Those who portray Bakunin as a heroic opponent of centralised power structures and rigid hierarchies find it difficult to explain his subsequent conduct – which may be why they often prefer to ignore it altogether. At the first and only International congress he attended (at Basle in 1869), he argued for ‘the construction of the international state of millions of workers, a state which it will be the role of the International to constitute’ – temporarily forgetting that ‘states’ of any and every kind were anathema to a true anarchist such as himself. During another debate, he actually proposed strengthening the power of the General Council to veto new applicants and expel existing members. And no wonder: as Carr admits, ‘Bakunin’s ambition at this stage was to capture the General Council, not destroy it.’ The closer one looks, the clearer it becomes that his later rage against the General Council owed less to a high-minded dislike of authority than to sour grapes at his own failure to seize control of it.
Behind the scenes, he was scheming away as usual. A perfect example of Bakunin’s modus operandi can be found in a conversation with one of his acolytes, Charles Perron:
Bakunin assured him that the International was an excellent institution in itself, but that there was something better which Perron should also join – the Alliance. Perron agreed. Then Bakunin said that, even in the Alliance, there might be some who were not genuine revolutionaries, and who were a drag on its activities, and it would therefore be a good thing to have at the back of the Alliance a group of ‘International Brothers’. Perron again agreed. When next they met a few days later, Bakunin told him that the ‘International Brothers’ were too wide an organisation, and that behind them there must be a Directorate or Bureau of three – of whom he, Perron, should be one. Perron laughed, and once more agreed.
Thus spake the great advocate of power to the people.
At the Basle congress of 1869 it was agreed that delegates should reconvene a year later in Paris. But the plan was overtaken by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in July 1870 – a last desperate attempt by Napoleon III to shore up his tottering Second Empire by challenging the mighty Bismarck. The International had long been preparing itself for this moment. Its 1868 congress in Brussels had passed a motion calling for a general strike the moment war began – though Marx dismissed the idea as ‘Belgian nonsense’, arguing that the working class ‘is not yet sufficiently organised to throw any decisive weight on to the scales’. All it should do, he believed, was issue some suitably ‘pompous declamations and high-faluting phrases’ to the effect that a war between France and Germany would be ruinous for both countries and for Europe as a whole.
This he duly did. On 23 July 1870, four days after the declaration of hostilities, the General Council approved an Address written by Marx. The defeat of his old bête noire, Louis Bonaparte, was cheerfully (and correctly) predicted. But he warned that if German workers allowed the war to lose ‘its strictly defensive character’ and to degenerate into an attack on the French people, victory and defeat alike would be equally disastrous. Fortunately, the German working classes were far too enlightened to permit any such outcome:
Whatever turn the impending horrid war may take, the alliance of the working classes of all countries will ultimately kill war. The very fact that while official France and Germany are rushing into a fratricidal feud, the workmen of France and Germany send each other messages of peace and goodwill; this great fact, unparalleled in the history of the past, opens the vista of a brighter future. It proves that in contrast to old society, with its economical miseries and its political delirium, a new society is springing up, whose International rule will be Peace, because its natural ruler will be everywhere the same – Labour! The Pioneer of that new society is the International Working Men’s Association.
All most inspiring. John Stuart Mill sent a message of congratulation, declaring himself ‘highly pleased with the Address. There was not one word in it that ought not to be there; it could not have been done with fewer words.’ While maintaining an official neutrality, however, Marx couldn’t resist privately calculating the odds and brooding on what result would best suit his purposes.
As long ago as February 1859 he had written to Lassalle that war between France and Germany ‘would naturally have serious consequences, and in the long run revolutionary ones for sure. But at the start it will bolster up Bonapartism in France, drive back the internal movement in England and Russia, arouse anew the pettiest passions in regard to the nationality issue in Germany, and will therefore, in my opinion, have first and foremost a counter-revolutionary effect in every respect.’ Eleven years on, this game of consequences had become an obsession. ‘I have been totally unable to sleep for four nights now, on account of the rheumatism,’ he told Engels in August 1870, ‘and I spend this time in fantasies about Paris, etc.’ One beguiling fantasy was that the two sides would thrash each other alternately, thus weakening both Bonaparte and Bismarck. Then, ultimately, the Germans would win. ‘I wish this because the definite defeat of Bonaparte is likely to provoke Revolution in France, while the definite defeat of Germany would only protract the present state of things for twenty years.’
Neither Marx’s wife nor his best friend needed any such convoluted justifications for taking sides. Jenny thought that France deserved a damn good walloping for having the impudence to try and export its ‘civilis-a-a-ation’ into the sacred soil of Germany. ‘All the French, even the tiny number of better ones, have an element of chauvinism in some remote corner of their hearts,’ she wrote to Engels. ‘This will have to be knocked out of them.’ Engels, who spent the war profitably knocking out military analyses for the Pall Mall Gazette, also felt the tug of atavistic allegiance. ‘My confidence in the military achievements of the Germans grows daily,’ he enthused. ‘We really do seem to have won the first serious encounter.’ Once Bonaparte had been smashed, his long-suffering citizens would at last have the chance to take power for themselves.
