Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  5

  The Infinitely Rich ’48 Harvest

  ‘At half-past twelve at night, the train arrived, with the glorious news of Thursday's revolution, and the whole mass of people shouted, in one sudden outburst of enthusiasm, Vive la République!’1 As the French monarchy crumbled, Marx and Engels were in the wrong place at the wrong time, milling around a Brussels train station snatching at the latest titbits of intelligence. It was to be a familiar pattern over the next eighteen months as the two aspirant insurgents chased the tail of the great 1848 revolutions across the continent – sometimes catching it, occasionally pulling it, but more often being led by it. It was a moment laden with promise and ridden with frustration.

  From Marx and Engels's perspective, the startling events of 1848 looked to be a textbook bourgeois-democratic revolution. Europe's archaic political and legal systems were out of sync with the ever quickening capitalist modes of production and would be forced to adjust themselves to the new economic realities. This disjuncture between industrializing structure and feudal superstructure meant that a revolution led by the rising bourgeoisie was the next step in the epic trek towards communism. The bourgeois revolution would, in turn, be succeeded by proletarian rule after the middle classes had done the dirty work of disposing of the old world.

  After all the talk of the last decade – ‘formulae, nothing but formulae’ – what 1848 offered was the tantalizing prospect of praxis and the chance to give history a helping hand. Leaving precious little to the inevitability of progress, Marx and Engels sought to accelerate the coming revolution through an exhaustive programme of political organization, newspaper propaganda, pamphleteering and, eventually, military insurrection. As the Communist Manifesto came off the presses, Marx and Engels criss-crossed Europe – from Brussels to Berne, Paris to Cologne – dodging arrest warrants and Prussian spies to urge the evisceration of Europe's crumbling, feudal anciens régimes.

  Engels himself would leave the battlefield particularly enriched: for, at last, the self-styled Montagnard, the student fencer and barrack-room boxer enjoyed some front-line military experience. A boy's own adventure fulfilled, he raised the red flag over his home town of Barmen and launched raiding parties against Prussian infantry troops – before fleeing, under fire, through the Black Forest. It was a blooding on the barricades, a life-and-death struggle for revolution against counter-revolution, which, over the coming decades, he would rarely allow friends or enemies to forget.

  Despite such personal heroics, the cumbersome reality was that the 1848–9 revolutions – in Denmark, Sicily, Sardinia, Piedmont, France, Prussia, Saxony, Hungary and Austria – were far from Marx and Engels's idealized class uprising. Instead, they rose and fell from a multiplicity of motives ranging from economic insecurity to national identity to republican ideology to popular aspirations for liberty. These uprisings, frondes, rebellions or revolutions – call them what you will – were also subject to rapid reverses in fortune depending upon the level of worker support, radical leadership and strength of the reactionary fight back. Such shifting, ultimately unfulfilled fortunes led A. J. P. Taylor to describe 1848 as the turning point when Europe ‘failed to turn’. And for Marx and Engels, this much vaunted ‘age of democracy’ represented a signal moment both of personal disappointment and ideological re-evaluation.

  The epic storm which broke over Europe in the spring of 1848 began, with a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, in the city of Palermo, where simmering noble discontent with the Bourbon king, Ferdinand II, and his aloof, Naples-based regime led to rioting in January of that year. Dissatisfied with decades of distant and aggressive Neapolitan rule, the leading Sicilian families played on widespread economic discontent to urge the restoration of their autonomous, pre-1816 parliament. Well-organized street demonstrations quickly spilled over into attacks on the police before the barricades went up, the king's troops deserted their barracks for the mainland and the Bourbon dynasty was deposed. Within weeks a provisional government was formed and a new parliament elected.

