By RENÉ BERTHIER*
Its administrative, economic and political measures were inspired by the work of Proudhon
The Paris Commune – which lasted three months – is a founding myth that was instrumentalized by most currents in the labor movement. Everyone can find inspiration and a model in her. Three months after taking power, the Bolsheviks would have celebrated, and Lenin would have said that now they could disappear, because they had lasted as long as the Commune. True or false, this story, as told to us by Marcel Body, is particularly significant.[I]
The libertarian movement is no exception in this process of producing myths, understanding that the creation of myths is not necessarily a negative thing. From Jacobins to Federalists, from Republicans to Libertarians, from Patriots to Internationalists, everyone can benefit from the events that began in March 1871, as long as they hide everything that contradicts their own theses.
However, “the Parisian International, on the eve of the Commune, is mostly Proudhonian”[ii]. When the Commune is proclaimed, “among the thirty international elect, almost two thirds can be considered as Proudhonians”[iii]. In addition to the terrorist provisions of Blanquist influence, the Commune's program is also clearly Proudhonian: Georges Gurvitch wrote that "all administrative, economic and political measures will be inspired by Proudhon"[iv]. It remains, therefore, that the themes that persist in surviving remain essentially libertarian themes: federalism, autonomy. However, oddly enough, libertarians are probably the least likely to seek to “recover” the Paris Commune.
What does the Paris Commune mean to them? (1) It marks the conscious affirmation of the entry of the popular movement into modernity; (2) It is, along with the AIT experience (but probably less so than the latter), one of the founding events of the opposition between anarchism and Marxism and is therefore a key theme in the debate over the revolutionary project.
The most interesting fact of this historical event is not, however, the observation of the ideological and political options of each one, but the fact that, when given these options, the protagonists were led, by the logic of things, to carry out, or to make an apology for a work sometimes contrary to their options; the example of Marx – external to events, it is true – being undoubtedly the most notable.
The Commune tried to create a federalist organization against state centralism, the federation of autonomous communes having to ensure the management of public affairs. It is opposed to “unity as it has been imposed on us until today by the Empire, the monarchy and parliamentarism”. It proposes “the voluntary association of all local initiatives, the spontaneous and free contribution of all individual energies towards a common goal, the well-being, freedom and security of all”. This is the opposite of Marxist positions.
Its objective is to achieve “the most complete and fruitful modern revolution of all those that have illuminated history”. This last statement shows the conscience of the actors of the Commune for the realization of an original work.
The workers and revolutionary socialists were few in the General Council and in the commissions. The latter were composed mainly of petty bourgeois republicans, anticlericals, more or less Jacobin or Blanquist patriots. The socialists, called “the minority”, were largely militants of the AIT: it was they who gave the Commune its ideal and founded the revolutionary myth. However, the AIT in France was greatly weakened when the popular revolt broke out in Paris. The most active militants were arrested or had to flee to Belgium. Those who continued their action were called Prussian spies. The war had robbed most sections of their supporters. The economic crisis and unemployment had done the rest. Of the 81 members of the General Council of the Commune, 17 were members of the AIT, but none of them could be called “Marxist” or “Bakuninist”. The members of the International played a specific role, without their organization being able to influence events.
The numerical weakness of the proletariat at the time, the crushing social weight of the petty bourgeoisie, the poor development of the productive forces; all this only accentuates the surprising nature of the revolutionary content of the myth created between March and May 1871. In addition to the weakness of the effective achievements of the Commune, the revolutionary myth was largely nourished by the memory of the heroism of the people of Paris in the face of the barbarism of Versailles, to the 25.000 massacred rebels, to the executed prisoners and wounded, to the corpses left behind; for the ruthlessly systematic nature of the repression, to the 13.440 men, women and children detained, sentenced to death or deportation to New Caledonia.
