On 12 July 1870 the General Council issued its invitations to the fifth congress. This was to meet at Mainz on 5 September. One item on the agenda which the General Council had prepared for discussion was the question of what the working class could do to prevent wars. A week later, on 19 July, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia.
The International was no longer confronted with the question of how wars could be avoided. The machines of war had begun to turn, and neither French nor German Socialists had the means of stopping them. The Brussels Congress, which had called on the working class to initiate a general strike in the event of the outbreak of war, had lost sight of the real relationships of power in the world. The International now had the task of identifying those responsible for the war, of keeping alive the feeling of solidarity among the workers of the two warring nations amidst a deluge of jingoism, and of giving a lead to the working class at a turning-point in history.
It was the Paris Federation which spoke first on behalf of the International, since it was in Paris that the war plot had been hatched. A full week before the disaster began to unfold, it issued a manifesto, 'To the Workers of All Nations', directed particularly to the workers of Germany. The manifesto denounced the threatened war as a crime perpetrated by the ruling dynasty. 'A war waged on account of…dynastic interests is, in the eyes of the workers, nothing but criminal folly.' It called on the 'brothers in Germany' to recognize that 'a war between us would be a civil war'. It went on to warn the German workers that 'our split would only bring in its wake the complete triumph of despotism on both sides of the Rhine'. And it closed with a solemn declaration that 'whatever the result, for the moment, of our combined efforts, we, the members of the International Working Men's Association, for whom no national frontiers exist, send you in token of our eternal solidarity good wishes and greetings from the workers of France'.
For German Socialists, the war raised rather more complicated questions. French Socialists were justified in denouncing the war as one of Bonapartist aggression. But in Germany the war seemed primarily defensive. Started by Louis Napoleon, it seemed to the overwhelming majority of German workers a clear case of aggression against their country. Could they, in the circumstances, decline the call to defend their fatherland? On the other hand, could the workers be said to have a fatherland at all? Was not every war the result of rivalry between ruling classes and dynasties?[1]
The German workers were divided in their attitude to the war. In reply to the Paris manifesto, the Berlin section of the International said: 'We earnestly agree with your protest.…We solemnly pledge that neither the sound of bugles nor the thunder of cannon, neither victory nor defeat will turn us from our task of making common cause with the workers of all nations.' In line with this statement, mass meetings in Chemnitz, Leipzig, Dresden, Krefeld and Elberfeld denounced the war as a crime by both French and Prussian dynasties. At a meeting in Chemnitz of workers from the province of Saxony, a message to the French workers was adopted which ran: 'In the name of German democracy and, specifically, of workers in the Social Democratic party, we condemn the present war as entirely dynastic.…We grasp with joy the hand of brotherhood extended to us by the workers of France.…Mindful of the motto of the International Working Men's Association, "Proletarians of all lands, unite!", we shall never forget that the workers of all nations are our friends and the despots of all nations are our enemies.'
However, this was not the dominant mood among German workers. On 16 July a mass meeting in Brunswick said in a message to the French that while they emphatically rejected all talk of hostility to the French people, since Louis Napoleon had in fact started the war, 'we find ourselves compelled to wage a defensive war as a necessary evil'. It was now their 'prime duty' to resist the man who had irresponsibly destroyed the peace. An even more forthright expression of patriotism was conveyed in a manifesto issued on 24 July by the Brunswick Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party. 'So long as French soldiers are so ill advised as to let themselves be dragged in the wake of Napoleon so that our German lands are threatened with war and devastation,' it declared, 'we are determined to play our full part in the defence of the inviolability of German soil against Napoleonic or any other despotism.'[2] Volksstaat, the organ of the Eisenach Social Democrats, saw the struggle as not only one of national defence but also as a war between the two political systems of despotism and democracy. On this interpretation, 'Bonaparte is trying to prop up his shaky throne by humiliating Prussia. The December Empire is the cornerstone of reaction in Europe. If Bonaparte falls, there will fall with him the mainstay of today's class and military regimes. If Bonaparte wins, European as well as French democracy will be vanquished.'
