Karl marx an Intellectual Biography Rolf Hosfeld

World War

At the time, Marx and Engels were deeply convinced that after the outbreak of the revolution, the German bourgeoisie’s transitory rule

would last a few years at most. “So just fight bravely on,” wrote En- gels at the end of January, 1848, “[i]n recompense whereof you shall be allowed to rule for a short time. You shall be allowed to dictate your laws, to bask in the rays of the majesty you have created, to spread your banquets in the halls of kings, and to take the beautiful princess to wife—but do not forget that the hangman stands at the door!”³² Shortly thereafter Engels himself sat at a dining table in the royal chambers of the Tuileries in Paris with a friend who was a former French refugee from Brussels. On 24 February the people of Paris had risen up, declaring the Republic. Those wounded in the street fighting were now recovering and smoking their pipes in the apartments of the overthrown Citizen King Louis Philippe, who had fled to England. Outside, to the sound of the Marseillaise, the National Guard and armed people were saluting the funeral proces- sion of a revolutionary worker who had died of his wounds.³³ At the same time, the author Fanny Lewald observed huge piles of torn-up cobblestones in the Parisian streets, as well as broken bread wagons and overturned omnibuses that had been used to build barricades in February. At the Palais Royal, now called the Palais National, she saw that all the windows and many of the window frames and scaffolds were broken, and the royal guardhouse lay in ruins, black- ened by smoke. The trees along the boulevards had been felled, well pipes and pillars had been torn down, and the tricolor flew every- where—on the theaters, over the church entries, and on all public buildings.³⁴

The year had begun with an uprising in Palermo, after which King Ferdinand of the two Sicilies had had to agree to a constitution on 29 January. The storm unleashed in the French capital in late February had completely different dimensions, however. With light- ning speed it engulfed all Europe, for the first time demonstrating to the world the great drama of the historical unity of European life. As Benedetto Croce once wrote, it was as if all the great impediments against which one had vainly struggled for half a century had sud- denly, with the sound of trumpets, lost all of their frightening magic, almost like the walls of Jericho.³⁵ The revolt against the coercive system of Europe’s Holy Alliance and the police state it entailed had already been heralded in the Communist Manifesto. Marx had predicted as early as 1844 that the revolution would begin with the crowing of the Gallic rooster. Since July 1847 the republican oppo- sition in France had been campaigning for the introduction of uni-

versal suffrage, a goal the Guizot regime strictly opposed. Then, with the prohibition of a voting-rights assembly on 22 February 1848, the situation escalated. The first street battles erupted on 23 February. In Paris, barricades were erected and the military’s advance on the Boulevard des Capucines resulted in over fifty fatalities and many wounded. An angry crowd laid the dead on wagons and paraded them through the city by torchlight, and the next day the uprising spread to all of Paris. On the evening of 24 February the Republic was proclaimed.

The news reached Brussels on 26 February. Thereupon King Leo- pold allowed the spread of a rumor that he was prepared to abdicate, should the people wish it. In reality, thought Marx, this was just a feint to get the Belgian democrats to refrain from any undertakings against such a benevolent monarch. And in fact, the Belgian au- thorities began compiling lists of persons who were to be arrested as potential disturbers of the public order. The first arrests took place in a hail of beating fists, kicks, and slashing sabers. The foreigners among those arrested were squeezed into prison wagons and brought to the French border.³⁶ The Belgian government, Marx noted, sud- denly positioned itself entirely on the side of the Holy Alliance. On 3 March, at five o’clock in the evening, Marx received the order to leave the kingdom within twenty-four hours. That night, after a meeting of the central authority of the Communist League, ten po- licemen arrested him at the Hotel Bois Sauvage, and the next morn- ing he and his wife Jenny found themselves in a dark cell of the city prison in the Rue de l’Amigo, not far from the Grand Place.³⁷ Es- corted to the border by the police, they arrived in Paris a short time later. Ferdinand Flocon, a democratic socialist and now a member of the provisional regime, had already sent news to the “brave and loyal Marx” on 3 March: “Tyranny has banished you, free France opens her doors to you.”³⁸ Marx felt that the martial reaction of the Belgian government would spark enthusiasm on Metternich’s part.³⁹ But his days, too, were numbered.

