Page:Ernest Belfort Bax - A Short History of the Paris Commune (1895).djvu/10

 4 the part of the French working-classes, notwithstanding that the immediate "plank" was Louis Blanc's scheme. Indeed, at this time and for some years later, "scientific Socialism," as we understand it to day, was practically unknown in France, the brilliant essays of Proudhon being the nearest approach to anything of the kind.

It remains to say a few words on the revolutionary tradition in France. Amongst the working-classes of the large towns—notably of Paris, of course, but also of Lyons, Marseilles, and other places—the remembrance of the power and position of the then young proletariat during the great years of the Revolution, 1792 to 1794, had lingered on ever since, now and again bursting out in somewhat aimless revolt, and again slumbering for a while, but always there. The party of the people embodying this tradition, which, of course, from time to time absorbed new ideas of a Socialistic nature as they arose, became definitely constituted in 1848, and was known after that year as the Red Republican Party, from the fact that, in the June insurrection, the red flag was adopted by the insurgents (I believe at the suggestion of Louis Blanc, when the national workshops system was the immediate question at issue) and everywhere acclaimed as the banner of the class-conscious proletariat and of Socialistic Republicanism, in opposition to the tricolour, which was that of the middle-classes and of bourgeois or political Republicanism. Such was the origin of the flag which is now, the world over, the great ensign of the modern Socialist movement.

In addition to the active Red Republican Party and its popular leaders, there has always existed in France a class of men who have made the history of the great Revolution their life-study. These men naturally conceive of every revolution as modelling itself on the lines of the French Revolution of 1789–96. Their influence has reacted on