AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Showing posts with label louis blanqui. Show all posts

Monday, July 30, 2012

From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-An Embryo Of An Alternate Government Gone Wrong-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-Auguste Blanqui 1839-Appeal of the Committee of the Society of the Seasons

Friday, July 27, 2012

From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-An Embryo Of An Alternate Government Gone Wrong-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-The works of Auguste Blanqui 1834-Who Makes the Soup Should Eat It

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-An Embryo Of An Alternate Government Gone Wrong-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-Auguste Blanqui 1834-First issue of “Le Libérateur”

Saturday, July 21, 2012

From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-An Embryo Of An Alternate Government Gone Wrong-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-Auguste Blanqui 1833-34-Organization of the Society of Families

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-An Embryo Of An Alternate Government Gone Wrong-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-Auguste Blanqui 1833-Democratic Propaganda

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradtion-Part Two -"Blanquism" ("Young Spartacus" March 1976)

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American for Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view.

As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but just not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose for educational purposes only:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part Two -"Blanquism" ("Young Spartacus" March 1976)

EDITOR'S NOTE: With this series Young Spartacus makes available for our readers a contribution presented by Joseph Seymour, a Spartacist League Central Committee member, at the mid-January Spartacus Youth League West Coast educational conference held in Berkeley. "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition," reproduced from the verbal presentation with a minimum of editorial abridgement, seeks to debunk the academic/New Left view of Marxism as a self-contained derivation from Hegelian philosophy by reaffirming the shaping influence of the experiences, programs and world-views of two generations of revolutionary militants who sought to fuse the bourgeois-democratic revolution with an egalitarian collectivist social order. The first part, featured in our February issue, discussed the Great French Revolution and the legacy of its insurrectionary and most radical wing, upheld by the revolutionaries Babeuf and Buonarroti.
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The history of the French revolutionary movement after the overthrow of Napoleon Bonaparte is the history of the polarization of the left opposition to royal absolutism into its bourgeois conservative, revolutionary democratic and communist component of revolutionary democracy, which simultaneously was transformed through proletarianization.
The two key dividing lines were the successful revolution of 1830 and the Lyons silk weavers’ insurrection of 1834.

Now, at the beginning of this period, 1815, the left opposition to the Bourbon Restoration had three main tendencies. First, the liberal bourgeoisie, whose economic policy was laissez faire, whose power base was the very restricted parliament based on a limited franchise, whose political program advocated not democracy but rather an extended franchise and certain rights, and whose main leadership was the wealthy nobleman Lafayette.

Second, there were the Bonapartists, who were mainly centered in the army and whose program was roughly national populism. Until Bonaparte died in 1821, they stood for the restoration of Bonaparte: "Let's kick these foreigners and their lackeys out of France." Revolutionary nationalism. But they were not committed to economic laissez faire; they could make certain populist appeals to peasant economic protectionism, and in that sense were even demagogically to the left of the liberals.

Then there were the revolutionary democrats, who in this period (1815-1820) were almost exclusively limited to the student population of Paris. And the vanguard was a small group of revolutionary democrats who, being illegal, took over a masonic order and named it the Friends of Truth, whose leader was a rather reputable and important figure named Saint Amand Bazard.

These three forces united in their mass on two occasions: the Carbonari Conspiracy of 1821-23, where they were defeated, and the revolution of 1830, where they were in a military sense victorious. But that victory split those component parts asunder.

Carbonari Conspiracy

I will just say a few words about the Carbonari Conspiracy, which was important. First, it had a genuinely mass character, encompassing at its height probably 80,000 activists. In France every revolutionist who was mature, and even some who were not mature, was a member of the Carbonari. It provided the first revolutionary experience for that generation. The 17-year-old Louis Auguste Blanqui had his first revolutionary experience in the Carbonari and his later secret organizations were modeled on the Carbonari—only cells of three and only one person in the three knew anyone in the cell above, so one had a hierarchy which sealed off the leadership from the base.

In 1821, in response to the gains of the liberals in parliament, the Bourbons moved to the right and rewrote the parliamentary laws. The liberal bourgeois opposition in effect said, "Well, we have no choice but to engage in insurrection." They contacted the radical students and the disgruntled Bonapartists and even democrats in the army, organizing a conspiracy whose main strategy was the subversion of the army. The Carbonari Conspiracy, thus, was a democratic mutiny in the army, financed and organized by the liberal bourgeoisie, utilizing the student radicals, each seeking to manipulate and utilize the other.

But the army, in the absence of a general social crisis, was isolated and sufficiently loyal to the regime that the Conspiracy did not work. When someone would say, "Psst, you want to join?," he would get turned in and would be executed. So there was a whole series of executions and abortive mutinies.

The suppression of the Carbonari had a significant effect but, interestingly enough, the various forces involved maintained a kind of good will toward each other. They drifted apart. The liberal bourgeoisie went back to parliamentary game-playing. The student-based revolutionary democrats, however, did something interesting. They decided to do some fundamental rethinking of political doctrine, and they soon discovered an eccentric nobleman named Saint-Simon, who actually died about the time they began reading his works.

Discovery of Saint-Simon

Saint-Simon was not a socialist, he was not associated with the revolutionary movement, but rather he was a technocrat who believed in state economic planning. He inherited the Enlightenment tradition. He said, "Capitalism is obviously irrational, production is obviously ungoverned, and I can think of fourteen different ways to improve the economy, but there has to be some kind of centralization."

So Saint Amand Hazard and his circle for a couple of years read this material and came out as the first socialist organization with a revolutionary democratic tradition. They were not an odd sect; they actually had experience in revolutionary politics and a real sense for political power.

