The Civil War in France

The Civil War in France

Karl Marx

Introductions by Friedrich Engels and Josh Holroyd; with articles by V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

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Karl Marx, English Edition of 1871 (taken from the Marxists Internet Archive and edited by Wellred Books)

Cover design by Jesse Murray-Dean

Cover image: ‘Barricade, the Paris Commune, May 1871’, by André Devambez (public domain)

Ebook produced by Martin Swayne. Smashwords edition, published April 2021.

Table of Contents

Introductions

Introduction: 150 Years Since the Paris Commune (J. Holroyd)

Lessons of the Commune (V.I. Lenin)

Lessons of the Paris Commune (L. Trotsky)

Introduction to the 1891 Edition (F. Engels)

The Civil War in France

First Address: The Beginning of the Franco-Prussian War

Second Address: Prussian Occupation of France

1. France Capitulates & the Government of Thiers

2. Paris Workers’ Revolution & Thiers’ Reactionary Massacres

3. The Paris Commune

4. The Fall of Paris

Engels’ Postscript

Landmarks

Cover

Introduction:

150 Years Since the Paris Commune

There has never been a better or more important time to publish Marx’s classic pamphlet on the lessons of the Paris Commune, The Civil War in France. Today, 150 years since the birth of the Commune, millions of workers are rising up against the injustice and inhumanity of the capitalist system. In such a period of momentous class struggle it is vital that the working class should know and understand its own history.

The Civil War in France is a series of addresses from the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA), drafted by Marx, starting in July 1870 with the onset of the Franco-Prussian War and ending in May 1871 with his defence of the Paris Commune, which was at that very moment being violently crushed. It is a masterful application of the Marxist method to the questions of war, revolution and the state and should be compulsory reading for any socialist.

However, the fact that Marx’s addresses were drafted and delivered in the heat of the events themselves meant that much of the historical background and the specific events of the Commune were left out. It is therefore the intention of this introduction to provide some of that detail, along with insights provided in Marx’s letters of the time, so that the modern reader can get as much out of this classic text as possible.

The rise and fall of the Second Empire

France is often considered the archetypal ‘republican’ country, but this was by no means the case 150 years ago. In fact, the people of France spent the majority of the nineteenth century living under the rule of three kings and two Bonapartes.

In February 1848, the masses, and the Parisian proletariat in particular, rose up and overthrew the bourgeois monarchy[1] of King Louis Philippe I. But having won the Republic the workers did not limit themselves to only democratic demands. As with the British Chartists of the same period, beneath the workers’ democratic aspirations lay social, class demands: the desire for a new social order with the republic as a means to achieve it. On the other hand, no section of society was more opposed to the democratic republic than the big bourgeoisie, which rallied behind the two rival monarchist factions, the ‘Legitimist’ supporters of the old Bourbon dynasty and the ‘Orleanist’ defenders of Louis Philippe. This contradiction at the heart of the republic would produce an intense and bitter struggle, which would leave its mark on the events of 1870-71.

The new republic of 1848 announced its birth with a massacre of the most radical Parisian workers in June of that year. But even that wasn’t enough to satisfy the ruling class. After less than four years, the republic was dissolved by a military coup on 2 December 1851, carried out by its own president, Louis Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. After four years of storm and strife, the landlords, industrialists and financial swindlers were clamouring for ‘Order’ above all and were more than prepared to sacrifice the bourgeois republic in return for peace and profits. As Marx explained in his classic work on the birth of the Second Empire, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Thus… the bourgeoisie confesses that its own interests dictate that it should be delivered from the danger of its own rule; that, in order to restore tranquillity in the country, its bourgeois parliament must, first of all, be laid to rest; that, in order to preserve its social power intact, its political power must be broken…[2]

With the blood of thousands of workers the bourgeoisie had bought itself eighteen years of social peace under Bonaparte. But even in this period of reaction, the mole of revolution was burrowing away. The capitalist upswing that followed the establishment of the Second Empire inevitably strengthened the ranks of the working class and as a new generation of workers began to strain against the Bonapartist yoke, they turned to revolutionary ideas, including those of the IWMA, which in France contained both Proudhonist (a form of anarchism) and what we would today call Marxist tendencies.

