SOURCE: "Conclusion," in Mid-Passage: Alexander Herzen and European Revolution, 1847-1852, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989, pp. 221-28.

[The following chapter, which reviews Herzen's reaction to the failed European uprisings of 1848, culminates in a comparison of Herzen's thought with that of Karl Marx.]

Historians have perceived the revolutions of 1848 as paradoxical defeats for the revolutionary ideal. The dreams of political romanticism died on the barricades in Paris in June, or in Vienna in October; the makers of the revolution went to prison, or to exile, or to their deaths. The age of generous ideals and of simple, clear visions of political morality came to an end, to be succeeded by a new "toughness" and "realism." Yet within a quarter century, the victors had put into place many of the reforms the vanquished had fought for; the radical and democratic exiles were amnestied and could come home to a world of civil liberties, parliamentary government, and national unification. But if the victory of the government forces was paradoxical, so too was the ultimate vindication of the revolutionaries. The worlds to which they could return at the end of their lives were arenas of business as usual. Constitutions and broad suffrage did not translate into the virtuous republicanism that had been their sustaining vision, and the new national, constitutional states had as little use for their exalted political dreams as had the reactionary regimes of 1847.

The fate of the revolutionaries' political vision reflects their own strengths and failings. For years before the revolution, they had worked to develop and propagandize their programs. Occasionally, they fought and died for their views, and if each individual revolutionary effort failed, the series of noble failures created a mythology and martyrology for radicalism. The heroic legends and the noble ideals were made known to the public at large through journalism, art, public demonstrations, and manipulation of the establishment media. The methods of political propaganda developed by this generation of radicals would last for well over a century and are not yet completely out of date.

Through their efforts the revolutionaries had put the program of democratic and socialist reform on the agenda. Their success as propagandists meant that in most of Europe their ideals had become so entrenched in the awareness of politically active sectors of the population that it had become almost impossible to repudiate them. Thus, their programs were enacted by the governments that defeated them.

But although they succeeded in setting the political agenda, the radicals had no mechanism for translating their ideas into political reality. Revolutionary processes brought many of them close to governmental power in 1848, but they proved to be incapable of holding on to it and using it creatively. Once the revolution was over, they were reduced to squabbling over the mistakes of 1848 and plotting futile armed insurgencies. In the decades to come it would be men who could command the political power of the state and who were not afraid to use this power for change rather than cautious retrenchment—men like Cavour, Bismarck, and even Alexander II—who were able to set their imprint on political events, not small bands of dedicated souls acting out of love for ideals and the people.

Alexander Herzen's mature life was shaped by his response to the European radicals, just as his youthful social vision had owed much to their propaganda. His expectations of the West had been formed by reading radical critics—Blanc, Proudhon, and George Sand being the most important—and linking their denunciations of European conditions to his left-Hegelian radicalism. He had therefore been expecting to find an imperfect and unjust social order, with a dominant bourgeoisie unworthy of its power and influence, when he came to Western Europe in 1847. But reality exceeded all his expectations; he was shocked and appalled by what he perceived as the corruption, vulgarity, and hypocrisy in the Bourgeois Monarchy of Louis Philippe. New acquaintances among the French and émigré radicals, whom he met after his arrival in Paris, helped him sharpen his analysis of the failings of European society.

The outbreak of revolution found Herzen in Italy. He was entranced by the revolutionary process in its operatic Italian form, and his respect for the Italian heroes of the Risorgimento would last the rest of his life. But revolution in Italy was not powerful enough to break the strength of the Hapsburg monarchy. The movement was doomed without outside help, and Herzen appears to have been aware of this by the time he left the peninsula to follow events farther north.