Saint-Simonism, therefore, was the first politically significant socialist tendency, although Owenism in Britain, by a very different process, was also achieving a semi-mass character. Saint-Simonism also spread through Germany—one of Marx's high-school teachers was a Saint-Simonian socialist—and was the first basic socialist doctrine to penetrate the continent.

While one tends to think of early socialist movements as being very primitive, in fact Saint-Simonism was the most technocratic of any socialist doctrine, not the most primitive. And it reflected the close organic ties between the radical democrats-cum-socialists and the liberal bourgeoisie, which at that time was very alienated from the state apparatus held by the Bourbons, who believed that they were living in the seventeenth century. So, certain elements of bourgeois technocratic socialism tended to penetrate these circles and became quite faddish. Only in a later period, with mass agitation, were the traditions of Jacobin communism rediscovered.

Revolution of 1830

Now, the next time the left opposition to the Bourbon regime unified for insurrectionary action they were successful ... much to their surprise. In the limited parliament, despite the various laws, the liberals were still gaining and finally won a majority. Then the king decided to pull a coup
d’état and declared, "We are dissolving parliament, and we are having total censorship of the press."

Some journalists, among them Louis Auguste Blanqui, although he was not a leader, said, "We refuse.' We protest.'" Some of them were arrested, and the cops knocked on the doors.

It was the spark that was needed to set off the Parisian masses. Among them were all these Bonapartist army officers, who were much better than the French army of the day, which had been purged to make it impossible for France to conquer the other countries anymore. After three days of street fighting, the French army was defeated, decisively driven out of Paris.

Now this should have been, as the radicals and the Saint-Simonians ex-pected the beginning of the second French Revolution. Hazard, the leader of the Saint-Simonians, went to his old friend Lafayette. As the historic leader of the liberal opposition Lafayette was now head of the de facto state power, the so-called National Guard, which was the military arm of the bourgeoisie in Paris. And he said, "Look Lafayette, this is my program, it's a communist program. You be a communist dictator, and we'll support you." And Lafayette stared at him.

Then the liberal pretender—the king's cousin—visited Lafayette along with a banker named Lafitte; Lafayette says, “I am a republican"; the liberal pretender exclaims, "So am I"; and the banker says, "Look, you don't want a lot of trouble." So Lafayette says, "Okay," and they went out—there's a famous kiss of reconciliation in front of the masses of -Paris. When the republicans cried "Betrayal!," they were beaten up and suppressed.

So the French Revolution simply led from an attempted absolutist monarchy to a somewhat more liberal one, although becoming increasingly repressive, in which the Parisian masses and particularly the left—the left wing of the left wing being Saint-Simonian socialists—rightly felt themselves betrayed. It took approximately five years for the new regime to consolidate itself, and the period between the revolution of 1830 and the great repression of 1835 was a continued series of attempts, some of them having a mass character, to carry the revolution of 1830 to a successful conclusion.

The first phase of the struggle, spearheaded by the organization called the Society of the Friends of the People, was simply leftist insurrections in Paris. They felt that the masses would never accept this king, and every couple of months they would rally the students, whatever artisans they could collect, and some disgruntled soldiers and simply attack the state. Blanqui was the vice president of the Society of the Friends of the People and was arrested for student agitation. This is for the SYL: in case anybody puts down agitating on campus, you can point to Blanqui, who never thought that agitating on campus was beneath his dignity.

Buonarroti and the Continuity of Revolutionary Jacobinism

Now, by 1832 the revolutionary democrats had gotten a little bloodied, and they formed another organization with a somewhat longer range and propagandistic purpose, called the Society of the Rights of Man. This was the first mass democratic organization in which revolutionary communists were a serious contender for factional power and the first revolutionary organization which intersected and in a certain sense led the mass organizations of the pre-industrial proletariat.

During 1832-34 in the Society of the Rights of Man there were two factions. The orthodox Jacobin faction republished Robespierre's writings, Robespierre's "Rights of Man," and could be called revolutionary bourgeois democrats anticipating social democracy. And the other faction, the outright Jacobin communist faction organized by Buonarroti, also claimed the same historic tradition. The 1833 program of the agents of Buonarroti within the Society of the Rights of Man declared:

"All property, movable or immovable, contained within the national territory, or anywhere possessed by its citizens, belongs to the people, who alone can regulate its distribution. Labor is a debt which every healthy citizen owes to society, idleness ought to be branded as a robbery and as a perpetual source of immorality."

[—Louis Blanc, History of Ten Years, 1830-1840}

And it was through the Society of the Rights of Man that Buonarroti in the last four or five years of his life was able to intersect a new revolutionary • generation and win them to the traditions of Jacobin communism.

Class Battles at Lyons

Now, after 1832, the scene of the major revolutionary battles in France shifts to the provincial industrial city of Lyons, which was the main concentration of the pre-industrial French working class concentrated in the silk industry, which was producing for the world market. In 1831, as a result of a wage struggle, they had a demonstration, the bourgeois National Guard attacked them, and they attacked back. The army vacillated, because after the revolution of 1830 the army was a little wary of going against the people—they had gone against it and lost. The weavers took over the city, but they had no ulterior political motives. They said, "Here, we don't want the city, you can have it back." So then, of course, the army came in and smashed them.

The silk weavers, however, were organized in a pre-industrial union known as the Mutualists. At the same time there were these burgeoning bourgeois-democratic-cum-communist propaganda groups in Lyons which sought to intersect the Mutualists. The leadership of the first unions were not socialists or revolutionary democrats but rather traditionalists heavily influenced by the clergy. It was only through a long period of struggle that the revolutionary democrats and the communists among them were able to penetrate the organizations of the pre-industrial working class and to win the masses.