On 9 March, Engels’s report of tremendous news from Germany reached Marx in Paris—full-blown revolution in Nassau, an upris- ing in Munich because of the king’s mistress Lola Montez, freedom of the press and a National Guard in western Germany. The Peo- ple’s Assembly of Mannheim had given the signal on 27 February, issuing demands for the arming of the people and the free election of officers, freedom of the press, jury courts based on the English

model, and the immediate convocation of a German parliament. These then circulated throughout Germany as the so-called March Demands, to be once again presented in Karlsruhe to thousands of people who had come by train from Mannheim and Heidelberg, and likewise, on 4 March, in Wiesbaden. Again it was the railway— which the Communist Manifesto had already predicted would play the role of a future revolutionary locomotive⁴⁰—that allowed ten thousand people to gather in front of the ducal palace. Liberal so- called March regimes, mostly led by bourgeois persons, sprang up overnight throughout Germany. “If only Frederick William IV digs his heels in!” Engels wrote to Marx, referencing the all-important Prussian king. “Then all will be won and in a few months’ time we’ll have the German Revolution. If he only sticks to his feudal forms! But the devil only knows what this capricious and crazy individual will do.”⁴¹

First, however, the spark ignited a fire at the center of the Habsburg monarchy—shown over the last decade to be hardly capable of re- form—where the Metternich system had been exercised most rig- orously. On 13 March, the Parisian virus gripped its first German metropolis, Vienna, initiating a whole year of democratic revolu- tions in every state of the German Confederation and the bordering European countries. “The Paris Revolution struck the darkness of our situation like a lightning bolt,” Saxony’s legation councilor in Vienna, Carl Friedrich Graf Vitzthum von Eckstädt, wrote to his mother as early as 5 March: “The malaise is universal, und I only fear that it will not be perceived as such from above, as is neces- sary.”⁴² Eight days later, open insurrection prevailed in Vienna. “The gates are closed,” wrote Vitzthum von Eckstädt on 13 March: “Can- nons are positioned at the court, in front of the castle, in front of the state chancellery. Heavy patrols are moving through the streets. In some alleyways barricades are being erected. One hears shouted: Hurray! The constitution!”⁴³ At around four in the afternoon, a few thousand demonstrators gathered under the windows of the state chancellery and demanded the resignation of Klemens von Metter- nich, whom they loudly called Austria’s fox. That morning in the Ministerial Council, the chancellor had still opposed all concessions to the rebels and categorically denied the possibility of a revolution in Austria, even as shots were fired outside his window. All that, he insisted, was “only Jews, Poles, Italians, and the Swiss who are stir- ring up the people.”⁴⁴ But by evening, the once supremely powerful

police dictator of the European Restoration had to surrender all of his offices and leave in disguise through the back door of the Hof- burg, fleeing to London by way of Prague.

On this same evening of 13 March, initial disturbances were also reported from Berlin. Under tents in the Tiergarten, a people’s as- sembly demanded that the king establish a Ministry of Labor, for the people were being “oppressed by capitalists and usurers.”⁴⁵ The crown, however, summoned the military to the city, prompting initial skirmishes and a few isolated fatalities. On 15 March the news of Metternich’s fall reached Berlin, sending the court into a panic, according to the young doctor Rudolf Virchow in the Berlin Charité. Friedrich Wilhelm reacted as Engels had feared: he made concessions, agreeing to the abolition of censorship and the convo- cation of a unified Landtag on 2 April. “A proclamation was made in a grandiloquent style,” Virchow commented on this half-hearted royal act.⁴⁶ But as news of the proclamation spread, thousands of Berliners streamed enthusiastically to the city palace. Actually they were celebrating the onset of a new era in Prussia and wanted to thank the king for conceding; a loud hurrah initially greeted the king as he appeared on the palace balcony. But the mood among the demonstrators changed suddenly when they noticed the concen- trated power of the dragoons assembled in the palace square to pro- tect the king. Demands were made for the military to withdraw, and the atmosphere increasingly became so hostile that the uncertain king, suddenly feeling threatened by the change in the mood of the crowd, gave General von Moellendorff an ill-considered order to clear the square. The people who had in fact gathered to pay tribute to the king were violently driven from the square by saber-swinging dragoons. But this was not a crowd that could be dissolved in the usual manner. It was—as Friedrich Wilhelm should have known, in light of the disturbances in recent days and the events in Paris and Vienna—the beginning of a state crisis.

