The Third Address
May, 1871
[The Fall of Paris]
The first attempt of the slaveholders' conspiracy
to put down Paris by getting the Prussians to occupy it was frustrated
by Bismarck's refusal.
The second attempt, that of March 18, ended in the rout of the
army and the flight to Versailles of the government, which ordered the
whole administration to break up and follow in its track.
By the semblance of peace negotiations with Paris, Thiers found
the time to prepare for war against it. But where to find an army? The
remnants of the line regiments were weak in number and unsafe in character.
His urgent appeal to the provinces to succour Versailles, by their National
Guards and volunteers, met with a flat refusal. Brittany alone furnished
a handful of Chouans[A] fighting under a white flag, every one of them
wearing on his breast the heart of Jesus in white cloth, and shouting "Vive
le Roi!" (Long live the King!)
Thiers was, therefore, compelled to collect, in hot haste, a motley
crew, composed of sailors, marines, Pontifical Zouaves, Valentin's gendarmes,
and Pietri's sergents-de-ville and mouchards. This army,
however, would have been ridiculously ineffective without the instalments
of imperialist war prisoners, which Bismarck granted in numbers just sufficient
to keep the civil war agoing, and keep the Versailles government in abject
dependence on Prussia. During the war itself, the Versailles police had
to look after the Versailles army, while the gendarmes had to drag it on
by exposing themselves at all posts of danger. The forts which fell were
not taken, but bought. The heroism of the Federals convinced Thiers that
the resistance of Paris was not to be broken by his own strategic genius
and the bayonets at his disposal.
Meanwhile, his relations with the provinces became more and more
difficult. Not one single address of approval came in to gladden Thiers
and his Rurals. Quite the contrary. Deputations and addresses demanding,
in a tone anything but respectful, conciliation with Paris on the basis
of the unequivocal recognition of the republic, the acknowledgment of the
Communal liberties, and the dissolution of the National Assembly, whose
mandate was extinct, poured in from all sides, and in such numbers that
Dufaure, Thiers' Minister of Justice, in his circular of April 23 to the
public prosecutors, commanded them to treat "the cry of conciliation" as
a crime! In regard, however, of the hopeless prospect held out by his campaign,
Thiers resolved to shift his tactics by ordering, all over the country,
municipal elections to take place on April 30, on the basis of the new
municipal law dictated by himself to the National Assembly. What with the
intrigues of his prefects, what with police intimidation, he felt quite
sanguine of imparting, by the verdict of the provinces, to the National
Assembly that moral power it had never possessed, and of getting at last
from the provinces the physical force required for the conquest of Paris.
His bandit-warfare against Paris, exalted in his own bulletins,
and the attempts of his ministers at the establishment, throughout France,
of a reign of terror, Thiers was from the beginning anxious to accompany
with a little by-play of conciliation, which had to serve more that one
purpose. It was to dupe the provinces, to inveigle the middle class elements
in Paris, and above all, to afford the professed republicans in the National
Assembly the opportunity of hiding their treason against Paris behind their
faith in Thiers.
On March 21, when still without an army, he had declared
to the Assembly: "Come what may, I will not send an army to Paris."
On March 27, he rose again: "I have found the republic an accomplished
fact, and I am firmly resolved to maintain it."
In reality, he put down the revolution at Lyons and Marseilles[B]
in the name of the republic, while the roars of his Rurals drowned the
very mention of his name at versailles. After this exploit, he toned down
the "accomplished fact" into a hypothetical fact. The Orleans princes,
whom he had cautiously warned off Bordeaux, were now, in flagrant breach
of the law, permitted to intrigue at Dreux. The concessions held out by
Thiers in his interminable interviews with the delegates from Paris and
the provinces, although constantly varied in tone and color, according
to time and circumstances, did in fact never come to more than the prospective
restriction of revenge to the "handful of criminals implicated in the murder
of Lecomte and Clement Thomas", on the well-understood premise that Paris
and France were unreservedly to accept M. Thiers himself as the best of
possible Republics, as he, in 1830, had done with Louis Philippe, and in
1849 under Louis Bonaparte's presidency. While out of office, he made a
fortune by pleading for the Paris capitalists, and made political capital
by pleading against the laws he had himself originated. He now hurried
through the National assembly not only a set of repressive laws which were,
after the fall of Paris, to extirpate the last remnants of republican liberty
in France; he foreshadowed the fate of Paris by abridging what was for him the
too slow procedure of courts-martial,[C] and by a new-fangled, Draconic code
of deportation. The Revolution of 1848, abolishing the penalty of death
for political crimes, had replaced it by deportation. Louis Bonaparte did
not dare, at least not in theory, to re-establish the regime of the guillotine.
