There are striking analogies in history. The Jacobin of 1793 has 
become the Communist of the present day. In 1793, when Russia, 
Austria and Prussia divided up Poland, the three powers produced 
the constitution of 1791,°°? which had been condemned unanimously 
because of its alleged Jacobin principles. 

And what had it proclaimed? The Polish constitution of 1791! 
Nothing other than a constitutional monarchy: legislation placed in 
the hanas of the representatives of the country, freedom of the 
press, freedom of conscience, public judicial trial, abolition of 
serfdom, etc. And all this was then called pure Jacobinism! Thus you 
see, gentlemen, that history has moved on. The Jacobinism of those 
days has today become, as far as liberalism goes, the most moderate 
imaginable. 

The three Powers have marched with history. In 1846 when by 
incorporating Cracow into Austria they confiscated the last remains 
of Polish nationality, they gave the name communism to what they 
once called Jacobinism. 

Now, what is the communism of the Cracow revolution? Was it 
communism to have wanted to restore Polish nationality? This is as 
much as to say that the war waged against Napoleon by the European 
coalition to save nationalities was a communist war, and that the 
Congress of Vienna” was made up of crowned Communists. Or was 
the Cracow revolution communist because it wanted to set up a 
democratic government? Nobody will charge the millionaire citizens 
of Berne and New York with communist leanings. 

Communism denies the necessity for the existence of classes; it 
wants to abolish all classes, ali class distinctions. The revolutionaries 
of Cracow wanted only to abolish political distinctions between the 
classes; they wanted to give equal rights to the different classes. 

But, briefly, to what extent was the Cracow revolution communist? 

Was it perhaps that it tried to break the chains of feudalism, to 
turn tributary property into free property, into modern property? 

If one asked French proprietors: “Do you know what Polish 
democrats want? The Polish democrats want to have the kind of 
property ownership which you already have’, the French propri- 
etors would answer, “They are quite right.” But if you say, with 
M. Guizot, to the French proprietors: ‘““The Poles want to abolish 
property as you instituted it by the revolution of 1789 and as it still 
exists in your country.” “What!” they will shout, “they are 
revolutionaries, Communists; these scoundrels must be trampled 
down!” The abolition of guilds, of corporations, the introduction of 
free competition, is now called communism in Sweden. The Journal des 
Débats went further: to abolish the unearned income constituted by 
the right of corruption for two hundred thousand electors, is to 
abolish a source of revenue, to destroy an acquired property, to be 
communist. Doubtless the Cracow revolution also wanted to abolish 
one kind of property. But what kind of property? One which could 
not be destroyed in the rest of Europe any more than the 
Sonderbund™ in Switzerland, both having already disappeared. 

No one will deny that in Poland the political question is tied to 
the social question. The one has always been inseparable from the 
other. 

Better ask it of the reactionaries! During the Restoration” were 
they only fighting political liberalism and its inevitable load of 
Voltairianism? 

A very renowned reactionary writer loudly professed that the 
highest metaphysics of a de Maistre and of a de Bonald was in the 
end a question of money, and is not every question of money a 
directly social question? The men of the Restoration did not conceal 
the fact that to bring back good politics it was necessary to bring back 
good property rights, feudal property, moral property. Everybody 
knows that loyalty to monarchy cannot dispense with tithes and 
corvée labour. 

Let us go further back. In 1789 the political question of the rights 
of man included the social question of free competition. 

And what then happened in England? In all questions from the 
Reform Bill until the abolition of the Corn Laws,°*” did the political 
parties fight about anything except changes in property rights, 
questions of property, social questions? 

Here, in Belgium itself, is the struggle of liberalism with 
Catholicism anything but the struggle of industrial capital with large 
landed property? 

CELEBRATION, A BRUXELLES, 

DU DEUXIEME ANNIVERSAIRE 

DE LA 

REVOLUTION POLONAISE 

du 22 février 1846. 

DMiscours 

PRONONCES 

PAR MM. A. J. SENAULT, KARL MARX, LELEWEL. F. ENGELS 
ET LOUIS LUBLINER, AVOCAT. 

