris. [March 30, Rappel. Jules Ferry, ex-mayor of Paris, by a circular on March 28, forbade the employees of the toll-office . . . to continue any collection for the city of Paris.]

    Small state rogueries, -- a little character . . . cankering conscience . . . everlasting suggester of parliamentary intrigue . . . petty expedients and devices . . . rehearsing his homilies of liberalism, of the "liberatés nécessaries " . . . eagerly bent on . . . strong reasons to weigh against the chances of failure . . . cogent arguments which counterpoise . . . kind of heroism in exaggerated baseness . . . lucky parliamentary stratagems. . . .

    M. E. Picard est un malandrin, qui pendant toute la durée du siège a tripoté à la Bourse sur les défaites de nos armées. [M. E. Picard is a robber, who speculated at the Bourse on our army's defeats throughout the period of the Siege.]

    Massacre, trahison, incendie, assassinat, calomnie, mensonge. [Massacre, treason, arson, assassination, calumny, lying.]

    In his speech to the assembly of maires, etc. (25th April), Thiers says himself that

the "assassins of Clement Thomas and Lecomte" [are] a handful of criminals -- "et ceux qui pourront à juste titre être considérés comme complices de ces crimes par conspiration ou assistance, c'est-à-dire un très petit nombre d'individus." ["and those who can rightly be considered as accomplices of these crimes by conspiracy or assistance, that is to say, a very small number of individuals."]

page 120

    Dufaure wants to put down Paris by press prosecutions in the provinces. Monstrous to bring journals before a jury because preaching "conciliation. "

    Dufaure plays a great part in the Thiers intrigue. By his law of the 10th of March, he roused all the indebted commerce of Paris. By his law on Paris house rents, he menanced all Paris. Both laws were to punish Paris for having saved the honour of France and delayed the surrender to Bismarck for 6 months. Dufaure is an Orleanist, and a "Liberal," in the parliamentary sense of the word. Consequently, he has always been the minister of repression and of the state of siege.

    He accepted his first portefeuille on the 13 May, 1839, after the defeat of the dèrnière prise d'armes [latest armed uprising] [117] Of the Republican party, was therefore the minister of the pitiless repression of the July government of that day.

    On the 2nd June 1849,[118] Cavaignac, forced on the October (1848) to raise the state of siege, called into his ministry two ministers of Louis Philippe (Dufaure, for the Interior, and Vivien ). He appointed them on the demand of the Rue [de] Poitiers [119] (Thiers), which demanded guarantees. He thus hoped to secure the support of the dynastics for the impending election of president. Dufaure employed the most illegal means to secure Cavaignac's candidature. Intimidation and electoral corruption had never been exercised on a larger scale. Dufaure inundated France with defamatory prints against the other candidates, and especially of Louis Bonaparte, what [readwhich] did not prevent him to become later on Louis Bonaparte's minister. Dufaure became again the minister of the state of siege of 13 June 1849 (against the demonstration of the National Guard against the bombardment of Rome, etc., by the French army). He is now again the minister of the state of

page 121

siege, proclaimed at Versailles (for department of Seine-et-Oise). Power given to Thiers to declare any department whatever in a state of siege. Dufaure, as in 1839, as in 1849, wants new repressive laws, new press laws, a law to "abridge the formalities of the courts-martial." In a circular to the Procureurs généraux [Attorney-Generals] he denounces the cry of "conciliation " as a press crime to be severely prosecuted. It is characteristic of the French magistrature that only one single Procureur général (that of Mayenne)[*] wrote to Dufaure to

"resign. . . . I cannot serve an Administration which orders me, in a moment of civil war, to rush into party struggles and prosecute citizens, whom my conscience holds innocent, for uttering the word conciliation. "

    He belonged to the "Union libérale" in 1847 which conspired against Guizot, as he belonged to the "Union libérale" of 1869 which conspired against Louis Bonaparte.[120]

    With respect to the law of 10 March and the law of house rents, it ought to be remarked that both Dufaure's and Picard's (both advocates) best clients are amongst the house proprietors and the big bourses averse to losing anything by the siege of Paris.

    Now as after the Revolution of February 1848, these men tell the Republic, as the executioner told Don Carlos, "Je vais t'assassiner, mais c'est pour ton bien. " (I shall murder thee, but for thy own good.)

    After Vinoy's attempt to carry the buttes Montmartre (on the 18th March, they were shot in the gardens of the Chateau

ridicule. Haunted by the spectres of his June victims, this man, without any official charge, must needs again reappear on [the] theatre of war of the 18th of March, where he scented another massacre of the Paris people. He fell a victim of Lynch justice in the first moment of popular exasperation. The men who had surrendered Paris to the tender mercies of the Décembriseur Vinoy, in order to kill the Republic and pocket the pots de vin, [tips], stipulated by the Pouyer-Quertier contract, shouted now: Assassins, Assassins! Their howl was re-echoed by the press of Europe so eager for the blood of the "proletarians." A farce of hysterical "sensibleness" was enacted in the rural Assemblée, and now as before, the corpses of their friends were most welcome weapons against their enemies. Paris and the Central Committee were made responsible for an accident out of their control. It is known, how in the days of June 1848, the "men of Order" shook Europe with the cry of indignation against the insurgents because of the assassination of the Archbishop of Paris.[*] Even at that time they knew perfectly well from the evidence of M. Jacquemet, the vicaire général of the Archbishop, who had accompanied him to the barricades, that the Bishop had been shot by the troops of Cavaignac, and not by the insurged,[**] but his dead corpse served their turn. M. Darboy, the present Archbishop of Paris, one of the hostages taken by the Commune in self-defence against the savage atrocities of the Versailles Government, however, seems, as appears from his letter to Thiers, to have strange misgivings [that] Papa Transnonain [121] be eager to speculate in his body, as an object of holy indignation. There passed hardly a day, in which the Versailles journals did not announce his execution, which the con-

page 124

tinued atrocities, and violation of the rules of war on the side of "order," would have scaled on the part of every government but that of the Commune. The Versailles Government had hardly realized a first military success, when Captain Desmarêt, who at the head of his gendarmes assassinated the chivalrous Flourens, has been decorated by Thiers. Flourens had saved the lives of the "defence men" on the 31st October. Vinoy the runaway (runagate), was appointed Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, because he had our brave comrade Duval when taken prisoner, shot inside the redoubts, because as a second instalment, he had shot some dozen captive troops of the line who had joined the Paris people, and inaugurated this civil war by the "methods of December."[122] General Galliffet -- "the husband of that charming Marchioness whose costumes at the masked balls were one of the wonders of the Empire," as a London penny-a-liner delicately puts it, -- "surprised" near Rueil a captain, lieutenant, and private of National Guards, had them at once shot, and immediately published a proclamation to glorify himself on the deed. These are a few of the murders officially narrated and gloried in by the Versailles Government. 25 soldiers of the 80th Regiment of the line shot as "rebels" by the 75th.

    "Every man wearing the uniform of the regular army who was captured in the ranks of the Communists was straight-away shot without the slightest mercy. The governmental troops were perfectly ferocious."
    "M. Thiers communicated the encouraging particulars of Flourens' death to the Assembly. "

    Versailles, 4 April.  Thiers, that misshapen dwarf, reports on his prisoners brought to Versailles (in his proclamation):

    "Never had more degraded countenances of a degraded democracy met the afflicted gaze of honest man." (Piétri's men!)
    "Vinoy protests against any mercy to insurgent officers or line men. "

page 125

    On the 6th of April, decree of the Commune on reprisals (and hostages):

    "Considering that the Versailles Government openly treads underfoot the laws of humanity and those of war, and that it has been guilty of horrors such as even the invaders of France have not dishonoured themselves by . . . it is decreed, etc."[123] (Folgen die Artikel. [The articles are as follows.])

