The Paris Commune/Introduction

by Friedrich Engels

Introduction to the German Edition

 

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The invitation to prepare another edition of the address of the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association concerning the Civil War in France, and to preface it with an introduction, came to me quite unexpectedly. I can only, therefore, take up the most essential points and touch upon them very briefly.

I prefix the two shorter addresses of the General Council to the longer pamphlet on the Franco-Prussian War. Firstly, because in the pamphlet on the Civil War reference is made to the second address, which itself would not be intelligible without the first. Secondly, because these two addresses, which are also the work of Marx, are, not less than the Civil War, excellent specimens of that marvelous gift of the author, first exhibited in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, of apprehending clearly the character, the import, and the inevitable consequences of great historical events, at the very time when these events are still unfolding themselves, or have only just taken place. And lastly because, as I write, the German people are still suffering from the evils consequent upon the events here considered, as clearly foreseen and foretold by Marx.

Has it not, indeed, come to a fulfilment, as predicted in the first address, that should Germany's war of defense against Louis Bonaparte degenerate into a war of conquest against the French nation, all the calamities that befell the German people after the so-called wars of liberation^[1] would revisit them "with accumulated intensity"? Have we not had twenty years more of Bismarckian rule, and in place of the former persecution of the "demagogues" have we not had the "exceptional law"^[2] and the hounding of socialists, with the same police tyranny and the same revolting interpretation of legal texts?

And has it not come literally true, that the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine would "drive France into the arms of Russia," and that after this annexation Germany would either become the acknowledged vassal of Russia, or would have, after a short respite, to arm herself for a new war? And what a war? A "race war of the Germans against the coalesced Slavs and Latins"! Is it not a fact, that the annexation of the French provinces has driven France into the arms of Russia? Has not Bismarck for twenty years courted in vain the favor of the Czar, and lowered himself before him with even meaner servility than little Prussia, before she became the "first great power of Europe," had been accustomed to display at the feet of "Holy Russia"? And does not the "Damocles sword" overhang us of a war, on the first day of which all written treaties will be blown unto the wind like chaff; of a war as to which nothing is certain but the absolute uncertainty of its issue; of a race war which will expose all Europe to the devastation of fifteen or twenty millions of armed men, and which only hangs fire at present for the reason that even the strongest of the great military states shrinks before the absolute uncertainty of the final result?

All the more, therefore, is it our duty to render accessible to the German workingmen these brilliant but half-forgotten documents, which attest to the far-sightedness of the International's proletarian policy in connection with the events of 1870.

What applies to these two addresses, applies also to the one entitled The Civil War in France. On the 28th of May, the last of the combatants of the Commune were crushed by superior numbers on the heights of Belleville, and not more than two days passed, before Marx, on the 30th, read to the General Council of the International the pamphlet in question, in which the historical significance of the Paris Commune is presented briefly, but in words so powerful, so incisive, and above all, so true, that there is no equal to it in the whole range of the extensive literature on the subject.

Thanks to the economic and political development of France since 1789, Paris has for fifty years been placed in such a position that no revolution could there break out without assuming a proletarian character, in such wise that the proletariat, which had bought the victory with its blood, would immediately thereafter put forward its own demands. These demands were more or less indefinite, and even confused, in accordance with the particular degree of development to which the Paris workmen had attained at the time; but the upshot of them all was the abolition of the class contrast between capitalist and laborer. How this was to be done, 'tis true nobody knew. But the demand itself, however indefinite its form, was a danger for the existing order of society; the workmen who made it were still armed; if the bourgeoisie at the head of the State would maintain their political supremacy, they were bound to disarm the workmen. Accordingly, after every revolution made victorious with the arms of the workers, there arose a new struggle which ended with the defeat of the workers.

