Karl Marx: Man and Fighter Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen

Bakunin was not discouraged by these abortive attempts. What did not succeed in one place must succeed in another-- must succeed. For time was racing by and the German army was relentlessly advancing into France. 'If there is no popular rising in France within ten days, France is lost,' he wrote to his friends, almost in desperation. 'Oh, if I were young, I should not be writing letters but should be among you.' Danton's words were constantly upon his lips. 'Before marching against the enemy, it is necessary to destroy, to paralyse the enemy behind one.'1

On August 14 Blanqui and some of his followers carried out an attack on the police barracks in the Grande Rue de la Vilette. Their cry: 'Vive la République! Mort aux Prussiens! Aux armes!' was greeted with silence by a gaping throng. The rising collapsed pitifully.

News of the disaster of Sedan reached Paris on September 4; one hundred and twenty-five thousand men had been taken prisoner, six hundred guns had been captured and the Emperor had surrendered to the Prussians. The Empire collapsed without raising a finger in its own defence. A Republic was proclaimed in Paris, and the provinces, in so far as they had not anticipated Paris, followed suit.

Napoleon left the Republic a fearful heritage. The enemy was in the land, the armies were in disorder, the exchequer was bare. Marx's anxious query about the future was destined soon to have an answer.

On the night of September 5 Marx received a telegram from Longuet: 'Republic proclaimed.' The names of the members of the Provisional Government followed, with the words: Influence your friends in Germany immediately. He need not have added this injunction. The manifesto of the Paris sections of the International, which Marx received next day, was not calculated to make him hurry. On the contrary, it merely repelled him as being 'ridiculously chauvinistic,' with its demand that the Germans promptly withdraw across the Rhine--as if the Rhine could possibly be the frontier. But it was not a question of criticising inept phraseology or the style of a well or ill-written manifesto now. This was no time for historical analyses. On September 6 Marx addressed the General Council on the fundamental alteration in the European situation brought about by the downfall of Napoleon in France. Thanks to the tremendous authority he exercised on the General Council, he succeeded in persuading it to acknowledge the young French Republic, in spite of the hesitation and vacillation of some of its English members. It was decided that the new situation merited the issue of a second manifesto. This was also written by Marx, with the assistance of Engels in those passages which dealt with military matters. It was published on September 9.

The main theme of the manifesto, on which all the rest depended, was this; after Sedan Germany was no longer waging a war of defence. 'The war of defence ended with the surrender of Louis Napoleon, the capitulation of Sedan and the proclamation of the Republic in Paris. But long before these events occurred, at the very moment when the whole rottenness of the Bonapartist armies was revealed, the Prussian military camarilla set its heart on conquest.' To refute the alleged necessity of the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine for the defence of Germany Marx used arguments with which Engels supplied him. These were convincing, but they were only calculated to make an impression on military experts. The chief emphasis lay in the political argument, which made the General Council's manifesto the most significant document of the time.

With the victory and the consequences that threatened to follow in its wake Russia, from being a shadowy figure lurking in the background, came to the fore in a fashion that grew ever plainer and ever more menacing. Marx saw it, and did all that was in his power to make it visible to the world. But in Germany he was talking to men who were dazzled and blinded. Russia was far away, but Strasbourg was near, near enough to seize, and they seized it. 'Did the Teuton patriots really believe,' the manifesto said, 'that Germany's independence, freedom and peace would be assured if they forced France into the arms of Russia? If the success of German arms, the arrogance of victory and dynastic intrigues drive Germany to rob France of French soil, only two ways remain open to Germany. She must either become a conscious vassal of Russia's plans for self-aggrandisement, with all the risks that that involves--a policy that corresponds to Hohenzollern traditions--or, after a short rest, arm for a new "defensive" war, not one of these new-fashioned "localized" wars, but a war against the allied Slav and Latin races.' A week after Sedan Marx clearly delineated the main lines that German foreign policy was to follow up to the outbreak of the Great War; first the 'friendship' with Russia that Bismarck fostered, followed by preparations for war against the Franco-Russian entente that began as soon as that friendship was dissolved. A few sentences Marx wrote to his friend Sorge on September 1, 1870, bear brilliant witness to his foresight. 'What the Prussian donkeys don't see,' he wrote, 'is that the present war leads just as necessarily to war between Germany and Russia as the war of 1866 led to war between Prussia and France. That is the best result that I expect of it for Germany. "Prussianism" as such has never existed and cannot exist other than in alliance and in subservience to Russia. And this War No. 2 will act as the wet-nurse of the inevitable revolution in Russia.' Forty-four years later Germany went to war with Russia and France, in 1917 revolution, unleashed by the war, broke out in Russia, and in 1918 the semi-feudal military might of Prussia collapsed.

Marx was not deceived as to the weakness of the German workers' movement and its inability to prevent the approaching catastrophe. 'If the French workers were unable to check the aggressors in the midst of peace, have the German workers a better prospect of checking the victor in the midst of the clash of arms?' he wrote. Nevertheless, however difficult the position of the German proletariat might be, he believed 'it would do its duty.'