The relationship between the Society of the Rights of Man and the silkweavers1 union has been described by Louis Blanc, the leading socialist historian writing in the 1840's in his History of Ten Years:

"We have said that a considerable number of Mutualists had entered the Society [the Society of the Rights of M an] but they had done so as individuals, for as the Mutualists societies considered collectively and in its tendency, it is certain that in the period in question, it was governed by a narrow corporate spirit. Above all, it was bent on preserving its industrial physiognomy, its originality, and all that constituted for it a situation apart amongst the working classes. No doubt, there were amongst it men exalted above their feelings. But these men did not constitute the majority, all whose interests might be summed up in increased wages for silk weavers. The influence of the clergy, moreover, over the class of silk weavers in Lyons has always been rather considerable. Now the following was the spirit in which was exercised this influence, of which women were the inconspicuous but efficient agents. The clergy, beholding in the manufacturers but liberals and skeptics, had felt no inclination to damp a disposition to revolt which animated the workmen against them. But at the same time it urged the latter to distrust the republican party but taking advantage of its sympathies. Now this was in fact precisely the conduct towards the Society by the leaders of Mutualism; for while they suffered themselves to be charged with republicanism, and availed themselves against the manufacturers in the popular diatribes of the Glaneusse [the republican press] they spared nothing to deaden the republican propaganda in the lodges."

Communist Ideology and Proletarian Struggles

The famous dictum of Lenin [in What Is To Be Done?] that socialist ideology must be brought to the proletariat from without is not a programmatic statement. It is not even a theoretical statement. It is an indisputable historical fact.

The communist movement has a prehistory, and the mass economic organizations of the proletariat have different prehistories. The communist movement arose out of the left wing of the bourgeois-democratic movement and, in its earliest phases, its mass base was essentially the young intellectuals concentrated among students. The mass economic organizations of the working class go back to the earliest mercantilist period, and their earliest natural leaders tended to be the clergy. The communist movement" arising out of the democratic movement and the trade unions emerging out of the artisan guilds intersect, and the workers movement is shaped by that intersection. But at every point there is a deep ideological struggle between the revolutionary democrats or socialists and the Catholic priests in France, or the Russian Orthodox priests in Russia, or the Methodists in England.

As a result of their experiences the leaders of the Mutualists, who were traditionalists and monarchists, appealed to the king and sought reforms, but at every point they were thwarted. Then in 1834 the Orleans monarchy attempted to totally suppress the left opposition, mainly the political opposition, with the so-called Law of Associations, which banned all associations. While these laws were mainly directed at political associations, they also affected the economic organizations of the workers.

So the Lyons silk weavers said, "You attempt to ban our organizations and we will fight." And they fought. There was a mass meeting, jointly called by the Society of the Rights of Man and the silk weavers' union and appealing to
other workers organizations in Lyons; they called a mass demonstration in April, 1834. When the army attempted to suppress the demonstration, the greatest revolutionary violence in France between the revolution of 1830 and those of 1848 occurred in Lyons-six days of fighting, in which hundreds, mainly silk weavers, were killed.

The leaders were repressed in a so-called "Monster Trial," in which both the political left opposition, including virtually all the leaders of the Society of the Rights of Man, and the leaders of the silk weavers were charged with conspiracy and insurrection and were imprisoned. After 1834 Lyons was a Red City for three decades; every communist tendency, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Cabet, had an organic base among the silk weavers in Lyons—until the industry essentially disintegrated in the 1860's. But it didn't begin that way.

Blanqui-Insurrectionary Communism

Blanquism as an identifiable doctrine is a product of the suppression of open insurrectionary activity culminating in the so-called "Monster Trial" of 1835. Blanqui had been a revolutionary activist since the age of 17. He had fought in all the street battles and had been decorated for his role in the revolution of 1830 by the new king. Until 1833-34, however, he was simply one of the boys, in no sense distinguishable, except by his personal courage, from three or four dozen other revolutionary democrats.

In prison between 1832 and 1834 he became a communist, but without particular doctrinal sophistication. He always pooh-poohed attempts to describe the nature of communist society. In prison he developed not the goal of communism, which as I said always had a very general characteristic, but strategic conceptions which were so radically different than those of his contemporaries that they constituted a new and distinct political tendency.

Blanqui asked himself two questions. First, why have all of the insurrections since 1830 failed? And second, why did the revolution of 1830, which succeeded in a military sense, also fail, bringing into power a regime which was at best only quantitatively less reactionary than the regime the masses had replaced?

Blanqui rejected the French revolutionary model which had inspired
Buonarroti: you begin with a bloc with the liberals or even the constitutional monarchists, and then you have the gradual radicalization of the revolution. Historical experience had proven impossible the replication of the experience of the French revolution, that is, the gradual radicalization beginning with a broad unity of all the opponents of the existing regime and then narrowing it down.

Instead, Blanqui insisted that communists must overthrow the government and directly rule. So he created what was in fact a secret army: the army was secret from the authorities, and the leadership of the army was secret from the ranks. He organized secret societies, such as the Society of Families and later, in the late 1830's, the Society of the Seasons.
In order to enter one of these societies, you were asked questions and you had to give the right answers, the revolutionary catechism. This is the catechism of the Society of the Families, 1836:

"What is the people? The people is the mass of citizens who work. What is the fate of the proletariat under the government of the rich? Its fate is the same as that of the serf and the Negro. It is clearly a long tale of hardship, fatigue and suffering. Must one make a political or social revolution? One must make a social revolution."

[—Samuel H. Bernstein, Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection]

You answer those three things correctly, and three years later you'll be fighting it out with the army in the streets of Paris.

The Society of the Seasons was not only a French organization; it had a German appendage, which for the history of Marxism is important. There was a large German population in Paris in the 1830's, heavily artisan. In Paris there was the so-called German Republican Party which contained all of the democrats. A man named Theodore Schuster, who by some curious coincidence was a friend of Buonarroti, formed a faction in the German Republican Party, split the party and from that split arose an organization called the League of the Just. When Buonarroti died in 1837, Blanqui inherited his constituency and formed a military bloc with the League of the Just, at that time a handful of communist intellectuals and a base of German artisans.

