Revolutionary Roles: Classes and ‘Countries’

Abstract

The first section of the Manifesto famously admires capitalism. Arguably of greater, but less remarked significance, this chapter contends, is the misplaced faith of Engels, in particular, and Marx in the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie. This had the bourgeoisie not merely taking on absolute monarchy but also acting in the interests of workers. The bourgeoisie would prove self-interested and reformist at best. The chapter questions Marx’s no less important trust in the industrial proletariat, tiny in the German states in 1848, as Marx well knew, but neither revolutionary in spirit nor in practice. Conversely, the greater revolutionary significance of peasants was overlooked. The chapter queries Marx’s perplexing Manifesto decision that ‘the Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany’, given the scathing stance of both Engels, notably, and Marx towards the German states, before, during and after the outbreak of revolution. In contrast, heavily industrialised England, where the stakes were far higher at Kennington Common in April 1848 than in Berlin in March 1848, and whose Chartists were championed by Engels, in particular, but also by Marx, barely features in the Manifesto.

‘The starting point of the Manifesto is quite different’, writes Stedman Jones. ‘It opens with a sustained tribute to its declared antagonist … the Manifesto will remain a classic, [for its] quite unsurpassed depiction of modern capitalism.’¹ This ‘sustained tribute’, in the opening section, to ‘the giant, Modern Industry … industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois’,² accounts for no less than 39% of the total pamphlet.

While counter-intuitive for a pamphlet promoting communism, this verdict, and its admiring tone, has become consensus amongst a diverse range of critics. For Schumpeter, ‘the Communist Manifesto … is an account nothing short of glowing of the achievements of capitalism’.³ Hannah Arendt described the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto as ‘the greatest praise of capitalism you ever saw’.⁴ Mandel wrote of Marx and Engels: ‘they sang a veritable hymn of praise to the glory of capitalism in their Communist Manifesto’.⁵

Not all commentators were impressed by the tribute. Heinzen, butt and source of much Marx and Engels criticism, in 1848 denounced Marx’s preoccupation with the bourgeoisie, that he would not ‘acknowledge that the 34 owners of Germany have already produced a shocking mass of negative material conditions’, that revolution did not require ‘a steam engine or some such factory instrument’ to have been invented.⁶

While the Manifesto’s depiction of modern capitalism may be ‘quite unsurpassed’, Marx and, in this context, more particularly Engels arguably misread the roles of all the key protagonists in the 1848–1849 revolution as it affected the German states, be they bourgeois or ‘modern capitalists’, proletarians or peasants. There is, of course, no shortage of hindsight analysis as to why these protagonists failed to fulfil their intended revolutionary destinies; this chapter first evaluates what foresight led Engels and Marx to allot them their specific roles (or not) in the Manifesto, in advance.

The Manifesto is unequivocal on the decisive revolutionary function of the bourgeoisie. In his sweep through economic history, Marx states that ‘The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.’ The Manifesto concludes, ‘The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution’.⁷

This, though, is Marx merely setting the bourgeoisie, in isolation, against absolute monarchy. It is Engels, in The Constitutional Question in Germany, written in March–April 1847, who identifies how the bourgeoisie will inter-act with other social classes, and why these are relationships of mutual dependency. First, Engels takes one of the many swipes aimed by himself and Marx against the True Socialists, this time for their apparently entirely erroneous read-across from past French Communist experience to likely German Communist outcome:

The true socialists … have learnt from the French Communists that the transition from the absolute monarchy to the modern representative state in no way abolishes the poverty of the great mass of the people, but only brings a new class, the bourgeoisie, to power. They have further learnt from the French Communists that it is precisely this bourgeoisie which, by means of its capital, presses most heavily upon the masses, and hence is the opponent par excellence of the Communists.

But the True Socialists, quite simply, had not done their homework:

They have not taken the trouble to compare Germany’s level of social and political development with that of France, nor to study the conditions actually existing in Germany upon which all further development depends; hastily and without long reflection they have transferred their hastily acquired knowledge to Germany.⁸

This at least is substantive ground for a confrontation with the True Socialists and its ‘chief representative’ (Engels’s 1890 phrase), Karl Grün, one which too often descended into personal abuse, on both sides.⁹ Marx’s choice phrases in the Manifesto on ‘German, or “True” Socialism’, across two pages—‘schoolboy task … German Philistines … foul and enervating literature’¹⁰—are characteristic. Both Marx and Engels went to enormous lengths to bring down Grün.¹¹ It is interesting, nonetheless, for the purposes of this immediate discussion, to see Marx elsewhere in this Manifesto section say that True Socialism had been offered the opportunity ‘of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. … To the absolute governments … it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie … this “True” Socialism thus served the governments as a weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary interest.’¹² The point of note here is not the True Socialists’ questionable allegiance to ‘absolute governments’ but their scepticism of ‘this bourgeois movement’.

Engels in 1847 in any event took a different line on the merits and role of the ‘German bourgeoisie’. In the second section of The Constitutional Question, he sets out in detail why ‘Germany’ is and will be different. Engels’s conclusions represent a significant element of his influence on the positioning of the Manifesto and bear some exposition:

One class must become strong enough to make the rise of the whole nation dependent upon its rise, to make the advancement of the interests of all other classes dependent upon the advancement and development of its interests. The interest of this one class must become for the time being the national interest. … Does this class, which can overthrow the status quo, exist now in Germany? It exists. … The bourgeoisie is the only class in Germany which at least gives a great part of the industrial landowners, petty bourgeoisie, peasants, workers and even a minority among the nobles a share in its interests, and has united these under its banner. The party of the bourgeoisie is the only one in Germany that definitely knows with what it must replace the status quo. … The party of the bourgeoisie is therefore the only one that at present has a chance of success. The only question then is: is the bourgeoisie compelled by necessity to conquer political rule for itself through the overthrow of the status quo, and is it strong enough, given its own power and the weakness of its opponents, to overthrow the status quo?¹³

Much closer to the start of European Revolutions, and the publication of the Manifesto—with 23 January 1848’s The Movements of 1847—Engels maintained his faith in the bourgeoisie. The Prussian bourgeoisie had withheld funds from King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who had bypassed them by turning instead to the Russians. But, Engels nonetheless concluded, ‘1847 was politically a very good year for the Prussian bourgeoisie in spite of their temporary defeat’. He believed, ‘we can therefore await the advent of this Prussian revolution with the utmost calm … the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie of the other German states have also noted this and shown the most heartfelt sympathy towards them. They know that the victory of the Prussian bourgeoisie is their own victory.’¹⁴

On the first Marx prediction in the Manifesto on ‘Germany’ then—the ‘country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution’—Engels in this passage continues to come across as very much a believer in a successful bourgeois revolution in ‘Germany’ (where he parts company from Marx is on the notion that ‘the country is on the eve’ of one).¹⁵ If there is disagreement between the two men on the timing of the German bourgeois revolution, there seems undoubted unanimity on the notion that when a proletarian revolution arises,¹⁶ the bourgeoisie will be beholden to the proletariat.

In the second diatribe against Heinzen, Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality, in a section written on 18 November 1847 (thus just weeks before the composition of the Manifesto), Marx wrote:

The workers know very well that it is not just politically that the bourgeoisie will have to make broader concessions to them than the absolute monarchy, but that in serving the interests of its trade and industry it will create, willy-nilly, the conditions for the uniting of the working class, and the uniting of the workers is the first requirement for their victory. … They know that the revolutionary movement of the bourgeoisie against the feudal estates and the absolute monarchy can only accelerate their own revolutionary movement.¹⁷

In his 23 January 1848 DBZ piece, Engels writes (rounding off with a Heine quote), ‘we are no friends of the bourgeoisie … in Germany in a very short time they will even have to ask for our help. … So just fight bravely on, most gracious masters of capital! … but do not forget that “The hangman stands at the door!”’¹⁸ This very much anticipates Marx’s line in the Manifesto proper, where he suggests that an embattled bourgeoisie ‘sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help’.¹⁹

This remains, nonetheless, a very trusting prediction. While there is no dispute that the German states were behind the times in terms of their economic and social development, it was still a leap of faith that the bourgeoisie would in due course act in the distinctively disinterested, indeed altruistic, manner that Engels assumes.

There were, moreover, pre-Manifesto warnings, issued even by Engels and Marx themselves. In a passage in The Constitutional Question, Engels observes ‘in all countries … the bourgeois is revolutionary until he himself rules’.²⁰ There is similar acknowledgement by Marx in November 1847 of bourgeois self-awareness and self-interest:

The bourgeois gentlemen would smile at such naivety. They know better where the shoe pinches. They are aware that in revolutions the rabble gets insolent and lays hands on things.²¹

It is not as if, moreover, there weren’t pointers from more politically evolved countries, such as England, as to how the bourgeoisie-in-power might behave. After outlining the ‘present contest now waging … between the agricultural and privileged classes on the one hand, and the monied and commercial classes on the other’—an English version of the absolute monarchy/feudal powers versus bourgeoisie contest—Hetherington et al. in the Rotten House spell out that the English bourgeoisie have scarcely offered any improvements for working men on the previous regime:

And if the past struggles and contentions we have had with the latter to keep up our wages—our means of subsistence—if the infamous acts they have passed since they obtained power, form any criterion of their disposition to do us justice, little have we to expect from any accession to that power, any more than from the former tyrants we have had to contend against. There are persons among the monied class, who, to deceive their fellow men, have put on the cloak of reform; but they intend not that reform shall so extend as to deprive them or their party of their monopoly and corrupt advantages. Many boast of freedom, while they help to enslave us; and preach justice, while they assist the oppressor … to perpetuate the greatest injustice towards the working millions.²²

In a section of the Illustrierte Geschichte der deutschen Revolution, 1848/49 (Illustrated History of the German Revolution, 1848–1849) entitled ‘the bourgeoisie does battle with the peasants’, Helmut Bleiber (in fact citing Valentin) claims that the bourgeoisie broke its side of the bargain with the peasants—one wing of the new revolutionary triad, grouped with the ‘German proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie’ in late March 1848’s 17 Demands—as early as that very month. He reports that Heinrich von Gagern, ‘March minister’ in Hesse-Darmstadt, ‘tore into the Counts Erbach for their renunciation of feudal privileges’.²³ One of the first acts of the Prussian Camphausen ministry on 30 March 1848 was to stress to the Lord Lieutenant for Silesia that ‘should you in the quelling of public order disturbances in the province require military support … turn to the General-in-Command, Count von Brandenburg’. Bleiber suggests that the bourgeoisie employed two weapons against the revolutionary rural population: ‘brutal military force’ and ‘giving hope to the peasants and rural workers that their demands would be taken into consideration through the forthcoming parliaments … the peasant movement’s anti-feudal and anti-Junker activity could not be fully effective because the bourgeoisie betrayed the interests of the peasants … and positioned itself protectively in front of the Junkers’.²⁴

When the revolution in the German states failed in 1848, Marx was happy not merely to deflect blame onto the shoulders of the culpable bourgeoisie but also to disown his, and in particular Engels’s, vision of how events would unfold in the German states, which had driven the tactical thrust of the Manifesto.

