Kyle A. Edwards introduces this republication of General Benjamin Butler’s remarks on the Paris Commune by highlighting the contemporary necessity for a mass independent workers’ movement.

W. Aléxis, Paris (1871), lithograph [recolored]

Introduction

The Paris Commune of 1871, it could be argued, constituted the belated promise of the 1848 European Revolutions, the first time the working class actually took political power, even if just for a couple of months. In 1848, Frederick Douglass was initially fascinated with the anti-monarchical revolts. However, once the working class attempted to throw their weight into the revolutions, Douglass denounced their actions—first by disparaging an April Chartist demonstration as “wild and wicked” and then by denouncing “the foul undertaking” of “the communists of Paris” in June 1848.¹

Douglass, the fugitive slave turned abolitionist leader turned revolutionary recruiter for the Union Army during the Civil War, covered the events of the Paris Commune of 1871 closely, as well, in his newspaper, the New National Era.² For April and June 1871, published around the same time as Karl Marx’s most important contribution to the Communards, The Civil War in France, Douglass wrote of “the spectacle of disastrous failure, and almost [feeling] like despairing of the fitness of the French for self-government.” The masses of Paris were “blind and deluded tools of their leaders.” Instead of glorious or heroic, they were “deluded, ill-starred men.”³ He attacked communists and workers fighting for a democratic and social republic as antithetical to republican institutions—equally bad as monarchists. After the bloody repression of the Thiers government—the conservative bourgeois republic with its Bonapartist generals and the monarch-friendly parliament—was made apparent, Douglass criticized the conservative regime as unworthy of the name ‘Republic,’ but he never came over to the side of the Communards.

Another contemporary figure, lesser known than Douglass but subsequently more consequential, had a different opinion about the Commune.⁴ When Karl Marx looked to Paris in April 1871, he exclaimed, “What resilience, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians!” No matter the mistakes the revolutionary workers of Paris made and even if their efforts went down to defeat, the rebellion was “the most glorious deed of our Party since the June [1848] insurrection in Paris.”⁵ In his May Address of the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, mentioned above, Marx wrote, “Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class.”⁶ Marx, in print and in organizational labor, supported and defended the revolutionary Parisian workers.

Liberals and conservatives alike, in respectable and bourgeois circles certainly, but even in abolitionist milieus, looked at the Commune in horror.⁷ They suspected class conflict on a monumental scale was possible in the United States. This suspicion was correct: the rise of labor unrest in the United States culminated in the St. Louis Commune during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.⁸ Wendell Phillips, one of the most radical of the abolitionists, was one of the few American supporters of the Commune; this may be unsurprising, given his post-Civil War affiliation with labor politics and his flirtation with the First International.⁹

A more surprising endorsement of the Paris Commune came from Benjamin Butler: a former Democratic supporter of Jefferson Davis at the 1860 Democratic National Convention in Charleston, South Carolina. A Massachusetts Democrat before the firing on Fort Sumter, Butler was appointed as a general by Abraham Lincoln based on political criteria—the need to find and promote Democratic defenders of the Union and the 1860 election against the secessionists. Butler quickly realized a defense of the Union would require attacking slave property and a hard war. He made some of the first moves to confiscate escaping slaves as property of the enemy along the line of march to free them early on in the Civil War during his command at Fort Monroe, Virginia. He oversaw a hard, though not brutal, occupation of New Orleans.¹⁰ By May 1864, Butler’s conduct had so impressed Marx that he wrote to Engels, “There’s nothing I would be happier to see than success for Butler. It would be of inestimable value, were he to enter Richmond first.”¹¹ This shift, developed in the struggle against the oligarchic slavocracy, combined with some advocacy for labor in the antebellum years, led Butler to develop and expand his radicalism in the post-war years, unlike the great majority of Republicans, to include advocacy for former slaves receiving “‘a fair share of the lands” they had already worked for generations and “support for and deepening identification with American labor.”¹² This is counterposed to the ardent defense of private property by the Republican Party, including by one of the best liberalism had to offer—Frederick Douglass.

