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Special pages :
Speech for the 15th anniversary of the Paris Commune
| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 18 March 1886 |
Printed according to the newspaper
Translated from the French
Source: Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 26
Engels wrote this letter in response to a request by the French Socialists that he express publicly his solidarity with them on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the Paris Commune. The letter was read out at a meeting in commemoration of the Commune on March 18, 1886 and published in Le Socialiste on March 27, 1886 under the title âLettre dâEngelsâ.
This letter was published in English for the first time in Frederick Engels, Paul and Laura Lafargue, Correspondence, Vol. I, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1959, pp. 406-07.
This evening, at the same time as you, and with you, the workers of the Two Worlds celebrate the anniversary of the most glorious and most tragic stage of proletarian evolution. In 1871, for the first time in its history, the working class seized political power in a major capital. It was, alas! but a dream. Caught between the mercenaries of the former French Empire on one side and the Prussians on the other, the Commune was soon strangled in an unparalleled massacre which will never be forgotten. Victorious, reaction knew no bounds; socialism seemed to have been drowned in blood, and the proletariat doomed to slavery forever.
Fifteen years have elapsed since that defeat. In all this time, in every country, the powers-that-be, in the service of the owners of land and capital, have not shunned any means to eradicate the last remaining intentions of working class revolt. And what have they achieved?
Look around you. Revolutionary working-class socialism, more alive than ever, is today a force before which governments everywhere tremble, the French radicals as well as Bismarck, the stock-exchange kings of America just as the Tsar of all the Russias.
That is not all.
We have arrived at the point where all our adversaries, whatever they do, are working for us in spite of themselves.
They believed they had killed the International. Yet at the present moment the international union of the proletariat, the revolutionary brotherhood between the workers of different countries, is a thousand times stronger, more widespread than it was before the Commune. The International no longer needs an organisation in the proper sense; it lives and grows through the spontaneous and heartfelt cooperation of the workers of Europe and America.
In Germany Bismarck has exhausted every means, even the foulest, in order to crush the working-class movement. Result: before the Commune he was faced with four socialist deputies; his persecutions have led to the election of twenty-five today.[1] And the German proletariat is laughing at the Grand Chancellor who could not have made better revolutionary propaganda if he were paid for it.
In France they have imposed on you voting by list,[2] this bourgeois election method par excellence, deliberately invented to ensure the election of lawyers, journalists and other political adventurers, the spokesmen of capital. And what has it done for the bourgeoisie, this poll of the rich? It has created in the heart of the French parliament a revolutionary socialist workersâ party whose mere appearance on the scene was sufficient to throw the ranks of all the bourgeois parties into disarray.[3]
This is where we are now. Every event turns out in our favour. The most calculated measures to arrest the progress of the proletariat serve only to speed its victorious march. The enemy itself is fighting for us, is condemned to fight for us. And it has done so much and done it so well that on this day, the 18 March 1886, the same cry emerges from thousands of workersâ throats, from the proletarian miners of California and Aveyron to the convict miners of Siberia:
âLong live the Commune! Long live the international union of workers!"
- â The reference is to the 1884 elections to the Reichstag, when, under the conditions of the Anti-Socialist Law (see Note 174), the German SocialDemocratic Party polled about 550,000 votes, and doubled its representation to 24 members.
- â Until 1885 France was divided into "small constituencies", each sending one representative to the Chamber of Deputies. In June 1885, on the initiative of moderate bourgeois republicans, a system of voting by department lists was introduced. Under this system, which operated until 1889, small constituencies were combined to form larger ones each corresponding to a department. Now a voter received a ballot paper with the names of candidates from different parties, but he was obliged to vote for a total number of candidates to be elected, one deputy from 70,000 people. A deputy was considered elected in the first ballot provided he had received an absolute majority of votes; a relative majority was sufficient in the second ballot.
- â On February 11, 1886, the workers' deputies in the French Parliament made an interpellation concerning the government's actions against the miners' strike in Decazeville (see Note 263). Engels regarded this as the formation of the socialist group in the Chamber of Deputies.