The fall of Louis Bonaparte opened up new and tremendous prospects to the French working classes. The General Council sent its greetings to the young Republic--to the Republic and not to the Provisional Government of National Defence. The mistrust felt for the latter in revolutionary circles was not misplaced. It consisted partly of avowed Orleanists, partly of 'middle-class Republicans, on some of whom the insurrection of June, 1848, had left an indelible mark.' Suspicion of the Orleanists, who occupied all the most important positions and regarded the Republic as but a bridge to the Restoration, was well-founded. Nevertheless, or rather for that very reason, Marx decided that the most pressing duty of the French workers was to support and defend the young Republic in spite of all its defects. The situation was full of dangers and full of temptations, requiring the most extreme caution and the most courageous initiative, iron self-control and all-daring heroism.

The struggle was no longer between Louis Napoleon, that 'commonplace canaille,' and a Germany which was on the defensive; republican France was now defending herself against rapacious German militarism. The manifesto called on the workers of France to do their duty as citizens. Their duty was to defend the French Republic against the invading Germans. 'Any attempt to overthrow the new Government with the enemy at the gates of Paris would be a desperate act of folly.' But at the same time it was obvious that the French working class must not forget its own class duties, and the General Council bade it exploit the favourable opportunity of forwarding its own interest to the extreme. Eugène Dupont, the representative of the French sections on the General Council, wrote to the Internationalists at Lyons: 'The bourgeoisie still have the power. In these circumstances the rôle of the workers, or rather their duty, is to let the bourgeois vermin make peace with the Prussians (for the shame of doing so will adhere to them always), not to indulge in outbreaks which would only consolidate their power, but to take advantage of the liberty which circumstances will provide to organise all the forces of the working class. ... The duty of our association is to activate and spread our organisation everywhere.' Six weeks later he wrote once more to Chavret at Lyons: 'The rôle (of the International) is to take advantage of every opportunity and every occasion to spread the organisation of the working class.'

'Restraint on the part of the International in France until after the conclusion of peace,' as Engels put it, was far from meaning that the French workers were to go on quietly and calmly organising as if they were living, say, in Belgium or in England or as if the date were still 1869. Their task was not only to participate actively in the struggle against the invaders and to continue the building up of their organisation. Marx highly praised what the members of the International did at Lyons before Bakunin ruined everything there. On October 19, 1870, he wrote to Beesly, saying that under pressure of the local section of the International a Republic had been set up before Paris took that step, and a revolutionary government immediately established; a commune, consisting partly of workers belonging to the International, partly of middle-class Radical Republicans. The octroi had been immediately abolished, and rightly so. The Bonapartist and clerical intriguers had been intimidated and energetic steps were taken to arm the whole population. Activity of this kind was far more than mere work of organisation; it meant that working-class organisations were actively co-operating in introducing and consolidating the Republican régime; and this was the only way the working-class movement could grow, by co-operating in shaping the country's destiny. Independent action of the working class must be postponed till later, until after the war was over and the necessary work of preparatory organisation had been done. Engels went so far as to stress the fact that the working class 'would need time to organise' even after the conclusion of peace. Hence it was impossible to decide in advance what form its future action might take. 'After the conclusion of peace,' Engels wrote in a letter to Marx on September 12, 'the workers' prospects in every direction will be brighter than ever before.' A remark in the same letter that 'not much fear need be entertained of the army returning from internment from the point of view of internal conflicts' indicates that he reckoned on the possibility--not the probability and definitely not the inevitability--of an armed struggle. In the same letter he warned the workers against any action during the war. 'If one could do anything in Paris,' Engels wrote, 'the thing to do would be to prevent the workers from striking until after the peace. Should they succeed in establishing themselves under the banner of national defence, they would take over the inheritance of Bonaparte and the present wretched republic, and would be vainly defeated by the German armies and thrown back again for twenty years. ... But if they do not let themselves be carried away under the pressure of foreign attacks but proclaim the social republic on the eve of the storming of Paris? It would be dreadful if the German army's last act of war were a battle with the Workers at the Paris barricades. It would throw us back fifty years, put everyone and everything into a false position, and, the national hatred and the demagogy that would take hold of the French workers! In this war France's active power of resistance is broken and with it goes the prospect of expelling the invaders by a revolution.'

For France the war was lost. He who continued it would be beaten and must humble himself before the victor. All other considerations must recede before that one decisive fact. The military situation alone forced the workers to hold back at least until the conclusion of peace. The manifesto warned them 'not to let themselves be swayed by national memories of 1792 as the French peasants had let themselves be deceived by national memories of the first Empire. Theirs was not to repeat the past but to build the future.' The argument sounded well, but if it had any validity it was but a secondary one. In the middle of August Engels had said that any government that tried to repeat the Convention would be but a sorry parody of it. After the Battle of Sedan a revolutionary war in the manner of 1792 seemed completely impossible. A letter of Marx's to Kugelmann, written on February 14, 1871, makes it clear that his attitude was determined by this estimate of the war situation. 'If France holds out, uses the armistice to reorganise her army and gives the war a real revolutionary character--and the crafty Bismarck is doing his utmost to this end--the great new German Borussian empire may still receive the baptism of a wholly unexpected thrashing.' To give the war a revolutionary character would be to repeat the Convention. In September, 1870, it would have only have been a miserable parody of the Convention. 'To sacrifice the workers now,' Engels wrote to Marx on September 7, 'would be strategy à la Bonaparte and MacMahon.'