This happened for the first time in 1848.^[3] The Liberal bourgeoisie of the Parliamentary opposition held reform banquets in favor of an electoral change which should assure domination to their party. In their struggles with the Government driven to appeal ever more to the people, they were obliged to admit to the front rank the Radical and Republican elements of the small middle class as well as of the wealthier bourgeoisie. But behind these stood the revolutionary workmen; and the latter had, since 1830, acquired for themselves a far greater sense of political independence than even the Republicans among the middle classes suspected. In the moment of crisis between Government and Opposition, the workmen inaugurated the battle in the streets; Louis Philippe disappeared, and with him the electoral reform. In its stead arose the Republic, and moreover a republic designated by the victorious workmen themselves as the "Social Republic." As to what was to be understood by this "social" republic, nobody was quite clear, not even the workmen themselves. But they now had weapons, and wielded power in the State. So soon, therefore, as the bourgeois Republicans, who were at the head of affairs, began to feel somewhat firm ground under their feet, their first object was to disarm the workmen. To effect this, the bourgeoisie drove them to insurrection in June, 1848, by the direct breach of pledges, by scornful and defiant treatment, and by the attempt to banish the unemployed into a distant province. The Government had taken care to have an overwhelming repressive force at hand. After five days of heroic struggle, the workmen succumbed, and now followed a massacre of the defenseless prisoners, the like of which had not been seen since the days of the Civil Wars which ushered in the downfall of the Roman Republic. It was the first time that the bourgeoisie showed to what a mad ferocity of vengeance it can be stirred up, so soon as the proletariat dares to stand up against it as a separate class with its own interests and demands. And yet 1848 was child's play compared with their fury in 1871.

But Nemesis straightway followed. If the proletariat could not as yet rule France, the bourgeoisie could not do so any more. At least, not at that time, when it was in its majority monarchical, and moreover split into three dynastic parties besides one Republican party. The internal dissensions of the bourgeoisie allowed the adventurer Louis Bonaparte to filch all positions of influence—army, police, administrative machinery—and, on December 2, 1851, to blow up the last stronghold of the bourgeoisie, the National Assembly. The Second Empire followed. It brought about the exploitation of France by a band of political and financial adventurers, but at the same time an industrial development such as had not been possible under the narrow and timid system of Louis Philippe, when France was under the exclusive domination of a mere fraction of the wealthier bourgeoisie. Louis Bonaparte took from the capitalists their political power, under the pretense, on the one hand, of protecting them against the workers, and on the other hand of protecting the workers against them; but, in return for this, his Government favored speculation and industrial activity, in short, the rise and enrichment of the whole of the capitalist class in a hitherto unheard of degree. Corruption and wholesale robbery, it is true, developed to a still greater extent at the Imperial Court and among its hangers-on, who exacted no trifling percentage of the new wealth accumulated by the bourgeoisie.

But the Second Empire—that meant also the appeal to French Chauvinism,^[4] which implied the demand for the reacquisition of the frontier of the First Empire lost in 1814, at the very least that of the First Republic. A French Empire within the boundaries of the old Monarchy, not to say the still more circumscribed ones of 1815, was impossible for long. Hence the necessity of occasional wars and extensions of frontier; but no extension of frontier so dazzles the imagination of French Chauvinists, as that beyond the German left bank of the Rhine. One square mile on the Rhine was worth more to them than ten in the Alps or elsewhere. Given the Second Empire, the demand for the reacquisition of the left bank of the Rhine, either in the lump or piecemeal, was only a question of time. This time came with the Austro-Prussian War of 1866; but Bonaparte was juggled out of the expected territorial indemnity through Bismarck and his own all-too cunning policy of hesitation. There remained nothing for Bonaparte but war—a war which broke out in 1870 and drove him first to Sedan and thence to Wilhelmshöhe.

The necessary consequence was the Paris revolution of the 4th of September, 1870. The Empire collapsed like a house of cards, the Republic was again proclaimed. But the enemy stood before the gates. The armies of the Empire were either hopelessly shut up in Metz or prisoners in Germany. In this extremity the people allowed the Parisian deputies of the former parliament (Corps Législatif) to set themselves up as the "Government of National Defense." This was the more readily conceded because, for the purpose of defense, all Parisians capable of bearing arms had been armed and were enrolled in the National Guard, of which the workmen now constituted the great majority. But the antagonism between the Government, composed almost exclusively of bourgeois, and the armed proletariat, broke out soon. On the 31st of October the working class battalions stormed the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall), and took some of the members of the Government prisoners. Treachery, direct breach of faith on the part of the Government, and the intervention of some middle-class battalions freed them again, and in order not to provoke civil war inside a town besieged by a foreign power, the existing Government was permitted to remain in office.

