Engels was particularly interested in the ongoing Hungarian uprising led by Lajos Kossuth. This nationalist rebellion against the Austro-Habsburg monarchy had been slowly fermenting since a Romantic resurgence of the Magyar language and culture in the late eighteenth century, which had been accompanied by an increasingly vocal prejudice against the millions of transnational Slavs resident within the Habsburg Empire. Over the decades this developed into a cohesive political and social reform movement with an enlightened Hungarian nobility championing national determination free from foreign, Austrian interference. Inspired by the upheavals in Paris and Vienna, a bloodless revolution in Pest allowed Kossuth and his fellow nobles to take control of the Diet and restore Hungarian sovereignty. However, Hungary had never been the unitary ethnic state of Romantic imagination and, in response to this Magyar upsurge, leaders of the disaffected Serb, Croat and Romanian minorities joined with Habsburg forces to crush the so-called ‘Hungarian Spring’. The winter of 1848–9 thus witnessed a series of dramatic back and forth battles between the Austro-Croatian forces and Kossuth's nationalist Magyar army.25 It was a campaign with multiple attractions for Engels. Despite earlier criticisms of Thomas Carlyle and his ‘great man’ theory of history, Engels was bewitched by heroic military statesmen – with Wellington, Napoleon and Cromwell as particular heroes. Similarly, he regarded Kossuth as ‘a truly revolutionary figure' fighting an obviously righteous cause. Ignoring criticisms that the Hungarian nobles were little more than an aristocratic fronde, Engels championed the Magyar cause for its nationalist ambitions, republican spirit and revolutionary violence.
In a rather less pleasant vein to modern eyes, he also supported its visceral anti-Slav sensibility. Exchanging a materialist analysis of class for an unscientific mix of race and national heritage, Engels branded the Slavs as part of that sub-group of humanity he labelled ‘historyless’ or ‘non-historic’ peoples prone to interfere with revolutionary progress and so needing to be excised. It was an unbecoming ethno-philosophy which Engels had earlier alluded to in the run-up to the September 1848 Cologne rallies. Part of the uproar then gripping the Rhineland was the result of the Frankfurt National Assembly signing the Armistice of Malmö – a humiliating treaty pressed on Prussia by Russia and England, forcing it to retreat from the Duchy of Schleswig and agree to its annexation by Denmark. For revolutionary nationalists, it was a debilitating setback for moves towards a united Germany, and Engels used the treaty controversy as an excuse to berate the ‘brutal, sordid, piratical, Old Norse national traits’ which made up Scandinavian culture with its ‘perpetual drunkenness and wild berserk frenzy alternating with tearful sentimentality’. Behind this boorish stereotyping was a more unnerving argument in favour of Prussia's ethno-national supremacy over the duchies. ‘By the same right under which France took Flanders, Lorraine and Alsace, and will sooner or later take Belgium – by that same right Germany takes over Schleswig; it is the right of civilization as against barbarism, progress as against stability.26
Roman Rosdolsky long ago suggested that Engels owed his theory of ‘non-historic’ people to Hegel, who, in his Philosophy of Mind, argued that only those people who were able – thanks to inherent ‘natural and spiritual abilities’ – to establish a state could be regarded as part of historical progress. ‘A nation with no state formation… has, strictly speaking, no history – like the nations which existed before the rise of states and others which still exist in a condition of savagery.27 It was an arbitrary, binary division which laid down only vague criteria for what constituted ‘national viability’ which seemed to centre mainly around a country's capacity to produce a bourgeoisie and then, in its wake, entrepreneurs, capitalists and workers. Yet what the concept did allow Engels to do was dismiss various stateless peoples as counter-revolutionary, non-historic remnants – amongst whom he included the Bretons in France, the Gaels in Scotland, the Basques in Spain and, of course, the Slavs. ‘There is no country in Europe which does not have in some corner or other one or several ruined fragments of peoples,’ he wrote in an essay on ‘The Magyar Struggle’. And it was no surprise that ‘these residual fragments of people always become fanatical standard-bearers of counterrevolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character, just as their whole existence in general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution’.28 Perhaps the best example of this struggle between ancient ethnicities and historic progress was taking place in North America where the United States was wrenching control of California, Texas and other territories from Mexico's hands. Engels was wholly in favour of this colonial landgrab. Is it in any way unfortunate, asked Engels, ‘that splendid California has been taken away from the lazy Mexicans, who could not do anything with it?’ Were the Mexicans capable of exploiting gold mines, building cities up the Pacific coastline, constructing railways and transforming global trade? Not a bit of it. ‘The “independence” of a few Spanish Californians and Texans may suffer because of it, in some places “justice” and other moral principles may be violated; but what does that matter compared to such facts of world-historic significance?’29
