This article is about the government
of Paris in 1871. For the Commune
during the French Revolution, see
Paris Commune (French Revolution).
Le Père Duchesne
looking at the statue of
Napoleon I on top of the
Vendome column:
"Eh ben ! bougre de canaille, on va donc te
foutre en bas comme ta crapule de neveu !…
(Well now! damn rascal, we will knock you the
fuck off just like your crook of a nephew!…")
The Paris Commune (French:
La Commune de Paris)
was a
government that briefly ruled
Paris from
18 March (more formally from
26 March) to
28 May
1871. It existed before the split between
Anarchists and
Socialists, and is hailed by both as the first seizure of power by the
working class. Debates over its policies and outcome contributed to the break
between those two political groups.
In a formal sense the Paris Commune was simply the local authority (council of a town or district — French "commune") which exercised power in Paris for two months in the spring of 1871. But the conditions in which it was formed, its controversial decrees and tortured end make it one of the more important political episodes of the time.
· Assault
· La Semaine Sanglante ("The Bloody Week")
· See also
o Notes
Destruction of the
Vendôme Column during the
Paris Commune (This and other pictures were
later used to identify and execute
Communards)
The Commune was the result of an uprising in Paris after France was defeated in
the
Franco-Prussian War. This uprising was chiefly caused by the disaster in the
war and the growing discontent among French workers.[1]
The worker discontent can be traced to the first worker uprisings, the
Canut Revolts, in
Lyon and Paris in the 1830s[2]
(a
Canut was a
Lyonnais silk worker, often working on
Jacquard looms).
The war with
Prussia, started by
Napoleon III in July 1870, turned out disastrously for France, and by
September
Paris itself was under siege. The gap between rich and poor in the capital
had widened in recent years, and now food shortages, military failures, and
finally a Prussian bombardment added to the widespread discontent.
"Discussing the
War in a Paris
Café",
Illustrated
London News 17 September 1870
Parisians, especially workers and the lower-middle classes, had long supported a
democratic republic. A specific demand was that Paris should be self-governing
with its own elected council, something enjoyed by smaller French towns but
denied to Paris by a government wary of the capital's unruly populace. An
associated but more vague wish was for a fairer, if not necessarily
socialist, way of managing the economy, summed up in the popular cry for
"la république démocratique et sociale!" ("the democratic and social
republic!")
In January 1871, after four months of siege, the moderate republican Government of National Defence sought an armistice with the newly-proclaimed German Empire. The Germans included a triumphal entry into Paris in the peace terms. Despite the hardships of the siege, many Parisians were bitterly resentful and were particularly angry that the Prussians (now at the head of the new Empire) should be allowed even a brief ceremonial occupation of their city.
By that time hundreds of thousands
of Parisians were armed members of a citizens' militia known as the "National
Guard", which had been greatly expanded to help defend the city. Guard units
elected their own officers who in working-class districts included radical and
socialist leaders.
A contemporary sketch of women and
children helping
take two National Guard cannons to Montmartre
Steps were taken to form a "Central Committee" of the Guard, including patriotic
republicans and socialists, both to defend Paris against a possible German
attack and also to defend the republic against a possible royalist restoration
following the election of a monarchist majority in February 1871 to the new
National Assembly.
The population of Paris was defiant in the face of defeat and was prepared to fight if the entry of the German army into the city led to an armed clash. Before the Germans entered Paris, National Guards helped by ordinary working people managed to take large numbers of cannons (which they regarded as their own property as they had been partly paid for by public subscription) away from the Germans' path and store them in "safe" districts. One of the chief "cannon parks" was on the heights of Montmartre.
Adolphe Thiers, head of the new provisional government, realised that in the
present unstable situation the Central Committee formed an alternative centre of
political and military power. In addition he was concerned that the workers
would arm themselves with the National Guard weapons and provoke the Germans.
Generals Lecomte and Thomas being
shot in Montmartre
after their troops join the rebellion: a photographic
reconstruction, not an actual photograph of the event.
The Germans entered Paris briefly and left again without incident, but Paris
continued to be in a state of high political excitement. The imperial and
provisional governments had both left Paris for Versailles, a safer haven
against the German armies, and during the time required to return there was a
power vacuum in the capital of France.