While Marx did all he could to prevent the workers from attempting to overthrow the Provisional Government while the war lasted, Bakunin and the 'Jacobins' held the overthrow of the Provisional Government to be their most pressing task. The 'Jacobins,' students, intellectuals, and déclassés of all sorts, seized on the traditions of the French Revolution--not so much those of the Jacobin clubs, for many of them considered Robespierre to be an irresolute weakling, as to those of the Hébertists. Many of them had vague Socialist ideas, and all of them every day went politically a step farther Left than the day before. They were conspirators by tradition and inclination, completely unorganised as a group or even as a party; but they were united by that mental kink exhibited in its purest form by the Bohemians of the Left Bank, who were in revolt against absolutely everything.

In the history of London's political exiles in the sixties the 'Jacobins' did not play a very honourable rôle. Such of them as had formed a special 'French branch' of the International soon came into Violent conflict with the General Council. Anyone who worked for the International in France was immediately suspect in their eyes. Such a person was bound to have inclinations towards Bonapartism, if he were not actually an agent of Napoleon. Felix [sic] Pyat, Vésinier, and others of their leaders outdid each other in radicalism. Tyrannicide was their ideal. Pyat constantly drank toasts to 'the bullet that will slay a tyrant,' and he opened a subscription to buy a 'revolver of honour' for Beresovsky, the Pole who made an attempt on the life of Alexander II in Paris in 1867, and indulged in many similar pranks. Though not himself a member of the 'French branch,' he used it as his platform and behaved as though he were the living embodiment of the International itself. The behaviour of this irresponsible would-be politician, which in other circumstances would have been nothing but a bad joke, became a matter of occasionally serious embarrassment for the International. The General Council had repeatedly to announce that Pyat and his friends had nothing to do with them. It could not allow legal organisations on the Continent to be jeopardised by Pyat's ranting. Marx had bitter contempt for Pyat, the 'mountebank of 1848,' and 'these heroes of the revolutionary phrase, who, from a safe distance of course, kill kings and emperors and Louis Napoleon in particular.'

The news of the fall of the Empire turned these people's heads completely. 'The whole French branch has set off for Paris to-day,' Marx wrote to Engels on September 6, 1870, 'to commit imbecilities in the name of the International. They wish to overthrow the Provisional Government, proclaim the Paris Commune, appoint Pyat French ambassador in London, etc.' As Marx considered this an extremely dangerous enterprise he sent Serraillier to Paris after the Jacobins to warn people of the danger of insurrectionary action.

Bakunin did not lag behind them in zeal. The seed he had sown so carefully seemed to have ripened now. The moment had come to strike. All the old powers had collapsed; and there was only one way to save France now, Bakunin's way, anarchism. An uprising of popular passion would achieve both victory over the external enemy and the complete reorganisation of society. The two were inseparably united in his eyes. Bakunin left Switzerland on September 14. The difficulty he had in raising money for the fare cost him several valuable days, or so he feared. With a Pole and a former Russian officer as his travelling companions he went to Lyons, where his most devoted followers lived. At first there were only a very few who were willing to follow him, but he succeeded in winning over the hesitaters and the doubters. Two days after his arrival he wrote to Ogarev: 'The real revolution has not yet broken out here, but that will come. Everything is being done to prepare it. I am playing for high stakes. I hope to see the triumph soon.' A week later he was as good as certain of the victory of his cause: 'To-night we shall arrest our principal enemies; to-morrow there will be the last battle and, we hope, victory.' On September 28 Bakunin and his followers seized the town hall of Lyons and proclaimed a revolutionary Commune. Paragraph I of the first decree stated: 'The administrative and governmental machinery of the state, having become powerless, has been abolished.' But with this the revolutionary energy of the Lyons Bakuninists was exhausted. The venture collapsed pitifully after a few hours, and Bakunin only just managed to escape. In other towns, as in Marseilles, where Bakunin tried again, and in Brest, where his followers went to work, things did not even get as far as that.

When Marx learnt of Bakunin's adventures in Lyons he was indignant. 'Those asses have ruined everything,' he wrote to Beesly. Belonging as they did to the International, the Bakuninists, Marx stated, unfortunately had sufficient influence to cause his followers to deviate. Beesly would understand, Marx added, that the very fact that a Russian--represented as an agent of Bismarck by the middle-class newspapers--had the presumption to impose himself as the leader of a French Committee of Public Safety was quite sufficient to sway the balance of public opinion. It would have been difficult indeed to have saved France by decreeing the abolition of the state at a moment when she was engaged in a life and death struggle with a terrible enemy whose demands were increasing from day to day.

The fair words spoken by the King of Prussia at the beginning of the war--as usual, he had invoked God as his witness and declared that he was fighting Napoleon but not the people of France--were now completely forgotten. Anyone who dared remember them was denounced as a traitor. When the 'Eisenacher' party committee issued a proclamation to the workers protesting against the Prussian plans of conquest and demanding an honourable peace with the French Republic, a general had them arrested and led away in chains. The Government Press described the demand that a King of Prussia should keep his promises as 'ingenuous.'

France defended herself desperately. All revolutionary elements everywhere were on her side. Old Garibaldi hurried to the assistance of the French Republic with a legion of volunteers. It was necessary to help her from without.

