KARL MARX

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576 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
18 April he declared that an Address to the International about the
struggle in France might be appropriate; but the members of the General
Council agreed that since the only information to date was based on false
newspaper reports, no detailed comment was possible. Marx was very
assiduous in collating different press reports, though it is a pity that he
does not seem to have used The Times correspondent who was, in fact,
the best placed. Marx wrote to Frankel at the end of April: 'The General
Council will publish shortly an address on the Commune. It has till now
postponed the publication of this because it counted from day to day on
receiving more precise information from the Paris Section.'" 1 Marx had
to apologise to the three subsequent meetings for not having completed
the Address; at the last two sessions Engels explained Marx's absence
on the grounds of ill health. However, this did not prevent Marx from
telling Frankel in mid-May that he had written 'several hundred letters . ..
to every corner of the world'. 112 Subsequent deadlines were again broken
and the Address was not presented to the Council until 30 May, three
days after the collapse of the Commune.
The Address, subtitled 'The Civil War in France', that Marx did
eventually present to the General Council was some forty pages long and
had been preceded by at least two full-length drafts that were noticeably
different. These drafts, among other things, show how little sympathy
Marx had for the Jacobin violence of some of the Communards. In the
first of the four sections of the final and published version, Marx analysed
the Republican Government under Thiers and concluded that it was more
concerned to suppress working-class activities than to defeat the Prussians,
since 'Paris armed was the revolution armed', and the first priority of
the so-called Government of National Defence was capitulation. Marx
characterised the leading members of the Government in a series of
vicious sketches. Of Jules Favre, the Foreign Minister, for example, Marx
wrote:
Living in concubinage with the wife of a drunkard resident in Algiers,
he had, by a most daring concoction of forgeries, spread over many
years, contrived to grasp, in the name of the children of his adultery,
a large succession, which made him a rich man. In a lawsuit undertaken
by the legitimate heirs, he only escaped exposure by the connivance of
the Bonapartist tribunals. 11 '
And of Thiers, the President:
A master in small state roguery, a virtuoso in perjury and treason, a
craftsman in all the petty stratagems, cunning devices, and base perfidies
of parliamentary party-warfare; never scrupling, when out of office, to
fan a revolution, and to stifle it in blood when at the helm of the state;