THE INTERNATIONAL 359den on the penalty of fines to reduce wages; there was to be no more
night-working in bakeries, rents were suspended, and all abandoned busi-
nesses were transferred to co-operative associations. These measures were
lar from being socialist. In fact the Commune had such a short life, was
composed of such disparate elements and operated under such exceptional
circumstances that it is difficult to ascribe any coherent policy to it.
Virtually from the outset Marx was pessimistic about the success of
the Commune. According to the Austrian socialist Oberwinder, 'two days
after the beginning of the insurrection, Marx wrote to Vienna that it had
no chance of success'.^105 'It looks as though the Parisians are succumbing',
he wrote to Liebknecht on 6 April. 'It is their own fault, that in fact
comes from their being too decent.'^106 By their unwillingness to start a
< ivil war and by their taking time to elect and organise the Commune,
he considered that they had allowed Thiers to regain the initiative and
concentrate his forces. A few days later Marx expressed to Kugelmann
his admiration for the boldness of the Communards:
What resilience, what historic initiative and what self-sacrifice these
Parisians are showing! After six months of starvation and ruin brought
about more by internal treachery than by external enemies, they rise
in revolt under Prussian bayonets as though there had never been a
war between France and Germany, as though the enemy were not still at
the gates. History can show no similar example of such magnificence.^107But he repeated his views that they should have marched on Versailles
immediately and that the Central Committee of the National Guard gave
up its power too soon. And in 1881 he declared that 'with a modicum of
common sense the Commune could have reached a compromise with
Versailles useful to the whole mass of the people - the only thing that
could have been reached at the time'.^108 There are only two surviving
letters from Marx to the leaders of the Commune. He had been asked
for specific advice by Frankel who was in charge of labour and commerce,
but his reply has been lost; in the letters that survive Marx offered no
specific advice, confining himself to the observation that 'the Commune
seems to me to waste too much of its time with trivialities and personal
nvalries'.^109
Marx's personal ambivalence to the Commune goes a long way to
explaining the otherwise curious fact that, throughout the two months of
the Commune's existence, the General Council remained absolutely silent.
On 28 March, the day after the establishment of the Commune, Marx
himself had proposed that an Address to the People of Paris be drawn
up and the Council had charged him with the drafting. A week later he
stated in the Council that an Address 'would now be out of place'.^110 On