FREDERICK ENGLES: REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN GERMANY
GERMANY AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE REVOLUTIONThe first act of the revolutionary drama on the Continent of Europe has closed. The "powers that were" before the hurricane of 1848 are again the "powers that be," and the more or less popular rulers of a day, provisional governors, triumvirs, dictators, with their tail of representatives, civil commissioners, military commissioners, prefects, judges, generals, officers and soldiers, are thrown upon foreign shores, and "transported beyond the seas" to England or America, there to form new governments in partibus infidelium,[2] European committees, central committees, national committees, and to announce their advent with proclamations
quite as solemn as those of any less imaginary potentates.
A more signal defeat than that undergone by the continental revolutionary party -- or rather parties -- upon all points of the line of battle, cannot be imagined. But what of that? Has not the struggle of the British middle classes for their social and political supremacy embraced forty-eight, that of the French middle classes forty years of unexampled struggles? And was their triumph ever nearer than at the very moment when restored monarchy thought itself more firmly settled than ever? The times of that superstition which attributed revolutions to the ill will of a few agitators have long passed away. Everyone knows nowadays that wherever there is a revolutionary convulsion, there must be some social want in the background, which is prevented by outworn institutions from satisfying itself. The want may not yet be felt as strongly, as generally, as might insure immediate success, but every attempt at forcible repression will only bring it forth stronger and stronger, until it bursts its fetters. If, then, we have been beaten, we have nothing else to do but to begin again from the beginning. And, fortunately, the probably very short interval of rest which is allowed us between the close of the first and the beginning of the second act of the movement, gives us time for a very necessary piece of work: the study of the causes that necessitated both the late outbreak and its defeat; causes that are not to be sought for in the accidental efforts, talents, faults, errors or treacheries of some of the leaders, but in the general social state and conditions of existence of each of the convulsed nations. That the sudden movements of February and March, 1848, were not the work of single individuals, but spontaneous, irresistible manifestations of national wants and necessities, more or less clearly understood, but very distinctly felt by numerous classes in every country, is a fact recognized everywhere; but when you inquire into the causes of the counter-revolutionary successes, there you are met on every hand with the ready reply that it was Mr. This or Citizen That who "betrayed" the people. Which reply may be very true, or not, according to circumstances, but under no circumstances does it explain anything -- not even show how it came to pass that the "people" allowed themselves to be thus betrayed.
And what a poor chance stands a political party whose entire stock-in-trade consists in a knowledge of the solitary fact that Citizen So-and-so is not to be trusted.
The inquiry into, and the exposition of, the causes both of the revolutionary convulsion and its suppression are, besides, of paramount importance in a historical point of view. All these petty personal quarrels and recriminations -- all these contradictory assertions that it was Marrast, or Ledru-Rollin, or Louis Blanc, or any other member of the Provisional Government, or the whole of them, that steered the revolution amidst the rocks upon which it foundered -- of what interest can they be, what light can they afford, to the American or Englishman who observed all these various movements from a distance too great to allow of his distinguishing any of
the details of operations? No man in his senses will ever believe that eleven men,* (Members of the French Provisional Government. --Ed) mostly of very indifferent capacity either for good or evil, were able in three months to ruin a nation of thirty-six millions, unless those thirty-six millions saw as little of their way before them as the eleven did. But how it came to pass that these thirty-six millions were at once called upon to decide for themselves which way to go, although partly groping in dim twilight, and how then they got lost and their old leaders were for a moment allowed to return to their leadership, that is just the question.
If, then, we try to lay before the readers of The Tribune [3] the causes which, while they necessitated the German Revolution of 1848, led quite as inevitably to its momentary repression in 1849 and 1850, we shall not be expected to give a complete history of the events as they passed in that country. Later events, and the judgment of coming generations, will decide what portion of that confused mass of seemingly accidental, incoherent and incongruous facts is to form a part of the world's history. The time for such a task has not yet arrived; we must confine ourselves to the limits of the possible, and be satisfied, if we can find rational causes, based upon undeniable facts, to explain the chief events, the principal vicissitudes of that movement, and to give us a clue as to the direction which the next, and
perhaps not very distant, outbreak will impart to the German people.?
