THE INTERNATIONAL 365view of the dictatorship of the proletariat. (In the third chapter of his
State and Revolution, Lenin put great emphasis on Marx's remark that the
proletariat 'cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and
use it for its own purposes'^125 - though in fact Lenin's view of the Party
.is the vanguard of the proletariat is more akin to Blanqui's conceptions;
and Lenin strained the facts of the Commune even further than Marx.)
ihe Civil War in France is only one interpretation of the Commune: there
were Proudhonist, Blanquist and anarchist interpretations that were as
instified as Marx's in that their views were similarly represented to the
(Commune. It must also be remembered that the Civil War was an obitu-
ary^126 and scarcely the place to offer a critical assessment: Marx's letters
show him much more reticent about the achievements of the Commune,
and later he even went as far as to say (in a letter to the Dutch socialist
I )omela Nieuwenhuis) that the Commune 'was not socialist, nor could it
have been'.^127
Nevertheless, amid the reaction that swept over Europe following the
defeat of the Commune, the very success of the Civil War, with its
somewhat inaccurate claim that 'wherever... the class struggle obtains
any consistency, it is but natural that members of our Association should
stand in the foreground',^128 helped to brand the International as the
greatest threat to society and civilisation. The most incredible rumours
were published as fact in the Press: the International had conspired with
Napoleon; it had conspired with Bismarck; Marx had even been Bismarck's
private secretary and was now dead. The charge of incendiarism was so
often repeated that even the great Chicago fire of 1871 was attributed to
the International. Favre, Foreign Minister in the Thiers Government, not
content with stifling the remnants of the Commune in France, issued a
circular to all European governments declaring the International a menace
to established order. This circular was itself a catalogue of inaccuracies;
it quoted, for example, a statement put out by Bakunin's Alliance as if it
had been made by the International.
Although European governments tightened their laws, Spain was the
only country that agreed to the extradition of the French refugees. In
spite of the almost universal condemnation of the Commune in the British
Press (complete with the wildest inaccuracies which Marx spent a lot of
tune trying to rebut) the British Government refused to co-operate with
f avre: in reply to a Spanish request for extradition the foreign minister
((iranville) said the British Government had no right to expel refugees
who had not contravened any British law or committed any of the crimes
specified in the treaty of extradition.
It soon became known that Marx was the author of the infamous
Address; from being virtually unknown in England, except to a very small