“From this moment the revolution began,” according to Rudolf Virchow, who actively participated: “Everything screamed betrayal and revenge. In a matter of hours all of Berlin was barricaded, and anyone who could get weapons armed himself.”⁴⁷ The big battles that would change Prussia for the foreseeable future broke out just before noon on 18 March 1848. Late in the evening at Alexanderplatz, after a heated battle that lasted many hours, the royal troops were forced to flee. It was a bright moonlit night, as the painter Adolph

Menzel reported, on which the lathe-turned rifles of the citizens’ marksman guilds often proved to be much more accurate than the simple commissioned rifles of the royal infantry.⁴⁸ A citizens’ brigade led by the veterinarian Urban captured General von Moellendorff and brought him to the marksman guild’s house, where he was com- pelled to sign an order to the Kaiser Franz and Alexander regiments to cease fire immediately and retreat to the barracks. A message sent to the king stated that if another shot was fired, the general would be shot dead immediately. Friedrich Wilhelm signed an appeal to his “dear Berliners” and promised to withdraw all troops. From this mo- ment forward, all shooting ceased.

On 22 March, the coffins of the fallen insurrectionists were laid out on a large scaffold in the Neue Kirche at the Gendarmenmarkt. Male choirs sang funeral marches and spiritual songs. Around ten o’clock a funeral procession moved toward the palace. On the bal- cony stood an adjutant with a black funeral flag, and across from him an officer of the citizens’ militia held the black-red-gold flag high. Each time a new procession of coffins passed, the king ap- peared, bareheaded, and remained standing until the procession had gone by. “His head shone from afar like a white spot,” noted Adolph Menzel, observing the almost surreal staffage with a painter’s keen eye for unreal aesthetic effects.⁴⁹ According to Menzel, it could well have been the most dreadful day of the king’s life. On the streets people filed by with black ribbons and black-red-gold cockades. The flag waved black-red-gold from the homes of citizens. A black-red- gold flag had even been affixed at the palace of the prince of Prussia, with an inscription reading “Property of the Entire Nation.”

The day before, the king had undertaken his first ride through Berlin since the revolution, accompanied by the prince, a few gener- als, and the ministers of his short-lived transitional government. Ev- eryone, including the king himself, wore black-red-gold armbands. A royal proclamation of the day announced that he had adopted “the old German colors,” establishing the legend that black, red, and gold were actually the colors of the Holy Roman Empire and its now-mythical Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa. In other words, during this period of critical emergency, the political romantic on the royal throne deftly tried to associate his backward-looking imperial idea, bound to the divine right of kings, with the symbols of the revolu- tion and thereby tacitly appropriate them for himself. As Engels had shrewdly guessed, it was almost impossible to anticipate the chess

moves the founder of the Christian state and the sacred Hohen- zollern tradition—“this capricious and crazy individual”—could still manage to make.

At this point Marx, who was living in a side street to the Bou- levard Beaumarchais in the vicinity of the Bastille, was initially completely occupied with keeping the German communists in Paris together. On 16 March, he wrote to Engels, the bourgeoisie there were again becoming atrociously uppish and reactionary, mais elle vera.⁵⁰ In his view a second armed conflict was imminent, this time be- tween the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and would decide the fate of the revolutionary movement across Europe; thus he called on the communists to remain in Paris and prepare for the coming battle. The central authority of the Communist League was reorganized, and on 10 March Marx became its formal president. Then came the news on 19 March from Vienna and on 20 March from Berlin. The first thousand printed copies of the Communist Manifesto had just been sent from London to Paris, and now four hundred Ger- man communists set off toward their old homeland, carrying these copies as well as the demands of the Communist Party in Germany. Marx himself left Paris at the beginning of April; traveling by way of Mainz, he arrived in Cologne on 10 March. Jenny followed with their two children, going first to Trier and three months later to the Rhine.

