The 1848 Revolution in Germany

The historical precedents of Germany’s counterrevolutionary structures at the outbreak of the 1848 revolution

Up to the French Revolution

In examining the military question of feudal society we saw that the living force that had given rise to this new society on the ruins of the slave society resided in the Germans. But the fruit of the efforts of these young peoples, that is, the modern nationalities and their bourgeois social organization, occurred in the countries they conquered, rather than in Germany. Here the medieval structure that was the Holy Roman German Empire was transplanted, and its material and ideological characteristics, instead of furthering the historical process, counteracted it. The emperor, as such, was against the feudal lords and princes, but as a feudal lord himself he supported the landed nobility and, in contrast to the monarchy in France and England from the 14th century onward, he would use his political power, the organized violence of the State apparatus, in a decentralizing sense, wasting it externally in a feudal-esque colonizing expansionism. Hence the tendency toward increasing the authority of princes vis-à-vis imperial power and the trend toward stable forms of territorial division. These centrifugal forces, which in other countries, to the extent that they were beaten, ended up giving an absolutist character to the monarchy, in Germany meant that the emperor continued to be electable like the early Frankish kings. This had the consequence that the German nation did not become confused with a royal house, as is the case elsewhere, and did not start to assume the unitary character of the modern nation. The emperor was chosen by the princes, either individually or in groups, and when, as in the 15th century, the emperor threatened their power, they simply changed the dynasty.

When the productive forces reached a high enough general level of development, Germany was crossed by all European trade routes, and the prospects for the formation of a domestic market and thus of national unity were favorable. But both the defeat of the bourgeois revolution first manifested as a religious movement (Reformation) and the shift of the axis of trade to the shores of the Atlantic condemned Germany to further decay. It was easy for Holland to break away and take for itself the mouth of the Rhine, where the world trade routes reached. So too did Schleswig-Holstein break off by joining Denmark, and Switzerland was established as an autonomous nation. The Reformation having failed even in its stated intent, it caused a religious division that reinforced the material and political one. Germany was on its way to becoming a kind of European China: no one within it could oppose foreign interference any longer; the French could buy princes with gold as they were already recruiting German mercenaries. The climax was reached with the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) after which the Empire is so in name only. The economy is in shambles and the population was decimated, with sovereignty remaining in the hands of the princes and the emperor himself is “guaranteed” by the Treaty of Westphalia.

Each subsequent war will take on the appearance of civil war, because the emperor will always find in the enemy camp some of the German princes allied with the foreigner. By now the religious divide will become a political institution, with a Protestant North and a Catholic South. The rivalries between Russia and Austria will complete the ruin of the German nation: their wars will allow Russia, the greatest feudal power of the era, to come and dictate to them and produce an asphyxiating stagnation in which the only signs of life of the German bourgeoisie will be given under the banner of “the most infamous virtues”.

From the Napoleonic Wars to 1830

The hope of a “regeneration” of Germany can now only come from the revolutionary violence of France in 1789. The shameful counter-revolutionary role played by all the small and large powers of the German Reich in stifling the bourgeois revolution in France will be followed by the punitive action of the Napoleonic Wars.

We have mentioned other times how Napoleon can be called “the father of the German bourgeois revolution”. In fact, his wars, certainly not because of the purposes they aimed at, but because of the material results they led to, were exceedingly positive for the German nation. Their imperialistic and destructive character gave rise by dialectical reaction to a national sentiment and warlike patriotic ardor, and led to the War of Liberation of 1813. By destroying many of the southern and western small States and aggregating them with larger States, Napoleon accomplished a revolutionary work that would have been even more decisive if he had done the same with the northern princes even before he merged the countries into the Confederation of the Rhine (this was born in July 1806, and in August the Empire died). He didn’t do so because the purpose of his wars was not to further the revolutionary process but to beat bourgeois rival England in the struggle for domination of markets.

Of course, Napoleon was well aware that military victory wouldn’t ever be consolidated if, specially at the beginning, he didn’t exploit the legacy of the revolution, but the actual development of history shows precisely in his example that the bourgeois revolution cannot overcome national limits and thus promote a revolutionary war with clear aggressive characteristics. International is only the bourgeois counterrevolution directed against proletarian revolutionary internationalism. The more Napoleon introduced bourgeois reforms into the conquered territories, the more the historical legitimacy of his presence fell, and from the moment he allied with the Russian despot, Alexander I, he lost all right to be considered “the liberator of the peoples”, while, at the breaking of its alliance with the Tsar, it will have to suffer the brunt of the last bourgeois-feudal coalition of England and Russia and, unbelievable but true, will see Russian and Prussian troops fighting under the banner of freedom from his military dictatorship.

Germany, this European colony, thus fights the first anti-imperialist war. But what a contradictory character this war of liberation has! Armed popular violence may have overthrown the imperialist despot, but the feudal Prussian monarch Frederick William III may, together with his Russian protector, go back on every promise of German freedom, unity and independence, and constitution. Thus, after Waterloo (1815) a period descends on Europe that, if not always nor everywhere can be one of social restoration (the Napoleonic plow had dug too deep; there was no turning back!), is nonetheless dominated by a desultory political reaction that no longer allows the bourgeoisie to raise its head and organize politically. Another lesson of history is thus that the German bourgeoisie goes indebted to foreign domination for much of the social emancipation it had won, and is then forced to fight its social liberator by putting itself at the service of its oppressors, the only ones to benefit from the victory.

Of all the promises made for German unity all that remained was a mockery of it in the form of German Confederation, still composed of 36 States bound by a Diet in which the delegates of the various Princes sat, which was to remain an instrument of reaction in the hands of Prussia and even more so of Austria. The bourgeoisie’s only attempt at resistance during this period was the creation of the Burschenschaft, a patriotic association of students. In the fifteen years from 1815 to 1830 Germany had to rebuild what had been destroyed by the wars of the previous fifteen years: the economic apparatus was thus weakly structured, industry was still the most backward in Europe, with a few areas of relative concentration in Silesia, Saxony and especially in the Rhineland, where Marx was born and where the Napoleonic code had already been introduced.

From the July Revolution to 1848

The bourgeois revolution in Europe, which had set the pace since the Congress of Vienna, resumed in 1830 with a new if temporary momentum. The period of peace following the Napoleonic wars revived the economy, and the French bourgeoisie’s signaled political revolution. By July 1830 all bourgeois social forces in other countries were in motion, here more and there less.

The repercussions in Germany are exhausted in a few weak agitations in the north, and in a few stronger ones in the south, but on the whole the movement does little harm to the existing order, and its results are meager if not insignificant. Without much effort, both Prussian and Habsburg despotism, the latter served by the “all-powerful” Metternich, roll back the bourgeois political movement.

However, in spite of themselves, some German governments, caught in the grip of financial necessity and forced to defend themselves against foreign competition, will prepare from 1834 that revolutionary economic measure of the Customs Union (Zollverein), which, together with the construction of railways, will stimulate industrial production and intensify mercantile exchange, thus dealing a severe blow to traditional preconceptions of particularism. Out of this growing fusion of bourgeois interests grew the strength of the bourgeoisie, which found the division of the country into 36 States increasingly absurd; and the consequence would be its shift to liberal political opposition. This change can be dated to 1840; that is when a real political movement of the bourgeoisie begins in Germany.

Along with the economic and political revolutionary movement of the bourgeoisie in Europe, its revolutionary thought develops. At the culmination of this general European movement will occur the triple class divide in England, France and Germany. The historical turning point that matures in these years, and which will appear in the light of day in ’48, is one in which the working class definitively detaches itself from the bourgeoisie and opposes it from an independent class position. But while such proletarian political movement is important, more important still is the fusion of the labor movement and socialism by Marxism.

Germany on the eve of revolution

We won’t stop here to describe the complicated social composition of pre-1848 Germany, the basis of its political organization. The landed nobility was numerous there and, besides no longer controlling the princes, it was left with all other medieval privileges, like exemption from taxes and jurisdiction over its subjects. The bourgeoisie, although it had seen its wealth and political importance increase since 1815, was still economically and politically backward: its political movement, we have already mentioned, dates from 1840. The petty bourgeoisie is very numerous; hence its great political importance in future struggles. Its intermediate position between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat determines its oscillating character.