For Engels, the subjugation of ‘non-historic’ people was especially suitable for the Slavs, who had committed the ultimate counterrevolutionary crime of allying themselves with the Habsburgs and Tsarist Russia against Kossuth's Magyars. As so many gruesome dictators, echoing his call, would do during the twentieth century, Engels advocated a policy of ethnic cleansing on the altar of progress and history. ‘I am enough of an authoritarian to regard the existence of such aborigines in the heart of Europe as an anachronism,’ he wrote years later of the Slavs in a letter to Eduard Bernstein, ‘… they and their right of cattle stealing will have to be mercilessly sacrificed to the interest of the European proletariat’.30 It was an ugly, imperialist ideology which would provide intellectual succour in the succeeding century for the liquidation of any number of ‘backward’, ‘feudal’ or ‘reactionary’ peoples. And there is something deeply chilling about Engels's bloodcurdling call, just weeks after he had returned from his Arcadian walking tour, for ‘bloody revenge on the Slav barbarian’. ‘The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.’31
But Engels soon had enough of standing on the sidelines of the 1848 revolutions and wanted to return to ‘the movement’. ‘Now that Gottschalk and Anneke have been acquitted, shan't I be able to come back soon?’ he wrote plaintively to Marx in Cologne in December 1848 testing the legal waters. The attractions of a reflective life in Berne – ‘lazing about in foreign parts’ – had started to pale. ‘I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that detention for questioning in Cologne is better than life in free Switzerland.’ And despite General Brandenburg's best efforts, the Rhenish revolutionary spirit had not completely succumbed to Prussian revanchism. Indeed, to keep the democratic flame alive a left-wing faction of the Frankfurt National Assembly had recently formed the Central March Association (Centralmarzverein) to defend the liberal settlement of March ’48. By the spring of 1849 it had some 950 branches and over half a million members. The struggle was far from over.
Meanwhile, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung had found its true voice after Marx took the paper in a dramatically left-wing direction. Now openly blaming the weak-willed liberals for the ‘failure’ of 1848, Marx looked to develop an independent political line for the working classes that would be distinct from the bourgeois-democratic movement. For Engels, Marx's achievements on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung constituted perhaps his finest hour. ‘No German newspaper, before or since, has ever had the same power and influence or been able to electrify the proletariat masses as effectively as the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. And that it owed above all to Marx.’32 Engels was delighted with the paper's militant turn and, in one of his first articles after returning to Cologne in January 1849, he demanded to know, ‘Why after
the revolution in France and in Germany did we show so much generosity, magnanimity, consideration and kindheartedness, if we did not wish the bourgeois again to raise its head and betray us, and the calculating counter-revolution to plant its foot on our neck?’33
Inspired by Kossuth, Engels now sought to import the insurgent tactics of Hungary into Germany. His vision, in early 1849, was for Frankfurt and southern Germany to rise in revolt and join the broader Magyar rebellion. It was a strategy which would require a much more sophisticated appreciation of guerrilla insurgency and asymmetrical warfare since the Rhenish revolutionaries could never hope to beat the Prussian army in open battle. The lessons from Hungary were clear. ‘Mass uprising, revolutionary war, guerrilla detachments everywhere – that is the only means by which a small nation can overcome a large one, by which a less strong army can be put in a position to resist a stronger and better organized one.’34 And now was the moment to implement this underdog tactic since, in March 1849, the parliamentary cretins in Frankfurt finally did something historic by voting to adopt a fully fledged Imperial Constitution for Germany. This was a seismic political decision laying the groundwork for a genuine constitutional monarchy and bringing the various states of Germany together under a single currency, tariff structure and unified defence policy. After years of debate, a coherent liberalism had emerged with concrete, progressive policy proposals. But it all rested on the willingness of the Prussian king, Frederick William IV, to accept the German imperial crown and, with it, the parameters of a constitutional monarchy acting in concert with a democratic parliament. Needless to say, the great feudal sovereign and faithful believer in the divine right of kings was having none of it. ‘This so-called crown is not really a crown at all, but actually a dog-collar, with which they want to leash me to the revolution of 1848,’ was his haughty response to the parliament's offer.35
