Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Vol V. Hal Draper

Engels had written an article only a month before the outbreak of the revolution in Germany on “Three New Constitutions”¹⁹ in which he ridiculed the claims of the German inhabitants of two Duchies, compared the Danish Constitution favorably to that of Prussia’s, and pointed to the extremely favorable status the German minority in the Danish kingdom enjoyed. He claimed that they had as many delegates in the Danish legislature as the Danes by law even though they were far less numerous.

      In short the Danes make every possible concession to the Germans, and the Germans persist in their absurd national obstinacy. The Germans have never been national-minded where the interests of nationality and the interests of progress have coincided; they were always so where nationality has turned against progress.

      The “interests of progress” in this case were represented by the relatively liberal Danish constitution. But the bourgeois liberals whose political pressure had won constitutional reform were also champions of Danish nationalism and cultural independence from Germany. It was a typical combination in 1848. Prussia as the stronghold of constitutional conservatism was only too willing to use the cause of the oppressed, and politically backward, German population of the territory as a weapon against the Danish liberals. This political lineup explains Engels’ hostility to the agitation of the Germans of Schleswig-Holstein in 1847. It was consistent with his, and Marx’s, general hostility to national movements that “turned against progress.”

      What changed? Well, for one thing, there was a revolution in Germany. And that brought to the fore an aspect of international diplomacy that Engels had previously ignored. This was not simply a contest between tiny Denmark and the might of Prussia. Behind Denmark stood England and Russia. For them, and especially for Russia, a successful revolution against their client in the heated atmosphere of June 1848 could be a disaster. What had been a minor squabble between the powers earlier in the year was now a serious matter. Worse, Russia and England’s formerly trustworthy ally, the King of Prussia, was apparently being taken captive by the revolution. As Count Nesselrode, the Russian Foreign Minister complained in his private correspondence:

      . . . my patience is at an end. . . . Yesterday, Saturday, a courier brought me the news of Wrangel’s refusal to sign the armistice straight from Copenhagen. . . . Our forbearance has really been abused. We have often repeated to Prussia that she is allowing things to reach a point where we will not be able to maintain a defensive posture towards her as we would wish because of her blind submission to the whims of the German demagogues.²⁰

      Marx and Engels’ appreciation of the situation was similar to that of von Nesselrode. What he saw as a danger they, of course, saw as an opportunity.

      It should also be understood, as part of the background, that Prussia in 1848 was not the military power that the German Empire was to become after 1870. The course of the war, in which the Prussians were humiliated, makes that clear.

      In the first NRZ article on the crisis—“Defeat of the German Troops at Sundewitt”²¹—Engels ridiculed the Prussian army. The article is full of contempt for the Germans and quite complimentary to the Danes. It also makes explicit what really lay behind the NRZ prowar stand in the affair of meerumschlungen Schleswig-Holstein.

      If this [the lackadaisical conduct of the war by the Prussians] is not a case of open treason, then it is a manifestation of such immense incompetence that in any case the management of the whole affair must be placed in other hands. Will the National Assembly in Frankfurt at last feel compelled to do what it should have long since, that is take over foreign policy itself?

      Engels expressed some scepticism in this article concerning the Assembly but at this early period both Marx and Engels still expected that the German bourgeoisie would be forced in their own interest to act out the role of their Girondin predecessors of fifty years before. They still believed that the bourgeois leadership of the Assembly would, in its own self-interest, embroil the country in a war with the monarchies that only a revolutionary government could win.

      The NRZ addressed its demands and its criticism to the Frankfurt Assembly, not to the German governments, because the Assembly was the first, hesitant, step to a united, republican Germany. Marx and Engels did not invent the issue of war with the Alliance any more than they invented the other issues which agitated the country. What distinguished the NRZ was that the “Marx party” whipped up public opinion where the Frankfurt Assembly, even its left wing, tried to calm the people down.

      In the end, when Prussia signed a humiliating peace rather than be forced into a war with England and Russia, the Assembly simply capitulated. It was one of the events that helped persuade Marx and Engels that the German bourgeoisie was not capable of imitating its French predecessors.

      6. Hungarians and Poles

      The last incident that raised the specter of 1793 was the Russian invasion of Hungary in April 1849. Up till this point the Hungarian insurrection had appeared on the verge of victory. And not only victory in Hungary. After being driven out of its main strongholds by numerically superior forces the Hungarian revolutionary forces aided by international allies, especially Poles, had waged a successful guerilla war that demoralized the armies of the Empire. At one point they appeared to be in a position to take Vienna. Even after the defeat of the revolution elsewhere it took a Russian invasion in April of 1849 to finally break the Hungarian resistance. We know that this was the last act of the 1848 revolution. From the vantage point of Engels and the NRZ it looked like the opening of a new round. In the second to last issue of the paper, just before it was shut down, Engels outlined what was at stake:

      . . . the Magyar war very soon lost the national character it had in the beginning, and assumed a clearly European character, precisely as a result of what would seem to be a purely national act, as a result of the declaration of independence. Only when Hungary proclaimed her separation from Austria, and thereby the dissolution of the Austrian monarchy, did the alliance with the Poles for the liberation of both countries, and the alliance with the Germans for the revolutionisation of Eastern Germany acquire a definite character and a solid basis. If Hungary were independent, Poland restored, German Austria turned into the revolutionary focus of Germany, with Lombardy and Italy winning independence—these plans, if carried out, would destroy the entire East-European system of states: Austria would disappear, Prussia would disintegrate and Russia would be forced back to the borders of Asia.²²

      Engels predicted that the German insurrectionary forces in the Baden-Palatinate, which he was shortly to join, and the troops of a renewed French revolutionary movement would meet with the Polish and Hungarian armies before the walls of Berlin. It was not to be. The German and French revolutionary movements were spent and the Hungarians and their Polish allies were crushed by Austrian and Russian troops.

      But Hungarians and Poles were united by something else than their mutual antagonism to the international relations of post-1815 Europe. For some time before the outbreak of revolution Marx and Engels had come to the conclusion that in Poland the only successful national uprising had to be based on a democratic social revolution and that, in a country like Poland, the only possible democracy was an agrarian democracy. In Poland, then, a successful uprising could only be an uprising which was also a civil war.

      Already the first partition led quite naturally to an alliance of the other classes, i.e. the nobles, the townspeople and to some extent the peasants, both against the oppressors of Poland and against the big Polish aristocracy. The Constitution of 1791 shows that already then the Poles clearly understood that their independence in foreign affairs was inseparable from the overthrow of the aristocracy and from agrarian reform within the country.²³

      When the Hungarian revolution, somewhat unexpectedly, broke out in late 1848, the NRZ found its hypothesis derived from the Polish case confirmed in this corner of Eastern Europe. Polish and Hungarian revolutionary democrats, leaders of independence movements on whose success or failure the success or failure of the revolution itself depended, also faced an enemy at home.

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