Given the political and geographical differences between the two countries there is astonishing similarity between the views of the Polish and Italian authors on partisan warfare. To the extent that the Italian military writers of the period were influenced by foreigners, it was Le Mière's book more than any other which became their catechism. The Poles, on the other hand, being cosmopolitans, did follow events in Italy closely. There was something like an organic link between Poland and Italy at the time: the "Legions" had fought in Italy, Chrzanowski was the chief of staff of the Piedmont army at one time and Mieroslawski, too, commanded Italian troops. Stolzman with Carlo Bianco helped to prepare Mazzini's ill-fated invasion of Savoy. F. Raquillier, a Polish general in Italian service, published in Florence in 1847 a "Practical Guide for the Perfect Partisan" in which he sharply criticized the idea put forward by some contemporaries that the partisans should fortify themselves within the main urban centers of the country and defend themselves from there.106
Why were the nineteenth-century theorists of guerrilla warfare so completely forgotten, despite the fact that their writings preempted twentieth-century guerrilla doctrine in so many essential points? The short answer is that the theories were discarded because reality refuted them. The Poles were backward-looking with regard to weaponry and tactics. The scythes of the peasants of Raclawice, where Kosciuszko had defeated the Russians fifty years earlier, blocked the progress of military technology. They failed to provide sufficient motivation to the peasants and they ignored the foreign political constellation. The Poles were invariably defeated and if the Italian struggle for unity was eventually crowned with success, it was not as the result of a partisan war as envisaged by Bianco, Mazzini, Pepe and others. It was only after many decades and in distant countries that many of the strategies first voiced in the 1830s and 1840s were to reappear.
Blanqui
Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) entered the annals of revolutionary history as the fearless fighter who always failed; Marx did not take him very seriously, Lenin regarded him as an adventurer and Trotsky said about him that he did not know the difference between revolution and insurrection. These judgments hardly do Blanqui full justice, because most of his theoretical writings on insurrection were not published in his lifetime and only became known around 1930.107 Far from being a blind believer in violent action as the only way to revolution, Blanqui wrote after 1848 that conspiracy, which he had thought of as a civic duty under the monarchy, he regarded as a public offense under the republic, and that only the abolition or the abuse of the franchise would "compel us to convert the ballot into a cartridge."108 In many respects Blanqui was a modern thinker; for instance, he believed in the need of an avant-garde consisting of déclassé intellectuals who would lead the masses onto the right path to progress. He thought that there was a latent revolutionary situation in France and that only a spark was needed to set the whole edifice on fire. His first major attempt at insurrection (May 1839) ended in total failure. True, there was a crisis, political and economic, the monarchy was discredited and the people, it seemed, were only waiting to join in an insurrection. Detailed preparations were made a long time ahead. The rising was fixed for a Sunday at noon; the army officers would be at the races, the new regiments just arrived in Paris would not yet have familiarized themselves with the geography of the city.109 Some five hundred to eight hundred insurgents were to attack police headquarters and occupy the Cité; barricades would be erected all over the town. But police headquarters resisted the attack and despite some local successes in other parts of Paris, the soldiers did not go over to the insurgents, nor was there much response from the population. Within twenty-four hours the coup had failed.
In his Instructions written thirty years later Blanqui drew the lessons from his failure — and also from the experiences of June 1848. In brief, his conclusions were that though the political constellation had been most auspicious, with the government in a state of disarray and the troops demoralized, the six hundred barricades had been erected without any proper plan of coordination. Some barricades were manned by ten, others by a hundred men who had spontaneously assembled. Some were deserted altogether because those who had built them went to collect weapons, sleep, smoke a pipe, have a drink in a nearby restaurant, or perhaps join some other barricade.110 Frequently no one was in command, everyone acted as he saw fit. There was constant coming and going, based on the assumption that if everyone did his own job, all would be well. No one knew what was happening anywhere else, no one came to help defend the barricades attacked by troops. In fact only thirty of the six hundred barricades were eventually attacked, but their defeat proved decisive.111 Two or three regiments would attack one barricade after another and kill the few defenders. There was no coordination and thus (Blanqui concluded) despite their intellectual and moral superiority the defenders were easily defeated. True, the insurgents had been successful in 1830 and again in February 1848. But these had been lucky coincidences: in 1830 the government was totally taken by surprise and panicked, in February 1848 Louis Philippe made no serious effort to defend himself. In June 1848 the rising collapsed despite the fact that the insurgents faced the most miserable of governments which entirely lacked self-confidence. What if the insurgents had faced brutal, militaristic rulers who might have used the most recent technical inventions against them? Blanqui, unlike some other revolutionaries, was not unduly worried by the broad boulevards built by Haussmann: though they facilitated the movements of government troops, they also exposed them to rifle fire. According to Blanqui, the rifle would remain the decisive weapon in street fighting; artillery only made a great deal of noise, and hand grenades were hardly more effective than paving stones. But above all, the revolutionaries needed organization, discipline and a central command. Never again should there be those stormy and totally disorderly risings of ten thousand men.