But did the Parisians have either the means or the leaders to effect a revolution while resisting the Prussian army? This question, more than any other, tormented Marx during those sleepless nights. ‘One cannot conceal from oneself that the twenty-year-long Bonapartist farce has caused enormous demoralisation,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘One is hardly justified in counting on revolutionary heroism. What do you think about it?’ Engels barely had time to reply before Bonaparte surrendered at Sedan and a new regime – the Third Republic – was proclaimed in Paris.
If you wait by the river for long enough, you will see the corpses of your enemies float by. The installation of the pipsqueak Napoleon had provoked Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte almost twenty years earlier; now he had the pleasure of writing the obituary. On 9 September the International issued a Second Address on the war, which began with the rather smug confirmation that ‘we were not mistaken as to the vitality of the Second Empire’. Alas, Marx continued, ‘we were not wrong in our apprehension lest the German war should “lose its strictly defensive character and degenerate into a war against the French people”.’ Anyone referring back to the First Address might notice that he had in fact denied this possibility, insisting that the heroic German working class would forestall it. But the purely ‘defensive’ campaign had ended with the capitulation at Sedan, and now that the Germans were demanding the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine he quickly rewrote history to spare his own blushes.
Not that we should be too hard on old Marx. His earlier tribute to Teutonic restraint had been a triumph of hope over experience, but with that notable exception his entrail-reading was amazingly accurate. If the fortune of arms and the arrogance of success led Prussia to dismember France, what then? In the Second Address he warned that Germany would either ‘become the avowed tool of Russian aggrandisement, or, after some short respite, make again ready for another “defensive” war, not one of those newfangled “localised” wars, but a war of races – a war of the combined Slavonian and Roman races’. A letter to the Internatio
nal’s American organiser, Friedrich Adolph Sorge, was even more prescient. ‘What the Prussian jackasses do not see is that the present war is leading … inevitably to a war between Germany and Russia. And such a war No. 2 will act as the midwife of the inevitable social revolution in Russia.’ Marx did not live to see the drama of 1917, but it would not have surprised him in the least. Sometimes he seemed to be looking even further ahead:
If limits are to be fixed by military interests, there will be no end to claims, because every military line is necessarily faulty, and may be improved by annexing some more outlying territory; and, moreover, they can never be fixed finally and fairly, because they must always be imposed by the conqueror upon the conquered, and consequently carry within them the seed of fresh wars.
Those who cite Marx’s occasional misjudgements as proof of his historical myopia might care to tell us if any other mid-Victorian had such an acute premonition of the rise of Adolf Hitler.
Marx’s Second Address welcomed the new French Republic (‘Vive la République!’), but with profound misgivings. ‘That Republic has not subverted the throne, but only taken its place become vacant,’ he noted. ‘It has been proclaimed, not as a social conquest, but as a national measure of defence.’ The provisional government was an unstable coalition of Orleanists and Republicans, Bonapartists and Jacobins, which might turn out to be a mere bridge or stopgap for a royal restoration. Nevertheless, the French workers must do their duty as citizens and banish all thoughts of revolution. ‘Any attempt at upsetting the new government in the present crisis, when the enemy is almost knocking at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly.’
Desperate folly was, of course, the favourite pastime of Michael Bakunin, who had been following the news from France at his Swiss villa. Hearing of an insurrection in Lyons after the Sedan defeat, he hastened there at once, strutted into the Hotel de Ville and appointed himself leader of the ‘Committee of French Salvation’. In a proclamation from the balcony of the town hall he then decreed the Abolition of the State – adding that anyone who disagreed with him would be executed. (Very libertarian.) The state, in the form of a platoon of National Guards, promptly entered the town hall through a door which had been inadvertently left unguarded and forced the Messiah of Lyons to scuttle back to the safe shores of Lake Geneva.
Marx’s admonishment against upsetting the apple-cart had no more influence than Bakunin’s vainglorious buffoonery. Adolphe Thiers, a veteran liberal lawyer, was installed as president of the Third Republic, and soon set about suing for peace with Prussia on behalf of his ill-named ‘Government of National Defence’. The rage of Parisians at this capitulation was redoubled when he announced that reparations would be financed by the immediate repayment of all outstanding bills and rents, which had been suspended during the siege. On 18 March 1871 an indignant crowd took to the streets – backed by the city’s National Guard, which had refused to obey an order to hand over its weapons to the government. Thiers and his followers decamped to Versailles, leaving the nation’s capital in the hands of its citizens.
Once again, the Gallic cock had crowed. The rulers of Europe affected deafness at first, perhaps hoping that the squawks would fade if they took no notice. When this failed, their panic was delightful to behold. The Times of London thundered against ‘this dangerous sentiment of the Democracy, this conspiracy against civilisation in its so-called capital’. Even Karl Marx, it reported, was so horrified by the uprising that he had sent a stern message of rebuke to French members of the International. The paper then had to publish a denial from Marx, who revealed that the alleged letter was ‘an impudent forgery’. (‘You must not believe a word of all the stuff you get to see in the bourgeois papers about the internal events in Paris,’ he advised Liebknecht in Germany. ‘It is all lies and deception. Never has the vileness of the reptile bourgeois newspaper hacks displayed itself more splendidly.’)