As much as a unifying myth for the international proletariat, the Paris Commune has been the revealer of the true nature of the bourgeoisie and the state. This lesson is still true: the social emancipation of the exploited masses will always face the most ruthless reaction from the ruling class.
a founding event
Although most of the Commune's revolutionary themes were libertarian in inspiration, Bakunin remained very reserved. He thinks that, in addition to the concrete achievements, it is above all the message sent by the Commune to the international proletariat that remains valid: “The Paris Commune lasted a very short time, and was impeded in its internal development by the mortal struggle that it had to support against the reaction of Versailles, so that he could, I say, not even apply, but only theoretically work out his socialist program. Furthermore, it must be admitted that the majority of the members of the Commune were not strictly socialists, and if they proved to be so, it was because they were irresistibly attracted by the inexorable force of things, by the nature of their environment, by the necessities of their position and not by his inner conviction. The Socialists, at the head of which, of course, is our friend Varlin, constituted only a tiny minority in the Commune; at most there were only fourteen or fifteen members. The rest were Jacobins…”
Later in the text, Bakunin adds: “In addition, the situation of the small number of convinced socialists who formed part of the Commune was extremely difficult. They did not feel sufficiently supported by the great mass of the Parisian population, the organization of the International Association, very imperfect in itself, embracing only a few thousand individuals, had to support a daily struggle against the Jacobin majority and under what circumstances!”[v]
Unlike Marx, who was in London, Bakunin was in France at the time and took part in the Lyon uprising. There he proposed, among other measures, the creation of a permanent revolutionary militia, the seizure of all public and private property, and the dismissal of all public servants. He also proposed measures of economic reorganization: the revolutionary communes had to nominate delegates, appoint commissions to reorganize work, and give workers' associations the capital they needed. When the city council decided to reduce the daily wages of workers at national construction sites, Bakunin was opposed to workers coming to the protest demonstration unarmed.
Marx could not help but mock Bakunin's action, which failed. Circumstances were obviously not ripe. However, a Bolshevik historian, Yuri Steklov, asserts that Bakunin's intervention in Lyon was "a generous attempt to awaken the dormant energy of the French proletariat and direct it towards the struggle against the capitalist system and, at the same time, to repel the foreign invasion”[vi].
Steklov adds that Bakunin's plan was not so ridiculous: "In Bakunin's mind, it was necessary to take advantage of the upheavals caused by the war, the incapacity of the bourgeoisie, the patriotic protests of the masses, its confused social trends, to attempt decisive intervention by the workers. in the big centers, to drag the peasantry back and thus start the world social revolution. No one then came up with a better plan.”[vii]
Bakunin believes that, “if the social revolution in France does not directly emerge from this war, socialism will die for a long time throughout Europe”[viii]. After the failure of Lyon, he wrote to Palix, one of his companions: “I am beginning to think that France is finished… Instead of your living and real socialism, we will have the doctrinaire socialism of the Germans”[ix]… He knows that the Prussian victory will lead to the creation of the German empire, and Bakunin fears above all that if the German workers are brought to serve “the institution of the German state”, the solidarity that should “unite them to the point where they become confused with their brethren, the exploited workers of the whole world” will be sacrificed to “national political passion”[X].
Torn between “socialist labor solidarity” and “political patriotism of the national state”, German workers risk being “united with their bourgeois compatriots against the workers of a foreign country”.
Bakunin, however, will pay homage to these social democratic leaders and German workers who took internationalist positions against the war, which contrasted with Marx's stance at the beginning of the conflict.
Defense War?
In the analyzes developed by Marx and Engels on the Franco-Prussian War, two periods must be pointed out (1) Before the Commune, the correspondence between Marx and Engels shows, without possible divergence, that they are in favor of a Prussian victory, because this will make it possible to achieve, even if “from above”, the unification of Germany. The war is presented as a defensive war for Germany. Furthermore, a German victory would guarantee the hegemony of German socialism over the French.