The Rural Assembly, not yet bold enough even to hint that the Parisians
were not rebels, but assassins, had therefore to confine its prospective
vengeance against Paris to Dufaure's new code of deportation. Under all
these circumstances, Thiers himself could not have gone on with his comedy
of conciliation, had it not, as he intended it to do, drawn forth shrieks
of rage from the Rurals, whose ruminating mind did neither understand the
play, nor its necessities of hypocrisy, tergiversation, and procrastination.
In sight of the impending municipal elections of April 30, Thiers
enacted one of his great conciliation scenes on April 27. Amidst a flood
of sentiment rhetoric, he exclaimed from the tribune of the Assembly:
"There exists no conspiracy against the republic but that of Paris,
which compels us to shed French blood. I repeat it again and again. Let
those impious arms fall from the hands which hold them, and chastisement
will be arrested at once by an act of peace excluding only the small number
of criminals."
To the violent interruption of the Rurals, he replied:
"Gentlemen, tell me, I implore you, am I wrong? Do you really regret
that I could have stated the truth that the criminals are only a handful?
Is it not fortunate in the midst of our misfortunes that those who have
been capable to shed the blood of Clement Thomas and General Lecomte are
but rare exceptions?"
France, however, turned a deaf ear to what Thiers flattered himself to
be a parliamentary siren's song. Out of 700,000 municipal councillors returned
by the 35,000 communes still left to France, the united Legitimists, Orleanists,
and Bonapartists did not carry 8,000.
The supplementary elections which followed were still more decidedly
hostile.
Thus, instead of getting from the provinces the badly-needed physical
force, the National Assembly lost even its last claim to moral force, that
of being the expression of the universal suffrage of the country. To complete
the discomfiture, the newly-chosen municipal councils of all the cities
of France openly threatened the usurping Assembly at Versailles with a
counter assembly at Bordeaux.
Then the long-expected moment of decisive action had at last come
for Bismarck. He peremptorily summoned Thiers to send to Frankfort plenipotentiaries
for the definitive settlement of peace. In humble obedience to the call
of his master, Thiers hastened to despatch his trusty Jules Favre, backed
by Pouyer-Quertier. Pouyer-Quertier, an "eminent" Rouen cotton-spinner,
a fervent and even servile partisan of the Second Empire, had never found
any fault with it save its commercial treaty with England,[D] prejudicial
to his own shop-interest. Hardly installed at Bordeaux as Thiers' Minister
of Finance, he denounced that "unholy" treaty, hinted at its near abrogation,
and had even the effrontery to try, although in vain (having counted without
Bismarck), the immediate enforcement of the old protective duties against
Alsace, where, he said, no previous international treaties stood in the
way. This man who considered counter-revolution as a means to put down
wages at Rouen, and the surrender of French provinces as a means to bring
up the price of his wares in France, was he not the one predestined
to be picked out by Thiers as the helpmate of Jules Favre in his last and
crowning treason?
On the arrival at Frankfurt of this exquisite pair of plenipotentiaries,
bully Bismarck at once met them with the imperious alternative: Either
the restoration of the empire or the unconditional acceptance of my own
peace terms! These term included a shortening of the intervals in which
war indemnity was to be paid and the continued occupation of the Paris
forts by Prussian troops until Bismarck should feel satisfied with the
state of things in France; Prussia thus being recognized as the supreme
arbiter in internal French politics! In return for this, he offered to
let loose for the extermination of Paris the Bonapartist army, and to lend
them the direct assistance of Emperor William's troops. He pledged his
good faith by making payment of the first installment of the indemnity
dependent on the "pacification" of Paris. Such bait was, of course, eagerly
swallowed by Thiers and his plenipotentiaries. They signed the treaty of
peace on May 10 and had it endorsed by the Versailles Assembly on the 18th.
In the interval between the conclusion of peace and the arrival
of the Bonapartist prisoners, Thiers felt the more bound to resume his
comedy of of conciliation, as his republican tools stood in sore need of
a pretext for blinking their eyes at the preparations for the carnage of
Paris. As late as May 18, he replied to a deputations of middle-class conciliators
—
"Whenever the insurgents will make up their minds for capitulation,
the gates of Paris shall be flung wide open during a week for all except
the murderers of Generals Clement Thomas and Lecomte."
