The Revolution of 1848 led him to return to Paris and thence to Germany. He had a quarrel With Marx over a matter in which he himself confessed later that Marx was in the right. He became a member of the Slav Congress in Prague, where he vainly endeavoured to promote a Slav insurrection. Towards the end of 1848 he wrote an "Appeal to Slavs," calling on them to combine with other revolutionaries to destroy the three oppressive monarchies, Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Marx attacked him in print, saying, in effect, that the movement for Bohemian independence was futile because the Slavs had no future, at any rate in those regions where they happened to be subject to Germany and Austria. Bakunin accused Marx of German patriotism in this matter, and Marx accused him of Pan-Slavism, no doubt in both cases justly. Before this dispute, however, a much more serious quarrel had taken place. Marx's paper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, stated that George Sand had papers proving Bakunin to be a Russian Government agent and one of those responsible for the recent arrest of Poles. Bakunin, of course, repudiated the charge, and George Sand wrote to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung denying this statement in toto. The denials were published by Marx and there was a nominal reconciliation, but from this time onward there was never any real abatement of the hostility between these rival leaders, who did not meet again until 1864.
Meanwhile, the reaction had been everywhere gaining ground. In May 1849 an insurrection in Dresden
