tria, Hungary and Germany over the patriotic,
liberal or democratic revolution. The bourgeoisie on its side had
overcome the proletarians of France and England. The indispensable
conditions for the development of a democratic and proletarian movement
suddenly disappeared. The battalion small in numbers indeed of the
Manifesto communists who had taken part in the revolution and who had
participated in all the acts of resistance and popular rebellion against
reaction saw its activity crushed by the memorable process of Cologne.
The survivors of the movement tried to make a new start at London, but
soon Marx, Engels and others separated themselves from the
revolutionaries and retired from the movement. The crisis was passed. A
long period of repose followed. This was shown by the slow disappearance
of the Chartist movement, that is to say, the proletarian movement of
the country which was the spinal column of the capitalist system.
History had for the moment discredited the illusions of the
revolutionaries.

Before giving himself almost entirely to the long incubation of the
already discovered elements of the critique of political economy, Marx
illustrated in several works the history of the revolutionary period
from 1848 to 1850 and especially the class struggles in France, showing
thus that if the revolution in the forms which it had taken on at that
moment had not succeeded, the revolutionary theory of history was not
contradicted for all that.[12] The suggestions given in the Manifesto
found here their complete development.

Later the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte[13] was the first attempt to
apply the new conception of history to a series of facts contained
within precise limits of time. It is extremely difficult to rise from
the apparent movement to the real movement of history and to discover
their intimate connection. There are indeed great difficulties in rising
from the phenomena of passion, oratory, Parliaments, elections and the
like to the inner social gearing to discover in the latter the different
interests of the large and small bourgeois, of the peasants, the
artisans, the laborers, the priests, the soldiers, the bankers, the
usurers and the mob. All these interests act consciously or
unconsciously, jostling each other, eliminating each other, combining
and fusing, in the discordant life of civilized man.

The crisis was passed and this was precisely true in the countries which
constituted the histor