Finally, on the 28th of January, 1871, Paris, starved out, capitulated, but with honors hitherto unheard of in military history. The forts were surrendered, the line of fortifications disarmed, the weapons of the line and of the Garde Mobile were handed over to the Germans, and the men themselves were regarded as prisoners of war. But the National Guard retained its weapons and cannon, and only entered into a truce with the conquerors. The latter did not venture upon a triumphal entry into Paris. Only a small portion of Paris, for the most part consisting of public parks, did they attempt to occupy, and even this only for a few days. And during the whole time they, who had kept Paris in a state of siege for 131 days, found themselves in their turn surrounded by armed Parisian workmen, who carefully watched lest any "Prussian" should overstep the narrow limits of the quarter reserved for the foreign conqueror. Such respect the Parisian workmen extorted from that army, before which all the armies of the Empire successively had laid down their weapons; and the Prussian Junkers, who had come thither in order to take revenge on the hotbed of revolution, were compelled to stand and deferentially salute this very armed revolution.

During the war the Parisian workmen had confined themselves to demanding the energetic continuance of the struggle. But now, peace having been established after the capitulation of Paris, Thiers, the new head of the Government, could not help seeing that the rule of the propertied classes—of the great landlords and capitalists—was in continual danger so long as the Parisian workmen retained their arms. His first work accordingly was the attempt to disarm them. On the 18th of March he sent some troops of the line with the order to steal the artillery belonging to the National Guard, which had been manufactured and paid for by public subscription during the siege of Paris. The attempt miscarried. Paris instantly rose in arms like one man, and war was declared between Paris and the French Government sitting at Versailles. On the 26th of March the Paris Commune was elected, and proclaimed on the 28th. The Central Committee of the National Guard, which had hitherto carried on the Government, decreed the abolition of the scandalous Parisian "guardians of morality," and then abdicated its functions into the hands of the Commune. On the 30th the Commune abolished the conscription and the standing army, and declared the National Guard, to which all citizens capable of bearing arms were to belong, to be the only force with the right to bear arms; it remitted all rents of dwellings from October, 1870, to April, 1871, such rent as had already been paid to be deducted from future payments; and stopped all sales of pledges in the city's pawnshop. The same day the foreigners elected to the Commune were confirmed in their functions, since "the flag of the Commune is that of the Universal Republic." On the 1st of April it was decided that the highest salary of a functionary of the Commune, whether a member or otherwise, was not to exceed 6,000 francs ($1,200) a year. On the following day was decreed the separation of Church and State, the abolition of all State payments for religious purposes, and the transformation of all ecclesiastical wealth into national property. As a consequence of this, all religious symbols, dogmas, prayers—in short, "all things appertaining to the sphere of the individual conscience"—were on the 8th of April ordered to be banished from the schools, an order which was carried out as soon as possible. On the 5th, in retaliation for the daily murder of communards captured by the Versailles troops, there was enacted a decree for the arrest of hostages, but it was never carried out. On the 6th, the guillotine was fetched out by the 137th battalion of the National Guard, and publicly burnt amid loud popular applause. On the 12th, the Commune ordered the triumphal column on the Place Vendôme, which had been constructed by Napoleon I. after the war of 1809 out of captured cannon, to be overthrown, as it was a symbol of chauvinism and mutual hatred among the nations. This was accomplished on the 16th of May. On the 16th of April, the Commune issued an order for a statistical account of all factories and workshops which had been closed by the employers; for the elaboration of plans for their management by the workingmen hitherto engaged in them, who were to be formed into co-operative societies for the purpose; and, also, for the federation of these societies into one great coöperative organization. On the 20th, it abolished the night work of bakers, as also the register-offices for procuring employment, which, since the Second Empire, had been the monopoly of certain police-appointed scoundrels, exploiters of the worst kind. The matter was hence-forward placed in the hands of the mayoralties of the twenty arrondissements^[5] of Paris. On the 30th of April it decreed the abolition of pawnshops, as being incompatible with the right of workmen to their tools and to credit. On the 5th of May it ordered the destruction of the chapel erected in expiation of the execution of Louis XVI.

