Revolution: 1848–1849
Eighteen-hundred-forty-eight
Bringer of the morning star
Peoples, earth are now awakened!
Night is fled; and Day is here.
Red the cheeks,
Dawn’s red splendor
Spreads beside the dusky light
Over grove and plain
Showing—blood, and shame, and fury
In awakened nations’ eye….
Great the times!
Holy now the words made flesh:
“One flock only and one shepherd”—
Only one religion reigns:
“Freedom!”
Gods are falling,
From their rubble
A new temple we will build,
Great and glorious, none so mighty,
Roof—the sky’s great brilliant tent—
And for altar’s light—the sun!
—Sándor Petöfi, 1848
Progress has settled on the barricades…It advances with giant steps, and covers great distances on the wings of electricity. The telegraph turns to the left to tell us that freedom arrived at Brussels; it turns to the right and we learn that liberty has reached London and Berlin… .Long live the European republic!….In a year, long live the universal republic!
—François Vincent Raspail, 1848
For those who could read, hear, or see, there were auguries, portents, and forewarnings of an imminent explosion. They were there in the writings of journalists, in the speeches of politicians and statesmen, but most unmistakably in the actions and faces of men, women, and children. The “Hungry Forties” spoke out more forcibly than any other voices. Of these years, those between 1846 and 1848 were probably the worst Europe had ever seen. While not the sole example, the “Great Hunger” of Ireland that stalked that land from 1845 on was not only the most glaring but also the most symbolic aspect of the current state of public misery and human decimation.
For even as late as 1851 a Census Report described the situation in Ireland in the following terms:
The starving people lived upon the carcasses of diseased cattle, upon dogs, and dead horses, but principally upon the herbs of the field, nettle tops, wild mustard, and water cresses. In some places dead bodies were found with grass in their mouths.1
Such was the consequence of the potato blight that struck all of Europe (and America as well) in 1845. The misery and depopulation of Ireland, of course, had no equal anywhere else, compounded as it was by the indifference of the British government, with its traditional antipathy toward the Irish Catholics, by a religious devotion to the operation of “natural causes,” as well as the “cash-nexus” that prohibited the violation of the Corn Law tariff and interference with private trading enterprise—a complex of attitudes abetted by a touch of genocidal intent. “God sent the blight,” the Irish said, “but the English landlords sent the Famine!”2
Conditions in the rest of Europe were only slightly less disastrous. The world had entered upon its cycle of economic crises, and industry as well as agriculture felt the impact. Since England was the prince of economic powers, what happened there had almost immediate international repercussions. The general commercial and industrial crisis in England,
already heralded in the autumn of 1845 by the wholesale reverses of the speculators in railway shares, delayed during 1846 by a number of incidents such as the impending abolition of the corn duties, in the autumn of 1847…finally burst forth with the bankruptcy of the London banks and the closing of the factories in the English industrial districts. The after-effect of this crisis on the Continent had not yet spent itself when the February Revolution broke out.3
The great depression of the 1840s swept all of Europe, producing large armies of unemployed who became dependent upon public and private relief. As if the additional scourge of the potato blight—which destroyed the entire potato crop of Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany—were not enough, a disastrously poor grain harvest followed in 1846. There were food shortages in Western and Central Europe beginning with 1847. Wheat and bread prices rose by over 100%; in a number of regions the price of potatoes went up by almost 600%. Added to starvation came eruptions of cholera, typhus, dysentery. It might have seemed that once again the ten Egyptian plagues were rampant…
In Flanders the populace fed on roots and carrion. Belgium alone was forced to extend relief to 700,000. Bread and potato riots occurred in many localities, and frequently troops were called out to quell them. In Berlin and Vienna barricades came into evidence.
In Ireland, thousands of poor tenants, unable to pay their rent, were dispossessed and cast adrift. Nations have different ways of starving, some with greater, others with lesser gentility. The Irish defied all decencies both in the mortality figures and their manner of dying…
Nicholas Cummins, magistrate of Cork, after visiting the Irish town of Skibbereen, wrote a letter to the Duke of Wellington which he also had published in the Times of December 24, 1846:
My Lord Duke…Being aware that I should have to witness scenes of frightful hunger, I provided myself with as much bread as five men could carry, and on reaching the spot I was surprised to find the wretched hamlet apparently deserted. I entered some of the hovels to ascertain the cause, and the scenes which presented themselves were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of. In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horsecloth, their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the knees. I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive— they were in fever, four children, a woman and what had once been a man. It is impossible to go through detail. Suffice it to say, that in a few minutes I was surrounded by at least 200 such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe, either from famine or fever. Their demoniac yells are still ringing in my ears, and their horrible images are fixed upon my brain…In another case, decency would forbid what follows, but it must be told. My clothes were nearly torn off in my endeavour to escape from the throng of pestilence around, when my neckcloth was seized from behind by a grip which compelled me to turn, I found myself grasped by a woman with an infant just born in her arms and the remains of a filthy sack across her loins—the sole covering of herself and the baby. The same morning the police opened a house on the adjoining lands, which was observed shut for many days, and two frozen corpses were found, lying upon the mud floor, half devoured by rats. A mother, herself in fever, was seen the same day to drag out the corpse of her child, a girl of twelve, perfectly naked, and leave it half covered with stones…4
And a few months before this, Lord Brougham, not the worst of men, spoke in the House on the subject of the evictions of impoverished Irish tenants:
Undoubtedly it was the landlord’s right to do as he pleased, and if he abstained he conferred a favour and was doing an act of kindness. If on the other hand he chose to stand on his right, the tenants must be taught by the strong arm of the law that they had no power to oppose or resist…. Property would be valueless and capital would no longer be invested in cultivation of land if it were not acknowledged that it was the landlord’s undoubted, indefeasible and most sacred right to deal with his property as he list.5
Hand in hand with the economic crisis—the rising misery, the poverty, and hunger—and not disjointed from it—was the corrosion of the political power of the old régimes. What had been left of the Holy Alliance and its succession was beginning to crumble. In Galicia, the Polish region of Austria, a new uprising took place. It was very soon turned by the adroit manipulations of the Austrian governors into a massacre of Polish landlords by their peasantry, and resulted, through the intervention of Russia, in the absorption of the hitherto semi-independent Cracow into the Austrian empire. In Italy, the election in 1846 of the allegedly “liberal” Pope Pius IX promised a new era of long-anticipated freedoms. The triumph of the Swiss liberals over the separatist Catholic Sonderbund in 1847, and the resultant greater democratization and centralization of the country, proved another alarming portent to the Metternichs and their allies. Once more it seemed as if that drowsy giant—the masses of Europe— was rousing himself.
Indeed, the tocsin of revolution—of the Revolutions of 1848 and 1849—was first sounded, strangely enough, in Sicilian Palermo, on January 12, 1848. “All’ armi! Viva Pio Nono! Viva l’Italia!” A frightened King Ferdinand made haste to promise a constitution, soon followed by King Charles Albert of Piedmont.
On the 22nd of February, Paris rose up against Louis-Philippe. The revolution in France was the powderkeg that set off explosions and conflagrations everywhere else.
Nothing like this had happened before—not in the same degree. The incendiary sweep moved with a celerity that soon embraced every state on the Continent, England and Ireland as well. It moved into the states of the German Confederation. In March it was in Vienna, in Berlin, in Bavaria, in Rome, in Milan. In April it swept England; somewhat later, Ireland. Soon it arrived in Hungary and Bohemia.
Monarchs, princes and prime ministers raced to find shelter in ever-hospitable England. Prince Metternich ran, Louis-Philippe ran, so did Prince William of Prussia and Minister Guizot of France. England was never so poor as to turn away a fugitive king or statesman.
The revolutionary storm lasted from January 1848 to September 1849—to the moment when Hungary was finally crushed. When it was over—the initial vertiginous hopes, the heroism, then the sorrow, the bloodshed and the final butchery—Europe was scarcely aware that she was entering upon a new era, opening a window, in fact, on the succeeding century.
La République, cette reine
Qui donne des leçons aux rois,
En trois tours d’horloge, a sans peine
Ressuscité tous nos vieux droits….
Que la terre entonne un cantique!
Gloire au peuple, joie en tout lieu!
Jurons par l’eau, l’air et le feu
De conserver cette relique:
La République vient de Dieu,
Vive la République!
The Republic, that majestic queen
The teacher of Kings,
In three days, without pain
Has reconquered our ancient rights…
Let the earth sound forth her psalms!
Glory to the People! Joy in the world!
Let us swear by fire, air and water
To hold fast by that sacred shrine:
The Republic is from God.
Long live the Republic!
—Pierre Dupont, “La Républicaine,” 25 February, 1848
François Pierre Guillaume Guizot had been minister of France from 1840 on, and the prime architect of the policies of the juste milieu reign of Louis-Philippe. A brilliant writer and historian, particularly of revolutions, he did not see a revolution brewing directly under his very eyes. For him the era of social upheavals was over; and so it seemed to many souls, satisfied with the fact that out of a population of about thirty-five millions there were no more than 200,000 electors eligible to vote. In their eyes, as in Guizot’s and the King’s, all seemed right with the world, and anything that was not could be amended either by prohibition or by force. With Guizot they thanked God and their own good sense, and echoed Guizot’s words:
Today, thanks to the victory of the good cause and to God, who gave it to us, situations and interests are changed. No more war from those below against those above; no more motive for raising the standard of the many against the few; no more obstacle for the mass of the ascending movement; except all those natural obstacles, inherent in the condition of man, such as God has made it, ever laborious, often hard and sad. God has destined man to exertions, though his exertions do not always meet with reward here below.6
Society was in his view divided into mangeurs and mangés—the eaters and the eaten. “Get rich and you will also get the vote,” was his celebrated dictum. All you had to have is the 200 francs in taxes. “The movement of ascension is nowhere stopped.” And it was true that many had “ascended” and become wealthy. There were the railroads and railroad stock; there were the huge loans floated by the government from which a number could draw large interest. The House of Rothschild alone controlled ten percent of the total investment in French railways. There were emoluments, perquisites, and offices to be bought and sold, as in all governments; and there were scandals.
But the fact remained that the greatest part of France was bereft of political power. For rule lay in the hands of the small segment of the finance aristocracy, the bankers, the stock exchange, the railway kings, the owners of coal and iron works, and a number of landed proprietors, while the industrial middle class was barely represented, and the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry and the working classes not at all. It was this isolation of the haute bourgeoisie from their economic inferiors, the petite bourgeoisie—this unmasking of the special advantages derived from the former’s political control of the country and its economy, to the disadvantage of trade, industry, agriculture—that stimulated the union of the artisans and the proletariat with the petty bourgeoisie, and engendered its revolutionary vitality. For it was not only the radicals or revolutionaries who recognized the true nature of the régime.
What the liberal-minded but careful Alexis de Tocqueville said in his Recollections:
In 1830 the triumph of the middle class had been so complete and final that all political power, every franchise, every prerogative, the whole government of the country, were enclosed, and so to speak, piled up inside the narrow limits of that class. Not only was it the sole ruler of society, but it may be said, it became the farmer of society.
the more radical Karl Marx would state more emphatically:
The July Monarchy was nothing other than a joint stock company for the exploitation of French national wealth, the dividends of which were divided among ministers, Chambers, 240,000 voters and their adherents. Louis-Philippe was the director of this company…. The bourgeoisie in the July days had inscribed on its banner: gouvernement à bon marché—“cheap government.”7
With Balzac’s tradesman Crevel, in Cousin Betty, they could have said that, in addition to fearing God, “I am of my own time, and I honor money!” He was lucky: he both honored money, and had it. But there were many hundreds of thousands that had none to honor or to possess. And there were many too who, having a little, wanted more.
In 1846 the Prefect of the Seine reported that there were in that district over six hundred thousand distressed inhabitants, and that almost 70% of the population of Paris were living in conditions of poverty. Diseases were rife in the lower segments of the cities, causing in some cases the extinction of large segments of the population. In certain cities of France, 50% of the children of the working classes died before the age of five. Statistics are dreary things; and those of poverty and mortality drab commonplaces, wearing repetitions. Suffice it to say that France too was a country caught up in the crises of the 1840s; that in 1847 there were in Paris alone over a million persons receiving public assistance; that in the city of Roubaix, 8,000 of the 13,000 workers were unemployed.
“We are dancing on a volcano,” Heinrich Heine wrote in 1842, “but we are dancing.”8
What Guizot in his self-confidence did not perceive was that the Revolution was far from over. The social implications and aspirations of the first French Revolution still simmered, even boiled, below the surface. And what was even more serious, he had failed to note clearly enough that these unsatisfied demands had become those of a new class—a proletariat, even if not as yet sufficiently unified to achieve leadership. But the rumblings could be heard, sometimes very distinctly, as, for example, in the song of the Lyons silk-weavers, the so-called canuts:
Pour gouverner il faut avoir
Manteaux ou rubans en sautoir…
For the rulers, mantles, and ribbons spread crosswise—these we weave, oh, great ones of the world; but we stay naked, and are buried without shroud.
But once our reign arrives,
And once our reign is over,
We will weave the old world’s shroud
For you can hear the groans of revolt
It is we, the canuts
Naked no more…..
C’est nous les canuts
Nous n’irons plus tout nus….9
A song that was to echo in Heine’s ear when he came to write his own Silesian weavers’ hymn.
It was heard in the worker-poet Pierre Dupont’s “Chant des Ouvriers” of 1846, a poem Charles Baudelaire greatly loved:
Mal vêtus, logés dans des trous,
Sous les combles, dans les décombres….
In tattered rags, living in holes, in garrets, midst offal…. while the red blood boiling in our veins longs for the bright sun and the branches of oak-trees…..
