Page:Ernest Belfort Bax - A Short History of the Paris Commune (1895).djvu/11

 Rh the popular movement and its leaders, and confirmed the natural bias of every Frenchman to try and re-live and re-act the greatest epoch in his national history, the general outlines and prominent names of which he is familiar with from his youth up.

In addition to the foregoing influences, there was, of course, that of the International, and with it, the Marxists, who had been industriously propagandising among the Parisian working-classes for five or six years past, and who made their influence felt at the time we are speaking of.

Such was the amalgam of tendencies and ideas—Proudhonism, neo-Jacobinism reminiscences of '48, with a recent infusion of the modern Socialism of Marx—which in various proportions went to constitute the mental background alike of the leaders and the rank and file of the French Red Republican Party in 1871, at the time when it established the Commune of Paris.