1. F. Engels. Revolution and Counter- Revolution in Germany
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN GERMANYl Written in August 1851-September 1852
Signed: Karl Marx
I. Germany at the Outbreak of the Revolution
[New-York Daily Tribune, JSb.3282, October 25, 1851]
The first act of the revolutionary drama on the Continent of Europe has closed. The "powers that were" before the hurricane of 1848, are again "the powers that be," and the more or less popular rulers of a day, provisional governors, triumvirs, dictators, with their tail of representatives, civil commissioners, military commissioners, prefects, judges, generals, officers and soldiers, are thrown upon foreign snores, and "transported beyond the seas" to England or America, there to form new governments "in partibus infidelium,"a
European committees, central committees, national committees, and to announce their advent with proclamations quite as solemn as those of any less imaginary potentates.
A more signal defeat than that undergone by the continental revolutionary party—or rather parties—upon all points of the line of battle, cannot be imagined. But what of that? Has not the struggle of the British middle classes for their social and political supremacy embraced forty-eight, that of the French middle classes forty years of unexampled struggles? And was their triumph ever nearer than at the very moment when restored monarchy thought itself more firmly settled than ever? The times of that superstition which attributed revolutions to the ill-will of a few agitators, have long passed away. Everyone knows nowadays, that wherever there is a revolutionary convulsion, there must be some social want in the background, which is prevented by outworn institutions from satisfying itself. The want may not yet be felt as strongly, as
In partibus infidelium—literally: in parts inhabited by infidels. The words are added to the title of Roman Catholic bishops appointed to purely nominal dioceses in non-Christian countries. In the figurative sense, they mean "not really existing".— Ed.
2-2076 generally, as might insure immediate success, but every attempt at forcible repression will only bring it forth stronger and stronger, until it bursts its fetters. If, then, we have been beaten, we have nothing else to do but to begin again from the beginning. And, fortunately, the probably very short interval of rest which is allowed us between the close of the first and the beginning of the second act of the movement, gives us time for a very necessary piece of work: the study of the causes that necessitated both the late outbreak, and its defeat; causes that are not to be sought for in the accidental efforts, talents, faults, errors or treacheries of some of the leaders, but in the general social state and conditions of existence of each of the convulsed nations. That the sudden movements of February and March, 1848, were not the work of single individuals, but spontaneous, irresistible manifestations of national wants and necessities, more or less clearly understood, but very distinctly felt by numerous classes in every country, is a fact recognised everywhere; but when you inquire into the causes of the counter-revolutionary successes, there you are met on every hand with the ready reply that it was Mr. This or Citizen That, who "betrayed" the people. Which reply may be very true, or not, according to circumstances, but under no circumstances does it explain anything—not even show how it came to pass that the "people" allowed themselves to be thus betrayed. And what a poor charice stands a political party whose entire stock-in-trade consists in a knowledge of the solitary fact, that Citizen So-and-so is not to be trusted.
The inquiry into, and the exposition of, the causes both of the revolutionary convulsion and its suppression, are, besides, of paramount importance in a historical point of view. All these petty personal quarrels and recriminations—all these contradictory assertions, that it was Marrast, or Ledru-Rollin, or Louis Blanc, or any other member of the Provisional Government, or the whole of them, that steered the revolution amidst the rocks upon which it foundered—of what interest can they be, what light can they afford to the American or Englishman, who observed all these various movements from a distance too great to allow of his distinguishing any of the details of operations? No man in his senses will ever believe that eleven men,[3] mostly of very indifferent capacity, either for good or evil, were able in three months to ruin a nation of thirty-six millions, unless those thirty-six millions saw as little of their way before them as the eleven did. But how it came to pass, that these thirty-six millions were at once called upon to decide for themselves
Members of the French Provisional Government.— Ed.
which way to go, although partly groping in dim twilight, and how then they got lost and their old leaders were for a moment allowed to return to their leadership, that is just the question.
