Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/32

Rh Each of these two documents is the characteristic product of a distinct epoch in the history of socialism, and in the spirit which they respectively display, as in the circumstances attending their respective appearance, they present a contrast that has no parallel in the socialist movement.

It was at the end of 1864 that the Workingmen's International Association, projected by Marx in 1862, was finally constituted. At that time Louis Bonaparte, ever so distrusted by every government on the face of the earth, was still kindly looked upon and gratefully remembered by the mercantile classes of Europe as the "Society-Savior" who, in strangling the French Republic, had most contributed to the reëstablishment of "order" on the Continent, and apparently brought to an end the irrepressible conflict between the bourgeoisie and the revolutionary proletariat of France. The events of 1848 had indeed made it quite plain that a revolution in France was apt to be quickly followed in other countries by similar upheavals, far more injurious to capitalist interests than any foreign war could be. Therefore, while the foreign schemes of Louis Bonaparte were watched in diplomatic circles and preparations were made to defeat them by the force of arms if necessary, his domestic rule was deemed everywhere by labor exploiters a general guarantee of "economic peace" between the classes. In the thirteen years that his exemplary despotism had already lasted, not a ripple of proletarian discontent had been permitted to ruffle the smooth surface of "business"; and while socialism had passed into Germany, where Marx's writings and Lassalle's agitation had begun its transformation from a sentimental utopia into a scientific certainty, its very name, practically expunged from the French language by the Bonapartist police, had become an almost foreign word in the land of its birth.