june 15th.
People, in France, are discussing the causes of the late insurrection, and measuring the consideration to which the Insurgents, whether as rebels or refugees, are justly entitled. That the tendency of opinion should be strongly against the Communists is natural, for the justification of their revolt appears difficult, while their last acts have excited universal abhorrence. It is, indeed, perfectly true that they had no grievance against the Government which they defied, for though, perhaps, the National Assembly might not have voted for a Republic, no Republic which could have been voted by any Assembly of Frenchmen would have satisfied the Insurgents of Paris. The political leanings of the Assembly may be put out of the question in searching for the origin of the Civil War. That war was hatched in the brooding minds of Parisian workmen, intent on one single object, and it became practicable when the Revolution of September last put arms in their hands and the capitulation of February left them there still.
The one fixed idea of the workmen of Paris was that work entitled them to something more than wages. They had so long and so intently contemplated the relations between labour and capital that they knew nothing of any other elements of human society, or of any other classes beyond employers and employed. They saw that a hundred workmen got their five francs a day each, and that the single person who hired them got his thousands a year. We are not aware that, as a rule, they were ill-paid or overworked, or in any way oppressed. We should infer rather that they were in the receipt of good wages, that they possessed education as well as skill, and that they had leisure enough and to spare for discussion and thought. The misfortune was that they thought of one subject only, until at last their conceptions grew actually monstrous. It was not all at once that they reached the doctrines recently declared. There is a wide difference between the ideas of 1871 and those of 1848. At the latter period the labourer was held simply to be worthy of his hire, and nothing was proposed beyond such an organization of labour as would insure a constant supply of work for all who wanted it, at wages determined rather by considerate adjustment than unrestricted competition. But the men of the Commune had advanced far ahead of such old Tories of Socialism and Democracy as Ledru Rollin and Louis Blanc. Still occupied with the one single prospect of their daily life, and regarding the relations between capital and labour as the be-all and end-all of existence, they had reached the conclusion that all capital should be transferred bodily to themselves; that they alone ought to constitute society, that all other classes should be dispossessed as worthless, and all established institutions abolished as effete. They began their demolition with the nation itself. They would have no nation, no France, no French Government. They renounced not only all Kings and Emperors, but all Presidents, all Conventions, and all Parliaments, the latter especially. In the place of such authorities they proposed to substitute Committees of working men, and to cut up the country into such areas as Trade Unions might conveniently govern. For their own particular Union they thought Paris might serve well enough, and so they stipulated for their own sovereignty within these limits under the title of the Commune. On those terms—every other species of authority and power being excluded—they believed they could put into practice their one idea of turning their own little world upside down and making the working class everything and other classes nothing. As they never looked beyond their own workshops, they considered that none but working people had ever done any duties or suffered any wrongs, and that no others, therefore, were entitled to any rights. The one object of their hatred, envy, and antagonism was capital, and they resolved to take capital into their own hands. For the future they would lead easy lives, and be the lords instead of the slaves of their old and detested enemy.
In those pretensions and those desires originated the Revolution just suppressed. The war thus undertaken was a Civil War, conducted without the least respect to any laws of war at all. The flight of the Government left the entire Capital not only with all its resources, but with all its treasures and all its inhabitants, in the hands of the insurgents. With these advantages they preferred their demands. They asked for the Capital of France to be delivered over to them as an estate or province within which they might proscribe the worship of God, appropriate every form of capital, and depose all authority and all ranks in favour of their own. Failing this, and in the event of their being defeated in the actual war, they asked for amnesty and liberty to depart. At first they reckoned on victory, for the Assembly appeared disorganized and its armies wavering; the support of other great towns was anticipated, and the outlaws of every country in Europe—the veterans of the universal Revolution—had carried their swords to the service of its latest and ripest expression—the Parisian Commune. Moreover, they had tremendous means of extortion in their hands. They held possession of all that was precious and admirable in the Capital of France, and they declared that, if they were neither allowed to prevail nor permitted to escape, they would spare nothing in their vengeance. In preparation for the worst they stored combustibles in the noblest edifices of the city, and then, laying their hands on some of the most eminent and venerated of its inhabitants, they penned them in a body for the contingency of prospective slaughter. They had no more personal animosity against Monseigneur Darboy than against any statue in the Tuileries or the Louvre. Animate and inanimate objects were marked for destruction on precisely the same grounds—the necessity of putting stress upon the enemy; and the threat was actually executed because its execution might improve the effect of terrorism another day. Of laws or of rules of war these men took not the slightest account. The military leaders of the insurrection had been trained in combats where every imaginable expedient had been held lawful, and the Committee of the International thought no price too high for the realization of their fixed idea. Soldiers and workmen alike were prepared for any extremity of outrage either in pursuit of victory or prosecution of revenge.
Such was the cause and such the conduct of this two months' war; but a war, nevertheless, it was, waged by a political insurrection on behalf of a political object. It is very true that the Insurgents aimed at no form of polity known to the world, and that it would have been impossible to content them by any measure of civil freedom or political rights. Their chief and most peremptory demand was, not for any rights of their own, but for the suppression of the rights of others. They denounced the extension of the suffrage to the rural population, and, as they were in a very small minority themselves, they protested against the right of any majority to outvote them, though they were preparing all the while to impose their own will on a constituency of ten times their number.
Such are my summary reflections concerning that gigantic insurrection.
Now, my Dear, that I have brought my daily correspondence to an end, happy shall I be, if such as may happen to read my small volume can find the perusal of it as interesting as you told it was to you.
I don't expect to stay much longer abroad: I shall soon return to England but quite heart-rent at what my eyes have witnessed, and notwithstanding my admiration for the noble qualities of the french nation, more than once, I fear, I shall not be able to refrain exclaiming: Poor France!