If then, we try to lay before the readers of The Tribune[2] the causes which, while they necessitated the German Revolution of 1848, led quite as inevitably to its momentary repression in 1849 and '50, we shall not be expected to give a complete history of the events as they passed in that country. Later events, and the judgment of coming generations, will decide what portion of that confused mass of seemingly accidental, incoherent and incongruous facts is to form a part of the world's history. The time for such a task has not yet arrived; we must confine ourselves to the limits of the possible, and be satisfied, if we can find rational causes, based upon undeniable facts, to explain the chief events, the principal vicissitudes of that movement, and to give us a clue as to the direction which the next and perhaps not very distant outbreak will impart to the German people.
And firstly, what was the state of Germany at the outbreak of the revolution?
The composition of the different classes of the people which form the groundwork of every political organization was, in Germany, more complicated than in any other country. While in England and France feudalism was entirely destroyed, or at least reduced, as in the former country, to a few insignificant forms, by a powerful and wealthy middle class, concentrated in large towns, and particularly in the Capital, the feudal nobility in Germany had retained a great portion of their ancient privileges. The feudal system of tenure was prevalent almost everywhere. The Lords of the Land had even retained the jurisdiction over their tenants. Deprived of their political privileges, of the right to control the Princes, they had preserved almost all their medieval supremacy over the peasantry of their demesnes, as well as their exemption from taxes. Feudalism was more flourishing in some localities than in others, but nowhere except on the left bank of the Rhine was it entirely destroyed.[3] This feudal nobility, then extremely numerous and partly very wealthy, was considered, officially, the first "Order" in the country. It furnished the higher Government officials, it almost exclusively officered the army.
The bourgeoisie of Germany was by far not as wealthy and concentrated as that of France or England. The ancient manufactures of Germany had been destroyed by the introduction of steam, and by the rapidly extending supremacy of English manufactures; the more modern manufactures, started under the Napoleonic
2* continental system,[4] established in other parts of the country, did not compensate for the loss of the old ones, nor suffice to create a manufacturing interest strong enough to force its wants upon the notice of Governments jealous of every extension of non-noble wealth and power. If France carried her silk manufactures victorious through fifty years of revolutions and wars, Germany, during the same time, all but lost her ancient linen trade. The manufacturing districts, besides, were few and far between; situated far inland, and using, mostly, foreign, Dutch or Belgian, ports for their imports and exports, they had little or no interest in common with the large seaport towns on the North Sea and the Baltic; they were, above all, unable to create large manufacturing and trading centers, such as Paris and Lyons, London and Manchester. The causes of this backwardness of German manufactures were manifold, but, two will suffice to account for it: the unfavorable geographical situation of the country, at a distance from the Atlantic, which had become the great highway for the world's trade, and the continuous wars in which Germany was involved, and which were fought on her soil, from the sixteenth century to the present day. It was this want of numbers, and particularly of anything like concentrated numbers, which prevented the German Middle Classes from attaining that political supremacy which the English bourgeois has enjoyed ever since 1688, and which the French conquered in 1789. And yet, ever since 1815, the wealth, and with the wealth, the political importance of the middle class in Germany, was continually growing. Governments were, although reluctantly, compelled to bow at least to its more immediate material interests. It may everf be truly said, that from 1815 to 1830, and from 1832 to 1840, every particle of political influence, which, having been allowed to the middle class in the Constitutions of the smaller States, was again wrested from them during the above two periods of political reaction—that every such particle was compensated for by some more practical advantage allowed to them. Every political defeat of the middle class drew after it a victory on the field of commercial legislation. And, certainly, the Prussian Protective Tariff of 1818, and the formation of the Zollverein,[5] were worth a good deal more to the traders and manufacturers of Germany than the equivocal right of expressing, in the chambers of some diminutive dukedom, their want of confidence in ministers who laughed at their votes. Thus, with growing wealth and extending trade, the bourgeoisie soon arrived at a stage where it found the development of its most important interests checked by the political constitution of the country—by its random division among thirty-six princes with conflicting tendencies and caprices; by the feudal fetters upon agriculture and the trade connected with it; by the prying superintendence to which an ignorant and presumptu-ous bureaucracy subjected all its transactions. At the same time, the extension and consolidation of the Zollverein, the general introduction of steam communication, the growing competition in the home trade, brought the commercial classes of the different States and Provinces closer together, equalized their interests, centralized their strength. The natural consequence was the passing of the whole mass of them into the camp of the Liberal Opposition, and the gaining of the first serious struggle of the German middle class for political power. This change may be dated from 1840, from the moment when the bourgeoisie of Prussia assumed the lead of the middle-class movement of Germany. We shall hereafter revert to this Liberal Opposition movement of 1840-47.