  Sicily was the first, but stresses were appearing in royal courts across Europe as social pressures piled up and falling revenues necessitated the calling of parliaments to levy new taxes which, in turn, demanded constitutional reform. This was the era of ‘pre-revolution’ (Vormärz) in which ill-defined expectations for significant power shifts abounded in newspapers and Diets across the continent's capitals. Fermenting much of this instability was the preceding decade of poor harvests, high grain prices, economic depression and the spectre of famine. Extensive crop failure in 1845 had undercut numerous rural economies, whilst an advancing credit crisis saw a collapse of confidence in urban markets, illiquidity in the banks and the inability of businesses to trade. Food prices rose, disposable incomes fell and unemployment mounted. All of which fostered a popular sense of dissatisfaction at the existing systems of arbitrary and monstrously unresponsive monarchy which had ruled Europe since the 1815 Vienna Conference. But, as Marx first predicted, it would take the crowing of the Gallic cock to transform such sullen resentment into a European conflagration.

  France's February revolution of 1848 – the lightning abdication and then ignominious flight of King Louis-Philippe to England – placed the Parisian workers back in the forefront of European communism. In the wake of the Palermo uprising and political discontent brought on by the economic hardship, French radicals started to organize outdoor banquets demanding universal manhood suffrage and economic reform. Against a backdrop of renewed republican nostalgia for the great events of 1789, revolutionary anthems were belted out by Parisian theatre crowds and chanted menacingly outside high-society balls. King Louis-Philippe's heavily reviled prime minister, the liberal historian François Guizot, reacted to the crisis by banning the banquets and calling out the National Guard. It did no good: Guizot, on 23 February 1848, was in turn offered up as a political sacrifice to the mob. Events soon succumbed to Parisian street tradition and, after the accidental shooting of republican protesters by nervous soldiers, the capital embarked on its familiar choreography of revolution.

  Marx and Engels, stuck in Belgium, were desperate that Brussels should not miss out on this revolutionary impetus sweeping the continent – or, as they put it in a letter to Julian Harney, ‘to obtain through the ways proper to Belgian political institutions the advantages which the French people have won’. To Marx's mind such ‘peaceful but vigorous agitation’ meant meetings outside the town hall, petitions to the town council and, more covertly, channelling arms to Belgian workers with money collected from his late father's estate.2 However, the wily King Leopold I had no desire to follow Louis-Philippe's flight across the Channel, and the Belgian police quickly clamped down on their troublesome German guests. On 3 March 1848 Marx was ordered to quit the kingdom within twenty-four hours and, not long after, Engels followed.

  As befitted the capital of the nineteenth century, Paris was the trigger, and across Europe popular grievances were now transformed into political revolts as the language of liberty and democracy, nationalism and republicanism sought to dismantle the post-1815 monarchical settlement. On the back of bread riots and rural rebellions, radicals saw a glorious opportunity to drive home constitutional reform and national self-determination. In Vienna, at the beginning of March 1848, the Austrian Diet was hijacked by student activists and workers leading to the assembling of barricades, then a bloody counter-attack by Habsburg troops before the eventual flight of that embodiment of ancien régime arrogance, Chancellor Metternich. As the Habsburg monarchy tottered, the northern states of Italy rose up with the urban poor of Lombardy, Piedmont, Venice and Milan leading the rebellion. Milan was to suffer a particularly fierce fight back by the Austrians, under Marshal Radetzky, during the celebrated ‘Five Days’ when 1,500 barricades went up overnight and the city's narrow streets became the setting for savage urban warfare. But it was to Paris, the laboratory of revolution and now host to the Second Republic, that Marx and Engels headed.

  The cit
y that had once harassed and deported them now embraced Marx, Engels and the executive committee of the Communist League with official ardour. A provisional government was in place staffed by a cadre of moderate republicans – such as the socialist philosopher Louis Blanc and the radical journalist Ferdinand Floçon (to whose paper, La Réforme, Engels had formerly contributed) – proud to welcome the communist revolutionaries. Engels, more used to being harried by police informers through the back-streets of Paris, revelled in the change of circumstance. ‘Recently I lunched at the Tuileries, in the Prince de Joinville's suite, with old Imbert who was a refugee in Brussels and is now Governor of the Tuileries,’ he boasted to his brother-in-law Emil Blank.3 True to form, the remainder of the letter was then filled with a denunciation of the prevarications, stupidity and weaknesses of the newly installed administration.