Immediately after the proclamation of the Republic in Paris the General Council set itself at the head of the movement that demanded that Great Britain should recognise it. On September 10 a great workers' meeting in St. James's Hall demanded recognition of the French Republic and the conclusion of an honourable peace. The latter demand was closely associated with and indeed followed from it. Demonstrations increased during the winter months and at the turn of the year a large number of bourgeois politicians joined the pro-French front. Not satisfied with diplomatic intervention, they actually claimed that the time had come for British military intervention as well. Marx, as a foreigner, could not come forward publicly himself, so the campaign of meetings was led by Odger, an English member of the General Council. But Marx seized every opportunity of action that came his way. In January, 1871, he learned of the difficulties of the German army in France from an informed source, namely Johannes Miquel, a high Prussian official who had been a member of the Communist League. Marx saw to it that the news was transmitted to the Government of National Defence through Lafargue. For, as Marx once more stated in an open letter to Bismarck in the Daily News of January 19, 1871, 'France was now fighting not only for her own independence but for the liberty of Germany and of Europe.' The General Council of the International was behind a mass demonstration in Trafalgar Square on January 23, to which the workers marched carrying the tricolour.

Engels energetically pleaded France's cause in articles in the Pall Mall Gazette. He denounced the brutal retaliatory measures the Prussians took against the francs-tireurs. There was an answer to these methods, he said. 'Wherever a people allowed itself to be subdued merely because its armies had become incapable of resistance it has been held up to universal contempt as a nation of cowards,' he wrote, 'and wherever a people did energetically carry out this irregular resistance, the invaders very soon found it impossible to carry out the old-fashioned code of blood and fire. The English in America, the French under Napoleon in Spain, the Austrians in 1848 in Italy and Hungary, were very soon compelled to treat popular resistance as perfectly legitimate, from fear of reprisals on their own prisoners.' Engels tried to convince the British that military intervention need only be on a very small scale to succeed. 'If thirty thousand British soldiers landed at Cherbourg or Brest and were attached to the army of the Loire, they would give it a resolution unknown before.' He followed the heroic resistance of the raw French armies with great sympathy, and with more than sympathy.

Engels sent to Gambetta's secretary, through Lafargue, a memorandum containing a carefully thought-out plan for raising the siege to Paris. The original document has never been discovered and may have perished in those agitated times. But Engel's executors, Bebel and Bernstein, found the preliminary draft after his death and destroyed it, fearing the possibility of its being used as evidence of 'treason' against the German Social-Democrats. Bernstein refused to discuss the matter during the whole of his lifetime, and that was the reason why that very remarkable document has practically never been mentioned in print before. However, hints in memoirs, taken in conjunction with Engels's own statements in the articles he wrote on the war, enable one to form a pretty accurate idea of what he proposed. His underlying idea must have corresponded exactly with the plan that Bourbaki's army tried to carry out in December, 1870. The coincidence may have been more than accidental. Engels became so enthusiastic about his plans that he actually wanted to go to France to offer his services to Gambetta. Marx, however, was sceptical. 'Do not trust these bourgeois republicans,' he said to him, according to Charles Longuet, 'whether you are responsible or not, at the first hitch you will be shot as a spy.'

The General Council discussed the prospects of British intervention. Short reports of meetings that appeared in a local London paper, the Eastern Post, only give the barest outline of Marx's views. At the end of September he seems to have regarded the prospects of British intervention as very slight. Privateering, England's most powerful weapon against the Prussians, had been forbidden by the Declaration of Paris in 1856. But the situation changed on October 20, when Russia denounced the Treaty of Paris as far as the Black Sea was concerned. The transactions of the General Council on January 1, 1871, show how Marx regarded the distribution of forces then. Engels said that if England had declared war on Russia after October 20, Russia would have joined forces with Prussia. Austria, Italy and Turkey would have adhered to the side of England and France. Turkey would have been strong enough to defend herself against Russia, and Europe would have expelled Prussia from France. Such a European War would have meant the saving of France and Europe and the downfall of absolutism. At a meeting on March 14 Marx was still in favour of British intervention and a ruthless privateering war. But by the middle of March the war was over. Four days later the Commune was proclaimed in Paris.

