By MICHAEL LÖWY*

Five hundred years later, the failed revolution of Thomas Muenzer  echoes in the MST and in the movements that dare to challenge the modern 'Baal': capital that, as in the 16th century, still dresses in sacred clothing to sanctify exploitation

1.

This year, revolutionaries around the world celebrate the memory of Thomas Münzer (1490–1525), executed in Mühlhausen on May 27, 1525. An Anabaptist preacher and one of the religious leaders of the Peasants' War in the Holy Roman Empire in the XNUMXth century, he was a true revolutionary leader.

Born into a family of poor artisans, he studied theology and was ordained a priest, but joined Martin Luther in 1519. Shortly thereafter, in 1521, he wrote the Prague Manifesto, a call to revolt against “the whore of Babylon”, the Church of Rome. However, he was quick to criticize Luther for his connivance with the powerful.

Your Sermon to the Princes, pronounced in 1524, was a virulent attack on the authority of the Church and the Empire. Joining forces with the Anabaptist peasant movement, he preached the reestablishment of the apostolic Church, through violence if necessary, to prepare the kingdom of Christ as quickly as possible. Thomas Münzer and his group seized power in February 1525, in Mühlhausen, Thuringia, where they established a kind of radical and egalitarian revolutionary power, allied with the peasant revolt.

A mystic and millenarian, inspired by the medieval doctrine of the “Third Age” of Joachim of Fiore, Thomas Münzer was also a revolutionary, denouncing the power of the rich and Luther’s complicity with the princes. Like the Anabaptists, he encouraged his followers to practice adult baptism. In the apocalyptic tradition, he announced the imminence of the end of times and the final judgment. In his sermons in Wittenberg (1523), he tried to incite artisans and peasants against the reigning princes and ecclesiastical powers.

Deciding to try his luck with the peasants' revolt, Thomas Münzer led an army of seven thousand peasant soldiers in May 1525 to fight the princes at Frankenhausen. The battle took place on May 15: poorly equipped and inexperienced, the peasants were massacred by the princely armies, made up of heavily armed professional mercenaries and cannons.

Wounded, Thomas Münzer was captured in a house in Frankenhausen, where he had taken refuge. After being tortured, he was beheaded in Mühlhausen (Thuringia), before an audience of representatives of the high nobility. In deference to the good people, his impaled head was displayed on the city walls.

A wall inscription in the town of Heldrungen stigmatizes him as archifanaticus patronus et capitaneus seditiosorum rusticorum: an involuntary tribute…

2.

From the 19th century onwards, German socialists found in the Peasants' War of the 16th century and in the figure of Thomas Münzer a source of inspiration and a fundamental historical precedent.

This is particularly the case of Friedrich Engels, who dedicates to them one of his most important – if not the most important – historical studies: The Peasants' War in Germany (1850). Its interest, or even fascination, probably resulted from the fact that this revolt was the only properly revolutionary movement in German history before 1848. The book begins with the sentence: “The German people also have their revolutionary traditions.”[I]

Analyzing the Protestant Reformation and the religious crisis at the turn of the century in Germany in terms of class struggle, Friedrich Engels distinguished three camps in conflict on a political-religious battlefield: (i) the conservative Catholic camp, consisting of the power of the Empire, prelates and a section of the princes, rich nobility and patrician class of the cities; (ii) the moderate bourgeois Lutheran Reformation party, which grouped together the property-holding elements of the opposition, the mass of the petty nobility, the bourgeoisie and even a section of the princes, who hoped to enrich themselves by confiscating the Church's property. (iii) Finally, the peasants and commoners constituted a revolutionary party, “whose demands and doctrines were most clearly expressed by Thomas Münzer”.[ii]

This analysis of religious conflicts from the perspective of antagonistic social classes is remarkable, even though Engels seems to consider religion, in a reductive way, only as a “mask” or “cover” behind which “the interests, needs and demands of the different classes” are hidden. In the case of Thomas Münzer, he considers that he “disguised” his revolutionary convictions under a “Christian phraseology” or a “biblical mask”; if he addressed the people “in the language of religious prophecy”, it was because this was “the only one he was able to understand at the time”.[iii]

