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.
7. The Old Poland and the New
The Marxologists almost universally allege that Marx and Engels ignored the reactionary tendencies in the national movement of these two countries. Some go so far as to accuse them of deviating from Marxism in this respect.* The allegations are unfounded and, as is often the case, ignore the explicit statements of Marx and Engels themselves. In the Polish case, one of the explicit statements is found in the Communist Manifesto. While terse, like much else in the Manifesto, the statement ought to at least tempt the researcher to look a little further.
It so happens that the question of Polish independence and its relation to the class struggle in Poland was on everyone’s mind while Marx was writing the Manifesto. This was just before the outbreak of the revolution in 1848. The question had been put on the agenda by the Austrian Foreign Minister Prince von Metternich who, in his own way, was one of the leading revolutionaries of the day. It was Metternich who, in 1846, faced with an insurrection of the Polish gentry and the urban classes, demagogically, and successfully, appealed to the class and religious hostility of the mostly Ukrainian peasantry in Galicia towards their Polish lords. His skillful playing of this card isolated the radical, democratic insurrection in Cracow. Even in 1848, the politics of this defeated insurrection continued to preoccupy the left. The relatively minor contemporary disturbances in Poland raised no comparable political questions concerning the internal politics of Poland.
As early as 1830, when a Polish uprising also coincided with a revolution in France and jeopardized the international order constructed in 1815, the class question forced itself on the nationalist movement. In that year, the landowning classes who led the insurrection promised an end to feudal obligations; in particular, the hated obligation to provide free labor at the landowners’ demand. But, hard pressed to meet the needs of the population under war time conditions, they reinstituted the system “temporarily” until the foreign armies were defeated. After this temporary sacrifice to ensure the defeat of the common enemy, the reforms would certainly be reintroduced. The peasants found the argument unconvincing and the insurrection was defeated.
In 1846, this precedent weighed on the minds of all parties. The Polish emigration was split on several lines but the main division was between the partisans of the old Poland—the patrimony of the powerful families who hoped to restore the old kingdom intact including its rule over non-Polish minorities and its exploitation of Polish peasants—and the partisans of a new, democratic Poland. The latter were organized in the Polish Democratic Association which was loosely allied with other Democratic Associations including that of Brussels in which Marx was active. One of their most prominent representatives was Joachim Lelewel who was also a member of the Brussels Democratic Association. Lelewel, a personal and political friend of Marx in 1846, had been a former Deputy in the Polish Diet in 1828 and a member of the Provisional Government during the insurrection of 1830.
In 1846 there were three centers of revolutionary activity in Poland. Perhaps, it would be better to say two centers of revolutionary activity and one of counterrevolutionary activity. The more conservative wing of the emigration hoped to use the conflicts between the occupying powers to maneuver their way back to power. Their hopes centered on organizing an insurrection against the Russians based in Prussian occupied Posen (present day Poznan.) However, when the representative of the insurrectionaries, Ludwik Mieroslawski arrived in Posen he was arrested.24 The Prussian monarchy was willing to flirt with the Poles to gain a little diplomatic leverage but anything serious was out of the question.
The real insurrection took place in Cracow which had been granted the status of free city under the terms of the Congress of Vienna. It was organized by the democratic wing of the emigration and held the city against overwhelming odds for ten days. Its program was one of agrarian reform, which meant the abolition of all feudal obligations without compensation, separation of church and state, which meant the emancipation of the Jews, and a democratic constitution, which meant the abolition of the old Poland. It enjoyed enormous popular support in the town and the surrounding countryside and it required some effort on the part of the Austrian and Russian forces to retake the city. Cracow was subsequently incorporated into the Austrian occupied sector of Poland.25
The third front was opened, not by the revolutionaries but by Metternich, in Galicia. In November of 1846, a new Conservative Party with an advanced program of agrarian reforms was formed with Metternich’s support. And when the Polish gentry revolted against the empire, they were met by a counter-revolt of the peasantry. There were charges made and countered that Metternich paid and organized peasant agitators to spread rumors that the plans of the government for reform were being frustrated by the Polish gentry and to organize the subsequent pogroms against the gentry. The facts behind these charges and countercharges are still a matter of controversy.26 What is not in dispute
