Introduction to the Red and Black Edition

 The Paris Commune was a crucial event for Marx and Engels, and a huge influence on the development of their political thought.

Until 1871, Marx had assumed that the working class would be able to seize the existing institutions of the bourgeois republic and use them as the basis for a socialist government after the revolution.

The Commune, however, completely changed Marx’s thinking on this point, and made such a profound impact on him that he added an amendment to the Communist Manifesto on the matter. The Commune was, he wrote, the “political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor.”

It is worthwhile, therefore, to study the history and program of the Commune, in order to compare the Leninist states to a true revolutionary society, one that existed not merely in words and phrases, but within definite historical circumstances.

The first order of business for the Commune was the complete destruction of the old bourgeois state apparatus. Marx writes;

From the outset, the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, the working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery, previously used against itself, and on the other hand, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.

Engels hailed this action by the Commune as a “shattering of the former state power and its replacement by a new and real democratic state.”

Lenin, in his pre-October days, writes of the similarity of the structure of the Paris Commune with the fledgling Russian “soviets”, or councils. Indeed, in his remarkable booklet State and Revolution, Lenin envisions the “soviet” as serving at the center of a Russian socialist system in terms very similar to those pictured by the council communists and embodied in the Commune. During his discussion of the “soviets”, Lenin pointed out that the Parisian revolutionary government was fundamentally different from the bourgeois state which it attempted to replace;

The Commune substitutes for the venal and rotten parliamentarianism of bourgeois society institutions in which freedom of opinion and of discussion does not degenerate into deception, for the parliamentarians themselves have to work, have to execute their own laws, have themselves to test their results in real life, and to render account directly to their constituents. Representative institutions remain, but there is no parliamentarianism here as a special system, as the division of labor between the legislative and the executive as a privileged position for the representatives. We cannot imagine democracy, even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions, but we can and must imagine democracy without parliamentarianism.

The Commune, Marx points out, operated on the principle of direct democracy:

The Commune was formed of the municipal councilors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time. Instead of continuing to be the agents of the central government, the police were at once stripped of their political attributes, and turned into the responsible and at all times revocable agents of the Commune. So were officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen’s wages. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. . . The whole of the educational institutions were opened up to the public gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of church and state. . . Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elected, responsible and revocable.

The Commune was composed largely of Blanquists and Proudhonists, but, as usual, practical necessities forced the Communards to abandon ideology in favor of practical measures. The resulting Commune was claimed by both Marxists and Bakuninists, but clearly it owed a great deal to both.

Marx noted that the state built by the Commune was no longer a “state”—that is, it was no longer the political instrument of a ruling class. The Commune was not a state that stood outside of society or over it; it was, rather, a government formed directly from the ordinary people and directly responsible to them.

Not all governmental functions disappeared under the Commune. There was still a need for such things as record-keeping and the enforcement of criminal laws. These functions were, however, stripped of their political and class functions. Marx writes:

While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society.

Thus, the necessary governmental functions were returned as fully as possible to freely elected officials under the direct control of their electors. In this way, the features of Leninist repression—the political police, the entrenched party bureaucrats, the farcical elections, the state apparatus of censorship and judicial repression, the lopsided distribution of wealth—were avoided.

The Commune recognized that even its meager state apparatus had the potential to become an entrenched elite, and introduced several measures to combat any tendency towards a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. Marx writes;

Against the transformation of the state and the agents of the state from the servants of society into the masters of society—an inevitable transformation in all previous states—the Commune made use of two infallible expedients. In the first place, it filled all posts --  administrative, judicial and educational—by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, with the right of these same electors to recall their delegates at any time. And in the second place, all, officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers.

The Commune also recognized that a standing army that was responsible only to the government was merely a repressive tool. “The first decree of the Commune, therefore,” writes Marx, “was the suppression of the standing army and the substitution for it of the armed people.” The citizens of Paris were given basic military training and were organized into local militias to defend themselves from outside threats and internal counter-revolution. The best guarantee to keep a government responsible to the population, the Communards concluded, was to arm that population.