(2) After the Commune, this thesis can no longer be supported: Marx resumed his role as General Secretary of the AIT and defended the insurrection. He published his famous book, The Civil War in France, in which, in complete contradiction with his own ideas, he defended the federalist point of view. (Marx was always staunchly opposed to federalism, which he likened to a political form of the Middle Ages.)
Marx's internationalist positions are often emphasized, but Marxist authors tend to move very quickly into the pre-Commune period. As early as 1844, Marx had written that “the German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat”[xi], which is, of course, a way of legitimizing his position as a leader: the vocation of the German working class is thus traced from the beginning. On July 20, 1870, at the beginning of the war, Marx wrote a letter to Engels in which he stated that “the French must be beaten. If the Prussians are victorious, the centralization of state power will be useful for the centralization of the German working class.”
Marx continues again: “German rule will also shift the center of gravity of the western European labor movement from France to Germany; and it suffices to compare the movement in the two countries, from 1866 to the present, to see that the German working class is superior to the French in theory and organization. The preponderance, on the world stage, of the German proletariat over the French proletariat would at the same time be the preponderance of our theory over Proudhon's.
It is indisputable that Marx's opinion of the future of the European labor movement was subordinated to the single point of view of German unity. Thus, when the Socialist Deputy of Saxony, Wilhelm Liebknecht, who was against Prussian hegemony over Germany, accused the North German Confederation of being an instrument of Prussia and the Reichstag of being “the fig leaf of naked absolutism”, was accused of being prusophobic, fanatical austrophile and, in the last insult, federalist. For Marx, federalist was an insult. When Liebknecht himself abstained from voting on war appropriations, he was viciously attacked by Marx. By posing the problem in terms of the hegemony of one working class over another, Marx only confirmed Bakunin's fears about the political strategy of Marxism: the organization of the proletariat into political parties on a national basis leads to the negation of internationalism.
Engels picked up the idea from Marx's July 20th letter. On 15 August he explained that German victory was necessary for the future of the proletariat and hailed the sacred unity that existed in Germany. The mass of the German people, he said, and all classes, understood that it was national existence that was at stake, "and they reacted immediately." To preach, under these conditions, the obstruction of the king's policy and to place "all kinds of secondary considerations above the essential, as Wilhelm [Liebknecht] does", seems impossible to him.[xii].
The “secondary considerations” in this case were obviously the opposition to the war and the internationalist statements of the Parisian and Saxon workers; the “essential” being the national war which was supposed to weld German national unity. Engels even denounced the chauvinism of the French, who, for lack of having "taken a good beating", made peace between the two countries impossible!
On 17 August 1870, Marx responded approvingly of his friend's analysis: "War has become national," he commented. The national war argument provides its own justification, because it serves a purpose that goes beyond particular or dynastic interests, and is therefore a war that the German labor movement can, and must, support. (Thus we see that the positions of the German Social Democracy at the beginning of the Great War are perfectly consistent with those of Marx.)
Marx's German Policy During the Franco-Prussian War
When, on September 4, 1870, the French Empire collapsed under the blows of the Prussian army, the French section of the AIT launched an internationalist appeal asking the German workers to abandon the invasion and proposing a fraternal alliance that would lay the foundations of the United States of America. Europe. It should be clear that the London leadership of the AIT has nothing to do with this internationalist initiative: it even opposes it! Marx will go so far as to describe this Appeal as “ridiculous”. It has, he said, "provoked laughter and anger among the working people of England"[xiii].
German Social Democracy responded favorably to this appeal and its leaders were immediately arrested. Among them were Liebknecht and Bebel who, as early as July, had abstained from voting on war credits: “German internationalists understood that it was not possible to vote in favor of a war waged by the Prussian autocracy and that it was not necessary to vote either. if they allow themselves to be suspected of harboring any sympathy for Napoleon III.”[xiv].
Despite his differences with German social democracy, Bakunin did not hesitate to "do justice to the leaders of the party of socialist democracy" and to all those who had the courage to "speak a human language in the midst of all this noisy bourgeois animality"[xv].
