Page:Friedrich Engels - The Revolutionary Act - tr. Henry Kuhn (1922).pdf/23

 enthusiasm and despair; we have today the one great international army of Socialists, advancing irresistibly, daily growing in numbers, organization, discipline, discernment and certainty of victory. And if this powerful army of the proletariat has not yet reached the goal, if, far from winning the victory by one fell blow, it must gradually proceed by hard, tenacious struggle from position to position, it proved once for all how impossible it was in 1848 to bring about the social transformation by a sheer coup de main.

Given a bourgeoisie split in two dynastic-monarchist sections, but which above all things demanded tranquility and security for its financial transactions, and opposed to it a defeated but still threatening proletariat about which petty bourgeois and peasant elements more and more grouped themselves—a permanent threat of violent outbreaks which, however, offered no prospect for the solution—that was the situation almost made to order for the coup d'état of the third, the pseudo-democratic pretender, Louis Bonaparte. By means of the army he made, on December 2, 1851, an end of the tense situation and secured internal quiet to Europe, only to bestow upon her a new era of war. The period of revolutions from below had come to a close for the time being; there followed a period of revolutions from above.

The imperialist reaction of 1851 gave to us new proof of the unripeness of the proletarian aspirations of the time. But the reaction itself was to create the