Johann Philipp Becker

#PUBLICATION NOTE

This edition of Johann Philipp Becker has been prepared and revised for digital publication by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism under the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Switzerland on the basis of the edition published in the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, First English Edition, Volume 26, Lawrence & Wishart, London.

#INTRODUCTION NOTE

This is an obituary written by Comrade Friedrich Engels in London, England, United Kingdom for Comrade Johann Philipp Becker on the 9th of December, 1886. It was first published in Der Sozialdemokrat, No. 51, 17th of December, 1886.

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#JOHANN PHILIPP BECKER

#Friedrich Engels

#9th of December, 1886

#★

Death has torn another hole in the ranks of the champions of the proletarian revolution. Johann Philipp Becker died in Geneva on the 7th of December.

Born at Frankenthal in the Bavarian Palatinate in 1809, he took part in the political movement of his native region back in the 1820s, when little more than a child. When this movement became republican in character in the early 1830s, after the July Revolution, Becker was one of its most active and stalwart supporters. Several times arrested, brought before a jury, and acquitted, when reaction triumphed, he eventually held to flee. He went to Switzerland, settled in Bienne, and took Swiss citizenship. He did not remain idle there, either. He was involved, not only in the affairs of the German workers' associations and the revolutionary endeavours of the German, Italian, and European refugees in general, but also in the struggle of the Swiss democrats for control of the individual cantons. It will be recalled that this struggle was waged by means of a series of armed raids on the aristocratic and clerical cantons, particularly in the early 1840s. Becker was implicated to a greater or lesser extent in most of these «coups» and was finally sentenced to ten years' banishment from his home canton of Berne on this account. These minor campaigns eventually culminated in the War Against the Special League in 1847. Becker, who was an officer in the Swiss army, took up his post and, during the march on Lucerne, led the advance guard of the division to which he was assigned.

The February Revolution of 1848 broke out; there ensued attempts to republicanize Baden by means of campaigns by volunteer corps. When Hecker launched his campaign,¹ Becker formed a refugees' legion, but was not able to get to the border until Hecker had already been pushed back. This legion, most members of which were subsequently interned in France, provided the nucleus for some of the best units in the armies of the Palatinate and Baden in 1849.

When the republic was proclaimed in Rome in the spring of 1849,² Becker sought to form an auxiliary corps from this legion to fight on the side of Rome. He went to Marseilles, set up the officer cadre, and took steps to gather together the troops. But, as we well know, the French government was preparing to suppress the Roman Republic and bring back the Pope.³ It went without saying that the French government prevented the auxiliaries from coming to the aid of its Roman adversaries. Becker, who had already hired a ship, was informed in no uncertain terms that it would be sent to the bottom as soon as it made any more to leave harbour.

Revolution then broke out in Germany.⁴ Becker immediately hurried to Karlsruhe; the legion followed, and later took part in the struggle under Böning's leadership, while another section of the old legion of 1848, trained by Willich in Besançon, formed the nucleus of Willich's volunteer corps. Becker was appointed head of the entire Baden people's militia, that is to say, all troops except troops of the line, and at once set about organizing it. He immediately came up against the government, and its leader, Brentano. His orders were countermanded, his requests for arms and equipment left unheeded or turned down flat. The attempt on the 6th of June to intimidate the government by a show of revolutionary armed strength, an attempt in which Becker was a major participant, proved indecisive;⁵ but Becker and his troops were then sent posthaste from Karlsruhe to the Neckar to face the enemy.

There, the battle had already started in a small way, and the decisive moment was rapidly approaching. With his volunteers and militia members, Becker occupied the Odenwald forest. Without artillery and cavalry, he was obliged to waste his few troops holding this extensive and awkward area, and not enough was left at his disposal to mount an attack. Nonetheless, on the 15th of June, he relieved, in a brilliantly fought action, his Hanau Gymnasts,⁶ who had been surrounded in Hirschhorn Castle by Peucker's Imperial troops.

