Ferdinand Lassalle

Ferdinand Lassalle (born April 11, 1825, Breslau, Prussia [now Wrocław, Pol.]—died Aug. 31, 1864, near Geneva, Switz.) was a leading spokesman for German socialism, a disciple of Karl Marx (from 1848), and one of the founders of the German labor movement.

Early years.

Lassalle was born of Jewish parents; his father, Heymann Lasal, or Loslauer, was a wholesale silk merchant and town councillor.

Ferdinand Lassalle—the spelling of the name dates from a stay in Paris in 1846—attended the Breslau classical high school but was expelled when he forged a signature on a school report. He attended a trade school in Leipzig in 1840, returned to Breslau in 1841, and passed his school-leaving examination in 1843. In 1843–44 he began to study philosophy, history, philology, and archaeology at the University of Breslau. In 1844–45 he continued his studies in Berlin, where he first encountered the ideas of the German philosophers G.W.F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach and of the French Utopian thinkers. Intending to take his degree and to qualify as a university lecturer with a thesis on the philosophy of Heracleitus, he made repeated studies of the subject in Paris between 1845 and 1847. Here he met the French social theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Heinrich Heine, the German poet.

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.

SIGN UP

By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Champion of Countess Hatzfeldt.

In 1846, in Düsseldorf, he met the unhappily married countess Sophie Hatzfeldt, who was trying to divorce her husband. Although not a lawyer, Lassalle conducted 35 lawsuits in her behalf and in 1854 finally obtained a divorce for her. Henceforth, he received an annual pension of 4,000 thalers from the countess, thus becoming financially independent. His lifelong relationship with the countess, though it was nothing more than that of son and mother, “stimulated gossip about Lassalle and immensely impeded his political career.” Lassalle lived in Düsseldorf from 1848 to 1857 and took part in the revolution of 1848–49, by which the liberal middle class tried to attain a constitutional monarchy that would grant such civil rights as freedom of assembly and freedom of the press.

During those days he established contact with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the socialist leaders. When Lassalle urged the militia to open revolt in November 1848, he was arrested and held in prison until his trial in July 1849. Although he was repeatedly arrested, indicted, and sentenced to prison, Lassalle counted his years in Düsseldorf, where he was able to be active both as a writer and as a labor organizer, among the happiest of his life. In the period of reaction following the abortive revolution, he traveled to Switzerland, to the World’s Fair in Paris in 1855, and to Asia in 1856. He completed the Heracleitus manuscript and the tragedy Franz von Sickingen (1859), which assigns to personality a role in determining the course of history.

Lassalle and Bismarck.

In 1857 Lassalle went back to Berlin, and in 1859 he settled permanently in the capital, where he became active as a political journalist. He met Marx in 1861, but, although they continued to correspond, they gradually became estranged. In contrast to Marx, Lassalle believed that the revolutionary phase had come to an end and that only a legal and evolutionary approach could hold hopes of success. With this goal in mind he held discussions with the Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck in 1863–64. Fourteen years after Lassalle’s death Bismarck said of him, “He was one of the most intelligent and amiable men I have ever associated with, a man of great ambition and by no means a republican.” Finding himself in a difficult political situation, Bismarck was, in the early 1860s, seeking allies in his struggle against the majority liberal opposition, while Lassalle was considering the concept of a monarchical welfare state. This was to be based on a universal suffrage for the three classes rather than on the existing suffrage that favored the upper classes. He thus hoped, by integrating the working class into political and social life, to achieve a transition from a bourgeois state based on private property to a democratic constitutional state. Lassalle and Bismarck were attracted to each other by their many common characteristics. Lassalle in particular was distinguished by his charismatic personality and his paternalist notions of democracy, which were understandable in the context of Germany’s largely politically apathetic population.

The year 1862 produced a crisis in Lassalle’s thinking when the uprising in Italy led by Giuseppe Garibaldi did not, contrary to Lassalle’s expectations, spread to other countries. The Prussian government meanwhile remained utterly unreceptive to his ideas. Realizing that lecturing and distributing pamphlets to artisans’ clubs and citizens’ associations were not producing sufficient results, Lassalle began agitating in worker’s associations in order to make his political aims known to the masses.

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

Organization of the “Suffrage Army.” In December 1862, Lassalle was asked by the executive committee of the “Central Committee to Convoke a General Congress of German Workers” to write a program for the congress. Lassalle at once recognized in the congress an opportunity to organize a “Suffrage Army.” “Organize yourselves as a general German workingmen’s association to agitate legally and peacefully, but untiringly and ceaselessly, for the introduction of universal and direct suffrage in all German provinces! This is the banner you must raise! This is the sign under which you will be victorious!”

In 1863–64 Lassalle hurled himself into the struggle for workers’ rights, especially in the Rhineland. “Only the working class matters to me,” he declared. When the ADAV (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, or General German Workers’ Association) was founded on May 23, 1863, in Leipzig, Lassalle was elected president for a five-year term. In Cologne he collaborated with a socialist writer, Moses Hess, but other associates rebelled against Lassalle’s authoritarian leadership and the cult of his personality he did nothing to discourage. His generally incendiary speeches were often followed by lawsuits.

Exhausted and disappointed over the insignificant results of his propaganda activity, Lassalle went to Switzerland for a rest in July 1864. There he met Helene von Dönniges. He courted her passionately, but, encountering opposition from the young girl’s family, he challenged her father and her former fiancé, Yanko von Racowitza, to a duel. Racowitza accepted, and on August 28, in a little forest near Geneva, the senseless duel was fought. Lassalle was struck in the abdomen and died three days later. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Breslau.

Legacy

Lassalle was for many decades considered a reformist heretic by the worker’s movement, which then adhered to the deterministic notions of popular Marxism according to which the dictatorship of the proletariat was foreordained by history. By others Lassalle continued to be romantically glorified as a pioneer of socialism.

Only since the time of Eduard Bernstein and the era of revisionism, when the German Social Democratic Party, aiming at becoming a mass political party, adopted the aims of parliamentary democracy and participation in government, has the modern significance of Lassalle been acknowledged. It is not the theorist or the organizer of a workers’ party who is remembered, but, in the words of the German Social Democratic leader Carlo Schmid, a Lassalle “who in place of scientific analysis constantly fixed his sights on the true aim on history’s horizon: the liberation of man from the position of object and the elimination of man’s alienation from himself through the power of his own will.”