Marx and Engels in Neue Rheinische Zeitung January 1849

The Revolutionary Movement

By Karl Marx

Written: 31 December 1848;

First Published: Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 184, 1 January 1849;

Source: Marx and Engels: Articles from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Moscow 1972, pp.
205–207;

Transcribed: Einde O'Callaghan for the Marxists Internet Archive (May 2014).

Cologne, December 31. Never was a revolutionary movement opened with such an edifying
overture as the revolutionary movement of 1848. The Pope gave it the blessing of the Church,
and Lamartine’s aeolian harp vibrated with tender philanthropical tunes on the words of
fraternité, the brotherhood of members of society and nations.

Welcome all ye myriad creatures!

Brethren, take the kiss of love!

[1]

Driven out of Rome, the Pope at present is staying at Gaeta under the protection of the

tigerish idiot Ferdinand; Italy’s “iniciatore”

[2]

conspires against Italy with Austria, Italy’s

traditional mortal enemy, whom in happier days he threatened to excommunicate. The recent
French presidential elections have given statistical proof of the unpopularity of Lamartine, the
traitor. There has been no event more philanthropic, humane, and weak than the February and
March revolutions, nothing more brutal than the inevitable consequences of this humanity of
weakness. The proofs are Italy, Poland, Germany, and above all, those who were defeated in
June.

But the defeat of the French workers in June was the defeat of the June victors themselves.

Ledru- Rollin and the other men of the Mountain

[3]

were ousted by the party of the National,

the party of the bourgeois republicans; the party of the National was ousted by Thiers-Barrot,
the dynastic opposition; these in turn would have had to make way for the legitimists if the
cycle of the three restorations had not come to an end, and if Louis Napoleon was something
more than an empty ballot-box by means of which the French peasants announced their entry
into the revolutionary social movement, and the French workers their condemnation of all
leaders of the preceding periods – Thiers-Barrot, Lamartine and Cavaignac-Marrast. But let us

note the fact that the inevitable consequence of the defeat of the revolutionary French working
class was the defeat of the republican French bourgeoisie, to which it had just succumbed.

The defeat of the working class in France and the victory of the French bourgeoisie at the

same time signified the renewed suppression of the nationalities, who had responded to the
crowing of the Gallic cock with heroic attempts to liberate themselves. Prussian, Austrian and
English Sbirri once more plundered, ravished and murdered in Poland, Italy and Ireland. The
defeat of the working class in France and the victory of the French bourgeoisie was at the same
time the defeat of the middle classes in all European countries where the middle classes, united
for the moment with the people, responded to the crowing of the Gallic cock with sanguinary
insurrections against feudalism. Naples, Vienna, Berlin. The defeat of the working class in
France and the victory of the French bourgeoisie was at the same time a victory of East over
West, the defeat of civilization by barbarism. The suppression of the Romanians by the

Russians and their tools, the Turks, began in Wallachia; Croats, pandours, Czechs, serezhans

[4]

and similar rabble throttled German liberty in Vienna, and the Tsar is now omnipresent in
Europe. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie in France, the triumph of the French working class,
and the liberation of the working class in general is therefore the rallying-cry of European
liberation.

But England, the country that turns whole nations into her proletarians, that spans the whole

world with her enormous arms, that has already once defrayed the cost of a European
Restoration, the country in which class contradictions have reached their most acute and
shameless form – England seems to be the rock which breaks the revolutionary waves, the
country where the new society is stifled before it is born. England dominates the world market.
Any upheaval in economic relations in any country of the European continent, in the whole
European continent without England, is a storm in a teacup. Industrial and commercial relations
within each nation are governed by its intercourse with other nations, and depend on its
relations with the world market. But the world market is dominated by England and England is
dominated by the bourgeoisie.

Thus, the liberation of Europe, whether brought about by the struggle of the oppressed

nationalities for their independence or by overthrowing feudal absolutism, depends on the
successful uprising of the French working class. Every social upheaval in France, however, is
bound to be thwarted by the English bourgeoisie, by Great Britain’s industrial and commercial
domination of the world. Every partial social reform in France or on the European continent as
a whole, if designed to be lasting, is merely a pious wish. Only a world war can break old
England, as only this can provide the Chartists, the party of the organized English workers, with
the conditions for a successful rising against their powerful oppressors. Only when the Chartists
head the English government will the social revolution pass from the sphere of utopia to that of
reality. But any European war in which England is involved is a world war, waged in Canada
and Italy, in the East Indies and Prussia, in Africa and on the Danube. A European war will be
the first result of a successful workers’ revolution in France. England will head the counter-
revolutionary armies, just as she did during the Napoleonic period, but the war itself will place

her at the head of the revolutionary movement and she will repay the debt she owes to the
revolution of the eighteenth century.

The table of contents for 1849 reads: Revolutionary rising of the French working class,

world war.

Notes

1. From Schiller’s An die Freude. The English translation is taken from Poems by
Schiller, “Hymn to Joy,” by Bowring, Chicago.

2. After his election in 1846, Pope Pius IX initiated a number of liberal reforms to prevent
the spread of the popular movement.

3. La Montagne (The Mountain) – in 1848-51 the name was given to a group of petty-
bourgeois democrats and republicans headed by Ledru-Rollin. Their newspaper was La
Réforme.

4. Mounted troops in the Austrian army who were notorious for their cruelty. – Ed.

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