Thus, since the 18th of March, the class character of the Parisian movement, hitherto thrust into the background by the struggle against the foreign invasion, came clearly and emphatically to the fore. As in the Commune there sat almost exclusively workmen, or the recognized representatives of workmen, its decisions naturally bore a distinctively proletarian character. It either decreed reforms which the Republican bourgeoisie had omitted to carry out from pure cowardice, but which formed a necessary foundation for the free action of the working class, as, for instance, the carrying out of the principle that religion, as far as the State is concerned, is a purely private matter; or it adopted measures directly in the interest of the working class, and in a few cases even cutting deeply into the life tissue of the old order of society. But in a besieged city all this could not be carried beyond the first stages of realization. And from the beginning of May onwards the struggle against the ever increasing masses of the army of the Versailles Government claimed exclusive attention and energy.

On the 7th of April the Versaillese had seized the bridge over the Seine at Neuilly on the west side of Paris; on the other hand, on the 11th, they were beaten back with much loss by General Eudes in an attack they made on the south side. Paris was continually bombarded by the very people who had stigmatized the bombardment of the same city by the Prussians as a sacrilegious outrage. These very people went on their knees to the Prussian Government to implore the speedy return of the French military prisoners taken at Sedan and Metz, who were to reconquer Paris for them. The gradual arrival of these troops gave a decisive superiority to the Versaillese from the beginning of May onward. This showed itself even as early as the 23d of April, when Thiers broke off the negotiations with the Commune respecting the latter's offer to exchange the Archbishop of Paris and a number of other priests retained in Paris as hostages, against Blanqui alone, who had been twice elected to the Commune, but who remained a prisoner at Clairvaux. It showed itself still more clearly in the altered language of Thiers; hitherto hesitating and ambiguous, he now suddenly became insulting, threatening, and brutal. On the south side the Versaillese took, on the 3d of May, the redoubt of Moulin Saquet; on the 9th, the fort of Issy reduced to a heap of ruins by the cannonade; on the 14th, that of Vanves. On the west side they gradually advanced, seizing the numerous buildings and villages which extended to the outer line of fortifications, up to the enceinte itself; on the 21st, they succeeded, owing to treachery and the carelessness of the National Guard posted at that point, in entering the city. The Prussians, who occupied the northern and eastern forts, allowed the Versaillese to press forward into the territory in the north of the city, which the conditions of peace had closed to them, and thence to inaugurate a formidable attack over a long line, which the Parisians, believing them to be covered by the terms of the truce, had in consequence only weakly occupied. The result of this was that the resistance in the western parts of Paris, the wealthier parts of the city, was only feeble; it became tougher and more severe as the attacking troops approached the eastern half, the working class parts of the city. Only after an eight days' struggle did the last defenders of the Commune succumb on the heights of Belleville and Menilmontant. And now the murder of defenseless men, women, and children, which had raged the whole week through in ever-increasing proportions, reached its highest point! The breechloader no longer killed fast enough; the conquered were slaughtered in hundreds with the mitrailleuses; "the wall of the Federals" in the Père la Chaise cemetery, where the last massacre took place, remains to-day a dumb but eloquent witness to the frenzy of crime of which the governing classes are capable as soon as the proletariat dares to stand up for its rights. Then, as the slaughter of all was seen to be impossible, came the arrests en masse, the shooting down of arbitrarily selected prisoners as victims for sacrifice, and the transference of the remainder into great camps, where they awaited the mercy of the courts-martial. The Prussian troops, who were encamped to the northeast of Paris, received the order to allow no fugitives to pass. Nevertheless, the officers often shut their eyes when the soldiers obeyed the call of humanity rather than that command. Especially does the Saxon Army Corps deserve the credit of having acted very humanely and of having let through many whose character as combatants of the Commune was obvious.

 

Looking back to-day, after twenty years, upon the acts and historical significance of the Paris Commune, it appears to us that the information contained in the pages of the Civil War in France may usefully be supplemented here by some special considerations.

