  It is over. We have a “Municipal Council,” according to some; a “Commune,” according to others. Not quite legally elected, but sufficiently so. Eighty councillors, sixty of whom are quite unknown men. Who can have recommended them, or, rather, imposed them on the electors? Can there really be some occult power at work under cover of the ex-Central Committee? Is the Commune only a pretext, and are we at the dÉbut of a social and political revolution? I overheard a partizan of the new doctrines say,—“The Proletariat is vindicating its rights, which have been unjustly trampled on by the aristocratic bourgeoisie. This is the workman’s 1789!” Another person expresses the same thing in rather a different form. “This is the revolt of the canaille against all kind of supremacy, the supremacy of fortune, and the supremacy of intellect. The equality of man before the law has been acknowledged, now they want to proclaim the equality of intellect. Soon universal suffrage will give place to the drawing of lots. There was a time in Athens when the names of the archontes were taken haphazard out of a bag, like the numbers at loto.” However, the revolution has not yet clearly defined its tendencies, and in the meantime what are we to think of the unknown beings who represent it? A man in whom I have the greatest confidence, and who has passed his life in studying questions of social science, and who therefore has mixed in nearly all the revolutionary circles, and is personally acquainted with the chiefs, said to me just now, in speaking of the new Municipal Council,[23] “It will be an assemblage of a very motley character. There will be much good and much bad in it. We may safely divide it into three distinct parts: firstly, ten or twelve men belonging to the International, who have both thought and studied and may be able to act, mixed with these several foreigners; secondly, a number of young men, ardent but inexperienced, some of whom are imbued with Jacobin principles; thirdly, and by far the largest portion, unsuccessful plotters in former revolutions, journalists, orators, and conspirators,—noisy, active, and effervescent, having no particular tie amongst themselves except the absence of any common bond of unity with the two former divisions, and being confounded now with one, now with the other. The members of the International alone have any real political value; they are Socialists. The Jacobin element is decidedly dangerous.”—If in reality the Communal Assembly is thus composed, how will it act? Let us wait and see; in the meantime the city is calm. Never did so critical a moment wear so calm an exterior. By the bye, where are the Prussians?[24] NOTES:
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