However, it could occur to a German Socialist to ask whether Bismarck's regime was also based on class and military rule, and whether responsibility for the war rested on Bonaparte alone. Might not Prussia's avowed policy of 'blood and iron' be also, in part, responsible?
The North German Parliament met on 19 July to debate on war credits. It contained five Socialist representatives, three from the Eisenach party and two Lassalleans. They had to decide on their attitude to the war. The Lassalleans saw it clearly as a war of defence and had no hesitation in voting for war credits. The Eisenachers, however, particularly Bebel and Liebknecht, were conscious of an acute dilemma. A vote for war credits could well be interpreted as a vote of confidence in Bismarck. On the other hand, a vote against war credits could be taken as condoning the iniquitous policy of Louis Napoleon, and strengthen him in his attempts to suppress the Socialist movement in France.
Bebel and Liebknecht solved their dilemma by abstaining. They defended their attitude in a statement which Bebel read in Parliament. If the existing war was being waged in the interests of the Bonaparte dynasty, it maintained, the war of 1866 had been fought in the interests of the Hohenzollerns. To vote in favour of war credits would amount to a vote of confidence in the Prussian government, 'which, through its actions in 1866, had prepared the ground for the present conflict'. To vote against credits, on the other hand, could be taken as 'approval of the outrageous policy of Bonaparte'. Therefore, 'as Socialists, Republicans and members of the International Working Men's Association, which fights all oppressors without distinction of nationality and which works to unite all the oppressed in a common bond of brotherhood, we cannot declare ourselves, directly or indirectly, in favour of the present war'.
Four days later, on 23 July, the General Council of the International met to formulate its attitude to the war. Marx had drafted an Address, 'To the Members of the International Working Men's Association in Europe and the United States',[3] which he read to the meeting and which was then unanimously adopted. The Address recognized that 'on the German side, the war is a war of defence'.[4] But this only raised the further question, 'Who put Germany to the necessity of defending herself? Who enabled Louis Bonaparte to wage war upon her? Prussia!…After her victory [i.e. over Austria in 1866], 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 added, over and above, all the tricks of the Second Empire, its real despotism and its mock democratism.'
As to France, the Address contained the prophecy that 'whatever may be the incidents of Louis Bonaparte's war with Prussia, the death-knell of the Second Empire has already has already sounded at Paris'. But the Germans, in their turn, were sternly warned that '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 alike will prove disastrous'. The Address concluded with an assessment of the historical significance of the international solidarity expressed in the fraternal exchange of messages between German and French workers.
The very fact that while official France and Germany are rushing into a fratricidal feud, the workmen of France and Germany send each other messages of peace and good will, this great fact, unparalleled in the history of the past, opens the vista of a brighter future. It proves that in contrast to old society, with its economic 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.
Scarcely six weeks later, the Empire had collapsed. The French army had capitulated at Sedan, Bonaparte was a prisoner of the Germans and two days later, on 4 September, the Republic was declared in Paris. The deputies in the capital constituted themselves a 'Government of National Defence'.
Next day the Central Committee of the German Social Democratic Workers party published a manifesto to the German workers, welcoming the French Republic. It recalled the fact that, for Germany, the war had been primarily defensive, and that it had been forced on the German people by the Emperor and not the people of France. Now the French people were once again in control of their own destiny, and the manifesto demanded an 'honourable peace' with the French Republic. It emphatically opposed the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, declaring that '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 civilization against Eastern barbarism, the German workmen will not patiently tolerate the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine.' The manifesto ended by pledging that 'we shall faithfully stand by our fellow workmen in all countries, for the common international cause of the Proletariat!' At the same time the Central Committee appealed to local branches throughout the country to organize immediately 'as impressive demonstrations as possible against the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and for an honourable peace with the French Republic'. Four days later the entire Central Committee of the party (except for Bebel and Liebknecht, who, as deputies, were immune) was arrested and taken in chains to the East Prussian fortress of Boyen near Lötzen. Protest meetings in Leipzig, Berlin, Augsburg and Nuremburg were broken up by the police.
