The Revolutionary Movement

Cologne, 31 December. Never was a revolutionary movement opened with so edifying an overture as the revolutionary movement of 1848. The Pope gave it his ecclesiastical blessing, Lamartine’s Aeolian harp quivered with soft-sounding philanthropic tunes, whose text was *fraternité*, the brotherhood of the members of society and of the nations.

“Be embraced, ye millions,
This kiss to the whole world!”

At this moment the Pope sits at Gaeta, driven from Rome, under the protection of the tiger-imbecile Ferdinand, the “Iniciatore” of Italy, intriguing against Italy with its hereditary deadly enemy, with Austria, whom he had threatened with the ban in his happy period. The latest French presidential election provided the statistical tables of Lamartine’s, the traitor’s, unpopularity. Nothing more humanitarian, more humane, weaker than the February and March revolutions, nothing more brutal than the necessary consequences of this humanity of weakness. Witnesses: Italy, Poland, Germany and above all the vanquished of June.

With the defeat of the French workers in June, however, the victors of June were themselves defeated. Ledru-Rollin and the other men of the Mountain were supplanted by the party of the bourgeois republicans, by the party of the *National*; the party of the *National* by the dynastic opposition, Thiers-Barrot, and this would itself have to give way to the Legitimists, were not the cycle of the three restorations exhausted and Louis Napoleon more than a hollow urn in which the French peasants deposited their entry into the revolutionary-social movement and the French workers their votes of condemnation against all the leaders of the epochs they had lived through—Thiers-Barrot, Lamartine and Cavaignac-Marrast. But let us register the fact that the defeat of the revolutionary French working class entailed, as its inevitable consequence, the defeat of the republican French bourgeoisie, to which it had just succumbed.

The defeat of the working class in France, the victory of the French bourgeoisie was simultaneously the renewed gagging of the nationalities which had answered the crowing of the Gallic cock with heroic attempts at emancipation. Poland, Italy and Ireland were once more pillaged, outraged, and foully murdered by Prussian, Austrian and English sbirri. The defeat of the working class in France, the victory of the French bourgeoisie was simultaneously the defeat of the middle classes in all European countries, where the middle classes, for a moment united with the people, had answered the crowing of the Gallic cock with a bloody rising against feudalism. Naples, Vienna, Berlin! The defeat of the working class in France, the victory of the French bourgeoisie was simultaneously the victory of the East over the West, the defeat of civilisation by barbarism. In Wallachia the suppression of the Romanians by the Russians and their tools, the Turks, began; in Vienna Croats, Pandurs, Czechs, Seressaners and similar rabble throttled German freedom, and at this moment the Tsar is omnipresent in Europe. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie in France, the triumph of the French working class, the emancipation of the working class in general, is therefore the watchword of European liberation.

The land, however, that transforms whole nations into its proletarians, that holds the whole world encompassed in its giant arms, that already once paid the costs of the European restoration with its money, in whose own womb class antagonisms have developed in their most pronounced and shameless form—England seems the rock on which the revolutionary waves shatter, that starves the new society even in the mother’s womb. England dominates the world market. A transformation of the national-economic conditions in every country of the European continent, on the entire European continent, without England, is a storm in a glass of water. The relations of industry and trade within every nation are dominated by their intercourse with other nations, are conditioned by their relation to the world market. But England dominates the world market and the bourgeoisie dominates England.

The liberation of Europe, whether it be the rising of the oppressed nationalities to independence, or the overthrow of feudal absolutism, is therefore conditioned by the victorious rising of the French working class. But every French social upheaval necessarily founders on the English bourgeoisie, on the industrial and commercial world-supremacy of Great Britain. Every partial social reform in France and on the European continent in general is and remains, so far as it is meant to be definitive, a hollow pious wish. And old England can only be overthrown by a world war, which alone can provide the Chartist party, the organised English workers’ party, with the conditions for a successful rising against its gigantic oppressors. The Chartists at the head of the English government—only from that moment does the social revolution pass out of the realm of utopia into the realm of reality. But every European war in which England is involved is a world war. It is waged in Canada as in Italy, in East India as in Prussia, in Africa as on the Danube. And the European war is the first consequence of the victorious workers’ revolution in France. England will, as in Napoleon’s time, stand at the head of the counter-revolutionary armies, but through the war itself be thrown to the head of the revolutionary movement and redeem its debt to the revolution of the 18th century.

Revolutionary rising of the French working class, world war—that is the programme of the year 1849.