As the Central Committee of the
National Guard adopted an increasingly radical stance and steadily gained
authority, the government felt that it could not indefinitely allow it to have
four hundred cannons at its disposal. So, as a first step, on
18 March Thiers ordered regular troops to seize the cannon stored on the
Butte Montmartre and in other locations across the city. But instead the
soldiers, whose morale was low, fraternised with National Guards and local
residents. The general at Montmartre,
Claude Martin Lecomte, who was later
said to have ordered them to fire on the crowd of National Guards and civilians,
was dragged from his horse and later shot together with General Thomas, a
veteran republican now hated as former commander of the National Guard, who was
seized nearby.
A barricade, March 18th, 1871.
Other army units joined the rebellion which spread so fast that the head of the
government, Thiers, ordered an immediate evacuation of Paris by as many of the
regular forces as would obey, by the police, and by administrators and
specialists of every kind. He fled ahead of them to
Versailles. Thiers claimed he had thought about this strategy (to retreat
from Paris to crush the insurrection afterward) for a long time while meditating
on the example of the
1848 Revolution but it is just as likely that he panicked. There is no
evidence that the government had expected or planned for the crisis that had now
begun. The Central Committee of the National Guard was now the only effective
government in Paris: it arranged elections for a Commune, to be held on
26 March.
The 92 members of the "Communal
Council" included a high proportion of skilled workers and several professionals
(such as doctors and journalists). Many of them were political activists,
ranging from reformist republicans, through various types of socialists, to the
Jacobins who tended to look back nostalgically to the
Revolution of 1789.
Louis Auguste Blanqui
The veteran leader of the 'Blanquist' group of revolutionary socialists,
Louis Auguste Blanqui, was elected President of the Council, but this was in
his absence, for he had been arrested on
17 March and was held in a secret prison throughout the life of the Commune.
The Commune unsuccessfully tried to exchange him first against
Mgr Darboy,
archbishop of Paris, then against all 74 hostages it detained, but Thiers
flatly refused (see
below). The Paris Commune was proclaimed on
28 March although local districts often retained the organizations from the
siege.
The commune adopted the previously discarded French Republican Calendar during its brief existence and used the socialist red flag rather than the republican tricolore — in 1848, during the Second Republic, radicals and socialists had already adopted the red flag to distinguish themselves from moderate Republicans similar to the moderate, liberal Girondists during the 1789 Revolution.
Despite internal differences, the Council made a good start in maintaining the public services essential for a city of two million. It also reached consensus on certain policies that tended towards a progressive, secular and highly democratic social democracy rather than a social revolution. Lack of time (the Commune was able to meet on fewer than 60 days in all) meant that only a few decrees were actually implemented. These included the separation of church and state; the right to vote for women; the remission of rents owed for the entire period of the siege (during which payment had been suspended); the abolition of night work in the hundreds of Paris bakeries; the granting of pensions to the unmarried companions and children of National Guards killed on active service; the free return, by the city pawnshops, of all workmen's tools and household items valued up to 20 francs, pledged during the siege as they were concerned that skilled workers had been forced to pawn their tools during the war; the postponement of commercial debt obligations, and abolition of interest on the debts; and the right of employees to take over and run an enterprise if it were deserted by its owner, who was to receive compensation.
The decree separated the church
from the state, made all church property public property, and excluded religion
from schools — after the fall of the Commune, the
Third Republic would have to wait until the 1880-81
Jules Ferry laws and the
1905 French law on the separation of Church and State to re-implement these
measures which founded French
laïcité. The churches were allowed to continue their religious activity
only if they kept their doors open to public political meetings during the
evenings. Along with the streets and the
cafés, this made the churches one of the main participatory political
centres of the Commune. Other projected legislation dealt with educational
reforms which would make further education and technical training freely
available to all.
The Commune returns workmen’s
tools pawned during the siege
Some women organized a
feminist movement, following on from earlier attempts in 1789 and 1848.