So, one nice spring day in 1839, a thousand Frenchmen and Germans, largely artisan, met for their routine military exercise in downtown Paris. But this time Blanqui and his lieutenant Barbes walked up and said, "Gentlemen, we are your leadership, and this is it!" They broke into a gunsmith shop, and for the next couple of days they were fighting a very surprised French army.

How did Blanqui recruit this relatively large number of people willing to just walk into the streets of Paris and start shooting? In a certain sense, he didn't. Blanqui rallied the militant wing of the broader revolutionary democratic opposition, which in general tended to be of the plebeian social background. At his trial Blanqui was the only one who was a bourgeois. Everyone else, there were 30 some odd, were all either artisans or shopkeepers. They had nothing to lose.

This indicates an essential aspect of Blanquism which in a certain sense is the key to this talk. Blanquism was the intersection of two currents. On one hand, Blanquism represented the extreme militarist wing of the bourgeois-democratic revolution whose tactics, concepts and whose method of recruitment were conditioned by the existence of a broader bourgeois-democratic movement. On the other hand it also represented the nascent collectivist instincts and impulse of the plebeian and particularly urban artisan masses. If one liquidates that dialectical tension, one cannot understand Blanquism. And if one fails to understand Blanquism, then one cannot comprehend this entire period.

To be sure, the Blanqui/Barbes uprising of 1839 was a pure putsch. But Blanqui remained tied to the bourgeois-democratic revolution; he proposed a revolutionary provisional government which contained himself and his lieutenants, but also one of the leading democratic oppositionists who knew nothing about the putsch. He said, "This is the government, we take power, you're the president." Blanqui assumed that if he overthrew the state, then the more cautious, conservative bourgeois democrats would go along with him, and, moreover, would also be easily won to communism.

In a certain sense Blanqui was right. The king really wanted to execute Barbes, the Blanquist leader who was captured first; it was only fear of a mass insurrection and mass violence if Barbes and Blanqui were executed that prevented it. So that even though this was a pure putsch, it was profoundly popular, and the execution of these two revolutionaries would have been not only in the mass unpopular but also not in the interest of the liberal bourgeoisie: the Blanquists had the protection of the bourgeois democrats on the grounds that the revolutionary communists can be used, as in 1830. One is not talking about the Weather-
men. - One is talking about an insurrectionary act under conditions of severe repression.

Blanqui spent the 1840's in jail. Blanquism as an organized phenomenon disappeared. If you knew the right Paris cafes in the 1840's, you could walk in and somebody would come up to you, start talking, ask for money to buy guns and say, "Well, do you want to come to a meeting?" Dispersed revolutionary activity.

Marx had great respect for Blanqui. He certainly is the only figure in the 19th century who stands comparable to Marx. He was, however, critical and in some ways contemptuous of Blanqui's conceptions of organization.

In the early 1850's Marx wrote a scathing attack on the typical Parisian revolutionary conspirator in the form of a book review ["Review of A. Chenu's 'Les Conspirateurs'," in Saul K. Pad-over, Marx on Revolution]. And Marx said, "Oh, you're a bunch of Bohemians, declassed intellectuals, declassed proletarians, easily penetrated by the cops, tending to lead a dissolute life-style." Marx was very prudish, a very straight guy.

What distinguished Marx was his insistence that the communists must be tied to the workers—not simply the exceptional workers who were prepared to become professional revolutionaries —the mass of the workers through their established organizations. So that's the negative aspect of Blanquism which quite early on Marx rejected. But in the only two revolutionary situations in which Marx was involved during his lifetime—the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune—Marx and Blanqui were forced together, and Marx on both occasions had to break with right-wing allies.

So, whatever his failing Blanqui insisted, again and again, on certain fundamental truths: namely, that one cannot build communism simply through cooperative bootstrap operations, which were very popular in that period; that you cannot establish communism unless the communists wield state power; and that the bourgeoisie is not going to establish a stable parliamentary democracy in which the communists could establish their constituency and by that means take over the government.

Engels, in a much later critique of the Blanquists, observed that Blanqui was a man of the pre-1848 period. But in some ways he was also a man of the post-1914 period—Blanqui above all grasped the centrality of the revolutionary overthrow of the state.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-An Embryo Of An Alternate Government Gone Wrong-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-Works of Louis-Auguste Blanqui 1832-The Trial of the Fifteen.

Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.

Markin comment:

I will post any updates from that site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History “ series started in the Fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.

* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).

*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

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Works of Louis-Auguste Blanqui 1832-The Trial of the Fifteen.
Defence Speech of the Citizen Louis-Auguste Blanqui
before the Court Of Assizes

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Source: Auguste Blanqui, Textes Chosisis, with foreword and notes by V.P. Volguine, Editions Social, Paris 1971;
Translated: Andy Blunden, proofed and corrected by Mitchell Abidor;
Transcribed: for the Marxists Internet Archive by Andy Blunden April 2003,
Subject to “CopyLeft” GNU Free Documentation License.

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January 12, 1832
Messrs Jurors,

I am accused of having said to thirty million French people, proletarians like me, that they had the right to live. If that is a crime, then it seems to me at least that I should answer for it not to judges and prosecutors. However, Messrs, note well that the Prosecuting Attorney did not address himself to your sense of equity and your reason, but to your passions and your interests; he did not call on you to be strict in responding to a breach of morals and the laws; he only seeks to unleash vengeance against what he represents to you as a threat to your existence and your property. I am thus not in front of judges, but in the presence of enemies; so it would be quite useless to defend myself. Also, I have no fear of any sentence that you may pass on me, while protesting nevertheless with energy against this substitution of violence for justice, for this frees me in the future of any inhibition against repaying the law with force. However, if it is my duty as a proletarian, deprived of all the rights of the city, to reject the competence of a court where only the privileged classes who are not my peers sit in judgment over me, I am convinced that you have enough courage to appreciate with dignity the role which honor imposes on you in a circumstance where more or less disarmed adversaries are delivered to you for execution. As for our role, it is written in advance; the role of accuser is the only one which is appropriate for the oppressed.

