Manifesto of the Communist Party

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Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871 

saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever recurring cause of dispute among the bourgeois 

themselves – the debtor and creditor accounts.

15

 The same portion of the bourgeois, after they had 

assisted in putting down the working men’s insurrection of June 1848, had been at once 

unceremoniously sacrificed to their creditors

16

 by the then Constituent Assembly. But this was 

not their only motive for now rallying around the working class. They felt there was but one 

alternative – the Commune, or the empire – under whatever name it might reappear. The empire 

had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesale financial 

swindling it fostered, by the props it lent to the artificially accelerated centralization of capital, 

and the concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them politically, it had 

shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted their Voltairianism by handing over the 

education of their children to the fréres Ignorantins,

17

 it had revolted their national feeling as 

Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one equivalent for the ruins 

it made – the disappearance of the empire. In fact, after the exodus from Paris of the high 

Bonapartist and capitalist boheme, the true bourgeois Party of Order came out in the shape of the 

“Union Republicaine,”

18

 enrolling themselves under the colors of the Commune and defending it 

against the wilful misconstructions of Thiers. Whether the gratitude of this great body of the 

bourgeois will stand the present severe trial, time must show.  

The Commune was perfectly right in telling the peasants that “its victory was their only hope.” Of 

all the lies hatched at Versailles and re-echoed by the glorious European penny-a-liner, one of the 

most tremendous was that the Rurals represented the French peasantry. Think only of the love of 

the French peasant for the men to whom, after 1815, he had to pay the milliard indemnity.

19

 In the 

eyes of the French peasant, the very existence of a great landed proprietor is in itself an 

encroachment on his conquests of 1789. The bourgeois, in 1848, had burdened his plot of land 

with the additional tax of 45 cents, in the franc; but then he did so in the name of the revolution; 

while now he had fomented a civil war against revolution, to shift on to the peasant’s shoulders 

the chief load of the 5 milliards of indemnity to be paid to the Prussian. The Commune, on the 

other hand, in one of its first proclamations, declared that the true originators of the war would be 

made to pay its cost. The Commune would have delivered the peasant of the blood tax – would 

have given him a cheap government – transformed his present blood-suckers, the notary, 

advocate, executor, and other judicial vampires, into salaried communal agents, elected by, and 

responsible to, himself. It would have freed him of the tyranny of the garde champetre, the 

gendarme, and the prefect; would have put enlightenment by the schoolmaster in the place of 

stultification by the priest. And the French peasant is, above all, a man of reckoning. He would 

find it extremely reasonable that the pay of the priest, instead of being extorted by the tax-

gatherer, should only depend upon the spontaneous action of the parishioners’ religious instinct. 

Such were the great immediate boons which the rule of the Commune – and that rule alone – held 

out to the French peasantry. It is, therefore, quite superfluous here to expatiate upon the more 

complicated but vital problems which the Commune alone was able, and at the same time 

compelled, to solve in favor of the peasant – viz., the hypothecary debt, lying like an incubus 

upon his parcel of soil, the prolétariat foncier (the rural proletariat), daily growing upon it, and 

his expropriation from it enforced, at a more and more rapid rate, by the very development of 

modern agriculture and the competition of capitalist farming.  

The French peasant had elected Louis Bonaparte president of the republic; but the Party of Order 

created the empire. What the French peasant really wants he commenced to show in 1849 and 

1850, by opposing his maire to the government’s prefect, his school-master to the government’s 

priest, and himself to the government’s gendarme. All the laws made by the Party of Order in 

January and February 1850 were avowed measures of repression against the peasant. The peasant 

was a Bonapartist, because the Great Revolution, with all its benefits to him, was, in his eyes, 

personified in Napoleon. This delusion, rapidly breaking down under the Second Empire (and in 

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64 

Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871 

its very nature hostile to the Rurals), this prejudice of the past, how could it have withstood the 

appeal of the Commune to the living interests and urgent wants of the peasantry?  

The Rurals – this was, in fact, their chief apprehension – knew that three months’ free 

communication of Communal Paris with the provinces would bring about a general rising of the 

peasants, and hence their anxiety to establish a police blockade around Paris, so as to stop the 

spread of the rinderpest [cattle pest – contagious disease].  

If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, 

and therefore the truly national government, it was, at the same time, as a working men’s 

government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labor, emphatically international. 

Within sight of that Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the 

Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world.  

The Second Empire had been the jubilee of cosmopolitan blackleggism, the rakes of all countries 

rushing in at its call for a share in its orgies and in the plunder of the French people. Even at this 

moment, the right hand of Thiers is Ganessco, the foul Wallachian, and his left hand is 

Markovsky, the Russian spy. The Commune admitted all foreigners to the honor of dying for an 

immortal cause. Between the foreign war lost by their treason, and the civil war fomented by their 

conspiracy with the foreign invader, the bourgeoisie had found the time to display their patriotism 

by organizing police hunts upon the Germans in France. The Commune made a German working 

man [Leo Frankel] its Minister of Labor. Thiers, the bourgeoisie, the Second Empire, had 

continually deluded Poland by loud professions of sympathy, while in reality betraying her to, 

and doing the dirty work of, Russia. The Commune honoured the heroic sons of Poland [J. 

Dabrowski and W. Wróblewski] by placing them at the head of the defenders of Paris. And, to 

broadly mark the new era of history it was conscious of initiating, under the eyes of the 

conquering Prussians on one side, and the Bonapartist army, led by Bonapartist generals, on the 

other, the Commune pulled down that colossal symbol of martial glory, the Vendôme Column.

20

  

The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. Its special measures 

could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people. Such were the 

abolition of the nightwork of journeymen bakers; the prohibition, under penalty, of the 

employers’ practice to reduce wages by levying upon their workpeople fines under manifold 

pretexts – a process in which the employer combines in his own person the parts of legislator, 

judge, and executor, and filches the money to boot. Another measure of this class was the 

surrender to associations of workmen, under reserve of compensation, of all closed workshops 

and factories, no matter whether the respective capitalists had absconded or preferred to strike 

work.  

The financial measures of the Commune, remarkable for their sagacity and moderation, could 

only be such as were compatible with the state of a besieged town. Considering the colossal 

robberies committed upon the city of Paris by the great financial companies and contractors, 

under the protection of Haussman,

21

 the Commune would have had an incomparably better title to 

confiscate their property than Louis Napoleon had against the Orleans family. The Hohenzollern 

and the English oligarchs, who both have derived a good deal of their estates from church 

plunders, were, of course, greatly shocked at the Commune clearing but 8,000f out of 

secularization.  

While the Versailles government, as soon as it had recovered some spirit and strength, used the 

most violent means against the Commune; while it put down the free expression of opinion all 

over France, even to the forbidding of meetings of delegates from the large towns; while it 

subjected Versailles and the rest of France to an espionage far surpassing that of the Second 

Empire; while it burned by its gendarme inquisitors all papers printed at Paris, and sifted all 

correspondence from and to Paris; while in the National Assembly the most timid attempts to put 

in a word for Paris were howled down in a manner unknown even to the Chambre introuvable of 

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