Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/19

xii neither deserved nor desired so much consideration; while her cruel husband showed little pity of any sort to the communards' honest wives, whom he shot after insulting them. Both were equally brazen-faced in their respective fields. Should it be claimed that the translator's intention was not to render Galliffet less odious to himself or to others than he should be, since the references to his cold-blooded murders were not suppressed, it might be observed that he, Galliffet, far from deeming himself odious for his diabolical brutalities, ever took pride in them; esteemed them, indeed, military achievements of the highest order. And he lived in a world that took the same view of such matters, in which, therefore, he was not a monster but a hero, and the opinion of which was for him the only opinion. But to be "the kept man of a shameless wife"! Fie, even for a general of the Second Empire.

We don't know that much light may be cast upon the mental operations of the French translator in question by stating that he is none else than Charles Longuet, ex-member of the Paris Commune and Karl Marx's son-in-law, now a Millerandist, that is, a convert to the new method" of "socialist union," even with such as Galliffet. Autres temps, autres mœurs. At any rate, his sins of omission are mere peccadilloes by the side of his sins of commission; which we must also notice here, simply because they typify the "tactics" lately adopted by a motley crowd of so-called "intellectual socialists," and consisting sometimes, as in the present case, in ludicrous attempts to stand Marx upon his head and in that posture make him see as they do.

On the title page of Longuet's French edition is given