On the same day the General Council of the International issued its second Address on the war, also drafted by Marx, calling on all sections of the International to demonstrate against the proposed annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, and for an honourable peace with the French Republic. In a searching analysis the Address refuted all the arguments — historical, strategic and nationalist — with which the German ruling class sought to justify the annexation of French territory. It warned in advance that such a step would be disastrous. It would without the slightest doubt force France into the arms of Russia and threaten Germany with another terrible but very different war. 'If the fortune of her arms,' said the Address, 'the arrogance of success, and dynastic intrigue lead Germany to a dismemberment of France, there will then remain open to her two courses only. She must at all risks become the avowed tool of Russian aggrandisement or, after some short respite, make ready again for another "defensive" war…a war of races — a war with the combined Slavonian and Roman races.'
Turning to France, the Address welcomed the establishment of the Republic, 'but at the same time we labour under misgivings'. The Republic, it pointed out, had not itself destroyed the throne; it had only occupied the vacant seat. It had been proclaimed not as a social conquest but as a national measure of defence. It was in the hands of a provisional government composed mainly of middle-class reactionaries. However, 'any attempt at upsetting the new government in the present crisis, when the enemy is almost knocking at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly'. The French workers, said the Address, should do their duty as citizens without delusions of grandeur or false analogies with previous revolutions. 'Let them calmly and resolutely improve the opportunities of Republican liberty, for the work of their own class organization. It will give them fresh Herculean powers for the regeneration of France, and for our common task — the emancipation of labour. Upon their energies and wisdom hinges the fate of the Republic.'[5]
Meanwhile, the Paris Federation of the International addressed a manifesto directly 'to the Social Democrats of Germany'. It appeared in the Volksstaat on 11 September. It recalled the solemn pledge made by the King of Prussia when in his speech from the Throne on the outbreak of war he had insisted that Germany was only fighting a war which had been forced upon her, and that she was waging it against the Emperor and not the people of France. The Emperor, the manifesto pointed out, was now a prisoner of the Germans and France was a Republic. 'In the name of 39,000,000 people…we repeat what was said to the European Coalition in 1793: the French people will not make peace with an enemy while he occupies their territory.' It called on the Germans to 'go back across the Rhine! Then France and Germany can link hands in friendship across both banks of the river for which they shed their blood. Let us forget the atrocities we have committed against each other at the behest of despots. Let us proclaim freedom, equality and fraternity among all nations!' Finally, to their fellow Social Democrats in Germany, the manifesto declared: 'The Social Democrats of France are confident that you will work with them to put an end to international hatred and achieve both general disarmament and universal harmony.'[6]
In its reply to the manifesto the Volksstaat declared: 'Up to 4 September Germany waged a defensive war.…The defensive war is now over. If fighting continues, it will have degenerated into a war of conquest, a war of monarchy against republic, of counter-revolution against revolution — a war waged as much against democratic Germany as republican France'. And when the North German Parliament met again in November to discuss 'the drafting of a Bill to raise the further sums required for the conduct of the war', the deputies of both working-class parties, Lassalleans and Eisenachers, tabled a request to the government 'to make peace as quickly as possible with the French Republic, and to renounce all intention of annexing French territory'.[7]
As soon as Parliament adjourned, Bebel and Liebknecht were arrested on a charge of high treason and sentenced to two years' imprisonment in a fortress. The Social Democratic movement had now lost its entire leadership. At the same time, the French section of the International had been affected by the war and by government repression. Serraillier reported to the General Council that, on his arrival in Paris in September, he had found that 'all members of the organization were either in prison or called up to their various regiments'.[8]
France's resistance to the German invasion, organized by her new Government of National Defence, soon collapsed. By 18 September German troops were approaching Paris, and at the end of October the fortress of Metz surrendered. The military situation seemed hopeless, and on 28 January the provisional government signed an armistice. Bismarck's terms included the surrender of Paris, the resignation of the provisional government and immediate elections for a National Assembly. The French government accepted.
