Abstract

Tw‌o books, each of them entitled The State and Revolution, were published forty years apart from one another, with the first one written in 1877 by French Communard Arthur Arnould and the other one in 1917 by Lenin, although unaware of Arnould’s work. Their confrontation is arranged and orchestrated in an anachronical way, in conformity with the method of "plagiarism in advance," in order for us to take the full measure of Arnould's resistance to Lenin's recuperation of the Paris Commune and to grasp the unbreachable discrepancy between these two revolutionaries as well as their respective views of the State’s power and of its destruction.