Thus,
Nathalie Lemel, a socialist bookbinder, and
Élisabeth Dmitrieff, a young Russian exile and member of the Russian section
of the
First International (IWA), created the
Union des femmes pour la défense de Paris et les
soins aux blessés ("Women's Union for the Defense of Paris and
Care of the Injured") on
11 April
1871. The feminist writer
André Léo, a friend of
Paule Minck, was also active in the
Women's Union. Believing that their struggle against
patriarchy could only be followed in the frame of a global struggle against
capitalism, the association demanded
gender equality,
wages' equality, right of
divorce for women, right to
secular education and professional education for girls. They also demanded
suppression of the distinction between married women and
concubines, between legitimate and natural children, the abolition of
prostitution (obtaining the closing of the maisons de tolérance, or
legal official
brothels). The Women's Union also participated in several municipal
commissions and organized cooperative workshops.[3]
Along with
Eugène Varlin, Nathalie Le Mel created
the
cooperative restaurant La Marmite, which served free food for
indigents, and then fought during the Bloody Week on the barricades
[4] Paule Minck opened a free school in the
Church of Saint Pierre de Montmartre, and animated the
Club Saint-Sulpice on the Left Bank.[4]
The Russian
Anne Jaclard, who declined to marry
Dostoievsky and finally became the wife of Blanquist activist
Victor Jaclard, founded the newspaper
La Sociale with André Léo. She was
also a member of the
Comité de vigilance de Montmartre,
along with
Louise Michel and Paule Minck, as well as of the Russian section of the
First International.
Victorine Brocher, close to the IWA
activists, and founder of a cooperative bakery in 1867, also fought during the
Commune and the Bloody Week
[4].
Famous figures such as Louise Michel, the "Red Virgin of Montmartre" who joined the National Guard and would later be sent to New Caledonia, symbolize the active participation of a small number of women in the insurrectionary events. A female battalion from the National Guard defended the Place Blanche during the repression.
The work-load of the Commune
leaders was enormous. The Council members (who were not "representatives" but
delegates, subject in theory to immediate recall by their electors) were
expected to carry out many executive and military functions as well as their
legislative ones. The numerous ad hoc organisations set up during the
siege in the localities ("quartiers") to meet social needs (canteens,
first aid stations) continued to thrive and cooperated with the Commune.
At the same time, these local assemblies pursued their own goals, usually under
the direction of local workers. Despite the formal reformism of the Commune
council, the composition of the Commune as a whole was much more revolutionist.
Revolutionary trends included
Proudhonists — an early form of moderate
anarchists — members of the International
socialists,
Blanquists, and more libertarian
republicans. The Paris Commune has been celebrated by
Anarchist and
Marxist socialists continuously since then, partly due to the variety of
tendencies, the high degree of workers' control and the remarkable cooperation
among different revolutionists.
For example, in the IIIe arrondissement, school materials were provided free, three schools were "laicised" and an orphanage was established. In the XXe arrondissement, school children were provided with free clothing and food. There were many similar examples. But a vital ingredient in the Commune's relative success at this stage was the initiative shown by ordinary workers in the public domain, who managed to take on the responsibilities of the administrators and specialists removed by Thiers. After only a week, the Commune came under attack by elements of the new army (which eventually included former prisoners of war released by the Germans) being created at a furious pace in Versailles.
The Commune forces, the National
Guard, first began skirmishing with the regular
Versailles Army on
2 April. Neither side really sought a major civil war, nor was either side
ever willing to negotiate. The National Assembly's army brutally crushed the
Commune, and when the Commune had been demolished, the
National Assembly proceeded with
executions that numbered 20,000 in one week. One of the generals leading the
counter-assault headed by Thiers was the
Marquis de Galliffet, the fusilleur de la Commune who later took part
as
Minister of War in
Waldeck-Rousseau's government at the turn of the century (alongside
independent socialist
Millerand).
Adolphe Thiers charging on the
Communards,
in
Le Père Duchênes illustré magazine
The nearby suburb of
Courbevoie was occupied by the government forces on
2 April, and a delayed attempt by the Commune's forces to march on
Versailles on
3 April failed ignominiously. Defence and survival became overriding
considerations, and the Commune leadership made a determined effort to turn the
National Guard into an effective defence force.
Strong support also came from the large foreign community of political refugees and exiles in Paris: one of them, the Polish ex-officer and nationalist Jarosław Dąbrowski, was to be the Commune's best general. The Council was fully committed to internationalism, and in the name of brotherhood the Vendôme Column, celebrating the victories of Napoleon I, and considered by the Commune to be a monument to Bonapartism and chauvinism, was pulled down.