The demands of the Communist Party exceeded the March De- mands—discussed widely at the time throughout the land—in only a few points. Feudal estates, mines, and all means of transportation were to be nationalized; inheritance rights restricted; high progres- sive taxes introduced; nationalized work sites established; and the existence of all workers secured.⁵¹ Entirely in keeping with the ideas of Marx and Engels, the events in Germany, of course, did not pertain to an imminent socialist revolution but rather a bourgeois revolution in which it was nonetheless desirable from the outset to embed certain demands that would necessarily develop a dynamic extending beyond the demands themselves. This was the only way, in their view, to foster the desired radicalization and ultimately the shift into a proletarian revolution. Thus they decisively rejected independent political actions by German workers for the time be- ing. But such actions did exist. “The workers are beginning to bestir themselves a little, still in a very crude way, but as a mass. They at once formed coalitions,” Engels informed Marx from Wuppertal in

mid April, “But to us that can only be a hindrance.”⁵² Such actions took place in Cologne as well.

On 3 March, long before the street battles in Berlin, a few thou- sand people had gathered at Cologne’s Rathausplatz and a delega- tion forced its way into the town hall meeting room to present the March Demands. Its leaders were communists named Andreas Gottschalk (a doctor for the poor), August von Willich, and Fried- rich Anneke (both former Prussian lieutenants). The main points were the right to work and free child education, demands that were decidedly popular among the masses of paupers in the city. A battal- ion of the 16th Cologne Regiment dispersed the crowd around nine o’clock that evening, killing a few people and wounding others with bayonets. Gottschalk, Willich, and Anneke wound up in prison,⁵³ although two weeks later they would again be free because of the Berlin revolution. After these events, a certain balance of power prevailed in Cologne between the city militia—subject to the local democrats—and the Prussian garrison. Gottschalk founded a work- ers’ association that soon included eight thousand members, and in mid May he left the Communist League, having fallen out with Marx over the question, in particular, of the elections to the Prus- sian parliament and the Frankfurt National Assembly. He was also disturbed by Marx’s short-lived efforts—entirely in keeping with his concept of a dynamic revolution—to get involved in the founding of a democratic association.

At first Marx even entertained certain hopes that left-leaning circles of the wealthy bourgeoisie would support his new newspaper project, which would be called the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. He even had Engels approach his old man in Barmen, but Engels responded that there was “damned little prospect” for the newspaper’s shares in those circles. Basically, he informed Marx, “even these radical bour- geois here see us as their future main enemies and have no inten- tion of putting into our hands weapons which we would very shortly turn against themselves”⁵⁴—which was indeed the case. Otto Cam- phausen, the brother of one of Marx’s former supporters from the days of the Rheinische Zeitung, had warned early on of the “danger of complete mob rule”;⁵⁵ Gustav Mevissen thought that one must “seize the moment” and agree to a “constitution with the crown.”⁵⁶ In March 1848 they felt that they had achieved the aim that, five years earlier, had spurred them to create the Rheinische Zeitung as a liberal oppositional newspaper with Marx as the chief editor. On

29 March, Ludolf Camphausen became the minister president and David Hansemann the finance minister in Prussia. No contribu- tion to the project could be expected from them now—or from anyone else. Marx had reckoned on amassing thirty thousand Ta- ler in share capital but barely managed to raise thirteen thousand. He had to finance his new paper largely through an advance on his inheritance.

The Neue Rheinische Zeitung conceived of itself as an “organ of democracy.” But at no time did it see itself as a newspaper for Frankfurt’s parliamentary Left; rather, it considered its primary task to be to journalistically monitor these democrats from its own political viewpoint. In certain respects, this viewpoint was a pro- visional Girondism from a self-enlightened Montagne perspective that had learned above all that striking too soon could be a ruinous mistake—as could retreating too soon. Entirely in accordance with the dynamic principles of the Communist Manifesto, it attempted in the movement of the present to represent and take care of the future.⁵⁷ As understood by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, for reasons of the his- torical sequence of events the current movement happened to be a bourgeois-democratic revolution in the countries of the German Confederation. This was also why the newspaper ran so little report- age on the concurrent developments of the workers’ movement in Germany, which in 1848 were in fact quite significant.⁵⁸

