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革命斑斑錄 – 開欄文
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2025/03/22 13:13 瀏覽131 ｜回應2｜推薦1 |
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我應該沒有「衝鋒陷陣」基因，自然跟「革命」扯不上什麼關係(1)；不過，七十多年來，心嚮往之的時刻還是有過那麼一次、兩次。
在一個訪問節目中，系國兄談到：「由於當時的政治環境，我們那個年代的青年很多都有所謂的『使命感』」(大意)。區區不才年幼無知時也曾經是這批人之一；在「天下興亡，匹夫有責」這類醬缸文化的薰陶(誤導？)下，滿腦子都是「如何富國強兵」。所以，在熟讀《孫武兵法》外，我從小就崇拜拿破崙。
初中時讀了高語和先生翻譯的《拿破崙傳》。其它內容我當然早就忘了，但有一句話我到今天還記得：「拿破崙自稱『革命之子』，但他卻背叛了革命」(大意)。雖然我讀完他這本傳記後不再崇拜拿破崙，但我保持對「法國大革命」這個事件的興趣；過去大概讀過四、五本《法國大革命史》。後來對「1848革命潮」也下了點工夫。「巴黎公社」一詞的印象，大概最早來自馬克思的著作(2)。我書架上有一本《論巴黎公社》，可惜我一直找不出時間讀它。
昨天在網上看到《巴黎公社：血腥的一週》(請見本欄第二篇貼文)。為了寫一段簡單的介紹，我上網搜尋此事件的相關資料；在這個過程中，覺得這段歷史值得寫上一筆；又進一步想到：可以藉這個因緣，談談「革命」大業；是開此欄。
附註：
1. 我上網查了「革命」一詞的出處；這才想起：「革命」的「命」並非小老百姓的「命」，而是指「天命」的「命」；或者說，皇帝小兒能夠坐上金鑾殿的「命」。只是在這個過程中，小老百姓要拿自己的「命」當賭注；故名此欄。
2. 此處請參見我這段簡評(該欄開欄文「結論」第一段和該文附註6。
本文於 2025/03/22 13:49 修改第 3 次
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馬克思和巴黎公社-Katherine Connelly
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2025/03/23 09:46 推薦0 |
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從本欄第二篇貼文我們知道巴黎公社的結果相當慘烈。我對這個歷史事件沒有研究，無從判斷它對馬克思本人思想，以及之後左翼人士鬥爭策略兩者的影響有多深遠。馬克思在世時間為1818 – 1883；大家由此可以了解「歐洲革命潮」(1848)和「巴黎公社」(1971)兩件大事跟他生涯的時間關係。
我不知道自己有沒有時間或能力就康莉講師這篇大作寫個讀後(1)；為了日後指示方便起見，我替原文的子標題加上序號，並增加了「前言」這個子標題。
下文討論了馬克思《法國內戰》；該書簡介請見此處。
附註：
1. 為了統一對人名的翻譯，自2024/01前後(或更早)到今年年初，我都使用【發音指南】上的美式發音來音譯外國人的大名。直到今年年初(或稍早)，我偶然間發現該【指南】提供的發音未必標準。今後我將參考2 -3個提供發音方式的網站來決定人名的音譯。英國人將根據英式發音，其他外國人一律使用美式發音。例如：依據美式發音，下文作者康莉講師大名需譯為：康奈莉或康娜莉。
Karl Marx and the Paris Commune
Katherine Connelly, 03/17/21
Editor’s Notes：Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune is a brilliant example of the interaction between revolutionary theory and practice, argues Katherine Connelly.
0. 前言
The Paris Commune made Karl Marx famous. After workers in Paris seized control of their city in March 1871 and were butchered by French troops only two months later, the press looked for a dangerous communist to blame.
They found him in Marx, a German exile from the 1848 revolutions who had found refuge in London. There were rumours that the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) that Marx founded had given secret commands to the workers of Paris. Journalists were soon calling at Marx’s home.
After living for years in obscurity, Marx rather enjoyed the notoriety – at least his ideas were getting heard.