A few days afterwards, when violently interpellated on these promises by
the Rurals, he refused to enter into any explanations; not, however, without
giving them this significant hint:
"I tell you there are impatient men amongst you, men who are in too
great a hurry. They must have another eight days; at the end of these eight
days there will be no more danger, and the task will be proportionate to
their courage and to their capacities."
As soon as MacMahon was able to assure him, that he could shortly enter
Paris, Thiers declared to the Assembly that
"he would enter Paris with the laws in his hands, and demand
a full expiation from the wretches who had sacrificed the lives of soldiers
and destroyed public monuments."
As the moment of decision drew near, he said — to the Assembly, "I shall
be pitiless!" — to Paris, that is was doomed; and to his Bonapartist bandits,
that they had state licence to wreak vengeance upon Paris to their hearts'
content.
At last, when treachery had opened the gates of Paris to General
Douai, on May 21, Thiers, on the 22nd, revealed to the Rurals the "goal"
of his conciliation comedy, which they had so obstinately persisted in
not understanding.
"I told you a few days ago that we were approaching our goal;
today I come to tell you the goal is reached. The victory of order,
justice, and civilization is at last won!"
So it was. The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in
its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against
their masters. Then this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised
savagery and lawless revenge. Each new crisis in the class struggle between
the appropriator and the producer brings out this fact more glaringly.
Even the atrocities of the bourgeois in June 1848 vanish before the infamy
of 1871. The self-sacrificing heroism with which the population of Paris
— men, women, and children — fought for eight days after the entrance
of the Versaillese, reflects as much the grandeur of their cause, as the
infernal deeds of the soldiery reflect the innate spirit of that civilization,
indeed, the great problem of which is how to get rid of the heaps of corpses
it made after the battle was over!
To find a parallel for the conduct of Thiers and his bloodhounds
we must go back to the times of Sulla and the two Triumvirates of Rome.[E]
The same wholesale slaughter in cold blood; the same disregard, in massacre,
of age and sex, the same system of torturing prisoners; the same proscriptions,
but this time of a whole class; the same savage hunt after concealed leaders,
lest one might escape; the same denunciations of political and private
enemies; the same indifference for the butchery of entire strangers to
the feud.
There is but this difference: that the Romans had no mitrailleuses
for the despatch, in the lump, of the proscribed, and that they had not
"the law in their hands", nor on their lips the cry of "civilization."
And after those horrors look upon the other still more hideous
face of the bourgeois civilization as described by its own press!
"With stray shots," writes the Paris correspondent of a London Tory
paper, "still ringing in the distance, and unintended wounded wretches
dying amid the tombstones of Pere la Chaise — with 6,000 terror-stricken
insurgents wandering in an agony of despair in the labyrinth of the catacombs,
and wretches hurried through the streets to be shot down in scores by the
mitrailleuse — it is revolting to see the cafes filled with the
votaries of absinthe, billiards, and dominoes; female profligacy perambulating
the boulevards, and the sound of revelry disturbing the night from the
cabinets particuliers of fashionable restaurants."
M. Edouard Herve writes in the Journal de Paris, a Versaillist journal
pressed by the Commune:
"The way in which the population of Paris [!] manifested its satisfaction
yesterday was rather more than frivolous, and we fear it will grow worse
as time progresses. Paris has now a fete day appearance, which is
sadly out of place; and, unless we are to be called the Parisiens de
la decadence, this sort of thing must come to an end."
And then he quotes the passage from Tacitus:
"Yet, on the morrow of that horrible struggle, even before it was completely
over, Rome — degraded and corrupt — began once more to wallow in the
voluptuous slough which was destroying tis body and pulling its soul —
alibi proelia et vulnera, alibi balnea popinoeque [here fights and
wounds, there baths and restaurants]."
M. Herve only forgets to say that the "population of Paris" he speaks of
it but the population of the Paris of M. Thiers — the francs-fileurs
returning in throngs from Versailles, Saint-Denis, Rueil, and Saint Germain
— the Paris of the "Decline."
In all its bloody triumphs over the self-sacrificing champions
of a new and better society, that nefarious civilization, based upon the
enslavement of labor, drowns the moans of its victims in a hue-and-cry
of calumny, reverberated by a world-wide echo. The serene working men's
Paris of the Commune is suddenly changed into a pandemonium by the bloodhounds
of "order."