There is a surprisingly early capitulation by Engels that their bourgeoisie thesis for the German states had not materialised, though not that it was wrong on their part—the ‘big bourgeoisie’ and ‘the people’ were very much to blame. In The Berlin Debate on the Revolution (thus, the sitting of the PNA on the resolution of Left-wing deputy Julius Berends in support of ‘those who fought on March 18 and 19’ in Berlin), Engels concluded, on 14 June 1848 (note the words ‘all along’):

In short, the revolution was not carried through to the end. The people let the big bourgeoisie form a Government and the big bourgeoisie promptly revealed its intentions by inviting the old Prussian nobility and the bureaucracy to enter into an alliance with it … the big bourgeoisie, which was all along anti-revolutionary, concluded a defensive and offensive alliance with the reactionary forces, because it was afraid of the people.

And yet. Engels could still not bring himself to give up their revolutionary thesis:

We cannot here go into the question as to why and to what extent the present rule of the big bourgeoisie in Prussia is a necessary transitional stage towards democracy, and why, directly after its ascent to power, the big bourgeoisie joined the reactionary camp. For the present we merely report the fact.²⁵

There are similarly disillusioned, if more wide-ranging pieces from Engels in the NRZ written between 17 and 24 July, first, The Debate on Jacoby’s Motion, then The Suppression of the Clubs in Stuttgart and Heidelberg (‘And that, upright German, has indeed been your fate once again. You believe you have made a revolution? Deception! You believe that you have overcome the police state? Deception!’).²⁶

From Marx, there is an initial broadside against the bourgeoisie within early November 1848’s The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna, whose most telling lines (and Engels-echoing closing judgement) are, ‘In February and March armed force was beaten everywhere. Why? Because it represented only the governments. After June it was everywhere victorious because the bourgeoisie everywhere had come to a secret understanding with it, while retaining official leadership of the revolutionary movement.’²⁷ We have to wait though until December 1848, in the NRZ, for Marx’s full-length J’Accuse against the bourgeoisie: The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution. He concludes, if far from to his friend’s face, that Engels’s 1847–1848 prognosis for the bourgeoisie in the German states was completely wrong. The bourgeoisie, far from giving ‘a great part of the industrial landowners, petty bourgeoisie, peasants, workers and even a minority among the nobles a share in its interests’ as Engels had argued the year before, ‘saw menacingly confronting it the proletariat and all sections of the middle class whose interests and ideas were related to those of the proletariat’. It was not ‘a class speaking for the whole of modern society. … From the first it was inclined to betray the people and to compromise with the crowned representative of the old society, for it itself already belonged to the old society; it did not represent the interests of a new society against an old one, but renewed interests within an obsolete society.’²⁸

With the benefit of nearly 40 years of hindsight, Engels, in his 1884 Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848–1849), reflects on 1848, the bourgeoisie’s impotence, its complicity with the ancien régime, and its inability to work with and for proletarians, who were not up the immediate revolutionary job:

The German bourgeoisie, which had only just begun to establish its large-scale industry, had neither the strength nor the courage to win for itself unconditional domination in the state, nor was there any compelling necessity for it to do so. … Terrified not by what the German proletariat was, but by what it threatened to become and what the French proletariat already was, the bourgeoisie saw its sole salvation in some compromise, even the most cowardly, with the monarchy and nobility.²⁹

What Marx failed to acknowledge in December 1848, and Engels in 1884, was the wisdom of the Marx pre-Manifesto prediction (in his second Contra Karl Heinzen piece) aired in November 1847, ‘The bourgeois gentlemen therefore seek as far as possible to make the change from absolute to bourgeois monarchy without a revolution, in an amicable fashion’.³⁰ Many leading bourgeois politicians in the spring and summer of 1848 spelt out the limits of their revolutionary ardour. Friedrich (‘Fritz’) Harkort, liberal industrialist and leader of the Right Harkort in the PNA, responded to the March 1848 Berlin uprising by saying, ‘We, revolution? We, in Prussia? That is quite impossible. We in Prussia want a peaceful, popular reform, and a liberal constitution but under no circumstances a revolution.’³¹ The more influential Right Centre liberal constitutionalist Friedrich Bassermann, who at the October 1847 Heppenheim gathering had called for a German nation-state, claimed in the spring of 1848 that with the appointment of the Committee of Fifty by the Frankfurt Vorparlament, ‘the right to revolution had been lost and the duty to reform had begun’. On 19 June 1848, he told fellow FNA deputies, ‘the essential thing is to reform, not revolutionise’.³² In the 14–17 June 1848 Berlin Debate on the Revolution—the PNA voted down the mildly revolutionary proposition from deputy Berends—Right deputy Adolf Riedel summed up the bourgeois bargain, ‘we all know: revolution is constitutional change taking place against the will of the ruling power whereas reform means change taking place with the assent of that power’.³³

Wal Suchting suggests that ‘what the Manifesto diagnosed as its death throes quickly proved to be, on the contrary, the travail attending the birth of a capitalism not only economically dominant … but now politically so as well; in particular, the prediction concerning Germany was quite off the mark (however, it must be added that Marx and Engels almost immediately saw their errors)’.³⁴

Suchting captures capitalism’s actual evolution perfectly here, but his final point seems overly generous. In the same 1884 review of the NRZ, straight after reprising the Manifesto’s ‘The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution etc.’, Engels confidently stated, ‘Never has a tactical programme proved its worth as well as this one. Devised on the eve of a revolution, it stood the test of this revolution.’³⁵

What of the role of the proletariat? Marx’s closing rallying-cry in the Manifesto to the proletariat carries an air of more solid conviction. ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ has rung down through the ages, certainly far more so than the most frequently used translation of the Manifesto’s closing sentence, ‘Working men of all countries, unite!’

But neither version is what Marx actually wrote. His German rendering, ‘Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt Euch’ literally translates as ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’

Translating ‘Proletarier’ as ‘proletarians’ connects the Manifesto’s closing slogan with its earlier section headings, and class preoccupations, Bourgeois and Proletarians, and Proletarians and Communists, but drawing attention to the correct rendering is not mere translational pedantry. It matters because Marx’s targeting of what was an unusually narrow social group—proletarians, and (as this book consistently contends) in the German states—is another important reason for the Manifesto’s lack of impact in 1848.

Several translators—for instance, Carver, Draper and the much-derided Macfarlane, whose ‘frightful hobgoblin’ (it was at least a variation on the hackneyed spectre) stalked ‘throughout Europe’ in her 1850 version of the Manifesto’s opening line—have invoked proletarians, not workers or working men. Many current English-language editions of the Manifesto, however—thus the Collected Works, and those introduced by Fernbach, Stedman Jones, Jeffrey Isaac, McLellan, Hobsbawm, Bender and Trotsky—follow Samuel Moore’s 1888 English translation, endorsed by Engels, which supplies ‘Working men of all countries, unite!’

Whether inspired by Engels or Schapper, the Communist League had initially adopted the slogan ‘Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt Euch’ at its First Congress in early June, and then placed it in the masthead of its one-off Kommunistische Zeitschrift, published in London in September 1847, ‘price 2 pence’. Marx also adopts it word-for-word. It’s a rare direct link in the Manifesto with its sponsor (although the 75+ mentions earlier in the pamphlet to ‘proletariat’, in particular, ‘proletarians’ or ‘proletarian’ make it quite implausible that Marx invokes the finale slogan solely as some kind of token, one-off salute to the League).

The concept of the proletariat in the eyes of Marx and Engels was by no means always narrow, being expressed in the early 1840s in often very broad-brush terms, but progressively becoming ever more tightly defined.

The first reference to the proletariat by Marx appears in the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, written between March and August 1843, and published in the single edition Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Annals) in February 1844.

Marx looked for ‘the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates … a sphere which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.’³⁶

Werner Conze doesn’t especially demystify this first stab, ‘The young Marx’s first shot at “proletariat”, then, has it as a historico-philosophical concept, which contained within itself a conviction-of-a-turning-point and an expectation of salvation’.³⁷

Engels makes matters simpler (though not clearer) in the 15 March 1845 preface to The Condition of the Working Class in England (published in German), his excellent study of the English industrial revolution as it affected Manchester and its surrounding towns: ‘similarly, I have continually used the expressions working-men (Arbeiter) and proletarians, working-class, propertyless class and proletariat as equivalents’.³⁸ A Conze footnote to the Poverty of Philosophy, written by Marx in the first months of 1847, makes a very similar point: ‘when Marx here speaks of “workers” and not of “proletarians”, this accords with his custom in expositions on political economy to prefer the word “worker” without thereby intending a conceptual difference with “proletarians”’.³⁹

But alongside these all-things-to-all-people definitions, there emerged, also in 1847, a narrower view, in the joint perception of Marx and Engels, of what a proletarian is. The new definition, spelt out by Engels in both the 1847 drafts to the Manifesto, identifies the proletariat (in Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith) as ‘the class of the completely propertyless, who are compelled to sell their labour to … the bourgeois’ and (in Principles of Communism) as ‘the class of society which procures its means of livelihood entirely and solely from the sale of its labour and not from the profit derived from any capital’.⁴⁰ This is ‘propertyless’ particularly in the sense of having no stake in the means of production. Marx repeats the idea in the Manifesto: ‘the proletarian is without property’.⁴¹

This is clearer, but still rather abstract, detached from actual workplaces or the changing historical context. As we get closer to the publication date of the Manifesto, a further precise refinement is emphasised. Marx had suggested even back in 1843 when writing on Hegel that ‘the proletariat is coming into being in Germany only as a result of the rising industrial development’.⁴² But this was a trend, not a specific. Engels is by 1847 much more particular, saying in the Draft, that ‘the proletariat came into being as a result of the introduction of the machines which have been invented since the middle of the last century, and the most important of which are: the steam-engine, the spinning-machine and the power loom’.

But then Engels adds, ‘we have gradually arrived at the position where almost all branches of labour are run on a factory basis’.⁴³ It’s helpful here to identify what ‘factory’ actually meant at this time.

As Joel Mokyr points out, even in far more heavily industrialised Britain, ‘it cannot be repeated often enough that the “factory”, in our minds associated with a large … user-hostile mill employing many workers … was still not the typical employer in the British economy by the mid-nineteenth-century. … Much of the cotton industry consisted of perhaps 900 establishments, many of which were still little more than workshops, employing fewer than 20 hands … in engineering, of the 677 firms in 1851, no fewer than two-thirds employed fewer than 10 employees.’⁴⁴ Two straightforward distinctions can still be drawn: the ‘factory’ around mid-century was not on an enormous scale, but it did represent industrialisation as it then was, and it was quite different to working on the land.

A more industrialised workforce remained a revolutionary prerequisite, to fulfil the proletariat’s Manifesto role. In a letter written to the Brussels Correspondence Committee on 16 September 1846, Engels mocks a review of a recent two-volume book by the anti-worker economist and journalist Theodore Fix, who writes ‘Monsieur Marx is a cobbler. … Marx says it’s necessary in Germany to create a universal proletariat (!!) in order to realise the philosophical doctrine of communism.’⁴⁵ Engels adds the two exclamation marks, and one can laugh along with the notion of Marx making shoes—perhaps Fix was merely invoking the proverb ‘let the cobbler stick to his last’—but the ambition that Fix rightly or wrongly attributes to Marx is very much to the point.

Stadelmann suggests that ‘there was in Germany before 1860 still no class-conscious industrial proletariat. The worker was not an independently acting factor in the March revolution.’⁴⁶ How fair is this view of the German industrial proletariat?

British statistician Michael Mulhall’s 1892 Dictionary of Statistics provides the best retrospective snapshot of how industrialised the German states actually were in 1850, relative to the global benchmark, Britain.

