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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.7: The Paris Commune Revisited

This was supposed to be our last episode of this Marxist anarchist introductory prologue to the Russian Revolution. But I just realized that I am taking a two week break in two weeks, that’s going to happen, because I’m now operating more closely in tune with the French school system schedule, which is roughly six weeks on, two weeks off. After we’re done with this little Marxist anarchist prologue, we are due to shift gears to a general history of Russia. It will take us up through the assassination of the Tsar Liberator in March of 1881, at which point we will tie these two threads together and merge them into a single narrative on our way to 1905, then 1917.

But if I commence with that general history of Russia next week, then I’m just going to disappear for two weeks, and it’ll be weirdly disjointed, so much better to launch that after I come back. So that means we get to do this cool thing where we linger on the explosive and supremely relevant event that landed in the middle of the ideological and personal conflict between Marx and Bakunin the Paris commune. And since we already did a whole series on the Paris Commune, this episode will help tie together past episodes to future episodes. So this was meant to be, it’s almost like I planned it. And with that, let us get going with the Paris commune revisited.

So the first thing we should do is get everyone geographically situated. In the summer of 1870 Marx was still living in London, Engels was living in Manchester, but having sold the family business, he was on the verge of making a retirement move to London later that fall. Bakunin was living in Switzerland at the time and active in the Geneva section of the International. Now, all of Europe was aware of the tensions between Bismarck’s Prussia and Napoleon the third’s second empire. But though these tensions were well known, the sudden declaration of the Franco-Prussian War in July of 1870 surprised everyone. Even if it was also paradoxically, not unexpected. The next year, it would be a seminal period for everyone, for the great powers of Europe. It was the beginning of the destructive conflict between France and Germany that would not end until 1945. For the revolutionary left it led immediately to the Paris Commune, the first time the new world they dreamed of had poked through the lead blanket of bourgeois reactionary repression.

Now we know what Marx and Engels and Bakunin thought about events in France because it produced some of their best and most important work. Marx would wind up writing three addresses for the International at three key moments over the course of the next year. The first address was published in July of 1870, just after war was declared the second in September of 1870, just after the Battle of Sedan, the capture and abdication of Napoleon and the proclamation of the third Republic, and the third and final address in may of 1871 after the Bloody Week and the Fall of the Commune. These three addresses would be collected 20 years later and published by Engels under the title, The Civil War in France, which Engels says is the coda to the 18th Brumiere of Louis Bonaparte, and it represents some of Marx’s most important political writing. Bakunin meanwhile, wrote a pamphlet called A Letter to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis in September of 1870, so again, just after the collapse of the second empire, within which he further elaborated on his hopes and plans for a mass social revolution in France to be the end result of all this. And then he has an essay called The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State, which was composed in May of 1871. Where he too now reflected in the aftermath of yet another defeat for the forces of revolution Marx and Bakunin’s respective preoccupations analysis, hopes, fears, doubts, and conclusions are informative not just about the position of left wing revolutionaries to arguably the seminal event of left wing revolutionary history up to that point, but they also set a framework for future revolutionary arguments. The arguments over events in France in 1870 and 1871 would just keep going forever. Trust me the question of whether the peasants have revolutionary potential is not going anywhere anytime soon.

To start just after the declaration of war by France on July the 19th, 1870 Marx and Engels, heaped blame for this war on Napoleon the Third, and they predicted the war would be the end of the second empire. Ever since Napoleon’s coup in 1851, Marx and Engels had seen the dynastic and territorial ambitions of this parody second empire as the principle threat to social revolution in the 1850s and 1860s. Now they were not insensible to the machinations of Bismarck in fostering this conflict, but as they discuss the situation, they concluded, as Marx said, in a letter to Engels dated July the 20th, the French need a thrashing.

Then in a letter dated August the 15th, Engels engaged in a little game theory, and he worked out that the best possible outcome would be Prussia winning a war of national defense that would lead to the unification of Germany and the fall of the second French empire. He wrote to Marx, if Germany wins French Bonapartism will at any rate be smashed. The endless row about the establishment of German unity will at last be got rid of. The German workers will be able to organize themselves on a national scale quite different from that hitherto, and the French workers, whatever sort of government may succeed this one, are certain to have a freer field than under Bonapartism.