Marx’s excitement at ‘the internal events in Paris’ was tempered only by a fear that the revolutionaries might be too decent for their own good. Instead of marching on Versailles at once to finish off Thiers and his wretched crew, they ‘lost precious moments’ organising a city-wide election for the Commune. He also disapproved of their willingness to allow the National Bank to continue with business as usual: if Marx had been in charge he’d have ransacked the vaults at once. Even so, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. ‘What resilience, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians!’ he exclaimed. ‘After six months of hunger and ruin, caused rather by internal treachery than by the external enemy, they rise, beneath Prussian bayonets, as if there had never been a war between France and Germany and the enemy were still not at the gates of Paris! History has no like example of such greatness.’
Of the ninety-two Communards elected by popular suffrage on 28 March, seventeen were members of the International. At a meeting in London that same day, the General Council unanimously agreed that Marx should draft a new ‘Address to the People of Paris’. But then nothing happened. Throughout the two months of the Commune’s existence, the International made no public statement whatever. By the time Marx delivered his fifty-page Address, on 30 May, it was an epitaph: Thiers’s troops had retaken the city three days earlier, and the cobblestones of Paris were red with the blood of at least 20,000 murdered Communards.
Why the delay? His biographers usually attribute it to ‘Marx’s personal ambivalence to the Commune’. He was certainly haunted by fears that the Commune would fall, but apprehension is not the same as ambivalence. The main reason, more banal and familiar, is that for much of April and May he had bronchitis and liver trouble which prevented him from attending the General Council – let alone gathering the necessary evidence for a magisterial fifty-page tribute that would do justice to the Parisians’ historic levée en masse. ‘The present state of things causes our dear Moor intense suffering,’ his daughter Jenny wrote in mid-April, ‘and no doubt is one of the chief causes of his illness. A great number of our friends are in the Commune.’ One was Charles Longuet, editor of the daily Journal Officiel, who moved to London after the fall of the Commune and married Jennychen in 1872. Another Communard, Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, later became the secret fiancé of Eleanor Marx – though the engagement was eventually broken off. Paul and Laura Lafargue had escaped from Paris shortly before the Prussians laid siege to the city, but were busily agitating on behalf of the Commune from their bolt-hole in Bordeaux.
Weighed down by illness and foreboding, Marx also had to struggle against his own obsessive perfectionism: whether in Capital or a brief pamphlet, he was reluctant to issue a definitive pronouncement on any subject until he had gleaned and winnowed all the available evidence. During the weeks of the Commune he dashed off dozens of letters to comrades on the Continent, badgering them for yet more documents and press cuttings. To judge by the more scurrilous passages in his long-awaited Address – which was published as The Civil War in France – the research also included close study of the gossip columns. Within the first couple of pages we are treated to this charming portrait of Thiers’s foreign minister: ‘Jules Favre, living in concubinage with the wife of a drunkard resident at Algiers, had, by a most daring concoction of forgeries, spread over many years, contrived to grasp, in the name of the children of his adultery, a large succession, which made him a rich man.’ The finance minister Ernest Picard is dubbed ‘the Joe Miller of the government of National Defence’, a reference to one of London’s music-hall comedians. Since Marx’s knowledge of English popular culture was almost zero, one guesses that his stage-struck daughters suggested the line. But the rest of the indictment against Picard is pure Marx, as each new item on the charge-sheet is produced with a legalistic flourish. Picard, we learn, ‘is the brother of one Arthur Picard, an individual expelled from the Paris Bourse as a blackleg (see report of the Prefecture of Police, dated the 31st July, 1867), and convicted, on his own confession, of a theft of 300,000 francs, while manager of one of the br
anches of the Société Générale, rue Palestro, No. 5 (see report of the Prefecture of Police, 11th December 1868). This Arthur Picard was made by Ernest Picard the editor of his paper, l’Électeur Libre …’ The Communards may have left the bank vaults unmolested, but they had certainly enjoyed rummaging in the police archives.
Having introduced the bit players, Marx ushers in Thiers himself – the ‘monstrous gnome’:
A master in small state roguery, a virtuoso in perjury and treason, a craftsman in all the petty stratagems, cunning devices, and base perfidies of parliamentary party-warfare; never scrupling, when out of office, to fan a revolution, and to stifle it in blood when at the helm of the state; with class prejudices standing him in the place of ideas, and vanity in the place; his private life is 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.
Marx then sketches the background to the Commune. Far from being some sort of mutiny against a legitimate government, it was a valiant attempt to save the Third Republic from Thiers’s unconstitutional demand that the National Guard surrender its arms and leave Paris undefended. He adds proudly that the popular uprising of 18 March was more or less untainted by ‘the acts of violence in which the revolutions, and still more the counter-revolutions, of the “better classes” abound’.
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