Schapper and Moll stretched a web of communist workers’ as- sociations across the Rhineland and Westphalia. Stefan Born, a for- mer typesetter for the Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung and an old member of the Communist League, found himself in Berlin shortly after the outbreak of the revolution. There he founded the Workers’ Brother- hood, which soon boasted a substantial membership of twelve thou- sand workers in the large cities of Prussia and Saxony as well as in Franken and Wurttemberg; it was thus the most important workers’ association on the continent.⁵⁹ The Berlin proletariat was revolu- tionary through and through, Born reported to Marx in early May, and he was doing his best to keep it from engaging in “useless riots.” Marx would have agreed, but he was bothered by Born’s penchant for strike movements, state-assisted reforms, and projects involving unions and production cooperatives when what really mattered was using political victories to further the breakthrough of the dynamic revolutionary process in Germany and Europe. In Marx’s concep- tion, the downfall of the monarchies and a bourgeois transition

period would by necessity end with the rule of the proletariat.⁶⁰ At that point, the minor everyday problems the Workers’ Brotherhood bandied about would no longer play a role anyway. With respect to the Communist League as such, wrote Born in the same letter, he had nothing to report: it seemed to have dissolved.⁶¹ Indeed, as Marx later wrote, the league’s activities had almost ceased completely because, as he saw it, there were more effective ways available to pursue his goals⁶²—above all, editing the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, as he wanted to drive the European revolution forward through its journalistic stance.

But Cologne was not Paris. From there it was hardly possible to have a national effect. Although the paper was later celebrated as by far the best political newspaper of the 1840s, it was only region- ally significant. What had worked to the advantage of its prede- cessor—namely, its concentration on the Rhineland—very much limited the newspaper’s effective radius in real revolutionary times. In all likelihood Marx was orienting himself along the lines of large Parisian publications like Réforme and others, which were backed by actual groups that played real roles in the National Assembly and government. Marx, however, did not have any connections with the radical Left in the Palatinate and Baden, or even with the left- wing representative Ludwig Simon in his hometown of Trier, and he viewed Stefan Born’s activities, as already mentioned, with consid- erable suspicion.

To be sure, he had correspondents and emissaries from the Com- munist League milieu, such as the loyal Wilhelm Wolff in Breslau.⁶³ But in principle, during the revolution the Neue Rheinische Zeitung remained an agent of political philosophy that provided critical commentary on contemporary events along the lines of the prin- ciples of the Communist Manifesto. It appeared fourteen days after the first meeting of the parliaments convened for constitutional de- liberations in Frankfurt and Berlin, and they were the subject of its first critique. For example: “The Assembly at Frankfurt is engaged in parliamentary school exercises and leaves it to the governments to act.” But a constituent National Assembly, according to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, must above all be “an active, revolutionarily ac- tive assembly.”⁶⁴ A left-wing minority led by the South Germans Hecker and Struve had already made such demands in the Frank- furt preliminary parliament; when they failed, Hecker—in a de- cidedly putsch-like fashion—proclaimed the German Republic in

Constance in mid April. The whole thing ended in a debacle. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung criticized the democratic party for abandon- ing itself to the intoxicating delirium of its first victory, noting that a proclamation was not a realization. What really mattered now was that it should understand its position.⁶⁵ Germany was difficult. After a revolution, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung announced, every provi- sional state would require a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that.⁶⁶ With this kind of reminder of the comité du salut public, however, Marx remained a lonely voice in the German territories. Therefore he initially placed all his hopes on a revival of the revolu- tion in France.