When Mieroslawski became commander-in-chief of the revolutionary army, Becker was given command of the Fifth Division — nothing but militia members and infantry — with orders to resist Peucker's corps, which outnumered Becker's division by at least six to one. But shortly afterward came the crossing of the Rhine by the first Prussian corps at Gemersheim, Mieroslawski's countermove, and the defeat at Waghäusel on the 21st of June. Becker occupied Heidelberg; the second Prussian corps under Gröben advanced from the north, from the north-east came Peucker's corps, each more than 20'000 strong, while to the south-west were Hirschfeld's Prussians, likewise more than 20'000 strong. And then the refugees from Waghäusel — the entire Baden army, both troops of the line and militia members — poured into Heidelberg to make an enormous detour through the mountains and rejoin the road to Karlsruhe and Rastatt, which was blocked to them in the plain.

Becker was supposed to cover this retreat — with his newly recruited, untrained troops and as usual without cavalry or artillery. At 20:00 on the 22nd, after allowing the refugees an adequate start, he marched from Heidelberg to Neckargemünd, where he rested for a few hours. Arriving on the 23rd at Sinsheim, where he again gave his troops a few hours' rest in battle formation in the face of the enemy, he reached Eppingen the same evening, and, on the 24th, he marched via Bretten to Durlach, arriving at 20:00 only to become tangled up again in the disorderly retreat of the now united Palatinate-Baden army. Here Becker was also given command of the remnants of the Palatinate troops, and was now expected, not only to cover Mieroslawski's retreat, but also to hold Durlach long enough for Karlsruhe to be evacuated. As always, he was again left without any artillery, since the artillery assigned to him had already marched off.

Becker hastily fortified Durlach as well as he could, and was attacked the very next morning (26th of June) on three sides by two Prussian divisions and Peucker's Imperial troops. He not only repulsed all the attacks, but also launched several counter-attacks, although he had only small arms to pit against the enemy's artillery fire, and, after four fours' fighting, withdrew in perfect order, unchecked by the columns dispatched to outflank him, after receiving word that Karlsruhe had been evacuated and his mission accomplished.

This must be the most briliant episode in the entire Baden-Palatinate Campaign. With soldiers, most of whom had only been in the army for two to three weeks and who, as completely raw recruits, had been given a perfunctory training by improvised officers and non-commissioned officers and hardly had a trace of discipline, Becker carried out, as the rearguard of the beaten and half-dispersed armies, a march of more than 80 kilometres in 48 hours, starting straight away with a night march, bringing them right through the enemy to Durlach in a fit state to offer the Prussians, the next morning, one of the few engagements of the campaign in which the battle objective of the revolutionary army was achieved in full. It was an achievement that would do credit to experienced troops and, in the case of such young soldiers, is extremely rare and praiseworthy.

Having reached the Murg, Becker came to a halt with his division east of Rastatt and played an honourable part in the battles of the 29th and 30th of June. The outcome is well-known: the enemy, six times superior in strength, marched around the position through the territory of Württemberg and then rolled it back from the right flank. The campaign was now formally settled and ended of necessity with the withdrawal of the revolutionary army to Swiss territory.

Until then, Becker had acted basically as an ordinary democratic republican; but, from now on, he went considerably further. Closer acquaintance with the German «pure republicans», particularly the southern German ones, and his experience in the Revolution of 1849, demonstrated to him that the matter would have to be tackled differently in the future. The strong proletarian sympathies that Becker had entertained since his youth now assumed a more tangible form; he had realized that, while the bourgeoisie always formed the core of the reactionary political parties, only the proletariat could form the core of a genuinely revolutionary force. The Communist by sentiment became a conscious Communist.

