Karl Marx

A Fact Confirmed

Written on July 22, 1859.
From the English.

[“New-York Daily Tribune” No. 5704 of August 4, 1859, leading article]

In his book on the Italian campaign of 1796 and 1797, Clausewitz remarks at one point that war is fundamentally not so theatrical an affair as some people seem to assume, and that victories and defeats, viewed with the eye of science, present themselves quite differently than in the heads of political chatterers. The knowledge of this truth enabled us to endure with equanimity the noisy outbursts of rage which our assessment of the military events of the last war repeatedly called forth from various zealous, if not very intelligent, Bonapartist organs of this country, both in French and English. We now have the satisfaction of finding our assessment of these events confirmed, much sooner than expected, by the decisive participants in the struggle, by Franz Joseph and Louis Napoleon.

Let us set aside mere questions of detail. What was the core of our criticism? On the one hand, we attributed the defeats of the Austrians not to any genius revealed by the allies, not to the legendary effects of the rifled cannon, not to the imaginary disloyalty of the Hungarian regiments, not to the much-vaunted boldness of the French soldiers, but solely to the strategic mistakes of the Austrian generals, who had been placed by Franz Joseph and his personal advisers in the positions of men like General Hess. Thanks to this faulty strategy, the enemy was not only everywhere opposed by numerically inferior forces, but even the available troops were deployed on the battlefield in the most absurd manner! On the other hand, the Austrian

army, even under such conditions, offered stubborn resistance; both armies fought in the battles on almost equal terms, despite the disproportion of the forces confronting each other; the strategic errors of the French and their unpardonable dilatoriness in pursuing the enemy depreciated the victory and even surrendered its fruits—all this justified our assertion that the situation of the belligerent parties would probably have been reversed if the supreme command of the Austrian army had been placed in more capable hands. As a second and most important point, we emphasised even before the outbreak of the war that the moment the Austrians passed from the offensive to the defensive, the war would be divided into two parts: the melodramatic one, fought out in Lombardy, and the serious one, beginning behind the Mincio line, within the formidable network of the four fortresses. All the victories of the French, we said, count for nothing at all when compared with the trials that still await them in a position whose reduction cost even the genuine Napoleon nine months, although at that time Verona, Legnago and Peschiera were militarily insignificant and Mantua alone had to sustain the whole weight of the attack. As we now see from the Viennese papers, General Hess, who, naturally, was better acquainted with the *status quo* of Austrian generalship than we were, had proposed at the beginning of the war not to invade Piedmont, but rather to evacuate Lombardy and to take up the struggle only behind the Mincio. Let us now hear what Franz Joseph and Louis Bonaparte adduce in their excuse—the one, because he lost a part of a province; the other, because he falsified the programme drawn up at the beginning of the war.

With regard to the war, Franz Joseph establishes two facts which the *Moniteur* does not contradict. In his army order he says that the Austrian forces were always confronted by a numerically superior enemy. The *Moniteur* ventures not to dispute this assertion, since, strictly viewed, it places the main blame on the Austrian emperor himself. Be that as it may, we count it as a merit to have peeled the real state of affairs out of the most contradictory reports of “own correspondents”, out of French lies and Austrian exaggerations, and to have correctly presented, with the scanty and inaccurate sources at our disposal, the proportion of forces of the contending parties in our critical examinations of the individual battles from Montebello to Solferino.

Franz Joseph lays great weight on another point, which must sound rather astonishing to a certain class of newspaper scribblers. We reproduce the declaration literally:

“Equally unquestionable stands the fact that our adversaries, despite their utmost efforts and the marshalling of their superabundant resources, long prepared for the intended blow,
were able, even at the price of enormous sacrifices, to achieve only advantages, but no decisive victory,
while Austria’s army, still unshaken in strength and courage, maintained a position whose possession left it the possibility of perhaps wresting the advantages gained from the enemy.”

Franz Joseph, however, did not venture to declare in his manifesto that he and his camarilla threw the whole war into hopeless confusion by imposing their whims and caprices on its conduct and by placing senseless obstacles in the way of the plebeian but capable generals. Yet even this offence is now openly confessed, if not in words, at least through deeds. General Hess, whose advice was disregarded throughout the entire campaign, and who was denied the position due to him on the grounds of his past, his age and even his place on the Austrian list of seniority, has now been appointed field marshal; the supreme command of the forces in Italy has been transferred to him, and on his arrival in Vienna the first thing Franz Joseph did was to pay a demonstrative visit to the wife of the old general. In a word, the entire present attitude of the Hapsburg autocrat towards the man who offended the pretensions of the aristocratic circles in Schönbrunn by his plebeian birth, his liberal sympathies, his blunt frankness, and his military genius, is an admission of guilt that is humiliating for men of all estates, but most of all for the hereditary rulers over mankind.

Let us now look at the counterpart to the Austrian manifesto—Bonaparte’s speech of defence. Does he share the simple-minded illusion of his admirers that he has won decisive battles? Does he believe that reverses are excluded in the future? Does he let it be understood that a decisive point has been reached and that, with sufficient perseverance, his victories can be brought to a glorious conclusion? On the contrary. He admits that the melodramatic part of the struggle has come to an end, that the aspect of the war would inevitably change, that reverses await him, that he was afraid not only of the threatening revolution, but of the power of “the enemy entrenched behind great

fortresses in front”. He saw nothing before him but “a long and sterile war”. Here are his words:

“Having arrived beneath the walls of Verona, the struggle inevitably had to change its character, both from a military and a political point of view. Obliged to attack frontally the enemy, who is entrenched behind great fortresses and protected on his flanks by the neutrality of the surrounding territories, and about to wage a long and sterile war, I found myself confronted by armed Europe, ready to dispute our successes or to worsen our defeats.”

In other words, Louis Napoleon concluded peace not only out of fear of Prussia, Germany and the revolution, but he was also afraid of the four great fortresses. For the siege of Verona, as a semi-official article in the *Indépendance Belge* informs us, he would have needed a reinforcement of 60,000 men, which he could not withdraw from France while at the same time leaving there the forces necessary for the Army of the North under Pélissier. And even if he had finished with Verona, Legnago and Mantua still remained to be conquered. In short, Napoleon III and Franz Joseph confirm perfectly, after the war, what we said before and during the war both about the military resources of the two countries and about the characteristics of the campaign. We cite these two witnesses as unwilling defenders of common sense and historical truth against that flood of idiotic exaggeration and foolish blindness which in the last two months has assumed a scale that, to all appearances, will not again be reached so quickly.