And what does this tremendous change prove to the bourgeois mind
of all countries? Why, that the Commune has conspired against civilization!
The Paris people die enthusiastically for the Commune in number unequally
in any battle known to history. What does that prove? Why, that the Commune
was not the people's own government but the usurpation of a handful of
criminals! The women of Paris joyfully give up their lives at the barricades
and on the place of execution. What does this prove? Why, that the demon
of the Commune has changed them into Megaera and Hecates!
The moderation of the Commune during the two months of undisputed
sway is equalled only by the heroism of its defence.
What does that prove? Why, that for months the Commune carefully
hid, under a mask of moderation and humanity, the bloodthirstiness of its
fiendish instincts to be let loose in the hour of its agony!
The working men's Paris, in the act of its heroic self-holocaust,
involved in its flames buildings and monuments. While tearing to pieces
the living body of the proletariat, its rulers must no longer expect to
return triumphantly into the intact architecture of their abodes. The government
of Versailles cries, "Incendiarism!" and whispers this cue to all its agents,
down to the remotest hamlet, to hunt up its enemies everywhere as suspect
of professional incendiarism. The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which
looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed
by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar!
When governments give state licences to their navies to "kill,
burn, and destroy", is that licence for incendiarism? When the british
troops wantonly set fire to the Capitol at Washington and to the summer
palace of the Chinese emperor,[F] was that incendiarism? When the Prussians
not for military reasons, but out of the mere spite of revenge, burned
down, by the help of petroleum, towns like Chateaudun and innumerable villages,
was that incendiarism? When Thiers, during six weeks, bombarded Paris,
under the pretext that he wanted to set fire to those houses only in which
there were people, was that incendiarism? — In war, fire is an arm as
legitimate as any. Buildings held by the enemy are shelled to set them
on fire. If their defenders have to retire, they themselves light the flames
to prevent the attack from making use of the buildings. To be burned down
has always been the inevitable fate of all buildings situated in the front
of battle of all the regular armies of the world.
But in the war of the enslaved against their enslavers, the only
justifiable war in history, this is by no means to hold good! The Commune
used fire strictly as a means of defence. They used it to stop up to the
Versailles troops those long, straight avenues which Haussman had expressly
opened to artillery-fire; they used it to cover their retreat, in the same
way as the Versailles, in their advance, used their shells which destroyed
at least as many buildings as the fire of the Commune. It is a matter of
dispute, even now, which buildings were set fire to by the defence, and
which by the attack. And the defence resorted to fire only then when the
Versailles troops had already commenced their wholesale murdering of prisoners.
Besides, the Commune had, long before, given full public notice
that if driven to extremities, they would bury themselves under the ruins
of Paris, and make Paris a second Moscow, as the Government of National
Defence, but only as a cloak for its treason, had promised to do. For this
purpose Trochu had found them the petroleum. The Commune knew that its
opponents cared nothing for the lives of the Paris people, but cared much
for their own Paris buildings. And Thiers, on the other hand, had given
them notice that he would be implacable in his vengeance. No sooner had
he got his army ready on one side, and the Prussians shutting the trap
on the other, than he proclaimed: "I shall be pitiless! The expiation will
be complete, and justice will be stern!" If the acts of the Paris working
men were vandalism, it was the vandalism of defence in despair, not the
vandalism of triumph, like that which the Christians perpetrated upon the
really priceless art treasures of heathen antiquity; and even that vandalism
has been justified by the historian as an unavoidable and comparatively
trifling concomitant to the titanic struggle between a new society arising
and an old one breaking down. It was still less the vandalism of Haussman,
razing historic Paris to make place for the Paris of the sightseer!
But the execution by the Commune of the 64 hostages, with the
Archbishop of Paris at their head! The bourgeoisie and its army, in June
1848, re-established a custom which had long disappeared from the practice
of war — the shooting of their defenceless prisoners. This brutal custom
has since been more or less strictly adhered to by the suppressors of all
popular commotions in Europe and India; thus proving that it constitutes
a real "progress of civilization"!
On the other hand, the Prussians in France, had re-established
the practice of taking hostages — innocent men, who, with their lives,
were to answer to them for the acts of others. When Thiers, as we have
seen, from the very beginning of the conflict, enforced the human practice
of shooting down the Communal prisoners, the Commune, to protect their
lives, was obliged to resort to the Prussian practice of securing hostages.