The composition of the different classes of the people which form the groundwork of every political organization was, in Germany, more complicated than in any
other country. While in England and France feudalism was entirely destroyed, or at least reduced, as in the former country, to a few insignificant forms, by a powerful
and wealthy middle class, concen trated in large towns, and particularly in the capital, the feudal nobility in Germany had retained a great portion of their ancient
privileges. The feudal system of tenure was prevalent almost everywhere. The lords of the land had even retained the jurisdiction over their tenants. Deprived of their
political privileges, of the right to control the princes, they had preserved almost all their medieval supremacy over the peasantry of their demesnes, as well as their
exemption from taxes. Feudalism was more flourishing in some localities than in others, but nowhere except on the left bank of the Rhine was it entirely destroyed.
This feudal nobility, then extremely numerous and partly very wealthy, was considered, officially, the first "order" in the country. It furnished the higher government
officials, it almost exclusively officered the army.
The bourgeoisie of Germany was by far not as wealthy and concentrated as that of France or England. The ancient manufactures of Germany had been destroyed
by the introduction of steam, and by the rapidly extending supremacy of English manufactures; the more modern manufactures, started under the Napoleonic
Continental System,[4] established in other parts of the country, did not compensate for the loss of the old ones, nor suffice to create a manufacturing interest strong
enough to force its wants upon the notice of governments jealous of every extension of non-noble wealth and power. If France carried her silk manufactures
victorious through fifty years of revolutions and wars, Germany, during the same time, all but lost her ancient linen trade. The manufacturing districts, besides, were
few and far between; situated far inland, and using mostly foreign, Dutch or Belgian ports for their imports and exports, they had little or no interest in common with
the large seaport-towns on the North Sea and the Baltic; they were, above all, unable to create large manufacturing and trading centres, such as Paris and Lyons,
London and Manchester. The causes of this backwardness of German manufactures were manifold, but two will suffice to account for it: the unfavourable
geographical situation of the country, at a distance from the Atlantic, which had become the great highway for the world's trade, and the continuous wars in which
Germany was involved, and which were fought on her soil, from the sixteenth century to the present day. It was this want of numbers, and particularly of anything like
concentrated numbers, which prevented the German middle classes from attaining that political supremacy which the English bourgeoisie has enjoyed ever since 1688, and which the French conquered in 1789. And yet, ever since 1815, the wealth, and with the wealth, the political importance of the middle class in Germany, was continually growing. Governments were, although reluctantly, compelled to bow at least to its more immediate material interests. It may even be truly said that from 1815 to 1830, and from 1832 to 1840, every particle of political influence, which, having been allowed to the middle class in the constitutions of the smaller
states, was again wrested from them during the above two periods of political reaction -- that every such particle was compensated for by some more practical
advantage allowed to them. Every political defeat of the middle class drew after it a victory on the field of commercial legislation. And, certainly, the Prussian
Protective Tariff of 1818, and the formation of the Zollverein,[5] were worth a good deal more to the traders and manufacturers of Germany than the equivocal right
of expressing, in the chambers of some diminutive dukedom, their want of confidence in ministers who laughed at their votes. Thus, with growing wealth and extending
trade, the bourgeoisie soon arrived at a stage where it found the development of its most important interests checked by the political constitution of the country -- by
its random division among thirty-six princes with conflicting tendencies and caprices; by the feudal fetters upon agriculture and the trade connected with it; by the
prying superintendence to which an ignorant and presumptuous bureaucracy subjected all its transactions. At the same time, the extension and consolidation of the
Zollverein, the general introduction of steam communication, the growing competition in the home trade, brought the commercial classes of the different states and
provinces closer together, equalized their interests, centralized their strength. The natural consequence was the passing of the whole mass of them into the camp of the
liberal Opposition, and the gaining of the first serious struggle of the German middle class for political power. This change may be dated from 1840, from the moment
when the bourgeoisie of Prussia assumed the lead of the middle-class movement of Germany. We shall hereafter revert to this liberal Opposition Movement of 1840-47.