It could be heard also in the more commonplace prosaic plaint of the ordinary working man of Lille:
I am a textile-worker earning 2 francs a day, the maximum wage for a weaver. My wife is a lace-worker, working at home, and earning 15 centimes a day. We have four children, the eldest is ten…Meat is too dear, we can afford offal, three times a week at 25 centimes…We are living like beggars…
He, too, has to live on exiguous charity and handouts. For his minimal living expenses amount to 12 fr. 63 sous a week.10
About the same city, Lille, the contemporary Dr. Gasset could report that “…Before the age of five, in the rue Royale one out of three children died; and in the rue des Étaques alone, 46 out of 48. So much for the talk about equality in death.”11
Was it a wonder that the parents of these children, and of their ilk in other industrial and commercial cities—Lyons, Paris, Marseilles—when they began to strike out in desperation, represented an invasion of “barbarism” more frightful than that which was to engulf Rome? The conservative Journal des Débats, speaking of the insurrection of 1831, uttered a dire warning:
The Lyons revolt has laid bare a grave secret: that of the struggle of the class with possessions and the class without. The barbarians who are threatening society are not in the Caucasus or on the steppes of Tartary; they are in the suburbs of our manufacturing towns. It is not a question of the Republic, or of the Monarchy, but of the safety of Society.12
Clairvoyant Heine, living in Paris, was not taken in by the deceptive quietus of the 1840s so greatly extolled by Guizot. Again, writing in 1842:
The greatest calm is prevailing at the present time. An exhausted, drowsy, yawning peace. All is quiet as in a snow-laden winter night. Only there is a slow, monotonous dripping sound. These are the interest rates that continue to trickle down on the funds, which are constantly swelling. And in between, the sobs of poverty. Sometimes too, one hears a clatter as of knives being sharpened.13
For despite intensified repressions and restrictions, republican, revolutionary and socialist ideas had not been extinguished, nor their exponents altogether shackled. True, those two firebrands of insurrection Armand Barbès and Auguste Blanqui had been jailed after an ill-timed and ill-advised attempt at an uprising; but their sentence of death had to be commuted as a result of a popular uproar. Underground societies such as the “Society of the Seasons” continued their perilous existence, and the words of Blanqui continued to resound from behind the bars. The “League of the Just,” precursor of the Communist League, was no less persistent. Once again Heine, who was no stranger to these groups, describes the underground ferment. One must remember that the terms Communist and Socialist were still used interchangeably. Speaking of the impending election of June 29, 1842, he calls attention to a hidden antagonist:
This antagonist still preserves his terrifying incognito, and resides like a needy pretender on the ground floor of official society, in those catacombs, where amid death and decay, a new life is germinating and flowering. Communism is the secret name of this terrible antagonist, who opposes the present régime of the bourgeoisie with the sovereign rule of the proletariat in all its consequences. There will be a fearful duel. How will it end? Only the gods and the goddesses know it—they, who know what the future holds in store. We know only this much: Communism, although it is little spoken of today and is loitering in the obscure garrets on its wretched straw pallet, is the sombre hero, destined for a great, though transient role in modern tragedy, waiting only for its cue to enter upon the stage.14
For most Frenchmen, the revolutionary days of 1789, 1793, and 1830 represented living realities. The urgencies of the necessary and unfulfilled promises were with them all the time. Living survivors of the first Revolution brought home to them the idealism, the élan, the passion that actuated the deeds of those years, contrasting so luridly and graphically with the grasping selfishness and appetence of the juste milieu. There was the living presence of Filippo Buonarroti, the intellectual tutor of Auguste Blanqui, the companion and associate of the unforgotten Gracchus Babeuf, leader of the insurrection of 1796. That tragic and memorable event Buonarroti recalled for all to read in his own La Conspiration des Égaux—The Conspiracy for Equality—a book that was being read by the cabinet makers and the locksmiths in the faubourgs of St.-Denis and St.-Martin. These were the aristocrats of the laboring classes, who were to play a significant role within a few years in the revolutionary uprisings. For them, Robespierre still shone as the “saint” of the Great Revolution. But they too had been denied the vote in 1830 and were likewise the sufferers in the economic crises of the 1840s. The more radical and more proletarian “mechanics”—mostly railway workers in the industrial suburb of La Chapelle—found in the ultra left-wing societies—the “Seasons” and the “Rights of Man”—more closely-knit links with the radical history of the French Revolution.
It is not, therefore, surprising that the stirring memories of the French Revolution represented the most sought-for intellectual nourishment of the French population. For “revolution” was in every mouth, on all lips—whether in the conservative extollment by Guizot of the English Revolution of 1688 as the ultimate achievement of political sagacity, or the more moderate but none the less vivid French revolutionary histories of Adolphe Thiers, or the sensationally popular and remunerative History of the Girondins of the poet-politician Alphonse de Lamartine. Readers craved to be reminded of, and to relive, those stirring days, and while these historical works did not cause, they did in fact serve as an emotional stimulant to, the revolutionary activities that were soon to erupt.
On all sides Frenchmen were reminded of their glorious responsibilities as the beacon lights of freedom. The presence in Paris of ever so many refugees from other, less enlightened lands, their activities and publications, their organizations—even if kept within bounds and soon to be seriously curtailed—still kept France and Paris alive as an international center of ceaseless political controversy. Russians, Germans, Poles, Italians—were these not the living symbols of what France stood for and had been standing for during a half-century? The cries of the oppressed of the world found ready sympathy and response in France. France, the liberator of mankind!
Sur un Caucase ardent les nations gémissent;
J’ai vu des peuples rois qu’on liait au rocher.
Quand sera le vauteur, sous qui les coeurs périssent,
Immolé par l’archer?
On a burning Caucasus the nations groan;
I have seen regal peoples nailed to the rock.
When will that vulture, feasting on human hearts,
Perish at the hands of the archer?
Thus Edgar Quinet, poet and philosopher, in the poem Prométhée.15
The march of democracy was irresistible—so the aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville had asserted, even if with trepidation—such was God’s way and decree. The old was bound to fall before its onward march, just as the ancien régime had fallen in 1789. France had led the way.
It is not because the French have changed their former opinions and altered their former manners that they have convulsed the world, but because they were the first to generalize and bring to light a philosophical method by the aid of which it became easy to attack all that was old and to open a path to all that was new.16
France spoke to the generality of mankind, to Man; and in his early days Tocqueville foresaw the whole world as eventually becoming “one people.”17
Even many years later, in a period of intense disenchantment, he still recalled the ecstasy of 1789, expressing feelings that were common to many of his contemporaries, and not only Frenchmen:
I think that no epoch of history has ever witnessed so large a number, so passionately devoted to the public good, so honestly forgetful of themselves; so absorbed in the contemplation of the common interest, so resolved to risk everything they cherished in their private lives, so willing to overcome the small sentiments of their hearts…The spectacle was short, but it was one of incomparable grandeur. It will never be effaced from the memory of mankind. All foreign nations witnessed it, applauded it, were moved by it…I venture to say that there is but one people on this earth which could have staged such a spectacle. I know my nation—I know but too well her errors, her faults, her foibles, and her sins. But I also know of what she is capable. There are enterprises which only the French nation can conceive; there are magnanimous resolutions which this nation alone dares to take. She alone will suddenly embrace the common cause of humanity, willing to fight for it; and if she be subject to awful reverses, she has also sublime moments which sweep her to heights which no other people will ever reach.18
For Tocqueville, too, had divined both the nature of the “continuing revolution,” or as he called it, the “one” revolution, “which has remained always the same in the face of varying fortunes, of which our fathers witnessed the beginning, and of which we in all probability, shall not live to see the end,”19 but also the different character of the participants now becoming more and more apparent. On the eve of the February Revolution of 1848, in fact, only a fortnight or so before its outbreak, he delivered his celebrated speech in the Chamber of Deputies, in which he asserted: “I believe we are at the moment sleeping on a volcano.” He was warning against the delusion of a continuing peacefulness, and was pointing to the changes in the mentality of the “working classes.”
No doubt they are not disturbed by political passions, properly so called, to the same extent as they have been; but can you not see that their passions, instead of political, have become social? Do you not see that they are gradually forming opinions and ideas which are destined not only to upset this or that law, ministry, or even form of government, but society itself, until it totters upon the foundations on which it rests today?…Do you not hear them repeating unceasingly that all that is above them is incapable and unworthy of governing them; that the distribution of goods prevalent until now throughout the world is unjust—that property rests on a foundation which is not an equitable one? And do you not realize that when such opinions take root, when they spread in an almost universal manner, when they sink deeply into the masses, they are bound to bring with them sooner or later, I know not when or how, a most formidable revolution?20
But the writer who most closely sensed the spirit of the decade in interpreting history, and that of the French Revolution in particular, was also France’s greatest historian—Jules Michelet. In an era that produced grand, generous, courageous men and women—and this age had no lack of them—who in the name of honor and principle underwent untold privations, and even imprisonment, Jules Michelet does not suffer by comparison. Born and brought up in poverty, son of a destitute printer, and a printer himself at an early age, Michelet possessed one of those inordinately curious minds that consumed knowledge unceasingly. The abnegation of his parents assured him an education; but most of what he learned he acquired on his own. A chance encounter with the Scienza Nuova of the great eighteenth-century polymath Giambattista Vico opened for him the vast possibilities of an organic synthesis of history, embracing all aspects of knowledge and experience. J. G. Herder and the German historical school reinforced his philosophical speculations, particularly as to theories of progress. An appointment in the governmental historical archives completed his preliminary education. Here he painstakingly scrutinized original documents of French history as few French historians had done before him. He began work on a universal history and completed a few portions. But soon he embarked on his History of France, a work which was to engage him for the rest of his life. He interrupted that work when he reached the Middle Ages in order to begin the story of the French Revolution, the first two volumes of which he completed in 1847. He brought his vision and boldness into his classroom, and along with Edgar Quinet and Adam Mickiewicz became one of the most inspiring and courageous teachers at the Collège de France. His attacks on the Jesuits and all religious bigotry (he was himself a Catholic) soon brought down on him the wrath of the theological hierarchy.
For Michelet, too, the French Revolution was the culminating point in the history of mankind, a landmark in the emergence of the modern world. Unlike other historians, who had concentrated on the “heroic” figures of the Revolution as its makers, Michelet saw and made the “people” its heroes and makers. He thus revolutionized the interpretation of that epochal phenomenon—not to the prejudice of individual personalities, for he had a genius that could bring them to life as few others. But he also had the vision of a poet that embraced all that was around the figures he was describing: the landscape, the earth, the city, the country. It was “the people,” however, that always occupied center stage. In his own words,
Another thing which this History will clearly establish and which holds true in every connection, is that the people were usually more important than the leaders. The deeper I excavated, the more surely I have satisfied myself that the best was underneath, in the obscure depths, and I have realized that it is quite wrong to take these brilliant and powerful talkers, who expressed the thoughts of the masses, for the sole actors in the drama. They were given the impulse by others much more than they gave it themselves. The principal actor is the people. To find the people again and put them back in the proper role, I have been obliged to reduce to their proportions the ambitious marionettes whose strings they manipulated and in whom hitherto we have looked for and thought to see the secret play of history.21
In 1846 Michelet published a personal social manifesto, Le Peuple—The People, in which he described the condition of France in his day: the state of the peasant, now become serf to usurer and moneylender; of the factory worker turned into an homme-machine—“machine-man”—laboring in “the Hell of boredom,” enfer de l’ennui. He also examined the other social strata. Here was a startling picture of “alienation,” engendered, as he believed, by an ever-mounting mechanization. Desiccation of feeling, he noted, was especially glaring among intellectuals, as compared with the “inferior” classes. He noted the inability of intellectuals to engage in action, and their propensity for talk, gossip, and recriminations.
The classes we call inferior, are more prone to follow their natural instincts, and are therefore more capable of action—and always ready for it. We, on the other hand, the cultured gentry, we chatter, dispute, we expend our energies in words…We race from book to book, and let them engage in bitter battles. We turn our lofty indignation on petty objects…We do nothing. We accomplish nothing. They, on the contrary, do not talk so much; they do not get hoarse throats from screaming, like our learned sages and grey-beards. But when the occasion arises, they take advantage of it, without noise. They act with vigor. Their economy of words enhances the energy of their actions…. The outstanding, the capital trait I have been struck by in my extensive study of the people, is that amidst the disorders of destitution, the vices of wretchedness, I have discovered a wealth of feeling, a goodness of heart, very rare among those better off. The whole world saw how during the outbreak of the cholera—who was it that adopted the orphans? The poor.22
If there is a kind of mystical idealism in this conception of the people, and if Michelet’s proposed solution of the ills of alienation and mechanization through the power of Love smacks of a certain naïveté, nevertheless his overall view of the motive forces of history, magnificently developed in his massive work with all the poetry and drama of an ardent scholar and the scholarship of a dedicated and inspired visionary, did much to illumine for his readers a new view of history and its actors, indeed of the historic process and its meaning, that was bound to transform historical scholarship in France. Movement in history is not the revelation of some absolute Fatality. Movement in history is movement of people. As man incessantly shapes his earth and his heaven, so he shapes events. There is the mystery! Man is the shaper of Man; “man is man’s environment.”
It was in this spirit that, in 1842, he suddenly interrupted his work on the Middle Ages and turned to a consideration of the French Revolution, mother of the present age. Like Lamennais in search of a new kind of Christianity, Michelet saw as the two principal actors in modern history—the deux grands faits—le Christianisme et la Révolution. “It was incumbent on God that he have his second epoch, that he appear on earth as the incarnation of 1789.”23
How he came to write his French Revolution he described in his own inimitable way:
By way of my study of Louis XI, I was about to enter upon the centuries of the monarchy. I was embarking on that venture, when chance brought me up sharply. One day, passing through Rheims, I saw in great detail its magnificent cathedral, the marvelous chapel of the coronation.
He climbs up to the uppermost belfry.
Here a strange spectacle faced me. The round tower was decorated with a garland of criminals. Here one with a rope around his neck. There one has lost an ear. The mutilated were more wretched-looking than the dead. With good reason! What horrifying contrast. What! The church of festivities!
For here was performed the rite of crowning, when Church and King were united in mystic wedlock.
What a lugubrious bridal necklace this! This pillory of the people right above the altar! And could not these tears…fall upon the head of the Kings? Dreadful unction of the Revolution, of the Lord’s wrath! “I will never understand the centuries of monarchy, if at once, before all else, I do not set up within me—the heart and faith of the people.” This I said to myself, and after Louis XI, I wrote the French Revolution.24
But the historians, great and lesser, supplied only a small segment of the impulse that pushed toward the explosiveness of 1848. The forces that Heine recognized as restlessly fermenting “below,” readying for action, found their spokesmen and ideologists best represented in the radical thinkers, ranging from the relicts of Saint-Simonianism and the Utopians like Étienne Cabet—whose popular representation of an ideal commonwealth, Icarie, and its attempted realization in America, formed the epigonal analogue to Robert Owen’s generous dreams—to the more revolutionary and influential activities of Buonarroti, Louis Blanc, Proudhon, and Blanqui. There were many women who participated in the movements and agitations of the 1840s, such as George Sand, with her novels and journalistic writings, and the astonishing Flora Tristan, one of the earliest projectors of an international association of workers, who unfortunately did not live long enough to experience February 1848. Nor were men like Fourier and Pierre Leroux without their coteries and influence.
Each group of workers—from the skilled artisans and craftsmen to the mechanicals and proletarians—had its journals: the conservative bonnetiers, the hosiers, read Le National or Le Siècle; stout republicans and radicals, the ébonistes—the cabinet makers—adherents of Cabet and Robespierre, read La Réforme and followed Louis Blanc; the mechanics of the workshops, most radical of all, looked to Blanqui and Barbès for leadership.
