Before the Peace Congress of Lausanne in September 1871, André Léo
(1824-1900), exiled in Switzerland after escaping the repression of theParis Commune, spoke out to rehabilitate the victims of those
revolutionary weeks, while propaganda worked tirelessly to smear them.
She denounced the massacres, their instigators and accomplices. ----
After reminding them that "wars, falsely called national, are nothing
but monarchical wars," she urged the congress delegates to condemn
another type of conflict: the civil war, which had existed in France
since 1848. She then strove to break the torrent of slander that
suffocated the truth: "They branded as murderers the murdered, as
thieves the robbed, as executioners the victims." She asserted that
"true order existed during those two months when Paris was entirely in
the hands of the poor" and accused the monarchists of having planned to
"clear out" Paris of the armed people who occupied it, deliberated and
self-governed it, even before March 18.
It was, "by the admission of all moderate newspapers[...]a provocation."
While 1793 is once again used as a scarecrow, she asks: "What month of
'93 equals this bloody week, during which 12,000 corpses - their own
newspapers say so - covered the soil of Paris?" She calls for a broad
union "against the enemy of social peace and toward the realization of a
common program," because "in reality there are only two parties in this
world: that of light and peace through liberty and equality; and that of
privilege through war and ignorance."
This denunciation of the stubborn complicities of a "small caste"
defending its privileges at any cost, against resistance and demands for
social justice, beyond its historical interest - the first immediate
testimony of a participant in the Commune - is strikingly current.
Ernest London (UCL Le Puy-en-Velay)
André Léo, La Guerre sociale, Bas du Pavé, April 2025, 84 pages, EUR7.
https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Lire-Andre-Leo-La-Guerre-sociale
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