The Civil War in France (Marx)

An Address Written in the Midst of Events

The Civil War in France is the third of the General Council's Addresses on the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. The First Address (23 July 1870) called the war Louis Bonaparte's dynastic war, "an amended edition of the coup d'état of December, 1851", and warned the German working class not to let the war of defence degenerate into a war against the French people. The Second Address (9 September), after Sedan and the proclamation of the Republic, foresaw that annexing Alsace-Lorraine would push France towards Russia and breed a new war, and urged the French workers not to overthrow the new government but to use republican liberty for the organization of their own class.

The third Address was written in April and May 1871 while the Commune was fighting, and was read to and adopted by the General Council on 30 May, two days after the last Communards fell at Belleville. Edward Truelove published it as a pamphlet in London in mid-June, and a revised second edition followed the same year. The original has no section titles, only the numbers I to IV.

What It Says

Sections I and II trace how the Government of National Defence of 4 September abandoned the defence of Paris for fear of an armed workers' victory, and how Thiers, in order to shift the cost of the war onto the producers, tried to disarm Paris and failed at Montmartre on 18 March. Marx counts the Central Committee's failure to march at once on a helpless Versailles a "decisive mistake".

Section III is the theoretical core. Marx writes that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes", and sketches how centralized State power grew from absolute monarchy to the Second Empire into an organ of class rule. Against it he sets the institutions of the Commune: the suppression of the standing army and the armed people, a working body both executive and legislative, elected officials recallable at any time, public service at workmen's wages. He finds the Commune's "true secret" in its being "the political form at last discovered" for the economic emancipation of labour. Section IV deals with the massacres of the Bloody Week, answers the charges of arson and of shooting hostages, exposes the cooperation of Prussia and Versailles, and defends the International, concluding that "the national Governments are one as against the proletariate".

The 1891 Edition and Engels's Introduction

For the Commune's twentieth anniversary in 1891 Engels assembled the third German edition, printed the two earlier Addresses with it and wrote an introduction. It points to the "irony of history" by which the Blanquist majority and the Proudhonist minority each acted against their own doctrine, to the "serious political mistake" of leaving the Bank of France untouched, and to the Commune's two means of keeping the organs of the State servants rather than masters of society: election with recall, and workers' wages. Its last words are "Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat."

What the Work Left Behind

In the 1872 preface to the German edition of the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels quoted its thesis on the State machinery word for word, saying the Commune had made parts of the Manifesto's programme antiquated. In 1917 Lenin devoted the whole of chapter 3 of The State and Revolution to its analysis and read the thesis as meaning that the ready-made State machinery must be "smashed". The tradition of Marxist theory that treats the institutions of the Commune as the prototype of a proletarian State starts from this Address. The full Korean text on this site follows the arrangement of the 1891 edition but leaves out Marx's two drafts.