It should be noted that Marx, at that time, had a high regard for the British trade union leaders, with whom he had an equivocal relationship, and who were totally uninterested in the International. Three of them, however, had been co-opted by him to the General Council. Marx never tried to create an English section of the AIT. This only emerged later, and in opposition to Marx.
The leaders of the English trade unions were not interested in ideological or international issues and let Marx have his way. Marx needed the British; they allowed him to strengthen his positions because he had absolutely no support at the existing federation level: there was not even a German federation, just a handful of individual members. The appeal of the French section of the AIT[xvi] it must have seemed to Marx too radical to be accepted by the British trade union leaders. Indeed, the latter later accused the Commune insurgents of being “bandits”.
On September 7, Engels wrote that the French workers “now demand, on the pretext that German victories have given them a republic, that the Germans must immediately abandon the sacred soil of France or else: war without truce! It's that old bluster. […] I hope these people come to their senses as soon as the euphoria passes, otherwise it would become hellishly difficult to continue international relations with them”. Engels is not wrong when he says that the Prussian victories gave France a republic, but it is the republic that, starting from Versailles, will organize the crushing of the Paris Commune.
Concerned to see the Parisian proletariat and poor people stirring, Engels wrote again on September 12: “If we could have any influence in Paris we would have to prevent the workers from moving towards peace, and Bismarck will soon be in a position to do so, either by taking Paris or because the European situation obliges him to end the war”.
Thus, it can be seen that, twice, in 1870 as in 1848, in a revolutionary situation, Marx and Engels wanted to curb the popular impulse because it did not fit into their strategic options.[xvii]. Thus, on September 9, the General Council of the AIT – that is, Marx – published a speech recommending to the French workers: (a) not to overthrow the government, because that would be “desperate madness”; (b) to “fulfill their duty as citizens”; (c) not “let oneself be carried away by the national memories of 1792”.[xviii]
The workers, says the message, “do not have to start over from the past, but build the future”. That, calm and resolute, they take advantage of republican freedom to work to build their class organization[xx].
Let's decipher: “Working to build your class organization” means using the institutions of the bourgeois republic to develop a parliamentary policy and seize power through the ballot box. Marx shies away from the fact that the Prussian victory is also the victory of reaction in France and Germany. In reality, that's not what worries you. This, he believes, is the price to be paid for the creation of parliamentary institutions which, in the long run, will necessarily ensure the political dominance of the proletariat.
In the texts of Marx and Engels at the time, it is expressly stated, on the one hand, that the German victory is a victory of the German labor movement, and that the German victory would mean the subordination of the French labor movement to the German labor movement ("the predominance of our theory over Proudhon's”). Relations between the national working classes are perceived as relations of national antagonism. Prussian victory would settle the German national question once and for all: "German workers could organize on a national scale, which they have not been able to do until now."
Marx, change of perspective
The defense war theory, which legitimized the war on the German side with the idea that France initiated it and that Germany was only the victim, could not be sustained indefinitely. The unanimous revolutionary opinion and the resistance of the Parisian masses forced Marx and Engels to change their point of view. Both Blanqui and Bakunin called for revolutionary war from the start, denounced the government's hesitations, predicted that Prussian hegemony would mean the triumph of reaction in Europe. It was only five months later that Marx returned to the revolutionary war argument. As in 1848-1849, he only adopted a revolutionary approach when the movement withdrew.
It is only in the face of the obvious collusion between Bismarck and Thiers that Marx will change his point of view. The one he thought was the opponent of Bonapartism – Thiers – is now accused of having “precipitated the war with France with his declarations against German unity” and of having accepted peace at all costs, begging “permission and means to carry out the civil war in his own crushed country”[xx].
From then on, Bismarck's unintentionally progressive role waned, while the glory of the Parisian workers vilified six months earlier rose. The Civil War in France it is the expression of this change of perspective. Henceforth, says Marx, national war is "a pure mystification of governments designed to delay the class struggle". Class domination, it is still said, “can no longer hide under a national uniform, national governments are unanimous against the proletariat”! Thus class struggle resumed its place as the driving force of history; French workers were no longer asked to “do their civic duty” – to vote – nor to refrain from overthrowing the government.