For one should not imagine that men who have today fraudulently been given a one-day power by stealth and fraud, can drag, at their will, patriots before their justice, and by showing us the blade, force us to beg mercy for our patriotism. Do not believe that we came here to justify the offences for which we are charged! Far from it! We are honored by this charge, and it is an honor to sit today on the same bench with criminals, for we will launch our charges against the wretched ones who have ruined and dishonored France, while waiting for the natural order of the opposing benches be restored in this court, and in which accusers and accused are in their true place.

What I will say will explain why we wrote the lines for which we are accused by the Crown, and why we will continue write more still.

The Prosecuting Attorney has, so to speak, summoned before your imaginations the a revolt of the slaves, in order, by fear, to excite your hatred: “You see,” he says, “it is the war of the poor against the rich; all those who have property must repel the invasion. We bring you your enemies; strike them now, before they become any more fearsome!”

Yes, Messrs, this is the war between the rich and the poor: the rich wanted it thus, because they are the aggressors. Only they find it evil that the poor fight back; they would readily say in speaking of the people “This animal is so ferocious that it defends itself when attacked.” The entire philippic of Mr. Prosecuting Attorney is summed up in this one sentence.

They never cease denouncing the proletarians as robbers ready to throw themselves on the men of property: why? Because they complain of being crushed by taxes for the profit of the privileged classes. As for the privileged, who live in luxury on the sweat of the proletariat, they are legal owners of property who are threatened with plunder by a greedy populace. It is not the first time that executioners take on the air of victims. Who are then, these robbers worthy of so much of hatred and torment? Thirty million French people who pay to the tax department a billion and half, and about an equal amount to the privileged classes. And the people of property who live off the labors of the whole society, they are two or three hundred thousand idlers who peacefully devour the billion paid by these “robbers.” It seems to me that it is here, in a new form, and between other adversaries, that we find the war of the feudal barons against the merchants they robbed on the highways.

In fact, the present government does not have any other base apart from this iniquitous distribution of benefits and burdens. The restoration of 1814 was instituted courtesy of foreigners, with the aim of enriching an imperceptible minority by depriving the rest of the nation. One hundred thousand bourgeois form what is called, by a bitter irony, the “democratic element.” What, good God, are the other elements Paul Courier already immortalized the “representative machine”; this suction-and-force pump which compresses the mass called the people, to suck out of them milliards which flow continuously into the coffers of idlers, this pitiless machine which crushes one by one, twenty-five million peasants and five million workers to draw out the purest extract of their blood and to transfuse it into the veins of the privileged. The wheels of this machine, combined with a marvelous art, reach the poor at every moment of the day, intruding into every moment of their humble life, taking a cut of their smallest earnings, the most miserable of their pleasures. And it is not enough that such an amount of money travels from the pockets of the proletarians to those to the wealthy in passing through the abysses of the tax department; more enormous sums still are raised directly from the masses by the privileged classes, by means of the laws which govern industrial and commercial transactions, laws which these same privileged people have the exclusive right to make for themselves.

In order for the large-scale landowner to draw from his fields a high rent, foreign corn is hit by an import duty which increases the price of the bread; well, you know a few centimes more or less on a loaf of bread is life or death for thousands of workers. The grain law hits especially hard the maritime population of the south. To enrich some large manufacturers and the owners of forests, iron from Germany and Sweden is subject to enormous duty, so that the peasants are forced to buy bad tools at high cost, while they could get the excellent ones at a cheap rate; the foreigner in his turn avenges himself for our prohibitions by pushing French wine out of his markets, which, together with the taxes which weigh on this food product inside the country, reduces the richest regions of France to misery, and strangling the wine industry, the most natural industry of this country, a truly indigenous form of cultivation, which promotes the enrichment of the soil and favors small-scale property. I will not speak about the tax on salt, the lottery, the tobacco monopoly, in a word, this inextricable network of taxes, monopolies, prohibitions, customs duties and government contracts. Who enchains and atrophies its members? Suffice to say that this mass of taxes is always to distributed so as to benefit the rich, and to weigh exclusively on the poor, or rather that the idlers practice a shameful plundering of the masses. Plundering is essential indeed.

Doesn’t one need a large civil list to pay the cost of the royal family, to console it for the sublime sacrifice which it has made of its peace and quiet for the happiness of the country? And, since one of the principal titles of the junior Bourbons to heredity consists in its numerous family, the State will not act in a petty fashion and will not refuse privileges for the princes and dowries for the princesses. There is also this immense army of sinecurists, of diplomats, and civil servants for whom France, for its happiness, must provide a huge budget, so that they can enrich by their luxury the privileged bourgeoisie, because all the money of these contributing to the budget is spent in the cities, and should not turn over to the peasants even one penny of the billion and half of which they pay the five-sixths.

Isn’t it necessary also that this new financial star, this Gil Blas of the 19th century, courtier and apologist of all the ministries, favourite of the Count d’Olivarès as of the Duke of Lerme, sell high offices for great lumps of cash? It is essential to lubricate the large wheels of the representative machine, to richly endow brothers, nephews, cousins. And shouldn’t the courtiers, the courtesans, the intriguers, the croupiers who gamble the honor and future of the country on the Stock Exchange, the middle-men, the mistresses, the dealers, the informers, those who speculate on the fall of Poland, all this vermin of the palaces and the salons, mustn’t they all be gorged on gold? Shouldn’t one promote the fermentation of this manure that so successfully fertilizes public opinion?