The Commune also recognized that the revolutionary government in Paris would not last if it could not encompass all of the country. While it lacked the means to carry out a national revolution, and thus fell to the guns of Versailles and Prussia, the Commune did lay a plan for a national revolutionary government under which to continue the social revolution. As Marx reports, “The cry of ‘social republic’ with which the Revolution of February was ushered in by the Paris proletariat, did but express a vague aspiration after a republic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that republic”:

In a rough sketch of national organization which the Commune had no time to develop, it states clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced with a national militia with an extremely short term of service. The rural communes of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates to the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send delegates to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate bound by the mandat imperatif of his constituents.

The local Communes were to be autonomous and elected, but they were not intended to be independent political entities. “The Communal Constitution,” Marx wrote, “has been mistaken for an attempt to break up the nation into a federation of small states. The antagonism of the Commune against the state power has been mistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle against over-centralization.” Instead, the Commune was to provide a national organization with the greatest possible local autonomy, while still maintaining a national framework.

Some tasks, such as the coordination of the national economy and the mobilization for national defense, had to be coordinated by a central government at the national level. The Commune’s plans, however, recognized that this body had to be monitored and regulated. “The few but important tasks which still would remain for a central government were not to be suppressed,” Marx writes, “but were to be discharged by Communal and therefore, strictly responsible agents.”

In short, Marx concluded, the Commune proved that the old bourgeois form of government would “have to give way to the self-government of the producers.”

It is this idea of “self-government of the producers” that separates the program of Marx and the council communists from the Leninists. Leninism in all its forms flatly rejects the notion of worker self-government. The Leninists fight, not for a government made up of the organized proletariat, but for an authoritarian party bureaucracy that acts “in the interests of the proletariat”.

The Commune’s program, by contrast, would have produced a national revolutionary government made up of autonomous decentralized self-governing bodies, a free association of producers such as that envisioned by Marx. Such a system can only be brought about by a broad mass-based movement which organizes the working class as a whole into a self-governing body.

The Paris Commune, we can see, was the first tentative step towards communist democracy. It was in essence a classless society; a government with no oppressed class to hold in check and no interests of its own to safeguard. It was not a government over  the workers, but a government of the workers, whose sole task was to administrate and coordinate the activity of the self-governing producers.

The Commune stands in sharp contrast to the repressive states of the Leninist tradition. The Leninist state, with its massive parasitic bureaucracy, falls far short of the Commune’s popularly-elected, revocable and responsible agents. Rather than “withering away”, the Leninist states grew ever larger and more parasitic until they finally could be tolerated no longer. The Leninist monstrosities have nothing in common with the communist democracy foreseen by Marx and the council communists, and practiced at the Commune.

Timeline of the Paris Commune

 1789

June 17 – Anti-royalist forces opposed to King Louis XVI of France meet in Paris and establish the National Assembly.

July 14 – Bastille Day.  A crowd of Parisians storms the Bastille Prison and releases everyone held by the King of France.

October 5 – King Louis is taken from his palace at Versailles and is held in Paris as a virtual prisoner.

1793

January 21 – King Louis is executed by guillotine.

September 21 – the First Republic is declared.

1799

November 9 – Military leader Napoleon Bonaparte is declared First Consul and assumes near dictatorial powers.

1804

December 2 – Bonaparte crowns himself Emperor of France.

1815

June 18 – Napoleon Bonaparte is defeated at Waterloo.  France returns to rule by a constitutional monarch.

1848

February 20 – King Louis Phillipe of France is overthrown, and the Second Republic is established.

December 10 – Louis Bonaparte, the nephew of the former Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, wins election as President of the Second Republic.

1852

December 2 -– Bonaparte stages a coup and seizes totall power from the Republic, declaring himself as Emperor Napoleon III.