Whatever their tendencies, and their often far-fetched dreams and schemes and projects, the ideologues of this period—men and women—displayed an inexhaustible dedication to their ideas, courage in the face of repressions, readiness to accept social and political responsibilities at extreme risk to life and livelihood, equalled only by the devotion of their numerous followers. Together, despite their internecine animosities and differences, they fill us with a sense of the historic importance of their age, of its greatness and its demands, so that even in their errors and defeats and failings they impart a transcendent feeling of power, of human selflessness. It was this feeling that made it possible for adherents and followers, when moments of great stress and crisis arose and leaders of name were lacking, to create their own leadership and fight independently.
With the notable exception of Proudhon, the majority of revolutionary leaders and ideologues were not “sons of the people.” Louis Blanc was the son of Joseph Bonaparte’s inspector-general of finance in Madrid; Blanqui, the offspring of a sub-prefect. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s father, on the other hand, was a peasant-proletarian of Besançon.
Louis Blanc was on his mother’s side related to the aristocratic and powerful conservative diplomat Count Pozzo di Borgo. Inspired by the July Revolution, Blanc came to Paris, suffered hardships, and engaged in journalism. Here, from 1834 on, he became associated with the cause of the working class, and in their interest developed his major program, which he expounded in 1840 in his De L’organisation du Travail— On the Organization of Labor. Put into partial practice after February 1848, its ideas were to play a critical role in the Revolution and its aftermath. Blanc was an opponent of class war, and his principles were moderate. He was hopeful of revolution by consent. He advocated a sort of producers’ cooperative, financed by the state, and hoped that eventually through “saintly” competition with private enterprise it would succeed in eliminating the latter. The state was to guarantee to every working man “the right to work.” This was a slogan apparently coined by Blanc, and became a battle-cry of the workers of 1848. “From each according to his capacity, to each according to his need!”—that was to be the ultimate achievement of social planning.
The state would thus be the “banker of the poor” and aid in establishing a social republic ruled by God. With the abolition of competition and human exploitation, a moral revolution would follow. “It is not force that governs the world,” he held; “it is thought.” Universal suffrage would enable the workers to gain control of the state, which in turn would establish the social workshops; and these, while self-governing, would still remain under the guidance and tutelary authority of the beneficent state. Such a state will eventually disappear, with the disappearance of class distinctions. “The seedbed of socialism can be fertilized only by the wind of politics.” In this spirit of trusting benevolence, Blanc addressed himself to the wealthy:
O, rich men, you are deceived when you become aroused against those who dedicate their waking hours to the calm and peaceful solution of social problems. Yes, the sacred cause of the poor man is your cause too. A solidarity of heavenly origin binds you to their misery through fear and links you by your own interest to their future deliverance. Only their emancipation is capable of opening up to you the real treasure, that of tranquil joy, which you have not known as yet; the virtue of the principle of fraternity is precisely that, as it lessens the sorrows of the poor, it adds to your joys…No, rest assured, violence is to be feared only where discussion is not permitted. Order has no better protection than study. Thank heaven, people today understand that, if anger sometimes chastises evil, it is nevertheless incapable of bringing about good, that a blind and ferocious impatience would only pile up ruins under which the seeds of the ideas of justice and love would smother to death. It is not a question of taking wealth away; it is a question of fertilizing it so that it becomes universal. It is a question of raising the level of humanity for the good of all, without exception.25
Blanc was to learn, in time to come, the bitter lesson of this trusting benevolence, when even the slogan of “the right to work”—weak and meaningless as it was—was deemed too incendiary and was made to yield to the “right to obedience.”
At the same time he was preparing a study of contemporary history—Histoire de dix ans, 1830 – 1840—A History of Ten Years—a critical appraisal of the juste milieu of Louis Philippe’s first decade. For Frenchmen of the 1840s he recalled year by year the aggravating contrast between ruling France and the condition of the people, the ignominy of the self-enrichment of the few, headed by the King—“par caractère et par position…le premier bourgeois de son royaume”—“by character and position…the first bourgeois of the realm”—and the shameful persecution of republicans, their courageous opposition during the many trials, and the disgraceful massacre of the rue Transnonain. Once more he recalled the role of France as the international voice of European emancipation; and on Minister Périer’s failure to vote for intervention in favor of the oppressed Italians on the score that “French blood belongs in France,” Blanc exclaimed: “Impious words! Blasphemy born of ignorance and incapacity! The genius of France had always been rooted in her cosmopolitanism and her devotion, imposed upon her by God as an element of her power and a condition of her life.”26
What is Socialism? he had asked. And he answered: “It is the Bible in action.”27
Yet of all these ideologues, none approached Auguste Blanqui in the price exacted from him for his socialist activities. He became known in later years as the “prisoner”—l’enfermé—for he spent over thirty-three years of his life, practically one half of it, in jail; and forty-four years under persecution. He was in truth a “son of the Revolution,” for his father had been a member of the revolutionary Convention of 1792. The Revolution of 1830 determined his career—republican, radical, revolutionary, and socialist—but above all he became a dedicated activist. Romain Rolland named him the “immortal hero of the French proletariat”; Karl Marx, “the head and the heart of the proletarian party in France.”28 He was the martyr-idol of the lower classes. Heinrich Heine attended a meeting of the republican “Society of the Friends of the People”—Les Amis du Peuple—on February 2, 1832, of which Raspail, Blanqui, and Godefroy Cavaignac were the shining lights. There were over fifteen hundred in the audience, young, middle-aged and old, men and women. Blanqui was then awaiting imprisonment for one of his numerous activities—this time, his unconventional behavior at the Trial of the Fifteen for incendiary republicanism. The crowded assembly listened to him as, in Heine’s words, he excoriated
the bourgeoisie, the shopkeepers, who had chosen Louis-Philippe, himself “la boutique incarnée”—incarnation of the shop—for their king, solely in their own interest, certainly not in that of the people, which “had no share in this shameful usurpation.”…. A dignified seriousness marked the attitude of both old and young in the assembly, characteristic of people who have powerful feelings. Only their eyes lit up, and at times they cried out, “That’s it. That’s true!” ….Robespierre’s last speech before the Eighth of Thermidor is their gospel.29
At the trial, distinguished by many notable speeches of the accused, Raspail’s among them, Blanqui too had made a programmatic address in a forthright statement of the objectives of the “Society of the Friends of the People” and of his own principles and views. It was here that he made clear his understanding of, and belief in, an unmitigated class war as an outstanding element of the social structure of the juste milieu, and graphically outlined the nature of that society.
In the interrogation he had been asked his profession, and he, who had been a teacher, studied law and medicine, and was a journalist of some note, replied, Proletaire, upon which the president of the court countered, “That is not a profession.” “If it is not a profession,” Blanqui retorted, “then I am without any.” And again, “What! not a profession! Why, it is the profession of thirty million Frenchmen, living by their labor and deprived of their political rights.!”30
He turned accuser of the court as the enemy of his class, and of himself.
I am not [he said] in the presence of judges, but of enemies….As a proletarian…I deny the competence of this tribunal, composed as it is of the privileged who are not my peers…Yes, Messieurs, this is a war between the rich and the poor; the rich have willed it, for they are the aggressors; only they have found it displeasurable that the poor offer resistance….They never cease to denounce the proletariat as “thieves” ready to hurl themselves and seize their property. Why? Because the latter complain that they are being crushed by taxes imposed for the benefit of the privileged….Who are these “thieves” deserving of such anathemas and punishments? Thirty million Frenchmen who pay imposts of a billion and a half, and an almost equal sum to the privileged. And the possessors, sheltered by the powers of the society, are only two or three hundred thousand idlers who peacefully devour the billions paid by the “thieves.” It seems to me we have here in a new guise, and with other adversaries, the war of the feudal barons and the merchants they robbed on the highways…The organs of the ministry repeat with complacence that there are ways open for airing the proletarians’ grievances…That is a joke…The people do not write in the newspapers; they do not send petitions to the Chambers. That would be a waste of time. On the other hand, the voices that find an echo in the political arena…are those of the privileged. None of them is that of the people. They are mute…We demand that the thirty million Frenchmen choose a form of government which is theirs, and nominate, through universal suffrage, true representatives, to make the laws….So that the taxes, instead of being taken from the poor and given the rich, will be taken from the superfluity of the idlers and distributed among the masses of the indigent…They will strike at the unproductive consumers, and enrich the sources of production….This, Messieurs, is the way we understand the republic.31
He had early been enrolled among the French carbonari. Secret societies were his life’s food and drink. As the repression of the régime became intensified and secret societies came under a ban, he formed close association with such groups as the “Society of the Families” and the “Society of the Seasons,” eventually becoming the leading influence of the latter. Pledged to absolute secrecy, small in number, strongly disciplined, and save for the usual complement of informers and agents provocateurs, thoroughly dedicated to armed insurrection, the members were prepared for whatever fortune might be in store for them. They listened reverently as their leader instructed initiates:
Each member has the mission of spreading, by whatever means, republican doctrines…Later, when the hour strikes, we will take up arms and overturn a government that is traitor to the fatherland. Will you be with us on that day? Reflect well, it will be a dangerous enterprise. Our enemies are powerful; they have an army, the means, the support of foreign kings, they rule by terror. We, poor proletarians, we have nothing but our courage and our righteous cause. Are you ready to brave the danger? When the alarm sounds, are you resolved to die, arms in your hand, for humanity’s sake?…
I swear not to reveal to anyone, not even to those closest to me, that which is said among us; I swear to obey the laws of the association, to pursue with hate and vengeance the traitors who glide into our ranks, to love and succor my brothers and to sacrifice my life and my liberty for the triumph of our sacred cause…
Have you arms, munitions? Each member, upon entering the association, furnishes a quantity of powder, in accordance with his means…During the combat, the members must obey their leaders in accordance with all the severity of military discipline…32
“To work for the deliverance of the people and of the human race”—pour travailler à la déliverance du peuple et du genre humain—such was their aim. Not political, but social revolution….
An unregenerate revolutionary, Blanqui was no sooner out of captivity than he was again involved in agitation. Indefatigable, indestructible (or so it seemed at the time), wherever there was discontent or incipient insurrection, he was there. He was undersized; for most of his life in ill health, aggravated by his prison experiences; but the electric current of intense activity, restlessness, and anger at what he felt to be the betrayal of the people never diminished. He excoriated black slavery in the colonies. He fulminated against white slavery in France:
For that matter, he wrote, there is less difference than meets the eye between the social condition of the colonies and that in our own country…Servitude, in effect, does not consist solely in being a man’s chattel or a serf attached to a plot of ground. A person is not free when he is deprived of the instruments of labor and must remain at the mercy of those privileged persons who detain him. It is this kind of monopolizing, and not one political constitution or another, that makes the masses into serfs. Hereditary transmission of the soil and of capital places the citizen under the yoke of the property-owners. The citizens have no freedom but that of choosing their masters…The facts have their own eloquence; they prove that there is a duel going on, a duel between profit and wage. Who will succumb?33
He was brave, frequently intemperate and foolhardy. In 1839, Blanqui, Barbès and associates believed the moment had come for a coup d’état. Though well organized and planned in many respects by the “Society of the Seasons,” the insurrection of May 12, 1839 was a disaster. Blanqui and other leaders had made fatal miscalculations. They believed the people would rise once again and follow them. They would establish a republic under a dictatorship. But the people did not rise. In the bloody scuffle that ensued, Barbès was badly wounded. Many others died. The leaders were captured. Blanqui, after evading pursuit for a number of days, was taken. Both Blanqui and Barbès were condemned to death; then their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. Blanqui was consigned to the fortress-prison of Mont-Saint Michel, where he remained till 1844. Thereafter, for reasons of health, he was transferred to Tours, and subsequently put under police surveillance in Blois. It was here that the news of the February Revolution reached him. He hastened back to Paris, weak of body but unbroken in spirit, in hope, in mind, and at once took his rightful place among the insurgents. He organized the “Société républicaine centrale.”
Count Alexis de Tocqueville was a member of the republican assembly amidst the revolutionary turmoil. Fastidious as ever, he contemplated the tumult and the confusion around him, when one of the speakers attracted his attention.
It was then that I saw appear, in his turn in the tribune, a man whom I have never seen since, but the recollection of whom has always filled me with horror and disgust. He had wan, emaciated cheeks, white lips, a sickly, wicked and repulsive expression, a dirty pallor, the appearance of a mouldy corpse; he wore no visible linen; an old black frock-coat tightly covered his lean, withered limbs; he seemed to have passed his life in a sewer and to have just left it. I was told it was Blanqui.34
It was Blanqui.
He had returned after an imprisonment of eight years. Now he stood there, pleading the cause of embattled Poland and calling for vengeance on the perpetrators of a massacre of working men and women of Rouen that had recently taken place….
He was a part of the tornado of doctrines that swirled unceasingly, gathering for and presaging upheavals.
Christian Socialists, such as Lamennais, P. J. B. Buchez, and Pierre Leroux, mentor of George Sand, preached a revitalized Christianity.
More strident, more powerful were the voices of anti-theism, even of atheism, among which that of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, social anarchist, was the most eloquent. The doctrine he was pleading was called “Mutualism.”
* * *
Proudhon came of peasant-artisan stock from the vicinity of Besançon, birthplace also of Victor Hugo and Charles Fourier. Except for a brief schooling in that city, he was almost totally self-educated. He was a genius, pertinacious and self-assured, and he amazed with the vast store of knowledge and information he succeeded in acquiring—diverse, somewhat disorganized—ranging from Hebrew and comparative philology to the Fathers of the Church and the social sciences.
Never dismayed by poverty or want—of which his experience was manifold— Proudhon was in turn printer, accountant, employee of a large transport firm, and ever the restless journalist. He was indefatigable in competing for prizes, and even won a number of them. And he shocked their donors by his outrageous radicalism. For lack of prizes, he struggled along as he best could, never concealing his views.
In a competition for a Besançon Academy prize on the theme of the usefulness of Sunday, he proclaimed slogans that were to become world-famous or notorious, such as,
What is Royalty—we ask—a myth? What is religion—a dream of the Spirit? What is God—the eternal X? What is property—theft?35
With this essay he won only a bronze medal. He printed his work on his own press in Besançon. In 1838 he obtained a pension from the Besançon Academy for a serious work and went to Paris to pursue his studies. He was, in fact, preparing a bombshell. It fell soon enough when, in 1840, he presented an essay with the provocative title, What is Property? and with the even more provocative answer:
“Property is theft!”