On January 28 the Provisional Government had signed an armistice with Prussia, in spite of Bismarck's monstrous demands. The population of besieged Paris was on the point of starvation, all the French armies had been defeated, and all prospect of the fortune of war changing seemed to have vanished. Was there really no way of saving France from dishonour? Had every possible thing been done? The Provisional Government had been accused of indecision, cowardice and even treachery before--treachery was the favourite accusation the Bakuninists and Jacobins directed at 'cette vermine bourgeoise'--and hundreds of thousands of Paris workers and members of the petty-bourgeoisie now started wondering whether these accusations, which they had scarcely listened to before, were not, perhaps, justified after all. They started listening to them with an attentive ear. Once more they turned over in their minds all their dreadful experiences in those four-and-a-half months of siege, and found much that was strange and difficult to understand, and much that had never seemed very plausible to them, though they had accepted it at the time as military necessity, not intelligible to them with their limited view over but a sector of the front. But now they suddenly looked at everything with different eyes. It is known to-day that after the Battle of Sedan it was absolutely impossible for the French to have won the war without external aid. The question whether a revolutionary war might or might not have forced the Prussians to reduce their demands--Marx still believed this possible as late as February--is scarcely one that can be settled now. But one thing is known now. The Parisians were justified in their suspicions. Paris was not defended as it might have been. The military command was crippled not only by disbelief in the possibility of success. There were large sections among the officers who were bitterly opposed to putting arms into the hands of the 'rabble,' particularly the workers, for fear that though they might fight against the external enemy to-day, to-morrow they might turn their arms against the enemy within. And the more violently the extremists agitated--the possessing classes regarded as an extremist anyone who did not devotedly accept everything that came from above--the more acute their fear of the future became. The Prussians were their enemies to-day, but they might be friends and allies in the revolution to-morrow. Towards the end of the siege the most shameless of these people made no more secret of the fact that they would prefer the Germans to march in to having a revolution in Paris. Fear of the imminence of insurrection was not the least of the factors that led the Provisional Government to conclude an armistice. The Germans were perfectly well aware of this. Side by side with the peace negotiations there took place negotiations concerning the assistance that Bismarck might provide." He was prepared to release immediately as many French prisoners as might be needed to refill the ranks of the 'army of order,' and the Provisional Government pledged itself to disarm the workers of Paris as soon as possible. Rumours of this spread quickly and intensified suspicion. From this to conviction of the Provisional Government's treachery to France was but a step. The Bakuninists and their allies, the Jacobins, saw to it that the step was taken.

This is not the place to write the history of the Paris Commune. Spontaneous mass movements and the deliberate actions of organised groups were so inextricably intermingled that in spite of all that has been written about it and all the research that has been done, the tangle has never been completely unravelled. But one thing is sure. The theory that the March revolution in Paris was an entirely spontaneous rising, entirely unorganised and unprepared, does not correspond to the facts.

True, Bakunin, the arch-conspirator, took no part in it. His strength was broken by the reverse he suffered at Lyons. While still there he wrote to a friend in deep despair: 'Farewell liberty, farewell Socialism, farewell justice for the people, and farewell the triumph of humanity!' All his hopes of France had been in vain. 'I have no more faith in the revolution in France,' he wrote at the end of October, 1870. 'The country is no longer revolutionary at all. The people has become as doctrinaire and as bourgeois as the bourgeois. The social revolution might have saved it, and the social revolution alone was capable of saving it.' The people had shown itself incapable of embracing its own salvation. 'Farewell all our dreams of imminent emancipation. There will be a crushing and overwhelming reaction.'

Great as Bakunin's influence on his friends was, on this occasion they did not follow him--his friends in Paris in particular. What bound them to him was not a thought-out programme--to say nothing of a comprehensive interpretation of society--but a will to action that flinched at no obstacles, recognised no obstacles; they were united less by community of conviction than by community of mood; and moods in besieged Paris were necessarily different from what they were at Lyons. Certainly Lyons had been a fiasco, and hard as it might be, they must be better prepared next time. That was what they thought in Paris. They did not rise but made their preparations first. They regarded the incident at Lyons, which had been a terrible blow to Bakunin, as but a preliminary skirmish. Their battle was still to come. They drew up their ranks. Their leader was Varlin.

He was not a particularly gifted speaker, but he set no great store by oratory. An able organiser, energetic and clear-sighted, he took up the cause of his class with complete devotion and utterly without personal ambition. General Cluseret called him 'the Christ of the working class,' a phrase that sounded false only to those who did not know the details of his life. The workers loved him as their best friend. His work on the Marseillaise had brought him into contact with the revolutionary intelligentsia, particularly with the leading men among the Jacobins. With some of them he was on terms of personal friendship and he was exceptionally fitted to re-establish political liaison between them and the Bakuninists, to whose ranks he himself belonged.

On September 4, 1870, Varlin was still in Brussels, to which he had been compelled to flee to escape the attentions of the Bonapartist police. On September 5 he made a speech to the workers of Paris. He very soon resumed the prominent position he had previously occupied in the Regional Council of the International, and there was more than enough for him to do. The minutes of the Regional Council's meetings in January, 1871, i.e. after a period of three months' intensive work, show that a delegate complained that the sections had been broken up and their members scattered--which gives an indication of the state the Paris sections must have been in during the first few weeks of the Republic. Another delegate was of the opinion that the International had been wrecked by the events that followed the proclamation of the Republic. In spite of exaggerations, due to reaction after perhaps excessive hopes, in the main these statements were correct. The International in Paris did not develop along the lines that Marx had indicated for it. Difficult the task that confronted the leaders of the Paris sections was--it was no light task, in the midst of the feverish excitement of a besieged city, to attempt to persuade members of the profoundly agitated and half-starving working-class masses to join an organisation which was not concerned with their immediate and most pressing interests. But exceptional as the obstacles were, some if not all of them might have been overcome if Varlin and his comrades had not set themselves aims which, though important, were less important than the resuscitation of the sections. He who aimed at overthrowing the Government of National Defence in the midst of war had no time to lose with secondary things but had necessarily to go straight forward towards his goal; and conferring with the Jacobins on preparations for an insurrection was obviously more important than the troublesome effort of trying to build up the still weak sections of the International.