    April 5, Proclamation of the Commune:

    "Every day the banditti of Versailles slaughter or shoot our prisoners, and every hour we learn that another murder has been committed. . . . The people, even in its anger, detests bloodshed, as it detests civil war, but it is its duty to protect itself against the savage attempts of its enemies, and whatever it may cost, it shall be an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."[124]
    "Les sergents de ville qui se battent contre Paris ont 10 frs. par jour," ["The policemen who fight against Paris get 10 francs a day."]

    Versailles, 11 April.  Most horrible details of the cold-blooded shooting of prisoners, not deserters, related with an evident gusto by general officers and other eyewitnesses.

    In his letter to Thiers, Darboy protests "against the atrocious excesses which add to the horror of our fratricidal war." In the same strain writes Deguerry (curé de la Madeleine ) [(priest at the Madeleine)]:

    "These executions rouse de grandes colères à Paris et peuvent y produire de terribles représailles." "Ainsi l'on est résolu, à chaque nouvelle exécution, d'en ordonner deux. des nombreux otages que l'on a entre les mains. Jugez à quel point ce que [je] vous demande comme prêtre est d'une rigoureuse et absolue nécessité." ["These executions rouse great wrath in Paris and may bring terrible reprisals." "It is thus resolved, for each new execution, to dispose of two of the many hostages on hand. Judge for yourself how urgent and absolutely necessary the demand is -- which (I) as a priest make of you."]

    In midst of these horrors Thiers writes to the Prefects: "L'Assemblée siège paisiblement. " (Elle aussi a le coeur

page 126

léger.)[125] ["The Assembly is sitting peacefully." (It is also light-hearted.)]

    Thiers and la commission des quinze [126] of his Rurals had the cool impudence to "deny officially" the "pretended summary executions and reprisals attributed to the troops of Versailles. " But Papa Transnonain [said] in his circular of 16th April on the bombardment of Paris :

    "If some cannon-shots have been fired, it is not the deed of the army of Versailles, but of some insurgents wanting to make believe that they are fighting, while they do not dare show themselves."

    Thiers has proved that he surpasses his hero, Napoleon I, at least in one thing -- lying bulletins. (Of course, Paris bombards itself, in order to be able to calumniate M. Thiers!)

    To these atrocious provocations of the Bonapartist black legs, the Commune has contented itself to take hostages and to threaten reprisals, but its threats have remained a dead letter! Not even the gendarmes masqueraded into [read as] officers, not even the captive sergents de ville, upon whom explosive bombs have been seized, were placed before a court-martial! The Commune has refused to soil its hands with the blood of these bloodhounds!

    A few days before the 18th March, Clément Thomas laid before the War Minister Le Flô a plan for the disarmament of trois quarts [three-quarters] of the National Garde.

    "La fine fleur de la canaille, disait-il. s'est concentrée auttour de Montmartre et s'entend avec Belleville." ["The cream of the mob is concentrated around Montmartre and united with Belleville," he said.]

    L'Assemblée élue le 8 février sous la pression de l'ennemi aux mains desquels les hommes qui gouvernent à Versailles avaient remis tous les forts et livré Paris sans défense, l'Assem-

page 127

blée de Versailles avait un but unique et clairement déterminé par la convention même signée à Versailles le 29 janvier -- de décider si la guerre pouvait être continuée ou traiter la paix; et, dans ce cas, fixer les conditions de cette paix et assurer le plus promptement possible l'évacuation du territoire français. [The Assembly elected on February 8 under the pressure of the enemy, to whom the men governing at Versailles had surrendered all the forts and handed over the defenceless Paris -- this Versailles Assembly had but one aim, clearly determined by the Convention signed at Versailles on January 29, that is, to decide whether the war could be continued or whether to treat for peace, and, in the latter case, to establish the conditions for such a peace and ensure the evacuation of French territory as quickly as possible.]

    Liberation of Chanzy took place almost simultaneously with the retreat of Saisset. The Royalist journalists were unanimous in decreeing the death of the General. They desired to fix that amiable proceeding on the Reds. Three times he had been ordered to execution, and now he was really going to be shot.

    After the Vendôme Affair :[*] There was consternation at Versailles. An attack on Versailles was expected on 23 March, for the leaders of the Communal agitation had announced that they would march on Versailles, if the Assembly took any hostile action. The Assembly did not. On the contrary, it voted as urgent a proposition to hold Communal elections at Paris, etc. By the concessions the Assembly admitted its powerlessness. At the same time Royalist intrigues at Versailles. Bonapartist generals and the Duc d'Aumale.[127] Favre avowed he

page 128

had received a letter from Bismarck, announcing that unless order were restored by the 26 March, Paris would be occupied by the German troops. Reds saw plainly through his little artifice. Die Vendôme affaire provoquée by le faussaire, ce jésuite infâme J. Favre, qui le (21 March?) est monté à la tribune de l'Assemblée de Versailles pour insulter ce peuple qui l'a tiré du néant et soulever Paris contre les départements. [The Vendôme Affair was provoked by the forger, that infamous Jesuit J. Favre, who mounted the tribune of the Versailles Assembly on (March 21?) to insult the people who had raised him out of obscurity, and to stir up Paris against the departments.]

    30 March, Proclamation of the Commune:

    "Aujourd'hui les criminels, que vous n'avez pas même voulu poursuivre, abusent de votre magnanimité pour organiser aux portes mêmes de la cité un foyer de conspiration monarchique. Ils invoquent la guerre civile, ils mettent en oeuvre toutes les corruptions, ils acceptent toutes les complicités, ils ont osé mendier jusqu'à l'appui de l'étranger."[128] ["Today the criminals, whom you did not even wish to pursue, abuse your magnanimity and organize a centre of monarchical conspiracy at the very gates of the city. They invoke civil war, they employ all kinds of corrupt methods, they accept any complicity, they even dare to solicit foreign support."]

    On the 25th April, in his reception of the maires, adjuncts, and municipal councillors of the suburban communes of the Seine, Thiers said:

    "La République existe. Le chef de pouvoir exécutif n'est qu'un simple citoyen. " ["The Republic exists. The Chief of the Executive is only a common citizen."]

    The progress of France from 1830 to 1871, according to M. Thiers, consists in this: In 1830 Louis Philippe was "the best of Republics." In 1871 the ministerial fossil of Louis Philippe's reign, little Thiers himself, is the best of Republics.

page 129

    M. Thiers commenced his régime by an usurpation. By the National Assembly he was appointed chief of the ministry of the Assembly; he appointed himself Chief of the Executive of France.

    The Assembly, summoned at the dictate of the foreign invader, was, as is clearly laid down in the Versailles convention of the 29th January, but elected for one single purpose: To decide the continuation of war or settle the conditions of peace. In their calling the French people to electoral urns, the capitulards of Paris themselves plainly defined that specific mission of the Assembly and this accounts to a great part for its very constitution. The continuation of the war having become impossible through the very terms of the armistice humbly accepted by the capitulards, the Assembly had in fact but to register a disgraceful peace and for this specific performance the worst men of France were [the] best.

