Historical Events of the Revolutionary World Movement

Bourgeois-democratic Revolution France 1848

Bourgeois-democratic Revolution

in France 1848

In the period leading up to the revolutions of 1848 Marx and Engels were extremely active as proletarian journalists, reacting to all contemporary events, especially those of a revolutionary nature.

This volume includes a large number of their articles and reports published in the working-class and democratic press of the time, particularly in the Deutsche-Brusseler-Zeitung, which under their influence became the unofficial organ of the Communist League.

The chief aim of Marx and Engels' writing for the press in this period was to explain to the working class its role and tasks in the imminent bourgeois revolution, to prepare the proletarian party that was beginning to take shape for the forthcoming battles, to spread the new revolutionary proletarian world outlook and to defend scientific communism from the attacks of its enemies.

The publication of these articles and reports helped to strengthen the international ties between the proletarian and democratic circles of the European countries and to evolve a common platform for the revolutionary forces.

Marx and Engels demonstrate that, although their ultimate aims go far beyond establishing bourgeois-democratic freedoms, the Communists' immediate aim is to win democracy, and in this struggle they make common cause with the democrats.

Engels argued that not the peasantry but "the industrial proletariat of the towns has become the vanguard of all modern democracy; the urban petty bourgeoisie and still more the peasants

depend on its initiative completely."

Marx and Engels regarded the bourgeois-democratic revolution as merely an intermediate stage in the proletariat's revolutionary struggle. The proletarians, Marx wrote, "can and must accept the bourgeois revolution as a precondition for the workers' revolution". With the victory of the democratic revolution the proletariat is confronted with the task of "becoming a power, in the first place a revolutionary power" in order to carry the struggle against the bourgeoisie itself to its ultimate conclusion. Marx and Engels

approached the idea of uninterrupted revolution and regarded the working class' conquest of political power as its next stage. 1848, we have the first published formulation of the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat as an instrument for the revolutionary reconstruction of society.

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Friedrich Engels

"the ever-burning volcano of Paris".

(Friedrich Engels - September 1, 1846)

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A Frenchman is necessarily a cosmopolite. Yes, in a world ruled over by French influence, French manners, fashions, ideas, politics.

In a world in which every nation has adopted the characteristics of French nationality. ,But that is exactly what the democrats of other nations will not like. Quite ready to give up the harshness of their own nationality, they expect the same from the French. They will not be satisfied in the assertion, on the part of the French, that they are

cosmopolites; assertion which amounts to the demand urged upon all others to become Frenchmen. (Friedrich Engels, December 1847)

Friedrich Engels

Reform Movement in France

1847

Karl Marx

THE SITUATION IN FRANCE

What does the Ministry do?—Nothing.

What does the parliamentary, legal opposition do?

—Nothing.