The working class cannot but be affected by the backwardness of the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, a vigorous current forms in its midst whose ideas about the emancipation of the proletariat are much clearer and in harmony with present facts and historical necessities. The active movement of the proletariat dates from 1844, that is, from the uprising of the industrial workers of Silesia and Bohemia. The peasants make up the great majority of the population and include a few landowners with agricultural proletarians in their service and many small landed peasants whose property is, however, only nominal, as it is still burdened with many aspects of serfdom. The revolution in France had given the peasants personal freedom and freedom of property: the fruit of the Napoleonic wars for Germany had been only personal freedom. A bourgeois revolution in Germany was therefore awaited by the peasants to obtain freedom of property as well. Despite this important aspiration of theirs, however, the peasants, because of their dispersion, were unable to raise an independent movement and, as the history of every country shows, required the impetus of the urban population, which was more concentrated and could thus organize more easily.

Add to this class structure the political division of the country and you have the whole picture of the situation: diverse and often conflicting interests; no center like London or Paris whose decisions can, by their weight, prevent struggle over the same issue in every province; inevitability that the class conflict will resolve itself into a mess of disconnected, bloody and sterile fighting; thus solving the military problem is very difficult.

Austria

Austria, using the civil and military bureaucracy, was governed by Metternich on the basis of two principles; the usual principle of absolute monarchies where they relied simultaneously on the nobility and the bourgeoisie, and that of keeping the various nations of the composite empire subject by pitting them against each other. A cordon sanitaire of censors insulated the country from foreign influence so that the “evil spirit” of the zeitgeist would not invade it. All seemed quiet, and for 30 years (since 1815) the stick reigned.

But here, too, the rising development of the productive forces had made inexorable inroads and with it general discontent, if not outright opposition: so Austria, too, was heading for profound change.

Prussia

Prussia was more open to the currents of thought coming from the West, and, after joining the Zollverein, its bourgeoisie had gained such strength that it openly demanded the realization of the regularly betrayed promises made by his father from Frederick William IV. It was precisely the new monarch’s refusal to keep them that prompted the bourgeoisie there to radicalize and begin its battle in the Rheinische Zeitung of 1842. Then when the monarchy, short of money, is forced in February 1847 to grant a United Diet in order to obtain loans from the bourgeoisie, the latter has the audacity to deny it because the Assembly is not “representative” at all, since, among the delegates of the eight provincial Diets that compose it, elements of the landed nobility dominate. To the rejection of the bourgeoisie, the monarchy reacts by dissolving the United Diet as well. The struggle is now inevitable, and since there’s no republican party, the alternative is: constitutional monarchy or socialism.

Smaller States

The admittedly mild constitutions torn up after the 1830-31 uprisings were repressed, and since provincial parliaments can no longer be used, the local bourgeoisies place themselves in the hands of the Prussian bourgeoisie. Engels concludes that “Germany was, in the beginning of 1848, on the eve of a revolution, and this revolution was sure to come, even had the French Revolution of February not hastened it”.

Parallel revolutionary development of the proletarian political movement and its history

The earliest forms of the German workers’ movement are recognizable in those organizations that sprang up abroad among workers and artisans who, either because of unemployment and hunger or because they were expelled by the prevailing reaction in Germany, were forced to emigrate. The most important of these associations is the League of Outlaws, which arose in Paris in 1834. Because of its democratic-republican tendencies and conspiratorial form, this organization can be considered similar to the French Society of the Rights of Man. But soon the proletarian tendencies became more pronounced and separated from the petty-bourgeois ones. In 1836 the most radical wing, headed by Schuster, split off and founded the League of the Just.

This already organizationally differs from its predecessor: no longer military-style hierarchy and dictatorship by a leader who must be blindly obeyed, as the conspiratorial aims demanded, but democratic leadership. This is not only a step forward in terms of organization but show that the method in which revolutionary struggle is conceived itself is changing: conspiracy is being put before propaganda to arouse a broad movement.

The League of the Righteous leaned on its French sister organization, the Society of the Seasons, headed by Barbès and Blanqui, and was thus involved in the Paris insurrection of May 12th, 1839. Part of its members, headed by Weitling, then moved to Switzerland; part moved to London with Schapper, and took on a more international character because, in addition to Germans and Swiss, it was joined by English, Dutch, Czechs, Poles and Russians; part remained in Paris, entrusted to Hess and Ewerbeck, a follower of the French communist Cabet.

Just as on the wave of the bourgeois revolution the revolutionary action of the proletariat was taking place, so on the wave of the bourgeois intellectual revolution (a reflection of the economic-political revolution) the revolutionary thought of the proletariat was developing, to give rise to its revolutionary doctrine and historical program by Marx and Engels. In Germany such an intellectual process was at a higher level than elsewhere and took its starting point from the critique of Hegel by his students.

But the attack was directed not at politics (conception of the State, its relations to society etc.), “still too thorny ground”, as Mehring says, but at religion. The most radical of the young Hegelians, Feuerbach, showed that without breaking away from Hegelian philosophy one could not break away from theology either. But this complete break with philosophical idealism was not yet Marx’s materialism, because it was reduced only to a natural science and not also a social science. Now, Marx will say, “the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth”, and he won’t come to this critique through bookish erudition: “There is no royal road to science (he will say in the French preface to Capital) and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits”.

Only the sufferings of the proletariat and the historical drama that was about to unfold could create in him that formidable will and passion that would stir his heart and brain, and that would make him deepen his economic and historical studies “The Love that moves the Sun and the other stars”. Without the burning ground of the class struggle, without the need to resolve the great contradictions, breaking down all obstacles and effecting revolutionary social transformations, Marx’s revolutionary passion would remain completely unexplained. Study and participation in real struggles alternate in him in dialectical unfolding. Every practical experience is stimuli to study; every achievement in theory is spur to test it on the solid ground of practical struggle.

The Berlin sojourn had shown him a face of German society: the whining, impotent petty bourgeois one. In the Rhineland he faced instructive practical struggles in the Rheinische Zeitung and quickly understood how revolutionary the German bourgeoisie was and how backwards the Prussian monarchy was, obstinate in its despotic methods. From the stifling air of Germany Marx moves on to breathe the freer air of bourgeois Paris, the capital of the European revolution. It was here that throughout 1844 he drank from the sources of the French Revolution and made contact with the socialist associations of L. Blanc, Flocon and Ledru-Rollin, and with the communist associations of Cabet. Here he became closer to the German proletarians and the workers of the League of the Just, which remained in Paris after the defeat of 1839.

Of the conceptions of these working-class parties Marx makes a comparative study criticizing the good and bad sides of each.

It’s in Paris that he meets on the revolutionary path of his thought Friedrich Engels, who in turn, driven by the same motive causes (the struggles of the proletariat) and the same interest (the revolution), had left Germany and gone to England to experience the then largest and richest proletariat in the history of modern capitalist industry. It was from this time that the two great revolutionaries continued to work together for the same cause to which they had come along different paths.

In Manchester, in 1843, Engels had understood the importance of economic facts: “the basis of the formation of political parties and of party struggles, and thus of all political history”. Marx, Engels continued, had “not only arrived at the same view, but had already, in the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher… When I visited Marx in Paris in the summer of 1844, our complete agreement in all theoretical fields became evident and our joint work dates from that time”. So, by this point, there’s no doubt for them that the social problem is essentially practical. The same is true of the necessity of revolution and its dual character: “Every revolution dissolves the old society and to that extent it is social. Every revolution overthrows the old power and to that extent it is political”.

Thus “without revolution, socialism cannot be made possible”.

It should be noted that Marx and Engels have so far given only an ideological adherence to communism. Before it can become political, it is necessary to purge what is still “crude” in communism, to shed light on the confusion of ideas and more or less “fraternalist” sentiments.

Unqualified political adherence could take place on one condition: that on the proletarian side ideological adherence to their conceptions take place. The encounter between the proletarian political movement and scientific socialism could not take place unilaterally: only if the proletariat, in its most genuine elements, showed that it understood their doctrine and preferred it to the visions of utopian socialism of the most popular idols, could the penetrating force of the doctrine itself be assayed as a sign of its profound realism and its correct understanding of the historical course.

In other words, workers had to make a definite choice on the basis of their healthiest class instincts, precisely in order to transform that instinct into theoretical consciousness, into class consciousness.