    The Republic was proclaimed on the 4th of September, not by the pettifoggers who installed themselves at the Hôtel de Ville as a Government of Defence, but by the Paris people. It was acclaimed throughout France without a single dissentient voice. It conquered its own existence by a five months' war whose cornerstone was the prolonged resistance of Paris. Without this war, carried on by the Republic and in the name of the Republic, the Empire would have been restored by Bismarck after the capitulation of Sedan, the pettifoggers with M. Thiers at their head would have had to capitulate not for Paris, but for personal guarantees against a voyage to Cayenne, and the Rural Assembly would never have been heard of. It met only by the grace of the Republican revolution, inchoated at Paris. Being no constituent Assembly, as M. Thiers himself has re-

page 130

peated to nauseousness, it would, if not as a mere chronicler of the passed incidents of the Republican Revolution, not even have had the right to proclaim the destitution [removal] of the Bonaparte's dynasty. The only legitimate power, therefore, in France is the Revolution itself, centring in Paris. That Revolution was not made against Napoleon the Little, but against the social and political conditions, which engendered the Second Empire, which received their last finish under its sway, and which, as the war with Prussia glaringly revealed, would leave France a cadaver, if they were not superseded by the regenerating powers of the French working-class Revolution. The attempts of the Rural Assembly holding only an attorney's power to the Revolution to sign the disastrous bond handed over by its present "Executive" to the foreign invader, its attempt to treat the Revolution as its own capitulard is, therefore, a monstrous usurpation. Its war against Paris is nothing but a cowardly Chouannerie[129] under the shelter of Prussian bayonets. It is a bare conspiracy to assassinate France, in order to save the privileges, the monopolies and the luxuries of the degenerate, effete, and putrefied classes that have dragged her to the abyss from which she can only be saved by the herculean hand of a truly Social Revolution.

    Even before he became a "statesman," M. Thiers had proved his lying powers as a historian. But the vanity, so characteristic of dwarfish men, has this time betrayed him into the sublime of the ridiculous. His army of Order, the dregs of the Bonapartist soldatesca [soldiery] freshly reimported, by the grace of Bismarck, from Prussian prisons, the Pontifical Zouaves,[92] the Chouans[91] of Charette, the Vendéens of Cathelineau, the "municipals"[130] of Valentin, the ex-sergents de ville of Piétri

page 131

and the Corsican gendarmes of Valentin, who under L. Bonaparte were only the spies of the army but under M. Thiers form its warlike flower, the whole under the supervision of epauletted mouchards and under the command of the runaway Decembrist marshals who had no honour to lose -- this motley, ungainly, hangdog lot M. Thiers dubs "the finest army France ever possessed "! If he allows the Prussians still to quarter at St. Denis, it is only to frighten them by the sight of the "finest army" of Versailles.

    Small state rogueries.

    Everlasting suggester of parliamentary intrigues M. Thiers was never anything else but an "able" journalist and a clever word-"fencer," a master of parliamentary roguery, a virtuoso in perjury, a craftsman in all the small stratagems, base perfidies, and subtle devices of parliamentary party-warfare. This mischievous gnome charmed the French bourgeoisie during half a century because he is the truest intellectual expression of their own class corruption. When in the ranks of the opposition, he over and over rehearsed his stale homily of the "libertés nécessaires," to stamp them out when in power. When out of office, he used to threaten Europe with the sword of France. And what were his diplomatic performances in reality? To pocket in 1841 the humiliation of the London treaty,[131] to hurry on the war with Prussia by his declamations against German unity, to compromise France in 1870 by his begging tour at all the courts of Europe, to sign in 1871 the Paris capitulation to accept a "peace at any price" and implore from Prussia a concession -- leave and means to get up a civil war in his own downtrodden country. To a man of his stamp the underground agencies of modern society remained of course always un-

page 132

known; but even the palpable changes at its surface he failed to understand. For instance, any deviation from the old French protective system he denounced as a sacrilege and, as a minister of Louis Philippe, went the length of treating disdainfully the construction of railways as a foolish chimera and even under Louis Bonaparte he eagerly opposed every reform of the rotten French army organization. A man without ideas, without convictions, and without courage.

    A professional "Revolutionist" in that sense, that in his eagerness of display, of wielding power and putting his hands into the National Exchequer, he never scrupled, when banished to the banks[*] of the opposition, to stir the popular passions and provoke a catastrophe to displace a rival; he is at the same time a most shallow man of routine, etc. The working class he reviled as "the vile multitude. " One of his former colleagues in the legislative assemblies, a contemporary of his, a capitalist and however a member of the Paris Commune, M. Beslay thus addresses him in a public address:

    "The subjugation (asservissement ) of labour to capital, such is the 'fonds ' ['foundation'] of your politics (policy). and [since] the day you saw the Republic of Labour installed at the Hôtel de Ville, you have never ceased to cry to France, 'They are criminals!'"

    No wonder that M. Thiers has given orders by his Home Minister Ernest Picard to prevent "the International Association" from communicating with Paris (Sitting of Assembly, 28 March). Circulaire de Thiers aux préfets et sous-préfets [Thiers' Circular to the Prefects and Sub-Prefects ]:

    "The good workmen, so numerous as compared to the bad ones ought to know that if bread flies again from their mouths, they owe it to

    (Jetzt die Geldgeschichte.) (Er und Favre haben ihr Geld nach London übersiedelt.) [(Now about the money affair.) (He and Favre have sent their money to London.)] It is a proverb that if rogues fall out, truth comes out. We can therefore not better finish the picture of Thiers than by the words of the London Moniteur of the master of his Versailles generals. Says the Situation [132] in the number of the 28 March:

    "M. Thiers has never been minister without pushing the soldiers to the massacre of the people; he, the parricide, the man of incest, the peculator, the plagiarist, the traitor, the ambitious, the impuissant [impotent]."

    Shrewd in cunning devices, and artful dodges.

    Banded with the Republicans before the Revolution of July, he slipped into his first ministry under Louis Philippe by thrusting Laffitte, his old protector. His first deed was to throw his old collaborator Armand Carrel into prison. He insinuated himself with Louis Philippe as a spy upon, and the gaol-accoucheur of, the Duchess of Berry, but his activity centred in the massacre of the insurgent Paris Republicans in the Rue Transnonain and the September Laws against the press,[47] to be then cast aside as an instrument become blunted. Having intrigued himself again into power in 1840, he planned the Paris fortifications, opposed as an attempt on the liberty of Paris by the whole democratic party, except the bourgeois Republicans of the National. M. Thiers replied to their outcry from the tribune of the Chambre des députés :

    "Quoi? Imaginer que des ouvrages de fortification quelconque peuvent nuire a la liberté. . . . C'est se placer hors de toute réalité. Et

page 134

d'abord, c'est calomnier un gouvernement quel qu'il soit de supposer qu'll puisse un jour chercher à se maintenir en bombardant la capitale. Quoi? Après avoir perce de ses bombes la voute des Invalides ou du Panthéon, après avoir inondé de ses feux la demeure de vos familles, il se présenterait à vous pour vous demander la confirmation de son existence! Mais il serait cent tois plus impossible après la victoire qu'auparavant. " [Chamber of Deputies: "What? To fancy that any works of fortification could ever endanger liberty. . . . That is to depart completely from reality. And first of all it is a slander on a government whatever it might be like to suppose that it could some day attempt to maintain itself by bombarding the capital. What? After having breached the vault of the Hôtel des Invalides or of the Panthéon with its shells, after having inundated your houses with its fire, it would present itself before you to demand confirmation of its existence! But such a government would be a hundred times more impossible after the victory than before. "]

    Indeed, neither the government of Louis Philippe nor that of the Bonapartist Regency dared to withdraw from Paris and bombard it. This employment of the fortifications was reserved to M. Thiers, their original plotter.

