Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/50

 Rh of frontier so dazzles the imagination of French Chauvinists, as that beyond the German left bank of the Rhine. One square mile on the Rhine was worth more to them than ten in the Alps or elsewhere. Given the Second Empire, the demand for the reacquisition of the left bank of the Rhine, either in the lump or piecemeal, was only a question of time. This time came with the Austro-Prussian War of 1866; but Bonaparte was juggled out of the expected territorial indemnity through Bismarck and his own all-too cunning policy of hesitation. There remained nothing for Bonaparte but war—a war which broke out in 1870 and drove him first to Sedan and thence to Wilhelmshöhe.

The necessary consequence was the Paris revolution of the 4th of September, 1870. The Empire collapsed like a house of cards, the Republic was again proclaimed. But the enemy stood before the gates. The armies of the Empire were either hopelessly shut up in Metz or prisoners in Germany. In this extremity the people allowed the Parisian deputies of the former parliament (Corps Législatif) to set themselves up as the "Government of National Defense." This was the more readily conceded because, for the purpose of defense, all Parisians capable of bearing arms had been armed and were enrolled in the National Guard, of which the workmen now constituted the great majority. But the antagonism between the Government, composed almost exclusively of bourgeois, and the armed proletariat, broke out soon. On the 31st of October the working class battalions stormed the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall), and took some of the members of the Government prisoners. Treachery, direct breach of faith on the part of the Government, and the intervention of some middle-class battalions freed them again, and in order not to provoke civil war inside a