While respectable opinion held that the Communards were uncivilized thieves and murderers, Marx boldly defended them – they had provided a glimpse of what he had hoped to see for most of his adult life: the working class in power. After their defeat, Marx helped the revolutionary refugees who fled to London, even trying to placate their angry landladies when they were unable to pay their rent.[1]
But Marx refuted all claims that he, or the IWMA, were secretly behind the Commune. Marx had spent years arguing against those he called ‘utopian socialists’ who thought that their role was to tell everyone how to organise society after a revolution, and he also argued against conspirators who thought their role was to secretly plan the revolution.
In the revolutionary year of 1848, Marx and his lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels argued in their Manifesto of the Communist Party (now famous as the Communist Manifesto), that capitalism itself, not a gang of revolutionaries, would generate social revolution.
1. The role of revolutionaries
What, then, did Marx think revolutionaries should do? According to the Manifesto, communists
‘are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.’
These two aspects of a revolutionary’s role are integrally linked. The theoretical understanding that ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves’ (as Marx put it in the first rule of the IWMA) informed practical efforts aimed at all times at strengthening working-class organisation and advancing working-class interests against capitalist interests.
Therefore, what a revolutionary like Marx did depended on an assessment of the context. In autocratic Prussia, Marx had campaigned for freedom of the press; in Britain he supported the most militant Chartists; in 1848 he was one of the leading revolutionaries pressing for democratic reforms. In exile in the 1860s, he formed the IWMA so that workers on strike could strengthen their action through international networks of support.
In 1871 the context looked bleak for the Parisian working class.
The year before, the French Emperor Napoleon III had been goaded into the Franco-Prussian war only to be captured on the battlefield. A Republic was declared in Paris which soon found itself under siege by the invading Prussian army. Working-class Parisians defiantly held out, enduring widespread privation and starvation, only for the French government to surrender.
In these circumstances, Marx argued that ‘any attempt to upset the new [French] government . . . would be a desperate folly’.[2]
Then, on 18 March 1871, the new French government tried to disarm militant, working-class Paris by sending troops to seize cannons on Montmartre. They were confronted by an angry group of working women. Ordered to fire, the troops instead turned their guns on their officers.
The government and wealthy Parisians swiftly fled the city in fear. Working-class Parisians instantly began to run the city themselves – declaring a Paris Commune.
2. Taking sides
Although up to this point he had cautioned against it, now that the French government had been ‘upset’ Marx recognised that the context he was operating in had changed.
In the abstract, declaring a Paris Commune at such a moment was a terrible idea. But now that it had happened, to maintain this stance and wait for the Commune’s failure to confirm his prediction would have flattered an intellectual commentator but have been a sectarian betrayal by a revolutionary.
The fact of the Commune posed the question ‘which side are you on?’ and Marx was in no doubt of his answer.
There were many different socialist, republican and anarchist ideas in play in the Commune, but Marx uncompromisingly identified it with the IWMA: ‘it is but natural that members of our Association should stand in the foreground’.
Sometimes this claim is derided as Marx exaggerating his influence, but Marx wrote this just after the Communards had been slaughtered in their thousands. In that context, Marx’s statement was principled and brave.
It has become fashionable for Marx’s detractors to scoff that he was a slow writer: he ‘only’ published the first volume of Capital.
What this caricature overlooks is that in revolutionary situations, when the lives of insurgents were at stake and the situation demanded quick, strategic analysis then Marx rose to the task, writing speedily, decisively and brilliantly. As Engels said in his oration, Marx was ‘before all else a revolutionist’.
After the outbreak of the Commune, Marx corresponded with some of its leading figures who sought his advice and, as he told them, he put tremendous effort into mobilising international support for the Commune: ‘I have written several hundred letters on behalf of your cause to every corner of the world in which we have [IWMA] branches’. In addition to all this, Marx wrote the IWMA’s analysis of events, The Civil War in France, completed only days after the Commune was crushed.
3. Revolutionary analysis
Marx’s analysis did not start from what he thought ought to have happened – which would have been of little use to anyone – instead, he proceeded from what had happened in struggle and what lessons could be learnt from it. This was useful: Lenin was reading The Civil War in France in 1917.
Lenin noted that Marx’s analysis of class struggle provided the only ‘correction’ he made to the Communist Manifesto: that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.’
The state appears, Marx wrote, to be ‘soaring high above society’ but this is an illusion. In fact it operates in the interest of the dominant class in society.
While capitalist societies can operate with very different kinds of state – for example, France between 1851-1870 had an imperial dictatorship, Britain today has a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy – what they have in common is that economic questions, which determine the very nature of our existence and the power-relations in society, are placed beyond democratic control. Challenge that, and the state intervenes.