Total cotton consumption in Britain in the 1840s was estimated at 2.3 million tons, compared to 610,000 tons in France and 410,000 tons in Germany. Coal production in Britain in 1850 was estimated at 49 million tons as opposed to 4.1 million tons in France and 6.6 million tons in Germany.⁴⁷ Iron consumption in 1850 was respectively 1.97 million tons, 600,000 tons and 420,000 tons. Steam power in 1850 was estimated at 1.29 million horsepower (hp) in Britain, 370,000 hp. in France and 260,000 hp. in Germany.⁴⁸ The respective populations of the three countries in 1851 (1852, for Germany) were 27.5 million in the United Kingdom (including Ireland), 35.8 million in France and 36.0 million in Germany.⁴⁹ In Schieder’s summation, ‘the industrialisation of Germany had in 1848 only just begun’. Until the middle of the century, there were in the German states neither mechanical propulsion in use on a meaningful scale nor ‘large-scale factories’ established with the further defining characteristic of employing wage labour.⁵⁰

Prussia, accounting for around half of the overall German states’ mid-nineteenth-century population, was much the most industrially advanced of those states. If we accept then chief Prussian statistician Dieterici’s view that ‘small towns with 1000, 2000, and 3000 inhabitants had more the character of the open country than of real towns’,⁵¹ the ‘true’ proportion of the Prussian population that was rural in 1849 was 78%. It’s obviously not a direct read-across to view this 78% as being solely dependent on the land for employment—Dieterici suggests, for example, that in the more agrarian southern districts of the Prussian province and further south in Rhein-Hessen and the Palatinate, 50–70% of the population were farmers, farm tenants, farm servants, farm labourers and their dependants⁵²—but by comparison, the 1851 England & Wales Census had 24.3% of the population being ‘primarily agricultural’ and 48.8% ‘primarily manufacturing’. Jean Sigmann adds, ‘by 1850, the United Kingdom was the first State of the modern world to have an equal distribution between town and country’.⁵³

Obermann, drawing on Berlin Statistical Bureau data issued in 1851, put ‘factory workers’, as a proportion of the total Prussian population, by occupation, at 4.1% in 1846.⁵⁴ This amounted to 557,730 individuals in 1846, rising only slightly, to 570,730 in 1849. Dieterici puts the 1846 number of Prussian factory workers at 553,542.⁵⁵ German social and economic historian Gerd Hardach, using this time German Customs Union data (again issued in 1851), initially also puts the number of Prussian factory workers at 4.1% in 1846 (albeit a higher 657,000 numerical figure) but then points out that the revised Prussian statistical calculation of 1861 sharply downgraded the 1846 proportion to 1.9% (310,000 individuals).⁵⁶ Stadelmann similarly starts by quoting an 1846 estimate for factory workers in Prussia of 550,000 but then argues that this is ‘greatly exaggerated’ given that this would equate to 3.3% of the then total population of 16 m, when the proportion in Berlin, ‘the biggest industrial town in the state’, is only 2.5%.⁵⁷ In broader brush fashion, McLellan in his introduction to the Manifesto says, ‘in Germany at that time, the proletariat in fact comprised less than 5 per cent of the population’.⁵⁸

Friedrich von Reden quotes factory workers in Cologne of 4102 in 1846,⁵⁹ out of a total population that year of 85,500,⁶⁰ although this 4.8% proportion would have been negatively impacted by the 1846–1848 financial crisis. As the Deutsche Zeitung observed on 17 June 1848, ‘one factory after another was obliged to substantially cut back their output, and not just to reduce the number of workers they employ but also to depress the wages of those remaining’. The major Cologne banking house A. [Abraham] Schaafhausen, which had financed 170 local concerns in previous years, including Krupp, Hoesch and the Eschweiler mining consortium, was a notable 1848 casualty. Schaafhausen failed, pointedly (as an indicator of Cologne’s then business emphasis), through getting overextended in property speculation and had to be rescued by the Prussian government.

In a nutshell, the German states in the late 1840s were not heavily industrialised—that was very much to come in the second half of the century—nor did they remotely have the ‘universal proletariat’, ‘to realise the philosophical doctrine of communism’. Many of the 50 trades’ groups into which the CWA in Cologne was initially organised in April 1848—stonemasons, nail-forgers, coopers, tanners, saddlers, wheelwrights, comb-makers, ribbon-weavers and so on—may well have been engaged in skilled work, but not in a highly industrialised context.⁶¹ An anti-industrial, protectionist mood featured in many workers’ mentalities, a desire to cope with the modern, nascent industrialising age in a pre-industrial way. Their political behaviour covered an extremely broad spectrum, both looking forwards to revolutionary systemic change and backwards to an anti-industrial, even Luddite social conservatism.⁶² For Thomas Nipperdey, ‘Industry’s share in the overall economy was still very small. Germany was still an agricultural country, to judge from the population distribution and the number of those in employment.’⁶³ Stadelmann argues, ‘in no way can one speak of an industrial proletariat in the modern sense on German soil … the real development of large-scale industrial enterprise only begins in the ’60s’.⁶⁴ According to Fernbach, ‘the proletariat, in the Marxian sense, was still a small minority of the population’.⁶⁵ For Schieder, ‘the “modern proletariat”, whose emergence Karl Marx described on the eve of the revolution in the Communist Manifesto, did not yet exist in Germany in 1848 … the industrial workers of 1848 in Germany were above all artisans and especially journeymen’.⁶⁶ Blumenberg, finally, after a sideswipe at ‘the corroborative statistics’ (he believed more in personal testimony), is the most sweeping: ‘in Germany there was neither the classic bourgeoisie nor the proletariat which … are presumed to exist in the Communist Manifesto. It was therefore completely impossible that a bourgeois revolution in Germany should be followed immediately by a proletarian revolution.’⁶⁷

This overwhelming body of evidence on the absence of a meaningful German states’ proletariat on the eve of the Manifesto’s publication certainly puts pressure on Marx’s contention in the final section of the Manifesto that ‘the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution’.⁶⁸ Even Engels, reflecting on this in 1884, was perplexed: ‘The proletariat, undeveloped to an equal degree, having grown up in complete intellectual enslavement, being unorganised and still not even capable of independent organisation, possessed only a vague feeling of the profound conflict of interests between it and the bourgeoisie’.⁶⁹

Marx’s specific targeting in the Manifesto of a tiny German proletariat—and one shouldn’t forget that Engels told Marx, in a letter dated mid-November–December 1846, thus a year or so from the composition of the Manifesto, ‘we can only appeal to a communist proletariat which has yet to take shape in Germany’⁷⁰—seems a major tactical misstep. Should he, or, to be fairer to him, could he have known better? It’s not as if, after all, that Marx and Engels in general shunned ‘corroborative statistics’. Hunt, writing of Engels’s 1845 Condition of the Working Class in England, says, ‘Alongside his own first-hand narratives. … Engels especially enjoyed deploying the reams of official documentation coming out Whitehall. And when there were no Blue Books [official British reports] available, “I always preferred to present proof from Liberal sources in order to defeat the liberal bourgeoisie”. … It was a polemical trick which Marx would perfect in Das Kapital. Thus the Condition is jam-packed with factory commission reports, court records, articles from the Manchester Guardian and Liverpool Mercury, and rosy accounts of merry, industrialising England from liberal protagonists.’⁷¹

In his 1867 Preface to the First German Edition of Das Kapital, Marx complains that ‘the social statistics of Germany and the rest of Continental Western Europe are, in comparison with those of England, wretchedly compiled’.⁷² Statistics on England in the mid-nineteenth century were extraordinarily detailed, but ‘wretchedly compiled’ seems both excessively harsh on the German states, and, more importantly, simply not true in practice, both before the publication of the Manifesto, and more particularly in the period from 1850 until 1867, when major German statisticians such as Dieterici⁷³ and Ernst Engel⁷⁴ published frequently.

Schaub argues that the use of supportive statistics in the Büchner/Weidig Hessian Country Messenger is by no means exceptional in an 1830s’ pamphleteering context.⁷⁵ In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx quotes extensively from the 1843 work, Die Bewegung der Produktion (The Movement of Production), by Schulz, a work described by Schulz in its subtitle as ‘a historical-statistical discussion’. Away from Dieterici’s orbit, the ‘Association for German Statistics’ was founded in 1846 by Reden, who praised Engels’s Condition of the Working-Class in England (it deserved ‘particular attention for both its subject and its thoroughness and accuracy’).⁷⁶ The association’s journal, which ran to thousands of pages, was first published in 1847 in Berlin. The first edition started by citing Prussian polymath Alexander von Humboldt, ‘in political budgeting as much as in research into natural phenomenon, the numbers are always the decisive factor’ before continuing (on page 23), ‘lack of livelihoods, pauperism and mass depravity are as is well known sorry products of our peaceful age’.

Specifically in respect of the Manifesto, Marx could call on a German statistical outrider, Gustav von Gülich. Marx references Gülich and his Historical Description of Commerce, Industry [and Agriculture] &c., in an article on protectionism (one of Gülich’s penchants) published in September 1847, ‘Herr v. Gülich has written a very scholarly history of industry and trade’.⁷⁷ His Historical Description ran to five volumes, and Marx filled three notebooks on it (reproduced across nearly 1000 pages of Volume IV/6 of MEGA²).

Gülich has his limitations. He races through history, with references to ‘the state of trade [in the German states] in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries’. His coverage of commerce and industrial life largely stops in 1842, and he belonged on the fringe of petty bourgeois socialists such as Sismondi (the wonderfully forenamed Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi), criticised by Marx in Section III of the Manifesto.⁷⁸ This school, though, as Marx acknowledged, did highlight such issues as ‘the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; over-production and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth.’⁷⁹

Most tellingly, in notes spanning nearly 140 pages (from Gülich’s Volume 4), Marx jotted down Gülich’s highly detailed observations on an enormous array of German industries—textiles, especially, but also leather, paper, carpets, straw hats, oil, flour, starch, soap, wood, tobacco, sugar, beer brewing, brandy, glass, porcelain, mining and ironworks. What emerges from this overview is certainly the early steps in the industrialisation of the German states—the advent of railways from 1835, 184 blast furnaces in Prussia in 1836, chemical factories in Saxony, steam power—but also a picture of states far behind England in industrial sophistication. England exported far more to the German states than the reverse, English technicians and foremen worked in the German states, England had ‘more attractive economic conditions, and more capital’, while the German states had ‘in the most recent period, in general, a greater increase in manual labourers in the countryside than in the town’.⁸⁰

None of this is news to any historian of the nineteenth century. But Marx’s notebooks on Gülich, compiled between September 1846 and December 1847—thus just months before the writing of the Manifesto—are surely evidence that he was empirically aware that Engels’s contention in June 1847 that ‘we have gradually arrived at the position where almost all branches of labour are run on a factory basis’, could not be accurate with respect to the German states at that time. With no comprehensive industrialisation, there could be no ‘universal proletariat’ to reinforce a German states’ revolution in 1848.

It is not as if Marx could not produce statistically backed analysis when he wanted to, during the revolution—he wrote an extraordinarily detailed account on 16 and 21 February 1849 of the mismanagement of the Prussian economy throughout the 1840s⁸¹—but there is no such statistical rigour in the Manifesto.

