The Bourgeois Revolution

In English history, the 17th century was a crucial one insofar as it saw the ending of the Middle Ages. During the previous century, new commercial routes to the Far East had been opened up along with the “discovery” of new colonial possibilities in America, and in Europe itself there had been demographic growth accompanied by monetary inflation. Only Holland, the sole European country where the bourgeoisie has risen to power at that time, managed to overcome the crisis with ease, and indeed to emerge from it extremely prosperous. Its commercial predomination however would only last until its competitors in other countries, with richer natural resources and higher populations, had managed to throw off the chains of feudalism. Out of all the European powers it was England that would make the greatest leap forward, and lay the basis for it to become the first big industrialized imperialist power with a pre-eminent role in global policy and economy; a position it would maintain for three centuries.

The two enemy camps which faced each other at the start of the 17th century in England had been formed (as we saw in the last instalment) in the previous century on the back of what Marx called “primitive accumulation”.

The monarchy, secure in its control of political and military power but continually in search of new sources of finance, had the backing of the traditional big feudal nobility, which had been ridden with crises for some time, and the official clergy, whose power was waning in the countryside and whose spiritual authority was continually being undermined by the rise of mainly Calvinist “non-conformist” sects.

In what we will call the bourgeois camp there was, on the contrary, an assemblage of different strata and interests which were in a state of growth, and which were actively accumulating money and claiming the right to be able to spend it how they chose. There were the big merchants, ship owners (mainly Londoners) and bankers on the one hand, whilst on the other there was the landed gentry, i.e. the medium and big agrarian bourgeoisie which had arisen after the dissolution of the monasteries, and which whilst often emanating from the lesser nobility nevertheless displayed a purely bourgeois and commercial mentality.

«The only explanation M. Guizot is able to offer of what to him is a great puzzle, the puzzle of why the English Revolution was conservative in character, is that it was due to the superior intelligence of the English, whereas its conservatism is to be attributed to the permanent alliance between the bourgeoisie and the greater part of the big landlords, an alliance which essentially differentiates the English Revolution from the French – the revolution that abolished big landownership by parcellation. Unlike the French feudal landowners of 1789, this class of big landed proprietors, which had allied itself with the bourgeoisie and which, incidentally, had already risen under Henry VIII, was not antagonistic to but rather in complete accord with the conditions of life of the bourgeoisie. In actual fact their landed estates were not feudal but bourgeois property. On the other hand, the landed proprietors placed at the disposal of the industrial bourgeoisie the people necessary to operate its manufactories and, on the other, were in a position to develop agriculture in accordance with the state of industry and trade. Hence their common interests with the bourgeoisie; hence their alliance with it» (Marx, [Review of] Guizot, 1850).

Naturally, the dividing line between the factions that fought with each other during the 1640s wasn’t clear-cut, and there was no shortage of renegades switching from one side to the other. There was also a geographical division which resulted in the North and the west of England being more realist, whilst the South and East, and most of the ports (all zones engaged in commerce, manufacture or mining), along with London, were predominantly supporters of Parliament. But particular individuals aside, the class interests of the contending factions were those described above.

The troops, the cannon fodder of the revolution, were principally drawn from the countryside, where the majority of the population still resided. It should however be noted that amongst the parliamentarians, and this was the big power of the bourgeoisie, there were numerous sons of the minor peasantry, tenants, artisans, and the small and micro-bourgeoisie who, born from the collapse of feudalism, thought themselves to be defending their own future by struggling against the aristocracy.

«Curiously enough, in all the three great bourgeois risings, the peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and the peasantry is just the class that, the victory once gained, is most surely ruined by the economic consequences of that victory. A hundred years after Cromwell, the yeomanry of England had almost disappeared. Anyhow, had it not been for that Yeomanry and for the plebeian element in the towns, the bourgeoisie alone would never have fought the matter out to the bitter end, and would never have brought Charles 1 to the scaffold. In order to secure even those conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering at the time, the revolution had to be carried considerably further – exactly as in 1793 in France and 1848 in Germany. This seems, in fact, to be one of the laws of evolution of bourgeois society» (Engels, Socialism; Utopian and Scientific).