Therefore, the task of achieving working-class emancipation has to go beyond putting the ‘right’ people into a ‘ready-made state machinery’ that is designed to oppress the working class. Instead, an insurgent working class must do away with that machinery and seize power.
This was the lesson of the Commune in which the seizure of the city was accomplished by making all representatives in positions of power (in the military, legislature and executive) responsible to people, who could recall and replace them. As Marx observed, working-class revolution necessitated genuine democratic exercise of power that revealed the inferiority of parliamentary democracy:
‘Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people.’
When one of those journalists seeking the evil genius behind the Commune asked Marx what his IWMA strove towards, he replied: ‘The economical emancipation of the working class by the conquest of political power. The use of that political power to the attainment of social ends.’
The democratic conquest of political power in the Commune produced huge social changes that Marx celebrated as ‘the glorious harbinger of a new society’.
The Church was separated from the state revolutionising among other things the nature of education.
Women’s lives were transformed as the Commune refused to distinguish between children born inside or outside of marriage.
Nightwork was abolished for bakers.
There was a flowering of cultural expression.
The Commune made important internationalist statements: electing foreigners to its government and tearing down the Vendôme Column that celebrated France’s military victories.
Instead of creating an armed body to use against the people, the people themselves were armed.
The Commune’s representatives were paid workers’ wages (compare this with MPs today who are paid over two and a half times more than the average wage).
And all this was achieved in a city fighting for its survival, under siege, in just 72 days – by people regarded as the scum of the earth by every government in Europe.
The Paris Commune provided the briefest glimpse of what a society run by working-class people might look like. It also demonstrated how savagely a threatened ruling elite would reimpose its authority.
In his response to the Paris Commune, Marx sided resolutely with those who had lost and analysed it closely and critically so that the emancipatory promise of the Commune might one day be realised.
References：
[1] David McLellan, Karl Marx: A Biography (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p.374.
[2] Quoted in ibid, p.365.
Katherine Connelly is a writer and historian. She led school student strikes in the British anti-war movement in 2003, co-ordinated the Emily Wilding Davison Memorial Campaign in 2013 and is a leading member of Counterfire. She wrote the acclaimed biography, 'Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire' and recently edited and introduced 'A Suffragette in America: Reflections on Prisoners, Pickets and Political Change'.
Katherine Connelly will be speaking at Counterfire’s event commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune on 21 March. Register here: tinyurl.com/ParisCommune150
本文於 2025/03/23 10:21 修改第 5 次
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巴黎公社：血腥的一週 ------ Danny Bird
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2025/03/22 15:31 推薦1 |
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馬克思主義者，或一般而言，各類左派人士，對「巴黎公社」大概都不陌生。這篇呈現巴黎公社最後一星期的「簡史」，彰顯了馬克思那個時代「階級鬥爭」的邪惡性質和慘烈程度。足資警惕；也讓我們感受到馬克思主義何以歷久不衰，至今仍被很多有志士仁人奉為圭臬的原因。
這篇文章作者的「史感」很強；文中借古諷今的幾個地方都很到位。值得欣賞；前事不忘，後事之師，良有以也
下文提及第一國際和《國際歌》，兩者請參見拙作《關於「共產國際」》。
The Paris Commune’s Bloody Week
In May 1871, a short-lived Parisian revolution in social relations was brutally suppressed. What is the legacy of the Paris Commune?
Danny Bird, 05/25/21
Destruction of the Vendôme Colonne during the Paris Commune, by Auguste Bruno Braquehais, 1871. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris. Public Domain. 請至原網頁觀看照片
In hiding and soon to be sentenced to death in absentia, Eugène Pottier completed a poem In June 1871 that still serves as the rallying cry for the Left worldwide: L’Internationale. Its themes of solidarity and universalism would enshrine the ambitions of the Paris Commune, a brief and extraordinary social experiment that unfolded during the spring of 1871 in what was then Europe’s second-largest city. However, between 21 and 28 May, central Paris was incinerated and approximately 25,000 people massacred when French soldiers annihilated the Commune, an atrocity remembered as the ‘Bloody Week’.
