Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/169

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
SOME CARDINAL SINS
137

street fighting from June 23 to 26, 1848, the victims of the executioner Cavaignac; nor the first of December, 1851, of Napoleon the "Little"; nor the sea of blood made with those 28,000 heroes, in which the French bourgeoisie, murdering in a wholesale fashion as the agent and avenger of a capitalism that was shrieking with rage, tried in the red week of May of 1871 to drown the Commune, that capitalist slave war; nor the Père-Lachaise cemetery and its wall of the Federals, the monuments of an incomparable heroism. These struggles, revolutionary in the highest degree, in which militarism did its fearful work, are outside the scope of our historical speculations.

The exploits of French militarism against defenceless striking workmen begin at an early date. The so-called "rebellion" of the silk weavers of Lyons, whose banner bore the famous and moving words, "vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant" [to live working or to die fighting], began in the month of November, 1831, by the military firing on a peaceful demonstration; in a fight lasting two days the indignant workmen con-