Abroad, there were rallies and messages of goodwill sent by trade union and socialist organisations, including some in Germany. But any hopes of getting serious help from other French cities were soon dashed. Thiers and his ministers in Versailles managed to prevent almost all information from leaking out of Paris; and in provincial and rural France there had always been a skeptical attitude towards the activities of the metropolis. Movements in Narbonne, Limoges, and Marseille were quickly crushed.
As the situation deteriorated
further, a section of the Council won a vote (opposed by bookbinder Eugène
Varlin, an associate of
Michael Bakunin and correspondent of
Karl Marx, and by other moderates) for the creation of a "Committee of
Public Safety", modelled on
the Jacobin organ with the same title, formed in 1792. Its powers were
extensive and ruthless in theory, but in practice it was ineffective.
Jaroslaw Dabrowski
caricatured in
Le Père
Duchesne Illustré - Un bon bougre!... Nom de Dieu!...
Throughout April and May, government forces, constantly increasing in number -
with Prussia releasing French POWs to help the Thiers government - besieged the
city's powerful defenses, and pushed back the National Guards. On
21 May a gate in the western part of the fortified
city wall of Paris was opened, and Versaillese troops began the reconquest
of the city. They first occupied the prosperous western districts, where they
were welcomed by residents who had not left Paris after the armistice. It seems
an engineer (who had spied regularly for the Thiers government) found the gate
unmanned and signaled this to the Versaillais.
The strong local loyalties which had been a positive feature of the Commune now became something of a disadvantage: instead of an overall planned defence, each "quartier" fought desperately for its survival, and each was overcome in turn. The webs of narrow streets which made entire districts nearly impregnable in earlier Parisian revolutions had been largely replaced by wide boulevards during Haussmann's renovation of Paris. The Versaillese enjoyed a centralised command and had superior numbers. They had learned the tactics of street fighting, and simply tunnelled through the walls of houses to outflank the Communards' barricades. Ironically, only where Haussmann had made wide spaces and streets were they held up by the defenders' gunfire.
During the assault, the government
troops were responsible for slaughtering National Guard troops and civilians:
prisoners taken in possession of weapons, or who were suspected of having
fought, were shot out of hand and
summary executions were commonplace.
Map of the April-May assault on the Paris Commune
The Commune had taken a "decree on
hostages" on April 5, 1871, according to which any accomplice with
Versailles would be made the "hostage of the Parisian people". Its article 5
also stated that the execution by Versailles of any
war prisoner or partisan of the regular government of the Paris Commune
would be followed on the spot by the execution of the triple number of retained
hostages. But this decree was not applied. The Commune tried several times to
exchange
Mgr Darboy, archbishop of Paris, against Auguste Blanqui, but Thiers flatly
refused and his personal secretary,
Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, declared: "The hostages! The hostages! too
bad for them (tant pis pour eux!)". The Commune unsuccessfully made other
negotiation attempts, proposing the exchange of all 74 hostages it detained
against Blanqui.
Finally, during the Bloody Week and the ensuing executions by Versaille troops, Théophile Ferré signed the execution order for 6 hostages (including Mgr Darboy), who passed before a firing-squad on May 24 in the prison de la Roquette. This led Auguste Vermorel to ironically (and perhaps naively, since Thiers had refused any negotiation) to declare: "What a great job! Now we've lost our only chance to stop the bloodshed." Ferré was himself executed in retaliation by Thiers' troops.[5][6]
The Catholic Encyclopedia states that on 24 – 26 May, more than 50 hostages were murdered. In some cases, certain leaders of the Commune gave the orders, in other cases they were killed by mobs.[7] Among the victims was the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy.
Commune prisoners being marched to
Versailles:
from a contemporary illustrated magazine
The toughest resistance came in the more working-class districts of the east,
where fighting continued during the later stages of the week of vicious street
fighting (La Semaine Sanglante, The Bloody Week). By
27 May only a few pockets of resistance remained, notably the poorer eastern
districts of
Belleville and
Ménilmontant. Fighting ended during the late afternoon or early evening of
28 May. According to legend, the last barricade was in the rue Ramponeau in
Belleville.
