Page:Friedrich Engels - The Revolutionary Act - tr. Henry Kuhn (1922).pdf/24

 conditions under which they had to ripen. Internal tranquility secured full development of the new industrial prosperity, the necessity to provide work for the army and to divert the revolutionary currents into outward channels produced the wars, wherein Bonaparte, under the pretext of upholding the "principle of nationality," sought to gather in annexations for France. His imitator, Bismarck, adopted the same policy for Prussia: he made his coup d'état, his revolution from above, in 1866, against the German Bund and Austria, and no less against the Prussian "conflict-chamber." But Europe was too small for two Bonapartes, and so the irony of history willed it that Bismarck overthrew Bonaparte, and that King William of Prussia not only restored the limited German empire but also the French republic. The general result was, however, that in Europe the independence and internal unity of the great nations, with the exception of Poland, had become a fact. It had done so, of course, within relatively modest limits—but at any rate so much so that the working class process of development no longer was hampered by nationalist complications. The grave-diggers of the revolution of 1848 had become the executors of its last will and testament. And, beside them, already rose threatening the heir of 1848, the proletariat in its Internationale.

After the war of 1870–71, Bonaparte disappears from the stage and Bismarck's mission is finished, so that he can subside again to his status of an ordinary