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(en) France, Monde Libertaire - IDEAS AND STRUGGLES: The Social War (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Date
Fri, 31 Oct 2025 08:02:24 +0200
"Being Free" ---- We are in the hall of the Peace Congress in Lausanne
at the end of September 1871. Four months earlier in Paris, Versailles
troops massacred between 15,000 and 20,000 people during Bloody Week,
not counting those sentenced to death and deportation. The savage
repression against the Paris Commune is on everyone's minds. One woman
has managed to escape denunciation, bullets, and imprisonment. She takes
the podium to speak, on behalf of her fellow Communards and Communards,
about the social war they experienced. It is André Léo, a journalist and
novelist who makes a living from her writing. And she is quickly booed,
accused of not staying on the agenda. Ah, the weight of bureaucrats in
assemblies... And quickly the words become more forceful: Down with the
Commune! Down with oil! Provocateurs? She couldn't finish her speech and
published it as a pamphlet. Le Bas du Pavé is reissuing it, and its
relevance makes it worth reading.
André Léo denounces monarchies and crimes
The League for Peace and Liberty was founded in 1867. It opposes war and
the laws of war. André Léo immediately denounces monarchies and crimes.
"War and monarchy are interdependent; they live and die together." But
there is more than war between countries and peoples; "there is another
war, which you had not considered, and which far surpasses the other in
devastation and frenzy. I am speaking of civil war." The speaker traces
it back to 1848 in France, when the people were shot in June. She
initiates a rehabilitation of the Commune despite a critical look at
certain dysfunctions. "I need to recall these wrongs committed by the
Commune since May. Such an outpouring of crimes has passed over them
that we no longer see them."
She recalls the absence of looting by the Communards, the absence of
murders, only fighting in self-defense. As for the hostages, one can
regret her clumsiness in placing the blame on Raoul Rigault and
Théophile Ferré while they were being tried before military tribunals.
She reestablishes the truth about the fires in Paris. Versailles
propaganda "excited France against Paris, which had created the Republic
and wanted to maintain it. This is how the victim was stigmatized before
being executed, and how all sympathy around it was destroyed, before
setting the trap in which it would perish." Let's not forget that André
Léo wrote a tract that was under-circulated in France because of the
Versailles blockade. It was entitled "To the Workers of the
Countryside," and ended with the following words: "Land to the peasants,
tools to the worker, work for all."
Thiers refused dialogue, with the goal of "the extermination of the
democrats and the crushing of Paris." A vast human slaughterhouse, it
recalls days of bloodshed, nights of anguish, and the sound of machine
guns like a nightmare. It calls for protest. In vain... the party of
order prevails in France, a step backward, particularly in education.
"This horrible corruption of childhood morals, which, despite so many
obstacles to its disclosure, erupts in such appalling and frequent
scandals." Isn't it relevant today?
It defends freedoms. For André Léo, "To be free is to be in possession
of all the means to develop according to one's nature."
Regarding the question of capital, she emphasizes that the middle class,
even the poor, suffers as much as the common people from the pressure of
this regime, which concentrates the power of money and authority. This
system holds the vast majority under the thumb of a minority. An echo of
Etienne de la Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, which should
always be reread.
The refusal of this assembly to listen to the speech of a woman who,
after having endured countless dangers, calls for peace, deeply saddens
André Léo. She concludes her pamphlet with these words: "For men
attached to the bourgeois milieu, what they call conventions stifles
principles. They live by compromise; may they not die from it!"
* André Léo
The Social War
Ed. Le bas du pavé, 2025
https://monde-libertaire.net/?articlen=8615
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