The Civil War in France was a pamphlet written by Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...

 as an official statement of the General Council of the International on the character and significance of the struggle of the Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

ian Communards

Communards

The Communards were members and supporters of the short-lived 1871 Paris Commune formed in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War and France's defeat....

 in the French Civil War of 1871

Paris Commune

The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...

.

Writing the pamphlet

Between the middle of April and the end of May 1871, London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 resident Karl Marx collected and compiled English, French, and German newspaper clippings on the progress of the French civil war, which pitted the radical workers of Paris against conservative forces from outside the city. Marx only had access to French publications supported by the Commune, as well as various bourgeois periodicals published in London in English and French. Marx also had access to personal interpretations of events passed along by several leading figures in the Commune and associates such as Paul Lafargue

Paul Lafargue

Paul Lafargue was a French revolutionary Marxist socialist journalist, literary critic, political writer and activist; he was Karl Marx's son-in-law, having married his second daughter Laura. His best known work is The Right to Be Lazy...

 and Peter Lavrov.

Marx originally intended to write an address to the workers of Paris and made such a motion to the meeting of the governing General Council of the International on March 28, 1871 — a proposal which was unanimously approved. Further developments in France led Marx to the opinion that the document should be instead directed to the working class of the world, and at the April 18 meeting of the General Council he passed along this suggestion, noting his desire to write on the "general tendency of the struggle." This proposal was approved and on this date Marx began the writing of the document. Main writing on the publication seems to have taken place between May 6 and May 30, 1871, with Marx writing the original document in English.

Publication

The first edition of the pamphlet, a slim document of just 35 pages, was first published in London on about June 13, 1871 as The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working-Men's Association. Only 1,000 copies of the first edition were printed and the pamphlet quickly sold out, to be followed by a less expensive second edition with a print run of 2,000. A third English edition, containing a number of corrections of errors, appeared later in that same year. The pamphlet was translated into French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Flemish, Croatian, Danish, and Polish and published both in newspapers and in pamphlet form in various countries in 1871-72 . The German translation was rendered by Marx's longtime associate Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...

, and the first German publication was serialized in the newspaper Der Volkstaat in June-July 1871 followed by Der Vorbote in August-October 1871. A separate pamphlet edition was also published by the Volkstaat in Leipzig

Leipzig

Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...

 in that same year.

On the fifth anniversary of the fall of the Paris Commune the German edition of the pamphlet was reissued, with Engels making certain minor corrections to the translation. The second edition was also published in Leipzig, this time by Genossenschaftsbuchdrukerei.

In 1891, on the 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune, Engels put together a new edition of the work. He wrote an introduction to this edition, emphasizing the historical significance of the experience of the Paris Commune, and its theoretical generalization by Marx in The Civil War in France, and also providing additional information on the activities of the Communards from among the Blanquists

Blanqui

Blanqui is a surname, and may refer to:*Louis Auguste Blanqui , a French revolutionary, after whom Blanquism is named.*Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui , a noted French economist....

 and Proudhonists. Engels also decided to include earlier material by Marx made for the International — in this way providing additional historical background to the Commune from Marx's account of the Franco-Prussian War

Franco-Prussian War

The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...

.

Theoretical Consequences

For Marx, the history of the Paris Commune

Paris Commune

The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...

 caused him to reassess the significance of some of his own earlier writings. In a later preface to the Communist Manifesto, Marx would write that "no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today." It is this earlier passage which sought to show the process of worker seizure of state power. Following the publication of The Civil War in France: "One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.'" Libertarian Marxist currents would later draw from this work, emphasizing the ability of the working class to forge its own destiny without the need for a revolutionary party or state to mediate or aid its liberation.

External links

• The Civil War in France Full text in html format from Marxists Internet Archive
• Preface to the 1872 publication of the Communist Manifesto