Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 13 - From Marx to Mao

475LESSONS OF THE COMMUNE 168After the coup d’état, which marked the end of the revolutionof 1848, France fell under the yoke of the Napoleonicregime for a period of 18 years. This regime brought uponthe country not only economic ruin but national humiliation.In rising against the old regime the proletariat undertooktwo tasks—one of them national and the other of aclass character—the liberation of France from the Germaninvasion and the socialist emancipation of the workers fromcapitalism. This union of two tasks forms a unique featureof the Commune.The bourgeoisie had formed a “government of nationaldefence” and the proletariat had to fight for national independenceunder its leadership. Actually, it was a governmentof “national betrayal” which saw its mission in fightingthe Paris proletariat. But the proletariat, blinded bypatriotic illusions, did not perceive this. The patriotic ideahad its origin in the Great Revolution of the eighteenth century;it swayed the minds of the socialists of the Commune;and Blanqui, for example, undoubtedly a revolutionary andan ardent supporter of socialism, could find no better titlefor his newspaper than the bourgeois cry: “The country isin danger!”Combining contradictory tasks—patriotism and socialism—wasthe fatal mistake of the French socialists. In theManifesto of the International, issued in September 1870,Marx had warned the French proletariat against beingmisled by a false national idea 169 ; profound changes hadtaken place since the Great Revolution, class antagonismshad sharpened, and whereas at that time the struggle againstthe whole of European reaction united the entire revolution-