By 22 June, this point had been reached. In a matter of hours, workers in the east of Paris erected over fifteen hundred barricades, generally along the axis stretching from Rue Saint-Denis to Rue Saint-Jacques. This was a response to the brutal dissolution of the National Workshops, through which February’s provisional regime had attempted to solve the problem of unemployment. After the bourgeois republicans prevailed in the late-April elections to the National Assembly, this coalition ceased to exist. On 22 June, the National Guard in the east joined the insurgents, while the Na- tional Guard in the west, together with the army, opposed them. The second armed conflict, which Marx had expected in March, was imminent. Reporting “the latest news received from Paris,” on 27 June the Neue Rheinische Zeitung wrote:
Paris bathed in blood; the insurrection growing into the greatest revolution that has ever taken place, into a revolution of the prole- tariat against the bourgeoisie. Three days which sufficed for the July revolution and the February revolution are insufficient for the colos- sal contours of this June revolution, but the victory of the people is more certain than ever. The French bourgeoisie has dared to do what the French kings never dared—it has itself cast the die. This second act of the French revolution is only the beginning of the European tragedy.⁶⁷
Never again in his entire life would Marx find himself in such a state of revolutionary euphoria as on this day.

Marx saw the June revolution as the first that actually “divided all society into two large hostile armed camps”⁶⁸—exactly as the Com- munist Manifesto had predicted. Yet, contrary to Marx’s hopes that day, the uprising failed to bring about the defeat of the bourgeoisie.

The republican general and appointed military dictator Cavaignac declared a state of emergency and had artillery brought to Notre Dame; he even entertained the idea of setting the entire quarter ablaze. Five thousand insurgents were killed during the battles; fif- teen hundred were summarily executed; twenty-two thousand were arrested and in large part deported to Algeria. With extreme sever- ity, the “fraternité” of the February Days was drowned in blood.

Looking back, Marx came to understand that these days had de- cided the fate of the European Revolution of 1848. “If the June in- surrection raised the self-assurance of the bourgeoisie all over the Continent, and caused it to league itself openly with the feudal monarchy against the people,” he wrote in 1850, “who was the first victim of this alliances? [sic] The continental bourgeoisie itself.”⁶⁹ This diagnosis rings true, if one takes into account that in the Ger- man states and Habsburg monarchy almost all of the structures of monarchic-military domination survived the commotion of the revolution intact. Later, in 1852, Marx maintained that the June uprising had revealed to everyone that the bourgeois republic in re- ality only meant the unlimited despotism of one class over other classes; in any case, he continued, the republic was only the political form of the revolutionising of bourgeois society and by no means its conservative form of life.⁷⁰

During the June Days of 1848, Cavaignac moved against the Parisian workers with greater brutality that even Windisch-Graetz would dare use against the insurgents in Prague or Radetsky against the rebels in northern Italy. Marx believed only two alternatives re- mained: radical revolution or complete counterrevolution. Prior to 1848, he noted, revolution had meant the overthrow of the form of government; now, after the events of June, it could only mean the overthrow of bourgeois society.⁷¹ After a battle like that of June 1848, wrote the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, “only terrorism is still possible,” conducted by one side or the other.⁷² Marx now came under pres- sure to radicalize, something that Saint-Just had referred to during the French Revolutionary Wars as the consequence of the “force des choses,” a force arising from the circumstances themselves in the struggle of life and death.

Marx developed an affinity for actionism. This included the Neue Rheinische Zeitung’s constant propagandistic call for a world war against Russia, the bulwark of the European reaction, modeled on the French “levée en masse” of 1792. Eric Hobsbawm once described

this revolutionary war as the first total war in history, for even then it had been a question of either the revolution’s total victory, or its utter defeat and the victory of the counterrevolution.⁷³ Revolu- tionary Germany’s war could only be a war against Russia, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung declared on 12 July 1848—a war in which Ger- many could “cleanse herself of her past sins” and muster the courage to also defeat her own autocrats.⁷⁴ By “past sins,” Marx meant the combined effort with Russia and Britain to eliminate Napoleon, for had French legislation and administration been employed back then to provide the Germans with a solid basis for their national unifica- tion, they would have been spared thirty-three years of humiliation and tyranny.⁷⁵