In truth, formal adherence to the proletarian political movement, for Marx and Engels, is not lacking for these essential reasons alone. They still have a further stretch to go in order to arrive at the clear and “definitive” understanding of social and historical reality. This will happen in their exile in Brussels, from 1845 to 1848, where Marx will take shelter as an outlaw for having wrote an apologia for the great Silesian weavers’ uprising in the Vorwärts!: “The Silesian rebellion starts where the French and English workers’ finish, namely with an understanding of the nature of the proletariat. This superiority stamps the whole episode. Not only were machines destroyed, those competitors of the workers, but also the account books, the titles of ownership, and whereas all other movements had directed their attacks primarily at the visible enemy, namely the industrialists, the Silesian workers turned also against the hidden enemy, the bankers. Finally, not one English workers’ uprising was carried out with such courage, foresight and endurance”.

In Brussels Marx was joined by Engels, who stayed with him between the spring of ’45 and the summer of ’46. He came from Elberfeld, where the Prussian government had interdicted his meetings with the enthusiastic sympathizers with whom he had managed to surround himself. “When, in the spring of 1845, we met again in Brussels, Marx had already fully developed his materialist theory of history in its main features form the above-mentioned basis and we now applied ourselves to the detailed elaboration of the newly-won mode of outlook in the most varied directions” (Engels’ On The History of the Communist League).

In the summer Engels and Marx go to England, and here Marx meets the most influential members of the League of the Righteous such as Schapper, Moll, etc., and the editor of the Northern Star, J. Harney, of the Chartist movement.

Once again they receive an invitation to join the League; but, once again, they “naturally” decline. They were urged to “set forth together our conception as opposed to the ideological one of German philosophy, in fact to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience. The intention was carried out in the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy” (Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy). Thus was born the German Ideology which, due to the usual editorial difficulties, was abandoned to the metaphorical “gnawing criticism of the mice” but fulfilled the function of self-clarification of ideas fantastically for our masters, as well as clarifying the facts which ideas produce.

Here it’s said in full letters “that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other kinds of theory”. Here communism finds its definition, quite opposite to the utopian method where one pulls the recipe of the perfect world out of one’s pocket: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”. Communism is thus part of the ongoing historical process. It’s now a matter of fostering and accelerating this process by revolutionary action in the correct direction and at the right time: things that can be identified on the basis of the theory of historical materialism.

It can be said that the “military question” is all here. For in the definition now given of communism, it is clear that the appropriation of all productive forces by the proletariat, and their subsequent transfer to all mankind, can only be realized through the “expropriation of the expropriators”, violent revolution.

Marx and Engels toward practical action

Having come to terms with their previous theoretical consciousness, all that remained for Marx and Engels was to move on to practical action by organizing political forces on the basis of the new revolutionary doctrine. They founded a communist circle in Brussels, which was joined by German refugees, many of whom would always remain loyal to the cause and carry out great activity in the future revolution in Germany: we mention only the names of W. Wolff, Weydemeyer and Stephan Born. Marx and Engels made this club a center of international correspondence to radiate their doctrine: through the Northern Star they would influence the proletarian movement in England; through the Réforme they would act on that of France; through the Deutsche Brusseller Zeitung on that of Germany.

Their aim was to create a far-reaching movement above nationalities; one of the means chosen to achieve this was internal struggle within the proletarian, socialist and communist movement itself. The most prominent figures, the prophets, the idols, whose merits, personal valor and all the qualities of genuine fighters for the proletarian cause were acknowledged, necessarily had to be hit. It began with Weitling and his mystical communism, moved on to his kindred Kriege; then it was the turn of K. Grün and his True Socialism, H. Wagner and his feudal-Christian-Germanic socialism, which tended to push the workers against the bourgeoisie in order to keep the existing order and the monarchy in place. It was finally necessary to attack Proudhon, the major doctrinaire idol of socialism, and this was done with The Poverty of Philosophy.

The Communist League and the Manifesto

After more than a year of intense activity carried out by the Brussels circle, the fruits were not long in coming: a show that even a small organization can do a lot – especially in a favorable situation – when it acts with a spirit of initiative and uncompromising consistency of ideas.

For some time Marx and Engels had been closely following the League of the Righteous in London and the developments of its physiological internal crisis: “We published a series of pamphlets, partly printed, partly lithographed, in which we mercilessly criticized the hotchpotch of Franco-English socialism or communism and German philosophy which formed the secret doctrine of the League at that time. In its place, we proposed the scientific study of the economic structure of bourgeois society as the only tenable theoretical foundation. Furthermore, we argued in a popular form that it was not a matter of putting some utopian system into effect but of conscious participation in the historic process revolutionizing society before our very eyes” (Marx).

In February ’47, the League instructed J. Moll to go to Brussels to ask Marx and Engels to join the League itself, after informing them that the most revolutionary proletarian majority had recognized all the organization’s deficiencies and that a congress to be held on June 1st in London was to reconstitute it on an entirely new basis. “The thunderbolt of thought had penetrated the naive popular soil”, says Mehring. And Engels recalls, “What we previously objected to in this League was now relinquished as erroneous by the representatives of the League themselves; we were even invited to co-operate in the work of reorganization. Could we say no? Certainly not. Therefore, we entered the League”.

The June Congress was attended by Engels representing the German community in Paris (where he had recently gone) and W. Wolff as a delegate from Brussels. There it was decided to change the name of the League to the Communist League and its motto to “Working Men of All Countries, Unite!” and defined the purpose of the organization as “the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old, bourgeois society based on class antagonisms and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property”. The purpose thus formulated will appear in the 1st article of the program that the League later gave itself at the 2nd Congress, in early December in London, along with the statutes. Presented by Marx and Engels, it was unanimously approved after ten days of lively discussion: it was a great triumph for the founders of scientific socialism, or revolutionary communism. The era of the prophets was over: the proletariat recognized and accepted Marx and Engels as its sole and undisputed leaders. To them the proletariat of the Communist League entrusts the compilation of that document which, from a simple “profession of faith”, will rise to a solemn Manifesto and represent the synthesis of the historical program of the working class and its revolutionary party for the whole historical arc destined to close with the world revolution and the final triumph of communism on Earth.

Marx’s theory and the military question

We felt it was our duty to address the process of the development of the revolutionary theory of the proletariat by Marx and Engels because for us, as Lenin put it, there is no revolutionary action without revolutionary theory. The military question, in the Marxist conception, therefore considers clarity of theoretical vision to be fundamental, and the achievement of communist theory itself to be a “military fact”. That of our masters was not academic work for science and culture in general: it was the work of fighters, it was itself a hard and tormenting battle to be won. We have seen how even the economic struggle for wages of the English proletarians was seen by Engels on the same level as the political struggle of the French revolutionaries. The same must be said of the struggle on the theoretical plane that Marx faced on behalf of the German and world proletariat, and which cost him exile, misery, and starvation.

The close link between theoretical work and armed struggle can be seen, moreover, in the fact that it’s an effort of profound analysis and critique of the methods of revolutionary struggle of the various classes and their fighting bodies: it is, in short, revolutionary military science and art. Thanks to it in fact, conspiratorial and Blanquist-type action will be definitively abandoned by the proletariat; thanks to it the whole European revolution and the German revolution in particular will be pushed forward by Marx and Engels in the two-year period of ’48-49. The failure of the revolution at the hands of the counterrevolution will never erase the work of politics and military action that the proletarian and communist party, through Marx, Engels and a few other valiant pioneers, carried out during the course of the dramatic events of that biennium. The very failure of the revolution, always feared and predicted, is but a confirmation of the validity of the theory and action of this “general staff” of the proletariat. Its legacy will be put to good use by Lenin during the great struggle waged and victoriously carried out in Russia by the Bolshevik Party.

1848 and the European Revolution

The root causes were economic in origin: the hour had come when the development of productive forces called for radical transformations of political structures in almost every country in Europe stretching to the Russian borders.

Both the agricultural crisis of ’45 and ’46 and the crisis of trade and industry that began in ’45 burst out in full force in the autumn of ’47 in England came together to precipitate the revolutionary crisis. The already fairly developed world market explains the rapid spread of the malaise in each country. For Germany we have already seen what political facts had ripened on the eve of ’48. For France it’s enough to recall the popular reactions to the conservative foreign policy of the government of Louis Philippe, especially after the crisis of the entente cordiale with England (1840) and the re-establishment of relations with the powers of the Holy Alliance. Marx says that from that policy followed “a series of mortifications to French national sentiment”, a sentiment that will be lifted by precisely the news of insurrections abroad.

Understanding all these complicated historical and political problems was no easy matter. But Marx’s party knew where to put the sword to unravel the fundamental knots; it was the only one capable of pointing out to classes and parties the right path to follow; above all, it knew how to act according to the immediate and mediated ends of the proletariat, the only truly revolutionary class.