BRUXELLES. 

C. G. VOGLER, LIBRAIRE-EDITEUR. 

a 

1848 

Cover of the pamphlet containing the speeches “On the Polish Question” 
by Marx and Engels 

19— 1826 

On the Polish Question 549 

And the political questions which have been debated for the last 
seventeen years, are these not basically social questions? 

Thus, however you look at it, whether from a liberal, radical, even 
aristocratic point of view, could you still reproach the Cracow 
revolution with having joined a social question to a political question? 

The men who led the Cracow revolutionary movement were 
deeply convinced that only a democratic Poland could be independ- 
ent, and a democratic Poland was impossible without the abolition 
of feudal rights, without the agrarian movement which would 
transform the tied peasants into free proprietors, modern propri- 
etors. Replace the Russian autocrat by Polish aristocrats and you will 
have given despotism naturalisation papers. It was thus that the 
Germans, in their war against foreign rule, exchanged one Napoleon 
for thirty-six Metternichs.>”’ 

If the Polish lord no longer has a Russian lord over him, the Polish 
peasant will still have a lord over him, but a free lord in place of a 
slave lord. This political change will have altered nothing in his social 
position. 

The Cracow revolution has given a glorious example to the whole 
of Europe, by identifying the national cause with the democratic 
cause and the emancipation of the oppressed class. 

If this revolution has been stifled for the moment by the bloody 
hands of hired assassins it is now rising gloriously and triumphantly 
in Switzerland and Italy. It sees the confirmation of these principles 
in Ireland, where the narrowly nationalist party has gone to its grave 
with O’Connell, and where the new national party is above all 
reforming and democratic.*” 

It is Poland once again which has taken the initiative, no longer 
feudal Poland, but democratic Poland; and from this moment its 
emancipation has become the point of honour for all the democrats 
of Europe. 

SPEECH BY MR. FREDERICK ENGELS 

Gentlemen, 

The insurrection whose anniversary we are celebrating today has 
failed. After some days of heroic resistance Cracow fell and the 
bleeding ghost of Poland, which had risen for a moment before the 
eyes of its assassins, descended again into its grave. 

The Cracow revolution was a defeat, a very deplorable defeat. Let 
us render the last honours to the fallen heroes, lament their setback 
and offer our sympathy to the twenty million Polish people whom 
this failure has again enchained. 

1 

But, gentlemen, is that all we have to do? Is it enough to shed a 
tear on the tomb of an unhappy country and to pledge against its 
oppressors an implacable hatred, till now not very potent? 

No, gentlemen! The anniversary of Cracow is not only a day of 
mourning, it is a day of rejoicing for us other democrats; for the 
defeat itself contains a victory, a victory whose fruits are ours to 
gather, while the results of the defeat are only transitory. 

This victory is the victory of young democratic Poland over the old 
aristocratic Poland. 

Yes, the latest struggle of Poland against its foreign oppressors has 
been preceded by a hidden struggle, concealed but decisive within 
Poland itself, a struggle of oppressed Poles against Polish oppressors, 
a struggle of democracy against the Polish aristocracy. 

Compare 1830° and 1846, compare Warsaw and Cracow. In 
1830 the ruling class in Poland was as selfish, narrow-minded and 
cowardly in the legislative body as it was devoted, enthusiastic and 
courageous on the field of battle. 

What did the Polish aristocracy want in 1830? To safeguard its 
own acquired rights with regard to the Emperor.’ It limited the 
insurrection to the little country which the Congress of Vienna was 
pleased to call the Kingdom of Poland"; it restrained the uprising in 
the other Polish provinces; it left intact the degrading serfdom of the 
peasants and the infamous condition of the Jews. If the aristocracy, 
in the course of the insurrection, had to make concessions to the 
people, it only made them when it was too late, when the insurrection 
had failed. 

Let it be said clearly: the insurrection of 1830 was neither a 
national revolution (it excluded three-quarters of Poland) nor a 
social or a political revolution; it changed nothing in the internal 
condition of the people; it was a conservative revolution. 