A campaign speech Butler made in Gloucester, Massachusetts, interestingly reprinted without comment in Douglass’s newspaper, made it clear that Butler not only had a deep identification with American labor, but also looked internationally to workers fighting for their rights and for power. While lacking in a truly class-based analysis of the Commune, calling it a struggle for a “town government” or a “municipal form of government,” in the mold of the old New England town halls, Butler also recognized it was a “struggle of the workingmen” that “should form the germ of a future republic.” Butler looked back to the municipal revolution of the 1770s and 1780s, certainly progressive in its role in fighting the monarchy through expanded political participation by common producers, as the lens in which to analyze the Commune. Still, he, much better than Douglass, saw that the Versailles government offered fighting workers “nothing but extermination” and explained much more clearly the destruction of monarchical property by retreating workers than did Douglass, who abhorred such actions. This defense of the Paris Commune was likely part of the reason Butler was described by one critic as “the greatest socialist demagogue of our day.”¹³

Reprinted below is Butler’s speech as it was printed in the New National Era, a rare example of a radical liberal in the United States offering solidarity to the masses in Paris in motion, the Commune, which Marx thought could “serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule.”¹⁴

It’s clear that opposition to the progressive march from bourgeois to proletarian revolution, or revolution in permanence, animated the retreat by northern liberals from Reconstruction. In addition to developments like the rise of the National Labor Union and the Colored National Labor Union in the wake of the Confederacy’s defeat, the movement for an 8-hour work day, and spreading strikes, the reaction of liberals to the Paris Commune proved a decisive turning point in how the once revolutionary Republican Party would abandon “their commitment to equality and tie the party to big business.”¹⁵ The revolutionary role the Republican Party played, backed by small farmers and workers in uniform, joined after January 1, 1863 by free Blacks and former slaves, in the defeat of the slavocracy and the Reconstruction Amendments should never be forgotten. But, led by “bloody constitutionalists,”¹⁶ liberal revolutionaries who refused the stern duties necessary to plant the seeds of interracial democracy, the revolutionary initiative had passed from the hands of the capitalist revolutionaries, becoming the historic mission of the working class and its allies. Reactionary terror in the South combined with the flight from equality in the North, resulting in counterrevolution—the worst setback for the American working class in its history. And as Michael Goldfield has noted, “all subsequent U.S. political history… has largely been the working out of those contradictions bequeathed by the Civil War and Reconstruction.”¹⁷

Looking at how reform liberals and radical liberals—Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Benjamin Butler again being other important examples—considered and debated the Paris Commune compared to Marx can also help us make sense of political debates today. The lessons Marx took away from the failed revolutions in Europe of 1848-1849, that in politics workers must organize independently of the capitalist class and what happens in the voting booth and the halls of Congress or Parliament is subordinate to what happens in the streets, picket lines, and on the battlefield, were strengthened and enhanced by the experience of the Paris Commune. Famously, “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purpose.”¹⁸

The fight to replace capitalism with a society where human solidarity takes the place of the wage and debt slavery systems that continually grinds down the working class and its allies on the land won’t be decided by democratic socialists who caucus, vote with, and campaign for one of the parties of capital. Their proposed reforms, as Marx and Engels outlined in Part III of The Communist Manifesto, are “desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.”¹⁹ The working class must build a labor party based on the unions, not simply one with electoralist ambitions, but one which will organize the entire working class to defend our interests with a view to taking state power. As Marx and Engels concluded, the working class movement must have its own political party and candidates in elections, to count their forces, maintain their independence, and educate the public about their revolutionary program. In the United States, this may seem a more remote possibility than ever. The working class has been in retreat for decades, since at least the 1970s. Physical ties to the truly mass movements that built the CIO, smashed Jim Crow, opposed the Vietnam War, and fought for women’s rights are fading.

