The Peasant War in Germany
Frederick Engels
Written: Summer 1850, London;
Published: Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Revue;
Translated: by Moissaye J. Olgin in 1926 for International Publishers;
Transcribed: by director@marx.org, July 1995, online Jan 4 1996;
Proofed and Corrected: Mark Harris (2010), Dave Allinson (2016).
Marxists Internet Archive
Available online at:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/peasant-war-germany/index.htm
The 1848 uprisings in Germany put Engels in mind of the last great peasant rebellions of
the 1500s. As he would later write:
“The parallel between the German Revolution of 1525 and that of 1848–49 was too
obvious to be altogether ignored at that time.”
Engels demonstrates the failure of both these revolutions was largely attributable to the
bourgeois/burgerdom (and thus underscoring the modern need for an alliance between the
working proletariat and the working peasantry).
The Peasant War in Germany was the first history book to assert that the real motivating
force behind the Reformation and 16th-century peasant war was socio-economic (class
conflict) rather than “merely” religious.
The Peasant War in Germany
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Preface to the Second Edition (1870)
This work was written in London in the summer of 1850, under the vivid impression of the
counter-revolution that had just been completed. It appeared in 1850 in the fifth and sixth
issues of the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a political economic review edited by Karl Marx in
Hamburg. My political friends in Germany
desire to see it in book form, and I hereby fulfil
that desire, since, unfortunately, it still has the interest of timeliness.
The work does not pretend to present independently collected material. Quite the
contrary, all the material relating to the peasant revolts and to Thomas Muenzer has been
taken from Zimmermann
[1]
whose book, although showing gaps here and there, is still the
best presentation of the facts. Moreover, old Zimmermann enjoyed his subject. The same
revolutionary instinct which makes him here the advocate
of the oppressed classes, made
him later one of the best in the extreme left wing of Frankfurt.
If, nevertheless, the Zimmermann representation lacks internal coherence; if it does not
succeed in showing the religious and political controversies of that epoch as a reflection of
the class struggles that were taking place simultaneously; if it sees in the class struggles
only oppressors and oppressed, good and evil, and
the final victory of evil; if its insight
into social conditions which determined both the outbreak and the outcome of the struggle
is extremely poor, it was the fault of the time in which that book came into existence.
Nevertheless, for its time, and among the German idealistic works on history, it stands out
as written in a very realistic vein.
This book, while giving the historic course of the struggle only in its outlines,
undertakes to explain the origin of the peasant wars, the attitude
of the various parties
which appear in the war, the political and religious theories through which those parties
strove to make clear to themselves their position; and finally, the result of the struggle as
determined by the historical-social conditions of life, to show the political constitution of
Germany of that time,
the revolt against it; and to prove that the political and religious
theories were not the causes, but the result of that stage in the development of agriculture,
industry, land and waterways, commerce and finance, which then existed in Germany. This,
the only materialistic conception of history, originates, not from myself but from Marx, and
can be found in his works on the French Revolution of 1848–9,
published in the same
review, and in his
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
The parallel between the German Revolutions of 1525 and of 1848–9 was too obvious
to be left entirely without attention. However, together with an identity of events in both
cases, as for instance, the suppression of one local revolt after the other by the army of the
princes, together with a sometimes comic similitude in the behaviour of the city middle-
The Peasant War in Germany
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