  For all its glamour and official hospitality Paris was only a holding post. As he explained in a letter to Marx, Engels's heart yearned for Germany. ‘If only Frederick William IV digs his heels in! Then all will be won and in a few months’ time we'll have the German revolution. If he only sticks to his feudal forms! But the devil only knows what this capricious and crazy individual will do.’4 Engels was not alone in hoping to transplant the revolution back to the homeland: Paris's vast German émigré community was equally keen to cross the Rhine and inaugurate their longed-for democratic republic. To that end, a German Legion of artisan volunteers had emerged from the Parisian faubourgs ready to march on Prussia and launch a series of military attacks. Understandably, the provisional French government was more than happy to see the back of these Straubinger troublemakers and offered them a 50 centimes a day subsidy to get to the frontier. To Marx and Engels, this ill-conceived, terrorist strategy was doomed to fail (as it duly did), and in response they founded an alternative German Workers’ Club of ideologically attuned proto-revolutionaries and set out their more considered approach in The Demands of the Communist Party in Germany. Curiously, given the urgency of the Communist Manifesto's tone, it laid down no demands for immediate revolution or an all-out assault on private property. Instead, it sought to further the ambitions of a bourgeois revolution – a complex process that could not be ushered in overnight by a brigade of cack-handed émigrés. The priority was to dispossess Germany's Junker classes of their political and military power and then work towards a bourgeois republic based on manhood suffrage, rule of law and parliamentary authority. At this stage, the Communist League's ambition was to unite Germany's bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, working classes and even peasantry in a cross-class coalition for democracy. It was much more a question of propaganda and organization than of violent political action and, to prepare the ground, the Workers' Club surreptitiously sent back to the Rhineland some 300 communist activists.

  There they found the soil well prepared. Part of the phenomenon of 1848 was the speed with which popular politics responded to events across Europe as the steam train and the telegraph ensured the rapid movement not just of troops and armaments, but also of information and ideas. ‘Telegraphic despatches’ and a fast-expanding newspaper industry offered a rolling news service of revolution – and the torching of the Paris Tuileries in February 1848 was all the encouragement the angry, radicalized German masses needed. Since the mid-1840s, a series of crop failures combined with a downturn in the business cycle had led to substantial increases in the price of foodstuffs alongside a falling standard of living. Escalating peasant unrest and attacks on government officials, bread riots in cities and growing unemployment produced a treacherous political terrain for the aristocratic administrations of princely Germany. In Bavaria, news of the February revolution led to the swift replacement of King Ludwig I who had ignored widespread peasant distress for the bawdy delights of his mistress Lola Montez (née Betsy Watson) with his son Maximilian II. In Saxony, King Frederick Augustus II gave in to liberal demands for a reform-minded ‘March ministry’ with an expansion of the suffrage and calling of a national assembly. Across the German states, ‘public meeting democracy’ flourished as petitions were drawn up, monster rallies held, and vast crowds of journeymen, peasants, workers and students picketed town halls and palaces. According to James J. Sheehan, ‘With the possible exception of the months immediately prior to World War I, there is no other period in German history so full of spontaneous social action and dramatic political possibilities.’5