The great mass of the nation, which neither belonged to the nobility nor to the bourgeoisie, consisted, in the towns, of the small trading and shopkeeping class and the working people, and in the country, of the peasantry.
The small trading and shopkeeping class is exceedingly numerous in Germany, in consequence of the stunted development which the large capitalists and manufacturers, as a class, have had in that country. In the larger towns it forms almost the majority of the inhabitants; in the smaller ones it entirely predominates, from the absence of wealthier competitors for influence. This class, a most important one in every modern body politic, and in all modern revolutions, is still more important in Germany, where during the recent struggles it generally played the decisive part. Its intermediate position between the class of larger capitalists, traders and manufacturers, the bourgeoisie, properly so called, and the proletarian or industrial class, determines its character. Aspiring to the position of the first, the least adverse turn of fortune hurls the individuals of this class down into the ranks of the second. In monarchical and feudal countries the custom of the court and aristocracy becomes necessary to its existence; the loss of this custom might ruin a great part of it. In the smaller towns, a military garrison, a county government, a court of law with its followers, form very often the base of its prosperity; withdraw these and down go the shopkeepers, the tailors, the shoemakers, the joiners. Thus, eternally tossed about between the hope of entering the ranks of the wealthier class, and the fear of being reduced to the state of proletarians or even paupers; between the hope of promoting their interests by conquering a share in the direction of public affairs, and the dread of rousing, by ill-timed opposition, the ire of a Government which disposes of their very existence, because it has the power of removing their best customers; possessed of small means, the insecurity of the possession of which is in the inverse ratio of the amount; this class is extremely vacillating in its views. Humble and crouchingly submissive under a powerful feudal or monarchical government, it turns to the side of Liberalism when the middle class is in the ascendent; it becomes seized with violent Democratic fits as soon as the middle class has secured its own supremacy, but falls back into the abject despondency of fear as soon as the class below itself, the proletarians, attempt an independent movement. We shall, by and by, see this class, in Germany, pass alternately from one of these stages to the other.
The working class in Germany is, in its social and political development, as far behind that of England and France as the German bourgeoisie is behind the bourgeoisie of those countries. Like master, like man. The evolution of the conditions of existence for a numerous, strong, concentrated and intelligent proletarian class, goes hand in hand with the development of the conditions of existence for a numerous, wealthy, concentrated and powerful middle class. The working-class movement itself never is independent, never is of an exclusively proletarian character, until all the different factions of the middle class, and particularly its most progressive faction, the large manufacturers, have conquered political power and remodelled the State according to their wants. It is then that the inevitable conflict between the employer and the employed becomes imminent and cannot be adjourned any longer; that the working class can no longer be put off with delusive hopes and promises never to be realized; that the great problem of the nineteenth century, the abolition of the proletariat, is at last brought forward fairly and in its proper light. Now, in Germany, the mass of the working class were employed, not by those modern manufacturing lords of which Great Britain furnishes such splendid specimens, but by small tradesmen whose entire manufacturing system is a mere relic of the Middle Ages. And as there is an enormous difference between the great cotton lord and the petty cobbler or master tailor, so there is a corresponding distance from the wide-awake factory operative of modern manufacturing Babylons to the bashful journeyman tailor or cabinet-maker of a small country town, who lives in circumstances and works after a plan very little different from those of the like sort of men some five hundred years ago. This general absence of modern conditions of life, of modern modes of industrial production, of course was accompanied by a pretty equally general absence of modern ideas, and it is therefore not to be wondered at if, at the outbreak of the revolution, a large part of the working classes should cry out for the immediate re-establishment of guilds and medieval privileged trades' corporations. Yet, from the manufacturing districts, where the modern system of production predominated, and in consequence of the facilities of intercommuni-cation and mental development afforded by the migratory life of a large number of the working men, a strong nucleus formed itself whose ideas about the emancipation of their class were far clearer and more in accordance with existing facts and historical necessities; but they were a mere minority. If the active movement of the middle classes may be dated from 1840, that of the working class commences its advent by the insurrections of the Silesian and Bohemian[3]
factory operatives in 1844,[6] and we shall soon have occasion to pass in review the different stages through which this movement passed.