At the same time, he does not hide his admiration for the figure of the chilial prophet, whose ideas he describes as “almost communist” and “revolutionary religious”: “His political doctrine corresponded exactly to this revolutionary religious conception, and went beyond existing social and political relations in the same way that his theology went beyond the religious conceptions of the time. (…) This program, which was less a synthesis of the plebeian demands of the time than a brilliant anticipation of the conditions for the emancipation of the proletarian elements that were germinating among these plebeians, demanded the immediate establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God, the millennial kingdom of the prophets, through the return of the Church to its origins and the suppression of all institutions that contradicted it, which were supposedly primitive but, in fact, were completely new. For Thomas Münzer, the kingdom of God was nothing other than a society in which there would be no class differences, no private property, and no external, autonomous state power that would oppose the members of society.”[iv]

What is suggested in this surprising paragraph is not only the protest and even revolutionary function of a religious movement, but also its anticipatory dimension, its utopian function. Here we are at the antipodes of the “reflex” theory: far from being the simple “expression” of existing conditions, Thomas Münzer’s political-religious doctrine appears as a “brilliant anticipation” of the communist aspirations of the future. We find in this text a new path that was not explored by Engels, but that would be richly developed by Ernst Bloch later, especially in his youthful essay on Thomas Münzer.

3.

Almost a century later, in 1921, the young Ernst Bloch published his Thomas Münzer, theologian of the revolution, an enthusiastic homage by a libertarian Marxist to the leader of the Anabaptists and a detailed analysis of his proclamations. In an introduction, he reviews the bibliography on Thomas Münzer and mentions Engels' book on the Peasants' War positively, presenting it only as "a study by an economist and sociologist, with a side reference to the events of 48": a description that does not reflect the richness of this work.

He also cites, as a sympathetic approach, the chapter dedicated to him by Karl Kautsky in his book on the precursors of socialism. However, despite its qualities, Karl Kautsky's attachment to the philosophy of the Enlightenment manifested, in his opinion, a “complete inability to understand religious facts” and, in particular, the apocalyptic mysticism of the revolutionary theologian.[v]

In Ernst Bloch, on the other hand, this apocalyptic dimension of Thomas Münzer's discourse is highlighted with admiration: "Here the struggle was not for better times, but for the end of all times: to be exact, an apocalyptic propaganda of action. Not to overcome earthly difficulties in a eudaemonistic civilization, but for (…) the irruption of the Kingdom.”[vi].

Analyzing Münzer's first major document, the Prague Appeal (1521) - Intimatio Thomae Muntzeri (…) against Papists –, which reproduces verbatim, Ernst Bloch sees in this inaugural text “the hatred of the masters, the hatred of the priests, the reform of the Church and messianic mysticism succeeding and confusing one another almost immediately”[vii].

However, Thomas Münzer's preaching quickly became radicalized. In an anarchist interpretation, Bloch understands his doctrine and that of the Anabaptists as a denial of the authority of the State and of all laws imposed from outside, “almost anticipating Bakunin”. Thomas Münzer preached “a mystical and universal republic” and even “something even deeper: a complete community of goods, a return to Christian origins, the rejection of all public authority”.[viii].

To illustrate Thomas Münzer's radicalism, Ernst Bloch quotes long passages from Apology of Nuremberg (1524), in which the Anabaptist theologian denounces the lords and princes (with many quotations from the prophets of the Old Testament), with arguments that are surprisingly current in 2025: “They appropriate all creatures; fish in the water, birds in the air, vegetation on the earth, everything must be theirs, Isaiah 5 (…). In the present, we see them oppressing all men, the poor farmer, the poor craftsman, flaying and scratching every living thing, Micah 3”[ix].

For Ernst Bloch, the reformer Thomas Münzer stood at the antipodes of the Lutheran deification of the state and Calvin’s “capitalism as religion.” He describes his 1525 appeal to the miners as a “declaration of war on the houses of Baal,” and even as “the most passionate, furious revolutionary manifesto of all time”—unfortunately, without much result.[X].