Here we have a government that the silver tongues of the ministry present to us as the masterpiece of all systems of social organisation, the summation of all that was good and perfect in the various administrative mechanisms since the flood; here are what they praise as the last word in human perfectibility as regards government! It is all nothing more than the theory of corruption pushed to its outer limits. The strongest proof that this order of things is instituted only for the exploitation of the poor by the rich, that they have sought no other base than an ignoble and brutal materialism, is the parochial idiocy which grips their minds. Indeed, this is a guarantee of morality, and the morality inadvertently introduced into such a system could enter there only as an infallible element of destruction.

I ask, Messrs, how men of noble heart and intelligence, rejected as pariahs by the aristocracy of wealth, would not resent such a cruel insult? How could they remain indifferent to the shame of their country, to the suffering of the proletariat, their brothers in misfortune? Their duty is to invite the masses to smash the yoke of misery and ignominy; this duty I have fulfilled in spite of imprisonment; we will fulfil this duty until the end by facing our enemies. When one has behind oneself a great people that is marching to the conquest of its welfare and its freedom, one must know how to throw oneself into the trenches as an inspiration and to make for it a way forward.

The ministerial organs repeat with kindness that there are ways open to the complaints of the proletarians, that the laws present regular means for to them to pursue their interests. This is an insult. The tax department is there, which hounds them its insatiable appetite; it must work, work night and day incessantly in order to ceaselessly throw feed to the ever-reborn hunger of this chasm; quite happy if there remains to them some scraps to disguise the hunger of their children. The people do not write in the newspapers; they do not send petitions to the chambers: it would be a waste of time. Much more, all the voices which have repercussion in the political sphere, the voices of the salons, those of the boutiques, of the cafés, in a word of all the places where what is called the public opinion is formed, these voices are those of the privileged; not one of these voices belongs to the people; it is mute; it vegetates far from these high areas where its destiny is determined. When, by chance, the tribune or the press lets escape some words of pity about the misery of the people, they hasten to impose silence in the name of public safety, which forbids touching upon these extreme questions, or such talk is declared to be anarchy. If someone persists, prison renders justice to this rabble-rousing which disturbs the ministerial digestion. And then, when there is a great silence, they say: “See, France is happy, it is peaceful: order reigns! ...”

But in spite of all these precautions the cry of hunger, emitted by thousands of poor wretches, reaches the ears of the privileged classes, they howl, they exclaim: “Force must remain with the law! The only passion a nation should feel is for the law!” So Messrs, according to you, all laws are good? Have you never come across a law that struck horror into you? Do you not know of any law that is ridiculous, odious or immoral? Is it possible to be so cut off behind an abstract word, a word that refers to a chaos of forty thousand laws, among which there is both the best and the worst? You answer: “If there are bad laws, ask for legal reform; but in the meantime obey...” This is an even more bitter insult. The laws are made by a hundred thousand voters, applied by a hundred thousand magistrates, carried out by a hundred thousand urban national guards, because you have deliberately disorganized the national guard in the countryside because they are too close to the people. However these voters, these jurors, these national guards, they are the same individuals, who accumulate the most opposed functions and are all at the same time legislators, judges and soldiers, so that the same man in the morning created a deputy, that is, the law, applies law at midday in his capacity as a juror, and carries it out in the evening in the street in the costume of the national guard. What do the thirty million proletarians do in all these transformations? They pay.

The apologists of the representative government have mainly founded their praises for this system on the separation of the three powers: legislative, legal and executive. They cannot think of enough words of praise for this marvelous balance that has solved the longstanding problem of reconciling order with freedom, of movement with stability. Eh bien! That is precisely what the representative system is, exactly as the apologists describe it, which concentrates the three powers in the hands of a small number of privileged people all linked by the same interests. Is this not a confusion that constitutes the most monstrous of tyrannies, by the very avowal of its apologists, so that there isn’t any confusion about what constitutes the most monstrous of tyrannies, by the admission of these same apologists?

So what is the upshot? The proletarian remains on the outside. The Deputies, elected by the monopolists of power, imperturbably continue their manufacture of tax laws, penal codes, administrative regulations, all directed with a same aim of exploitation. Now that are the people going about, shouting of their hunger, demanding of the elite that they abdicate their privileges, of the monopolists that they give up their monopoly, and of all of them to renounce their idleness, they will laugh at them, looking down their noses at them. What would the nobility have done in 1789 if one had humbly begged them to give up their feudal rights? They would have punished the people’s insolence... Things are done differently now.

The most skilful of this gutless aristocracy, sensing all that is threatening to them in the despair of a starving multitude, propose to reduce the misery of the people a little, not for reasons of humanity, God forbid! But to reduce the danger. As for political rights, one cannot say anything of them, it is only a question of throwing the proletarians a bone to gnaw upon.

Other men, with better intentions, pretend that the people are tired of freedom and only ask to live. I do not know what whim of despotism impels them to exalt the example of Napoleon, who knew how to rally the masses by giving them bread in exchange for freedom. It is true that this populist dictator was supported for a time, particularly because he tried to flatter the passion of egalitarianism, and because he shot corrupt traders, who would today be penalized by being made deputies. He didn’t perish any the less for having killed freedom. This is a valuable lesson for those who want to follow in this tradition.

