Note 168 — Chapter XXIII
Eleanor Marx Aveling translation
He confessed his trickery in a speech pronounced at Bordeaux in 1875: "I was enabled with the remains of the defeated army to unite a military force of 150,000 men, but if this force was sufficient to tear Paris from the Commune, it could not have kept down the large towns of France, keenly bent on the maintenance of the Republic, and coming to ask me with distrust and irritation if it were the monarchy that we combated for."