The Rotten House pamphlet, in contrast, devotes fully two-thirds of its contents to a detailed numerical analysis (it notes that the Working Men’s Association ‘have taken considerable pains to compile the following document’) of the number in 1835 of registered electors, and the number of males above 21, in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Moreover, it then drills down deeply into its own data, to conclude that while there may be 839,519 registered electors (just 14% of the 6,023,752 males over 21), ‘by an Analysis of the Constituency of the United Kingdom, we find that 331 Members being a majority of the House of Commons [there being 658 MPs] are returned by 151,492 Registered Electors, giving an average of about 457 to each’. Thus, ‘owing to the unequal state of the representation’, only about one-fifth of registered electors, or just 2.5% of males (let alone females) over 21, ‘have the power of returning the majority of the House of Commons’.⁸² All this, three years after the Great Reform Act of 1832.

If, as Engels would spell out in March–April 1847 in The Constitutional Question, industrialisation of scale was not obviously in evidence in the German states—‘in Germany the countryside dominates the towns, agriculture dominates trade and industry’—the proletariat also lacked an empowering unity, to allow it to fulfil its revolutionary role. The proletariat is not singled out as such in this state-of-the-nation essay, but is identifiable via its defining tag, ‘the propertyless’, attached to ‘the working classes’: [its] ‘division into farm labourers, day labourers, handicraft journeymen, factory workers and lumpen proletariat, together with their dispersal over a great, thinly populated expanse of country with few and weak central points, already renders it impossible for them to realise that their interests are common, to reach understanding, to constitute themselves into one class. This division and dispersal makes nothing else possible for them.’⁸³

This contemporary view of the proletariat is by no means confined to Engels. In The Prussian Diet & the Prussian Proletariat , an article in the Kommunistische Zeitschrift, Wilhelm Wolff, the likely author,⁸⁴ writes, ‘yet at present we lack cohesion, we act as individuals often at variance one with another, we tear one another to pieces, we know not the strength of unity’.⁸⁵ The circular of the League’s Central Authority, written at a similar time (14 September 1847), but this time signed by Schapper, Moll and Bauer, also addresses unity, as well as proletarian lethargy: ‘Many German proletarians are anxious to liberate themselves, but, if they do not set about the task more energetically than they have done so far, they will indeed not make much progress. We can’t wait for things to fall into our lap. Many people are hindered in their activity by their mental sluggishness … the majority of the proletarians, and the most active at that—those in Silesia, Saxony, Rhenish Prussia, Westphalia and Hesse have poor or indeed no leadership, at least no communist one.’⁸⁶

What’s more interesting, though, about Marx’s faith in the German states’ proletariat in the Manifesto (and Engels’s, prior to it) is that its failure to make an impact in the 1848 revolution was regardless of, not because of, its limited scale and organisation.

It’s informative to establish which were the industrial heartlands of the German states, where by extension the German industrial proletariat would be found, and then to see how far these correlate with those German states, and those German citizens, featuring most prominently in the 1848 revolution.

Both Cornu and Schraepler identify the most industrialised provinces of the German states as being the Rhineland, Westphalia, Saxony and Silesia,⁸⁷ all belonging to Prussia. Fernbach observes, ‘the proletariat, in the Marxian sense, was … concentrated particularly in the cotton mills of the Northern Rhineland’.⁸⁸ Of the two cities which became Communist League strongholds (as such) in 1848 after the return of émigré members, Berlin according to Dieterici was ‘a significant factory- and trade town’⁸⁹ but Cologne, Marx’s base, was not.

Cologne was Prussia’s third most populous town, with a population in 1849 of 94,789, well behind Berlin (423,902), more narrowly behind Breslau (110,702), in Silesia.⁹⁰ Sugar refining,⁹¹ Cologne’s largest industry, employed 707 people in 1846 across 13 factories, for an average per factory headcount of 54, but tobacco and cigars manufacturing, nominally a bigger activity, with 796 employees (though 292 were under 14), involved 51 factories, giving average factory employment of 16 (or, if one crudely discounted the under-14-year-olds), under 10.⁹² ‘Real estate speculation’ was ‘by far the most profitable and popular investment in the decades before 1850’ in Cologne.⁹³ In Gerhard Becker’s words, ‘in Cologne sat the major bankers, the influential trading houses, the managers of provincial taxation, the Rhenish Appeal Court’.⁹⁴ Cologne social historian Pierre Ayçoberry puts the sugar refining into context: although its sales turnover grew exponentially, from perhaps three million Thalers in 1836 to eight million Thalers 10 years later, this compares to the 1163 land transactions registered in Cologne in 1845 (up fivefold on 1835), also worth eight million Thalers (the capital tied up in sugar refining obviously being much lower than the sales value it generated). An economic staple of the era, meanwhile, the textile industry, was seeing its employment base contract sharply, in the face of competition from Saxony and England, technical advances and a survival only of the fittest: the number of major textile businesses in Cologne fell from 75 in 1839 to 57 in 1846.⁹⁵ Gerhard Becker comments that ‘before the Revolution, the bulk of the proletariat was, however, not yet in industrial firms, but in craft-shops, trade, employed as servants’.⁹⁶ According to Sperber, steam engines and large workshops represented only small niches in the Rhenish manufacturing economy towards mid-century; in 1849, craft outworkers in the Prussian Rhine Province outnumbered factory workers employed in spinning and weaving mills by a ratio of nearly five-to-one.⁹⁷ Aachen was the Rhineland’s main industrial centre of the era, with a focus on textiles. Before 1850, Aachen was a far more significant area than the Ruhr, with 13 times the number of textile workers, and 30% more employed in metallurgy.⁹⁸

So what was the heartland of the German states’ revolution in late February and March 1848? In the early weeks, very much not the industrialised provinces of Prussia. The German revolution got under way on 27 February 1848 in Mannheim, in Baden, at a rally attended by 2500 people, but then spread north to other states such as Hesse-Darmstadt, Nassau, Kurhesse, and beyond up to Brunswick, Hanover and Oldenburg, and east, to Württemberg, and Bavaria. In the first instance, this was a revolution of Third Germany⁹⁹—in general, the small and medium German states, excluding Prussia and Austria—but there was revolutionary activity in Prussia from early March, with gatherings in Cologne (from 3 March), the first major revolutionary act in the state,¹⁰⁰ Breslau in Silesia, Berlin (from 6 March) and Saxony. According to Stadelmann, ‘the government in Berlin had reckoned on more substantial clashes in the capital in the first days of March … it was not until the evening of 13 March¹⁰¹ that the masses [there] became more strongly agitated’.¹⁰² Through early April, anxious Prussian officials reported in to Interior Minister Alfred von Auerswald, warning in Trier of ‘general resentment towards the civil guard … the garrison can’t be relied on’, and in Düsseldorf, that ‘the very functioning of the administration is endangered’. In Aachen, there was ‘severely heightened agitation from several incidents between reservists and local inhabitants’. Auerswald promised ‘military columns’ to combat the ‘outrages’.¹⁰³ It’s fair to say, in general, the German revolutionary vanguard was not Prussian.

Schmidt et al. contend that ‘everywhere in Germany, the proletariat in the March days was a strong progressive force inside the anti-feudal opposition’,¹⁰⁴ but this conclusion is challenged by the biggest event of the March days, in Berlin on 18 March, when the authorities turned on a large crowd gathered on the Berliner Schlossplatz (palace square). At 2 p.m., King Friedrich Wilhelm IV appeared on his balcony, but when no instruction was given to withdraw the troops assembled in the palace courtyard, the crowd grew restless, prompting the king to order his cavalry to disperse the crowd. Dragoons and two companies of infantry swarmed out of the palace, and after two shots were fired, either deliberately or by accident by a nervous soldier, bloody fighting on the barricades ensued.¹⁰⁵

The casualty statistics on that Berlin day, which started to appear on bill posters, are telling. Of the 303 killed, only 52, or 17%, were identified as ‘workers and proletarians’. The biggest number, 115, were journeymen, a motley collection of joiners, tailors, shoemakers, locksmiths, blacksmiths, silk knitters, bookbinders, carpenters and bricklayers. Servants, small traders, educated classes and non-working women together accounted for more deaths than the proletariat.¹⁰⁶ Stadelmann adds, of the demonstrators in general: ‘it wasn’t just men in worker’s smocks and artisans, but also well-dressed students, journalists, respectable shopkeepers, the vet Urban … in short, “citizens of all classes”’.¹⁰⁷ He also provides an anecdote from Berlin on 18 March 1848: ‘the student Arnold von Salis set off with a couple of friends for the Borsig locomotive plant, to get the support of the muscular engineers with their heavy iron-bars and hammers. They wouldn’t stir themselves until they’d had their weekly wages paid out, they weren’t remotely in some blind revolutionary frenzy.’¹⁰⁸

It was a similar story at the Aachen riots in mid-April. According to Sperber, ‘these disturbances in the Rhineland’s leading industrial city involved few industrial workers. … Aachen’s industrial labour force remained politically passive, as it would throughout the revolution.’ Only 15% of those arrested were factory or textile workers, despite comprising over half the Aachen’s labour force. Artisans and day labourers collectively accounted for half the arrests.¹⁰⁹ The Aachen People’s Association was able to enrol only between 10 and 150 of Aachen’s 48,000 inhabitants.¹¹⁰ Stadelmann concludes: ‘Wherever one looks, and I have taken trouble over numerous individual instances, the social disturbances did not properly speaking occur in the industrial sector and at all events were not of a proletarian character’.¹¹¹

Trotsky’s October 1937 introduction to the Manifesto concluded: ‘the error of Marx and Engels … flowed … from an overestimation of the revolutionary maturity of the proletariat’.¹¹² Raymond Aron asked more pithily: ‘why must the proletariat be revolutionary? … there is no conclusive evidence that the proletariat as such is spontaneously revolutionary’.¹¹³ In Taylor’s summation, factory workers were already not in the mould of rioters, being no longer machine-breaking Luddites, and with even less inclination to man the barricades.¹¹⁴ Alvin Gouldner sums up, of the German states: ‘it was artisans, not the proletariat, who exhibited the greatest militancy during the 1848 revolutions and, indeed, before then’.¹¹⁵

So much, by these accounts, for the Manifesto’s claim that ‘of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class’.¹¹⁶

If Marx and Engels placed too much faith in German proletarians in the 1848 revolution, they placed too little in the peasants of the German states. This is surprising given that, within their immediate coterie, Wilhelm Wolff, characteristically, had been an early advocate—well before the onset of revolution in 1848—of involving the peasantry. His articles for the DBZ, drawing on his experiences in his native Silesia, dealt with the ‘peasant question’ above all,¹¹⁷ notably his article on 1 August 1847, Der Bauernstand und die politische Bewegung (The Peasantry and the Political Movement), ‘it’s in the open country that we must organise agitation, if we want swiftly and successfully to chuck out the current governing order of our fine, German rulers … only by bringing together town and country’.¹¹⁸ There are also commentators closer to our own era willing to see the peasants as a significant political force in 1848. Rainer Koch argues that ‘a lasting union of Democrat and Peasant, of the intellectual, bourgeois-republican elite and of the great mass of the people would have, as an overwhelming phalanx of the revolution, set the seal on the fate of the ancien régime’.¹¹⁹ A fanciful notion, perhaps, but there were more solid grounds for ‘why the peasantry must be revolutionary’, to invert Aron, than for an inevitable tactical alliance between the bourgeoisie and proletarian communists. For Schieder too, German peasants were not merely random, individual insurrectionists, ‘but also in places thoroughly organised, and en masse on the side of the revolution’.¹²⁰