In the 1600s, proletarians (labourers, workers, servants, the poor and other propertyless classes) only really constituted a class in the statistical sense, even though it is estimated that they represented around half the population. They didn’t therefore appear as a political force in the revolution, or only insofar as they exerted influence indirectly on the parties in struggle, who would make decisions based on their fears about the unrest which could follow if the economic situation became insupportable. There are in this period however (and even before) the first signs of workers’ associations, of mutual aid societies, of co-operatives, occurring mainly (the Cornish tin miners for instance) in those rare instances where there was significant concentration of workers.

The chronicle of the reigns of James 1 and Charles 1 is a continual trial of strength between the Crown, constrained to govern in a world that for any enterprise whatsoever required increasingly large sums of money, and those who possessed this wealth, the emerging middle classes, who before releasing the purse-strings sought recognition of their right to be involved in decisions about how the money would be spent. Hence parliament, which was increasingly coming to represent the moneyed classes, tended to increasingly arrogate to itself the power to make decisions in the realms of public spending, foreign relations, commerce, domestic politics, and religion in order to shape the country to its requirements.

Constantly short of money, the monarchy, which was one of the worst off in Europe, counted on irregular taxations, which in order to be exacted promptly required the support of parliament, that is the bourgeoisie. And it was the bourgeoisie’s reluctance to pay up which pushed the king towards governing without parliament, and therefore towards a growing despotism. James 1 reasserted the theory of the Divine Right of Kings, in other words, independent power for the Executive, but in practice managed to co-exist with parliament. Charles 1, however, wasn’t quite as astute: by means of arrests and arbitrary imprisonment he managed to impose the taxation he required without parliamentary consensus, and without parliament he attempted to reign. Even in religious matters despotism tried to defend the church of England against the “puritan” heresies, and the elimination of their priests, the raising of tithes, and the theological measures which tended to make Anglicanism much more similar to Catholicism had among other things the consequence of favouring puritan emigration to America (as in the famous Mayflower episode).

During the period 1629 to 1640 Parliament wasn’t convoked, and Charles 1 was constrained to enact a series of unpopular measures to raise money; measures which enraged the bourgeoisie even further but who, through lack of organisation with the exception perhaps of London, were unable to do anything about it. The regime hobbled along at this stage rather well (notwithstanding the fact that it was increasingly difficult to raise taxes from a bourgeoisie which judged them to be illegal) but it lived in such an unstable equilibrium that it needed just one more incident to tip the balance. That incident materialised in the war against Scotland, and Charles 1 was forced to convoke Parliament in 1640, then three weeks later he dissolved it (the short parliament) and then in November of the same year he was compelled to convoke it again (the Long Parliament).

This time, thanks to the uprisings in the countryside against the enclosures and mass demonstrations in London, the bourgeoisie managed to gain better representation in the Parliament and impose its first measures on the King: destruction of the bureaucratic apparatus, negation of the formation of an army controlled by the King, abolition of illegal taxation, and control over the church by Parliament.

The Irish revolt in 1641 caused the crisis to come to a head: the refusal of parliament to entrust an army to Charles 1 caused an internal split between the progressives and the realists, the latter representing the classes which had most to lose if the social order was overturned.

In London, a new wave of popular uprisings (merchants, artisans, apprentices) provided the Progressives with the courage to denounce the king in the “Grand Remonstrance”, an indictment which was approved by parliament and then published and distributed. The king tried to arrest the parliamentary leaders, but then fled with his followers to the north.

The Civil War had begun. The puritans, lacking a revolutionary programme, would nevertheless be the agents which unleashed the revolution: to defend their conquests in parliament they would have to defend them by force, until it became clear that the rising social-economic order which was taking shape was incompatible with the established order; to turn back would have been fatal, so they pressed on, lacking consciousness but backed up by the unstoppable weight of the gigantic economic forces which were gestating in society, and which were staking a claim to shape the world according to its needs. Cromwell himself confided in a friend that he didn’t know where it was all going, but it had to keep going forward.

Military operations commenced in the summer of 1642 after the two parties had managed to organise their armies. This was more difficult for parliament at the start since they lacked sufficient officers (nobles), but they had nevertheless an invincible weapon: money. Also, the ports and the Navy came over to the bourgeoisie almost immediately, which made it difficult for the king to receive assistance from abroad. After initial setbacks, parliament managed to equip itself with an army that was much more modern as well as strong numerically (the New Model Army). Trotski has described this phase of the revolution very well in Where is Britain Going?