The left in France — Socialists, Internationalists, Jacobins and Blanquists — regarded the capitulation as high treason. They called for the continuation of the struggle, and for a revolutionary-patriotic war on the model of France's revolutionary war of 1793, in which she had secured her freedom, chased the armies of the coalition monarchies from her territory and carried the revolution into their own lands. But the French peasants were no longer revolutionary. They were tired of the war, while the propertied middle class was paralysed by its fear of the workers. The elections on 8 February resulted in a crippling defeat for the left. Among the new Deputies there were only twenty Socialists, and two members of the International: Henri-Louis Tolain and Benoît Malon. About 450 described themselves as Monarchists, almost equally divided between Legitimists and Orléanists. The rest were middle-class Liberals and Republicans.
The government was led by Adolphe Thiers, with Jules Favre as Foreign Secretary. On 13 February the National Assembly met, not in Paris, where the working class was gripped by a fervour of revolutionary patriotism, but in Bordeaux, from where it soon moved to Versailles. Two weeks later Thiers and Favre signed the Peace Treaty, which included the cession of Alsace-Lorraine, a vast war indemnity and the occupation of Paris by the Prussian army. But Paris refused to capitulate. The workers were armed, since the provisional government had itself organized a National Guard as a popular militia, to defend Paris after the proclamation of the Republic. Thus the working class found itself with the physical means of defying the government.
Thiers tried to disarm Paris. On 18 March 1871 regular troops were ordered to attack an artillery position held by the National Guard in Montmartre. The workers of Paris rose under the leadership of Eugène Varlin, the regular troops were repulsed and the government fled to Versailles. Thiers then withdrew the entire apparatus of central and local government from the city, and in order to crush Paris asked Bismarck to release the French soldiers held by the Germans.
The administration's withdrawal left a vacuum. Since the rise of Napoleon I, Paris had been governed not by an elected local authority but by civil servants and officers appointed directly by the government, and although each of the twenty districts of the city had its own mayor, he had scarcely any effective authority. With the withdrawals of the local administration, therefore, there was only one authority left in Paris: the Central Committee of the National Guard. As soon as the Central Committee found itself in possession of effective power, it decided to call elections for a popular assembly to which it could hand over the government of the city. The local council elected in this way assumed in its proclamation of 28 May the symbolic title of Commune de Paris,[9] after the style of the Council of Paris which had been set up during the revolution in 1792.
The Commune was not the result of a conspiracy or of a preconceived plan. It came into existence to fill a vacuum left by the removal of the administrative apparatus by Thiers. With the disappearance of those institutions which had hitherto exercised authority in Paris, a new source of authority based on new institutions became essential if Paris was to be governed at all. And in the circumstances no authority was acceptable other than a council elected by the citizens.
The Commune was elected by universal, direct and equal suffrage. As a great many members of the propertied middle class had fled from the city, it came to represent the workers and the lower middle class. But it was in no way Socialist, and only seventeen of the ninety-two elected representatives were members of the International's Paris Federation. Nor was it, as Lissagaray pointed out, a workers' government; two third of its members were petit bourgeois in origin. Politically, the Commune was controlled by Blanquists and Jacobins. Its earliest decrees were concerned with political freedom. 'Freedom of thought,' declared one of them, 'is the prime freedom'; and the Commune went on to secure the separation of church and state, and 'considering that the clergy was in reality an ally of the monarchy against freedom', the transfer of hereditary church lands to common ownership. It also ordered the demolition of the Emperor's column in the Place Vendóme — that 'symbol of brute force and infamy' as it was called in the decree of 13 April. Later, after the fall of the Commune, the famous painter Gustave Courbet, a member of both the Commune and the International, was prosecuted by the Versailles government for his part in the demolition.