The most important revolutionary organisation in Paris was the Central Committee of the twenty arrondissements, which was intended from the first not merely to be a popular check on the Government but to be a definite substitute for it when the proper moment came. The Committee was in the hands of the Bakuninists and their allies, the Jacobins, and its paper was Le Combat, which was edited by Félix Pyat. There were plenty of differences between the Bakuninists and the Jacobins, but they faded into the background behind their common goal, the overthrow of the Government and the setting up of the revolutionary Commune. Bakunin at Lyons had associated himself with General Cluseret, though he had very soon regretted the decision. But the Bakuninists in Paris remained faithful to their alliance with the Jacobins almost to the last day of the Commune. Little detailed information is extant concerning the activities of the Central Committee. It had contacts with Lyons, and General Cluseret went there on its behalf, though it did not identify itself with Bakunin's attempted rising. But it did learn from it that the time to strike had not yet come. A circular signed by Varlin and Benoît Malon written at the end of 1870 stated: 'We are hurrying the organisation of our Republican committees, the first elements of our future revolutionary communes. We are not neglecting to take precautions against the scattered but menacing forces of reaction. We are organising our vigilance committees with this end in view and we are planting the foundations of districts, which were so useful in '93. Our revolution has not yet come, bu we shall make it, and, when we are rid of the Prussians, we shall lay the foundations in a revolutionary fashion of the egalitarian society of which we dream.'

The armistice got rid of the Prussian millstone for them, or so, at least, they thought, and now the time for action had come. The first task was to win over the National Guard, whose numbers had grown enormously and whose composition had fundamentally altered during the siege. Whereas previously it had been an instrument of the possessing classes, scarcely yielding in loyalty to the Imperial Guard itself, its ranks were now filled with workers and members of the petty-bourgeoisie. After the armistice Paris had a garrison of twelve thousand regular troops, but there were two hundred and fifty-six battalions of the National Guard. If they came over to the side of revolution victory, at any rate in Paris, was assured.

The National Guard had formed its own central committee. Within a short time Varlin and his friends had succeeded in gaining influence upon the battalions and the central committee. A meeting of the delegates of the National Guard was held on March 10, 1871, and presided over by Pindy, the Bakuninist who had attempted a rising on August 9 in the previous year. One battalion after another declared itself for the revolution. Varlin was full of confidence. P. L. Lavrov, the Russian philosopher and revolutionary, who was living in Paris and knew Varlin, describes in a letter a conversation he had with him a few days before March 18. 'Another week, Varlin said, 'and seventeen of the twenty arrondissements will be ours; the other three will not be for us, but they will not do anything against us. Then we shall turn the prefecture of police out of Paris, overthrow the Government and France will follow us.'

Varlin had foreseen well. A Government attempt to take away the rifles of the National Guard precipitated the outbreak of the revolution by a few days. Nevertheless Varlin's calculation was correct. On March 18 fifteen of the twenty arrondissements acknowledged the authority of the Central Committee of the National Guard; two hundred and fifteen of the two hundred and fifty-six battalions adhered to it. The Commune was proclaimed in Paris.

'The International did not raise a finger to make the Commune,' Engels later wrote to Sorge. Varlin was one of the two secretaries of the Paris regional council; but his work for the Commune was not done as secretary of the International. The minutes of the meetings of the regional council during this period have been preserved, and the meagreness of references to the movement that led to the Commune is astonishing. To Lavrov, who was comparatively a slight acquaintance, Varlin made no secret of what was going forward, while at the same time those delegates of the Regional Council who were not his associates had no idea of what the morrow might bring forth. On March 17, the day before the rising, a delegate wrote in answer to Gambon, who wanted to know what the attitude of the Regional Council was to the assembly at Versailles: 'In view of the obscurity of the political situation, the Regional Council, like you, is in perplexity. What is to be done? What do the people really feel at heart?' All the same the organisers of the Commune were leading Paris members of the International, though the General Council in London did not 'raise a finger.' There is no reference in any documents or in any letter of Marx or Engels, even in those of the most confidential nature, that gives the slightest indication that the rising in Paris was demanded, much less organised, by London.

But nevertheless, as Engels wrote in the same letter to Sorge, the Commune was 'unquestionably the intellectual child of the International'; not because Marx and Engels declared complete solidarity with Varlin and his Bakuninist comrades or with the Blanquists or with Pyat and his Jacobins--they knew practically nothing whatever about the activities of these groups in February and the first half of March; not because the Commune was 'staged' by the International, which it was not; but because the Commune, with all the limitations of its time and place, with all its illusions and all its mistakes, was the European proletariat's first great battle against the bourgeoisie. Whether it was a mistake at that juncture to resort to arms, whether the time was misjudged, the leaders deluded, the means unsuitable, all such questions receded before the fact that the proletariat in Paris was fighting for its emancipation and the emancipation of the working class. The latter was the battle-cry of the International. Marx's attitude to the Commune, was determined by that fact.

Unfortunately only a few of Marx's utterances during those months have survived, but all the indications available go to show that from the first he regarded the Commune's prospects of success as very slight. Oberwinder, an Austrian Socialist, who later became a police agent, says in his memoirs that 'a few days after the outbreak of the March rising in Paris Marx wrote to Vienna that the course it had taken precluded all prospects of success.' The utmost that Marx hoped for was a compromise, an honourable peace between Paris and Versailles.