For radical groups in the Central March Association and elsewhere, the Imperial Constitution was the symbol of everything they had struggled for. And they were not going to let it fall away lightly. As Rhenish Westphalia rose in support of the constitution, Frederick William unleashed the Prussian Landwehr on the workers. By April 1849 revolution was once again talked of in western and southern Germany as communists and socialists assumed leadership posts once held by middle-class democrats and bourgeois constitutionalists. As political solutions crumbled, violent unrest resurfaced. ‘Everywhere the people are organizing themselves into companies, electing leaders, providing themselves with arms and ammunition,’ Engels reported excitedly.36 On 3 May, Dresden erupted after the king of Saxony, Frederick Augustus II, closed the state parliament and followed Frederick William in refusing to recognize the Imperial Constitution. Workers, revolutionaries and Polish officers flooded on to the streets to battle both Saxon and Prussian troops. Amongst those manning the barricades was Engels's former Berlin classmate and now active anarchist, Michael Bakunin; the prudish, precious Stephan Born, who had spent the previous months running a Workers’ Brotherhood in Berlin; and the newly appointed conductor of the Dresden Opera, Richard Wagner. The Rhineland took its cue from the south as Düsseldorf, Iserlohn, Solingen and even the Wupper valley itself joined the rebellion. After his detailed research into revolutionary warfare and guerrilla insurgency, after his youthful articles denouncing the Prussian state and long evenings spent with Moses Hess outlining the promise of communism to guffawing industrialists, the moment of violent contradiction had arrived. ‘The Neue Rheinische Zeitung, too, was represented at the Elberfeld barricades,’ as Engels, the native child of the Wupper, proudly put it.37
In May 1849, with opposition to the Prussian authorities spreading through the Rhineland, workers in Elberfeld gathered in a beer hall overlooking the city to hear rousing speeches from democrats and radicals urging a campaign of resistance. The result was the formation of a revolutionary militia which the local civic guard wisely demurred from disarming. When a troop of soldiers arrived from Dusseldorf to challenge the insubordination, the mayor ordered them back. By 10 May the county commissioner had fled and Elberfeld, that once pious, loyal Zion of the obscurantists, was in a state of armed revolt.38 ‘From the middle of Kipdorf and lower Hofkamp everything was closed off with barricades,’ recalled the Elberfeld surgeon Alexander Pagenstecher. ‘Here, there were fellows busy repairing and reinforcing the old barricades and setting up new ones; and, with them, groups of armed, adventurous sans culottes with all manner of shooting, hacking and stabbing weapons.’39 To co-ordinate the resistance, the Elberfeld Political Club established a Committee of Public Safety which included (to the disgust of many revolutionaries) members of the existing city council.
Into this delicate situation stepped Engels. Adhering closely to protocol, on his arrival in Elberfeld – ‘with two cases of cartridges which had been captured by the Solingen workers at the storming of the arsenal of Grärath’ – he reported to the committee. His revolutionary reputation having far preceded him, they wanted to know what precisely his motives were. Engels replied falsely that he had been sent from Cologne and innocently suggested he might be able to provide some military assistance against the inevitable Prussian response. But, far more importantly, ‘having been born in the Berg Country, he considered it a matter of honour to be there when the first armed uprising of the people of the Berg Country took place’. And the good burghers of Elberfeld had no need to worry about his red, radical politics. ‘He said that he desired to concern himself exclusively with military matters and to have nothing to do with the political character of the movement…’40 Unwisely taken in by such sophistry, the committee gave him the task of inspecting the barricades, positioning artillery installations and completing the fortifications. Drawing together a company of sappers, Engels reconfigured various defences, strengthening all possible entry points along the narrow Wupper valley.41 But this ‘dyed in the wool’ radical was not going to let the revolutionary promise of the Elberfeld barricades escape his presence.