The Commune’s origins lay in France’s humiliation during the Franco-Prussian War. In September 1870 Napoleon III’s Second Empire gave way to the French Third Republic, which resolved to continue fighting. Paris was besieged by Prussia and privation soon ravaged the city’s poorest districts. In January 1871 France signed an armistice with the new, Prussian-dominated German Empire. The National Assembly held elections the following month and appointed Adolphe Thiers to lead the incoming government.
A steely political navigator of France’s tumultuous 19th century, Thiers was soon rubbing salt into Parisian wounds. The wartime moratorium on debt repayments was rescinded, now requiring repayment within 48 hours, while landlords could seek arrears. This was devastating to working-class Parisians, whose industry and commerce had stalled during the war.
The National Guard (the fédérés), a militia that had expanded significantly during the siege and whose officers were elected in working-class districts such as Belleville, now posed a direct threat to bourgeois order. The aristocratic officer corps of the professional army considered them a dangerous rabble, particularly as the fédérés were determined to keep their cannons in areas like Montmartre.
Barricade on the Rue de Flandre, unknown photographer, 18 March 1871. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris. Public Domain. 請至原網頁觀看照片
Matters came to a head on 18 March when the army attempted to confiscate them. Confronted by fédérés and local residents, many professional soldiers defected, while generals Jacques Léon Clément-Thomas and Claude Lecomte were seized and summarily executed. As barricades went up across Paris, Thiers gave orders for the National Assembly and army to abandon the capital for Versailles. In their wake, fédérés occupied key buildings in the central arrondissements. The next day a red flag flew over the Hôtel de Ville.
On 26 March, elections established a new authority: the Paris Commune. Mandated to affirm the city’s autonomy, its delegates were comprised of Jacobins, devotees to the French Revolution’s most fanatical faction; Blanquists, followers of the veteran socialist, Auguste Blanqui; and members of Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association. Massing outside Paris, Thiers’s forces – the Versaillais – pointed to a foreign conspiracy.
For soldiers like Louis Rossel, however, disgusted at the armistice with Germany, the Commune offered a lifeline. He notified the Minister of War: ‘I do not hesitate to join the side which has not concluded peace, and which does not include in its ranks generals guilty of capitulation.’ In Versailles, mocked since the surrender as defeatists and also blamed for the cannons fiasco, the likes of General Joseph Vinoy spoiled for a reckoning.
While the Commune set about abolishing night work in bakeries and granting pensions to unmarried widows and children, the Versaillais plotted the reconquest of Paris. Troops were saturated with propaganda that depicted a city usurped by the dregs of society, ex-convicts, drunks and foreigners. Soldiers suspected of sympathy were deployed elsewhere in France. Newspapers such as Le Soir informed readers that property recaptured from the Communards would require ‘fumigation’.
'Les hommes de la Commune', published in L'Illustration, 15 July 1871, by Jules Robert. Raoul Rigault is positioned bottom left. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris. Public Domain. 請至原網頁觀看照片
In April, following the murder of its military commanders by Versaillais troops, the Commune adopted a Decree on Hostages. For every Communard killed, three hostages would be executed in retaliation. Raoul Rigault, the Commune’s chief of police, began abducting clerics, including the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy. The Communards sought an exchange for Blanqui but Thiers refused, estimating that it would be equivalent to handing over a battalion. Instead, the Versaillais launched missiles on the affluent western arrondissements, pulverising their own side’s houses.
On 16 May the Commune toppled the Vendôme Column, a monument sculpted of melted Austrian and Russian cannons, crowned with a statue of Napoleon Bonaparte in the style of a Roman emperor. Its jingoistic symbolism was an affront to their internationalist values, while its demolition provoked outrage among the Versaillais. General MacMahon conjured its iconoclasm to rouse bloodlust in his troops: ‘Some so-called Frenchmen had the nerve, under the eyes of the Prussians, to destroy this witness to the victories of your fathers over the European coalition.’
On 21 May the Versaillais breached Paris’ defences and swept towards the Arc de Triomphe. The slaughter was already underway as Thiers crowed: ‘The punishment will be exemplary, but it will take place within the law.’ In the western districts, a journalist for Le Gaulois happened upon 30 bodies next to a ditch: they were fédérés strafed by the Versaillais with a mitrailleuse – a rapid-firing weapon similar to a Gatling gun. The Bloody Week had begun.