Such an agreement, however, was only attainable if the Commune forced it upon its enemy. But this it failed to do. 'If they succumb,' Marx wrote to Kugelmann, 'only their kind-heartedness is to blame.' On April 6 he wrote to Liebknecht: 'If the Parisians are beaten it looks as if it will be by their own fault, but a fault really deriving from their excessive decency.' The Central Committee and later the Commune, he said, gave the mischievous wretch, Thiers, time to centralise the hostile forces (1) by foolishly not wishing to start civil war, as though Thiers himself had not started it by his attempted forcible disarming of Paris, and (2) by wishing to avoid the appearance of usurping power, wasting valuable time electing the Commune--its organisation, etc., wasted still more time--instead of marching on Versailles immediately after the forces of reaction had been suppressed in Paris. Marx believed the Government would only consent to a compromise if the struggle against Versailles--military, economic and moral--was conducted with extreme vigour. Marx regarded as one of the Commune's greatest mistakes the fact that it treated the Bank of France as a holy of holies off which it must piously keep its hands. Had it taken possession of the Bank of France it would have been able in case of need to threaten the country's whole economic life in such a fashion as to force the Versailles Government very quickly to give in. Once civil war had broken out it must be continued according to the rules of war. But during the first few weeks the Commune conducted it sluggishly, and worse, in the face of an imminent attack it failed to consolidate the position of its weak but important outposts outside Paris. Even the steps taken in the rest of the country to weaken the enemy at the gates of Paris were only carried out, if not altogether neglected. 'Alas! in the provinces the action taken is only local and pacific,' Marx wrote on May 13 to Fränkel in Paris. The action in the provinces which Marx considered so necessary had, of course, nothing in common with some adventurous plans which were being hatched in Switzerland. There the old insurrectionary leaders, P. Becker and Rüstow, were planning an invasion of the South of France by Swiss members of the International. They believed they would carry the people with them and rescue Paris. In other words they planned a repetition of Herwegh's expedition of 1848. The 'Legion of Internationalists' would have benefited no one but the Commune's enemies. Becker complained later that 'London' would have nothing to do with the enterprise, and 'London' meant Marx. When the Commune was on the point of collapse Marx advised the leaders with whom he was in contact to transfer 'papers that would be compromising to the canaille at Versailles' to a safe place. He believed that the threat of publishing them might force them to moderation. All that Marx did, all the advice that he gave, was directed to one end. 'With a small amount of common sense,' he wrote ten years later to the Dutchman, Domela Nieuwenhuis, 'the Commune could have attained all that was attainable at that time, namely a compromise that would have been useful to the whole mass of the people.'

Bakunin, however, hoped not for a compromise but for a heroic defeat. He had as little faith as Marx in victory for the people of Paris. 'But their deaths will not be in vain if they do their duty,' he wrote to his friend Ozerov at the beginning of April. 'In perishing let them burn down at least the half of Paris.' He could not contain himself with joy at the thought of the day 'ou le diable s'éveillera' and a bonfire would be made of at least a part of the old world. At Locle, where he was living at the time, he waited impatiently for 'heroic' deeds. One of his followers describes how 'he foresaw the Commune's downfall, but what he wanted above all else was that it should have a worthy end. He talked about it in advance and said: 'My friends, is it not necessary that the Tuileries be burned down?' And when the Tuileries were burned down, he entered the group room with rapid strides--though he generally walked very slowly--struck the table with his stick and cried: 'Well, my friends, the Tuileries are in flames. I'll stand a punch all round!' Bakunin had no contacts with Paris. What happened there happened without him, without his advice or help.

Marx's opportunities of influencing the course of events in Paris were not much better. The Paris Regional Council's messages to the General Council were more than meagre. Towards the end of April Marx complained that the General Council had not received a single letter from the Paris section. True, he had had a special emissary, the shoemaker Auguste Serraillier, in Paris since the end of March, but Serraillier could do nothing in the face of the ranting of the Jacobins. Pyat and Vésinier were particularly prominent in this direction, and the help which Serraillier besought of the General Council did not avail him very much. The otherwise excellent and enthusiastic Serraillier was not even adequate as a reporter, and Marx learned practically nothing from him. The difficulties of keeping up a regular correspondence between London and blockaded Paris were, of course, very great. Marx managed occasionally to smuggle information through to Paris by making use of a German business man, and two or three letters even reached Varlin and Fränkel, the leading Communards. But these only serve to demonstrate what is also demonstrated by all the rest of the evidence; namely the smallness of the extent to which Marx was able to influence the Commune. But he could at least work for it.

From the very first day, to quote Marx's words in a letter to Kugelmann, 'the wolves and curs of the old society' descended in a pack upon the Paris workers; they lied, cheated, slandered, no means were too filthy, no sadistic fantasy too absurd to be employed. The Liberal Press yielded in nothing to the openly reactionary Press, and Bismarck's newspapers used the same phrases as did Thiers's papers and the great English Press. And they were believed. Even those who otherwise looked with favour upon the International wavered and wished to repudiate the Paris 'monsters.' Even some of the English members of the General Council objected to the General Council's defence of the Commune, in spite of the fact that in England there was still some possibility of distinguishing the true from the false. Other countries were entirely without information. The General Council was overwhelmed with inquiries from everywhere. Marx informed Fränkel that he wrote several hundred letters 'to all the corners of the earth where we have connections,' and from time to time he managed to get an article into the Press. But that was not sufficient by far. The General Council had to proclaim the International's attitude to the Commune to the whole world.

