Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/37

xxx himself, "of action or reaction"; so that in this particular country even more than in any other, the "No Compromise" fundamental rule of socialist tactics seemed to have the force of a self-evident proposition.

Then came Millerand, with his portfolio and his bureaux de tabac.

His self-appointed mission was to save the bourgeois republic in the name of Socialism, with the sword of Galliffet.

To be sure, in the domain of the unexpected nothing could be more startling.

A commonplace incident (the "Dreyfus affair"), an act of violent injustice committed by military members of the oppressing class upon one of their fellows, had been so worked up by "socialists," so-called, of the eleventh hour, as to totally eclipse the multitude of acts not less infamous committed by the same class upon the proletariat. And the result was—not, of course, the Social Revolution, not the relaxing, for one moment, of class injustice and class oppression, not even the rehabilitation of Dreyfus and the punishment of his torturers, but the entrance of a "socialist," hand in hand with the murderer Galliffet, in the bourgeois government, quickly followed by the participation of that "socialist minister" in the massacres of strikers at Martinique and Châlon.

Did a cry of indignation arise, unanimous, from every "socialist" quarter throughout the world? No; a cry of horror arose, deep and significant, but it was not "unanimous."

Why? What had happened to thus suddenly "transform circumstances and men"? And was this, indeed, the kind of transformation expected by Marx?

The answer to these questions is simple enough. A man is not "transformed" by merely changing his name.