Ernest Belfort Bax

“ Finally, the senseless cry of "Every man to his arrondissement! when every man ought to have been out of his arrondissement at strategical points, settled matters. An immense number of barricades were thrown up, without system, in each arrondissement, and heroically defended, without method, with the inevitable sequel of capture and massacre, and thus was the Paris of the Revolution annihilated piecemeal. ”

“ There were a few honest middle-class men to be found who, though caring nothing for the Commune, and with no sympathy for its aims, yet refused to join in the great class-conspiracy of vilification, and who, at all events up to their lights, spoke the truth as to what they had seen and heard in Paris under the red flag, who bore witness to the noble disinterestedness of the defenders of the Cause, and to the foulness of their persecutors. ”

“ In all quarters the pickaxe was to be heard removing paving stones and digging the foundations of barricades, which rose by the hundred. Men, women, and children were at work. Now began that enthusiasm, that limitless courage and contempt of death—displayed in defence of an ideal—the colossal proportions of which dwarf everything similar in history, and which alone suffices to redeem the sordidness of the nineteenth century. ”

“ THE COMMUNE IS DEAD!
As the defence receded, the tide of massacre rose higher and higher. Denunciations poured in on all sides. Organised hunts were made in the occupied quarters, and every available building was choked with prisoners, who were taken out in batches and shot, in some cases being mowed down with the Mitrailleuse, and buried half-dead. Through the night was heard the agonised cries of the wounded and mangled. From the Friday evening the whole defence centred in Belleville. ”

“ Instead of at once passing a resolution declaring the Commune as sitting in permanence, which was the obvious thing to do—thereby giving a centre and rallying point to the defence—the Commune abandoned the Hotel de Ville, deliberately committed suicide, and with this act of self-destruction sounded the death-knell of revolutionary Paris. The last hope lay in a strong, well-organised rally of all the forces at the disposal of the Commune within the city, with the construction of a system of barricades connecting the three chief strategic points, Montmartre, the Trocadèro, and the Pantheon. ”

“ 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 goodwill; 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 economical miseries, and its political delirium, a new society is springing up, whose International rule will be Peace, because its national ruler will be everywhere the same—Labour! The Pioneer of that new society is the International Working Men's Association. ”

“ To talk about the "head of the state" when alive as merely the representative of an impersonal political entity, to talk of him when executing some cruel function in the name of "law and order" as a mere mechanical figure "doing his duty," and, when assassinated, as "the man, the brother and the father of his family" over whose fate we are supposed to weep our eyes out, is a little too thin. Every sphere of life has its dangers, the chief danger attending the headship of a Government being assassination. ”

“ That there was never, throughout all history, an execution more completely justified than that of the hostages by the despairing adherents of the Commune must be apparent to every unbiassed mind. This the purveyors of public sentiment cooked-up at the cheapest rate knew perfectly well, but their master, bourgeois class-interest, demanded, as we have seen, that they and all true bourgeois should pretend to regard this simple and, judged by their own standard, even grossly inadequate, act of judicial retribution as an unspeakable atrocity. ”

“ The deliberate perversion of facts and the distorted judgments of the bourgeois journals anent the Commune were too impudently flagrant to have passed muster as they did, even with the ordinary mind, had there been a Socialist press to expose them, such as we now have, for example, in Germany.
But the dominant classes, though they may succeed, by aid of their wealth and power, in perverting the truth for the time, can do no more. The proletariat once conscious of its class-interests, and knowing what these interests imply, will not forget the pioneers in the struggle for liberty. ”

“ We have seen on the other hand the Versaillese, under Thiers, organising with a cold-blooded deliberation and ferocity an orgy of blood for weeks in advance, keeping their hands in the while by isolated murders of prisoners of daily occurrence, in short, deliberately planning and carrying out a crime unexampled in history, compared to which the worst Anarchist "outrage" of our days is but as the pressure of a suckling's gums is to the rending of a tiger's maw. ”