The members of the Commune were divided into a majority of Blanquists, who had also predominated in the central committee of the National Guard, and a minority, which consisted for the most part of members of the International Workingmen's Association, who were adherents of the Proudhonian School of Socialism. The great mass of the Blanquists at that time were socialists only because of their revolutionary proletarian instinct. A few only had attained to greater clearness of principle owing to Vaillant, who was acquainted with German scientific socialism. Thus we can understand why, in the economic field, many things were left undone which, according to our present conceptions, should have been done by the Commune. The most difficult thing to understand is, indeed, the sacred respect with which the Commune reverently stopped before the portals of the Bank of France. This was also a portentous political error. The Bank in the hands of the Commune—that was worth more than ten thousand hostages. It would have meant the pressure of the entire French bourgeoise upon the Versailles Government in the interest of peace with the Commune. But what is still more wonderful, is the number of correct things done by the Commune, in spite of its make-up of Blanquists and Proudhonists. Of course, the Proudhonists are responsible for the economic decrees of the Commune, for those that are praiseworthy as well as for those that are not, while the Blanquists are responsible for the political acts of commission and omission. And in both cases the irony of history would have it—as is usual when doctrinaires take the helm of the State—that both the ones and the others did the reverse of that which the doctrines of their school prescribed.^[6]

Proudhon, the socialist of the small farmer and petty tradesman, hated association most heartily. According to him, it does more harm than good; it is naturally unfruitful, even detrimental, because it curtails the worker's freedom; it is pure dogma, unproductive and troublesome, destructive of the freedom of the worker as well as the saving of labor; its disadvantages multiply faster than its advantages; while competition, division of labor, private property, are economic springs of greater power. Only in exceptional cases—these are Proudhon's own words—of great industries and great business corporations, the railroads, for instance, is the association of the workers good and proper.^[7]

And yet, even in Paris, the center of the artistic trades, production on a large scale had so far ceased to be an exception in 1871 that the most important decree of the Commune had for its object the organization of great industries and even of manufacture;^[8] and this organization tion was to comprise not only the association of the workers in each factory, but also the union of all these coöperative associations into one great federation: in short, an organization of such a character that, as Marx very correctly states in the Civil War, it must have ultimately ended in communism, that is, in the very opposite of the Proudhonistic theory. For this reason, the Commune was the grave of the Proudhonist School of Socialism. This school no longer exists among the French workers; and among the Possibilists^[9] no less than among the Marxists, there now rules undisputedly the Marxian theory. To-day Proudhonists are found only among the "radical" bourgeoisie.

The Blanquists fared no better. Brought up in the school of conspiracy, held together by the rigid discipline essential to it, they started from the conception that a comparatively small number of resolute, well organized men would be able not only to grasp the helm of State at a favorable moment, but also, through the display of great energy and reckless daring, to hold it as long as required, that is, until they had succeeded in carrying the masses of the people into the revolutionary current and ranging them around the small leading band. To accomplish this, what was necessary, above all else, was the most stringent, dictatorial centralization of all power in the hands of the new revolutionary government. And what did the Commune do, which in the majority consisted of these very Blanquists? In all its proclamations to the French people in the provinces, it called upon them for a free federation of all French communes with Paris, for a national organization, which for the first time was to be the real creation of the nation. The army, the political police, the bureaucracy, all those agencies of oppression in a centralized government, which Napoleon had created in 1798, and which since then every new government had gladly used and kept up as ready weapons against its enemies, were to be abolished everywhere, as they had been abolished in Paris.

From the very outset the Commune had to recognize that the working class, having once attained supremacy in the State, could not work with the old machinery of government; that this working class, if it was not to lose the position which it had just conquered, had, on the one hand, to abolish all the old machinery of oppression that had hitherto been utilized against itself, and, on the other hand, to secure itself against its own representatives and officers by declaring them to be removable, without exception and at all times. In what did the chief characteristic of the old State consist? Society had created for itself definite organs, originally by simple division of labor, for the provision of its common interests. But these organs, at the head of which is the power of the State, had in the course of time, and in the service of their own separate interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into its masters. And this is true not only of the hereditary monarchy, but also of the democratic republic. Nowhere do the "politicians" form a more distinct and more powerful subdivision of the nation than in the United States. Here both the great parties, to which the predominance alternately falls, are in their turn ruled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate upon seats in the legislative bodies of the Union and the separate States, or who live by agitation for their party and are rewarded with offices after its victory. It is well known how the Americans have tried for thirty years past to throw off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and how, notwithstanding, they sink ever deeper into the mire of corruption. It is just in the United States that we can most clearly see the process through which the State acquires a position of independent power over against the society, for which it was originally designed as a mere tool. There exists here no dynasty, no aristocracy, no standing army with the exception of a few men to guard against the Indians, no bureaucracy permanently installed and pensioned. Nevertheless, we have here two great rings of political speculators, that alternately take possession of the power of State and exploit it with the most corrupt means and to the most corrupt purposes. And the nation is powerless against these men, who nominally are its servants, but in reality are its two overruling and plundering hordes of politicians.

