structural:reformatting, structural:summarization, quality:correction, structural:scholar_edition
Political views

In a letter to George Brandes shortly before the Paris Commune, Ibsen expressed anarchist views that Brandes later positively related to the Paris Commune. Ibsen wrote that the state "is the curse of the individual.… The state must be abolished." Brandes related that Ibsen "presented to me as political ideals, conditions and ideas whose nature did not seem to me quite clear, but which were unquestionably akin to those that were proclaimed precisely one month later, in an extremely distorted form, by the Parisian commune." And in another letter shortly before the Commune came to an end, Ibsen expressed a disappointment with the Commune, insofar as it did not go far enough in its anarchism in its rejection of the state and private property. Ibsen wrote, "Is it not impudent of the commune in Paris to go and destroy my admirable state theory, or rather no state theory? The idea is now ruined for a long time to come, and I cannot even set it forth in verse with any propriety." However, Ibsen nevertheless expressed an optimism, asserting that his "no state theory" bears "within itself a healthy core" and that some day "it will be practised without any caricature."