Schapper was born in Weinbach in Germany in 1812, the son of a priest. A radical student, studying forestry, he was involved in an attempt to overthrow the Diet in Frankfurt in 1832. Imprisoned, he escaped to Switzerland, joining the ‘Young Germany’ movement of the utopian communist Wilhelm Weitling. He then participated in Mazzini’s armed invasion of Savoy, after which he was again imprisoned. Deported from Switzerland in 1836, he moved to Paris, joining the League of the Banned (also known as the League of Outlaws), before joining the League of the Just, which was mainly comprised of exiled German artisans. Schapper and his colleagues participated in the Paris insurrection of May 1839, which was led by Auguste Blanqui and Armand Barbes. Deported to London, Schapper and his colleagues established the Communist League, which in 1847 merged with the Brussels-based Communist Correspondence Committee led by Marx and Engels. In London, Schapper, still influenced by Weitling and Blanqui, organised the (German) Workers Education Association and collaborated with the Fraternal Democrats, the Chartist group led by George Julian Harney. It was he who organised the publication of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto in 1848. He returned to Germany to participate in insurrectionary activity in Cologne and Wiesbaden, before being expelled and returning to London.
Willich, born in 1810, was a soldier in the Prussian army. A republican he participated in the Baden uprising, during which Engels was his aide de camp. On the suppression of the uprising, he fled via Switzerland to London, where he worked as a carpenter and joined Schapper in the Communist League. In London, he was an associate of the French republican exile Emmanuel Barthélemy. Willich and Barthélemy thought Marx was too conservative, and apparently considered killing him. Willich ended up having a duel with one of Marx’s supporters, Konrad Schramm, in Belgium. Both survived. Barthélemy was later executed for murder.
Willich and Schapper split with Marx and Engels on the issue of political tactics. They still believed in insurrection, while the latter wanted to build a mass movement. They set up a Communist Central Committee, a Blanquist organisation, as a rival to the Communist League. In 1853, Willich emigrated to the United States, editing the German Republican journal, participating in a Hegelian circle in Ohio, later becoming a brigadier general on the union side in the American civil war and later taking a degree in philosophy at the University of Berlin. He died in 1878. Schapper was reconciled with Marx in 1857 and participated in the founding of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864, joining the General Council and supporting Marx in his disputes with Proudhonists and Blanquists. He died in 1870.
Schapper wrote in 1838 a political statement: Gütergemeinschaft. This has not been translated into English, but the extract below is given in Lattek’s study (see further reading) at page 24. There is no record of any writings by Willich in the revolutionary period, though he later wrote articles on Hegel when he lived in Ohio.
“ Mankind will only be truly free and happy when all people, according to nations, live in an association of states where all possess equal rights to the earth’s goods and their enjoyment, and where all work equally in some way for their production or preservation for the communal welfare of all, i.e. if there is community of goods … Community of goods is the first and essential condition of a free democratic republic.”
There is also a record by Marx of an argument between himself and Schapper at a meeting of the Communist League. Schapper is recorded as saying:
“The question at issue is whether we ourselves chop off a few heads right at the start or whether it is our own heads that will fall. In France the workers will come to power and thereby we in Germany too. …If we come to power we can take such measures as are necessary to ensure the rule of the proletariat. I am a fanatical supporter of this view… You want to have nothing more to do with us – very well, let us part company now. I shall certainly be guillotined in the next revolution”.
Further Reading Sperber, Jonathan Rhineland Radicals (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993) Hammen, Oscar The Red ‘48’ers (New York: Scribner 1969) Latteck, Christine Revolutionary Refugees: German Socialists in Britain 1840-1860 (Abingdon: Routledge 2006) Gilbert, Alan Marx’s Politics: Communists and Citizens (Oxford: Martin Robertson 1891) Hunt, Richard The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels: Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy 1818-1850 (London: Macmillan 1975) Weisser, Henry British Working Class Movements and Europe 1815-1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1975) Dixon, David Radical Warrior: August Willich’s journey from German Revolutionary to Union General (University of Tennessee Press 2020) Easton, Lloyd Hegel’s First American Followers: The Ohio Hegelians (Ohio University Press 1966) Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Collected works Vol 10 1849-1851 (Lawrence and Wishart 1978) Documents of the First International Vol 1 1864-66 (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1962)
