Page:Ernest Belfort Bax - A Short History of the Paris Commune (1895).djvu/8

2 work of the International in the Commune, it did nothing worth speaking of, although much feared by the authorities on the Continent. But apart from the Socialist movement in its proper sense, it is necessary, in order to fully understand the strains which composed the Paris Commune, to note more particularly its relation to the general revolutionary movement of '48 and to the French national revolutionary tradition. The European Revolution of 1848 was the culmination of the bourgeois revolutionary movement which began in the sixteenth century, and which in England partially, though very imperfectly, succeeded in breaking down the monarchical bureaucracy veneered with Feudalism—into which the mediæval political system had become transformed—at the close of the seventeenth century. On the Continent, however, this transitional political order of things, based on the power of the reigning monarch (in Germany, prince or duke) and his functionaries, was not even "scotched," much less killed, before the end of the eighteenth century. In the general reaction which succeeded the French Revolution it was temporarily resuscitated with slight modifications, but it suffered again a partial reverse in 183032, and from that time forward the irresistible wave of middle-class ascendancy gathered its forces till it swept all before it in the great revolutionary year. The middle-class was backed by the proletariat, as yet politically undifferentiated from it, and constituting, so to say, the body of the progressive party, which the middle-class leaders claimed to direct as its head.

One of the main features of the popular movement of '48 was " patriotism," by which was understood centralisation—the "United Germany," "United Italy," "Independent Hungary" mania, and the rest. All the united, independent, and patriotic balderdash, over which so much