The Commune announced its social aims in its 'Declaration to the French People' on 17 April, as 'the ending…of exploitation, stock exchange speculation, monopolies and privileges to which the proletariat attributes its slavery, and the fatherland its misery and ruin'. But the decrees past under the Commune did not aim at the destruction of private property. Their tendency was social reformist, not Socialist. Characteristics were the orders prohibiting night work in bakeries, forbidding employers to make deductions from wages and salaries by way of fines, banning sales of unredeemed articles by bawn-shops and suspending rents for a limits period. In only two decrees is it possible to discern Socialist tendencies: the provision of a maximum salary of 6,000 francs a year for public servants and the transfer to co-operative associations of all businesses abandoned by their owners, with payment of compensation. In any event the Commune, with a life-span of only two months, could hardly have achieved a radical transformation of society. Moreover, throughout the entire period, Paris was under siege and her people engaged in a desperate and relentless struggle for survival.
The great historical significance of the Commune, in Marx's view, which he expressed in an Address written for the General Council, lay in its form of organization. It had developed a system of direct democracy in contrast to the central, hierarchical powers of the traditional state. Marx described it as 'the political form, at last discovered, under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor'. Breaking away from the normal parliamentary system with its rigid separation between legislature and executive, it combined both functions in one. Parish councils, which were directly responsible to the electors and could be recalled by them at any time, formed commissions responsible for the various branches of administration which they carried out themselves. All public posts, administrative, judicial and teaching, were elected by universal suffrage, with a right of recall. The principle on which the Commune was based was the decentralization of political power. Its programme would have created a French nation formed from a voluntary federation of local communities. In its 'Declaration to the French People' the Commune acknowledged the complete autonomy of every local community: 'Each small section of the nation should be a microcosm of the life of the whole, creating the unity of a beehive rather than of a barracks. The organic cell of the French Republic is the local community, the Commune.'
Contrary to legend, the Paris Federation of the International was in no sense at the heart of the working class in this period of revolutionary upheaval. It played no noticeable part in the proclamation of the Republic on 4 September, the uprising of 18 March or the proclamation of the Commune on 28 March. Under the dominant influence of the Proudhonists, who denied the necessity for working-class political activity, its initial attitude to the Republic had been one of suspicion. Organizationally too the Federation was weak. It had been broken up by Napoleon's police shortly before the outbreak of war, and had been only slowly and partially re-established by the beginning of the Commune. 'We are indeed a moral force in Paris, if nowhere else in France,' said Leo Frankel at the sitting of the Paris Federation on 15 February, 1871, 'but we are not a material force, for we have no organization.' When on 14 March the General Council of the International considered calling a conference in London. Serraillier opposed on the grounds that the Paris Federation, which was 'scarcely organized', would be unable to send representatives.
Karl Marx, in the 'Second Address' of the General Council, issued five days after the proclamation of the Republic, had urged the French section of the International to concentrate first on re-establishing working-class organization. They should not waste efforts in insurrection, since without a strong basis of organization, attempts to overthrow the bourgeois government and seize power would undoubtedly end in defeat. Serraillier returned to Paris soon after the Republic had been proclaimed, with these directions from the General Council, and Eugène Dupont, the Corresponding Secretary for France, urged the same course in his letters to the French section. The Paris Federation followed this line and took no part in the Blanquist attempts to seize power on 31 October and 22 January. Leading members of the International in Paris, such as Varlin, Vaillant, Frankel and Melon, joined the Central Committee of the National Guard; after the Commune was established they placed themselves at its disposal. The main political posts in the Commune, however, were taken over by Blanquists and Jacobins. Members of the International, constituting a small minority in the council of the Commune, were allocated to economic and social tasks. Varlin, Beslay and Jourde went to the Finance Commission, Pindy and Duval to the Military Commission, Assi and Chalain to the Commission for Public Security, Frankel to the Commission for Labour and Commerce, Vaillant to Education, Theisz to the Post Office, Camélinat to the Mint and Fontain to Telegraphs.