Peasant violence against feudal overlords was very widespread, Sperber remarks, from Kikinda in Croatia-Slavonia, to Slotinicy in Bohemia, to Hechingen in southwestern Germany. Feudal privileges were not the only grievance, with other rural grievances including access rights to the forest and the division of common land. Nor was peasant protest devoid of a revolutionary element—‘the peasants constantly justified their actions by reference to the political issues of the day, they marched into the forest behind the … flags of the revolution’.¹²¹

Many other commentators do in fact regard the countryside as much more fruitful territory for unrest and revolutionary activity than industrialised towns. Cobbett contended, in his Political Register, that industrial workers ‘talk well, think well, are sprightly and full of intelligence; but they live in crowds, and their hands and skins are soft. … The country people, less intelligent and less talkative, are accustomed to all that hardens man: their hands are hard as sticks, they bear cold like cattle … and are not easily frightened at the approach of danger. … Never, let what will happen, will these people lie down and starve quietly.’¹²² Similarly, and unhelpfully to one of Cobbett’s primary aims, namely encouraging rural workers to petition (peacefully, and indirectly, through him) the government for parliamentary reform, ‘the labourers … were unaccustomed to expressing their protests in the written word … they still perceived the riot, as well as more covert forms of protest, as the most efficacious means of popular political action’.¹²³ Aron again, ‘the fact [is] that proletarians as such are less inclined to violence … the peasants, resentful against the big landowners because they aspire to the possession of the land, should be far more disposed to violence. It is in the countryside that the question of ownership has a real and decisive importance.’¹²⁴

The anger and violent response of German states’ peasants took on a ubiquitous character in March 1848. According to Hans-Joachim Behr, ‘In March 1848 in the final resort the agrarian communities with nearly all social problems became also in many places the subject of grievances and open conflicts. There were only a few parishes in the countryside which were not seized by the outbreaks of violence in some fashion.’¹²⁵ It was also a case of the countryside being much harder to police, as Rainer Koch explains (via a colourful quote from Wilhelm Riehl in 1851): ‘to a much greater extent than the bourgeois liberals, the manual workers or even the workers’ movement would have been able, the agrarian revolution posed a question of survival for the old authorities: “The available military forces could wade in when the urban population rose up, but where the peasants rise up from their homesteads, it’s as if a town is simultaneously on fire in every quarter”’.¹²⁶ Taylor concurs: ‘The peasants alone made revolution really dangerous’.¹²⁷

The peasants’ participation in the 1848 revolution in the German states falls into two periods, with peasants initially active particularly in the South and South-West, and to the fore. According to Jean Sigmann, ‘the peasants of the South were to take their destinies into their hands in March 1848’,¹²⁸ while Rainer Koch records ‘in the southern and south western estates and manors, the agrarian revolution preceded the general political movement’.¹²⁹ As early as 1 March, a peasant-driven movement got under way in Nassau, and on 4 March, around 30,000 peasants, some armed, poured into Wiesbaden, making it a ‘completely peasant-occupied town’. Youths carried placards through the streets, one saying, ‘no prince, no count, no nobleman shall exist from now on’.¹³⁰ Hobsbawm adds: ‘south-west Germany saw a great deal more of peasant insurrection than is commonly remembered’.¹³¹ In a categorisation of 489 instances of protest in the German states in March–April 1848, reported by Siemann, there were 85 actions by peasants and 88 by agrarian underclasses, together more than the 150 ‘political’ actions and considerably ahead of the 94 actions by urban underclasses. Peasants burned down the castle of Niederstetten, in Württemberg, on the night of 5 March.¹³² According to Stadelmann, ‘after 4 March, the peasant revolution spread across the country … no-one paid taxes any more, a general freedom to hunt was proclaimed, along with unrestricted access to woodlands. … In Weinsberg [in north Baden-Württemberg, on 12–13 March], when the intimidated bailiff offered the key to the wine-cellar, he received the response: “we haven’t come to eat and drink, we want nothing … other than to burn the documents which bring us to beggary”.’¹³³

While peasants were prominent participants in the revolution in the spring of 1848, it was once believed that they then fell away as a revolutionary grouping, playing no meaningful role in the ongoing phase of the revolution.¹³⁴ This, though, overlooks a second wave of activity in September 1848 as frustration at the slow pace of feudal liberalisation prompted fresh peasant protests in Schleswig, Saxony, Bavaria, the Badenese Oberland, the Odenwald (Wertheim, 13 September) and Mecklenburg (surprisingly in its case, because while being more than usually subject to Grand-Ducal oppression, it was also in Germany’s far North).¹³⁵

Marx and Engels undoubtedly grasped the grievances which drove the peasants in the German states to revolt in 1848. A first piece in the NRZ on 25 June 1848 reviews a memorandum on how ‘the abolition of feudalism in the countryside’ will be regulated, expressing astonishment that ‘there has not been a peasant war long ago in the old-Prussian provinces. What a mess of services, fees and dues, what a jumble of medieval names …!’¹³⁶ In the second, appearing on 30 July, Marx is indignant at Agriculture Minister Gierke’s comments on the bill notionally proposing the abolition of feudal obligations¹³⁷: ‘does Herr Gierke consider that the right to pluck the peasants’ geese is out of date, but the right to pluck the peasants themselves is not?’ He closes with a witty aphorism, ‘what in brief is the significance of this lengthy law? It is the most striking proof that the German revolution of 1848 is merely a parody of the French revolution of 1789. On 4 August 1789, three weeks after the storming of the Bastille, the French people, in a single day, got the better of the feudal obligations. On 11 July 1848, four months after the March barricades, the feudal obligations got the better of the German people.’¹³⁸

Both Marx and Engels acknowledged that by the summer of 1848, any putative alliance between bourgeoisie and peasantry had failed. Marx on 29 July writes that ‘the German bourgeoisie of 1848 unhesitatingly betrays the peasants, who are its natural allies, flesh of its own flesh, and without whom it cannot stand up to the aristocracy’.¹³⁹ But Engels, at a much more significant time, straight after the uprising in Frankfurt in September 1848, argued that where their urban counterparts had been repelled, ‘angry peasants are not likely to put their weapons down … the peasant war begun this spring will not come to an end until its goal, the liberation of the peasants from feudalism, has been achieved’.¹⁴⁰

While these remarks point to an informed empathy with peasants over their primary grievances, doubts remain as to whether Marx and Engels ever perceived, or were willing to engage with, peasants as genuine political allies. We have already heard of Engels’s theoretical contempt in 1847 for peasants (‘helpless class’ and so on). After the warrant for his arrest over his appearance at the Worringen rally was issued on 3 October 1848, Engels’s time on the run initially took the form of an agreeable walking holiday through France into Switzerland. While much of the account of his overall trip (From Paris to Berne) involves him sampling local wine and women, there is some substantive political commentary. Just days after his encomium to peasants in Frankfurt, he now writes that ‘the peasant in France, as in Germany, is a barbarian in the midst of civilisation … everywhere this same obtuse narrow-mindedness, this same total ignorance of all urban, industrial and commercial conditions, this same total blindness in politics, this same wildly uninformed surmising about everything beyond the village, this same application of the standards of peasant life to the mightiest factors of history’.¹⁴¹

This is a de haut en bas return to the Manifesto’s attack on the narrow horizons of rural life—Draper comments on ‘the Manifesto’s general insensitivity to the peasant question’¹⁴²—which also makes the differently tailored 17 Demands of late March 1848 (‘it is to the interest of the German proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie and the small peasants to support these demands with all possible energy’)¹⁴³ look like temporary tokenism. As Hobsbawm puts it, ‘we may note in passing that during 1848–1849, Marx and Engels, like most of the left, underestimated the revolutionary or even the radical potential of the countryside in which they took little interest’.¹⁴⁴ Taylor argues that Marx dismissed peasants ‘as a reactionary force without revolutionary significance. … Nevertheless the revolutions were serious only when the peasants were drawn into them.’¹⁴⁵

The wider Marx faction did belatedly pay more attention to peasants as a political force. At the first Rhenish District Congress of Democratic Associations, which took place in Cologne on 13–14 August 1848,¹⁴⁶ a resolution was passed on the necessity of conducting work among the factory proletariat and also the peasants. As noted earlier, Schapper, for the CWA, urged an approach not based solely on political education, ‘Let us speak to the peasants about material interests! Ideas are not attractive to someone who has no bread to eat or who is bent over by debt!’¹⁴⁷

On 27 August 1848, the CWA, now with Moll as president, followed up this new targeting in its house journal:

Peasants and workers are the mainstays of the state, and yet among the most oppressed of all. The capitalists are forever finding means and ways of flipping the burdens, which ought to be falling on themselves, onto the shoulders of the people … in the peasant and working-classes lies the revolutionary force of Germany … at the present time, the only remedy. When the peasants and the workers unite, when they stick closely together, then they will soon be freed of the feudal burdens, of the profiteering and the pressures of capital.¹⁴⁸

By November 1848—although in the dying days of that year’s German states’ revolution—Marx had realised, in his ‘No More Taxes!!!’ campaign, that German peasants in the countryside were both responsive and practically (in contrast to garrisoned towns) more difficult to police. Marx writes to Lassalle on 13 November 1848, telling him to resolve at his meeting of the People’s Club in Düsseldorf a ‘general refusal to pay taxes—to be advocated especially in rural areas’.¹⁴⁹ Marx later (18 November) says the countryside has ‘the best opportunity to serve the revolution’.¹⁵⁰ The tax boycott campaign certainly energises the rural peasantry who are also urged to write to their enlisted sons urging them not to betray their (tax-boycotting) parliament.¹⁵¹ The Deutsche Zeitung of 20 November 1848 writes that ‘the peasants are dreaming of nothing more and nothing less than complete freedom from taxes’.¹⁵²

Within Marx’s circle, much the most concerted, and certainly the highest profile and highest achieving, intervention on behalf of peasants came through two series of articles, in the NRZ, written by Wilhelm Wolff. The first series, of six articles—Wozu das Volk Steuern Zahlt (Why the People Pay Taxes)—running from mid-December 1848 until mid-January 1849, dealt successively with the respective taxation of the ‘Junker-clique’,¹⁵³ and of the Prussian peasantry, the abolition of feudal obligations, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and finally suffrage and parliamentary manoeuvrings affecting peasants. Wolff’s Die Schlesische Milliarde (The Silesian Milliard)¹⁵⁴ is altogether more heavyweight, a sustained attack on regressive taxes in a series of nine lead NRZ articles between 22 March and 25 April 1849. While also criticising the Grundsteuer (Land Tax) and Schutzgeld (Federal Caution Money), Wolff rails most forcefully against the Klassensteuer (Class Tax), described by historian Huber as ‘something between a poll tax and an income tax’¹⁵⁵ and by Prussian statistician Dieterici as ‘a personal tax on everybody’.¹⁵⁶

Wolff’s skill, in the Silesian Milliard—‘the highpoint in Wolff’s overall political and journalistic output. It is his most comprehensive and best Marxist work’¹⁵⁷—but also in general, was his ability to break down complex subjects to render them intelligible, and to introduce journalistic hooks that would resonate with his peasant audience. Here, he disentangles the Class Tax:

Let’s pluck someone out from the masses. He owns eight Morgen¹⁵⁸ of land of middling quality, pays a host of tithes annually to his ‘gracious’ lord, must perform a large amount of statute labour for him every year, and still has to pay Class Tax of seven Silver Groschen and six Pfennigs monthly, or three Thalers annually. Contrasted with him, we have a ‘gracious’ lord with the most extensive estates, with forests and meadows, iron-works, zinc ore mines, coal mines etc.—as an example, the arch-wailer, Russophile, feaster on democrats and Deputy to the Second Chamber, Count Renard. This man has an annual income of 240,000 Thalers. He sits on the highest rung of the Class Tax, paying no more than 12 Thalers monthly, or 144 annually. Compared with the rustic tenant with the eight Morgen, he should have been paying at least 7,000 Thalers in Class Tax annually.¹⁵⁹

Engels, in his 1876 tribute to Wolff,¹⁶⁰ claims of The Silesian Milliard, ‘few of the many inflammatory articles in the NRZ had such an effect as these … orders for the newspaper from Silesia and the other Eastern Provinces increased at a furious rate, individual issues were requested’.¹⁶¹ Prussian Interior Minister von Manteuffel regarded the NRZ’s April 1849 articles, notably The Silesian Milliard (and Marx’s Wage Labour and Capital) as sufficiently inciting that he sent them to the Justice Ministry, with a view to instigating a legal prosecution.¹⁶²

The fourth article in the first series, on the provisional law abolishing feudal obligations in Silesia, was reprinted as a pamphlet by leading members of the Rustic Association and widely circulated through Silesian villages. The Rustic Alliance further distributed free of charge 10,000 copies of the articles on the Silesian Milliard (a significant effort, bearing in mind that barring its final day sale of 20,000 copies, the highest circulation figure for the NRZ was 6000). The NRZ editorial team responded on 15 April 1849 by saying, ‘we are delighted that the named articles are being further distributed’.

