The Class Struggles in France, 1848-50
Works of Karl Marx 1850
Written: by Marx, January - October 1850 for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue;
Published: as a booklet by Engels in 1895;
Source: Selected Works, Volume 1, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1969;
Transcribed for the Internet: by Louis Proyect;
With the exception of only a few chapters, every important part of the revolutionary annals from 1848 to 1849 bear the heading: Defeat of the revolution!
What succumbed in these defeats was not the revolution. It was the pre-revolutionary traditional appendages, results of social relationships which had not yet come to the point of sharp class antagonisms — persons, illusions, conceptions, projects from which the revolutionary party before the February Revolution was not free, from which it could be freed not by the victory of February, but only by a series of defeats.
In a word: The revolution made progress, forged ahead, not by its immediate tragicomic achievements but, on the contrary, by the creation of a powerful, united counterrevolution, by the creation of an opponent in combat with whom the party of overthrow ripened into a really revolutionary party.
To prove this is the task of the following pages.
Part I: The Defeat of June, 1848
Part II: From June 1848 to June 13, 1849
Part III: Consequences of June 13, 1849
Part IV: The Abolition of Universal Suffrage in 1850