Today one cannot respond to the cries of distress from a starving population, by repeating the insulting words of Imperial Rome: panem et circenses! Let it be known that the people do not beg any more! There is no question of dropping from a splendid table some crumbs to amuse them; the people do not need alms; it intends to secure its well being by its own efforts. The people want to make and will make the laws that must govern them: then laws will no longer be made against them; they will be made for them because they will be made by them. We do not recognise the right of anyone to grant such generosities which a contrary whim could revoke. We ask that the thirty-three million French people choose the shape of their government, and name, by universal suffrage, the representatives who will have the mission of making laws. This reform accomplished, the taxes which strip the poor for the profit of the rich will be promptly destroyed and replaced by others established on a contrary base. Instead of taking from the hardest workers to give to the rich, taxes must seize the superfluity of the idlers to distribute it among the poor masses, condemned to unemployment because of the lack of money; taxes must hit the unproductive consumers so as to fertilize the sources of production; facilitate the reduction of the public debt, which is the ruin of the country; finally to substitute for the disastrous swindle of the Stock Exchange, a system of national banks where the active men will be able to find the capital they need. Then, but only then, will the taxes be a benefit.

Voilà, Messrs, that’s what we mean by the republic, not otherwise. ‘93 is a bogeyman good for porters and domino players. Take note, Messrs, that it is quite intentionally that I pronounced these words ‘universal suffrage’, to show our contempt for certain rapprochements. We all know well that a government backed into a corner puts to work lies, calumnies, and ridiculous or perfidious tales to restore some credence to the old tale that it has been exploiting for such a long time, of an alliance between the republicans and the Carlists, that is, between things which are totally antithetical to each other. This is its only port in a storm, its great resource in finding some support. It can only find support by basing itself on such filth; and the most stupid conspiracy stories, the most odious farces invented by the police do not appear too dangerous a game for them if it manages to frighten France with Carlism, to turn it for a few days more from republicanism, where its instinct for salvation leads it. But what can persuade people of the possibility of this union against nature? Don’t the Carlists have on their hands the blood of our friends who died on the scaffolds of the Restoration? We are not so forgetful of our martyrs. Isn’t it against the revolutionary spirit, represented by the tricolor behind which the Bourbons assembled all Europe for twenty-five years, and behind which they still seek to assemble? This flag is not yours, apostles of quasi-legitimacy! it is that of the Republic! It is we, the republicans, who raised it in 1830, without you and in spite of you, who burned it in 1815; and Europe knows well that republican France only will defend it, when it is again attacked by the monarchy. If there is a natural alliance, it is between you and these Carlists; it’s not that you are in agreement on the same man at the moment; they are holding on for theirs, who is not here yet; but you will sell yours cheaply, to be more accommodating, and to better arrive at that which you have in common with them, all the more because in doing so you do nothing but return to your old racket.

Indeed, the very word “Carlists” is nonsensical; they are, and can only be in France royalists and republicans. Political opinion divides itself every more sharply between these two principles; the good people who had believed in a third principle, some species of neutral kind called a “happy medium,” are gradually giving up this absurdity, and will wriggle their way to one or the other flag, according to their passion and their interest. However, you, monarchists, who exude monarchy as you speak, everyone knows under which banner your doctrines belong. You did not wait eighteen months to choose it. On July 28, 1830, at ten o’clock in the morning, in the newspaper office, having said that I was going to get my rifle and my tricolor rosette, one of the today’s powerful individuals exclaimed, filled with indignation: “Sir, the tricolor can well be yours, but they will be never mine; the white flag [of the royalty] is the flag of France.” Then as now, these gentlemen held France with a small group.

Eh bien! We conspired fifteen years against the white flag, and it is with grinding teeth that we see it floating above the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville, where the foreigner had planted it. The most beautiful day of our life was when we dragged it through the mud of the gutters, and where we trampled underfoot the white rosette, this prostitute of the enemy camp. One needs a rare amount of impudence to throw in our face this charge of complicity with the royalists; and on another hand it is a clumsy hypocrisy to take pity on our alleged credulity, on our simplistic good-naturedness, which lead us, according to one of you, to be so easily deceived by the Carlists. If I speak thus, it is not to insult our enemies while they are down; they say that are strong, they have their Vendée; let them start up again, and we’ll see what we’ll see!

As to the rest, I repeat, one will soon have to choose between the monarchical monarchy and the republican republic; we will see whom the majority support. Still, if the opposition in the Chamber of Deputies, as national as it is, cannot rally the whole country; if it allows the government to accuse it of incapacity and impotence, it’s that even while clearly rejecting royalty, it hasn’t dared declare itself, with the same frankness, for the republic; in saying what they did not want, they nevertheless did not articulate what they did want. It solves nothing to avoid using this word republic, with which the men of Corruption endeavor to frighten the nation, knowing well that the nation wants the republic almost unanimously. They have distorted history, for forty years, with incredible success, so as to frighten people; but the last eighteen months have corrected many errors, dissipated many lies, and the people will not much longer accept the situation. They want freedom and well-being. It is a calumny to represent it as a trade off, that the people must give up all their freedoms for a piece of bread: we must cast this imputation back at the political atheists who threw it. Is it not the people who, in all the crises, were ready to sacrifice their welfare and their lives for moral interests? Is it not the people who asked to die in 1814, rather than to see the foreigner in Paris? And yet what material need pushed it to this act of devotion? It had bread on April 1 as well as on March 30.

These privileged people, on the contrary, that one would have supposed so easy to stir up by the great ideas of Fatherland and Honor, due to the exquisite sensitivity that they owe to opulence; who could at least have calculated better than others the disastrous consequences of the foreign invasion; isn’t it they who raised the white rosette in the presence of the enemy, and kissed the boots of the Cossack? What! Classes which applauded the dishonor of the country, which make a profession of the most disgusting materialism, which would sacrifice a thousand years of freedom, of prosperity and glory for a three day cease-fire purchased by infamy, these classes would have in their hands exclusive custody of national dignity ! Because corruption has made them made stupid, they recognize in the people only the appetites of beasts, in order to assume the right to allow them only such food as is necessary to maintain the people as fodder for them to exploit!