1870

January 10 --  After journalist Victor Noir, a pro-democracy Republican, is killed by Bonaparte’s cousin, massive demonstrations occur in Paris against the Second Empire.

July 19 – Bonaparte, in an attempt to rally support to his regime, declares war on Prussia, which is under the rule of Otto von Bismarck.  The Franco-Prussian War begins.

September 2 – 83,000 French troops led by Bonaparte and Marshal MacMahon are defeated at Sedan and surrender.

September 4 – Upon hearing of Bonaparte’s capture by the Prussians, a crowd of French people take over the Legislative Assembly in Paris, and proclaim the Third Republic.  A Government of National Defense is established, which blames the war on Bonaparte but refuses to end the war until Prussia agrees to withdraw from the Alsace-Lorraine region.

September 19 – The Prussian Army reaches Paris and lays siege to the city.

October 27-30 – The French army is defeated in a series of battles and surrenders, leaving only  the National Guard citizen militia to defend Paris.

October 31 --  Militant French workers led by Louis Auguste Blanqui seize City Hall (Hotel de Ville) and establish a Committee of Public Safety to serve as a shadow government.

November 1 – After promising to hold elections, the Government of National Defense seizes the Hotel de Ville and arrests Blanqui for treason.

1871

January 22 – Blanquists and other demonstrators gather outside the Hotel de Ville, and are fired upon by French troops.

January 28 – Paris is officially surrendered to the Prussians.  The National Guard citizen militia, however, is allowed to retain its weapons, and they restrict the Prussian troops to a small section of the city.  Paris workers hold demonstrations demanding that power be passed from the Government of National Defense to an elected city government (a commune).

February 8 – Elections are held for a new National Assembly to replace the Government of National Defense.  No elections are held for a local commune government in Paris.

February 16 – Adolphe Thiers is elected President of the new National Assembly.

February 26 – Peace treaty is signed between the Thiers government and von Bismarck, ceding the Alsace-Lorraine region to Prussia.

March 11 – Fearing more riots and demonstrations by Paris workers, the National Assembly moves from the city to nearby Versailles.

March 18 – Thiers sends French army troops to Paris to disarm the National Guard.  Instead, the French troops kill their own generals, Claude Martin Lecomte and Jacques Leonard Clement Thomas, and join the insurrectionaries.

March 26 – Paris workers organize their own elections for a municipal government (Paris Commune), and elect 92 trade unionists, socialists, anarchists and other radicals to the new government.  Blanqui is elected as President of the Commune, despite the fact that he is still being held in prison by the National Assembly.  The Commune declares revolutionary aims, noting that “the flag of the Commune is the flag of the World Republic”.  In a series of proclamations over the next few weeks, the Commune abolishes the draft, establishes the National Guard (consisting of all citizens capable of bearing arms) as the sole armed body, allows women the right to vote, freezes all payment of rents for two years, limits the salary of all government officials, decrees the separation of church and state, postpones all debts for three years, closes all pawnshops and returns all items to their owners, and abolishes interest on those debts, and proclaimed that workplaces that had been abandoned by their owners were now to be run by councils elected by the workers.

April 2 – Thiers asks Bismarck to release French prisoners of war to help take Paris and crush the Commune.  French troops begin a siege of Paris.  Communards move cannons to the heights of Montmartre.

April 7 – Theirs’ forces capture the bridge at Neuilly, giving them an entryway into Paris.

April 11 – French army troops enter southern Paris, but are driven back with heavy losses by the National Guard.

May 16 – Paris workers pull down the Vendome Column, which celebrated the victories of Napoleon Bonaparte and was made out of bronze from captured guns.

May 21 – Prussian troops surrounding Paris allow National Assembly forces under Marshal MacMahon to enter Paris.  They defeat the National Guard militia and the Commune is crushed.

May 21-28 --- La Semaine Sanglante (“Bloody Weeek”). MacMahon orders the summary execution of over 30,000 Communards, while another 38,000 are jailed and 7,000 are deported.