On New Year’s Eve 1848 in Cologne, Marx and the author Ferdi- nand Freiligrath were invited to have dinner with Mr. Keene from Britain’s Daily News. They discussed the past year’s events and raised their glasses to the revolution in Vienna; to the October uprising, with its marked proletarian characteristics and its suppression by Prince Windisch-Graetz and the Croatian General von Jellachich; and to the Hungarian insurrection led by Lajos Kossuth. After the events in Vienna, Marx had remarked on the cannibalism of the coun- terrevolution in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, expressing the convic- tion that the only way to shorten, simplify, and concentrate the murderous death throes of the old society was revolutionary terror.⁷⁶ On this New Year’s Eve they still felt that the bloody suppression of the Viennese was only a partial defeat within the grand European drama.⁷⁷

On the next day, 1 January 1849, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ar- ticulated for its readers the scenario of an entire world of enemies:
The defeat of the working class in France and the victory of the French bourgeoisie was at the same time a victory of East over West, the defeat of civilisation by barbarism. The suppression of the Ruma- nians by the Russians and their tools, the Turks, began in Wallachia; Croats, Pandours, Czechs, Serezhans and similar rabble throttled German liberty in Vienna, and the Tsar is now omnipresent in Eu- rope. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie in France, the triumph of the French working class, and the liberation of the working class in gen- eral is therefore the rallying-cry of European liberation. But England, the country that turns whole nations into her proletarians, that takes the whole world within its immense embrace, that has already once defrayed the cost of a European Restoration, the country in which

class contradictions have reached their most acute and shameless form—England seems to be the rock against which the revolutionary waves break, the country where the new society is stifled even in the womb.⁷⁸

Precisely in England, where more than anywhere else all the neces- sary conditions obtained, realizing the revolutionary cause was the most difficult. Therefore the revolution had to be induced through violence from the outside. Old England could be overthrown only through world war, the sole path to creating the conditions in which the Chartists—the party of the organized English workers—could effectively rise up against their powerful oppressors. According to Marx, this war would be waged in Canada and Italy, in India and Prussia, in Africa and along the Danube. Revolutionary rising of the French working class, world war—thus read the table of contents for the year 1849.⁷⁹

World war against Russia and England was indeed much more than an unrestrained “puer robustus, sed malitiosus.” This was not to involve hanging aristocrats from streetlights or decapitating kings. Rather, the revolutionary terrorism of the old revolutionary wars was to be reintroduced on a more modern, globally expanded level. What kind of Super-Napoleon would bring this about?

From the perspective of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the war against Denmark in the fall of 1848 over Schleswig and Holstein was “the first revolutionary war waged by Germany,” and it had the newspaper’s explicit support. Marx and Engels thought anyway that Scandinavianism was a “brutal, sordid, piratical” business, so they also perceived this war as an armed conflict waged with the “right of civilisation as against barbarism, of progress as against stability,” and to that extent legitimated by the final judgment of history.⁸⁰ As part of the German Confederation subject to the Danish monarchy, Schleswig-Holstein was governed by a revolutionary provisional ter- ritorial regime when on 21 March 1848, after an annexation resolu- tion in Copenhagen, Danish troops marched into the region. On 12 April, the German states declared a confederate war led by Prus- sia against Denmark, which turned out, however, to be incredibly complicated and ended on 26 August with a cease-fire in Malmö, negotiated unilaterally by Prussia. The Frankfurt National Assem- bly rejected the cease-fire on 5 September, and only after protracted negotiations and two votes was the assembly narrowly convinced to accept the agreement. Had it not, the war Marx and Engels so

fervently desired with Russia and England (without any realistic appreciation of the comparative strengths) might presumably have come to pass. Imperialistic undertones colored the debates over Schleswig-Holstein in the National Assembly; especially the speak- ers on the Left were explicitly nationalistic. Jakob Venedey from Cologne spoke of the “humiliation” that would be imposed upon Germany, as had occurred with the Peace of Westphalia; it could be avoided only if one did not fear “going to war with the entire world to become a unified Germany.” Carl Vogt, later a close friend of Marx, reminded the delegates of the French Revolution and the national war declared by the Convention.⁸¹