‘After I had climbed over the barricade by the Haspeler Bridge, which was armed with three or four small Nuremberg-calibre salute cannons, I was stopped in front of the nearby house that acted as a barrier,’ continued the worried Pagenstecher. ‘It had been transformed into a sentry room, and Dr Engels from Barmen was in command.’42 And he had decorated the site in a suitable manner. ‘On the barricade by the mayor's house, a piece of red material torn from one of his curtains had been put up, and young men had made themselves sashes and bands from this same material; these signs were taken as proof that all of this was for the Republic – the red one, naturally.’43 At the Committee for Public Safety the penny had finally dropped: this was the red-radical takeover, instigated by the town's most infamous communist turncoat, they had all feared. ‘When the flags of the red republic finally fluttered on the barricades in our bleak streets, it fell like scales from the eyes of our well-meaning Elberfelders,’ was how one local paper reviewed the events of May 1849.44
A loving array of myths and legends surrounds Engels's time on the Elberfeld barricades. The finest story is that of Friedrich Engels senior encountering his rebel son directing the gunners on the Haspeler Bridge. The fraught meeting, as witnessed by local resident and Barmen manufacturer Friedrich von Eynern, between the ‘barricade-mounting son’ and ‘old, dignified factory owner’ (on his way to church no less) feels almost too pathos-ridden for reality.45 And, indeed, evidence for this encounter seems fairly thin. Similarly, Alexander Pagenstecher has suggested Engels was involved in the capture and ransom of the Elberfeld minister Daniel von der Heydt, along with his mother and brother. Again, apart from the aggrieved Pagenstecher, the supporting sources are sketchy. What is certainly true is that Engels's time in Elberfeld was both shortlived and widely resented. To one member of the Committee for Public Safety, barrister Höchster, Engels was ‘a dreamer, one of those who ruin everything’.46 And his replacement of the German tricolour with the red flag had not gone down well at all – according to his fellow insurrectionist,
the drawing instructor Joseph Körner, ‘people were so upset early the next morning that a counter insurrection and Engels's maltreatment could only be avoided through the speedy clearing away of the red scraps and Engels's “removal from the city” ’.47 It fell to Hochster to deliver the ultimatum: he approached Engels and stated that (in Engels's own version) ‘although there was absolutely nothing to be said against his behaviour, nevertheless his presence evoked the utmost alarm of the Elberfeld bourgeoisie; they were afraid that at any moment he would proclaim a red republic and that by and large they wished him to leave’.48
Engels was furious at his summary removal from his birthplace and setting of such potential heroics and demanded ‘that the abovementioned request should be presented to him in black and white, over the signatures of all members of the Committee for Public Safety’. If this was an attempt to call the bourgeoisie's bluff, it failed miserably as they swiftly returned with a signed statement which, to deepen the public humiliation, they posted around Elberfeld:
WHILE FULLY APPRECIATING THE ACTIVITY HITHERTO SHOWN IN THIS TOWN BY CITIZEN FRIEDRICH ENGELS OF BARMEN, RECENTLY RESIDENT IN COLOGNE, IT IS REQUESTED THAT HE SHOULD FROM TODAY LEAVE THE PRECINCTS OF THE LOCAL MUNICIPALITY SINCE HIS PRESENCE COULD GIVE RISE TO MISUNDERSTANDINGS AS TO THE CHARACTER OF THE MOVEMENT.
It could not have been any clearer. According to Engels, ‘The armed workers and volunteer corps were highly indignant at the decision of the Committee for Public Safety. They demanded that Engels should remain and said they would “protect him with their lives”.’49 Selfless to the end, Engels accepted the verdict and decided to leave Elberfeld with a last shred of dignity and allow the town to return to its habitual moderation. When, one week later, Prussian forces arrived, ready to storm the Wupper valley, they found the barricades dismantled, red flags and all. But as Engels departed Elberfeld he received a stinging rebuke from his family. In a letter which gave full vent to the repeated humiliations of public arrest warrants, police searches of the family home and endless neighbourhood gossip about the wayward son, Engels's brother-in-law Adolf von Griesheim ripped into him as a hapless ‘hounded dog’. ‘If you, besides, had a family and worried about them, like me, you would change your restless life and, in the friendly circle of your loved ones, you would gain more from this short life than you ever can receive from a heartless gang of cowardly, ungrateful, troublemakers… It is as if you still have this thankless idea of sacrificing yourself for irredeemable Mankind, to become a social Christ and to devote all your egoism to achieving this goal.’50
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