The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850

Contents

1. Translator’s Preface (Kuhn, 1924) 6 min 4

   Henry Kuhn, of the Socialist Labor Party, introduces the first English translation in January 1924. He compares the French petty-bourgeois democrats of 1848 with the German Social Democrats of 1918–19, predicts that capitalism cannot recover from the war, and reads Engels’s introduction as support for the SLP’s programme of revolutionary industrial unionism.

2. Engels’s Introduction (1895) 52 min 18

   Engels’s last major work, written in March 1895. He explains that the book was Marx’s first attempt to apply historical materialism to current events and that its key lesson was the link between economic crisis and revolution. He admits that he and Marx had been wrong in 1848 to expect a swift proletarian victory: the continent was not economically ripe, and revolutions by conscious minorities belong to the past. He argues that modern weapons and city planning have made the old barricade fight obsolete, and holds up the German Social Democrats’ growing vote as the model: legality now favours the workers, and the parties of order will have to break their own laws. The text was cut at the party leadership’s request and then quoted in Vorwärts to make Engels seem a pure legalist, which he protested; the cut passages were restored only in 1930. It became the founding text of reformist Marxism, and a subject of lasting dispute.

3. I From February to June, 1848 1 h 6 min 29

   From February to June 1848. Marx describes the July monarchy as the rule of one fraction of the bourgeoisie, the finance aristocracy, which lived off state debt and speculation, and he traces its fall to the harvest failures of 1845–47 and the commercial crisis of 1847. The Provisional Government of February was a compromise of classes. The Paris workers forced it to proclaim the republic and the “right to work,” but the government reassured the bankers, rescued the Bank of France, and taxed the peasants with the 45-centime tax. It raised the Mobile Guard from the Lumpenproletariat and set up the National Workshops as a relief scheme. The conservative Assembly elected in April dissolved the workshops and drove the workers into the June insurrection, the first great battle between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Its bloody defeat stripped away the illusions of February; Marx ends: the revolution is dead, long live the revolution. Contains antisemitic phrasing (“stock exchange Jews”) noted in the annotations.

4. II From June, 1848, to June 13, 1849 1 h 27 min 22

   From June 1848 to June 1849. The bourgeois republicans of the National rule under Cavaignac’s state of siege. They abandon the indebted petty bourgeoisie to its creditors, strike the right to work and the progressive tax from the constitution, and produce a constitution whose central contradiction is to give political power, through universal suffrage, to the classes whose social subjection it guarantees. On 10 December 1848 the peasants, rebelling against the republic of the tax collector, elect Louis Bonaparte, and the royalist Barrot ministry harries the Constituent Assembly into dissolution. The French expedition against the Roman Republic, the union of petty-bourgeois democrats and socialists as the “Social-Democratic” or Red party, and the Montagne’s failed protest of 13 June 1849 close the period.

5. III From June 13, 1849, to March 10, 1850 1 h 32 min 27

   From June 1849 to March 1850. After the collapse of June 13, the petty-bourgeois insurrection, repression strengthens the royalist majority. Bonaparte breaks with the Barrot ministry and appoints the banker Fould to finance: the finance aristocracy returns, because a debt-ridden state cannot do without it. Marx analyses the indebted smallholding peasantry, exploited by capital through mortgages and taxes, whose disappointments with the vote turn it toward the Reds: “revolutions are the locomotives of history.” Every reform is now branded socialism, and the middle classes rally round the proletariat. Against utopian schemes Marx sets revolutionary socialism, “the declaration in permanency of the revolution,” the class dictatorship of the proletariat as a transition to the abolition of classes, the first published use of the idea. The socialist victory in the Paris elections of 10 March 1850 drives the bourgeoisie to its last resort: abolishing universal suffrage.

6. IV The Abolition of the General Franchise in 1850 39 min 16

   Added by Engels in 1895 from the Review that Marx and Engels wrote in the autumn of 1850. A new commercial boom has replaced the crisis, and with it any real chance of revolution: a new revolution is possible only following a new crisis. In France, the Assembly abolishes universal suffrage by the law of 31 May 1850 while the Montagne protests politely and the workers, at work again, stay calm; a new press law follows. The party of order remains divided between its dynasties and in conflict with Bonaparte, who courts the army with sausages and champagne. Marx predicts the Assembly will extend Bonaparte’s term; instead, Bonaparte seized power in the coup of December 1851, analysed in The Eighteenth Brumaire.