Schmidt claims that ‘the agrarian question was precisely in these months one of the neuralgic points, which the revolutionary party had to capitalise on … the peasantry was discontented in the extreme and found itself in a mood of revolutionary agitation. … Wolff’s articles show the efforts of the NRZ to draw the peasantry into the revolutionary fight.’¹⁶³ Such comments, and more particularly the claim of the German Collected Works that these (series of) articles were ‘part of the systematic propaganda for the winning-over of the peasant masses of Germany’,¹⁶⁴ are something of an overstatement, given that they were largely the output of one man,¹⁶⁵ but The Silesian Milliard and, in a more diffused way, the No More Taxes!!! campaigns show that with the right grievance(s), the right journalistic stimulus and the right organisation on the ground (Silesia’s Rustic Alliance, with its 200,000 registered members), the Marx faction could appeal successfully to the peasantry.

There is no counterfactual purpose here in suggesting that the Manifesto’s final sentence should have been ‘Peasants of all countries, unite!’, but this was a social group that was empirically at times more revolutionary and active than Marx’s north German industrial proletarians.

Our comparator pamphleteers dealt with, if not peasants directly, certainly the rural working class. Büchner and Weidig target peasants (though without addressing them directly) in the opening sentences of their Hessian Country Messenger: ‘Behind the plough go the peasants, but behind the peasants go the gentry, driving them on together with the oxen, stealing the grain and leaving them the stubble’.¹⁶⁶ Schulz’s Question and Answer Booklet opens ‘“how is it in the world then?” and “how isn’t it” and “how ought it to be”—such questions and the answers to them are to be found in this booklet, and the citizen and peasant shall see for themselves whether everything in it, is true and just’.¹⁶⁷ Cobbett in his time addressed both rural and urban readers, but his pamphlet, To the Journeymen and Labourers of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, explains tax, for instance, in terms of its payment in bushels of wheat. Rural Rides was ‘Cobbett’s quintessential text on rural and agrarian England’.¹⁶⁸ Although Chartism is most closely associated with London and provincial urban centres, the analysis of The Rotten House of Commons, addressed ‘to the Working Classes of the United Kingdom’, measures working-class under-representation in parliament nationally. In the economic analysis in Shelley’s An Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte, ‘the labourer [is] he that tills the ground and manufactures cloth’.¹⁶⁹

A recurring theme of this book has been the geographical emphasis placed by the Manifesto on the German states. As Hobsbawm asserts of the Manifesto: ‘although its horizon was firmly international … its initial impact was exclusively German’.¹⁷⁰

This emphasis would seem entirely supported by Engels’s anticipatory confidence: ‘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’.¹⁷¹ This, though, is after-the-event confidence since this observation of Engels’s appears on 28 October 1851, in his retrospective series, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, written for the New York Daily Tribune (NYDT).

What the pre-revolution Engels actually thought, as he was writing an article (Revolution in Paris) for the DBZ over 25–26 February 1848, thus days after the French Revolution had got under way, and on the eve of the Mannheim People’s Assembly (the first event of the German states’ Revolution), was a good deal more half-hearted:

Germany, we hope, will follow. Now or never will it raise itself from its degradation. If the Germans have any energy, or any pride or any courage, then in a month’s time we shall be able to shout: “Long live the German Republic”.¹⁷²

There is a remarkable consistency to the disparaging view of the German states’ revolutionary potential evinced by Marx and Engels, towards the close of 1847 and in early 1848, while the Manifesto is being conceived.

Engels’s lengthy rebuttal in early October 1847 of Heinzen’s ‘long polemic against the Communists’ sets the tone: ‘As a result of its industrial lethargy, Germany occupies such a wretched position in Europe that it can never seize an initiative, never be the first to proclaim a great revolution, never establish a republic on its own account without France and England’.¹⁷³

Principles of Communism, Engels’s final run-through for the Manifesto, locates the German states firmly at the bottom of the revolutionary pecking order:

The communist revolution will therefore be no merely national one; it will be a revolution taking place simultaneously in all civilised countries, that is, at least in England, America, France and Germany. In each of these countries it will develop more quickly or more slowly according to whether the country has a more developed industry, more wealth, and a more considerable mass of productive forces. It will therefore be slowest and most difficult to carry out in Germany, quickest and easiest in England.¹⁷⁴

Even in February 1848, just days after Marx has finished writing the Manifesto with its upbeat expectations of the German states, there is no let up in doing these states down. In an article published in the DBZ on 13 February 1848, Marx argues: ‘Germany is retarded in its political development, it still has a long political development to undergo. We should be the last to deny this!’¹⁷⁵

A week later, also in the DBZ, Engels is no less forceful: ‘Germany lags behind. Every nation is moving forward. … Only the 40 million Germans never bestir themselves.’¹⁷⁶ Engels then suggests the German states could be humiliated into revolution: ‘the Germans must first of all be thoroughly compromised in the eyes of all other nations, they must become, more than they are already, the laughing-stock of all Europe, they must be compelled to make the revolution’.¹⁷⁷

The confidence, too, in the Manifesto that ‘Germany … is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is … but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution’ seems to have dribbled away as early as 8 March 1848. After reporting back to Marx on the arrests of Gottschalk, August Willich and Anneke, Engels starts buoyantly enough: ‘otherwise the news from Germany is splendid. In Nassau a revolution completed, in Munich students, painters and workers in full revolt, in Kassel revolution on the doorstep, in Berlin unbounded fear and indecision, in the whole of western Germany, freedom of the press and National Guard proclaimed; enough to be going along with.’

But despite this clear evidence of a good many Germans having ‘bestirred’ themselves (and notwithstanding the often flippant tone of Marx-Engels correspondence), a defeatist Engels then concludes: ‘if only Friedrich Wilhelm IV digs his heels in! Then all will be won and in a few months’ time,¹⁷⁸ we’ll have the German Revolution.’¹⁷⁹ It’s taken Engels less than a fortnight to forget any dreams of saying ‘Long live the German Republic … in a month’s time’.

In fact, it is hard to find any instances in March 1848 when Marx and Engels are unequivocally upbeat about the progress of revolution in the German states. There is just one moment, on the eventful 18 March, when Engels tells Marx: ‘In Germany, things are going very well indeed, riots everywhere and the Prussians aren’t giving way. So much the better.’¹⁸⁰ It’s 20 words.

Otherwise, before, during and after the events of 1848–1849, Marx and Engels are unrelentingly negative about the revolutionary capability of the German states. Engels’s ‘anticipatory’ optimism in 1851 was entirely absent three days earlier, on 25 October 1851, even within the same series of articles for the NYDT: ‘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’.¹⁸¹

Marx’s December 1848 review of the betraying bourgeoisie, The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution, is also particularly downbeat and scathing:

When the March deluge—a Biblical deluge in miniature—subsided, it left on the surface of Berlin no prodigies, no revolutionary giants. … The Prussian March revolution was intended to establish nominally a constitutional monarchy and to actually establish the rule of the bourgeoisie. Far from being a European revolution it was merely a stunted after-effect of a European revolution in a backward country. Instead of being ahead of its century, it was over half a century behind its time. … The Prussian March revolution was not even a national, German revolution; from the outset it was a Provincial Prussian revolution.¹⁸²

So why did Marx target the German states in the Manifesto (and how to explain Engels’s periodic ambivalence on the subject, generally being dismissive of their revolutionary potential—notably in the run-up to and at the time of the Manifesto’s composition¹⁸³—though not unambiguously)?

Third-party explanations are not very satisfactory. Ryazonov pointed out factually enough, in his 1937 biography of Marx and Engels, that the Manifesto’s sponsor, the Communist League ‘was composed of a few Belgians, some communist-minded English Chartists, and, most of all, of Germans’.¹⁸⁴ Laski suggests, of League members, ‘they were, after all, Germans, with the passionate nostalgia of the exile for his native land’¹⁸⁵ (a generalisation hard to apply to Marx during his post-revolutionary exile in England from 1849). Taylor refines Laski’s point, more dispassionately if more disputably, suggesting Marx was simply a German, writing for German tailors.¹⁸⁶

As with the role of the peasantry, there is no intention in this book to be pointlessly counterfactual, thus crafting a different Manifesto to the one actually written in January 1848. But there is a very germane question in the context of its geographical targeting—if the German states, questionably, why not, also, England?

Fernbach is implicitly perplexed on this point—‘Yet the country to which they primarily directed their attention was not advanced England, but backward Germany’.¹⁸⁷

It is, of course, easy to dismissively treat the role England—and more particularly, the Chartist movement and its leaders—ultimately didn’t play in 1848. Henry Weisser wades in:

The standard interpretation of 1848 in Britain is that while Continental Europe reached a turning point, and failed to turn, as the famous aphorism states, Britain reached its turning point in 1832 [the year of the Great Reform Act], and thus avoided revolution in the year of revolutions.

He then turns to, or on, the Chartist leaders and their movement:

In 1846, Engels had been instructed by [Chartist leader] Harney that “a revolution in this country would be a vain and foolish project”. … Most Chartists did not see themselves, like French workers at the barricades, as potential revolutionaries.¹⁸⁸

Nicolaevsky goes so far as to suggest, drawing on a survey of revolutionary movements from 1814–1852, based on materials collected by the Vienna police, that during the very first days after the revolution in Paris, ‘Karl Schapper made an attempt to “rouse a revolt in London as well” but did not succeed, as the Chartists did not support him’. If there were any truth in this story, this would have to have been between 22 February and 7 March 1848, the period Schapper spent in London before moving on to Paris. While Nicolaevsky adds ‘we have not been able to find any confirmation of this statement’,¹⁸⁹ this Schapper anecdote would certainly square with Engels’s 1885 portrait of him, in his history of the League: ‘Of gigantic stature, resolute and energetic, always ready to risk civil existence and life, he was a model of the professional revolutionary’.¹⁹⁰ Elsewhere in his League history, Engels says of the 1840s that ‘The English Chartists, on account of the specific English character of their movement, were disregarded as not revolutionary’.¹⁹¹ This is quite a climbdown from Engels’s verdict on their potential, in the 1845 The Condition of the Working-Class in England: ‘the People’s Charter, whose six points … which are all limited to the reconstitution of the House of Commons, are sufficient to overthrow the whole English Constitution, Queen and Lords included’.¹⁹²

Malcolm Thomis and Peter Holt also take this common line on England—‘that revolution did not occur in the period 1789–1848 must be attributed primarily to the absence of any popular desire for revolution’¹⁹³—while Marxist historian George Rudé regarded the question, ‘why was there no revolution in England in 1848? … hardly worth discussing’.¹⁹⁴

But, as with much of the criticism of Chartism in 1848, there is a strong element of hindsight wisdom about such comments, which misrepresents the perception and potential of events in England that year, of which the Chartist Demonstration at Kennington Common¹⁹⁵ on 10 April 1848 was the case in point.