Meanwhile, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung struck a completely new chord in the debate by addressing the topic of peoples with and without history. Marx and Engels appropriated this distinction from Hegel, who had claimed, with respect to so-called peoples without history, that they had “no movement or development to exhibit.”⁸² The real capital of Denmark, Engels insisted for example, was not Copenhagen but rather Hamburg, for within the realm of the Dan- ish crown the German cultural element that would otherwise be missing from the “primitive” Scandinavian nation could only be found in Altona.⁸³ Later, when “Croatian freedom and order” under the command of General Jellachich raged in Vienna with “arson, rape, [and] looting,”⁸⁴ judgment was pronounced collectively against Croatia and Slovenia, nations that had “long ago degenerated and were devoid of all historical power of action,” unable to accomplish anything apart from supporting the Austrian reaction.⁸⁵ In the next world war, according to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, not only reac- tionary classes and dynasties would vanish from the earth but also “entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.”⁸⁶

Engels especially held the view that the Slavs—and here he always explicitly excluded the Poles, even wanting to grant their republic the Baltic coastline all the way to Riga—were everywhere the major tools of the counterrevolution, born “oppressors of all revolutionary nations.”⁸⁷ Ultimately, he called for an “inexorable life-and-death struggle” against the “Slavs who betray the revolution; an annihilat- ing fight and ruthless terror—not in the interests of Germany, but in the interests of the revolution!”⁸⁸ These were more than simply alarming words, even if they are not over-interpreted in light of the experiences of the twentieth century. By annihilation Engels largely meant cultural assimilation, though certainly he could well imag-

ine deploying drastic, violent measures to execute this cultural en- terprise. Incidentally, power-political considerations doubtless also played an important role. Croatia and Slovenia, thought the Pan- German Engels and Marx along with him, must by all means be kept from cutting off German and Hungarian access to the Adriatic.⁸⁹ Such was the minimum tribute that “people without history” had to pay to the historical revolutionary nations.

This was the almost inevitable verdict of what Hegel in a Chris- tian tradition called the World Court, one that could also be ren- dered elsewhere. “Or is it perhaps unfortunate,” asked Friedrich Engels, “that splendid California has been taken away from the lazy Mexicans who could not do anything with it?”⁹⁰ Later the theme of peoples without history even helped Marx justify colonialism. The question, he wrote in 1853 in the New York Tribune, is “not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to In- dia conquered by the Briton. England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia.”⁹¹ This strange revolutionary variant of the dogma of “the white man’s burden” was understandable only from the perspective of the conception of history in Marx’s historical ma- terialism, in which only the titanic efforts of the British bourgeoisie could one day include a country like India in the process of the pro- letarian world revolution.

In any case, the conflict between “advanced” and “reactionary” nations contributed in no small way to the failure of the Euro- pean revolution. The “defection from God,” as Friedrich Wilhelm IV described the events beginning in March 1848 in a letter to a confidant, was almost over by the spring of 1849. That same let- ter featured what would soon become a common phrase: “The only thing that helps against democrats are soldiers.”⁹² The German Rev- olution ended with the capitulation of the Rastatt fortress on 23 July 1849. So began the long years of systematic reactionary politics and repressive police measures that—classically represented by the main character Diederich Hessling in Heinrich Mann’s Der Unter- tan—left deep traces in the German mentality. And in France, Louis Napoléon’s coup ended the brief years of the Republic in 1851.

This provided Marx with occasion to draw a preliminary conclu- sion about the revolutionary years. Bourgeois revolutions like those

of the eighteenth century, he maintained, moved dramatically—set in sparking diamonds—but were short-lived and inevitably ended with a hangover of prosaic circumstances. In contrast, the proletar- ian revolutions of the nineteenth century, which created their poetry out of the future, constantly criticized themselves until they attained their objectives. By this Marx meant the real crises of the revolu- tionary courses of action, not just theoretical criticism. Against the backdrop of recent events, this also applied to the bloody criticism wrought by weapons—and the defeats that followed, like the rout Cavaignac’s troops delivered to the insurgent Parisian proletariat in June 1848. Proletarian revolutions derided with cruel thoroughness all the half-measures of their first attempts, until at some point there arose a situation that made all turning back impossible, and the condi- tions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!⁹³ It was an epic scenario of a devouring and purifying purgatory, almost Shakespearian, with the masses as heroes and villains. The French Revolution of 1789 seemed in contrast like a sober tragedy by Racine.