Page:Friedrich Engels - The Revolutionary Act - tr. Henry Kuhn (1922).pdf/25

 Junker. The termination of this period is formed by the Paris Commune. A surreptitious attempt by Thiers to abstract from the Paris National Guard its cannon, caused a victorious uprising. It was again shown that, in Paris, no revolution is possible other than a proletarian one. Government fell, after the victory, into the lap of the working class, all by itself. And again it was shown how impossible even then, twenty years after the period depicted in our review, was the rule of the working class. On the one hand, France left Paris in the lurch, looked on while it was bled to death under the bullets of MacMahon; on the other hand, the Commune consumed itself in a futile struggle between the two parties that split it, the Blanquists (the majority), and the Proudhonists (the minority), neither of whom knew what was to be done. As sterile as the coup de main of 1848 was the gift-victory of 1871.

With the Paris Commune, the militant proletariat was considered finally buried. But, on the contrary, from the Commune and the Franco-German war may be dated its most powerful rise. By the complete transformation of the methods of warfare, through the conscription of the entire population capable of bearing arms into armies that could thereafter be counted only by the millions, through firearms, projectiles and explosives of hitherto unheard-of effectiveness, a sudden end was made, on the one hand, of the Bonapartist period of wars, and subsequent peaceful industrial