Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

THE INTERNATIONAL 377

with class prejudices standing him in the place of ideas, and vanity in

the place of a heart; his private life as infamous as his public life is

odious - even now when playing the part of a French Sulla, he cannot

help setting off the abomination of his deeds by the ridicule of his

ostentation."^4

The second section dealt with the events immediately preceding the

establishment of the Commune. The only obstacle to Thiers' counter-

1 evolutionary conspiracy was armed Paris. To overcome this, Thiers had

invented the lie that the cannon of the National Guard were the property

of 1 he state. It was Thiers who had begun the Civil War by sending

soldiers to remove the cannon. The only violence practised by the Com-

mune was the shooting of the two generals Lecomte and Thomas

by their troops and the dispersal of an armed demonstration in the

Place Vendome, which was as nothing compared to the atrocities of

the Versailles Government with their wholesale shooting of prisoners.

The most interesting part of the Address is its third section, where

Marx described the political organisation of the Commune - both actual

.mil potential. His organisational model was noticeably less centralised

1 linn that in the parallel passage at the end of the Communist Manifesto.

I Ins change of emphasis was marked right at the beginning of the section:

I he working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machin-

II y, and wield it for its own purposes'.^115 Marx then defined the organs

• •I state power as being the 'standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy,
  <IIK 1 judicature' and gave a history of its developments in France up to
  die Second Empire which

professed to save the working class by breaking down Parliamentarism,

and, with it, the undisguised subservience of Government to the proper-

tied classes. It professed to save the propertied classes by upholding

then economic supremacy over the working class; and, finally, it pro-

lessed to unite all classes by reviving for all the chimera of national

glory. In reality, the Empire was the only form of government possible

it a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class

had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation.^116

I lie Commune was the 'direct antithesis' to the Empire and was the
positive form' of the Republic of 1848. Marx then described the election
ol the Commune (he exaggerated the working-class nature of its

• imposition) and the transformation of the standing army, police, admin-
  iniiaiion and judicature into elected, responsible and revocable agents of
  tin < ommune:

I lie Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great

industrial centres of France. The communal regime once established in