In this letter Liebknecht defends the Commune from charges of incendiarism.

‘Letter from Leipzig, XIX’ by Wilhelm Liebknecht from Workingman’s Advocate (Chicago). Vol. 7 Nos. 45 & 46. July 15 & 29, 1871.

Leipzig, June 23, 1871

To the Editor of the WORKINGMAN’S ADVOCATE:

Ludwig Pfau, a man of established character, and whose word can be implicitly trusted–by the by, he is one of our first writers on art–has just returned to Paris, where he had been living before the war. He writes to the Frankfort Gazette, under date of June 17, as follows:

“With regard to the state of things here, the public has been shamefully deceived and misinformed. Excepting a few monumental edifices, which cannot be restored so quickly, all traces of the late catastrophe will have disappeared in Paris before two months are over. Not so in the surrounding towns–Neuilly, St. Denis, Auteuil, etc., where a longer time will be required. One single improvement of Haussmann, the old Prefect of the Seine, has demolished more houses than all the petroleum of the Commune has done; and the Versaillese have by their bombs battered down at least twenty times as many houses as the National Guards have burned. No doubt a certain terror had seized the whole town; and that is not to be wondered at. Does not the conflagration of a large building redden the sky so that it can be seen for many miles? And if we consider that that here several colossal edifices were in flames, together with a number of six-storied houses in different parts of the town; if we further consider the incessant roaring of the cannons, the storming of the barricades, the rattling quick-fire of the Chassepots, and the rain of balls falling down everywhere; and all this going on for days–then we cannot wonder if the Parisian thought the day of their last judgment had come and their town was disappearing from the face of the earth. A panic-terror such as Paris has never felt shook the town and seized the minds, and the inhabitants quaked and trembled like forest trees under the scourage of the hurricane. I saw still many cellar holes that had been walled up or stuffed with sand-sacks, to guard against the pouring in of petroleum, and I spoke with people, otherwise quite reasonable, who were still convinced that the Communists had filled the subterranean drains with petroleum, in order to blow up all of Paris. And yet three seconds of reflection are sufficient to show the utter impossibility of such a plan. The drains of Paris are so high that a man can walk upright in them, and correspondingly wide. They have “trottoirs” on both sides, and in the middle the stream of sewerage is running towards the Seine. Petroleum thrown into these drains would, of necessity, have run into the Seine, unless the outlets had been stopped; but in that case it would have collected in the lower parts, and in any case, it would have been so thinned by the water and the sewage that it could not have burned.

“The stories of battalions of drilled incendiaries; of ‘Petroleurs’ and ‘Petroleuses’ with oil cans, and of children with matches, are fantastic delusions and infamous lies, that would raise our laughter if they had not been the cause of so many innocent people losing their lives. I have wandered through Paris in all directions, and I have looked at everything with my own eyes; and the truth is, altogether not more than one hundred private buildings are burned [in the little town of Strassburg the Prussians destroyed five hundred houses], and those hundred houses have, by lying correspondents, been puffed up into a third of Paris.

“I should only wish the horrors told of the Versaillese might in the same manner prove exaggerations; but here, unhappily, the manufacturers of lies were in no need of exaggerations. The houses burned were, almost all of them, burned near the barricades, as a last means of defense, when the barricade had been taken or had become untenable, in order to stop the progress of the troops. Other buildings, near some public edifice, took fire accidentally, against the intentions of those who had fired it (that public edifice); others again were fired by individuals indulging their private or political vengeance–for instance, some great Magasins de Nouveautés, whose owners had made themselves obnoxious by their votes at the last fatal plebiscite. Of course, there was also a parcel of miscreants at work, who tried to profit by the opportunity, but this much is sure: A plan of burning Paris by organized petroleum bands has not existed. Whether such a plan will not be formed and executed in future, I will not forswear, after what has happened in the last four weeks.”

I thought it my duty to translate for you the greater part of this letter, because, as far as I know, it is the most weighty evidence against the slanderers of the Commune yet produced. The writer is not a common newspaper correspondent, whose principal aim is to create a sensation and to please his employers; he is a man of tried probity, who is known throughout Germany, and beyond our frontiers even (some of his works on art are translated into foreign languages), and utterly unable to swerve from the strictest truth. This testimony is all the more weighty because he had to give it in the teeth of his own prejudices against Socialism, and more or less in opposition to his political friends, all prejudiced against Socialism in general, and the Commune in particular. He belongs to the so-called South German, or Swabian, party of the people–Volkspartei–which, as a party, has happily disappeared, and only consists of a small knot of discontented people. regretting the past, and despairing of the future. And, besides, the paper in which his letter appeared is one most hostile to our movement.

II.

And fearful deeds they have done in Paris, these missionaries of Mr. Bismarck! But to return to my subject–when the Guards. Turcos and Zouaves’ were all sent back to France, for some time no further French prisoners of war were released, though meanwhile the peace had been concluded. They had to wait till the Commune was completely strangled, and the danger of arising in the South had disappeared. The reason of this delay will become clear to you by the following little fact: Last Monday about 1,500 soldiers, who had been stationed here in Leipzig, departed for their native country; they were soldiers of different regiments, regular and irregular; when they entered the wagons, they shook hands with the people, mostly workmen that had assembled to look at the scene, and as soon as the train had started, from all windows slips of paper were thrown out with the words in French written upon them, “Long live the Republic! Down with the Kings and Emperors that the world may have peace, and all people be brothers! Vive la Commune! Vive humanité!”

Now, you know why those soldiers were not sent to France sooner. And you must not think this to be a solitary example. From all places where French prisoners were garrisoned, we hear that democratic and socialistic opinions are widely spread amongst them, and that they pronounce an emphatic abhorrence of war. So, for instance, I find in today’s paper a correspondence from Naumburg, stating that several hundred French officers have just returned home, and that while taking leave of the inhabitants, they tried, as if by common accord in the little broken German they have picked up here, to tell the people: we do not hate the Germans, and we are Republicans, and as such detest war on principle.

We see from this, that the French army, which already at the Plebiscite gave 40,000 votes for the Republic, is deeply imbued with republicanism and socialism; we must not allow ourselves to be misled by the events at Paris: the crimes committed there have been committed by the corps d’elite, selected expressly for that purpose. I am finally persuaded, that neither the regiment of the line nor the gardes mobiles and all the military bodies formed after the proclamation of the Republic, would have done this infamous work; and I do not doubt, that the army will prove an insuperable obstacle to the reactionary machinations of the Versailles monarchists, instead of being their instruments.

The Berlin festival was very agreeable for those persons that had come to see something, and had managed to get good places, but it was very disagreeable for the actors in this spectacle: the poor soldiers. They had to stand or march in full accoutrement, with filled knapsack, uninterruptedly, from 5 in the morning till 4 in the afternoon, most of the time under a burning sun. When the torture was over whole companies dropped down to rest on the pavement–some soldiers never to rise again. Eight soldiers are already reported as dead, 48 as dangerously ill, and more than 200 as sick. The King, of course, enjoyed the festival, and said himself that he never felt happier.

The Chicago Workingman’s Advocate in 1864 by the Chicago Typographical Union during a strike against the Chicago Times. An essential publication in the history of the U.S. workers’ movement, the Advocate though editor Andrew Cameron became the voice National Labor Union after the Civil War. It’s pages were often the first place the work of Marx, Engels, and the International were printed in English in the U.S. It lasted through 1874 with the demise of the N.L.U.

PDF of full issue: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89077510/1871-07-15/ed-1/seq-2/

PDF of issue 2: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89077510/1871-07-29/ed-1/seq-1/