Today in Labor History May 3, 1849: A popular rebellion broke out in Dresden, with the militant Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin emerging as a leader. He was imprisoned in the Konigstein fortress and condemned to death. He eventually was released. Composer Richard Wagner also participated. He fled to Switzerland to avoid arrest. The Dresden Rebellion was one of the last in the series of uprisings and revolutions that broke out across Europe in the late 1840s. The revolutions, also known as the Springtime of the People, opposed monarchy, serfdom and feudalism. It was the most widespread wave of uprisings in European history, affecting 50 countries. The combatants ranged from those fighting for liberal bourgeois democracy and universal suffrage for propertied men; to radicals who wanted universal suffrage for all men; to socialists, and communists (including Karl Marx), and anarchists, like Bakunin. Over 230 died in the fighting in Dresden, with hundreds more captured and imprisoned. Overall, however, thousands were killed or imprisoned, and tens of thousands were exiled.
Many of the German revolutionaries fled to the U.S. and became part of the immigrant generation known as Forty-Eighters. Many continued their radical activism in the U.S. In the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati, they participated in the riot of 1853, in which they violently protested the visit of the papal emissary Cardinal Gaetano Bedini because of his repression of revolutionaries in the Papal States during the Revolutions of 1848-1849. Many participated in the Wide Awakes movement, a paramilitary group aligned with Abraham Lincoln’s Radical Republicans. They opposed slavery, seeing it as the moral equivalent of the feudalism and serfdom they had fought against in Europe. They fought street battles with confederates. And in Saint Louis, in 1861, they participated in the Camp Jackson Affair, when Union-affiliated militias opened fire and massacred secessionists who were attempting to raid the Saint Louis Arsenal. Some of the Forty-Eighters who settled in the U.S. include the sociologist Max Weber; the journalist and publisher Henry Boernstein, who had previously worked with Marx on the radical newspaper Vorwärts, in Paris; Wilhelm Weitling, one of the early proponents of communism; Pauline Wunderlich, one of the small group of women who fought at the barricades alongside the men; and Carl Schurz, who would go on to become Secretary of the Interior.
For more on the Forty-Eighters, read here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/27/the-wide-awakes-and-the-antebellum-roots-of-wokeness/
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