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The End of the Communist League CHAPTER XV THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE THE more desperate the situation in Germany became the c greater hopes did the revolutionaries entertain of France. ln France the battle will start again in the spring,' Marx wrote at the beginning of 1849. The 'revolutionary volcano' in France seemed on the eve of an eruption, and it seemed to him that its flames must inevitably overflow into Germany, Austria and Hungary. The German counter-revolution could only be, must only be an incident in the European revolution. What did Baden and the Palatinate matter? If Paris rose the whole of Europe would be in flames. Marx went to Paris. But Paris viewed from within was different from Paris viewed from without. Cholera was rampant in the city. 'The air was sultry,' wrote Alexander Herzen, the Russian revolutionary, who was in Paris at ( the time. A sunless heat oppressed mankind. Victims of the contagion fell one after another. The terrified population, and the procession of hearses dashing to the cemeteries as if they were racing, seemed in keeping with events' i.e. the political events ofJune, 1 849. The irony of history had once more placed revolutionary warfare upon the order of the day, but it was very different from what it had been a year before. At the end of May an expeditionary force of the French Republican Army, sent to Italy for the official purpose of defending Italy's freedom and independence, had stormed Rome, the last stronghold of Italian liberty, and delivered its Republican defenders into the hands of the Papal Inquisition. The French Constitution still contained the fine phrase: 'La Rtyublique frangaise rHemploie jamais ses forces contre la liberte 1 (Faucun peuple.' On June n, only a few days after Marx's arrival in Paris, Ledru-Rollin, leader of the Montagnards, proposed in the Chamber that the President, Louis Bonaparte, and the cabinet be arraigned for violation of the constitution. To quote 1 The Republic never employs its forces against the liberty of any people. 199 2OO KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER .Marx's words in his Class Struggles in France, his words were 'plain, blunt, unpretentious, matter-of-fact, pithy and power- ful.' The Chamber postponed the debate on this proposal, but its fate was not destined to be settled in the Chamber. In the evening a meeting took place between the leaders of the Montagnards and the delegates of the workers' secret societies. Marx's account of the meeting indicates that he either was present himself or was given detailed information by one of the principals at the meeting. He very successfully fulfilled the task entrusted to him by the German Democrats, namely that of making contact with the French revolutionaries. There is some evidence that would seem to indicate that he actually became a member of one of the secret Communist organisations in Paris. As he wrote to Engels, he came into contact with the whole of the revolutionary party and had good grounds for hoping that within a few days he would have every revolutionary journal in Paris at his disposal. But a week later no revolutionary journals were left. The Montagnards were not one whit behind the German Parliamentarians of the 'Left' in indecision. They rejected the proposal of the workers' delegates that they should strike that very night. True, the chances of a successful rising were no longer very great, but the refusal to act cost the Monta- gnards their last chance. For when they summoned a demon- stration to the streets on June 1 3 the Government had long completed its preparations. It was a simple matter for their dragoons and riflemen to drive the unarmed masses from the streets. Some of the Montagnard deputies were arrested, others escaped. From that day on the National Assembly was 'nothing but a committee of public safety of the Party of Order.' The last resistance of the revolutionaries in Central Europe collapsed at the same time. In the Danube basin the army of independent Hungary capitulated to the Russian troops, which were far superior in numbers and equipment. Those of its leaders who fell into the hands of the counter-revolution were hanged. Those who managed to escape to Turkey lived in fear of being handed over to the Austrian hangmen by the Sublime Porte. In dismembered Germany the revolution died piecemeal. Even to the very last everything was done to make THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 2OI the victory of the counter-revolution as easy as possible. The risings in the spring of 1849 broke out one after another, each outbreak coinciding with the suppression of its prede- cessor. There was brave fighting in Dresden and on the Rhine, and many hundreds, most of them workers, left their lives on the barricades. The words 'artisan/ 'miner/ 'day- labourer/ etc., constantly recur in the lists of dead. Many of them were members of the Communist League. Only the extreme Left wing of the workers' movement, the group that followed Gottschalk and Weitling, opposed the rising. The organ of Gottschalk's followers warned the workers against participation in a movement which was not the immediate concern of the proletariat but of the bourgeoisie. This was but a consequence of an attitude which started out from extreme revolutionism and necessarily ended in complete passivity. Whatever their position may have been in 1848 and 1849, ^ie overwhelming majority of the members of the League flung themselves headlong into the struggle and fought to the bitter end. Joseph Moll, who was unable to return to London after his German journey, helped in the preparations for the rising in Baden. With characteristic courage he even managed to enlist in the insurrectionary army under the fire of the Prussian guns. Then he went to Baden, where he fought bravely and fell in the fighting on the Murg, shot in the head by a Prussian bullet. Engels took part in the campaign, first as a simple infantry- man, later as an adjutant to Willich, who was in command of a corps of volunteers. His was one of the best units of the revolutionary army and consisted almost entirely of workers. The sober, clear-thinking, sceptically inclined Engels entered the struggle without any great expectations, for the weak sides and it had practically nothing but weak sides of the whole enterprise did not escape his keen intelligence; but he could not deny himself the pleasure of heartily and unceremoniously laughing at the mixture of excitement and alarm manifested by the petty-bourgeois revolutionary statesmen. During the course of the expedition he drew nearer to Willich, the 'one 5 as practical officer who took part in it, and he praised him bold in action, cool-headed, clever and quick in decision. Engels took pat in four engagements, two of which were fairly 2O2 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER important. 'I have discovered,' he wrote to Frau Marx soon afterwards, 'that the much-lauded quality of impetuous courage is one of the most ordinary properties that man can have.' He fought to the very end and marched into Swiss territory with his corps, which was one of the very last units of the revolutionary army to survive. That was the end of the revolution of 1848, the beginning of which had been so full of promise; moreover, it was the end of the period of European history which culminated in it. But those who had been in the thick of the fray did not believe it, could not and would not believe it. The more fervently they identified themselves with the world that had departed, that world in comparison with which the new and greater world which it had engendered dwindled practically into non- existence in their eyes, the greater was their difficulty in acknow- ledging the existence of the new. The whole thing could not be over. To-morrow or the day after it would all break out again and everything would be altered. He who in such a situation thought anything else would have been no revolutionary. But he who remained subject to this mood too long, unable to shake it off and reconcile himself sternly to the fact that a new historical epoch had begun, was no true revolutionary either. Marx had battled so ardently that for a time he too was subject to these inevitable illusions. He was dominated by them for a whole year. A letter he wrote to Weydemeyer on August i, 1849, gives some clue to the extent to which his analytical intelligence, generally so accurate, could err. Dis- agreeable as the situation was at the moment, he belonged nevertheless to those who were satisfaits. 'Les choses marchent iris bien, and the Waterloo of official Democracy is to be re- garded as a victory. The governments by the grace of God have taken over the task of revenging us on the bourgeoisie and are chastising them for us.' Marx searched for the weakest point in the enemy's front. England attracted his particular attention, and he began to hope that the next blow might come from there, and that England would be the scene of the 'beginning of the next dance.' England seemed to him to be on the eve of a tre- mendous economic crisis, and not long afterwards he confi- dently predicted its outbreak for August, 1850* THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 2O3 In spite of the hopes he had of England in the immediate future he had no intention of going there. At the beginning of July, 1849, his wife and children came to Paris.
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