I unexpectedly received the proposal to prepare a new edition of the declaration of the General Council of the International for the Civil War in France and to accompany it with an introduction. For this reason, I can only briefly touch upon the most essential points here.

In the larger work I mentioned above, I precede the two shorter declarations of the General Council regarding the Franco-Prussian War. First of all, because in the Civil War, the reader is referred to the second declaration, which itself cannot be fully understood without the first. Moreover, because these two declarations, which were also drafted by Marx, are no less than the Civil War, excellent examples of the remarkable gift of the author, who first established in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the ability to clearly grasp the character, significance, and necessary consequences of great historical events, while those events are still unfolding before our eyes or have just been completed.

Lastly, because we in Germany still suffer today from the consequences of those events that Marx predicted. Or did not what the first declaration states occur, that if Germany's defensive war against Louis Bonaparte degenerates into a predatory war against the French people, all the misfortunes that befell Germany after the so-called liberation wars would revive with new intensity? Did we not have another twenty years of Bismarck's dominance, and instead of the persecution of demagogues, did we not have the exceptional law and the hunting of socialists with the same police arbitrariness, with the exact same terrible interpretation of the law?

[Excerpt from the text of the introduction of the edition]