Though they both hoped that the nationalist fervor kicked up in Germany and France would not lead German and French workers to forget that their enemy was the bourgeoisie, not each other, in the summer of 1870 Marx and Engels had a rooting interest, and their rooting interest was down with Napoleon. Then in September of 1870, there’s this run of cataclysmic events in rapid succession: the defeat of the French army at Sedan, the capture and abdication of the Emperor, and the proclamation of the third Republic on September the Fourth, 1870.

So Napoleon has gone down. Marx and Engels were cautiously optimistic about the third Republic and now switched their rooting interest from down with Napoleon to long live the Republic. So now they’re sort of rooting for the French rather than the Germans. But they wanted working class activists and members of the International to hold off on immediately staging some kind of social revolution in France. Here they were thinking specifically of Blanqui, who would no doubt see the political chaos as an opportunity to stage a coup and forge a revolutionary dictatorship. The call by Marx and Engels to hold back was partly driven by strategic calculations, because they saw France’s capitulation to Germany as inevitable, and what Marx and Engels wanted was for the new government of national defense to become the government of national defeat, to let them be the ones who would become fatally unpopular when they inevitably sign the surrender. That is when we stage our revolution. So Engels wrote to Marx on September the 12th, whatever the government may be, which concludes peace, the fact that it has done so will eventually make its existence impossible. And in internal conflicts, there will not be much to fear from the army returned home after imprisonment. After the peace, all the chances will be more favorable to the workers than they ever were before.

What Marx and Engels wanted least and feared the most though, was a German invasion of France. If Bismarck turn this from a war of defense, into an aggressive war of conquest, it was going to have profoundly negative reverberations. But again, for now, their position was caution and support for the third French Republic.

Bakunin meanwhile had quite the opposite reaction. In his letter to a Frenchman on the present crisis, which was written at this same moment, he was positively giddy about the idea of a German invasion. When the second empire collapsed and invasion of Germany would arouse the latent energy of the people, Bakunin believed that he and his comrades could then harness this aroused energy and advance it from mere national defense to mass social revolution. So what Bakunin calls for is for socialists and anarchists to go out among the people. First, get them riled up to fight the Germans and form them into patriotic guerrilla units, then in the midst of this organization, explained to them that if they wanted, they could all just keep going and rid themselves of all their enemies, not just German invaders, but the landlords and the bankers, the bureaucrats, the aristocrats, the fat cats. And by starting with locally organized guerrilla militias, they could build from the bottom up as befit Bakunin’s vision of voluntarily affiliating local communes, overthrowing state power.

So Bakunin was not cautiously optimistic about the third Republic and he did not advise holding off on revolution. For him, the Republic was no different than the empire and the moment to crush it was here now at the moment of its birth, to make this so-called third Republic a minor footnote in history, to make the fall of the second empire the dawning of the truly new era free out rulers and hierarchies. Now Bakunin agreed with Marx that he thought the city workers had to lead. He says, only the workers in the cities can now save France. But then Bakunin throws down an ideological gauntlet: he says, faced with mortal danger from within and without, France can be saved only by a spontaneous uncompromising, passionate, anarchic, and destructive uprising of the masses of the people all over France. Because though Bakunin thinks the urban working classes will take the lead, he does not believe the urban proletariat is the only revolutionary class. He says, I believe that the only two classes now capable of so mighty and insurrection are the workers and the peasants.

