On the Paris Commune 1920

Kingsley on the Commune: Gives a Vivid Picture of Ruling Class Atrocities in France

On Sunday evening at the Royal, Comrade E. T. Kingsley told once more the story of the Paris Commune of 49 years ago, than which, he said, probably no event in human history had been more misrepresented. Not even the present-day vilifiers of the Bolsheviki had reached the height in the art of vilification attained by the French ruling class of that day.

The speaker began with the collapse of the empire of Napoleon the Little in 1879 [sic] under the onslaught of the Prussian arms—“a tinsel empire, as all empires are.” The dispute, incidentally, was as to “which royal spawn should sit on the throne of Spain,” this being, of course, “a very serious matter to the common people” of Germany and France.

With the German armies rapidly approaching the gates of Paris, and the Napoleonic government absolutely impotent to repel them, a republic was proclaimed and a committee formed to prosecute the war or negotiate a peace. But treachery was at work; and, though there was ample force available to drive off the invader, the capitalist gang in control agreed that France should pay a heavy indemnity, and that the Germans should occupy Paris temporarily as a matter of form, and then retire to the suburbs, and later to the frontier, to await payment. In the face of an enraged populace, this programme was duly carried out.

The proletariat in France at that time, said Comrade Kingsley, was the most advanced in the world in its knowledge of the Socialist philosophy. It was therefore very dangerous to the ruling class of the world, which accordingly looked complacently on its extinction by the capitalist class of France.

First the National Guard was disarmed, and its 2,500 cannon were surreptitiously seized in the night—March 18, 1871. Next day, the whole working class, men and women, surged around and re-captured them; two generals, who had been prominently brutal to the workers in 1848, were now put against the wall and shot. This act was duly recorded against the commune, which had not yet been proclaimed. The government fled to Versailles; and, on the morning of the 19th, the red flag was displayed on the Hotel de Ville and other public buildings of Paris.

For 80 years, the speaker explained, Paris had had no municipal self-government like other cities; it was now decided that the city should be ruled by a civil administration duly elected, by the popular exercise of the franchise, and an executive committee was appointed to give effect to this decision in the name of the Commune. The ensuing elections were carried out without interference or juggling, more than a quarter of a million votes being polled; and about 35 candidates were elected and took control of the municipal affairs.

But the monarchist-clerical-bourgeois gang at Versailles now obtained the release of about 250,000 prisoners held by the Germans; from among these and the Catholic peasantry they recruited a great force to crush the Parisian proletariat, closing in on the south and west while the Germans completed the cordon on the north and east. Bismarck, in particular, thought this a good time to clean up the dangerous revolutionaries collected in Paris. Paris was shelled by the government forces, and entry was made on the south side on Sunday, May 20. During the following “Bloody Week,” 20,000 men, women and children of the working class were slaughtered; and no civilized government in the world raised a hand in protest.

During the absence of the reactionaries at Versailles, Paris had been for the first time clean of pimps and prostitutes, police and criminals in general; life and property had never been so safe before. Now, the people died with “vive la Commune!” on their lips; and the line ladies came back from Versailles with their parasols, poking and peeking at the dead “vermin.” At last exasperated, some communards, without authority, then for the first time retaliated by killing 65 hostages; this was, of course, bruited all over the world against them. But the total number of Versaillese killed during the whole struggle was set at 800 or 900; the number of workers butchered exceeded 35,000, the hunt after men, women and children being kept up for six years, while countless thousands were transported for life.

Comrade Kingsley admitted the Communards made mistakes, as when they allowed the reactionaries to sneak out of Paris alive and also left the plunder in the banks untouched, though there was gold enough there to buy the Germans off. They should have imprisoned every one of the old gang and appealed to the country for their one chance of success; however, perhaps their experiment was half-a-century too soon and would have failed in any case.

The speaker characterized this as the most stupendous slaughter of slaves since Spartacus, and added that “hundreds of thousands more will be slaughtered before this job is finished and the ruling class dismissed for ever. Don’t think you are going to get them off your back by talking nice to them; they will stick to you like a long-lost brother—and will drive a dagger to your heart.” As an indication, he pointed to recent measures against the workers in this country, where, he observed, “the revolt is pitifully weak as yet.”

This slave civilization, however, would die by its own hand. Its machines must go down and out; and with them would go the society that was based upon them. The cities themselves must perish; the whole city life was practically an economic waste. The period of human freedom was marked, not by great organized industries, but by the utilization of very primitive and simple means of production. With a complicated system, all liberty was lost; conditions became ever more intolerable, and nothing was left but inevitable collapse.