a Russian--whom the newspapers of the bourgeoisie
represented as an agent of Bismarck--pretending to thrust himself at the
head of a _Committee of Safety of France_ was quite sufficient to change
completely public opinion. As to Cluseret, he behaved at once like an
idiot and a coward. These two men left Lyons after their failure."[15]
Bakounin's so-called abolition of the State appealed to the humor of
Marx. He speaks of it in another place in these words: "Then arrived the
critical moment, the moment longed for since many years, when Bakounin
was able to accomplish the most revolutionary act the world has ever
seen: he decreed the _abolition of the State_. But the State, in the
form and aspect of two companies of national bourgeois guards, entered
by a door which they had forgotten to guard, swept the hall, and caused
Bakounin to hasten back along the road to Geneva."[16]

Such indeed was the humiliating and vexatious ending of Bakounin's dream
of an immediate social revolution. His sole reward was to be jostled,
pinched, and robbed. This was perhaps most tragic of all, especially
when added to this injury there was the further indignity of allowing
the father of terrorism to keep his revolver. The incident is one that
George Meredith should have immortalized in another of his "Tragic
Comedians." However, although the insurrection at Lyons was a complete
failure, the Commune of Paris was really a spontaneous and memorable
working-class uprising. The details of that insurrection, the
legislation of the Commune itself, and its violent suppression on May
28, 1871, are not strictly germane to this chapter, because, in fact,
the Bakouninists played no part in it. In the case of Lyons, the
revolution maker was at work; in the case of Paris, "The working class,"
says Marx, "did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no
ready-made utopias to introduce _par decret du peuple_. They know that
in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that
higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending, by its own
economic agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles,
through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and
men."[H] But, while Marx wrote in this manner of the Paris Commune, he
evidently had in mind men of the type of Bakounin when he declared: "In
every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a
different stamp; some of them survivors of a