Now this is a bigger deal than you might think. Bakunin is consciously arguing against what was becoming the Marxist possession that only the working class proletariat could be the revolutionary class. The proletariat’s relations to the means of production and their potential for achieving revolutionary class consciousness made them unique. The peasants on the other hand were ignorant backwards, superstitious, selfish. They were tools of reaction. They had no ability to form revolutionary class consciousness as Marx evoked with his colorful description of the peasants as quote, a sack of potatoes. So for the Marxists, the urban working classes must be the ones and the only one to stage the revolution. Bakunin absolutely 100% disagreed with this. And partly, this was because the kind of mass movement Bakunin envision required a massive people, not some narrow band of city workers who even in 1870 were dwarfed by the ranks of the rural peasantry. But he also disagreed that they were just hopelessly backwards and conservative. And so he addressed the three main complaints against the peasants: that they are fanatically attached to superstitious religion, that they are zealously committed to the emperor, and that they obstinately cling to private property. As to the religious point, well, Bakunin hates religion more than anybody. And he agreed that the peasants were backward and superstitious. But he was far more concerned about the damage that would be done by trying to abolish religion by violent decree, rather than educating the peasants and letting them shrug off religion for themselves. Bakunin says, it always angers me to hear not only the revolutionary Jacobins, but also the enlightened socialists of the school of Blanqui, and even some of our intimate friends advancing the completely anti revolutionary idea that it will be necessary in the future to decree the abolition of all religious cults and the violent expulsion of all priests.

Bakunin’s concern here is that was some people out there being so hot to recreate the revolutionary dictatorship of 1793, they will wind up making the same mistakes. And instead of getting the peasants on board with the revolution, they will trigger a new Vendée uprising. He says, you can therefore be entirely certain that if the cities commit the colossal folly of decreeing the extermination of religious cults and the banishment of priests, the peasants will revolt on mass against the cities and become a terrible weapon in the hands of the reaction.

The second point against the peasants was that they seemed in most places to always support authoritarian sovereigns: emperor, Napoleon, or the King of Prussia, or the tsar of Russia. But Bakunin says don’t be deceived, they often love the single sovereign because they hate the wider aristocracy. The rich idlers, the noble landlords, overfed bankers, the peasant hate them all. Bakunin says, they are willing to kill the rich and take and give their property to the emperor because they hate the rich in general. They harbor the thoroughgoing and intense socialistic hatred of laboring men against the men of leisure, the upper crust. And then he says further, I am not at all alarmed by the platonic attachment of the peasants to the emperor, this attachment is merely a negative expression of their hatred of the landed gentry and the bourgeois of the city. So Bakunin spied in this seemingly hopeless love of autocracy a socialistic spirit, hatred of the non laboring rich, that very much gave the peasants revolutionary potential if it was cultivated correctly.

Then finally he addresses the peasants attachment to their individual plots of land, which Bakunin both sympathizes with and wants to help them overcome, but not by imposing decrees from on high Bakunin says the peasant holds on passionately to the little property that he has been able to scrape together so that he and his loved ones shall not die of hunger and privation in the economic jungle of this merciless society. Then he says, it is true that the peasants are not communists, they hate and fear those who would abolish private property because they have something to lose, at least in their imagination. The vast majority of the city workers owning no property are immeasurably more inclined towards communism than are the peasants.

But here and elsewhere in his writings, Bakunin is clear that he does not think this can be overcome by the immediate mass confiscation of private property. That would trigger a backlash. He thinks it must happen slowly and carefully. Critically, he thinks it must be undertaken by the peasants themselves, not by outside agents or revolutionary commissars from the city. And Bakunin says that to get them on board at least initially, we just need to focus on seizing large landed estates of their rich neighbors. That they’re going to be totally on board with. And then over time, as they see the benefits of collective and cooperative work, they will lose their attachment to their own little individual plot, because that little individual plot will no longer represent the means of their very biological survival.

So how then to cultivate the revolutionary potential of the peasants correctly? Well for Bakunin, it kind of boils down to, don’t be a dick about it. The necessary alliance between workers and peasants usually fails because urban proletariat leaders are full of arrogance and contempt for the peasantry. That they took it as a matter of course that when the revolution came that the rural areas would have to be conquered, not cultivated. And Bakunin says, where do the French socialists get the preposterous, arrogant and unjust idea that they have the right to flout the will of 10 million peasants and impose their political and social system upon them? What is the theoretical justification for this fictitious right? And for Bakunin, it’s nothing but hubris and arrogance. So he advises the urban leaders to abandon the pretentious scholastic vocabulary of doctrinaire socialism, and then come to the peasants and explain in simple language without evasions and fancy phrases, what they want. Bakunin says that when these leaders come to the country villages, not as conceited preceptors or instructors, but as brothers and equals trying to spread the revolution, but not imposing it on the landed workers, when they burn all the official documents, judgments, court orders, and titles to property and abolish, rent, private debts, mortgages, criminal, civil law books, and all that, when this mountain of useless paper symbolizing the poverty and enslavement of the proletariat goes up in flames, then, you can be sure, the peasants will understand and join their fellow revolutionists, the city workers. That’s the plan, anyway.