«In the England of the 1640s we see a parliament based upon the most whimsical franchise, which at the same time regarded itself as the representative organ of the people.
The lower house represented the nation in that it represented the bourgeoisie and thereby the national wealth. In the reign of Charles I it was found, and not without amazement, that the House of Commons was three times richer than the House of Lords. The king now dissolved this parliament and now recalled it according to the pressure of financial need. Parliament created an army for its defence. The army gradually concentrated in its ranks all the most active, courageous and resolute elements. As a direct consequence of this, parliament capitulated to this army. We say: as a direct consequence of this. By this we mean that parliament capitulated not simply to armed force (it had not capitulated to the king’s army) but to Cromwell’s puritan army, which expressed the requirements of the revolution more boldly, more resolutely, and more consistently than did parliament.
The adherents of the Episcopal or Anglican, semi-Catholic Church were the party of the court, the nobility and of course the higher clergy. The Presbyterians were the party of the bourgeoisie, the party of wealth and enlightenment. The Independents, and the Puritans especially, were the party of the petty bourgeoisie and small landed proprietors. The Levellers were the party of the left-wing of the bourgeoisie, the plebeians. Wrapped up in ecclesiastical controversies, in the form of a struggle over the religious structure of the church, there took place social determination of classes and their re-grouping along new, bourgeois lines. Politically the Presbyterian party stood for a limited monarchy; the Independents, who then were called root and branch men or in the language of our day, radical, stood for a republic. The half-way position of the presbyterians fully corresponded to the contradictory interests of the bourgeoisie – between the nobility and the plebeians. The independents party which dared to carry its ideas and slogans through to their conclusion naturally displaced the presbyterians among the wakening petty-bourgeois masses in the towns and countryside that formed the main force of the revolution (…).
Any historical analogies demand the greatest caution especially when we are dealing with the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries; yet nonetheless one cannot help being struck by some distinct features that bring the regime and the character of Cromwell’s army and the character of the red Army close together. Admittedly, then everything was founded upon faith in predestination and upon a strict religious morality; now with us militant atheism reigns supreme. But running beneath the religious form of Puritanism there was the preaching of the historical mission of a new class, and the teaching on predestination was a religious approach to an historical pattern. Cromwell’s fighters felt themselves to be in the first place puritans and only in the second place soldiers, just as our fighters acknowledge themselves to be above all revolutionaries and communists and only then soldiers. But the points of divergence are even greater than the points of similarity. The Red Army formed by the party of the proletariat remains its armed organ. Cromwell’s army, which also embodied his party, became itself the decisive force».

Cromwell’s army wasn’t a confessional one however, and in fact within it there was far greater religious tolerance than in society at large. «The State, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies» Cromwell would say.

The officers, who often came from the poorest backgrounds, built their careers on their merits alone. The drilling and training was rigorous and an iron discipline prevailed, and the Ironsides would emerge as the diamond spearhead of Cromwell’s army, revolutionising cavalry warfare in the process.

In 1646, shortly before the end of the war, and after a run of brilliant victories which put Cromwell’s forces into an increasingly strong position (and during which providence always took the side of the heavier battalions) Cromwell himself returned to being a simple parliamentarian.

The Presbyterians, who represented the right-wing of the bourgeoisie and had been subjected to the will of the Left for many years, were victorious in parliament and happy with what had been achieved. For them it was now a question of getting back to business in a quiet environment, and this required amongst other things at least partial demobilisation of the army, which, as well as being costly, had become a breeding ground for extremists and sectarians.

But the niggardliness and arrogance with which this manoeuvre was attempted (they didn’t want to pay the soldiers their back pay) caused a widespread rebellion amongst the veterans who for four years had fought for the fat London merchants. First in the cavalry and then in the infantry divisions councils of deputies – known as “agitators” – were elected; a type of forerunner of the soviets.

Within these councils, the influence of the Levellers, a movement with a strong power base in the army, was a determining factor.

The Levellers were maybe the first real party of the modern epoch. By means of a number of eminent theoreticians and leaders (Lilburne, Walwyn, Winstanley etc.) it gave itself a democratic political programme which was so advanced that it wouldn’t have done badly as a programme of a bourgeois party of the 19th century.

The Levellers, who were the mouthpiece of the small and middle artisan and peasant bourgeoisie, unconsciously represented the truly revolutionary spirit of the Civil War. As well as contingent demands, the programme of the Levellers party included a number of other demands: universal suffrage, for all men who had reached their majority who were not “of servile condition” (revealing the class boundaries of this popular movement since “of servile condition” referred to all those dependent on an employer; wage-earners); local self-government; the most complete religious tolerance; freedom of speech, press and assembly; an end to the standing army and obligatory conscription; separation between Church and State; taxation related to earnings; and abolition of tithes, etc, etc.