    When King Bomba[49] of Naples bombarded Palermo in January 1848, M. Thiers again declared in the Chamber of Deputies: "Vous savez, Messieurs, ce qui se passe à Palerme: vous avez tous tressailli d'horreur en apprenant que, pendant 48 heures, une grande ville a été bombardée. Par qui? Etait-ce par un ennemi étranger, exerçant les droits de la guerre? Non, Messieurs, par son propre gouvernement. Et pourquoi? Parce que cette ville infortunée demandait des droits. Eh bien! pour la demande de ses droits il y a eu 48 heures de bombardement. Permettez-moi d'en appeler à l'opinion européenne. C'est un service à rendre à l'humanitè que de venir, du haut de la plus grande tribune peut-être de l'Europe, faire retentir quelques paroles d'indignation contre de tels actes. Messieurs, lorsque, il y a 50 ans, les Autrichiens, exerçant les droits de la guerre, pour s'épargner les longueurs d'un siège, voulurent bombarder Lille, lorsque plus tard les Anglais, qui exerçaient aussi les droits de la guerre, bombardèrent Copenhague, et tout récemment, quand le régent Espartero, qui avait rendu des services à son pays, pour réprimet une insurrection, a voulu bombarder

page 135

Barcelone, dans tous les partis, il y a eu une générale indignation." ["You know, gentlemen, what is happening at Palermo. You, all of you, shake with horror on hearing that a large town has been bombarded for 48 hours. By whom? Was it by a foreign enemy exercising the rights of war? No, gentlemen, it was by its own Government. And why? Because that unfortunate town demanded its rights. Well, then, for demanding its rights, it has got 48 hours of bombardment. Allow me to appeal to European public opinion. It is doing a service to mankind to stand up and make reverberate some words of indignation against such acts from perhaps the greatest tribune of Europe. Gentlemen, 50 years ago when the Austrians, exercising the rights of war, wanted to bombard Lille in order to spare it a long siege, when later the English, who also exercised the rights of war, bombarded Copenhagen, and recently, when the Regent Espartero, who had rendered services to his country, wanted to bombard Barcelona in order to suppress an insurrection, indignation was general in all political parties."]

    Little more than a year later, Thiers acted the most fiery apologist of the bombardment of Rome by the troops of the French Republic, and exalted his friend, General Changarnier, for sabring down the Paris National Guards protesting against this breach of the French Constitution.

    A few days before the Revolution of February 1848, fretting at the long exile from place to which Guizot had condemned him, [and] scenting the growing commotion of the masses, which he hoped would enable him to oust his rival and impose himself upon Louis Philippe, Thiers exclaimed in the Chamber of Deputies:

    "Je suis du parti de la révolution, tant en France qu'en Europe. Je souhaite que le gouvernement de la révolution reste dans les mains des hommes modérés. . . . Mais quand ce gouvernement passerait dans les mains d'hommes ardents, fût-ce des radicaux, je n'abandonnerai pas ma cause pour cela. Je serai toujours du parti de la révolution. " ["I am of the party of the Revolution, not only in France but in Europe. I wish the Government of the Revolution to remain in the hands of moderate men. . . , but if that Government should fall into the hands of ardent men, even into those of Radicals, I shall, for all that, not desert my cause. I shall always be of the party of the Revolution. "]

page 136

    To put down the February Revolution was his exclusive occupation from the day when the Republic was proclaimed to the coup d'état.

    The first days after the February explosion he anxiously hid himself, but the Paris workmen despised him too much to hate him. Still, with his notorious cowardice, which made Armand Carrel answer to his boast "he would one day die on [the] banks of the Rhine": "Thou wilt die in a gutter" -- he dared not play a part on the public stage before the popular forces were broken down through the massacre of the insurgents of June. He confined himself first to the secret direction of the conspiracy of the réunion [party] of the Rue de Poitiers which resulted in the Restauration of the Empire, until the stage had become sufficiently clear to reappear publicly on it.

    During the siege of Paris, on the question whether Paris was about to capitulate, Jules Favre answered that, to utter the word capitulation, the bombardment of Paris was wanted! This explains his melodramatic protests against the Prussian bombardment, indicating the latter was a mock-bombardment, while the Thiers bombardment is a stern reality.

    Parliamentary mountebank.

    He is for 40 years on the stage. He has never initiated a single useful measure in any department of state or life. Vain, sceptical, epicurean, he has never written or spoken for things. In his eyes the things themselves are mere pretexts for the display of his pen or his tongue. Except his thirst for place and pelf and display there is nothing real about him, not even his chauvinism.

    In the true vein of vulgar professional journalists he now sneers in his bulletins [at] the bad looks of his Versailles prisoners, now communicates that the Rurals are "à leur aise [at

page 137

their ease]," now covers himself with ridicule by his bulletin on the taking of Moulin-Saquet (4 of May), where 300 prisoners were taken.

    "Le reste des insurgés s'est enfui à toutes jambes, laissant 150 morts et blessés sur le champ de bataille," ["The rest of the insurgents took to their heels, leaving 150 dead and wounded on the battlefield,"] and snappishly adds: "Voilà la victoire que la Commune peut célébrer demain dans ses bulletins." "Paris sera sous peu délivré de ses terribles tyrans qui l'oppriment." ["There's the victory the Commune can celebrate tomorrow in its bulletins." "Paris will shortly be delivered from the terrible tyrants who oppress it."]

    Paris -- the "Paris" of the mass of the Paris people fighting against him is not "Paris." "Paris -- that is the rich, the capitalist, the idle" (why not the cosmopolitan stew?). This is the Paris of M. Thiers. The real Paris, working, thinking, fighting Paris, the Paris of the people, the Paris of the Commune is a "vile multitude." There is the whole case of M. Thiers, not only for Paris, but for France. The Paris that showed its courage in the "pacific procession" and Saisset's escapade, that throngs now at Versailles, at Rueil, at St. Denis, at St. Germain-en-Laye, followed by the cocottes sticking to the "man of religion, family, order, and property" (the Paris of the really "dangerous," of the exploiting and lounging classes) ("the franc-fileurs "[89]) and amusing itself by looking by the telescope at the battle going on, for whom "the civil war is but an agreeable diversion" -- that is the Paris of M. Thiers (as the emigration of Coblenz was the France of M. de Calonne). In his vulgar journalist vein he knows not even to observe sham dignity, but he murders the wives and girls and children, found under the ruins of Neuilly, not to swerve from the etiquette of "legitimacy." He must needs illuminate the municipal elections he has ordered in France by the conflagration of Clamart, burnt by petroleum bombs. The Roman historians finish off

page 138

Nero's character by telling us that the monster gloried in being a rhymester and a comedian. But lift a mere professional journalist and parliamentary mountebank like Thiers to power, and he will outnero Nero.

    He acts only his part as the blind tool of class interests in allowing the Bonapartist "generals" to revenge themselves on Paris; but he acts his personal part in the little byplay of bulletins, speeches, addresses, in which the vanity, vulgarity, and lowest taste of the journalist creep out.

    He compares himself with Lincoln and the Parisians with the rebellious slaveholders of the South. The Southerners fought for the slavery of labour and the territorial secession from the United States. Paris fights for the emancipation of labour and the secession from power of Thiers' State parasites, of the would-be slaveholders of France!

    In his speech to the maires

   : "On peut compter sur ma parole à laquelle je n'ai jamais manqué!" ["You can count on my word, which I have never broken!"]
    "L'assemblée est une des plus libérales qu'ait nommée la France." ["The Assembly is one of the most liberal France has elected."]

    Er wird die Republik retten [He will save the Republic]

"pourvu que l'ordre et le travail ne soient pas perpétuellement compromis par ceux qui se prétendent les gardiens particuliers du salut de la République." ["provided that order and work are not constantly endangered by those who claim to be particular guardians of the safety of the Republic."]

    In der Sitzung der Assemblée vom 27 April sagt er: "L'assemblée est plus libérale que lui-même!" [He said at the April

page 139

27 session of the Assembly: "The Assembly is more liberal than he himself is!"]