Introduction to the 1886 Edition

The following translation of Lissagaray’s Histoire de la Commune was made many years ago, at the express wish of the author, who, besides making many emendations in his work, wrote nearly a hundred pages especially for this English version. The translation, in fact, was made from the Histoire de la Commune as prepared for a second edition — an edition which the French Government would not allow to be published. This explanation is necessary in view of the differences between the translation and the first edition of Lissagaray’s book.

Written in 1876, there are necessarily passages in this history out of date today; as, for example, the references to the prisoners in New Caledonia, the exiles, and the amnesty. But for two reasons I prefer leaving this translation as it was originally. To have it “written up to date” would only be making patchwork of it. Secondly, I am loath to alter the work in any way. It had been entirely revised and corrected by my father. I want it to remain as he knew it.

Lissagaray’s Histoire de la Commune is the only authentic and reliable history as yet written of the most memorable movement of modem times. It is true Lissagaray was a soldier of the Commune, but he has had the courage and honesty to speak the truth. He has not attempted to hide the errors of his party, or to gloss over the fatal weaknesses of the Revolution; and if he has erred, it has been on the side of moderation, in his anxiety not to make a single statement that could not be corroborated by overwhelming proofs of its truth. Wherever it was possible, the statements of the Versaillese in their Parliamentary Inquiries, in their press, and in their books are used in preference to the statements of friends and partisans; and whenever the evidence of Communards is given, it is invariably sifted with scrupulous care. And it is this impartiality, this careful avoidance of any assertion that could be considered doubtful, which should recommend this work to English readers.

In England especially most persons are still quite ignorant of the events which led up to and forced the people of Paris into making that revolution which was to save France from the shame and disgrace of a fourth Empire. To most English people the Commune still spells “rapine, fear and lust”, and when they speak of its “atrocities” they have some vague idea of hostages ruthlessly massacred by brutal revolutionises, of houses burnt down by furious petroleuses. Is it not time that English people at last learnt the truth? Is it not time they were reminded that for the sixty-five hostages shot, not by the Commune, but by a few people made mad by the massacre of prisoners by the Versaillese, the troops of law and order shot down thirty thousand men, women, and children, for the most part long after all fighting had ceased? If any Englishman, after reading Lissagaray’s History of the Commune, still has any doubt as to what the “atrocities” of the Commune really were, he should turn to the Parisian correspondence for May and June, 1871, of the Times, Daily News, and Standard.

There he can learn what kind of “order reigned in Paris” after the glorious victory of Versailles.

Nor is it enough that we should be clear as to the “atrocities” of the Commune. It is time people understood the true meaning of this Revolution; and this can be summed up in a few words. It meant the government of the people by the people. It was the first attempt of the proletariat to govern itself. The workers of Paris expressed this when in their first manifesto they declared they “understood it was their imperious duty and their absolute right to render themselves masters of their own destinies by seizing upon governmental power”. The establishment of the Commune meant not the replacing of one form of class rule by another, but the abolishing of all class rule. It meant the substitution of true co-operative, i.e., communist, for capitalistic production, and the participation in this Revolution of workers of all countries meant the internationalizing, not only the nationalising, of the, land and of private property.

And the same men who now cry out against the use of force used force — and what force! — to vanquish the people of Paris. Those who denounce Socialists as mere firebrands and dynamitards used fire and sword to crush the people into submission.

And what has been the result of these massacres, of this slaying of thousands of men, women, and children? Is Socialism dead? Was it drowned in the blood of the people of Paris? Socialism today is a greater power than it has ever been. The bourgeois Republic of France may join hands with the Autocrat of Russia to blot it out; Bismarck may pass repressive laws, and democratic America may follow in his wake — and still it moves! And because Socialism is today a power, because in England even it is “in the air”, the time has come for doing justice to the Commune of Paris. The time has come when even the opponents of Socialism will read, at least with patience if not with sympathy, an honest and truthful account of the greatest Socialist movement — thus far — of the century.

Eleanor Marx Aveling
                June  1886