Radical democrats of 1848

Name and scope

The forces that carried the revolutions of 1848–1849 soon split into moderate liberals and radical democrats. In the Frankfurt National Assembly the liberal centre, which favoured a constitutional monarchy with a hereditary emperor, was called "the Halves", and the democratic left, which demanded a parliamentary all-German democratic republic, "the Wholes". Historians of the Italian Risorgimento likewise distinguish the republican "democrats" from the "moderates". This entry covers the radical democrats of several countries who sought to abolish monarchy and privilege and to found republics on popular sovereignty and universal suffrage, and who took up arms as well as parliamentary work. German-language reference works describe Hecker, Struve, Jacoby and Schurz as "radical-democratic" (radikaldemokratisch) politicians or revolutionaries.

Germany: the Baden republicans and the left of the National Assembly

In Baden radical-democratic and early-socialist revolutionaries were strongly represented, and the demand for a democratic republic was pressed more consistently than elsewhere in the German Confederation. At the Offenburg assembly of 12 September 1847 Friedrich Hecker presented thirteen demands of the people. He advocated abolishing the monarchy, a parliamentary republic and state-supported but freely competing workers' associations, and attacked the gap between the unlimited power of big capital and the want of the "fourth estate". Gustav Struve said there was no salvation for Germany while 34 princely families ruled it and called for a federal republic on the North American model. Defeated in the Frankfurt Pre-Parliament in March 1848, the two led a volunteer column from Konstanz in April — the Hecker uprising — and were beaten at Kandern; Struve rose again at Lörrach in September.

In the National Assembly the democratic left formed the Deutscher Hof club and, further left, the Donnersberg, which merged in November 1848 into the Central March Association. The Donnersberg demanded popular sovereignty and a state on the American model while also pressing to include Schleswig, Posen, Bohemia and Moravia in the German state. The left's leader Robert Blum joined the defenders of Vienna in the October rising and was shot on 9 November 1848 after a court-martial. In May 1849 the Imperial Constitution campaign turned into risings in Saxony, the Palatinate and Baden; the Palatine rising aimed to defend the constitution and to break away from Bavaria, and the Baden revolution ended with the fall of Rastatt on 23 July. About 80,000 people then left Baden.

Italy: Mazzinian democrats and the Roman Republic

Giuseppe Mazzini's Young Italy, with the mottoes "God and the people" and "Union, Strength and Liberty", aimed to unite the Italian states into a single republic with a central government. In the Papal States the Roman Republic was proclaimed on 9 February 1849; governed by the triumvirate of Mazzini, Aurelio Saffi and Carlo Armellini, it was founded on principles such as universal male suffrage. Giuseppe Garibaldi, Goffredo Mameli and others from across the peninsula defended it, but it ended on 4 July after the intervention of French troops sent by Louis Napoléon Bonaparte. Italian Wikipedia sums up 1849 as the failure both of the moderates' neo-Guelph programme and of the Mazzinian democratic one.

After the defeat the democrats argued over strategy. Carlo Pisacane, Giuseppe Montanelli and others criticised Mazzini, arguing that the national movement had to be combined with a social transformation serving the masses; Mazzini kept to insurrection through his Party of Action. In 1860 Garibaldi led the Expedition of the Thousand that brought the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies into the new Kingdom of Italy; Mazzini regarded his handing of the conquests to the king as betrayal.

France, Hungary, Wallachia and Britain

In France the daily La Réforme, founded by Alexandre Ledru-Rollin in 1843, became the organ of those with a republican and radical programme; for its contributors, among them Louis Blanc and Ferdinand Flocon, political reform had to be social. As interior minister of the Provisional Government after the February revolution Ledru-Rollin introduced universal male suffrage by decree, but he won only 5 per cent in the presidential election of 1848. In 1849 he led the Mountain, a group of more than 200 deputies, and after the failed attempt of 13 June 1849 he escaped to England.

In Hungary the poet Sándor Petőfi, a leader of the "Youth of March", stood at the centre of the Pest revolution of 15 March 1848; his "National Song" became, with the Twelve Points, the main expression of the popular will that day. He died near Fehéregyháza on 31 July 1849. In Wallachia Nicolae Bălcescu co-founded the secret society Frăția ("Brotherhood") in 1843, sat in the provisional government of the Bucharest revolution of 1848 and demanded land for the peasants and universal suffrage; in 1849 he met Lajos Kossuth at Debrecen to broker a Romanian–Hungarian reconciliation.