    He, whose rhetorical trump card was always the denunciation of the Vienna treaties, he signs the Paris treaty,[133] not only the dismemberment of one part of France, (not only the occupation of almost 1/2 of it), but the milliards of indemnity, without even asking Bismarck to specify and prove his war expenses! He does not even allow the Assembly at Bordeaux to discuss the paragraphs of his capitulation!

    He who upbraided throughout his life the Bourbons because they came back in the rear of foreign armies and because of their undignified behaviour to the allies occupying France after the conclusion of peace,[134] he asks nothing from Bismarck in the treaty but one concession: 40,000 troops to subdue Paris (as Bismarck stated in the Diet). Paris was for all purposes of internal defence and [opposing] foreign aggression fully secured by its armed National Guard, but Thiers superadded at once [to] the capitulation of Paris to the foreigner, the character of the capitulation of Paris to himself and Co. This stipulation was a stipulation for civil war. That war itself he opens not only with the passive permission of Prussia, but by the facilities she lends him, by the captive French troops she magnanimously despatches him from German dungeons! In his bulletins, in his and Favre's speeches in the Assembly, he crawls in the dust before Prussia and threatens Paris every eight days with her intervention, after having failed to get it, as stated by Bismarck himself. The Bourbons were dignity itself compared to this mountebank, this grand apostle of chauvinism!

page 140

    After the break-down of Prussia (Tilsit peace 1807), its government felt that it could only save itself and the country by a great social regeneration (revolution). It naturalized in Prussia on a small scale, within the limits of a feudal monarchy, the results of the French Revolution. It liberated the peasant, etc.[135]

    After the Crimean defeat, which, however Russia might have saved her honour by the defence of Sevastopol and dazzled the foreigner by her diplomatic triumphs at Paris, laid open at home the rottenness of her social and administrative system, her government emancipated the serf and [reformed] her whole administrative and judicial system.[136] In both countries the daring social reform was fettered and limited in its character because it was octroyed[*] from the throne and not (instead of being) conquered by the people. Still there were great social changes, doing away with the worst privileges of the ruling classes and changing the economical basis of the old society. They felt that the great malady could only be cured by heroic measures. They felt that they could only answer to the victors by social reforms, by calling into life elements of popular regeneration. The French catastrophe of 1870 stands unparalleled in the history of the modern world! It showed official France, the France of Louis Bonaparte, the France of the ruling classes and their State parasites -- a putrescent cadaver. And what is the first attempt of the infamous men, who had got at her government by a surprise of the people and who continue to hold it by a conspiracy with the foreign invader, what is [their] first attempt? To assassinate, under Prussian patronage, by L. Bonaparte's soldatesca and Piétri's police, the glorious work of popular regeneration commenced at Paris,

page 141

to summon all the old Legitimist spectres, beaten by the July Revolution, the fossil swindlers of Louis Philippe, beaten by the Revolution of February, and celebrate an orgy of counter-revolution! Such heroism in exaggerated self-debasement is unheard of in the annals of history! But, what is most characteristic, instead of arousing a general shout of indignation on the part of official Europe and America, it evokes a current of sympathy and of fierce denunciation of Paris! This proves that Paris, true to its historical antecedents, seeks the regeneration of the French people in making it the champion of the regeneration of old society, making the social regeneration of mankind the national business of France! It is the emancipation of the producing class from the exploiting classes, their retainers and their State parasites, who prove the truth of the French adage, that "les valets du diable sont pires que le diable himself." ["the devil's valets are worse than the devil himself."] Paris has hissed[*] the flag of mankind!

    18 March : Government laid

    "stamp of 2 centimes on each copy of every periodical, whatever its nature." "Forbidden to found new journals until the raising of the state of siege."

    The different fractions of the French bourgeoisie had successively their reigns, the great landed proprietors under the Restoration (the old Bourbons), the capitalists under the parliamentary monarchy of July (Louis Philippe), while its Bonapartist and Republican elements kept rankling in the background. Their party feuds and intrigues were of course carried on on pretexts of public welfare, and a popular revolution having got rid of these monarchies, the other set in.

page 142

All this changed with the Republic (February). All the fractions of the bourgeoisie combined together in the Party of Order, that is the party of proprietors and capitalists, bound together to maintain the economic subjugation of labour and the repressive State machinery supporting it. Instead of a monarchy, whose very name signified the prevalence of one bourgeois fraction over the other, a victory on one side and a defeat on the other (the triumph of one side and the humiliation of the other), the Republic was the anonymous joint-stock company of the combined bourgeois fractions, of all the exploiteurs of the people clubbed together, and indeed, Legitimists, Bonapartists, Orleanists, bourgeois Republicans, Jesuits and Voltairiens, embraced each other -- no longer hidden by the shelter of the crown, no longer able to interest the people in their party feuds by masquerading them into [read as] struggles for popular interest, no longer subordinate the one to the other. Direct and confessed antagonism of their class rule to the emancipation of the producing masses -- order, the name for the economical and political conditions of their class rule and the servitude of labour, this anonymous or Republican form of the bourgeois régime -- this bourgeois Republic, this Republic of the Party of Order is the most odious of all political régimes. Its direct business, its only raison d'être is to crush down the people. It is the terrorism of class rule. The thing is done in this way. The people having fought and made the Revolution, proclaimed the Republic, and made room for a National Assembly, the bourgeois, whose known Republican professions are a guarantee for their "Republic," are pushed on the foreground of the stage by the majority of the Assembly, composed of the vanquished and professed enemies of the Republic. The Republicans are entrusted with the task to goad the people into the trap of an insurrection, to be crushed by fire

page 143

and sword. This part was performed by the party of the National with Cavaignac at their head after the Revolution of February (by the June Insurrection). By their crime against the masses, these Republicans lose then their sway. They have done their work and, if yet allowed to support the Party of Order in its general struggle against the proletariat, they are at the same time displaced from the government, forced to fall back in the last ranks, and only allowed "on sufferance." The combined Royalist bourgeois then become the father of the Republic, the true rule of the "Party of Order" sets in. The material forces of the people being broken for the time being, the work of reaction -- the breaking down of all the concessions conquered in four revolutions -- begins piece by piece. The people is stung to madness not only by the deeds of the Party of Order, but by the cynical effrontery with which it is treated as the vanquished, with which in its own name, in the name of the Republic, that low lot rules it supreme. Of course, that spasmodic form of anonymous class despotism cannot last long, can only be a transitory phasis. It knows that it is seated on a revolutionary volcano. On the other hand, if the Party of Order is united in its war against the working class, in its capacity of the Party of Order, the play of intrigue of its different fractions, the one against the other, each for the prevalence of its peculiar interest in the old order of society, each for the restoration of its own pretender and personal ambitions, sets in in full force as soon as its rule seems secured (guaranteed) by the destruction of the material revolutionary forces. This combination of a common war against the people and a common conspiracy against the Republic, combined with the internal feuds of its rulers, and their play of intrigues, paralyses society, disgusts and bewilders the masses of the middle class and "troubles" business, keeps them in a chronic state of disquie-

page 144

tude. All the conditions of despotism are created (have been engendered) under this régime, but despotism without quietude, despotism with parliamentary anarchy at its head. Then the hour has struck for a coup d'état, and the incapable lot has to make room for any lucky pretender, making [an] end of the anonymous form of class rule. In this way Louis Bonaparte made an end of the bourgeois Republic after its 4 years of existence. During all that time Thiers was the "âme damnée" [tool] of the Party of Order, that in the name of the Republic made war upon the Republic, a class war upon the people, and, in reality, created the Empire. He played exactly the same part now as he played then, only then but as a parliamentary intriguer, now as the Chief of the Executive. Should he not be conquered by the Revolution, he will now as then be a baffled tool. Whatever counter-vailing government will set in, its first act will be to cast aside the man who surrendered France to Prussia and bombarded Paris.