An example of the French bourgeoisie’s counterrevolutionary policy is its support for the reactionary Sonderbund, the league of Swiss Catholic cantons fighting against the league of radical and Protestant cantons for the preservation of their medieval autonomy: conduct all the more shameful in that France intervened alongside that Austria against which the Swiss had once fought their first battles for independence. The victory of the Swiss liberals (Nov. ’47) and the bloody uprising of the people of Palermo (Jan. 15, 1848) had repercussions in Paris, and, says Marx, acted “like an electric shock on the paralyzed masses of the people and awoke their great revolutionary memories and passions”. In Italy too, the revolution that had been bubbling under the ashes had been reawakened just about everywhere, particularly with the Palermo insurrection for separation and absolute independence from the kingdom of Naples.

In conclusion, the revolutionary torrent swelled everywhere in Europe and fearfully threatened the banks of counterrevolution. After the first damages, the great breach opened in France, and from there the movement spread to all countries. The great stages of the revolution will be Paris, Vienna, Berlin. The same stages will mark the path of the counterrevolution.

Social aspects of the revolution intersect with national ones, domestic problems with those of foreign policy. Revolution and war are on the agenda everywhere and influence each other. Not all independence uprisings fit into the proper historical course: the Palermo separatist movement, an exasperation of a just struggle against absolutism, is nonetheless anti-historical, as are the “national” uprisings of the Slavic peoples of the Austrian Empire, etc.

The February Revolution in Paris

The combination of all the existing crises had made “the autocracy of the finance aristocracy” (from Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850), that is, that fraction of the bourgeoisie that groups within its bosom “bankers, stock-exchange kings, railway kings, owners of coal and iron mines and forests, a part of the landed proprietors associated with them”, even more unbearable.

Against it immediately began the opposition of the industrial bourgeoisie, with agitation at political banquets for electoral reform that would enable it to win a majority in the chambers. The Guizot government’s prohibition of one of these banquets and a popular protest provoked the insurrection. By February 24th, Paris was entirely in the hands of the insurgents who, thanks to the passive demeanor of the National Guard, managed to disarm the army and drive it out of Paris.

“The Provisional Government which emerged from the February barricades necessarily mirrored in its composition the different parties which shared in the victory. It could not be anything but a compromise between the different classes which together had overthrnown the July throne, but whose interests were mutually antagonistic (…) This government was in short the image of that ‘fraternité’ under whose banner the revolution was made and in whose intoxication the proletariat disdained itself and dropped its red flag in front of the tricolour flag”.

The months leading up to June would clarify the meaning of that fraternité, and the June insurrection would bring down any remaining illusions about a society without class contrasts.

The character of the February revolution was and was to remain essentially political: the already bourgeois society was to remain so. It was only a question of giving the whole bourgeois class the political power that had previously been in the hands of a fraction of it. But it was irrelevant whether this was done with or without a change in the form of the State. Marx shows that the republic was imposed by the proletariat. In its name Raspail “commanded the Provisional Government to proclaim a republic; if this order of the people were not fulfilled within two hours, he would return at the head of 200,000 men”. If this republic was a “republic surrounded by social institutions”, it was also due to the threats of the proletariat: “a mass of 20,000 workers marched on the Hôtel de Ville with the cry: Organize labor! Form a special Ministry of labor!”

Believing in the miraculous capacity of these institutions, however, also demonstrated the weakness of the proletariat. Even this illusion that it could defend “its own interests side by side with those of the bourgeoisie” would fall with June, when it fought not alongside the bourgeoisie but against it.

The March Revolution in Vienna

By October ’47, Metternich had already begun to lose his composure: “The phase that now runs through Europe”, he wrote, “is the most dangerous that the social body has had to face in the last sixty years.”

On March 13th, “On the 13th of March following, the people of Vienna broke the power of Prince Metternich, and made him flee shamefully out of the country” (from Engels’ Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany). All the forces with which they had tried to shackle the rising revolution were broken in a single day’s fighting.

After Paris, all the peoples of the Austrian empire moved to demand separate constitutions, autonomy or absolute independence. So did the various classes: the peasants were destroying feudalism in the countryside before it even happened on paper. Delegations of all kinds were making demands for equal civil and political rights. One such committee on March 13th went to present its demands to the assembled Landtag, leading a tumultuous procession. The government offered armed resistance and the demonstration turned into an insurrection.

“The Revolution of Vienna may be said to have been made by an almost unanimous population”. This was because the bourgeoisie acted with a relative “political innocence”, mainly due to the fact that it had not yet “seen working men acting as a class, or stand up for their own distinct class interests”, and because it saw that “the working people agree with themselves upon all points: a Constitution, Trial by Jury, Liberty of the Press, etc”. But this idyll could not last long: “it is the fate of all revolutions that this union of different classes, which in some degree is always the necessary condition of any revolution, cannot subsist long. No sooner is the victory gained against the common enemy than the victors become divided among themselves into different camps, and turn their weapons against each other. It is this rapid and passionate development of class antagonism which, in old and complicated social organisms, makes a revolution such a powerful agent of social and political progress; it is this incessantly quick upshooting of new parties succeeding each other in power, which, during those violent commotions, makes a nation pass in five years over more ground than it would have done in a century under ordinary circumstances”.

This settling down process can be seen by examining the structure of power immediately after the insurrection. It appears divided among three forces: monarchy, bourgeoisie, workers, plus the students (these stand between the bourgeoisie and the workers). The monarchy, having made momentary concessions, has been able to salvage what it can and will soon think of climbing back up the fallen steps. The bourgeoisie, although it has been able to set up its own armed force, the National Guard, and a kind of revolutionary government, the Security Committee, can consider its supremacy a theoretical rather than a practical truth, because another power has formed alongside its own: that of the workers and students who have created the Academic Legion, a real armed force on which the revolution will be able to rely for its further development.

Partly out of haste to resume production and partly out of fear, the bourgeoisie quickly cools its enthusiasm and yearns to restore “normality”. Its alliance with the other revolutionary forces after the insurrection soon breaks down. It’s only due to the monarchy’s clumsy conduct that the alliance is reconstituted a few more times. Determined to regain all power, the emperor provokes another uprising first on May 16th, after the publication of a mock aristocratic constitution, then on the 26th, by imposing the disbandment of the Academic Legion, “Perhaps this blow might have succeeded, if it had been carried out by a part of the National Guard only, but the Government, not trusting them either, brought the military forward, and at once the National Guard turned round, united with the Academic Legion, and thus frustrated the ministerial project”.

Meanwhile, the emperor and court had left Vienna to resume planning the intrigues of the counterrevolutionary camerilla, whose main agents were among the civil and military bureaucracy.

Revolution in Berlin

Demonstrations also took place in Berlin, demanding full bourgeois freedoms and rights. The workers, who also demanded labor rights and not fooled by the promises of Frederick William IV, pushed forward the movement, which from the 13th to the 16th produced considerable bloodshed in clashes with the army. News of the insurrection in Vienna fanned the fire. The bourgeoisie demands of the king the withdrawal of the armed forces and the organization of an armed civic guard that, in its intentions, is to replace the royal army in keeping the restless workers at bay.

The withdrawal of the troops becomes the slogan by which the battle between crown and the people is engaged, in which the latter, on the night of March 18th-19th, after 13 hours of fierce fighting on the barricades, succeeds in imposing its will: the 14,000 soldiers and 36 cannons are withdrawn, The greatest sacrifice of the struggle, as was also the case in Vienna, is borne by the proletariat: 183 dead. The revolutionary proletariat wished to honor these martyrs to honor by condemning the king to uncover his head before their corpses carried on the shoulders of barricade fighters parading in procession with victorious weapons still in their fists. “Thus was celebrated against the Hohenzollerns a trial to which no Stuart or Capeta was subjected before the gallows, a trial whose terrible violence has been preserved to us forever in the immortal verses of Freiligrath” (Mehring, Absolutism and Revolution in Germany 1525-1848). The funeral procession was not only the atonement imposed on a guilty ruler: it required him to approve of the nation up in arms.

Is this not that much? Did the proletariat have to overthrow the throne materially as well? “The reproof is as justified or as unjustified as criticizing those who stormed the Bastille for not immediately declaring the republic”.