Once again, he attempted to set up a voluntary corps; it was in 1860, after Garibaldi's victorious march on Sicily. He travelled from Geneva to Genoa to make the preparations in collaboration with Garibaldi. But Garibaldi's rapid progress and the intervention of the Italian army, which was to secure the fruits of victory for the monarchy, brought the campaign to an end. Meanwhile, there were widespread expectations of another war with Austria next year. It is common knowledge that Russia sought to use Louis Napoleon and Italy to consummate the Russian revenge on Austria, which had remained incomplete in 1859. The Italian government sent a high-ranking officer from the general staff to see Becker in Genoa, offering him the rank of colonel in the Italian army, a splendid salary, and an allowance, and command over a legion to be formed by him in the war that was expected, provided he agreed to make propaganda in Germany for Italy and against Austria. But the proletarian Becker turned the offer down; the service of princes was not for him.

That was his last attempt as a volunteer. Soon after, the International Workers' Association was established, and Becker was among its founders; he was present at the famous meeting in St. Martin's Hall that saw the birth of the International.⁷ He organized the German-speaking and native workers of Romand Switzerland, founded the Vorbote [Herald] as the group's journal, attended all the congresses of the International, and was in the vanguard of the struggle against the Bakuninite Anarchists of the Alliance of Socialist Democracy⁸ and Swiss Jura.

After the disintegration of the International, there was less opportunity for Becker to play a public role. But he always remained, nevertheless, in the midst of the working-class movement and continued to exert his influence on its development through his extensive correspondence and by virtue of the many visits he received in Geneva. In 1882, he played host to Marx for a day, and, as recently as this September, the 77-year-old undetook a journey through the Palatinate and Belgium to London and Paris, during which I had the pleasure of having him to stay for two weeks and talking over old times and new with him. And scarcely two months later, the telegraph brings news of his death!

Becker was a rare kind of person. He can be epitomized in a nutshell: hale and hearty. In body and mind, he was hale and hearty to the end. A giant of a man, of tremendous physical strength and handsome with it, he had developed his untutored, but far from uncultivated mind, thanks to a fortunate disposition and healthy activity, as harmoniously as his body. He was one of the few persons who, to do the right thing, only need to follow their own instinct. That was why it was so easy for him to keep pace with every development of the revolutionary movement and to stand in the front rank in his 78th year as fresh as when he was 18. The boy who had played with cossacks passing through in 1814 and seen Sand (who stabbed Kotzebue to death) executed in 1820, advanced further and further from the vague oppositional figure of the 1820s and was still fully abreast of the movement in 1886. Yet he was no gloomy timeserver like most of the «very serious» republicans of 1848, but a true child of the joyful Palatinate, full of life and as fond of wine, sex, and song as the next person. Having grown up in the land of the Song of the Nibelungs⁹ around Worms, he still looked like one of the figures from our old epic, even in old age: light-hearted yet sardonic, calling to his opponent between sword blows, composing popular ballads if there was no one to beat — this, and no other ways, is how Volker the Fiddler must have looked!

But his greatest talent was undoubtedly military. In Baden, he accomplished much more than anyone else. While the other officers, raised in the school of standing armies, found outlandish, almost unmanageable soldier material here, Becker had learned all his organizational skill, tactics, and strategy in the outrageous school of the Swiss militia. A people's army was nothing strange to him, its inevitable shortcomings nothing new. Where others despaired or raged, Becker remained calm and found one solution after another; he knew how to handle his soldiers, cheering them up with a jest, and finally had them in his hand. Many a Prussian general of 1870 might envy him the march from Heidelberg to Durlach with a division of almost nothing but untrained recruits, who still remained capable of going straight into battle and giving a good account of themselves. And, in the same engagement, he threw into battle the until then intractable Palatinate troops that had been assigned to him, and even got them to attack in open country. In Becker, we have lost the only German revolutionary general we had.

He was a person who took part, with distinction, in the freedom struggles of three generations.

But the workers will honour his memory as one of their best!

#Friedrich Engels

#London

#9th of December, 1886