“ Those who howled loudest knew that the action of the Commune was justified, but as with the wolf and the lamb, the typical bourgeois is bound by his traditions and class interests to make out the Commune and all connected with it as having been in the wrong, and he will continue to do so, despite all facts and arguments to the contrary. After all, the best advice to give the authorities of the modern state is "kill not that ye be not killed." ”

“ The glare of a hundred conflagrations reflected in pools of blood; corpses and human remains wherever the eye lighted; the half of Paris one vast, hideous, dreamlike hell, against the reality of which Dante's imagination seems feeble! ”

“ THE CIVILISED WORLD AND ITS "THRILL OF HORROR."
We have seen that the Commune had one special fault, that of a fatuous moderation in all its doings; we have seen that probably never since history began have any body of men allowed themselves and theirs to be treated as lambs in the slaughterhouse with more lamblike forbearance and absence of retaliation than the Commune and its adherents; we have seen this illustrated by the incredible fact that up to the last, amid all the slaughterings of Communists, the vast majority of the hostages and prisoners in its hands remained unscathed. ”

“ It is useless to go in detail over the sad tale of barricade after barricade, protected for hours, sometimes for two or three days, by a handful of men only at last to be overwhelmed by a whole regiment of "regulars," or maybe taken in flank, as often happened with barricades impregnable to direct attack. So incredible did it appear to the enemy that the defenders of Paris should have made no effective preparations for his reception, that they should have had no organised plan of defence, that up to Tuesday evening it was only with great hesitation the Versaillese pressed forward. ”

“ To deprive them of the power of offence, you must deprive them of the means of defence. You must not only garrot, but murder. If ever conqueror took "material guarantees" for breaking the sinews of a nation, the first Napoleon did so by the Tilsit treaty, and the way he executed it against Prussia and the rest of Germany. Yet, a few years later, his origantic power split like a rotten reed upon the German people. ”

“ In stipulating the surrender of Paris, Jules Favre, acting for the Government of National Defence, had arranged for the retention of their arms by the Parisian Nationals. This was not done out of any affection for the citizen soldiers, but because the Government well knew that any attempt to disarm this proletarian army would be met by a resistance they had no adequate means of dealing with, and which would not improbably have upset them and all their schemes, especially the terms of surrender, which were regarded by all classes as already humiliating enough. ”

“ People are told by their papers that they are feeling "thrills of horror" till they really think they are, the journalist who pens the gasping leaders meanwhile laughing up his sleeve, knowing it is all "business." These observations are specially appropriate to the subject in hand, as never was there a more barefaced or more successful attempt made by the governing classes of the world to bluff their own hideous crime by trumping up a sham horror at their victims than in the "civilised world's" verdict on the Commune of Paris. ”

“ Had there been a leading body of men to have given a head to the insurrection of the 18th of March, the gates of Paris would have been immediately closed, and the already disaffected troops would never have been suffered to slip through the fingers of the insurrection and form the nucleus of a hostile army at Versailles. ”

“ To aid in breaking the force of the representatives of the established order in press and on platform, it is necessary to have a vigorous party press which will place matters in their true light before that mixed and nebulous section of public opinion possessed of wavering or of no definite principles, but which, in default of thinking and examining into facts for itself, takes the impress of any statement that it finds repeated a few times without very decisive and publicly-made contradiction. ”

“ Thus a vast number of poor people were relieved from a crushing liability which they were utterly unable to meet without ruin. This was all very proper as far as it went, but the Commune omitted to perform two important duties which the situation imperatively demanded, the first was to issue a clear and easily intelligible manifesto explaining its programme and plan of action. The second and if anything still more serious omission was not keeping in touch with the provinces, which immediately after the 18th of March had shown the most favourable signs of sympathetic action with Paris. ”

“ The great general lesson taught us by the failure of the Commune of 1871 is the supreme necessity of an organisation comprising a solid body of class-conscious proletarians and other Socialists well acquainted with each other, whose views are clearly defined, who know what they want, and who have, at all events, some notion of the course to pursue on an emergency. Had there been such a body of men in Paris in February and March, 1871, the subsequent course of events might have been very different. ”