Shortly afterwards, in Frankenhausen, the “revolutionary and messianic army” of peasants, poorly armed – lacking artillery and gunpowder – and without a general staff, inspired but not commanded by Thomas Münzer, is exterminated by the lords.

Ernst Bloch sees Thomas Münzer as a crucial moment in the underground history of the revolution, which stretches from the Cathars, Waldensians and Albigenses to Rousseau, Weitling and Tolstoy: an immense tradition that wants to “do away with fear, with the State, with all inhuman power.”[xi].

Who would be the heirs of Thomas Münzer and this underground history today? Ernst Bloch evokes Karl Liebknecht, and, in the conclusion of his essay, calls for an alliance “between Marxism and the dream of the unconditioned (…), on the same campaign plan”.

Ernst Bloch’s essay was written at a time, 1921, when revolution in Germany still seemed possible. Hence the book’s surprising conclusion: “Rising from the rubble of a ruined civilization, rises the spirit of ineradicable utopia (…)”[xii].

4.

Is this story still relevant five centuries later? Does the figure of Thomas Münzer still have something to say to us? This is the conviction of the editors of the magazine Negative and the Paris Surrealist Group, who published, on May 1, 2015, a magnificent tribute to the 500th anniversary of the Peasants' War.

She highlights this quote from Ernst Bloch's book: “She waits for us to hear her voice, this underground history of the revolution.”

The authors thus refer to the preacher beheaded by the lords in May 1525: “At the forefront of this movement, the figure of the preacher Thomas Münzer emerges as the most radical voice of the moment. Thomas Münzer (…) the loudest voice that called for a vast revolt; he, the avenging hammer ready for any battle against the famine-causers, the exploiters and the religious hypocrites of his time; he, who made the powerful tremble; (…) he, who did not abandon the insurgents, when the armies of the princes, reinforced by the ideological support of the sinister Luther, joined together to savagely massacre those who had dared to rise up against his order; he, Thomas Münzer, who succumbed in combat, still gives us, five hundred years after his death, an example of the inflexibility of our demands, more than a thousand years old and even more radical than any outdated millenarianism.”

“On this May 1, 2025, glory to you, Thomas Münzer, whose incendiary shadow will still tear through the night of our era, which is no less dark and obscurantist than yours.”

The leaflet was distributed during the May Day 1 demonstrations.

In his preface to the reprint of the French translation of The Peasants' War in Germany Engels, Eric Vuillard observes: “This peasants’ war does not belong to the past, it is not (…) an outdated revolt destined for the history books. (…) This story is not over yet.”[xiii]. This is true for many countries, but especially for Brazil, where the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) is a worthy heir to the struggle of the insurgent German peasants of the 16th century.

Walter Benjamin was convinced that the memory of martyred ancestors is the most powerful source of revolt for the oppressed. This was true, more than ever, of the peasant insurgents of 1525 and of their revolutionary theologian, Thomas Münzer.

*Michae Lowy is director of research in sociology at Center nationale de la recherche scentifique (CNRS). Author, among other books, of What is Liberation Christianity?: Religion and Politics in Latin America (Popular Expression). [https://amzn.to/3S1rYf4]

Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.

Notes

[I] Friedrich Engels, The war of paysans in germany (1850), Paris, Ed. Sociales, trans. Emile Bottigelli, Foreword by Eric Vuillard, Introduction by Racher Renault, p. 69.

[ii] Ibid., p. 101.

[iii] Ibid., p. 95.

[iv] Ibid., p. 113.

[v] E. Bloch, Thomas Münzer, theologian of the revolution (1921), Paris, Julliard, trans. Maurice de Gandillac, 1975, p. 21.

[vi] E. Bloch, Thomas Münzer, theologian of the revolution p. 91.

[vii] Ibid., p. 32-33.

[viii] Ibid., pp.119, 137.

[ix] Ibid., pp. 66-67.

[X] Ibid., pp. 182-183, 96-98.

[xi] Ibid., p. 305.

[xii] Ibid., pp.154, 306.

[xiii] Eric Vuillard, “Preface”, in Engels, The war of the paysans in Allemagne, pp. 9-10.

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