Did the newly released Communist Manifesto have any influence on the Revolutions of 1848?

by Cyaned

Curious what effect Marx and socialist/communist theorists had on the often overlooked revolutionary wave of 1848. Seems like it would've been a great time with enough turmoil and unsatisfied masses to boost a communist state into power.

Talleyrayand

Not really, no. The Manifesto was published in London in February 1848, and the first wave of uprisings began in Paris that same month. At the time, Marx and Engels were head of a small group of German ex-pats living in Great Britain that published a newspaper with a small readership. The Manifesto is more a product of the times than a shaper of them. Later, the ideas outlined in it would become incredibly influential, but not really until the late 19th and early 20th century. In the Manifesto Marx does predict workers' revolution, so you could say it was prescient in that regard. However, he had to explain why that revolution didn't turn out the way he said it would a mere four years later.

To get at a different point, though - many historians would hesitate to characterize the revolutions of 1848 as "working class" revolutions. Jonathan Sperber's book is the best one on the subject, and he claims that the revolutions were many ways the product of several developments. One of the most important though, was a middle-class frustration with being cut out from the realm of political power (no European countries had universal male suffrage at the time). The 1848 revolutions - at least in many of their most important political forms - were as much revolutions of the bourgeoisie as they were of the proletariat.

Sperber also has a biography of Marx that I would highly recommend.