“ The heights of Montmartre were the main stronghold left to the Commune, now that the Trocadéro was gone and the Pantheon threatened. As a position Montmartre was very strong, and, with a properly directed defence, might have held the enemy at bay for many days. But everywhere was the same cry "we must defend our own quarter." Nevertheless, as evening drew near barricades sprang up in every direction. Paris did indeed seem to be rising en masse. This deceived many who even still sincerely believed in victory. ”

“ As for the argument that the hostages in their personal capacity were technically innocent, the bourgeois should have bethought himself of this when the practice of seizing hostages for the good behaviour of the enemy was revived by the German military authorities during the war. The idea of innocent French citizens being killed for the misdeeds of those who wore the national uniform, never evoked any special protest that I am aware of, from the sensitive middle-class conscience or from that of its press. ”

“ In addition to the active Red Republican Party and its popular leaders, there has always existed in France a class of men who have made the history of the great Revolution their life-study. These men naturally conceive of every revolution as modelling itself on the lines of the French Revolution of 1789–96. Their influence has reacted on the popular movement and its leaders, and confirmed the natural bias of every Frenchman to try and re-live and re-act the greatest epoch in his national history, the general outlines and prominent names of which he is familiar with from his youth up. ”

“ Poor Flourens was a type of revolutionist of whom we have few nowadays left. Many there are now who undertand the economic question better than Flourens, but none we know who have quite that old-world chivalrous devotion to the Revolution which this remarkable man had, and which so endeared him to the impressionable working-classes of Paris. ”

“ No one seemed even to appreciate adequately the ethics of insurrection—that an insurrectionary administration which has succeeded in establishing itself, becomes by that very fact (from the point of view of the insurrection) the sole rightful repository of power for the time being, and that the Government, against which the insurrection was directed, becomes in its turn the rebel power, to be crushed in the most expeditious manner possible. ”

“ They bethought them of the three hundred hostages, taken as a guarantee that the laws of war should be observed but not a hair of whose heads had been touched, notwithstanding that prisoners had been murdered without intermission at Versailles during the whole time, and that now, to crown all, for four days every quarter of Paris occupied by the Versailles army had been converted into a shambles, with its thousands of victims—men, women and children—whose mutilated corpses lay heaped up pell-mell in the streets. ”

“ The band of the 10th of December, organised under the presidency of Louis Bonaparte, having been masqueraded into blouses and let loose on the streets of Paris, there to perform the contortions of war fever, the real workmen of the Faubourgs came forward with public peace demonstrations so overwhelming that Pietri, the Prefect of Police, thought it prudent to at once stop all further street politics, on the plea that the feal Paris people had given sufficient vent to their pent-up patriotism and exuberant war enthusiasm. ”

“ One of the most unfortunate characteristics of the leaders of the Commune was their sensitiveness to bourgeois public opinion. The first thing for the leader of a revolutionary movement to learn is a healthy contempt for the official public opinion of the "civilised world." ”

“ If the German working class allow the present war to lose its strictly defensive character and to degenerate into a war against the French people, victory or defeat will prove alike disastrous. All the miseries that befell Germany after her war of independence will revive with accumulated intensity. ”

“ Meanwhile, the Paris members of the International had again set to work. In the Reveil of July 12th, they published their manifesto "to the Workmen of all Nations," from which we extract the following few passages:—
'Once more," they say, on the pretext of European equilibrium, of national honour, the peace of the world is menaced by political ambitions. French, German, Spanish Workmen! let our voices unite in one cry of reprobation against war! ... War for a question of preponderance or a dynasty, can, in the eyes of workmen, be nothing but a criminal absurdity. ”

“ In answer to the warlike proclamations of those who exempt themselves from the blood-tax, and find in public misfortunes a source of fresh speculations, we protest, we who want peace, labour, and liberty! ”

“ But in principle there is no doubt whatever, that a strong dictatorship was just what the situation demanded. The Committee failed, if for no other reason than because it contained no man strong enough to "dictate." There is no gainsaying that this action of the minority in allowing their personal spleen to get the better of them, even granting that provocation had been given, was a great blow to the influence of the Commune, both internally and externally, and was naturally the occasion of much crowing " on the part of the friends of "order" at Versailles and elsewhere. ”