“France had required the whole period from 1789 to 1792 to assemble Dumouriez’ army, which disintegrated; Hungary had needed the period of March, 1848, to the middle of 1849 to field an organized army. Engels concluded that “precisely the factor that enabled Napoleon to form gigantic armies rapidly, namely good cadres, is necessarily lacking in any revolution (even in France)” (32). Engels never regained his lost faith in the military invincibility of a popular rising. “National enthusiasm”, he wrote in 1866, “is a capital thing to work upon, but until disciplined and organized, nobody can win battles with it. “Revolutions created disorder, and disorder was incompatible with military effectiveness. The Sepoy rebels, “a motley crew of mutineering soldiers who [had] murdered their own officers, torn asunder the bonds of discipline”, and established no unified command, were dismissed in 1857 as “certainly the body least likely to organize a serious and protracted resistance” (33). The legend of 1793 took its place among the optimistic illusions that the scientific socialists delighted in exposing. When in 1870 Gambetta attempted a ‘levée en masse’, Engels could consider that his predictions of 1851 had been confirmed. There were not enough officers; once the regular armies were lost, as in the capitulation of Metz, it became “extremely difficult to turn crowds of men into companies and battalions of soldiers”. Engels continued: “Whoever has seen popular levies on the drill-ground or under fire – be they Baden Freischaaren, Bull-Run Yankees, French Mobiles, or British Volunteers – will have perceived at once that the chief cause of the helplessness und unsteadiness of these troops lies in the fact of the officers not knowing their duty; and in this present case in France who is there to teach them their duty?” (34)” Martin Berger, Engels, Armies, and Revolution. The Revolutionary Tactics of Classical Marxism’, Connecticut, 1977] [(32) To Marx, Sept. 26, 1851, 27, 355; (33) “Notes on the War, No. III”, Manchester Guardian, June, 28, 1866, EMC, 133; “The Revolt in INdia”, Tribune, Aug. 4, 1857, FIWI, 44. Edmond Laskine uses quotations of this sort to prove to his satisfaction that Engels and Marx really opposed revolution. ‘L’Internationale et le pangermanisme’ (Paris, H. Floury, 1916), 74-78; (34) “The Fall of Metz”, Pall Mall Gazette, Oct. 29, 1870, Notes on the War: Sixty Articles reprinted from the “Pall Mall Gazette”, 1870-1871, ed. Friedrich Adler (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1923), 78-79]
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- Articolo pubblicato:28 Febbraio 2016