As John Saville concludes, ‘To contemporaries in 1848 the affair of Kennington Common was certainly not as trivial as it has mostly been portrayed in the history textbooks’. The quotations with which he sets the scene in the days running up to the demonstration make it plain that the scale and stakes of the demonstration were far bigger than most revolutionary events of 1848 on the Continent.

That the third Chartist petition would be handed over on Monday 10 April had been formally announced in the Northern Star of 18 March, but public tension rose considerably in the week prior to the handing-over. A 39-strong Chartist Convention, with representatives drawn from all over the United Kingdom, came together at the John Street Institute in Fitzrovia (founded by Owen in 1840) on 4 April, and on the following day, issued a promotional placard (in bold, with exclamation marks), whose final paragraph reminded the working people of London that ‘the eyes of EUROPE are fixed upon you’.

On the eve of the demonstration, the chairman at the Chartist meeting in Blackheath proclaimed: ‘We are determined to conquer tomorrow; nothing shall put us down. We shall not be terrified by bullets or bayonets. They have no terrors for oppressed starving men.’ Members of the Communist League were to be actively involved in the event, Lessner recounting in his memoirs that fellow League member and tailor Georg Eccarius prepared for the demonstration by sharpening his tailor’s scissors, to be used for fighting the police when they tried to disperse the demonstrators.¹⁹⁶

All rather melodramatic no doubt, but the authorities didn’t underestimate the threat. Queen Victoria and her family left London for the Isle of Wight on the morning of 8 April. The near 80-year-old Duke of Wellington was summoned to help coordinate defences. All the main buildings in Whitehall were heavily protected. Colonel C.B. Phibbs reported to Prince Albert that ‘all the bridges would be occupied by troops and Guns pointed, and that an immediate battle was expected’. [The Earl of] Clarendon told Sir George Grey, ‘I feel sure you will not appeal in vain to the “Haves” in England against the “Have Nots”’, to which Thomas Allsop responded in a letter to Owen: ‘The worst feature is the antagonism of classes shown by the readiness of the middle classes to become special constables’.¹⁹⁷

It’s worth spelling out the extent to which Kennington Common dwarfed the scale of the uprising in Berlin on 18 March 1848, generally regarded as a central event in the ‘March Days’, if not in the German states’ revolution as a whole. Estimates of the number of demonstrators, and of the scale of the forces facing them in London, vary considerably. Dorothy Thompson settles conservatively for ‘perhaps 20,000’ demonstrators.¹⁹⁸ Saville has ranged against them: 7122 military including cavalry, just over 4000 police and about 85,000 special constables.¹⁹⁹ William Langer (in his essay, The Pattern of Urban Revolution, 1848) suggests 3000 police, ‘at least 150,000 volunteer special constables—including the future Napoleon III of France—while all major public buildings were sandbagged. Meanwhile three ships packed with troops patrolled the Thames and up to 50,000 more troops were kept in reserve should real trouble break out. Should that have happened, both Wellington and Napier, in charge of the military, were prepared to use cannon against the demonstrators.’²⁰⁰ The authorities allowed just four cabs (one containing Chartist leaders) to deliver to Westminster the third petition, containing, if not the ca. six million names they claimed, a (still challenged) ca. 1.9 m signatures. Over in Berlin, 3000–4000 insurgents erected nearly 1000 barricades, and faced 14,000 troops and 36 cannon.²⁰¹ Prussia’s Prince Wilhelm alone behaved disproportionately, remaining in temporary exile in London for far longer than Queen Victoria stayed on the Isle of Wight.

Fernbach talks up the significance to Marx and Engels of English Chartists as a pre-revolutionary (if not necessarily violent) vanguard, of distinctive scope and scale, ‘the first historic movement of a mass character … based on the industrial proletariat. Recognising this fact, Marx and Engels gave consistent support to the Chartists.’²⁰² In 1845, in The Condition of the Working-Class in England, Engels wrote: ‘In Chartism it is the whole working-class which arises against the bourgeoisie’.²⁰³

Some critics argue that within the Marx-Engels relationship, it was Engels who particularly carried the torch for an English revolution. It is certainly true that it is predominantly Engels who talked England up and the German states down. It is Engels in the Principles of Communism saying that the communist revolution ‘will therefore be slowest and most difficult to carry out in Germany, quickest and easiest in England’.

Stathis Kouvelakis is dismissive of this championing of England, ‘the young Engels’s “Anglo-centric” theory of revolution appears to be the result of a blindness that … afflicted few of his contemporaries, for whom the idea that London (or Manchester) might replace Paris as the capital of the revolution seemed far-fetched, to say the least’.²⁰⁴ One of the afflicted contemporaries was Hess, who wrote on 10 October 1847 (pre-dating Engels’s Principles by some three weeks), ‘yet the conditions for such a revolution of the proletariat are not universally on hand; not in Germany, where the people are oppressed in multiple ways; not even in France—although here … a revolution could soon break out, for which the proletarians are nicely placed—perhaps England is the only country in Europe, where a revolution of the proletariat is possible, and where it will be a necessity in a not too distant time’.²⁰⁵

Very close to the writing of the Manifesto, Marx proved himself to be every bit as ‘Anglo-centric’ as Engels. In London on 29 November 1847, a meeting was held to mark the 17th anniversary of the Polish uprising of 1830. Both Marx and Engels gave speeches. It was to be expected that appropriately pro-Polish sentiments would be voiced, but Marx also said, ‘of all countries, England is the one where the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is most highly developed. The victory of the English proletarians over the English bourgeoisie is, therefore, decisive for the victory of all the oppressed over their oppressors. Hence Poland must be liberated not in Poland but in England. So you Chartists must not simply express pious wishes for the liberation of nations.’²⁰⁶

The damp squib outcome of the confrontation on 10 April marked a major setback for Chartism, and was intended to, as Saville suggests: ‘The Whig government … did not overreact, as has often been suggested’. The Chartists, with their 5 April message that ‘the eyes of EUROPE are fixed upon you’ had rightly assessed the significance of their event, both at home and abroad. Whig ministers intended not merely to see off their own radicals but also to demonstrate to their counterparts in Europe’s other capitals that they had learned the lessons of the barricade battles in Paris in February. Banning any mass demonstration of Chartists to accompany the petition to Westminster nipped any possibility of a subsequent riot in the bud. Better still, it was ‘a bloodless victory—one indeed that could be laughed off, as this one was’.²⁰⁷ Langer, cited by Sked, attributes ‘the lack of revolution in Britain in 1848 to the government’s precautions against the Chartists on 10 April … the alternative to concessions was systematic repression’.²⁰⁸

But Kennington Common in fact did not mark Chartism’s last hurrah. While Prince Albert dismissively remarked to Baron Stockmar, ‘we had our revolution yesterday, and it ended in smoke’, Lord Palmerston was more circumspect, writing to Clarendon, also on 11 April: ‘Things passed off beautifully here yesterday, but the snake is scotched, not killed’.²⁰⁹ Dorothy Thompson writes, ‘So far from Chartist feeling declining in the immediate aftermath of 10 April, there seems to have been an increase in violence in the response of many of the younger Chartists. … Halifax, Leeds and Bradford were areas of great activity in the early summer, when pitched battles between police and Chartists resulted in arrests and rescues in rapid succession.’²¹⁰ According to Saville, there was unrest through the summer, particularly in and around Manchester, in Bradford and its environs, and in Liverpool. Organised Chartist activity also revived, in due course, in London.²¹¹ Hobsbawm argues that ‘Chartism did not die in 1848 but remained active and important for several years thereafter’,²¹² while Stedman Jones contends that ‘the failures of the strike of 1842 and the Kennington Common demonstration in 1848 were demoralising defeats (even if Chartism did not come to an end in 1848, as the middle-class myth would have it)’.²¹³ Henry Mayhew claimed in 1849 in the Morning Chronicle that artisans were Chartist-inclined and ‘almost to a man red-hot politicians’.²¹⁴

Engels, in particular, and Marx certainly did not lose the faith. Days after Kennington Common, Engels told his brother-in-law on 15 April 1848 that ‘my friend’ Chartist Harney ‘in a couple of months … will be in Palmerston’s shoes. I’ll bet you tuppence and in fact any sum.’²¹⁵

The NRZ struck a rare defeatist note on England on 23 June 1848, ‘Is not the bourgeoisie tired of revolution? And is there not standing in the middle of the ocean the rock upon which the counter-revolution will build its church: England?’²¹⁶ But on 31 July 1848, responding in the NRZ to The Kölnische Zeitung on the State of Affairs in England, Engels, returning again to the issue of relative scale, could still confidently write: ‘The class war of the Chartists, the organised party of the proletariat, against the organised power of the bourgeoisie, has not yet led to those terrible bloody clashes which took place during the June uprising in Paris, but it is waged by a far larger number of people with much greater tenacity and on a much larger territory’.²¹⁷

While Chartism may have had some after-life after 1848, Saville still concluded of 1848 that the activity that had followed Kennington Common ‘increased until the mass arrests of the summer brought the whole movement throughout the country to an end in September’.²¹⁸

Marx appeared to agree, remarking on 18 October 1848, ‘in England, all the Chartist leaders arrested and deported’,²¹⁹ but he attempted to breathe fresh life, and importance, into Chartism in a New Year’s message, The Revolutionary Movement, published in the NRZ on 1 January 1849. After a year of so many revolutionary setbacks, it is no surprise to read Marx (once more invoking the ‘England as counter-revolutionary rock’ image of the previous June) gloomily pronouncing that ‘England seems to be the rock against which the revolutionary waves break, the country where the new society is stifled even in the womb’. But the country and its proletarian movement are again antonymous, and he hasn’t totally given up on the Chartists, ‘and only a world war can overthrow the old England, as only this can provide the Chartists, the party of the organised English workers, with the conditions for a successful rising against their gigantic oppressors. Only when the Chartists head the English Government will the social revolution pass from the sphere of utopia to that of reality.’²²⁰

Carver provides plausible grounds for the focus in the Manifesto on the German states, ‘Marx may of course have been appeasing Germans in the League (which was principally German, anyway) who might have felt consigned to a revolutionary backwater by Engels’s Anglo-centric view’.²²¹

But while the Manifesto was being written, England, with its far greater industrialisation, and hence more substantial proletariat, as well as a mass movement in Chartism, offered a much more substantive economic, social and political case for revolution than the German states could muster at that time. Kouvelakis can quite rightly say, ‘let us note that that the English repressive apparatus proved very effective indeed in 1848’,²²² but this apparatus, though certainly in place in January 1848 and before, was not deployed on the same scale as it was in the run-up to and aftermath of Kennington Common.²²³

Kouvelakis comments, ‘the Manifesto … co-authored by Marx and Engels on the eve of the “real” revolutions of 1848, does not mention England in connection with social revolution’,²²⁴ or reflect in any way, ‘Engels’s Anglo-centric’ view. This is not literally true in that the Manifesto in its round-up of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism, in Section III, does refer to the opposition of (utopian) Owenites in England to Chartists, implicitly a point in favour of Chartists’ practical relevance.²²⁵ There is also an oblique Manifesto allusion to the ‘revolutionary’ character of the English Civil War and passing mentions of the English Ten Hours Bill of 1847 and of the Young England literary movement.²²⁶ But these are marginal references: Kouvelakis’s general contention holds good, and there is certainly no reiteration in the Manifesto of Engels’s argument in Principles that ‘the communist revolution … will therefore be slowest and most difficult to carry out in Germany, quickest and easiest in England’. The absence in the Manifesto of a pronounced ‘Anglo-centric’ view seems another Manifesto missed opportunity in 1848.

