The Arcades Project - Operi

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[The Commune]
"The history of the Paris Commune has hecome a touchstone of great importance
for the question: How should the revolutionary working class organize its tactics
and strategy in order to achieve ultimate victory? With the fall of the Commune,
the last traditions of the old revolutionary legend have lilmwise fallen forever; no
favorable tUrll of circumstances, no heroic spirit, no martyrdom CHn take the
place of the proletariat's clear insight into ... the indispensable conditions of its
emancipation. What holds for the revolutions that were carried out hy minorities,
and in the interests of minorities, no longer holds for the proletarian revolu­
tion . ... In the history of the Commune, the germs of this revolution were effectively
stifled by the creeping plants that, growing out of the bourgeois revolution of
the eighteenth centurYl overran the revolutionary workers' movement of the nineteenth
century. Missing in the Commune were the firm organization of the prole­
tariat as a class and the fundamental clarity as to its world-historical mission; on
these grounds alone it had to succum})." [F. Mehringl] '"Zum Gedachtnis del' PariseI'
Kommune," Die neue Zeit, 14, no. 1 (Stuttgart, 1896), pp. 739-740. [kl,l]
"We ·wiH say hut two words about the lecture-presentations that have multiplied in
reoent years . ... M. Ballande, who first thought of devoting Sunday afternoons to
the inexpensive performance of masterpieces or the exhibition of certain monuments
of art, preceded hy a historical and literary explication of the work, had hit
upon a happy and rewarding idea . ... But success breeds imitation, and it is rare
that the imitations do not bring out the trouhlesome aspects of the things they
copy. This is indeed what happened. Daily presentations were organized at the
Chatclet and the Ambigu. In these performances, questions of artistry were relegated
to a position of secondary importance; politics predominated. Someone
fetched up Agnes de Meranie; another exhumed Calas and Charles IX, ou L 'Ecole
des rois.' ... From here, things could only go downhill; the most benign of works,
by a strange inflection of the political madness, provided material . .. for the most
heterogeneous declamations on the affairs of the day. Moliere and Louis XIV
would certainly have heen surprised, Ht times, by the attacks . .. for which they