ABSTRACT
Not until 1891 did Engels refer to the Paris Commune as the embodiment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but save for Bakunin few contemporaries would have disputed the claim in 1871. Because the Commune struck at the very heart of its state, social and economic system, the European middle class rallied against the insurrection in a movement resembling a religious crusade. Conservatives feared that the ghosts of the French Revolution had risen again and that the lower classes were taking the old egalitarian formulas and slogans seriously. No one could predict when or where the leaders of the great conspiracy, the men who composed the General Council of the International, might again hurl their ‘cosmopolitan’ (the standard conservative epithet) forces into battle. 1