Two years after these lines were written, shortly after the outbreak of the war with Prussia, Blanqui tried his luck again. At the head of three hundred men he attempted to storm the firemen's barracks in La Villette quarters. But the firemen refused to hand over their arms and, devoid of any other signs of revolutionary enthusiasm elsewhere in Paris, Blanqui's men were sent packing. The next revolutionary rising, the Commune, was only a few months off. In Blanqui's strategy immediate success or failure would depend on the first phase of the fighting. In fact, he only envisaged street battles of short duration; either the masses and the army would join the insurgents, in which case the war was won, or the revolutionaries would remain isolated, in which case they might as well disperse and wait for a more auspicious occasion. As Bakunin put it in conversation with a friend: even if the insurgents were defeated twenty times they might receive popular support on the twenty-first occasion. Each revolt, however unsuccessful, had its uses; hence Bakunin's theory of "propaganda through action" as the only possible way to revolutionize the masses, and his glorification of the Lumpenproletariat and bandits as the social elements most likely to overthrow the existing order.112112* Hence the demand that the professional revolutionary should be ready to engage in violent, even desperate action at any time; Satan in contemporary reincarnation is the spirit of rebellion.
Mazzini, like Blanqui, believed in his more sanguine moments that once the call for a rising had been sounded it would be echoed everywhere: if there was no response, one had to try and try again until one finally succeeded. This belief led him into operations that were exceedingly amateurish. On one occasion he prepared for the conquest of the Kingdom of Naples with the help of twenty-two men, on another he wanted to invade Italy with two hundred patriots, despite the fact that all the police forces of Europe were familiar with the details of his plan. In his writings Mazzini frequently referred to historical examples that were of no relevance to his countrymen, such as the war of the Dutch against the Spanish. He never claimed to be a military expert and when toward the end of his life, he was presented with a sword by his admirers, he said: "I am not a soldier, and
I do not like the soldier's trade."
Nevertheless Mazzini was the author of two detailed blueprints concerning the establishment of guerrilla bands. In his view, the guerrillas were the precursors of the nation, which they would rouse to insurrection, but they had no right to substitute themselves for the nation.113 He assigned the guerrillas a fairly narrowly circumscribed role: they were not entitled, for instance, to punish those among the population who were guilty of collaboration; they had to give account of their operations to a nationwide Center of Action. They had to avert the enemy wreaking vengeance on small localities, and when they passed through such places they should seek to repress, rather than promote, a revolutionary demonstration on the part of the population.114
Such political guidelines apart, Mazzini provided detailed advice which he had, no doubt, gathered from earlier writers on partisan warfare: for example, that a retreat should always be left open ("A band that is surrounded is lost"), that attacks should take place in twilight, that a quarter of the band be kept in reserve at the time of attack, that there be a rifle range of three hundred yards before shooting at an adversary. "Much may be learned by listening with the ear close to the ground, and it does not require much practice."115 Critics of Mazzini would argue that, figuratively speaking, he did not keep his ear sufficiently close to the ground, and that if Italy was eventually liberated, the guerrilla bands to whom he freely gave advice did not play a prominent part in the process.
Marx, Engels And The Armed Struggle
Much as Marx and Engels were preoccupied with the problem of revolutionary violence, they never accepted Blanqui's strategy of street fighting carried out by a few hundred, or at most a few thousand determined followers. Insurrection, as Engels wrote in his comment on the German experience of 1848/49, was as much an art as regular warfare, with its own rules of procedure that, if neglected, would lead to defeat and ruin. Engels's basic advice was never to play at insurrection unless fully prepared to face all the consequences which might ensue. Secondly, once an insurrection had been started, it was absolutely essential to maintain the offensive. Only thus could wavering elements be won over, and the enemy dispersed before it could gather its strength. There should be daily successes however small, since to be on the defensive was the death of every armed rising.116
The military experience of the revolutionary party in 1848/49 had been discouraging and Marx and Engels were not to pin their hopes again on another armed insurrection in the style of those that had failed. Although they wrote a great deal on military affairs (Engels's comments on contemporary wars fill several volumes), guerrilla warfare preoccupied them only rarely; they thought it, on the whole, to be of limited applicability. Commenting on the Carlist wars in Spain for his American readers, Marx on one occasion recalled Napoleon's experience. He noted that the guerrilla bands had been most successful while they remained small, and that once they started to "ape" a regular army they frequently suffered defeat; corps of three to six thousand men could no longer hide easily and disappear suddenly without being forced into battle. It was in the first and second stages of the fighting against Napoleon's armies that the guerrillas posed the greatest menace to the French. Marx quoted the description of the Abbé de Pradt of how the French forces were exhausted by the incessant molestations of an invisible enemy who, if pursued, disappeared among the people out of which he would immediately reappear with renewed strength: "the lion in the fable, tormented to death by a gnat gives a true picture of the French army."117
According to Marx, Mina, the Empecinado and their followers were among the most revolutionized sections of Spanish society. But in the light of subsequent events in Spain he showed awareness with regard to the dangers of "guerrillaism":
... it is evident that, having for some years figured upon the theatre of sanguinary contests, taken to roving habits, freely indulged all their passions of hatred, revenge and love of plunder, they must, in times of peace, form a most dangerous mob, always ready at a nod in the name of any party or principle, to step forward for him who is able to give them good pay or to afford them a pretext for plundering ex-cursions.118