If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word; It is murder, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man, is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise answer, It is theft, without the certainty of being misunderstood?… Property is theft! That is the war-cry of ’93! That is the signal of revolutions! Reader, calm yourself: I am no agent of discord, no firebrand of sedition. I anticipate history by a few days; I disclose a truth whose development we may try in vain to arrest; I write the preamble to our future constitution….
Having come into contact indirectly with the ideas of Hegel, as sifted through many strainers, Proudhon arrived at his own “Hegelian formula.” He was ever after to employ what he believed to be a Hegelian dialectic with a sang-froid, born of a diluted understanding, that was to prove the despair and horror of Engels and Marx. He now applied it to the theory of property:
To express this idea by a Hegelian formula, I will say: Communism—the first expression of the social nature—is the first term of social development—the thesis; property, the reverse of communism, is the second term, the antithesis. When we have discovered the third term, the synthesis, we shall have the required solution…The third term of society, the synthesis of communism and property, we will call liberty…..Politics is the science of liberty. The government of man by man (under whatever name it be disguised) is oppression. Society finds its highest perfection in the union of order with anarchy….
In the same way, the exploitation of labor is theft, for labor alone is the basis of value. What the capitalist appropriates is not only the labor of the individual worker, but the vast heritage of past installations, accumulated techniques, and cooperation. This is the true “surplus value” appropriated, which is never paid. It is theft of “collective” work. Property is incompatible with Justice.
What are the solutions? For all forms of regulative systems of social improvement, such as the socialisms of the Saint-Simonians, of Fourier, or for the communism of such ideologues as Cabet and others, Proudhon has no use at all. In one form or another, they disguise the principle of property. For what is the difference, if instead of the individual, the community becomes the owner not only of the property, such as land and factory, but also of the person himself, his labor, his talents, his faculties, to use them for the common good? Absolute equality and liberty are incompatible with a state, no matter what its character.
As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy. Anarchy—the absence of a master, of a sovereign—such is the form of government to which we are every day approximating.
It is obvious that Proudhon, in his advocacy of “anarchist individualism,” is still thinking of an agrarian society such as he was brought up in, rather than of a highly developed industrial entity. The “synthesis” that is to represent the resolution of contradictions, and which he terms “mutuality,” sees in the independent workshops a replacement for the state—an establishment of individual communes, consisting of small landowners who are masters of their fields.
What then is the government of the future? I hear some of my readers reply: “Why, how can you ask such a question? You are a republican.” “A republican? Yes, but that word specifies nothing. Res publica, that is, the public thing. Now, whoever is interested in public affairs—no matter under what form of government, may call himself a republican. Even kings are republicans.” “Well, you are a democrat.” “No.”….“Then what are you?” “I am an anarchist.!”36
It can be readily understood that with an “anarchist” attitude like this, and also with an already defined antagonism to “class-war” and overt action, he should have come into conflict with Marx and his followers. Karl Marx had been very appreciative of Proudhon’s What Is Property?—particularly the latter’s analysis of the nature of “surplus value”—anticipations, in fact, of his own more elaborate labor theory of value. He regarded Proudhon’s essay as a penetrating work and as having an exceptional importance for the times. Before Marx was expelled from Paris in December 1845, he had had occasion to discuss matters with Proudhon, for Proudhon was then already in contact with the German expatriates like Ruge, Heine, Marx himself, and other socialists, as well as the Russian, Mikhail Bakunin. From Brussels, Marx wrote Proudhon, inviting him to join in the effort to establish a corresponding society in various countries, that would put sympathizers and adherents in touch with each other, and make for a potential international organization. Proudhon agreed, but with such ideological reservations as to make further communication between Marx and himself utterly impossible. The differences become obvious in the letter or reply that Proudhon addressed to Marx:
…I have also some observations to make on this phrase of your letter: at the moment of action. Perhaps you still retain the opinion that no reform is at present possible without a coup de main, without what was formerly called a revolution and is really nothing but a shock. That opinion, which I understand, which I excuse and would willingly discuss, having myself shared it for a long time, my most recent studies have made me completely abandon. I believe we have no need of it in order to succeed; and that consequently we should not put forward revolutionary action as a means of social reform, because that pretended means would simply be an appeal to force, to arbitrariness, in brief, a contradiction. I myself put the problem in this way: to bring about the return to society, by an economic combination, of the wealth which was withdrawn from society by another economic combination. In other words, through Political Economy to turn the theory of Property against Property in such a way as to engender what you German socialists call community and what I will limit myself for the moment to calling liberty or equality. But I believe that I know the means of solving this problem with only a short delay. I would therefore prefer to burn Property by a slow fire, rather than give it new strength by making a St. Bartholomew’s night of the proprietors.37
Here, certainly, there was no reconciliation of “opposites.” Proudhon disbelieved in the class struggle, disbelieved in revolution. He disbelieved in political action. “The social revolution is seriously compromised if it comes through a political revolution.” The small, independent farm holding and the workshop were for him the focal centers for the education toward a new order. Yet while he pleads, “No hatred, no hatred. Eliminate by principle,” he also states that “the new socialist movement will begin with the war of the workshops.”38
His dream was of “Association,” a community of worker-producers, drawing upon a People’s Bank for credit and exchange. These would eventually push out the exploiters and the owners of capitalist means of production and of land. His hostility to all other forms of socialism did not prevent him from anticipating that they too would be drawn into these associations, even the Communists, and “by 1860, the globe will be overrun by the Association.”39
So strongly individualist was he that he took on God almost singlehandedly, as he fulminated against Him.
Actually, his dialectic, far from subsuming a “synthesis” born out of “conflict,” was an effort at balancing out the “good” and “evil” in each of the opposing elements and bringing about a “reconciliation.” His small proprietor, eventually to establish himself as part of similar proprietors in voluntary federations, now has not “property” but “possession.”
Not only is no government and no authority compatible with the principle of mutuality, but no authority can aid in the work of reform…For this moment we must live to ourselves and to ourselves alone.40
Proudhon’s “mutualism,” based as it was on a rejection and eventual elimination of government authority or authority of any kind except that growing out of an individualist morality, was to find far-echoing sounding boards, adherences, and practical applications in such divergent figures and movements as Mikhail Bakunin, Leo Tolstoy, Prince Peter Kropotkin, and the “syndicalist” labor organizations.
His publication in 1846 of The System of Economic Contradictions, or, the Philosophy of Poverty, elicited from Karl Marx the well-known, much discussed, devastating analysis and criticism, The Poverty of Philosophy. This work set the permanent stamp upon the unresolvable opposition of two basic attitudes and two schools of social philosophy. For Proudhon, Marx became the “tapeworm of socialism.” In Marx’s eyes, Proudhon was another petty-bourgeois, who disguised as Hegelian radical dialectics a scheme that sought to “balance out” oppositions and “reconcile” them, without reference to history and economic reality. The system represented a separation of theory and practice; and its principal and dangerous faults lay in Proudhon’s distrust of direct action, even strikes; his disparagement of universal suffrage as a political and social weapon; his personal isolation and extreme individualism; and finally, his narrow viewpoint of the small artisan and small peasant proprietor, altogether inadequate to cope with the vast expansion of modern capitalism and industry. Proudhon, too, like the bourgeois, had fallen for a belief in “absolutes.”
Proudhon does not rise above the bourgeois horizon…He seeks for a synthesis of their ideas, their equilibrium, and does not see that the only equilibrium possible is the one that exists today. Actually, he does what all good bourgeois do. All of them tell you that competition, monopoly, etc., are, in principle, that is, taken abstractly, the only foundations of life, but that they leave much to be desired in practice. All of them want competition without its fatal consequences. All of them want the impossible, that is, the conditions of bourgeois life, without the necessary consequences of these conditions. All of them do not understand that the bourgeois form of production is a historical and transient phenomenon, just as the feudal form was. This error arises from the fact that the bourgeois man represents to them the only possible basis for society, and they cannot imagine a social order in which the man ceases to be bourgeois.41
This was but one of the many acrimonious controversies of the latter 1840s,42 part of the tremendous turmoil that was very soon to be out-thundered by the giant outbreaks of 1848.
A keen-sighted Russian visiting Paris in those years was impressed by the premonitory ferment:
The first thing that struck one on encountering the capital of France was, of course, its social movements. Everywhere throughout Europe there already existed parties which were subjecting the conditions and institutions of European life to analysis, and everywhere there had already formed societies for the consideration of measures to halt, change, and redirect the course of contemporary life, but only in Paris did this critical activity enter into, so to speak, the ordinary daily run of things….One could not resist feeling drawn into this activity which was made up of shrewd and clever articles from the world of journalism, propaganda in the theater, series of lectures and discussions by professors and nonprofessors. For example, I spent three Sundays in a row listening to A. Comte himself, expatiating, in the hall of a certain arcade, on the basic features of his theory before a crowd of people who could have had no inkling of what that theory would become later on. This activity was supplemented by a huge number of books on social topics, which began the well-known war against official political economy, and also by affiliations of honest, well-read, and well-developed workers who had already taken account of the new socialist positions and had revised them in their own fashion, such as Corbon, a future deputy, who was a watchmaker by trade and whom I also had a chance to see in the shop that served him also as the office of his journal, L’Atelier. All these were the flames that preceded the famous Revolution of 1848.43
* * *
Je croyais à l’avenir parce que je le faisais moi-même.
I believed in the future because I was myself making it.
—Jules Michelet
Sentinelles héréditaires,
Les fils de la grande cité,
Se sont levés, comme leur pères,
Pour les droits de l’humanité.
Hereditary sentinels, sons of the great city,
Have risen, like their fathers, for the rights of Humanity.
See! See! Sublime battle! Saintly glory!
People arise! To the proud sons of the future,
Heaven accords victory! The reign of evil is over!
The Earth has conquered Hell!…
—Jean Journet, “Le Triomphe des travailleurs,” March 1848.
The French Revolution of 1848 began with banquets and ended in bloodbaths. This was literally true for France; it was symbolically true for the rest of Europe. In France, the banquets inaugurated in 1847, in imitation of the English model favored by William Cobbett during the Corn Law agitations, represented the most successful means of evading the repressive legislation directed against secret societies, meetings, and the press, and the most effective, popular way of giving wide voice to, and notice of, the feelings of the opposition, and rallying them to a common agitation for reform, principally of the unjust electoral system.
In addition to the thousands who paid as gustatory participants, there were many other thousands who came if only to see, hear, and cheer. These banquets were addressed by parliamentary and other notables, and their views ranged from moderate to radical republicanism as well as socialism. They multiplied in popularity and in intensity of feeling and expression. Sometimes even moderate republican speakers, carried away by their own and their audience’s enthusiasm, allowed themselves more radical sentiments than they had intended. There was the famed banquet of July 18, 1847, at Macon, when its deputy Alphonse de Lamartine, exquisite poet, author of the recently published History of the Girondins (this being the alleged occasion for the celebration), and in his own eyes another Lafayette, potential savior of his country, spoke to almost six thousand listeners. He was predicting the doom of the Louis-Philippe monarchy: “Elle tombera,” Lamartine exclaimed, “cette royauté, non dans son sang…”
It will fall, this royalty, be sure of that. It will fall, not in its blood, like that of ’89, but it will fall in its trap. And after having had the revolutions of freedom and the counterrevolution of glory, you will have the revolution of public conscience and the revolution of contempt.44
“La révolution du mépris!”
The banquets became more numerous and more animated, the demands for reform more extensive, now even embracing the workers who had hitherto been given little mind in the agitations. Even the moderates of the opposition became frightened—as did the government. It was the attempted cancellation of such a banquet in February 1848, originally planned for the predominantly workers’ quarters of the twelfth arrondissement on the Left Bank, that set off the demonstrations that within a few days would overthrow a régime that had lasted eighteen years.
The stupidity of astute statesmen and rulers is as proverbial as it is astonishing. There were signs enough to forewarn Guizot; and the King, even if he believed, as it is said, that there was no danger because Parisians never make a revolution in winter, might have been persuaded that when revolutions are brewing the weather is often of little consequence. Had they read the government organ, the Moniteur of January 30, they might have become aware of a speech delivered in the Chamber of Deputies the day before, by Alexis de Tocqueville—assuming they had not been present when it was delivered. This is what Tocqueville said:
I believe that we are at this moment sleeping on a volcano….I am told that there is no danger because there are no riots; I am told that, because there is no visible disorder on the surface of society, there is no revolution at hand….True, there is no actual disorder; but it has entered deeply into men’s minds. See what is preparing itself among the working classes, who, I grant, are at present quiet. No doubt, they are not disturbed by political passions, properly so-called, to the same extent as they have been; but can you not see that their passions, instead of political, have now become social? Do you not see that they are gradually forming opinions and ideas which are destined not only to upset this or that law, ministry, or even form of government, but society itself, until it totters upon the foundations on which it rests today? Do you not listen to what they say to themselves each day? Do you not hear them repeating unceasingly that all that is above them is incapable and unworthy of governing them; that the distribution of goods prevalent until now throughout the world is unjust—that property rests on a foundation which is not an equitable one? And do you not realize that when such opinions take root, when they spread in an almost universal manner, when they sink deeply into the masses, they are bound to bring with them sooner or later, I know not when or how, a most formidable revolution?…Do you not feel, by some intuitive instinct which is not capable of analysis, but which is undeniable, that the earth is quaking once again in Europe? And do you not feel—what shall I say?—as it were a gale of revolution in the air?…45
Overdramatic?—perhaps.
But the populace, especially of the workers’ arrondissements, is aroused, furious at the deputies who have so easily yielded to ministerial pressure. Sometimes people and events move faster than their alleged movers suspect. And now the students of the medical and law schools are up in arms, literally. On February 23 crowds come out en masse; at various points of the city, Government troops are already on the alert. But the National Guard, bulwark of constitutional monarchy, is for the greater part no longer on the King’s side. That of the twelfth arrondissement is against him; that of the eighth refuses even to honor the call to arms. As for King and counsellors…it is too little too late. Guizot is sacrificed, but this is not enough. Not Thiers, nor any one else at this moment, will satisfy the people.
The demonstration moves in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The army is there. A chance shot—was it panic or was it deliberate? Who knows? The Revolution is on. Fifty are dead.
Barricades go up—over 1500 of them; the fighting spreads to the Chateau d’Eau, then over to the Palais Royal, thereafter to the Hôtel de Ville, which is taken, with its cannon, and then comes the march to the royal palace of the Tuileries. Nothing can assuage the militant crowds, neither the much-hated General Bugeaud, commander of the King’s forces, nor the more friendly Odilon Barrot. The cry is up—for a Republic! The King’s offer to abdicate in favor of his young grandson and his mother’s regency is not acceptable, though Lamartine is not altogether opposed. He had hesitated to proclaim the Republic, but the people are doing it.
