England's 17th Century Revolution (article)

"England's 17th Century Revolution" is an 1850 review by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels of François Guizot's pamphlet "Why Did the English Revolution Succeed?" (Fr: "Pourquoi la révolution d'Angleterre a-t-elle réussi?") of the same year. Guizot had been a professor of history before he entered politics, eventually becoming prime minister of the unstable July Monarchy in 1847. Five months into his term, Guizot and his government were overthrown in the February Revolution, and he returned to the field of history to defend his monarchist outlook. In his 1850 pamphlet, he blames the French "character" for the tumult of the past half-century, arguing that the monarchist-liberal compromise of the July Government ought to have met the same success as the English constitutional monarchy and drawing unfavorable comparisons between the anti-monarchist French Revolution of 1789 with the English "Glorious Revolution" a century before. Marx, in his response, accuses Guizot of only explaining events by way of idealist "political phrases" rather than focusing on the vast differences in the course of English and French economic development. His refutation of Guizot's arguments is presented through a brief summary of his own historical materialist analysis, which outlines the concept he would later term "bourgeois revolution". The resulting brief text has value for Marxists mainly because of its concrete take on events that had preceded Marx's lifetime—a small corpus when compared to his political and economic body of work.

See also

• Bourgeois revolution
• English Civil War

External links

• England’s 17th Century Revolution at Marxists.org