Marshall MacMahon issued a proclamation: "To the inhabitants of Paris. The French army has come to save you. Paris is freed! At 4 o'clock our soldiers took the last insurgent position. Today the fight is over. Order, work and security will be reborn."
Reprisals now began in earnest.
Having supported the Commune in any way was a political crime, of which
thousands could be, and were, accused. Some of the Communards were shot against
what is now known as the
Communards' Wall in the
Père Lachaise Cemetery while thousands of others were tried by summary
courts martial of doubtful legality, and thousands shot. Notorious sites of
slaughter were the Luxembourg Gardens and the Lobau Barracks, behind the Hôtel
de Ville. Nearly 40,000 others were marched to Versailles for trials. For many
days endless columns of men, women and children made a painful way under
military escort to temporary prison quarters in Versailles. Later 12,500 were
tried, and about 10,000 were found guilty: 23 men were executed; many were
condemned to prison; 4,000 were deported for life to
New Caledonia. The number killed during La Semaine Sanglante can
never be established for certain, and estimates vary from about 10,000 to
50,000. According to
Benedict Anderson, "7,500 were jailed or deported" and "roughly 20,000
executed".
[8]
Communards killed in 1871.
According to
Alfred Cobban, 30,000 were killed, perhaps as many as 50,000 later executed
or imprisoned and 7,000 were exiled to
New Caledonia.[9]
Thousands more - including most of the Commune leaders - succeeded in escaping
to Belgium, Britain (a safe haven for 3,000-4,000 refugees), Italy, Spain and
the United States. The final exiles and transportees were amnestied in 1880.
Some became prominent in later politics, as Paris councillors, deputies or
senators.
In 1872, "stringent laws were passed that ruled out all possibilities of organizing on the left."[8] For the imprisoned there was a general amnesty in 1880, except for those convicted of assassination or arson. Paris remained under martial law for five years.
Karl Marx found it aggravating that the Communards "lost precious moments" organising democratic elections rather than instantly finishing off Versailles once and for all. France's national bank, located in Paris and storing billions of francs, was left untouched and unguarded by the Communards. Timidly they asked to borrow money from the bank (which of course they got without any hesitation).[citation needed]
The Communards did take over the
Paris mint and issued a 5
franc coin (identifiable by a trident
mintmark) which is today quite scarce. However, they chose not to seize the
national bank's assets because they were afraid that the world would condemn
them if they did. Thus large amounts of money were moved from Paris to
Versailles, money that financed the army that crushed the Commune.
A plaque honours the dead of the
Commune in
Père Lachaise cemetery.
Communists, left-wing socialists, anarchists and others have seen the Commune as
a model for, or a prefiguration of, a liberated society, with a political system
based on
participatory democracy from the
grass roots up. Marx and
Engels,
Bakunin, and later
Lenin and
Trotsky along with
Mao tried to draw major theoretical lessons (in particular as regards the "dictatorship
of the proletariat" and the "withering
away of the state") from the limited experience of the Commune. A more
pragmatic lesson was drawn by the diarist
Edmond de Goncourt, who wrote, three days after La Semaine Sanglante,
"…the bleeding has been done thoroughly, and a bleeding like that, by killing
the rebellious part of a population, postpones the next revolution… The old
society has twenty years of peace before it…"
Karl Marx, in his important pamphlet The Civil War in France (1871), written during the Commune, touted the Commune's achievements, and described it as the prototype for a revolutionary government of the future, "the form at last discovered" for the emancipation of the proletariat. Friedrich Engels echoed this idea, later maintaining that the absence of a standing army, the self-policing of the "quartiers", and other features meant that the Commune was no longer a "state" in the old, repressive sense of the term: it was a transitional form, moving towards the abolition of the state as such - he used the famous term later taken up by Lenin and the Bolsheviks: the Commune was, he said, the first "dictatorship of the proletariat", meaning it was a state run by workers and in the interests of workers. But Marx and Engels were not entirely uncritical of the Commune. The split between the Marxists and Bakuninists at the 1872 Hague Congress of the First International (IWA) may in part be traced to Marx's stance that the Commune might have saved itself had it dealt more harshly with reactionaries, instituted conscription, and centralized decision making in the hands of a revolutionary direction, etc. The other point of disagreement was the anti-authoritarian socialists' oppositions to the Communist conception of conquest of power and of a temporary transitional state (the anarchists were in favor of general strike and immediate dismantlement of the state through the constitution of decentralized workers' councils as those seen in the commune).
