The fall of the Commune naturally involved that of the International. The immediate failure of its action was obvious, and blinded people to its indestructible principles. Besides, a period of great commercial prosperity visited the 202 countries of Europe at this time. The French milliards which Germany had won as the prize of war were being turned over and over by the German bourgeois in their merry game of "beggar-my-neighbour.” It was a time now called by the German middle classes themselves the “swindle period.” England was at the height of her era of “leaps and bounds.” Even France, in spite of her being the plundered country, recovered from the condition into which the war had thrown her with a speed that made the plunderer envy her. In short, it was one of those periods which prove to the bourgeois exploiter that he is positively right, in which the bettermost workman grows quite unconscious of the chain that binds him, and is contemptuously regardless of that which lies heavy on the labourer below him, to whom the prosperity or adversity of the rest of the world makes little or no difference.
Internal dissensions, also, were at work within the International, and at the Congress of the Hague in 1872 it was broken up; for though it still 203 existed as a name for the next year or two, the remaining fragments of it did nothing worth speaking of.
In Vienna, in 1871, the movement in sympathy with the Commune became threatening, but was repressed by the authorities, and several of the prominent members of the party were imprisoned for the part they had taken in a Socialist demonstration—amongst others, Johann Most and Andreas Scheu.
For a while after the fall of the Commune the interest in the active side of the movement turns to Germany and Russia. In 1878 Nobiling and Hodel shot at the Emperor William; which event gave the occasion for the attack by Bismarck on the rapidly increasing Socialist party in October 1878, when the repressive laws were enacted which were maintained up to 1890.