Winstanley went even further and advocated the abolition of internal custom duties, universal education, state monopoly on foreign trade (one of the first measures taken by the Soviet Government in 1917), and even went so far as theorising a kind of socialist society.

Within the movement ideas and potentialities were unleashed which up until then had been repressed; there were theorisers of atheism (indicator of the extreme freedom of thought of the revolutionary years of 1642-1653); there were movements for the reappropriation of uncultivated and expropriated land, (the Diggers), an isolated example (of brief duration) of an organisation which proletarians could join; and most controversial of all perhaps were the warlike women who appeared on the political scene. This animated spirit resulting from the bourgeois revolution enjoyed a brief, exciting period, during which the group in power were forced to take notice of it; to the extent that in 1647 Cromwell himself sided with the rebel army, which at that time constituted an indomitable force.

Cromwell and his group of independents adopted an attitude during this period which whilst most suited to preventing the revolution from taking too radical a course, at the same time defended it from the internal forces of disintegration of the Presbyterians, who feared the revolution would go further than they liked and push them off the edge of the precipice.

Thus the movement in the army was channelled towards less subversive objectives, whilst at the same time allowing the agitators to capture the king without anyone batting an eyelid: Cromwell set himself at the head of the army in 1647 but didn’t hesitate to repress the troops’ most radical spokesmen; up to 1648 even Cromwell supported the king returning to the throne, but towards the end of the year he purged parliament and then conducted a ruthless campaign that ended with the beheading of Charles I, whereupon the war was resumed against the Realists and the Scottish.

The problem of the king having been resolved once and for all, and the break with the past having been accomplished (at least temporarily), it appeared evident to Cromwell that it was the Presbyterians who represented the bourgeois interest, and he effected a reconciliation with them in 1649 whilst at the same time, with another abrupt change of front, he arranged to settle accounts once and for all with the Levellers inside the army, who had started to accuse him of being a dictator. The arrests and executions of May ’49 were the signal to the big bourgeoisie that private property was safe, and that Cromwell could be considered their man.

With the country pacified, Cromwell dedicated himself to foreign affairs, that is, to the conquest of Ireland. This subject is too broad to discuss in depth here, but suffice to recall a letter Engels wrote to Marx in 1869: «things would have taken another turn in England but for the necessity for military rule in Ireland and the creation of a new aristocracy there»; and Marx «the English republic under Cromwell met shipwreck – in Ireland. Non bis in idem» (i.e. it won’t turn out the same in our revolution). Ireland was the first English colony, and its existence has always, in the history of England, had the effect of castrating all progressive movements, the democratic movement first and the proletarian movement second. «Irish history shows one how disastrous it is for a nation when it has subjugated another nation» wrote Engels to Marx; «The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland» wrote Marx to Engels. Later Engels would generalise «No people that oppresses another can itself be free».

In the homeland, only the Levellers (Walwyn) opposed military intervention and made the cause of independence for the Irish their own.

* * *

By 1653, Cromwell represented only the interests of the Presbyterian whilst the purged rump of the Long Parliament considered itself the depositary of the continuity of the puritan revolution; this dualism of power Cromwell quickly put to an end and ordered the soldiers to hunt down the members of parliament that intended to continue to exercise its functions. The booting out of the members of parliament (a fact we are not scandalised by because our respect for “freely elected” parliaments is no higher than Cromwell’s) finally revealed the true nature of the bourgeois revolution in England: it was the revolution of the merchant, financial and agro-capitalist sectors, who wanted it to go no further after it had served its purpose for them.

If it served their ends, absolutism was fine as well, be it under the form of monarchy or of personal dictatorship; the important thing was that their class was in a position to make the choices in the realm of political economy.

Cromwell became Lord Protector, and the five years which followed saw a military dictatorship govern the country in the name of the most strict conservatism in the church and the State; the radicals were purged from the key posts and in 1655, censorship was brought in

On the death of Cromwell it was clear to the big bourgeoisie that the wished for stability could only be maintained by another dictatorship, and Charles II, son of the beheaded monarch, was invited to return to the throne; even if the axe had worked for a while, his reign was the logical and painless continuation of the Protectorate.

