At the session of the Commune of April 25, Jourdé, and not without foundation, congratulated himself on the fact that the Commune had "never yet infringed the principle of private property." By this means they hoped to win over bourgeois public opinion and find the path to compromise.
"Such a doctrine," says Lavrov, and rightly, "did not in the least disarm the enemies of the proletariat, who understood excellently with what its success threatened them, and only sapped the proletarian energy and, as it were, deliberately blinded it in the face of its irreconcilable enemies." (Page 137.) But this enfeebling doctrine was inextricably bound up with the fiction of democracy. The form of mock legality it was that allowed them to think that the problem would be solved without a struggle. "As far as the mass of the population is concerned," writes Arthur Arnould, a member of the Commune, "it was to a certain extent justified in the belief in the existence of, at the very least, a hidden agreement with the Government." Unable to attract the bourgeoisie, the compromisers, as always, deceived the proletariat.
The clearest evidence of all that, in the conditions of the inevitable and already beginning civil war, democratic parliamentarism expressed only the compromising helplessness of the leading groups, was the senseless procedure of the supplementary elections to the Commune of April 6. At this moment, "it was no longer a question of voting," writes Arthur Arnould. "The situation had become so tragic that there was not either the time or the calmness necessary for the correct functioning of the elections…. All persons devoted to the Commune were on the fortifications, in the forts, in the foremost detachments…. The people attributed no importance whatever to these supplementary elections. The elections were in reality merely parliamentarism. What was required was not to count voters, but to have soldiers: not to discover whether we had lost or gained in the Commune of Paris, but to defend Paris from the Versaillese." From these words Kautsky might have observed why in practice it is not so simple to combine class war with interclass democracy.
"The Commune is not a Constituent Assembly," wrote in his book, Millière, one of the best brains of the Commune. "It is a military Council. It must have one aim, victory; one weapon, force; one law, the law of social salvation."
"They could never understand," Lissagaray accuses the leaders, "that the Commune was a barricade, and not an administration."
They began to understand it in the end, when it was too late. Kautsky has not understood it to this day. There is no reason to believe that he will ever understand it.
The Commune was the living negation of formal democracy, for in its development it signified the dictatorship of working class Paris over the peasant country. It is this fact that dominates all the rest. However much the political doctrinaires, in the midst of the Commune itself, clung to the appearances of democratic legality, every action of the Commune, though insufficient for victory, was sufficient to reveal its illegal nature.
The Commune—that is to say, the Paris City Council—repealed the national law concerning conscription. It called its official organ The Official Journal of the French Republic. Though cautiously, it still laid hands on the State Bank. It proclaimed the separation of Church and State, and abolished the Church Budgets. It entered into relations with various embassies. And so on, and so on. It did all this in virtue of the revolutionary dictatorship. But Clemenceau, young democrat as he was then, would not recognize that virtue.
At a conference with the Central Committee, Clemenceau said: "The rising had an unlawful beginning…. Soon the Committee will become ridiculous, and its decrees will be despised. Besides, Paris has not the right to rise against France, and must unconditionally accept the authority of the Assembly."