The great mass of the nation, which neither belonged to the nobility nor to the bourgeoisie, consisted, in the towns, of the small trading and shopkeeping class and
the working people, and in the country, of the peasantry.
The small trading and shopkeeping class is exceedingly numerous in Germany, in consequence of the stinted development which the large capitalists and
manufacturers, as a class, have had in that country. In the larger towns it forms almost the majority of the inhabitants; in the smaller ones it entirely predominates, from
the absence of wealthier competitors for influence. This class, a most important one in every modern body politic, and in all modern revolutions, is still more important
in Germany, where, during the recent struggles, it generally played the decisive part. Its intermediate position between the class of larger capitalists, traders and
manufacturers, the bourgeoisie, properly so-called, and the proletarian or industrial class, determines its character. Aspiring to the position of the first, the least
adverse turn of fortune hurls the individuals of this class down into the ranks of the second. In monarchical and feudal countries the custom of the court and
aristocracy becomes necessary to its existence; the loss of this custom might ruin a great part of it. In the smaller towns a military garrison, a county government, a
court of law with its followers, form very often the base of its prosperity; withdraw these, and down go the shopkeepers, the tailors, the shoemakers, the joiners.
Thus, eternally tossed about between the hope of entering the ranks of the wealthier class, and the fear of being reduced to the state of proletarians or even paupers;
between the hope of promoting their interests by conquering a share in the direction of public affairs, and the dread of rousing, by ill-timed opposition, the ire of a
government which disposes of their very existence, because it has the power of removing their best customers; possessed of small means, the insecurity of the
possession of which is in the inverse ratio of the amount -- this class is extremely vacillating in its views. Humble and crouchingly submissive under a powerful feudal
or monarchical government, it turns to the side of liberalism when the middle class is in the ascendant; it becomes seized with violent democratic fits as soon as the
middle class has secured its own supremacy, but falls back into the abject despondency of fear as soon as the class below itself, the proletarians, attempt an
independent movement. We shall, by and by, see this class, in Germany, pass alternately from one of these stages to the other.
The working class in Germany is, in its social and political development, as far behind that of England and France as the German bourgeoisie is behind the
bourgeoisie of those countries. Like master, like man. The evolution of the conditions of existence for a numerous, strong, concentrated and intelligent proletarian
class goes hand in hand with the development of the conditions of existence for a numerous, wealthy, concentrated and powerful middle class. The working-class
movement itself never is independent, never is of an exclusively proletarian character, until all the different factions of the middle class, and particularly its most
progressive faction, the large manufacturers, have conquered political power and remodelled the state according to their wants. It is then that the inevitable conflict
between the employer and the employed becomes imminent and cannot be adjourned any longer; that the working class can no longer be put off with delusive hopes
and promises never to be realized; that the great problem of the nineteenth century, the abolition of the proletariat, is at last brought forward fairly and in its proper
light. Now, in Germany, the mass of the working class were employed, not by those modern manufacturing lords of which Great Britain furnishes such splendid
specimens, but by small tradesmen whose entire manufacturing system is a mere relic of the Middle Ages. And as there is an enormous difference between the great
cotton lord and the petty cobbler or master tailor, so there is a corresponding distance from the wide awake factory operative of modern manufacturing Babylons to
the bashful journeyman tailor or cabinet-maker of a small country town, who lives in circumstances and works after a plan very little different from those of the like
sort of men some five hundred years ago. This general absence of modern conditions of life, of modern modes of industrial production, of course was accompanied
by a pretty equally general absence of modern ideas, and it is therefore not to be wondered at if, at the outbreak of the revolution, a large part of the working classes
should cry out for the immediate re-establishment of guilds and medieval privileged trades' corporations. Yet, from the manufacturing districts, where the modern
system of production predominated, and in consequence of the facilities of intercommunication and mental development afforded by the migratory life of a large
number of the working men, a strong nucleus formed itself, whose ideas about the emancipation of their class were far clearer and more in accordance with existing
facts and historical necessities; but they were a mere minority. If the active movement of the middle classes may be dated from 1840, that of the working class
commences its advent by the insurrections of the Silesian and Bohemian factory operatives in 1844,[6] and we shall soon have occasion to pass in review the different
stages through which this movement passed.
