Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution by Peter Fitzsimons Read Free Book Online Page B

down, and the mob might rule. And so for the moment, that was where it was left . . .
     
    ———
     
    In other parts of the world, within less than a decade, the challenge by the broad mass of people to the rule of the elite was not so easily averted.
    In late 1847, a 29-year-old German philosopher and law graduate by the name of Karl Marx – at the time living in Brussels because his homeland had denied him freedom of speech in the press due to his dangerously revolutionary ideas – was putting the finishing touches to a pamphlet he had worked up with his great friend Friedrich Engels. Engels was the 27-year-old bon vivant eldest son of a wealthy German cotton manufacturer, who had recognised, he felt, a genius in Marx that perhaps even Marx himself was not aware of.
    It was a pamphlet they called the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, which became known in the English-speaking world as The Communist Manifesto . Using analysis that was revolutionary in every sense of the word, their firm view was expressed in the manifesto’s opening line: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’ Most pointedly, they asserted that the working class was being exploited by those who owned the means of production and that the capitalist system was inherently unfair. They proposed an entirely new economic structure for the world, presenting a vision whereby the workers would and should rise against their oppressors, seize the means of production, and the world’s wealth would thereafter be redistributed on a far more equal basis: ‘ Jeder nach seinen Fahigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedurfnissen’ – ‘From each according to their means, to each according to their needs.’
    Workers of the world unite!
    According to them, workers around the world were beginning to rise against their oppressors, and their chief hope was that their book would encourage others to do the same.
    Within weeks – not because of Marx, but because of the forces he identified – that very thing began to happen across Europe, as a broad mass of the population in country after country rose up against the traditional establishment elites and challenged their iniquitous rule.
    First, in February, the good citoyens of Paris, France, and most particularly the humble workers, flooded into the streets in revolt at the rule of ‘Le Bourgeois Monarch,’ King Louis-Philippe and his Prime Minister, Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot. ‘Down with Guizot!’ they shouted. ‘Down with the sold ones! Down with Louis-Philippe! Vive la Reforme !’
    Erecting barricades, throwing pavement stones at the Parisian municipal guards – so fiery was their rage, so great their numbers, that Guizot resigned. Still, that did not quell the uprising and on the next day French soldiers fired directly into the milling crowd, killing 52 and wounding hundreds of others.
    ‘ Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons !’
    And so they did. In such numbers and with such fury – all of it concentrated on the royal palace – that within two days King Louis-Philippe put himself in a disguise and, travelling as ‘Mr Smith’, fled to England, a country that was itself in turmoil . . .
     
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    In England, a little over a decade earlier – in a curious coalition of six liberal parliamentarians combining forces with six forward-thinking working men – a committee had been formed as the foundation of a movement that then and there was engaged in a fierce struggle for the nation’s destiny. In 1838 they had published the People’s Charter, which had six basic planks in its platform, calling for enormous political change in Great Britain: the vote for every man of sound mind over 21 not in gaol; secret ballot elections; no property qualifications for members of parliament; parliamentary members to be paid, enabling poor people to stand, too; equal constituencies so everyone’s vote was worth the same amount; and annual parliaments, with