At the offices of the National and the Réforme a provisional government is being formed. Conflicting groups have to be reconciled. The moderates would have liked to exclude the radicals, but the workers protest against it. Louis Blanc and Albert, a working man, are included. Lamartine is there too, and the great astronomer Arago— all, with the exception of Blanc and the working man Albert, moderate republicans of the bourgeois persuasion. The extreme right too has rallied to the Revolution, particularly the Legitimists, rejoicing in the expulsion of the Orléanist pretender, and having gotten over fear for their lives, are assured now also of their vast properties.
For the moment at least, there is for the generality of the people of Paris the dream and the hope. The new government has moved to abolish sweat labor and has fixed the work day to ten and eleven hours. It has proposed to “guarantee work” by establishing “national workshops.” It has created a labor commission, the so-called Luxembourg Commission, made Louis Blanc its chairman, and set him to work on a labor program. But it is also suspiciously hurried in setting new elections, following passage of a universal suffrage decree. The electorate will now be enlarged from 250,000 to nine million. The radical groups are ill at ease: is the rest of France, especially the agrarian part, ready for such an election, uninstructed as it is in the ideas of the new régime and its program, and itself so very suspicious of Paris and its revolutionary left?
A multipolar phenomenon now comes into sight. One aspect of it is perhaps best seen in the description by Tocqueville of his experiences during the first days of the February Revolution:
I spent the whole afternoon in walking about Paris. Two things in particular struck me: the first was, I will not say the mainly, but the uniquely and exclusively, popular character of the revolution that had just taken place; the omnipotence it had given to the people, properly so called—that is to say, the classes who work with their hands—over all others. The second was the comparative absence of malignant passion, or, as a matter of fact, of any keen passion—an absence which at once made it clear that the lower orders had suddenly become the masters of Paris…The Revolution of July was effected by the people, but the middle class had stirred it up and led it, and secured the principal fruits of it. The Revolution of February, on the contrary, seemed to be made entirely outside the bourgeoisie and against it…Nothing more novel had been known in our annals.46
It was this sense of a new force—a new motive element of history—that struck even those who were less conscious than Tocqueville of the class conflict now revealed. None was more aware of this new phenomenon than that segment of society, the bourgeoisie, that had with the assistance of the lower orders now come into power and intended to consolidate it. The bourgeois liberals, the moderate republicans, now became the right wing and proceeded to confirm their ascendency by crushing, or at least immobilizing or neutralizing, the more radical of the working-class elements and their leadership. Once in power, they began to segregate Louis Blanc, whom, next to Blanqui, they regarded as their most formidable menace. Isolated in the Luxembourg Commission, he was proposing various plans for worker cooperatives and extensive social services which they in due time could nullify. The newly established national workshops they entrusted to Emile Thomas, a skilful and persuasive organizer. Here workers were either directly supported or assigned work in a paramilitary structure. These too, they imagined, could be used when the time was ripe as an army to crush other recalcitrants or for other purposes. In the meantime they applied themselves to active propaganda in other parts of France where, with the aid of dominant influences in the provinces, they could use the elections to crush the have-nots…
Louis-Desiré Véron, proprietor of the influential journal the Constitutionnel, was perhaps too harsh, but not too far from the truth when he asserted in his memoirs that “the day following the February Revolution, the bourgeois of Paris trembled for his head, and once he was sure of retaining it, he trembled for his purse.”47
Once beginning to be reassured of his purse, he proceeded to form new coalitions to secure his newly found powers.
While the Luxembourg sought the philosopher’s stone, in the Hôtel de Ville they minted the current coinage.48
The Provisional Government proceeded to buy the confidence of the French financiers by paying interest on state loans in advance. It imposed a 45-centime surtax onto the four direct taxes, which fell most heavily on the impoverished peasantry, and thus tried to make them pay for the costs of the February Revolution and at the same time, by arousing their resentment, turn them into the most potent counterrevolutionary element in France. It formed the Mobile Guards, recruited from the Paris lumpenproletariat, an army of 24,000, as another counterrevolutionary force. At the same time Lamartine, sensing possible trouble ahead, made provisions for the reenforcement of the regular army, and held it in readiness. The pleas of the radicals for postponement of the elections was disregarded. Demonstrations and counterdemonstrations in March 1848 portended trouble. April 23 and the elections arrived….
The measure of popular discontent was full to overflowing. The economy stagnated, and national workshops could not—even if their directors had so desired—fill the needs of the unemployed of Paris and of those who had drifted in from the provinces. The plans of Louis Blanc’s Commission remained mostly on paper; and outside of Paris the peasant-farmers, already burdened with heavy taxes, now faced the additional imposts with burning resentment, for in their eyes they were being made to pay for the support of Paris working men and women and for the enrichment of Paris overlords. Thus, both the proletariat of Paris and other cities, and the peasants of France, regarded the government measures as provocations; and it is not at all certain that the government did not so regard them too, and welcomed them as such. The counterrevolutionary alliances that were being welded throughout the country boded ill for liberal and radical republicans. A delegate from Charente and Poitiers reported how the “bourgeois, the nobles, men of money, yesterday separated into several opposed parties, today united to pervert the spirit of the revolution and stop the torrent of reforms…Nobles, the high clergy…bankers, and some poor dupes” also joined forces for the same purposes.49 And when those inveterate enemies the Orléanists and the Legitimists joined forces, it did not require keen ears to hear a doomsday knell in the distance.
The prospects of the election frightened the radical left. George Sand, who had hurried to Paris to place herself at the service of the Revolution, and who became one of the editors of the Bulletin de la République, voiced the general fear in its issue of April 14.
Unless the elections bring about the triumph of social truth, if they are no more than an expression of the interests of one class, wrenched from the loyal and trusting people, then the elections which should be the salvation of the Republic will be its destruction; of that there can be no doubt. Then there will be only one road to salvation for the people who set up the barricades, and that will be to demonstrate their wishes for a second time and put off the decisions taken by the false National Representation.50
Alas! Cassandra proved to be right…The elections returned about three hundred moderate republicans to the Constituent National Assembly, out of nine hundred; two hundred Orléanists; one hundred Legitimists; and a bare seventy-five or eighty radicals and socialists. In Paris, only Armand Barbès and twelve socialists were elected, Louis Blanc among them. Blanqui and Raspail failed of support. For the time being, everyone in the Assembly spoke like a republican, even the most diehard royalists. Republicanism was the fashion.
If it was not yet time to liquidate the republic, it seemed high time to pulverize the radical working class and its leaders. The sharp class-antagonisms that were to rock France and the rest of Europe for years to come were laid bare as never before. Working-class riots that broke out in several cities—in Limoges, in Rouen—were soon suppressed. Tempers in the clubs of Paris boiled over. Barbès, Blanqui, Raspail were not men to sit idly by and watch the Revolution being—as they felt—betrayed. The lines were being drawn—tightly—and the Assembly, looking to Lamartine to lead it, dominated as it was by “notables,” that is, men of property and wealth, joined by the petty and middle bourgeoisie, was set to fight the radical menace and eradicate it as soon as feasible. Alongside of them they now had the support and prestige of the Catholic party, headed by Montalambert. The Assembly set to work on May 4 and began proceedings by acclaiming and proclaiming the Republic. Absit omen!
There were in their midst many would-be executioners of the newborn republic, eager to prove their skill and exercise their métier. There was one absentee, however, who from faraway London watched the historic proceedings in France—from the wings, so to speak—ready to make his appearance at the proper moment—one who was eventually destined to wield the axe with adroitness and expedition. This was Prince Louis-Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte.
The drama of “liquidation” by the hand of the government now moved rapidly toward a dénouement. The first step was to attempt to decapitate the leadership of the radical wing of the working classes, and opportunity soon offered itself. On May 15, a mass demonstration of workers and others forced its way into the Assembly in order to compel it to intervene in the interest of Poland against Austria and Russia, as well as to voice its chagrin at the slowing pace of social improvement, now threatened with total paralysis. Blanqui and Barbès at first opposed the demonstration, but its momentum forced them into a reluctant leadership. From the Assembly the masses moved toward the Hôtel de Ville, intent on demanding a new government. The government in power had been waiting for just such a moment, and crushed the movement before it had the chance to spread. Blanqui, Barbès and other leaders were arrested.
Thereupon, the government moved to liquidate whatever remained of its “socialist” program. It rejected Louis Blanc’s demands for the establishment of a ministry of labor, and the moderate reforms his Commission had been proposing. Then it proceeded to the more radical (from its point of view) and necessary step of abolishing the expensive and dangerous national workshops that had been established to give relief to the unemployed but had barely been able to minister to a fraction of them. On May 24 it was decided to drop those who had been resident in Paris less than three months, and to send the younger members into the army. Others were to be transferred out of Paris to clear marshes. Thousands were to be left altogether destitute, having before this learned how to starve on the pitiful subsistence handed out to them. Such a provocation would not have been undertaken without the assurance that means were already at hand to meet a crisis of resistance. General Eugène Cavaignac, the severe governor-general of Algeria, was summoned back and entrusted with the prospective tasks: he was to command the troops, the National Guard, and the Mobile Guards.
The tragic tale is soon told—all too soon. But it was to remain engraved in the minds of men and women forever after. The June Days of 1848…
* * *
La France est pâle come un lis,
Le front ceint de gris verveines,
Dans le massacre de ses fils,
Son sang a coulé de ses veines…
O Niobé des temps passés,
Viens voir la douleur de la France!…
Quatre jours pleins et quatre nuits,
L’ange des rouges funérailles,
Ouvrant ses ailes sur Paris,
A soufflé le vent des batailles….
France is pale as a lily,
Her brow circled with grey vervain,
In the massacre of her children,
Her blood flowed from her veins…
O Niobe of ancient times,
Come, see the grief of France!…
Four days, and through four nights
The angel of bloody destruction
Spreading her wings over Paris,
Fanned the winds of warfare….
—Pierre Dupont, “Les Journées de Juin”—1848
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
—William Butler Yeats, “Easter 1916”
Nothing like this had happened before.
“Du pain, du travaille, ou du plomb!” “Bread, work, or lead!”—the cry of some of the fifty thousand of the workers who on June 22 massed to protest the actions of the Assembly. It was an uprising of hunger. These were the men and women who only a few months before, in February, had offered—in the words of one of them, a worker—to “put three months of misery at the service of the Republic.” Now their sacrifice was being repaid in such words as Minister Marie uttered to a petitioning delegation of workers. “Obey the orders of the Government; the workers do not wish to go to the provinces—we will compel them by force…by force, do you understand?”51 Some time earlier they had been told that there was no such thing as the “right to work”—only the “right to assistance.” They were to be dispersed, sent to the provinces!
These were the men and women whose leaders had been jailed, who had been deserted by their middle-class and radical allies (Lamartine and Proudhon were standing aside, looking on), who on June 22 faced the combined forces of General Cavaignac—the army, the Mobile Guards, the Paris National Guard, the National Guards that had been brought in from the provinces. Leaderless, they made their own leaders and manned the barricades. There they were—the mechanics from Chapelle; metal workers, carpenters, cabinet makers in the St.-Antoine district; dockers in the Cité; ragpickers and quarry workers in the twelfth arrondissement of the Pantheon. There were printers and transport workers, some members of the liberal professions, and shopkeepers.
For the first time, the poet-statesman heard the cry, “Lamartine à la lanterne!”—a cry of disenchantment and hunger. Another Lafayette had betrayed them and the Revolution…
Alexis de Tocqueville, again….He is now with the right wing of the Assembly, but he cannot recall the event without astonishment:
I come at last to the insurrection of June, the most extensive and the most singular that has occurred in our history, and perhaps in any other: the most extensive, because, during four days, more than a hundred thousand men were engaged in it; the most singular, because the insurgents fought without a war-cry, without leaders, without flags, and yet with a marvelous harmony and an amount of military experience that astonished the oldest officers…A struggle of class against class…It must also be observed that this formidable insurrection was not the enterprise of a certain number of conspirators, but the revolt of one whole section of the population against another. Women took part in it as well as men. While the latter fought, the former prepared and carried ammunition; and when at last the time had come to surrender, the women were the last to yield. These women went to battle with, as it were, a housewifely ardour; they looked to victory for the comfort of their husbands and the education of their children….On the 22nd of June, they marched through Paris in troops, singing in cadence, in a monotonous chant, “We won’t be sent away, we won’t be sent away.”…On the 23rd, on going to the Assembly, I saw a large number of omnibuses grouped around the Madeleine. This told me that they were beginning to erect barricades in the streets…They proceeded in their work with the cunning and regularity of an engineer, not unpaving more stones than were necessary to lay the foundations of a very thick, solid and even neatly-built wall, in which they left generally a small opening by the side of the house to permit ingress and egress…52
Friday, June 23: Barricades. First blood is shed at the Port-Saint-Denis. Government reenforcements begin to pour in from all parts of France. It seemed almost as if all of France was up in arms against Paris. On June 24 the Assembly made General Cavaignac dictator. What a far cry from those days in February when Lamartine was hailing the Revolution with the words, “The Republic is a surprise which has turned into a miracle.”
The miracle—if there was any—was now on the barricades. General Cavaignac held off until he could strike with full force. On Sunday, June 25, Corpus Christi Day, the Chapelle sector was stormed and taken; on Monday the Bastille positions. Soon it was all over…Not quite…For then followed the reprisals and the massacre of the prisoners….Between twelve and fifteen thousand arrested; three thousand or so cut down in cold blood, or shot out of hand.
Indeed, the National Assembly seemed implacable (writes a modern American historian, partisan of General Cavaignac) as it summarily voted on June 27 to send insurgent “leaders” before courts-martial and to deport all others without a trial. A few radicals pleaded vainly for less stringent penalties, but the Assembly refused even to exempt the aged and minors from the prospective voyage to a tropical prison camp.53
George Sand was brokenhearted. “I no longer believe in the existence of a republic which begins by killing the proletariat…Today, I am ashamed of being French, I who used to be so proud of it.”54
Others listened and heard the sound of ominous shots that meant more prisoners were being executed. That great Russian, Alexander Herzen, who had managed to leave Russia in order to begin enjoying the blessings of Western freedom, has some memorable pages in which he describes the sanguinary aftermath of the June insurrection and the feelings of desperation he and his friends experienced. He was one of that remarkable group of Russians, the so-called “generation of the ’40s”—including men like Bakunin, Belinsky, Ivan Turgenev—all living abroad and destined, each in his own way, to affect history. Herzen had arrived in western Europe in 1847 and had come back from Italy just in time for the Revolution. This was the aftermath of the original exultation:
On the other side of the river in all the streets and alleys barricades were being built. I can see now those dark figures dragging stones; women and children were helping them. A young Polytechnic student climbed onto one barricade that apparently was finished, hoisted a banner and began singing the “Marseillaise” in a gentle, mournful voice; all those who were working joined in, and the chorus of the grand song resounding from the stones of the barricades laid hold of one’s heart…and the tocsin still rang out. Meanwhile, the artillery thudded over the bridge, and from the bridge General Bédeau scanned the enemy’s position through a telescope…
And then on the 26th of June it was all over….