The book that Marx wrote about the Commune is often cited as a typical expression of his political thought, although he approached this event from a federalist point of view, that is, in total opposition to his ideas. Engels' famous formula about the Commune as the finally found form of the dictatorship of the proletariat is well known.[xxx]. However, Marx's texts that precede the book do not bring any of this idea, and the texts that follow never again allude to it. Bakunin himself, moreover, pays homage to the Commune as a “historical negation of the State”[xxiii], but stresses that it did not have time to accomplish much, that multiple internal contradictions paralyzed it and that its main interest as an event was to set a precedent.
O The Manifest he simply stated that the first stage of the revolution is the conquest of the democratic regime, that is, of universal suffrage. That is, confirmed by Engels in the preface to Class Struggles in France[xxiii]. Nowhere, the The Manifest tells how the conquest of democracy could ensure the political hegemony of the proletariat.
Engels simply says, in his project “Catechism”[xxv], that universal suffrage will directly guarantee the rule of the working class in countries where the working class is in the majority. In countries where the proletariat is a minority, its rule will be indirectly secured by alliance with the peasants and petty bourgeoisie who depend on the proletariat for their political interests, and who will therefore have to "quickly submit to the demands of the working class". Engels points out that a second revolution may then be necessary, but that it can only end with the victory of the proletariat.
Precisely, however, careful observation of the political situation in Germany leads Bakunin to the conclusion that a political alliance with the petty bourgeoisie or with the radical bourgeoisie on parliamentary grounds inevitably leads to the subjugation of the proletariat to the strata with which it allies. Engels' vituperations towards the end of his life against petty-bourgeois influence in the Social Democratic Party confirm these fears.
Marx's Blanquist and Jacobin-inspired conceptions of power would dominate, despite the momentary interlude of the Commune, accompanied by a profound contempt for all socialist opponents of Jacobinism.
Although neither Proudhon nor Bakunin had anything to do with this, it was the federalist conceptions that dominated in the Paris Commune: federations of decentralized communes, replacement of elected and revocable delegates by the state apparatus, which contrasts considerably with the apology for the work of centralization initiated by the monarchy, as developed in the 18 Brumaire. Now, Marx adheres to the work of the Commune, and the speech of the General Council of the AIT, written by him, was written from the point of view of the own Communards. Until now, the creation of a socialist society was, for the The Manifest, conditioned to the creation of a democratic proletarian state resulting from universal suffrage or, to put it Class Struggles in France, to the creation of a dictatorial state.
The approval of the Commune's work – and in 1871, did Marx have a choice? – thus corresponds to a complete inversion of his point of view on the question of power, to the abandonment of the centralist point of view and to the encounter with the Proudhonian and Bakuninist theses (although these last two points of view should not be assimilated), according to the for which the destruction of the state apparatus and the establishment of a decentralized political structure, to which federalism ensures global cohesion, is the precondition for the establishment of socialism.
If the Commune was a historical negation of the State, as Bakunin says, the communist insurrection in Paris inaugurated the social revolution; Its importance does not lie in the “very weak evidence it had the opportunity and time to make”, but in the ideas it stirred up, “the brilliant light it threw on the true nature and purpose of the revolution, the hopes it aroused everywhere and, hence, the strong commotion it produced among the popular masses of all countries”[xxiv].
He added: “The effect was so tremendous everywhere that the Marxians themselves, whose ideas had been overthrown by this insurrection, were forced to doff their hats to it. They did much more: reversing simpler logic and their true feelings, they proclaimed that their program and purpose were theirs. It was a buffoonish caricature, but a forced one. They had to do it, otherwise they would be crushed and abandoned by everyone, so much was the passion that this revolution provoked in everyone”[xxv].