The proletariat, in the blood spilled on March 18th, had washed away decades of shame and raised a historic barrier from which no power in the world would turn back. It could do no more than pave the way for the bourgeoisie, that is, the class that at that historical moment was called upon to seize power and come to terms with absolutism: in its hands was the decision to crown or betray the daring March 18th Insurrection.

Compared to the Vienna Revolution, the Berlin Revolution was not as “unanimous” because the bourgeoisie was more politically mature and knew the Paris Revolution was a prelude to the battle between bourgeoisie and proletariat. The bourgeoisie’s cooling off is thus rapid, and soon we see the shameful spectacle of its government agreeing with the crown to pass a constitution and electoral law and to exclude the workers from the Civic Guard, which is to remain only of armed bourgeoisie.

Soon the peasant revolution, which had spread due to the influence from the city to the entire countryside, where it had destroyed the last remnants of feudalism, must also return. Such a betrayal of the peasants (say Marx and Engels) by the German bourgeois party, which was supposed to have them as its best allies “never was committed by any party in history”, and whatever chastisements the future may reserve for it “it has deserved [them] by this one act every morsel of it”.

Revolution in the smaller States

As early as March 5th liberals, mainly from the south, had gathered in Heidelberg to convene a national constituency, that is, a parliament for all of Germany, in Frankfurt. This became a reality only after the Berlin Revolution because the bourgeoisie of the small States had relied on the Prussian bourgeoisie, which already dominated the Zollverein.

The historical role of the new body could’ve been really important, but the bourgeoisie’s misuse of it once again demonstrates its inability to fulfill its revolutionary tasks. It should have declared itself the “only legal expression of the sovereign will of the German people, and thus have attached legal validity to every one of its decrees”. But first of all it would have had to secure “an organized and armed force in the country sufficient to put down any opposition on the parts of the Governments. And all this was easy, very easy, at that early period of the Revolution”.

Unfortunately, the Assembly disappointed everyone and ended up serving the counterrevolution.

The international relations of the German revolution

“[The] subsequent events cannot be clearly understood without taking into account what may be called the international relations of the German Revolution. And these international relations were of the same intricate nature as the home affairs.. This is the reason why we too are obliged to make a few descriptive and also critical remarks.

The German Confederation included among its smaller States Bohemia and Prussian Poland. The two duchies of Holstein and Schleswig had remained politically linked to the Danish crown, from which, during the revolution (on March 20th) they had demanded separation to join the German Confederation; but the monarchy, keeping the bourgeoisie happy with some democratic concessions, had rejected the claim of these two German countries for nationality and necessary for Germany due to commercial-military reasons. Even certain Danish “democrats” supported their State in pursuing a pan-Scandinavian nationalism – dreaming of a return to the great Danish monarchy, also including Norway and Sweden. War between Germany and Denmark was thus inevitable.

But history put the formation of the unitary and indivisible German State on the agenda, and demanded that in addition to the above-named regions, the other smaller States, Prussia and Austria, would be an integral part of it.

The latter of course would have to liquidate its empire by granting total independence to Hungary, the Italian regions of Lombardy-Venetia, and certain Slavic regions, as the true and genuine revolutionary interest of the German bourgeoisie demanded, against the opposing aims of the reactionary court in Vienna and a handful of nobles.

In regard then to a free Hungary, Croatia should not have asserted rights to secede from it, just as Bohemia should not have done so in regard to German Austria. There the Magyar element predominated, here the Germanic one: the Slavic “liberals” in these regions should therefore have felt a revolutionary duty to remain united with the strongest and most viable national groups. What, on the other hand, was their attitude following the revolution? That of wanting to join a national group – the Slavs (Russians, Poles, Serbs and Bulgarians) – which was strong, yes, but historically very backward. With their agitation for independence, the Slavic peoples of these countries “they betrayed the revolutionary cause for the shadow of a nationality which, in the best of cases, would have shared the fate of the Polish nationality under Russian sway”. The Panslavism that had its home in these two regions was but an anti-historical theory in the service of the most reactionary power of the time: Tsarist Russia.

What then was to be the revolutionary duty of the German-Austrian bourgeoisie in Vienna? That of not being satisfied with the initial concessions made by the emperor and barring the way for his armies sent to suppress the Italian and Hungarian revolutions. Failure to do this would cost them being driven back from the positions they gained in March and being beaten militarily by the very imperial army allied with the pan-Slavists.

How could all these betrayals have been prevented? The answer given by the most radical party, Marx’s proletarian and communist party, was: by war on Russia! This solution was also demanded by the need for resurrection of the Poles, who were demanding separation from Prussia. It’s true that they too had been largely Germanized over the past seventy years and that the German frontier had shifted further east, but, “The question of delimitation between the different revolutionized nations would have been made a secondary one to that of first establishing a safe frontier against the common enemy. The Poles, by receiving extended territories in the east, would have become more tractable and reasonable in the west”. In any case, even a small national sacrifice would have had to be endured to solve the major problem of the unity of the German nation. Not having done so even in this area, indeed having stifled with arms the revolutionary agitation of those Poles for whom until then “the Germans had proclaimed such an enthusiasm”, meant that the German bourgeoisie dug its own grave with its own hands.

In conclusion, the German-Prussian bourgeoisie, where, as with Schleswig-Holstein, it had to show national and warrior spirit, showed itself cowardly, and where it could and should compromise, as in Prussian Poland, it was aggressive and nationalistic.

The action of the proletarian Party to push the revolution forward

The New Rhenish Gazette

At the outbreak of the revolution in Paris, the central committee of the Communist League had referred powers to the steering committee in Brussels, and this in turn to Marx. But he had already decided to join the London and Brussels refugees in Paris, where he had also been invited by Flocon. Expelled by the Belgian government, he then went off to France.

Here among the ten thousand German refugees the question of “marching” on Germany to arouse the revolution as was being agitated there, Marx considered it a foolish adventure and, risking all his popularity and defying all the “left-wingers” who accused him of cowardice and treason, he did not hesitate to condemn it. Leading that drunkenness was Herwegh, who was under the illusion – as were other patriots after the July ’30 revolution – that the French government would foster revolution in Germany. Instead, Marx understood perfectly well that the pacifist Lamartine would help the Germans only to get them out of Paris and France and ward off an outbreak of revolutionary infection. Marx pointed out well the two major errors contained in the idea of the “march”: a military one, whereby he foresaw a quick defeat of the improvised fighters, and a political one, because a symbolic outside force could never arouse the necessary mass movements that a revolution needs and would in fact have the opposite effect on the strata of the already vile bourgeoisie.

This warning was not heeded, and on April 1st Herwegh’s legion, with music and a black-red-gold flag at its head, set out from Paris. As chance would have it, on the same day the members of the League who had remained loyal to Marx, by Marx’s order, also left Paris in a hurry to go to Germany and form there the germ of the future revolutionary movement. The facts proved shortly thereafter that Marx had been correct: the moment they crossed the Rhine, Herwegh’s legion was dispersed by the troops of the King of Württemberg.

Of his disciples, however, W. Wolff reached Breslau still in time to get elected to the National Assembly in Frankfurt, where he would be the single bearer of Marxist views; S. Born went to Berlin and founded the association there, the Workers’ Brotherhood; Willich reached Mainz; Marx and Engels, on the other hand, settled in Cologne, the future center of great struggles.

Already from Paris the Communist League had launched in an appeal the “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany”, articulated in 17 points that reflected the interests of the proletariat, peasantry and petty bourgeoisie. They included German unity as a unitary and indivisible republic, the nation up in arms, and nationalization of transportation and sovereign lands to practice large-scale farming. But even some of these demands, which were also backward compared to those envisaged in the Manifesto, were to be found too advanced for the situation in Germany.

The Communist League itself lost the reasons for its existence: it was too weak as a lever for organizing the broad masses, and as a means of propaganda it could be replaced by more effective instruments. Therefore, in a dictatorial act, Marx, defying all hesitation, proclaimed its dissolution.

But the proletarian party would be able to make its authoritative voice heard and fight its battle through a major newspaper, which would be the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the New Rhenish Newspaper. It’ll be this that will direct the action of the communists scattered throughout Germany and enable the development of the working class on clear positions of revolutionary struggle which, beyond the demagogic action of certain working-class leftists, aimed at the main purpose of the moment: to push forward the large and small bourgeoisie, to base its power on the strength of the people: “The bourgeoisie cannot establish its dominance without winning the whole people as its temporary ally and without taking up a more or less democratic attitude”.