On the evening of the 26th of June, after the victory of the National over Paris, we heard regular salvos at short intervals…We glanced at one another and all our faces were green….‘They are shooting people,” we said with one voice, and turned away from one another. I pressed my forehead against the window-pane. Such moments provoke ten years of hatred, a lifetime of thirst for vengeance: woe to him who forgives at such moments!
Herzen’s friends were leaving the country one by one; but he resolved to remain, wracked as he was by despair, a despair shared by many others.
Many times in moments of weakness and despair, when the cup of bitterness was too full, when my whole life seemed to me nothing but one prolonged blunder, when I doubted of myself, of “the last thing, all that is left,” those words came into my head: “Why did I not take the gun from the workman and stay at the barricade?” Struck down by a sudden bullet, I should have borne two or three beliefs with me to the grave.55
History, in presenting us with movement, currents, flux and reflux, often hides from us the individuals who are the actors, and we tend to forget the individual in the mass. That young workman who offered Herzen a gun is part of a drama; Herzen, who did not take it, is part of a drama. Those men and women who built and fortified the barricades had individual heart-blood in them, each craved bread and security, and each was making history in more senses than he realized. What individual and concerted heroism it was to face the disciplined assault of a well-armed soldiery, when your own arms are either nonexistent or in scant supply! One is both alone and together with others. In their massed effort, in the community of their undertaking, in their common acceptance of their roles as heirs of the Great Revolutions, of the risk of defeat and death, or of hopes of victory, in their fused identities they represent movement—the movement of history. Yet each individual felt himself master of his destiny at that moment, the mould of the future in the hand that held rifle, or spade, or other makeshift weapons, and for four days they seemed such. For four days they defied the decree of annihilation issued against them by the other side. They were defeated. Looking back upon the event, History may see it as a tragic illusion, with that condescension which the survivor has toward the dead. Yet who shall deny that that “illusion” was to perpetuate itself not as “illusion,” but as a reality that even in its tragic immediacy changed the course of history?
For Karl Marx, as for Alexis de Tocqueville, the event represented a historic “reality” of the first magnitude, a turning point of history, antipodal as were the political and social philosophies of the two men.
The February republic was won by the workers with the passive support of the bourgeoisie…Just as the February republic, with its socialist concessions, required a battle of the proletariat, united with the bourgeoisie, against monarchy, so a second battle was necessary in order to sever the republic from socialist concessions, in order officially to work out the bourgeois republic as dominant. The bourgeoisie had to refute the demands of the proletariat with arms in its hands. And the real birthplace of the bourgeois republic is not the February victory; it is the June defeat…The workers were left no choice. They had to starve or start to fight. They answered on June 22 with the tremendous insurrection in which the first great battle was fought between the two classes that split modern society. It was a fight for the preservation or annihilation of the bourgeois order. The veil that shrouded the republic was torn to pieces.56
The French historian and biographer of Blanqui, Gustave Geffroy, has eloquently tried to rescue from the dark pits of oblivion and anonymity the individuality of the participants:
The anonymous mass that fought and succumbed in the shadows, went into battle without leaders and without a program, and the best of those who fought against them, the great poets, Lamartine and Hugo, those indeed who should have mounted high and advanced the future, understood nothing of this arrival of the masses. Everyone believed it to be a revolt of the obscure mob, an irruption of uncomprehending wild animals; not one of them saw that these wretches wanted to come out of the night and that…with tears, and with invocations to death, they clamored forth their hunger for light and happiness…No one was in command of this elemental force, that army of fatality, that had already signed a pact with death…It is with difficulty, searching among these ruins, these débris of history, that one discovers the vague names, already obliterated, of those who assembled the men, sounded the alarm, and gave orders behind the barricades. Le Genissel, club orator, was in the faubourg Poissonnière; Benjamin Laroque, man of letters, at the close of St.-Lazare; the shoemaker Voisambert commanded in the rue Planche-Mibray; and the mechanic Barthélemy, in the rue Grange-aux-Belles…The principal actor in this drama was the nameless mass, as confused and indistinct in life as in their common grave, a lamentable and heroic chorus, going its way in a herd, without goal, without hope. It is they who have emerged into the political world in June, and will never again disappear from the world stage.57
Though Victor Hugo—still a monarchist—was not of them, nor that weathervane Lamartine, there were poets to celebrate and mourn the June martyrs. Louis Ménard, a member of the Blanquist club, had been on the barricades in that month. He composed a “Prologue d’une Révolution,” in which he paid tribute to the fallen insurrectionists:
Puisque vos ennemis couronnent d’immortelles
Le cercueil triomphal où reposent leur morts,
Pendant que, sans honneur, entassés pêle-mêle,
Dans las fosse commune on va jeter vos corps…
With crowns of immortelles your enemies have decked
The triumphal bier where rest their dead;
While despoiled of honor, piled in heaps,
They hurled your bodies into the common ditch;
Accept this tribute of our silent tears,
Brothers, we follow alone your sacred remains,
And in the discreet night, we will venture again
To the graveyard corner where you found repose.
But no! behind you we will march without tears,
For you have fallen in a sacred war,
Hope in your hearts, arms in your hand,
We who survive, will weep no more…
In another poem, he vowed vengeance:
Si l’aveugle hasard me donnait la puissance
Pour un jour, je voudrais tenir
La glaive justicier de la sainte vengeance
Et le droit sacré de punir…
If blind chance were to give me the power
For just one day, I would love to hold
The retributive sword of holy vengeance
And the sacred right of punishment….
Vengeance will come; the inevitable day
Of just expiations
Will dawn, and sweep a crime-ridden race
With the wind of revolutions…
It will be your turn, no pardon, our masters,
Neither prayers nor penitent’s pleas
Will save you from kissing the sacred spots
Drenched by our martyrs’ blood….58
I am forced to make the solemn declaration that there is no power on earth that can ever move me to transform the natural relationship between Prince and his people, made so strong among us through its innermost truth, into a formal, constitutional one. And that not now or ever will I allow a sheet of written paper to intrude between God in Heaven and this land of ours, like a second Providence, to rule over us with its paragraphs, and take the place of our time-honored, sacred sense of loyalty.
—King Frederick William IV of Prussia—April 11, 1847
Oui, ma chère, nous sommes morts.
Yes, my dear, we are dead.
—Prince Metternich to his wife, March 1848
The locomotive of history rushed on with headlong speed. Or better, the locomotive of revolution. Its thunders resounded throughout Europe, shaking dynasties, empires, and institutions as never before.
March 1848: the mensis mirabilis, the “miracle month” of German revolutions. For in that single month following the upheaval in France, King Ludwig of Bavaria had to abdicate; King Frederick William of Prussia, he who would not yield in 1847, bowed bareheaded before the hearses of those slain by his soldiery in the streets of Berlin, and thereafter paraded through the city, greeting the citizens and bearing the revolutionary colors on his arm. In this month Prince Metternich, barely escaping with his life, left Vienna by a back door to make his way to England; and the Prince of Prussia, the future Emperor William I—brother of Frederick William IV—also sought refuge there…
It was in March too, on the sixth of that month, that the Hungarian nationalist leader Lajos Kossuth addressed the Diet at Pressburg:
The future of our Fatherland is not assured so long as the system of government in the other provinces [of Austria] is in gross contradiction to all constitutional principles, so long as the State Council which has charge of the common affairs of the Monarchy continues, in its elements, its combination and its tendency, to render homage to absolutism…From the ossuaries of Vienna’s System a pestilential air blows toward us, which numbs our nerves and fetters our spirits…It is for us to save the dynasty, to attach its future to the brotherhood of the different races in Austria, and for the evil binding force of bayonets and bureaucratic oppression to substitute the firm cement of a free constitution…We therefore seek to surround the imperial throne with constitutional organizations, and to obtain the grant of a constitution to all countries within the Austrian Empire.59
The address reverberates throughout the Austrian monarchy. And in Vienna it is read aloud to the thousands upon thousands who are gathered in protest before the Landhaus, meeting place of the Estates, with their demands for a Constitution and other reforms. This is March 13. The revolution has begun.…The end of Viennese Gemütlichkeit….
The news of the fall and flight of Metternich sends a lightning thrill throughout the German states. Already fired by wave upon wave of discontent, aroused in meetings fecund in petitions, the agitations mount. Berlin is aflame. Hatred of the military, whose very presence is provocation, leads to the raucous cry, “The soldiers must go!” The petitions are comparatively mild, but they are an affront to the affable father of his country, and unbecoming in hitherto well-behaved children: “Freedom of the Press, convocation of the Diets, withdrawal of troops, arming of the citizens, withdrawal of the ministers, protection of labor.”
This time, the constitution that had been time and again promised by Prussian kings since 1815, and with equal regularity denied, could no longer be withheld. The crust of malaise, of apathy, of despair that had settled on the Germans after the defeat of their hopes in the 1830s, was broken. Not since 1815 had paternal despots found mornings so different from the nights before. Would France again undertake a campaign and bring another revolution into all the sacrosanct corners of Europe? True, Lamartine was reassuring the world that France had only peaceful intentions. But who would trust those French? A horrified Prussian king turned to England’s Queen Victoria with desperate warnings of perils besetting her country. Failing of consolation here, he would soon welcome the intervention of the Russian giant in the East. In Paris, Heinrich Heine—who had anticipated and forewarned of the impending débacle of French royalty, but had incredulously asked, “Will there be a revolution in Germany?”—heard the news from the other side of the Rhine with disbelief. For the last time in his life he walked through the streets of Paris on his own legs. Thereafter, for eight long years until his death in 1856, he would look upon his beloved city only when, carried in the arms of his wife, he was brought to the balcony of his apartment.
Panic-stricken German monarchs hastened to grant concessions—hopeful of repudiating them when the time came. Their difficulties, and those of the “rabble” which was up in arms, stemmed from the fragmentation of the country.
And miracle of miracles! The nation of philosophers, poets, dreamers, thinkers—as well as inveterate coffeehouse debaters—had descended from the ethereal clouds of Ideas onto the barricades of Reality! Celestial dialectics turned into street battles!….
The lesser German states were not far behind. Fires of revolt flared up everywhere: in Baden, Württemberg, Cologne and other Rhine provinces, thereafter in Saxony, Nassau, Hesse-Darmstadt…The liberalizing spirit was strongest in the south and west of Germany, and it was from these regions that a call resounded for a united Parliament and a General German Assembly. For the moment, diversity and divergence became unity as both constitutionalists and republicans joined forces in preparation for what was to be the momentous Frankfurt Parliament. The liberals were led by Heinrich von Gagern, prime minister of Hesse-Darmstadt; the revolutionary radicals, by Friedrich Hecker and Gustav von Struve. When the assembly finally convened at St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt on May 18, 1848, it was constituted predominantly of the upper and middle classes, most of them “intellectuals”—95 lawyers, 104 professors, 124 bureaucrats, 100 judicial officers, 34 landowners, 13 businessmen, and a microscopic representation of the working-class population, these led by the redoubtable Robert Blum of Leipzig. Heinrich von Gagern presided.
As was to be expected in the presence of so many professionals, an exuberant, unrestrainable oratory seemed at times to take precedence over the need for action. Indeed, this Frankfurt Parliament has often been derided, if not objurgated, as a congregation of chatterboxes. It is therefore not the least remarkable of wonders that for the time being some very positive actions should have been undertaken, and even set in motion, in an atmosphere of violent disputations within the St. Paul’s Church, and amid the fierce political and physical clashes outside its walls and in other parts of the German states. The dominant tone of the assembly was conservative and antirevolutionary, and in that spirit it elected Archduke John of Austria as Reichsverweser— vicar-general or regent—of what was to be a unified Germany (including, at the moment, Austria), and set about preparing a Constitution and instituting immediately necessary reforms (or at least proposing them), such as freedom of movement, of speech, publication, meetings and assemblies, of thought and religion; of learning and equality before the law; public trials; inviolability of property; protection for national minorities; abolition of the death penalty, etc. But of the rights of labor and the reform of laboring conditions there was nothing at all.
Rarely had such a galactic company of brilliant intellectuals graced a political gathering. “Welch reicher Himmel!”—What a rich sky! There were such stars as Jakob Grimm, Ludwig Uhland the poet, writers and historians, Heinrich Laube, Arnold Ruge, Droysen, Duncker, Gervinus; the Viennese poet, Anastasius Grün; the eminent theologian Ignaz Döllinger. What might they not agree and disagree on! It was hardly surprising that uneasy elements should intrude, like German chauvinism and super-nationalism; suspicion of non-Germanic minorities; local interests and particularism; bitter antirepublicanism, panic fear of “anarchy,” and a dread of the more radical revolutionaries. A constitutional monarchy represented their highest ideal. Their dream: a federal empire under the leadership of Prussia, with Frederick William IV at the head.
The intentions and programs were well-meaning enough, and corresponded in the main with the interests of the predominantly middle-class liberal groups. But how to bring all this into the realm of “actuality”? Or was this Assembly of notables a Frankfurt “never-never-land”—debating, arguing, planning, philosophizing—while all around it the world was in conflagration? An assembly suspected (even despised) by the ruling classes of all the German states, suspected by the lower classes and the radicals—a “government” without a treasury, courts, or an army?
When in 1849 the Frankfurt Assembly finally came up with a constitution—in many ways a fairly liberal one, though without provisions for the improvement of the lot of the working population—and then resolved to offer the crown of “Germany” to King Frederick William IV of Prussia, the tide of revolution had already waned, and reaction had begun to gain the upper hand. The King of Prussia haughtily declined both the Constitution and the honor of heading a yet nonexistent united Germany. He would not, in his own words, besmirch his royal head with a “crown from the gutter.” He would accept it only if handed him by the German sovereigns of the several states. “Gegen Demokraten, helfen nur Soldaten.” “Against Democrats, he would manage with the aid of his soldiery!” The King’s attitude spelled Doomsday for the Assembly. Already split between right and left, it soon disintegrated. A working-class uprising in Frankfurt against it, though quickly suppressed, only sealed its doom. A left-wing rump removed to Stuttgart, where it was soon dispersed by the government. The Assembly’s life had run almost concurrently with the course of revolution on the Continent; when it expired, its death was only an ignominious parody of the tragedy of blood and human sacrifice that was being enacted everywhere else.
