It is over. We have a “Municipal Council,” according to some; a
“Commune,” according to others. Not quite legally elected, but
sufficiently so. Eighty councillors, sixty of whom are quite unknown
men. Who can have recommended them, or, rather, imposed them on the
electors? Can there really be some occult power at work under cover of
the ex-Central Committee? Is the Commune only a pretext, and are we at
the début of a social and political revolution? I overheard a partizan
of the new doctrines say,—“The Proletariat is vindicating its rights,
which have been unjustly trampled on by the aristocratic bourgeoisie.
This is the workman’s 1789!”
Another person expresses the same thing in rather a different form.
“This is the revolt of the _canaille_ against all kind of supremacy,
the supremacy of fortune, and the supremacy of intellect. The equality
of man before the law has been acknowledged, now they want to proclaim
the equality of intellect. Soon universal suffrage will give place to
the drawing of lots. There was a time in Athens when the names of the
archontes were taken haphazard out of a bag, like the numbers at loto.”
However, the revolution has not yet clearly defined its tendencies, and
in the meantime what are we to think of the unknown beings who
represent it? A man in whom I have the greatest confidence, and who has
passed his life in studying questions of social science, and who
therefore has mixed in nearly all the revolutionary circles, and is
personally acquainted with the chiefs, said to me just now, in speaking
of the new Municipal Council,[23] “It will be an assemblage of a very
motley character. There will be much good and much bad in it. We may
safely divide it into three distinct parts: firstly, ten or twelve men
belonging to the International, who have both thought and studied and
may be able to act, mixed with these several foreigners; secondly, a
number of young men, ardent but inexperienced, some of whom are imbued
with Jacobin principles; thirdly, and by far the largest portion,
unsuccessful plotters in former revolutions, journalists, orators, and
conspirators,—noisy, active, and effervescent, having no particular tie
amongst themselves except the absence of any common bond of unity with
the two former divisions, and being confounded now with one, now with
the other. The members of the International alone have any real
political value; they are Socialists. The Jacobin element is decidedly
dangerous.”—If in reality the Communal Assembly is thus composed, how
will it act? Let us wait and see; in the meantime the city is calm.
Never did so critical a moment wear so calm an exterior. By the bye,
where are the Prussians?[24]