In 1869 the workers began to move again and the Empire, ostensibly so powerful with its gigantic army, police and bureaucracy, found itself suspended above a seething cauldron. Confronted with the same choice as all doomed regimes, that of repression or concessions, the government first attempted to repress the workers and then to appease them. Both only emboldened the masses. Elections were called for May 1869, offering the choice between the regime and a tame opposition. The government only received fifty five per cent of the vote, concentrated overwhelmingly in the most backward, rural parts of the country. The opposition more than doubled its votes and Paris overwhelmingly elected Republican candidates.

Sensing weakness, the workers went on the offensive. Crowds assembled in Paris, singing the hymn of the Great French Revolution, La Marseillaise. After the cousin of the Emperor shot and killed a journalist, Victor Noir, in January 1870, the Parisian masses responded with an enormous demonstration, numbering 200,000. The authority of the Emperor was in tatters. Forced to offer the spectre of reform in order to prepare the jackboot of reaction, Bonaparte called a plebiscite, effectively a vote of confidence, in which voters were asked to endorse the regime’s ‘liberal’ reforms, or reject them. At the same time, known members of the IWMA were arrested in order to limit their growing influence amongst the working class.

On the face of it the May 1870 plebiscite gave Bonaparte a resounding victory, with 82.7 per cent of the vote going in his favour. As in 1869, the regime had relied on the support of the rural masses, while Paris overwhelmingly voted ‘no’ or abstained. But amidst the celebrations in the Tuileries Palace and the Paris stock exchange, the outline of the future crisis could still be seen. Only four months later, the Second Empire was no more.

Not for the first nor the last time in history, national chauvinism and war were turned to as a means of rallying support around the state. Bonaparte hoped that by hurling France into a war with Prussia for the domination of Europe he would exorcise the ghost of 1848, which was looming over the nation. As Marx notes: The war plot of [19] July 1870 is but an amended edition of the coup d’état of December 1851.[3] But it was precisely this adventure which would finish off the Empire for good.

The French Emperor declared war on 19 July 1870. Both sides rapidly mobilised hundreds of thousands of troops and threw them into the pointless carnage. Overstretched and outmanoeuvred, the French armies suffered a series of bloody defeats. On 18 August, the French Army of the Rhine under General Bazaine retreated to Metz, which was besieged by the Prussians.

Bonaparte’s project of invading Germany was hopeless, and yet his generals continued to throw themselves into the traps laid for them. In reality, they preferred the prospect of defeat to a foreign enemy over revolution at home. An eye-witness of the Commune, Lissagaray, writes in his History of the Paris Commune of 1871 that the Bonapartist Minister, Palikao, had written to the head of the French forces, Marshall MacMahon on 27 August, stating: If you abandon Bazaine we shall have the Revolution in Paris.[4] The Emperor led the army himself in an attempt to rescue Bazaine. On 1 September 1870, he was caught at Sedan, surrounded by 200,000 Prussian troops. After losing over 17,000 of his men trying to break out of Prussian encirclement, Bonaparte surrendered to the Prussian leader, Bismarck, on 2 September, along with the whole of his army.

At the news of the defeat at Sedan and the Emperor’s capture, the ruling class began conspiring to replace the Empire with a constitutional monarchy. The bourgeois republicans on the other hand could think of nothing other than the maintenance of order. In response to Parisian demonstrators demanding a republic, the ‘radical’ Leon Gambetta announced: You are wrong; we must remain united; make no revolution.[5] But his pleas fell on deaf ears. On the morning of 4 September, the workers assembled in their National Guard battalions (a militia first organised in 1789 for policing and military reserve purposes), forced their way into the Corps Legislatif, cleared the deputies of the now defunct assembly out of the hall and forced the same Gambetta to declare the abolition of the Empire.