    Thiers had many grievances against Louis Bonaparte. The latter had used him as a tool and a dupe. He had frightened him (shocked his nerves) by his arrest after the coup d'état. He had annulled him by putting down the parliamentary régime, the only one under which a mere State parasite, like Thiers, a mere talker, can play a political part. Last [but] not least Thiers, having been the historic shoeblack of Napoleon, had so long described his deeds, as to fancy he had enacted them himself. The legitimate caricature of Napoleon I was in his eyes not Napoleon the Little, but little Thiers. With all that there was no infamy committed by L. Bonaparte which had not been backed by Thiers, from the occupation of Rome by the French troops to the war with Prussia.

    Only a man of his shallow head can fancy for one moment, that a Republic with his head on its shoulders, with a National

page 145

Assembly half Legitimist, half Orleanist, with an army under Bonapartist leaders, will, if victorious, not push him aside.

    There is nothing more grotesquely horrid than a Tom Pouce affecting to play the (acting the part [of]) Timur Tamerlane. With him the deeds of cruelty are not only a matter of business, but a thing of theatrical display (stage effect) of phantastical vanity. To write "his" bulletins, to show "his" severity, to have "his" troops, "his" strategy, "his" bombardments, "his" petroleum bombs, to hide "his" cowardice under the cold-bloodedness with which he allows the Decembrist blacklegs to take their revenge on Paris! This kind of heroism in exaggerated baseness! He exults in the important part he plays and the noise he makes in the world! He quite fancies to be a great man: and how gigantic (titanic) he, the dwarf, the parliamentary dribbler, must look in the eyes of the world! In [the] midst [of] the horrid scenes of this war, one cannot help smiling at the ridiculous capers Thiers Vanity cuts! M. Thiers is a man of lively imagination, there runs an artist's vein through his blood, and an artist's vanity able to gull him into a belief in his own lies, and a belief in his own grandeur.

    Through all the speeches, bulletins, etc., of Thiers, runs a vein of elated vanity.

    That affreux Triboulet.[*]

    Splendid bombardment (with petroleum bombs) from Mont-Valérien, zerstört [destroyed] a part of the houses in the

page 146

Ternes within the rampart (?), with a grandiose conflagration and a fearful thunder of cannon shaking all Paris. Bombs purposely thrown into [the] Ternes and the Champs-Elysées quarters.

    Explosive bombs, petroleum bombs.

    The glorious British penny-a-liner has made the splendid discovery that this is not what we used to understand by self-government. Of course, it is not. It is not the self-administration of the towns by turtle-soup guzzling aldermen, jobbing vestries, and ferocious workhouse guardians. It is not the self-administration of the counties by the holders of broad acres, long purses and empty heads. It is not the judicial abomination of "the Great Unpaid."[137] It is not political self-government of the country through the means of an oligarchic club and the reading of the Times newspaper. It is the people acting for itself by itself.

    Within this war of cannibals the most disgusting, the "literary" shrieks of the hideous gnome seated at the head of the government!

    The ferocious treatment of the Versailles prisoners was not interrupted one moment, and their cold-blooded assassination was resumed so soon as Versailles had convinced itself that the Commune was too humane to execute its decree of reprisals!

    The Paris Journal (at Versailles) says that 13 line soldiers made prisoners at the railway station of Clamart were shot off-hand, and all prisoners wearing the line uniforms who arrive in Versailles will be executed whenever doubts about their identity are cleared up!

page 147

    M. Alexandre Dumas, fils, tells that a young man exercising the functions, if not bearing the title, of a general, was shot when having marched (in custody) a few hundred yards along a road.

    5 mai, Mot d'ordre :[138] D'apres La Liberté, qui parait à Versailles, "tous les soldats de l'armée régulière qui ont été trouvés à Clamart parmi les insurgents ont été fusillés séance tenante" [May 5, Mot d'ordre : According to La Liberté published in Versailles, "All the soldiers of the regular army who were found at Clamart among the insurgents were shot on the spot"] (by Lincoln Thiers!) (Lincoln acknowledged the belligerent rights.) "These are the men denouncing on the walls of all French communes the Parisians as assassins!" The banditti!

    Desmarêt.

    Députation de [la] Commune à Bicêtre (27 April) pour faire une enquête sur les 4 gardes nationaux du 185e bataillon de marche de la Garde nationale, où ils ont visité le survivant (grièvement blessé) Scheffer. [Deputation from the Commune went to Bicêtre (April 27) where they visited the only survivor (seriously wounded) Scheffer to inquire about the four National Guards of the 185th Infantry Battalion of the National Guard.]

    "Le malade a déclaré que, le 15 April, à la Belle-Epine, près de Villejuif, il était surpris avec trois de ses camarades par les chasseurs à cheval, qui leur ont dit de se rendre. Comme il leur était impossible de faire une résistance utile contre les forces qui les entouraient, ils jetèrent leurs armes à terre et se rendirent. Les soldats les entourèrent, les firent prisonniers sans exercer aucune violence ni aucune menace envers eux. Ils étaient déjà prisonniers depuis quelques instants, lorsqu'un capitaine des chasseurs à cheval arriva et se précipita sur eux, le revolver au poing. Il fit feu sur l'un d'eux sans dire un seul mot et l'étendit raide mort, puis il en fit autant sur le garde Scheffer, qui reçut une balle en pleine poitrine et tomba à côté de ses camarades. Les deux autres gardes re retirèrent effrayés de cette infâme agression, mais

page 148

le féroce capitaine se précipita sur les deux prisonniers et les tua de deux autres coups de revolver. Les chasseurs, après les actes d'atroce et de féroce lâcheté, se retirèrent avec leur chef, laissant leurs victimes étendues sur le sol."[139] ["The wounded man said that on April 15,[*] at Belle-Epine, near Villejuif, he and three comrades were attacked by cavalrymen who told them to surrender. As it was impossible to put up effective resistance against the forces which were surrounding them, they threw their arms to the ground and surrendered. The soldiers surrounded them and took them prisoner without using violence or threats. They had been prisoners for several minutes when a cavalry captain came and rushed at them, revolver in hand. Without a word he fired at one of them and killed him; in the same way he shot at the guard Scheffer who received a bullet in the chest and fell beside his comrades. Terrified by this foul attack, the two other guards drew back, but the frenzied captain rushed at them and killed them with two revolver shots. After these atrocious and base acts, the cavalrymen retired with their chief, leaving their victims lying dead on the ground."]

    "New York Tribune "[140] outdoes the London papers.

    M. Thiers' "most liberal and most freely elected National Assembly that ever existed in France" is quite of a piece with his "finest army that France ever possessed." This senile Chambre introuvable, chosen on a false pretext, consists almost exclusively of Legitimists and Orleanists. The municipal elections, carried on under Thiers himself on the 30th of April, show their relation to the French people! Of 700,000 councillors (in round numbers) returned by the 35,000 communes still left in mutilated France, 200 are Legitimists, 600 Orleanists, 7,000 avowed Bonapartists, and all the rest Republicans or Communists.[**] (Versailles Cor., Daily News, 5 May.) Is any other proof wanted that this Assembly with the Orleanist mummy Thiers at its head represent an usurpatory minority?

    "Il ne faut point confondre le mouvement de Paris avec la surprise de Montmartre, qui n'en a été que l'occasion et le point de départ; ce mouvement est général et profond dans la conscience de Paris; le plus grand nombre de ceux-là mêmes qui, pour une cause ou pour une autre, s'en sont tenus à l'ècart n'en désavouent point pour cela la légitimité sociale." ["One must not confuse the movement of Paris with the surprise attack on Montmartre, the latter being only the cause and starting point; this movement is general and goes deep into the consciousness of Paris; even the majority of those who for one reason or another keep aloof do not deny its social legitimacy."]

