Page:Karl Kautsky - Frederick Engels - 1899.djvu/14

 action than the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung" so long as there were actual opponents to overcome or that advocated more unreservedly the overthrow of every remaining support of the old order.

Meanwhile conditions were more powerful than the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung." The reaction triumphed. One portion of the Rhine province, the principal seat of commerce and manufacturing, Elberfeld, Dusseldorf, Solingen, etc., arose in May, 1849, to oppose the crumbling, reactionary opposition. Immediately upon hearing this Engels hurried from Cologne to Elberfeld, but only to see the uprising quickly go to pieces. The laborers were everywhere betrayed and left in the lurch by the little bourgeois.

This decided the fate of the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung." It was suppressed May 19th, and Marx was exiled. Engels also, on account of his participation in the Rhenish uprising, was persecuted and compelled to leave Cologne, where he had concealed himself when he returned from Elberfeld. Marx went with a mandate of the Democratic Central Committee to Paris, where a new crisis was preparing that was to be of importance to the German revolution. Engels went into the Palatinate, which, together with Baden, had risen to the support of the constitution of the Empire, and joined a volunteer corps, filling the position of an adjutant. He took part in three battles, as well as the decisive combat on the Murg. Here 13,000 poorly led and poorly disciplined revolutionary soldiers faced 60,000 Prussian and Imperial troops. Nevertheless the latter won only through the violation of its terms of neutrality by Wurtemburg, which made possible a flank movement.

The fate of the Baden-Palatinate insurrection, which had hardly been doubtful heretofore, was decided by this. The South German Democracy had been the soul of the insurrection. This was almost exclusively a small bourgeois party, and all their ridiculousness and miserableness came to view in this insurrection, which would have fallen to pieces more quickly than it did had it not been for the proletarian element and the bad military management of the Prussians.

"Politically considered," says Engels concerning the uprising in Baden and the Palatinate, "the government plan of campaign was from the first a failure. From a military point of view it was equally so. The only chance of its success lay outside of Germany, in the victory of the Republicans of Paris on June 13th—and the conflict of June 13th failed.