Ten days after the rising Marx was instructed by the General Council to write an address 'to the people of Paris.' But at a meeting on April 4 it was decided temporarily to postpone it, as on account of the blockade it would not have reached those to whom it was addressed. It was also intended to issue a manifesto to the workers of other countries, but this too was postponed, and for two reasons. On April 25 Marx wrote to Fränkel that the General Council was still waiting for news from day to day, but the Paris sections remained silent; and the General Council could wait no longer, for the English workers were waiting impatiently for enlightenment. Marx was forced to toil through the English newspapers--French newspapers only reached England very irregularly--to find what he wanted. His notebooks during this period are full of excerpts from the Press. Even the apparently least important details were valuable to him; he kept them all and tried patiently to form a picture of the great event that was happening from the chaotic jumble of truth and half-truth and fiction that confronted him. On top of these difficulties another one came to hamper him. At a time when every ounce of his energy was demanded he became ill. During the first half of May he was unable to attend the meetings of the General Council; he could only report, through Engels, that he was working on the manifesto. On May 30, when at last he was able to read his address, The Civil War in France, to the members of the General Council, the Commune had already been honourably defeated.

In that bloody week of May twenty thousand Communards had been killed on the barricades, cut down in the streets by the bloodthirsty Versailles troops, or massacred in the prison yards. Tens of thousands of prisoners awaited death or banishment. This was not the moment for writing an historical treatise, a cool and dispassionate analysis and critique of the Commune. The manifesto was no lament for the dead, no funeral elegy, but a rapturous hymn to the martyrs of the war of proletarian emancipation, an aggressive defence of those who were slandered even in death. Never had Marx, the passionate fighter, fought so passionately. One recalls his scepticism at the beginning of the war. He had written that after twenty years of the Bonapartist farce one was scarcely justified in counting on revolutionary heroism. The Commune had taught him he was wrong. He looked on, astonished and overwhelmed at 'the elasticity, the historical initiative, the self-sacrificing spirit of these Parisians.' In a letter to Kugelmann he wrote: 'After six months of starvation and destruction, at the hands of internal treachery even more than through the foreign enemy, they rose under the Prussian bayonets as though the war between France and Germany had never existed and the enemy were not outside the gates of Paris. History has no comparable example of such greatness.' The address hailed Paris, 'working, thinking, fighting, bleeding Paris, almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of the cannibals at its gates--radiant in the enthusiasm of its historic initiative.'

What had the Commune been accused of? Of acts of terrorism? The shooting of General Thomas and Lecomte? The execution of the hostages? The death of the two officers 'was a summary act of lynch justice performed despite the instance of some delegate of the Central Committee. ... The inveterate habits acquired by the soldiery under the training of the enemies of the working class are, of course, not likely to change the very moment these soldiers change sides.' But the hostages were shot. Yes, that was true. 'When Thiers, as we have seen, from the very beginning of the conflict, enforced the humane practice of shooting down the Communal prisoners, the Commune, to protect their lives, was obliged to resort to the Prussian practice of securing hostages. The lives of the hostages had been forfeited over and over again by the continued shooting of prisoners on the part of the Versailles. ... The real murderer of Archbishop Darboy is Thiers.' A week after the massacre of thousands of Communards criticism of the Terror was impossible. The observations in Marx's notebooks show what he thought of the senseless actions of the Jacobins. The address, without naming them, talked of people who hampered the real action of the working classes, 'exactly as men of that sort have hampered the full development of every previous revolution. They are an unavoidable evil; with time they are shaken off; but time was not allowed to the Commune.'

But although the Commune had no time to develop, although it only remained 'a rough sketch of national organisation,' to those who refused to allow their view to be obscured by secondary things, it revealed its 'true secret.' And that was that 'it was essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour. The Commune,' it continued, 'was the reabsorption of the State power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the organised force of their suppression, the political form of their social emancipation instead of the artificial force (appropriated by their oppressors) of society wielded for their oppression by their enemies. The form was simple like all great things.' The workers had no ideals to realise, no ready-made Utopias to introduce by decree of the people, but they had to set free the elements of a new society with which the old collapsing bourgeois society was pregnant. 'They know that in order to work out their own emancipation and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men.' These sentences recall, even at times in their very phrasing, those that Marx addressed to Willich and his followers--the Jacobins of their time--after the final collapse of the revolution of 1848 and 1849. He warned his followers against illusions, but his warnings were not shackles put upon them, hampering them, but gave power and strength and the unshakable conviction of final victory. The address ended with these stirring words: 'Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that external [sic] pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.' The final words were like the sounding of the Last Trump. The Commune was defeated, a battle was lost, but the working-Class struggle was continued.

Chapter 19 notes

1: 'Avant de marcher contra l'ennemi, il faut le détruire, le paralyser derrière soi.'