The Paris uprising and the establishment of the republic drew Herzen back to France. He arrived too late for the ebullience of February and found, instead, the first stages of reaction; even the moderate policies of the Provisional Government were repudiated by the conservative National Assembly. Herzen's response was critical and his view of the revolutionary movement complex. He now differentiated between the crowds who had made the revolution and the opposition politicians who has emerged with governmental power. It was the inadequacy, the timidity, and the fundamental conservatism of the politicians that had held them back from joining with the Paris populace to make a clean sweep of the old order. Forced into confrontation with revolutionary forces, they had lost their democratic veneer altogether. The French revolutionary government had been unable to take the measures necessary for victory, and Herzen had arrived in Paris just in time to see its defeat. This was registered by the election of the conservative National Assembly, followed soon after by the bloody defeat of the revolutionary Paris crowd.

The more radical leaders, who had never held power, might be admirable and heroic, and Herzen often could admire them as human beings; however, their theories and programs could no longer attract him. His political disillusionment was complete. Herzen perceived the exploited and oppressed Paris workers, and eventually the Russian peasants, as truly revolutionary forces and thought they might well ultimately win; but he also felt that these forces were themselves indifferent to the values of individual freedom that he cherished. There seemed no way of linking the call for freedom and individual autonomy of the middle-class radicals with the urgent demand for social justice that animated the Paris workers.

Despite his disenchantment with the revolution, Herzen renewed and extended his acquaintance with French and exiled radicals in Paris, as well as socialist politicians and journalists. If he could no longer admire them as leaders, he could still appreciate them as potential colleagues and friends. He entered into the world of political action with his move to Geneva in the summer of 1849. Soon, he was involved in the collaboration with Proudhon on La Voix du Peuple and in addition was developing networks of contacts among the Italian and German exile colonies. He began to write extensively for French and German audiences, thus discovering his dual Western journalist's role as gadfly of the radical movement on the one hand, and as the interpreter of Russia to the Western left on the other.

Throughout his first years in the West Herzen appears to have been seeking a community in which he could find both liberty and fraternity—the individualism lacking in Russia combined with the harmonious friendship of his old Moscow circle. Constitutionalism, revolution, and the Geneva exiles all failed to satisfy his political demands, and by 1852 the circle itself was irrevocably lost, not only by his emigration, but also by his friends' repudiation of his work. Finally, he attempted to create his own little high-minded commune on the narrowest conceivable scale—his family and the Herweghs, living in relative isolation from the mainstream of exile life. The family crisis shattered this dream forever, and his faith that private life offered a sanctuary for his values was destroyed once and for all.

Nor was there any hope of going back, retreating to a pre-European innocence. From the latter part of 1848 onward, nostalgia for friends and youthful memories in Russia became a major motif; it inspired many of the best pages ofByloe i dumy. But Herzen never entertained the slightest illusion that he could return in fact to his homeland.¹ (In the memoris of Herzen's Russian acquaintances, he is frequently portrayed as expressing a painful homesickness and fantasizing about going back, but it is unlikely that he ever believed this was a possible option. More often than not, the fantasy revolved around his children returning to Russia after his own death.) Russia was more repressive, politically more hopeless than the West. Emigration offered the only practical way to work for radical change in Russia.

Herzen retained his illusions about the circle for a longer time; the reality of his isolation from the friends he had loved so much and trusted so long was unbearable. His emotional disengagement from the circle, to the extent it ever took place, came only in 1855-1856. First Granovskii died, leaving the circle without its most important member, and then Ogarev joined him in London, and the two men were able to recreate in part the world of friendship.

Yet, even as Herzen lost his youthful idealism, he became a tougher, more realistic, and more effective political figure. He rejected grand theoretical schemes and dismissed socialist panaceas, but he established the press and edited his journals, and thereby did provide a vehicle for uncensored Russian thought. In the short run he had some influence on the reform effort of Alexander II, and in the long run he helped shape Russian revolutionary thought. During his career as a journalist, he kept his sights fixed on his goals; and like Proudhon in 1849, he was willing to find shortterm alliances wherever possible, from the provincial estate to the Winter Palace, and was also willing to give up his stake in revolution for the sake of meaningful reform in the present.

