It is hard to say which has sunk lower in the last three years, the 
monarchy or the republic. The monarchy—on the continent of 
Europe, at least—is everywhere assuming its final form, Caesar- 
ism, at an increasing pace. Everywhere sham constitutionalism with 
universal suffrage, an overgrown army as the buttress of 
government, bribery and corruption as the chief means of 
government, and enrichment through corruption and fraud as the 
sole end of government, are irresistibly undermining all the 
splendid constitutional guarantees, the artificial balance of forces, 
of which our bourgeois dreamt in the idyllic days of Louis 
Philippe, when even the most corrupt were still angels of 
innocence compared with the “great men” of today. As the 
bourgeoisie daily loses the character of a class temporarily 
indispensable in the social organism, shedding its specific social 
functions to become a mere gang of swindlers, its state turns into 
an institution for the protection, not of production, but of the 
overt theft of products. Not only does this state carry its own 
condemnation within itself; it has actually already been con- 
demned by history in Louis Napoleon. Yet it is also the last 
possible form of monarchy. All other forms of monarchy are worn 
out and obsolete. After it, the only possible type of state left is the 
republic. 

The republic, however, is not faring any better. From 1789 to 
1869, it was the ideal of enthusiastic freedom fighters, always 
aspired to, attained after a hard, bloody struggle, and scarcely 
attained—fleeing again. Since a King of Prussia* succeeded in 

setting up a French republic all that has changed. From 
1870—and this is the progress attained—republics are no longer 
made by republicans, precisely because there are no pure 
republicans left, but by royalists despairing of the monarchy. To 
avoid civil war, the monarchist-minded bourgeois are consolidating 
the republic in France and proclaiming it in Spain*”’—in France, 
because there are too many pretenders; in Spain, because the last 
possible king* is on strike. 

Herein lies a twofold advance. 

First, the magic that hitherto surrounded the name of the 
republic has been dispelled. After the events in France and in 
Spain, only a Karl Blind can cling to the superstitious belief in the 
miraculous effects of a republic. The republic is finally seen in 
Europe, too, for what it is in essence, and in America in actual 
fact—as the consummate form of the rule of the bourgeoisie. I say 
“finally in Europe, too”, because republics like Switzerland, 
Hamburg, Bremen, Litbeck and the ex-free city of Frankfort— 
God rest her soul—are irrelevant here. The modern republic, 
with which alone we are concerned at this point, is the political 
organisation of a great people, not the provincial political 
institution of a city, a canton or a club of cantons that has been 
historically handed down from the Middle Ages, assuming more 
or less democratic forms, and, at best, replacing patrician rule with 
a peasant rule that is scarcely any better. Switzerland exists partly 
through the indulgence and partly through the jealousy of its 
great neighbours; whenever these are united, it is forced to 
swallow its republican phrases and obey orders. Such countries 
exist only as long as they do not attempt to intervene in the course 
of history, which is why they are neutralised and thus prevented 
from doing so. The era of the true European republics dates from 
September 4, or rather from the day of Sedan,” even if a brief 
Caesarist setback (under no matter which pretender) might be 
possible. And in this sense, it might be said that the Thiers 
republic is the final realisation of the republic of 1792; the 
republic of the Jacobins without the self-deception of the Jacobins. 
From now on, the working class can no longer have any illusions 
about the nature of the modern republic: the type of state in 
which the rule of the bourgeoisie achieves its final, consummate 
expression. In the modern republic political equality, which is still 
subject to certain exceptions in all monarchies, is at last fully 
implemented. And this political equality—what is it but the 

declaration that class differences do not concern the state, that the 
bourgeois have as much right to be bourgeois as the workers to be 
proletarians? 