Bakunin was not alone in noticing the contrast between Marx's earlier positions and those he defended at the time of the Commune. Marx's biographer Franz Mehring also notes that The Civil War in France it is difficult to reconcile with the The Manifest and that Marx develops a point of view similar to that of Bakunin: “Brilliant as these analyzes were, Mehring said, they were nevertheless slightly [sic] in contradiction with the ideas defended by Marx and Engels for a quarter of a century and already advanced in the Communist Manifesto. […] The praise that the General Council's speech addressed to the Paris Commune for having begun to radically destroy the parasitic State was difficult to reconcile with this last conception. […] It is easy to understand why Bakunin's supporters could easily use the General Council speech in their own way”[xxviii].
Madeleine Grawitz writes on this subject: “Marx, offended at seeing the revolution explode, as he had predicted, but mistakenly judging it to be Bakuninist, manages after defeat to appropriate a movement that, not only ignores him, but also opposes him. all your theories[xxviii].
The “libertarian” conceptions that Marx imposed on himself under the pressure of events remain perfectly opportunistic and isolated in his work, and in no way correspond to his actual thinking; they irrefutably respond to a desire to regain movement. Undeniable? Many refugees had gathered in London and Marx was trying to gather them with him, especially the Blanquists.
Os Communards The ungrateful did not join him, and Marx wrote to Sorge angrily: “And this is my reward for wasting almost five months working for the refugees and for saving your honor by publishing A Civil War in France"[xxix].
Thus, Marx “saved the honor” of the Communards… This simple sentence reveals both his true thinking about the Commune and the meaning that must be given to the work he wrote on this occasion. It is an opportunistic work that can only be a reference for those who want to distort Marx's true thought and give it an “anarchist” coloring. The Civil War in France it cannot in any way constitute a reference in the study of Marx's thought.
Furthermore, he did not even mention the Commune in his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). Engels barely touches the surface of the matter in a letter to Bebel on the same program, when he proposes to replace the word "State" with the Germanic word The community (community), “excellent old German word, which responds very well to the French word 'town"[xxx].
When, twenty years later, Engels wrote, in the preface to the German edition of The civil War: “Look at the Paris Commune. It was the dictatorship of the proletariat”, the expression “dictatorship of the proletariat” no longer has any meaning. In 1850 it meant a centralized dictatorship without popular representation; in 1891, under the pen of Engels, it meant the hegemony of the workers through the conquest of parliament.
Indeed, he wrote in the same year in his critique of the Erfurt program: “One thing is certain, that our party and the working class can only achieve domination in the form of a democratic republic. The latter is even the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution shows.[xxxii]".
We are in total confusion.
*René Berthier is an activist of the Gaston Leval group of the Anarchist Federation. Author, among other books by Proud honiennes etudes (Editions du Monde Libertaire).
Notes
[I] Marcel Body (1894-1984) was a typographer who was part of the troops sent to Russia to fight the revolution. He defected and joined the Bolshevik Party and was a member of the French Communist Group in Moscow from 1918, a Communist Party activist and USSR diplomat in Norway. He quickly adopted a critical position towards Stalinist power and became one of its opponents. Upon returning to France, he was expelled from the French Communist Party in 1928. He was Bakunin's translator for the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. He told us that when Denikin made his invasion of northern Russia, crushing Red Army resistance, party leaders were ordered to pack their bags and prepare to flee to Finland. Escape ultimately did not take place, as Makhnovist troops broke through Denikin's supply lines, cutting off his advance. Saving the revolution did not earn the Makhnovists any recognition from the Bolsheviks.
[ii] J. Bruhat, J. Dautry & E. Tersen, The Commune of 1871, Editions sociales, 1960.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Georges Gurvitch, who was a direct witness to the formation of the soviets in 1905, reports that “the first Russian soviets were organized by Proudhonians […] who came from left-wing elements of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and […] from social democracy […]. The idea of revolution by the base soviets […] is […] exclusively Proudhonian” (Cf. Jean duvignaud, “Georges Gurvitch, une théorie sociologique de l'Self-management", Self-management, n° 1.
