Death has torn another hole in the ranks of the champions of 
the proletarian revolution. Johann Philipp Becker died in Geneva 
on December 7. 

Born at Frankenthal in the Bavarian Palatinate in 1809, he took 
part in the political movement of his native region back in the 
1820s, when little more than a child. When this movement became 
republican in character in the early 1830s, after the July 
Revolution, Becker was one of its most active and _ stalwart 
supporters. Several times arrested, brought before a jury and 
acquitted, when reaction triumphed he eventually had to flee. He 
went to Switzerland, settled in Biel and took Swiss citizenship. He 
did not remain idle there, either. He was involved not only in the 
affairs of the German workingmen’s associations and the revolutio- 
nary endeavours of the German, Italian and European refugees in 
general, but also in the struggle of the Swiss democrats for control 
of the individual cantons. It will be recalled that this struggle was 
waged by means of a series of armed raids on the aristocratic and 
clerical cantons, particularly in the early 1840s. Becker was 
implicated to a greater or lesser extent in most of these “coups” 
and was finally sentenced to ten years’ banishment from his home 
canton of Berne on this account. These minor campaigns 
eventually culminated in the Sonderbund War of 1847. Becker, 
who was an officer in the Swiss Army, took up his post and, 
during the march on Lucerne, led the advance guard of the 
division to which he was assigned. 

The February Revolution of 1848 broke out; there ensued 
attempts to republicanise Baden by means of campaigns by 
volunteer corps. When Hecker launched his campaign,’”” Becker 

formed a refugees legion but was not able to get to the border 
until Hecker had already been pushed back. This legion, most 
members of which were subsequently interned in France, provided 
the nucleus for some of the best units in the armies of the 
Palatinate and Baden in 1849. 

When the republic was proclaimed in Rome in the spring of 
1849,?”° Becker sought to form an auxiliary corps from this legion 
to fight on the side of Rome. He went to Marseilles, set up the 
officer cadre and took steps to gather together the troops. But, as 
we well know, the French Government was preparing to suppress 
the Roman republic and bring back the Pope.* It went without 
saying that the French Government prevented the auxiliaries from 
coming to the aid of its Roman adversaries. Becker, who had 
already hired a ship, was informed in no uncertain terms that she 
would be sent to the bottom as soon as she made any move to 
leave harbour. 

Revolution then broke out in Germany.’” Becker immediately 
hurried to Karlsruhe; the legion followed, and later took part in 
the struggle under Boning’s leadership, while another section of 
the old legion of 1848, trained by Willich in Besancon, formed the 
nucleus of Willich’s voluntary corps. Becker was appointed head of 
the entire Baden people’s militia, that is to say, all troops except 
troops of the line, and at once set about organising it. He 
immediately came up against the government, which was domi- 
nated by the reactionary bourgeoisie, and its leader, Brentano. His 
orders were countermanded, his requests for arms and equipment 
left unheeded or turned down flat. The attempt on June 6 to 
intimidate the government by a show of revolutionary armed 
strength, an attempt in which Becker was a major participant, 
proved indecisive 7°; but Becker and his troops were then sent 
post-haste from Karlsruhe to the Neckar to face the enemy. 

There the battle had already started in a small way, and the 
decisive moment was rapidly approaching. With his volunteers and 
militiamen, Becker occupied the Odenwald forest. Without artil- 
lery and cavalry he was obliged to waste his few troops holding 
this extensive and awkward area, and not enough was left at his 
disposal to mount an attack. Nonetheless, on June 15 he relieved, 
in a brilliantly fought action, his Hanau Gymnasts,”! who had — 
been surrounded in Hirschhorn Castle by Peucker’s imperial 
troops. 

