Strategy (47 page)

During 1848, revolution spread like an epidemic across Europe, with the most important outbreaks in France, Germany, Poland, Italy, and the Austrian Empire. Although the contagion began in Sicily, it was France that led the way in the intensity and seriousness of its own uprising. After the fall of Napoleon, France had returned to a monarchy, supposedly constitutional. As Charles X sought to acquire real power in 1830, he provoked a successful popular revolt, giving further support to the view that this was the one country in Europe where taking to the streets invariably made a difference. Charles's
replacement, Louis Philippe, however, was not much better and maintained rule by a privileged elite. The barricades went up again in 1834, providing the backdrop for Victor Hugo's
Les Misérables
. This uprising was suppressed, but in February 1848, after soldiers had fired into a crowd and the mob converged on his palace, Louis Philippe abdicated and fled to England. Soon a provisional government proclaimed the Second French Republic, along with universal male suffrage and relief for the poor.

The revolution, however, soon suffered from both economic and political chaos as the wealthy fled, businesses closed down, and the members of the new government argued with each other. The French socialists were in their language and aspirations creatures of 1789, idealists rather than materialists, concerned with rights and justice rather than capitalism. In rural France, Paris was seen to be selfishly imposing new taxes to support a better city life. Soon demands were heard for more order. Conservatives gained control of the government and with the army began clearing out the barricades. The middle classes were content, but the working classes were left seething. By June, feeling abandoned, the workers of Paris once again put up the barricades. The government forces were ruthless and effective. For four days the workers fought, but in the end it was a massacre and they were defeated.

In Germany, the main arena for Marx and Engels during these heady months, the situation was complicated by the national question. Under the Congress of Vienna, with its stress on an orderly balances of power rather than disruptive self-determination, there was a loose German Federation, which brought together Austria, at its head, along with Prussia and 38 smaller states. To confuse matters further, the Hungarian territories were part of the Austrian Empire but not the German Confederation. The whole top-heavy arrangement, when combined with the authoritarian quality of the individual states, was designed to cause aggravation. The cause of German unity based on national sovereignty went hand in hand with demands for greater democracy.

The revolutions followed a general pattern. An upsurge of broadly based anger resulted in large demonstrations. Stones got thrown. Troops responded. Some demonstrators died. The anger swelled and barricades went up. Where streets were narrow and crowded, the barricades provided real barriers to state control though they were useless in wide thoroughfares and squares. Having lost control of the populated parts of their city centers, the authorities were caught between further bloodshed and political concessions. Divided among themselves, they made enough concessions to satisfy the crowds and then retired to regroup. At first, therefore, the revolutionaries had the “unity of purpose, across social and political divisions” and prevailed.
⁵
But insurrection
was not the end of the story. There might have been opportunities to create new state institutions, including armed forces, to protect the revolution and take it forward, but the uncertainties in the new situation instead created tensions between radicals and moderates. The middle classes wanted reform but were petrified of revolution and persistent disorder. The left overreached itself and played to middle-class fears. There were debates about whether demands went too far or not far enough. Meanwhile the monarchs and their governments rediscovered their ruthlessness and organized their forces. In often bloody battles, the radicals were defeated, their leaders were thrown into prison or escaped into exile, and the population was cowed. In France it was different because of the abdication of Louis Philippe. But it was the exception that proved the rule—in revolution as in war, the quality and cohesion of the contending coalitions made a critical difference.

The initial stance of Marx and Engels for Europe in general and Germany in particular, following the logic of the recently published
Communist Manifesto
, was that workers should support a democratic revolution in preparation for the struggle for socialism. The larger the coalition challenging the old order the more likely it was to be successful. With universal suffrage and freedom of speech, the working classes would be better able to organize their own revolution. At the very least, a move to the next historical stage—even if it took time to complete—would allow the working class to grow in numbers, consciousness, organization, and militancy.
⁶
The risk was that the triumphant bourgeoisie would immediately move to suppress communist activity. To counter this, communists had to be constantly reminding the working class that even while working on a democratic revolution, relations with the bourgeoisie were bound to be hostile and antagonistic. Out of this came the idea of “permanent revolution,” suggesting that there would be no time to relax after stage one of the democratic revolution before moving on immediately to the proletarian stage two.

The speed of events excited them. France was the country where the revolutionary tradition was strong and class struggles were sharp and decisive. As the first news came from Paris in February, Engels exclaimed: “By this glorious revolution the French proletariat has again placed itself at the head of the European movement. All honor to the workers of Paris!”
⁷
The subsequent disappointment was followed by more excitement with news of the June uprisings. Marx concluded that the great moment had come. “The insurrection [is] growing into the greatest revolution that has ever taken place,” he wrote, “into a revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.”
⁸
Even the crushed uprising was judged to be a sort of advance. By exposing the harsh reality of class struggle, it would forge a more complete
communist consciousness. Whereas February had been the “beautiful revolution, the revolution of universal sympathy,” June was “the ugly revolution, the repulsive revolution, because reality took the place of the phrase.” Marx was not unique among revolutionaries in assuming that failure would make the working class more ferocious and determined rather than despairing and fatalistic.

