Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/139

 96 these promises by the Rurals, he refused to enter into any explanations; not, however, without giving them this significant hint: "I tell you there are impatient men amongst you, men who are in too great a hurry. They must have another eight days; at the end of these eight days there will be no more danger, and the task will be proportionate to their courage and to their capacities." As soon as McMahon was able to assure him that he could shortly enter Paris, Thiers declared to the Assembly that "he would enter Paris, with the laws in his hands, and demand a full expiation from the wretches who had sacrificed the lives of soldiers and destroyed public monuments." As the moment of decision drew near he said to the Assembly, "I shall be pitiless!"; to Paris, that it was doomed; and to his Bonapartist banditti, that they had State license to wreak vengeance upon Paris to their heart's content. At last when treachery had opened the gates of Paris to General Douai, on the 21st of May, Thiers, on the 22d, revealed to the Rurals the "goal" of his conciliation comedy, which they had so obstinately persisted in not understanding. "I told you a few days ago that we were approaching our goal; to-day I come to tell you the goal is reached. The victory of order, justice, and civilization is at last won!"

So it was. The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters. Then this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge. Each new crisis in the class struggle between the appropriator and the producer brings out this fact more glaringly. Even the atrocities of the bourgeois in June, 1848, vanish before the ineffable infamy of 1871. The self-sacrificing heroism with which the population of Paris—men, women, and