Trotski, in his writing on Great Britain lingered around the subject of Cromwell, and his “Bonapartist semi-dictatorship”, and it is worth reporting both what he wrote on that “heavy military hammer on the anvil of civil war” in whose person “Luther joins hands with Robespierre”, and on the dictatorship in general: «If Lenin can be juxtaposed to anyone then it is not to Napoleon nor even less to Mussolini but to Cromwell and Robespierre. It can be with some justice said that Lenin is the proletarian twentieth-century Cromwell. Such a definition would at the same time be the highest compliment to the petty-bourgeois seventeenth century Cromwell.
The French bourgeoisie, having falsified the revolution, adopted it and, changing it into small coinage, put it into daily circulation. The British bourgeoisie has erased the very memory of the seventeenth-century revolution by dissolving its past in ’gradualness’. The advanced British workers will have to re-discover the English revolution and find within its ecclesiastical shell the mighty struggle of social forces. Cromwell was in no case a ’pioneer of labour’. But in the seventeenth-century drama, the British proletariat can find great precedents for revolutionary action. This is equally a national tradition, and a thoroughly legitimate one that is wholly in place in the arsenal of the working class. The proletarian movement has another great national tradition in Chartism. A familiarity with both these periods is vital to every conscious British worker. The clarification of the historical significance of the seventeenth-century revolution and the revolutionary content of Chartism is one of the most important obligations for British Marxists (…)
Cromwell’s task consisted of inflicting as shattering a blow as possible upon the absolutist monarchy, the court nobility and the semi-Catholic Church which had been adjusted to the needs of the monarchy and the nobility. For such a blow, Cromwell, the true representative of the new class, needed the forces and passions of the masses of the people. Under Cromwell’s leadership the revolution acquired all the breadth vital for it. In such cases as that of the Levellers, where it exceeded the demands of the regenerate bourgeois society, Cromwell ruthlessly put down the ’lunatics’. Once victorious, Cromwell began to construct a new state law that coupled biblical texts with the lances of the ’holy’ soldiers, under which the deciding word always belonged to the pikes. On 19th April 1653 Cromwell broke up the rump of the Long Parliament. In recognition of his historical mission the Puritan dictator saw dispersed members on the way with biblical denunciations; ’Thou drunkard!’ he cried to one; ’Thou adulterer!’ he reminded another. After this Cromwell forms a parliament out of the representatives of God-fearing people, that is, an essentially class parliament; the God-fearers were the middle class who completed the work of accumulation with the aid of a strict morality and set about the plunder of the whole world with the Holy Scriptures on their lips. But this cumbersome ’Barebone’s Parliament’ also hampered the dictator by depriving him of the necessary freedom of manoeuvre in a difficult domestic and international situation. At the end of 1653 Cromwell once again purged the House of Commons with the aid of soldiers. If the rump of the Long Parliament dispersed in April had been guilty of deviating to the right, towards deals with the Presbyterians – then Barebone’s Parliament was on a number of questions inclined to follow too closely along the straight road of Puritan virtue and thus made it difficult for Cromwell to establish a new social equilibrium. The revolutionary realist, Cromwell, was building a new society. Parliament does not form an end in itself, law does not form an end in itself and although Cromwell himself and his ’holy’ men regarded the fulfilment of divine behests to be ends in themselves these latter were merely the ideological material for the building of a bourgeois society».

Marxism considers that it is not individuals, however eminent or intelligent, who determine the course of history, but class and mass movements. It is these movements, often taking centuries to mature, which overturn, smash down, and reform social, political and economic conditions which had remained unchanged over long periods.

It is to the merit of marxism to have revealed the fundamental driving-force behind these upheavals, and our doctrine has always derided “leaders”, “generals” and “chiefs” and that ubiquitous group of so-called “men of destiny”; on the contrary, we have always held such people to be simply “puppets of history”, who are less capable in fact than any other mortal of making volitional acts and radical choices (in either direction); and the same goes even in regard to their own private lives.

Cromwell was certainly one such “puppet of history”, although he did have the additional merit of (always!) being conscious of it. He was never linked directly to any definite movement, or was a member of any particular religious sect; he didn’t claim to have written any sacred texts or have inspired any eternal doctrines, but rather to be doing the work to which he thought “providence” had called him.

Cromwell was an honest-to-goodness opportunist: when asked to make a choice between monarchy, aristocracy or democracy he replied “any of them can be good in itself, or for us, according to how providence directs it”. In effect, the reference to providence was in him the sign of a political change of front.