Having written all this, Bakunin then himself packed up his bags and headed for Lyons, where he hoped to participate in the organization of a commune that would help kickstart this mass revolution. But this dream ended very quickly. On September the 28th, 1870, Bakunin and a few of his comrades attempted to seize the Hotel de Ville in Lyons and declare a revolutionary commune. But the whole thing was a dismal failure. The Lyons national guard was very much supportive of the new third Republic, Bakunin and company were promptly arrested and expelled from the city. Bakunin returned to Switzerland.

When Marx found out about this little misadventure, he was ticked off at Bakunin for jumping the gun. He wrote to his friend, Edward Spencer Beasley on October the 19th, the asses Bakunin and Cluseret arrived at Lyons and spoiled everything. So over the winter, they could all just watch from afar as the events that we covered over the rest of our series on the Paris Commune unfolded: the siege of Paris, the capitulation of the government of national defense, that happened just as Marx hoped. But it paved the way for the return of the hated Adolphe Thiers and the royalists, whose principal enemy was not the Germans, but the Paris working class. And that slogan, better Bismarck than Blanqui, was already making the rounds.

Marx absolutely subscribed to the phony war theory about the siege of Paris, that all of this was play acted by French generals and government officials to keep the workers occupied and occasionally send them more zealous of them off to certain deaths in pre-arranged massacres. Then, as Marx Engels and Bakunin observed from afar, the Versailles government attempted to seize the cannons of the Paris National Guard, triggering the declaration on the commune, its brief blaze of life, and its bloody and merciless death. And so both Marx and Bakunin came back around in May of 1871 to write their respective obituaries of the Paris Commune.

So if you will recall, the Paris Commune was made up of a mix of Proudhonists, Blanquists, and neo Jacobins. Some of them were International men, men who were members of the International Working Men’s Association, but despite accusations at the time, the International was not some secret guiding hand to all this. Remember since the beginning of the siege of Paris back in September, it was incredibly difficult to even exchange letters with Parisians, let alone puppet master a revolution. Then, if you will further remember, one of the great divergences within these groups was over the question of what the commune even was. What was this all about? For the Proudhonists, and I’ll just quote my own self here from episode 8.6, the commune was about moving forward with the anarchist dream of creating a non-state or an anti-state. The replacement of the heretofore unchallenged assumption that political power, whatever it’s based and whatever its goals, could only be expressed through coercion and force.

In a sense, the Paris Commune was supposed to be something wholly new in the world. And then I said, but as the Proudhonists look towards a utopian future, the Blanquists and the Neo Jacobins look to revive a glorious past. For them, the Paris Commune was the direct descendant, the full revival, in fact, of the original Paris, commune that had existed from 1789 to 1795. With Robespierre and the Committee of Public safety as their acknowledged idols, their vision of the commune was 180 degrees different from the anarchists. They wanted the commune to be a revolutionary dictatorship.

And we know who won this fight: after a few military setbacks in April of 1871, the communal council voted to form a five man committee of public safety, a revolutionary dictatorship that would rule by absolute decree.

So Bakunin’s spends a great deal of time in his essay, the Paris Commune and the Idea of the State, lamenting this unfortunate turn of events. And he now used the unfortunate example of the commune to draw further distinctions between his stateless socialism and the authoritarian tendencies of his revolutionary rivals. He says, in the proletariat of the great cities of France and even of Paris, still cling to many Jacobin prejudices, and to many dictatorial and governmental concepts, the cult of authority has not yet been completely eradicated in them. Giving into these prejudices meant that we would wind up with a political dictatorship, the reconstitution of the state with all its privileges, inequalities, and oppressions. By taking a devious, but inevitable path, we would come to re-establish the political, social and economic slavery of the masses.