    Who says this? The delegates of the Syndical chambers, men who speak in the name of 7-8,000 merchants and industrials.[141] They have gone to tell it at Versailles. . . . The Ligue de la réunion républicaine . . . the manifestation of the francs- maçons,[142] etc. [The League of Republican Union . . . the demonstration of the Freemasons, etc.]

    Les provinciaux espiègles. [The provincial rogues.]

    If Thiers fancied one moment that the provinces were really antagonistic to the Paris movement, he would do all in his power to give the provinces the greatest possible facilities to become acquainted with the movement and all "its horrors." He would solicit them to look at it in its naked reality, to con-

page 150

vince themselves with their own eyes and ears of what it is. Not he! He and his "defence men" try to keep the provinces down, to prevent their general rising for Paris, by a wall of lies, as they kept out the news from the provinces in Paris during the Prussian siege. The provinces are only allowed to look at Paris through the Versailles camera obscura (distorting glass). (Les mensonges et les calomnies des journaux de Versailles parviennent seuls aux départements et y font loi.) [(Only the lies and slanders of the Versailles journals reach the departments and have any validity there.)] Pillages and murders of [read by] 20,000 ticket-of-leave men dishonour the capital.

    "La Ligue se donne pour premier devoir de faire la lumière et de rétablir les relations normales entre la province and Paris."[143] ["The League considers its first duty to clarify the facts and restore the normal relations between the provinces and Paris."]

    As they were, when besieged in Paris, thus they are now in besieging it in their turn.

    "Le mensonge comme par le passé est leur arme favorite. Ils suppriment, saisissent les journaux de la capitale, interceptent les communications, sift the letters, de telle sorte que la province est réduite aux nouvelles qu'il plaît aux Jules Favre, Picard et Cons. de lui donner, sans qu'il soit possible de vérifier l'exactitude de leur dire." ["As before, lying is their favourite weapon. They suppress and seize the capital's newspapers, intercept communications, sift the letters, so that the provinces can only get the news which Jules Favre, Picard and company are pleased to give, and there is no way to verify the truth of what they say."]

    Thiers' bulletins, Picard's circulaires, Dufaure's. . . . The placards in the communes. The felon press of Versailles and the Germans. The petit moniteur.[144 ]The reintroduction of passports for travelling from one place to another. An army of mouchards spread in every direction. Arrests (in Rouen, etc., under Prussian authority), etc. Les milliers de commissaires de

page 151

police répandus dans les environs de Paris ont reçu du préfet-gendarme Valentin l'ordre de saisir tous les journaux, à quelque nuance qu'ils appartiennent, qui s'impriment dans la ville insurgée, et de les brûler en place publique comme au meilleur temps de la Ste. Inquisition. [The thousands of police superintendents scattering round Paris received an order from the prefect-gendarme Valentin to seize all newspapers, whatever their shade, printed in this insurgent city and to burn them in public as was done at the height of the Holy Inquisition.]

    Thiers' government first appealed to the provinces[*] to form battalions of National Guards and send them to Versailles against Paris. The Province, as the Journal de Limoges [145] says, showed its discontent by refusing the bataillons of volontaires [volunteers] which were asked from it by Thiers and his Ruraux. The few Breton idiots, fighting under a white flag, every one of them wearing on his breast a Jesus heart in white cloth and shouting "Vive le roi!" are the only "provincial" army gathered round Thiers.

    The elections. Vengeur, 6 May.[146]

    M. Dufaure's press law (8 April ). Confessedly directed against the "excesses" of the provincial press.

    Then the numerous arrestations in the Province. It is placed under the Laws of Suspects.[147]

    Blocus intellectuel et policier de la province. [Intellectual and police blockade of the provinces.]

    April 23, Havre : The municipal council has despatched three of its members to Paris and Versailles with instructions to offer

mediation, with the view of terminating the civil war on the basis of the maintenance of the Republic, and the granting of municipal franchises to the whole of France. . . . 23 April, delegates from Lyons received by Picard and Thiers -- "Guerre a tout prix" deren Antwort. ["War at any price," was their answer.]

    Adresse des délégués de Lon présentée a l'Assemblée par Greppo[148] [le] 24 avril. [Petition of the Lyons delegates presented to the Assembly by Greppo on April 24.]

    The municipalities of the provincial towns committed the great impudence to send their deputations to Versailles in order to call upon them to grant what [was] demanded by Paris; not one commune of France has sent an address approving of the acts of Thiers and the Rurals; the provincial papers, like these municipal councils, as Dufaure complains in his circular against conciliation to the procureur général,

    "mettent sur la même ligne l'Assemblée issue du suffrage universel et la prétendue commune de Paris, reprochent à la première de n'avoir pas accordé à Paris ses droits municipaux, etc." ["put the Assembly born of universal suffrage on the same footing with the pretender Paris Commune, reproach the former with not having accorded Paris its municipal rights, etc."]

    and what is worse, these municipal councils, for instance, that of Auch,

    "unanimement lui demandent de proposer immédiatement un armistice avec Paris [unanimously demand of it to propose immediately an armistice with Paris ] and that the Assembly chosen on the 8th of February, dissolves itself because its mandate had expired." (Dufaure, [à ] l'Assemblée de Versailles, 26 April.)

    It ought to be remembered that these were the old municipal councils,[149] not those elected on 30th April. Their delegations so numerous, that Thiers decided no longer to receive them personally but address them to a ministerial subaltern.

page 153

    Lastly the elections of 30 April, the final judgment of the Assembly and the electoral surprise from which it had sprung. If then the provinces have till now only made a passive resistance against Versailles without rising for Paris, [it is] to be explained by the strongholds the old authorities hold here still, the trance in which the Empire merged and the war maintained the Province. It is evident that it is only the Versailles army, government and [the] Chinese wall of lies, that stand between Paris and the provinces. If that wall falls, they will unite with it.

    It is most characteristic, that the same men (Thiers et Co.) who in May 1850 abolished by a parliamentary conspiracy (Bonaparte aided them, to get them into a snare, to have them at his mercy, and to proclaim himself after the coup d'état as the restorer of the universal suffrage against the Party of Order and its Assembly) the universal suffrage, because under the Republic it might still play them freaks, are now its fanatical adepts, make it their "legitimate" title against Paris, after it had received under Bonaparte such an organization as to be the mere plaything in the hand of the Executive, a mere machine of cheat, surprise, and forgery on the part of the Executive. (Congrès de la Ligue des villes ) (Rappel, 6 mai.)[150]

    It may be asked how these superannuated parliamentary mountebanks and intriguers like Thiers, Favre, Dufaure, Garnier-Pagès (only strengthened by a few rascals of the same stamp) continue to reappear, after every revolution, on the surface, and usurp the executive power -- these men that always exploit and betray the Revolution, shoot down the people that made it, and sequester the few liberal concessions

page 154

conquered from former governments (which they opposed themselves)?

    The thing is very simple. In the first instance, if very unpopular, like Thiers after the February Revolution, popular magnanimity spares them. After every successful rising of the people the cry of conciliation, raised by the implacable enemies of the people, is re-echoed by the people in the first moments of the enthusiasm at its own victory. After this first moment men like Thiers and Dufaure eclipse themselves as long as the people holds material power, and work in the dark. They reappear as soon as it is disarmed, and are acclaimed by the bourgeoisie as their chefs-de-file [file-leaders].

    Or, like Favre, Garnier-Pagès, Jules Simon, etc. (recruited by a few younger ones of similar stamp) and Thiers himself after the 4th of September, [they] were the "respectable" Republican opposition under Louis Philippe; afterwards the parliamentary opposition under L. Bonaparte. The reactionary régimes they have themselves initiated when raised to power by the Revolution, secure for them the ranks of the opposition, deporting, killing, exiling the true revolutionists. The people forget their past, the middle class look upon them as their men, their infamous past is forgotten, and thus they reappear to recommence their treason and their work of infamy.