Yet, importantly, today, there are embryonic struggles that show the nadir is behind us. Workers have been and are in motion, more willing to use union power to fight for raises needed to fight inflation and schedules that allow them to see their families. To fight against the two-tiered system put into contracts following the 2008-2009 financial crisis. To fight against dangerous working conditions and for control of safety on the job. These fights by workers and their unions—in industrial bakeries, in auto, at hotels, on the railroads, by longshore workers, by communication workers, teachers, and flight attendants, at Boeing, and even on campus with graduate worker unions—are the most important thing going on today in politics. Much more so than which candidate, Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, both committed to ruling on behalf of the capitalists, won in November.

Class conflict and economic crisis are inevitable under capitalism. The outcomes of these struggles, however, are not. And what type of leadership the working class and others squeezed during economic downturns will look to is not preordained either. Just as the Trump phenomenon makes some long for a return to the George Bush-era Republican Party, there will likely be someone who will make Trump look tame in comparison when the capitalists are willing to take off the kid gloves and unleash a real fascist movement. There are big labor battles ahead but until our class breaks with both parties it will not be able to build the disciplined movement of millions needed to take the future into our own hands and create a new society based on human needs and human solidarity. Or as Butler put it, “the struggle of the workingmen, the struggle of the laborer… should be the germ of a future republic.” That microbe must grow into the fight for a workers and farmers government on the road to joining the global fight for socialism.

-Kyle A. Edwards

General Butler on the French Situation

From the July 6, 1871 edition of New National Era

Gen. Butler, in his speech at the dedication of the new town hall in Gloucester, on Thursday, after some local allusions, said:

“Here we see a town hall built by the people, and for the people. As I listened to the eloquent and appropriate address of the gentleman who has given you an historical account of the town organization of the State, it brought to my mind the great event which has distinguished this year, and perhaps its effect on human liberty will distinguish this century, possibly overshadowing the great act of emancipation by which this country liberated four millions of people. It is because the act of which I am about to speak has a connection with town governments, and interfered with the liberties of mankind, that I refer to it now. You were well told that to our town system we owe our liberties, and I am reminded that our earlier towns declared war and carried it on more than two hundred years ago. The towns of Massachusetts Bay declared war upon the royal governor and drove him to Castle William. One hundred years after the town of Billerica, in Middlesex county, put upon its own records, where it stands to-day, as eloquent and effective a declaration of freedom and independence as that which was afterwards penned by the immortal Jefferson, in convention of our fathers assembled. The British came, as we all remember, and attempted to stop the progress of liberty by order General Gage to see that no new town meetings were called in the city of Boston, and our fathers got rid of that by adjourning the old one from year to year and never calling a new one. The reason why liberty has never found a firm foothold in the Old World is a want of town or municipal organization.

We have all heard with horror, disgust, and indignation, of the great struggle which has recently taken place in France between the Commune and the Versailles government. We have all made our minds up upon it with more or less intelligence, because we have only heard the story of that conflict through the mouths of the enemies of the Commune. What was that Commune? It was an endeavor of the people of the city of Paris to have a town government such as we enjoy here, or a city government—in one word, a municipal form of government; that they should not be ruled against their consent by the general government of France. They wished to secure that which we no more appreciate than the air we breathe, or the water we drink—a town government.

That terrible struggle was the struggle of a city of two millions of people insisting upon a right we all enjoy, that of self-government. It was the struggle of the workingman, the struggle of the laborer of the middle class for self government which should be the germ of a future republic. How dreadfully and fearfully that struggle was carried on we have heard, and how dreadful its results we all know, except that none of us can foretell what has been the result on the future liberties of mankind by the crushing out of the Commune. The crushing out of a people struggling for such a government has, I fear, rolled back the tide of republican liberty in Europe for years and years, if not forever.

This thought has hardly yet obtained a place in the minds of the American people. We have only been told they attempted to set fire with petroleum to the great structures built by kings and princes; that they pulled down the column erected to commemorate the great deeds of the first Napoleon in the Place Vendome. That last was done by the decree of the civil government. Why? Upon what theory was that done? We are told we must execrate the men that did it. They said this column was erected as an emblem of the military glory of a despot, to commemorate his deeds. The first act of a free people was to tear it down and level it to the ground, although they might destroy a work of art in so doing. Was not that in accordance with the spirit of free institutions?