Yet this final, consummate form of bourgeois rule, the republic, 
is only introduced by the bourgeois themselves with the utmost 
reluctance; it forces itself on them. Why this curious contradiction? 
Because the introduction of the republic means breaking with all 
political tradition; because it requires every political institution to 
justify its existence; because, therefore, all the traditional influ- 
ences that support the powers that be under the monarchy fall 
away. In other words: if the modern republic is the consummate 
form of bourgeois rule, it is also the type of state that frees the 
class struggle from its last fetters and prepares the battleground 
for it. The modern republic is, in fact, nothing but this 
battleground. And this is the second advance. On the one hand, 
the bourgeoisie feels that its end is near as soon as the ground of 
the monarchy is whipped away from under its feet and, with it, all 
the conservative power that resided in the superstitious belief of 
the uneducated masses, particularly in the countryside, in the 
traditional supremacy of the royal houses—no matter whether this 
superstition worships the kingdom of God’s grace, as in Prussia, or 
the legendary peasant emperor Napoleon, as in France. On the 
other hand, the proletariat feels that the funeral dirge of the 
monarchy is simultaneously the clarion call for the decisive battle 
with the bourgeoisie. The modern republic is nothing but the 
stage cleared for the last great class struggle in world history —and 
this is what gives it its tremendous significance. 

In order, however, for this class struggle between bourgeoisie 
and proletariat to be decided, these two classes must be sufficiently 
developed in the countries concerned, at least in the large towns. 
In Spain this is only the case in individual parts of the country. In 
Catalonia, large-scale industry is relatively highly developed. In 
Andalusia and some other areas big landed property and 
large-scale agriculture—landowners and wage-labourers— prevail; 
in most of the country small farmers prevail in rural areas, small 
industry in the towns. The conditions for a proletarian revolution 
are thus relatively poorly developed, and, for precisely this reason, 
there still remains a great deal to be done in Spain for a bourgeois 
republic; above all, its mission here is to clear the stage for the 
imminent class struggle. 

A primary necessity is the abolition of the army and the 
introduction of a_ people’s militia’ Geographically, Spain is so 
favourably situated that it can only be seriously attacked by one 

neighbour, and even then only along the short front of the 
Pyrenees; a front that does not even comprise an eighth of its total 
perimeter. Moreover, the conditions of the terrain in the country 
are such that they complicate mobile warfare by large armies in 
the same measure as they facilitate irregular popular warfare. We 
saw this under Napoleon, who at times despatched up to 300,000 
men to Spain, but they were always defeated by the people’s dour 
resistance; we have seen this countless times since then and see it 
to this day in the impotence of the Spanish army in the face of the 
few gangs of Carlists in the mountains.” A country like this has 
no pretext for an army. Furthermore, since 1830 the army in 
Spain has merely been the lever of all those generals’ plots which 
have brought down the government every few years with a 
military revolt, in order to replace old thieves with new. To 
dissolve the Spanish army is to release Spain from civil war. This, 
then, would be the first demand the Spanish workers should make 
on the new government. 

Once the army is abolished, the main reason that the Catalans, 
in particular, are demanding a federal state organisation disap- 
pears. Revolutionary Catalonia, the great working-class suburb of 
Spain, as it were, has hitherto been kept down by _ heavy 
concentrations of troops, just as Bonaparte and Thiers kept Paris 
and Lyons down. This is why the Catalans demanded the division 
of Spain into federal states with independent administration. If 
the army goes, so does the main reason for this demand; it will be 
possible to achieve independence in principle without the reac- 
tionary destruction of national unity, and without reproducing a 
larger Switzerland. 

The financial legislation of Spain, as regards both internal taxes 
and border tariffs, is nonsensical from start to finish. A bourgeois 
republic can do a great deal about this. The same applies to the 
confiscation of the landed property of the Church, which has 
often been confiscated but has always been amassed once again, 
and, last but not least, the provision of highways, which are 
nowhere in a worse state than here. 

A few years of peaceful bourgeois republic would prepare the 
ground in Spain for a proletarian revolution in a way that would 
surprise even the most advanced Spanish workers. Instead of 
repeating the bloody farce of the previous revolution,’ instead of 
staging isolated, easily crushed rebellions, it is to be hoped that the 

Spanish workers will make use of the republic in order to join 
together more firmly and organise themselves with a view to an 
approaching revolution, a revolution they will command. The 
bourgeois government of the new republic is merely seeking an 
excuse to suppress the revolutionary movement and shoot down 
the workers, as the republicans Favre and consorts did in Paris. 
May the Spanish workers not give them the excuse! 

March 1, 1873; La Emancipacion, March 7, 
1873; O Pensamento Social, March 23, 1873 

Frederick Engels