Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/56

 Rh the conquered were slaughtered in hundreds with the mitrailleuses; "the wall of the Federals" in the Père la Chaise cemetery, where the last massacre took place, remains to-day a dumb but eloquent witness to the frenzy of crime of which the governing classes are capable as soon as the proletariat dares to stand up for its rights. Then, as the slaughter of all was seen to be impossible, came the arrests en masse, the shooting down of arbitrarily selected prisoners as victims for sacrifice, and the transference of the remainder into great camps, where they awaited the mercy of the courts-martial. The Prussian troops, who were encamped to the northeast of Paris, received the order to allow no fugitives to pass. Nevertheless, the officers often shut their eyes when the soldiers obeyed the call of humanity rather than that command. Especially does the Saxon Army Corps deserve the credit of having acted very humanely and of having let through many whose character as combatants of the Commune was obvious.

Looking back to-day, after twenty years, upon the acts and historical significance of the Paris Commune, it appears to us that the information contained in the pages of the Civil War in France may usefully be supplemented here by some special considerations.

The members of the Commune were divided into a majority of Blanquists, who had also predominated in the central committee of the National Guard, and a minority, which consisted for the most part of members of the International Workingmen's Association, who were adherents of the Proudhonian School of Socialism. The great mass of the Blanquists at that time were socialists only because of their revolutionary proletarian instinct. A few only had attained to greater clearness of principle