Lastly, there was the great class of the small farmers, the peasantry, which, with its appendix of farm-labourers, constitutes a considerable majority of the entire
nation. But this class again subdivided itself into different fractions. There were, firstly, the more wealthy farmers, what is called in Germany Gross- and
Mittelbauern*,[* Big and middle peasants. --Ed. ] proprietors of more or less extensive farms, and each of them commanding the services of several agricultural
labourers. This class, placed between the large untaxed feudal land-owners and the smaller peasantry and farm-labourers, for obvious reasons found in an alliance
with the anti-feudal middle class of the towns its most natural political course. Then there were, secondly, the small freeholders, predominating in the Rhine country,
where feudalism had succumbed before the mighty strokes of the great French Revolution. Similar independent small freeholders also existed here and there in other
provinces, where they had succeeded in buying off the feudal charges formerly due upon their lands. This class, however, was a class of freeholders by name only,
their property being generally mortgaged to such an extent, and under such onerous conditions, that not the peasant, but the usurer who had advanced the money,
was the real land-owner. Thirdly, the feudal tenants, who could not be easily turned out of their holdings, but who had to pay a perpetual rent, or to perform in
perpetuity a certain amount of labour in favour of the lord of the manor. Lastly, the agricultural labourers, whose condition, in many large farming concerns, was
exactly that of the same class in England, and who, in all cases, lived and died poor, ill-fed, and the slaves of their employers. These three latter classes of the
agricultural population, the small freeholders, the feudal tenants, and the agricultural labourers, never troubled their heads much about politics before the revolution,
but it is evident that this event must have opened to them a new career, full of brilliant prospects. To every one of them the revolution offered advantages, and the
movement once fairly engaged in, it was to be expected that each, in his turn, would join it. But at the same time it is quite as evident, and equally borne out by the
history of all modern countries, that the agricultural population, in consequence of its dispersion over a great space, and of the difficulty of bringing about an agreement
among any considerable portion of it, never can attempt a successful independent movement; they require the initiatory impulse of the more concentrated, more
enlightened, more easily moved people of the towns.
The preceding short sketch of the most important of the classes, which in their aggregate formed the German nation at the outbreak of the recent movements, will
already be sufficient to explain a great part of the incoherence, incongruence and apparent contradiction which prevailed in that movement. When interests so varied,
so conflicting, so strangely crossing each other, are brought into violent collision; when these contending interests in every district, every province, are mixed in
different proportions; when, above all, there is no great centre in the country, no London, no Paris, the decisions of which, by their weight, may supersede the
necessity of fighting out the same quarrel over and over again in every single locality; what else is to be expected but that the contest will dissolve itself into a mass of
unconnected struggles, in which an enormous quantity of blood, energy and capital is spent, but which for all that remain without any decisive results?
The political dismemberment of Germany into three dozen of more or less important principalities is equally explained by this confusion and multiplicity of the
elements which compose the nation, and which again vary in every locality. Where there are no common interests there can be no unity of purpose, much less of
action. The German Confederation, it is true, was declared everlastingly indissoluble; yet the Confederation and its organ, the Diet,[7] never represented German
unity. The very highest pitch to which centralization was ever carried in Germany was the establishment of the Zollverein ; by this the states on the North Sea were
also forced into a Customs Union of their own,[8] Austria remaining wrapped up in her separate prohibitive tariff. Germany had the satisfaction to be, for all practical
purposes, divided between three independent powers only, instead of between thirty six. Of course, the paramount supremacy of the Russian Czar, as established in
1814, underwent no change on this account.
Having drawn these preliminary conclusions from our premises, we shall see, in our next, how the afore-said various classes of the German people were set into
movement one after the other, and what character this movement assumed on the outbreak of the French Revolution of 1848.
London, September, 1851