On 18 May the Peace Treaty was ratified by the National Assembly, and three days later the Versailles troops began their attack on Paris. Bismarck had placed 10,000 French prisoners of war at the disposal of the Versailles government for the suppression of the Commune. Thiers could now attack Paris with overwhelming force. The battle for the city opened on 21 May, and lasted for eight days. The Versailles troops had to capture a whole series of barricades, one after the other, against bitter resistance from their working-class defenders. Charles Delescluse, who commanded the Commune's forces, was killed in the street fighting, was killed in the street fighting. Eugène Varlin, who took over the command, was captured by government troops on the last barricade and slashed with swords as he was dragged, with one eye hanging out of its socket, to the firing-squad. Bleeding from innumerable wounds, he was shot and his body mutilated. Finally, when the Commune had been drowned in the blood of its defenders, the victors went on killing in cold fury and with a cruelty unequalled in the nineteenth century.[10]
Marx had warned the French workers against the 'desperate folly' of seizing power. From the very inception of the Commune he knew that it was doomed.[11] These forebodings explain the strange fact that the International remained silent during the two-month life of the Commune, the only proletarian revolution to occur during the lifetime of the International; it issued neither an appeal for solidarity nor even an expression of sympathy and support. Marx's powerful 'Third Address' — the Civil War in France — was written after the overthrow of the Commune.[12]
Marx read the 'Address' to the General Council at its meeting on 30 May, three days after the fall of the Commune. In the sheer force of its eloquence and passion, it was one of the most impressive documents in the entire range of political literature. It constituted a formidable indictment which 'nailed' the 'exterminators' of the Commune 'to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.' It was, at the same time, a memorial to the defenders of the Commune, worthy of the terrible tragedy which consumed them. Historically it is also of considerable importance, since in Lenin's interpretation it provided the basis for the Bolshevik view of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The 'Address' did not attempt to provide a critical history of the Commune. It described the events which led to the rising, and the acts of treachery which caused its downfall. It also provided an assessment of its historical importance. Marx saw it as expressing 'a vague aspiration after a Republic that was to supersede not only the monarchical form of class-rule, but class-rule itself'. Its essential secret lay, he said, in its character as 'essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour'.
Thiers, and after him the middle-class press of Europe, had charged the International with responsibility for the Commune. Although Thiers himself had allowed thousands of Paris workers to be slaughtered and their homes to be burned, he accused the International of instigating 'arson'. To this Marx replied that 'the police-tinged bourgeois mind naturally figures to itself the International Working Men's Association as acting in the manner of a secret conspiracy, its central body ordering from time to time explosions in different countries. Our Association is in fact nothing but the international bond between the most advanced working men in the various countries in the civilized world. Wherever, in whatever shape, and under whatever conditions the class struggle obtains any consistency, it is but natural that members of our Association should stand in the foreground.' Against the flood of denunciation and slander which poured as from an overflowing sewer against the Commune, Marx concluded his Address with the forthright and uncompromising statement, in the name of the International: 'Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class.'
1. For a detailed account of contrasting attitudes among German Social Democrats during the Franco-German War, see Karl Kautsky, Sozialisten und Krieg (Prague, 1937), pp. 188–214; August Bebel, Aus meinem Leben (Stuttgart, 1910 – 14), vol. II, pp. 167–85.
2. For the text of this manifesto, see Der Wiener Hochverratsprozess, p. 859.
3. For this and the subsequent 'Address of the General Council on the War and the Paris Commune', see Karl Marx, Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich, with an introduction by Friedrich Engels.