Lastly, there was the great class of the small farmers, the peasantry, which, with its appendix of farm-laborers, constitutes a considerable majority of the entire nation. But this class again subdivided itself into different fractions. There were, firstly, the more wealthy farmers, what is called in Germany Gross- and
Mittel-Bauern, proprietors of more or less extensive farms, and each of them commanding the services of several agricultural laborers. This class, placed between the large untaxed feudal landowners and the smaller peasantry and farm-laborers, for obvious reasons found in an alliance with the anti-feudal middle class of the towns its most natural political course. Then there were, secondly, the small freeholders, predominating in the Rhine country, where feudalism had succumbed before the mighty strokes of the great French Revolution. Similar independent small freeholders also existed here and there in other provinces, where they had succeeded in buying off the feudal charges formerly due upon their lands. This class, however, was a class of freeholders by name only, their property being generally mortgaged to such an extent, and under such onerous conditions, that not the peasant, but the usurer who had advanced the money, was the real landowner. Thirdly, the feudal tenants, who could not be easily turned out of their holdings, but who had to pay a perpetual rent, or to perform in perpetuity a certain amount of labor in favor of the lord of the manor. Lastly, the agricultural laborers, whose condition, in many large farming concerns, was exactly that of the same class in England, and who, in all cases, lived and died poor, ill-fed, and the slaves of their employers. These three latter classes of the agricultural population,
Czech.— Ed.
the small freeholders, the feudal tenants, and the agricultural laborers, never troubled their heads much about politics before the revolution, but it is evident that this event must have opened to them a new career, full of brilliant prospects. To every one of them the revolution offered advantages, and the movement once fairly engaged in, it was to be expected that, each in their turn, they would join it. But at the same time it is quite as evident, and equally borne out by the history of all modern countries, that the agricultural population, in consequence of its dispersion over a great space, and of the difficulty of bringing about an agreement among any considerable portion of it, never can attempt a successful independent movement; they require the initiatory impulse of the more concentrated, more enlightened, more easily moved people of the towns.
The preceding short sketch of the most important of the classes, which in their aggregate formed the German nation at the outbreak of the recent movements, will already be sufficient to explain a great part of the incoherence, incongruence and apparent contradiction which prevailed in that movement. When interests so varied, so conflicting, so strangely crossing each other, are brought into violent collision; when these contending interests in every district, every province are mixed in different proportions; when, above all, there is no great center in the country, no London, no Paris, the decisions of which, by their weight, may supersede the necessity of fighting out the same quarrel over and over again in every single locality; what else is to be expected but that the contest will dissolve itself into a mass of unconnected struggles, in which an enormous quantity of blood, energy and capital is spent, but which for all that remain without any decisive results?
The political dismemberment of Germany into three dozen of more or less important principalities is equally explained by this confusion and multiplicity of the elements which compose the nation, and which again vary in every locality. Where there are no common interests there can be no unity of purpose, much less of action. The German Confederation, it is true, was declared everlastingly indissoluble; yet the Confederation and its organ, the Diet, never represented German unity.[7] The very highest pitch to which centralization was ever carried in Germany was the establishment of the Zollverein; by this the States on the North Sea were also forced into a Customs Union of their own,[8] Austria remaining wrapped up in her separate prohibitive tariff. Germany had the satisfaction to be, for all practical purposes, divided between three independent powers only, instead of between thirty-six. Of course, the paramount supremacy of the Russian Czar, as established in 1814, underwent no change on this account.
Having drawn these preliminary conclusions from our premises, we shall see, in our next, how the aforesaid various classes of the German people were set into movement one after the other, and what character this movement assumed on the outbreak of the French Revolution of 1848.
