Ferdinand Lassalle Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Ferdinand Lassalle

Ferdinand Lassalle, an admirer and onetime friend of Karl Marx, was one of the most colorful and romantic figures in nineteenth-century history, an energetic and self-assertive political activist whose ardent radical convictions inspired him to powerful oratory and to ambitious and reckless deeds. He was an idealist with a strong sense of justice and inordinately high hopes for the victory of democracy and socialism in his own time; but he was also a master of effective propaganda and a political realist who concentrated on immediate tasks. He first earned public notoriety for his personal campaign on behalf of a woman whom he defended as a representative victim of male prejudice and of an unjust society. He kept himself in the limelight in a series of political trials in which he propagated his ideas by turning his defense into an accusation of his accusers. Meteorlike he emerged from an inauspicious background to become an intellectual, a man of independent means and aristocratic tastes who founded the first social democratic party in Germany and was its charismatic and tyrannical leader.

Read the rest of this Biography with our Ferdinand Lassalle Access Pass.