Barricades at the Place de la Concorde were soon overwhelmed. Bourgeois citizens in the prosperous districts cheered on the carnage as Versaillais troops rained down bullets from upper-storey windows. To impede the enemy’s advance, the Commune ordered that strategic buildings be torched.
Barricade on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, unknown photographer, 18 March 1871. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris. Public Domain. 請至原網頁觀看照片
Anti-Communards saw this as proof that the Commune was capable only of destruction. Yet there is strong evidence that Versaillais missiles were the primary cause of the inferno that would leave Paris in ruins. Nevertheless, Communards did incinerate landmarks such as the Tuileries Palace, reviled as a symbol of the Second Empire, and the Hôtel de Ville, as they retreated to the eastern arrondissements. From his bedroom in the Marais, the English merchant Edwin Child recorded that by 24 May ‘it seemed literally as if the whole town was on fire’.
Suddenly, rumours of female arsonists – pétroleuses – firebombing buildings became rife. Women caught carrying bottles, even chimneysweeps with blackened hands, were shot on the spot by the Versaillais. Killing was conducted in the open, with as many as 3,000 men and women dispatched in the Jardin du Luxembourg between 24 and 28 May. Children, too, fell victim to the bloodbath. Medical personnel who tended to the wounded or dying were, as The Times reported, suspected of ‘sympathising with them and thus meriting the same fate’.
Many generals involved in the massacre had earned their stripes crushing indigenous rebellions in French colonies. The Versaillais was a highly disciplined force and the piles of corpses left strewn throughout Paris that week attests to a ruthless mentality that perceived anyone who challenged the ideals of the French state as alien and incorrigible.
Finally, after a rash decision to execute Archbishop Darboy and other hostages, the Commune made its last stand among the tombs of Père-Lachaise Cemetery. On 28 May Vinoy lined 147 fédérés up against its eastern wall and mowed them down. In Montmartre, Eugène Varlin, one of the Commune’s brightest leaders was beaten so savagely that his eyeball was left dangling from its socket before he was killed in the same location as the two generals on 18 March. According to the Journal des débats, the army had at last ‘avenged its incalculable disasters by a victory’.
Around 35-40,000 prisoners were marched on foot to Versailles. Upon reviewing one convoy, General Galliffet had all grey-haired men executed, suspected of having participated in the 1848 Revolution. Bourgeois women lining the route struck prisoners with their umbrellas. Crammed into filthy, open-air prison camps, disease and exposure claimed many lives. In the years that followed, survivors would face firing squads, destitution and banishment to remote penal colonies.
Blessing ceremony of the foundation stone of the Sacré-Coeur church, by Louis-Josée-Amédée Daudenarde, 1907. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris. Public Domain. 請至原網頁觀看照片
Subsequently, the Third Republic consolidated its grip on France’s national memory. School textbooks highlighted Darboy’s death while trivialising the slaughter of tens of thousands of Parisians and precluded any mention of the military’s eliminationist policy. Within years, a Catholic basilica, the Sacré-Cœur, soared over Montmartre in expiation for the Commune’s ‘sins’. The basilica was financed by the National Assembly, even as it fought against efforts to have ‘Member of the Commune’ inscribed on Communards’ tombstones.
The recent iconoclasm of national idols throughout some parts of the world has prompted fierce debate about the ‘cancelling’ of history, triggering prophylactic jeering among conservative commentators, as it did in 1871. It bears emphasising that the Communards’ plan to tear down contested monuments was no less political than their construction in the first place. According to the Communard Antoine Demay, when Thiers’s mansion was razed in May 1871 the Commune was keen to preserve his many books and artefacts, in order to ‘conserve the intelligence of the past for the edification of the future’, which rather debunks the barbarian caricature pushed by the Versaillais.
In the spring of 2021, two letters addressed to the French government and anonymously written by members of the military warned darkly of national disintegration and civil war because of anti-racist activism and Islamic extremism. In an image that evokes the radical reputation of working-class districts such as Belleville during 1871, the first letter spoke of ‘hordes from the banlieue’ threatening ‘our civilisational values’. The second referenced La Marseillaise, specifically the French national anthem’s seventh verse about avenging the military’s elders. The events of the Paris Commune and the Bloody Week still cast a long shadow over France.
Danny Bird is a writer based in Bristol, UK. A graduate of UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, he has a special interest in modern European history.
本文於 2025/03/23 11:47 修改第 8 次
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