London, September, 1851
Endnotes
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[2] The Tribune is short for the New-York Daily Tribune. Marx's work in this progressive newspaper continued from August 1851 to March 1862, but a large number of the articles he dispatched were written at his request by Engels. Marx began to send his own articles to New York in August 1852, the first being "The Elections in England.— Tories and Whigs" (see this volume, pp. 327-32). Initially, he wrote them in German, and his friends, most often Engels, translated them into English. But by January 1853 he had sufficiendy mastered the English language to write his contributions in English. Marx's first English-language article was "Capital Punishment.—Mr. Cobden's Pamphlet.— Regulations of the Bank of England" (see this volume, pp. 495-501). Marx's and Engels' articles in the New-York Daily Tribunedea.lt in the main with major questions of foreign and home policy, the working-class movement, the economic development of European countries, colonial expansion, the national liberation movement in oppressed and dependent countries. The articles at once attracted attention by the amount of information they conveyed, their acute political assessments and brilliant literary style. The editors of the Tribune publicly acknowledged their outstanding quality. Thus, in a leading article on April 7, 1853, they saw fit "to pay a tribute to the remarkable ability of the correspondent". They went on to say: "Mr. Marx has very decided opinions of his own, with some of which we are far from agreeing; but those who do not read his letters neglect one of the most instructive sources of information on the great questions of current European politics." In a letter to Mrs. Marx of July 1, 1853, Charles Dana, one of the editors, wrote that her husband's articles were highly thought of by the Tribune owners and the reading public. Many of the articles by Marx and Engels were reprinted in the Tribunes special editions, the New-York Weekly Tribune and the Semi-Weekly Tribune, and were quoted by other American newspapers, in particular by the New-York Times. The articles also reached England. Some were reprinted in the Chartist People's Paper, and in his speech in the House of Commons on July 1, 1853, John Bright, the Free-Trade leader, specially mentioned Marx's Tribune article on Gladstone's budget. The editors of the New-York Daily Tribune arbitrarily printed some of Marx's and Engels' articles without the author's signature as editorial leading articles, and occasionally made insertions and additions to the text which were sometimes contrary to their content. Marx repeatedly protested against this. In the autumn of 1857, in view of the economic crisis in the USA, which had also affected the newspaper's finances, Marx had to reduce the number of his contributions. His final break with the newspaper occurred during the Civil War in the United States. It was largely due to the fact that its editorial policies increasingly supported compromise with the slave-owning states and to its general falling away from progressive views.
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[4] The Continental System, or the Continental Blockade, proclaimed by Napoleon I in 1806, forbade the countries of the European Continent to trade with Great Britain.
[5] The Protective Tariff of 1818 (Schutzzolltarif) abolished internal duties throughout the territory of Prussia and created the conditions for the formation of the Customs Union (Zollverein). The Zollverein, a union of German states, which established a common customs frontier, was set up in 1834 under the aegis of Prussia. Brought into being by the need to create an all-German market, the Customs Union subsequently embraced all the German states except Austria and a few of the smaller states.
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[6] The reference is to the uprising of the Silesian weavers on June 4-6, 1844, the first big class battle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in Germany, and to the uprising of the Bohemian workers in the second half of June 1844. The workers' movement, which was accompanied by factory and machine wrecking, was brutally suppressed by government troops.
[7] The German Confederation (der Deutsche Bund)—an ephemeral confederation of German states founded in 1815 by decision of the Congress of Vienna. The Federal Diet (Bundestag)—the central body of the German Confederation, which consisted of representatives of the German states and held its sessions in Frankfurt am Main. Having no actual power, it nevertheless served as an instrument of monarchist feudal reaction. After the March 1848 revolution in Germany, Right-wing circles tried to revive the Diet, but in the summer of 1848 it had to cede its functions to the Imperial Regent elected by the Frankfurt National Assembly and to the Imperial Government which the Assembly set up. The Diet's powers were restored in March 1851. The formation in 1866 of the North-German Confederation under Prussia's hegemony put an end to the German Confederation and the Diet.
[8] The Customs Union (Steuerverein) was formed in May 1834; it included the German states of Hanover, Brunswick, Oldenburg and Schaumburg-Lippe, which were interested in commerce with Great Britain. In 1854 this separatist union disintegrated and its participants joined the Zollverein (see Note 5).