He also found a community in which he could function—the world of exile as it crystallized in London during the 1850s. He often found the émigrés naive or foolish. The controversies that periodically tore the community apart seemed futile and pointless to him, and the tactics even of the men he most admired he found unacceptable. Nonetheless, he joined them, and found in their midst sociability, if not the profound affection he had earlier sought from his friends. The exiles also provided a set of moral and cultural standards that helped give shape to a life that was otherwise threatened by a loss of all values. On a more practical level, the revolutionary community provided Herzen with legitimation of his own activity and with practical experience in publishing and disseminating émigré literature.

Always, however, he remained something of an outsider, the stranger, the Russian "barbarian," observing even the most sympathetic men with the unsentimental gaze of one who was not himself involved. Since he had not been a participant himself, he did not need to rationalize or defend the measures taken during the revolutionary struggle. The very absence of a Russian émigré community helped him in this; there was no "party" to establish a "party line" in interpreting events; there was no revolutionary strategy that could be harmed by a misplaced word or a too harsh and too public assessment of an ally. This disengagement from the revolutionary milieu enabled Herzen to write one of the best analyses of the French revolution of 1848, that contained in the Pis'ma series, as well as the frequently mordant portraits of the members of the international revolutionary community found in Byloe i dumy.

One Western 1848 revolutionary politician stood at least as far from his fellow exiles as did Herzen—Karl Marx. Even before revolution broke out in 1848, Marx had separated himself from the community of middle-class intellectual radicals and journalists in order to build a modern political movement. He sought primarily working-class groups,² which he then attempted to forge into obedient executors of his commands. He was uninterested in working with other middle-class theorists; they were potential rivals, and at best they confused the drive for action by offering alternative strategies and visions. We have seen that even before 1848 Marx was more likely to drive such intellectuals out of his organization than deal with them.

In Cologne during the revolutionary period, Marx's special style had matured. He had attempted, ultimately successfully, to seize control of the workers' movement from the more popular and more responsive Andreas Gottschalk, at considerable cost in bitterness. He had also insisted on complete tactical flexibility, attempting to forge an alliance with non-working class radicals and rejecting the demands from his own constituency for revolutionary purity. Ultimately he alienated not only the Cologne organization and his wouldbe liberal-democratic allies, but also even his own lieutenants who had come from London to work with him. The cost, by 1851, was the dissolution of the Communist League, the arrest of the Cologne leadership, and the splitting of the London communist organization. The same pattern would be repeated later on, most spectacularly in the case of the First International.

Marx thus failed as dismally in 1848 as all the other revolutionaries. However, he had begun the process of creating a modern, working-class party. Social Democracy, once Marx had forged it, would understand power and would be able to utilize the new political structures to organize a strong constituency and wield very considerable influence. By the time Marx died, such a party would have been created in Germany, and by the end of the nineteenth century parties heavily influenced by the Marxist and German Social Democratic example would have been established throughout Western Europe. To be sure, the socialist parties did not develop as Marx had predicted, and their very success in organizing and representing the workers may well have been a factor in the exhaustion of the revolutionary impulse in Europe. Nonetheless, it is Marx's imprint that the modern socialist movement bears.

Herzen and Marx—this unbalanced pair continues to force comparisons. Both lived for over a decade in London, at times not more than a mile or two apart. Both stood apart from the enthusiasms and the squabbles of the main émigré groups. Both also stood apart from Mazzini's attempts to establish émigré organizations, and they both rejected the Italian's old-fashioned liberal nationalism. Both saw the motive force of revolutionary change coming from the exploited depths of society. And they refused to have anything to do with each other. Marx charged that Herzen was a Russian nationalist who called for European revitalization through a barbarian Russian invasion. On at least one occasion, he refused to share a speaker's podium with the Russian, and he was not at all pleased that his English ally Ernest Jones was also an ally of Herzen.³ Herzen charged that Marx purposely fomented the rumors that Bakunin was a Russian agent⁴ and undermined his socialist credibility by allying himself with the conservative Russophobe David Urquhart. Herzen's portrait of Marx's followers is the most biting in Byloe i dumy. One has the sense that the mutual antipathy between these two men was fueled by the fact that each felt that the other presented an alternative vision of socialist organization.