Chartism, a working-class movement for political reform in Britain from 1838 to 1857, was strongest in 1839, 1842 and 1848. Led by Feargus O'Connor, publisher of the Northern Star, the Chartists held a meeting on Kennington Common on 10 April 1848 from which a third petition was to be carried to Parliament; the movement declined rapidly afterwards.

After the defeat: exile and later paths

Many of the defeated democrats went first to France, England and Switzerland, and those who could afford it to the United States. In London Mazzini founded the Central European Democratic Committee in 1850; according to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia Ledru-Rollin set up this émigré body together with Mazzini and Kossuth. German exiles in America were called Forty-Eighters. From 1856 Hecker campaigned in the Illinois Republican Party against slavery and for Lincoln; Franz Sigel, war minister of the Baden revolutionaries, became a Union major general; and Carl Schurz, who had freed his teacher Gottfried Kinkel from Spandau prison in 1850, was US Secretary of the Interior from 1877 to 1881.

Others took different paths. Johann Jacoby joined the German Progress Party in 1861 and in 1872 the Social Democratic Workers' Party, saying that its principles "and the principles of the democracy of 1848 are the same". Garibaldi called the International Workingmen's Association "the sun of the future" and sided with the Paris Commune, whereas Mazzini rejected Marxism and criticised the Commune.

Marx and Engels

The Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which Marx edited in Cologne in 1848–1849, bore the subtitle "Organ of Democracy"; it called for a united, indivisible, democratic German republic and for a war against Russia to restore Poland's unity and independence. Engels, one of its editors, fought in the Baden campaign of 1849.

The Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League that Marx wrote in March 1850 described the democratic party as "the party of the petty bourgeoisie" and divided it into three elements: the most advanced parts of the big bourgeoisie; the democratic-constitutional petty bourgeois, represented by the left of the Frankfurt Assembly and the Stuttgart rump parliament; and the republican petty bourgeois, whose ideal was a federal republic on the Swiss model and who now called themselves red and social-democratic. It held that they demanded cuts in state spending, taxation of the great landowners and the bourgeoisie and public credit institutions, while wanting the workers to remain wage labourers. The revolutionary workers' party, it said, "marches together with them against the faction which it aims at overthrowing, it opposes them in everything whereby they seek to consolidate their position"; and while the democrats wished to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, the workers' task was "to make the revolution permanent".

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx discussed the "Social-Democracy" formed in February 1849 by the alliance of the French petty-bourgeois democrats with socialist leaders. He located its character in demanding democratic-republican institutions "as means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony" — "the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie". He added that the democratic representatives need not all be shopkeepers: what made them representatives of the petty bourgeois was that in their minds they did not get beyond the limits which the latter did not get beyond in life. Mazzini and Marx criticised each other; Marx called Mazzini "the pope of the democratic church".

"Revolutionary democrats" in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1969–1978) calls Petőfi and Bălcescu "revolutionary democrats" and Garibaldi a leader of the "revolutionary-democratic wing" of the national liberation movement that fought to unite Italy "from below"; it describes Mazzini as a "bourgeois democrat" and leader of that movement's "left republican-democratic current", and Ledru-Rollin as a "petty-bourgeois democrat". The same term was used for Herzen, Chernyshevsky and others in Russia in the 1830s–1860s, a current treated in the separate entry on Russian revolutionary democracy. The classification is not uncontested: the Russian Wikipedia article on Garibaldi argues that his alliances with Mazzinians or with the monarchy do not place him in either current and that he cannot be said ever to have fully shared revolutionary-democratic views. Romanian communist ideologists, citing some of Marx's works, regarded Bălcescu as a forerunner of the Romanian communist ideal.

Related entries

The Mountain (1848–1851) refers only to Ledru-Rollin's group in the assemblies of the French Second Republic, and the Mountain to the radical faction of the National Convention of 1793. Russian revolutionary democracy is a current of the Russian intelligentsia. The course of the revolutions is covered under the Revolutions of 1848 and the national events, the American exiles under Forty-Eighters, and the communists who took part in the same revolution under the Communist League (1847–1852).