Thus the newspaper was born, on June 1st, ’48, as “the organ of democracy”. But it mustn’t serve the democrats; it must control them so that they remain on the revolutionary track that the proletarian party itself and only the proletarian party, through the N.R.Z., is able to indicate. It does not conceal the ultimate goals of the proletariat, and makes it clear that its ideal is not the black-red-gold republic, which, if anything, must mark the beginning of a proper proletarian opposition. The fundamental pillar always highlighted is that of “permanent revolution” against the will of the party of the big bourgeoisie, which, immediately after March, wants to consider the barely started revolution as having ended. And, as counterrevolution appears on the European and German horizon, the incitement to battle becomes even more pressing.

June 1848 in Paris: first act of the drama

We have seen how in February, according to Marx, “By dictating the republic to the Provisional Government, and through the Provisional Government to the whole of France, the proletariat immediately stepped into the foreground as an independent party, but at the same time challenged the whole of bourgeois France to enter the lists against it. What it won was the terrain for the fight for its revolutionary emancipation, but by no means this emancipation itself”. The latter could only be the fruit of a successful armed insurrection against all the classes that February had brought to power. This great historical battle was reached in June ’48.

“The February Revolution had cast the army out of Paris. The National Guard, that is, the bourgeoisie in its different gradations, constituted the sole power. Alone, however, it did not feel itself a match for the proletariat. Moreover, it was forced gradually and piecemeal to open its ranks and admit armed proletarians, albeit after the most tenacious resistance and after setting up a hundred different obstacles. There consequently remained but one way out: to play off part of the proletariat against the other.

“For this purpose the Provisional Government formed twenty-four battalions of Mobile Guards, each a thousand strong, composed of young men from fifteen to twenty years old. They belonged for the most part to the lumpenproletariat […] And so the Paris proletariat was confronted with an army, drawn from its own midst, of 24,000 young, strong, foolhardy men. it gave cheers for the Mobile Guard on its marches through Paris. It acknowledged it to be its foremost fighters on the barricades. It regarded it as the proletarian guard in contradistinction to the bourgeois National Guard. Its error was pardonable”.

It was compensated for by an error of the bourgeoisie.

“Besides the Mobile Guard, the government decided to rally around itself an army of industrial workers. A hundred thousand workers, thrown on the streets by the crisis and the revolution […] The Provisional Government believed that it had formed, in them, a second proletarian army against the workers themselves. This time the bourgeoisie was mistaken in the national ateliers, just as the workers were mistaken in the Mobile Guard. It had created an army for mutiny”.

The only purpose achieved by the bourgeoisie was the misunderstanding between the national ateliers advocated by L. Blanc and the sort of English workhouses in the open organized by the government, a misunderstanding exploited to disorient the proletariat in the struggles that were soon to begin, for example in the days of March 17th and April 16th, when the government seized there “the excuse for recalling the army to Paris”.

The bourgeoisie’s first attack on the proletariat came after the election of the National Constituent Assembly (May 4th).

“The Assembly broke immediately with the social illusions of the February Revolution; it roundly proclaimed the bourgeois republic, nothing but the bourgeois republic. It at once excluded the representatives of the proletariat, Louis Blanc and Albert, from the Executive Commission it had appointed”.

This attack on proletarians on the political level was soon followed by the decisive one on the military level, “They had to be vanquished in the streets, they had to be shown that they were worsted as soon as they did not fight with the bourgeoisie, but against the bourgeoisie”. This was to “refute, arms in hand, the demands of the proletariat”.

It targeted the national ateliers as the “the real point of the attack”, and this was for their name “though not in their content, the national ateliers were the embodied protest of the proletariat against bourgeois industry, bourgeois credit, and the bourgeois republic”. Thus the government “ordered the forcible expulsion of all unmarried workers from the national ateliers or their enrollment in the army. The workers were left no choice; they had to starve or let fly. They answered on June 22 with the tremendous insurrection in which the first great battle was fought between the two classes that split modern society. It was a fight for the preservation or annihilation of the bourgeois order. The veil that shrouded the republic was torn asunder”.

Marx comments on the defeat of the June insurrection on the N.R.Z. on June 29th, 1848, as follows: “None of the numerous revolutions of the French bourgeoisie since 1789 assailed the existing order, for they retained the class rule, the slavery of the workers, the bourgeois system, even though the political form of this rule and this slavery changed frequently. The June uprising did assail this system.”

Marx’s struggle in Germany continues tirelessly

Marx felt the blow of the June defeat in Paris, understood its significance in all its magnitude for the fate of the revolution in Germany. And because of this, his action became more intense and fierce on all fronts, and not only through that revolutionary organ that was the N.R.Z. Its “redaction” was reduced to Marx’s dictatorship. A great newspaper, which must be ready at the decisive hour cannot maintain a consequential position with any other regime. “Moreover”, Engels says, “Marx’s dictatorship was a matter of course here, was undisputed and willingly recognised by all of us. It was primarily his clear vision and firm attitude that made this publication the most famous German newspaper of the years of revolution”.

The battle for the more immediate goal that was the “conquest of democracy” in Germany also made use of three Associations that arose in Cologne in mid-April ’48: the Democratic Association, the Workers’ Association and the interclass Association of Employers and Workers, all of which, before they could march unitedly according to the direction imparted by Marx, cost him bitter struggles against Gottschalk’s maximalism, which, with demagogic and childish positions, would lead to the isolation of the proletariat from the bulk of the army of which it was to represent the “extreme left wing… for the Bastille is not yet taken and absolutism is not defeated yet”.

It’s the question of tactics that Marx saw clearly in that historical situation: the only revolutionary policy was to whip the bourgeoisie to a bloody pulp in order to force it to fulfill the tasks that history assigned to it and which it rejected, and thus to rely on the “people up in arms” which for Marx meant essentially the “armed proletariat”. It was therefore necessary to show that the civil and military bureaucracy remained in place after March and that, with its help and that of the army, the Prussian King and the Austrian Emperor would be able to take revenge and restore the old order. It was necessary to point out that the framework in which the revolution could proceed had international dimensions, because the most important bourgeois task, which was the unification of the German nation, necessarily bumped against feudal Russia.

If then the revolutionary war had also involved England, then the revolutionary process would not only liberate Germany and the other oppressed peoples (Italy, Hungary and Poland) but could give the English Chartists a way to overthrow the national imperialist oppressors, and the French proletariat a way to take revenge for June: in short, the national liberation movement struggling against the imperialist-feudal alliance could be welded to the proletarian struggle of the more advanced countries.

Thus, Marx, saw the beginning of the revolutionary process and strategy that were to become the only possible one in the imperialist phase of capitalism that began with the present century as already being possible. It was necessary to drag the bourgeoisie at full force into revolutionary military actions, because these, with their logic and necessities, would impose within it an increasingly energetic and decisive direction, thus increasingly driven toward exclusive and dictatorial forms of power.

This is why Marx no longer insists on the formula for organizing the German State that emerged from the March Revolution. Instead of exhausting himself in useless discussions about what “best form to give to the State”, it was necessary to operate in a revolutionary way because this operation would, with its necessities, dictate the most suitable form of State, which then, for Marx, had the meaning not of a point of arrival but of a new point of departure to push the struggle between the classes in the direction of the final duel between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. “The best form of polity is that in which the social contradictions are not blurred, not arbitrarily – that is, merely artificially, and therefore only seemingly – kept down. The best form of polity is that in which these contradictions reach a stage of open struggle in the course of which they are resolved”.

The bourgeois parliamentary and governmental institutions in Berlin, Frankfurt and Vienna, which had arisen in the aftermath of the March Revolution, were, according to Marx, faced with a tragic dilemma, either “suicide by cowardice to suicide by heroism”: if the revolutionary process had been pushed forward, they would have disappeared to give way to more advanced bodies; if, on the other hand, that process had come to a halt, they would have perished just the same, but at the hands of counter-revolutionary forces.

The German bourgeoisie chose “suicide by cowardice”!

Counterrevolution comes down on Germany

The first decisive act of the European counterrevolution happened in June in Paris. But already by April “the revolutionary torrent had found itself stemmed… In France, the petty trading class and the Republican faction of the bourgeoisie had combined with the Monarchist bourgeoisie against the proletarians; in Germany and Italy, the victorious bourgeoisie had eagerly courted the support of the feudal nobility, the official bureaucracy, and the army, against the mass of the people and the petty traders. (…) In England, an untimely and ill-prepared popular demonstration (April 10th) turned out a complete and decisive defeat of the [Chartist] popular party. In France, two similar movements (16th April and 15th May) were equally defeated. In Italy, King Bomba regained his authority by a single stroke on the 15th May”.