Against this transformation of the State and the State's organs from the servants of society into its rulers—a transformation which has been inevitable in all hitherto existing States—the Commune adopted two unfailing remedies. In the first place it filled all positions of administration, justice, and instruction, through election by universal suffrage, the elected being at all times subject to recall by their constituents. And secondly, it paid for all services, high or low, only the same pay that other workers received. The highest salary that it ever paid was six thousand francs. Thus a check was put to all place-hunting and career-making, even without the imperative mandate under which delegates to the representative bodies were placed, quite superfluously.

This disruption of the power formerly possessed by the State, and its replacement by a new power that was truly democratic, is described in detail in the third chapter of the Civil War. But it was necessary to enter here once more upon some of its features, because in Germany the superstition concerning the State has been transmitted from philosophy into the general consciousness of the bourgeoisie, and even of many workers. According to the conception of philosophy, the State is the "realization of the Idea," or the philosophic equivalent of the Kingdom of God upon earth—the sphere in which eternal truth and righteousness are, or ought to be, realized. There follows from this a superstitious reverence for the State and all its adjuncts, a superstition that is all the more natural, since from our very childhood we have grown up in the idea that the affairs and interests common to the whole of society could not be provided for in any other way than had been the practise hitherto, namely, through the State and its highly paid functionaries. And people imagine they have taken a very bold step, when they have once freed themselves from the belief in monarchy and swear now by the democratic republic. But in reality the State is nothing else than a machine for the oppression of one class by another class, and that no less so in the democratic republic than under the monarchy. At the very best it is an inheritance of evil, bound to be transmitted to the proletariat when it has become victorious in its struggle for class supremacy, and the worst features of which it will have to lop off at once, as the Commune did, until a new race, grown up under new, free social conditions, will be in a position to shake off from itself this State rubbish in its entirety.

The German philistine has lately been thrown once again into wholesome paroxisms by the expression "dictatorship of the proletariat." Well, gentle sirs, would you like to know how this dictatorship looks? Then look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Frederick Engels.

 

London, on the 20th anniversary of the
Commune, March 18, 1871.

