Ferdinand Lassalle

German jurist and socialist (1825–1864)

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Lived 1825–1864, aged 39

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Wikipedia
57 languages
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Era
1825–1864
Aged 39

Summary

Updated 2026-06-10

He founded Germany's first independent workers' party in 1863, then died in a duel over a woman a year later — at 39, before his movement could prove whether state socialism and secret talks with Bismarck would save or sink the cause.

Biography

About

Born in 1825 to a prosperous Jewish family in Breslau, Lassalle spent his youth steeped in Hegelian philosophy and gained public renown in the 1840s and 1850s defending Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt in a sensational legal case. Active in the revolutions of 1848, he clashed repeatedly with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels while writing major works including Heraclitus the Obscure (1857) and The System of Acquired Rights (1861). In the early 1860s he broke with the liberal progressives during the Prussian constitutional conflict and launched a campaign for an independent working-class party, found…

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