The Civil War in France Quotes

“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.”
― Karl Marx, The Civil War in France

“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!”
― Karl Marx, The Civil War in France

“All this 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.”
― Karl Marx, The Civil War in France

“But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for
its own purposes.”
― Karl Marx, The Civil War in France

“The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few.”
― Karl Marx, The Civil War in France

“The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.”
― Karl Marx, The Civil War in France

“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”
― Karl Marx, The Civil War in France

“The Commune used fire strictly as a means of defence.”
― Karl Marx, The Civil War in France

“As the Second Empire thought the North
German Confederation incompatible with its existence, so autocratic Russia must think herself
endangered by a German empire under Prussian leadership. Such is the law of the old political
system. Within its pale the gain of one state is the loss of the other.”
― Karl Marx, The Civil War in France

“The Germans are an essentially peaceful
people. In their sober guardianship, conquest itself changes from a condition of future war into a
pledge of perpetual peace”
― Karl Marx, The Civil War in France