All France has heard the word of your destiny which might have been the word of hers.  She has waited for it in vain.  I too, simple, I waited.  While blaming the means I did not want to prejudice the end.  There has always been one in revolutions, and the revolutions that fail are not always those with the weakest basis.  A patriotic fanaticism seems to have been the first sentiment of this struggle.  These lost children of the democratic army were going perhaps to subscribe to an inevitable peace that they judged shameful:  Paris had sworn to bury herself under her ruins.

The democratic people were going to force the bourgeois to keep their word.  They took possession of the cannon, they were going to turn them on the Prussians, it was mad, but it was grand....  Not at all.  The first act of the Commune is to consent to the peace, and in all the course of its management, it does not have an insult, not a threat for the enemy, it conceives and commits the remarkable cowardice of overturning under the eyes of the enemy the column that recalls his defeats and our victories.  It is angry against the powers emanating from universal suffrage, and yet it invokes this suffrage in Paris to constitute itself.  It is true that this was not favorable to it; it dispenses with the appearance of legality that it intended to give itself and functions by brute force, without invoking any other right than that of hate and scorn for all that is not itself.  It proclaims positive social science of which it calls itself the sole depository, but about which it does not let a word escape in its deliberations and in its decrees.  It declares that it is going to free man from his shackles and his prejudices, and at that very instant, it exercises a power without control and threatens with death whoever is not convinced of its infallibility.  At the same time it pretends to take up the tradition of the Jacobins, it usurps the papal social authority and assumes the dictatorship.  What sort of a republic is that?  I see nothing vital in it, nothing rational, nothing constituted, nothing constitutable.  It is an orgy of false reformers who have not one idea, not one principle, not the least serious organization, not the least solidarity with the nation, not the least outlook towards the future.  Ignorance, cynicism and brutality, that is all that emanates from this false social revolution.  Liberation of the lowest instincts, impotence of bold ambitions, scandal of shameless usurpations.  That is the spectacle which we have just seen.  Moreover, this Commune has inspired the most deadly disgust in the most ardent political men, men most devoted to the democracy.  After useless essays, they have understood that there was no reconciliation possible where there were no principles; they withdrew from it with consternation, with sorrow, and, the next day, the Commune declared them traitors, and decreed their arrest.  They would have been shot if they had remained in its hands.