When Mieroslawski became commander-in-chief of the rev- 
olutionary army, Becker was given command of the 5th 
' Division—nothing but militiamen and infantry—with orders to 
resist Peucker’s corps, which outnumbered Becker’s division by at 
least 6 to 1. But shortly afterwards came the crossing of the Rhine 
by the first Prussian corps at Germersheim, Mieroslawski’s 
countermove and the defeat at Waghausel on June 21. Becker 
occupied Heidelberg; the second Prussian corps under Groben 
advanced from the north, from the northeast came Peucker’s 
corps, each more than 20,000 strong, while to the southwest were 
Hirschfeld’s Prussians, likewise more than 20,000 strong. And 
then the refugees from Waghausel—the entire Baden army, both 
troops of the line and militiamen—poured into Heidelberg to 
make an enormous detour through the mountains and rejoin the 
road to Karlsruhe and Rastatt, which was blocked to them in the 
plain. 

Becker was supposed to cover this retreat—with his newly 
recruited, untrained troops and as usual without cavalry or 
artillery. At 8 p.m. on the 22nd, after allowing the refugees an 
adequate start, he marched from Heidelberg to Neckargemiind, 
where he rested for a few hours. Arriving on the 23rd at 
Sinsheim, where he again gave his troops a few hours’ rest in 
battle formation in the face of the enemy, he reached Eppingen 
the same evening, and on the 24th he marched via Bretten to 
Durlach, arriving at 8 p.m. only to become tangled up again in the 
disorderly retreat of the now united Palatinate-Baden army. Here 
Becker was also given command of the remnants of the Palatinate 
troops, and was now expected not only to cover Mieroslawski’s 
retreat but also to hold Durlach long enough for Karlsruhe to be 
evacuated. As always, he was again left without any artillery, since 
the artillery assigned to him had already marched off. 

Becker hastily fortified Durlach as well as he could, and was 
attacked the very next morning (June 25) on three sides by two 
Prussian divisions and Peucker’s imperial troops. He not only 
repulsed all the attacks but also launched several counter-attacks, 
although he had only small arms to pit against the enemy’s 
artillery fire, and after four hours’ fighting withdrew in perfect 
order, unchecked by the columns despatched to outflank him, 
after receiving word that Karlsruhe had been evacuated and his 
mission accomplished. 

This must be the most brilliant episode in the entire Baden- 
Palatinate campaign. With men most of whom had only been in 
the army for 2-3 weeks and who as completely raw recruits had 

been given a perfunctory training by improvised officers and 
NCOs and hardly had a trace of discipline, Becker carried out, as 
the rearguard of the beaten and half-dispersed armies, a march of 
more than 80 kilometres (or 11 German miles*) in 48 hours, 
starting straight away with a night march, bringing them right 
through the enemy to Durlach in a fit state to offer the Prussians, 
the next morning, one of the few engagements of the campaign in 
which the battle objective of the revolutionary army was achieved 
in full. It was an achievement that would do credit to experienced 
troops and in the case of such young soldiers is extremely rare 
and praiseworthy. 

Having reached the Murg, Becker came to a halt with his 
division east of Rastatt and played an honourable part in the 
battles of June 29 and 30. The outcome is well known: the enemy, 
six times superior in strength, marched round the position 
through the territory of Wurttemberg and then rolled it back 
from the right flank. The campaign was now formally settled and 
ended of necessity with the withdrawal of the revolutionary army 
to Swiss territory. 

Until then Becker had acted basically as an ordinary democratic 
republican; but from now on he went considerably further. Closer 
acquaintance with the German “pure republicans”, particularly the 
south German ones, and his experience in the 1849 revolution 
demonstrated to him that the matter would have to be tackled 
differently in future. The strong proletarian sympathies that 
Becker had entertained since his youth now assumed a more 
tangible form; he had realised that while the bourgeoisie always 
formed the core of the reactionary parties, only the proletariat 
could form the core of a genuinely revolutionary force. The 
communist by sentiment became a conscious communist. 

