June 21, 1791 -- Royalist plot -- Flight to Varennes -- Drouet pursues King -- Decision of people -- Effect of this decision-France without a King -- Middle classes recant -- Causes of their reaction -- King declared reestablished -- Massacre of republicans -- Danton escapes to England -- Robert, Marat and Féron go into hiding -- Electoral rights of people further restricted -- King takes oath to Constitution -- Constituent Assembly dissolved -- Legislative Assembly obtains power -- Views of Marat and Desmoulins -- Reaction continues -- Treason in the air The Great Revolution is full of events, tragic in the highest degree. The taking of the Bastille, the march of the women on Versailles, the attack on the Tuileries, the execution of the King, have resounded all over the world-we were taught the dates of them in our childhood. However, there are also other dates, which are often forgotten, but have an equally great significan...
From: International Publishers, International Pamphlets No. 12, sponsored by the John Reed Club, an organization of revolutionary writers and artists in New York. Third edition, 1934. On March 18, 1871, the revolutionary workers of Paris established the Commune. It was the first attempt at a proletarian dictatorship. Again and again the story has been told: how Napoleon III (the Little) attempted to bolster up the decaying regime of the Second Empire by declaring war on Prussia in July, 1871; how he met his debacle at Sedan and exposed Paris to the Prussian troops; how a bourgeois republic was proclaimed in September and a so-called Government of National Defense organized; how this Government betrayed the besieged city and how the Parisian... (From : Anarchy Archives.)
We have all been so drilled from our youth up in the prejudices of property and authority that even the workers, for whom property and authority have done so little, are not free from superstitious belief in their necessity. Especially we are all too much inclined to believe that mere confusion must follow on a popular revolt, unless some central or local authority be immediately set up to control social life and reorganize the people. During the Commune of 1871, the newly-elected Municipal Government was too deeply engaged by the enemy at the gates to make many attempts at social reconstruction. Was the city, in which so much of the old order had been overthrown, given up to disorder or to merely aimless individual effort 7 Did its social ... (From : AnarchyArchives.)