CHARLES LONGUET [1900] summer 1872

We feel with how much emotion and anxiety Marx wrote [his pages on the Paris Commune]. We feel that he admires and loves those unknown proletarians, those obscure brothers, whose imperishable memory will live forever "in the great heart of the working class." The horrors experienced by these martyrs of a new faith, the tortures they suffered, all this immense grief brought mourning to the house of Marx, as they were mourned throughout the the whole world by the great family of socialists, of which Marx is the honor and glory.

This was Marx's state of mind, these the feelings of his family when he wrote those pages of fire. There, in the extreme refuge of the Hegelian dialectic - which today advances, along with all of us, put back on its feet by Marx, and is therefore able to advance again - there, in the temple of historical materialism, always pulsated a life full of the highest ideals - the only life worth living. There the exiles of all movements people were always welcomed with open arms, and, regardless of any other consideration, from any dissent of a theoretical or doctrinal order, with a spirit far from any trace of sectarianism, they encountered the signs most numerous and tangible of the most affectionate hospitality. In that house no one was ever wronged any absent, independent spirit. There was no ashamed to honor the noble adventurer of Italian independence [Garibaldi]. Even the heroism thrown to the wind of one Gustave Flourens, as active in Crete as in Belleville, was followed with emotion rather than with derision. In that house never lacked a gentle hand ready to caress the idealized image of the romantic knight of the Mancha.

The Polish insurrection of 1863, the Irish Fenian uprisings of 1869, the Agrarian League and the Home Rulers of 1874: all these uprisings of the oppressed nationalities were followed from the terraces of that fortress of the International with no less interest than the rising tide of the socialist movement of the two hemispheres.

In that house one never hesitated to take a stand against the conflicts in which one could recognize "the different fractions of the bourgeoisie." Neutrality was abhorred. In the words of his favorite poet, the implacable Ghibelline, Marx hunted neutral souls to the gates of hell,

"Mixed [...] with that evil chorus

Of the angels who were not rebellious

Nor were faithful to God, but for themselves were"

damned not for their revolt but for their cowardice. His philosophy was not was casuistry; never would he take refuge in ambiguous quibbles where at stake was at stake the clear, open theory of class struggle. Marx would have stigmatized the torturers of Captain Dreyfus no less than the executioners of the worker Varlin.