In general, the columns of the NRZ, certainly in 1848, are preoccupied with constantly evolving internal politics in the German states and Prussia especially: ‘local Cologne events were considered but there was no ongoing reporting on Cologne and the Prussian Rhine province’.²²⁷ But as the editors of the English Collected Works spell out, the paper also very much harboured pan-national and international aspirations: ‘The NRZ, supporting as it did the revolutionary actions in many countries, was rightly regarded as the revolutionary organ not only of German democracy, but also of European democracy’.²²⁸

Engels was foreign editor but Born and M. Dyrenfurth wrote on Berlin, Albert Lehfeld on Frankfurt, Dronke on Poland, Hermann Ewerbeck and Ferdinand Wolff on developments in Paris, with, from the end of July 1848, Eduard von Müller-Tellering in Vienna. The NRZ covered events in France, the Austrian Empire (in addition to Austria, taking in Hungary, Lombardy-Venetia, Bohemia, Croatia, Galicia, Transylvania and affecting Slavs, Magyars, Poles, Slovaks, Ruthenians/Ukranians, Romanians, Moravians, Illyrians and Serbs), Belgium, Italy in general, Denmark, Sweden, Spain and America—as well as the varying involvement of Russia.

This unique international reach begs a number of questions. How far were the countries the NRZ covered of intrinsic importance in the 1848–1849 revolutions? How far were they of disproportionate interest to the NRZ alone? How far did they capture the attention of not just the NRZ’s readership but also of the constituencies targeted by the Manifesto and the 17 Demands, bearing in mind that the day-to-day practical political activity of Marx and Engels in 1848 had a Cologne orientation or one certainly anchored within the German states? The conclusions vary from country to country.

For Schmidt et al., ‘it was in the centre of Europe, in Germany, that the reverberation of the Paris February days was strongest … the outbreak of bourgeois revolution was precipitated by the example of France’.²²⁹ The ‘June days’ in Paris—‘the first act of the drama’, in Marx’s phrase, and in the NRZ’s first month of existence—found a less widespread echo. For the Collected Works’ editors, ‘the paper’s proletarian and internationalist attitude became especially evident during the uprising of the Paris workers in June 1848. It was the only newspaper in Germany, and practically in the whole of Europe, that from the very outset firmly sided with the insurgents.’²³⁰ Conservative newspapers in contrast celebrated the suppression of the uprising, ‘the turning point of the revolution in the whole of Europe’²³¹ but the Central Committee of Democrats of Germany also ‘avoided taking a stance on the June events’, a planned address (at the Second Congress, on 27 October 1848) failing to materialise ‘because the circumstances were too complicated’.²³²

The ‘Vienna Insurrection’²³³ of October 1848—‘the second act of the drama’—was rather different. Looking back for the New York Daily Tribune in March 1852, Engels wrote, ‘we now come to the decisive event which formed the revolutionary counterpoint in Germany to the Parisian insurrection of June, and which by a single blow, turned the scale in favour of the counter-revolutionary party’.²³⁴ The NRZ provided several progressively more dispirited reports, but the Second Democratic Congress this time issued on 29 October 1848 an impassioned appeal ‘To the German People! … The cause of Vienna is the cause of Germany and the cause of freedom. With the fall of Vienna, the old tyranny will raise its banner higher than ever. … It is up to us, German brothers, not to allow Vienna’s freedom to perish.’²³⁵ Marx had arrived in Vienna on 27 August, staying several days, both to try and raise funds for the NRZ and to address several meetings of Viennese democrats and workers. With the CWA now under the control of the Marx faction, Marx could also comment back in Cologne on the events in Vienna, for Freiheit, Brüderlichkeit, Arbeit.²³⁶

Hungary provided the major internal challenge to the Austrian Empire in 1848–1849, but the NRZ’s coverage, although eventually extensive (up until its own demise on 19 May 1849), only belatedly took off, and not for parochially Hungarian reasons. On 28 January 1849, Engels reported in the NRZ, ‘German Austria, an independent union of states, is waging war against Hungary, an independent state; the reason for it is of no concern of Prussia’s.’ But this was not a lack of interest on Engels’s part but displeasure: Prussia was being asked to assist in the arrest of Hungarian leader Lajos Kossuth, ‘the greatest man of the year 1848’, which Engels felt was neither any of Prussia’s business nor its legal right. By 18 May 1849, all borders, legal or otherwise, were down, ‘by becoming a European war, the Hungarian war is brought into reciprocal interaction with all other factors of the European movement. Its course affects not only Germany, but also France and England.’²³⁷ Prussia’s involvement, or interference, in extra-territorial affairs extended to 40,000 Prussian soldiers being sent to Bohemia, and saw Engels both characterising King Friedrich Wilhelm IV as ‘the imperial Russian subordinate knyaz [prince] in Potsdam’ and also giving vent to a general anti-Prussian tirade:

It was only by force that we became Prussian subjects and have remained Prussian subjects. We were never Prussians. But now, when we are being led against Hungary, when Russian robber bands are setting foot on Prussian territory, now we feel that we are Prussians, indeed we feel what a disgrace it is to bear the name of Prussian!²³⁸

Denmark, for all its peripheral position on the northern edge of the Confederation and its disparate ‘empire’ (Greenland and West Indies colonies, in addition to Iceland and the Faroe Islands), briefly in 1848 mattered a great deal to Prussia, to Marx and Engels, and to ordinary citizens in the German states, through its involvement in Schleswig-Holstein. For Engels, who wrote seven pieces for the NRZ on ‘the Schleswig-Holstein Question’, or ‘The Danish affair’,²³⁹ as he labelled it, the issue brought together antipathy towards Prussia, the FNA and Russia, as well as a potential catalyst for German unification and for reviving a German states revolution.

‘The Schleswig-Holstein Question’ constituted a territorial dispute that had endured for centuries (the 1460 Treaty of Ribe determined that the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein should be ‘up ewig ungedeelt’, or ‘eternally undivided’). Southern Schleswig had been drawn to Holstein and the German states, but Northern Schleswig, with a sizeable Danish population, to Denmark. Although both Schleswig and Holstein were largely German-speaking counties within the Danish kingdom, Holstein was also part of the German Confederation. The situation came to a head on 21 March 1848 when Denmark determined to annexe, and then advanced into, Schleswig. When German nationalists rose up against Denmark, Prussia was drawn into the conflict, General Wrangel advancing into Schleswig, with lesser military support also coming from other German states. When European war threatened given the backing of Russia and England for Denmark, and the lack of support from Austria, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV ordered Wrangel, and the superior Prussian forces, to withdraw from captured Danish territory. On 26 August 1848, a humiliating seven-month armistice between Denmark and Prussia was signed in the Swedish city of Malmö, initially without ratification by the FNA.

Engels ends his first article on the armistice, on 8 September, by advocating (with ‘little hope’) that the FNA ‘should not let itself be intimidated’ but should rather, ‘discard the armistice’. This will provoke ‘another European war, a rupture between Prussia and Germany, new revolutions, the disintegration of Prussia and the genuine unification of Germany’.²⁴⁰ His follow-up piece, published two days later, argues that in contrast to the conflicts in Italy, Posen and Prague, the Germans were, in Schleswig-Holstein, fighting for the revolution, making the Danish war, popular among the German people, ‘the first revolutionary war waged by Germany’.²⁴¹ Engels further wraps the NRZ political programme around the armistice by linking ‘the German Revolution and its first result—German unity’, and by arguing that non-ratification by the FNA would trigger ‘just the kind of war that the flagging German movement needs’—against Prussia, England and Russia. This would be a war, against ‘the three great counter-revolutionary powers … which would really cause Prussia to merge into Germany, which would make an alliance with Poland an indispensable necessity’.²⁴² It was not to be. On 23 September, the NRZ printed a proclamation, stating that ‘the decision of the Frankfurt National Assembly of the 16th, approving the dishonourable armistice with Denmark, is a betrayal of the German people and of the honour of German arms’. Those FNA deputies who were not willing to resign were denounced as ‘traitors to the people’.²⁴³

Notwithstanding Engels’s alliance hopes, Poland had quickly proved a lost cause in 1848. After tentative initial support from Prussia for a campaign led by Ludwig Mieroslawski to liberate Polish territory from Russian control—‘let us go into action against Tsarist Russia in an alliance with liberated Germany!’²⁴⁴—the Prussian mood turned, dividing along German- and Polish-speaking lines, and resulting in Prussian troops in April 1848 easily seeing off Mieroslawski’s poorly armed nationalists.²⁴⁵ This didn’t, though, substantially harm Poland’s long-established image as a romantic revolutionary lost cause. Büchner’s first extant letter to his family, in December 1831, reported the rapturous passage through Strasbourg of the in general quite unworthy General Ramorino,²⁴⁶ one of the 6000 rebels in the ‘Great Emigration’ after Poland’s 1830 defeat by Tsar Nicholas. ‘Vive la liberté, vive Ramorino!’ go the cries. Büchner’s letter concludes, ‘Thereupon Ramorino appears on the balcony, expresses his thanks, there are shouts of Vivat!—and the comedy is done’.²⁴⁷ In similar if much more sincere vein, Marx and Engels had both given speeches at the ‘International Meeting Held in London on November 29, 1847 to Mark the 17^th Anniversary of the Polish Uprising of 1830’. Poorly treated, as ever, as the Poles may have been in 1848, their actual significance in the events of the European Revolutions did not warrant the scale of the NRZ’s coverage, well into the autumn. Italy, on the other hand, was a much more noteworthy revolutionary player, justifying the NRZ’s attention, especially in 1849, when, along with Hungary, it appeared to offer a revolutionary last gasp.

In mid-July 1848, it is stated that ‘only a war against Russia would be a war of revolutionary Germany’.²⁴⁸ There is an attempt by Engels in his 1884 history of the NRZ to put this Russian policy retrospectively centre-stage—‘this policy pervaded every issue of the newspaper’²⁴⁹—and an acknowledgement that the major revolutionary events right across the continent somewhat got in the way—‘the Vienna, Milan and Berlin events were bound to delay the Russian attack’²⁵⁰—but in truth, interventionist Russia and betrayed Poland are more consistently treated in the NRZ in terms of Prussia’s maladroit relations with both countries.

Marx and Engels clearly applied a wide-angle lens to the European Revolutions of 1848–1849. The next chapter primarily examines more narrowly how and why Marx and Engels varyingly chose to engage with unfolding events in Paris, in March and early April 1848, and in the German states in the ‘March days’ and beyond.