Once again he attempted to set up a voluntary corps; it was in 
1860, after Garibaldi’s victorious march on Sicily. He travelled 
from Geneva to Genoa to make the preparations in collaboration 
with Garibaldi. But Garibaldi’s rapid progress and the intervention 
of the Italian Army, which was to secure the fruits of victory for 
the monarchy, brought the campaign to an end. Meanwhile, there 
were widespread expectations of another war with Austria next 
year. It is common knowledge that Russia sought to use Louis 
Napoleon and Italy to consummate the Russian revenge on 
Austria, which had remained incomplete in 1859. The Italian 
Government sent a high-ranking officer from the general staff to 

see Becker in Genoa, offering him the rank of colonel in the 
Italian Army, a:splendid salary and an allowance, and command 
over a legion to be formed by him in the war that was expected, 
provided he agreed to make propaganda in Germany for Italy 
and against Austria. But the proletarian Becker turned the offer 
down; the service of princes was not for him. 

That was his last attempt as a volunteer. Soon after, the 
International Workingmen’s Association was established, and 
Becker was among its founders; he was present at the famous 
meeting in St. Martin’s Hall that saw the birth of the Internation- 
al.?*? He organised the German and native workers of Romance 
Switzerland, founded the Vorbote as the group’s journal, attended 
all the congresses of the International and was in the vanguard 
of the struggle against the Bakuninist anarchists of the 
Alliance de la Démocratie socialiste” and the Swiss Jura. 

After the disintegration of the International there was less 
opportunity for Becker to play a public role. But he always 
remained, nevertheless, in the midst of the working-class move- 
ment and continued to exert his influence on its development 
through his extensive correspondence and by virtue of the many 
visits he received in Geneva. In 1882 he played host to Marx for a 
day, and as recently as this September the 77-year-old undertook a 
journey through the Palatinate and Belgium to London and Paris, 
during which I had the pleasure of having him to stay for a 
fortnight and talking over old times and new with him. And 
scarcely two months later the telegraph brings news of his death! 

Becker was a rare kind of man. He can be epitomised in a 
nutshell: hale and hearty. In body and mind he was hale and hearty 
to the end. A giant of a man, of tremendous physical strength and 
handsome with it, he had developed his untutored, but far from 
uncultivated mind, thanks to a fortunate disposition and healthy 
activity, as harmoniously as his body. He was one of the few men 
who, to do the right thing, only need to follow their own instinct. 
That was why it was so easy for him to keep pace with every 
development in the revolutionary movement and to stand in the 
front rank in his seventy-eighth year as fresh as when he was 
eighteen. The boy who had played with cossacks passing through 
in 1814 and seen Sand (who stabbed Kotzebue to death) executed 
in 1820, advanced further and further from the vague opposition- 
al figure of the 1820s and was still fully abreast of the movement 
in 1886. Yet he was no gloomy timeserver like most of the 
“serious” republicans of 1848, but a true son of the gay 
Palatinate, full of life and as fond of wine, women and song as the 

next man. Having grown up in the land of the Nibelungenlied?** 

around Worms, he still looked like one of the figures from our old 
epic, even in old age: light-hearted yet sardonic, calling to his 
opponent between sword blows, composing popular ballads if 
there was no one to beat—this, and no other ways, is how Volker 
the Fiddler must have looked! 

But his greatest talent was undoubtedly military. In Baden he 
accomplished much more than anyone else. While the other 
officers, raised in the school of standing armies, found outlandish, 
almost unmanageable soldier material here, Becker had learned all 
his organisational skill, tactics and strategy in the outrageous 
school of the Swiss militia. A people’s army was nothing strange to 
him, its inevitable shortcomings nothing new. Where others 
despaired or raged, Becker remained calm and found one solution 
after another; he knew how to handle his men, cheering them up 
with a jest, and finally had them in his hand. Many a Prussian 
general of 1870 might envy him the march from Heidelberg to 
Durlach with a division of almost nothing but untrained recruits, 
who still remained capable of going straight into battle and giving 
a good account of themselves. And in the same engagement he 
threw into battle the hitherto intractable Palatinate troops that had 
been assigned to him, and even got them to attack in open 
country. In Becker we have lost the only German revolutionary 
general we had. 

He was a man who took part, with distinction, in the freedom 
struggles of three generations. 

But the workers will honour his memory as one of their best! 

London, December 9, 1886 
Frederick Engels 
No. 51, December 17, 1886 paper