t364 KARL MARXI A BIOGRAPHYBismarck once the peace was signed. When eventually the final battle for
Paris began, the atrocities of the Versailles Government were monstrous:
To find a parallel for the conduct of Thiers and his bloodhounds we
must go back to the times of Sulla and the two Triumvirates of Rome.
The same wholesale slaughter in cold blood, the same disregard, in
massacre, of age and sex; the same system of torturing prisoners; the
same proscriptions, but this time of a whole class; the same savage hunt
after concealed leaders, lest one might escape; the same denunciations
of political and private enemies; the same indifference for the butch-
ery of entire strangers to the feud. There is but this difference, that
the Romans had no mitrailleuses for the despatch, in the lump, of the
prescribed, and that they had not 'the law in their hands' nor on their
lips the cry of civilisation.^125To the charge of incendiarism Marx replied that in war fire was an arm
as legitimate as any. A few hostages had also been killed, but their lives
had also been forfeit many times by the shooting of prisoners by the
Versailles Government. The result of the Commune was that class anta-
gonisms had been sharpened:
But the battle must break out again and again and in ever-growing
dimensions, and there can be no doubt as to who will be the victor in
the end, - the appropriating few, or the immense working majority.
And the French working class is only the advance guard of the modern
proletariat.... Wherever, in whatever shape, and under whatever con-
ditions the class struggle obtains any consistency, it is but natural that
members of our association should stand in the foreground. The soil
out of which it grows is modern society itself. It cannot be stamped out
by any amount of carnage. To stamp it out the Governments would
have to stamp out the despotism of capital over labour - the condition
of their own parasitical existence.
Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated
as the glorious harbinger of a new society. The 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.^124The Civil War in France (the title given to the Address) was the most
brilliant of Marx's polemics, and had an immediate success unknown to
any of the previous pronouncements of the General Council. It ran
through three editions in two months, sold 8000 copies in the second
edition and was translated into most European languages. In an overall
study of Marx's views it is important for its emphasis on decentralisation
as a goal of future socialist society. In the general context of socialist
thought it is important in providing Lenin with a basis for the Bolshevik