4. It was not known, at the time, that Bismarck had deliberately provoked the war by his 'editing' of the Ems Telegram. Many years later Bebel wrote: 'Bismarck deceived the whole world. He managed to create the impression that Napoleon III provoked the war, and that he, the peace-loving Bismarck, found himself the innocent victim of aggression.…The events which led to the outbreak of war were so confusing that nobody noticed that France, which declared war, was militarily unprepared, while Germany, against whom war was declared, was ready for it down to the last detail, and completed its mobilization without a hitch.' Bebel admitted that if he and Liebknecht 'had known, at the time of the outbreak of hostilities, what we learned during the next few years from official publications and memoirs', they would not have abstained from voting war credits. 'We should have voted directly against them' — August Bebel, Aus meinem Leben (Stuttgart, 1910 – 14), vol. III, pp. 167–8; vol. II (1911), p. 167.
5. Fear that the French workers, under the stress of revolutionary and patriotic emotions, would attempt an uprising during the war in an attempt to avert the defeat of France and to establish the 'Social Republic', was a nightmare for Marx. Almost a month before the battle of Sedan, on 8 August 1870, he wrote to Engels: 'What troubles me at the moment is the state of affairs in France itself. The next great battle can hardly fail to turn against the French.…If a revolution breaks out in Paris, the question is whether the workers have the means and the leadership to offer a serious resistance to the Prussians.' After Sedan, Engels wrote to Marx on 12 September: 'If anything at all could be done in Paris, a rising of the workers before peace is concluded should be prevented.…However the peace may turn out, it must be concluded before the workers can do anything at all. If they were victorious now — in the service of national defence — they would have to inherit the legacy of Bonaparte and of the present lousy Republic, and would be needlessly crushed by the German armies and thrown back another twenty years.…But will they not let themselves be carried away again under the pressure of the external attack, and proclaim the Social Republic on the eve of the storming of Paris? It would be appalling if, as their last act of war, the German armies had to fight out a battle with the Parisian workers at the barricades. It would throw us back fifty years. …' — Marx-Engels Briefwechsel, vol. IV, pp. 430n., 459.
6. For the text of the manifesto, see Der Wiener Hochverratsprozess, pp. 408ff.
7. August Bebel, Aus meinem Leben (Stuttgart, 1910 – 14), vol. III, p. 194.
8. Minutes of the General Council, 28 February 1871.
9. The classic, if not very scientific, account of the Paris Commune is P.-O. Lissagaray's Histoire de la Commune de 1871. A valuable analysis of political theories prevailing during the Commune is given by Heinrich Koechlin in his Die Pariser Commune des Jahres 1871 im Bewustein threr Anhänger (Basle, 1850). For an excellent examination of the Commune's social and political structure, see G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought — Marxism and Anarchism, 1850 – 90 (London, 1954,) ch. VII. See also N. Lukin, 'Protokolle des Generalrats der Internationalen Arbeiter-Assoziation als Quelle für die Geschichte der Pariser Kommune' in Unter dem Banner des Marxismus (1932), Year VI, no. 1, and, and in particular Karl Marx, Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich. For a critical treatment, see also E. S. Mason, The Paris Commune (New York, 1930); Samuel Bernstein, The Beginnings of Marxian Socialism in France (New York, 1933).
10. 'Including those killed, wounded and deported, there were 110,000 victims; women, children and aged dependants were left to shift for themselves. …' This estimate of the brutality committed after the fall of the Commune was made by the founder of the Catholic trade-union movement in France, Jules Zirnheld, in Cinquante annés de syndicalisme chrétien (Paris, 1937), p. 19.
11. Some years later he explained the reasons why, in his opinion, the Commune was bound to founder: '… apart from the fact,' he observed to Domela Nieuwenhuis, 'that this [the Commune] was merely the rising of a city under exceptional conditions, the majority of the Commune was in no way Socialist, nor could it be. With a modicum of common sense, however, it could have reached a compromise with Versailles useful to the whole people — the only thing that could be attained at the time. The appropriation of the Bank of France alone would have been enough to put a rapid end to the rodomontades of the Versailles crowd. …' — Correspondence, edited by Dona Torr (1936), pp. 386–7).
12. For an explanation of this 'apparent mystery', see Collins and Abramsky, op. cit., pp. 194–8.