BOOKS
57.
The historical passages show no evidence of scholarly research (Gor-
man apparently has never read Lissagaray's
The Paris Commune of
1871
or Marx's
The Civil War in France) "
they are crippled by gross distor-
tions and perforated with gaping omissions.
Unlike the great bourgeois
realists-Balzac,
Dickens, Daudet and Zola-never
once does Gorman
contrast the poverty of the masses under Napoleon the Little with the
extravagances of the court. He makes no attempt to probe the real causes
of the Franco-Prussian War, which largely resulted from Napoleon's
desire to check the growth of republican sentiments in France.
Ignoring Napoleon's Decembriseur agents-provocateurs,
who stirred
up jingo manifestations, he asserts, "The Emperor would do anything at
all within reason and commensurate with the dignity of France to avoid
war. He does not want it . . ..
But he must consider the temper of the
people."
There is no hint that the Rothschilds played any part in the holocaust;
that Napoleon
III
had made the German munitions magnate, Krupp, an
Officer of the Fren::h Legion of Honor; that the Emperor's police in 1868
had dissolved the Paris section of the First International
following the
successful bronze workers'
strike; that the German deputies Bebel and
Liebknecht were imprisoned for opposing the Franco-Prussian War or that
the Thiers-Trochu Government of National Defense prolonged the siege
of Paris to annihilate countless thousands of revolutionary workers.
The refusal of the proletarian National Guard to surrender its
privately constructed artillery, the move that started the revolutIOn, is
misrepresented; ~farx in 1871-23 years after the publication of
The
Communist J1;lanifesro
and four years after the publication of
Dar Kapital
-is termed an "unknown" man; the outstanding revolutionist, Blanqui, is
pictured as directing the Commune when actually he was held a prisoner
by Thiers outside of Paris and a fictional character, Gauthier de Saint-
Just (who is apt to be confused with Antoine Saint-Just of the French
Revolution) is shown as the secret, supreme revolutionary dictator.
The
alliance of the recent enemies, the German Bismarck and the French
Thiers, to suppress the Commune is ignored. Likewise no account is given
of Thiers' white terror, which drowned the first Universal Republic in the
blood of forty thousand workers.
Gorman contends that the revolutionists'
philosophy was "they who
were on the bottom shall be on top whether they are fitted so to be mental-
ly, physically and morally or not." With the blind venom of a Carlyle
libeling the heroes of the French Revolution, he presents every revolu-
tionist, historical and fictitious, as having "popping bloodshot eyes,"
"yellow fangs," "huge loose red lips," "a thin crooked mouth," etc.
