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Home , Communards, Paul Lafargue

Chapter Four Anti- and the Cacotopia

I. Introduction

‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism’. By the time the opening salvo of the Communist Manifesto appeared in print, in February 1848, the series of revolutions that heralded the nineteenth-century’s ‘springtime of peoples’ had already exploded throughout Europe. This ‘momentary realisation of the dreams of the left, the nightmares of the right’, as puts it, was succeeded by a period of spectacular global growth for the capitalist system. It was not until 1871, the year of the , that ‘the spectre of social revolution once again irrupted into a confident capitalist world’ – in the form of a proletarian government that, until its brutal suppression by the Versailles troops, presided over the capital of the nineteenth-century for some two months. In the aftermath of this event, the European was beset by the social and economic anxieties associated with the Great Depression. As a result, ‘it was a little less self-confident than before, and its assertions of self-confidence therefore a little shriller, perhaps a little more worried about its future’.1

1 Hobsbawm 1962, pp. 248, 308. 130 • Chapter Four

Marx’s explicit intention in publishing the views, aims and tendencies of the communists in the Manifesto had been ‘to meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism’ – that is, to refute the infantile propaganda of the bourgeoisie in the form of a compressed historical epic.2 After the , however, the anti-communists’ cautionary tale – in which Marx, presiding over the International, appeared as the political equivalent of Strüwelpeter – was enriched with colourful illustrations of the grotesque antics of the French . The expedience of this ‘spectre-rouge trick’, as Paul Lafargue styled it, was proved by the conjurations of the French state: ‘Thiers found in the massacres of the commune, instigated by himself, the bloody rags for a new red-spectre, in order to overrule the unruly Assembly of Versailles’. In general, Lafargue argued, ‘political men who value their places’ invoke the red spectre in order to persuade ‘the shopkeepers, the millowners, [and] the moneylenders’ of two facts: first, ‘that the bourgeois will be robbed of his life which is barely worth living and of his purse which is well worth fighting for’; and second, ‘that, there they are, at the helm of the State, ready to save and the world along with it from wreck and ruin’.3 ‘But what is the secret of the red bogey’, wrote Marx and Engels in a letter to Bebel and others in 1879, ‘if not the dread the bourgeoisie has of the inevitable life-and-death struggle between it and the proletariat?’4 For the anti-communist imagination, the Paris Commune forced a confrontation with the primal scene of the 1790s, or with its repetition in the 1840s. The European bourgeoisie was terrified by the prospect of a working-class movement motivated by socialist ideas and mobilized by socialist organizations. Its traumatic encounter with the Communards had the impact of the return of the repressed. And journalists and political commentators lost no time in importing the nursery tale to England too in 1871. Correspondents of the newspapers, drawing on the influential rhetoric of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and on conservative reaction to the insurrections of 1848, developed a nightmarish demonology of the so-called ‘Fourth French Revolution’ – a demonology that acquired popular currency at the very moment when establishment journals in France were being suppressed by the Communards.

2 Marx and Engels 1976c, p. 481. 3 Lafargue 1883, p. 103. 4 Marx and Engels 1984, p. 260.