4
INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION
geoisie at the head of the State would maintain their political supremacy, they were bound to disarm the workmen. Accordingly, after every revolution made victorious with the arms of the workers, there arose a new struggle which ended with the defeat of the workers.
This happened for the first time in 1848.[1] The Liberal bourgeoisie of the Parliamentary opposition held reform banquets in favor of an electoral change which should assure domination to their party. In their struggles with the Government driven to appeal ever more to the people, they were obliged to admit to the front rank the Radical and Republican elements of the small middle class as well
- ↑ Of course there were in earlier days premonitions of that class-conscious movement of the proletariat, which in 1848 won a first victory—soon, however, followed by defeat—under the circumstances here referred to. In Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Engels himself calls attention to the fact that "in every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was a forerunner, more or less developed, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasants War, the Anabaptists and Thomas Münzer; in the great English Revolution, the Levelers; in the great French Revolution, Babœuf." To this may be added that in the seventeen years that followed the Revolution of 1830 (the second revolution of the French bourgeoisie, by which the political conquests which this class had made during its great revolution of 1789–93, were finally placed beyond the reach of feudal reaction), several proletarian insurrections occurred in France; and although the "bread question" was always instrumental in provoking them, the "social question" gradually assumed in them a greater importance until it was paramount in the minds of the insurrectionists. The first uprising was at Lyons in 1831, when the canuts (silk workers) descended from the heights of Croix-Rousse upon the rich quarters below with a black flag on which was inscribed in red letters: Vivre en travaillant, ou mourir en combattant (to live working or to die fighting). The subsequent outbursts at Lille, Saint Etienne, Limoges, and other industrial centers were of the same character. But in 1839 the Barbès insurrection not only was "communistic," but through the foreigners who fought in its ranks, it acquired, to some extent, an international character, which in the trials that followed was duly pointed out by the prosecuting attorneys. At the same time in England, the thoroughly proletarian Chartist agitation was carried on, coincidently with the mercantile-class movement in favor of free trade. The fact is that all these outbursts, insurrections, and revolutions so called, including 1848 and the Commune of 1871, are mere episodes of the great Proletarian Revolution, which is in course of accomplishment.—Note to the American Edition.
