Compendium

The Civil War in France

Karl Marx, 1871

Marx’s addresses for the International on the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune of 1871: a history of the war and the siege, a defence of the Commune as “the political form at last discovered” for the emancipation of labour, and an indictment of its bloody suppression. Engels’s 1891 introduction calls the Commune the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Edition
Written in English for the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association (1870–71); with Engels’s introduction of 1891, as published in The Paris Commune, edited with a preface and notes by Lucien Sanial (New York Labor News Company, 1902)
Source
Wikisource

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Contents

  1. Publishers’ Note (1902) 2 min 3

    The New York Labor News Company explains that its volume is the first complete English edition of Marx’s three addresses with Engels’s full 1891 introduction, earlier English editions having abridged it. The editors added the chapter titles of The Civil War in France and four appendices.

  2. Sanial’s Preface to the American Edition (1902) 52 min 26

    Lucien Sanial of the Socialist Labor Party attacks Charles Longuet, Marx’s son-in-law, whose 1901 French edition cut passages from the addresses and enlisted Marx in support of Alexandre Millerand, the socialist who joined a French government in 1899 alongside General Galliffet, butcher of the Commune. Sanial dissects the Paris Congress’s “Kautsky resolution” on socialists in government as an act of cowardice and contrasts it with the International’s defiance in 1871. A document of the debate between revolutionary and reformist socialism around 1900, using the Commune as its touchstone.

  3. Engels’s Introduction to the German Edition (1891) 35 min 33

    Engels introduces the addresses on the Commune’s twentieth anniversary. He notes that Marx’s predictions about the war had come true, narrates the history from June 1848 through the Second Empire, the siege and the Commune’s decrees, and describes the Bloody Week. He judges the Commune’s Blanquist majority and Proudhonist minority, both of whom acted against their own doctrines, criticises the failure to seize the Bank of France, and draws the lesson that the working class cannot use the old state machine but must replace it with elected, recallable officials paid workers’ wages. The state is “a machine for the oppression of one class by another,” even in a democratic republic. The Commune, he concludes, was the dictatorship of the proletariat.

  4. First Address on the Franco-Prussian War (July 1870) 12 min 13

    The General Council’s address of 23 July 1870, written by Marx days after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. It calls the war a Bonapartist plot, quotes French and German workers’ protests against it, predicts the end of the Second Empire, accepts that Germany is fighting a defensive war but warns German workers against letting it become a war of conquest, and points to the danger from Russia. Workers’ messages of peace across the battle lines herald a new society whose rule will be peace.

  5. Second Address on the Franco-Prussian War (September 1870) 19 min 12

    The address of 9 September 1870, after Sedan and the proclamation of the French Republic. Marx attacks German demands for Alsace and Lorraine, refuting the claim that they are a military necessity, and predicts that annexation will drive France into Russia’s arms and lead to a future war of races. He praises German socialists’ protests, welcomes the Republic with misgivings about its Orleanist and moderate leaders, and advises French workers not to attempt an insurrection but to use republican liberty to organise.

  6. 1 The National Defense 25 min 21

    The address proper begins with the Government of National Defence formed on 4 September 1870, which Marx accuses of fearing an armed Paris more than the Prussians and planning capitulation from the start. He exposes the alleged corruption of its members Favre, Picard and Ferry, and gives a long, savage portrait of Thiers. The armistice of January 1871 produced a monarchist “Rural” Assembly that made peace on Bismarck’s terms and provoked Paris with a series of measures, preparing a civil war to shift the cost of the war onto the workers.

  7. 2 The Eighteenth of March 20 min 9

    Thiers’s attempt to seize the National Guard’s cannon on 18 March 1871 failed when the troops fraternised with the people, and the Central Committee took power in Paris. Marx defends the revolution against the charges over the killing of Generals Lecomte and Clément Thomas and the shooting in the Place Vendôme, criticises the Central Committee for not marching on Versailles at once, and contrasts the Commune’s restraint with Versailles’s murder of prisoners.

  8. 3 The Historic Significance of the Commune 40 min 31

    The theoretical core. The working class cannot simply take over the ready-made state machine, which grew from absolute monarchy into the instrument of capital and culminated in the Second Empire. The Commune was its opposite: the standing army replaced by the armed people, officials elected, recallable and paid workmen’s wages, a working body both executive and legislative, the church disestablished, and a national organisation built from communes. It was “essentially a working-class government … the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor,” aiming at the expropriation of the expropriators through co-operative production. Marx describes its appeal to the middle class and peasants, its internationalism, its social measures, and the transformation of Paris compared with Versailles.

  9. 4 The Repression 33 min 19

    Thiers rebuilt his army with prisoners released by Bismarck, staged sham conciliation, signed the Treaty of Frankfurt, and took Paris in the last week of May. Marx describes the massacre that followed as the true face of bourgeois civilisation, defends the Communards’ use of fire and their execution of hostages, which he blames on Thiers, and condemns the conquering and conquered armies uniting against the proletariat. He defends the International against the governments’ attacks and ends: workers’ Paris with its Commune “will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society.”

  10. Appendix I: The Anti-Plebiscite Manifesto (1870) 7 min 4

    A translation of the manifesto issued in April 1870 by the Paris sections of the International and the Federal Chamber of Labour Societies, calling on workers to abstain or vote against Napoleon III’s plebiscite and to demand the Social and Democratic Republic: free compulsory education, public ownership of the great public services, tax reform, confiscation of church property, and abolition of conscription.

  11. Appendix II: “Bloody Week” 11 min 3

    Sanial compiles reports from French and British newspapers on the “Bloody Week” of May 1871: mass graves, the shootings at the Mur des Fédérés, Galliffet selecting prisoners for execution, people buried alive, and executions of women and children after summary courts-martial.

  12. Appendix III: Jules Favre on the International 5 min 3

    The letter of John Hales, secretary of the General Council, to The Times (June 1871) answering Jules Favre’s circular calling on European governments to suppress the International, with a comment on the Spectator’s repetition of Favre’s errors.