In Hungary, too, the movement had taken legal forms, and in Austria the restoration of the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the people on May 15th was due more to the Monarchy’s haste to take all power back into its hands. But two military events of Germany’s two greatest powers had occurred at the behest of the monarchs and with the shameful complacency of the ruling bourgeoisie:

1) Already in April, six weeks after the Berlin Revolution, the Prussian army had succeeded in crushing the Polish movement. “Thus the advanced party in Germany, deeming a war with Russia necessary to keep up the Continental movement, and considering that the national re-establishment even of a part of Poland would inevitably lead to such a war, supported the Poles; while the reigning middle class partly clearly foresaw its downfall from any national war against Russia, which would have called more active and energetic men to the helm, and, therefore, with a feigned enthusiasm for the extension of German nationality, they declared Prussian Poland, the chief seat of Polish revolutionary agitation, to be part and parcel of the German Empire that was to be. The promises given to the Poles in the first days of excitement were shamefully broken. (…) This immense and incalculable service to the Russian autocrat was performed by the Liberal merchant-ministers, Camphausen and Hansemann. It must be added that this Polish campaign was the first means of reorganizing and reassuring that same Prussian army, which afterward overthrew out the Liberal party, and crushed the movement which Messrs. Camphausen and Hansemann had taken such pains to bring about. “Whereby they sinned, thereby are they punished.” Such has been the fate of all the upstarts of 1848 and 1849, from Ledru Rollin to Changarnier, and from Camphausen down to Haynau”. (Marx and Engels, March 5th, 1852).

2) In June, the Austrian army, made up of Slavic troops and commanded by General Windischgrätz, stifled the movement of the Czech-speaking Slavic “democrats” with a terrible bombardment of Prague, after which the Austrian army with Radetzky could take revenge in Italy against the heroic Milanese revolution (the Five Days, March 18th-23rd) by defeating the Lombard-Piedmontese army at Custoza on July 25th. And so “The army again was the decisive power in the State, and the army belonged not to the middle classes but to [the old feudal bureaucratic party]”. The bourgeoisie, by restoring the honor of the regular army that the revolution defeated, had prepared for its miserable end.

The first great clash between revolution and counterrevolution

“By the beginning of autumn the relative position of the different parties had become exasperated and critical enough to make a decisive battle inevitable. The first engagements in this war between the democratic and revolutionary masses and the army took place at Frankfort.” Underlying it was the German national war against Denmark, the leadership of which had been entrusted to Prussia and its army. This one, which had fought with extreme vigor in Poland, in this war, “the only popular, the only, at least partially, revolutionary war”, moved listlessly, and on August 28th Prussia signed the shameful armistice of Malmö for two reasons: Prussia wanted to reserve the army as a means of internal repression and not as a revolutionary means, and it did not want to set itself against England and Russia, which were protecting Denmark.

Here the historical revolutionary role of the Frankfurt Assembly could be decisive: therefore Marx through the N.R.Z, urged, “The war that may now arise from the decisions taken at Frankfurt would be a war waged by Germany against Prussia, England and Russia. This is just the kind of war that the flagging German movement needs – a war against the three great counter-revolutionary powers, a war which would really cause Prussia to merge into Germany, which would make an alliance with Poland an indispensable necessity and would lead to the immediate liberation of Italy; a war which would be directed against Germany’s old counterrevolutionary allies of 1792-1815, a war which would ‘imperil the fatherland’ and for that very reason save it by making the victory of Germany dependent on the victory of democracy”.

Unfortunately, the “parliamentary cretinism” that Marx had always lashed out against made for an irreparable situation. After the comedy of the crisis of the confederal ministry, later reconstituted by Gagern, pro-Prussian and under the orders of the Hohenzollerns, the Assembly approved the armistice on Sept. 16th, ’48: instead of putting Prussia at its command, it put itself at its service! “This disgraceful proceeding roused the indignation of the people. Barricades were erected, but already sufficient troops had been drawn to Frankfort, and after six hours’ fighting, the insurrection was suppressed”.

“Similar, but less important, movements connected with this event took place in other parts of Germany (Baden, Cologne), but were equally defeated”. These minor events include the dismissal of Hansemann in Berlin and his replacement by General Pfuel, who had distinguished himself in the repression of the Poles, and the agitations in the Rhineland (on September 17th, at a rally of 10,000 people, Engels, W. Wolff and Schapper spoke) that contested the eight-day suspension of the publication of the N.R.Z.

The Frankfurt clash “gave to the Counter-Revolutionary party the one great advantage, that now the only Government which had entirely – at least in semblance – originated with popular election, the Imperial Government of Frankfort, as well as the National Assembly, was ruined in the eyes of the people. This Government and this Assembly had been obliged to appeal to the bayonets of the troops against the manifestation of the popular will”. The military and revolutionary issue was all here: instead of putting itself under the protection of the people up in arms, a government that nevertheless owed its birth to those arms, put itself under the protection of the reactionary army.

October 1848 in Vienna: second act of the drama

“But we repeat: these armies, strengthened by the Liberals as a means of action against the more advanced party [i.e., the proletarian party], no sooner had recovered their self-confidence and their discipline in some degree, than they turned themselves against the Liberals, and restored to power the men of the old system. When Radetzky, in his camp beyond the Adige, received the first orders from the “responsible ministers” at Vienna, he exclaimed: “Who are these ministers? They are not the Government of Austria! Austria is now nowhere but in my camp; I and my army, we are Austria; and when we shall have beaten the Italians we shall reconquer the Empire for the Emperor!” And old Radetzky was right – but the imbecile “responsible” ministers at Vienna heeded him not”.

We have already seen that in July Radetzky had won in Italy. The emperor, who had fled in the wake of the May 15th uprising, could now return to Vienna, flatter the bourgeois National Guard there, win them to his cause, and then go on the offensive by provoking the workers with a decree “withdrawing the Government aid, given hitherto to the workmen out of employ. The trick succeeded. The workers organized a demonstration. The bourgeois National Guards declared themselves for their minister’s decree; they were thrown at the "anarchists", and on August 23rd they pounced like tigers on the unarmed and unresisting workers, and massacred a good number of them.

“Thus the unity and strength of the revolutionary force was broken; the class-struggle between bourgeois and proletarian had come in Vienna, too, to a bloody outbreak, and the counter-revolutionary camarilla saw the day approaching on which it might strike its grand blow”. This day was to be October 5th.

Austria had earlier attacked Hungary by withdrawing the concessions it had made in March and, following the old policy of exploiting national rivalries, set the Croats commanded by Jelačić against the Magyars. On October 5th he then decreed the Hungarian Diet dissolved, and at the same time ordered troops stationed in Vienna to go and reinforce Jelačić, now governor of Hungary. This last act caused the people to rise up, who dragged both the Academic Legion and the National Guard with them in opposing the departure of the troops. It was the last victorious revolt, which again saw the emperor flee, to Olmütz. But here the Slavic deputies of the Constituent Assembly came to his rescue by staging a campaign against the revolution, which, according to them, was to do away with Germans and Magyars “invading the Slavic land”.

“Windischgrätz, the conqueror of Prague, now commander of the army that was concentrated around Vienna, became at once the hero of Slavonian nationality. And his army concentrated rapidly from all sides. From Bohemia, Moravia, Styria, Upper Austria, and Italy, marched regiment after regiment on routes that converged at Vienna, to join the troops of Jelačić and the ex-garrison of the capital. Above sixty thousand men were thus united towards the end of October, and soon they commenced hemming in the imperial city on all sides, until, on the 30th of October, they were far enough advanced to venture upon the decisive attack”. On the other side of the barricade, namely in Vienna, the situation was chaotic: “[…] In Vienna, in the meantime, confusion and helplessness was prevalent. The bourgeoisie, as soon as the victory was gained, became again possessed of their old distrust against the “anarchic” working classes; the working men, mindful of the treatment they had received, six weeks before, at the hands of the armed tradesmen, and of the unsteady, wavering policy of the bourgeoisie at large, would not trust to them the defence of the city, and demanded arms and military organization for themselves”.

So on the one hand there was organization and power, on the other disorganization and class antagonisms. “There could hardly be a doubt about the issue of such a struggle, and whatever doubt there might be, was settled by the events of the 30th and 31st of October, and 1st November”. Vienna was bombarded cruelly and “barricade after barricade was swept away by the imperial artillery”. The methods followed by Cavaignac in Paris were perfectly imitated by the pan-Slavist generals Windischgrätz and Jelačić.

