Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/33

xxvi Manifestly, Louis Bonaparte was the chief obstacle to the revival of that proletarian movement which had already made itself felt as a powerful factor in the various uprisings of 1848. True, as above stated, socialism in its perfected form was effecting a lodgment in Germany. But Germany was still a conglomeration of States widely differing in economic and political conditions. The partial awakening, here and there, of some local bodies among the many that composed her working class could not yet be of such general import and widespread influence as must have attached to an equal display of vigor by the more compact proletariat of France; and so long as this recognized leader in the social-revolutionary process lay seemingly unconscious and helpless under the yoke of a vulgar despot, the German socialists, hampered at every step in their agitation by the repressive measures of their own petty tyrants, could only prepare their own ground and await developments.

Necessarily, then, the first aim of the International Association must have been to gain a strong foothold in France, with a special view to the abolition of the Bonapartist régime. Marx realized that among the French militants that could be enlisted for this arduous task, there were but few, if any, whose economic knowledge was sound and safe. He was aware of the fact that most of them were incoherently imbued with Proudhonist notions of "gratuitous credit," "banques du peuple," and other middle-class reform quackery, which they innocently believed, upon the word of Proudhon himself, to be the essence of scientific and practical socialism. But he knew also that the class spirit, fomented from time immemorial by class persecution, and intensified by the stupendous acts of bourgeois treachery repeatedly committed from 1789 to 1848, was highly developed in the