February 21, 2011
“No. What?”
“The French have driven away Louis Philippe and proclaimed the Republic!”
Schurz abandoned his manuscript and jumped enthusiastically into the stream of history. When he ran into the marketplace with other young men, he asked himself, “What did we want there? This probably no one knew. But since the French had driven away Louis Philippe and proclaimed the Republic, something of course must happen here, too.” His insight was like that of the Egyptian students who converged on Tahrir Square after the Tunisians” victory. Schurz wrote, “We were dominated by a vague feeling as if a great outbreak of elemental forces had begun, as if an earthquake was impending of which we had felt the first shock, and we instinctively crowded together.”
The 2011 Middle Eastern revolutions followed sudden spikes in food prices, with the cost of wheat in Egypt rising nearly 70 percent over the past year, that made basic necessities unaffordable for the great majority of people who are not living on lavish state contracts from their powerful friends. Similarly, crop failures and famines in 1846 and 1847 (remembered today by those of us whose ancestors fled Ireland’s Great Potato Famine of 1847, or as my great-grandmother called it, “the year of the black rain”) compelled masses of people to overthrow their incompetent rulers in 1848. The revolution spread from France to the German states to Rome (from which the Pope fled to Genoa), as well as to Venice, Vienna, Hungary, the Balkans, Ireland’s County Tipperary, and even Brazil. Yet it did not last. France, having established the Second Republic, elected Louis-Napoléon president. He returned to monarchy with himself as emperor in 1852.
After constitutional forces fell at Rastatt, Schurz fled to France, Britain, and finally the United States. Like many of his German comrades who found refuge in the young American republic, he campaigned for slavery’s abolition. One of Germany’s greatest patriots became one of America’s greatest statesmen, fighting as a general in the Union Army and becoming a newspaper editor (who gave a job to another young German named Joseph Pulitzer) and Secretary of the Interior.
Schurz amended the American jingoist slogan “My country right or wrong” by adding, “if right, to be kept right; if wrong, to be set right.” Another German of the 1848 generation took a different lesson from that year’s revolutions. Seeing that the revolutionaries” internal divisions left them weakened and vulnerable to reactionary forces, he became disillusioned with democracy. His name was Karl Marx.