  Revolution officially arrived in Prussia in mid-March 1848. Berlin had suffered particularly badly from the economic downturn with the collapse in manufacturing leading to dramatic and dangerous levels of unemployment. In turn, the usual recourse of petitions, rallies and meetings had steadily metamorphosed into a threatening array of encampments and anti-military skirmishing across the capital. In response, King Frederick William IV didn't dig his heels in as expected but wisely looked to steer a course through the rebellion by offering (as in Saxony) a similarly liberal ‘March ministry’ package of constitutional reforms and easing of censorship. When the concessions were announced, the mood in Berlin instantly lightened with cheering crowds thronging into Palace Square to catch sight of their benign sovereign. While Frederick William was soaking up the applause, his less enlightened military commanders were planning to clear the square with a squadron of dragoons. As the troops closed in, the guns of Grenadier Kühn and Warrant Officer Hettgen both discharged. No one was hurt but the capital's febrile crowds – rightly suspicious of Berlin's officer class – thought the army had turned on them and they responded with barricades and makeshift missiles. The result was one of Europe's bloodiest March revolutions, with over 300 dead protesters (mostly artisans and labourers employed on public works projects) and nearly 100 military casualties. In the aftermath of the massacre, Frederick William IV was forced to return to Berlin to inspect the dead. As he and his wife, Queen Elisabeth, stood ‘white with fear’ in front of the crowds, she is said to have whispered, ‘All that is missing is the guillotine.’6 To avoid just such a Terror, the king ceded further ground by withdrawing troops from the city and issuing a humiliating address, ‘An mein Volk und an die deutsche Nation’, promising greater liberalization of the Prussian state and declaring his support for the calling of an all-German National Assembly as a step towards unification and liberal democracy.

  With the monarchy in retreat, the time was now ripe for bourgeois revolution. Marx and Engels chose the Rhineland city of Cologne for their reentry into German politics rather than the bloodied streets of Berlin – a city they did not remember fondly for ‘its cringing petty bourgeoisie’ and ‘mass of bureaucrats, aristocrats and court riff-raff’. Moreover, from his days in the newspaper industry, Marx still had useful connections in Cologne, and its extensive industrialization, expanding proletariat and wealthy manufacturing elite made the city ‘in every respect the most advanced part of Germany at that time’.7 The urban, industrial Rhineland was destined to be in the forefront of the impending revolution – and its relaxed censorship regime made it the perfect base for Marx's scheme to revive the Rheinische Zeitung.

  Yet the location was not without its difficulties. Chief amongst them was Andreas Gottschalk, a Jewish butcher's son and gifted slum doctor, who had bravely led the March revolution in Cologne by invading the town hall and demanding voting reforms, abolition of the standing army and freedom of the press. For his troubles, he was arrested, jailed and then released in the liberal aftermath of the Berlin riots. By the time Marx and Engels arrived, Gottschalk stood at the front of an 8,000-strong, grass-roots Workers’ Association and was able to dictate much of the city's politics. Naturally, such proletarian authenticity infuriated Marx, who responded by splitting the city's working-class movement with a Democratic Society founded in direct opposition to Gottschalk's Workers’ Association. In fairness, there was more to the Gottschalk spat than the habitual internecine strife of communist politics. Gottschalk was a follower of Moses Hess, Karl Grün and the ‘true socialist’ school of thought which advocated a peaceful reordering of th
e capitalist system towards an equitable mode of exchange. Pragmatically ignoring much of the philosophical absolutism of Marx and Engels's communism, Gottschalk's socialism avoided the dynamic of class struggle and historical progression towards proletarian revolution. Instead, the Workers’ Association subscribed to a mixture of co-operation and mutualism based on a harmonious ideal of humanity beyond party politics – a programme which Marx and Engels variously dismissed as petit-bourgeois, Utopian or naive.

  Ironically, such a stance actually made the true socialists more antagonistic to the ruling bourgeoisie than Marx and Engels since Gottschalk saw no need for an intervening period of bourgeois-democratic rule. He wanted to move straight from the remnants of a feudal polity to socialism. ‘You have never been serious about the emancipation of the repressed,’ Gottschalk taunted the two Prussian intellectuals. ‘The misery of the worker, the hunger of the poor has for you only a scientific, a doctrinaire interest… You do not believe in the revolt of the working people, whose rising flood begins already to prepare the destruction of capital, you do not believe in the permanence of the revolution, you do not even believe in the capacity for revolution.8 The pursuit of constitutional government was, in the words of Karl Grün, ‘an egotistical wish of the possessing classes’ which true socialists would have nothing to do with. As a result, they boycotted the approaching elections for the all-German National Assembly – a decision which instantly placed the Cologne Workers’ Association on a collision course with Marx and Engels's carefully crafted plans for a bourgeois-democratic revolution.9