C’est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous et demain
L’Internationale
Sera le genre humain.
-Eugène Pottier – Paris, June 1871
Hellraisers Journal, Thursday March 31, 1898
Paris Commune Celebrated Annually by Socialists
From The Social Democrat of March 1898:
THE COMMUNE OF PARIS.
The 18th of March, the anniversary of the Paris Commune, is annually celebrated by Socialists throughout the world. The Commune of Paris is an event unique in history. It was the first working-class government that the world had ever seen. For the first time the working people had seized the reins of government, and taken into their hands the administration of a great city. No wonder the possessing classes were alarmed; no wonder all the forces of “respectability,” of reaction and obscurantism, rallied to the government of the “little man,” Theirs, and his gang of Imperialist mouchards and Royalist ruffians at Versailles. The revolution of the Parisian proletariat was not a mere political movement, it was a menace to all those interests which live and thrive by the enslavement, the exploitation, and the plunder of the workers.
The history of this epoch-marking insurrection is an oft-told tale. Who, among Socialists, does not know of the desertion of Paris by the reactionary Assembly; of the measures for disarming the Parisian National Guards; of the attempted seizure of the guns on the heights of Montmartre in the morning of the 18th of March; how that attempt was frustrated, and how the troops sent to carry it out fraternised with the National Guards, and shot the officer who ordered them to fire upon the people?