At the Hôtel de Ville (city hall), the Parisian deputies proclaimed a new republic and announced themselves as the new Government of National Defence under pressure from the masses. Thus the Third French Republic was born: a bourgeois democratic revolution carried out in defiance of the bourgeoisie itself. With one push the workers had established the Republic, but entrusted its defence to a cabal of place-hunting barristers,[6] whose mandate consisted in nothing more than the fact they represented Paris in a Bonapartist parliament.

The siege of Paris

It may be asked why, having toppled the Empire by their own strength, the workers allowed themselves to be duped by such a hypocritical and useless cabal as the likes of Gambetta, even applauding the names as they were read out at the Hôtel de Ville. This may seem all the more puzzling when one considers the revolutionary events that were to come. But what this apparent contradiction demonstrates is precisely the contradictory nature of consciousness itself. As Trotsky explains in his masterpiece, The History of the Russian Revolution, The swift changes of mass views and moods in an epoch of revolution thus derive, not from the flexibility and mobility of man’s mind, but just the opposite, from its deep conservatism.[7] The masses will only take the dangerous path of revolution when the impossibility of continuing with the present situation becomes an undeniable fact, but even then they do not necessarily rise up with a clear plan of the way forward.

The Russian masses rose up in February (March in our calendar) 1917, and toppled the centuries-old despotism of the Tsar in a matter of days. Their power was irresistible. And yet power fell into the lap of a ‘Provisional Government’, a cabal perhaps even more motley than the Government of National Defence in 1870. In Russia, as in France, the workers although triumphant, naturally assumed that power should go to their ‘superiors’: the famous men of politics who had represented them in the past. After all, this view is reinforced by decades of experience in all countries in normal times. But the masses do not give their leaders a blank cheque; painful experience teaches the masses to know their own strength as they test and discard those leaders and parties who obstruct their path.

The Paris workers cheered the Government of National Defence because they saw in it the only available means to repel the Prussians. Even the most hardened revolutionaries became intoxicated by this mood of ‘national defence’. The local section of the IWMA sent delegates to the Hôtel de Ville, offering their support in the organisation of the defence. Auguste Serraillier, an Internationalist worker in Paris wrote to Marx, outraged at this capitulation to the ultra-chauvinist mood, explaining: When I express indignation at their conduct, they tell me that, were they to speak otherwise, they would be sent packing![8]

An observer at the time, if they only took account of the superficial mood on the surface of society, could have written off the Parisian workers as too ‘co-opted’ by chauvinist illusions to carry out a revolution, as many ‘left-wing’ commentators do today. And yet it was the same workers who little more than six months later elected foreigners to the Commune, declaring that the flag of the Commune is the flag of the World Republic,[9] and who cheered as they pulled down the Vendôme column (a monument dedicated to Napoleon’s conquests). On the basis of events, the illusions of the masses would be transformed into their opposite.

For the Parisian worker a predatory war waged by his own oppressor represented nothing but a strengthening of his own oppression in the case of victory, and an intensification of his suffering in the case of defeat. But the capitulation of Bonaparte, the abolition of the Empire, and the intention of Bismarck to transform a war of defence into a war of plunder against the French people changed all this. Albeit in a confused way, intermingled with national chauvinism – which is omnipresent in bourgeois society – the worker saw the continuation of the war as the defence not only of France but of the Republic. And crucially, behind the Republic lay not just a political ideal but the means to realise his own class interests. In short, what the workers were unconsciously striving for was a workers’ republic, which they were prepared to defend against all comers. And they would have to.

Neither Bismarck, nor the French ruling class had any interest whatsoever in preserving the Republic of 4 September 1870. For Bismarck, the presence of a democratic republic