But before the humbled monarchs would rise again and with reborn insolence reassert their authority, many of them were forced to eat the dust of shame and humiliation. Also to eat their words. The King of Prussia, who vowed never, never to cede, saw Berlin rise up against him in March 1848; stood bareheaded as the procession of those his army had killed wove before his eyes, close to three hundred, practically all of them workers and artisans of the city; promised an assembly, a constitution, a liberal cabinet; and was forced to listen to the monster demonstration that called for universal suffrage, a ministry of labor, a minimum wage, a ten-hour day—a frightful spectacle not only to kings but also to respectable Germans, and not only in Berlin but in the Rhineland as well. One workers’ society sprang up after another. In Cologne, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung began appearing in June, edited by Karl Marx, now returned from exile…
No less startling was the news from the south of Europe. In Rome, Pope Pius IX was forced to grant a constitution on March 10; a few days later a Milanese uprising and attack on the Austrians drove the latter back to Verona. In the same month an uprising in Venice resulted in the declaration of a republic; and almost against his will, King Charles Albert of Piedmont was moved to declare war on Austria and was sending his army into Lombardy.
The ice-crust that had congealed so much of Europe’s heart booms as it begins to break and rush down in irresistible floes against dikes and barriers, intent on crushing them. And if all the currents had flowed together, there would have been no resisting them. But crosscurrents and countercurrents, national self-interests, national hatreds, local patriotisms and chauvinisms, legitimate national strivings, countered the pressing currents of democratic internationalism; class interests strove against one another. Yet that the situation was desperate in the eyes of the powers is nevertheless proved by the call Austria extended to the Russian Tsar for help in crushing the almost-victorious uprisings in Hungary.
It would be a disservice to historical truth to overlook the fervent sense of internationalism that characterized the revolutions, the feeling that this was truly one war against privilege and oppression, though seemingly fragmented and discontinuous. Such a sense of unity is perhaps well symbolized in the action of the Polish soldier General Josef Bem, a veteran of the Polish struggles of the 1830s, who now felt it his duty to come to the aid of the revolutionaries of Vienna, and soon thereafter, of Hungary. It is also symbolized in the figure of Robert Blum, the political leader of Leipzig, a member of the Frankfurt Assembly, who went to Vienna, participated in the insurgent movement there, and was upon its defeat shamefully executed, despite his parliamentary immunity. And it is also symbolized in the irrepressible and omnipresent Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian.
The chronicle of these revolutions may be epitomized as flux and reflux—until the shattering defeats toward the end of 1849. As was to be expected, a great deal of the quixotic was manifested in a number of ill-planned ventures; there were Hotspurs leading the way to disaster, as in the April uprisings in Baden planned by Hecker and the German poet Georg Herwegh. Yet ever and again there rose frequent visions of proximate victory to be salvaged from disasters. Lurid and macabre paradoxes, too, manifest themselves, as when the French government, having crushed the June uprising in Paris, proceeded in July 1849 to destroy the newly established Roman republic and restore the Pope. But here and there, minor epics of resistance were still wrought, as in the battles around Rome; in the heroism of Venice under Daniele Manin against the Austrians. But the bastions of revolution were falling one by one, as Prussian, Russian and Austrian armies ranged far and wide.
But not before at least two extraordinary exploits electrified the world. One was the Hungarian resistance to the Austro-Russian forces; the other, the second uprising of the populace of Vienna in October 1848. The two events were interlaced.
Emperor Franz of Austria had once remarked: “My peoples are strangers to each other, and that is all right. They do not get the same sickness at the same time…From their antipathy will be born order, and from mutual hatred, general peace.”60And so it was indeed—at least for a time. That strange miraculous thing—Austria— giant with feet of clay, a clay that seemed imperishably tenacious but was held together in part by the national hatred and rivalries of Germans, Magyars, Slavs, Croats, Serbs, Czechs—an Austria still semifeudal, only a small segment of it industrialized. Its highly bureaucratic machine, centered in Vienna, was headed by an absolute autocrat, the feebleminded Emperor Ferdinand; its authority was vested in the stick that descended with varied degrees of vigor from the Emperor down to the least paterfamilias. What seemed an impenetrable Chinese Wall of censorship and police surveillance sealed off ideas from abroad; fear kept them down internally. But every wall has its chinks, and some of those winds of doctrine and revolution that were howling outside managed to penetrate. The February of Paris became the March of Vienna. And who would have expected it of Vienna? That city was hailed as
City of pleasures, city of music,
Proud and morning-joyous Vienna,
Lo! spring-times’ happy children
Are nurturing Freedom’s roses!61
And who would have thought the impoverished intellectual proletariat—the university students—would form the vanguard, and one of the mainstays, of the revolutionary armies?
Lo, who be these so proud in bearing?
The bayonets flash, the flags fly free.
They come with silver trumpets blaring,
The University!62
Under the leadership of an inspired professor-priest, Anton Füster, these students sparked the movement of resistance among the workers, tradesmen, and intellectuals. And these in turn sent forth their petitions demanding fundamental reforms. They marched to the Landhaus, meeting place of the Estates, and here a young Jewish doctor, Adolf Fischoff, spoke in the name of all for a free press, a united Empire, and other reforms. Then someone read aloud Kossuth’s spirited speech, and shouts arose: “Constitution! Metternich must go!” Misery needs little ideology for a vent—and though the proletariat was scarcely class-conscious, they joined in the common upsurge and demanded the right to bear arms.
When troops were called out, the natural thing happened. There was a clash, arms went off, and a number of protesters were killed. The Revolution was on. Arsenals were ransacked, an Academic Legion came into being, a citizens’ National Guard and a Militia. Rifts widened, tempers rose, demands became more forceful, more extensive: for a constitutional convention convened through universal suffrage. Now, worker and servants, previously ignored, were making their voices heard….
Emperor Ferdinand fled, along with his camarilla, to the more loyal terrain of Innsbruck. Here they hoped to find time and support for a happier return. His generals were already beginning to retrieve some of their earlier losses: Prince Windischgrätz was liquidating the revolution in Prague; Radetzky was successfully counterattacking in Lombardy; and the Croat leader Joseph Jelačič was secretly conspiring with the Austrians to attack the rebellious Hungarians. Thus Croat and Serb nationalism, repressed by the Hungarians, could now be used in the interests of the common overlord!
Though the uprisings in Vienna had less of socialist consciousness or theory than any other in Europe, their ultimate fate would be determined by the extent to which the middle classes would lend their support. In the earlier stages of the revolution in Vienna, before the demands of the lower classes had become more articulate and emphatic, tradesmen, manufacturers, business people in general, whose interests had been neglected by the Austrian bureaucracy and who had been hampered in their enterprises, naturally sided with the movement for a liberalization of government control and for a share in governmental decisions. But the revolution, as always happens, loosed new forces—in this case laborers and machinists and railroad workers. These in turn represented a fresh menace to the middle groups. And an economic crisis sharpened the differences which had already become manifest.
The return of the Emperor to the capital was therefore hailed by the moderates. It also marked the incipience of a counteroffensive against the radicals. Pitiful subsidies of doles for the unemployed, resented by those who were better off, were now to be reduced if not altogether abolished. Skirmishes between workers and the national guard occurred; there were fatalities. The workers were defeated. Civil war was in the air. With victory over the Italian rebels assured, there were now two goals for the reaction—total defeat of the now established autonomous Hungarian régime directed by Lajos Kossuth; and simultaneously, assault on the Viennese insurgents, and their destruction. Latour, Minister of War, had been deep in the conspiracies directed toward both these end—he was the bête noire of liberals and radicals—and it was his action in October that precipitated the last, most dramatic phase of the revolution in Vienna, the October uprising.
Racial and national animosities marked the Viennese Assembly that had been convoked as a result of the elections. For the first time the many varied national groups were represented by their spokesmen, who set about to prepare a Constitution. Yet how sharp the divisions were, and how deeply ingrained, can be gauged from the attitude of the Austrian middle and upper classes as they hailed Radetzky’s victories over the Italians. Here nationalist fervor and economic self-interest overlapped, for “Lombardy and Venetia contributed a third of the revenue of the imperial treasury.”63 How much more does it redound to the credit of the radical left that it recognized a kinship with Poles, Hungarians, and Italians in their common aspirations! For it was as much in the cause of Hungarian independence as in their own interest that the students, workers, and other citizens of Vienna organized the October insurrection, thus identifying themselves with the international revolutionary movement of all Europe.
The drama erupted on October 6, 1848. The role of sacrificial goat fell to Minister of War Latour. This pitiful and malevolent official was torn and hanged on a lantern by an infuriated populace. It seemed to the Emperor and his entourage that the appropriate moment had arrived. The Emperor was securely lodged in Bohemian Olmütz, whence he could address his beloved Viennese while thrusting the mighty iron of his armies agains the city.
The drama of counterrevolution had been well prepared. The Croat Jelačič was now commander-in-chief of all troops in Hungary, Transylvania, and Croatia, and also Imperial Commissioner for Hungary.
On October 6, Minister of War Latour had ordered an Austrian battalion to move from Vienna and join Jelačič for an attack on the Hungarians. The Austrian battalion refused to move. An alerted student body, aided by a good portion of the aroused population, joined forces in obstructing the movement of the army. The Assembly was powerless; masses stormed the arsenal and seized arms. Latour had ventured into the streets and was murdered. The Emperor, still in the Hofburg but planning an escape to Olmütz, promised amnesty—in fact, anything. But Jelačič and the Croatians, as well as Windischgrätz and his army, were at the same time moving on Vienna. Soon some 60,000 men surrounded the city.
Vienna prepared for the siege. Influential citizens, Habsburg adherents, the well-todo, and others, had already fled the city.
It was no highly trained and disciplined army of citizens that was about to face the guns of the enemy. Only the Academic Legion was militarily prepared. There was no trained commander to lead them. Women joined in the defense. A writer, Wenzel Messenhauer, who had some knowledge of army strategy, was placed in command. He was fortunate in having at his side General Josef Bem, commander of the Mobile Guard. Bem was a soldier, and commanded respect. From Frankfurt came Robert Blum and Julius Fröbel. Surely, outside help would be forthcoming. Surely the Hungarians, still undefeated, would soon come to their aid?
Had not the Viennese themselves risen up to help them? And had they not sung on an earlier, happier day, offering to staunch the wounds of their Hungarian comrades?—
We of you our brothers make,
And curse who’e’er this bond will break!
Hail to you! We greet each other;
Austria’ll never desert her brother…64
Recruits dribbled in—from Brünn, from Graz, from Styria…
But what could these avail? The undisciplined Viennese fought as best they could amid rumors and counter-rumors, the most bedeviling being those that spoke of an imminent incursion by Hungarians, who under General Perczel were stationed on the outskirts of the city behind Jelačič, whom they had successfully pursued.
History and historians have since that time debated: guilt or strategy? Had the Hungarians betrayed, or had they merely adhered to a strict legalism? When the Hungarians finally moved, it was too late.
October 31: Vienna’s day of doom. The city capitulated, and Jelačič and his victorious armies moved in on November 3. “Ladies…were waving their handkerchiefs from every window, and saluting Jelačič, who bowed courteously on every side…Vivat, vivat, vivat!” Spectators thundered their welcome.65
Historians have variously evaluated the actions of the Viennese radicals in defending the city. One very recent scholar writes as follows:
Nearly all the important people—the influential ones—sided with the Habsburgs. The democrats were the “little people”: the students, the lower-middle-class artisans and shopkeepers, and the great proletarian masses. The revolutionary leaders were mostly young people or penniless intellectuals. On the whole, they were people who had nothing to lose but their unhappy lives.66
Another historian, writing in 1851, evaluated the Viennese uprising and the nature and objectives of its participants in somewhat different terms:
We have seen that the Viennese, with all the generosity of a newly-freed people, had risen for a cause which, though ultimately their own, was, in the first instance and above all, that of the Hungarians. Rather than suffer the Austrian troops to march upon Hungary, they would draw their first and most terrible onslaught upon themselves…And if Hungary should even have forgotten that Vienna had fought the first battle of Hungary, she owed it to her own safety not to forget that Vienna was the only outpost of Hungarian independence, and that after the fall of Vienna nothing could meet the advance of the imperial troops against herself…as a German, we may further be allowed to say, that not for all the showy victories and glorious battles of the Hungarian campaign would we exchange that spontaneous, single-handed rising, and heroic resistance of the people of Vienna, our countrymen, which gave Hungary the time to organize the army that could do such great things.67
The chronicle of the aftermath lists among those executed by the victorious Habsburg troops the names of the journalists Julius Becker and Hermann Jellinek, the commander-in-chief Messenhauer, and the deputy to the Frankfurt Parliament Robert Blum. It is not recorded that these had nothing to lose “but their unhappy lives.” On the contrary, the measure of their life’s quality can be gauged by the way they met their death.
Here are two accounts of eyewitnesses. One concerns the last hours of Becker and Jellinek. In this instance it is an army Major involved in the executions who narrated his experience:
Throughout the whole day the Major had been too agitated to eat, because he had been obliged, early that morning, to superintend the carrying out of two executions, which had made a profound impression upon him. The matter concerned two journalists, who were to be made the targets of the Royal and Imperial riflemen, on the charge of having, through the newspaper The Radical, incited the people to revolt against His Majesty the Kaiser, and to offer armed resistance to his Highness, Field-marshal Prince Windischgrätz. One of these accused was Dr. Julius Becker, 45 years old, of the Protestant faith, proprietor and responsible editor of the above paper. The other was his collaborator, Dr. Hermann Jellinek, 25 years old, of the Jewish religion. Dr. Becker….walked to his death with a firm step and calm glance, without wasting one word….Dr. Jellinek…tried with the help of lively gestures to make clear to the Major that some error underlay the entire affair…As soon as he had convinced himself that all further talk was useless, he pulled himself together and cried, stepping back resolutely, “Now, shoot me dead.!”—assuming at the same time a bearing which showed that moral strength did not fail him…68
The other is Robert Blum’s last letter, written to his wife:
My treasured, good dear Wife, Farewell! farewell for the time, some call for ever, but that will not be so. Bring up our—now only your children to be noble, then they will never bring shame upon their father. Sell our little property with the help of our friends. God and good men will help you. All that I feel is melting into tears, hence once again, Farewell, dear Wife! Consider our child to be a precious bequest to foster and cherish, and thus you will honor your faithful husband. Farewell, farewell! A thousand, thousand last kisses from your Robert. Vienna, November 9, 1848, morning, five o’clock, at six o’clock I shall no longer be. I had forgotten the rings. I press the last kiss for you upon the marriage ring. My seal ring is for Hans, my watch for Richard, the diamond stud for Ida, the chain for Alfred, as keepsakes. Distribute all the other keepsakes according to your judgment. They are coming! Farewell! Farewell!69
He was shot on November 9, 1848.