1. 1813–15, against Napoleon.—Note to the American Edition.
2. This law was passed by the German Reichstag in 1878 with the object of suppressing socialist agitation, confiscating the socialist press and literature, etc. Owing to the courage and determination of the socalists, this "law of exception" proved a boomerang, and after twelve years of fierce conflict between the socialist workingmen and the capitalist government, the latter allowed the law to die by limitation.—Note to the American Edition.
3. Of course there were in earlier days premonitions of that class-conscious movement of the proletariat, which in 1848 won a first victory—soon, however, followed by defeat—under the circumstances here referred to. In Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Engels himself calls attention to the fact that "in every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was a forerunner, more or less developed, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasants War, the Anabaptists and Thomas Münzer; in the great English Revolution, the Levelers; in the great French Revolution, Babœuf." To this may be added that in the seventeen years that followed the Revolution of 1830 (the second revolution of the French bourgeoisie, by which the political conquests which this class had made during its great revolution of 1789–93, were finally placed beyond the reach of feudal reaction), several proletarian insurrections occurred in France; and although the "bread question" was always instrumental in provoking them, the "social question" gradually assumed in them a greater importance until it was paramount in the minds of the insurrectionists. The first uprising was at Lyons in 1831, when the canuts (silk workers) descended from the heights of Croix-Rousse upon the rich quarters below with a black flag on which was inscribed in red letters: Vivre en travaillant, ou mourir en combattant (to live working or to die fighting). The subsequent outbursts at Lille, Saint Etienne, Limoges, and other industrial centers were of the same character. But in 1839 the Barbès insurrection not only was "communistic," but through the foreigners who fought in its ranks, it acquired, to some extent, an international character, which in the trials that followed was duly pointed out by the prosecuting attorneys. At the same time in England, the thoroughly proletarian Chartist agitation was carried on, coincidently with the mercantile-class movement in favor of free trade. The fact is that all these outbursts, insurrections, and revolutions so called, including 1848 and the Commune of 1871, are mere episodes of the great Proletarian Revolution, which is in course of accomplishment.—Note to the American Edition.
4. Jingoism.
5. Subdivisions, districts. Each arrondissement of the French capital has its own Mayor, subject, however, to the regulations and orders of the Municipal Council, which directs the general affairs of the whole city and, at the time here spoken of, was called the Commune.—Note to the American Edition.
6. In the "Appendix" to his French edition of the papers published here in English, Charles Longuet takes exception to this statement of Engels concerning the composition of the Central Committee and the Commune. The fact is, however, that although Longuet can claim that he was a member of the Commune and might, therefore, be supposed to know whereof he speaks in this matter, Engels' view is absolutely correct. Longuet classifies men, as a statistical clerk might do, by the organizations to which they respectively happened to belong; whereas Engels judges of them, as a philosopher must do, by their actual spirit and tendencies. The revolutionary spirit that dominated the Commune was essentially "Blanquist"; while the prevailing economic notions, among the comparatively few who had any, were "Proudhonist." Of clear-minded, thorough "Collectivists" there was only a handful in the whole city of Paris. That with intellectual elements economically so weak, and under circumstances so unfavorable to the proper consideration of economic questions, the Commune should have done so well as to deserve the praise of Marx and Engels for such measures as it was able to take during its short life, is in itself an object lesson of the highest import. It shows in a vivid light the natural tendency of the proletarian mind when its class-consciousness is set in motion by a terrific class struggle.—Note to the American Edition.
7. See Idée générale de la Révolution, 3me étude.
8. This term, "manufacture," is a compound of two Latin words: manu, by hand, and factum, made. From the birth of the factory system the true meaning of this expression has been lost by the "vulgar bourgeois," who ignorantly applied it to all the products of industries carried on upon a large scale, without making in his terminology, as he surely did in his mercantile operations, the important discrimination between those that were still entirely or chiefly wrought out with hand tools by hand labor, and those that now were to any appreciable extent turned out by "labor-saving" machinery, moved by steam, water, or some other non-human power, and simply "tended" by mere "operatives," less paid than the "artizans," and fewer in number as compared with the amount of production. Nay, sometimes the sense adulteration went even farther. For instance, a century ago every shoe was hand-made, was a "manufacture." To-day some shoes are still hand-made, and therefore are still truly "manufactures," while the great bulk of the shoe production is machinery-made and comes from "factories." Yet shoes of the latter sort are called "manufactures," while the former are not (except by the census-taker when this particular class of footwear is turned out in custom shoe-making establishments of some importance). Marx and Engels, however, never failed to put back on its feet what the "vulgar bourgeois" had turned upon its head. They restored in their works the correct sense of the expression, according to its derivation; and by the word "manufacture" is here meant the product of the large workshop in which the work is done by hand, as of old, but the modern characteristic of which is the division of labor. Let us also observe here that although the division of labor is in this case a mere administrative device, economic results are obtained from it that are similar to those which flow from the division of labor necessitated by the use of machinery: namely, greater efficiency of the worker in the particular branch of work especially assigned to him; increase of the intensity of his toil; decrease, however, of his general skill, and, consequently, "cheaper labor."—Note to the American Edition.
9. The "Possibilists" were opportunists, who believed in working only for what they considered as "possible" or "practicable;" the "Marxists" are the great French Labor Party (Parti Ouvrier Français), a thoroughly socialist revolutionary organization. The acceptance of the Marxist theory by the Possibilists can refer only to the goal—the Socialist Commonwealth. Incorrigible arrivistes, they hastened into the camp of the Ministerialists when Millerand accepted a portfolio in the Waldeck-Rousseau-Galliffet cabinet.—Note to the American Edition.