old world to the revolution and democracy.
Modern scholarship has tended to question this oversimplified picture.1 In the beginning it was the pro-monarchists and the Gironde who formed the war party in France and those members of the Convention most sympathetic to the popular movement opposed the provocations of the French government. Robespierre was the most outspoken opponent of the war while moderates like Lafayette hoped to drown the revolutionary movement in a flood of patriotic sentiment. On this question, as on others, the politics of the French Revolution were more modern than is generally realized. Marx and Engels, however, did not know what we know now.
In any case, in 1793 the war had turned into a war between defenders of the old order and the new. What is more important for us, from 1815 on, from the signing of the treaties drawn up at the Congress of Vienna until 1848 and beyond, the diplomatic policy of the European powers aimed at subordinating dynastic conflicts and national interests to the common need to defend traditional, and not so traditional, privileges against the republican and egalitarian demons wakened by the French Revolution. They saw in every moderate liberal measure and every tentative attempt by oppressed nations to ameliorate their position the specters of Jacobinism and Napoleon. This policy, of course, made revolutionaries out of very mild reformers.
In the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat liberalism in Germany especially was humiliated. After backing a war of liberation against the French Emperor spurred in part by promises of reform liberals were rewarded with a strengthened bureaucratic absolutism. Austria and Prussia, backed by Russia, placed the Germans under a kind of house arrest. The press was strictly censored, the Universities subjected to police control, and the radical students’ associations outlawed. All this for the sole purpose of preserving the division of the country into some thirty-odd mini-states ruled by petty princes whose cruelty was moderated only by their sloth and incompetence
Poland, however, was the lynch-pin of the whole system. This country, whose dynasty was at least as legitimate as that of the Russian Romanovs, the Austrian Hapsburgs and the Prussian Hohenzollerns, had been partitioned between the latter three for over seventy years. The Holy Alliance between Russia, Prussia and Austria was cemented by the parties’ common need to keep Poland down and, especially, to keep it from becoming a point of contention between them. That could wreck the whole system. As Engels put it “The tearing asunder of Poland by the three powers is the tie which links them together; the robbery they jointly committed forces them to support one another.”2 In 1830 and 1846 Polish insurrections, bloodily suppressed, provoked European wide outrage. They did not lead to a European war only because liberal and democratic opposition in Europe was weak or compromised.
In 1848, as in 1830, a revolution in France was simultaneously a revolt against the European-wide order policed by the Holy Alliance and backed by England. The spread of that revolution into Central and Eastern Europe had to lead to war between the revolutionary governments and the Holy Alliance. The war did not come because the revolution won out nowhere. Only in Hungary did the republican party carry out its program to the point of open rupture with the Alliance. Hungary was crushed.
In Marx and Engels’ day, then, the more consistent the revolutionary the more “prowar.” But something else, something more important, followed from the reliance on the 1793-4 analogy. The war being advocated was not a war in support of any of the existing states. It was a war against all of them by the loose coalition of opposition classes and tendencies that was called “the Democracy.”
2. The Main Enemy
This is the background which explains the contradictory combination (so it seems to us) that characterized the foreign policy of the newspaper edited by Marx in Cologne, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (NRZ). On the one hand, there were the patriotic calls for a war against Russia in the interest of a united Germany and, on the other, a steady stream of articles which could be summarized under the head—“the main enemy is at home.”
In Engels’ case this identification of patriotism and hostility to the existing authorities predated his association with Marx or his interest in socialism. Writing as a “Young German,”3 in 1841 he took for his target the apologists for German backwardness. Perhaps the best example of Engels Young German period, this article, titled “The ‘War of Liberation’ Against Napoleon,” was an attack on the hysterical Francophobia of the “Franzözenfresser”*—the defenders of Christian-German reaction. No, says Engels, the French are a model for us Germans; they represent “civilization.” The enemy is the alliance of England and Russia. Later, the post-Marx Engels would be more specific. He would identify “civilization” with the bourgeoisification of Germany (and other backward countries) and explain why England and Russia, for different reasons feared the spread of the bourgeois order in Europe.** In this early article Engels is expressing the “left” nationalism that was common to all the young radicals who felt ashamed of the backwardness of their country. His was the defensive nationalism of the citizen of a fragmented country.
Writing in this context Engels gives his own twist to the German nationalist glorification of the “War of Liberation” against Napoleon. Like most Rhinelanders—not just radicals—Engels tended to look on the French occupation favorably because of its “civilizing”4 effect. The subsequent occupation of the Rhineland by backward, feudal-absolutist, bureaucratic, Prussia reversed the gains that had been made under Napoleon. As a Young German Engels was torn between admiration for the rebellion against Napoleon and skepticism as to its results:
. . . the greatest result of the struggle was not the shaking off of foreign rule [which would have crashed anyway] . . . , it was the deed itself . . . That we became conscious of the loss of our national sanctuaries, that we armed ourselves without waiting for the most gracious permission of the sovereigns, that we actually compelled those in power to take their place at our head, in short, that for a moment we acted as the source of state power, as a sovereign nation, that was the greatest gain of those years . . .”5
Engels was to comment later, on a number of occasions, on the halfheartedness of this imitation of 1793. In fact, his estimation of the national movement of the Germans, as of the French and other nationalities, varied over time depending on political circumstances. What was to remain constant was his emphasis on rebellion against the existing authorities as the real measure of a nation’s greatness and viability.
3. A Nation That Oppresses Others Cannot Itself Be Free
<< Index will generate here >>In 1848, the NRZ emphasized throughout that the main obstacle to German unification and self-determination was not foreign militarism but the slavish political traditions of the Germans themselves. Their collaboration in the oppression of other peoples was what kept them chained to their own rulers. One chain could not be broken without breaking the other.
Within a month of the paper’s first appearance,6 Engels recounted in detail the role of Germans as mercenaries, especially in the pay of England, from North America to Greece and Italy, but, he concluded:
The blame for the infamies committed with the aid of Germany in other countries falls not only on the governments but to a large extent also on the German people. But for the delusions of the Germans, their slavish spirit . . . the German name would not be so detested, cursed and despised, . . . Now that the Germans are throwing off their own yoke, their whole foreign policy must change too. Otherwise the fetters with which we have chained other nations will shackle our own new freedom, which is as yet hardly more than a presentiment. Germany will liberate herself to the extent to which she sets free