But what Marx, Engels and all communist revolutionaries fiercely fought against was even worse: the betrayal of Vienna by both Germans and Hungarians. After all, “the Viennese, with all the generosity of a newly freed people, had risen for a cause which, though ultimately their own, was in the first instance, and above all, that of the Hungarians”. The latter could, if only they had so desired, have "adjourn to that day six months every concentration of an Austrian army. In war, and particularly in revolutionary warfare, rapidity of action until some decided advantage is gained is the first rule, and we have no hesitation in saying that upon merely military grounds Perczel [Hungarian general who had beaten Jelačić in early October forcing him to retreat toward Vienna] ought not to have stopped until his junction with the Viennese was affected. There was certainly some risk, but who ever won a battle without risking something? And did the people of Vienna risk nothing when they drew upon themselves – they, a population of four hundred thousand – the forces that were to march to the conquest of twelve millions of Hungarians?”

As for the German people who were supposed to be “second ally of Vienna” suffice it to mention, “The Frankfort Parliament and (...) the so-called Central Power, profited by the Viennese movement to show forth their utter nullity”. In short, the N.R.Z. spurred Germans and Hungarians to defend Vienna in Frankfurt, Berlin, etc, etc, etc. And, when defeat came, it wrote as such: “The second act of the drama has just been performed in Vienna, its first act having been staged in Paris under the title of The June Days. In Paris the Guarde Mobile, in Vienna “Croats” – in both cases lazzaroni, lumpenproletariat hired and armed – were used against the working and thinking proletarians. We shall soon see the third act performed in Berlin”.

November 1848 in Berlin: third act

In a revolutionary process, more advanced political forces replace milder ones; the opposite happens if the process is reversed and the counterrevolution advances. Precisely this happened in Berlin where the bourgeois Camphausen’s ministry was succeeded by Hansemann’s and this one by Manteuffel’s under which, at the expected good time, i.e., after the fall of Vienna, the king dismissed the ministers and moved the “Assembly, which was to agree with the crown upon a new constitution”, to Brandenburg, “a petty provincial town dependent entirely upon the Government”, where it could do nothing but begin “that grand comedy of ‘passive and legal resistance’”, rather than responding to violence with violence.

The Prussian Assembly had rejected the offer of armed intervention by the proletariat organized in the Workers’ Brotherhood headed by Stephan Bern. Thus, “when the decisive moment came, when Wrangle, at the head of forty thousand men, knocked at the gates of Berlin, instead of finding, as he and all his officers fully expected, every street studded with barricades, every window turned into a loophole, he found the Gates open, and the streets obstructed only by peaceful Berliner burghers”.

Would it have been won if armed resistance had been attempted? It certainly can’t be said for sure, but even if Berlin was to suffer the fate that befell Paris and Vienna, “a well-contested defeat is a fact of as much revolutionary importance as an easily-won victory” because it leaves “behind themselves, in the minds of the survivors, a wish of revenge which in revolutionary times is one of the highest incentives to energetic and passionate action”. And that “it is a matter of course that, in every struggle, he who takes up the gauntlet risks being beaten; but is that a reason why he should confess himself beaten, and submit to the yoke without drawing the sword? In a revolution he who commands a decisive position and surrenders it, instead of forcing the enemy to try his hands at an assault, invariably deserves to be treated as a traitor”.

But if this had been the behavior of the Prussian Assembly and its National Guard, which had surrendered its arms without a fight, no less shameful had been the behavior of the Frankfurt National Assembly and the central government.

Last flashes

We won’t dwell here on other important aspects of the events that took place after the fall of Vienna and Berlin. Among these, of considerable interest would be the trial of Marx for having signed, along with other revolutionaries, a call for violence to transform the cowardly passive resistance proclaimed by the Prussian Assembly into active resistance, a trial that ended with his acquittal by the bourgeois judges to whom he had given a real lesson in revolutionary logic.

The essential facts that characterized the return to full absolutism in Austria, Prussia and all of Germany in the early months of 1849 are as follows.

In Austria the Diet was dissolved on March 4th and the deputies dispersed by force of arms: among them those Slavs who had placed themselves so faithfully in the service of the Empire, from which they deluded themselves into thinking that they would obtain an independent national existence. With the new Constitution of May 4th, Austria resolved the dilemma of the Frankfurt Assembly: whether the future head of the German Reich should be Prussian or Austrian, which, according to the Constitution finally passed in Frankfurt on March 28th, would no longer be a republic but an empire!

The triumph of Prussia and the proponents of “Little Germany” (i.e., Germany without German Austria) was thus a foregone conclusion: it was the work of the petty bourgeois of the Democratic Party now in the majority in the Frankfurt Assembly after the Austrian deputies left.

They expected that the King of Prussia would accept the imperial crown. Not such thing happened: he declared that he could accept it only from the princes and, with that, put the Frankfurt Constitution underfoot by not recognizing it as sovereign law. Conflict between parliaments and governments throughout Germany thus became inevitable, and only force of arms could decide it. The parliaments were on the side of the Frankfurt Assembly and its “power” (always exalted and never secured by popular force): the governments decided to dissolve them at the invitation of Prussia, which, after convening a Congress of Princes, concentrated an army three days’ march from Frankfurt.

The conflict broke out in early May. The situation was much more favorable to the Assembly than could have been anticipated. In fact, the Democratic Party from a minority had become a majority due to the defection of conservative members and Austrian deputies recalled to Austria. Would this Left be up to the task? It “had profited by their places on the opposition benches to spout against the weakness, the indecision, the indolence of the old majority, and of its Imperial Lieutenancy. Now all at once, they were called on to replace that old majority. They were now to show what they could perform”.

The people were on its side, the army was vacillating, Austria was paralyzed alongside Russia by the struggle against the Hungarians (the latter would be beaten only in August while the Italians already were in March), and in Prussia – the most feared – many sympathies existed for the revolution. Everything depended on the conduct of the Assembly, that is, whether it could push the government into action and if not, replace it with a more energetic and decisive one.

Unfortunately, it proved that it did not know that “insurrection is an art”, and that not observing its rules of action can only lead to ruin. This was what happened. “The working class took up arms with a full knowledge that this was, in the direct bearings of the case, no quarrel of its own; but it followed up its only true policy, to allow no class that has risen on its shoulders (as the bourgeoisie had done in 1848) to fortify its class-government, without opening, at least, a fair field to the working classes for the struggle for its own interests, and, in any case, to bring matters to a crisis, by which either the nation was fairly and irresistibly launched in the revolutionary career, or else the status quo before the Revolution restored as nearly as possible, and, thereby, a new revolution rendered unavoidable”.

Not only did the petty bourgeois not show the Danton-esque boldness that was needed, but they even acted backwards: they did everything they could to break away from the revolution: instead of moving the Assembly to the insurrectionary areas, they took it to Stuttgart where the government observed a kind of neutrality, and only in the last moment did they decide to do what the Assembly’s only revolutionary, W. Wolff. editor of the N.R.Z., had long been demanding: outlaw the “regent of the empire”. But by then it was too late: the balance of power had completely reversed. Thus the Assembly, which now counted for nothing, was dissolved manu militari by the Württemberg government, at the instigation of Prussia, on June 18th, 1849.

The end of the beginning

With it disappeared the last remains of what the March 1848 revolution had produced in Germany, the counterrevolution could from then on advance freely.

We have seen that the proletariat “only supported the bourgeois revolution in order to clear a battlefield where it could wage open war on the bourgeoisie”. As soon as it saw that this bourgeois class was beginning to sacrifice its own interests in order to deny them that battlefield, “it was also forced to recognise that it could no longer let itself be led by the bourgeoisie, but would have to organize itself despite the bourgeoisie. The more the bourgeois revolution silted up, the more revolutionary the working class became. It was still far too weak to carry the banner that the bourgeoisie had betrayed to victory, but it fought bravely for that banner and its defeat was not, as was that of the bourgeois class, the beginning of the end, but only the end of the beginning of its struggle for emancipation” (Mehring, Absolutism and Revolution in Germany 1525-1848).

“In place of the demands, exuberant in form but still limited and even bourgeois in content, whose concession the proletariat wanted to wring from the February Republic, there appeared the bold slogan of revolutionary struggle: Overthrow of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the Working class!”