The lives of the hostages have been forfeited over and over again by the
continued shooting of prisoners on the part of the Versailles. How could
they be spared any longer after the carnage with which MacMahon's praetorians[G]
celebrated their entrance into Paris?
Was even the last check upon the unscrupulous ferocity of bourgeois
governments — the taking of hostages — to be made a mere sham of?
The real murderer of Archbishop Darboy is Thiers. The Commune
again and again had offered to exchange the archbishop, and ever so many
priests in the bargain, against the single Blanqui, then in the hands of
Thiers. Theirs obstinately refused. He knew that with Blanqui he would
give the Commune a head; while the archbishop would serve his purpose best
in the shape of a corpse.
Thiers acted upon the precedent of Cavaignac. How, in June 1848,
did not Cavaignac and his men of order raise shouts of horror by stigmatizing
the insurgents as the assassins of Archbishop Affre! They knew perfectly
well that the archbishop had been shot by the soldiers of order. M. Jacquemet,
the archbishop's vicar-general, present on the spot, had immediately afterwards
handed them in his evidence to that effect.
All the chorus of calumny, which the Party of Order never fail,
in their orgies of blood, to raise against their victims, only proves that
the bourgeois of our days considers himself the legitimate successor to
the baron of old, who thought every weapon in his own hand fair against
the plebeian, while in the hands of the plebeian a weapon of any kind constituted
in itself a crime.
The conspiracy of the ruling class to break down the revolution
by a civil war carried on under the patronage of the foreign invader —
a conspiracy which we have traced from the very 4th of September down to
the entrance of MacMahon's praetorians through the gate of St.Cloud —
culminated in the carnage of Paris. Bismarck gloats over the ruins of Paris,
in which he saw perhaps the first instalment of that general destruction
of great cities he had prayed for when still a simple Rural in the Prussian
Chambre introuvable of 1849.[H] He gloats over the cadavers of the
Paris proletariat. For him, this is not only the extermination of revolution,
but the extinction of France, now decapitated in reality, and by the French
government itself. With the shallowness characteristic of all successful
statesmen, he sees but the surface of this tremendous historic event. Whenever
before has history exhibited the spectacle of a conqueror crowning his
victory by turning into, not only the gendarme, but the hired bravo of
the conquered government? There existed no war between Prussia and the
Commune of Paris. On the contrary, the Commune had accepted the peace preliminaries,
and Prussia had announced her neutrality. Prussia was, therefore, no belligerent.
She acted the part of a bravo, a cowardly bravo, because incurring no danger;
a hired bravo, because stipulating beforehand the payment of her blood-money
of 500 millions on the fall of Paris. And thus, at last, came out the true
character of the war, ordained by Providence, as a chastisement of godless
and debauched France by pious and moral germany! And this unparalleled
breach of the law of nations, even as understood by the old-world lawyers,
instead of arousing the "civilized" governments of Europe to declare the
felonious Prussian government, the mere tool of the St. Petersburg Cabinet,
an outlaw amongst nations, only incites them to consider whether the few
victims who escape the double cordon around Paris are not to be given up
to the hangman of Versailles!
That, after the most tremendous war of modern times, the conquering
and the conquered hosts should fraternize for the common massacre of the
proletariat — this unparalleled event does indicate, not, as Bismarck
thinks, the final repression of a new society up heaving, but the crumbling
into dust of bourgeois society. The highest heroic effort of which old
society is still capable is national war; and this is now proved to be
a mere governmental humbug, intended to defer the struggle of classes,
and to be thrown aside as soon as that class struggle bursts out into civil
war. Class rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform;
the national governments are one as against the proletariat!
After Whit-Sunday, 1871, there can be neither peace nor truce
possible between the working men of France and the appropriators of their
produce. The iron hand of a mercenary soldiery may keep for a time both
classes tied down in common oppression. But the battle must break out again
and again in ever-growing dimensions, and there can be no doubt as to who
will be the victor in the end — the appropriating few, or the immense
working majority. And the French working class is only the advanced guard
of the modern proletariat.