What was Herzen's alternative? Like Marx, he turned away from the maneuvering within the radical exile community; however, instead of seeking a different constituency and a more modern type of organization, as had Marx, he turned back to Russia. His mission became the one that the first wave of exiles had carried out well in the period preceding the outbreak of revolution. Fröbel had established a press to smuggle forbidden work into Germany; the poetry of Herwegh had had pride of place in this activity. Herzen's press made available to Russian readers the poetry of Pushkin and other classic writers which for political or moral reasons could not pass the censors, as well as that of his friend Ogarev. Herwegh and Ruge had attempted to create written symposia to expose the viewpoints of a variety of political thinkers who could not publish in their homeland; Herzen would accomplish this goal for Russia with Poliarnaia zvezda. The Poles and Germans in Paris had popularized their respective causes among the French politicians and journalists; Herzen did the same in London. In general, the pre-1848 emigrations had established the legitimacy of demands for democratic and socialist change in their homelands; Herzen did the same for his. In so doing, he implicitly asserted the validity of the program of middle-class, intellectual revolutionaries, while Marx's entire career repudiated that program.

The Russian dimension to his work made it unnecessary for Herzen to involve himself too deeply in émigré life. But, unlike Marx, his avoidance of the squabbles did not constitute a condemnation of the men and women who made up the exile community. On the contrary, he continued in his personal life to be a traditional middle-class intellectual radical who operated through the written word and social interaction, not political organization. He shunned hierarchical organizations, seeking instead egalitarian communities. He acknowledged the norms of the radical subculture and contributed to elaborating the sense that this culture possessed its own mores and values that were more rational and humane than those of surrounding Victorianism. Russian backwardness meant that there was a fruitful field of work for a tough-minded survivor who retained the ideals of a gentler, more romantic age.

Notes

¹ In 1861, Tolstoi told Proudhon of Herzen's desire to return; Herzen responded, "I do not think at all about going into the bear's mouth. Probably Count Tolstoy has taken my castles in Spain for castles on the banks of the Volga" ( Herzen to Proudhon, in Mervaud, "Six Letters," p. 314).

² I am deliberately avoiding the term proletariat. Marx, of course, believed that revolution would come from the organized industrial workers, whom he called the proletariat. There are two problems with this usage. First, it appears to be a rather idiosyncratic definition used by some Saint-Simonians and by Marx, but not generally accepted. For other socialist thinkers of the time, the word meant the poorest and most oppressed of the poor, without regard to the source of their income; in actual fact, these would more likely be artisans, especially in decaying crafts, than industrial workers. Marx's Lumpenproletariat seems rather closer to the contemporary meaning of proletariat. (On the Saint-Simonian use of proletariat to mean industrial workers, see James Briscoe, "The Unfinished Revolution: The Saint-Simonians and the Social Question—Origins of Socialist Debate in the July Monarchy," The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, Proceedings [1984], pp. 235-37.) Second, Marx's own groups were more often made up of artisans than of industrial workers.

³ It is a measure of the hostility of Marx and Engels toward Herzen that Engels felt one of their friends had failed in his responsibility by allowing an article of Herzen's to be published in an English newspaper. Marx did not argue with Engels's desire for censorship, but pointed out that the friend in question worked for a different newspaper, and thus was not to blame for the article appearing (Engels to Marx, April 21, 1854; Marx to Engels, April 22, 1854, in Marx and Engels, Werke 28:344-46).

⁴Sobranie sochinenii 11:158-60, recalls an episode in 1853; see also Marx to Engels, September 3 and 28, 1853, in Marx and Engels, Werke 28:280-84, 295. There was another episode in 1862.