By this time Marx and Engels were in Cologne. This was an area Marx knew, with a relatively substantial working class and an intense political situation. He established, using a timely inheritance, a campaigning newspaper, the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
(New Rhenish Newspaper), to promote the radical cause. The paper began publication on June 1 and soon gained some six thousand subscribers. It reflected Marx's belief that the proletariat was too small to move alone and so must unite with the peasants and lower middle classes (petit bourgeoisie) against the bourgeoisie. This unity was unlikely to be achieved by urging socialism on small property holders. So weeks after publishing the
Communist Manifesto
, Marx and Engels made comparatively tame demands—a standard democratic program of a unified republic and universal male suffrage with some additional measures to address social issues. The first rally Marx organized was in a rural area where he brought workers and peasants together.
⁹

At the time the main workers' organization was the Cologne Workers Council, with some eight thousand members. Its founder Andreas Gottschalk concentrated on improving social and working conditions rather than wider political action.
¹⁰
He judged Marx too extreme in his ultimate goals yet too moderate in his method. He had little sympathy for an orderly progression through revolutionary stages and scant interest in a democratic revolution. Marx argued for support of democratic candidates in elections. The alternative was “to preach Communism in a small corner magazine and found a small sect instead of a large party of action.”
¹¹
Gottschalk was for boycotting elections and pushing at once for socialism.

When Gottschalk was arrested in July 1848, Marx and Engels took over the council and redirected it to support the democratic movement. This new stance was not particularly popular, especially when coupled with a request for dues from members. Membership declined sharply. The revolution was turning out to be hard work. The workers were not necessarily progressive. They might be concerned about social conditions and annoyed with big business, but they also yearned for preindustrial days of work and had no appetite for deep class conflict. This lack of revolutionary fervor depressed Marx. He later observed wryly that if German revolutionaries ever stormed a railway station, they would buy a platform ticket.
¹²
He hoped that the news of the
June events in Paris would galvanize the German revolution. Instead it was the counterrevolutionaries who were emboldened.

As the German governments cracked down, Marx became more radical. From early 1849, he emphasized purely proletarian demands for a socialist republic. As 1850 began, he took heart from deteriorating economic conditions. His spring 1850 essay on “Class Struggles in France” raised the prospect of the proletariat imbued with a new revolutionary consciousness, matured by its defeats, and ready to accelerate the historical process. The events of the previous year meant that “different classes of French society had to count their epochs of development in weeks where they had previously counted them in half centuries.”
¹³
The revolutionary process could create its own momentum, its ferocity shattering idealistic illusions and forging a sense of class interests and destiny in the face of the desperate measures of the ruling class. Prior to this time, Marx had backed demands for workers' rights; now he mocked them for leaving capitalism in place.

His optimism was premature. The mood was against more uprisings and bloodshed. Caution prevailed. The European economy recovered and the revolutionary moment slipped away. Marx and Engels were left politically isolated, with time to reflect on their disappointment. Then it got even worse. In December Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the Emperor, managed to get himself elected as the first president of the new republic, on a vaguely progressive platform. As president, Bonaparte worked with the conservative assembly, but an impasse developed over his continuing interest in social reform. In November 1851, he mounted a coup d'état and a year later he abolished the Second Republic and established himself as emperor.

Engels remarked to Marx how Louis-Napoleon's coup d'état was a travesty of the Eighteenth Brumaire (the date in the French Revolutionary Calendar when the first Napoleon seized power in a coup). This was a re-enactment, “once as grand tragedy and the second time as rotten farce.”
¹⁴
Marx picked up on this theme in one of his most brilliant and sardonic pieces of historical writing,
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
. The proletariat had allowed itself to be tempted by revolutionary activity and so ran “ahead of itself, positing solutions which under the circumstances, degree of education and relations could not be immediately realized.” It had lost its way, abandoned by the fearful petit bourgeoisie while the peasantry was still besotted with the Napoleonic legend. Only the conservatives acted on their true interests. Prior to the uprisings, Marx and Engels had recognized the fear of disorder as the wedge that might divide the revolutionary working classes from the rest. But having broken with old-style social democracy, Marx was now inclined to blame the failure on the leadership of the radical movements.

“Men make their own history,” he observed in a famous passage from the
Eighteenth Brumaire
, “but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” This was a profound though simple strategic insight. Individuals worked to shape their own destinies but their choices were conditioned by the situations in which they found themselves and the way that they thought about the situation. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” At the moment when men started to engage in revolution, “creating something that did not exist before,” they suffered from a failure of imagination, looking back rather than forward. They “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.” The original French Revolution appeared first in the image of the Roman Republic and then the Roman Empire, while the Revolution of 1848 could only parody that of 1789. Somehow Marx urged the “social revolution of the nineteenth century” to find its “poetry” from the future rather than the past.

Marx himself was also guilty of this. As MacGuire notes, “it is difficult to escape the all-pervading influence of the French Revolution of 1789 on Marx's thought.”
¹⁵
It set a benchmark against which all else was judged: the drama of the storming of the Bastille, the subsequent revolutionary justice, and the readiness to rethink everything including the calendar and forms of greeting—to reconceive the world from the bottom up rather than the top down. This was both the prototype and archetype for a contemporary revolution. While trying to lead Cologne workers in 1848, Marx called the Jacobin Convention the “lighthouse of all revolutionary epochs.” During this period he constantly referred to the images and lessons of 1789, from the role of peasants to models of leadership and the likelihood of a European War. His strategy for the German revolution in 1848 was encapsulated by the phrase “the French Revolution radicalized.”
¹⁶
The
Eighteenth Brumaire
itself depends on the comparison.