While the European governments thus testify, before Paris, to
the international character of class rule, they cry down the International
Working Men's Association — the international counter-organization of
labor against the cosmopolitan conspiracy of capital — as the head fountain
of all these disasters. Thiers denounced it as the despot of labor, pretending
to be its liberator. Picard ordered that all communications between the
French Internationals and those abroad be cut off; Count Jaubert, Thiers'
mummified accomplice of 1835, declares it the great problem of all civilized
governments to weed it out. The Rurals roar against it, and the whole European
press joins the chorus. An honorable french writer [Robinet], completely foreign
to our Association, speaks as follows:
"The members of the Central Committee of the National Guard, as well
as the greater part of the members of the Commune, are the most active,
intelligent, and energetic minds of the International Working Men's Association...
men who are thoroughly honest, sincere, intelligent, devoted, pure, and
fanatical in the good sense of the word."
The police-tinged bourgeois mind naturally figures to itself the International
Working Men's Association as acting in the manner of a secret conspiracy,
its central body ordering, from time to time, explosions in different countries.
Our Association is, in fact, nothing but the international bond between
the most advanced working men in the various countries of the civilized
world. Wherever, in whatever shape, and under whatever conditions the class
struggle obtains any consistency, it is but natural that members of our
Association, should stand in the foreground. The soil out of which it grows
is modern society itself. It cannot be stamped out by any amount of carnage.
To stamp it out, the governments would have to stamp out the despotism
of capital over labor — the condition of their own parasitical existence.
Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated
as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in
the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already
nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest
will not avail to redeem them.
The General Council
M. J. Boon, Fred. Bradnick, G. H. Buttery, Caihil, Delayhaye,
William Hales, A. Hermann, Kolb, Fred. Lessner, Lochner, T. P.
Macdonnell, George Milner, Thomas Mottershead, Ch. Mills,
Charles Murray, Pfander, Roach, Rochat, Ruhl, Sadler, A. Ser-
Railler, Cowell Stepney, Alf. Taylor, William Townshend.
Corresponding Secretaries:
Eugene Dupont, For France Zevy Maurice, For Hungary
Karl Marx, For Germany And Anton Zabicki, For Poland
Holland James Cohen, For Denmark
Fred. Engels, For Belgium And J.G. Eccarius, For The United
Spain States
Hermann Jung, For Switzerland
P. Giovacchini, For Italy
Hermann Jung, Chairman
John Weston, Treasurer
George Harris, Financial Secretary
J. George Eccarius, General Secretary
Office: 256 High Holborn Road, London, W.C., May 30, 1871
Postscript by Engels
[A]
This name was given to the Versailles soldiers of royalist sympathies recruited in Brittany, by analogy with those who took part in the counter-revolutionary royalist insurrection in North-Western France during the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century.
[B]
Under the impact of the proletarian revolution in Paris which led to the establishment of the Commune, revolutionary mass actions of a similar nature took place in Lyons and Marseilles. However, these were brutally crushed by French government troops.
[C]
Under the law concerning the procedure of military courts, submitted by Dufaure to the National Assembly, it was ruled that cases were to be investigated and sentences carried out within 48 hours.
[D]
This trade treaty between England and France was concluded on January 23, 1860. Under its terms France was to abandon her prohibitive Customs policy and replace it by introducing new import duties. As result of the influx of English goods to France, competition in the home market dramatically increased, causing dissatisfaction among some French manufacturers.
[E]
This refers to the rain of terror and bloody repression in Ancient Rome at the various stages of the crisis of the slave-owning Roman Republic in the first century B.C.E. — Sulla's dictatorship (in 82-79 B.C.E.), and the first and second triumvirates: Pompey, Caesar, Crassus (60-53) and Octavian, Antonius, Lepidus (43-36 B.C.E.) respectively.
[F]
In August 1814, during the war between Britain and the United States, British troops ceased Washington and burned the capital, the White House and other public buildings to the ground. In October 1860, during the war waged by Britain and France against China (the first of the Opium Wars), British and French troops pillaged and burned down the summer palace of the Chinese emperors near Beijing, a treasure-house of Chinese art and architecture.
[G]
In ancient Rome the privileged life-guards of the general or emperor; they constantly took part in internal disturbances and not infrequently interisland attention. Later the word "praetorians" became the symbol of the mercenary, tyrannical nature of the militarists.
[H]
This is what Marx called the Prussian Assembly by analogy with the French Chambre introuvable. The Assembly elected in January and February 1849 consisted of two chambers: the first was a privileged aristocratic "chamber of the gentry"; the composition of the second was determined by two-stage elections in which only the so-called "independent" Prussians took part. Elected to the second chamber, Bismarck became one of the leaders of the extremely reactionary Junker group.