tradition in Germany of successful revolution, such as had been firmly established in France by the events of 1789, 1830, and 1848. From its first formal appearance, German Socialism was less revolutionary than evolutionary.
At first glance the happenings of 1848 might seem to disprove this thesis. Was not the revolutionary movement of 1848 attended in Germany by a lively agitation among the working classes? Were not the Bund der Gerechten and the Arbeiterverbrüderung true precursors of Socialism? Upon closer scrutiny, however, the revolution of 1848 reveals itself as an essentially middle-class uprising, in which outbreaks of violence among the workingmen for the most part bore a closer resemblance to riots than to organized revolution. Germany in 1848, let it ever be remembered, was even more unripe for a Socialist revolution than for a democratic and national one. Industrial development, the spread of the factory system and the growth of cities—the very stuff from which Marxian socialism has always been fashioned—was much more backward in Germany than in England or in France; urban wage-earners were relatively few and impotent. What workers there were, moreover, were imbued with the petty bourgeois spirit and, worse still from the standpoint of revolution, to some extent actually with the spirit of the medieval gilds.
Only a comparatively small minority of the German workers had grasped the revolutionary mission of the working class. If they everywhere fought in the front rank of the advanced parties; if, wherever they could, they tried to urge on the middle-class democracy, they paid the cost of all this in their own person. The Communists of 1848 fell on the barricades, on the battle-field of Baden; they filled the prisons, or they were obliged, when the reaction triumphed all along the line, to go into exile, where a large number of them died in misery.[1]
Great economic prosperity in 1850 not only bolstered up the tottering thrones of central Europe but also snuffed out the last flickering flames of the workingmen's agitation of the period. The governments soon felt themselves strong enough to dissolve all revolutionary organizations, and, on the motion of Prussia and Austria, the Bundestag in 1854 decreed that all the federated states must suppress every workingmen's society or fraternity which pursued political, socialist, or communist ends. Not only did the revolutionary movement of 1848–1849 mean for German Socialists the loss of their leaders and the dissolution of their organizations, but it likewise left in their minds an ineradicable distrust of violence as a means of realizing their ends. Marx and Engels perceived
- ↑ Bernstein, Ferdinand Lassalle as a Social Reformer (1893), pp. 4–5.
