up to the frontier, where after the eloquent Lamartine,
the Foreign Minister who was so readily moved to tears,
quickly found an opportunity of betraying them to their
respective governments.
We opposed this playing with revolution in the
most decisive fashion. To carry an invasion, which was
to import the revolution forcibly from outside, into the
midst of the ferment then going on in Germany, meant
to undermine the revolution in Germany itself, to
strengthen the governments and to deliver the
legionaries—Lamartine guaranteed for that —
defenceless into the hands of the German troops.
When subsequently the revolution was victorious in
Vienna and Berlin, the legion became all the more
purposeless; but once begun, the game was
continued.
We founded a German communist club, in which
we advised the workers to keep away from the legion
and to return instead to their homes singly and work
there for the movement. Our old friend Flocon, who
had a seat in the Provisional Government, obtained
for the workers sent by us the same travel facilities as
had been granted to the legionaries. In this way we
returned three or four hundred workers to Germany,
including the great majority of the League members.
As could easily be foreseen, the League proved
to be much too weak a lever as against the popular
mass movement that had now broken out. Three-
quarters of the League members who had previously
lived abroad had changed their domicile by returning
to their homeland; their previous communities were
thus to a great extent dissolved and they lost all
contact with the League. One part, the more ambitious
among them, did not even try to resume this contact,
but each one began a small separate movement on
his own account in his own locality. Finally, the
conditions in each separate petty state, each province
and each town were so different that the League would
have been incapable of giving more than the most
general directives; such directives were, however,
much better disseminated through the press. In short,
from the moment when the causes which had made
the secret League necessary ceased to exist, the
secret League as such ceased to mean anything. But
this could least of all surprise the persons who had
just stripped this same secret League of the last
vestige of its conspiratorial character.
That, however, the League had been an excellent
school for revolutionary activity was now
demonstrated. On the Rhine, where the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung provided a firm centre, in Nassau,
in Rhenish Hesse, etc., everywhere members of the
League stood at the head of the extreme democratic
movement. The same was the case in Hamburg. In
South Germany the predominance of petty-bourgeois
12
democracy stood in the way. In Breslau, Wilhelm Wolff
was active with great success until the summer of
1848; in addition he received a Silesian mandate as
an alternate representative in the Frankfort
parliament. 122 Finally, the compositor Stephan Born,
who had worked in Brussels and Paris as an active
member of the League, founded a Workers’
Brotherhood in Berlin which became fairly widespread
and existed until 1850. Born, a very talented young
man, who, however, was a bit too much in a hurry to
become a political figure, “fraternised” with the most
miscellaneous ragtag and bobtail in order to get a
crowd together, and was not at all the man who could
bring unity into the conflicting tendencies, light into
the chaos. Consequently, in the official publications
of the association the views represented in the
Communist Manifesto were mingled hodge-podge with
guild recollections and guild aspirations, fragments
of Luis Blanc and Proudhon, protectionism, etc.; in
short, they wanted to please everybody. In particular,
strikes, trade unions and producers’ co-operative were
set going and it was forgotten that above all it was a
question of first conquering, by means of political
victories, the field in which alone such things could
be realised on a lasting basis. When, afterwards, the
victories of the reaction made the leaders of the
Brotherhood realise the necessity of taking a direct
part in the revolutionary struggle, they were naturally
left in the lurch by the confused mass which they had
grouped around themselves. Born took part in the
Dresden uprising in May 1849 56 and had a lucky
escape. But, in contrast to the great political
movement of the proletariat, the workers’ Brotherhood
proved to be a pure Sonderbund [separate league],
which to a large extent existed only on paper and
played such a subordinate role that the reaction did
not find it necessary to suppress it until 1850, and its
surviving branches until several years later. Born,
whose real name was Buttermilch, has not become a
big political figure but a petty Swiss professor, who no
longer translates Marx into guild language but the
meek Renan into his own fulsome German.
With June 13, 1849, in Paris, the defeat of the
May insurrections in Germany and the suppression
of the Hungarian revolution by the Russians, a great
period of the 1848 Revolution came to a close. But
the victory of the reaction was as yet by no means
final. A reorganisation of the scattered revolutionary
forces was required, and hence also of the League.
The situation again forbade, as in 1848, any open
organisation of the proletariat; hence one had to
organise again in secret.
In the autumn of 1849 most of the members of
the previous central committees and congresses
gathered again in London. The only ones still missing
Class Struggle