[v] Bakounin, L'Empire Knouto-Germanique et la Révolution Sociale. Préambule pour la seconde livreison. Bakounine, Œuvres, take VIII.
[vi] In: Fernand Rude, From the War to the Commune, Editions Anthropos, p. 20-21.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Letter a, 31 August 1870.
[ix] In: Fernand Rude, From the War to the Commune, editions Anthropos, p. 19.
[X] Cf. Bakounin, Artworks, Champ libre, VII, p. 92.
[xi] Critical notes on the article “The King of Prussia and Social Reform”, in: Forward, 07-08-1844.
[xii] Letter from Engels to Marx, August 15, 1870.
[xiii] Letter from Marx to Engels, September 10, 1870.
[xiv] Alexandre Samis, dark storms, ed. Hedra, p. 201
[xv] Bakounin, L'Empire knouto-germanique, Champ libre, VIII, 58.
[xvi] There was no French AIT federation expressing itself publicly and organizing congresses, because of repression; but, unlike Germany, there were many active sections. A “French federation” was finally formed in Switzerland and published two issues of the Avant-garde, em 1877 and 1878.
[xvii] During the revolution of 1848-1849 in Germany, Marx and Engels, applying the schemes of their brand new historical "method", believed that the time had come for the bourgeois revolution and that therefore it should be encouraged to rise to power. Marx then decided to dissolve the Communist League, the first communist party in history, so as not to jeopardize this project. Marx and Engels were excluded from the first communist party in history (Cf. Fernando Claudín, Marx, Engels and the revolution of 1848, Maspéro, 1980).
[xviii] In February 1792 a military alliance was formed between Austria and Prussia, threatening a revolution. The Duke of Braunschweig irresponsibly launched a manifesto that threatened worse reprisals against cities that dared to resist the invasion. The manifesto aroused general indignation and revolutionary enthusiasm. In September the homeland was declared in danger and a mass rally formed a volunteer army which, at Valmy, crushed the Prussian army. From there, the period of the revolutionary wars began: the southern army entered Savoy, took Chambéry. Another army crossed the Rhine, occupied Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Frankfurt. Dumouriez's army entered Belgium and defeated the Austrians at Jemmapes, occupied Mons and entered Brussels to the acclaim of the population. In 1870, Marx and Engels were terrified that an uprising would repeat the mass revolt of 1792.
[xx] Seconde Adresse du Conseil général sur la guerre Franco-Allemande, in La Guerre civile en France, Editions sociales, 1968, p. 289.
[xx] K. Marx, La Guerre civile en France, Editions sociales, pp. 182-183.
[xxx] 1891 foreword by La Guerre civile en France.
[xxiii] Bakounin, Artworks, Champ libre, III, 213.
[xxiii] The revolution referred to in Communist Manifesto it is the democratic revolution, which will impose universal suffrage in a society still marked by feudalism. The superimposition of Leninist discourse on what Marx had actually said led generations of activists to reinterpret Marx's words in the wrong way.
[xxv] The first version of The Manifest it was a “catechism” written by Engels, that is, a document written in the form of questions and answers, which was abandoned and rewritten in the form we know today.
[xxiv] Bakounin, Artworks, Champ libre, III, 166.
[xxv] Ibid.
[xxviii] Franz Mehring, Karl Marx, Histoire de sa vie, Social editions, p. 504.
[xxviii] Madeleine Grawitz, Bakounin, Plon, 1990, p. 467.
[xxix] Letter from Marx to Sorge, 9 November 1871.
[xxx] Letter to Bebel, March 18-28, 1875, in Sur l'anarchisme et l'anarcho-syndicalisme, editions du progres, Moscow, 1973, p. 170.
[xxxii] Marx and Engels, Critique des programs de Gotha et d'Erfurt, P. 103, Social editions.