But within the conservative revolution, within the national 
government itself, there was one man who vigorously attacked the 
narrow views of the ruling class. He proposed really revolutionary 
measures before whose boldness the aristocrats of the Diet recoiled. 
By calling the whole of ancient Poland to arms, by thus making the 
war for Polish independence a European war, by emancipating the 
Jews and the peasants, by making the latter share in landed property, 
by reconstructing Poland on the basis of democracy and equality, he 
wanted to make the national cause the cause of freedom; he wanted 
to identify the interest of all peoples with that of the Polish people. 

4 Nicholas I.—Ed. 

On the Polish Question 551 

Need I name the genius who conceived this plan, at once so vast and 
so simple? It was Lelewel. 

In 1830, these proposals were continually rejected by the blind 
self-interest of the aristocratic majority. But these principles, ripened 
and developed by the experience of fifteen years of servitude, we saw 
inscribed on the flag of the Cracow uprising. At Cracow, it was 
clearly seen that there were no longer men who had much to lose; 
there were no aristocrats; every step that was taken bore the stamp of 
that democratic, I might almost say proletarian, boldness which has 
only its misery to lose and a whole country, a whole world, to gain. 
There, no hesitation, no scruples; the three foreign powers were 
attacked together; the freeing of the peasants, agrarian reform, the 
emancipation of the Jews were proclaimed, without caring for a 
moment whether this offended certain aristocratic interests. 

The Cracow revolution wanted neither to re-establish ancient 
Poland nor to preserve what the foreign governments had let remain 
of the old Polish institutions; it was neither reactionary nor 
conservative. 

No, it was even more hostile to Poland itself than to its foreign 
oppressors, hostile to the ancient Poland, barbarous, feudal and 
aristocratic, based on the serfdom of the majority of the people. Far 
from wanting to re-establish the ancient Poland, it aimed to 
overthrow it utterly, and to found on its ruins, with a wholly new 
class, with the majority of the people, a new Poland, modern, 
civilised and democratic, worthy of the nineteenth century, and 
which might be really the outpost of civilisation. 

The difference between 1830 and 1846, the immense progress 
made within unhappy Poland itself, bleeding and torn; the Polish 
aristocracy completely separated from the Polish people and thrown 
into the arms of the oppressors of its country; the Polish people 
irrevocably committed to the democratic cause; and finally the class 
struggle, the motive force of all social progress, established in Poland 
as here, that is the victory of democracy proved by the Cracow 
revolution, that is the result which will bear fruit when the defeat of 
the insurgents has been avenged. 

Yes, gentlemen, by the Cracow insurrection the Polish cause, from 
being national, as it was, has become the cause of all peoples; from a 
question of sympathy, as it was, it has become a question of interest 
of all democrats. Until 1846 we had a crime to avenge; henceforth we 
have allies to support, and we shall do it. 

And it is above all our Germany which ought to congratulate itself 
on this explosion of democratic passion in Poland. We are, ourselves, 
on the eve of a democratic revolution; we shall have to fight 

barbarian hordes from Austria and Russia. Before 1846 we might 
have had doubts as to what side Poland would take if there were a 
democratic revolution in Germany. The Cracow revolution has 
removed all doubts. Henceforth the German people and the Polish 
people are irrevocably allied. We have the same enemies, the same 
oppressors, for the Russian government weighs on us as much as on 
the Poles. The first condition for the deliverance both of Germany 
and of Poland is the overturning of the present political state in 
Germany, the downfall of Prussia and Austria, the driving back of 
Russia beyond the Dniester and the Dvina. 

The alliance of the two nations is therefore not by any means a 
beautiful dream, a charming illusion; no, gentlemen, it is an 
inevitable necessity resulting from the common interests of the two 
nations, and it has become necessary through the Cracow revolution. 
The German people, which until now had little of its own except 
words, will now have deeds to offer its Polish brothers; and just as we 
German democrats present here clasp hands with the Polish 
democrats, so the whole German people will celebrate its alliance 
with the Polish people on the very field of the first battle won in 
common over our common oppressors.