If guerrilla warfare had been effective under specific conditions in the preceding fifty years, Engels still doubted whether it had a future. His skepticism emerges from his comments about the Spanish colonial experience in North Africa: even on broken ground (he wrote), a regular infantry force should easily gain on irregulars. The modern system of skirmishes along an extended line, behind which stood support groups and reserves, the tactics of concentrating troops against a common target, all this entailed, in Engels's view, certain defeat for the irregulars — even if they had a two to one superiority. That the Spanish took so long to advance on Tetuan could be explained by the fact that they had not yet mastered the technique of modern warfare, and that their army had been dispersed over too wide an area.119
During the later stages of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 irregular units played a part of some importance. Popular resistance continued after the regular French armies had been defeated and had virtually disappeared. New troops and franc tireurs, fighting behind barricades and embrasures, using night attacks and various guerrilla tactics, prolonged the opposition to the German invaders. For a few weeks Engels thought that it might be Spain of 1809 all over again. If real national enthusiasm were revived among the French, everything could yet be won, he wrote in October 1870; in November: "In the course of the last six weeks, the character of the war has markedly changed. . . . The ubiquitous 'four Ulans' are no longer able to ride into a village or town outside their own lines, demanding absolute obedience to their orders without incurring the danger of being taken prisoner or killed. . . . The German positions are surrounded by a belt of no-man's-land and it is precisely there that popular resistance is most palpably felt." And on 26 November: "Once the spirit of popular resistance is awakened, even armies of 200,000 men can no longer make rapid progress, they soon reach the point when their detachments are weaker than the forces opposing them; it depends entirely on the intensity [the élan] of popular resistance how soon this stage will be reached."120 What if every citizen became a soldier, every village and town a fortress? But from the very beginning Engels had doubts whether a people's war was still possible in Europe of the second half of the nineteenth century. Once, many years earlier, he had written that a people who wanted to gain independence could not be restricted to conventional warfare. Levée en masse, revolutionary war, guerrillas everywhere — these were the only means by which a small people could defeat a bigger one, an army could resist its stronger and better-organized opponent.121 But even when these lines were written, at the time of the Austrian-Italian war of 1849, Engels did not really expect that a monarchy could advocate "revolutionary terrorism." Engels knew, of course, about the Vendée, about Spain and Russia, but he preferred to invoke the shining example of 1793·
Engels sadly concluded that there really was not much hope for a people's war in Europe: "such fanaticism and national enthusiasm is not customary among civilized nations. One may find it among Mexicans and Turks but no longer in money-making Western Europe." The same view was expressed on another occasion in December 1870: "It is a fact that men have lost all recollection of a real war . . . the right of real self-defence is granted only to Barbarians."122 Truly national wars, in Engels's view, had been fought in Algeria and the Caucasus. It was now expected of civilized nations that they would not continue a struggle once the "official nation' had surrendered.
As regards the German armies in France, they considered the franc tireurs as assassins and robbers. Accordingly, civilians found carrying arms were shot, and villages were burnt if there was a suspicion that it was from their direction that German units had been fired upon. The path of the German armies in France was marked, as Engels noted, with fire and blood. The Germans had a short memory, for according to Scharnhorst's Landsturm Ordnung of 1813 the more effective the means used against the French invaders the better. It was s
tated expressis verbis that the Landsturm should not wear any uniform whatsoever, so that they could turn civilian at any moment, thus making it impossible for them to be recognized by the enemy.
Engels's skepticism about the efficacy of guerrilla warfare was based both on his own experiences in the fighting in Baden in 1849, and on an analysis of historical precedents. National insurrection and partisan warfare, he wrote in 1857, were possible only in the mountains. In this context he referred to the Tyrol rising, the Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon, the insurrection of the Carlist Basques, and to the struggle of the Cherkessians in the Caucasus.123 But the Tyroleans and the Spanish guerrillas had only been effective because of outside help, the Basques were able to resist for so long because of the almost total disarray of the Spanish army, and the Caucasians, with their greater mobility, were successful only as long as they attacked the Russian rear and ambushed their columns. Whenever the Russians counterattacked, they were victorious.
If the prospects for guerrilla warfare in Europe were not propitious the chances in Asia seemed a little better. Commenting on the Indian mutiny, Engels did not exclude the possibility that guerrilla warfare, involving the dispersion of insurgent units in inaccessible forest and jungle, could cause far more attrition and losses to the British than a battle or siege. But he doubted whether the Indians were able to do this. Their military record during the mutiny had been poor: they had failed to cut the British supply lines and to organize an active small war. He thought more highly of the Chinese capacity to inflict damage on foreign invaders. They might not be able to hold their own against Anglo-Indian forces on the battlefield, but they could poison food (as they had already done in Hong Kong), launch night attacks, kill Europeans on board ships and, generally speaking, engage in the most unconventional warfare. It was pointless to complain about their fanaticism and barbarity; every nation fought in accordance with its level of civilization, and, anyway, the British, too, had behaved in a barbaric manner.124
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