He forbade the binding of his eyes, but allowed it when they pointed out that the riflemen would shoot more accurately. With the words, “I die for German freedom, for which I have fought. May the Fatherland keep me in remembrance!”—he offered his breast to the bullets, which laid him low.70
Wenn wir doch knien könnten, wir lägen auf den Knien;
Wenn wir doch beten könnten, wir beteten für Wien!
If only we knew how to kneel, on our knees we would have lain;
If only we knew how to pray, for Vienna we would have prayed!…71
Thus the German poet, Ferdinand Freiligrath, in November 1848, in a desperate and vain plea to his fellow-Germans to come to the aid of the beleaguered revolutionaries of Vienna. But alas! neither knee-bending nor prayers alone could have availed. The Hungarians had failed them; their fellow-Germans had failed them; the peasantry they had helped liberate from feudal obligations and bonds had failed them. The execution of Robert Blum, deputy of the Frankfurt Parliament, was a deliberate and shocking insult to that body, and to all liberal Germany.
The collapse of the October uprising in Vienna, together with that of the preceding June in Paris, marks the actual, though not the immediate, finis of these revolutions. The tidal wave is now reversed; the reaction is not only heartened, but feels empowered to proceed with ever bolder steps to the ultimate accounting.
Prussia picked up the cue at once, and the King began taking the offensive against a recalcitrant and frequently insistent Prussian parliament that defied royal prerogatives and agitated for its own constitution as against that “granted” by the ruler. In October a huge demonstration even brought forward demands for Prussian intervention in favor of the Viennese! There was great noise, but little action. The Viennese disaster dismayed the Berlin population, and General Wrangel occupied the city without resistance. Parliament was dissolved. The following year a new electoral law was passed which effectively barred workers from any voice or participation in the government. Once more the propertied classes, the large landowners, and the upper middle classes had proved victorious. Royal authority was fully restored in the new constitution of 1850. The army had proved a decisive factor in the defeat of the revolution.72
For the Austrian government the subjugation of Hungary proved a far more difficult and bloody undertaking. Here it met with the brilliant, and for a time, incredible resistance of the Hungarian armies, skilfully led and abetted by the country’s unity. High had been the hopes raised in Hungarian hearts by the March revolution. On March 15, 1848, the Parliament at Pressburg voted for the abolition of serfdom. Actually it hoped to eliminate Viennese control, establish an independent state formally united under the person of the Austrian Emperor, who would be King of Hungary, and eventually incorporate Croatia and other Slavonic provinces. Such a Hungarian state would have an independent government, with a ministry responsible to its Parliament. The so-called “March Laws” called for elections to the Lower House by males over twenty, but circumscribed the franchise with considerable property qualifications. For the time being the upper classes acceded to these radical reforms, and, like their coevals in other threatened lands, bided their time. There was a more radical sector in Hungary that even demanded a republic. Sándor Petöfi, the poet, was one of the leaders of this group. Reluctantly, Ferdinand approved of the measures proposed by the Hungarian government. Lajos Kossuth’s influence and prestige in the country were too powerful at the moment for resistance by disapproving countrymen. As events became more and more favorable to Austria, the Habsburg camarilla, heartened by the repression of Prague and the victories of Radetzky in Italy, proceeded to annul Ferdinand’s reluctant promises. The Emperor repudiated the March Laws, dissolved the Hungarian Parliament, and declared all its decisions invalid. Capitalizing on the strong anti-Hungarian sentiment among the Croats and other nonMagyars, he now made use of Jelačič to undo Hungary.
The final reckoning came with the Vienna débacle, the abdication of Ferdinand, and the accession of Franz Josef. The new Emperor declared Kossuth and his supporters to be traitors. He also counted on the disaffected Magyar magnates, Kossuth’s bitter opponents, to rally to the Habsburg cause. What no one, however, had counted on was the miracle of Hungary’s resistance, her victories under the leadership of that military genius Artur Görgei, who even threatened a march on Vienna. The victories of March 1849 by soldiers under the indestructible General Bem finally forced Austrian minister Schwarzenberg to turn to Russia for help. Ultimately 360,000 Russians were sent in response. Kossuth appealed in vain to “friendly” nations for help. In addition, he found himself opposed by Görgei, who favored accommodation with the Habsburgs.
On August 13, 1849, Görgei surrendered with his army to the Russians at Világos. A few weeks later, the last of the Hungarian bastions fell, and the war was over. But not the recriminations. Julius von Haynau, Austrian general, who earned the sobriquet of “Hyena of Brescia” for his atrocities in Italy, proved true to his nickname. Kossuth and General Bem managed to escape to Turkey. Sándor Petöfi, Hungary’s uncrowned poet-laureate, a soldier in Bem’s army, fell on the field of battle. He was twenty-six years old.73
* * *
The critical months of July, August, and September 1849 ring down the curtain on the European Revolutions of 1848 and 1849. In July, the newly established republic of Rome capitulated to the French army. In August, Venice surrendered to the Austrians. August and September mark the expiration of Hungarian resistance to the Russians and Austrians. Some seventeen months before, in April 1848, the British government had dealt Chartism in England a crushing defeat, all without barricade or bloodshed.
The drama of Rome’s revolution and Rome’s fall, its republican life extinguished after only five months’ duration, reveals glaringly how far the tide of reaction had swung. For it was neither a Russian army nor an Austrian force that brought about the surrender, but French soldiery led by a French general. It was the France of General Cavaignac, the France of its new president, Louis-Napoleon, that now joined other European powers in order to shatter the last remains of revolution and republicanism. It was General Oudinot of the Republic of France who administered the death-stroke to the Republic of Rome!
Yet there had been times when it seemed that the Italians would at last throw off the yoke of Austria, bring about the unification of the country, and realize the apostolic and apocalyptic vision of Giuseppe Mazzini and his “Young Italy” followers. The dream was to create the “Third Rome”—to follow that of the first Rome and that of the Popes—a Rome that would lead the world toward a confederation of nations— even republics! Others hoped for a Rome less radical, a unified Italy that would do away with a medieval past and emerge as a modern, advanced industrial and commercial land. The clogs of autocracy, the burden of sustaining a foreign rule, of contributing manpower and wealth to its support—and not least, the pressures from within the country itself, of a critically poor population also suffering from the international crisis, and the potential danger it posed—all these actuated both the more liberal aristocracy, the landlords, and whatever there was of a bourgeoisie, to agitate for reforms that could only be achieved through a concomitant liberation of the land. The uneasy torpor that had bound the nation’s energies was suddenly broken by the news from France, and the March uprising in Vienna made it clear that powerful Austria was also vulnerable. Now seemed to be the moment to realize the dream of an Italian risorgimento. But who was to lead? The spiritual leaders were there to press the Italian destiny—Giuseppe Mazzini and the Abbé Gioberti. As for national leadership, the eyes turned upon King Charles Albert of Sardinia, who was coveting the Austrian provinces of Lombardy and Venetia to unite them with his own Piedmont, and who, though he had twice betrayed the cause of liberalism, might perhaps now be impelled by the great upsurge to lead the Italian armies against Austria. Philosophers like Gioberti looked to Pope Pius IX, whose “liberal” aura had not yet been dimmed.
When in the month of March, 1848 Milan rose up, built barricades, and after its “five glorious days” succeeded in driving out the army of the formidable Radetzky, forcing him to retreat, the auguries of success seemed inerrable. Once again, it was the workers, the artisans, who did the fighting, leaving the direction of affairs to the upper and middle-class provisional government. Indecisive King Charles Albert moved and, had he not been Charles Albert, might have successfully overcome the retreating armies of Radetzky and actually destroyed them in the regions to which they had retreated. The chances of doing so were excellent, for a revolution had broken out in adjoining Venetia. Whatever Charles Albert’s reasons or fears, it is likely that he dreaded the radical eventualities of a revolution in Milan, as did no doubt a great many of his upper and middle-class supporters. His halfheartedness, his failure to follow up his early successes and those of the Milan revolutionaries, gave the eighty-one year old Radetzky—probably the most gifted soldier of his day—time to reinforce his troops, recoup his losses, and counterattack at the appropriate moment. In spite of, or in the face of, an earlier opposition on the part of his Austrian superiors, he did that very thing. In the end, his successful counteroffensives spelled the doom of Charles Albert’s ambitions and all too belated efforts, costing him his crown. Unfortunately, it also blasted Italy’s hopes of liberation for years to come.
Those who had believed in Pope Pius IX as the potential leader of a united and free Italy under a liberalized régime, were doomed to bitter disenchantment. In 1846, on his accession, he had been hailed as the coming savior of his country; even in France he was looked upon by many as the lodestar of freedom. The French poet Pierre Dupont had then addressed a plea to him, to save the world from despair,
Rends-lui, rends-lui la liberté,
Veux-tu commencer la croisade?
Give it, give it liberty!
Do you wish to begin the crusade?74
Of course, Italy itself reacted to the accession of the Pope with extravagant expectations. Giuseppe Verdi altered the chorus of his opera Ernani, substituting for “A Carlo Quinto sia gloria e onor,” “A Pio Nono…”
Giuseppe Mazzini’s messianic words reechoed throughout the land:
The destiny of Italy is that of the world…Rome, by design of Providence…is the eternal city, to which is entrusted the mission of disseminating the Word that will unite the world…Nationalism is the share God grants people in the work of mankind. It is that people’s mission, the task it must perform on earth, so that God’s purpose may be fulfilled, the achievement which gives it the freedom of the City of Mankind, the baptism which endows it with its character and assigns it a place among the peoples, its brothers…75
The patriot-poet Goffredo Mameli, Mazzini’s devoted follower, soon to die in the defense of Rome, electrified the country with his battle hymn, “Alla Vittoria.”
Fratelli d’Italia,
L’Italia s’ è desta…
“Italian brothers, Italy is awake. Hitherto despised and derided, because we were not a people, because we were divided,”
Uniamoci, amiamoci:
L’unione e l’amore
Rivelano ai popoli
Le vie del Signore…
“Let us unite, and love; for union and love reveal God’s ways to the people. Let us swear to liberate our native soil; united by God, who can conquer us?”76 Mazzini’s words were turned into this battle cry. The incredible, legendary warrior Giuseppe Garibaldi, returned from his works of liberation in South America ready for similar tasks in his native Italy, confessed that he was swept away by the sound of Mameli’s lines. Verdi set them to music.
As the fires of 1848 raged throughout the Italian states, even reluctant princelings and other rulers were compelled to join in sending troops for the assault on the Austrians. In due time they were to repent and withdraw them. But now, with all cities astir, Rome and the Papal States too became agitated. Pope Pius IX, who had already been constrained to grant something of a constitution to his people, was pressured to join the “crusade” against Austria and yield to demands for the greater liberalization of his domain. He began to have second thoughts. A month after having granted a constitution, he pronounced an allocution on April 19, 1848:
Although some persons desire that we, together with other peoples and princes of Italy, make war against the Austrians, we deem it proper to disclose clearly in this solemn meeting of ours, that it is wholly foreign to our intentions, since we, however unworthy, exercise on earth the functions of Him who is the author of peace and lover of charity, and according to the office of our supreme Apostolate we follow and embrace all races, peoples, and nations with equal and paternal love.77
He also declined to have any part in a proposal to make Italy a united republic under his presidency (this was Gioberti’s program) and urged all Italians to reject such plans and remain loyal to their princes.
In the upheaval that followed, Pellegrino Rossi, one of the Pope’s cabinet ministers, was assassinated on November 15, 1848. A violent uprising on the same day, accompanied by emphatic demands for a democratic cabinet and a declaration of war, forced the Pope to yield—outwardly at least. For on November 24, he secretly fled from Rome and took refuge in Gaeta, in the Kingdom of Naples. From his retreat he sent forth appeals to the great powers asking for intervention. In Rome, the elections for a constituent assembly returned a democratic majority; the latter declared the power of the Pope at an end, and on February 9, 1849 proclaimed the Roman Republic. Additionally, it decreed the nationalization of church properties, abolished clerical control of the university, suppressed the Inquisition, abolished censorship, and enacted other measures for the benefit of the poor.
It was not long thereafter that Louis-Napoleon sent his army to bring Rome to her senses and restore the Pope. With Mazzini now in Rome to inspire her citizens, and with Garibaldi ready to engage in daring sorties and forays with his legionnaires, the poorly equipped army under General Pietro Roselli surprised the first contingents of General Oudinot’s troops, and even inflicted serious damage upon them. The dedication and courage of the besieged, men and women, proved as heroic as in the end it proved futile. For soon the reinforced French army numbered 30,000 men, and when the final assault began on June 3, it became evident that the city could not long withstand the bombardment. Garibaldi managed to extract his followers, and in typical fashion proceeded to lead them to the succor of the besieged Venetians. Mazzini eventually found his way to London. On July 3, the French occupied Rome. The Pope waited until April 12 of the next year before reassuming his sovereignty. The Restoration was complete.
It remained now to subjugate the stubborn republicans of Venice….
Venice too rejoiced at the news of the Vienna uprising of March. Like Milan, she felt that Austrian domination of Italy was, if not at an end, at least badly shaken. Venetians shared in the triumphs of Milan’s “five days,” as they expelled their Austrian governor and stormed the arsenal. Unfortunately they forgot to secure the naval fleet. They carried the liberated Daniele Manin, formerly prisoner of the Austrians, on their shoulders, and placed this tried republican in leadership. Eagerly they waited for the approach of Charles Albert’s army as it swept back Radetzky’s forces; like Lombardy, they voted for union with Piedmont under that king, against the hopes and urgings of Manin. But Charles Albert did not come; he retreated, betraying Venice’s fondest hopes. Once more they turned to Manin…
Then the Austrians blockaded the city, severed it from the mainland, and bided their time through the winter of 1848 and 1849. In March 1849, Radetzky effectively defeated Charles Albert at Novara and forced his abdication in favor of his son Victor Emmanuel II. In the same month the Venetians elected Manin President of their Republic. Then began the bombardment of the city by the Austrians. Led by General Pepe, who had defected from King Ferdinand of Naples, the besieged city did what it could against cannon, famine, and the cholera. With miraculous heroism it held out until August 22. Within a brief period of not quite two months, Venice followed the fate of Rome, of Hungary. The Venetian Republic was over. Manin was allowed to leave.
Under her new Emperor, young Franz Josef, Austria settled back to reestablish the old order. A few placebos, such as mild constitutional sops, were distributed to the awakened national minorities.
In other parts of Europe a few occasional post-mortem flareups betrayed the last mortal agonies of the Revolution. Then the fires died down altogether….