the
"Marseillaise" is to be found, which is sung at Socialist gatherings:

Shall hateful tyrants, mischief-breeding,
With hireling hosts, a ruffian band,
Affright and desolate the land,
While Peace and Liberty lie bleeding?
To arms! to arms, ye brave!
The avenging sword unsheathe!
March on! March on! all hearts resolved
On Liberty or death.[1105]

In the eyes of many British Socialists the French Revolution was not
sufficiently democratic, not sufficiently radical, not sufficiently
violent. We are told that the French revolutionaries were soft-hearted
men, and that our sympathy with their innocent victims, such as Queen
Marie Antoinette, is quite uncalled for. "The Revolution was in its
conception, its inception, and its results a middle-class revolution.
The revolution was inaugurated by the Parliament of Paris--a
pettifogging legal assembly. Marie Antoinette was but one fine useless
woman among the millions, and she personified the heedless prodigal
selfishness of autocracy. We of the Socialist movement, who are full
of the idea of social service, of making a full return to society for
the bread we eat, the clothes we wear out, and the house-room we
occupy, how can we be expected to think so much of the suffering of
one idle extravagant woman and so little of the age-long privation and
torture of the hard-working useful mothers and sisters of France? The
crimes of ignorant, passionate democracy, of which Burke and Carlyle
have made so much, are as a drop in the ocean by comparison with the
deliberate enormities perpetrated by enlightened cold-blooded
autocracy, from Herod to Nicholas. The democracy has always been
pitiful, extremely pitiful. Even the September massacres, carried out
by the lowest of the low in an enraged and degraded and
terror-stricken populace, are brightened by golden patches of clemency
and love such as the annals of class punishment nowhere reveal."[1106]

The outbreak of the Paris Commune of 1871, having been less a
"middle-class" revolution, is considered by Socialists with greater
approval than the French Revolution of 1789. The philosopher of
British Socialism writes: "The Commune of Paris is the one event which
Socialists throughout the world have agreed with single accord to
celebrate. Every 18th of March witnesses thousands of gatherings
throughout the civilised world to commemorate the (alas! only
temporary) victory of organised Socialist asp