It is not hunger either which, in July, pushed the workers into the streets; they were motivated by sentiments of the loftiest morality, the desire to redeem themselves from servitude by rendering a great service to the country, and especially by the hatred of the Bourbons! Because the people never recognised the Bourbons; their hatred smoldered for fifteen years, waiting in silence for the chance of vengeance; and, when their strong hand smashed their yoke, they believed that they had torn up the treaties of 1815 at the same time. The thing is that the proletariat has a more profound political sense than the statesmen; its instinct told it that a nation does not have a future, so long its past is burdened with a shame of which it has not been cleansed. And so war! This does not mean that France should again embark on absurd conquests, but rather to raise France from its status as an outlaw, to restore its honor, the first condition of prosperity; War! in order to prove to our sister nations of Europe that, far from bearing a grudge for what was a fatal error both for us and for them, which led them to carry their arms into France in 1814, we could avenge both them and us by punishing the lying kings, and at the same time bring peace and freedom to our neighbors! This is what 30 million French people wanted when they greeted the new era with enthusiasm.

This should have been the outcome of the revolution of July. It came to serve as the complement to our forty revolutionary years. Under the Republic, the people had conquered freedom at the price of famine; the Empire gave them a kind of prosperity while stripping them of their freedom. The two regimes gloriously knew how to enhance dignity beyond our borders, the primary need for a great nation. All this perished in 1815, and this victory of the foreigners lasted fifteen years. So what was the battle of July, if not a revenge for this long defeat, and it revived again the bonds of our national feeling? And any revolution having been a step forward, shouldn’t this one have assured us the complete enjoyment of those goods which we had till then only had partial enjoyment of, finally restoring to us all that which we had lost by the Restoration?

Freedom! Well-Being! National dignity! Such was the currency entered on the plebeian flag of 1830. The ultra-royalists read instead: Maintenance of all the privileges! Charter of 1814! Quasi legitimacy! In consequence, they gave to the people servitude and misery within our borders, and infamy beyond them. Did the proletariat thus fight just for a change of the effigy placed on these banknotes which they so seldom see? Are we at this point concerned with new medals, for which we have overturned thrones to bring such fantasies to pass? It is the opinion of a ministerial propagandist who swears that in July we persisted in demanding a constitutional monarchy, with the variant of Louis-Philippe in place of Charles X. The people, according to him, took part in the fight only as an instrument of the bourgeoisie; that is, that the proletarians are gladiators who kill and have themselves killed for the amusement and profit of the privileged classes, who applaud from their balconies…. once the battle has ended, of course. The booklet, which contains these beautiful theories of representative government, appeared on November 20; Lyon answered on the 21st. The response of the Lyonnais appeared so swiftly, that nobody said another word of the work of this propagandist.

What devastation the events of Lyon have just revealed to our eyes! The whole country was moved by pity at the sight of this army of spectra, half consumed by hunger, running into the grapeshot to die at least in one fell swoop.

And it is not only in Lyon; it is everywhere that the workmen die crushed by taxes. These men, once proud at the moment of the victory which marked their arrival onto the political scene and the triumph of freedom; these men who brought about the regeneration of all Europe, they struggle against hunger, a hunger does not leave them even enough strength to protest at each new dishonor added to the dishonor of the Restoration. Even the cry of dying Poland could not divert them from contemplation of their own miseries, and they kept what remains to them of their tears to cry over their lot and that of their children. What sufferings could make such people so quickly forget the exterminated Poles!

Here is the France of July as the ultra-royalists have given it to us. Who would have imagined it! In those intoxicating days, as we wandered automatically, rifle on shoulder, through unpaved streets and barricades, quite heedless of our triumph, our chests inflated with happiness, dreaming about the pale faces of the royalty and the joy of the people as the far-off roar of our singing of the Marseillaise would reach their ears; who would have imagined that such joy and glory would change into such mourning! Who would have thought, seeing these great six-foot tall workmen, before whom the bourgeoisie were left trembling their cellars, trembling, kissing their rags, and speaking again of their disinterestedness and their courage with sobs of admiration, who would have thought that they would die of poverty on these streets, of their being conquered, and that their former admirers would now call them the plague society!

Magnanimous spirits! Glorious workmen, whose dying hand my hand grasped in final adieu on the battle field, where I veiled the faces of the dying with rags, you died happy in the victory which was to redeem your race; and, six months later, I found your children lying in dungeons, and each evening I fell asleep on my bunk, with the noise of their moaning, the curses of their torturers, and the whistle of the whip which obscured their cries.

Is there not, dear sirs, some imprudence in lavishing these insults cast at men who withstood the test of their strength, and who suffer under conditions worse than those which pushed them into battle? Is it wise to teach the people such a bitter lesson how easily it was deceived by their moderation in triumph? Are you so certain that you will not need the clemency of the workers, that you can with full safety expose yourself to finding them pitiless? It seems that you take no other precautions against popular revenge than exaggerate the picture in advance, as if this exaggeration, these imaginary scenes of murder and plunder were the only means of forestalling their reality. It is easy to put the bayonet and grapeshot into men who surrendered their arms after the victory.

What will be less easy is to erase the memory of this victory. Almost eighteen months have been spent rebuilding bit by bit what was undone in forty-eight hours, and the eighteen months of reaction did not even shake the work of three days. No human power could eradicate that which was achieved. Ask of those who complained of an effect without a cause, if he flatters himself that there can be causes without effects. France conceived in the bloody embraces of six thousand heroes; childbirth can be long and painful; but the wombs are robust, and the ultra-royalist poisoners will not cause it to abort.

You confiscated the rifles of July. Yes; but the bullets have taken off. Every bullet of the Parisian workers is on its way around the world: they strike without cease; they will continue to strike until not a single enemy of the happiness of the people and of freedom is left standing.