    Night of 1 to 2 May : the village of Clamart had been in the hands of the military, the railway station in that [read those] of the insurgents (this station dominates the Fort of Issy). By a surprise (their patrouilles [patrols] being let in by a soldier on guard, the watchword having been betrayed to them) the 23 Bataillon [*] of Chasseurs got in, surprised the garrison, most

page 155

of them sleeping in their beds, made only 60 prisoners, bayoneted 300 of the insurgents. Dazu [In addition,] line soldiers [were] afterwards shot off-hand. Thiers in his circular to the Prefects, civil and military authorities of 2 May has the impudence to say:

    "It (the Commune) arrests generals (Cluseret!) only to shoot them, and institutes a committee of public safety which is utterly unworthy!"

    Troops under General Lacretelle took the redoubt of Moulin-Saquet situated betwixt Fort Issy and Montrouge, by a coup de main. The garrison was surprised by treachery on the part of the commandant Gallien, who had sold the password to the Versailles troops. 150 of the Federals bayoneted and over 300 of them made prisoners. M. Thiers, says the Times correspondent, was weak when he ought to have been firm (the coward is always weak as long as he has to apprehend danger for himself ), and firm when everything was to be gained by some concessions. (The rascal is always firm, when the employment of material force bleeds France, gives great airs to himself, but when he, personally, is safe. This is his whole cleverness. Like Anthony, Thiers is an "honest man.")

    Thiers ' bulletin über [on] Moulin-Saquet (4 mai ):

    "Délivrance de Paris des affreux tyrans qui l'oppriment," ("les Versaillais étaient déguisés en gardes nationaux,") ("le plus grand nombre des fédérés dormaient et ont été frappés ou saisis dans leur sommeil.") ["Deliverance of Paris from the dreadful tyrants who oppress it," ("Versailles men disguised as National Guards,") ("Most of the Communards were asleep and were killed or captured in their sleep.")]

    Picard :

    "Notre artillerie ne bombarde pas: elle canonne, il est vrai." (Moniteur des communes, journal de Picard.) ["Our artillery does not bombard: it's true it shells." (Commune Monitor, Picard's paper.)]

page 156

    "Blanqui, enseveli mourant dans un cachot, Flourens, haché par les gendarmes, Duval, fusillé par Vinoy, les ont tenus dans leurs mains au 31 octobre et [qu'] ils [ne] leur ont rien faits." ["Blanqui, shut up dying in a prison cell, Flourens, hacked to pieces by the gendarmes, and Duval, shot by Vinoy, held these people in their hands on October 31, and nothing was done to them."]

were simply incarcerated on no charge whatever as political suspects. Consequently it charged [one] of its members -- Protot -- to make inquiries. By him 150 people [were] set free who, being arrested since six months, had not yet under gone any judicial examination; many of them, already arrested under Bonaparte, had been for a year in prison without any charge or judicial examination (9 April ). This fact, so characteristic of the Government of Defence, enraged them. They asserted the Commune had liberated all felons. But who liberated convicted felons? The forger Jules Favre. Hardly got into power, he hastened to liberate Pic and Taillefer, condemn ed for theft and forgery in the affair of the Etendard. One of these men, Taillefer, daring to return to Paris, has been reinstated in his convenient abode. But this is not all. The Versailles Government has delivered, in the Maisons centrales [prisons] all over France, convicted thiefs on the condition of entering M. Thiers' army.

    Decree on the demolition of the column of the Place Vendôme as "a monument of barbarism, symbol of brute force and false glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international right" (12 April ).[151]

    Election of Frankel (German member of the International) to the Commune declared valid: "considering that the flag of the Commune is that of the Universal Republic and that foreigners can have a seat in it" (4 April ) ;[152] Frankel afterwards chosen a member of the Executive of the Commune (21 April ).

    The Journal officiel has inaugurated the publicity of the sittings of the Commune (15 April ).

    Decree of Paschal Grousset for the protection of foreigners against requisitions. Never a government in Paris so courteous to foreigners (27 April ).

page 161

    The Commune has abolished political and professional oaths (27 April ).

    Destruction of the monument dit "Chapelle expiatoire de Louis XVI" rue d'Anjou-St. Thérèse (oeuvre de la Chambre introuvable de 1816) (7 mai ). [Destruction of the monument called "the Chapel of Atonement of Louis XVI," Rue d'Anjou St. Therese[*] (work of the Chambre introuvable of 1816) (May 7 )]

    Decree of Reprisals. Never executed. Only the fellows arrested, Archbishop of Paris and curé of the Madeleine ; whole staff of the college of Jesuits; incumbents of all the principal churches; part of these fellows arrested as hostages, part as conspirators with Versailles, part because they tried to save church property from the clutches of the Commune (6 April ).

    "The Monarchists wage war like savages; they shoot prisoners, they murder the wounded, they fire on ambulances, troops raise the butt-end of their rifles in the air and then fire traitorously." (Proclamation of [the ] Commune.)[153]

    In regard to these decrees of reprisals to be remarked:

    In the first instance, men of all layers of the Paris society -- after the exodus of the capitalists, the idlers and the parasites -- have interposed at Versailles to stop the civil war -- except

    The Commune had been proclaimed at Lyons, then Marseilles, Toulouse, etc., after Sedan. Gambetta tried his best to break it down.[154]

    The different movements at Paris in the beginning of October aimed at the establishment of the Commune, as a measure of defence against the foreign invasion, as the realization of the rise of the 4th of September. Its establishment by the movement of the 31 October failed only because Blanqui, Flourens and the other then leaders of the movement believed in the gens de paroles [men of their word] who had given their

page 165

parole d'honneur [word of honour] to abdicate and make room for a Commune freely elected by all the arrondissements of Paris. It failed because they saved the lives of those men so eager for the assassination of their saviours. Having allowed Trochu and Ferry to escape, they surprised them by Trochu's Bretons.[*] It ought to be remembered that on the 31st of October the self-imposed "Government of Defence" existed only on sufferance. It had not yet gone even through the farce of a plebiscite.[155] Under the circumstances, there was of course nothing easier than to misrepresent the character of the movement, to decry it as a treasonable conspiracy with the Prussians, to improve the dismissal of the only man[**] amongst them who would not break his word, for strengthening Trochu's Bretons, who were for the Government of the Defence what the Corsican spadassins [desperadoes] had been for L. Bonaparte, by the appointment of Clément Thomas as commander-in-chief of the National Guard; there was nothing easier for these old panic-mongers [than] -- appealing to the cowardly fears of the middle class [in the presence of the] working bataillons who had taken the initiative, throwing distrust and dissension amongst the working bataillons themselves, by an appeal to patriotism -- to create one of those days of blind reaction and disastrous misunderstandings by which they have always contrived to maintain their usurped power. As they had slipt into power the 4th of September by a surprise, they were now enabled to give it a mock sanction by a plebiscite of the true Bonapartist pattern during days of reactionary terror.

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

    But this much is shown: The Revolution of the 4th September was not only the reinstalment of the Republic because the place of the usurper had become vacant by his capitulation at Sedan -- it not only conquered that Republic from the foreign invader by the prolonged resistance of Paris although fighting under the leadership of its enemies -- that Revolution was working its way in[to] the heart of the working classes. The Republic had ceased to be a name for a thing of the past. It was impregnated with a new world. Its real tendency, veiled from the eye of the world through the deceptions, the lies and the vulgarizing of a pack of intriguing lawyers and word fencers, came again and again to the surface in the spasmodic movements of the Paris working cl