We hear that the Versailles government overpowered them, and they offered to deliver themselves up and become–what? Become prisoners of war. They were answered, “Nothing but extermination.” And then we are told that they said, “If we are to be exterminated then all the monuments of human despotism shall fall with us; the palace of the Tuileries, the Louvre—all the great public buildings erected by the sweat and toil of unrequited labor shall come down, if we are to perish.” In the agony of desperation—and it was an act of desperation, not by any manner of means to be justified or defended; but, simply to speak the truth to you, it was an act of desperate men—they fired their own city. What could make well-taught women, well-instructed men leave their homes and fire their own and their neighbors’ houses but desperation? What was that act but the turning of the worm when it was trodden upon? Does it lie in the mouth of the lover of American liberty to say that the laboring men of Paris should not pull down the places of kings, raised by despotism and wrong, by unrequited labor, which never in any free government could have been made? Therefore I thought fit on this occasion to call to your attention the struggle of people maddened, infuriated, wronged, in the hope and with the endeavor to obtain that which we enjoy—a municipal government. That was the struggle of the French Commune. It was the effect of a wronged people arising in its wrath and its madness.

But, you say, they were but the working men, and you point to their deeds, the tearing down of temples and the burning of buildings. What did the Versailles or the Thiers government do when they obtained the mastery of the city? They marched them out by fifties and by hundreds, the tender women and the still tenderer children of thirteen or fourteen, manacled together, and shot them by machinery. Because men were not often found cruel enough to do the act, therefore the mitrailleuse, a gun that works by machinery, by simply turning a crank, was used to mow them down by platoons. For the purpose of obtaining a municipal government and liberty under the law, this great struggle has gone on, and I pray you one and all to read it with this view, for the purpose of strengthening your love for the institutions of your own Government, and for the appreciation of the benefits of a municipal government.

I do not intend to trespass longer upon your time. I hope to meet with you sooner or later to speak upon the prosperity of Gloucester; upon recent legislation and executive action of the treaty-making power; upon the business of Gloucester. We are to have the seas open to us as they were to our fathers.

Whatever treaty laws may do with your fish, they cannot take away our granite, or the strong arm which cuts the granite block out and fashions it into building purposes. That depends upon ourselves.

I mean to address you upon this point. This is not the day or the hour for that.

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August H. Nimtz and Kyle A. Edwards, The Communist and the Liberal Revolutionary in the Second American Revolution: Comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in Real-Time (Brill, 2024), 64-66.
Kyle A. Edwards, “‘Those Deluded, Ill-Starred Men’: Frederick Douglass, the New National Era, and the Paris Commune,” New North Star 4, No.1 (2022). A more generous interpretation of Douglass’s reaction to the Commune is included in Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2024), 353-354.
Frederick Douglass, “Adulterated Republicanism,” New National Era, April 6, 1871. Frederick Douglass, “Dark Prospects”, New National Era, June 8, 1871.
For a detailed real-time comparison of Marx and Douglass between 1848-1871, see Nimtz and Edwards, The Communist and the Liberal Revolutionary in the Second American Revolution.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Volume 44 (International Publishers, 1975-2004),131-132
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Volume 22 (International Publishers 1975-2004), 355.
Phillip M. Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune (Harvard University Press, 1998). Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (Harvard University Press, 2001).
Mark Kruger, The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (Pathfinder Press, 2002).
On Phillips, see Edwards, “‘Those Deluded, Ill-Starred Men’,” 13-14 and Nimtz and Edwards, The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal, 294, 296, 328-329.
Williamson Murrary and Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War (Princeton University Press, 2016), 161-163.
Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 41 (International Publishers, 1975-2005), 530.
Elizabeth D. Leonard, Benjamin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life, (The University of North Carolina Press, 2022), 158, 185.
Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 117.
Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 22, 334.
Heather Cox Richardson, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (Basic Books, 2014), 66, 93-94.
Gregory P. Downs, The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (The University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 5-6.
Michael Goldfield, The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics (The New Press, 1997), 136.
Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 22, 328.
Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 7, 513.