Chapter III: The Revolution of 1848

The ink had hardly dried on the Communist Manifesto when the February Revolution broke out. The crowing of the Gallic cock soon awoke an echo in the various German States, whilst in Brussels the democrats were attacked and ill-treated by the mob. One of the victims of this attack was Karl Marx, who was, moreover, banished shortly afterwards by the Belgian Government. This action, however, did not cause him any embarrassment, as he was ready in any case to proceed to Paris, whither the Provisional Government of the French Republic had already invited him in the following terms:

"Paris, March 1, 1848.

"BRAVE AND FAITHFUL MARX,

"The soil of the French Republic is a place of refuge for all
friends of freedom. Tyranny has banished you; France, the free,
opens to you her gates--to you and to all who fight for the holy
cause, the fraternal cause of every people. In this sense shall
every officer of the French Government understand his duty.
_Salut et Fraternite._

FERDINAND FLOCON,
Member of the Provisional Government."

The stay in Paris was, however, of short duration. Marx and Engels gathered together the members of the League of Communists and procured them the means for returning to Germany to take part in the German revolution. They themselves travelled to the Rhineland and succeeded in getting the establishment of the newspaper planned in Cologne into their hands. On the first of June, 1848, the _Neue Rheinische Zeitung_ appeared for the first time. It goes without saying that the editor was Karl Marx, and among his collaborators were Engels, Freiligrath, Wilhelm Wolff, and Georg Weerth. Occasionally, too, Lassalle sent contributions. It is but rarely given to a daily paper to have such an editorial staff. In the third volume of his "Collected Papers of Marx and Engels," Franz Mehring gives a selection of the articles which appeared in this journal. They are still worth reading. Here are a few examples. After the fall of Vienna he wrote an article concluding with the following words: "With the victory of the 'Red Republic' in Paris the armies from the inmost recesses of every land will be vomited forth upon the boundaries and over them, and the real strength of the combatants will clearly appear. Then we shall remember June and October, and we too shall cry, 'Woe to the vanquished!' The fruitless butcheries which have occurred since those June and October days ... will convince the peoples that there is only one means of shortening, simplifying, and concentrating the torturing death agonies of society--only one means--revolutionary terrorism."--(_Neue Rheinische Zeitung_, November 6, 1848.)

Or take, for example, this passage from the last article of the paper, when on May 18, 1849, it succumbed to the "craft and cunning of the dirty West Kalmucks" (i.e., the Prussians).

"In taking leave of our readers we remind them of the words in our first January number: 'Revolutionary upheaval of the French working class, general war--that is the index for the year 1849. And already in the east a revolutionary army comprised of warriors of all nationalities stands confronting the old Europe represented by and in league with the Russian army, already from Paris looms the Red Republic.'"

In reading these extracts one has only to substitute Russia for France and Moscow for Paris and we get at one of the sources of Lenin's and Trotsky's revolutionary policy. The articles written by Marx in 1848 and 1849 have supplied the Bolsheviks their tactics.

The censorship, Press lawsuits, and the decline of the revolution severed the life threads of the paper after scarcely a year of its existence. Marx sacrificed everything he had in money and valuables--in all, 7,000 thalers--in order to satisfy creditors and to pay the contributors and printers. Then he travelled to Paris, where he witnessed not the triumph of the Red Republic but that of the counter-revolution. In July, 1849, he was banished by the French Government to the boggy country of Morbihan, in Brittany; he preferred, however, to go over to London, where he remained to the end of his life.