The Paris Commune has been the subject of awe for many communist leaders. Mao would refer to it often. Lenin, along with Marx, judged the Commune a living example of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", though Lenin criticised the Communards for having "stopped half way … led astray by dreams of … establishing a higher [capitalist] justice in the country … such institutions as the banks, for example, were not taken over;" he thought their "excessive magnanimity" had prevented them from "destroying" the class enemy.[10] At his funeral, his body was wrapped in the remains of a red and white flag preserved from the Commune[citation needed]. The Soviet spaceflight Voskhod 1 carried part of a communard banner from the Paris Commune. Also, the Bolsheviks renamed the dreadnought battleship Sevastopol to Parizhskaya Kommuna.
Simultaneously with the Paris Commune, uprisings in Lyon, Grenoble and other cities established equally short-lived Communes.
· Verlaine
· Vinoy
· As well as innumerable novels (mainly in French), at least three plays have been set in the Commune: Nederlaget by Nordahl Grieg, Die Tage der Commune by Bertolt Brecht, and Le Printemps 71 by Arthur Adamov.
· There have been numerous films set in the Commune. Particularly notable is La Commune (Paris, 1871), which runs for 5¾ hours and was directed by Peter Watkins. It was made in Montmartre in 2000, and as with most of Watkins' other films it uses ordinary people instead of actors in order to create a documentary effect.
· The Italian composer, Luigi Nono, also wrote an opera Al gran sole carico d'amore (In the Bright Sunshine, Heavy with Love) that is based on the Paris Commune.
· The discovery of a body from the Paris Commune buried in the Opera, led Gaston Leroux to write the tale of Le Fantôme de l’Opéra.
· The title character of Karen Blixen's Babette's Feast was a Communard and political refugee, forced to flee France after her husband and sons were killed.
· Soviet Russian filmmakers Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg wrote and directed in 1929 the silent film The New Babylon (Novyy Vavilon) about the Paris Commune.
· Terry Pratchett's Night Watch features a storyline based on the Paris Commune, in which a huge part of a city is slowly put behind barricades, at which point a brief civil war ensues.
· The rise and fall of the Paris Commune was depicted in the novel Spangle by Gary Jennings.
"In March 1871 the Commune took power in the abandoned city and held it for two months. Then Versailles seized the moment to attack and, in one horrifying week, executed roughly 20,000 Communards or suspected sympathizers, a number higher than those killed in the recent war or during Robespierre’s ‘Terror’ of 1793–94. More than 7,500 were jailed or deported to places like New Caledonia. Thousands of others fled to Belgium, England, Italy, Spain and the United States. In 1872, stringent laws were passed that ruled out all possibilities of organizing on the left. Not till 1880 was there a general amnesty for exiled and imprisoned Communards. Meantime, the Third Republic found itself strong enough to renew and reinforce Louis Napoleon’s imperialist expansion—in Indochina, Africa, and Oceania. Many of France’s leading intellectuals and artists had participated in the Commune (Courbet was its quasi-minister of culture, Rimbaud and Pissarro were active propagandists) or were sympathetic to it. The ferocious repression of 1871 and after was probably the key factor in alienating these milieux from the Third Republic and stirring their sympathy for its victims at home and abroad."
But two mistakes destroyed the fruits of the splendid victory. The proletariat stopped half-way: instead of setting about “expropriating the expropriators”, it allowed itself to be led astray by dreams of establishing a higher justice in the country united by a common national task; such institutions as the banks, for example, were not taken over, and Proudhonist theories about a “just exchange”, etc., still prevailed among the socialists. The second mistake was excessive magnanimity on the part of the proletariat: instead of destroying its enemies it sought to exert moral influence on them; it underestimated the significance of direct military operations in civil war, and instead of launching a resolute offensive against Versailles that would have crowned its victory in Paris, it tarried and gave the Versailles government time to gather the dark forces and prepare for the blood-soaked week of May.
…Mindful of the lessons of the Commune, it [the Russian proletariat] knew that the proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle—they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution—but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes.
Older works include:
Back to Contents