This was the secret of his victory, and with it the victory of the big bourgeoisie: not to tie ones hands with prescriptive formulas, but to manage the situation whilst keeping in mind a few minimum objectives, in order to create a society in which neither the lower classes, nor the aristocracy would be able to gain the upper hand. As opposed to the French Revolution, in England the two spirits of the revolution, the radical and reactionary, Robespierre and Napoleon, were fused in the continuity of the power of Cromwell; and the Restoration, even if it hung the Protector’s dead body from the gallows, didn’t modify the politics, or only insofar as it didn’t apply it so well.

There is no better epitaph for this servitor of the bourgeois State than one of his most famous sayings: “Nobody arrives so high as one who doesn’t know where he is going”.

The Revolution of 1642-1648 is considered by the classical philistine English historians as a strange phenomenon, which is difficult to reconcile with the supposed legalitarian propriety of the British people: it is therefore often contemptuously referred to as the “Great Rebellion”, and its importance is minimised with respect to the events of 1688-89, when the English bourgeoisie sacked the Stuarts and called on the Dutch House of Orange to take on the mantle of monarchy. For them this is the “Glorious Revolution”, which drove out a king who was inept and unpatriotic without blood being spilt. in fact, it was a case of the final touches being made to a bourgeois society which wouldn’t have existed but for the painful delivery of forty years before.

The “Glorious Revolution” brought the businessmen to power; who didn’t look kindly on the decline of prestige which was occurring under the Stuarts (who hadn’t managed to adjust to the fact of the monarchy’s loss of power). However the Stuarts hadn’t rolled back the conquests of the revolution: whether the abolition of feudal rights, the massive enclosures, the abolition of the monopolies and all the economic controls so hated by the bourgeoisie, a foreign policy which prioritised commercial interests, the loss of power of the bishops and a greater religious tolerance (compared with the rest of Europe) and an exceptional awakening of scientific and philosophical thought.

Even fiscal taxation (increased since the revolution to notable levels) had become permanent and progressive, and the old feudal obligations no longer existed. Some relatively extreme measures would naturally reappear (abolition of the monarchy and the upper house, which however henceforth counted for little), but English society in 1689 differed from that of 1660 above all by the definitive confirmation of parliamentary control (gentry and mercantile oligarchy) over a strong executive.

With a few, vigorous lines Marx would give a clear synthesis of the revolutionary process and its determinism: «Although M. Guizot never loses sight of the French Revolution, he does not even draw the simple conclusion that everywhere the transition from the absolute to the constitutional monarchy is effected only after severe struggle and after a republican form of government has been gone through, and even then the old dynasty, become useless, has to make room for a usurpatory collateral line. The most trivial common places are therefore the only information he can give us about the overthrow of the restored English monarchy. He does not even mention the direct causes of it: the fear of the new big landed proprietors created by the Reformation that catholicism might be re-established, in which event they would naturally have to restore all the lands of which they had robbed the Church – a proceeding in which seven-tenths of the entire area of England would have changed hands; the dread experienced by the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie vis-à-vis Catholicism, which in no way suited their book; the nonchalance with which the Stuarts, to their own advantage and that of the court aristocracy, sold all English industry, and commerce as well, to the government of France, that is, of the only country which at that time dangerously, and in many respects successfully, competed with the English, etc.
M. Guizot does not consider it worthwhile mentioning that the wars against Louis XIV were purely trade wars to destroy French commerce and French sea power, that under William III the domination of the financial bourgeoisie received its first sanction by the establishment of the Bank and the institution of the national debt, and that the manufacturing bourgeoisie were given new impetus by the consistent application of a protective tariff system» (from A Review of Guizot’s book).

And quoting Marx again: «The victory of the bourgeoisie was therefore the victory of a new social order, the victory of bourgeois over feudal property, of nationality over provinciality, of competition over the corporations, of division over primogeniture, of dominion of landed property over the domination of land over property, of enlightenment over superstition, of the family over the family name, of industry over heroic laziness, of civil rights over feudal privileges» (from The Bourgeoisie and the Counterrevolution, 1848).

With the accession of William III another section of the bourgeoisie, the manufacturers, saw their dreams of power draw closer. This strata, still young, showed signs of a great future, along with its grand protagonist of that future, described by Engels as its “shadow”, the industrial proletariat.