The insurrection at Lyons and Bakounin's decree abolishing the State amounted to very little in the history of the French Republic. Writing afterward to Professor Edward Spencer Beesly, Karl Marx comments on the events that had taken place in Lyons: "At the beginning everything went well," he writes. "Under the pressure of the section of the International, the Republic had been proclaimed at Lyons before it had been at Paris. A revolutionary government was immediately established, namely the _Commune_, composed in part of workmen belonging to the International, in part of bourgeois radical republicans.... But those blunderers, Bakounin and Cluseret, arrived at Lyons and spoiled everything. Both being members of the International, they had unfortunately enough influence to lead our friends astray. The Hotel de Ville was taken, for a moment only, and very ridiculous decrees on the _abolition of the State_ and other nonsense were issued. You understand that the fact alone of a Russian--whom the newspapers of the bourgeoisie represented as an agent of Bismarck--pretending to thrust himself at the head of a _Committee of Safety of France_ was quite sufficient to change completely public opinion. As to Cluseret, he behaved at once like an idiot and a coward. These two men left Lyons after their failure."[15] Bakounin's so-called abolition of the State appealed to the humor of Marx. He speaks of it in another place in these words: "Then arrived the critical moment, the moment longed for since many years, when Bakounin was able to accomplish the most revolutionary act the world has ever seen: he decreed the _abolition of the State_. But the State, in the form and aspect of two companies of national bourgeois guards, entered by a door which they had forgotten to guard, swept the hall, and caused Bakounin to hasten back along the road to Geneva."[16]