Now granted even the anarchists of the Paris commune believed that with the armies of Versailles at the gates that they needed clear leadership. But still, they wound up with the complete opposite system of what they wanted. They were not boldly embracing new forms of emancipatory liberty, but recreating old forms of dictatorial power. Bakunin was bitterly disappointed to say the least.

Now for his part, Marx agreed that this obsession with recreating the past was hugely counterproductive. He had personally given up that ghost in 1849. And he wrote in his third address to the International, in every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a different stamp, some of them survivors and devotees of past revolutions, without insight into the present movement. These types are guilty of repeating year after year the same set of stereotype declarations against the government of the day. And so he goes on to say, after March the 18th, some such men did also turn up. As far as their power went, they hampered the real action of the working class, exactly as men of that sort have hampered the full development of every previous revolution. They are an unavoidable evil. With time, they are shaken off, but time was not allowed to the commune.

So though Marx is always going to believe that the workers must seize the state before they can slough off the state, by dictatorship of the proletariat he never meant anything like a compact one party rule vanguard slavishly cosplaying Robespierre. He imagined something new, which we will talk more about next week.

Aside from these ideological issues, Marx and Bakunin also shared a couple of tactical criticisms. Both agreed that the idea that the commune could avoid war with the Versailles government by being nice and not making trouble or not provoking a war was insane naiveté. No matter what the commune did, Versailles would be bringing war.

So in those opening days, right after the showdown over the cannons, the national guard should have marched on Versailles while the government was wobbly and their army demoralized. But instead, the men of the commune turn their attention to holding elections, not making war. And it was a fatal error. They also criticized the leaders of the commune for not seizing the bank of France and instead, simply negotiating loans from it. Bakunin of course is always going to want to destroy every bank he finds, while Engels had an additional comment in his postscript to The Civil War in France, he wrote, the hardest thing to understand is certainly the holy awe with which they remain standing respectfully outside the gates of the bank of France. This was also a serious political mistake. The bank in the hands of the commune, this would have been worth more than 10,000 hostages. It would’ve meant the pressure of the whole of the French bourgeoisie on the Versailles government in favor of peace with the commune. Marx and Bakunin and Engels also agreed though that the commune fell in part because the men and the women of the commune were simply too decent. Bakunin writes, yet, precisely because they were men of good faith they were filled with self distrust in the face of the immense task to which they had devoted their minds in their lives. They thought too little of themselves. And then Marx wrote a letter to a comrade in April of 1871, so just after the commune’s failed March on Versailles. He writes, it appears that the defeat of the Parisians was their own fault, but a fault which really arose from their too great decency. So far from this image of the communards as being bloody-minded animals, they were in fact not executing hostages willy nilly, like the Versailles government was, they were not going out of their way to plunder and burn, they were doing everything they could to avoid or end a civil war to simply be allowed to live and let live. It was Adolphe Thiers and his government who would not have it. They were the bloody-minded animals in all this. And a large part of The Civil War in France is Marx deploying the full venom of his poison pen against the monstrous gnome Adolphe Thiers who more than anyone else was to blame for everything. As for accusations against the so-called barbarian incendiaries who burned down chunks of Paris. Marx says that in war, armies have always used fire and destruction, and it was only considered beyond the pale now because this was done in the name of the powerless against the powerful, not the powerful against the powerless.

He writes, the working men’s Paris, in the act of its heroic self holocaust, involved in its flames buildings and monuments. While tearing to pieces the living body of the proletariat, its rulers must no longer expect to return triumphantly into the intact architecture of their abodes. The government of Versailles cries, incendiaryism, and whispers this cue to all its agents down to the remoteness hamlet, to hunt up its enemies everywhere as suspect of professional incendiaryism.” And Marx finishes contemptuously, “the bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar. For Marx and Engels and Bakunin, the Paris Commune was the last great revolutionary uprising of their lifetimes. The last time they had a chance to put theory into practice. And it was like every other revolutionary uprising of their lifetimes, a bitter disappointment.

But the Paris Commune had given them a concrete example of what a more just society in the future might look like. And it would give the next generation of revolutionaries something to point to and study and say yes, that, something like that is what we want. And so I’ll wrap this up today with the fitting closing line from Marx’s third address: working men’s Paris with its commune will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.