Page:Friedrich Engels - The Revolutionary Act - tr. Henry Kuhn (1922).pdf/18

 Paris between proletariat and bourgeoisie; when even the victory of its class so shattered the bourgeoisie that it fled back into the arms of the same monarchist-feudal reaction that had just been overthrown, there could be, under the conditions prevailing, no doubt for us that the great decisive struggle was at hand, that it would have to be fought to a finish in one long revolutionary period and with shifting fortunes, but that it could end only in the final victory of the proletariat.

By no means did we, after the defeats of 1849, share the illusions of vulgar democracy, grouped in partibus about the provisional future governments. These reckoned with an imminent, once for all decisive victory of the "people" over its "oppressors"; we reckoned with a long struggle, after the elimination of the "oppressors," among the antagonistic elements concealed among that very "people." Vulgar democracy expected a renewed outbreak from one day to another; we, already in the autumn of 1850, declared that the first phase of the revolutionary period had closed and that nothing could be looked forward to until the advent of a new economic world crisis. Wherefore we were banned with bell, book and candle as traitors to the revolution by the same people who, later on, almost without exception made their peace with Bismarck—in so far as Bismarck considered them worth while.

But history also proved us in the wrong, and revealed our opinion of that day as an illusion. History went even farther; not only did it destroy our former